skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree; also, this seems like the kind of copy that most smart companies would be measuring for conversion.
Example of not thinking clearly at 5AM with no sleep...
No.

I use Linux.
View source will only show the state of the HTML before Javascript renders the rest of the HTML. Check out the application using firebug (firefox plugin) and look at the HTML that is actually being rendered. Lots of div's for the layout of course and a few canvas elements (i think those are for the slide rendering).

While it may not be the most readable XHTML in the world - at least it doesn't use a plugin to do that work.
> That badge is/was on every page for companies that haven't set up an account with them

Yeah, the badge itself is an include in a template, good tools give you great leverage but they amplify your mistakes as much as they magnify your successes.

I could see that being a mistake of the "We didn't think through the consequences of what we were saying.", type.

OTOH I think 37signals is on the right tack by responding publicly because a private conversation would have had to start with a C&D over the use of their trademark in a manner likely to cause confusion.
It's not like it's an either/or decision to send a private email or post an accusatory blog post. They could have simply tried the mature way first and then posted publicly if that didn't work.

In fact, the public post would probably have had even more impact if they had been able to say "We contacted GetSatisfaction to work with them but they wouldn't cooperate." As it is, it just reads like another one of 37signal's invented controversies designed to garner page views.
pclark got the core of it. As for look/feel: part of it is a really concerted effort on the part of the guys that designed it to keep things as streamlines as possible; part of it is that they went over-the-top to add fun cartoony art everywhere.
How about this: what's an honest answer about how pissed you'd be if:

(1) I was the top Google search result for "RescueTime security"

(2) That page linked to a site where I collected security reports from end-users.

(3) That page had your logo on it.

(4) That page had copy that might suggest RescueTime didn't take the security of your customer's data seriously.

We've established that you'd come talk to me first (actually, by your wording, we've establish that I'd be hearing from your lawyer). But how upset would you be?
I'd probably think I'm done when I have no more strategies/energies/willingness to grow the company further. If you sell too early, you miss out on a good deal of the business' (future) value too.
3-D printing hits rock-bottom prices with homemade ceramics mix
Interesting points. My issue is with your contention that as a service company, you don't decide what goes into the software. This is where a web production/service agency can learn from the creative industry.

Such a service agency should position itself as an industry expert, one that clients turn to for solutions, not products. That is, if a client -- let's say, a chain of local gyms -- comes to you and needs a website built, it shouldn't be turnkey and you should expect to contribute your thinking to the end product, not just the code that creates that.

Not code monkeys. Inform and shape the final product, because you know more than your client. They need you for a reason. They don't know the best answer, you do. That's why they hired you.
Nobody has to, it just dominates the discussion on this forum.
How To Create Multiple Email Addresses In Gmail
Most of us own more than one email account , one from Gmail, one from Hotmail …Most of us are lazy and don¨t like to log in a lot of accounts It would be cool to have one email account where you can send emails from multiple addresses.
I dunno if you've ever worked in a small startup, but to think that all wording that gets out the door gets vetted all the time is just ridiculous. My startup is pretty careful, but we've gotten caught with mistakes or even placeholder content once or twice. Chances are, some lowbie at the company said, "Oh, this will improve the text, I bet. I'll make sure to bring it up in the next design review".

If a private communication as I described would've resulted in change (it would've), what extra benefit do we get out of turning it into an expose'? If it's a big monolithic evil company, I get the concept of a public spanking. But if it's a small startup, can't we give people just a LITTLE benefit of the doubt and try the polite path first?
You miss my point entirely. You can only conceive of the old system going, so you want to get the government to fund it. But there's another way: Let the market figure something out.

Governments can't do new things. They usually can't conceive of them, and if they can, they can't get them past committee.

The old system isn't working. Pouring more government money into it has no realistic prospect of working. For one thing, how can the "fourth estate" function as a watchdog if they're getting too much of their money from the people they're supposed to be watching? Your only hope of something that actually works is a truly new system, and the government can't come up with that.

But the market can, even if you can't think of what that may be and if I can't think of what it may be. It's not blind faith, every niche works that way. The government did not create the auto industry. The government did not create the electronics industry; it did not create the RAM industry or the CPU industry or the video card industry. It did not create the insurance industry, it did not create the furniture industry. It did not create just-in-time delivery or Amazon.com. These all came from supply on one side figuring out how to reach demand on the other, with all sort of creative chaos in the middle (and ongoing) that could never have been legislated into existence. (It can, on the other hand, be legislated out of existence.)

Why should the government prop up the current system instead of letting something new happen?

Nothing in my post had anything to do with "unregulated capitalism". It's simply how the economy works, and without this critical understanding, not only can you not go forward, you can not understand how we got where we are.
I'd suggest a really good lawyer who would look at the deal with an adversarial perspective before taking money from either of them. Just my two cents.
Thanks for the comments.

