skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another alternative is to permit salary ranges that are a factor of 2 wide, meaning you can literally pay your "best" people (itself a terribly loaded/complex term) twice what you pay the average qualified employee at that level. Yes, paying someone 10% more than their peer isn't enough to recognize excellence. Paying them double probably is in many cases. Hell, even 50% over makes a marked difference in quality of life and is going to be both noticeable and relatively harder to match.

In my past experience, even at employers where everyone to the last employee was totally qualified, there was general consensus about who the top, distinguished cohort was, and to the extent that people were jealous or bitter, it centered around the fact that those people were better, not around the fact that they got paid more.

Even if nothing in a mid-sized company is truly done by individuals, I know the handful of employees that would really hurt to lose and the buckets full where we would be perhaps genuinely sad to see them go and wish them well in their next endeavor, but that I wouldn't lose much sleep over it. Survey 10 high-level managers, and the lists would line up pretty well I imagine. If that's the case in your org, and you aren't making damn sure that pay, within fairly BROAD bounds, isn't going to be a reason for the stars to walk, you're doing it wrong IMO.
It's biased judges all the way down.
Supposedly, there was confusion about what exactly "turning off GPS" meant, because on the G1, you "enable" GPS, but it doesn't actually do anything unless an app queries for geolocation data -- it doesn't drain the battery just because GPS is enabled. So you'd disable it and wouldn't have to worry that there was some app running that would drain your battery because it is using GPS. But there is a UI problem, somewhat exposed with the Maps app, with when you have it disabled, the app detects that and tells you that you'll need to enable it. Except the wording isn't straightforward, and the app doesn't handle turning it on itself (which may be a good or bad thing, if you've got it disabled in the preferences). G1's GPS setting does need some work, but it's good that it's getting some attention now that location based apps are increasing in popularity.
These stories make me ever more excited for the Pre. Palm's always been extremely open about third party apps. It's one thing to block an app from the "Official store." It's another thing altogether to prevent third party apps from being installed from everywhere except the official store. I suspect if users could install their own apps manually, all this hubbub would go away.

Of course, I couldn't possibly see Apple allowing this, for fear of someone else creating their own App Store app and developer submission network, without Apple's complete lack of written guidelines, and apparently inconsistent application of whatever it's own internal guidelines are.
"One Jump Ahead: Computer Perfection at Checkers" - How Dr. Schaeffer's team came up with Chinook, the program that became world champion at checkers. Later the team went on to solve checkers (like tic tac toe is a "solved" game).

Some of the book is about researching new algorithms etc, but a large chunk is about programming, debugging etc. Very enjoyable read.
This article is accurate, but lets be real, every 'tip' they have is for a very high traffic site. With the exception of the traditional caching mechanisms and external dependencies, the rest would be a waste of effort 99% of the time.

The purpose of this article is not to inform you about how to scale a rails app, quite the opposite, it is an article intended to intimidate you about rails deployment. The harder people think it is to do, the more 'value' EY is adding.
Netflix has said that they are more interested in retaining customers than acquiring new ones. People sign up, watch the stuff they can think of, then quit. If they reliably use the recommendation algorithm, they will stay profitable much longer.

If this wasn't their worry, the recommendation algorithm is counterproductive-- by giving consumers more movies to like they watch Netflix increases its own postage costs, etc.
The iPod touch already has a 600Mhz processor in it and the user experience is pretty much the same. I wouldn't expect anything mindblowing from a 50% speed boost.
That's actually a really interesting metric: the amount of effort per minute of video.

A quick mental runthrough of various video sites I've used suggests this would be an effective predictor of content quality.
Suburbs and Cities: The Unexpected Truth
I agree with you on the more startup reviews part. Part of it though is startups getting our attention - sending emails to news[at]mashable.com consistently work, since we read that account religiously. Also, weekends.
If the devs aren't hitting their targets, that's a problem. If they are hitting their targets, but you think they are capable of more then make the schedule more aggressive.

However, I should point out that thinking for a living is a little different than many other modes of employment - just because they aren't typing doesn't mean they aren't working.
I don't fully understand...why not just post your video to Youtube and then tweet the URL?
You're being downvoted because, by your logic, genocide can decrease net suffering. I'm not sure if that's incorrect, but I'm sure that no one likes hearing that.
Totally agree. His resume is pretty tough to beat, Apple, NeXT, and Pixar. I'd also argue that he has almost single handedly brought design to the forefront of the computer industry. Overall, a tough businessman who you can't help but like.
* While acknowledging that the administration's heart is in the right place, he pointed out that traditionally, direct investment in technology by governments doesn't work out well. He said the United State's subsidies on ethanol, France's decision to skip the Internet in favor of the state-sponsored Minitel, and Japan's direct investment in supercomputers as it tried to spend its way out of a recession were examples of poor investments. *

I'd be willing to say that VC's aren't really interested in government funded research because it actively competes with them.

