skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Work smart, not just hard. The question is whether or not it would have been possible - and whether or not the compromises he made on his family life actually made the difference between failure and success.

In other words, those emails answered by sneaking off to the bathroom, did they matter in the success of the company, or could they have waited until morning?

Would leaving the office an hour early twice a week have resulted in missing delivery dates and loss of contracts? If they did, were those deliveries and contracts critical to the exit? Did dragging everyone into work on a weekend actually help the company, or was all that hard work (on his part and his employees') actually slowing down their engineering?

None of that is obvious. I dislike the Silicon Valley meme that family and money are mutually exclusive, or that one must necessarily go on suicidal work-rampages for months/years on end to achieve financial success. There is a world of difference between what looks critical and what is critical. I also dislike the notion that a bunch of sleep-deprived, high-strung people who don't have their shit together, staying alive by a combination of greed, caffeine, and blood pressure, is what "working optimally" looks like. It's clearly not.

This whole blog post is basically a post mortem where the author wonders if all those things that he thought had to be done right then, right there, actually had to be, or whether there was more wiggle room than he thought at the time.
Hi JacobH!

I was curious what your startup is? Do you happen to have a link or a landing page?
So... follow through with this. A significant portion of the NSA are abusing their powers to spy on average people?
It doesn't count.

Your kids didn't ask to be born. You decided to have them. If you're going to raise your kid by simply providing for them, and not nurturing them and spending time with them, then all of your "providing for" is worthless. If you decided to have kids when you could barely afford it, and had no extra time to do anything besides work, then they are right to consider you a bad parent.

Go listen to Cat's in the Cradle by Harry Chapin.
So very low! Those were fun times tho, doing speed tests by seeing how quickly windows would open ;)
Chromium has all the dev tools I need OOTB. Adblock? Perhaps one risk I'll take on extensions. What else? Nothing. Unnecessary shit for people who want to configure every detail but can't be bothered to hack it themselves with uzbl or one of its equivalents.
I find it weird that a company providing a security/privacy tool isn't even using https on the website and providing a checksum for the binary.
A diplomatic situation implies a meeting of equals. That comment suggests a meeting wherein you very very very gently raise the possibility that perhaps there can be a small change to what's been mandated.

Cordial and professional doesn't mean being a doormat, and talking to management as an adult with autonomy over one's own life does not require an ultimatum.
I think his point is that ultimately what matters is whether these abilities are being abused, particularly for something like political ends - so far we've seen only a few isolated cases towards personal ends(and the nsa did not protect those people). Given the size of the organization I think it's safe to say that that is within the bounds of statistical probability.
U.S. itself is a big huge startup from Europe. Maybe that's why startup people are all in U.S.
Ask HN: How do you send money to friends?
In Canada, we have email money transfers. Every major bank supports this function. This acts as the main payment method for collecting money.

How do people in the United States and other countries do this? Do people actually use paypal, square up, and google wallet?
Aye, making cultural generalisations is as absurd as saying Swedes are inclined to be taller than Siclians or that men are generally stronger than women. It's almost as ridiculous as thinking that there's a difference in how much trust you can put in the assurances of a Japanese and Chinese company in their home countries. Just like all people, all cultures are exactly the same.
So, follow through. The NSA is abusing its abilities on a systematic basis - to spy on the personal lives of average people? For political purposes?
With the exception of "one touch", this ("Visual Voicemail") is exactly how voicemail has worked on every iPhone ever. I assume similar implementations are available for other platforms. The ony time I see the traditional "push 1 to listen" voicemail interface is when I use my iPhone on an unsupported network.
http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/manual/x147.html helped me with this.
'Keyhotee - move everything into this platform that we created, with absolutely no technical details provided.'

> connects you directly to the person you are addressing ...
> without revealing the relationship or contents to anyone.

So... directly connect to the other host, whilst apparently not revealing the relationship between the two of you?

