skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great article but I think it's a fine line. I am so much more productive when I am doing something I enjoy.

Let's say I am 5 times faster working on what I love to do, but it's only 50% as effective for my business as what I should do. Well it's still better than being 5 times slower to do something that's only twice as important.

The hard part is working out those numbers and knowing what wins, but being aware of the concept is a great start.
Dilbert? How about the entire Congress?
So which books will teach me how to combat "simple sabotage" in my organization?

[edit] I'm referring only to chapter 5, section 11 "General interference with organizations and production."
If your theory is correct, and I think it is, you can easily assess someones skillset by talking to someone, and finding out what they (are) like (if you need a book for that I can recommend "how to talk to anyone").

If you know which skills are needed for the founding team, the missing skills are simply the difference between the two.

I think finding out which skills are needed might not be very trivial. They need to be close to the core directive of the startup, all the other required skills can be filled by employees. (as in, if your startup is highly technical the founders could be 2 engineers, as long as the first two employees are a CEO and a marketer)

I love the article btw, nice and direct. Hopefully someone in the comments disagrees completely :)
Is it that bad? I remember someone that lived there said the place had changed a lot.

Still if it's that bad then it should be cheaper too, weird how it doesn't shows on that map.
Yeah, my impression was that the VC community is actually getting a bit pissed about all the acqui-hires. Sorry to link just to Arrington, but I can't seem to find the other sources I had read on it:

http://uncrunched.com/2012/08/26/investors-dont-like-acqui-h...
The StartSSL free ones do this too, I have them on all my domains.
Honestly, I've spent decades of my life living amongst Americans, and I had no idea that 'blackface' is something offensive. This is totally harmless, and no racist by a long stretch.
Absolutely, promoting other useful products to the community is not in any way what HN is about. You should be here pushing your own startup, useful or not, or reading some pointless blog of someone just because they started yet another picture sharing service that will be dead tomorrow, or fawning over whomever the latest superstar is.

But one day sales on useful information that would otherwise be missed by many users here? Oh no, there's a group think to be maintained.
That "list of things I’d want to do by the time I turn 30" list is so utterly cringe-worthy.

Go to the moon? Reduce India’s poverty by at least 10%? Really?
Do any of these languages solve the debugging problem?

I'd love to write my client-side code in something other than JS, but I'd still be debugging it in JS, and I have trouble believing that's going to help ...
I haven't lived there, but people I know who do seem to report hearing gunshots somewhat regularly.
Operate with Impunity - About a data validation framework
Hybrid 3-D Printer Used to Create Cartilage Implants
The ebook's 50% off today, if you use CYBERDAY as a promo code.
Yes, I call them my moonshot goals :)
You are taking this way too seriously. Posts like this are rare. Also very useful. I have bought ebooks before in sales which I came to know via HN. As the GP said the best part was the discussion by people about the books they are buying and why.

If you don't like this post, flag it.
Even the CIA does not have smart enough people to do that :)
Apple's Spaceship Campus Travels … Into the Future
New Alzheimer Drug Found (German/Translated)
Gadget Lab's Guide for Holiday-Travel Home Safety
Oh please, market to me.

I won't pay you for taking away stuff I love. No vim replacements, please.

But I will pay you for taking away stuff I hate, or can't. Here's a few ideas off the top of my head:

* cheap REST API based domain registration and DNS setup

* cheap rsync based backups (rsync.net minus support + cheap)

* pre-loaded legal cross-platform lightweight browser testing OS images, or hackable VNC based SaaS

* Strongly customizable imageless web site skeletons

* Mechanical Turk like service for design

* cheap REST based server encrypted file storage (Do a better job explaining the trust involved than S3)

* cheap raspberry pi co-location (low power, low cost, but dedicated). Optional 1TB USB drive and spindown code (I have this at home but it took me a day and I have 100Mbit broadband)

* cheap generic WLAN robot with REST interface (rolling hand with eye)

* Household chore automation devices

* Super fast shipping cheap 3D printing service with stress and durability certs

* Outsourced System Administration: Provide well tuned Debian based software stacks as simple pastable command line scripts in emails. Do the same for security upgrades. Be funny and edgy while doing so.

