skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stock price is based on speculation. And these days it's not even speculation about the future performance of the company but instead it's speculation about what other investors are going to be willing to pay for a share.

"$76b in wealth disappeared" is a dumb statement. Speculative value is not wealth any more than fantasy football wins the superbowl ring.

It didn't disappear, that money failed to transfer from someone who has the cash to someone who had the stock.

The first dotcom bubble was fueled in part by opening up the stock market to new users through IRA and 401k accounts, and through direct, low cost brokers like Schwab and ETrade. A huge amount of money went into the stock market that historically had gone into bank savings accounts.

Where's the money supposed to come from these days to fulfill fantasy valuations?
Capturing sites that require a login works the same as other pages. We use the HTML output to capture a server-side screenshot.
I would love that, I have never seen any interest to subscribe to their Ubuntu One service. I would be pleased to access Amazon Cloud from Ubuntu, and have a system-wide integration. Hope this is their long term strategy.
Good thought & intentions however any rules put in place that can lower a firm's tax will be abused. If I'm the CEO under a regime where ratio of top to bottom earners determines tax for my firm, I take a $1 salary, and then get paid massively in options or some other income-but-not-really-income method. That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are other ways to skirt these sorts of rules.
* Rewrite.

* NEVER modify existing one. Once you change one line of comment, you own all the code and problem from that point.

* If rewrite is not allowed, then ask huge pay raise for this work. Basically it is not about money, it is about bring everyone on the same page on the status of he existing solution.

* If the above does not work out, prepare to switch to another project, or quit the job totally.
It seems like your suggestion wouldn't allow for subtyping: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle
Sounds like one of those silly Quora questions but I'll take a shot at it.

Yes.
Here's the punch-line: It's called "Linux".
In Gmail, it's in the gear menu on the upper-right, labeled as "Report a bug".
This is the best response. To be a bit more general: evaluate whether the client is actually willing and able to take the sane course of action starting NOW and continuing over the long term. If not, and you stay, there's no advice that's going to be much help. Your life will be hell.
First read the Fowler's 'Refactoring' book; it was written just for you. Then:

1. Identify a small and easily separable piece of code (what you woud call a component in a normal system.)

2. Write tests covering every (important?) edge-case of the piece of code you want to rewrite.

3. Mercilessly refactor until it's nice and squeeky clean.

4. Lather, rinse and repeat.

And of course, make sure your client acknowledges that it's a giant clusterf... and is on board with you pulling the system out of the stone age.

Also, if you want to make life a bit more interesting for yourself, get the PHP code's AST and programmatically rewrite existing code to shared conventions for kicks.
Following the link, it appears that the unity search will simply also return Amazon results. This could be cool or not - in any case it is easy to uninstall apparently.

I use the amazon search via DuckDuckGo all the time in Firefox. Granted, I still tell DDG explicitly to search Amazon (via !), but it is not a far step to simply returning it always.

Maybe adding something like the !-notation for special searches to unity would be the golden way.
Fred Wilson's followup on PG's growth essay: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/growth.html
Feedback != Complaining

The difference is subtle, but important.

Feedback: "I would use your product more if it did x."

Complaining: "Your product sucks because it doesn't do x."

In short: you're absolutely correct. Making it easier to complain doesn't help. Making it easier to give feedback does help.
Last time I tried Fedora (it was maybe 3 years ago), I tried to play an MP3 on my thumb drive and it failed to do so, then asked me to pay money for an MP3 codec license.

10.04 is still the best Ubuntu, if newcomers to Linux want simplicity and usability that's what I recommend whether they're not very tech savvy or programmers. I still use it on my work laptop. (I've been using Gentoo on my home devices since 2007 or so.) The .deb model of packaging is sane, Ubuntu just can't be trusted anymore with what comes installed out of the box and what's available to install/uninstall out of the box.

I'm still looking for a good Ubuntu/Debian derivative that's at least as good as 10.04. Xubuntu is always a "good enough" option in many respects. A lot of people recommend Mint and I don't see why. But I'm also very biased in favor of Gnome2.
How will you define pay? Are we talking 300:1 W-2 wages? Should we(how will we) account for benefits, stock options, deferred compensation agreements, payments to corporations owned by employees, phantom stock agreements? All of these would need to be accounted for otherwise there are going to be loopholes left and right and they will be abused.
Unity has been an epic disaster. Sad.
So? If you are used to Ubuntu's filesystem layout, package management, etc. it makes much more sense to go for Debian or a well-maintained Ubuntu distribution such as Mint. Also, Mint has gnome-shell and Nautilus forks that bring back a lot of sanity.

Anyway, this is all a non-discussion for an experienced user, since the lens can be removed easily. Also, Ubuntu 12.10 is still beta, so they might still remove this functionality or make a separate shopping lens, or whatever.
Might I instead suggest a 'supporter' icon somewhere obvious?

