skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Quick wins for your business?
I thought, hey, since there are a bunch of smart people here, we might be able to share some little minor practices or projects we found were effective. Sure, most things are business specific, but I'm betting we can all benefit a lot from some generally applicable tips.

My contribution:

I used to spend an unhealthy amount of time doing metrics navelgazing -- go to Google Analytics, go to payment processor logs, go to email, etc. A good deal of it was just a nervous habit -- wonder how many sales I made today, wonder whether this month will be better than last month, etc. And it always turned out to be the same four or five metrics.

So I build myself a dashboard on my site, which used APIs and data I already had, and put all those metrics on /private/dashboard, behind a HTTP basic password prompt. This took me an hour and has saved me dozens. Every time I find myself doing repetitive processes (looking up customer keys, etc), that process gets added to the sidebar on the dashboard.

Thus its one click access to a quick business health-check and two clicks to get to essentially anything I do more than once a month. The ROI on time is impressive -- now instead of spending 5 minutes logging into my payment processor, clicking "access transaction log", and typing in parameters to answer the question "What are sales like this month as compared to last month?", its something I can catch out of the corner of my eye as I do productive work.
Does the Comments Box allow for threaded comments? Unthreaded comments are a pain imho.
Facebook privacy chief hits back
“Uthing LITHP ith like having no money, you never know where your next meal ith coming from.”

Lisp and art: no way to make a living.
The case of the App Store ripoff (Updated)
It's always good to see an Uncyclopedia article that isn't full of random bullshit that's supposed to be funny.
I hate to nitpick, but they are in fact meant to "look like the sun" due to the fact that most monitors generally run at a color temperature of 5500K which is (approximately) the same color temperature of sunlight. When set to a "night" setting it isn't creating an "overcast", it is merely changing the color temperature of the monitor to something more in line with moonlight (4100K) or lamp (3400K) light sources, something you could do manually by adjusting your monitor settings.
Cupcake Demo'd on an Android Dev Phone
I'm a freelance software consultant, which is my main source of income. Besides that, I act. I take auditions occasionally and lands to roles in local commercials, TV programs, independent films and reginoal theatres time to time. I'm payed by acting, though it constitutes less than a few percent of my income (CMs generaly pay well, up to $1000/day; indie films and theatres mostly pro-bono or like $100 per production).

I'm by no means a professional actor; I'm non-union. Acting is, objectively, my hobby. In heart, I reluctant to call it a hobby, though. I keep taking acting classes and hope someday I can land on some union gig. It's not about money; consulting pays enough for living. It's about great experience working with skilled actors and directors.

Oh, by the way, I'm almost 40. I was deeply involved in theatres when I was in college. Then I decided to concentrate on building engineering career, got PhD in EE and a programming job. About 7 years ago I became independent, and soon after that I resumed acting.

Retrospectively, I think if I had pursued both acting and engineering simultaneously, I couldn't get the current flexible working condition. When I got a job at a company making video games and CG movies, I imagined I could contribute to projects in a unique way because of my multiple interests. Then I realized that, in order to contribute substantially, I had to excel in at least one field; there was no room for a person who had multiple skills but every one was half-assed. In any field I think you have to have certain period concentrating in pursuing something to acquire skills at meaningful level. It may or may not make money (money is largely determined by the balance of supply and demand), but money can be used as a litmus; if your skill is unique enough that people even pay to get you instad of someone, probably you are above par.

So I perspired in the software field. I couldn't become world-reknowned developer or something but got enough reputation so that I could work independently. Then I resumed acting. It's slow, but I'm not in hurry; I'll be happy if I'm still acting in regional theatres and had a couple of small roles in films at 60. If I had chased both acting and engineering, I suspect I'd be much more in haste and desperate. Besides, the experience of working professionally in one field can be applied to another field; I know how I supposed to prepare, and I can see worth in my work itself separate from its monetary value.

Any skill takes large amount of time to master. Probably the strategy is not to keep your passion, but to take several years to deeply dive into one thing at a time until the skill reaches certain level. Then keep doing them in parallel for the rest of life.
Wow, I'm impressed. It works in IE 6+, Firefox 1.5+, Safari 3+, Opera 9.5+, and Chrome.
The Hacker News OnePage Greasemonkey script ( http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512 ) or the SplitView Greasemonkey script ( http://www.nirmalpatel.com/web.html#splitview ) for a split view of the story & comments may help you.
How open are these APIs? Is it possible to build a single widget that accepts either opensocial or friendconnect or fbconnect?
Ask YC: Has the economy changed the going rate for programmers?
The going rate for good salaried programmers used to be 80K - 120K per year, with some stock option grants varying company to company. Has the economic crisis affected that at all? Does it depend on what part of the country (or what part of the world) you're in?
for several IDEs the settings can be exported or are even stored in a file that can be synched via subversion or some other revision control. I keep all of my emacs customization files in subversion and can quickly replicate my environment anywhere.

