skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... He began by scanning the Internet for workout tips and read that five minutes of sprinting was the equivalent of a half-hour jog. This seemed like a great shortcut—an elegant exercise hack—so ... That same afternoon, he laced up his new kicks and burst out the front door ... He took a few strides, slipped on a concrete ramp and crashed to the sidewalk, shattering his left elbow. ..."

Typical programmer error. How many times do you have to say it before it comes back to bite you ... don't prematurely optimise.
Speaking as one of the developers who watched Joel put up the blinds, I know that this one shared instance of "servant leadership" falls in line with plenty of others that go unmentioned.

Just off the top of my head, I remember one Fog Creek get-together when one of my guests (Joel barely knew her) mentioned to me that she was thirsty, and before I could do anything about it Joel rushed off to get her a glass of water. While not a huge deal, fetching water for his developers' guests is not something that Joel really has to do.

...and even if I were to assume the basest of motives (that Joel wants to keep his developers working at Fog Creek so they make him lots of money), it's still a compliment as a developer and the type of attitude that makes me enjoy working hard.
Not condescending at all! This is why I love Hacker News: there are so many people worth listening to and they take their time to talk.
I'm sure it'll be all over slashdot/digg, maybe HN too
IMHO, the "best" countermeasure is the most inconvenient one, which is not only inconvenient on personal levels, but also on social levels. The inconvenience is evident in another posting on this thread and extends to areas beyond tuna -- which is why I am bearish on whole matter (just imagine the number of people with that sentiment), even if you increase production.
A lot of times I wonder if the so called experts really are experts.
But for the company, this is an absolute failure. The site is shutting down. The money invested in this business is not getting repaid. The vision wasn't close to realized.
Any packet can be dropped at any time, for TCP or UDP. So the protocol stack or application needs to deal with it and re-send, using a backoff policy.

Its worth looking at IM2000 and the pertinent questions that D. J. Bernstein asks about a future mail infrastructure.

http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
And I had a bit of a "Someone is wrong on the Internet." moment followed by a lapse of judgment.

see: http://xkcd.com/386/

So, sorry HN/unalone, next time I'll just be quiet.
Broken window theory applies to online spaces [vid]
What if Gall’s Law were true?
I'm not in your target market, so this is just a 5 second impression. Again, good design. One glaring gripe, the tagline: "... may be free..."

I don't understand why you put yourself on the defensive for your own product. It does not work in your favor at all.
hehe, certifications thingie and bs about firing QA folks freaked me out. Also the statement that OS lacks innovation - yeah, right. Its just so ignorant...
Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking
Google's New Open Stack Expanding - Sans Facebook, Microsoft
I know Leah and she is also sick of comments like that.

Aside from being one of the lead engineers on Pownce she wrote parts of the OAuth spec as well as the standard Python implementation.

Why not comment on her engineering talents instead?
#4) xbox
#5) sex
You've got to figure some extensions'll be made by the public. From the specs, it sounds like google will be building extensions. Imo this is a good change, I've always thought firefox should have a team making & maintaining extensions.
wow, thanks for posting. didn't expect something like this to be on HN. The Netherlands is proving itself to quite the innovator. that's nothing new really. even more since the last dutch design themed post which was posted:
http://pythonide.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-to-make-money-with...

Hope they release this font to the public but it is doubtful.
The emergence of the mortgage broker in the Australian mortgage industry?
My choice finance is a mortgage broker company, it offers competitive rates for car finance and home finance.
I LOVE the idea! I'm sure you're working on these but if you could eventually add:

- Links to usernames in the left pane, as well as on @

- Let us know when we send a direct message. I sent one, but got no feedback (it went through though)

- A simple "IRC like topic" in when I load it up, it shows how much direct messages I have and other Twitter stats that are easy to fetch.

That's all I can suggest, great feature .. Mibbit is the only irc client I use when away from home :)
I'll forward this on to a FF extension developer I know.
Google Street View launches in New Zealand
Incontrovertible proof that the will of the people is the will of heaven. Fuck you hackers.
Google Calendar now supports Apple iCal
where tiny bit = volume of anchor / surface area of lake. if the boat moves some because it isn't properly anchored, then presumably there would be more tension on the chain and thus a net rise in water level. of course, the problem initially never describes a chain & introducing the effects of one makes the problem far less tractable.
No! Not at all. You did what you thought was right.
I think the article is right on the money. We've been inundated the past few months with articles about a__hat CEO's in the financial services industry who were absolutely clueless, allowed their people to take financial risks that have brought their companies to their knees, while taking tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.

Meanwhile, Joel says that sometimes as a CEO, it's helpful if you put up the blinds and not just say that you care about your employees. CEO's get stuff out of their way so their people can do the work.