How I want it to work: I click on the icon and get taken to a page that shows whether I've donated. If I do, I say how long the donation is for. (E.g., I choose $10 and 6 months.) My icon goes green across all my machines and I feel smug. In 6 months, it looks sickly, so I click on it and donate again.
I'm certainly no expert when it comes to evaluation of a company. These are merely my thoughts as a tech geek and developer. When Google IPO'd some experts made claims that ( I am paraphrasing here), Google is entering a crowded Search market and the real money was in portals.

As a geek , I fully grasp Facebook's 12.24 pages/visit stat. Even Reddit is just a hair below, at 10.6. (source: Alexa). That type of engagement is insanely hard to get for a site as big as Facebook. Investors do not look at these things because they do not understand what they mean. They look at traditional investor metrics.

If Facebook included ONE banner ad across the top of their pages, their revenue would soar. They are choosing their own path and are paying the price for it right now. Time will tell if their method will work out.

What I do know is that investors are a finicky bunch. When Zuck spoke at Disrupt 2 weeks ago investors decided to buy Facebook and it rose 4 dollars since then. The reality is nothing had changed, but in their eyes it just looked better. Fair enough, that is how the game is played.

If an investment firms evaluates traditional companies like Borders, Best Buy, or Radioshack then I would not even question their expertise. They are a very knowledgeable bunch when it comes to traditional companies.

However I do not believe their analysis of the tech companies that exist on the internet is as accurate, simply because they do not fully understand the industry and web.
Absolutely ridiculous....
Who's "truth?"
Ruby defines 'map', 'each', and other iteration utilities as higher order functions. This means that, while it works for tuples, this does not for looping.

The equivalent code in Python would be this:

def each_fn(unused, unused, email):
pass
map(iter_fn, list)

And this does in fact give a syntax error:

SyntaxError: duplicate argument 'unused' in function definition
" I can't even find the MASH TV show, only the movie. Pretty weird considering that it's considered the 2nd best TV comedy of all time. #74 'Seinfeld' - considered the 3rd best TV comedy of all time."

Are you really criticizing the subjectivity of this list based on the subjective rankings of your generation?

Also game of thrones is brilliant, imo.
I felt that way at first, but I'm pretty happy with it now. The 12.04.1 stuff seems solid to me, and now that I'm comfortable with the new interface, I like it fine.

If their goal was to provide something that novices could get comfortable with quickly, I think they did a good job. It fell down for me in making the transition easy for people comfortable with the old UI, but that's clearly an audience they didn't intend to address, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.
I've spent quite some time the cross-component spaghetti code large companies sometimes write.

I've come to believe that the skill of not rewriting from scratch but forcing yourself to slowly refactor (as per Martin Fowler's definition) existing systems into a proper state is one of the most important skills you can develop.

That way, once you've refactored most of the system (which includes adding tests for all the important functionality) you can indeed confidently rewrite everything.
If you do it any sooner than that though, you're in for a world of pain.
On the subject of “writing rules”:

The submitted article is titled “Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well”, but (as of this writing) the title appears here on HN as “Writing Rules Advice From The Times on Writing Well”.

Arguably, the modified title is readable, and largely conveys the meaning of the original article.

But certainly the run-on converted title is quite different than the source. I wonder if the HN parser would do well to, instead of simply stripping all exclamation marks as a matter of principle, at least convert mid-title exclamations to a hyphen, to indicate the separation within the original title?

E.g. “Writing Rules – Advice From The Times on Writing Well”

(Even then, “Rules” loses its original implication as an excited verb to instead become a noun, but this particular confusion may be unavoidable.)
What is your specialization? At my firm and position level CPE is just a paid day of learning which is great.
We need more entrepreneurs doing cool stuff like this. I wish him well, but I also fear he may prove the old adage: "the way to acquire a small fortune is to start with a large one."
Yes, and the chance that the OP will get the codebase in order sounds minimal. It's simply too large, it would take one person many years to clean up a mess like that.
> Why does he get 65 days off a year?

Because why not (and I know india has quite a lot of religious celebrations which may or may not have holidays attached).
As long as this stays Unity-only, I wonder if the other Ubuntu-based distros (Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.) will see a surge in users. Even if the ads can be removed, this move still sours me on Ubuntu more than a little.
Nothing wrong with checking account.

When you think about "return on capital", do not forget "return of capital".
They've burned through several contractors, and now you're the latest one to be headed for the auto-da-fé?

Unless you're can't-pay-your-bills broke and there are no other jobs in your area, the correct response is "I'm sorry. This can't be fixed. It needs to be scrapped completely and replaced with something maintainable. If that's not an option, I'm going to have to resign."