As for the suggestion that web IDEs are becoming mainstream, I say: far from it. Most developers haven't even heard of bespin or similar projects. Personally, I'd be surprised if they ever go mainstream.
Ask HN: What sites do you go to mostly to read the comments?
I see in the thread about Facebook competing with Disqus there is discussion about website discussion via comments. I LOVE to read the comments here on HN, so I can plainly see the value of comments from users on websites. And I read several online discussion forums (the one where I spend the most time is College Confidential), so like lots of user-contributed content when it is moderated, and good. But most news sites, and other information sites, I visit have comments that in my opinion REDUCE the value of reading the site, so I often skip the comments entirely. What sites do you visit, besides HN of course, where what draws you to the site is as much the comments from random users as it is the built-in content from the site operators?
This is a drastic departure from desktop world where any such thing would be either labeled "spyware"

Do my eyes deceive me or did Netbeans and Eclipse come with "anonymously share usage statistics" these days?
Wow. Talk about a really, really, long tail here.
You realize of course that Google's reordering tool only affects the results they display to YOU, right?

Please tell me you haven't been furiously hitting the delete button in the hopes of tidying up the internet!
This is actually quite an interesting idea, but neither the precision nor the reliability of IQ tests are sufficient to gather the kind of data you are looking for.

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html
The lesson as always: Keep your Freeagent drive on the floor.

I've knocked mine over more than a few times, but since I've got it sitting on the floor, there's been no issues.
Plus developers generally have pretty wonky setups that are crazy different from each other. Ever tried doing paired programming at a small dev shop? I couldn't type on anyone's keyboard, everyone had their own key mappings, keyboard layouts, shortcuts etc. Some had shorthand hostnames in their .ssh/config, non-standard terminal settings, crazy scripts in their .bashrc files, different virtual machines for different environments, etc. I'd say it would be impossible to convince a developer that this is the only IDE they can/should use.
Voice, Media, Verification - Facebook's Evolving Philosophy
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the only two guys I know of who worked at Hewlett Packard's calculator division are Jeff Hawkins and Woz.
Hmm. I thought everybody got this out of their system in 2005. You know, Google Maps API comes out and everybody writes that little test application where you can put pins in the map and store locations in a database. Dozens of sites that look exactly like this this went live over a 3 week period. Some of them inexplicably even got funded.

But it's 2009 now. It's a bit hard to get excited about this.
Don't all laptops have ambient light sensors and adjust their displays & keyboard lighting accordingly?
Im sure that it decreases, but I bet that this effect lasts for at least three weeks.
Currently. They might do more with it.
Intuit tries to call Mint's bluff? Is this normal?
He may have meant this when he created the slide, but precise numbers here seem less important than relative magnitude as long as one is reasonably close.

One could be a few ns off on how long a L2 cache lookup takes, and endure in all but the most time-critical situations. Far bigger problems occur when one failed to account for drive seeks being around eight orders of magnitude slower than L2 cache lookups.

It doesn't strike me as a list of numbers to memorize and be able to recite, but more the sake of cultivating an intuition of where to start looking for places to optimize communication, and the relative order of things one should focus on.
"Never" seems a bit hasty. Facebook very rarely lets things stay non-streamlined for long. They usually start rough and then iterate until they've got something that' insanely polished.
I would love to think that they meant to do that all along, because that's the true killer feature of Facebook. I like looking at my friends list and seeing names rather than handles.
UK taking bids on stadium work
I can see this being useful for introductory programming classes, but not for real projects. For a real programming project, there are a lot of things you need which are very hard to implement in a browser: a debugger, profiler, version control, and code completion, to start. And then there's the whole issue of the host running people's arbitrary in-development code on their server, which may accidentally spin into an infinite loop, or deliberately send spam, exploit local root exploits on the host system and so on.

The browser is good for many things, but it is not and will not ever be a good IDE.
On Disqus or on this Facebook model?

I'm sure that this Facebook system could be hacked to allow for unregistered comments.
Trivia: Andrew Tridgell's techniques here catalyzed the creation of git. He applied them to reverse-engineer parts of the Bitkeeper protocol, a proprietary version control system then hosting the linux kernel. Bitkeeper CEO Larry McVoy revoked linux's license to use BK, Linus went off and wrote a replacement, and the rest is history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper
As the old saying goes: If you're worth suing then you might be doing something right.
This is good news for 3rd world countries that cannot afford expensive lines.
And if you want to read the article, you need a subscription to Science. Nice.
Well, they kept for as long as it took me to realize that there is no meaningful search or browse feature. Then I left and can not imagine why I would ever come back...
Sites have seen as much as 40-50% more comments...

