skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Feedback on New Website Launch for Web Based Project Management Company
We just re-launched our website today. Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

http://bit.ly/qtask-relaunch
> Since IE7 is pushed pretty aggressively by windows update I would think there must be a few large corporations in there who have rejected the update thus far?

Don't forget that IE7 isn't available on Win2k, which is still being used in academic and government organizations a far bit.
"The reasons CEOs make millions is because their performance is directly measurable in how well their company did that year."

They make millions because they negotiate a contract that says so, irregardless of performance. They're able to get that contract due to the perception that with them leading, the company will make more money than if they weren't. It's essentially a bet the company is making on the CEO, because even if the CEO drives the company into the ground the contract is still in place.
Stop doing government work :p
"It's centered around getting help and being heard."
By airing complaints in a public forum.

I'm afraid that to me the whole scenario and fallout more resembles one child poking another in the eye with a pencil, followed by all the child's friends complaining about how the kid totally cried and went to the teacher...and the first kid griping about tattle-tales even as he promises to be more careful with his pencil in the future.

GS has gotten bad press for actual things that it has done. It doesn't matter that they're just a few guys, or that they're a bunch of awesome people who mean no wrong, as many of their defenders insist. They did things that quite fairly deserve askance looks and criticism, and their burden will be to correct those things and attempt to earn back any lost confidence. Comparing this to a "vigilante mob" is hyperbolic, distasteful, and rather fanboyish.

EDIT: Or, to put it another way - nobody likes having their business criticized. People even dislike seeing businesses they really like criticized. When the criticisms are valid, though, it's time to stop arguing against them, even in the passive aggressive manner of saying things like "We all know what it’s like to feel manipulated," (emphasis in original) and just promise to do better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library
The popular linguistics blog "Language Log" had some interesting commentary on "Politics and the English Language" written in a calmly analytical style (interspersed with some judicious jibes) that I think many YC.HN readers will find rather agreeable:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992

The entire 'Prescriptivist Poppycock' category at Language Log is generally good reading:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5
Trying to run a company by formulas like this rarely works. And a 'take it or leave it' approach to negotiating compensation (yes, you are negotiating, even if your stance is not to) would seem to encourage hiring of employees who either don't know their own value in the marketplace or, worse, are looking for a place where there is less pressure to perform.

It might make sense for a non-profit, but if the company is for-profit, it makes sense for the employee contracts to reflect that fact. Of course it's incumbent on you as manager to pay people what they really are worth, and not play favorites for emotional or other random reasons.
SlideShare’s April Fool’s Prank: Cruel, Or Just Unusual?
You're just using word play to try to validate your point. Any salary discussion is going to go straight to the employee's performance.

The problem with this system is it takes the focus off that individual employees performance and puts it on the rest of the office's performance. Suddenly you aren't talking about how good that employee is you're talking about why Joe in the next cubicle over rates higher than him.

That's exactly where you don't want salary negotiations to go.
I think all the things criticized were intentional. It's hard not to think that a writer of Orwell's caliber would say something without meaning exactly what he said. A careful read becomes: "these are good general rules, and in describing them I'll also show you how to break them when appropriate". It would be fitting with Orwell's style in his fiction writing.
Just read that comment again, I meant the largest 7-tuple of primes in arithmetic progression. Otherwise that doesn't make any sense :-)
Since this is a hacker group, I did one better -- I registered the domain CheeseWeasel.net

I'll fill it out and submit the page as a link on Friday (which is officially CWD)

Who knows, I might make my $15 back in AdWords.
You've completely misunderstood my point. I'm talking about individual productivity, not a group one.
Tesla Electric Roadster Shows Its Range at the Rallye Monte Carlo d'Énergies Alternatives
Miss Universe says Guantanamo Bay is 'soooo beautiful'
you can try, sure, but if a group really wants to make money and wants to keep their changes internal, they're not going to cough them up.
Yes, but definitely quite a funny one!
As one of my math teachers said once, mathematics' greatest advantage to programmers, or people in general, is to train the mind at thinking analytically. Most people who have a good background in maths won't necessarily use it everyday, but the process of learning and using it itself makes you think more rationally, and gets you used to solving difficult problems with whatever tools are available.

It's boot camp for the brain.
How could these folks think making their customers look and feel like idiots would benefit their business?
Further tying the past to the present, Google now inhabits the offices that SGI had to leave behind as their business declined. As far as I can tell, Google kept the old building numbers, too, which explains why the first building Google moved into were numbered in the forties.
Well, unlike a union shop, people can be fired. And we're talking about (50? 100?) people that are chosen very selectively from a nationwide (worldwide?) pool. It's not a 20,000 worker steel plant.
Whenever I help someone like the entrepreneur above, I’m paying others back for helping me.

A very American view of Karma - the endless paying back of an ongoing debt.

