skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is the benefit of the MS startup zone?

Doesn't it make it easier for MS to control you without actually giving you a payout?

I'm trying to think of this from the perspective of someone that fears MS as competition or desires MS as an acquirer or as someone who doesn't care about either. Why would anyone want it?
I think you are dead on; you need to find a job you enjoy. When I was a student I was lucky enough to do 6 co-op terms (internships).
During this time I learned that your actual productivity is not being measured. The majority of your performance is measured relative to other coworkers, and simply the perception on how smart and hard you work. On one co-op term, I was highly regarded, but only doing what I considered 2 hours of work per day. However, I was doing all they expected of me and continually asking for more work, so they thought I was fantastic. I was able to do this by working smarter, not harder. Another co-op term at a small company I was doing 6+ hours of work (again, from my perspective) and I did not get a good review at all. This was because I was doing about half the work of the other programmers there, who were very senior and experienced developers. Additionally, there were no opportunities to work smarter, I just had to churn out a lot of code in a very confined way.

So, I quickly learned that
a) your employer is judging your work on their perception of performance, not what you think
b) in order to excel, you need to be in a position to work smarter

All of this brings me to the conclusion that in order to succeed you need to be set up for success.
True. The reason I so deeply disrespect the man, though, is because with that 10 million dollars he has done absolutely nothing to advance the experience of people on his site.

It's also possible that he could take his huge customer base and monetize it more effectively by introducing new features and making the experience better. But he's so lazy/apathetic that he wont even write a script to keep the pictures the right aspect ratio.

Sure he makes 10 million dollars a year, he provides a great service, etc, but in the end he's not really contributing anything to society but a well-baked cake with dog shit frosting.
Brits, get your Euros now - Pound expected to drop
You sound exactly how I was. I don't think that its so much that you hate your work, but the fact that you're at a job. For some people more than others, the conditions of a job (9-5 every day, don't choose your own work) just dont work. I used to love my work but hated that it was a job, so I quit.

My advice is to find the most self motivated person you know, quit and do a startup with them. Your desire to work hard along with their relentless persistence will be a great combo. Also, working 14-15 hours a day is a breeze when its for yourself.

Until then use this to block the net at work
http://thingsilearned.wordpress.com/2007/05/04/combating-int...

Try skipping out on meetings as much as possible and work long but less days (your personal schedule) as much as you can. Push the boundary's, what have you got to lose?
Two more tips:

1. Use FreeBSD, not Linux; and if you must use Linux, benchmark the performance of new kernels before you upgrade to them: http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/os-mysql.pdf

2. Use PostgreSQL, not MySQL:
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/os-pgsql.pdf (compare vs. the mysql graph -- pgsql maxes out at about 30% more transactions per second).
The Trouble With Me and My Baby Carrot
As great as it is to make an affordable car that almost anyone can own.. This is going to create havoc for oil prices and the environment. Who's going to be riding their bike now they can zoom about in their car?
Adding physical movement doesn't hurt. Sitting at the computer for 8 hours is pretty boring if you think about it (and occasionally butt-cramp inducing).

I work on two computers that are spaced slightly apart, requiring me to frequently push myself from one to the other on my little rolly-wheel computer chair. Rolling is fun. Spinning is fun too.
I've got an OpenID account but have rarely used it, probably because there are few places to actually use it.
MS Shill (?version).0
Noble or savage?  Hunter-gatherers
2008: The Rise of Functional Programming: F#, Scala, Haskell (and failing of Lisp)
If this is all you have to show for 6 months of "combing Google", then you've wasted a lot of time.
Linux-VServer is an odd choice, since it appears to be less actively maintained and less popular than OpenVZ/Virtuozzo.
You got to hand it to them...the RIAA's website is something else
What came to my mind when I first read the paradox was that the class of ravens is closed whereas the class of non ravens is open. We have a definition of raven that's independent of its colour, otherwise we wouldn't be able to tell whether a particular thing is a raven, and thus, whether its colour is evidence for anything related to ravens at all. However, we don't have a definition for all non raven things, so the number of non-ravens is not merely large, as the article suggests, it is in fact infinite as counting needs definition to tell one thing from another. Drawing conclusions by induction from one of an infinite number of instances seems meaningless to me.

But there is another interesting question that arises from the Bayes explanation at the bottom of the article. If we had all things in the universe available and sufficiently defined to tell what is one thing and what is another, and we found that there are indeed no non-black ravens, that would still leave open the question of whether there could possibly be non-black ravens in the future. They could be born right in this moment, so there would be a race condition between making the statement and the statement being falsified by the event of a non-black raven being born. And I think that's one of the problematic things about purely extensional logic advocated by philosophers like Quine.
Yeah, I'm not outraged over it either. I suspect that MacHeist and the participating developers never anticipated selling as many copies as they did, so they didn't consider that MacHeist might walk away with most of the money. Since this is the second year, developers are probably a little smarter in their negotiations. I think it's worth discussing since "how to not get ripped off while starting your business" is a popular topic here on YC.

