skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're similar in quantifiable traits (language, currency, same federal government). Culture, how individuals (often businesses) interact are much different.

The south as a whole is much different than the west coast, and somewhat the midwest.
Surely that fits under the meaningful work description?

What you may find hard, others may find easy. So at this point it's how meaningful is this work to me? Am I learning anything? Am I finding it challenging enough?
In the UK an entrepreneur can set up a LTD company which limits personal liability.

Pedantically, the UK allowed limited liability companies for about 150 years. This is not a new thing.
This is an article glorifying one exception in a sea of rules. This article gives the false impression that a paywall is a good idea for news sites, (and perhaps some will extend this to any kind of site, pointing to the success of the NYT).

The NYT can rely on its name: we all know it's good, and its been around forever. Their target audience is the educated middle-upper-class. Many will pay, and they'll make money.

But very few existing news organizations could successfully implement a paywall, and zero new organizations could. The only really successful business model on the internet has been "freemium", and free, but ad-based: Google, Facebook, etc. So this one exception occurs; great. But I'm saying lets not all get excited and start suggesting that next tech startup launch with a paywall. "But the NYT did it successfully" will be their last words.
Lying is a skill few people appreciate but it can be invaluable.
>What is this post responding to? And who is the target audience?

People making comments like yours? E.g

>Reading this feels exactly like reading the passive aggressive facebook posts of someone currently in a fight with their boy/girlfriend. We get it, Rails is "opinionated", sorry I guess we're saying "omakase" these days. Who really gives a fuck?

Well, a lot of people don't give a fuck, and that's the problem the post addresses. They want Rails to not be opinionated, or to cater to _their_ opinion.

>The reason DHH is getting loud complaints is because people feel that they carry a legitimate grievance but also feel no way to voice that opinion (or are trolls). Douchetastic talking down to them like exemplified in this post won't help (and will encourage trolls).

I don't see anything bad (sorry, I guess we're saying "douchetastic" these days) about the post. Sounds like a legitimate complain from the creator of a popular framework.

I also fail to see how people feel they "carry a legitimate grievance" but at the same time "feel no way to voice that opinion".

If they don't participate in the Rails project, then, no, they don't have a "legitimate grievance". They just have a personal grievance.

If, on the other hand they do participate, then they have lots of ways to voice their opinions.
evn smlr kbrds, lol?

Then again people got used to texting on T9...
you have starter pictures on the cooling page. otherwise, i love this - i'll show it to my kids!
I put in the comments because I thought it'd be an easy way of adding some content for free as people add to the information already there, and also to let people moan about errors so that I can then go in and fix them. Comments are a fairly low-maintenance feedback system, especially with Disqus dealing with the spam filtering for me.

An eBook is a great idea. I just worry that the information is slightly out of date for people to actually pay for it. I know virtually nothing about ebook formats so this would be quite a learning curve for me. I'll bear it in mind though. I could realistically see 200 x $5 sales per year, which isn't to be sneezed at.
Was going to say the same thing.
The problem comes when people think that there is as much variation amoung US states as between EU countries. There are much more common denominators amoung parts of the USA than EU.
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2012/12/working-better-together-...
I would tell him he is asking the wrong question. In my experience the vast majority of college classes will never have any significant value in the workplace. Instead, I would tell him to branch out, take courses he might never think of trying, and follow a line of courses that he finds most intellectually interesting. People that are passionate and engaged tend to excel at whatever they are doing. There is plenty of free time to learn practical skills.
> his contrasts between the European market and the American market from the entrepreneur's point of view are really pretty trustworthy.

They're not. And I've run businesses in lots of different countries as well. Martin is on the ball when it comes to comparing Spain the US, but his contrasts between the European and the American market from the entrepreneurs point of view are way off the mark.

He should have simply titled his post: "what it's like to be an entrepreneur in Spain" and there would have been no issue at all.

Btw, Varsavsky isn't an American, he's had quite a few business dealings in the UK and in Spain but as far as I know doesn't hold a stake in a company in any of the other EU countries that he's writing about and I really don't understand what it was that he was trying to achieve with his post.

If you don't believe me go visit Berlin, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Tampere, Paris, Stockholm, Bucharest, Warsaw or a hundred other places and compare those contrasts for yourself.

On the whole there are very few of Varsavsky's points that hold water, a summary between the US business climate and the EU one from an entrepreneurs pint of view could be made much shorter:

- in the EU it is a lot harder to be a dick to your employees

- in America you will (due to the larger and more homogeneous home market) likely have a much better chance grow fast

- in Europe you will have to think internationally from day 1

- in Europe it is less dog-eat-dog and more cooperative

Those are from my own personal experience.
I like the bike/wheel/rental place examples; it helped me conceptualize what she was talking about.

