skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed re: everything.

I have a fairly good idea of the competitors, as I've used most of them, and my ideas are much better than a good looking UI, and working policies - the fact that the largest security company in the world can't even supply those basic things makes me think the areas a good target.

Understood re: 50K sales, and agreed re: steak and stripper sales guy - I already have a guy in mind. Agreed re: long engagement - as an architect in my day job I'm on the other end of the coin daily.

In the general entrerprise space, I'd basically be a ServiceNow equivalent to Remedy - multipronged attack on an established competitor at 80% of the price.
Here's another one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=311740

Ask HN: Hack a healthy, yet not expensive, meal.
37 points by rokhayakebe 117 days ago | 115 comments
I remember reading about a tech company 20 years or so ago (cant remember the name or industry) that attributed their success to splitting divisions in two when the head count exceeded 600. 600 was the maximum size where everyone knew everybody's name.

My experience is that 100 is a very good size to join. It's small enough that an individual can have an impact, that everyone knows who you are, that stock options mean something, and that you get paid every month.
Aren't non-QWERTY layouts strictly for people who never use other peoples' computers, and never let other people use theirs? I just swap Control and Caps Lock to their traditional Unix positions (helps relieve stress tremendously), and it already makes using someone else's keyboard incredibly painful.
Sweet potatoes and potatoes are quite different.

They do have fiber, and other vitamins. I'm not trying to say they are as empty as sugar candy. But compared to the other foods on the list they just don't fare as well. There are many other foods that should have taken their spot.
10 Most Romantic Tips | SeasonBeauty
This is pretty interesting to me. When karma was implemented at /. we used to expose the number, but then the number became why people did things on /. Then we obscured the number by replacing it with english words like "excellent" for the top karma scores, then we started paying off in terms of allow people to moderate and meta-moderate. It was pretty neat at the time, but I have to admit I like HNs system. It seems like it embraces the karma rather than obscuring it as some kind of necessary but lamentable side effect, which is how it sometimes felt at /.
Is it Gore-Tex maybe? I've read something like this in "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell.

This is a must-read.
You're too forgiving. D- for not researching Calvin & Hobbes.
No, they're for people who choose to take twenty seconds to choose a different keyboard layout in the OS control panel to save the health of their fingers, and a bit of typing time too.
How to Learn A New API/Programming Language (and Enjoy It)
> At the very least, rational U.S. taxpayers may start looking askance at why their money is being conscripted to support this slaughter.

Slaughter? If any European country (or the US) had been on the receiving end of the Hamas rocket attacks, Gaza and the surrounding areas would have been smoking piles of rubble years ago. And yes, Israel has the capability.

As to Israel's sins, they pale in comparison and they don't have a history of doing everything that they can to wipe out the Palestinians, something that is within their power. Meanwhile, Hamas' "kill all Jews" charter appears to be representative.

Interestingly enough, it's not just Jews. The reason why Arab countries don't allow significant numbers of political Palestinians has nothing to do with Israel.

The "plight of the Palestinians" is almost entirely self-inflicted. Israel was able to "make the desert bloom" without local help so it's absurd to claim that Israel is keeping the Palestinians down.
'Pulp' refers to 'wood pulp', as in cheap and without much substance. Though you're right, judging something as objectively good is a generally hard thing to do, especially when what you are really trying to do is guess what people in 100 years will think of as good.
What was your position there? Did your friends bust you a bit for going to work there as a Linux guy? :)
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/

this is quite similar.
However, the author (an investor himself) deemed this case sufficiently noteworthy to write about it.

No he didn't. He explicitly said that there was nothing noteworthy about the case.

My friend couldn’t understand why his board was blocking the sale. He asked me why the VCs on his board couldn’t see the situation they were in and appreciate the opportunity for a great exit that was right in front of them.

I explained that it wasn’t the VCs who were missing something; it was my founder friend who didn’t get it.

This is not an isolated event. It happens all the time.
Not surprisingly, they're on this list every year:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2008/sn...

No formal titles, egos are strongly discouraged and business units are divided when headcount goes over 100.
Selflessness vs Selfishness
Genes remember sugar hit: Australian research
But benefits have a lot to do with utilization
Write a vim plugin for scheme!
You NAILED it.

I wrote about my internship experiences at Microsoft and Google a while back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227162>. What you say pretty much sums it up.

Google is just so used to being the hot cool shit and they haven't been large enough for long enough to realize that simply isn't true any more. Don't get me wrong, they are both incredible places to work, but Google needs to adjust to their new count and composition of employees.

