skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
rent is hardly a barrier to entry to most startups that have the money to actually open an office.

SV and California in general are hardly rent friendly
Wow, you totally ripped off Apple, it seems like ripping off apple's UI is becoming a trend in the web 2.0 business.
A Wish List for the Next Mainstream Programming Language
Dustin never said he wasn't doing well, he just said he'd be doing better if the UI was upgraded.
... and the kids don't get to see Dad much anymore.

Kids need to come first, and they need both parents. Mom and Dad: work it out -- for their sake.
If you're using an Intel Mac, give VirtualBox a try. Handy if you need access to Windows. You can expose a folder on the Mac side as a network drive to Windows, so that any files you are working on don't need to be kept inside the virtual machine.

http://www.virtualbox.org/
Can You Scale Down?
Paper: Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion
Mass produced software components (1968)
Your requests have been using up lots of cpu and timing out on the db. So I've disabled your access temporarily.
We used to use Fogbugz then switched to Lighthouse because it was much cleaner, more intuitive and had near seamless Github integration.

It's not that Fogbugz is necessarily difficult, it's that Lighthouse is easier.
what can I use to create the rock garden border they have in the reception: http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...
Y A P L C: Online Book-keeping application
It is no doubt possible. I've done something similar to this on a single forum 3 or so years ago and had reasonably interesting results.

Basically, I scraped the site, removed formatting/spacing/dead-words, stemmed (using a modified porter), constructed a matrix of word-frequencies per post. After which I did several various analytical techniques (statical, geometric, etc). The net result from using a blended method was able to identify several most aliases of board posters However, the issue google would no doubt have is sampling size. In a small enough sampling size quirks work as identifying characteristics, in a larger dataset you would no doubt see clusters of people who have similar backgrounds (e.g. education).
Well ... not exactly its ass.
Installing Ubuntu 8.10 hang at 82% scanning mirror
Maybe it's "high end". But all of these are better:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctony/2486595834/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewiedewie/2377292918/

http://la.eater.com/uploads/2008_02_mcdonalds-thumb.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/meteorry/17414425/

There's a McDonald's down the street from me similarly superior to Joel's lunchroom, which resembles none of the above. It was clearly patterned after a high-school cafeteria.
Breasts aren't considered part of the genitalia, and also breastfeeding isn't exactly a lascivious display. That they did this does not strike me as a legal thing, much more a PR thing; they don't want to piss off anyone who is offended by the display of too much of the wrong area of skin.
Researchers unlock secrets of 1918 flu pandemic
Ask HN: review My 120k flex app done in one month
http://www.kpicturebooth.com

Here is the app, its heavily inspired by Apple's photobooth, therefore you need a webcam and Flash 10 to use it. It implements almost all of the features of photobooth, including background removal and video effects. I've also included export to both Facebook and Flickr

Here are some of my thoughts after I wrote this

http://tharavaad.wordpress.com

If it generates enough interest, I will clean up the code and opensource it.
Between ludicrous offices and the 37s "4 days a week" plan, I'd probably go with 37s.

Or I was idly thinking once of a plan where you sprint for 3 weeks (still with weekends off) and then everyone has an entire week off.

Over and over, ~13 weeks of vacation a year.

I wonder if a refreshed, happy, and likely less compensated team like that could keep up with a full time one.
How come everyone in the media is reporting such dire consequences? Do they plan to scare people? Why can't they just motivate people. Suggest things that need to be done, what changes need to be made, instead of criticizing everything? I think it's not the time to go over the same things over and over again, it's time to try and get back on our feet again. And the media should be ashamed of not playing an integral part in it.
FYI, for those of you guys who are located in the greater Boston area, check out the South End Technology Center (http://www.tech-center-enlightentcity.tv/). Like the NYC outfit, they have a Fab Lab with laser cutters/drill bits/circuit making machinery and open-access hours to public for anyone who's interested.

Also, if you are in D.C, check out HacDC, a hacker collective in D.C. (http://hacdc.org/). I've never been, but read about them in 2600. They seem pretty cool.
Grabbing attention or building a reputation?
I really doubt that intelligence agencies such as the NSA and GCHQ have any secret and powerful ways to break cryptography at all.

I know that everybody thinks that they do, but where is the evidence for this? Even during the 60s and 70s when they had a near monopoly on cryptographic research there is no indication that they made any unique and spectacular breakthroughs.
That's a very sweet idea. I think along with the musings of his growing up connect it with your life and your stories.

