skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
great point, but let me ask you this, how many people out there have the talent and product that matches up to Jobs and Zuck; they're once (maybe twice) in a generation kind of guys. For everyone else, you should try to get as much help as possible, and I think dressing appropriately can help you do that. You're right though, counter-signaling is something that you can use to your advantage, but you should not just be a badass, but you better have a badass product (and hopefully tons of customers)
Madison, Wisconsin (http://g.co/maps/pnsev) has an imagined Monona Terrace as well as some kids with silly hats.
Groupon is a ponzi. They need money from new groupons to pay out past groupons. This is why they are constantly buying out smaller companies for new markets, and getting into higher end groupons. If the new money coming in is less than the money payed out to previous groupon, the companies collapses, just like a ponzi.

As long as they can make the company look healthy in the near term (accounting tricks), they hope investors won't notice the medium-long term liabilities, or the flow of funds necessary to keep the company afloat, but by then insiders would have sold out the bulk of their positions, and someone else is holding the bag.

Groupon will signal the bursting of web bubble 2.0, and will drag down the Facebook IPO. And if the Facebook IPO falters, silicon valley hits the skids, because everyone in Silicon Valley is in that play. Everyone.
Two interesting issues I've come across:

1) A lot of designers work at an agency at one point or another. The environment there encourages behavior very different than what startups need. E.g., long cycles vs rapid iteration, "final" deliverables vs incremental release, an emphasis on what clients want vs what users need, hopping from project to project vs really digging in on one thing, ability to specialize vs necessity of being an adequate generalist, high-church design vs getting one's hands dirty, and being hip vs being passionate.

2) One gets to be a really good designer by designing a lot of different things and keeping very current on trends. But startups require a long-term focus on a single product, which takes people out of the design game. That's a very hard sell.

At our startup we outsource individual pieces of design (e.g., logo creation, color and layout selection, coming up with a new look for something). But that ends up serving as raw material for the in-house activities. Most of the design ends up being done by the product manager, the engineers, or both collaboratively. That works for us because we do a lot of user testing and iterate frequently, and also because we know when to hand some piece of visual creation off to an expert.
I think it's the Zuck effect too. Problem is, there's only one Mark Zuckerberg and when a bunch of people are out there emulating that... err, I mean "being themselves", then it loses all meaning. The appeal of this trend will fade and eventually those walking into VC meetings like their shit doesn't stink in a hoodie and flip flops will be looked at like the phonies they very well may be and asked to leave until such time they can show that they take themselves, the people they're meeting, and their ideas seriously.
Mancini furious at Balotelli
Appearances do matter a lot which is why I would never dress up for a technical interview.
You could add a secret sharing tool to make sure that your data can be recovered if you have at least n surviving relatives agree to recover it: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/intrepid/man7/gfshare.7....
Just a bit west of Shinjuku you can find a dragon quest slime where square enix's office is
I wish there was a way to work with other people to think and talk through big ideas. Talking with other people seems to be the best way to actually find big problems to solve as you never know where your conversations might take you.
A Pasco County beekeeper knows why bees are dying and colonies are collapsing
1% = millions of users. Out of that 1% comes a significant portion of the people who run the sites that serve flash content.
Inflation is hardly a characteristic of the boomer years. We've had persistant inflation since 1914, went we went to a fiat money system.
I think the important difference between VCs and Wall Street is that the MBS stuff was obvious chicanery with a terrible societal cost. They might as well have been stuffing horse manure into sausage casings and selling it as all-beef hot dogs.

I grant that Groupon is pretty dubious, but the other upcoming tech IPO candidates I know about have actual solid businesses. I think VCs don't generally play the "greater fool" game, if only because it doesn't work well at their timescales. MBSes were very liquid, and the organizations making them had ways of selling them off quickly. For VCs, on the other hand, the median time from initial investment to exit is something like 7 years; that's a long time to wait hoping that nobody sees through the bullshit.
I'm probably what you'd call an introvert. I get along fine with most people. I have no problem chatting about work and non-work subjects. I have no problem helping others with a coding problem, or asking for help when I have one. But I can't sit literally elbow-to-elbow with another person and share a keyboard for much longer than 10 minutes at a time.

My creative output happens mostly when I'm working in a solitary, focused manner. When we adopted mandatory pair programming it destroyed my productivity and my enjoyment of work to the point that I had to quit.
CSIRO to reap more than $220m from global firms after US legal settlement
I find it strange to reconcile this position with the other oft-repeated position that people over 50 cannot get hired.
He removed it: https://github.com/nickjacob/nickjacob.github.com/commit/c9a...
I'm a 100% creative type. I used to be a visual designer, and now I focus on UX design with visuals taking a secondary role. As just the type of designer they are describing, Don Draper on Mad Men summed it up:

"[...]we’re the least important, most important thing there is.”