Hell, a CEO just using the term, "servant leadership" to describe their philosophy of management is a pretty idea these days, considering what the financial sector is going through.
maxklein, if you read this, please tell me how this latest update is "propaganda for our election cycle"

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326852)
I think they're really good at telling us what happened, but really bad at predicting anything. After all, if they were able to, they'd probably not doing that job, they'd be rich instead.
about $200/month.
Advertising - 80%. Premium Services - 20%
It used exec instead of setattr/getattr.
Ask HN: Where to find freelance/contract iPhone work?
To all the freelancers out there, where do you go to find contract work? I'm specifically interested in doing some work for companies who need iPhone apps.

I am able to find people who need just regular web dev work, but I don't know where to look for people who need iPhone devs.
Gmail on your Desktop
I was expecting a break down of materials cost, guess I should smoke less.
Phusion Passenger 2.0.4 released; 37signals’s Ta-da List now using Passenger
An In-Depth look at Nokia’s hardware damage labs
As a side not: the big automakers' suppliers often have very similar complaints against the automakers. unreasonable, unsustainable, short sighted, they'll take the whole ship down.
yeah I was just thinking why people care to know about something before it is released doesn't that just build anticipation? - trust me when it comes you won't miss it
Amusing the order you chose.
> Personally, I'd kill for the kind of free time I had in college....

When I see all the posts telling you "what would you tell your younger self", that's what I think (at the age of 25, working full-time while attending graduate school part-time and dating somebody an hour's drive away).

When you're a full time student... you don't know how great being a full time student is in many ways: not a worry in the world, you just manage your course load; you select the time of your courses, deadlines are reasonable and set ahead of time. On top of that if that there are smart and inspiring people for you and plenty of courses that you can take just for the hell of it (I really miss taking history and philosophy courses).

Of course it's easy for me to wax nostalgic about the great college days when I just drove home (to an 830 sq ft apt all to myself!) in a sports car I purchased new, after dinner at an upscale Indian place -- I am tempted at times to just take a leave of absence from work and do graduate school full time -- but once you're used to a certain lifestyle it's not easy to go back and cut your spending drastically.
It was pretty well simultaneous for me.
There are plenty of biomales who nonetheless consider themselves female, and would probably be well-served by a site like this. What's the value in keeping them out?

If they present themselves in public as bonafide females then I wouldn't. This would be for people who are female gendered in real life. There are already plenty of places where you can be a female just online.

There may not be harm in men visiting the site. But there is potential benefit in a female-only site. This would only happen if we could keep most men out.
check out GitX
www.sspsystementerprisellc.com
The first time I met Kevin in person the first words out of my mouth were "wow, you're taller than I expected." He is 6 feet tall, and I'm not sure why he gives the impression of being shorter.
wasn't compelling until his example of two gmails at once (currently a pain) I think this applies to many most hackers who might have two seperate social or business commitments at once
Random factoid. All of the people in those pictures are employees. That supports a totally different interpretation.
In real life, it isn't just "ask and trust them." You have to be invested in an identity. I figure that maintaining a female Facebook identity is a good enough analogue. This won't be absolute, but as you point out, neither is determining gender in real life.

If gender-bending is not so cheap, then by your logic, you should get different dynamics. I am curious what a social news site for intelligent women would produce. Not a Digg for women, but a Hacker News for women!
You should be ashamed of yourself! Dijkstra would not like it: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2291/1591358554_0568182db3.jp...
I think you're taking this too seriously, even people who work at Apple think it was hilarious.
Same for me. I asked my Dad for an allowance once. He laughed and said, "You're barely earning your keep the way it is!" Then he sent me back to work. The end.
What are you doing to prepare for the recession?
I'm working on a talk about surviving (and, hopefully, prospering) in hard times. I've got a good outline, but I'd like to hear what you're doing to prepare for/survive the recession. Any good links or books would be awesome too. Thanks!
She took computer science at a university. I would expect that she knows how to deal with different hashing functions for hash-tables, different types of trees and knows some graph theory among other things. To not be familiar with ceil, floor and round after taking computer science courses is very sad.
The Promise of Prediction Markets [pdf]
I'm all for leadership by example. I think that Joel led by example when he was still actively developing code.

Hanging blinds? Not so much. Hanging blinds strikes me more as an entertaining diversion from normal work than as a way to show leadership.

I enjoy Joel's writing and think he sounds like a good guy. I'd be curious to see what he did if some of his employees left Fog Creek to start a company. The reaction would be a good measure of leadership.
I'm 6'7/6'8 - do I get bonus points?
It actually sounds do-able considering how Chrome is built and how Google has built other things using HTML and JavaScript.
Ask HN: feedback on my startup?
As for myself, I am increasing my savings, working on more side projects, writing and presenting to get my name out there. I am also going to be re-designing my web presence and updating/optimizing my resume.

