skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
but gmail is good. and we like it.

being corporate != departure from quality.

its not really fair to say that the burden rests on hackers and startup founders to promote/use small providers. small providers also have a responsibility to innovate and compete to provide superior products. It is the responsibility of end users to choose the application that suits their needs best.

If small providers aren't competitive with gMail, then gMail will maintain its large marketshare and continue to receive attention from its users.
I think that every time you have an idea for a redesign that's comprehensively better than your old layout, you should take it. Don't redesign for the heck of it. Wait until you've got a good idea.
"One year" is a long time in internet years. Users won't notice the difference between yearly redesigns and bi-yearly redesigns. Good idea might be to change little at a time, all the time, with some A/B testing thrown in.
Test constantly. Button placement, calls to action, colors of buttons, etc -- 5% increases to conversion compounded 20 times means big bucks.

As for total throw-it-out-and-start-over redesigns: I'd say "seldomly". I did one once, because I had the golden opportunity for it -- both a major tech change that was going to require a code rewrite, significant technical debt in keeping up the old templates, and major feature modifications which forced a rethink of my information architecture. As long as I was going that far I figured, eh, what the heck, get it a totally new look as well.

I was surprised that for all the extra work added and the professional design, conversion rates moved less than when I tweaked spacing on buttons a little bit. Ahh well, that's the way the cookie crumbles. The non-design aspects of the relaunch proved worth their weight in gold.

(I was also totally prepared to send the designer a check and a thank-you card and not use a single pixel of it if the conversion rates changed in a majorly negative direction after the switch. Thankfully the starting hiccups were not that bad.)

[Edit: incidentally, sub-sections or mini-sites are a great way to beta a design against your visitors without having to put your existing relationships or numbers at risk. When I made sweeping changes to my site, the sweeping changes started out on a "brought to you by this other site" mini-site that I set up, and I did iterative improvement on things like button placement and calls to action over there before I integrated them with the oh-goodness-if-I-screw-up-this-will-cost-money site.]
If there's no immediate, overtly measurable change in temperature, then obviously the tons of CO2 aren't doing anything negative. Also, the scientists working on climate change should just stop wasting their time; can't they see that all of their results and research can just be countered with a witty remark and an observation any seven year old can make? They obviously have an agenda.

Anyway, I find it impossible to have these conversations as they are more ideology than facts. Once a political movement hijacks an idea, it stops being scientific and starts being a conviction shared by all those in the movement.
Honestly, a manager who was ok with him going home after one day would be stupid. Then he's giving them no additional benefit for his fabled skills, and their best developer wouldn't be there most of the time and the rest of the team would probably resent it.

Instead of the manager forcing him to sit at his desk for 40 hours a week, he should be giving this guy more autonomy. You don't keep good developers by squelching their abilities or freedom, they'll get fed up and leave.
Lesson Learned: Use Privacy Controls On Your Social Network Profile

I'm pretty sure that U2-singer Bono would say something like "don't trust Privacy Controls On Your Social Network Profile"

Don't put anything potentially compromising online, private or not.
I was really lost as to what this was for. I thought it might be web application invites (i.e. to social networks). I didn't know that this was for events/parties/etc.

Maybe you can put an example somewhere or even give them an option to send those emails through you with an example email form clarifying?
I don't know, but since it was posted right before midnight and a number of funky things are happening with voting on this thread... the possibility that we are being played does need a look.
It's not surprising that a manager would feel this way. But surely the obvious solution was to give the programmer more challenging things to do?
You may want to add a message to the invite. For the question "What is your response" I answer what? what is this?
Does it unnerve anybody else that there are "Linus or nobody" sections of code, when GNU/Linux is often linked with the "open source / many eyes" security defense?
Was the word SCRUM specifically created to sound dirty?
Arguably there can be a relation. We have 140 years of somewhat-quality data, and the last decade shows a counter-indication to a correlation. One could argue an increasing base with variance based on sunspot cycles. Or one could argue just sunspot cycles as the cause of change. Or carrier pigeons.

It's an interesting area of study, precisely because there are so many unknowns, sarcasm or not.
Nokia 1110 1600 Contact Service

1110, 1110 contact service, 1600, 1600 contact service, 6030, 6030 contact service, contact service, Nokia, problem
Only redesign when you have a measurable goal or set of goals in mind. It helps if they're quantifiable, but they don't necessarily have to be.

There are many dangers in redesigning prior to establishing a goal (particularly with commercial sites) -- principal of which is never knowing when and if you've succeeded.
The idea was that you'll mention that in the email when you send the invite link to your friends.
PG mentioned that Trevor Blackwell rewrote their entire system in smalltalk in two weeks, which was everything that he and rtm wrote in 6 weeks. That's like an order of magnitude difference..