* Create designer raspberry pi case. Allow me to provide ROM and brand stamp. Ship to customers for me. Be cheap.
Food packaging you can eat.
Google reportedly gearing up to launch its own, 12.85-inch touch notebook
The network is built to cope with a peak demand that only occurs for a relatively small amount of time. By reducing the peak demand they can delay the capital expenditure of upgrading the network a number of years.
Yes I do, although in fairness my experience has been that Verisign and Thawte at least will ring the number you provide at some stage. I guess they also do a Companies House[0] lookup in the UK as they request related details IIRC.

What's more of a scandal is that Verisign at least 'license' their EV certificates to be used on a given number of servers [1]. Now if the 'service' provided is identity verification, that practice is the real scam.

[0] http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/

[1] http://www.verisign.co.uk/ssl/ssl-information-center/ssl-bas...
Great point! Totally agree.
> Are you saying that the goal of hacker news is to post commercial ads

Are you suggesting that O'Reilly paid to have this link posted to HN? That's not correct. They didn't. Someone saw the offer, knew that many people on HN would find it useful, and posted it.

It's valid to not like it, and to ignore it or flag it, but don't dislike it for something that didn't happen.
Does Perl make us of a lot of characters you can't find on your keyboard? Sure, you can use backticks shell style, but you'll probably have better luck with IPC::Open3.

Perl's strings look pretty much the same as everyone else's strings.
That's what Source Maps are for. Currently supported in a superset of {CoffeeScript, TypeScript and GWT}.
Also missing http://www.saltarelle-compiler.com/
Seeing Like a Baby
Sounds like we've found common ground, then. I'm opposed to the death penalty for the same reason I'm opposed to restrictions on speech: because governments sometimes get it wrong.
This is one
http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/I...

The other one is cited in this book (I read it there first)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1857883292/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Here is a not so scientific national poll about this
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2135843/Children-liv...
"Cold, carbonated" in 7 days.

That's not beer! That's vile fizzy fake-beer!

Real automated home breweries do exist: the Braumeister range from Germany spring to mind:

http://www.speidels-braumeister.de/Eigenes-Bier-brauen-mit-d...

... But you won't get anything drinkable in less than a month.
You don't need to be a founder to lie to yourself about this. I manage a not-for-profit and I've found it very easy to hide amongst the work I'm naturally gifted for (figures, bookwork, projections) instead of dealing with the stuff that really needs doing AND that I need to be the one to do (refining processes, setting the tone & direction for the team and working out how exactly to accomplish the objectives set by our board).

You're right about the way it affects our choices when we pick our daily work. I think the real work, whether it's a startup or not, is to clarify what's important. You startup folks just get the fun of having to really think deeply about that, because there's nobody above you to tell you what the most important thing is right now.
Image and video post-processing with WebGL
Obama Didn’t Trust Romney to Use Unmanned Drones to Kill Innocent People
check the stats for both time online & online spend -- I'm sure both are still growing; even in the US. then add in the # of young / old people on smart phones and tablets that weren't online 3-5 years ago, and you could say that even raw # users in US is also growing.
I'm Italian and nearly everyone I know (who's a programmer) uses an US layout.
Long rationalisations are not easily conveyed to a public which is used to one liners.

"You can no longer install games on windows 8 except through the windows store."

vs

"Some versions of windows 8, which come under the bracket of windows RT but will still be referred to as windows 8, will not allow you to load specific metro apps without buying them through the windows store, but desktop programs will be run and installed as normal. The famous people in the news complaining about Microsoft locking down windows are wrong."