Luckily, the original article is just one of many bits of proof that Google is aware of problems and is working to resolve them. Microsoft would never show this level of transparency for (the obviously justified) fear of these sorts of forum posts leaking.
So: working for a large company is different than working for a small company. I started at G when it was ~2k people and now we're at ~20k people. I've worked for very small companies and much larger companies than Google and I have to say that Google is a great place to work, when comparing to both and is probably the best large organization for a real , cs focused, software engineer to work for. If you love algorithms, scaling problems and the rest, you are likely to find a group where you can be pretty happy, intellectually speaking. But, if you aren't into that kind of thing, it may not be the place for you.

As long as I've been there, Google has been about 1/2 engineer and 1/2 everyone else. That's very atypical for large technical organizations, where if you have 25% engineering you'd feel pretty lucky. This also means that sometimes there is a 'engineers and everyone else' sort of thing going on. This is reflected in the exit stories, as are the very real problems that face globally distributed engineering organizations.

I find myself wanting to make excuses for some of the complaints mentioned in the article, but it really comes down to not every company matching every engineer, and if you have a large engineering org, you'll have some people who don't fit the org (the short story writer), and some people treated lamentably or regrettably by thier co-workers or managers.

A side note: the hiring process is much better than when I started. I've been sitting on hiring committees for 4 years now, and it is much more efficient than when I interviewed. I was interviewing for an odd position though, so it was even more extreme in my case (for both good and bad). I interviewed with 13 people and was given an offer within a few weeks. but back then a typical interviewer would have 8+ interviews, now we almost never go over 6.

That said, hiring is a dark art. I don't pretend to have an answer for that.
An Introduction To Django (Aimed at new users)
Perhaps not a "language lesson", but PHP has a great deployment story: upload then refresh your browser.

PHP allows a strong separation between system administrator (who is running Apache) and the "application developers" who are people using FTP to upload their script files to a shared host. The simplicity of the system makes it easy for anyone to get started, hence the popularity.

There is also the bit about taking an existing UI (written in HTML) and being able to insert programming hooks into it at will. The "minimal change" is very small, the biggest step is changing the file extension from html to php.
As presented in the post they are.

Monads are abstract data types that satisfy three conditions:
1) They wrap themselves around other data types
2) They have an operation, confusingly called return, that actually performs the aforementioned wrapping
3) They have an operation called bind that allows to feed the value wrapped inside the monad into another function, as long as the function returns a monad. </quote>

What condition is not satisfied by decorators with method chaining?
I'd like to see this done with some of the lesser-used keys that get used heavily in coding: [ ] { } " ' , . <Tab> <Esc>

I wonder if he used source code as the primary input into his algorithm, how the results would change. I can't type on the home row in qwerty, because my right hand is always shifted right about 2 keys, because I use those other keys so often.
Nothing food service related! Think your keyboard is dirty now? Wait until your laptop has been on the salad station for a night or two. Seriously though: The forest service has some -lonely- jobs watching for fires in the national forests. Lighthouse keeper? Night watchman? Lots of night shift jobs should be conducive to hacking.

Seriously consider also jobs that won't be conducive to hack but would be for knowledge acquisition. Get a job at MIT that comes with course audit benefits. A job that requires the hands, but allows you to consume audio lectures on your ipod. Long haul trucker that listens to mit courseware?
Gem in the comments:

You could have been a little compassionate in breaking the news to ELIZA. Couldn't you see that she/it is in denial?
Some of my best times hacking have been on planes. A pal of mine used to fly around the world, selling off upgrades and miles online to cover it. He spent a lot of time reading, the slack...he could have been coding!
That article mentions that Dunbar proposed 150, but the real count is probably closer to double that.

I think for a company, 150 is probably perfect. If the real number of relationships one person can maintain is 300, that grants an allowance of 50% of their maintainable relationships for both work and play.
I switched to the dvorak layout in my early twenties and it's been well worth it. It's not so much about speed, as it is about accuracy, and especially about comfort.

I would recommend in switching that you do NOT move your keycaps around, or draw new letters on your keyboard, or any other mental crutch, but instead simply memorize the new layout mentally. It won't take long, and that small step will hasten your transition.

There were a few interesting side effects however. For the first couple of days, I realized that I could no longer spell some words -- my life is so terminal oriented that much of my rote spelling knowledge was based on muscle memory.

In the first couple of days while feeling really inept at the keyboard, that feeling also carried over into regular voice conversations -- I had to remind myself that I wasn't speaking impaired, only typing impaired.

I easily exceeded my old qwerty performance within the first several days.

