skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are incorrect that "they could [sic] give a shit" (you probably meant couldn't) about wealthy Chinese citizens. With affluence comes influence. Maybe if we were talking about factory labourers they would not care, but when a country's wealthiest citizens are in mortal peril you can bet your ass there will a swift response.

You are correct that trade relations are key here, and I omitted this 800 pound gorilla. Thank you for the addition.
This is The Biggest Lie Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves (tm).

You hear about the fact that only 10% of startups succeed, but you tell yourself "I'm better than them". pg himself reinforces this notion by saying things like "some founders have a 0% chance of success, others a 95% chance".

pg is right, in a sense, but there is very little way for you to know whether you really are "better" than others. Very few people actually know what makes a startup successful, so there's that. On top of which, the people who are taken into account in the 10% statistic includes, among others, people who are building their 5th startup, the sons of highly influential politicians, personal friends of movie actors, etc. It includes people 30 years in a particular industry, with tons of insider knowledge, who decided to build a product in that industry. And it includes other 21 year olds with stars in their eyes, and nothing more.

This isn't to say "don't build a startup". That's a different conversation, and depends a lot on your goals in life.

But most people are in the startup game at least partially for the money. And for the purposes of calculating your potential earnings, unless you have a good reason why you're special, pay attention to the damn statistics!
People using Windows (I don't know about Linux) think that Caps lock is Shift lock. Wrong. It's Caps lock. And that's pretty useful.

On OSX French keyboard, Shift-é would give 2, Caps-lock+é gives É. That key gives straight and easy access to uppercase diacriticals: é-É, è-È, à-À, etc. And when "UNTEL ACCUSE" means "some guy accuses", "UNTEL ACCUSÉ" means "some guy accused". It's pretty important.
Bessbrook 'pipe bomb' explosion part of traveller feud
Also, instead of fixing the stand up, his solution is to generate a whole bunch of crappy paperwork for the team lead (email, pdf stored somewhere, blah blah).
Lack of freedom is maybe a reason to reject responsibility for one’s own society, but neither a justification nor an excuse. Being allowed to reject such responsibility on the basis of a lack of freedom would make it too easy for the general public to blame a select few for crimes committed by the state whilst enjoying their results just as well.
Yes, the qualifier was important. As I stated elsewhere, with affluence comes influence. If we were talking about factory labourers, China would obviously care much less about their fate. When you are talking about people that make up the upper echelons of government and industry - the people in control of the decision making apparatus - their fate becomes much more important.
It takes a lot of artillery to flattern a city, and the DPRK doesn't have that many guns that can reach that far, or many artillery positions within 55km of Seoul. While they also probably have nuclear weapons, it's unlikely they have any means of delivering them yet.

The DPRK could potentially cause a lot of damage to civilians, but they cannot win an offensive war. The question is whether they're crazy enough to try.
That is an interesting perspective, and again raises the question of contingency recruiting as a model. The company is paying for the service, so I guess you could equate the company as the seller paying a commission on the price. But the buyer (candidate in your model) and agent (recruiter) are the ones trying to drive price up (higher salary), which isn't how buyers act. I don't think that mentality is really prevalent in the industry, and the analogy seems to offend technologists. If there is a better analogy, I haven't found it yet.
How do you achieve that?
It sounds to me like you are doing your standups wrong. The job of the facilitator (in your case, the team leader) should be to keep things moving, and ensure that you aren't taking 30 minutes.

The most important thing to get out of the meeting, IMHO, is challenges, as status should be evident by the location of your story tickets. The problem with providing an environment where "Others can skim-read or ignore." is that they often will, and peer challenges can easily go unresolved without adequate feedback.

You are standing for a reason - its uncomfortable (for those of us who sit all day). Your facilitator should be roping in the conversation (and if not you need to replace them - rotating among team members often works). If that doesn't work, then your teams are likely too large.
> Well, food is one reason. China, NK being almost cut-off from most of world, practically feeds NK and some other nations keep sending ration in aid from time to time.

Even the DPRK has enough food reserves to last a few weeks, which is how long the war would last before they were destroyed from one side or the other.

> China was one support that helped North Korean Kim family rule NK for so long and strategically keep the nation cut-off from rest of the world, effectively pushing it into a modern stone-age.

That was all set by Mao and Stalin, who weren't exactly the most well meaning cookies in the jar. Recently the relationship between the PRC and DPRK has been less happy.
Fisics and Phynance
I am pretty strongly against micromanagement and process-for-authority's-sake. However, I think Standup is a necessary evil. It sucks. But it just might suck less than the alternative, which is opacity (which gives power to management). Standups deserve some kind of timer, though. One minute per person, and split the standup if it gets beyond 10-15 people. Everyone should also have the right to opt-out.

