skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He didn't say becoming an asshole was inevitable, just that it was inevitable that some of the things you would have to do would make you feel like one.
Minimal meetings, distractions = office with door.

Fast computers, multiple hi-rez screens, comfy chair.

Flexible working hours.

Result oriented instead of time-sheet driven.

And most importantly ... manager who runs interference for us. Being shielded from executives from other areas. Realistic project plans. No fuss and quick acquisition of resources as required.

Concierge Service: have PA types to run errands, get in food, clean-up meeting rooms, organize stationery, get last minute gifts, tickets, flowers, whatever. NB: In the film and TV industries they're called 'assistant directors' - fancy title for general purpose gofers. Without them the pace and productivity would be a lot less. Just think about it, you pay them a heck of a lot less than great programmers and the programmers end up not wasting time on stuff they'd rather not do anyway.
You do not understand what an exchange is. You have made up a mental model that is not even close to reality and are now arguing against that. Please do a little research before having an opinion.

What you are describing is actually a great deal like how many exchanges work. Open outcry pits or whatever are not the prevailing model. There is NO room with screaming people for NASDAQ.

The pricing data is delayed because it is free. You can buy realtime pricing data. It's hard to support a large infrastructure for free, of course, and you are making money on it.

Big traders, especially block traders, execute at least partially off-exchange anyway.

"All the statistics" are not necessarily stored or generated by the exchange. Other companies do this (Reuters, etc.) We had to calculate "all the statistics" ourselves when we did automated trading systems.

I'm not sure how APIs magically make all fees and costs "go away" in some magical fashion.
I'm not so sure that made a difference. Springs are designed to store energy that is delivered by a force from a specific direction If I hit you in the face with the side of a coil spring vs. in the direction of the coil, the amount of energy the spring will store (and thus how badly you are injured) is vastly different.
Every corporation has articles of incorporation, bylaws and there may even be a shareholder agreement. Any or all of the things you say may or may not be applicable depending on the existence and contents of those documents.

OP may have more rights and possibilities to recourse than he thinks, being a shareholder is not 'all bad', there are plenty of laws that govern your rights as a shareholder too.

At a minimum there has to be an annual report and a once per annum general shareholders meeting, if the percentage the three hold is large enough they may even be able to convene such a meeting.

Seriously, get a lawyer if the stakes are high enough.

If it's a couple of grand your talking about let it go and hope that some day they get bought out, then you will be in the drivers seat (they won't be able to sell without your consent).
Unpublished rules and clarifications from Apple's App Review team
JRuby’s Future at Engine Yard
Charles Oliver Nutter talks about the JRuby team's recent announcement about the move to Engine Yard, and what the future holds.
This article is terrible.

Summary:

1. You won't be your own boss.

2. You won't like your personal life.

3. You won't succeed.

4. You'll hate the problems.

5. You'll be a jerk.

6. You'll hate your lifestyle.

7. Again, you'll fail.

Terrible, terrible, terrible.

Save yourself the 5 minutes please.
AdBlockPlus. It flags .tynt.com as adware, so sfgate just seems like inert text to me.

With respect to NYT, I've found this rule to be quite effective:

|http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/app/*

Kills that nasty action.
I have been doing startup work in Silicon Valley since 1984 and have seen all the variations on this.

It all depends on the facts.
When a startup struggles and misses payrolls, it is legitimate for the executive team to ask employees to stay and help the company through the struggle. Each employee then must decide based on his or her individual circumstances. Employees will have varying stakes in this. The employee who, say, owns 1-2% of the company via stock options may have a different motivation from the one who owns little or no equity, particularly if the company may eventually have a huge upside with a turnaround.

If the sacrifice is significant, though, then the employees should at least be offered some additional compensation for the added risk they are taking in potentially working for nothing. A commitment to give them added option grants if the company turns it around does this well.

This hits the founders and investors, but it should hit them - they are the ones asking people to do extraordinary things to help them save their dreams and they are the ones who will most benefit if it can be saved.