Traditionally, design (and user experience) is the last thing to be added, and the first thing to be cut. If you have 2 founders, a business guy, and a engineer, you can make a product. No design required. But a designer and a business guy? They can make a prototype, but nothing functional.

And we live in a world (the startup, internet world) where function always supersedes form. For every 1 site with good design and bad functionality, there are 50 with bad design and good functionality.

It just so happens that a great many startups are started by technical people. And typically, they can develop a working product, or very advanced prototype, with no designer help at all. And when you add in the "inmates are running the asylum" mentality, most technical founders and engineers don't notice/care if their design (ux, ui, graphic arts) aren't superb because that's just "lipstick and lace."

There are a lot of engineers and technical founders that realize this isn't the case, but they are in the minority.
You can't be a rebel unless you wear the right uniform.
Perhaps it's too simple, but here's mine: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dozingcats.... Runs on Android 1.6 or later, while conditionally supporting features in newer versions like camera zooming and efficient preview data buffers (2.2) front-facing cameras (2.3), and dimming software system buttons (4.0).

It's not that hard. I'd estimate less than 10% of development time was working around "fragmentation" issues, and the difference in productivity between Java and Objective-C more than made up for that.
It doesn't run on iOS , the version for android/blackberry is declared dead. Windows 8 will only support it in it's legacy "desktop" mode, it's shrinking to one browser under Linux and somehow I doubt Apple wants to keep in running under OS X for any longer than they have to.
Are people who dress in spiffy clothing more likely to be trustworthy?
> you will have to filter through a bunch of examples that may be several years old

No need for that now, search for "rails examples" and you'll find the RailsApps project with useful example apps, all up to date (Rails 3.2) and kept current by a growing community of contributors: http://railsapps.github.com.
Society overall and human mind in particular have a great tool that handles that situation: forgetting.

Stuff that is not in use is gradually getting forgotten. So if you do not update your project (because you abandoned it or because you are dead), then the project is getting useless and is gradually forgotten.

Yes, you can put some effort into maintaining your digital project after your death, but it worth the overhead only in a very rare cases. Most of the time it's better to spend the effort on creating new project, than on maintaining someone else's digital project.
Computer Science for the Rest of Us (Non-Computer Scientist)
I think that a) Groupon will take longer to blow up than that, and b) people will be happy to write off the daily deals sector as something pretty much unrelated to Silicon Valley. Groupon is in Chicago, Living Social is in DC. They are marketing companies, not technology companies.

Now if something else fails big, I'm sure people will see a trend. But I don't think Groupon will be enough.
For those interested, On The Edge by Brian Bagnall (http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/...) does a good job recounting the life and death of Commodore. The management of that company was definitively rocky.
As long as they can make the company look healthy in the near term

They are not doing a very good job given the lead articles in the WSJ talking about Groupons financial issues.
You both have a point but this counter-signaling thing is a fad. When everyone is doing it the value just plummets. The whole casual dress for pitching thing is so common now that I predict it's not long at all before the guys dressing nicely are taken more seriously again.

Also, what does "dressing like a hacker" mean? Hackers exist outside the valley too and there's no uniform that I was issued. Maybe theyre on back order for the Chicago metro area? But in all seriousness, if you said "he doesn't dress like a doctor" it makes far more sense than "he doesn't dress like a hacker". I'm a hacker but I'm also a business owner. So what attire do I don? Hoodie and flip flops or open sport jacket and collared shirt sans tie? I feel that in this case many aspects of hacker culture are just fads and the old standards (like dressing well for pitches and interviews) will never go out of style.
Where are you going to find a office that has 50-something private offices?

I've worked in places with 30+ programmers - what building exists that a company could afford to have 30 private offices??
The USPS was losing money on package delivery - especially "priority" delivery - when private companies were initially allowed to enter the package and "express mail" business. FedEx and UPS made a profit providing the exact same service the USPS lost money on, and eventually did it so well that the post office now subcontracts a lot of that work to FedEx.

As for "ramping up massive infrastructure", Fedex and UPS do door-to-door already. In fact, in many areas they deliver to the door where the post office only delivers to a "mail stop" that might be miles from the relevant "door". One thing they don't do is waste resources cruising the entire neighborhood on the random off-chance that somebody might have put out a package for delivery. Instead, you can either drop off a package at the nearest Kinko's or supermarket or corner drop box, or you can tell them (by phone or over the web) that you've specifically got a pickup for them to get and they'll come get it.

They also don't ludicrously overpay their workers. Package delivery should probably be a minimum wage job, not a career.