The O/R Mapper product generates sales primarily because of the support and the domain modeling tools we build into Visual Studio. It does help that the core framework is very powerful too but that was something we picked up early on - the code is not as important as the whole delivery (support, integration, documentation, etc).

Visual controls such as the WPF controls we sell require much less effort to move than our ORM product. I think corporates will still happily spend on visual things but are moving away from non-visual elements of application development such as O/R Mappers due to the quality of some open source offerings.
Great find! Much easier to work with. (But it did work on my system on that article; maybe it was just your specific browser config...)
Point taken - thanks :-)

This was actually part of some experimentation on my behalf. An earlier post had a subscribe at the start, the second at the end and this one at both the start and the end. It did feel a bit over the top but I wanted to see how it went.

Thanks for the feedback.
If sending mail requires CPU cycles, then spammers will steal cycles. If it requires real money, spammers will steal that.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork2.pdf
Why should it have to be handled on Get Satisfaction's support site?
Companies should not be responsible for payments to workers after they stop working. This should be the responsibility of the government - the companies should pay in while the person works with them, and when the person leaves, the government takes over all payment.
For me: Ubuntu/Debian VM image = same env for dev and deploy. Fewer moving parts.
Yes they do.

Which is unfortunate, because in some cases they are providing a valuable service.

This is one of those challenges that can make or break a company.
Emacs and Vim have ridiculous learning curves. Their practitioners wouldn't be so fanatic about them if anyone could unlock their powers in a day. However if you're ready to make a real commitment to learning it, you might get a great return on investment down the line. Learning about all the great programmers who favorite those editors might give you enough faith to give it a serious try.
What was slanderous (or, since it was written, libelous) about anything in the blog post?

Very simply, GS set up web pages where they appeared to represent another company in a detrimental way. That is <i>not</i> something the other company is obligated to quietly request them to stop - they are well within their rights to open up with a cease & desist order, not an annoyed blog post.
Oh man, I so wished this was true...

C'mon IE dev team please include the option to use different rendering engines and the ability to use Firefox extensions. Oh and make IE run on linux so I don't have to install a complete OS just to test mono platform software. Oh and have a chat with Mac Safari people so that they will start making cross platform software instead of their stereo software. I mean, isn't this supposed to be the dolby digital age. Too bad it's almost the first of April
Kill Your Darlings
You're absolutely right that that's how it ought to work. And when you have a good relationship with your clients you can sometimes get close to that. In practice it won't always work like that, but you can try to pick and choose your assignments and 'train' your clients to move in that direction.
Ask HN: Colleague has schizotypal personality disorder - should I advise therapy?
I recently learned a colleague of mine has schizotypal personality disorder (i.e. he scored over a 50 on a 0 - 74 test for the thing, STP-A I think it was). Apparently it is a schizophrenia-like disorder but more mild, without hallucinations all of the time. (http://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/schizotypal.html) Should I tell him to seek therapy - he seems more or less OK, if a little "off" at times. Unfortunately I don't know enough about this myself to have a gut feeling on the matter. Does anyone have any ideas on this one? (My colleague is a programmer.)
Pros and Cons of Web Products in the Chinese Market
Or operate a "Pepsi Helpline", for that matter.

I'm amused at all the "gee, he should have just emailed them" responses. The fact that 37Signals didn't lawyer up to start with was an act of restraint.
Facebook Sure Does Have Trouble Keeping Execs
"This issue is wrongly portrayed by both the liberal and the conservative media as one of management versus labor, when really it is a battle between General Motors past and General Motors present."

That is a really wise point. It very well may have been a battle between labor/management, but the real cost is clearly past vs present/future.
Talking with the GetSatisfaction guys on their Ustream: http://getsatisfaction.tv/

The badge has been up for about 2 weeks according to them. It was deployed with their redesigned header 2 weeks ago.
Totally OT, but aren't posts like this and other similar "I agree" posts redundant? I thought that's what the little up-mod button was for? This feels like clutter to me.
Survival of the loudest
The core issue seems to be one of transparency and the lag time for FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Accounting_Standards_...) to recognize that its rules had exploitable loopholes.

We have to be careful to differentiate between profitability and cash flow. If the GM of the 60's had been forced to purchase a unit of pension/retiree health benefits from a 3rd party for every employee-year worked, that decade's annual reports would have looked a bit different. And, the reports from this decade would look a bit rosier.

Since GM's future obligations were not obvious to investors, the stock price remained relatively high and GM was able to borrow money at favorable terms. Obviously, things have changed. So much so that even newer accounting rules couldn't keep investors from being afraid of the unknown. So, the Big3 negotiated VEBAs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Employee_Beneficiary_...) as a way of converting a seemingly unknown stream of future payments into a simpler scheme of definite ones.