If this is done with options, there are no special tax complications. Nor does it cost anything to make a letter commitment that can be documented formally after the turn-around once the company has money again.

The one thing that has shocked me most over the years are the management types who expect employees to take the hit in such situations but who will not lift a finger to reward them for making a special sacrifice.

Others have mentioned secretiveness as a danger sign for the employees. I would add to this any display of unfairness such as a failure of management to recognize that special sacrifices deserve special rewards.

Of course, some cases are hopeless and then the only remedy is to run for the door, as many have noted.
There's a tradition that anyone seeking to convert to Judaism must be turned away 3 times. They are told only about the possible negatives. Only after they return the 4th time have they shown that they want it badly enough to be taken seriously.

Sometimes I think the same approach should be used for starting a business. OP sure tries awfully hard to emphasize the possible negatives. Hopefully, most hn readers want it badly enough to remain undaunted and keep coming back for more.
How could you make Life into "more of a game"? Let two people make figures and hope they move in the general direction of one another to "fight"?
>You can’t always choose your own hours or get to work from home. Business is all about making money, so you have to do whatever it takes to succeed. If that means you have to answer calls in the middle of the night, then so be it.

Not necessarily true. I've known an entrepreneur that left consulting to do a software startup for exactly this reason. Being beholden is a consulting nightmare, not a software product company nightmare, in my experience.
Maybe we'll actually get an accurate picture of Apple's rules.
You shouldn't ask for an email address without some sort of privacy policy statement.
Stimulating Economic Development via Public-Private Partnerships
The Googlebot runs Javascript
Blackboard Patent Struck Down
It's a terrible site. They've also been known to sue other companies that have tried to improve the online learning experience.
Currently there is much lack of transparency, stock market data is delayed from many exchanges to the general public, sometimes up to 15 minutes

No, there is no lack of transparency. You get what you pay for. If you don't pay for anything, don't expect real-time quotes. Wall Street is not Santa Claus.
Aside from the cameras, it's already known that they are using range-finding sensors to map building shapes, and I'd be surprised if they weren't recording GPS data to go along with the photos.
These resources are called tax lawyers, and they are very expensive. The knowledge required to do this is very specialized and guarded with extreme zeal by its possessors. As is usual in any situation involving government regulation, the biggest winners are the lawyers. If you want to get an idea of how complex and draconian these things really are, try looking up PFIC and "controlled foreign corporation".
Allowing 'Defamation via Twitter' lawsuits opens a gigantic can of worms
Ask HN: are any of you intersted in trying my beta iPhone app?
A buddy and I are about to release an iPhone app. It's a social networking application and we are looking to have people beta test it before it goes live.

About the App:

Groupie is a group messaging utility that allows users to create, join, and manage social groups on their iPhone. It's purpose is to greatly enhance group interaction. In moments you can create a group of your own or join an existing one. Every group has a message board, live chat room, GPS-enabled map, and member directory. From your dashboard, you’ll always be just two clicks away from communicating with a group of three people or three hundred.

=== If you're interested, shoot me an email at lefstathiou@gmail.com. In order to get the build on your iphone you need to download "ad hoc helper" and send me your UDID. It's apple bullshit designed to prevent apps from going viral outside of itunes.

Thanks in advance. I doubt any of you read my profile, but i'd like to make it clear that if there is anything i can do for any of you(especially if you're working on a project and need feedback/ideas/criticism/advice/etc), i am 100% available to you. i live for this stuff...

I made a flickr album with some screenshots so you can get an idea of how it looks. Only 6 photos though.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/39014474@N04/?saved=1
I'm sure that HN can use a bit of balance when it comes to the glories and downsides of being your own boss but this article seems over the top.

Sometimes it's hard and of course there are times when you wonder if you should not have stayed at your 9-5 job. But those are pretty rare, most of the time it's just plain hard work and the satisfaction coming from moving under your own power and to work on the things that you think are important.