Full disclosure: I could be wrong in the exact details of the second statement, it's just what I've gleaned thus far from reading comments about it.
website is slow as molasses. Cant even buy a book!
Do you really want Congress to be circumventing procedure and expediting decisions?
Thank you, that's more or less what I understood too, then. It seems to me that not every server can spare the quoted tens of GB of RAM just for authentication, that's why it seemed odd to me.
Sounds like this solution is not for you. That's ok, even if it were free, you'd probably still want to build your own (if you even have a need to host a job board).
He becomes Rickshaw Puller for months to understand government public policies
Share HN: Cyber Monday Deals
Upvote & share the good deals, surely everyone is getting e-mails...
Oreilly - 50% off ebooks/videos http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/cyber-monday.do
ElasticSearch pre-flight checklist
Well, Amazon is signing up authors, and if their first foray is successful, I can see them expanding to music, but video is in a completely different level. While digital filming has reduced cost, it has also increased quality expectations, so the cost for one TV episode hasn't changed all that drastically in the last 20 years or so.

If we see tech companies creating their own content, those probably won't be the giants. I think Netflix or Hulu are much more likely to start experimenting in this direction, since it's much closer to their core business.
To combat sabotage of productivity within an organisation it would likely be necessary to employ techniques that ironically reduce creativity, increase levels of distrust and breed a culture of caution and inaction.

From this perspective one could potentially read this document as being a product of sabotage.

Related topics (within the national security space): polygraph testing at US laboratories, overheads of Special Access Programs
I'm surprised, I always thought I was a pretty slow typer (about 60 wpm after corrections). But that's actually the second-highest bracket on Typeracer.
NewEgg - http://www.newegg.com/Cyber-Monday-Deals-Sales/PromotionStor...
I'm not from US, so can anyone tell me why some months have low energy consumption compared to other months? (electricity - may vs july)

Also, do you guys use natural gas for heating too?
yes, that's possible in a pure referential transparent language (strict or lazy is not the point).
as others have mentioned, you have absolutely identified a core issue that can be validated everywhere, everyday. people love adding features instead of improving/validating the core (guilty) and they sure love chatting with other founders/the "scene" about their startups and where they're headed instead of spending their time with finding/growing actual customers. and yes, I even believe most spend too much time at hackathons and events getting feedback from peer entrepreneurs instead of actual customers.

the flip-side of this is important though. I totally agree that most people involved in startups are way too busy 'living the startup-life' and forgetting about the essence and true face of it all, namely that it still is "hardcore business". it still requires picking up the phone, ramping up customer after customer, smart investment of resources and selling 'to the person' and not just tweet about it, and so forth. but, as said, flip-side: if all startups were to face the most traditional form of doing business every day, most would simply not find it fun enough to dedicate their passion to this. so we get a little leeway so we can move around our actual duties and it's all good. there's just this super-fine-line that most of us overlook eventually, where people forget about the essence of what they're supposed to do and just enjoy the lifestyle a tad more than it might be healthy to the mission.

great article, definitely one i'll be coming back to for a refreshing read every once in a while in the future.
I dont think they paied for it, and I dont dislike O'Reilly. They didnt do anything here beyond having a sale and selling non-drm products. Like I initially said, they get major points for this.

I only pointed out that this is an ad promoting a sale. No one seams to contest that. What people seems to have an issue with is the claim that ads should not sit alongside other articles.

It would be interesting to hear why having a ad promoting a sale posted in a news aggregate is a good thing, or why in this case we should have an exception that sites like amazon or newsegg does not deserve. After all, they too have done 1 day's sales, some very interesting for hackers. Thus, I am failing to find an attribute that this ad differ from all other ads. Does anyone has an insight to what that attribute is?
Inside Google Spanner, the Largest Single Database on Earth
Sheetsee.js - visualize data from a Google spreadsheet
So much more with a pet robot...
Gizmodo - massive list - http://gizmodo.com/5961045/all-the-cyber-monday-deals-2012
I feel like the points under (11) on page 28 and forward is like a character description for Michael Scott/David Brent or any other office-working sitcom character. This is truly comedy gold.
The biggest proportion of household energy goes towards temperature management -- heaters, air conditioners, or in some climates, both!
Sorry, missed that part.

