skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post... does GreenMountain Engineering need any materials science engineers :~) ?
We will of course do this for the second kid :-). I think this will turn out to be not too much of a burden. I am sending a dozen medium-sized emails everyday already, what is a couple more for my children.
Ask YC: Dragging text from OSX terminal windows?
About 6 months ago I got a Macbook Air. It's an improvement over my old Powerbook in most respects, but not one: dragging text from terminal windows.

In older versions of OSX, it was very easy to highlight text in a terminal window and then click on it and drag it into another window. In more recent versions this doesn't work so well: the sw seems to have been tweaked to err on the side of interpreting the second click as changing the highlighted area, unless you pause and hold the cursor absolutely still for a bit before clicking. I usually work by dragging changed code into a repl, so this makes it much harder for me to program.

Does anyone know of any settings I can change in OSX to undo this "improvement?"
I don't understand why everyone is whining yet not suggesting an alternative.

I would pick Twitter... :D

All in this year, they moved Evan Williams to CEO (good idea), raised over $20 million in funding (from Union Square Ventures, Jeff Bezos, and others), acquired Summize (easily the hottest app in a while), grew ridiculously popular while stabilizing their service/uptime, and turned down an acquisition offer by Facebook (rumor?). Now that is success.

I can't even think of a close second.
Fog Creek office slideshow
How do we resolve "offices with doors that close" with "communal work environment" anyway? Are they just diametrically opposed office philosphies?
"Where does it save the data too? What if I'm on multiple computers (ie, work from home and work), do I have to have it installed on each?"

Yes, for now. It uses a local database to store info.

We're working on, for lack of a better term, the "enterprise" version, which posts data to a remote server.

"It looks nice, but I'll stick with http://slimtimer.com which is web based, so you can track your time from any computer."

I'll have to give that a try. It doesn't look as though it will remind me to enter information, though, which is my main issue. (And I don't really want to keep a browser open all the time. Or have to remember not to close it.)

"Best of luck!"

Thanks!
People at Fog Creek read Hacker News. edit: Other than just Joel.

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...
Ask HN: rate/review my LAST startup
after 7 years of working myself into the ground and never really getting anywhere I'm giving up. I'm about to turn 30 and have nothing to show for it.

I've sold all my business/marketing books as well as the laptop I used to code on and I'm left with just over 1000 (GBP). So here's the plan:

I'm buying 1000 lottery tickets for the draw this wednesday.

I'll update this post Wednesday night to let you all know how I got on.
Yes, a dedicated service would be great.
For now, I hope Gmail would be reliable enough for our purposes. We stored the passwords to the account, and we plan to visit the account every couple of days (If not for keeping a tab on the account, I would do this just to learn what my wife has been writing to my son ;-)
It would be nice to have a script that occasionally downloads the emails and make them into a big pdf file.
Anyone who works any kind of assembly line job can't just leave for a few minutes without causing problems. Bio breaks are usually taken at scheduled breaks.

(based on my summer jobs at the mill, at least)
You mean people like Joel?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=spolsky
A big difference in the freemium model may be if you sell directly the advertising. I feel that sometimes 3rd party ad suppliers may be getting a much bigger slice of the cake than the webmaster himself.
Distinguishing constructive criticism from bad business advice
Wow! Very nice.
allow me to be the first to say that, if this is a serious post, don't do this.
Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control
Since there seem to be some confusion over what it is good for I'll post some excerpts from a Haskell-session:
http://hpaste.org/13412

Basically you get the best of both worlds, static typing, ie types checked at compile-time but you don't have to write out all the types(you can however if you want to).

add x y = x + y
Prelude> :t add
add :: (Num a) => a -> a -> a
The author of this article, Charles Murray, is best known for writing "The Bell Curve", which argued that biological factors determine intelligence, and intelligence determines success. I don't agree with his premise that only 10% of university students are innately capable of a hard-science curriculum. Intelligence is just a coefficient to effort. Being a genius certainly helps, but most people could get through a science or engineering program if they were willing to put in the work.

OTOH, he is correct that BA degrees have little relevance in the modern economy. They persist as a relic from the role liberal-arts colleges played before WW2 in conferring educational pedigrees on upper-class men. Higher education is much more egalitarian today, but we're still aping the educational practices of that era.

As a general rule, I don't think anyone should spend the time or money on a degree that they aren't going to use after graduation.
Wire news is extravagantly expensive. The amount they could make from ads on feeds is going to be a pittance in comparison.

Sure, once the big cash cow newspapers die they'll have to have a rethink, but there are going to be bigger problems with news creation when that day actually arrives.
do it!

that way when you start over it will truly be from scratch.

and if you win the lotto i can be all "yea, i believed in his dream."

legendary

and really. thirty is young. there are older people who haven't even started doing anything yet...
I found this forum for suggesting features to Gmail people.
http://groups.google.com/group/gmail-labs-suggest-a-labs-fea...