Here's why Standups can be powerful and, actually, a bit subversive. They create Common Knowledge (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic) ) of what you are doing. That's different from shared knowledge. Shared knowledge means everyone knows it. Common knowledge means everyone knows everyone knows it (and, recursively, everyone knows everyone knows everyone knows, and so on...). Bob knows you are getting useful work done. So does Tom, your boss. But, thanks to Standup, Tom also knows that Bob knows you are getting your work done. At least in theory, this limits Tom in his ability to isolate, disempower, disparage and ultimately create cause to fire you. Standups move authority away from managerial hands. They're not intended toward that effect, but if they work well, that is something they accomplish.

(Of course, in a closed-allocation company, your boss can just give you impossible or extremely boring work if he wants to flush you out.)

It also needs to be made clear and constitutional that the daily standup is the only status-reporting overhead, except in a production crisis. If there's Daily Standup and your boss gets to interrupt you regularly with status pings (which is a show of power; he probably won't even remember that he asked you, just like people look at their watches but forget to read the time) then you're just getting screwed.

Also, I agree that standup before 10:00 or after 4:00 is just shitty. I'm usually up at 6:00 am, but the idea that you have to have the same schedule as the boss to be a worthwhile human being is just garbage.
I think its most impressive to actually run the demos themselves. On this site are some good examples: http://awards.scene.org/archive.php?year=2011&cat=9

Edit: It would be intresting to see demos like this (4KB / 64KB) for WebGL. Does something like this exist already ?
+1 Our 6 man team takes also 10 minutes the most. Everybody knows from previous work experience how annoying long meetings are. So we really just talk what everybody is going to do roughly for the upcoming week and coordinate if somebody needs to talk to another team-member for a bit longer.
So everybody knows what's going on, but the details are discussed separately.

It seems like in his poisonous meetings there is too much detail for everybody.
When its war, they aren't going to sacrifice any intelligence/surprise advantage to preserve a few tourists, that is true for either side (PRC, ROK, DPRK, USA). It doesn't matter who these citizens are actually, and its probably not the "country's wealthiest citizens," those are either safely at home or in Hong Kong. We are talking just about a few rich business men at most.
What did his billionaire status have to do with anything?

I know why you said it of course, that kind of wealth has a stigma these days. And what could be more obnoxious than a billionaire CEO!

There's no evidence Jobs coveted being a billionaire, he didn't make an effort to show off his extreme wealth, and he didn't go out of his way to brag about it.
>To write DSLs? You cannot use JSON to create new syntax for your language. The whole idea of DSLs is to extend the language for the problem at hand.

I'm not that sold on DSLs. I have a language (the base language) that people know, has certain semantics, etc.

Now I suddenly go on and add a new mini-language on top of it, with my ad-hoc semantics for the "problem domain"? Why multiply the languages used, so that someone would have to reason and understand both, instead of just one?

I could just use the functionality of the base language, AND it's syntax/semantics, to model the problem. I.e with objects in an OO design, with functions, in a procedural design, data and first class function in a functional design etc.

I don't really like all those Ruby DSLs for example, like for testing, were you have to learn each one ON TOP or knowing the core language.
"middle class(if there's one)"

Whilst Western definitions of middle-class tend to involve our economy in some way, the best I could manage would be those living in the cities and towns. They get (not brilliantly reliable) electricity, access to healthcare, housing that varied from buildings genuinely I thought were abandoned up to blocks of flats that weren't in too horrific shape. In the cities there was some (overcrowded and often dark) public transport. Towns relied on bicycles and lots of walking.

The majority of people were those living in villages. I passed these over and over again on the roads (by which I mean, I could see them from the road - they were usually NOT on the road network themselves, presumably by design). Buildings were of brick or other such material. Vehicles extremely rare. Oxen extremely rare (and clearly prized as ploughing tools). Three-person ploughing teams depressing common (looked like a shovel and two ropes tied to the head - one person jams it into the field, everyone lifts it and turns the earth, everyone takes one step forwards and repeats, over and over and over again). I didn't see much evidence of electricity in these villages. They're effectively cut off; there's no way for Kim Citizen to decide to wander over to the next village. Rivers used for washing clothes. People walking a long, long way to the fields they were working. The number of people engaged in working the land was enormous. For someone from the West used to the idea that a very small percentage of the population need be engaged in actually growing the food, it's a shock to see people in the 21st century farming effectively by hand. The evidence of the famine and also massive deforestation is clear if you look. Every scrap of land that someone can can reach and might support crops is being farmed. There are vast, vast numbers of saplings with little white stone circles around them (presumably to mark it). In the last decade, they were clearly in a very bad way for solid fuel.

I agree that keeping the population in the dark is a very effective means of control. The locals I met were very keen to flick through what magazines etc I'd brought with me and wanted to know simple things about my life.