I wonder if there was a noticeable change in tone or quality though, with the decreased barrier to commenting.
the date plugin is really a time-saver.
I don't think that's true. Remember beacon? But you are right "never" is a bit hasty. They will have to fundamentally change the way this works for it to be mainstream. The dev app interface alone is too confusing for your average blogger.
Obama and the Economy
As you are no doubt aware, all advertising claims must be verified and substantiated before they are used in advertising.

Now that's a novel idea. Nine out of ten doctors agree.
Hi,

SMSGYAN Looks like a really cool application. I'm glad to see some innovation in God's country. However, I have just one recommendation. After reading some of your team bios, it seems that you guys are also enjoying some of the perks that come with success (partying, beautiful women, etc) and this is great, but i've noticed that two of your team members have the same blog theme (the one with the shirtless guy flexing his back muscles). I would suggest changing that theme because you come off as a little gay.

All in all, except for that slight suggestion, keep up the good work and keep innovating!
We are using make for exactly that purpose, works like a charme.
I think the marketing value alone makes it worth implementing into a site.

update: I just took a brief look at the Facebook comment widget and I think it's missing one feature. Facebook connect was meant for augmenting an existing login system that a site has but it doesn't allow site's own login user (when they are not logged in as Facebook user) to post comments as the user. Not as configurable as I would like.
You need a white chocolate mocha.
I can just picture a large board room at Intuit of stuffy suits all sitting around baffled how this tiny startup is managing to totally dominate them. I'm going to sign up for Mint right now.

Fun fact: A safer way a company can brag in advertising is called "puffing" http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/puffing
I don't think it's really impacted the market for great developers much at all.

People that can develop working, maintainable software that makes users happy seem to always be in demand.
> As for the Quantum/Relativistic physicists: they were quite distributed, but I would argue that during the important years (i.e., the few decades immediately following their theoretical breakthroughs), they were more concentrated in the United States than anywhere else.

Is this just because of the Manhattan Project?
I don't know if it's normal, but it's certainly an unbelievably fucking dumb marketing move; your dad knows Quicken, but might not have known about Mint --- until Quicken made sure he did.
Because it isn't necessary for my robot to carry around a programming board. If I come up with another application that uses a microcontroller, I have to pay for another USB programming board/AVR combo.
1) Disqus

2) As plausible as hacking Disqus to allow Hacker News accounts.
Discount hotel rates
Hotelsatanywhere.com provide of common features found in hotel rooms are a telephone, an alarm clock, a television, and Internet connectivity; snack foods and drinks may be supplied in a mini-bar, and facilities for making hot drinks. So don’t waste your time and visit on http://www.hotelsatanywhere.com/
my mac does this automatically? and since its color calibrated for photo editing I don't want the monitor to change color on me.
Agreed. It is possible Facebook doesn't care because many people do have accounts, but I would take non-users into consideration.
This isn't competing with Disqus at all. Disqus totally replaces blog commenting with a fairly trivial integration, and even syncs the comments back to your database where you can retain ownership. What is a blogger going to do, put this Facebook widget at the bottom of every post?
Beacon was very quickly dumped after the massive backlash that was brought up upon it. I have no doubt that had there not been the massive public resentment they would have quickly iterated on it and made it into a very viable and interesting product.

The parent's post is quite correct. They could've spend months polishing beacon and it would've still been doomed to failure. Instead they put it out there and when it didn't get the desired response they canned it. If the comments system gets any traction whatsoever (and doesn't become a pr disaster like beacon was) I fully expect them to very quickly polish the product and make it very usable for people that aren't the early adopters.
When comparing technology vendors in a mature area I think it's good to pick a new, smart entrant who's somewhat proven but still hungry. They are the ones who get customers by competing on quality and features. Don't always go with the default or the sexy choice.

"somewhat proven" is key. Don't shoot yourself by piloting something experimental without the ability to fix it yourself or replace it in a hurry.

Know the technology well. Build the quick+dirty version yourself, then shop around for mature software that does what you now know you need.
> Compare this to Fedex and USPS where hundreds of random strangers cooperate to safely deliver very high value goods through bureaucratic hurdles like customs across countries reliably.