Even if you manage to fix it, it'll still be a pile of crap, and you'll never get the credit you deserve.

On the other hand, if you don't manage to fix it you're going to get blamed.

Zero credit on the upside, major blame on the downside. There's nothing for you in this but pain, my friend.
I love this kind of stuff - if you fancy an extra pair of hands then contact details are in my profile
Paul Graham is a hero all technology startup founders need to look up to. Who else can say "the constraint of growing at a certain rate can help define a startup", so well?

It is rare to find a blog post that has so much insight that you will need to read it slowly and then read it again even more slowly.
Lubuntu 12.04 is fantastic on my netbook, which I use for writing and other offline tasks where I don't want to be distracted. I don't think I'd be as high on it for a desktop or a daily-driver laptop, but I have a retina MBP for that.
I'm fairly socially liberal, and I would be in favor of a serious effort like this, except that it has nearly zero chance of working.

The largest corporate tax contributors make an art out of avoiding paying any Federal taxes at all, let alone 35% [1]. Building a tax code that would close all of those loopholes without meeting tremendous political resistance is probably impossible -- especially since those loopholes are used by individuals with political influence.

And how would you decide who is and isn't eligible for social assistance under such a program? Let's say that your program somehow moved the nearly $1.5 trillion dollars currently used for some form or another of social welfare directly into the pockets of a burgeoning middle class. Everybody's spending again, people are saving for retirement and college, angels bugle from the skies. However, the proposal only incentivizes wage increases [2]; what do you do for the poor shmucks that work for businesses that choose to not participate?

To your credit, your idea is different from the usual fix-our-economy fare. Unfortunately it's just about as likely to work as a nationwide flat tax or simply taxing the rich more.

[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/microsoft-taxes-pro..., http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2011/03/ten_giant_us_compani...

[2]: Actually, it doesn't even do that. It just incentivizes making wages more balanced, which leaves corporations at least two other major loopholes: simply pay their top-level people less, or reward them in ways which would exempt them from the program's calculations.
You need to manage their expectations, explain they can only expect one or two fixes in the first month. They will probably tell you that isn't good enough but you have to hold your ground.

I've turned around a few failing projects and rarely is the problem technical, most of the issues start with poor management.
If I need a lawyer to use your API, well then, bye!
"Growth drives everything in this world."

I think you're choosing one single sentence and taking it out of context, in other words, misunderstanding. By "this world", I took pg to mean the high-tech area of economic activity, with silicon valley serving as a figurative stand-in. I don't think pg means that every single thing in the world is driven by growth. The essay is about what makes a company a startup, and how a startup can be successful. The essay is not about what is most important in the world.
It is... What I would like is a separate shopping lens, where you could search for books, albums, and movies. Preferably, it would search a few competing sites and return the best offers. They could make them affiliate links.

But getting books about empathy in my Dash when launching a chat client is plain silly.
700k+ codebase and a single developer? That sounds crazy.

Run away from this. Trying work with this code would make you stressed and frustrated, which will have a significant negative impact on your productivity.

If the company plans to add features to this software, they should hire more than one developers and perhaps rewrite it from scratch.

Edit: Also send your boss link to this discussion :)
> The hyper-reals of non-standard analysis are, in fact, a strict superset of the reals.

And .9999==1 in the hyper-reals

>>If it were, then any operation involving only real numbers
>>would behave identically to the real number system.
>Why is that a problem? Seems to me that that's desirable.

Consider the expression ".999... - 1" in the real number system. As has been established earlier, this simplifies to 0.

Consider the same expression ".999... - 1" in the hyper-real number system. As all the numbers are real, this expression simplifies just as it would in the real number system. Meaning that ".999... - 1 =0" in the hyper-real system. Adding 1 to both sides ".999... = 1" in the hyper-real system.

One could also argue that because the statement ".999... = 1" is true in the real number system, and the hyper-reals are a superset of the reals. Then ".999... = 1" is true in the hyper-reals.
Maybe Apple should recruit these two chaps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGZ56qzXltU

There again maybe they did.

But in all fairness, Apple have stated it will get better and in that everybody believes them because I doubt it could get much worse, especialy given pictures like this: https://plus.google.com/u/0/105902573976541607678/posts/iTjb...

On the plus side, they haven't found anything to realy moan about the phone, so there had to be something for the press to complain about. A company new to maps release a map that they can update as they go along and make it better, oh the shock, what was google maps like on initial beta, I know last year google maps got me lost and upon one occacion traveling thru a brick wall, bless. It'll get better and or there will be something new to complain about. Poor Apple, were is RIM when you need them :D.
State Farm - primed for account theft.
The biggest red flag that I see when it comes to fb stock is that it has single digit institutional ownership. Even yahoo has 75% institutional ownership. Fb has like 7% IO. Big money is staying away from fb and that is a huuuuge red flag.