At this point, this is all preemptive action, but I want to be ready.
Twing: Accoona’s Final Disgrace.
Be Better.
The Simpsons has not been funny for a while. I think the last funny episode I saw was the one where Homer and Bart become Catholic. Why pick on this episode?

By the way, did you stop to think that maybe Steve Jobs internet connection sucks because he lives under the sea?
Ultra Lean Green Tea
Ultra lean green tea is quite the amazing tea to help you lose weight & it provides an added energy boost all day long. Don't take my word for it, get a free 30 day sample while supplies last.
Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson Debate
Cyber Monday traffic better than last year
maybe java code that has dozens of namespaces, thousands of classes & objects, hundreds of methods needs an ide badly

lisp code written as fp doesn't require all those, so it fits the programmer's head better
Consider a contract that pays $1 if Candidate X wins the presidential election in 2008. If the market price of an X contract is currently 53 cents, an interpretation is that the market “believes” X has a 53% chance of winning.

Some how this seems a bit too linear...
Show and Tell HN: GitHub on iGoogle
For all you GitHub hackers out there. And if you haven't tried GitHub for work/fun/private/public projects, you should!

If you'd like to contribute, you're welcome to fork the repository (on GitHub, of course!) at:

http://github.com/Aupajo/github-google-gadget/tree/master

All feedback welcome :)
Hitler also did what he thought was right.

I have always wanted to Godwin a thread :D
Why Are Wages Low in Developing Countries?
The fact that they mentioned that it can be installed alongside another OS is good, because unless they plan on packaging it with more than just the browser, it always should be.

I like web apps as much as the next guy, but they can never truly take the place of desktop apps 100%. There will always be situations where one is offline, so my computer better still let me word-process offline.

Also, even google docs, the king of web word processors, is slow and buggy. Whether it's server or connection problems, it often takes me 2-3 tries to get gdocs to actually let me save so that I can close the document. Sometimes I change windows and come back to gdocs, and then I start typing and it's in some weird state where it has a cursor, but what I type doesn't show up.

And has anyone even thought about using some kind of web development environment? No. We want our editor to be fast and reliable, and we know that both embedding in a webpage and having to talk to a remote server a lot make that impossible.

Basically, all web apps still have the problem that the languages that run them are slower, anything remote is slow, and having to embed them in browsers--and have them work on all browsers--limit their functionality.

Maybe when more solutions to embedding apps have come round, and the Internet really is everywhere, this will work, but for now, the browswer cannot supplant OSes.
The order is even in a song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmZL0fmhTbA (have to give it to at least 1:09)
Geeking with Greg: Yahoo's automatic content optimization
That has rather little do do with MIT being better than State of Denial University and rather more with MIT graduating a lot of engineers and State of Denial University graduating a lot of English, Philosophy, and Women's Studies majors.

Engineers get paid more than generic office employees with no specific marketable skills. Film at 11.
U might be right. But, on the other hand I think many of us would be lucky to have a boss like Joel.
The Double Meaning of "Feedback"
Once again, not doing well does not make it a failure.
I agree about not putting yourself in the defensive. Sentences like mentioned above or "It could be the worst piece of software on the planet, and people would still use it..." don't convince me to sign up. Tell me instead what I can do on your site, what makes it so cool that I have to sign up right away.
Of course, because it wasn't actually in any way critical or incisive. It was unfunny.
Thanks for chiming in - that means a lot.

Since self promotion is more rampant than ever, it's very hard to separate the marketing from the information.
The latex2rtf program might help. The result looks like hell initially, compared to the PDF, but the content, styles and images are retained surprisingly well. (Equation support is weaker.) Just load the generated RTF in Word/Writer, tweak the styles and margins, and save as a .doc -- if the fix-up is simple enough for your document, you might not even need to keep a parallel Word copy.
Ask HN: Info. & Resources on Market Research.
Hey all,

I need to do some market research for an idea I'm using in a school business plan competition, an idea I'm thinking about actually pursuing depending on the market research. I've never really conducted any market research and am coming here to see if any of you have good resources, articles, or personal advice on how to begin researching a market, assessing whether there is a need for a service, etc.

Thanks.
The postgresql contrib stuff used to include My2Pg.pl. It's never enough to finish the job for you, but it at least gets you started. (e.g. converts autoincrement to sequences.)

Any conversion process is going to involve a lot of hand-tuning.
If they were experts, they wouldn't work for the government. They just have time-consuming degrees.
I disagree. Somewhat.

Sure this should be part of whatever spreadsheet you are using. I totally agree with that. But it's not. That's the reason someone came up with an external solution.