How about a view of Karma as a 'virtuous circle' instead?
I'm one of those people who has a really hard time with the idea of having left money on the table. When I'm in foreign countries, I love to haggle in the markets, but no matter how big a reduction in price I get, I always walk away wondering if they're laughing at me behind my back because I still paid 10x the going rate.

Anyway, working for a large corporation with an opaque salary system was an exercise in frustration. I moved to SF and took a job at a midsize company making what I thought was a very decent salary. I was just out of college and making more than my parents, so I thought I was doing really well. However, after a bit of digging and research, I discovered that the "going rate" for my position was actually 20 - 30% higher. Ugh.

I can totally see the appeal of a transparent salary system, especially when you throw profit-sharing into the mix.
It not word play; there's a difference between "You aren't paying me enough for the work I'm doing" and "I don't belong at the level you say I do."

The former is open to much more interpretation than the latter, being that the latter has a documented set of predefined expectations, such as years of experience and daily duties. It's hard to be obscure about whether or not you lead a project, or whether or not you have 5 years experience. Joe in the next cubicle rates higher because he is either your - or your colleagues' - senior. This is self evident.

What you are left doing is saying "I lead my project better than Joe leads his project." This isn't a salary conversation, it's an annual bonus conversation. Annual bonuses are designed to measure performance in most cases.
You're really missing the point here.
Thanks to Mashable for bringing some sense in the April Fools stupidity. I like the idea of the day, but if it's not really really funny don't do it. Notably, "company X buys company Y" is dull. Doubly so if X == Google.
Except here:
"Thanks for the feedback, and I’m sorry for the hassle."
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1650-get-satisfaction-or-...

Do you have to use the word "sorry" to express regret/"mea culpa"? All of that stuff felt pretty apologetic to me (comments, blog posts, etc).
Um, April Fools? No? This seems ridiculous, but it's on BBC...
Google’s cross-platform advertising strategy is in shambles
Wow! She also claims it was "a loooot of fun!"

I can't decide whether she is self absorbed,
or just an idiot.

I suppose she could be both.
Its very common for people that do not grok maths to confuse it with calculations.
That article made me smile.

I've had the same experience, where I've gotten some really great unbiased help and advice from people and I intend to pass it on in the future.

But putting that in perspective with the 37s and GS case; I'm not sure why they don't treat each other like they would like to be treated themselves.
dealing with the type system in scala can be a pain and is a hit to productivity in the early stages. The question is if the hit in the early stages leads to more productivity in the later stages. I'm not convinced that it does.

I've done a lot of ruby, and I've had monkey patching bite me a few times. However, fixing the problem was never that hard (two days max) and is clearly overshadowed by the productivity gained from the power ruby gave my teams.
Blackberry App World launched
This is the real reason, at least for myself.

My level of skill currently rests somewhere between "intermediate" and "proficient" with the languages and libraries I use on a day to day basis, in my opinion. I'm nowhere near a guru with anything I use - however, I can't even discuss the implementation of things I consider trivial with the people I implement them for, because there is such a huge divide in knowledge, and domain-specific language. I would have to spend a long time explaining basics before I could even get close to making the point I would like to, but would probably be able to explain what I needed to to make the point in 20 minutes to someone who just had some basic software development experience.

It's very easy to forget just how much stuff goes on, and how much you have to take into account, and how much you learned to get to the point where you could implement what you did - even with what we consider to be very simple apps. As such, it is very easy to extremely undervalue an application.
Software is far more a group activity than building widgets. With an assembly line you can slow others down but it's hard to boost the groups productivity so if you are competent enough to keep your job you are worth X. With software each individual can have a large positive or negative impact on everyone's performance while still being individually productive. Do you write reusable code or break the build?
"Who, exactly, is asking you to feel sorry for Get Satisfaction?"

At the risk of answering for someone else...At this point, I would summarize most of the criticisms of Fried and defenses of GS as "The good, kind people of GS are being bullied by 37Signals." So, those people.
couple things:

1) the design is nice, but for some reason, to me at least, it seems like it's a template site, though I'm sure you guys built it from scratch, but that's just the first impression I had.

2) I think the free 60 day call to action needs to be higher on the page and/or more prominent, rather then being squeezed between to bigger parts of the page.
And Jim Clark 'marries' while ROM burns.
Thanks for the link. Can you add some context for why you think this is relevant ot the topic?
I think (and I mostly code Ruby these days) it's not least because of comments like this.
Depends on if you mean M0, M1, M2, or M3.

If you mean M0, then assuming 300,000,000 people in the US it's $2,500 per person. If you mean M2 it's $25,000. And M3 is is a secret, but in 2006 it was about 35% larger than M2.

Defining money is a lot more complicated than you think, since the majority of the money in the world is in the form of debt, and it's not actually possible to share it around.
Heh. Yaw, I woulda stopped at one mea culpa in their shoes-- instead, they did 5 or so (2 blog posts, 3 comments, and a live webcast).

