skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Um, he did say being involved in the chatting. So, presumably, he's well aware of why they are chatting and what it's about. I find that this is true of me, too. I get drawn into all kinds of conversations in person which are ultimately useful only for being friendly and producing a friendly atmosphere. This isn't completely useless (and is sometimes very important!), but it's also astonishing how often I look back at long conversations I had and wish I could get that time back, because the whole conversation was about nothing in particular.
Ask HN: start on my own or negotiate with the employer?
As an employee I work for a small software company developing a SaaS product, and I see a lot of opportunities to make this product much better. After all we use it on a daily basis and we’ve got plenty of experience with it. I am not talking here about incremental improvements in usability or coming up with some new cool features (although these too). There seems to be a better way to solve the same problem which the product already does by changing the product’s philosophy, its core principles and building new features on top of it. As you may guess this would require a major overhaul, or even more – complete rewrite. If this would be not enough to you, I am not satisfied with the current development platform and thinking about changing it.
I have been thinking really hard and evolving this idea for the last several months and very passionate about it. I haven’t noticed someone has already implemented it, but I’m sure, if done properly, it would become a hit.
Now, what should I do with my idea? Do I have to start working on a new product on my own, or should I go to my employer and convince him there’s a better way to make the same product? There are pros and cons going both ways. If I work on it on my own, I am sure it won’t be stolen and I will have freedom to implement it in the way I see it. But I will have to start a new company from scratch and attract customers one by one. If I negotiate with my employer, I will have access to the already existing resources and customers, but the tricky part to me is how to negotiate properly.
Can you please give some advice about what can I do in a situation like this?
(not free, but cheap)

taskpaper http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper

scrivener http://www.literatureandlatte.com/trial.html

curio + small pen tablet http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/, http://www.wacom.com/bambootablet/bamboofun.php
Fusion's really easy to use. I've got Windows 7 installed on it, using the 'Vista' install option, and it's working great. It makes it so easy to get it working on the network, and to create a shared folder between the VM and your Mac (if you ask it to).
What about... games? :P
Thanks for that... I was just looking for a syntax highlighter for Quicklook!

http://code.google.com/p/qlcolorcode/
I've struggled and gone back and forth on that, and it's somewhat arbitrary -- compared to the obvious up-down orientation for signal/noise votes. The fact that questionnaires and poll-charts are more likely to put 'yes/agree' on the left and 'no/disagree' on the right swayed my proposed orientation, but I could be flipped.

I also think rather than just a net tally, results could be shown as a teeny tiny inline horizontally stacked barchart -- a sparkline of sorts -- with the overhang of the leading sentiment in its vote-direction. For example, with left-agrees, this would be more agrees than disagrees:

++++++++
----

More disagrees than agrees:

+++
--------

But this sort of display might argue for right-agrees; number-lines and cartesian axes go positive to the right, and right-motion in some way signals acquiescence/continuation in the direction of the reviewed text.
Aaron Boodman (the creator of Greasemonkey) and others are working on this part of chrome. Aaron had initially tried to get his idea for extensions as greasemonkey scripts into Firefox between 1.5 and 2.0.

Google isn't a small startup. Even if Mac is more important than their extension story, it makes no sense having non-Mac developers working on it. They aren't simply building a GUI, they are doing hard "OS level" work of building the security sandboxes for processes - something that is requiring trail blazing work.
Noise voting should take precedence over agree voting.

Perhaps an even better idea would be to not have the Agree/Disagree voting add directly to signal, but for the score to have some affect on Karma and comment visibility through some function.

Also, this scheme might be to your liking:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=613520
1Password's nice, but I've found Sxipper [1] to be better if all I need to use is Firefox. Sxipper has a really nice way of handling password changes, multiple accounts, and comment forms.

[1] - http://www.sxipper.com/
Mailplane is great, especially if you have multiple gmail and google mail accounts.
Well anything can seem obvious in retrospect. As T.H. Huxley said of Natural Selection, "How utterly stupid of me not to have thought of that myself!" And indeed, natural selection seems quite obvious once one understands it. But it takes the odd visionary like a Newton or a Darwin to come up these things that years later seem "obvious". It takes the "black swans" of history - today "cloud computing" is becoming not only acceptable, but even the norm for SCM solutions whereas even a few years ago SCM solutions were largely big, bulky, custom-made, run-in-house, not portable nightmares. Today (2009) companies that need SCM (supply chain management) solutions are seeing the benefits of easily deployable "cloud" applications more and more. Circa 2020, doubtless conventional wisdom will be that it is "obvious" SCM should be done via the "cloud", but in 2000, not only was it not "obvious", it was relatively rare. It takes the individual achiever, the black swan, to move history forward and make the things that future generations will think to be "obvious".
I see. In that case why did you label your post as "answer" to "build or buy" question?
You need to check any contract you might be under with the University. If your code was developed on university time with university resources it probably doesn't belong to you! If you open source personal code then add it to the University code base you may be creating a problem if the code will ever be sold. Sadly you need to realize that todays market doesn't automatically assign ownership rights to your code even though you created it. In most cases ownership will be governed by any contracts or license restrictions you might be working under. Study everything very carefully!
Don't dumb yourself down. People will sense that you are not being yourself and you will be miserable anyway. I have made the same mistake myself in past and I have realised that often times people that you consider less 'intellectual' are capable of very stimulating conversation if given the right subject to talk about.