The fact that the private companies could do the work with fewer offices - combining with companies like Kinko's as they do rather than maintaining a separate office - and fewer workers (due to more streamlined competitive processes) and cheaper workers (due to it not being a federal unionized workforce) suggests they could do the job more cheaply. How much more cheaply is an open question, but I would tend to expect the cost of delivering a letter to drop over time (relative to inflation) as technology improves and as the population grows.
If you're gunning for book immortality, one of the worst thing you could do is to copyright it.
Unless Montreal has become a Toronto suburb recently, I don't think any of the options account for the Montreal --> Toronto bus ride.
The way the baby boomer generation has raped our society of wealth by piling on debt to be paid by future generations is an abomination. To me, it is concrete proof that democracy doesn't work. How is it possible make things fair in a popularity contest when you're outnumbered?

I honestly don't know why everyone under the age of 30 isn't rioting and burning down the system right now. They got dealt a shit hand.
Ah, but you see; the "right uniform" changes over time. In an age where everyone tries to be a rebel; wearing a suit becomes rebellion.

A uniform is by definition anti-individuality.
Why would you want to run a browser as root?
I have not achieved a state of mental flow in over a year. If a place I'm
interviewing at has adopted the open floor plan, it's a deal breaker.

I hear you. As an aside, does anyone know of any dev shops in Sydney (Australia) that don't use open-plan setups? I've been going for nine years, and I've only ever seen one (Campaign Monitor); the rest have been benches, or benches separated by low walls.
I have this sneaking suspicion that Scala has blown past C++ and is taking aim on Perl.
I had an internship last summer where the interns were all in an open-air room. It worked pretty well even though I am 95% introvert, because I naturally tend to zone out everything I'm not focused on anyways.

I think it's possible to simulate that, even if you aren't naturally oblivious so your surroundings, by putting on a comfy pair of over-the-ear noise cancelling headphones and listening to some ambient music. In addition to providing insulation from audible distractions, it's also a good cue to your co-workers that if they try to attract your attention, they will be interrupting you. If you are distracted easily in your peripheral vision by people walking by, then this won't help you much, but otherwise it's a pretty good approximation of being alone.

My point is that as a programmer there are things you can do even in an open-air environment to provide creative isolation, without losing the benefits of having easy access to the people around you when you want to talk.
8% returns, where does one get that?
You must have a strange social group. I don't have a facebook, and have never once had a problem in anything but other websites wanting me to have one. When friends ask for my facebook I say I don't have one, tell them I don't like their attitude towards privacy, they find it interesting and we move on.
Google Analytics Graphs Play Music - April Fools
I dislike projects that are named literally. It causes unnecessary linguistic gymnastics to distinguish between the project, the thing it's trying to achieve and the next project.
Haha what are these some weird PR-bots? (or in this case bad PR-bots)
Try Street View! Awesome.
I almost don't see why this can't be realtime. I imagine from here, all you need to do is throw more computing power at it? It's very cool. Imagine this plus a head-mounted pico-projector - any scrap of paper or wall could become an interface. Very excited about this technology.
You select an instrument and it plays according to the graph displayed. Am seeing this on the main vistors overview page of the standard reporting tab of the new analytics version.
I was also thinking about the question over my working career. My best work has been done in a closed office shared with 1 or 2 other people also working on the same project. I worked at home for 2 years and while I had great spurts of productivity when the task was well defined, getting questions answered or bouncing ideas off others hurt some types of work.

Cubes never did work well for me because they rarely get any natural light. I'm a sun driven person and try my best to insist on a window in my office.
See (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/may/20/la...) about "I couldn't care less"
I think "design" is a vague term here.
What most people think of as design is "making it pretty" or designing individual graphical elements such as logos etc.

What a startup really needs is somebody who can make their app "feel" right,;i.e be easy to use, accessible , press all the right emotional buttons and have an attractive visual style that fits the app.

In my experience most of the people I have encountered in design, even in web design are the former rather than the latter.
We were looking for a designer to redesign a website some time ago and had one highly recommended.
I was optimistic until I looked at her portfolio. Entirely Flash websites serving upwards of 10MB to get the first page down, animation everywhere , all text was images , "mystery meat" navigation , no SEO whatsoever etc etc.

Now no doubt she was a very talented and skilled artist, but obviously somebody who held high end visuals as a priority above everything. I knew at that point that I categorically could not work with someone like that. She could probably have designed some nice logos, buttons and other things for us but I could not hand direction of an entire website over to someone like that.