Institutional ownership is a vote of confidence for the long haul. Mutual funds and pension funds buy long and cannot participate in short selling.

Big money knows something about fb long term prospects that all of us don't. I don't know what that is but their actions speak louder than anybody's opinions can.
Second this. The temptation to rewrite from scratch is to be avoided; the code is going to be a mass of edge-cases, and you can't spot them all at once. Rewriting will take just as long as refactoring and introduce new bugs instead of killing old ones.
Gittip: New, Interesting, Important
There is absolutely no way to rewrite a million lines of business logic without ending up with an even bigger mess. See also: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Is Apple’s new maps app upsetting? The OpenForum chimes in
The plan only needs one addition: everyone gets a pony.
Cautionary Tales About Collective Rights Organizations
If you meet somebody who literally cannot get enough food, it's pretty easy to recognize that there's something wrong. If their desire to eat wrecks relationships, causes harm to their health, makes it so that all they can talk about is the next meal, you say: that's not right.

But when it's money, it's much harder to recognize that insatiability is a sign of pathology.

That's not to say that all hyper-rich people are pathological. For some it is indeed a favorite game (Buffet) or a tool for big plans (Musk) or the result of doing something they loved (Page and Brin).

But having worked in the financial industry, I have met people for whom the desire to amass incredible wealth is a sign of deep, deep problems.
I think you might be underestimating the costs of doing it commercially.

Judging from the photos, The mountain looks like one big rock. You would surely need a hydraulic breaker on your backhoe, and the maintenance that would go with it for so much work. Also, it looks like it would be hard to get a backhoe on top of that steep mountain.

I would have thought for something like this, drilling deep holes and shoving in some TNT would be the way to go in order to reduce the solid rock to rubble.
> First read the Fowler's 'Refactoring' book; it was written just for you.

"Refactoring" is not the tool for the job, although it's a nice sidearm.

What OP needs is the big gun, Feathers's "working effectively with legacy code": http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fea...

As the title hints, it was written specifically and expressly for the "I just got a huge amount of complete shit of a codebase shoved unto me, how do I survive". Just check the TOC of part 2 (the meat of the book): http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/software-engineering-an...

> And of course, make sure your client acknowledges that it's a giant clusterf...

That's hugely important. No promises of delivery, and that the client understands it's not a cakewalk.
But converting Ubuntu One to using Amazon services wouldn't be an affiliate deal, presumably, right? That would be a high-level, "we'll shut down a competitor to EC2/S3/… if you pay us X MM/year" sort of thing. It would also endanger their just-released-10-days-ago music store, if Amazon (their new X MM/year revenue stream), comes to them and asks forcefully.

An affiliate deal seems to make a much lighter impact to Ubuntu's ability to make independent decisions, in part because the revenue stream is less and also because the service is somewhat fungible–Ubuntu can switch to another online retailer (or suite of retailers).

Also, the perceived switching costs for a consumer to convert from Ubuntu One to Cloud Drive is going to be a helluva lot higher than `sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping` (unless they make ubuntu-desktop a dependent package, making apt return a scary message)
Whether you like the ad-supported model or not, this is just bad UI!

Who searches their programs and wants to see matching books and music? I could understand listing other software for sale, but this is daft.

I doubt they'll get anything but complaints about this and it'll go away.
* Situation like this is not only technical issue any more. Your solution needs to reflect that.

* This is not best situation to be in, but if you learn to deal with this and emerge from it. This experience will make you so much stronger. So be ready to quit, but do not quit too early.

Good luck!

(I replied earlier, but the above two points are so important that they worth a different post.)
The OSHW Summit is going to be particularly interesting because Josef Prusa, the designer of the most popular RepRap variant and an opponent of closed source 3D printing will be giving a talk. A couple of hours later, Bre Pettis, co-founder of MakerBot is also scheduled to give a talk, entitled Challenges of Open Source Consumer Products.
Maybe It's because my mind is different, but I actually found his explanation very nice. I understand that it looks like just "symbol manipulation" but that is just one way to look at it. He shows how to define complex numbers using the bare minimum assumptions. As he mentioned, the reason why complex numbers are useful is precisely because of their properties under addition, subtraction and multiplication.

Like I said, it just might be because our minds are different. But this seems like a good foundation, i.e you first show that this is all there is to it. Now, you can go ahead and explain the nice physical/geometric interpretations.

Incidentally, this is the way that most books introduce Algebra (well, mathematical algebra, with groups, rings etc, not the algebra from high school)
The Launch Pad: Inside YC - ebook
Just a note: all the ads will be removable with the command:

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping --purge
"Working Effectively with Legacy Code" is by Michael Feathers. http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fea...