Have you read 'Black Beauty'? I would want my son/daughter to read something similar while he/she is growing up. To make it a personal thing, it could be stories from my life itself.
I read the article the same way GHFigs did. Apple sells a machine that handles light web browsing and email well for a reasonably cheap price. Like their competitors they also sell more expensive, more powerful machines that do more stuff, are more pleasant to use and are less portable. The difference is Apple's is based around mobile data. Most other netbooks are just adding that now.

It is a closed platform. Like most Apple products (Apple TV, iTunes DRM'ed songs) it's closed unless you want to put in the time, effort and risk of opening it. Then you can pretty much do anything that the hardware is capable of doing.
Well, the idea of the $700b worth of loans (which is not the same as $700b of giveaway, much of it will be recouped) is to prevent a depression, which would cost far more than the loans. We're in a situation where either way, the taxpayers lose. If those $700b of loans prevent us from losing $7 trillion, then it's worth it. They're not giving out the loans just because the companies asking for them are large. They're doing it to jumpstart the lending the entire economy depends on.

Is that a good idea? I really can't say for sure. The theory sounds good, but for all I know its misguided.

It's not worthwhile for me to try to determine that for myself. I don't have years to devote to the study of economics, which would be necessary for me to have an informed opinion on whether or not the loans will prevent far more than they cost. We can't all be economists, and anyone who isn't can't have an informed opinion. And even if I did have that kind of time, by the time I got that far it would be too late. And even then, the most informed opinions are still far from infallible. They're significantly more likely to be correct than the one I have now for sure, and they're the best we can do, but I'm not sure how much my one extra vote would matter.

That's the thing with government and capitalism, it's all about division of labor. I can't be informed about everything. I just try to vote for people who will get advice from people who are, which is why I base my votes more on a candidate's intelligence and epistemology than their stances and specialized issues such as economics..
#1 the credit card holder contacted us
#2 it was obvious when I looked, the credit card billing address was in the US. Their store contact information was based in the UK (my company Flying Cart allows people to easily build their own online store)
Almost everyone wants the same thing: they want to program apps for Android, but they don't want to use Java.
Bill Murray's charachter is seen as a bit of a philosophical parable about self-improvement. See http://www.schindler.org/psacot/20010813_ghd.shtml
We are the worst registrar in the world
Good intention, but bad idea. Instead, keep a scrapbook for him. To include text, write it in Emacs then print it out and paste in the paper. Put pictures in the scrapbook too. Involve your wife and decorate the pages too, if you like.

Forget about using gmail for this. Keep his childhood private -- he'll thank you for it. The scrapbook is something you can look at together on the couch as a family.
Ebert isn't "the media"; he's an esteemed American writer writing what he's thinking. Do you think that people called Mencken "the media" last century? Maybe.
What a depressing bit of hang-wringing.

As a movie aficionado, I've been watching Ebert for a long time. Ebert makes a great point to somebody else's counterpoint when it comes to movie reviews.I like him, and I like watching him.

I don't share his view of reality, and I'll put a hundred bucks down that his vision of the next 100 years is wildly pessimistic. That's not saying that bad things won't happpen -- it wouldn't surprise me to see a nuke used in terrorism within the next 30 years -- but overall the next 100 years will be as great as the last 100.
There's so much room for interpretation in this movie it's hard to know where to start. Consider, for instance, the fact that Murray's character apparently spends decades in this state.
I know little about cryptanalysis and the mathematics behind cryptographic ciphers, so I can't comment much on that. But I doubt they'd break widely-used ciphers and continue to allow the military and executive to use them. Once broken, they would have to fear that the method would leak or be independently recreated by someone else. Everyone still uses RSA, D-H, AES and Blow/twofish though, as far as I know.

And I find it unlikely that they've developed and built special hardware to brute-force these algorithms and nobody knows about it.
You probably should stick it out while looking. It gives you negotiating leverage if your previous employer isn't dead before you get a new job.

But look seriously. It takes a while to apply for jobs; both times I took a new job, I started looking about 2 months before I actually started (okay, there was also a startup where they contacted me, we met for lunch, and I started the next day, but that's the exception). And it takes quite a bit of attention. Since it seems like you can't stand your cofounder or the thought of working on the product, use all that procrastination time to inquire seriously about jobs. Then you can fold the startup when you have an offer.

And if things miraculously turn around with the startup, you could do that instead of taking the job.
aren't they? this is not against testers anyway - it's just sad how the 'joke' is tailored by testers for testers
I agree, but appreciate the sincerity and craft in that writing. Check out his other blog posts; it's just really interesting.

Check this one out; you'll like it:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind....
Detailed stats and demographics for Twitter (2008)
spolsky gives way too many interesting comments to be just a representative.
It's interesting though about the platform for your social network defining what is acceptable.

