skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you managing monkeys or are you managing highly competent human beings? Are your employees actually any good?

The whole exchange stank of condescension and patronization. This is a high-level exec at a company, his basic intelligence doesn't need to be questioned - he did not need the principle of 1:1's to be explained to him as if he were a child.

One of his direct reports is violating a very clear, established policy. "Steve" needs to fix it, pronto, and that's all that needed to be communicated. The whole pointlessly patronizing "lesson" in business and the direct threat to Steve's job was entirely unnecessary. It's unproductive and just plain power-posturing.

It's only necessary if your workforce is consisted entirely of slack-jawed yokels that need to be hand-held through the very job you hired them to do. If that's the case, you should fire yourself for having created an organization full of slack-jawed yokels.

Side note, from the article:

> "it’s personally very important to me that Opsware be a good company. It’s important to me that the people who spend 12 to 16 hours/day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life"

Protip: if you want to have a good place to work, and your employees to have a good life, don't have 12-16 hour days.
Bad Education (2011)
Is this written in Turkish?
You can just write it as

sum(x for x in xrange(1,101) if x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0)

and skip the inner set of parenthesis; the parenthesis on a generator expression are not needed if it is the only argument to a function.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

Without the word "essential", this quote sounds very absolute and idealistic, which was of course not the intention.
good call, I took the REPL section out. the whole thing is also on github in case you wanna help out https://github.com/maxogden/javascript-for-cats
Apart from never being able to make this work, what would be a better way of lifting people out of poverty and making their lives better would be the government to abolish the caste system.

Indian society is a mess and this won't change a damn thing. Apart from making the lives of the desperately poor even more bureaucracy-ridden and miserable.
Thanks David. I agree with these points. Given the founder's priority is for their team, how do they effectively represent both their team's interest and the investor's interest to the acquirer? In a tight situation, who gets the preference and how much?
Seriously, HN is getting worse.

I posted this earlier, and it didn't even make it to the homepage.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4392695

This is a clear violation of HN guideline.
HN guideline is:
"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."
I didn't pass any judgment on it, I just said it's more restrictive than a BSD style license. I have opinions on the two licenses, and could probably write a fairly lengthly article on it: "it's complicated".
Discovering the Power of Social Media through Gumroad
This is a clear violation of HN guideline. HN guideline is: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."
Being a vegetarian, now I exactly understand how Muslims might be feeling.

Dammit, there are countries in the East where people are primarily vegetarian and no one's an extremist.
Luckily, VCs don't really get to tell you how to run a company.
This was alarmingly accurate.
reading this felt like reading an Aesop's Fables :). Very useful
Buckminster Fuller - Everything I Know (42 hours of video)
Machiavelli was writing to someone with a kind of absolute power that business folks simply do not have and thus a large swath of his advice is simply not applicable.

The entire Fear vs. Love discussion, iirc, makes the argument that fear is preferable as you control if people fear you, whereas individuals decide whom they love. As such Machiavelli proposes fear is superior for means of maintaing control as it is something you can directly create/control. This clearly doesn't apply to modern business as you can't impart massive, fear-inducing bouts of violence on people (which, btw, was what Machiavelli generally prescribed for a prince to keep the underlings in check) and anyone that has any talent at all isn't really in fear of you firing them. Contrast this with the situation during the time Machiavelli lived/wrote where most people were very directly affected by every whim of the ruling powers and there were no good alternatives (i.e. 'just move somewhere else' wasn't really a feasible option for most, and 'find another prince' certainly wasn't either).

It further ignores the fact that while people do choose whom they love/like they don't just change those allegiances arbitrarily, it is generally preceded by actions, such as being a massive douchebag / trying to pull rank or play silly power games to show 'who's in charge'.

Edit: grammar
I like the idea of a 501c3 twitter competitor. It would be like wikipedia business-wise I guess.

Centralization has it's benefits, and they could be maintained without all the crap that's happening with twitter right now.
Wait, is this guy the A16z Horowitz? Not a time to flout obnoxiousness and ruthless disregard for staff, in the middle of the OnLive situation.
Personally, I would have asked WHY he didn't know this, because the events that led up to the current situation are almost certainly bigger than the fact itself.

And then: fire or not fire the guy - at a small startup you have no time to rehabilitate people. It's just too expensive.

(Personally, I am not a big fan of threats. This isn't something that has come up at work much, though.)
Anti-piracy drive sees new developments – a court ruling and a scam
I (and my partner) have one rule: respect.

Everyone is treated with respect. I personally would've never "talk down" to an employee like this Ben guy did. And frankly, we expect our employees to act them same (and most do - the ones who don't don't last long here).
Or the conversation was an amalgamation of other situations designed to illustrate the point in the blog.