Having dealt with Fedex and UPS in Italy, I think I'd willing to take a chance with the Indian guys. True story: my dad sent me my birth certificate via Fedex, and after a week it still hasn't arrived. Finally, I get a call from Fedex, telling me it's been held in customs until I agree to pay the import duties. "Import duties, WTF?!" was esentially my reaction. It turns out my dad had declared a value of $40 for the shipment, which was, in effect, the replacement value of the document if it had been lost. After a bit of hemming and hawing, the Fedex guy admitted that the resale value of the birth certificate was zero and shouldn't be taxed, and it showed up a day or two later. It bears repeating that I was not talking with an Italian customs official, but Fedex, who are supposed to, as you say, "cooperate to deliver goods through bureaucratic hurdles".
Depends more on language than on anything, I think.
I think the main reason why we're seeing such a shift is that in the long run it is easier to ram advertising down people's throats over a video link than it is to get them to click on ads in textual content. The CPM's paid for delivered video ads reflect that, they count those much higher than delivered (but not clicked) text or graphics (even flash) ads.
Salaries are very dependent on what part of the world you're in, obviously.

Here in central Japan many companies have seen bonus cuts. Typical compensation for a 20-something Japanese programmer might be:

$2,500 a month salary

+ $200 single's living allowance

+ $200 commute allowance

+ overtime

So call their base monthly pay $3,000, plus overtime. Now twice a year they get a bonus, which is calculated as "X months of your base monthly pay", where X is determined by how well the company is doing. In good times, that might be X = 2.5 or X = 3. In leaner times, it can scale down or be eliminated.

If you assume that you earn 12 months pay from work and 5 months pay from bonuses, then a quick contraction in bonuses amounts to a substantial pay cut.

Bonuses at my company are down this year, by essentially rounding error, but some of my professional colleagues in the city have been cut all the way to zero.

These are not slouchy engineers, they just work for companies that supply a certain large automobile manufacturer, and that large automobile manufacturer has laid down the law: cut costs to us or find yourselves another large automobile manufacturer to give you 60% of your orders.
My response to video links is to simply ignore them (which is quite ironic, given my background).

If you can't find the time to at least accompany your video with a textual representation then I'm not interested, I think the choice of medium should lie with the recipient, not with the producer.
Welcome to the world of automation. This is also how many underdogs manage to grab a slice from the "big players". You'd be surprised how many large companies that could easily afford to optimize their processes just don't do it.

You find dedicated people (or even departments) doing nothing but strictly repetitive tasks. Things like filing invoices, keeping a stock of parts according to a set of rules or even, like you said, aggregating always the same information and mailing it in always the same format to the execs.

In every company that I have worked so far there were quite a few people who could have literally been replaced by the proverbial shell-script.

Doing so (when appropiate) always gives you an edge because you'll be faster and less prone to errors in that area than the meatbag-driven competitor - plus you free up ressources for more interesting tasks.
Well, if we can't distribute food to everyone, why would we be able to distribute quasi-immortality that easily?
I've been on Facebook since it started. I'm honestly bored of the site and I sure as hell hope it doesn't stick around for the rest of my life. I'm not sure how much good it has brought. If anything, I think some of my relationships have suffered.
Amazon SimpleDB - New Count Function, Long Running Queries, Etc.
There is a pet peeve of mine, I usually have my monitors speakers plugged in and active, so if I land on a page that starts playing some silly video I run the risk of waking up the whole house. Ads with video in them are even worse, a surefire way to let me never ever visit that site again (these warrant an entry in my hosts file).
not me. i got a good offer in late nov. right in the middle of the financial turmoil, but i also do mobile dev. and really good mobile devs. are rarely in the market. They either have already a job, or they are doing their own apps + some contracting on the side.

But the market is affecting some people. My previous company is having about 2% raises achross the board (last year was about the same), and they are underpaying most developers, and they can pull it off, as the market has cooled off, and there are less options out there.

The funny thing, is that the company is thinking that is gaining by having little raises, but i know from a fact that a lot of people are just working less, and are in a don't care mode/will do just enough not to get fired mode.
Riiiight.

"Last weekend, Valve decided to do an experiment with Left 4 Dead. Last weekend's sale resulted in a 3000% increase over relatively flat numbers. It sold more last weekend than when it launched the game. WOW. That is unheard of in this industry. Valve beat its launch sales. Also, it snagged a 1600% increase in new customers to Steam over the baseline."

and

"6:56 PM - Looking at a third-party game, it saw increases of 36,000% with a weekend sale. Oh. Em. Gee. Okay, Gabe is starting to convince me that PC at retail is going to die very soon."

http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/Live-Blog-DICE-2009...

So, Activision, Electronic Arts: What's killing you? YOUR REFUSAL NOT TO SUCK
so I can just email any company and demand them to give out their proprietary data? Mint should have told them to go to hell.
I don't think luminosity can be demonstrated with screenshots. Those are better suited to demonstrate other functionality like layout, workflow etc. I have been using this for a couple hours and it seems to be a good thing so far.
I signed up sometime last week to check it out, and my six-digit bank account ID numbers in Mint's database are 6079xx and 6079xx+1. They're sequential, so there are 600,000ish rows in the table, but that's not necessarily proof that they're all active.

I don't use Mint for anything really, but technically I'm a user.