During the transition, it was an added challenge to do everything, and that reminded me the previous generation of punch card programmers describing their work. Suddenly it became more efficient to think about the problem harder before trying solutions, rather than just firing rapidly from initial thoughts until I had bludgeoned a solution.

It's amusing to secretly change some unfortunate person's keyboard to dvorak, watch the bewilderment, then type a few sentences, and walk away. "Works fine for me. I don't know what your problem is..."
A little confused as to why you, as a sole founder with little hope of securing funding, would choose a direct sales product with a 4 month sales cycle. But, best of luck!
Interesting ad seeking Lisp developers (not 'mere coders')
I remember seeing a For Better or for Worse (http://www.fborfw.com/index.php) comic where a guy says hi to a little girl in a shopping cart at the store, she waves back. Her mom freaks out and moves the cart, scolding the girl for talking to a stranger. The last frame of the comic has the guy saying "Sometimes I hate this world". Not very funny. I mean... what?!
Actually I'm thinking of writing my own (emacs-inspired) IDE. I can't stand the idea of legacy considerations limiting the novelty of my thinking.
I think the best deterrent against spammers is to make your service unattractive for them. This is quite hard if you are creating a webmail platform, but luckily most of us aren't. Hide down-modded comments, surround outgoing emails with descriptive templates, etc.
Starting My own product
Hi all i am a regular reader of Hacker News.I am working for a software firm since 3 years.My long term goal is to start my own company.
Now i like to start a product part time to learn how to build a product from scratch, learn new technologies and not for money.I am an average programmer but ready to learn new things.
I would like to build up something which is cost effective and as a service something on Google AppEngine.Please suggest me some product so that i can work on .Your kind advice is highly appreciated.

Thanks
Kiran
"And we know that congress is susceptible to being lobbied successfully by people, institutions, cities, states, and corporations. So I'm quite worried that this $550bn is not going to get spent in the right ways because it's seen as a big pot of money to get your hands on."

There is no historical precedent that I know of for government ever redistributing large amounts of money in a way that was good for the economy. The "New Deal" helped extend the Great Depression for 10 years rather than a shorter term if the govenment had not taken such a heavy handed approach.

The idea that a few in government can actually accurately determine the needs of a vast quantity of people economically makes no sense. We're talking about trillions of transactions. Central control was tried by the Russian Soviets, and it failed miserably. Japan recently suffered a decade of decline after their attempt at a "New Deal" infrastructure spending plan. Why are not more people complaining about the foolishness of trying this again given the track record of abject failure in the past?
It certainly is an interesting ad. Horrifically interesting, but interesting nonetheless. It seems to me that this statement could also be about the ad itself:

Lispers seem to be a breed of uber-nerds (super nerds) who are extremely clever in some ways but utterly foolish in others.
I had a similar idea once. The key is that you need to add a cost to signing up on a site. If you make the cost be paid in time that will tend to deter normal users. The correct deterrent, I feel, is CPU cycles. Light browsers/users have plenty of them, a spammer needs all he can get.

The idea would be to pair a CAPTCHA test that a human can do well on with a compute-intensive task that really only a computer can do (like solving a big discrete log). An implementation would be to have the user type in the specific values (which are given in CAPTCHA form) into an on-page javascript calculator. This will then take some time to solve the equation (which can be easily adjusted by the size of the discrete log).

If a spammer uses humans to bypass the image recognition task, they'll still have to spend CPU time to solve the equation. Likewise, cracking the CAPTCHA with OCR will not circumvent the computation. If too many successful spam logins are still occurring the difficulty of the compute task and or the OCR task can be adjusted.
Strangely enough, sweet potatoes/yams break down much slower. Yummier too.
The lost cult of Microsoft program managers
There is a link to some math from the references article, but here's an independent calculation.

Suppose the VCs expect 10% of their investments to succeed wildly, 10% to mostly succeed, 30% to limp along and 50% to fail. Suppose also they want 50% profit, which is a complete guess, but seems plausible.

For 100 investments of $10,000 each (total outlay $1m) they want a $1.5m return. Some of that might come from the moderate successes, so let's say that $1m needs to come from the 10 wild successes.

That's $100,000 each, a factor of 10 on the original investment.

This suggests that the factor of 10 is driven by the numbers, and not (purely) by greed.
No, there isn't a way.
State of Innovation in India: 2009
Likewise, I could never quite get monads. I was afraid that I might have to learn Haskel to understand them. Now, I realize that they are a pattern that I have used for decades but applied inconsistently. This was one of those "Ah ha" moments where I realized that I had almost had it and probably would have gotten it with a little more introspection about Jquery.
A Tale Of Two Tradeoffs
It does seem like you'd have to be foolish to code in Lisp for $11/hour. Maybe that's why they have to keep reposting the ad? Maybe they're looking for 3rd-world coutry lispers?
I'm reminded of http://cr.yp.to/sarcasm/modest-proposal.txt.
The "New Deal" helped extend the Great Depression for 10 years

More on this, here: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/History/New_Deal/new_d...