But why shouldn't it be a web based app? If it works just as well? If you have privacy/legality issues then OK, you need a local app. A local app may also be just as good for many other things. But why is this less suitable to the web then word processing or spreadsheets?

From there on it's just a marketing/distribution issue.
The better the college, the more doors that are open to start one's career. But it seems once college is over, and the more work experience that one has, the less that college matters.
After my 4th app went into the store, I get e-mails all the time now. Release something fairly popular within its niche and the opportunities will start to come your way.

In the meantime, just keep trawling the usual sites. e.g., 37signals job board etc.
Except to the extent they're artificially depressed by some interference in market pricing (e.g. by politicians or cartels), it can only be because the people are unproductive and/or it's hard to ship stuff to buyers.
I sort of disagree with you. Sure for some people you need offline capability but these days internet access is becoming ubiquitous and personally I can't do much of anything work-related without internet access. This sort of OS would be perfect on, for example, my iPhone hardware or my Dell mini netbook. The advantages of working online easily overshadows the disadvantages especially with faster and more reliable net connections.
What Open Source Can’t Do
Encyclopaedic overview for the UK
Britain.tv contains a vast array of information on all things British. Information includes everything from travel and tourism to UK city guides, universities and studying in the UK, eating out and nightlife guide for every town and city in the country, lifestyle, doing business in Britain along with key British statistics and politics.
I've had that a few times. It is very cool. But eating is cool too. Balancing the two is important. ;)
He does appear to completely lose the plot in several instances, eg. Extreme Programming is all about drinking Jolt, snowboarding and all night hacking sessions, now can we all get on with some more testing please.

It would also be easier to take him seriously if his paper wasn't riddled with grammatical errors. Holding up programmers as lazy when you haven't proof read your publication properly does seem a little odd. (I notice that it's marked as an "unpublished draft" on his site, but if you're going to put it up on the web I figure it's fair game).

I also particularly like the way that he advocates planning in advance, doing things right, etc. but then can't get the budget for a decent test environment (for their real time OS no less) in http://www2.fsmlabs.com/~cort/publications/sparky/sparky.pdf and has to cobble together a PC from spare parts.
I am probably type C. I think type C might be quite big.

The type of person who can't program a blog but can & will install a Wordpress if she can find decent instructions because blogger doesn't let her do XYZ.

The type of person who can & will use forum code but can't use html/css.

The type of person that can & will set up a hosted online shop but can't alter the code.

Basically, if the problem exists & the excel solution is not something that you would just come across in excel without knowing, it comes down to what solution you do come across.As an online app, this might have a better chance of being that.

The second thing is this: would you (A) prefer to explain to your clients (B) how to use the excel solution or send them a link to this?
Build it for the love, not the money
Stop Global Warming
Buy deforested land, help it regenerate, and protect it from exploitation again forever. You can do something about global warming and deforestation right now. The Wild Again Reforestation Trust relies on public donations to purchase deforested land.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Dow+Jones&btnG=...
UTest Raises: Crowdsourced Bug Testing
haha yup. You win on clarity
Bonus points if you can do them both at once.

Naps, exercise and eating good food are also effective.
Oh, wow. Yes. I've often thought that a lot of this process is just to keep the lowest common denominator from messing things up. I want to spend my life surrounded with people that don't need this, because then we could do so many more worthwhile things.
you should move the "how it works" link up top, because right now the whole thing is very confusing and the how it works link is way on the bottom, in a neutral color which you can barely see
I'm not sure if you're aiming to agree or disagree, but...yes totally :)

There are many other examples of the "open source business model," such as Dries Buytaert who runs Drupal and Acquia.

The point is that contributors to open source projects are willing to write code for free but not willing to wear the beepers that go off when the servers go down.
CNN Pitches a Cheaper Wire Service to Newspapers
Cool, that's exactly what I need, yet, even after skimming "how it works" page I'm still not sure.
Design lessons from World of Goo
sexbox?
I like the clean layout, but I'm completely lost on a few things
1) what exactly is the problem you are trying to solve? I read the 'about' page, and I still don't get it.
this probably leads to
2) why am I buying content that is freely available?
3) what does 'adjust' mean? a tool tip on both buy and adjust might be a good idea.
4) your statistics list current/previous -but previous to what? previous entries from that user? that's the closes I could figure.
5) i just clicked on the 'nope' for not a content owner, and the 'buy spot' link takes me to 'submit new content', but I'm not a content owner. is that right?

sorry guys, i'm completely lost as to what you are trying to accomplish. hopefully it is just a messaging adjustment for you and you're off to the races.

congrats on the launch though.
Considering that the paper is posted as an unpublished draft on his documents listing, isn't it a bit silly to criticize this paper because it has typos and spelling errors?
Pointless comment. Just go to hulu.