An actual conversation would probably have been more instructive but less clear.
This will allow massive credit expansion in India, as being trackable means lending companies can more easily identify people. Same thing has happened in the Philippines over the last 10 years, easy credit has exploded.
Its an excellent question. I know if I were "Steve" in this scenario I'd feel bad that I had so misread something that was very important to my boss. As with most things I would also be evaluating how I felt about it.

At Sun I worked briefly for a guy who was an incredible micro-manager. He would ask me to report on what my folks were doing, and then tell me what they should be doing so that I could meet the goals he had set out for me. I pushed back on that. My push back was that I felt I had a better handle on how to meet the goals than he did, I also recognized that if that wasn't something he could live with it was well within his rights to remove me (as I recall I even offered to proactively move at that point).

I completely agree with Ben's original assessment that part of making a place fun to work at is that you and your reports have a clear idea of what you're being asked to do, and your management supports your effort to get that done.

The part of this story that seems to trigger the most emotion is the notion that Ben brings this guy in, then drops this requirement on him with the consequence that if he doesn't do it in 24hrs he'll be out of a job. That level of clarity in direction is rare in my experience. It also read a bit like Ben was taking no responsibility for not communicating clearly the importance of this requirement. If I were Steve I would want to understand that better. But we don't know what sort of 1:1s that Ben and Steve had prior to this one. Perhaps it came up often and Steve made vague affirmative noises about how he would get around to it soon or something. And only after repeated nudges did Ben come out and make this clear delineation of behavior and consequence.
A few of my savvier (small-ish) software buddies use this system:

1) We have an onboarding Google Doc for everyone at the company. It is grouped into headings. One heading might be, e.g., "Common Customer Support Questions" followed by "Query: A customer complains they can't log into the software. Common phrasings for this: X, Y, Z." Research: "Go to page X in the dashboard [detailed in Internal Tools]. Search for... . If you find the customer, use the password reset tool, then copy/paste the following response to the customer, adding in their first name if you can reasonably guess it. If the tool reports no results, forward email to foo@bar.com and send no response."

2) Every time the proprietor gets tired of a genre of emails, they improve either the internal tools or the business rules to optimize themselves out of that workflow.

3) There is frequently a catch-all rule saying something like "If you have a novel situation and think you can handle it for under $100, do so [see: Getting Access To A Company Card], and fill in why the situation was novel, how you handled it, and what you spent on your weekly report Google doc. Don't worry, we trust you to use your judgement." (This is probably among the best pieces of actionable advice Tim Ferris ever gave.)

4) Capturing this state machine as a Google doc means the business has a memory longer than the individual workers, which is particularly important in a virtual-company sort of situation where you're dealing with VAs/freelancers who a) will often not pan out and b) when they do pan out have an expected lifetime tenure with the company of 6 ~ 24 months only.
They are not sending trillions of light pulses, otherwise they'd be making a very long movie. If they want to do a 10 second video, they just need to send 240 pulses.
Show HN: Customizable, on-page tutorials as a service, Tutorialize.me
is this a bug in compiler?
i asked this question on stackoverflow and got comments that this is a bug. Don't know is it true?
There is a massive difference between knowledge workers and hourly workers at Walmart. I have never met anyone in my life in the tech industry who would 'be fired for showing up 30 minutes late'. This isn't a minimum wage job where you can simply be replaced by the next idiot that walks in the door, so the norms are slightly different. If people want to manage highly skilled workers as if they were replaceable cogs they certainly can, I just suspect it will lead to them having a staff full of replaceable cogs and not much success.
Ask HN: Online security for non-tech spouse/partner?
How do you encourage your non-tech spouse/partner to take online or computer security seriously? Similarly, what strategies or solutions have you found to help make things easier? LastPass seems to have solved the simple password reused over and over problem, but what else is the HN community using?
How does the "marketplace has reached boiling point [with Twitter]", for app.net, differ from the marketplace reaching a boiling point with Facebook -> DIASPORA*, yet the trends speak pretty loudly (http://www.google.com/trends/?q=diaspora) that boiling point & press != success.

I'm hopeful to see app.net take off, but have been unable to find any arguments/discussions talking about how app.net will succeed where DIASPORA failed.

(Ignoring the obvious of having a better name, of course!)
Delegate or die: the self-employed trap.
i asked this question on stackoverflow and got comments that this is a bug. Don't know is it true?
Where would you place the likelihood that somebody who intentionally makes ticks bite people is well-balanced and without mental issues?
Thanks for mentioning GoSquared. I've been looking for something like that.
A subtle and yet key thing from this article: the guy delegated writing the answer into the manual; irritatingly, I know that that is a step I would have missed (leaving me now in charge of formatting a manual).
Really? Are you serious?

BTW, there's a big difference between "background radiation" and ingested radiation (either through air, food, water, etc.)