Why eight years of Roosevelt economic policy produced such disastrous economic recovery results, is the crucial question. The answer appears to be that the group of men who advised the President on economic and social policy during the peace years of the Depression, were focussed on a broad social agenda, one of using the depression crisis to shift the United States from a market economy, which they contemptuously termed "laissez-faire capitalism," towards a State-dominated economy of central planning.
so you pay $20/month so you can run bittorent on a dedicated computer without hogging down your own network + machine? That doesn't sound too bad. Is it a pain to transfer the files back to local computer though?
For Greasemonkey: http://internetducttape.com/2008/05/23/filtering-reddit-and-...
Idea 4, which is much like Idea 3.

=========================================

Make Open Source viable for the "medical industry." There are numerous problems with deploying an opensource application environment when it is involved in the care process. Lawyers have made this a legal quagmire to validate software installs, but it can be done, just not for small startups.

By validating linux installs on machines via a process you will lower the barrier to entry for using technology in the medical industry and it should help improve care and reduce cost over all.

Medical companies will pay large dollars at first for this service (probably on order with what they pay for other software of its type).

For example, Documenteum installs can run between $5,000,000 and $50,000,000, where IBM content manager is Cheap, it still will cost on average $500k+ and it needs to be installed on windows.

By managing the documentation correctly, one could design and configure a set of 'validated' applications based on opensource technology.

I know there is money in it, and I would have done it by now, except I am not a linux person.

PS. if you do this well, you could probably get some support from change.gov.
When I was interning at Amazon a little while back I was quite surprised to hear from Google interns how little they were being paid (in comparison, the salary is still respectable). I'd always imagined Google to be the type that showered you in money/perks simply because of their Googliness.

Turns out they rely on the "but we're GOOGLE!" schtick a lot when hiring.
Actually, not. A 3x return over 10 years is 11% annually. Subtracting VC fees (say 2% management and 30% take) brings that down to about 6% for the LPs. VCs have to deliver much better returns than that.

Also, don't underestimate the cost of an acquisition. Not just the few $100k in legal fees. Generally it means they have to distribute proceeds to the LPs, and they're exposed to various liabilities if the acquisition goes badly. Assuming they get restricted stock in a public company, selling it is a complex procedure. They may be prohibited in trading in that acquirer's stock while the acquisition is pending, which complicates other deals. Sad to say, but you really can't run a fund with only 3x returns.
sudo make me a sandwich :-)
I think that most people don't understand that money spent by the state is directly(taxes) or indirectly(inflation) taken from them. That might seem crazy, but I've often had political debates with people, who had absolutely no clue about basic economics.
This solution is interesting, but it fails on two counts:

1. You're making the process even more of a pain in the ass, not less, increasing the likelihood that real users will abandon the registration.

2. This doesn't protect at all from the human captcha-cracking farms.
I'm surprised by the comments about low salaries. From the public records, it certainly looks like Google pays somewhat higher salaries. The difference though is that there is a huge variance.

http://envy.appspot.com/?q=microsoft|google&title=softwa...

The issue with reports like these is that it is a biased audience. It could very well be that only the people who had low salaries posted their comments on the website.
I just spent 30 minutes reading the whole article, who else did that? haha
Ask HN: Do you program in black or white?
I just switched from Eclipse to TextMate a month ago. With that change I also wanted to try out coloured text on black background.

Interestingly it’s a huge improvement for me. I seem to be much more focussed. It’s also really pleasing to look at code now.

Did you have similar experiences? In which colours do you program?
Well, yeah. Not all comics are funny. FBOFW has a serious side to it.
The issue here is that a lot of people, Fred Wilson being among them, refuse to acknowledge that their view of the world is untenable even when the evidence clearly points to it. In this very post he lays out every reason why this stimulus package will fail, says his own friends are planning to take as much advantage as they can, but then remains committed to it. It’s dogma over reason.

That’s how these plans continue to get implemented even with no record of success. Because "have the Government give people money" is such an appealing idea that they simply can’t bring themselves to acknowledge how ineffective it is.

The true irony is that the part he hates, the tax cuts, are probably the only piece of this money that will actually get to the people this plan is designed to help (though I agree even that will be ineffective because any tax cut to the lower tax brackets is just going to get stuffed in a bank and saved for an emergency in this economic climate)