skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
any suggestions for calming nerves while we wait? :)
Facebook COO works a 9-to-5 every day
which free service (or service that pays you money, ala AdSense) has a better approach to customer service? Honestly curious because I hear a lot of complaints about Google, but I have a feeling that Facebook, Bing/Microsoft, etc aren't any better.
You do realise you can quite happily commute from Oxford or Cambridge to London? It's only about an hour on the train from either city.

Oxford and Cambridge are hardly the only two universities to hire tech talent from either, there are are universities with excellent CS depts in London itself. Imperial and UCL spring to mind. There are at least a dozen more excellent universities within a couple of hours travel time from London...
"> What would "JavaScript the Railified Parts" look like side-by-side with Crockford's The Good Parts, and Flanagan's Definitive Guide?
It would look like this: http://pragprog.com/book/tbcoffee/coffeescript

Err, that's CoffeeScript, not JavaScript. CoffeeScript gets cross-compiled into JavaScript. It isn't JavaScript in itself.
tip: the word "hysterical" is misogynist, having its origin in proto-psychology blaming being overly emotional on disturbance of the womb. i assume you didn't know this when you used it. now you know! 'melodramatic' would work just as well.
EA Laying Off Hundreds of Employees, but Still Aggressively Hiring
Putting out fires at 37signals: The on-call programmer
The question is, can it continue to not be a bubble? With so many investors vying to invest in YC companies in angel rounds the demand is eventually going to reach an unsustainable frenzy. Good for them, as the author assumes, if they are being more conservative and not really asking what they could (25mm priced rounds) just because they could. If prices keep going up, and there's a bad batch or two (not saying there will ever be ;)) then it could go away in true bubble fashion. What won't go away is the consistency in tutelage and the invaluable, growing alumni network. The question is if there is a way to keep YC Companies from hitting that bubble and then bursting it, just by sheer force of demand and consistency of investment in an otherwise inconsistent environment?
Yes. There's even a name for it: It's called an "acqui-hire".
IT's Role Changing Faster Than Expected
managing "flow" post-hoc visual design is a ux nightmare.
In the technology industry is it OK to work 5-9 schedule
I find it a bit ironic that Jeff Atwood is advocating reading the source when he's built his company on top of a closed-source stack. Can he read the source of ASP.Net when he encounters an issue with the web frontend? Can he debug into MSSQL Server when he has an issue with database performance?

Jeff can talk about the importance of having source available, but his actions speak louder than his words. He's built a very successful startup on top of a closed-source stack. Having the source isn't as important as it seems, then.
I think you're wrong on almost every point.

Seems like it can scale quite well. Look at Merry Maids and Jani-king. It wouldn't surprise me if a more modern maid service that was entirely corporate-owned (rather than a franchise) supplanted the current leaders at some point.

The margins seem high enough that layers of management could work.

Difficulty in keeping good employees hasn't stopped Wal-Mart or McDonald's.

Times are tougher than most people alive can remember, so if it's working at all now, it probably can only get better.

There may be a solid first-mover advantage, so barriers to entry that are non-financial may exist.

It sounds like his part of the work isn't difficult. I don't know if I'd define what a maid does as difficult either. It just sucks.

Running a business of any size is a major personal growth opportunity.

My guess is customer service calls will happen at reasonable hours. Nobody wakes up at 4 am to decide their maids did a bad job.

I can't comment on taxes. He claims to be insured/bonded. I don't know much about that for that sort of business though.
Sexuality is such a taboo in American culture that kids don't know what realistic sexuality is. In some cultures, parents talk frankly and openly to their kids about it, and teach them how to respect and listen to their partners and protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy and STI's. American parents uncomfortably change the subject whenever they ask where babies come from.
Completely unrelated, but why do stories having anything to do with Pete Cashmore always include a photo of him looking seductively into the camera? This one seems to be in some cool night club. As if knowing that the author happens to be a rare attractive tech reporter adds some credibility to his stories.

I do agree with the tenets of the story though. Working until 5pm should be plenty long to call it a productive day if you don't spend your time yanking off at the water cooler or gossiping with coworkers or even worse sitting in pointless meetings.

I felt so adamantly about this at one point that I wrote a series of op-eds to the New York Times trying to make the case that the single greatest way to alleviate our dependence on foreign oil, lower pollution, mitigate the need for mass-transit, and increase productivity was to give tax incentives to employers who allow employees to work from home 1-2 days per week. Seems surprising to me that more focus hasn't been put on this recently. Anyhow, the stories were never run and now I'm really off topic.
I heard one reasons myspace didn't scale was because it was hard to find people who had experience scaling so large.
Have you considered running on AppHarbor instead of raw EC2? Nancy works great on our platform.
What you've said is incredibly vague. You mention "emotional content" in regards to violence and sexuality depicted through media, but there is no way to know what that means and you offer no way to define it. In my experience, this kind of rationalization comes from those who have their own discomfort on these issues and using non-specific language is way to avoid making definite statements while still affecting the outcome of a discussion.