Posts like this (from the link at the bottom of the page) are also not promising:

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1962.msg22546#msg2...
If only there was a way for these different providers to interoperate. XMPP gets us most of the way there, but is a bit short on features - inline images still seem to be in development, for example. Worse, those providers that do support it don't consistently support federation, so I still can't talk to a Facebook user from Google Chat.
Oooh, that could be a controversial point of view.

I've done a fair bit of the stay-at-home dad thing and I found it HARD. There something unremitting about dealing with the demands of small children while trying to keep the house clean and food on the table (and while my office life was all about getting rid of repetitive tasks, stuff like cleaning and cooking just has to be done again and again, which I found very hard to deal with).

I used to look forward to the days I went to the office; they were like days off.

No, I would never say that "staying at home with the kids" was the easy option.
True, it might not be harder than brain surgery, but neither is your current job, and raising kids is probably harder than your current job. If you don't give a shit about how your kids turn out, then raising kids is pretty easy, but if you actually care, it's probably going to be the hardest job you'll ever have.
I'm facing many of the challenges Scott is talking about. I churned through the first part of the essay and thought "yes! yes! yes, yes, let's get to the solution!" But the second part of the essay falls short for me.

It's a bit like the depression and the broken hand cartoon[1]. I can't disconnect. I know I'm supposed to turn off my phone, do household chores, and take my wife out to a nice dinner. I know taking the time to do these things makes me happier and more productive. It's not that I don't know this, it's that actually doing it requires enormous discipline, but after spending 80 hours a week slowly changing reality by a sheer force of will, I have no more willpower left for anything else.

I also know I don't have to feel like I'm changing reality by a sheer force of will, and in fact, feeling this way is a sign that I have a lot to learn about leadership and about life. But that's not something I can just decide to change either.

The problem is very real. The solution, at least for me, is as elusive as ever.

[1] http://www.akimbocomics.com/?p=573
Livestream of the Y Combinator panel at MHacks
Microsoft are much better than Apple at this, heck just look the latest fixed on connect.

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/8...

I've had issues which I've posted in newsgroups and forums, that have been turned into bug tickets.

Some teams appear better at this than others mind.
I think what the post is trying to say, if you look at Earth, you'd say, look at those bunch of whiners, on average they don't do squat. I mean most of them are just plagiarizing and barely make ends meet. Or just starving to death...

Taken into average VC spirit is pretty dead in most places on Earth. Can VC in Africa, India and China be compared to USA?

USA shares common history, language, state system. Europe is waaay more diverse. Treating it like a singular entity is much like treating all human states on Earth as a single entity.
Your GDP per capita numbers do not appear to be accurate. There is a substantial difference in the per capita incomes; off the top of my head I think the countries you list are about 1/3 lower (or their per capita has to climb 50% to match the US). This by itself is a big deal when sizing up a market.

US: $51,700; Germany: $38,666; UK: $36,569; France: $35,295; Spain: $30,058; Italy: $29,812

The EU is $31,571 (40% lower)

It's also worth noting that you can relatively easily reach into the wealthy Canadian market if you're targeting the US; Canada's economy is larger than Spain's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
FWIW I'm the only person in my family that reads hacker news, and I'm also the only person in my family that does NOT receive personal email on my phone.
lol, this guy is a legend around here. If he wanted a job, he'd have it.
> All the people I've seen who spout nonsense about ZOG are white nationalists or part of some other extremist group.

And the ones I've seen are part of the International Socialist Organization and the Green Party. Strange how you apparently can't escape racism just by getting away from the far-right.
I've not seen it said once, and based on a quick search -

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&start=0&q=t...

I've not been able to find a great many massively uninformed comments about it. Admittedly I only went two pages back, but it was starting to get to the X years ago stuff, so... I lost interest at that point ^^

Do you have a significant number of sources?
I feel like my brain has encrypted good chunks of my experience from that time (since it was quite traumatic tbh), but perhaps I'll write about it some day...

