skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I need some way to know how hard the engineers are working"

You get what you measure.

If you really want to know how many hours your engineers are sitting in front of a keyboard and screen in your office, you can find a way to get that information. If you tie compensation to that figure, your engineers will definitely give you plenty of butt-in-seat time (or quit).

If you do not have other ways to evaluate their output, though, you may not get much more than that. They might just read Hacker News all day. You can put in measures to block Hacker News, but at that point you have an escalating battle of not trusting your employees and putting in increasingly draconian measures until you have created a call center environment where your employees have a set number of minutes a day they are allowed to go to the bathroom, and have to get really good at holding it otherwise.

How many good developers do you think will be left at that point?

I did jump over some points along the continuum there. But the point is, if you do not have some level of trust in the relationship with your developers, you're probably screwed anyways.
You mentioned further down that you're a manager.. results are whatever you've agreed with your team is the "deliverable".

So you might agree on having a set of bugs fixed, for instance, or agree on getting a piece of functionality implemented. I'm not an expert on ROWE, but as I understand it, the key is that you agree on results which you (as a manager) are satisfied with and which the team (who will produce those results) is satisfied with.

Then, you don't care about how many hours they work. At the agreed time, you expect the result that you agreed on. If it's there, no problem, move on to the next bit of work that needs to happen. If it's not there, then you can sit down with your team and figure out why (but avoid the all-too-easy accusation that "they didn't spend enough time on it").

Apparently this technique (along with a set of workplace practices that actively discouraged managers from trying to figure out whether their teams were actually working or doing something else) worked really well for Best Buy.
History and Economics
thras~$ grep -c -e "group|individual" chiffonade_comment.txt

0

Ah yes. I was repeating what you said. I see that now. Goodbye.
Nah. I appreciate the feedback. I'm uploading the full video to Vimeo. Will post a link here when it's done.
Sounds a lot like weebly.com, except targeted to corporate customers.
You're right. Most videos need more of a setup, but I think Paul was clear on his own.
I'm going to take the opposite position of the last post I made and give some reasons for measuring hours worked.

It is important to track hours worked per feature or bug in order to improve future estimates. You also want to know if things are taking longer than expected, and why. You may also want to know if finishing and committing fixes and features too quickly leads to more bugs and maybe encourage developers to take more time and get it right the first time.

Is this the kind of thing you have in mind when you want to measure hours worked? That I can certainly agree with.
Joel Spolsky: A new business is like a shortwave radio.
Doug Stanhope (check youtube), while has a dirtier tone and not as poignant or substantive as Bill Hicks does continue along the same path.
Discount Wedding Travel Article
You may be offered discount wedding travel by some businesses, however you can often find the best savings by researching various offers and methods of saving money yourself. The different savings options include long stay discounts
I am a stay at home entrepreneur and oftentimes get this sort of flame from my girlfriend or relative. There just isn't a way to measure my work on a per hour basis. The fact is when you fully commit yourself to perusing your own ideas and passions, as mine being web development, you begin to notice that most of the day becomes consumed with the tasks at hand. On most occasions I find myself think through my ideas as I do common chores around the house, even when spending time getting physical exercise. How do we measure this time as productive? The ability to to measure productivity must be in ones ability to set and meet deadlines, yet continue to improve the output quality.
I should clarify, then, that my statement was specific to getting the internet on my cellphone, not about the cellphone itself. The scenario I specifically cited was how having access to the web from whereever I may be may not have changed my life, but it is an incremental improvement.
I have no doubt about the life changing effect of cellphones. Where I come from, cellphones fulfilled, and exceeded, the promise that landlines failed to meet.
IANAL etc...

You are correct that out-of-work is a very bad place to be as an H1B holder. But USCIS allows you to interview for a different job, apply for visa transfer to the new company and quit the old company after the visa transfer is approved.
Reversing ecology reveals ancient environments
Fear of Launch - Lessons Learnt for Developers
I live on this site. I've done several interviews on Mixergy.com because of what I've read here. Thanks for the feedback.
It is not unheard of (i.e. DEMO is a good example). However, comparing this event to DEMO is like comparing apples and oranges. The visibility of DEMO makes the fee a little less hard to swallow. The visibility of this event is limited primarily to a particular state. They would be better off marketing this as a "conference" or "exhibit" where up to 40 companies can participate and a Top 10 will be selected. To say it is the Top 40 in Georgia though is a little deceiving and false advertising in my opinion. For example, what if I am legitimately selected as one of the top 40 and cannot afford to participate (and assuming I do not qualify for a "scholarship"), does the next company in line take my spot or are only 39 companies exhibiting? If the next company takes my spot, then you really can't say it is the Top 40 in Georgia, it is more like the Top 39 and a company that could afford to pay. Yes, I know it clearly states that I will be charged a fee if selected before I apply, but that in itself destroys the notion of a "Top 40" since obviously the only 40 companies there are going to be ones that can either afford to pay or qualify for a scholarship.

