skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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I don't see much arrogance in this thread, or hackers > business folks.

What I do see, and agree with, is good business would have a ridiculously hard time finding a great programmer. I don't even think good programmers could consistently identify the great hackers with the ability to propel a startup forward. Also finding that individual is only half the battle - putting their expertise to work optimally for a startup is no easy task.

I have seen articles on how hackers cannot identify good business/marketing/sales people. I recall one article explaining quite well how a smart programmer with a good business concept was sunk by his bad selection in a sales guy.

We can just generalize this argument to 'Identifying people great at a task is difficult, even more so if you come from a disjoint background'. Perhaps adding in 'A subset of those great people will be able to leverage that skill at your startup'.

Let me summarize with an analogy.

Finding a great ship is an enormous challenge - especially for someone who is neither a ship-builder or sailer. But owning a great ship does not guarantee faster travel; the winds and currents must be harnessed.
The answer is obvious: the businesspeople should learn to hack.

My boss is a pure business guy. He didn't rise up from the ranks to become the boss; he's run multiple startups, and each time he's served as a "business guy," not a hacker.

Yet despite this he knows enough about every facet of his business that you can explain to him a subtle bug in our software or an algorithm involving frequency transforms--and he'll understand you. The power of this is incredible; while it takes a good amount of effort to be familiar with the technical aspects of the business, it gives so many benefits--from the obvious (the hackers trust you more and are more likely to give you the accurate lowdown on any situation or proposal) to the less obvious (you can recognize good hackers better).

Recently, he wrote a very complex threading patch that dealt with all sorts of race conditions for a program that, while part of our business, he had never touched before.

Being a "business type" does not justify being clueless about the technical aspects of your business.
Really it's a tautology.

"Non-technical people can't judge technical people."

Once someone learns enough to judge technical skills, they are declared technical and so don't disprove the statement.
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* would be happy to shell out $10-$20 for a DVD to support her, but could forget about it in a few weeks.*

well, burn your own DVD and donate now before you forget :)
Relative to offline journalism, the amount of work that gets done by online-only outlets is small, but it's certainly not zero. Look at places like Slate (disclosure, I work for Newsweek, and we share a corporate parent with Slate) and Salon. Most major outlets also have "web exclusive" reporting, which while frequently soft can occasionally surprise.
Unless this is a new development, this "daily quota" doesn't exist. There's no ids, no central database, no daily quotas. There wouldn't be "drug tourists" all over the Netherlands if there were such a thing.

And there's no mention of it on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_the_Netherlands
GRE is completely inapplicable to grad school, I'm pretty sure it's used with a cutoff to thin out the applicant pool.

I didn't study for mine one iota and did pretty well (got into Yale) -- I think if I'd spent some time preparing I could've had close to straight 800s, but I don't see that alone getting me into the schools I was rejected from.

Honestly I think "GRE scores" are about 19th on the list of things most university departments look for when they're seriously considering applicants. You'd be much better off putting that effort into preparing material for publishing.
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My worst hire was a java guy that I took a gamble on because we were short staff and could have used some help with mobile stuff. He was fired within two weeks, so I totally understand where this guy is coming from. I've also done interviews where I've asked candidates why they became interested in programming and they replied, "I don't really like computers, I just do this for the money." One guy actually said exactly that.

When 95% of the people you see coming through the door are like this I could see a non-programmer not being in a position to figure out that these people simply aren't worth hiring.... the solution I don't see addressed is more rapid and iterative trial and error in the development hiring process: bringing people on in a limited capacity or throwing them at smaller and contained technical projects before giving them responsibility for more important stuff. I'm a big fan of finding good people for part-time work and then growing them into full time positions if the business model starts supporting it and they want more work. This has worked well for non-programming stuff too.
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It could well offer fewer features, presented from a useful alternative perspective and without the old method's social baggage.

Having said that, my first instinct upon reading this feature list is to suspect that you're right. Yammer has too many of email's features. They need to leave more things out. Otherwise the pathological behaviors that characterize corporate email (poor composition, unclear expectations, inbox overload, endless chains of quotations, complex workflows, reliance on cut-and-paste versus publish-and-link, the use of Microsoft Office attachments) will just port right over, and nothing will change.

