skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These lists are kind of cute, but I don't think all that relevant to readers of HN. I spent 4 years at SAP, apparently now in 4th place for best tech companies to work for (one after Google) and it's just not the kind of work you want to be doing if you're young and ambitious. It's stable. You're paid pretty well. You get decent free lunch, nice break areas and they don't do cubes.

But your work is a drop in the bucket. Always.

Got a cool idea? "I'll pass it on to my boss. And if it makes it through him we'll send it over to legal." 9 months later, after you've forgotten why you wanted to do it in the first place, you get your answer.

If you don't really care much about work -- like if you're just there to do your 8 hours, get paid, and then, you know, focus on your family, or look forward to your sabbatical (you can take one for 6 months after 5 years) or in my case, focus on my open source work, that's great. If you want to work to do something with your career, they're not.
Can a profitable business model be applied to podcasting? (research paper)
A Modest Blogging Proposal
Top 10 objectively biggest tech stories of 2008
Yes, but if someone ask "what do you do" or "where do you work" you have about three seconds before they trail off and stop listening. Self-righteous rants tend to be off putting.

Just give in and say you are starting up a web 2.0 powered widget syndication platform for the next-gen WebOS.
Brand name products usually use fancier packaging, they spend money on advertising (direct mail fliers for example), the extra profits encourage more waste in the company since they can afford it, while generic manufactures will go to great lengths to be very efficient. And if money is not spent there it goes to larger marketing budgets, and finally if nothing else to profits, and larger salary. Larger salary usually means larger home, etc, and all that goes with it. So, no, it's not an edge case.

PS. The environment should not be your only reason for choosing or not choosing something to buy. But comparing the price will help you avoid greenwashing.
You wrote yours while I wrote mine. Yours gets the point across better.
Moral of the story: you can sell a fart application for the desktop, too, even if it isn't as glamorous as a fart application for the iphone.
The article seems to ignore one thing: rent control helps people stay together, and in doing so helps communities stay together. The examples they give of communities with rent control and higher rents are places I'd want to live in. They have real community fabric. This counts for something, though I'm not sure how much.
novel?
"2. "Have a Nice Day."

Translation: "I would like you to have a pleasant time today" or "I hate you" - or anything in between."

LOL at that one. So English speakers elsewhere don't say that?
"Only if there were a monopolistic housing provider."

Come on, man, housing isn't a commodity. If you're an owner charging whatever crazy price you can get in the LES as passive income on top of doing whatever you do as a day job, you're not interested in going out and spending the energy on amping production of more housing units. Plus, maybe you live in the neighborhood yourself, and you'd hate to see soulless apartment blocks go in, and if they did go in, all the charm and neighborliness that makes it so great and desirable in the first place disappears, and prices collapse. You really don't think that guy is spending his political capital on preventing new apartment construction in his awesome neighborhood? I know that's how it happens in the Mission in SF, where I'm living now.

"Living in a bad neighborhood is rewarded; the reward is cheap rent."

Until the rich people see you living there happily and drive up prices trying to be your new neighbor - hence, rent control.

"So if you argue for subsidizing hip locals who make a neighborhood attractive, do you also want to penalize disagreeable locals? If not, why not?"

I said subsidize the people who make the neighborhood desirable to live in. It's pretty cynical if you think that's just the hip locals who moved in only a little before the rest of the wave. Harlem is a little rough today in parts, but I fucking love that part of town. Crime hurts everyone; people who are less well-off have just as much right to live in a crime-free neighborhood as everyone else. Squint a little, and maybe you can see it another way: how much does it suck that the rich white people have to move in before a neighborhood gets policed properly?
"We applaud security research of this sort and are glad that white hats like the "MD5 Collision Inc." group make a point of investigating online security. This group went to great lengths to keep its findings private, and unfortunately that included ensuring that VeriSign did not receive any of this information ahead of the actual presentation, rendering it impossible for us to begin work on mitigating this issue prior to this morning. So I'll caution you that these responses are preliminary, and if it turns out that any of the information we've received is inaccurate, my responses may change."

I really like this, especially the last sentence. That's refreshingly direct communication.
Q: What do you do?

A: I run my own business. It's an online start-up that helps architects to work better.

(practiced condensed answer, the result of introducing myself countless times)
This post is full of sweeping generalizations. Not all developers are working on a startup. There are also more startups out there that start without everyone being a (software) developer. Not all startups do software, for that matter.

With the dot-com rise and bust, the web-2.0 rise (and already, some say, bust) and the developers, salesdroids, business suits all blogging about this kind of work constantly - there is enough material out there to make an informed decision about the risk you're taking and the challenges and pitfalls you face as well as the potential fallout if it goes bust.

This post would have been better titled 'Some developers take risks without doing their homework'.
Either of the first two.

