skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sadly you can arbitrarily declare where someone can sue you. In legal terms it is called a "forum-selection clause" and is common in almost every contract you will read here in the US. The party designates what court will hear any dispute regarding the nonperformance of the contract. Google does have a forum-selection clause in their terms of service for Google Checkout so to sue for breach of contract she would have to file in the court stated in the terms of service for Google.

One option would be for her to file with a local court and seek jurisdiction. This would be time consuming and costly though. I am not sure exactly how this would work with her being in the UK.
Twitter also lacks an income, but I digress.

One could argue that viral marketing is business development. The main difference is that in the former, your customers are doing the work for you, while in the latter, you've got a defined role.

I'd be careful to suggest though that this role isn't being done at all.
If this happens, what is the likelihood of any of the JVM languages working there as well? (I haven't used GAE, so I have no idea how it is with libraries.)

It'd be fun to have Jython, JRuby, Groovy, Clojure, etc on GAE.
Terrible customer service makes them evil?

You have my full sympathies and it's a crappy situation but that has got to be the most banal version of evil I've ever heard of.
The article is written "...by Amy Hoy, an interface designer/developer living in Vienna, Austria." $2300 is probably not worth the travel.
WTF, why am I getting moderated down?

To be clear: I was referring to the "fact" that real estate prices are not being affected in Ahmedabad due to a car plant being built in a location about 50km away from the city. That is simply not true -- my parents are in the market to sell their house in Ahmedabad, and the price is nowhere close to what they would have gotten a year ago.
At least they are firing sales and marketing people and not engineers.
It's not possible (by definition) to "short-circuit" or undermine evolution. Modern medicine is our species acting within the process of evolution. Just as we consider early humans to have "evolved" the ability to use crude tools, we have "evolved" the ability to use penicillin, brain surgery, etc.

"Survival of the fittest" is a useless tautology. An organism's evolutionary fitness, if there were such a thing, would be its ability to survive to reproductive age. So of course the fittest survive, we've defined fitness to mean survival.

In reality it's the species that has an evolutionary fitness; and the distinction is important. Take a bee colony for example, a huge number of the bees are infertile.

To address your example: infertility treatments may catalyze an evolutionary process of selecting against those who are disinterested in child rearing. Or, like the bee colony, infertility in some members of the species may be evolutionarily advantageous; hard to imagine, but not without precedent.
I think anyone who comes out of any school thinking they know it all is wrong. But that's more a personality flaw.

On the article I think the author is off-base here and I think you as a person are exactly the reason why. Staying in school 2 more years is not a "high risk/high return" situation at all (as the author claims). It's a no risk/guaranteed return situation (MBA's make more in the workplace, that's been proven by countless studies)

The real high risk/high return folks are the ones who go out and start a business or join a startup. That's truely a risk.

Anyway, once you've disproven the idea that an MBA is a high risk action the rest of the author's thesis falls apart.
And why is that better?
In theory, that is the optimal procedure. But writing code is so much more interesting right now.

It's my most productive form of procrastination.
A little bit sad about the tone. It's certainly a reasonable thing to do, reading this,

"We did look at a number of different options but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organizations in order to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a business."

An ever-so-slight amount of corporate sheen on the writing, a little bit less emotion. A dangerous step away from being a personable company people trust.

On the plus side, they are being pretty generous with time for those let go, outplacement support, and possible severance packages. Just hope they can retain a personable face.
No more Java 7
Can you offer a better one?
I get a salary that would be laughable by most standards, partly because I'm a young autodidact with a BFA, and partly because I live in a part of the US with very little web dev opportunity. I'm stuck here while my SO finishes grad school. I think it's time to start looking again, this time remotely.
This was worth it just to remind me of After Dark; I remember owning that program. I loved those damn toasters...

I'm surprised they didn't mention Voodoo. I still have a few of their graphics cards lying around.
Wow. I will NEVER, ever use Google Checkout after reading this -- unless I see a very, very, very, VERY convincing response from Google.
Desktop operating systems.
Wow, crazy ass law. I learned something today about my southern neighbours.

But the courts would decide the validity of the request. A single person suing a multi-national billion dollar corporation would have a good case.

Wikipedia has some more info, including certain states that favour the plaintiff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_non_conveniens#United_Sta...
That's a nice way to put it. However, the reality is they went on an insane hiring spree over the past 3 years and hired a lot of useless people. I'm surprised they are only cutting 200.
We are long past the point of evolution as it applies to all other life.

And I don't mean that in some crazy pseudo science way.

Consider the human brain. Did you know human infants fall intellectually behind chimpanzees of the same age.

Eventually humans overtake but it's several years late, how come?

It's because our brains are so huge that we can be born without them getting all mashed up. Our skull plates are flexible and they do to a newborn's brain what would instantly kill an adult.