I've been thinking about the roll of government funded research for a while, and I've been amazed at how much science is advanced by military and government funding. Take the tour at the Computer History Museum. I doubt that computing history would have been the same without massive government funding of Colossus and ENIAC. Where would the internet be without ARPANET?

Where would nuclear energy be without the Manhattan project? Where would chemical science be without the huge funding in World War I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_funding_of_science

Would our understanding of technologies like radar and sonar be the same without government funding? Would the semi-conductor industry be the same without government investment at it's inception? Certainly NASA has developed a few good technologies.
Ask HN: What % of friends on Facebook are friends?
I am a lonely nerd. I go on to Facebook and find people with 300 friends. How big % of those are anything close to real friends do you think?

I see a lot of people having contacts that are just like "went to the same high school and probably didn't ever say many words to each other".

I still find it depressing though but at the same time inspiring.
Depressing because it made me realize how lonely I am but inspired because it makes me think I have to do something about my situation. I want friends, I don't want to be alone.

But I'm not someone that you like 5 mins after meeting.
I don't think what you and others are implying is the case at all, I think it's pretty clear that the app store is being mismanaged and that the approval process is severely broken, but I don't think Apple is imposing it's oppressive will upon the masses. If that were the case, I think they would be more consistent.

I guess the real question is, did the other ebook readers currently in the App Store that allow access to the same material slip through the cracks, or was this a case of an over zealous App Store employee making a mistake?
I really feel like this is a bit of a puff piece. They are looking to license their patents but there are no takers.
In order to sweeten the deal they have partnered with a corporation with an office space surplus and some VC.
They will be making some money in there somewhere.
I am not saying it's all bad, it does sound like it will help the Finnish economy.
When was the last time one of these insiders was right about a product launch? They were blatantly wrong about the iPhone, Apple TV, the iPod, the iPod mini, the video iPod, and so on. The only leak I can recall was the unibody leak, and that was relatively minor. But people still quote these people, despite none of them doing any more than stating the obvious "Apple hasn't made a netbook or a tablet so maybe they're making one now".
You'll never get them to switch with something small. You need something that's uniquely better than the competition.
"just because they aren't typing doesn't mean they aren't working"

The harder the problem, the less time you spend at the keyboard relative to the total project time.
It seems to me that the marginal cost for an ebook is indeed zero. (Or very, very nearly zero: do you count the cost of the electricity or bandwidth to download it?) You disagree?
charity is about signaling your fitness to others

While this is undoubtedly a factor, it fails to be a complete explanation, given that much charity is anonymous, and anonymous charity has no obvious utility for signaling. It would also imply that those who are happily married would tend to be significantly less charitable, which AFAIK is not true.
The pictures add a lot to the list.
Last line: "It could be worse, they could be Apple."

Ouch. And that can't be something Apple is looking for either.
Why not just post your image to Flickr?
It looks like the .com (http://twitvid.com) belongs to someone else, does anyone else see this as a pretty big hurdle to adoption?
Certainly not. You use eyes to view.
Showstopper. This influenced me to join Microsoft and work on the same team as Dave Cutler
I think you are mistaking 'allowed' for 'able to'. I can't see how it would be called 'jailbreaking' if it was somehow sanctioned. It is like saying 'you are free to leave - if you can escape'.

> You just can't jailbreak your computer and then expect to download Apple's new updates

Image saying this in terms of your desktop. It doesn't make sense. There is no technical reason why why you should need to jailbreak your phone to be able to chose which applications to run on it. Receiving updates and using free software is not technically incompatible.
Has ANKoS had the impact you envisioned? If so, what are the most significant results that have come as an outgrowth of its thesis.
<em>Dreaming in Code</em>

Chandler Project.
I suppose the only real reason to use Twitpic or TwitVid over Flickr & YouTube would be for the Twitter-specific features. For TwitVid, I guess that's easy access to retweet, favorite, or reply to a video. For Twitpic, I suppose that would be the reply chains that appear below the pictures. I'm still surprised that's enough to make people want to use these services over the more popular/mainstream ones.
Ask HN: To Intern or Not To Intern? Share your experiences.
Has anybody had a really good experience? Why was it great?

I got burned by an internship last summer--essentially promised an awesome learning developer position, but got stuck doing data entry and trivial updates on existing projects. As you can imagine, after that I was hesitant to touch anything associated with the word 'intern.'