Out of curiosity, where do you live? AFAIK, Yelp's hours are user-submitted, so you might just be in a place with low yelp usage.

I reside in their home city (SF), and I've rarely ever had issues with faulty hours. In your case, you might just need to hire someone to collect the data, since individually no one has enough incentive to do so.
Very accurate points, in my opinion. The money quote: "In general whenever a X-guy enforces solving a problem with X everyone should step back and try to analyse it objectively".

All three of us at tldr.io are coders, so we indeed jumped in the code and built (what we thought was) a great product. We thought the product would be viral, and of course it wasn't. So now we are in a two weeks long "no code" period, and this forces us to go outside of our comfort zone.
i cant help but wonder why on earth they're giving promotions without preparing their infrastructure. reminds me of "free ebook from Packt" promo that lasted for days but never managed to get any since the website was always down.

the one that went well was Pragmatic Programmer, bought an Arduino ebook. it was posted here last week. those who complain that book promo shouldn't be here have their reason, but i'm glad i see this kind of promo in HN.
5 COSAS QUE AUMENTAN EL DESEO SEXUAL EN LAS MUJERES
Well, if you've got a pretty big standard library, you've got more on which to base external libraries on, regarding the style of the code. The STL alone didn't really provide a big enough template. Sometimes it even went the opposite way, so when you read something in lower-case letters with underscores, you knew that you were using the "core C++ language", putting things like "vector" and "reverse" closer to keywords than library APIs.

Especially if the rest of the code base was the usual OO class forest.

I knew of Ada use in teaching, it seems to be quite popular for some advanced "software engineering" courses. Then again, I've seen a pretty great amount of Algol-family languages there, out of proportion to the actual practical use. Oberon was quite popular for a while, as it was a very small language to teach and the barriers to running your first programs were basically non-existant (as you can easily call your module function directly, compared to the rather perplexing "public static void main" of introductory Java courses).
20+ Thoughts on CSS/HTML Preprocessors and Frameworks
they should air drop this on North Korea
I was amused to read that he bought LED bulbs for everything.

I don't deny that they're efficient, but are they so efficient they're worth spending 3-5x the price of a standard energy efficient bulb?
well the 'fine line' you mention is the essence of the article that might be lost with a lot of new entrepreneurs i think. you got it exactly right, it's super motivating to do stuff one enjoys, and it gives us enough momentum to do things we might not enjoy as much. but there's this slow transition into self-reassuring ourselves back to cozy comfort zones, in which we're often less productive that we might want to admit we could be, on the long run.
Thanks for that. Great and valid points.

I didn't focus on the developer/hackathon vs getting customer aspect.

I believe you are right about it - when it comes to myself 1000% spot–on. But i know the same pattern with biz-centric founder teams, even with balanced founder teams. People just hide in the comfortable skill-zone and wait/blame/hire for the rest
The US loves their air conditioners. May hits that lull between people turning down their heaters and cranking up their air conditioners.
I think the article starts great, "people will fill their time with what they love to do if you let them", but does not provide a solution.

In general the work of a manager is precisely that, find the people that will love to do what is required(know about people), understand what is required(know about the needs of people and your customers) and remove all the blocks they could find doing it(know about execution).

Not as easy at it sounds, they are also "naturals" at it.