The key is to not be condescending. People don't mind smart people, but they hate being made to feel stupid. If you have to correct someone, do it in a kind, diplomatic matter.

People don't always have to be super smart to be interesting, even less intelligent folks have the ability to teach you something if you really show an interest.

I myself would rather spend most my time with 'boring', real live people than with a web browser in a darkened room.
World of Goo is a must-have, even for non-gamers. It's makes for a nice break from doing actual work. ;) http://www.worldofgoo.com/
The kind of people using the jar command (Java developers) are the kind of people who just accept the limitations of their systems without questioning.

I've been a Java programmer for, yikes, is it ten years now? Of that decade, perhaps 45 minutes has been spent waiting for jar to finish.

Tell me, does it sound like a productive use of my time to go hunting for an optimization to cut 30 minutes off of that?

If I were to wake up in the morning one day and say "You know, instead of implementing features customers actually want, I think today I'm going to make fast things faster", I'd start by targeting things which happen frequently, take a lot of time, and are on the critical path for my users. JAR is oh for three. For my business, I have to run it once per release candidate, or about eight times a year, for a total cost of two minutes. Even at my day job, since you can restart development servers without re-jarring everything, we only have to re-jar once per every restart of the production servers, a process which is rate limited by collecting approval on paper for the restart anyway.
I found this part interesting.

"Many prisoners find survival in physical exercise, prayer, or plans for escape. Many carry out elaborate mental exercises, building entire houses in their heads, board by board, nail by nail, from the ground up, or memorizing team rosters for a baseball season. McCain recreated in his mind movies he’d seen. Anderson reconstructed complete novels from memory. Yuri Nosenko, a K.G.B. defector whom the C.I.A. wrongly accused of being a double agent and held for three years in total isolation (no reading material, no news, no human contact except with interrogators) in a closet-size concrete cell near Williamsburg, Virginia, made chess sets from threads and a calendar from lint (only to have them discovered and swept away)."

It seems that isolation works like a virus attack, slowly rendering the mind incapable of working properly. Somewhat like a mental Gom Jabbar. Some people at least seem to fight back by consciously creating stimulation. Hack and Counter Hack.
Agreed. You (the OP) need to be socialized. :-) There is a phenomenon I call the "Engineering Dance", where engineers and similar types go through a kind dominance ritual on first meeting, probing to see who is the most expert. This doesn't work in most social situations; most people dont like it.

My SO has a masters in math and a minor in CS, but we dont talk about my work much at all. She's a painter; we talk about painting. I enjoy it because I'm learning a lot. I suggest finding a nontechnical interest and become good at it: music, art, literature. You dont have to be an artist or musician, just knowledgeable.

Enlist a woman in the reclamation project. Their social skills really are better than ours, especially the extroverts. Dont look for a GF to do this. Enlist a sister or friend. The two of you can throw a barbecue or the like for the expanded set of friends.

Most people have a socially adept friend. Use said friend for introductions.
It strikes me that there could easily be a mismatch between the actual intent of the person utilizing these tricks and the perceived intent. To the extent that these two are the same, these are great methods to use. If they are different, then these tricks will lead to greater disillusionment in the long run, requiring even subtler approaches.

I can't stand to walk through a mall or browse the web without Adblock because it's like swimming through a sea of lies. Somewhere out there are honest and genuine marketers with a product that is deserving of everything they say about it, but I can't hear them through the noise of all the other marketers using the same exact tactics.
I've often thought about finance blogs from a binomial distribution point of view. Say, that out of the 25M+ finance blogs (http://bit.ly/ep75e) there are about 100k serious ones. Say that each week for a year each blog makes a verifiable, binary outcome prediction. Also assume that there is a 50-50 chance of that prediction coming true. We could expect 4 or 5 of those 100k blogs to be right 40 weeks of the year JUST BY GUESSING. Let alone some actual insight. Say you were one of those winning blog readers, and week after week this blogger keeps getting things right. Like Bear Stearns going bankrupt, for example. Every now and then (s)he could get something wrong, but there would always be a reason, or (s)he could say that the outcome is just temporary, and that the true outcome is anytime now.