Maybe if Gmail people hear about this application, they might provide more support for the "generational delivery" as fnazeeri puts it.
Yeah, fire the wife!! How come she says that instead of supporting you?? I guess she didn't contribute with anything to your success but probably swallows money like a shark.

But then you have 4 kids with her :(...you're kinda trapped there.
We haven't hired any material science folks yet. If we were to double in size (15 people -> 30 people), I bet we'd need a material scientist and a chemical engineer. At present, we're mostly generalists, with a slight bias toward the mechanical.

It took us ~3 years to get to 15; in the last 2 years we've been roughly constant, plus or minus a few people. Maybe in 2012.
Not what I heard, but who knows the real story there.
Wow, that is almost unbelievably creepy.

I can't even really put my finger on why it disturbs me so much, but it definitely does. It certainly does not make me want to donate to OLPC, even though I find their efforts very noble and worthwhile.

As the poster mentioned, almost anything would have been better than a creepy redub.
This would be a great premium service for Ancestry.com.
There are enough cases when the man goes bankrupt and the wife is leaving him instead of supporting him until he recovers.
But also there are cases when the wife is supporting the man until he gets on his feet...I've seen both.
Haskell has typeclasses (http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/A_brief_introduction_to_Haske...), though. They allow inference of required type characteristics ("requires a type which can be sorted", "requires a numeric type", etc.), rather than type identity, which can solve many of the same problems.
it is a serious post and I know the odds of a big win are practically non-existent, but then again so are the odds of the kind of payoff that many on HN have dreamt of at some stage in their life and it hasn't stopped them has it? certainly didn't stop me :)

I'm going to start a teacher training course in September after which I'll hopefully start a career in teaching. Whilst I don't think I'll ever lose the entrepreneurial bug I don't think I'll ever be able to put in as much passion as energy as I have these past few years.

In short, I've peaked, and this is just my idiosyncratic way of saying farewell to that part of my life.
BlackBerry Pearl 8110 Red WITH GPS 
The BlackBerry 8310 has a refreshing display with a resolution of 320 x 3240 pixels. It comes with a flash memory of 64 MB and has a microSD (TransFlash) card slot. It comes with high-speed and advanced features such as GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP and miniUSB.
droool
Hmmm not sure. It works well for me on my iMac.
I doubt it has a good ROI via recruiting, etc. Joel mentioned he spent more than a million on improving the interior design. No recruiting is going to make up for that, any time soon#. And in a few years Fog Creek will move to a different location again - at which point they'll have to build a new high end office.

So really, this seems to be a case of spending money to improve quality of life. The other benefits, such as for recruiting and PR are just a nice side effect.

#) Assuming 50 employees, over 5 years, the costs are roughly $4000 per employee per year. That's maybe 15% of their salary, probably less. Given the choice, I would probably give up 15% of my salary to work in a nice place with good food, a good view, good equipment, and so on.
2009 Predictions: iPhone Gaming Will Replace Nintendo and Sony
At least wait until one of those mega-lotteries gets to an EV of a unit wager is over 1.0. (Yes, I'm willing to let slip the NPV discounting, and buy tickets when the "advertised amount" makes it a +EV wager.)
For $40 you can try one of these:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/musical-instruments/a94...

If you want something with more options, go for:
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PocketPOD/

You can also do it through your computer, just google "free amp sim" and you'll find plenty. The only catch is that you'll usually need a music program that supports VST.
nostrademons mentioned above playing around headphones so I'll also throw in suggestions for Guitarport or Guitarrig, computer-interfaced amp modeling solutions which output to headphones or speakers.
It seems to me that the reviewer read the first 50 pages of the book then put it down and wrote the review. On the whole, I think Gladwell did a decent job arguing that it is a confluence of factors -- base intelligence, hard work, opportunity and savviness, which contribute to success. The 10,000 hour "rule" is just one point among many to basically illustrate that hard work is part of the equation which is sometimes overlooked.
Hey thinkcomp, I didn't go searching for what your idea is, and you didn't mention it in the article, and realistically I guess it doesn't matter.

As you well know, implementing your idea is the largest part of the battle, so are you giving up on the idea? I would think that a man of your experience would move forward with the idea anyway, and not let this speedbump turn into a roadblock.

I would also have liked to see (and maybe the community here could help) a suggestion as to how KPCB should handle the situation.
You clearly understand that they can't just support every idea that they inadvertently made public, and I completely agree with you that their proposal of you promising not to sue in exchange for the opportunity to pitch again is worthless.
You clearly have never spent a week polishing a 16x16 system tray icon.