I wouldn't have it any other way, bad times included.
I'm thinking of starting a Derek Sivers Fan Club. Maybe not a club, just a rough collection of people who enjoy Derek's consistently good posting.
Its kind of unfair that only big companies can get this sort of competitive advantage while smaller startups are stuck paying taxes through their nose under the draconian tax policies of the US government.

There is nothing preventing you from moving to a country with more favorable tax laws, especially with a business based around the Internet. If your sentence was meant to reference money, well that's something every company goes through in the early stages. At that stage the best you can hope for is to turn a profit and get to the point where barriers to entry kick into effect.
Leaves Fall, Infrastructure Fails
There’s No Such Thing As A Google Killer
This would be better described as the 'Top 7 Place to Watch Great Speakers in Action'. I'm sure they are really clever too but you aren't really seeing them 'in action'. By analogy to sports, you are seeing the post game analyses rather than the game.

I really would like to see a place where you can see the top minds in action. I guess you could argue chess and poker are somewhat like this but they are too restrictive and slow for my liking. I wonder if anyone does public brainstorming sessions - the only similar things I've seen have degenerated in to deliberate comedy.
That actually makes good sense. It would be an excellent spam page deterrent, since most cloakers are very handy in using javascript to diguise the destination of the page.

At some point the filtering must get so complex that simply running the javascript on the page and looking at the output is the simpler solution.
Same here. Those tiny inline balloon popups are always in the way!
You'd need a clean room and specialist equipment to do it. If the data is that important use a professional service. The best ones only charge for successful data retrieval, but that can cost from a couple of hundred $ to thousands.
Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Struck, Will Be Announced Within Next 24 Hours
Yes I do, and now that you mention it, I'm sure it's two manifestations of the same behavior.
I have to say Jeff and the polleverywhere guys are some of the funniest guys I've ever met.
"...how do you react?"

I don't think there's an easy answer to this. Humor can be a double edged sword. If the recipient "gets it", you're a hit. If not, you look like an idiot. In print the risk is magnified.

I once had a vendor ask me what my 3 most important "business values" were. Aside from the fact that it was a stupid question, I knew I had to answer it to compete for the job. So I took a chance and said something like, "1-Quality, 2-Ethics, and 3-Taking the customer to a Chinese buffet every Wednesday". They loved it and I got the gig. It could have easily backfired, but I was in a "what the heck" mood.

What mood are you in?
Please explain how he is wrong?
Microsoft and Yahoo are said to have reached a deal
I understand the pressure, and it makes sense that we should treat them as respectfully as any other person. Yet, police should be expected to react rationally regardless of the situation. They should be prepared for all manner of verbal abuse; it comes with the job.

As an example, take a look at E.R. doctors. They treat a lot of people who are insanely abusive, both physically and verbally. Do they refuse to treat these patients? No, they are required by law and by their hippocratic oath to care for their patients. I work at UCSF, and residents tell me their war stories about drugged up patients who scream profanities at the doctors endlessly. Should a resident retaliate in any way, they would be pulled from their program. This process forces E.R. doctors to have thick skin and learn to cope with assholes on the job.

If we are to give police officers this insane amount of power to the public, we should expect nothing less than their ability to withstand some idiot's verbal tyrades.
Building mashups that work
Being niche is great, but what happens when you get big?
After observing a similar pattern at my last startup, I thought it might be a good idea to intentionally screw up something minor. Then we could apologize for it like this and maybe offer some small reward to make up for it.

My theory was that it would endear our customers to us that much more.

I still haven't tested that theory, but I'd really like to some day.
If anything, the iPhone rejection weakens any case against Google. Google creates a way to make free phone calls. Google wants to let its competitors use that, but the competitors won't allow it. Google is trying to play nice, but Apple won't let them. They could restrict GV to Android, but they chose not to.
Yeah I'm the same way. I'm a compulsive highlighter and I often find myself disassembling pens or mechanical pencils, or folding paper, or removing the plastic coating inside a bottlecap, or balancing my glasses on the tip of my finger...The people I spend time with in meetings must wonder if I'm actually paying attention.
so...any information on blekko's actual product/service?
An article does not have to be "wrong" to be terrible.