Doing 90% of your best time in live before dying something you can't be great at because you don't appreciate it is not sustainable in the middle and long term.
I'm fairly certain that if you create an account with o'reilly, you get a 'buy one get one free' code for their ebooks, so with two books it basically works out to be 50% off anyway, any day of the year.
> these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money

Just to make it clear: I've been a professional musician, a composer an arranger, and I've played with Touré Kunda and recorded with Deep Forest. I've also been a graphic artist and built the official TV CGs effects for World Cup 1998. I pretend to know quite a bit about why people (including myself) create music or art, and I can affirm you that even the worst commercial, tasteless eurodance artist doesn't do it for the money first. They want to perform their art first, then seek a way to get money while doing it.

Selling your art can take numerous forms. For musicians, most of the time the better part of their revenue comes from concerts and not recorded music (usually at best they get a few percents of a CD price anyway).

> you are stealing from these people.

I've only extremely rarely downloaded any media from the net, and only things unavailable by other ways. I'm standing on principles and not looking for excuses.

> If you really don’t like it, go and create your content and release it under creative commons and stop watching and listening to commercial movies/radio.

Amusingly enough, that's exactly what I'm doing.
Don't know if it's Great or not, but I never knew of CLR via C# before the sale (depressing since it's in it's 4th edition)

Thanks to the sale info I've found the answer to one of my self-education questions, "how can I learn about the CLR in an accessible manner?"
Great writeup. I think you hit the nail on the head by identifying several key components of a good hackathon experience. I think you might be asking yourself the wrong question when you go to these events though.

Over the past two years, I've noticed that the ratio of prizes to teams at any given hackathon has been approaching 1:2. All that means is that "winning" in the sense of getting a prize is becoming more and more common. It leaves me wondering if the people who are winning these events now are getting the same amount of benefit as the people who were winning when I first started out. Thus, I think the more important question that people should be asking is "How do I get the best experience out of this event?".

I think your writeup did a great job of nailing exactly how to do that:

1. Work with a team with a varied skillset

2. Demoing what you made

3. Work on something you're passionate about

4. Keep things succinct and manageable
This can be a problem, though I doubt an alternative airport parking based service would be much quicker.

As mentioned by others, Hertz Gold etc really ups the service, but it's usually not worth the 2-4x you pay on the rental.

I've found Payless and Fox both to be the cheapest and provide adequate service. I've had run-ins about fees and such, but generally I fell I get excellent value.
Yes definitely. Absolutely agree.

I tried to focus on that by explaining that founders tend to think of themselves as executors while they are at the same time managers (of themselves)

Ad "solution": As you said - i don't really provide many of them - if you got good links to recommend please post them - i will add them!

Ad "naturals": I am unsure if managers are born or trained. I know a lot of people who grew in that role.
Show HN: create Foursquare from Facebook
the fact you write about this shows that you're at least able to self-reflect from distance, so that's big. but there's so many who only learn this through failure, and even then often resort to blame it on other things.

this is where a ceo or manager usually excels or completely fails. the best managers i've had, especially in the US, were able to find the sweet-spot. they kept me out of comfort most of the time, but with just the right reward settings, so you will be constantly surprised by your new-found potential and always feel the world is requesting a bit too much from you but you still manage to work it out, all the time, magically.
> All it cares about (apart from our reproduction) is our happiness.

This isn't quite true. All evolution cares about is reproduction, that's literally it. It only tangentially cares about happiness/earning millions/whatever if it improves reproductive ability (which they probably do).
The Elegance & Authority of Black in Web Design
Theory of black, not only about its visual presentation but also - what’s black from the point of view of physics and psychology. Article contain examples of stunning dark websites.
As a Dutchman I can't help but see this as a sizable but not even truly problematic engineering challenge.

Our entire country was basically a piece of sea / swampland nobody else wanted, which we proceeded to turn into our own little kingdom through a massive cooperative effort.

Since large parts of our country are already below sea-level and we've already built massive flood barriers after severe floodings [1] half a century ago; it just means we'll have a bit more demand than usual for our engineering skills and we'll all be fine.

From what I heard we're already talking with New York ;)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Flood_of_1953
11 Apple iPads per hour vs. zero Microsoft Surface tablets