But our brains are adapted to deal with that, we survive and fully recover, catch up to and surpass other great apes.

But birth is STILL problematic for us humans, so we invented cesarean section.

A medical procedure which was already common by the time Cesar was born.

And ever since all the knowledge society can come up with influences who survives.

This kind of group level evolution is not unique to us, a lot of social animals have aspects of that But we're unique in just how much our intellectual innovation matters.

Short answer, we're selecting for brains and not much else.
And that's a good thing.

Chimpanzee's have a much better immune system then us, but they're endangered.
I recall reading here that the project making an open version of Google's stack is being helped by google. If that is the case then it isn't quite the same.
Toss some links in your profile of stuff you've done. There are always folks on here who get asked for recommendations or who are looking to hire.
She had a Wired cover. That counts as famous.

Doctorow is a "clear thinker" if you're fine with his oversimplifying matters and making a lot of assumptions about things that he shouldn't be making. He's a bit too bloodthirsty about killing copyright: he seems all-too-willing to abandon all traditions just because things are changing. I don't think that "get rid of everything" is at all a measured response to the issues at hand. Similarly, whenever he talks about art I want to jab a fork between my eyes. The guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He knows less about what he's talking about than I do on the same issues, and I'm not particularly well-versed in the subject.

His fiction is terrible. That he was nominated for awards with that one story of his just saddens me. It's cliched, poorly-written, and really not all that interesting.
Because I'm not a sales or marketing person. :)
I didn't notice she moved. Last I remember she was American. Perhaps I'm wrong, my bad.
Buzzword Frenzy
No I am complaining that Dawdle is creating money out of thin air. Somebody must be buying those used games for 40$, and they don't show up in the equation.

As for ripping off, who is forcing you to buy at GameStop? I don't get it (I am not associated with GameStop and I don't know them either).
A lot of people talk about dysgenic trends that they imagine must be happening because the weak are being protected from having their genes eliminated from the human gene pool. But few notice that the data show improvements in phenotype that are so large in effect size that they can't even be explained by ENORMOUS favorable changes in gene frequencies.

http://books.apa.org/books.cfm?id=431712A

http://www.springer.com/statistics/social/book/978-0-387-949...

The simple empirical fact is that human ingenuity and shared cultural knowledge is improving the human condition faster than any process of natural selection of genes could, and we can all join in on that, whatever genes we have. And it won't be too long before we can start manipulating the genes of our descendants, if we so choose.
In general, it's hard to look at web traffic statistics alone for a product like Dropbox because in some use cases, it can be doing its job perfectly without you ever needing to go to the website. A surprising percentage of our active users basically never go to the site!
Yeah,it is a little crazy, but kind of makes sense if you think about it when it comes to preventing frivolous lawsuits.

There are ways around it, and as you pointed out you can file locally and try to convince the local court that i should take jurisdiction over the case. But this would cost you money and time. Plus, you would have an uphill battle trying to convince a court to overturn a clause you agreed to in the first place.

While you cannot always do it, at least in the states, if you are negotiating a contract for your business try to get the other party to agree to dual jurisdiction. Basically stating that your local court or their local court can have jurisdiction over the contract. Some parties will agree outright, others will want it to say something like if they sue you it has to be in your court, but if you sue them it has to be in their court.
Ditto. Ditto Ditto. Sorry, but they did it to me. Was only $80.00, but Ditto.
Didn't Ionian and Dorian Greeks speak two different languages? And weren't there Ionian cities where Dorians were not allowed to set foot?

I guess my question is, how can primitive peoples bring such total destruction over such a large area?

Rome barely manged to wipe out Carthage and it wasn't easy. Completely exterminating people isn't easy.
Ask PG: Unique visitors by country
Can you share the percentage of traffic to HN by country?

Curious to know if that percentage is semi-accurate to the real % _of_hackers/country. Anyone have a study/stats? Please share.
Wikipedia article on the temple:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Is anyone else troubled by the submitted article coming from Fortean Times? That's not usually considered a reliable source, as it doesn't fact-check the way many other publications would.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortean_Times
I know, that's why I put "not hacker news" in scare quotes. It may not fit with the main thrust of the site, but it's fascinating stuff nonetheless.
Evolution often occurs when due to changes in the environment (climate change, new diseases, new predators) vast numbers of the species die off. The marvels of modern medicine are a less traumatic alternative.

For example, if evolution were to have its way, HIV should kill off those humans who lack the CCR5 gene. This would be bad news for most Africans and Asians, as well as up to 95% of people of European descent.