I don't mean to be harsh, but perhaps you could explain, in clear, concrete terms, why depictions of sexuality in media are of special concern compared to other depictions in media, unrealistic or not.
That's mixing things up. Imitation isn't the problem here: clones happen of all successful products, and that's a good thing.

The problem is fraud. These titles and authors (and sometimes cover art) are deliberately similar to existing products and appear designed to catch sales from people who aren't paying attention. That's not the same thing at all.
single malt.
Same reason I don't want $everything-facebook I also don't want $everything-google.

Plus google has little to zero experience at offering big products on non unix/android platforms.

EDIT: I didn't literally mean zero, since I'm writing from Chrome
So should this stop someone from taking a job at Nokia?
Packet Flight: HTTP request  40X
My current favorite podcast: TechZing Live - http://techzinglive.com

They discuss HN stories, but mostly talk very honestly about working on their startups and have great interviews with people like Patrick Collison (Stripe founder), Anthony Goldbloom & Jeremy Howard (Kaggle founders), Alex MacCaw, etc.
I totally understand your points of sometimes the point justifies the attention grabbing. But I also think that other measures might be worth taking other than flaming - like I often see the use of swears in titles to grab attention and help convey the importance of the subject, I think that alternative measures would be much more reasonable and still achieve the same goal.
I think labeling it the "future of gaming" is simply for attention. If anything, we're not talking about much more than the next iteration of consoles.

While XBox and Sony were battling over who could have the prettiest graphics, Nintendo made lots of money with the Wii's unimpressive hardware, and Apple (maybe even unintentionally) and other smartphone manufacturers came in and revolutionized the mobile gaming market with unimpressive gaming hardware.

There is a "future of gaming" for consoles and more serious gamers, and there is a "future of gaming" for more casual gamers.
this is a good skill to have. however, there are a lot of problems / domains where reading the source isn't enough. debug the operation of compiler logic, for example. what's really important is to know how the algorithm has been implemented and how the algorithm, as implemented, is interacting with your current problem / use case.

if understanding the algorithm involves boning up on two semesters of type theory or graduate-level courses in algorithms, number theory and abstract algebra, as debugging problems in modern databases, compilers and high-performance integer libraries would, then having the source code is probably not going to help you as much as you think it would...
Can he read the source of ASP.Net when he encounters an issue with the web frontend?

Yes. Recently they even went a step beyond the traditional "shared source" thing by releasing it under the Apache 2.0 license.

http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/

Less so with MSSQL. But it's less of an issue there, because MSSQL provides a very good view of what's going on under the hood to begin with, and Microsoft has done an extremely good job of documenting the whole thing.
Did no one read the part of her interview where she said she started work (sending emails so people would notice) at 5.30 am? And then would send emails from home at like 9pm? Ie. she was working way more than 12 hours a day, she just happened to leave the office at 5.30 when other bosses might be scheduling meetings.

The 'story' is completely not what it's being made out to be.
I switched to Ubuntu One. It has 5GB free and a decent android client.
While I agree with the sentiment of your message, I think that the designer loses something when people give him props for a good looking page that doesn't work. "Not working" is a relative term of course, but assumptions should always be based on something, and decisions shouldn't be arbitrary.

I think it would be worth it to the designer to justify the decisions to himself, and let us try to tear them down, as that will further his learning. I'm assuming that by doing these exercises, he's trying to grow, and that puts him in an entirely different situation than with Bowman.

The flip side of that coin is that no design is proven until it's A/B tested. You can have awards for the site's beauty, but if a significantly uglier design increases sales, then you've lost the plot. Keats writes really great poetry. The writing is beautiful. I would no sooner put a Keats poem as my website copy than I would an Ansel Adams photograph as my website's visual design.

This is why website design is harder than people think. This is what separates the good from the great.

The designer is of course under no obligation to us to do this, but it may help himself. Even if he doesn't bother to justify things out loud, sometimes the act of thinking through justification in your head is enough to solidify (or compel change to) a design decision.
I honestly don't get it. I am almost skipping to my car after my day job so I can go home and work on my personal projects. Why would anyone want to stick around later to make someone else more money?
It would be that way, but for the fact that this style breaks other tooling.
Am I the only one a little disappointed backtype disappeared?

With twitter's search function as poor as it is + google no longer indexing their database of updates, it's incredibly hard to find any tweet more than a month old or so.