The better option in this case would be to setup something like TechCrunch50 where the top 50 get to present for free, BUT other companies can exhibit for a fee.

The bad part about these events being marketed like as a "Top XXX" competition is that people generally assume, based on the title of the competition, that if you aren't exhibiting then you are not a "Top Company", when in fact you could have been selected but unable to afford the cost of exhibiting.

Sadly when events like this are held and marketed this way I think good companies are often overlooked. My technology may be the next great thing, but will be overlooked because I can't afford the "entry fee" to exhibit and be viewed as a "Top 40" or possibly a "Top 10" in the state.
Why is the Author's Guild advertising the new Kindle?
I don't "look down on" Hispanics - intelligence is not a moral value. And I've been around enough Chinese Americans to know that yes, a lot of them do look down on white Americans, for the aforementioned reasons as well as others.
Kindle by the pool or beach - I would worry about it being stolen.
Yes. The concept of the "10x developer" is one of those examples that describe the variance in productivity among software developers

http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2008/03/27...
Dude - just finish it up, if you want to be a luxurious entrepreneur you must finish all assignment.s
In this community, I've come across too many people who claim incredibly long hours -- 'the startup standard' of 10+ hour work days.

And I find out they also have an impressive knowledge of internet memes and recollection of top stories on Reddit.

There's some value in hours obviously. The more you sit there "working", the more hours likely to convert into productivity. But measuring hours as an indicator of productivity is pretty faulty. I clicked "7-8" because I tend not to fuck around while working, and over the course of about an average 8-9 hour workday. I'll subtract a couple hours for "unavoidable" distractions.

Of course, the extremes usually hold true. If your hours are in the 2-3 range, you're probably not working very hard. If it's in the 14+ range, you're probably at least getting a fair amount accomplished.
Just to give you some rough range, Redis is in the range of 10k query/second on an entry level laptop. As you can guess the main bottleneck is the networking I/O with things like Memcached or Redis.

About the speed of dumping the DB. 1 million keys DB with 16 bytes string inside every key takes something like 1 second to be saved on the same HW. For the next release I hope to have replication and LZO compression of (compressible) big values working.
Not to just keep pimping my own things, but this was why I started Startup Riot (http://www.startupriot.com) which I just held in Atlanta last week. Presenting companies pay nothing and there are no exhibitors. Other startups can attend and pay the registration fee ($20/person for startups).

That said, you make a good point on what happens if a company drops out because they can't pay. I'm not clear as to what happens. Since it's billed as a Top 40, I'm assuming they fill the slot with someone else.
I get similar letters at least once a week. The first time it did catch me off-guard, but after talking with our attorney we determined it was a scam to get people to buy China domains. Interestingly enough the same company "Path soft Corp" is always the one trying to register domain names that supposedly infringe on my trademarks.
hmmmmmm

launch it fast... launch it early.
This article is... perfect?
Seems much easier to use Flash to detect installed fonts…
http://www.maratz.com/blog/archives/2006/08/18/detect-visito...
This article completely ignores the effect of teamwork.

Most knowledge work is done in teams. Only the team's results latency and results throughput matters. However, an individual's total throughput ("results per unit time") is only one variable in the bigger equation.

As an example using "bugs fixed" as a substitute for results, an individual who can fix a 10 hard bugs a week working only 8pm-12am might not be as valuable as someone who only fixes 5 hard bugs a week but is around 9am-5pm to e.g. mentor junior employees.

As usual, the real answer is "It depends and you should manage your own situation according to your own circumstances."
i'd prefer an SD card slot to the built in 512MB.
Targeted marketing with Social Media Apps
Is there VC money out there?
Quotes are tricky to deal with. I'll note this as a bug and fix it. I'm sure you can imagine NLP isn't trivial and without "launching" there was only so much I'd catch on my own. Will get on these issues though!

I know whats causing the space eating issue. Will get it fixed.
Thank you captain obvious...
I don't write javascript, because I don't run javascript (with a few exceptions). I associate javascript with crap websites. It is slow and it causes the browser to use up a lot of memory. The functionality gained by it is usually pointless fru-fru, the doilies and tailfins of the internet. I fully realize that to some people those doilies and tailfins are very important, but perhaps I can achieve my business goals by selling things to other people.

The notion of writing a program to run on someone's desktop is reasonable; the notion of writing a program to run on my server, but send it's display information out to a browser, is also reasonable. The idea of having most of a program be on my server, but some random chunks be on the user's computer, seems like a bad split. I realize that in some cases such as input data validation it can remove a browser-server round trip, and in some cases it might be an over all win; but as a general rule it's a bad idea.