That said, I would love to read a sequel that deals with more abstract objects that sync or authenticate or what have you.
I'd always assumed that the product you'd build with one of these frameworks would live behind some sort of authentication such that SEO wouldn't really be an issue because the bots wouldn't see it. Your marketing site would be driven by a separate CMS.
The Surface doesn't carry the third-party signing key, so in the absence of a flaw in the firmware implementation you're not going to be able to run anything other than Windows.
Quantum key distribution is, theoretically, uncircumventable.

QKD implementations on the other hand ...
> it's never about the money

In finance, that's certainly not true. I've seen several people make the leaps from the entry-level $100k job to the mid-level $200k job to the profit-sharing (or director-level) uncapped compensation jobs, doing it for the money. But to be fair, the difference in developer payscales as you move across finance-related roles is lifestyle-changing large, not the $20k bump you get switching from MSFT in Redmond to Google in Kirkland.
Also, I explicitly mentioned that I exclude international mega corps from the equation. When you are big enough, you can open offices in neighbouring countries, or on other continents and you can sell globally.

My point is about small-to-mid corporations, which was also the OP's point (as far as I understood)
(Always wanted to be a commercial pilot. My wife also is a physician).

Curious, what is type procedure to verify that someone really is a physician? The OP doesn't mention if a license was checked or otherwise. He relates having to speak to a someone on the ground before he could use the kit but doesn't indicate if any check of credentials was made.
I can't offer much help with many of the other issues you mentioned but if you really want to understand the internals of backbone better I don't think there's really a better path than reading the annotated source [0]. One of backbone's strengths is that it is so minimal, and the source so compact.

0. http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html
Related: the ability to do research.

In my previous life doing IT, I was the "go-to guy" almost entirely because I knew how to efficiently and effectively read man pages and use Google. Nowadays that may take the form of reading API specs or language docs.

The way to acquire that skill is simply to do it over and over again.
Thanks; these are great suggestions. You can see all the keyboard shortcuts with F1. (We'll make ? work for this as well.)

The key bindings are all configurable (by us, for now, maybe by everyone eventually -- if anyone wants that). We'll work on improving them.
As of now, my wife is just going workout with me and skip the personal training. She has had better results in the past by working out on her own, so we are going to revisit that. As for me, if I'm going to spend money on training it will definitely be with a USAW certified coach as I would just want to learn the Olympic lifts. Thank you for the advice though, if my wife does decide to get back in to see a trainer I'll definitely keep that in mind.
2 or 3 of the countries in the UK are not "Anglo-Saxon" countries, but would be "Celtic" countries. :P

Additionally the UK does elect and choose EU legislators, in the European Parliament & Council of Minsiters, European Commission, etc. etc.
Ask HN: product idea, tool to create ui guider for website
Hi,

I am thinking about creating tool for websites to make fast and easy user interface guiders (arrows and text which could over time dynamically describe how interface works).

Example of such guider is here https://www.videopixie.com/console/8rLaaBBwQACZeP83IjzkAg

Thanks to such guiders visitors who come first time to given website can really fast understand what is going on and how to use this website.

What do you think? Is my idea for product right or no?
One more pubkey/privkey layer I assume. Some people think that several locked doors are more secure.
I shall say that several locked doors would be more secure if the time is limited for the intruder. We, from the hacking world, have a good amount of time to unlock this one more layer. Well well well, one more layer that does nothing but prevents computers from computing.
Wikipedia is a perfect storm of pagerank so unless google have specifically made an exception for it, links from there must be pretty valuable. IANASEO.
"I think that developers can understand developers better "

Very true and I am with you on that. However, when it comes to hiring, it is unfortunately not just about developers understanding developers. The reason most recruiters are not really technical is simple. Most Clients do not give a shit how technical a recruiter is. Clients have requirements and the bigger the client is, more lazy they will be to do any legwork on their own in finding good candidates. All they do is to outsource to these "technical" recruiters who charge a fee to find that right fit.

So this model works because clients are ok with it. But may be it is ok. Hiring includes searching through endless resumes, screening, salary negotiations, etc. which the recruiters can help with. For a developer, it sounds like nothing (I feel the same way) but clients value those steps a lot and pay essentially for that. Not for how techie a recruiter is.
Ask HN: How to make a startup without money?
Although I am already in a startup, sometimes I ponder if that startup fails, how one go to create a startup while having no money.

I for example have all the skills I need for all my startup ideas, but my skills are too specific for normal employment, and I am deep in debt...

How I start something while having only debts? (damn you student debts! shit idea go to college...)
> Stop being a dick.

Indeed.
"No" isn't a strategy.

I think if you think the story is about saying "No", then you've missed the point. The point is the mental shift between living reactively and ceding control to anyone who asks for it, to living with purpose and giving your time and attention to those people who deserve it.