What I like about using the word "start-up" is getting people thinking about start-ups. That is a good thing.

http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html

http://paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html
Except why pick carbon? There are many other pollutants I care far more about. VoC's for example (someone spray painting), smoke, NOx's, heavy metals. Trash litter. Spilled toxic fluids.

I consider those much worse than carbon.

If a pollution tax was implemented I would give the money back as cash to every person in the country. So the money would basically move in a circle, but those who are more efficient will gain.
IRS Deadline For Section 409A Compliance is Tomorrow
What an informative read! I always thought it was: "wrapped up like a douche in the middle of the night." =]
Ticket scalping also involves equally fun acts & regulations. Luckily the laws are changing (for the better) which is one reason why it was a good idea to invest in us :-D.
I got mine through craigslist. So did the other people I know who live in rent-controlled places.
What Rent Control Does (from Economics in One Lesson)
Very interesting talk. Lots of concepts and learning behind simple experiments.
If you just read:

"RapidSSL's total lack of acknowledgement or response to this problem on their front page"

See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414836
Change the world it probably will.

Media is a huge influence on politics. The medium is an important part of what gets covered, how it gets covered, the narrative that goes with it & ultimately public opinion.

There is plenty written on what the television did to the US: Vietnam war coverage, civil rights movements & so forth.

New internet based media is bound to have an effect too as it allows for various new things. But I wouldn't conclude that it will be a positive one. For one thing, the concept of impartial news is out the window. From government groups to human rights groups to armed groups to soldiers with blurred out faces to the next door neighbours, the stories will reflect specific agendas, specific experiences and individual stories. Many will be embellished, forged or corrupted.
I agree and I like your analogy.

However .. I feel compelled to point out that if you're anywhere on the way to a star, you'll find yourself in an interstellar micro-vacuum with no moons in sight.

If you manage to reach a moon from there, you might as well travel the (now) insignificant distance on to the nearest star.

(I'm very sorry, I just had to point this out. Really, it was a lovely analogy.. ).
I've noticed this too, but all my relatives are from the Midwest!
Iceland was bailed out. That can't happen with the US.
Profit is the world's way of signaling that you are doing something in an efficient, effective, and long-term sustainable way.

So, given that health care is one of the most fundamental individual needs, profit most definitely should be the goal.

But health care is not the most fundamental need -- that would be food. I find it puzzling that people don't apply the same arguement to this need. Why not say that profit shouldn't be the goal of the food industry? And that supermarkets are immoral for making a profit at the expense of hungry people? Well, because it's clearly nonsense, of course.

But I wonder if it would seem like nonsense if we lived in a world where there was no free market in food supply. We might worry that greedy corporations would only be interested in serving expensive foods to rich people.
The article that this article is responding to is useful in understanding as well.

http://sgillies.net/blog/858/how-to-decorate-python-gis-code...

This one as well.

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=240845
High income shoppers slashed their spending the most over the holidays
"... Here are the top 10 that, after nearly seven years here, infuriate me most ..."

missed... Awesome! ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3143793874/
Optimize your site's images
"... I can has startup? ..."

I kan haz startupp? ~ because cats are not that clever & can't spell
Poker, Business, and Life: It's Never Too Late to Change Tables
I know you didn't intend what you said to come across as being nice, but I'll take it as a compliment. :)
Techmeme Top 10 Stories Of The Year
Taco Bell's Newest Concoction = Divine
I lived in a rent-controlled apt in SF that I found through craiglist. It wasn't cheap, nor squalid - Similar to what the other people say. My experiences over 20 years of renting also say - landlords treat good tenants like gold - if you don't make noise, don't sell drugs, and pay on time, they generally are happy to not raise your rent.
industrial democracy is awesome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_democracy
It was through Craigslist... the deal is that every building in San Francisco built before a certain year (I don't remember which year) is rent controlled, so you don't really need a connection. The year cutoff is, I assume, to encourage developers to build new rental properties.

There was a proposition to ban rent control in California, which failed to pass.
I prefer to use "Internet company" instead of startup as in:

"I run an Internet company that does XYZ for consumers/businesses".

Startup means something specific within the technology community that I think is potentially lost on those outside of it.
Ben Goertzel: The Structure of the Physical World and Definitions of Intelligence
I just bought and read a very interesting but slim tome called "Go for No" An interesting opinion of the book is that the most successful people are those who not only take on (1st level) or accept (2nd level) or want (3rd level) or truly desire failure (4th level) - it's those who organize others to take on risk or failure (5th level).