There is an idea that you can avoid the load of running everything on your server, but also avoid the problems of writing client programs for all the variations of operating systems, by writing code that runs in some wrapper, usually associated with the browser. These attempts - flash, java applets, javascript, active X objects, etc - are all bad ideas.

I realize that the majority of the population uses javascript enabled browsers. I didn't "miss the memo", I was there when the memo came out: I remember attending free lectures given by Sun Java evangelists when Java was first released, in fact I still have a free coffee mug with "headstart java" or something on it around here. I got excited, did the "hello world" app and then a calculator, and then suddenly had to disable java applets to keep the ads from crapping up my browser. Javascript came after that, then flash, now it looks like Microsoft is pushing this silverlight thing which sounds like v5.0 of the same bad idea.

Now, just so I don't totally seem like an old grouch, here's some constructive advice: write your web app so it's interface is all very standard, very minimal html. Then, write an iPhone program that does the client-side stuff you think is so great. If you are still in business after that, take the iPhone app and make it into an OSX desktop program and announce your iPhone app is now available on the desktop. Presuming your idea is not the friendster or geocities of it's age and already dead, and presuming that people find these client-side features appealing enough to download and install something, then move on to making your desktop client work on other platforms. Do not take the shortcut of presuming that the browser is an appropriate platform.
Because a lot of people relied on you and you left them hanging. You can beat up on the straw man about killing people, but ditching the project isn't cool.
My Father (another old person ;) attributes this magical ability to a couple other things, too:

1. General personality; he believes most people are either "generally happy" or "generally unhappy" with regard to how they interpret both extreme (death) and everyday (sunset) events.

2. How emotionally confident one is that they've "found their place in the world" and the feelings that contribute to that peace (sense of accomplishment, etc.)

When I finally escaped our hometown, moved to Boston, and began this adventure that became a company, I soon started seeing beauty in everything. I was finally happy with where I was at that moment and nothing else mattered. I could not be upset.

Naively, I thought that might last forever; it didn't. Though not nearly as restless as I was a few years ago, it has crept back slowly and I no longer have that feeling of nirvana, if you will. I hope it comes back, though; I miss the beauty of those sunsets.
In this case, I think I would complete the first job first, for a couple of reasons.
1) You estimated 6 weeks, and after 5 weeks, you have about 5 weeks remaining. Your estimate was way off. You'd really be burning the company to leave at this point.
2) You're only talking about a month of work.

In addition to the options you say you've considered, you could also consider repaying/taking no compensation for the first job, in order to pursue the second. In that case, they would be out nothing, and you would be free to pursue the other work, if you thought it was more rewarding.

Tough spot to be in. Good luck.
I have a massive fear of launching (just did it 1.5 hours ago). Before launching I wrote this cover letter to my "future employers" to help relieve some of the tension:

http://killall.dashnine.org/2009/02/i-may-need-a-new-job-bec...
> but there's no way for others to keep track of where the project has gone to

so now instead of searching around for the project's new homepage, you have to search through dozens of forks each with one or two bugfixes or random changes and find out which one is the most actively maintained?

i'm all for git's concept of forking to make your own development easier, but unless you merge your fixes back into a mainline distribution, it's just stupid and creates confusion for everyone else relying on that software.

say you want to run a script that someone has written that uses net-ssh. until now you could be assured that they wrote it using the official net-ssh ruby module and it will work with the one you have installed. so from now on you'll have to install the random net-ssh version that someone has stashed away on his github account? and what happens when that particular fork of net-ssh stops getting maintained? someone else forks it and now you have to install a different version?

what about the security ramifications of using some random person's fork of an ssh module that you are entrusting to login to your servers? would you install a forked version of openssh from an unknown source on your server or would you rather get it from a known, trusted source?
One suggestion - let me change the default text from the URL. Maybe something like http://flippingtypical.com#MyText.
Researchers solve mystery of deep-sea fish with tubular eyes and transparent head
Ask HN: Do you trademark your brand / app name / business?
I'm curious if it's common or recommended for a web app to trademark their name early on. It would cost $2000 (+$1000 to respond to complaints) to file, if that helps.

Does anyone have any experience or recommendations ?
So long and thanks for all the fish^H^H^H^H AWESOME SOFTWARE!
This is not mainly YC's fault. Surf around. Every other week, I see a great startup that launches here with a consumer focus. All they needed to do, was focus on businesses and they could make a ton of money.