A few developers have reported that they got virtually no upgrade sales after MacHeist/MacZot:
http://reinventedsoftware.com/blog/2007/12/17/so-thats-why-i...
In 2008 it became compulsory for Norwegian companies to appoint a substantial number of women to their management boards
Time May Not Exist
Hopes of custom-built organs as scientists create beating heart
"Newcomb's Problem, for those of you with social lives, is this."

I have no life and I didn't know what Newcomb's problem was. :(
Google, the Search Party
Prepare to be assimilated... Resistance is futile. :)
Point taken. I did not mean to suggest that they are one and the same, just that they are both examples of measures that web services are taking to open their systems up. I agree that OAuth definitely seems to be inherently much more valuable.
It is beautiful - part of my point.
I don't get why this logic violates intuition. The proposed solution in the article is fairly obvious and intuitive. Just because two logical statements are equivalent doesn't mean evidence for one gives evidence for the other:

"The origin of the paradox lies in the fact that the statements "all Ravens are black" and "all non-black things are non-ravens" are indeed logically equivalent, while the act of finding a black raven is not at all equivalent to finding a non-black non-raven. Confusion is common when these two notions are thought to be identical."
Why would any startup join Microsoft's thing? They only give you their software. From the minutes I regret having spent on the site (the banner that says "we value innovation" tells you what you're in for) they give you software if you join. That's it. You have to run your stuff using .NET. It doesn't say anything about funding, lawyer time or hacker time. That is, none of the things they offer are better than what you can get for free at sourceforge. Again, this is what I saw in the first few minutes of browsing the site. If they do provide funding, then that's another story.
What are you hoping for?
I agree with all of what you say. That's why I paid $35 for 1Password. It stores all my passwords locally. It supports 95% of the sites in the world, today. It doesn't sit outside a firewall or accept requests from the open internet. It doesn't run on Windows. It is unphishable. It doesn't provide hackers, datacenter thieves, and rogue employees with a big tempting centralized target. It doesn't require me to figure out OpenID. When my laptop gets stolen, I will know immediately that it's time to change all my passwords, and hopefully the encryption will buy me the time to do so. The company will probably not be bought by DoubleClick and used to data-mine my login history (which, at the moment, it doesn't track anyway), and if that does happen it is easy and intuitive for me to just switch to something else -- or just switch to a notepad -- because I have all the passwords under my local control.

Is OpenID more secure than my solution? I mean, it's obviously less convenient and harder to understand, but perhaps it would be more secure.

I guess you could argue that my passwords are sometimes sent in the clear, when the site I'm logging into doesn't have HTTPS. Fair enough, but I wouldn't think that the marginal additional security of OpenID would matter too much in that scenario. Sites which don't support HTTPS can hardly be relied upon to be careful with my data, anyway.
Depends what you mean by straight. Without going to the bathroom? A good definition would be: without paging the problem out of your brain. I.e. you can go to lunch, but in a sense you're still working, because you're mulling over big questions related to the problem. In most kinds of work interruptions of that sort are net helpful.

Browsing the web, unfortunately, generally does page out whatever you were thinking about. I think it is a bad kind of interruption.

The way to work for long periods on something is to be interested in it. Few to no people have the discipline to make themselves work on something that bores them for many hours straight without paging it out. Probably none of the people whose work I admire do. Their trick is to work on stuff they like. That's not as passive as it sounds, though: you can often redefine problems to make them more interesting.
For example, if you have an otherwise boring piece of software to write, you could make it interesting by using it as an excuse to learn some new language or library; or by seeing how few lines of code you can write it in; or by trying to make it very fast.

I've found one sure-fire trick to make the programming interesting is to design the software as two components: a language for problems of that type, plus some code for this particular application. Defining languages is always interesting (at least for me), no matter how boring the domain is. Plus it turns out to be a good way to structure programs anyway.

Another handy trick, especially in startups, is to motivate yourself by using competition. Kicking a ball into a rectangular net is completely boring by itself, but it gets interesting when someone else tries to prevent you from doing it. With sufficient resistance, you have to become an artist to get the ball into the net. At Viaweb we loved making our software better than our competitors'. Even Robert could get excited about cooking up some new feature that would leave them scratching their heads wondering how we did it.
Nobody is avoiding your site because they have to remember a password. That requirement hasn't killed eBay, Gmail, Amazon, PayPal, Facebook, Plentyoffish, HotOrNot, news.yc, or any other site in history.

So what are you saying -- that because there are successful sites that require passwords, that passwords aren't a problem for users?