As someone who is probably just barely 2nd level and logical to a fault, I am starting to open my eyes and see that the 4th level is a characteristic that I see in all of my successful friends (and almost everyone I've read about- from Sylvester Stallone with "Rocky" (the story behind how he got the first one made) to...)
Some of the Worst SQL Ever.
"The company recently held a party to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the last time [Semler] made any decision at all. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2003/apr/27/theobserver.o...
"If a pollution tax was implemented I would give the money back as cash to every person in the country. So the money would basically move in a circle, but those who are more efficient will gain."

Well, I'm predisposed against this idea, but that sounds more like an argument for than against it. If everyone's paying in proportion to their cost to others (a big 'if'), then those who cost others less should be paid more than they pay, all else equal.
Doesn't seem to be: http://ycombinator.com/news.css

Although if they're serving a custom .css file to my Firefox 3 that doesn't include that precisely because it doesn't work, I wouldn't know. wget got the same pre stuff in the last two lines, though.
One problem is that if it turns out that we enter a cooling period (due to solar activity decrease or something else), it seems unlikely that such a tax would be repealed just because it was actively harmful (cf. prohibition).
Is trolling obvious?
Free Coloring Pages - Harry Potter
I personally love to read a good rant.

Zed's flaming exit from the Ruby community, however, is not something I would recommend everybody does. Things generally work differently for different people in different situations. (Good luck trying to pin me down on that one!).

Rants come in different shapes and sizes. They also have different targets, but they are usually about blowing off steam.

The history of alt.sysadmin.recovery is full of rants against the cluelessness of users, the stupidity of vendors, the irrational behavior of management and the absurdity of day-to-day tech work. In fact, that's what the whole newsgroup is about.

However, ranting against general situations that (some) people can identify with is different from ranting against specific people. Once you do that things turn into a mud-slinging fest very fast.

I enjoy Zed's rants, but I really could do without the personal attacks he launches. They may or may not have some basis, but I really don't care. In addition, they distract from the technical message he's usually trying to get across in his rants.
Microsoft's Metered PC Idea Is Not Greedy. In Fact, It's Almost Brilliant
It isn't destroying the environment, but it is pretty dumb that they have to mail me a CD instead of just letting me download a rip of the movie.

Instead, their "instant" offering is a low-quality, DRM-encumbered stream, with only the least popular movies available. Why would I pay for this when I can get the full 1080p versions mailed to me, or downloaded from Usenet?
Oh no, collecting data is so droll and boring. I'm a decider!

(Sorry, your comment really bugs me. I don't actually adhere to running A/B testing for everything, but come on, everytime I look at analytics data doesn't make my site less "fun".)
It's somewhat interesting that such articles are a staple of the "not US" press but analogous articles are a rarity in the US press.
Which is why Economics and Philosophy (while I would even argue as far as even Psychology) all fall under Social Sciences, where axioms need not apply.
Marissa Mayer's 2009 Resolution: Leave Google
Please critique "Read My Tweets" -- using CAPTCHAs to increase your followers on twitter.
Check it out:

http://www.readmytweets.com

It's like a banner exchange but applied to tweets with CAPTCHAs to ensure that people actually do read the tweets.
Silicon Valley looks towards 2009
Playing guitar, just like business success are subjective. I consider 37signals, youtube and balsamiq successful and they contain few common elements (except making things people want).

When listening to business advice I listen to those that have failed often; one of the best talks I have ever had was with a taxi driver who once owned an entire fleet of tourist buses but went under. Failure is often more useful to listen to than success.
Better discoverability

This is a big overlooked weakness of both Emacs and Vi(m). After about five years of using Vi I switched to a friendlier editor, NEdit; within a couple months, I was better at using NEdit than I was at Vi, mainly because of discoverability. I then used (X)Emacs for a couple of years (mainly for Python programming, though the original motivation was learning Lisp), and found it rather opaque. Now I use TextMate, and I've had the same basic experience as with NEdit.
> The main attraction to living in Harlem is the 1-6 trains.

One thing I've thought about is who is paying for the new light rail in Seattle and who will be receiving the benefits of it. It won't be in my current area until 2030, but I'll be paying taxes for it for 21 years. People who move her then get it for free, and since we could say they've been living cheaper elsewhere by not paying for this light rail, they can now bid more for the same area, driving up prices. So the laws should force newcomers to pay up their share of past costs. Otherwise, there is a disincentive to improve our area.

In summary, maybe the current residents shouldn't get rent control, but you new residents should pay plenty on top of rent.
Do you think people should be allowed to smoke? Should they be allowed to eat Doritos? Should they be allowed to skydive?
Confusing Domain of GoDaddy
Pretty rare here, although you might hear "'ave a good one, mate". "Have a Nice Day" is usually vacuous.
I hate all people that don't speak US english. Slight differences in language annoy me, as do complete differences. EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD IS WRONG.

Wait. Does this make me sound like a complete idiot? Hmm...
> My grandparents lived in rent controlled apartments in NYC that they could not have afforded to stay in [...]