You (and eventually, your friends) would start investing your money along his/her advise, and if the blogger is really, really popular (s)he could start moving the market enough to change the odds from 50-50 to 60-40.

I don't really know how to stop this, but it is interesting.
I know it seems like minimum wage would price workers out of the market, but in reality it tends not to work that way. For example, McDonalds doesn't price a hamburger based on costs, but the best price point for a variety of factors, where raising the price will tend to lose profit. And the headcount also is fairly inflexible. So what gets hit? The shareholders wallets.

In other words, raising minimum wage doesn't mean Bob won't get a job, it just means Betty won't get a second yacht.
how does he do it?
There is of course though a fine line between going the extra distance for a client and being taken advantage of/ underpaid.
"What's the error on your estimate of how hard what he's done is?"

I don't like to think of hard in terms of the time required, but rather in terms of the skills needed and the things that need to happen to make the project a success. If you break down any project into a PERT chart, the best projects are the ones where each circle is capable of being realized in multiple ways. Whereas if you look at Sam's PERT chart, there are clearly a number of steps that are a one shot deal, where if they don't work the whole thing falls apart. For example if you can't partner with any carriers then the project is dead, unless you go around the carriers in which case your risk (and cost of capital) goes up so your upside goes down.

"What are the alternative ways of making $10m that you casually assume to exist?"

There are lots of ways. For example, doing LBOs on your own you can easily make 2-3 a year. The only problem is that you need the skills to know how to do this, and there are only a few hundred people at most who can serve as mentors to teach you at any given time. Running a fast food franchise is fairly predictable way to make 3-5m, so is starting a conference. If you start an ad network you can count on making 10+ if you know what you're doing.

There are tons of very predictable ways to make money on your own, the problem is they require skills that you can only acquire by finding a mentor who knows what they're doing. (And finding good mentors is a hard to acquire skill on its own.)
> they start crying 'Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet'.

And they don't have to choose. Google search results don't include very much of the content so a user has to click on the link to go to their site to see said content. They're free to do whatever they want to do to protect content on their site. They're free to do whatever they want to do to monetize said content.

When pushed, their complaints seem to be:

(1) when they implement protections, users go elsewhere

(2) They can't get enough ad revenue from their pages.

(3) Other folks "steal" their content and google will find said stolen content and help users find it. (In many cases, said other "copies" are completely legit. The sneer quotes are because they object when someone else reports the same news.)

(4) Google makes money online and we're not, and since we're providing content and Google is just telling folks how to find it, Google is clearly cheating somehow.
A lot of what was believed to be "dissonant crap" some 50 years ago is now part of jazz and avantgarde. Many jazz fans value Thelonious Monk's music, for example, more than any popular harmonious crap. Obviously you are not familiar with music. Good luck in exploring it before you try to formalize it.
Is a ROM Machine worth its price?
SONY ERICSSON K510 RED UNLOCKED
What happens in a second can be remembered for a lifetime. Capture it with the K510 RED. Take quality photos or record video clips with the 1.3-megapixel camera, save them and share them.
I just reinstalled my mac today.
Here is what i installed so far :

1-quicksilver

2-iTerm (terminal. with tabs)

3-Photoshop CS3 (cs4 is slow on my macbook)

4-Transmit

5-DropBox client

6-Textmate

7-Git

8-The Hit List (best osx app for lists)

9-LimeChat (irc client)
Leaving the company to work on a competing product will sometimes violate any agreements you may have signed for this employer, so check those first.

Usually the barrier to doing a parallel rewrite is staffing. If the company barely has enough people now, sending people off on something else needs (in the management's view) a very good reason. So you have to show how time will be saved, at least medium-term.

Another potential barrier is testing. If your product has a lousy set of regression tests and unit tests, forget it; until more tests are written, a rewrite is far too risky. Basically, the test suite needs to prove what all the important current behaviors are, so that you can be very confident in replacing code.

Is there something wrong with the code base? Is it hard to maintain? You'll probably have more success proposing changes if this is true. For example, you can pull up the last 20 bugs/enhancements, and explain to your management exactly where all the time was spent on them; then show how your revised design would have made those changes more efficient. If you have access to the time it takes customers to do things, you could have similar analysis; show how awkward or clunky something currently is for them, and how much better it would be if it worked differently.
Coda is expensive ($99) but the convenience of working on remote files via SFTP within the program is unmatched. If your session gets disconnected in the midst of editing a file, nothing to worry about, Coda will automatically log back in for you and update the file you were working on when you save.
I have influence and am considering this book. Is there any significant difference in content?
From my point of view, memcached isn't a godsend because the database is weak, it is a godsend because it prevents you from trying to do things that no database should be asked to do.