The deletion mutation of CCR5 in Europeans is possibly an evolutionary adaptation to mediaeval European plagues - the Black Death and smallpox. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5 )

We don't have a moral obligation to evolve. I'll stick with medicine, personally. As well as clothes, houses, electricity, supermarkets, central heating and air conditioning.
Looking for SW Engineers for DocVerse, very early stage startup
We need to grow fast.

Our product turns Office into Google Docs.

There is not a comparable product to what our product does.

It is private beta for 4 weeks now and gaining significant user, customer and partner traction.

We have many hard engineering problems to solve.

We will begin generating revenue in 2009.

We have lots of runway left from our first round of investment.

If you are the kind of software engineer that reads hacker news (which you obviously are :-) and are interested in talking with us, we definitely want to hear from you.

Email me directly: shan@docverse.com

Shan
Wow. Memo to self - Avoid having business dealings with google if there are alternatives.
A few years of systems have given me a really good way for handling this problem (other than the obvious bit of just using whatever packaging system the OS provides). I use /opt rather than /usr/local, but you can do either.

Build all your packages into /opt/package-version, and set up a symlink from /opt/package to /opt/package-version for whatever you want the default version to be. As an example, Ruby 1.8.7 goes into /opt/ruby-1.8.7, and /opt/ruby points to this directory.

The only disadvantage is you need to add each bin/ directory into your path, which will be a problem if you install hundreds of applications in this fashion.

On the other hand, being able to do in-place upgrade and rollback almost instantly (just re-point the symlink) is a big, big win in a production environment. Plus, because everything is located in one place, you can readily move your /opt/app-version directory to other systems.
Perhaps because they realize that the company's long-term future depends on products people want, as opposed to products people are being convinced they want?
Hire people that can, specifically for that purpose.

Just like a founder that recognizes he/she isn't good at design specifically seeks that skillset in others.
You can have a contract that has a "forum-selection clause" but it's far less binding that people assume. For example if there was fraud or duress or undue influence involved in the signing of the contract then the entire contract can be worthless including the "forum-selection clause".
Decades of research has shown that the way to make a computer application approachable is to make sure that the user can VISUALLY infer possible usage patterns. It's like having a map in front of you of where you are in the app and where you might go next. The best way that we know of to do this is with a GUI. There's a reason why GUIs won, kids.
"fitness" in a Darwinian context has the sense of what a hand does to a glove, rather than physical prowess. Those organisms that survive "fit" their environment better.
I wonder if you could sue Google EU?
doctorow doesn't have a "get rid of everything" position on copyright. i don't know where you got that from. He argues creators should still maintain a monopoly on selling their art.

but back to your original claim, you may not like his writing but you have to acknowledge that other people do. not only does he write, but he does so about important and relevant topics, and from a point of view too often ignored by a large part of society. in the very least, to write him off as a paris hilton is dishonest if not asinine.
First order answer: No, douchebags are. It just so happens that douchebags gravitate disproportionately to MBA programs (although the majority of MBA students and business people I know are not douches).

To present an undergraduate analogue: in elite colleges, which invariably and intentionally lack business programs, economics programs have a large number of douchebags in them who see "econ" (they never call it "economics") as a pathway to investment banking. Real economics students hate sharing classes with them.

In colleges with business programs, the douches tend to gravitate toward the business degrees, and leave the economics students alone. Just as with economics, which has many serious students, there are non-douchebags who also pursue business degrees and MBAs, obviously, and I'm sure they hate sharing classes with the power-seeking douchebags as well. A lot of really good people go through MBA programs into management. But douchebags also also follow that track, because they follow money and status; it's how douchebags operate.

However, it's not even accurate to say that douchebags are the problem, since there are about as many of them (give or take) as in any other point in history. The difference is that the post-1980s mainstream corporate environment favors and promotes those prone to overtalk, power-play, and "hunger" (corporate euphemism for greed)-- in other words, douchebags. Douchebags thrive in environments of superficiality, conformity, hierarchy, and opacity of contribution. So now you have a system where, despite the best efforts of business-inclined and talented non-douchebags to pursue MBA programs and management tracks, they cannot ascend in the majority of corporate hierarchies, because most companies have filled their upper ranks with douchebags.

MBA programs don't cause this problem. The money and status they offer attracts douchebags, but I've seen absolutely no evidence that they encourage more people to become such. Moreover, the problem isn't that there are more douchebags alive than there were, say, 30 years ago. The fundamental problem is that large, hierarchical corporations now select in favor of douchebags rather than against them. What degrees the douchebags have has nothing to do with this.
Which company has received the highest grade from RTM? Loopt?
"In reality it's the species that has an evolutionary fitness".

Sorry but no. Read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. Selection does NOT act on the level of a bee colony, it acts on the level of the individual genes to be found within that colony. So sure some bees are infertile, but they are in service of the genes of the fertile bees. They are in effect enslaved by the genes of the Queen bee for instance.