This attitude is "wrong" for succeeding.
Yes. It's a cheap flight to SFO.
I really liked Yahoo. It will be missed.
GUI Icon Sets for Web Designers
Minority stockholders are pretty much at the mercy of the majority holder, except for out and out fraud. They dont need the OP's consent. They may ask for his vote, but that is all it is, a per share vote.
With taxes set to rise (and given the literally trillions of dollars of cumulative new deficits how can they not?), this is going to happen increasingly more. The unfortunate reality is that politicians heap blame on the "greed" of profitable corporations and wealthy individuals forgetting that these companies (and people) have the greatest ability to move abroad.

Going Galt anyone? Related article: http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/107123/Mi...
Must say that many companies outsource email campaigns and it may not be the company's fault (directly). Just sayin' :)
It doesn't surprise me that OpenBSC is more advanced given that my understanding is that the Siemens hardware does a lot of the hard work. OpenBTS is more impressive (and more customizable for evil) since it has to do everything in software.
Not all businesses exist with a primary purpose of making money. That's like saying people exist to procreate.

FWIW.

If it can't pay you though, and you need the money, then you should leave.
It's a search deal, not an outright sale of the company.
er, it's only for Bing to provide search results. Yahoo's been here before with Inktomi.
Stanley Bing on VC: It's Like a Ponzi Scheme
The Game Disses 50 Cent & G-Unit Again | Hip Hop MVP
It sucks even more if you are talking to a robot... I've been trying to contact Xbox Live support lately and I cannot seem to get any "person" to respond to me that isn't clearly a classifier.
Here's another perspective (http://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/23/police-discretion-a-diff...) from a police captain/philosophy student.
In terms of how this might benefit the innovation or the internet as a whole is still a question. They both might together own 30% of the search market, but what difference does it make? any thoughts?
Sex In The Office Declines Thanks To Downturn
Come on, everybody knows the infocalypse has four horsemen; you forgot about the money launderers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyps...
Nope, we screwed it up. We renamed the FNAME field in our mail app to FIRST_NAME and forgot to change that field when we sent out that email to all of our customers. Oops!

BTW, we use Mailchimp for our emailings. Too bad they don't have an idiot checker before a message is sent out :)
Long ago, it was Google who served Yahoo's search results.
Lookup UI feedback times. Bouncing the icon will actually make it appear more responsive. Same reason that for the few seconds that a web page takes to load you see some kind of spinning icon or page load indicator. Not having those reponse animations make the software look unrespinsive, not fast.
The "tragedy of the commons" in action. The infrastructure that enables their customers to buy their products doesn't come for free. But since they don't have to help pay for it, they don't.

It will all come tumbling down eventually.
"The odds of any entrepreneur succeeding more than once is very low. A lot lower than succeeding once."

Unless it works like one of those statistics questions where you're more likely to succeed twice than once, but most likely to succeed not at all.
it also fills out forms on your pages to see where they lead:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/crawling-...
You are showing a significant bias by laying the burden of proof on those saying this has an effect on people. 'Innocent till proven guilty' is a principle of the justice system, not science. You could have made these same comments about the health problems associated with smoking in the 60s and you would have been wrong. The original poster laid out a reasonable argument for why the default position should not be to assume there is no effect.

A less biased and more useful statement would have been "there have been enough studies done on this to show that wifi 'sensitivity' is unlikely to exist". If that was the case I'd like to know.
Its definitely not a UK problem - happens here in SF w/ AT&T usually in my house when I can't get a signal ;-)
If you're happy, then we know it: Scientists build 'hedonometer'
Customers are endeared by this sort of thing because it's genuine. Simulating this effect with a fake trick may work, but it is not cool.