The politics of this are interesting -- a bankruptcy would allow a judge to modify contractual provisions, an outcome likely unfavorable to UAW members. I suppose that these changes could include the recently negotiated VEBA payment structure?

Thinking beyond GM's current woes, I have often observed behavior in large companies and thought: If there was a single owner, and he was sitting in this meeting, he'd be screaming. Instead, because of screwed-up incentives, employees do stuff with dire consequences for the business. If GM's 60's era CEO had been a majority owner (and he expected the business to stay in the family), I doubt that the UAW contract would have looked anything like it did then.

I once heard a marketing manager say in a meeting, "I don't care about that revenue stream because we're already above plan there -- concentrate on the other one because we're below plan!" Compared to the latter stream, the former was likely 100x as profitable per dollar, and additional dollars were much easier to capture. When the accounting scheme is "variation from plan," it's obvious what you'll get.
No. British broadsheet The Guardian had a high-profile redesign in 2005 which shifted the newspaper away from the traditional broadsheet into a full-colour Berliner, and soon after the paper won multiple design awards and their circulation has increased while the rest of the industry has contracted. However, the devil is in the details: the newspaper has continued to make large operating losses (£26.4m this year compared to £15.9m last) and continues to be propped up by other businesses in the group.
That's true, but this is the internet. Just because the customer is not visible in this exchange doesn't mean that (s)he is not watching.
Ask HN: Please provide feedback for androidsnippets.org
Androidsnippets.org is a new website to share and review snippets of source code for Google's Android platform.

The project is based on the djangosnippets.org source code, updated for Django 1.0, extended by some features (OpenID, search, ...) and released under BSD the other day [1].

Currently we are working on the user interface and to make it easier to browse snippets and find interesting ones. Another idea is to display "related snippets" (eg. snippets with overlapping tags).

What do you think about it?
For me, it's b/c of the bad experiences I had with it. Packages never compiled correctly, I always got error messages which I'd google around for. It would take over an hour to finally install MySQL, Subversion, SQLite3, etc...

I must be an idiot if I can't do 'sudo port install PACKAGE' correctly.

Then I got a new laptop and just used the .pkg installer, way easier and faster.
Ebert has the kind of fame that can outlive his company's downfall. He'll just take over his domain name and keep reviewing, and his content will probably continue to be syndicated nationwide.

In fact, he might end up making more since he won't have to give the Sun-Times it's share.

Just because a company goes under doesn't mean it takes all it's assets with it. The good bits will be bought by someone.
http://www.androidsnippets.org

[1] http://www.4feets.com/2009/03/androidsnippetsorg-source-code...
I gotta say, that vim syntax highlighting theme looks awesome.
I failed to consider the variable of increasing health care costs and lifespans. These contracts were negotiated in the days when union guys all smoked and were expected to fall over from a heart attack well before age 70. Now, they'd get a $50K surgery and live to age 80.
Did he call it a magazine?
Why are you creating a hypothetical situation about security? Seems like a hypothetical situation about customer support would be more appropriate. The answer is (for customer support)-- moderately. But the question is: What's the goal with a response? To make them suffer? Or to fix it? How does it benefit my business to invest extra time/money to make another company suffer?

I think the grown up / smart way to respond to feeling pissed off/slighted isn't what 37s did. And it's not calling a lawyer. Or not at first.

If it was important to my business that the issue fix itself, I'd way the costs and benefits of assorted actions. Easiest thing is to pick up the phone and take 15 minutes to politely explain our position and ask for a timeframe for resolution. If didn't feel that was going to solve the issue, I'd go the expose' route (which, as someone else mentioned-- carries a lot more weight if you can say, "I privately asked them to fix it and they pretty much told me to fuck off"). If that didn't work, I'd decide whether it was worth the $300 to spin up a form letter from my lawyer. And if that didn't work, I'd decide whether it was worth it to spin up a lawsuit (in terms of time and money).

Being "pissed off" shouldn't enter into business decisions. But, again-- I don't think 37s' decision to take this public immediately was not motivated by anything but self-gratification (unless you want to go meta and credit them for a great linkbait play).
I look to the 401K/403B as one answer that meets your criteria.
Why does the government need to pay for them? I understand issues like social security and medicare, but shouldn't the employees have been saving for retirement in the first place?

I agree that the company should not be expected to pay for work not done, but these payments are essentially part of the benefits package agreed upon when the employee started working. It was probably unwise for management to agree to those terms, but it's no different than police and firefighters who receive checks into retirement. It's delayed payment for their commitment to the organization.
Next up on Ask HN:

* My colleague broke his leg - what sort of cast should I recommend?