I think they are probably just so eager to eat their own dogfood (open, transparent conversation) that they just can't stop.

The PR reaction is a different (and really interesting) conversation. Someone oughta write a blog post about it... ;-)
Have you MET the internet? You're surprised that people are quick to attack, slow to defend, and assume the worst about every other human being alive?
That "TJ Rogers" article is reporting itself as "not found." (EDIT: Never mind, I tried again and it loaded.)

Also - meaning absolutely no disrespect to sama - but why specifically is he on the list? I've used Loopt, and while it's very good, it's not particularly interesting in its design, and while it fills a pretty huge niche, so do quite a lot of other startups. I'm certain other sites have more users, more addicted users (Facebook?), and more constant activity.

Perhaps it's a matter of knowing Sam in person? In that case, I'd be curious as to what exactly makes him such a memorable figure.
Interview w/ TJ Rodgers. Lots about his solar company:

http://fora.tv/2008/04/07/Uncommon_Knowledge_T_J__Rodgers#ch...

Also worth noting that he has a highly technical background.
I still don’t agree in that I simply don’t think the real world works that way.

On the Joel point: Joel runs a small-ish company and it’s become obvious in several HN threads that his employees are people who essentially worship the ground he walks on. That’s great for them, for him, and for that company and I’m happy for them all. But what that distinction means is that sometimes Joel’s advice doesn’t apply to the rest of the world outside his little utopia.

In my experience living in the rest of the world people don’t respond well to "your salary has nothing to do with your performance but you MIGHT get more 9 months from now." A bonus is great but it’s just that: a bonus. Salary is where employees are paid for their services and that’s where they expect to be rewarded for their performance.

Again, hopefully your employees are well off enough that they couldn’t care less about waiting 9 months. But in my experience the "wait for your annual bonus line" usually leads people to look for companies that pay their employees based on their performance.

P.S. You still didn't address my central point which is the fact that this method puts the focus on other people's performance in relation to the employee rather than the employee's performance alone
the C++ STL library was based off of the header based standard developed at SGI. So if you've used STL before in C++, you're building off the work that came out of SGI.
Google Reveals its Data Center Secrets
From what I've read/heard, the guy is fearless and can make anything happen.

"Sam Altman could parachute into an island full of cannibals and be king within 5 years."

When I was his age, I was boldly drinking my first beer and trying to figure out who I was. He was apparently building autonomous helicopter navigation systems, making deals with major cell phone companies, and getting prepared to be a speaker at the Apple WWDC.

I've never met him, but from what I gather he just has the "it" factor.
I think beauty queens are "supposed" to be incredibly positive about everything, rather than to think for themselves. Usually it's good to be positive, but obviously not always :)

Anyway, I'm not sure why anyone cares more about her blog posts than anyone else's. If Obama said it, that's one thing, but this is just some random girl. (Not newsworthy.)
I'm surprised that in tech circles, the conversation hasn't been dominated by GS fans or knee-jerk support of a "pro-consumer" site.

EDIT: or for that matter, hatred of 37Signals.
No way, they judge the winner of this contest by intellect.
Interesting, I can kind of wish you talked about Sam Altman since we don't know too much about him other than Loopt.

Sounds like he's super motivated to win but I wish there was an example =)
Lots of people are fearless and can make anything happen. I'm not sure you can really compare Loopt with Apple quite yet :/ Bizarre.
Years of experience is only sometimes correlated to employee value. So, including it in an inflexible formula to determine level will cause mis-levelling. Exceptionally talented staff with few years under their belt will be levelled too low and more experienced staff who aren't so capable will be levelled too high.

Supplemental point: IANAL but I think it would also be illegal to factor years of experience into salary calculation in the UK.
This post shows how you can implement the old direct mail sales letter as a web page. It does stay on the surface of direct marketing know-how, but it is a good introduction into the matter.

It shows the inner architecture of the sales letter (which is AIDA) and shows well, how this can be applied to the landing page, which I call conversion page.

If you like to get a taste of how one could go deeper into the direct mail tricks here, just google for example "bucket brigade". That should give a hint how said inner architecture of a landing page could made even more tricked out.

And one for the historians. Did you know that 37signals did just that as a service agency, improving conversion rates, prior to going into web services?
You're right. Muller's comment there is head and shoulders above later remarks by GS (and much of the arguments made on their behalf).

As to your question, yes, you do have to say "sorry" or "I apologize". You also have to avoid criticizing those you've wronged while doing so and in subsequent statements on the matter.
Anything in particular that you read/heard?

I mean, again - don't get me wrong, because he's a very impressive guy. I hope that I'm able to do things that great that young. But "young ultrasuccessful founder" is not a rare thing. Being a billionaire before 25 has happened again and again.