My personal projects use memcached recently, but not for anything interesting. At the day job, we have a particular case where we render a per-user sidebar. The data for the sidebar is volatile, but unpredictably volatile -- i.e. it should be unchanging for the length of a user session except when it isn't, but when it isn't the user requires us to know Right The Heck Now (TM). That data is actually stored on another system, and accessing it requires hitting a web service on the other system. Accessing the web service is, obviously, an overhead, and the service it calls is very heavy. Obviously, big win for us if we can avoid hitting that service on every request for a webpage with a sidebar.

Enter memcached. It is a fairly simple way to keep the sidebars for 3+ app servers synced with each other, and the other system can force-expire the cache if it wants to. This isn't a knock against the database running on the other system -- it doesn't and shouldn't care about what format we use their data in, just that they're keeping the contract about providing it when we ask and pinging us when it needs expiry.
Fusion is awesome, especially their "Unity" feature.
Even though I can follow a conversation about graph theory and computational biology, I still avoid the guys at social hour that won't talk about anything else

I read his question as more like: "How do I reconcile knowing spouting X and Y are egregious idiocy with socializing with people who do that?"

I hear this question as more like "Doctor, it hurts when I do that, what do I do?" Answer: Don't do that!
What can I say? I'm a karma whore. I just restate the obvious and bask in the upvoting love. ;)

Seriously though, I thought long and hard about hitting the submit button. Too many times somebody comes to the group with an honest question and then we rag all over them. It's easy to be critical! As hackers we are really good at finding faults.

But I tried to put myself in his shoes. After all, he came for some feedback. I thought the best thing to do was try to give it to him as honestly and as kindly as I could.

The feeling is mutual! Look forward to meeting you as well some day.
I'm an introvert and of course that's how I travel! I walk, sit, and enjoy. I still meet enough interesting people over time but they're comparatively few and far between -- on the other hand, that just perfectly suits my introverted taste.

I hope the author of the article will learn to live and travel without bearing such a useless and futile reactive pattern as shame.
That paragraph lists exceptions to patentability - inventions that infringe on "public order" or "moral conventions". In particular listed are human cloning, methods to modify the human germline, industrial use of human embryos and modification of animal germlines which cause suffering to the animals without providing any medical benefits for animals or humans. So every invention that can be used to breed a master race is explicitly non-patentable, plus there's a blanket formulation that can be extended to mean "anything the Nazis would have liked to have invented to make their job easier". An implant that poisons you when you don't follow the Führer would arguably fit right in there.
It's funny how a simple "I find most people intellectually boring, what to do?" got a lot of highly up-voted "get off of your high horse, smarty-pants" replies. I suppose the first lesson here is not to let people know you think lowly of them. Otherwise they get angry and stuff, silly bipedals.

You would have had much different replies if you rephrased your question to "Hey, HN is full of great people with interests and values similar to mine. I feel like I found my long-lost solumate, only several hundred of them at once. How do I find / build similar community in real life, so that I can share both bar hopping and code-hacking?".

:-)
Starting a closely related competing product is not something that can be reasonably considered ethical. Many contracts prevent you from doing that. Just because you're not in such a contract, doesn't make it right, though. I would suggest talking to your employer and remaining on good terms whether or not you decide to part ways.
just use http://supergenpass.com/
There do exist groups of people who like being corrected, and seek out their own mistakes. e.g. critical rationalists (see the philosophy of Karl Popper).

if interested, email me (see profile).
Let me say: I think that getting a girlfriend who will up and tell you when you are being an ass (later on, in private) is one of the best things you can do!

"Engineering Dance" -- Guilty as charged! Brilliant name for it.
Free Ebooks - PPC Doctor
Gitx is a native OS X GUI for git. It comes with a nice command line tool, gitx, that works like gitk. http://gitx.frim.nl/
Seems like his provider didn't want him 'two' use 'to' much of their ram either... :)

I think this might be the article (google cache):
http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:Li-1XUnINOUJ:www.geoffc...
I find GrabUp (http://grabup.com/) better than Skitch, mainly because I never use the extra features that Skitch gives on top of just taking a screenshot and uploading it.
Good call, thanks for that tip.
> > give up the I'm-so-smart routine. Trust me, you're an idiot like the rest of us

> What can I say? I'm a karma whore. I just restate the obvious and bask in the upvoting love.

It's weird that insulting the OP and myself is a method of karma whoring. Anyway, downvoted for being so pessimistic and then calling your ideas "obvious" which is arrogant (and moments after you implied the OP is arrogant by saying he overestimates himself). Also "trust me" is a non-argument that makes you sound slimy.