:-)
CastleCops Shuts Down
Hey, it's a good way to test out the law of averages.
Well, if you've really made up your mind then it would be damn cool to see a post Wednesday night about your big win!

Regardless of the outcome, I hope you'll be okay with yourself (actually I hope that for everybody). There are other things in life besides payoffs.
"Lots of young people are turned out of home when they reach adult age."

I'm 30 and I've never met or heard of one in the last fifteen years or so. I'm sure such young people exist, but I doubt there are "lots" of them anymore.
How is he not motivated by money in this post? Is plumbing his love and passion, or is he trying to provide for his family? And what's so wrong about being motivated by money, except for that it offends the secular liberal religion?
I couldn't agree more. There are lots of Americans who thinks of Europe in the same way as the US. Just because most of western Europe is in the EU and share a continent, doesn't mean that you can say something about one country just because you have visited another. And we're talking about Europe here. I can only imagine the kinds of misconceptions we (both Europeans and Americans) have about the Middle East
Monkey ball arrived and all have mimicked since.
Better recruiting tool: Make an office that female developers want to work in, the male developers will follow.
Microsoft patents "pay-as-you-use" computer leasing
Not necessarily a bad assumption. However I think the word "materialistic" is being thrown around without considering its deeper meaning. Women must provide for their offspring, the survival of our genes depend upon it. This concept of "providing for their offspring" has historically meant choosing men who can help with this difficult task.

Materialism is a perfectly reasonable evolutionary outcome. It is nothing to be ashamed of or scoffed at. It has serious implications at the evolutionary level. If you have children you have to provide for them so they don't die.
Here's the suggestion from Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn:

The best adaptation I've seen of the open-office idea is a partial retreat from it. People crave acoustic privacy so they can talk on the telephone, but visual privacy is not as important -- they like being able to see what's going on. This has led to a very satisfactory compromise called "cave and commons". Each office worker has a private office, often small, which opens into a generous open area surrounded by many other private offices. The open area has a kitchen, some couches, sometimes tables for sitting around informally, and sometimes a working library, or at least a rack of current periodicals. You can shut the door of your cave and concentrate, or you can leave your door open and keep an eye and ear on who's coming and going in the commons, and whether the meeting or presentation going on there might be worth leaning in on. The feeling is congenial and homey, and it encourages the casual encounters which, research keeps showing, are at the heart of creativity in offices.

I lived in a dorm designed like this for four years of college. I'm not sure I've ever been as productive since. ;)

I would not be surprised to learn that Spolsky has read Brand's book. He's certainly got the idea. Note the emphasis on glass in the Fog Creek offices, providing acoustic privacy but not visual isolation.
That is a great idea. I think they should be interested in providing something like this.
I guess this justifies iFart.
"I'm 30 and I've never met or heard of one in the last fifteen years or so."

What circles do you hang out in?

I'm considerably older, and perhaps I've lived in more different places too.
But then does the impressiveness rest with the Disney Marketing Machine for Hannah Montana. In part it seems like she would be replaceable (or at least - another could havew been picked) with probably no detriment to the result.

The same doesn't work for Tiger Woods or Bill Gates.
I'd love to work on the idea still, but sadly, ideas need funding. If I could have done it anyway, I wouldn't have needed KPCB's help in the first place.
I agree, but then of course, spending a shit ton of money just to make yourself feel better is one of the luxuries of not being beholden to outside investors.

Between ludicrous offices and the 37s "4 days a week" plan, I'd probably go with 37s.
Because there's no loss or no gain when you fold preflop and you don't even see cards, so it's more like abstaining completely? I don't know, I see your point though, the metaphor was stretched a bit far.
ContactSwap: Shake your iPhone to swap contacts
> good framework for measuring success in startups

Accounting world is partial to profits as a sane measure. Investors should look at ROI. In other words no startup is successful until it's making money. Which I don't think is an unfair measure.

Now if you want to compare pre-success startups to one another, good luck. A measure doesn't exist. That is why the whole VC system exists and investors are willing to gamble 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 startups will pay off.
It's not just about status, but the people who would want the relatively higher income are correct, IMO.

Abstract (fiat) money exists as a proxy for productive labor. If in one world an hour of unskilled labor costs $1, and in a parallel world, an hour of unskilled labor costs $10, I'd assume that world A's dime is worth world B's dollar, and all other things equal, I'd rather have a dime in world where everyone else had a penny than a dollar in a world where everyone had ten dollars.