People will resent you for being unreasonable. People will resent you when their expectations are not met.

When you are too accommodating, people may value your courtesy. However, they will expect you to be accommodating, and if you ever try to stop, they will resent you for violating their expectations.

If you say no when it's reasonable to do so, then you set fair expectations. People respect your fairness, so they don't expect more than is reasonable from you.

If you are unreasonable, people expect you to be unreasonable. They will ask little of you, but they wont have any respect for your character.

It's very easy, especially when you are worried about people's perception of you to be too compromising, which leads to unmanageable expectations and that feeling of persecution. It's your own fault when this happens, you've been silently making promises with your actions, and people get angry when you break them.

Say you go to a coffee shop every day and get a sandwich, and to be nice, the server gives you a free small coffee, and you do this for a few months, and every time you get a free coffee. Then one day, you go to the coffee shop with enough money for your sandwich and ask for a sandwich and coffee, but the server demands you pay for the coffee this time. That's frustrating because you don't have the cash to get both, so you either go without the coffee or plead with the server.

However, consider another coffee shop where you ask for a sandwich, and the server asks if you want a small coffee for a dollar. You decide you want the coffee, you buy them both. You're happy with the arrangement, and the former situation never comes up. You never have the opportunity to be frustrated with the server because she hasn't set any expectation she's not willing to maintain.
> It's as if someone talked about investing in the US, and someone felt obliged to blog about the differences between Illinois and New York and rural Idaho, Mississippi, Alabama and South Dakota.

This, exactly, seems to be the point OP is missing.
I'm a former ski patroller, which is a kind of outdoors EMT / paramedic. Once, on a flight from Seattle to Boston (for a YC interview!) I walked to the aft bathroom only to find a young woman who had collapsed there, still prone and lethargic, with a stewardess standing over her with a look of annoyed disgust. An evaluation indicated she was probably just dehydrated, so I had the still-annoyed stewardess bring her water, which revived her. (Of course I recommended that she see a doc when we landed just in case, but I doubt she did.) After an hour or so we were able to get her back to her seat. The rest of the flight was uneventful. The only thing that never added up was the bizzare attitude of the stewardess.

(edited: semi-conscious -> lethargic)
Depends on what you call a difference. The nice lady at the DMV, or the IRS or the county assessor's office will likely know far more about you than you ever will about her because of access to data. A lot of that data is not publicly available.
Clearly this post is not primarily aimed at the core team, but the random people harassing him on Twitter and elsewhere.
whatever I do, I do it with passion
which others? doesn't do it on sendmail or postfix
Let's see... Algorithms and Data Structures classes were probably the most useful for computer science.

The Software Engineering class was a great way to learn what happens when you have bad/no management.

Technical Writing and the "Job Application and Interviewing" classes might have been the most useful long-term, though.
Thanks for the answers. Copyright use of images, especially screenshots, had always been a confusion point for me.

For the case study, basically I'd like to know what it entails before purchasing. All the other content speak of principles and guidelines but I find it more interesting to read about an actual case study, the thoughts and reasoning behind the decisions made. (I can't find what the case study was about too - just that it's a time tracking service. Is it Harvest? Basecamp?)

You said you'll be working with the company further, I look forward to that one!
Ask HN: Why doesn't netflix use failover for amazon web services?
When reading the details about the Netflix outage, it looks like the N Virgina data centers were having problems. And upon reading further it looks like they only have one data center in the US.<p>What I don't understand is why doesn't Netflix failover to another datacenter (US-West for example) to continue at least partial service? Isn't that why the HA services exist? Thoughts?
Correct regarding the reasons and wrong regarding the current situation. You will be much more spot-on if you divide between the "former USSR" and "rest of Europe". Former USSR countries are mostly unified by the same language, religion (or lack of) and culture. They used to be the same country... much alike the USA.

"The rest of Europe" is now mostly part of (or willing to join) the European organizations like (but not only) the EU.

This is only the political situation. In terms of culture, language, religion, markets, laws, all the differences remain.
Differences Between Software Licensing Agreements and SaaS Agreements
Guess no one really cared about Facebook, etc. logo usage.
>Pawel - a Rails developer.

I'd like people adding those kinds of claims to also give an estimate of how much they have contributed to the project.

I.e.

John S., Linux Kernel developer, contributed maybe 10 lines of code, or 0.0001% of the kernel source

or:

L. Torvalds, Linux Kernel developer, wrote the kernel code from scratch, that's my name on the project, biatches

Else, this "a Rails developers" signature tells us we should give extra credit to your opinion, but we don't know how much compared to DHH.