I can understand Facebook making a clear decision to have their platform not be about Porn and sex, but this seems a little bit too far.
Gridinator: create custom grid layouts
Some more interesting context, this time by HD Moore from Metasploit/Breakingpoint:

http://www.breakingpointsystems.com/community/blog/Attacking...
What original arguments Gladwell makes are clearly speculative, but it's inherently sloppier to attempt to refute an argument whose reasoning you can only speculate about.

Your arguments about Bill Gates and The Beatles are themselves flawed and classically oversimplistic. Bill Gates didn't get rich as a business man / negotiator / monopolist: he got rich as a programmer business man / negotiator / monopolist. Hard to believe a regular on HN could fail to see how Gates' having serious technical chops was essential to his success.

As for The Beatles, I'll leave it to you to actually read the book.
I really disagree that games lack soul. I wonder if the author has ever played any of the Metal Gear Solid series, any of the Final Fantasy series, Folklore, or even any Shin Megami Tensei games. That's just to name a few! It's a real insult to the whole industry to just declare that games are "soulless." I mean, read the following quote again:

"Games suck. Game companies have spent so many years trying to make skulls explode complexly and water ripple prettily that they haven't invested any time in learning how to make games that are as emotionally dense as the best novels and films. Most games are a waste of time. Soulless. Empty."

This is essentially meaningless, and is not at all specific to video games. Are not movies as obsessed with flashbang as games are accused of being?

To my mind, the only people who can claim that video games are soulless are those who don't play games, play the wrong games or are just too jaded to see the labors of love sitting on store shelves today.
He was with me until he started bringing earthquakes and volcanoes into the mix. What's bringing that about? Too many fat people pressing on the Earth?

Sure, there's a lot of crap going on right now but sometimes it comes in bunches. When that happens, folks start noticing the old plaster crack over the sofa and the basement sink that's leaked for years, and everything starts looking like a disaster.

It sounds like Roger just sat down to write on an 'off' day. That would have been me about a week ago. Things are bad (they're _always_ bad to someone) but they're not '100 years' bad.

Pour yourself another eggnog and add a bit more rum to it than usual. We'll resume tackling our difficulties tomorrow.

For now, we could all use a moment's pause to collect our wits. Let's pull our way out of this in 2009.
> The closedness of the iPhone is its Achilles heel.

If the iPhone was targeted just towards hackers, then yes I agree that closedness is its Achilles heel. But the presence of the "regular schmo" in the market negates the closedness problem.

The more regular schmos the iPhone attracts, the larger the market for the hackers.

I cite the profitability of Windows applications as an example of a closed system that works to the benefit of both the hacker and the schmo despite its closedness.
This is a seriously awesome office space that any developer looking for the urban lifestyle that NYC offers would be nuts to not want to work at. But Joel, you already have a fantastic reputation and should be able to recruit top talent based on your location, reputation, and because because you employ other smart people. That 500K of your own cash you put into that space depreciates over 39 years. You basically can't write it off until you move! I got stuck with over 200K in our last build-out that I'm still sitting on 3 years later. However if 500K is all you spent in addition to your lease with a standard buildout allowance, you got a great deal.

Like Joel, I bootstrapped a software company to similar size (25 employees). I did a calculation and we spend about 1.4% of our revenue today on 5,000 sqft of office space, but have outgrown it and it's no longer the nice spacious office we started with. 10,000 sqft of space in the best class A space in Western MA will cost about 3% of our 2009 expected revenue, with modest but nice build-out included. Given that this would be our 4th move in 6 years, I tend to be careful about long leases and lease buildouts.

I'd rather invest in paying good salaries, offering the best equipment and a nice (but not extravagant) work environment. Then I can afford to launch new products without being beholden to investors.

I really like the glass walls though...
How to get ahead in human resource management
At 27 (not that old I know) I'm often on the road for work. I played sax for years as a kid but I haven't picked one up in at least 12 years.

Recently I taught myself blues harp (harmonica) because it's something I can slip in my bag. With the help of web sites and gritting my teeth I'm getting pretty good. I'm now learning the accordion as well and plan to start on the trumpet some time in 2009.

I love music and there is something wonderful about being able to make it your own again. I would really recommend picking and instrument up whatever you age. The harmonica was a great introduction for me because it's cheap, easy and my wife could put up with me playing it.
Bowling Green
You should check out http://web.mac.com/reinholdpenner/Software/Home.html if you are on OSX. Reinhold made three great apps which download the lastest version of Firefox, Webkit and Camino for you automagically. They are Firefix, Nightshift and CaminoKnight respectively.

An absolute must to follow John's advice.
Prepare to be astonished.
Actually a nice example of a larger problem: people, even today, think of software production the way they do of any physical product.