I was hoping with the acquisition of backtype, they'd at least integrate the service into the native twitter interface/service.
I've read that google's main goal for these free products is to increase the amount of time people spend online and not to monetize every bit of information that they come across. The more time people spend online, the more people see adsense ads. That's why Chrome and Android aren't spying on people's browsing habits like they technically could be, for example.
That's probably because most people have ridiculous commutes. Even if you only commute 30 minutes each way, and work 8 hours a day, it certainly feels like you've worked 9 hours that day.
I believe strongly in a sustainable pace. Software development isn't like brick-laying - you can't work more hours, past the breaking point, and expect to get marginal returns. Sure, you'll get some sloppiness and "bugs" in bricklaying, but likely nothing that can fundamentally ruin the project.

Software developers working too much lead to negative returns as they add more bugs than they fix (or add features). And sleep-deprived coding has lead to more architectural "bite us in the ass" problems than any slightly faster feature output.

That's why I have a cap at ~40 hrs/week. Don't work any more or I'll get mad.

And I believe in the "Results Only Work Environment" (http://www.gorowe.com) - there is no clock; folks "working late" or "coming in early" have nowhere to hide. Only the people working at a sustainable pace and consistently delivering high-quality, working software are rewarded.

And we're hiring: http://fundinggates.com/jobs
tip: the original meaning of a word doesn't necessarily have any relation to it's current meaning. I assume you didn't know about the etymological fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy) when you used it. Now you know!

Seriously, stop being overly PC. You're just being annoying.
Whoa. That is actually pretty cool. I didn't realize that Microsoft would open-source such a core piece of technology.
of course the goal is not to let anyone leave the start-up, the assumption are:
1) you team member doesn't put his energy on the project, 2) you team member can't execute as well as he is committed to. 3) you have tried every single possible way to improve his performance but 4) he just refuses to change.

in this extreme case, you have to take eaction to avoid a deterioration within the team even if he is your friend in years.

of course, you guys might still be friends in life, life is not just about start-ups anyway.
Taste depends on expectation and convention. There's no absolute standard to apply, only local and traditional practices.

As others have pointed out, the Star Wars transitions are part of the conceit of the movies. As an old fart, I grew up watching the movie serials that the Star Wars, and Indiana Jones, movies are made in homage of. If you aren't familiar with them then you are watching a very different movie than I am.

This is probably one of the reasons that I rather like the prequels; I'm viewing them in the context that they were created in. If Lucas erred it was in expecting future generations to be aware of the context and not expecting them to simply take the movies at face value. Since the movies made a lot of money, I don't feel he erred by much.

Lucas also is referencing a lot of post war Japanese film narrative technique; this is less critical to "reading" the film, though.

I've never heard anyone who knows about film narrative technique say that Lucas was an "unskilled" film maker. As for the films literary quality, YMMV.
> Before you ask, “Is there a YC bubble?” you have to address "Is the internet industry experiencing a bubble?" Yes there are bubbles, but those bubbles make up the froth on top of the massive rising tide of value being startups are creating today.

I may be mistaken, but I don't think so. I don't see the majority of tech startups creating much of substantial long term value. YC does a great job at vetting tech startups, but lets not get that confused with long-term value. Initial investors make their money from temporary valuation and subsequent investment by others. They don't care about the long-term value of a startup, and because of that, these startups are still a risky investment for late stage investors.

So, there is a bubble. But, this is just temporary.

As long as the world economy stays unsettled, investors are going to be running to YC to vet startups because it is less risky. When the market is less volatile and starts going up smoothly, those investors will happily just invest in the market, and will have the money to take bigger risks by investing in startups that aren't vetted.
Belly feeling is needlessly puerile.
"What do you do when a 11-12 hour workday is expected upon penalty of being marginalized and eventually let go?"

Quit and work somewhere sane :)
I'm only explaining what makes sense. I know, personally, I'm not going to change how I'm writing my code because of what two influential Javascript developers bitched about on a Github ticket, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that sentiment.

I'm merely explaining why it's drawing so much attention, and what nerves this debate seems to be touching, because as a technical debate it is insanely boring. But that's clearly why it's not strictly a technical debate.
Those letters are helpful in making the snap decision as to whether to even bother investigating the content further. I can't give every game/book/movie/whatever proper review, so it helps to know that some sane adult marked it with an easily-understood cue. If there's an "M" or "T" on the box, I don't want to waste another second wondering if it's suitable for my toddlers.