I don't mean it about you, Pawel, or your comment (I don't follow Rails that much anyway the last 2-3 years), I mean it in general.
Many people use laptops that don't have enough power to handle two OSes. I just switched from an i5+SSD Thinkpad to a Xeon-based workstation and the difference while running the same VMs as before is huge.
I would agree: when the employee gets to the point where, "It's about the money" I would guess that it's probably not.

In addition to not finding fulfillment (edw519's list of motivating factors), I'd say there's a list of demotivating factors too:

* Having your feedback or objections being ignored by management
* "... I'm gonna need you to come in on Sunday..." once too often
* Not being able to do your best work (because of schedule, or other, pressures)
* Too many meetings / status checks
* Greener pastures, technology stack wise, "Wow, here I am doing Java, but hot darn does Scala look cool, I wish we could use some Java version later than this Java version from 1999"
* too much drama

With enough of these conditions too often, it doesn't matter how good the money is.

Having said that, if your current salary is around the amount you need to survive, then these worries come into place. If you're worried about losing your house because your salary is too low, then you're at a different place on the Maslow's pyramid and then it might really be about the money. ("Wow, this job is actually going to pay me, vs working for equity. I should take it")
They missed the fact that the ATF requires reporting of rapid/multiple gun purchases. Regardless, this is a huge invasion of privacy, akin to reporting of library book checkouts or anything medical related.

Bad idea.
Oh, and not to forget... this is a huge generalization on my side. There are huge exceptions to this, eg. the Baltic Countries.
In my opinion Varsavsky's blog post was ok. Sure it mostly covered Spain and France, but that's where he's worked at. It conveyed actual experience from one person's perspective.

Some responsibility always lies with the reader:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_reading
You are right, the ads look absolutely shit - I could perhaps go with Buysellads when traffic picks up.

Interesting idea - I'm a huge admirer of things that follow that model - Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial and Avdi Grimm's Object's On Rails.

I am hoping that people fixing cars are more transactional (read likely to click an ad) than people looking for coding tutorials. I might leave it as ads for six months and then try six months of freemium access and compare the two.
The prevention of bikeshedding is one of rail's greatest strengths.
Can someone elaborate on why this is an issue? Why would you need to block screenshots of your app?
On the choose your own OS, this is why Vagrant was made. It's not like the company is going to provide any meaningful operating system support at that size (or really at any size for a developer) so there's really no benefit to forcing people to use a specific OS.
Your ignorance of the respective areas is showing. It's hard to talk about a common culture between California and Louisiana when neither California nor Louisiana has a common internal culture.

In Louisiana, spend some time in Houma, and then some time in Shreveport. Louisiana has a Cajun-dominated region and a region that's very much part of the Old South, and they're not much alike.

In California, spend some time in Berkeley, and then some time in Redding, and then some time in El Centro. California has a relatively liberal coastal culture, a libertarian culture in its interior, and an almost exclusively Hispanic culture in portions of its south.

I'll gladly agree that Europe is gloriously diverse, but you really should stop underestimating American cultural diversity.
An Experiment In ePub eBooks (two 1922 essays)
sorry for that I have been too busy learning Chinese, french Italian and Spanish. can't have it all.
You're right about the pictures for sure, I need to add a few random pics and thumbnails for chapter headings. I focussed on SEO for starters and Googlebot doesn't see pictures, but now that I have people I need to think about actual aesthetics.
This seems like a silly way to analyze things. If, as you seem to assume, the US is currently at the forefront of innovation, then why shouldn't we attribute the status quo to the US's strong IP regime by the same logic?
The extrapolation of knowledge, so you can learn and solve problems trough a previous set of skills
For exactly this reason Wikipedia adds "nofollow" attributes to all external links on Wikipedia. You will get no SEO / page rank link juice from adding links to Wikipedia. You will probably get organic traffic though.
I run a similar site on a different niche, which I have monetized to good effect.

1) get a few links. google will likely send you more traffic if they see others linking to you.

2) ask people to link to you on the site.

3) add some social buttons ("share this on facebook" and "+1 this"). Also, try to get it on pinterest. You might create a "5 car tips" image that could get shared as an image on pinterest, generating traffic and likely getting some blog links.

4) split test your adsense. use all three units, plus link units. then split test which ads work better when placed where. Think long term. 10% better RPM will add up. You probably want to add a skyscraper.

5) add links to amazon (through their affiliate program) where useful. need a tool for that? buy one here. I like to link to searches for products, rather than actual products. That way, the user sees all the available products rather than just the one you selected, and if that particular product goes away (which it might, because in a niche, you are probably linking to products sold through amazon by others - and they can change often - or be out of stock).

6) add content occasionally. google likes "fresh" content. changing things around, adding new articles, etc. will help you over the long term.

7) tailor your html titles to describe the content, and don't have "how a car works" in every page. It makes sense, but you really want to tell google what's there, and adding the site-wide keywords might dilute the message.