There was a famine before, and it didn't end the regime. There is a persistent myth that if a people gets hungry enough, they have a revolution, but it didn't happen in China and it didn't happen in the DPRK. I would be hesitant to think that simply cutting off the food would be so effective in quickly changing the DPRK foreign policy.
Thanks for the creating YC Universe. It was a great resource for us to reference. Our startup has a clickable prototype that we are sharing with investors. But we would appreciate a link to http://thrivestreams.com. Our private beta is on the cusp and we would love to have more people sign up. Thanks in advance!
I tried analysing data using persistent homology. What is not obvious, although they do admit it in one line of every paper, is that is it susceptible to noise :( So it has to go in the bin even though I really want to know what my manifolds look like!
Of course there are larger geopolitical issues at play... Economically, China has no reason to defend the DPRK and every reason to maintain trade relations with South Korea and the US.

And, China obviously does not want the US to have even more of a foothold, and they obviously do not want the burden of absorbing North Korea into China... Which is why I said the end-game for Chinese interference would be installation of a new puppet regime.

But yes, rich tourists are very very important. There is no better rallying cry for interference than affluent citizens being killed. Do you honestly think that the Chinese government would be able to brush off the hundreds, if not thousands of Chinese casualties in Korea?
This is a good point. It happened to me for one of my very occasional HN posts, in which I presented our startup idea to HN for feedback. It was flagged for no apparent reasons while on front page top, and this impaired quite a lot its visibility. I'm not implying there were any deliberate malicious attempts, or organized obscure interests, behind flagging it, but as of today, I can't understand why it was. It would perhaps be useful to include a mandatory short motivation whenever you are flagging a post, which may be automatically delivered to authors' HN profile, so that they may be able to more easily understand the reasons behind the report.
oh and by the way, one of the mice is called Algernon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon#Short_stor...
Thanks Lucas! Best of luck to you too. Did our tips line up with your own process? I'd be interested to here what other resources and references other use.

I suggest using iPG (http://www.jamescun.com/ycs12/) to prep for an invitation for interview for your team.
Lack of freedom is maybe a reason to reject responsibility for one’s own society, but neither a justification nor an excuse.

They're not rejecting responsibility. It's not as if they used to be fully in control and one day decided that they'd have a go instead at being prisoners of the state, utterly powerless, to see how that went. Nobody allowed them to reject responsibility.

Being allowed to reject such responsibility on the basis of a lack of freedom would make it too easy for the general public to blame a select few for crimes

Are you serious? You want to hold people responsible for something they didn't do and had absolutely no control over? If that's how it is, then YOU are also to be held responsible.
> (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail).

I tend to uninstall vi and install ed on my machines, it is just enough and about 90% smaller! :)
This guy is seriously suggesting replacing stand-ups with management and paperwork? There's something very wrong here, but that was already clear from the objections.

"30 minutes", "action points", "notes", "weekly update"?

Seriously, I know that "you're not doing it right" is the standard lame excuse from Scrum-evangelists, but this paints a picture of doing pretty much the opposite of Scrum.

Especially the emphasis placed on the "weekly update" is a big red flag, suggesting this team is doing something that isn't even close to being Agile. Agile and Scrum are supposed to be about delivering working software, and in the case of Scrum it's strictly time boxed. Weekly updates suggest micro-management and/or not delivering anything shippable.

Only the 10:00 versus flex time is a genuine issue. We have a very simple solution for that: if you can't be there, mail it in (or use HipChat). Yes, this also applies to people who start early and are deep in the zone by 10am. It's not supposed to be a two-way conversation anyway, just quickly syncing up.
Live music programming in Haskell
I'm interested in what people think of this type of course vs. some of the interactive guitar learning software out there?

Rocksmith - http://rocksmith.ubi.com

Rock Prodigy - http://rockprodigy.com

Ovelin - http://ovelin.com

Jamstar - http://jamstar.co

Miso Media - http://misomedia.com

Instinct - http://getinstinct.com

Disclaimer, I'm a cofounder at Instinct.
My team right now has around 30 members in the sprint. I've checked with some of the experienced Scrum master in my company, the ideal member is around 4 - 6 person. Even having 7th member's slow things down in his experience. And this is not on just the standups, it applies to daily operations as well.

My take here is that we should have much smaller teams and if possible have Scrum of Scrums to handle bigger project. However, I know that this might not be possible for some since some project tends not to have a good demarcation on what should be in which teams.
Who's dictating 10 o'clock? Standups can be e.g. just before or after lunch, or in the afternoon. The team should be able to agree on a time that works for everyone. And if that really is impossible, then use Skype or similar to include people who are still at home.

A six person team should be able to be done in less than 10 minutes. If someone gets off topic or rants on about details, stop them, and perhaps suggest a meeting afterwords.