The scientific consensus is that there is no amount of radiation that is safe to ingest.

http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/pdf/10.1667/RR2629.1

Do you really want to test your theory?
You have to consider relative scale. If you have 5mb of log data, and you have 1000mb of app data that triggered that log data, the logging isn't your problem.
I see it's from 1995. Is there something more updated? With the prominence of programming life-style businesses I'd imagine there are new things to be taught.
No Traffic Lights Vs Traffic Lights
Cool service! Just left some feedback :)
People in HackerNews tend to ignore things that have no 'funding', 'VC', 'capital', 'investment', 'startup' or related terminology.

In this very same thread people are mentioning that an open, distributed system is needed or that they'Will contribute by code and kind'.

And identi.ca is not even mentioned in the article.

Disclaimer: Im not trying to be offensive through other posters. They may simply not know about identi.ca. But that proves my point even more. Twitter and app.net have been discussed so much in the past few weeks. Identi.ca barely got any attention.
I'm nowhere near Ben's experience and don't fully understand the challenges of layers of management yet, but positive energy (clear objectives and highlighting success to the group) has always worked better for me than negative energy (threatening to fire). Maybe it's specific to the workplace, but I think it'd prefer the former as a leader or employee.

Agree the "why" is key to buy-in and success. But leaders need to coach not command. 1:1s and firing can be necessary, but only after the CEO has done a great job of setting clear objectives that everyone buys into. It's also ideal when people hold themselves accountable versus a leader having to (e.g. report at group meetings).

As a data point, Jeff Bezos, who Ben references, apparently doesn't like 1:1s. He prefers group meetings so everyone gets on the same page and to avoid "the telephone game." [source - Bing Gordon's 2011 talk at the Endeavor Summit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdTaywChuYM]
I have to admit I thought the same thing.

As to why anyone would think of this as others have asked in other comments below? You don't see many pro-meat groups (are there any?) fire bombing vegetable stands but PETA, ALF and other extremist groups who are vegetarian due to their views on animals do use violence; verbal or physical to intimidate people.
Right. But the point of high speed photography, like the apple bullet that is disingenuously compared in the video, is that you avoid motion blur. My 200 fps camera can take a trillionth of a second snapshot, with some, um, motion blur
Or in javascript..

new Array(100).join(1).split(1)
.map((function() { var i = 0; return function() {return ++i;}})())
.filter(function(x) { return !(x % 15); })
.reduce(function(x, a) { return a += x; }, 0);
A new LinkedIn competitor can survive and it can even thrive.

Off the top of my head, some of LinkedIn's competitors include the likes of:

BranchOut

Viadeo

Xing

Bizily

partnerup

company.com

Zerply

If you're looking for what strategies can help to survive, then you should look at how those guys have grown (not only the likes of Viadeo/Xing but how BranchOut have done leveraging the Facebook Platform).

Likewise, you should look at how you can make it "better" in a way that will entice users to join - Zerply mainly tries to do this via better looking profiles. This feature may involve something related to recruiters - maybe even giving them a seperate profile - where they can still find people to recruit for their clients but also so people can use the service for what its for networking.

Infact, you shouldn't limit yourself to looking at how LinkedIn and its competitors have grown - you should also look at other Social Networks and how they've grown as well e.g. Instagram, Badoo, Tagged etc

Similarly, if you're planning on "going viral" and a "great product" then it isn't enough! You need to have a great distribution strategy above anything else.

And if you want to create a "LinkedIn Killer" then it has to be significantly different like how Facebook was to Myspace and for LinkedIn to not notice it (you have to appear different enough from LinkedIn so they simply don't copy the features), in order for you to stay under-the-radar for long enough where you hit a tipping point where, everyone joins your service and you completely take over the market
Already on front page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4401812

(Lack of "www." here kept the duplicate detector from detecting this.)
Why does the researche call it "trillion fps", when it is really 1/trillionth sec frame? That sort of misrepresentation is supposed to be saved for the news office or the popular press.
The achievement is interesting enogh without the deceptive exaggerations.
I think if FB and Twitter fail (compared to their expectations), that would be a good thing for the startup world. Right now we see a lot of consumer startups whose sole business model is online advertising - it doesn't matter if it's Adsense, display ads, sponsored tweets, what have you - it's the same thing. Online advertising. And even if you're optimistic, if you do the math, you realize one thing: it's not sustainable.

If there's 1 thing I like about App.net, it's that we're starting to see a shift from relying on ads as revenue to building a product users will PAY for, whether it's B2C or B2B. In a sense, relying on online ads is a semi-copyout. It's like you're throwing your hands up on the air, and saying "I got NO clue how to provide a service people will pay for here, I'll let YOU advertisers do that instead for a fee!".