I'm guessing that removing the character limit will prove to be an especially foolish design decision: Who wants to read five-paragraph Tweets? And file attachments are probably even worse. One of the charms of Twitter is that it refuses to allow such dinosaurs. Instead it forces you to adopt an amazing modern technology -- the hyperlink -- to point people at your blog, or your Flickr set, or your Slideshare page, or your Scribd page, or your github account.
Totally off topic, but I had to go find out what Billy Idol is doing these days. According to wikipedia he's 53 and

'In November 2006, Idol released a Christmas album called Billy Idol: Happy Holidays. It includes classic Christmas songs like "Frosty the Snowman", "Jingle Bell Rock", and "Silent Night", plus some originals.'

Again sorry for going off topic. Couldn't resist.
That's a really interesting site. In the talk at http://www.deepcapturethemovie.com/ he has a graph showing how "naked short-selling" can be used to create an illusory over-supply of a stock and drive the actual stock price into oblivion.

I don't know how much of it is true, but it's both (a) a clever trick, and (b) hopefully completely illegal.
He's just putting together a similiar argument with different parameters...
To clarify, I am eying an elite CS school.

Would you mind explaining what do you mean by preparing material for publishing, please?
The description of the "dutch system" is totally imaginary. Downvoted for making things up and presenting them as fact.
OK, let's face it. HN is not Reddit.

Nobody here wants (or reacts to) sensational titles. We read the article, and then form our own opinion. No need to poison the well.
Real World Haskell wins the Jolt Award for Best Technical Book 2009
What an incredible abomination of an article format.
A lot of it (maybe) just relates to being able to judge people.

You're best off hiring someone you can work effectively with, rather than the best programmer in the world (as for judging someone you can work with long term, that's another problem).
newspapers had grown complacent and corpulent and were content to rest on their laurels,

There never was a golden age of journalism. Before the FTC and the Fairness Doctrine, yellow journalism used to routinely whip people into frenzied states of war mongering. During the Fairness Doctrine era reporting was bland and extremely biased towards the status quo. The journalism of today mostly alternates between summarized press releases and tabloid smears.

Further note that much of the raw material of news reporting is now online: press releases, CSPAN videos, documents, reports, economic statistics. When everything is online, there is much less reason to attend meetings and sift through files (not that pint journalists used to do that anyway). Your arm chair online journalists can report on these just as well, if not better, than your on the ground news paper journalist. For example, the site Read the Stimulus ( http://readthestimulus.org/ ) has done the best work on what is actually contained in the stimulus package. A blog Verum Serum did a better job investigating the Obama - Bill Ayers connection than any newspaper ( see this post http://www.verumserum.com/?p=2907 ). The best economic writing comes from Brad Setser who routinely analyses the data from its original sources.

Even Naked Capitalism, which routinely references newspapers, usually only does so to quote a bank executive or a government official. Naked Capitalism almost never relies on "investigations" done by print journalists. Without newspapers, those officials could just post their quote directly to a blog, without having to go through a newspaper.

Most newspaper journalism has always sucked. Most online journalism sucks. It takes time and patience to build a set of sources you can trust. In my opinion, the rise of the internet has both increased the level of noise and crappy sources, but also increased the number of truly worthwhile sources. I now find, that in almost every subject, the best source of information is an online news source. Can you name one subject on which the best print news source is better than the best online source?
I'm not a business guy but I've been around a lot of them.

Honesty and self-honesty are key. Curiosity too. They best business people tend to teach as they go... but the worst like to lecture as they go. So talkativeness is not always a good sign.

Greed in a business person is not fatal, but needs to be watched. Hunger is a better motivator than greed because it's self-limiting.

Business school is not always a good indicator -- I've met both idiots and geniuses who went to Sloan, LSE, EDHEC, etc.

Self-taught or self-made business folk tend to have smaller horizons. You find them a lot in businesses that are less risky, more limited, yet profitable -- eg contract software for government.

Scions of old successful (eg 4 generations) families can be very good as long as they are not too emotionally scarred. If they have something to prove, let them do it somewhere else.

People who have entrepreneurs (parents, aunts, etc) in the family tend to have more natural and secure approach to business overall. They've seen it done from birth.

One good negative indicator is being too "fancy". If a person seems to create complex deals just for the joy of it, run away. You want elegant power in business deals just as you want it in programming. Being too fancy is a sign of inexperience, but may also be a sign of greed or worse.

Another negative indicator: I've never seen a VC make an outstanding CEO.
But the analogy is awful! It's entirely reasonable to expect good reporting from TC, and entirely unreasonable to expect MS Songsmith to produce professional-quality music.
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>> I call bullshit.

> WTF. Is this some sort of playground?

Calling people out is an important part of a healthy, critical discussion focused on the exchange of ideas. I might not share someone's opionion, but I aplaud fighting against groupthink.

>> All this PHB stereotyping around here is just arrogant vanity.