I'd like to hear about the differences of interning at a large company (Google/Microsoft/Apple) vs. small, young (funded) startups.

thanks.
the problem is the name...even on techcrunch article they are branded as twitvid, not twitvid.io
You actually use the compost?
If the author ever writes a vol. 2, and if karma correlates with startup success, then it looks like you have a good chance to be featured in it:)
It seems to still work correctly in 1.5 with Locale on my phone, but I honestly haven't paid too close attention to it. Perhaps they're planning this change for after 1.5?
I'd like to know whose idea it was for hyping Wolfram Alpha as a Google Killer
The logic behind the fees is essentially the same as a Pigovian Tax:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

It may not be "fair" but it results in widespread modification of behavior in a socially beneficial way.

Taxes on carbon fuels are not fair -- lots of firms built up huge infrastructure on narrow profit margins before such taxes were imposed -- but if you advocate a different policy what would it be? Every policy entails some "transfer" from one group to another. At least with a tax the incentive is clear and obvious moving forward, and precisely targets the specific negative externality it's intended to address.
Really well done, really well executed. The .com version might be dangerous, as people tend to type the .com intuitively, but these guys got the advantage of an early release...
The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle by Michael Shnayerson.

If that gives you a taste for how crazy General Motors is, follow up with On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors by John Z. Delorian. Less about tech, more about management anti patterns!
Idea Firm, Moons team@moonsideafirm.com
123 Unknown Street
Berkeley, CA 12345
US

If you can't even comply with the minimal disclosure requirements mandated by ICANN; I do not rate your chances in the highly regulated banking sector.
When I had my car accident, front end collision, which then spun the car around to hit the side, the front air bag didn't deploy, but the side one did.
Not everyone in the third world is starving. If you give out medicine and a poor person survives and has children, who also survive and live relatively normal lives, then I view that as a net gain. It's a mistake to simplify charity to 'giving starving people food.' Gates does a lot of work in healthcare, financial assistance, disaster relief, and even charity work here in the US. Most of the beneficiaries of these efforts may be impoverished, but that does not mean that they can't lead fulfilling lives.
The situation is much improved. I no longer get all the invitations and they were the most annoying aspect of apps -- as were the invitations required pages on so many apps (which actually got me to stop installing apps)
On twitter the guys own twitter.com/twitvid

owning @twitvid will also be super valuable to get ahead
Where I work (Cal State Long Beach), they decided to switcy form Blackboard (called Beachboard here) over to Angel another competitor. A month or so later, Blackboard buys Angel. Gotta love it. I was hoping our school would select Moodle, which is open source and used by some very big Universities.
Victorian Internet, Tom Standage

http://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteen...
Last I checked it was also rather buggy. As in, it messed up almost any time I attempted to add song to my library, couldn't handle songs or artists special characters, and the iPod support was iffy. I like the UI and addons, but it has a long way to go before being usable.
"4.Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing" - no, it's not. And such hubris can prevent knowledge discovery (besides the loss of reputation).
One very good reason is that it's way faster to upload to Twitvid and share stuff than Youtube. They auto-tweet it once the vid is done processing so you don't even have to wait.
His take on the singularity might be interesting.
About 80-90% of the people that are my Facebook friends are what I'd consider real friends. As in, if I saw them on the street I'd come up to them and start a conversation without feeling awkward or mentioning when we last saw each other. Then again, I have ~180 friends, not like 500+ that some of my friends have.
I didn't mention WinMo because I personally do not have much experience with them - the last time I played with a WinMo phone was very briefly, so I don't think it's wise to judge the user experience on it.

Ditto for Android, though my short few-minutes experience with it was somewhat negative, but that's mostly due to the obtuse hardware design of the G1 (recessed touchscreen?).

I do agree, though, that the UI gap is being closed at least somewhat - which is great news. It's about time that usability started being a buzzword in the tech industry and started being a real focus. Bear in mind, however, that "being able to load programs faster" and "being able to play more realistic games" are qualitative measures, which was one of the points I tried making with my original post: consumers care about qualitative things, not quantitative. The screen looks sharp? Great. Nobody cares about resolution. Likewise, the phone feels snappy? Awesome - still nobody cares about CPU speed.
Having never used TwitPic, I actually consider that a valid question.
What is the deal you are offering to an investor? How many customers? Do they pay a monthly subscription?
It looks great, but unfortunately, the plugin is Windows only (and I'd never install a random plugin anyway), and the Java-based demo won't work either since I just turned Java off (http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/macosx/CVE-2008-5353.2009...)
Snowball: The Business of Life
I think the way it's presented (the use of "pretending" in particular) is poor, but I think the idea behind it is good. Not knowing what you're doing shouldn't stop you from doing it, it simply means you have things to learn before you're done. If you're willing to accept that and seek knowledge and help where appropriate (and don't deceive others about it, as pretending tends to imply), behaving as if you know what you're doing is a good means of personal growth and getting fresh ideas into a project you're joining.
Ha, true. If it weren't broadly available information that you almost had to close your eyes to miss I'd never mention it.
> I'll assume you've heard all the counterarguments I want to provide right now, and simply choose to ignore them.