The sad truth is everyone wants to build the next Google. Meanwhile a few guys could copy services such as Scribd and sell the software to lawyers, small banks and clinics. And make a load of money.
He does owe the community of users something. He didn't write docs, set up a website, set up a mailing list, etc. because he just thought it was a fun hack he was tossing out there, he was building a community of users. All he owed was a "Hey, anyone interested?" blog post before dropping it. I didn't know he was still going to answer questions on the mailing list -- that in and of itself is probably enough.

I'm not a heartless bastard or a useless eater, I just think it's not cool to ditch people you encouraged to rely on you. It's not at all unreasonable if he's burning out, but that doesn't make it classy.
You're right, I should've submitted it. I did and the dev's said they'd look into it.
You can't change definitions on the fly!

If fixing bugs is the "result," then fine. But you can't penalize the guy who fixed 12 but didn't mentor anyone over the one who fixed 5 and mentored junior employees, because then you're redefining what a result is to include mentoring.

It's OK to expect different results from different people, but you need to let them know that.
Just tried to wikify the documentation a bit:

http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/README

Not very well formatted but if you want to know a bit more about Redis without to uncompress the tar.gz it should help.
I'm with you buddy! :-)
I think a lot of businessmen don't get it. They don't understand why one would write open source and/or free software, and many get hung up on the "you get what you pay for" thing (alternative: "anything free is worth what you pay for it").
What were they smoking ? I though the auto-correcting language interpreter/compiler went out the window with Pascal, there were some pretty good reasons for it and 'automatic bug insertion' was the main one.

This ought to be deprecated and exterminated.
i don't think it's as much an issue of organizing around that new person as it is organizing around the new home for the software, regardless of who is maintaining it.

if i want to update my installed version of net::ssh, can i go to the project's homepage and download a new version or do i have to look through a dozen forks on github to find out which one looks to be the most maintained and hasn't broken anything?
RS-232 serial ports date back to 1969, and survived into the mid-to-late 1990s, for instance.

Did they? Funny, I was using one earlier today...

(And liking it. Nothing like plugging a device in and knowing there are no drivers, no 500Mb software downloads, no autoconfig, no software that has to spend minutes "searching" for the device, no wifi, no passwords, and that everything these days speaks 9600,8,n,1. Just beautiful gets-out-of-my-way simplicity. A joyous technology.).
As Goldacre himself puts it:

"The Daily Mail, as you know, is engaged in a philosophical project of mythic proportions: for many years now it has diligently been sifting through all the inanimate objects in the world, soberly dividing them into the ones which either cause - or cure - cancer."

http://www.badscience.net/2007/12/a-rather-long-build-up-to-...
"My point is that there's it's very difficult to measure the productivity and "results" of knowledge work, and you need to look at all the data. This includes looking at hours worked..."

I agree with jimbokun: measuring "time spent" can be useful in many cases, but it does not measure productivity or quality of work. I understand how difficult it is to measure productivity, but the answer is not to use a poor metric just because it's handy.
And for what it's worth: I wasn't trying to yank your chain, or be one more bit of stress in your life. I didn't know you'd stay on the mailing list, that's good of you.

Setting up the website, writing docs, writing the mailing list, taking improvements -- you might not have made an explicit promise to be immortal and support capistrano and all western civilization in perpetuity, but your actions led people to believe they could rely on you.
Ask HN: Why are you proud of your species?
On another thread, weavejester recently wrote, "Not only are we never satisfied, we're also very quick to criticize our society and species." I want to ask about the positive side. What have we as a species done that you're proud of?

A few I can think of are going to the moon, reading our own DNA, and the classification of all finite simple groups.

I favor this kind of hard progress over (1) artistic works, because it's more collaborative, and over (2) justice/quality-of-life improvements, because it's hard to credit those to human intent vs technology and emergent processes. Feel free to disagree!
You're probably the only one using Yahoo store, but you aren't the only one using a Lisp-based web app that wasn't originally intended to be a blogging platform.
17 percent of mobile app buyers spend over $100
How will it help me automate my lavalamps? It plugs into a wall socket, but it isn't a wall socket.

It's no different from a hacked Linksys WRT54G or any hacked Linux powered home NAS, except in shape and openness.

And openness isn't a great distinction compared to a hacked Linux powered device, since their closedness has been worked around.

I don't see it as especially exciting - it has no ethernet-over-mains or wireless or switching or any other tech that makes it inherently geared towards home automation, it's just another linux powered print/disk/ssh/web server, isn't it?
In the Health Care industry, when technology doesn't work the way it's supposed to people can die, or at least be seriously negatively effected.

Without at least the illusion of support from a big official distributor, that responsibility stays entirely on the shoulders of the person who selected the technology.
This is a startup? How?
What's the answer to the Fermi paradox then? Why hasn't one of those thousands of intelligent races colonized the galaxy? It would take a blink of an eye in galactic timescales.