* My colleague is coughing a lot - should I tell him to take antibiotics for pneumonia?

* My colleague is having chest pains - should I recommend open heart surgery?

Dammit, we're miracle workers, not doctors! (Apologies to the real McCoy.)

More seriously -- if you're concerned about someone's health (mental or otherwise), feel free to politely ask if they have consulted a doctor; but please leave the diagnosis and any treatment decisions in the hands of medical professionals.
Aagh, I had a ridiculously thorough reply, which I promptly lost when I closed gedit. The messy, truncated version:

I'm guessing that you play piano (in regards to the "novice" part).
Marsalis is a jazz sax musician; the Marsalis family is probably the closest thing that jazz has to a household name these days. The point I was trying to make with him is that instrumental music training rarely has such a limited scope in terms of genre: in the case of piano, even the most hardcore classical-focused piano teacher would still have their students dabble with Scott Joplin or whatever.

Einaudi does comtemporary classical piano / string arrangements, sometimes with a mix of digital / world type stuff for ambience. "Giorni Dispari" is the first song of his that I heard, probably one of my favorites of his and not particularly hard to play if you can find sheet music: http://tinyurl.com/dnj7t3

I haven't played much lately, as I'm currently a sleep-deprived college student living in an apt. Last two songs I remember working with are Carly Comando's Everyday (you can actually buy the sheet music from her directly on her MySpace page for a few bucks) and Greg Maroney's Castle of Shadows. I've developed a serious bent for modern / minimalist stuff lately. My favorite piece I've ever played is Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor; that song is a beast. It's definitely for the less experienced though, I doubt I'd be able to play it now without taking the time to get my skills back up to where they were.
thanks. interesting stuff. I had no idea google even tried to negotiate with record producers for this kind of stuff. (US, Europe)
Doug Bowman, former Visual Design Lead at Google, joins Twitter
Being able to manage "feeling upset" is generally considered a good thing, no? Or are we supposed to give in to our feelings every time we feel upset?
For starters he implied (and borderline accused) GetSatisfaction of blackmail and extortionist practices.
Actually, according to the founder of the company (and, more importantly, the Internet Archive), that wording changed with their most recent release.
What? Some random guys put nonsense like "37 signals is not committed blah blah blah" and 37signals should be polite with those bastards?
And in case you missed the news, 37signals' main income is not ads on their blog, they have pretty successful web app business. Posting that for "generating page views" sounds ridiculous if you know at least a bit about the company which posted it.
While I could potentially agree in premise that a bridge may qualify for stimulus money I can't imagine what they've proposed is the most fiscally responsible way to build it. If they truly believe that the bridge qualifies for stimulus money then they should provide the most financially modest plan that would accomplish their goals. I highly doubt that a 36 million dollar bridge is it.
Ignoring the effect of McColo, I wonder how the recession has affected spammers. Are they making more money or less?

People "down on their luck" might buy more dubious crap. Businesses in more desperate times might use less "palatable" marketing than they normally would.
Actually there's a lot of overlap between those battles: much of the problem with GM past is that they caved in to unions.
Or a Squeezebox Boom.
I think you are missing the point of his statement. His discussion of making money for his shareholders is in his role as a CEO. The CEO of a company has a very different set of obligations and interests than an entrepreneur starting a business. When you are the chief executive officer of a publicly traded corporation, you have a specific duty to your shareholders to act on their behalf and to benefit their interests. That is the nature of the position. As an entrepreneur if you passionate about your business, then it will likely succeed and therefore benefit your investors. If you have little passion for your business, it will likely fail therefore significantly hurting your investors. So there is no contradiction.

Furthermore, your hyperbole about buying his businesses for $1 is ridiculous. It is obvious and implied that he intends to sell the business at a profit and not at a loss.

I do agree with you when you state that you'd rather sell your business when you decide you're "done" with it. That is great in a perfect world where you are not publicly traded and have no obligations to shareholders or investors, but the bottom line is that if you are elected by the board of directors to serve as the chief executive of your corporation, you have to act in their best interests, not yours.
Phil Greenspun had a blog posting (which I can't find) which basically argued that demand for new vehicles ought to go down as their lifespans increased. Today, a car with 100K miles is still considered reliable, especially a Japanese one.

GM and all the car manufacturers benefited from suburbanization, highway construction, working moms, and increasing family incomes. But, what additional forces are there that will drive future increases in demand? Population growth? The US grows primarily though immigration, and we're becoming even more restrictive. More vehicles per person? There are few people who don't have a car who want one, save for the poorest of Americans. Overseas demand? This looks good, but other countries are bringing cheaper, localized production online. So, as cars last longer and longer, the industry should expect demand to drop.