And this problem hasn't killed any sites that were really good? How do you know? Perhaps clever entrepreneurs can steer around the problem, but the point is that there could be a whole other class of apps enabled by a universal identity system.

I happen to work on a site where the user can derive a lot of value from getting recommendations, based on their social network. We do well, but our biggest problem is that a new user doesn't know how good it can be once they've done the work of creating their own network. All over again. For every site that they use.

The short-term answers are strategies such as you mention. Your points about delaying the need for signup are good advice for today.

The long-term answer to this problem is not Facebook, or for everyone to get acquired by Yahoo or Google or whatever. The answer is to create an open or otherwise portable social network -- manage in one place, use everywhere. OpenID, or something like it, will be required for this.

There are some big flaws in OpenID (the phishing problem for one) but at least some people are trying to address them.
"If we had all things in the universe available and sufficiently defined to tell what is one thing and what is another, and we found that there are indeed no non-black ravens, that would still leave open the question of whether there could possibly be non-black ravens in the future."

That's not a bug in Bayesian inference, that's a feature! It would be a mistake to ever assign a probability of 0.0 or 1.0 to any statement. It means you have infinite confidence in the statement, which is impossible unless you have a screwy prior distribution.

You also don't have to evaluate all of the data if you're giving a probability. You can just report your degree of confidence in the proposition based on the data you've evaluated so far, and this degree of confidence is called a probability.
Well, a company still living in the 90s should have a matching website.
Testing Web Apps Effectively with twill
It's like stock photos of board meetings propagated back into the real world...
Things Are Looking Good At Startup Schwag
Ask YC: Do you process bounced emails from your app?
Hi, we're in the process of building the bounce management piece for the emails that go out of our application. A key piece to make sure we don't look as spammers to ISP's. However, I have no idea where to start.

How do you guys process bounce emails for emails sent from your application. Any links to articles, tutorials etc. would be much appreciated. PHP specific articles would be even better.

Thank you.
Unfortunately, it depends on the boss you have. Where I work, it is required that you work 42 hours a week. No hour less, and you have to be there at least at 10 and stay to at least 4. No excuse.

Even though I'm sure I would be more productive by working less hours, I just fit in, and try to split my work over the 8 hours as the others do, do more pauses and chit chat. At the end I feel a little depressed, because I stay so long at work, and the day is over. I also have problems working for somebody's other pocket, in that case.

At my previous job, I could come and go when I wanted. And when I was there, I was extremely productive. SHould have stayed there ;).
Will be interesting to look at Norway vs Sweden, Finland, Denmark and other European firms in five years or so, and see if there is any impact.
it's not an accident that some of the ugliest websites on the internet (MySpace, Craigslist) are also the most popular.

This is way too simple to be true. Other sites, like Google, Flickr and the pre-F8 Facebook, made clean design a virtue.

MySpace is about user self-expression, especially for teenagers. Teenage bedrooms don't look like House Beautiful. Also, teenagers have a proven ability to extract signal from greater noise (no really, look it up; they really can read text on wacky complex backgrounds much better than oldsters). So their aesthetics are somewhat different.

Craigslist is not particularly pretty but the usability is very good. Everything is there for an obvious reason. And regarding the rather "default" look -- not only does this save on bandwidth, it actually helps usability. Designers should remember that if they even make non-underlined or non-blue links, they just lost a lot of unsophisticated users.

There's very little the user needs to understand, few barriers to posting or reading, and pages load really quickly. The Craigslist people are the masters of giving you 80% of the value for about 10% coding effort and 1% user effort.
A video of ferrofluid in action. A magnet is stuck underneath the dish of the ferrofluid. As the magnet moves closer, the strong the field, the smaller the spikes.
Less convenient? So, what happens when you're at a friend's house or public computer where you don't have your 1Passwd/Keychain database?

Plus, once you're logged into your OpenID provider, you don't have to enter your password for any sites which you already trust, until you log out. That's part of the advantage of a single sign-on system.

"Sites which don't support HTTPS can hardly be relied upon to be careful with my data, anyway." -- so, the vast majority of sites? People are going to use these sites either way. Most users don't even know what HTTPS is.

While it's unlikely an OpenID provider would sell out to DoubleClick, etc, if you're paranoid it's also very easy to use your personal website URL as a portable OpenID (it's literally two extra HTML tags in your homepage's header). You can either run your own provider using a simple prepackaged solution, or do what I do and just delegate to another provider, which you can easily change in the future with a quick edit of you homepage's header. Here's mine:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://tlrobinson.myopenid.com/" />

There's even WordPress (and I'm sure others) plugins to make this trivial for non-technical users.