If I have relatively more money, I can pay people to do things that I don't care to do (rake leaves, remove garbage, grow food, whatever) much more easily than if everyone in the world has more money than I do...
How Google Is Influencing Server Design
the costs are roughly $4000 per employee per year. That's maybe 15% of their salary, probably less.

You think that top software engineering graduates in New York City make $26k per year? Recalibrate! Recalibrate!

I think the number you're looking for is "less than 4%". Remember that the office-construction expenses can be massaged by accountants to reduce taxes on them, and that an employee's (e.g.) $80k salary costs the employer considerably more than $80k, thanks to the employer share of things like Social Security and health insurance. To say nothing of the costs of recruiting a single employee. Note that a headhunter will charge you a cool $30k to recruit an employee with a $100k salary:

http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/basics2.htm

...and who knows what kind of stiff that headhunter is going to try to foist off on you?

The chances that the $4k per employee per year is paying off for Fog Creek are much, much better than you think.
Why do the admins have to sit in a closet?
Actually, that's a shot of Joel's office. But, yeah, Fog Creeker's other than Joel do read Hacker News.
I just don't buy this. Most small business are really bad at collecting their Accounts Receivable, and it is one of the number one reasons for small business failures. I agree with what someone else wrote, there may be a kernel of truth to this, but it's too polished and too neatly tied with a bow to be true.
Deja vu: Internet ‘widgets’ coming to the TV in 2009
How Common Craft Stopped Doing Client Work, In Plain English
Dope office is dope!
You don't believe a custom written lower level implementation would be more efficient than using a general purpose framework stack?
I agree that Apple probably sees the iPhone as their netbook competitor - because the netbook market is not one market (duh) but several.

'My' slice of the market is the working-on-a-plane set, who value a 7 hour battery life, a good keyboard, low weight, and a big SSD that can survive a Turkish taxi ride - preferably while not being a $2,000+ mugging magnet like the Air...

But I'm not stupid enough to believe that the netbook market I'm part of is bigger than the slice who just use theirs to surf the Internet, and if you look at just that market the iPhone (or especially the iPod touch) is a pretty good proposition.
Thanks for the encouragement :) I am indeed still plugging away, even if the process is not as easy or as fast as I would like. And it is fun nonetheless -- I am in love with the instrument: its size, the physical immediacy of the sound it produces, the charming ease with which you can play in C. It would be nice to think that I'll end up actually being good some day, though. We'll see.

Have you gone back to the piano as you learn guitar? It's arguably the ideal instrument for theory...
That's like 3-5% of their salary or at least I hope so. Just how little do you think they earn?
wow, my experience is just the opposite. I'm 40, but I'm guessing its not a generation thing as I have plenty of friends from age 20 through 60. Where do you live and what social circles do you run in? I am legitimately curious here. You may have discovered a pocket of utopia.
37signals 2008 Year in Review
Why Sell at a Loss
This is a very strange summary.

The history of Greece - both the current protests and the political history described in the article - are simply another playing out of some common patterns:

The US meddles in a country, a military dictatorship rises, the country is exploited, student protests follow. (e.g. most of the countries in South America.)

Mainstream politics undergoes a homogenisation: the number of influential political parties goes down, the policies of the remaining parties become more closely aligned. (e.g. England.)

Riots are sparked by a specific event, but are actually caused by socio-econonic divisions. (e.g. Paris.)

I've just made some horrible generalisations. However, the linked article offers no insight into the particular situation in Greece. History is briefly explained but then disregarded (the military government). General conclusions are drawn without any real evidence (riots in response to poverty). The current events described are linked to something that is getting a lot of headlines (the credit crunch).
My first reaction was also: "He's never going to read all those e-mails." But after reading some of the comments and giving it some thought, I'm realizing this may be a pretty good idea. I'm not sure I'd have the discipline to write an e-mail every day, and he's already 1.5 years old, but at least once a week might go a long way.

Not only that, but say you make it a habit and it lasts for more than the 5 years. Yes, it might sound stupid to send e-mails to your own son when he's in the same house every day where you can just talk. But if you keep the habit and it's time for him to leave the house (goes to college, gets married, etc.), you will have that ongoing communication---and that will be priceless.

My dad is a pretty smart guy, but I feel I've made a lot of mistakes that I could have learned from him if we had just talked about stuff. I don't want that to happen with my son. It would be awesome to teach him everything I've learned from/about life.

Anyway, now I'm deciding if I should send him e-mails to a Gmail account or keeping this in Emacs Org-Mode. I've never used Org-Mode, but it looks like it has some good features that would help keeping entries well-organized and easy to retrieve, e.g.:

Tags: http://orgmode.org/manual/Tags.html#Tags
Publishing: http://orgmode.org/manual/Publishing.html#Publishing

Thanks for sharing your idea!
You're a lucky man.