> Actually, it's experience.

Both sides of this discussion have pointed to ethereal "examples", "experience" without giving any meat. Show the evidence - empirical or anecdotal - to support your opinion.

> Let's see some evidence.

Let's see some evidence from your side too.
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Seems like you're painting some pretty broad strokes here. There's a difference between national and local political news. There's a difference between national and local business news. Even within local there are many flavors of news (small-town, big-city, suburban paper, etc.). And, though you don't see it, there's a heck of a lot more local journalism that gets done every day than there is national.
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One hint. If you ever find yourself using a $ instead of an S, there's a good chance you need to rethink your title.
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I disagree. The anchoring point of this article is rooted in the multiple-identity problem in online communities. Shirky's idea is to limit scale and embrace identities, while this article's counter is to deemphasize identities and disincentivize secondary accounts.

In other words, this whole article is about tackling the ONE issue that real-world interactions don't have.
The entire article HTML in the image title is especially abominable.
Well written article, but it would be more relevant, IMHO if it compared Haskell and Clojure, not CL.
> How do you recognise good programmers if you’re a business guy?

Simple. Ask someone who knows. If you don't know anyone who knows, you might want to reevaluate whether you should be getting into the tech industry.

As for the arrogance thing - look at Brin/Page, Ellison and Gates, etc. - all hackers. When a "business" guy's achievements in the hacker space outdo these hackers' achievements in the business world, be sure to let me know.
Off the top of my head, no, but that's because the best are now both.

But it's the wrong question entirely. There's nothing at all relevant in the medium. Print isn't better because it's on paper, but because it has a business model that up until now has allowed for lots of journalists to get paid.

Can you name one website that financially supports 300 journalists? There are countless thousands of newspapers that do.

Sure, some of their work - regardless of what you think of it's quality, it was the best we had - can be replaced by volunteers, and some of it we won't miss in the least. But a sizeable amount we will. (It's not the quotes officials are happy to put out on blogs or otherwise that matter; it's those that are forced out of them).

The solution to this problem isn't going to come from going "pah, who needs them, they suck anyway amirite?", which is how your first post reads. It's going to come from admitting where online is weak, what is currently unique about print reporting, and working out the hell we can rescue those parts before we lose them entirely.

A free press is a hallmark of a democracy. We don't have an online one yet, just a bloated op-ed section. We need to get one, fast.
What a terrible URI!
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Also, software is not singular...
I wholly disagree. Entourage sucks, but Excel and (particularly) Word for Mac are even better than their Windows counterparts.

Word 2008 is a masterpiece. It has a number of nice features (notebook mode is great for university students).
I like the whole series, not because the people are "cult", but because I have proof that they are actually building something with their set ups.
There's one test I recommend to my semi-technical fellows:

Give a small practical problem to solve and see what the other person comes up with. For instance you could ask prospective employee to hack together a small app or a script to do something or anything you can understand and think is solvable with technology.

The great part of this test is that most of the time slackers just don't even attempt it. For those who give a shot, you can look at certain behavioral patterns using your softskills. For a non-techie judge, you won't be able to analyze the quality of design but the end result also says a lot.
And interestingly, being able to judge people is one of the most important traits of a business person. When you boil it down, picking and motivating people is the major part of a good CEO's job.
Even if you're not applying to YC (though quite a lot of people here are), the fact remains that PG is somebody who's fairly well-known in the hacker community, and he's very active here (compare that to how the heads of some other social sites don't directly get involved on their sites as much). People will always be more wary of making an ass of themselves in front of somebody with a reputation than they will be of doing the same in front of anonymous strangers.

In fact, on Hacker News it's even more so a matter of known people, since there are a lot of well-known people who come on here and say stuff. I know one of the big Delicious people do, because my first month here I got rebuked by him for insulting Delicious. There are people from most of the major YC companies, along with guys from 37signals, Joel Spolsky, Jason Calcanis, and more - and when there's a site frequented by a lot of people who have reputations, suddenly spouting stupid mouth noise seems a lot more foolhardy.

(I find that whenever somebody whose web site I use gets annoyed at something that I say here, it absolutely makes me at least reconsider what I said. I judge people by the awesome things they make, so this is a community that has a lot of people that I respect a ton, and it encourages me to remain civil and reasonable here.)
That's basically a dream set of interviewees. I rarely know every single name on a list of people, but in this case I knew nine out of ten.

(Also: if nothing else, look at the _why interview, where the lucky stiff responds with drawings rather than text. If you don't know why the lucky stiff then you're missing out: he's a pretty awesome person.
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I see this question a lot...why microblogging? Why not just stick with email?