But we're all aware of that, since the culture is so ultrafocused on the youth and beauty brigade. And obviously PG isn't writing Sam in because he wants to promote Loopt, because Sam doesn't need another Inc mention beyond the ones he's had already. So I'd be interested in what exactly Sam's on the list for, since I know next to nothing about the guy.
At the very least, it's certainly not Hacker Newsworthy.
There's no such thing as bad publicity.*

* I don't believe this maxim, but a ton of people do. They are rich, I am not.
I wish Joel made his salary info public. I completely understand why he doesn't, but it would be illuminating.
Here is a great computer science class that covered buffer overflows extensively: http://cr.yp.to/2004-494.html
How can one effectively argue against an entirely subjective judgment of difficulty in terms of dealing with a type system?

Anecdotally, I find that leveraging functional language programming features coupled with type inference and polymorphism leads to considerable productivity gains as code correctness can be ensured through judicious use of types -- without requiring extensive testing or programmer effort -- while excess verbosity can be eliminated through the use of FP features such as type-safe anonymous functions, currying, etc.
please be a giant april fools conspiracy. anything else is just too painful to conceive.
Once a year, my management team sits down, reviews every employee's work, and recalculates every employee's level.

There's your incentive, besides profit sharing[1], to buckle down and work hard. Besides, if Joel & co. have an eye on market wages through use of glassdoor, they're not going to get very far out of line in the course of a single year.

[1] This works at the size Fog Creek is now, but somewhere around 100-120 employees it breaks, because you nobody has a good feel for how individual productivity feeds into company productivity, and it turns into politics.
Museum of Bad Art - Wikipedia
Reddit is actually quite funny. Check also subreddits (science, wtf, nsfw, pics, worldnews).

And there are Easter eggs when you use AdBlock :).
I think this prank was hilarious. People need to stop taking themselves so seriously.
He didnt compare loopt with apple, he compared Sam with Steve Jobs, how old is sam? plenty of time for bigger things than loopt(which is still a pretty impressive achievement)
As a long-time-lurker-first-time-commenter:

I understand that the x-men movie and Hacker News have a lot of audience overlap. That said, this feels more like a reddit/digg post. I know, I know, it's a subjective judgement, and I'm new. And the scope of HN isn't limited to tech. still....

I finally created an account so that I could flag stuff like this that I personally wouldn't like to see here, but I don't see the option, probably because I don't have any karma. Is there a doc somewhere that states what actions are available to users at any given karma level? Am I so blind that I overlooked something obvious in my searches?
People punish others when asked for too much. After all, asking too much is the etymology of arrogance.
wiki: The RBN has been described by VeriSign as "the baddest of the bad"

Great links. Thanks. Can't believe rtm didn't serve any jail time.
Interesting app. But so, isn't this very similar to what something like Evernote does?

If so, how do you plan on competing with an application that has been there for much longer and has built quite a plan? Do you think that there's still a market for such applications?(All actual questions)
I think he's referring to Sam's appearance at WWDC regarding Loopt on the iPhone.
Wow, blast from the past. I remember reading this in grad school -- it's such an inspiring talk.
Paul Buchheit at Startup School 08
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxP0i9ah8E

Sam Altman at Startup School 08
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m43t44WL8-w
PG or anyone else: Can you point me to any further reading on the "doctrine of the elect" ?
Android (G1) Market Observations — 4 Weeks Iconic Memory
Yes, as the two astute replies beforehand have pointed out, you have to have someone on your payroll provide content for someone else's site. Nice work if that other site can get it.
"""At Fog Creek, we decided that the right thing to do when the labor market tightens is to give raises to everybody at the same level."""

I've always been wondering what would happen (has happened) when the labor market softens?
I have no comment whatsoever on Joel, his company, or his products. I don't know him, anyone in his company and don't use his products. I've taken issue with him previously on this forum.

However, I think you're misunderstanding a Base Salary with a Performance Bonus - which may or may not be annual - and the notion of Total Compensation.

In most companies, including mine, the idea is a that a salary is what you earn in exchange for doing your job to the minimum expected standard. The only reason these salaries aren't equivalent to legislated minimum wage across the board is that there are market forces involved that companies must work within. Joel is simply stating that in most organizations, there is a drive to push this salary as low as possible, and that this creates problems. I see nothing in mine or other's experience that is contrary to that point.

His solution is to basically simplify this equation, and publish it. That's the exact same thing that every union workforce has. The only issue he has with this is that if he miscalculates the market value of a certain level, he'll basically create the conditions for a strike. He recognizes this and explains his workarounds in the article. He also retains the notion of a bonus to help him recognize those he chooses to.

Salary is where employees are paid for their services and that’s where they expect to be rewarded for their performance.

This is clearly where your opinion differs, but this attitude creates the entire situation that Joel is commenting on.