I don't know about that situation, but in general, rewriting a system is much easier than writing it in the first place.
This is another disappointing showing of Valerio making ad hominem attacks to defend his framework.

I like MooTools, and I even agree with much of what his reasoning is for not adopting Sizzle, but the way he voices it is frustrating. First, he addresses a collaborative open source project setting as a short coming of the integration. While I can appreciate his desire to maintain coding style across all of MooTools, this argument is poorly constructed. He then covers himself with this:

Or we could fork it, which would negate any proposed benefits, like having all developers of all frameworks work on a common piece of code.

But forking a project hardly negates the collaborative benefits. Perhaps he is unfamiliar with a dvcs workflow?
Under Linux, the only difference between a thread and a process is not sharing the address space. Both POSIX threading libraries for Linux (NTPL is the current, LinuxThreads is the old one) do a clone() system call for every pthread_create(). The clone() system call is basically fork() with extra functionality (such as sharing the address space).

Inside the kernel, your "threads" and "processes" are both represented by the task_struct data structure. So, on Linux, threads and processes are the same thing in different flavors.

I brought this up since the parent said "starting OS processes when all you wanted were threads is somewhat ugly." My point is that on Linux, starting a "process" and starting a "thread" is fundamentally the same action and have the same cost.
That missed the point though. He wasn't asking for more autonomy, apparently. He was asking to work less. A good developer that's not getting any more done than the other developers doesn't add value.
It's also unnerving that there are huge projects (not just Linux) and huge operating systems that have sections that are "Subsystem maintainer/author or nobody." Open source projects get volunteers because volunteers find the work interesting and some esoteric parts can have very, very few people working on them. I don't really have a solution to this, but it's to be expected.
I thought that it would be easier (not just for me, but for users as well) to let the users handle the invite delivery (email / sms / twitter etc). If they sent it through a webapp, they would have to worry if the invite was eaten by a spam filter etc.
Some subscriptions act somewhat as filters for other (possible) subscriptions. I have quite a number of feeds bookmarked; however, I visit only a subset daily, having found over time that they generate or cite the majority of the items I find interesting. Other feeds I touch on somewhat less frequently, when I am in the mood for something different or when an item causes me to "see what they've been up to".
Did YouTube Just Turn On HD For Real?
It's interesting that OSX is basically FreeBSD with bells on, and it can suspend/resume without too much difficulty. That is what needs to be fixed at the source (haha), not one-off hacks.
One word: Sexiness.
My suggestion is to make auto play an opt-in option for registered users.
Dear all HN:

:)

Regards,
JB.
So it's seriously a statement of fact that he's the only person in the entire community who could possibly debug that problem? I find that incredibly hard to believe.
Python 3.0 upgrade incompatible with earlier versions
Extreme simplicity is good for mobile applications. While your app goes a bit too far, it's a good direction. A slightly less minimalist mobile version with the ability to send invites by SMS and mail might be very useful, though that application overlaps with Twitter. It would be better for the specific purpose than Twitter, however.

Imagine:

Hey guys, how about checking out this new joint for a beer?
http://mobilvite.com/i/abcdefghi

They click on the URL and their phone goes to a nicely designed browser page with the details, which has been populated by the host-user filling out a few items like where, when, in a simple form. The Javascript on the form can detect if it's on an iPhone or other smartphone and present a directions button that pops up Google Maps.

The advantage of this over Twitter: the information is presented to the invitees cleanly, and they get the details only if they ask for it. Sending multiple tweets or multiple multicast SMS would be cumbersome to compose and annoying to receive.
Actually, Sun came up with it first.

But Google won't let that happen, oh no! http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071010-google-patents...
Ruby.rewrite(Ruby) Reginald Braithwaite RubyFringe talk
A profile of Sergey Brin: Enlightenment man
The top programmers (in terms of profitability anyway) have made infinitely more than the top soccer stars. Bill Gates could buy every soccer star with the money under his mattress.
Depends - is the site mainly content or functional/transactional?

If it's mostly content then I'd say constant small revisions with the occasional overhaul. Tweak to whatever delivers the content best.

It's different for a functional site. Even if a tweak is an usability improvement, existing users will go "eh?" when you (say) move a button. If you did this too often it would actually reduce your net usability. I'd say changes to this kind of site would be better aligned with every major feature release... With a major overhaul probably being a rare event.
I think it was another pg essay (possibly http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html) which suggests that workplaces have office hours because they can't accurately measure an employee's productivity. So they aren't likely to know where the productivity is really coming from anyway.