Example: "Happy Tree Friends" is advertised & starts with cute forest animals in simple & colorful renderings; an appropriate parental cue helps prevent having to explain other definitions of "rendering" to a kid who can barely talk and is wondering why seconds later that cute squirrel is shrieking, spewing red, and has a bad case of the ouchies. A prominent "T" would be helpful to those adults who don't know the show and are being pestered by a 3-year-old to watch it on Netflix.
Twitter Acquires Hotspots.IO to Beef Up Revenue Engineering
press ups, sit ups, code something, draw something just keep doing something contructive! single malt? not before night! ;-)
Yes, you can certainly build a startup on .Net[1]. That said, there are some things you should consider carefully before you do:

* Will you be able to recruit top talent? In Seattle, not likely a problem. In the Bay Area, it's harder[2].

* Does the licensing cost make sense for your business? BizSpark is awesome, but it's not forever. In most cases the answer is yes, but not always[3].

* Are you willing to learn Linux too? You're going to run across something cool you want to use that only works on Linux, or works best on Linux. Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, etc. come to mind.

I've built a startup on .Net before, and may do it again. The documentation for the whole Windows/.Net/SQL Server stack is amazing, and they're very predictable. With little effort you can learn enough to know how they'll perform, where they'll fall down next, and the next steps to move forward[4].

[1] I co-founded and was CTO of Loopt. We may have had product problems, but the tech never held us back.

[2] It's hard to find really good people willing to work on .Net in The Valley. They know their next gig will likely be at another startup, Facebook, or Google - .Net won't likely help you there.

[3] After BizSpark is over, look into SPLA licensing. It allows you to pay monthly for only what you use, and allows you to always be running the latest version. During all of Loopt Microsoft Licensing never cost more per month than an engineer, and the software saved us at least as much time and money. Remember, each time "The New Hotness" breaks, the time you spend debugging or migrating to something else is time you're not spending on your product.

[4] For example, Windows and SQL Server have great performance reporting. You'll know you need to get more RAM in a month, or switch to SSDs soon, long before you actually have problems.
Uh, they have a dropbox-like client coming out soon. Also, I far prefer their web interface to dropbox's. I see no reason to continue using dropbox once skydrive client comes out.

...unless you're on linux :)
I don't see how this is a problem at all.

It's no different than stopping at "Dairy King" and being disappointed in the ice cream. Eat somewhere else next time.

In fact, there are plenty of legitimate artistic works that have the exact same name. You can't copyright a title, and you shouldn't be able to. Maybe Isaac Worthington, with a little practice, will become a well-respected writer. Certainly you can't blame a guy who wrote a book about Steve Jobs for calling it "Steve Jobs".
"Hysterical" is one of those words that the original meaning has been completely replaced by common usage. I think we can all safely use it without being misogynists. Similarly, I feel safe using the word "idiot" without fear that listeners will assume I am insulting people with mental retardation.
Wait, "Where's Waldo" but in 3d, from first person perspective?

6 Paparazzi - Start with a lousy camera, have to take
photos which are graded for score. Get better lenses
and access to better hiding places as level ups.
(This is like a FPS, but with no guns, and with
the enemy on a pre-determined route and with strict
time limits for each level)

7 Tree in the Field - you start in a field.
There's a tree. You wander around. You can
climb the tree. You can run. As you do certain
things (start running, for example) a timer
starts with a recommendation ("Hey! How fast
can you run round the field? / Climb the tree?
/ etc". You find a magnifying glass. You can
look at bugs. You can look at stones (and the
fossils). You can look at flowers. The weather
changes. The day turns into night. You find
a box. When you find the box another prompt
pops up "Hey! This looks like a good place to
keep your fossils!". There is a rich and
diverse eco-system, with hooks into information
about everything ("This is a 'Cowslip' (*Primula
veris*)" - but then more links if wanted. Right
down to high level biology concepts.) You can
race bugs against each other. You find some
seeds, and a trowel, and some rickety rackety
implements.

7a Tree in the Field DLC - A Toolshed for the
equipment / A mini greenhouse / etc etc.
Hotspots, Posterous, BackType...who else am I missing?
Anyone thinking about building an .NET (ASP.NET MVC) based web application should strongly consider a Mono - PostgreSQL - Unix-based OS stack. You get the power of Unix (not a negligible thing in my opinion), PostgreSQL is simply awesome (and it's getting better every day) and Mono is really ready for primetime. Hosting will be cheaper as well. We've been doing this for a while and so far we had very good experiences.
The Canadian appeals court has actually created precedent for an an economically 'dependent contractor'. That contractors may run their own business and meet many of the independence criteria, but still be working for a single firm or contract.

Summary of the case at:
http://www.djmlaw.ca/downloads/Snapshot_April_2010.pdf
How about "it's just not out yet"? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/20/connecting-you...
"shedding the pressure of deadlines"

This is exactly why Khan Academy works for me. I need to learn at my own pace. Kudos for the insight!