I agree OpenID is a little difficult to understand (as evidenced by some of the comments here) but it's actually very easy to set up a simple OpenID (many people already have one and don't know it... all AOL, Technorati, LiveJournal, WordPress, and some other accounts are OpenIDs) and not too much harder to set up a delegated OpenID or run your own provider.

Here's a great little article by Sam Ruby: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-S...

I suggest everyone look into OpenID a little more before completely dismissing it.
Rare earth magnets for fun and profit
The stuff towards the end about ferrofluids is why I posted this. It's pretty damn neat.
You are 100% correct. I didn't point out that that 'ugliness' is not universal, and can co-exist with great usability.
Firm shows off functional Android build on ancient HTC hardware
Consider that if you're more productive than average, it is very unlikely your employer will pay your salary proportionally to your productivity. Taking it easy and leaving early is often the only way you'll recover this otherwise wasted effort and get a chance to recharge. Often I'll put in 60+ hours one week to enhance productivity in a project at work, then spend the next few weeks coasting on my effort.

Of course, in my spare "coasting time" I'm usually playing with new technologies and tools, so its hard to say that doesn't provide value to my employer in the long run.

The important thing is to guard your time jealously, and avoid an employer that pries too much into it, or wastes it with useless meetings. Find an environment that cares more about results than warm bodies in chairs for 8 fixed hours a day.
If two logical statements are equivalent, then yes indeed, evidence that implies one of them (in classical logic) implies the other one. The solution is indeed intuitive but is not formalizable in classical logic.

Classical logic does not, in general, jibe with the intuition: consider the case of the negative antecedent:

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/log/mat-imp.htm

For example, the statement, "If unicorns have one horn, then I am the Queen of England." is logically true.
Doesn't the statement limit itself to the present? "All ravens are black."
The Raven paradox is a good example of why we need Bayesian inference. The paradox is not a real paradox -- it doesn't imply true and false at the same time -- but it makes a strong case for a system that integrates degree of confidence through and through, as opposed to merely assigning true and false.
Tichy - oftentimes as a consultant you can work offsite. There are of course those contract gigs where they want you onsite, but that sounds like it would be just the same problem for you.

I'm the same way though... consulting has been great, so far.

You have to build up a network though and get the word out that you are doing it. I've been lucky so far.

If things go well I'll have made $13k in a month, even though the eventual idea is just to do enough consulting to do a startup.
The part of the Wikipedia article you quote has nothing to do with what you quote it for.
By comparing it to the Euro?
i read reddit for 4 out of those 8 hours on the job.
Redeeming Gifts vs. Redeeming Gift Certificates
Does anyone know of an online store (preferably with an affiliate program) that allows people to redeem actual gifts rather than gift certificates/vouchers?

Basically, I am looking for something that would allow a shopper to buy something for someone else and provide the recipient's email address. The recipient would then get a redemption code and an email with a link to the product-order page. The recipient enters the code to redeem the gift and provides his/her shipping address. Only then is the order completed.

The point of this is that the sender need not know the recipient's shipping address in order to send them a gift - but the recipient can still control what orders get shipped to them.

In case you were wondering, a) no - Amazon does not appear to support this feature; and b) I need this for an application that I am developing.

Many thanks.
I'd go with Dave Cole. From the Wikipedia article: "when one finds a black raven, it is a much more important discovery than finding a non-black object simply because there are fewer black ravens than everything else"

Finding a black raven yields evidence that all ravens are black.

Finding a green apple also yields evidence that all ravens are black, but very weak, much weaker than finding a black raven. It offers the same weak (and in this case misleading) evidence that all ravens are pink.
And I just bought a new watch! Frick!
Check the foldable display project too, it's amazing: http://hackedgadgets.com/2007/11/14/foldable-displays-and-au...
> it's not an accident that some of the ugliest websites [...] are also the most popular.

It just indicates that our sense of beauty is broken. Or more accurately, hasn't adapted for web pages evaluation yet.

My guess is that we use, to judge web pages, a sense of beauty that we developed for static graphic arts: painting, typography, advertising etc. It fails to take key points into account: a site's dynamic nature, its complex structure, its usability. My usual experience is that many sites which look shiny on screenshots are a PITA to actually use.
I've done a variety of jobs, from classic intro-job retail to working in a computer tape library to scoring essays to teaching to, yes, actually, programming. :-)

In my experience, programming is perhaps the hardest of the lot to do consistently, all day, day in, day out. Some days I manage to really get into "hack mode" and crank out lots of good code. Other days I can barely focus and don't actually produce much. I really think a lot of it is the cubicle, etc., environment, as my days spent programming in an office were generally better than being in a cubicle.

Either way, I had no problem working and staying on task while sorting computer tapes. But serious programming requires a particular state of mind and deep understanding of the problem at hand. The harder it is to achieve that each day, the harder it is to be productive as a programmer.