On the other hands, I can't draw for shit or even choose good colors but I have been using computer applications for long enough to have some idea as to what UI elements should be included, where they should be placed. How to logically organize a UI etc but I wouldn't call myself a "designer" but I think these are skills that are essential to web app designers.
I noticed that when I clicked on a cat, a $cat was attempted on my password files.
> If you’re looking for a designer who can come up with your identity, design your site, create UIs with great user experience for your web and mobile apps, and on top of that code his or her work in HTML/CSS (and why not throw in Javascript in the mix!), then I’m sorry to inform you that you’re hunting unicorns.

I can do all of that. And I can do it all really well. I don't normally toot my own horn, but this all just seems like part of the job. These are skills that I've acquired over 13 years (I'm only 23), and apparently the combination is more desirable/rare than I thought.

Here's the thing, though: I don't consider myself a 'designer'. I think the title is too limiting, because it doesn't encompass other skills (like coding). And while I would never call myself a 'designer', I could probably outperform 99% of the designers I've come across.

Some recent work:

http://grubwithus.com (if anything is ugly/weird here, we're heavily A/B testing right now)

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grubwithus/id492155022?mt=8

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/11/grubwithus-goes-mobile-with...
The target of society is not equality, per se, but a high minimum standard of living. pg has a great essay on this at http://paulgraham.com/gap.html. As a quick summary: as technology increases and multiplies people's abilities to be productive, we would expect the income gap to widen; someone 10x-50x as productive as someone else should be compensated accordingly. Conversely, if the marginal tax rate is 92% above 100k income, people will seek other forms of compensation in their work - for example, shorter hours. No one is going to put in 100 hour weeks to earn $300k a year, because after taxes that comes out to an extra $27k; I'll relax at a 9-5 instead and just earn my government mandated salary cap.
Make the most of your client-side routes
My personal timeline, built with CSS3 and jQuery
Entertaining, but not as good (or original) as jotly...
(Compared to the protest movement of the Sixties, the Occupy movement is a toothless tiger.)

Maybe that's because the Occupy protesters have seen the videos of what happened in more extreme cases to the 60s protesters (not to mention advances in crowd control techniques, like microwave guns, pepper spray, and using LRAD at close range).
Here is a video from Dr. Robert Lustig about sugars. It is an hour and a half long but very informative.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

After watching it, I've considerably reduced my sugar intake. I still drink soft drinks during lunch/dinner, but I am slowly weaning myself off them and onto water/tea and other better alternatives.
Another issue that I've personally run across is negotiating how much control a (non-founding) designer has over the product.

In an early stage startup, it makes sense that one of the founders will run the product side of the company. But really good designers often want to have a good amount of control over the product, knowing that putting a glossy coating on a product with bad UX is a losing proposition.

This often means getting more involved in product research/strategy/prioritization process. This can be problematic, since non-founding designers are often hired mostly for their UI design/front-end implementation skills.

My feeling is that very good designers are ideally suited to taking a larger role in running the product side of the company. If startups are willing to offer this, I think they can lure more good designers to their company.

Personally, this is the position I'm in. I'm an experienced designer, looking for an early stage startup to work with. Many founders I speak with are hesitant when I say that I'm interested in working on the big picture vision for the product. I'm still looking for the right fit in this regard.
This contributes to the problem the article illustrates. You outsource your design, as you put it the "logos, color and layout selection, or a new look for something," and then say that the PM and engineers wing the UI and UX?

So you outsource your design and art, and then don't even really have a resource, outsourced or not, for user experience.

Also, it's quite a shame that you're associated designers with being "hip and not passionate" and "specializing and not being an adequate generalist."

Imagine if your post was reversed, and described why design-based startups can't find good programmers. All the pejorative "this vs. that" statements you could write about a programmer and what their "environment encourages."
Or astroturfing...
When I tried to use Carmax it was very pricey. As in, it was only a small bit cheaper than the retail prices offered by dealers, retail prices that everyone knows you can take thousands off.
Liquidmetal Technologies filing outlines its $20 million agreement with Apple
Hm, I didn't see those in my brief look this morning (was on my phone), I'll have to take a look. There was a syncing issue with the last version which was causing some crashes, but I think it should be fixed in this version. For this version's reviews, I just see a login problem and a couple complaining of it not loading anything (usually connectivity issues). I should probably prompt users for reviews to get the skew away from those motivated by negative experiences.

It's obviously not Android's fault entirely, but as a result of their choices (letting handset manufacturers run wild with no real standardization, including making custom versions of the OS), getting things to look and work perfectly is more work. For a one man shop and some occasional contractors, that makes continuing development less of an obviously good idea because for the amount of time that can be spent on it, the results won't be as good, and it's a direct result of the way Google has been handling their ecosystem. For people whose whole job it is to make apps, sure, Android is a perfectly fine platform, but it's higher maintenance than the iOS side of things.
Slow to no progress. The obstacle will be what it has always been. The masses choose the path of least resistance.