No I'm not ignoring them. I've heard them, understood them and disagree.

> If you want to be an ass online you're allowed.

So the fact that I hold a contrary opinion is being an ass?
A less weasely example might be the company simply deciding to take a loss or very low margin at low volumes to enable faster growth.

That might make sense for them because they have an open ended upside. It doesn't for whoever makes a cut.
Here's hoping, but I kind of doubt it. Correlation not causation, etc.
It seems like it's not the end of the world. Dropbox doesn't have dropbox.com, and they're doing well. It's a constant annoyance, but it doesn't kill you. What kills you is making something users don't like. As long as you make something users like, you can survive domain name problems.
I interned at BizRate when it was <10 people and at IBM; both were valuable for different reasons. In both cases I was doing "real work" which made it more fun. The differences between startups and bigcos are mostly what you'd expect; a startup has more camaraderie but startup people may not have as much time for mentoring since they're working so hard. What I found most valuable were the personal connections (it really is about who you know) and I think you can make more connections at a large company if you try.
You may be right... Some of the pages I found from Googling claimed that the "plain view" exemption also applies to hearing, smell, etc., but I'm having trouble finding an actual citation. The closest thing I can find is Kyllo v. US, where the Supremes said that you need a warrant to use thermal imaging to look for the heat of marijuana-growing lamps, even if you never step onto the suspect's property to use the imager.
The wonder that is India's election
All companies, given enough time, become stinky. Google already has a malodourous air about it. That Gates built one that still exists, that was formed 34 years ago in the tech space, deserves some measure of respect.
Commercial Real Estate - Tips For Investment
This is only true for the best schools with a decent amount of money. As bloomberg noted in a piece last month, a lot of schools on the cusp are in big trouble financially and depend on tuition to make up the difference. For most of these schools, students making under whatever the line is, don't get full aid like they might at Harvard, MIT, etc.

Also, this only extends to international students at, again, the best schools. When I applied for college several years back, I think it was only five schools that were need-blind to international students (they were also very generous with that aid). There might be more schools that do so now but I can't imagine it's substantially more.
Végre nem butulok tovább.
[Finally I am becoming stupider no more.]
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Ask HN: Most successful startups launched during tech conferences?
Demo, Techcrunch50, Web 2.0 ... you name it, tech conferences are (said to be) a great way for startups to go to the next level, network, find investors etc.

What are the most successful statups launch in this kind of conferences over the last 3 years :

- in term of profitability today ?
- in term of market share or other important metric of success ?

I think it's important to look back at those and try to understand what key aspects they share in common.
Currently, 10% ROI + 1-2% equity (suggestions welcomed). Now <5; hiring sales (we sell ad time/sponsorship, semi-pay 2 air). Email in HN profile.
On the contrary, video delivery networks (VDNs) have been recommending loading data this way for years, such as one that's routinely internationally FedEx-ing those cheap 2TB "network" drives back and forth in small white mil-spec shipping cases.
Default Behavior and the Internet Operating System
Perhaps, but you still need big peripherals to get work done. A screen and a keyboard at least.
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop. It's a very fun, easy, and interesting read of the origins of modern computing, the people who worked day and night to make their vision a reality, and the passion that carried their dreams to reality (the book, besides mentioning Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, also names people from Grace Hopper to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates).
In general, "Revolution in the Valley" about the making of the Macintosh. You cen feel the excitement of the team, and it goes into some fun technical details on how they created a GUI while everyone else outside research labs was still text-based.

For game programmers, "Masters of Doom" and "Dungeons and Dreamers". Both have a real human perspective on the people and companies they cover; they made me feel like regular humans, not gods, made games.
> It's called freedom.

Something consumers have, IMHO, overwhelmingly proven that they do not demand from their cell phones.

The tech industry if full of people building products for themselves, as opposed to the people they are trying to sell to. This obsession with CPU and RAM specifications, open access, etc, is just a symptom of this.
Why does he insist on taking sole credit for most of the innovations of his employees and underlings?
If you liked MoD, then you'll probably enjoy "Dungeons and Dreamers" too; and the "Postmortems" book from Game Developer.
What's wrong with the cleanup? I've never had a clog just rinsing the grounds right down the kitchen sink.
Google was on my mind when I wrote this. They've already lost it.

Microsoft isn't necessarily worthy of contempt, but I don't respect what they do now. They've lost it. Apple hasn't, at least not yet.
I don't think craigslist would be my first option for concert tickets. But for search I usually use my browser search box. Movies fandango, ruby news, ruby.alltop.com