Even if they know you're 10x as productive as the other developers, they may not reward you so as not to make the other developers jealous or resentful.
They use a strange metric for success, in that the company has to go public. I'd say a good acquisition is clearly also a "success". Assuming that far fewer companies go public than are acquired (and make the founders wealthy), their numbers are quite a bit low.

At any rate, those numbers are already HUGELY higher than I had thought.
Somebody needs to take a few anger management lessons.

As somebody who makes bucks off the word "agile", I feel like I should respond. I'm not going to take apart his piece, because I too am sick of the manifesto and believe that the top dogs are just in this as a marketing exercise.

Having said that, Agile was not put together by those guys. That's just what their books say. Agile techniques have been being used for decades. They just didn't have the cool marketing term. You don't have to drink the coolaid to be agile -- any high-performing team is going to be agile, whether they call themselves that or not.

Second, Agile is a philosophy, not a methodology. It doesn't tell you what to do, it tells you what to think about what you're doing. Agile/Lean IS just common sense, but nobody seems to have much common sense anymore. You can apply the agile philosophy to all sorts of methodologies.

Third, Agile is not for mushy-headed enterprise guys. It probably works better for small customer-facing shops. To say agile is a response to CMM or heavy-handed processes is again to buy into the story the book-writers want to tell you. Put down the crack pipe. Agile has always been around, and has been used inside of all kinds of other methodologies.

Finally, Scrum is NOT agile. Scrum is a project management framework that you can use for agile projects. You can use a lot of others, or you can roll your own. The Scum guys are the religious nuts in this circus, if you ask me, and they are the ones causing all of the backlash. The rest of the Agile movement is just about how to best iteratively and incrementally do your job. That's a good conversation to have.

Ironically, a key factor I'm finding in successful agile teams is the ability to be open-minded. If you are an agile disciple or evangelist, or if you are a anti-agilista, usually it gets in the way of team performance. It's the people who want to have an ongoing conversation about how to keep increasing team performance -- without getting hung up over what book it was in or not -- that grow killer teams.
How many hardware platforms does OSX do suspend/resume on without too much difficulty?
Very interesting ... I am going thru this exactly. We had a couple vc's that are in due diligence, but in this economy, I don't think it's best for us to take the money. Our overhead (as you mention in your article) is essentially just the founder's living expenses which we have been able to cover for nearly 4 years now.

My choice is either raise vc, or sell something. Selling something is non-dilutive. VC's need to get a clue. If I take $1 or $5M, I'm going to give away 1/2 the company, so might as well as for $5M. But what the hell do I need that much money for!

Bootstrapping's back in style.
Do cyberattacks count as war?
I understand that this may be a gain in efficiency, but I can't see how anyone who calls themselves a foodie could enjoy eating the same eight dishes on a slightly-randomized schedule for months at a time.

We don't do the same 8 meals every month. We've actually grown to having about 30-40 separate recipes that we rotate through. On, any given 4-6 weeks, we have the same meal 4-5 times.
Ah, but then it wouldn't be "services in the cloud", it'd just be storage in the cloud.
I thought PG's article was pretty spot on. He wanted regulatory actions to be viewed in the broader context with an understanding of the net drag of all the regulations. If we could convince elected officials to do this sort of analysis, we might be able to weed out a lot of the unnecessary inefficiencies.

That said, the solution to an overabundance of regulations is not necessarily to utterly eliminate them, and the lack of perfection should never be an excuse for not performing an action when the consequences of inaction are worse.

I won't pretend to know what should or shouldn't have happened in the current financial crisis. My post was really directed more toward basic consumer protections -- things like truth in advertising, not selling rotten meat, being upfront about the terms of payday loans, etc.
Python 3.0: What's The Point?
Uh, he didn't use "suffering" in his conversations. That is just a description of the manager's philosophy. The most relevant factor wasn't the work accomplished and the quality. It was serving time.
If there were someone else, it sure sounds like he would be happy to have sloughed off the work. It doesn't sound glamourous. It sounds like it sucks. So everyone else would rather work on something they think is cool, and Linus is stuck with the crap work that in the end nobody is willing to do. That is why he's the guy in charge. That is why he deserves the credit for Linux.
A good developer that gets as much work done as the other developers adds at least as much value as they do. More, if the work is quality.
Lets not get into this age-old debate. IQ is not based solely on genetics. Mainly, IQ is a product of birth conditions and parents diet, as well as environmental factors.