This is how rent-control can create shortages.

Under rent-control, older people who would otherwise downsize have no incentive to do so. Younger people who might still be able to live with their parents instead rent separate apartments.

The fundamental problem is there's not enough housing for everyone to get as much of it as they want. So, there's a need to economize.

The additional problem is that your residence is not a commodity to you. Being forced, by the market, to move out of your place is very traumatic, even if it could be better used by someone else.
"... I'd like to meet up with a group of people that are technology-oriented ... recent transplant to New York ..."

Might be worth checking out http://www.nycresistor.com it provides a private workspace (something like $30/month) and project groups, accessing smart locals on Saturdays & Sundays. The events are here http://www.eventbrite.com/org/52408308?s=1 and you can read an NYT article ~ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/nyregion/thecity/28tink.ht... There is also HN thread somewhere (I killed 'SearchYC.com' looking for it).
> I, like Buffet, Gates and many others, believe that those of us who are in a position to pay 40% of our income and still live in extraordinary comfort should do so.

Buffet and Gates won't be paying 40% in income taxes. And, nothing has stopped them from paying 40% in the past, so ...

Hmm - have you been paying the higher tax rates that you propose? If not, why not?

Most people are employed by folks who make more money. Why don't you want more of that?

And then there's the actual effect of luxury taxes. It turns out that people of modest means are employed making them, so when you reduce the sales of said goods through taxes, said people lose their jobs. What is the benefit that exceeds that cost?

Buffet and Gates have also arranged things so that almost none of their wealth will be subject to estate taxes.
I have never lived anywhere to see rent control in action, but its an interesting demonstration of economics when you fix one variable.

Also - how to doctors have political or economic power? (do you mean they earn enough to bribe?)
True. I don't think anyone would object to helping the 1% of people who are actually in that category. The problem is that interest groups hijack the programs in order to win handouts for those who don't really need the programs.
sorry, any relevance to anything?
Eclipse for PHP projects.

PSPad (a very nice and free editor) for Python PHP and general quick and dirty editing.

FlashDevelop for ActionScript. This last one was truly a happy find, with all the VS look and feel and a very comprehensive toolset, again for free.
I have a friend who says: "Hell will be full of landlords."

She is a master's degree holding architect who rents.
"Just because Phillip Morris pays a few dollars to keep the institute running does not mean Cato's arguments are unfounded."

lol

"As an individual, it's up to you to research both sides and decide on which makes the more compelling case."

Yup. If you don't give equal time to paid shills you're not being Fair and Balanced.
Breadcrumbs as a Design Cop-Out
From a UK comedy program called Time Trumpet: The Tesco Wars

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=20IpSch8sSk
Configuring Your Machine For Testing With A Screen Reader
Isn't this exactly what PG said in his Cities and Ambition - http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html - essay?

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.
The right is inherently anti-union (hence not supporting automakers in this case) and pro-corporate. And all of Cato's positions about "personal responsibility" vs. government regulation (of tobacco, or oil, or whomever else pays them) is obviously a tactic to influence public opinion against regulation under the guise of being pro-individual. It's total bullshit. They're about as libertarian as my left nut.
The rent amount is gossip from the super. The other stuff is first hand, and probably adds a little "control" to my rent as well, but believe me not that much.
Think about it for a moment, have you ever heard of a business come to your door, shake your hand, and while looking in there eyes tell them you would like to earn the business and by they way here is a fifty dollar gift card that can be used anytime for any plumbing service they need.

Why is it that so many people seem to think direct sales is some kind of new idea?
This falls firmly in the "I'll believe it when I see it" category.
Well that was a right ole' waste a' time, eh chaps? Let's get back to discussing how the Harry Potter movies would have been far superior in the colonial lingo, wot?
Thank you for sharing -- unfortunately this thread wasn't as popular as I imagined it would be... lesson learned.
This site is owned and operated by Comodo. There are similar sites operated by their competitors. Most of them make it very difficult to find out what the certificate chains (including the root certificate) are for the different products. That is the most important piece of information because that is the only way you can verify compatibility for the browsers and devices you are targeting.

As recently as two years ago, I was using phones that had only the Verisign Class 2 (IIRC) root certificate (the most expensive one on the market). If you don't want to pay over $400 a year for a cert then the next best option is GeoTrust's ~$89/yr QuickSSL cert, which is installed on most phones. After that, you can try Comodo's InstantSSL certificate. Before ordering, contact Comodo's technical support and tell them you want a certificate that actually works on mobile phones. They will respond with the information you need to order an InstantSSL certificate (cheap, domain-validation-only) that has a similar (the same?) cert. chain as their EnterpriseSSL certs.
How about: "I've freed myself from the tyranny of working for someone other than myself."?