You solution totally ruins the dynamics of the standup.
WordPress.com is down
I don’t use a ring of any kind on my phone. Path CEO
There's probably an app (that has probably been done) in there for making the screen show in hues of red. Or, if not an app then a screen protector that's a gel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_gel).
How is this supposed to work given the JVM does not support tail calls?
No, functions do the washing. Macros where used in the factory by a designer only.
The situation is not so delicate that China would be able to brush off these deaths for strategic reasons. I'm not even sure what you think a strategic reason for China biding it's time would be. A vague reference to intelligence/surprise attack doesn't really mean anything. A rapid response from the north is an automatic loss for North Korea, there will be no waiting.
Oh dear. Everywhere I read the horror stories and every person who has been there says the same. The people their have actually no choice. That's the reason they won't even have their Korean spring. In comparison Africa and Arab is luxury then.

I guess the big emancipators ought to rather emancipate them first!
Colour Energy Orgone 3 (CEO 3)
Our Weekdone (http://weekdone.com/) service is meant exactly for what you propose, although more on a weekly paradigm. Many of our users have switched from regular standup meetings to an online weekly process. And even if you do the meetings, distributing plans, progress and problems ahead to the whole team can be a huge timesaver.

We currently have only daily progress input via e-mail at Weekdone, but are looking at providing daily e-mail summaries as well.

Appreciate any input how to make a process like that better in a web/e-mail/mobile service.
Isn't reddit basically what you're thinking about?
Is Facebook testing a new Tab Bar UI for its iOS app?
In my experience while standups are often tedious and need to be kept short, if someone wishes to stop having them or seeks to avoid them it is a worrying sign for a team player.

If the person in question can't be coached to collaborate with others then a role where they can be a sole contributor may be better.
yeah, it failed for mee too a couple of times. I also got an error from Facebook twice. Probably one of their carriers or a CND issue
Get window height on mobile Safari
I have this deeper in the thread, but I'll repeat myself:
go take a good look at http://justinguitar.com/
He offers beginners [1] and intermediate course [2], technical stuff, jazz staff and much more. There you will also find recommendations on how to learn, what and how to practice.
Justin has been teaching guitar for a long time so he knows what's important, what people struggle with and what to pay attention to. You will also find some songbooks for purchase and some free video lessons to accompany them. Highly recommended.
No affiliation :)

[1] http://justinguitar.com/en/BC-000-BeginnersCourse.php
[2] http://justinguitar.com/en/IM-000-IntermediateMethod.php
If you have a six person team and you all speak for half an hour then you are definitely doing it wrong. You should ideally speak for no more than a couple of minutes.

Standups that routinely last longer than 15 minutes need to be corrected. Either split the team, don't have everyone talk every day or find some other way to cut time.

An email is not a terrible substitute if someone is working from home, but part of the value of a standup is that you can quickly ask questions and get answers right there and then.
I would disagree on this. This is the second comment about having no interest in salary, and that seems to be a fairly serious misconception about most recruiting.

I'm not sure where you are located, but in the US most recruiting is done on a contingency basis, meaning a fee is paid only if a hire is made. That fee is almost always based on a percentage of the employee's starting salary (could include bonus as well). Fees have a wide range, but during my career I have seen them everywhere between 15 and 33%.

The counter argument is that contingency recruiters want to close the deal, otherwise they don't get paid at all. Is the easiest way to close a deal, and to make sure the deal stays closed (see "counteroffer"), to get the candidate his/her minimum acceptable level? No. You are doing both parties a disservice if you do that.

You are doing the candidate a disservice by only trying to achieve the minimum. You are doing the client a disservice because although they may get the hire, the deal is not as secure as it would be at a higher number (again, see counteroffer), and if your goal as a recruiter s to help clients both attract and retain (key is retain) talent, they are better off paying a bit more to make the hire happy on start and less likely to be poached by someone else.

If I know a candidate's minimum, achieved via some proxy ('Dave, I'll accept at 120 and start May 15', it is fulfilling to call that candidate and say 'Remember when you said I could accept at 120? Well I got you 128. Congrats!' Happens all the time, and feels good every time for the candidate. On the other end, I'm coaching clients about retention and not just getting someone on board.

The biggest benefit to a recruiter (or any intermediary) in negotiations is a buffer. I've seen candidates do some incredibly dumb things in negotiation, such as asking for 150% of what they really are worth and expect to get, just to 'start off negotiations' - as if this were a good tactic. What happens if the recruiter isn't there as a buffer? The candidate makes the proposal, and the company says no thanks and let's just pretend we never met.

Other side is a client will call and say 'your candidate was making 80 at the last job? I'll go as high as 90, but offer 60 just do see the reaction.' My response would be 'the reaction is going to be an annoyed candidate who now feels lots of time has been wasted. Lets not screw around, get serious about this.'

Without a buffer, neither of these deals happen, yet both parties were willing to accept the terms of he other. If you think this is rare, you haven't been involved in enough deals with enough people yet.