As twitter has shown, there's value in the posting of notes about what you're observing, reading, thinking. I like to think of it as messaging without guilt. Email, IM have a certain social expectation, microblogging doesn't. I like the way Alan Lepofsky put it: "Email is 'reply hoped for'. Instant messaging is 'reply expected'. Social messaging/microblogging is 'reply optional' (http://bit.ly/dm03).

The principle here is that people are so much more than the jokes they email, and the requests they send to one another. There's a whole lot of smarts people have that do not have a channel. And organizations are the poorer for not providing a way for employees to contribute these things they know and dream up.

Once this notion of commenting without guilt takes hold, a lot of what employees express becomes conversational material. And where will that happen? Likely within the microblogging app, not email.
And why not NNTP? Newsgroups offer all the listed features and NNTP is a mature protocol.

The only barrier is user infamiliarity with newsreaders. But newsgroups are close enough to e-mail that there should be plenty of carryover.
Not really, the criticism apply in both cases. The main area where clojure wins against CL is that clojure is not bloated and that wasn't where the author of the article had major problems. Also, to his additions, I would like to add in the lack of decent data-structures in lisp. Cons cells are nice but they are no match for algebraic data-types and pattern matching.
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That's a very good point, but you're forgetting about the "hidden projects" indicator. That should help prove that the "candidate" is not only enthusiastic, but also capable. Someone who has a bunch of open source projects going is likely to be able to deliver as well as talk the talk.
Is there analog to List macros in Haskell?

edit: yes, there is! http://www.haskell.org/th/
I used Windows XP for years and then switched to Vista about six months ago. AFAICT, there is nothing slower about Vista than XP on the same machine (an old ThinkPad T60). But, because of usability improvements in Vista, I can get things done faster. UAC removes a lot of the hassles of running as a limited user in XP, and that is the main reason I upgraded. UAC probably saves me at least an hour a week.
This is code from the erlang interpreter, erl_eval. It takes the abstract syntax of the code for a fun and returns a "real" fun which when called will interpret the code. This means that the fun which is returned can be called by compiled code, any code for that matter, as if it were compiled.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the code the compiler generates for a fun.
If Linus takes a snapshot of a kitten, can we discuss kittens on Hacker News next?
Off the top of my head, no, but that's because the best are now both.

Let me rephrase, can you name a single subject, where the best source of information is an old school, mass media source ( ie, a source funded mainly by in print issues, distributed to a mass audience).

(It's not the quotes officials are happy to put out on blogs or otherwise that matter; it's those that are forced out of them).

That happens on blogs too. For instance, Techcrunch runs a nasty article calling out Google on some issue, and Google is forced to respond on its blog.

A free press is a hallmark of a democracy. We don't have an online one yet, just a bloated op-ed section. We need to get one, fast

Since we never had a good mass media, and never will, it is more realistic to discuss how to alter the structure of government, to make it less dependent on the whims of the masses.
Yay! Hacker News is on a new and improved server now.
"We're down for (we hope) a few minutes while switching to a new server."

... and they are back.

Thank you pg, rtm and everyone who made this happen.
I don't even read the supposed "controversial" articles any more. I will just browse through the HN comments, figure out everyone's take and biases and move on.

It's a fun little exercise.
Yes, should be a lot faster. We're now just trying to kill the old one cleanly...
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OK, so the actual transaction here, isn't Twitter users donating to the charity, it's Twitter users donating publicity to a company which is donating to charity - correct?
Impressive and definitely influenced by Amy Hoy's Twistori

http://twistori.com/
It definitely feels much faster. Thanks again pg!
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I think that is definitely a winner. It shows pro-activity which companies want. If I had a company in the bay area and was looking for a marketing manager, I'd sure as heck give this guy a call! :-)
wonder what the server specs are...for both the new and the old one
"for now" would be my guess. But if Obama mentions us on his State of the Union...
The bit about a good programmer knowing a lot of unrelated technologies is entirely off-base, IMO. Better to specialize in one area and be the best you can be at that than spend your time learning a lot of technologies you will never use, just for the sake of knowing them. I do think knowing more than one language is a definite plus, but keeping them all related makes perfect sense (a web stack, a java stack, etc.).Even great programmers who are infinitely passionate about what they do aren't going to enjoy every programming language out there, just by virtue of it being a programming language.
Perhaps if they had been running Erlang on the server you wouldn't have had to take the site down while migrating to a new server. Sorry just had to point this out
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