And don't excuse it with "companies everywhere do this all the time" either. Everywhere and every time that kind of stunt is pulled, it is not cool.
What if Google Voice were instead Microsoft Voice? And what if Windows Mobile were as modern and competitive as Android? Would you be as surprised then that Apple is discouraging iPhone owners from using the service?

This is a BS argument. It's the same as saying that MS has every right to block iTunes, Firefox, Netscape, Safari (and every other product that competes with a MS product) from installing on Windows.

Imagine where Windows would have been, and Mac OSX for that matter, if the only products that were allowed on PCs, and Macs, were the ones which didn't compete with the OS vendor's products.

And BTW, the fact that GV is available on Blackberry etc. tells me with no doubt that AT&T had absolutely nothing to do with this.
"X Killer" never meant that in my experience. It is phrased as such because it generates clicks and ad revenue. That's it. A lot of headlines are hyperbolic because they are designed to garner attention.

They also serve to introduce concepts to people who aren't familiar with the field. Saying "web search start up" to a layman isn't going to excite much, but "google killer" will, regardless of accuracy.
And it was Yahoo who served Microsoft's search results (via Inktomi). How about that for recursion ?
They did email the whole list immediately. I received the same exact apology email minutes after the first came out.

Despite the fact that it was clearly a (now properly formatted) form email, it was still nice to see that they had realized the mistake and quickly took action in a self-effacing manner. Good on them.
Two men woke up in their campsite one morning to radio news that a man-eating tiger was on the prowl. One man promptly started wearing his running shoes, while the second teased him: "surely, you don't think you're going to outrun the tiger in those?!". "I don't have to outrun the tiger", replied the first man. "I only have to outrun you."

They don't have to kill _Google_. Outsurviving Y! Or Bing will do handsomely.

PS: that said, comparing google to coke is an analogy without legs.

Edit: clarified based on reply.
The success rate of YC startups should suffice to prove the article is not well-grounded.
Maybe take this up with the police department rather than HN? There's not much we can do about it.
I'm not even sure how to copy text to the clipboard (with conkeror).
Interesting, I just ran across this wiki a couple of days ago

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Conway's - too damn - interesting. After a few months I saw myself in one of those flip-flops.
You're really likely to screwup someday, somehow unintentionally anyhow. Even if your the nice guy(company) that takes responsibility for your actions, they'll still go somewhere else if you screw up too much, so don't try to up your screw up rate on purpose!
BATS _is_ a Reg-NMS protected exchange on par with Nasdaq, Arca, NYSE and all the others.
Free Download iPod to iTunes Transfer  
In order to transfer iPod content to iTunes, here offers you a free downloaded iPod to iTunes Transfer, which you can free downloaded to convert come ture the process of iPod to iTunes transferring.
So who do they have to kill/outrun/whatever? I'm not sure I understand your analogy.
Good call, I really think yahoo is bigger than just search. They could also use the money to develop their properties like flickr and news - think of it like in monopoly when 2 players trade with each ending up with a monopoly and get started building hotels. In this case the odd man out (google) doesn't get sympathy because he's rich and hansome; and already owns 60-8o% market share
Foreign Investment in the U.S. Going Down
feel free to sign up =)
I'm still waiting to read something about an Android fon written by someone who can tell me about its pitfalls. There's very little press about them, other than reactions to PR.
#2: y! & bing
Hmmm ... when you've got Google's kind of money, the Feds will raid small nations for you.
White House blocks Twitter, and with Good Reason
The Trust Economy Bubble - it does have a certain ring to it.
Amazon in Love: The Four-Year-Long Courtship of Zappos
I wish the AdSense bot would also render javascript before deciding what ads to deliver. Lots of my pages have very little static content and are rendered dynamically (think Twitter mashups). This causes AdSense to deliver completely irrelevant ads most of the time :(