Some types of ants will raid the colonies of other ants, and kidnap their children, bring them back, and the kidnapped children were grow up in service/servitude to the colony which had kidnapped them, and join in on future raids of what was once their home nest. The kidnapped ants are in service to their captors, to the genes of their captors. Say for instance the kidnapped ants were black, and their captors were red(or the other way around), so, even though the kidnapped ants do not have the "red" gene, they are helping to promote the selective advantage of the "red" gene by joining in the hunt for the colony of their captors. It is not a matter of "colony a" being selected for over and above "colony b". It is rather the genes of either colony getting selected for over other genes. All life, from viral to the naked apes like us, are subject to "the tyranny of the selfish gene".
Skype for iPhone to Be Released as Early as Next Week
The open cloud manifesto is full of hot air anyway so this is no surprise.
Right. One of my clients has working sonofusion, but are currently spending several magnitudes more energy to produce the effect than they are getting for output.
That sounds a lot like what my ex-cofounder did. I resigned from the company.
sorry, It seems I can't edit it now. Is there a timeout?
Off topic but then I would presume that you do not know what marketing is. Marketing is not just about selling and shouldn't be. It is also about figuring what products people want and communicating it clearly to the people who build products.
Ruby on Rails has been accepted into Google Summer of Code
Just like Google Code was aimed, tangentially at least, at reducing the number of software licenses, it'd be a major coup for GOOG to establish a VM for languages big and small.
Review my dating startup: EstablishedMen.com
are you kidding me? I have to be cool. :P
I wouldn't say that.

I mean, I use Google nearly 24/7. They are by far my favorite company and generally their products are awesome.

I even still use Google Checkout for some of my friends' websites.

It's just that in this particular case it would be nice if they improved things a bit.
Do you really think so? Apple isn't enough of a competitor?
Isn't that market research? I used to date a market researcher - she was very touchy about the confusion between the two fields.
Um it isn't blatant copyright violation. Are you just not informed of all the bandwidth shaping that Comcast does? Comcast tried to block many legit uses of broadband. Also falsely claiming unlimited data while limiting both total data and you data speeds to be less than advertised.

I can't even run bit torrent to legal files with out my connection dropping speed or failing to connect to the torrent entirely.

I also don't think my internet provider should be looking at my packets at all so they shouldn't be aware of copyright or not, I demand and get privacy in my real mail, why can't I expect it online. Open others mail is a felony, but sharing my packets with filters from the RIAA so they can accuse people?
Most companies conveniently avoid doing a RCA (Root cause analysis) on why these folks were hired in the first place, who hired them, and who was responsible for created overlapping organizations.

Firing that person would really help Google, alas in most cases that is some VP making the firing decisions and is obviously not going to fire himself/herself.
The author seems to confuse dignity with bureaucracy.

If you don't have dignity, you are a joke. You'll know it,
your customers will know it, your competitors will know it.

Bureaucracy on the other will (slowly) kill any business.
Unless you have a legal monopoly.
Thanks for your insightful answer, Peter. I think a lot of entrepreneurs have to wear far more hats than what their strengths and/or preferences are. As you've said, I think one luxury of a level of success is to "retire" to one's preferred areas.

Side note: Having to do significant work in one's areas of weakness/aversion is what makes the initial phases of starting up disproportionately challenging.
Thanks for posting this. Since I haven't seen any positive comments about Checkout in the comments, so far, I figured I'd chime in.

I've been using Checkout since about January 2007 to sell digital resources through my site gmathacks.com. In that time, I've had thousands of purchases through Checkout with gross sales well over $100k.

Having had problems with PayPal before (not with this business, but a previous one), I was careful from the outset -- I generally err on the side of refunding people, I follow Checkout's procedure (click the "shipped" button, even though it's a digital product, etc.) to a "t," and I do the best I can with customer service in general.

My experience has, quite simply, been great. Checkout's algorithm seems to reject some purchasers more readily than other systems do (often, I think, because their IP doesn't match the country in their credit card address), which is better than a recent experience of mine through PayPal, when a $200 purchase was reversed weeks later because of a fraud concern. (Which turned out to be false.)

All the while, the fees charged have been way cheaper than PayPal's. (This, unfortunately, is changing. Depending on your monthly sales, Checkout fees are going up as much as 40% in the next month or two.)

I will say that little has happened to turn Checkout against me -- in 2+ years, my chargeback rate is just a shade over 0.1%. And as noted, I'm aware of some of the risks, so I've trod carefully.

All of this certainly isn't a defense for Checkout's (non-existent?) customer service and apparently faulty algorithms. But...while I'm glad to be aware of situations like this, I'll continue to happily use Checkout and recommend to others that they do the same.