Most people are just naive and see FB making billions on ads and think they can build a startup around advertising as well. The harsh reality is that only a few hundred companies can rely on advertising, and even most of them are having troubles these days, with the incredible high cost of creating high quality content, diminishing advertising rates, and avoiding Google penalties that happen every other week. The ROI is just not there.
And it crashed.... http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://developer.voic...
You're missing his point, which is that he lives in Denver and is happy with his decision. :)
great idea, looking forward for the rest.
Wow... I really don't get the algorithm.... I posted the story, it was on the "new" page... it started to get votes, it went into the first page, it was 20th, then 16th, then 14th, and then... suddenly at minute 24, it went right into position... 658th???
Really??? What is going on???
So instead of talking about the content, we are all discussing the way that he posted his content.

Who cares? One click, two clicks. It really doesn't effect me that much.

I think all of us are talking way too much much about how much HN needs to be fixed. Almost every large thread has a reference to how HN is broken. HN may or may not be "going downhill" but if that's all we talk about... It certainly will.

And I recognize the irony in this statement. :)
I'm generally the bastion for cutting edge tech whenever I buy any gadget. I don't mind spending ridiculous amounts of money for that _one_ specific feature or niche that I want, because I'm not going to spend money again for a very very long time.

Believe it or not, my first Android smartphone was only bought last year, and that too, because there weren't premium dumbphones. Most of them were cheap plasticky crap. Even Nokia seemed to have lost focus so I thought, "Hey why not?" and jumped in. It was hard to transition from blind messaging and blind dialing to actually giving a damn to what's going on, on the screen. I mean, it's just a slab of glass. They could've atleast had hardware Send and End keys like the HTC HD2... Otoh Google wants to go completely buttonless.
I think a really nice feature would be to let me send some voice feedback to MYSELf instead of to you guys, so I can test it. I wanted to test it but not necessarily send you feedback.
Some examples

1. Purely declarative animations in a general purpose language
http://conal.net/fran/tutorial.htm

2. A recursive descent parser where you can declare your grammar as in yacc i.e. it is not a separate compiler generator but a regular library, and the code is type safe unlike yacc. The best part is that the actual library is just 2 lines of code, thanks to the magic of lazy evaluation and a powerful type system.

result v = \inp -> [(v,inp)]

p `bind` f = \inp -> concat [f v out | (v,out) <- p inp]

http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/237/1/monparsing.pdf
Facebook is (mainly) a single web app and the market knows it as such. Real time messaging is a smorgasbord of different clients on different platforms built by different people. The distributed nature of multiple vendors marketing efforts might give it the edge.

Coupled with a lot of negative sentiments that Twitter users and developers feel might make it an interesting story in the tech press. Diaspora had a lot of press when they first started but they couldn't live up to the promise.

In this case it would be easier to live up to the promise because most of the client code already exists. It would largely be a case of clients adding new endpoints to the frontend and abstracting the rendering functions.

It would also be super easy for users to import their Twitter profile into a new system. Just enter a Twitter username and you could easily get the bio & avatar. Very low cost of transfer. If the press pushed it, and it was so easy to move over, it would have a chance IMHO.

I should also point out I don't think app.net has this opportunity, I think it could only happen for a truly free non-profit system.
A 501c3 twitter is almost a brilliant solution. What grantmaker wouldn't want to support an organization dedicated to people's speech and open journalism? Valuing extensibility, openness, and free access, the mission is strong and the market is there. If Caldwell wanted to move this way, and offer $50 sustaining memberships for new features and $100 memberships for developers, nobody would blame him and all of a sudden he's open to some amazing funding opportunities.
Sivers is one of the few writers on the subject of business/startups that is reliably good.

A few reasons this is the case:

1. He's not some professional blogger pontificating on things he doesn't know about. He started a real business and his posts are from his experiences starting and scaling up a successful business. He's not the usual mountebank type you get here.

2. His real business involved selling actual products that made people happy, he wasn't agglomerating eyeballs for wholesale to the advertising industry. The value proposition is very explicit.

3. He thinks like an engineer and applies the rational processes normally demanded of programmers/engineers/etc. to the business. It's not Six-Sigma certification lessons, it's him analyzing and responding to discrete business, engineering, and product problems.

You could just bundle up a dump of every post he's made about programming, products, and businesses and sell it as a book and be distributing something far more useful than 99% of what exists on the business advice book market or what gets posted to HN day to day. Toss in a bonus pack of Patrick's advice on business, SEO, A-B testing, statistics, marketing, etc and you've got a great batch of material to start with.

The stuff is timeless (relative to the internet) in a way that Norvig's post on his sudoku solver for demonstrating dynamic programming and constraint solving was.
Btw, it had 7 votes when it was ostracized. At the top 100 there are many stories with fewer votes and way older. Can someone explain it to me? I really don't get it.