Writing the same system more than once (e.g. a consulting firm for companies' internal applications) will get economy of scale, yes, but that's missing the real point. If you're writing the same app twice, you've already screwed up.

I want to say that it has to do with language selection, that the mainstream languages are set up for local syntactic sugar instead of large-scale abstraction. But then people ask what language I think they should use (I won't name names, but let's just say "something functional"), and they just say "Fuck You Lally."
Paul Buchheit: blog, v2
Heather Armstrong does this monthly for her daughter publicly on Dooce.com
Seriously, how does Joel make both ends meet in an expensive place like NYC ? Selling bug-tracking software ?
Joel knows how to make exciting demos
There is a rising cynicism today that reminds me of growing up in post-watergate America (I was born in 1967). We survived that previous wave of downspirit and this wave will also pass. There's no guarantees in life that our world will survive a 100 years but there's no reason to give up hope either.

Still, I'm a big fan of Ebert and appreciate his essays. As always, I take his opinions as food for thought.
You might want to look into a community art center. For example, in Silicon Valley there is http://www.arts4all.org
How many people born 50 years ago realistically had access to computers, though? It's considerably easier to learn programming when you can test things, and PCs weren't readily available until the late 70s. (Anyone in their 50s now would have already been in their 20s in 1978...)

I was lucky enough to get a Commodore 64 when I was six or so, and taught myself simple programming stuff with library books. That's probably more or less true of several other people here. Imagine not even using a computer until after college, or learning by submitting code on punch cards, one batch per day.
Once it becomes more widespread, start buying.
"Ruby programmers (and, to a lesser extent, other dynamic OO coders) tend to get very excited about concepts like "duck typing" -- 'if it walks like a duck, it may as well be a duck' -- and tend to use it heavily for polymorphism, future-proof APIs, and other nifty "agile" programming techniques."

OK, I think I get the advantage in terseness and power relative other static languages. Does it, or how does it, give you any of the other advantages of Duck-typing (such test functions that equally use mocks, stubs or the real objects?
Nobosh's Tag Algorithms & Results Page Gets an Upgrade
In person, I think I've only heard it used in the criminal sense. Even among programmers.
While the lack of tactile controls is a big downside to the iPhone as a gaming device, there are plenty of games that are playable without, and for very casual gaming for short periods of time even the ones faking controls on the touchscreen can pull it off.

I don't think the iPhone could ever dethrone the PSP or NDS, but I think if one already owned an iPhone that they'd probably ignore the other gaming devices unless there was a specific game one wanted to play. I fall into that category (as well as the significant other who likes to steal my phone), and I definitely haven't looked twice at any gaming specific devices because I can get everything I want on my phone most of the time. I only pack the NDS on trips involving kids I don't trust with my iPhone :)
Rent-stabilized buildings would be affected. Rent-control is a different beast altogether.

Rent-stabilized means that an apartment's rent can't increase faster than the rate of inflation, plus a certain margin (1-2% per year, I believe). The purpose of this is to remove the volatility in rents that causes urban centers to rot. When rents are volatile, it's bad for residential infrastructure on both the up and down swings. When rents are high, as in 2007 New York, landlords don't need to do shit to move properties, so they let them decline. When rents are low, there's no point in improving the housing. This is why a lot of urban centers crumbled in the 1950s.

Rent control was instituted in the 1940s to prevent GIs from coming back to unaffordable rents. For rent-controlled (unlike rent-stabilized) apartments, the landlord cannot raise the rent at all (meaning he takes a loss equal to the rate of inflation).

Rent stabilization is a good thing and should be extended. Rent control was a huge mistake and should probably be abolished.

One thing that happens in non-RS buildings in New York (the new-construction "luxury" buildings) is that landlords routinely hit tenants with 10-20% rent increases, regardless of the direction of the market. The reason for this is that they know people hate moving, especially in New York where most people don't have cars, and Wall Streeters are (were) getting 25-50% raises each year, so they would take the pain.

If rents are decreased on a rent-stabilized building, I don't think it's easy to bring them back up, but this is probably better than carrying a vacancy.

I've heard that RC goes out the window if there's a 5% vacancy rate, but that could be an urban myth. It's getting close to that point right now.
wait a minute, are you spolsky?
I'm talking about residential rent, not office space. It contributes massively to the burn rate, especially in New York. To cover the additional living costs, you need $20k+ post-tax per person, per year, more than you would need in a place like Madison, WI. It wouldn't kill a VC-funded post-series A startup, but it makes it harder to survive on seed funding.
In bad times, X is always better than being unemployed.
I am not sure that word means what you think it means.