The genetic link has been used by closet and public racists to push their agenda. They also included factors such as sex. Not saying you are one of those people, but it is a slippery slope, we may want to avoid...
Those at least look a lot more professional. The Ithaca Hours I saw (I was there maybe 5 years ago) looked like someone made them using colored paper and a copy machine. They had serial numbers, but as far as I know there was no way for a merchant or individual to verify those at the time of transaction, so they were useless except maybe after the fact (at which point it would still be hard to tell which was an original and which a fake).
Ask HN: what's the web app for entrepreneurs which compares products from the competition?
I remember a web app from New Zealand which allows you to list competitors, list different criterias, and compare features. It also listed different figures automatically from databases & marketing buzz from the internet.

thanks
Sort of. It's not about who sets the pay rates - otherwise, actors and sports figures wouldn't get their $multimillion salaries, since it's the movie execs and team owners that set the pay. It is about negotiating leverage.

When a company hires a CEO, they usually decide who they want first, and then they negotiate over price. There are few substitutes for their choice - usually, a company will find only a handful of candidates that are suitable for the position. This gives the CEO enormous leverage. There's only one of them, yet there are probably a couple companies that want to have them as CEO, so the price goes up.

Similarly, brand-name actors can drive moviegoers to theaters just by their name alone. There is only one Brad Pitt, but there are several movies that would love to have Brad Pitt star in them. Dakota Fanning gets like $4M/movie, because her name alone ensures the movie would get more attention than it otherwise would. David Beckham got a $250M contract, even though he's kinda washed up, because his reputation means people will watch.

An average programmer is filling a role, however. If they ask for too much money, the company just goes out and gets a different programmer. At hiring time, they don't know who'll be 10x more productive, unless that programmer already has a strong brand behind them.

I'm very curious to know how much "brand name" programmers like Peter Norvig or Guido van Rossum get paid. There are many Python programmers, but there is only one Guido, and many places that want him. I'm guessing I'll never find out, though.

BTW, this is behind a lot of the career advice that Internet celebrities give. Seth Godin's "you should throw away your resume" really means "your personal brand should be strong enough that employers want you and aren't just filling a position." Paul Graham's "work hard at things that excite you" is because if you do so, people will notice (eventually), and then they'll want you for what you've done and not just any old programmer. Marc Andreesen says "set the controls for the heart of sun" because that's the work that people notice, and that'll make you stand out from the crowd.
There are some aspects that might be worth voting this article up. Like the one you noted, or the mere fact that even a genius like Linus gets frustrated about debugging.

Still, I can't help suspecting that many voters wouldn't care if some John Doe had written this story.
You say not to get into the debate, then you immediately launch into your side of it...
ExtraHop’s New Take on App Monitoring
Will video crash the internet? | Surviving the exaflood
Out of curiosity, how much money has Twitpay sent around so far? (not counting the founders, of course :p)
Enable "path view" in Finder (OS X)
It's absolutely amazing how polarizing evite it. Some people swear it is the absolute best webapp on the internet and would be lost without it while others find it entirely perplexing that anyone uses it at all.
This is the single best advice in the thread. "Launch and you'll be forced to stay on your toes". This is what I did, and i'm finding it more and more difficult to procrastinate :-).
They are not the same thing. Threads share address space and processes don't and that's a crucial difference.
Defining gender absolutely precisely is not important. Keeping males out absolutely is not important either. People deal with the gender issue in real life just fine without such absolutes. The system only has to work well enough, like real life. And in real life, it manages to work well enough because of costs. It will "cost" a lot more to pose as a female on such a site. Therefore there will be fewer posers.

More page-views is fine. Commenting would be female-only. That is the value proposition. Female-majority forums aren't all that common.
I am the Scrum Master!
Think about a real rock star (not a rock star programmer). They play/sell their music to millions of paying fans. Now think about the difference to a band that only plays out in local clubs and might sell a few CDs. That rock star who plays to millions of people might not be as "good" as the local band but they are generating a lot more value. Now think about the programmer who is 10x better than a "not so good" programmer... is the end result of the 10x better programing worth 10x more value in the end? Even if they are generating 10x more value - I think that the value generated by real rock star is 100s or 1000s of times more than the local band. So do "rockstar" programmers create a 100x or 1000x more value than a "not as good programmer" does for a company - great rockstars do, great sport players do, great actors do...
Ruby on Rails Hosting Round-up
Yahoo Search To Offer Abstracts of Search Results, Determine Intent
found it, it's http://www.competitious.com
i love this idea.

it amazes me that people can deconstruct organic life as being just mechanical robots built with organic parts, then try to make their own organic robots that "live" (have biological processes, reproduce, etc.)

science is cool.