Problem is, it's hard to write it without sounding overly derogatory :P
In the UK if you send a text to a landline, the phone will ring and the message will be read to you. (via automatic voice of course) So yes, even a landline works in that case.

(Although maybe it's just on BT lines. Not sure.)
How Radians Work in 30 Seconds
Thanks for clarifying, and for sharing some interesting data points. Again FWIW, what you've described there seems a lot more reasonable to me than the raw 2/week rate without as much context did.

I think the key thing that didn't come across before, at least as I read your previous post, was the "when the user wants them" qualifier. If you're sending material that is useful for genuine users and carefully timed for when it's likely to be of interest to them, that's great.

The ones that wind me up are the businesses that have your e-mail address because you tried their site for ten minutes or made a one-off purchase from their on-line store and then think they're welcome to send you their latest "special offers" every few days for the next several weeks with a bit of trivial customisation based on what you tried/bought before.
Blues? I thought the linear ones were red... I guess I get the colors mixed up all time then.
I feel jealous with your luck. I've had as many crash as I can imagine since switching to Mac from Windows (before, I don't even remember how many times I got freezing apps or BSOD). And it seems to occur that often since Mavericks so it's my sole assumption.

I agree about the battery life improvements part as a nomadic user. However, it's totally depends on which applications you are using. For me, chrome/firefox, which eats up most of the battery, is used constantly, therefore, cannot be turned off (to save energy, because it doesn't support AppNap, I suppose). I don't see any help looking at the Energy Tab as whatever it's like, I don't have a choice there.
> The challenge is there will always be people who are willing (either consciously or unconsciously) to throw away their family and personal relationships in order to pursue success in their career, and it is difficult, if not impossible to compete against them with the 'balanced life' bit set.

So don't compete with them.
This job will be more appropriate for somebody else, and this company will probably be better off with somebody happy working in the new environment.

If several senior developers leave because their attitude is not a good fit for new management, then the company may have to hire and then train new staff on loads of bespoke stuff without the people who wrote it being there. Who cares about getting people who fit the company culture if doing so kills your product?
The issue is one of serial vs parallel processing. You cannot treat all hours as equal when you or someone else is the bottleneck for your entire startup/project. In this case the local and the global optimization problem need to be solved together, or it just won't work. That being said, I think that not all local optimization problems are of this type, but some certainly are. And many of the nasty ones fall on founders and startups disporportionately.
I say, I stand corrected. I was sure I read the opposite somewhere, but I would not dream of contesting your reference.
> 2 - Some sense of Naiveté in the European site, in part because of the less restrictive laws and stronger regulations (beats me how Soundcloud started in Germany, anyone who has tried to use Youtube there can relate - at the same time Soundcloud is "the exception that proves the rule")

SoundCloud actually started in Stockholm and moved to Berlin. Maybe because of the music scene there.

> 3 - Less "hacking" spirit.

I can only talk about Sweden, and I certainly think there's a culture like that here. Lots of old demo coders, etc. Probably one reason why there are quite a few game companies.

As I see it, the startup scene is real and has the same kind of "glorification" here, maybe because of the country's past with entrepreneurs and large companies. Or maybe because of success stories like Minecraft, Spotify, Skype, etc. People will certainly not look down on you for going your own path. What's lacking though are VCs willing to spend money, I think it's harder to get funding.
It's not too long. :)
At $50/yr to lease a modem from Time Warner, and replacement modems at $50-$100, then leasing a modem from TWC would only be cheaper if Time Warner upgrades their network more than once every 1-2 years (which I'm betting they don't)
And just think, Americans (and Canadians) also get much less vacation time than Europeans! Geniuses!
I guess.

I saw that most of the time people did complain about the first releases of the OS. I didn't get most of those problem, though, until Mavericks.
Mr. Nichols is an expert in an area where our experts have led us on multi-trillion dollar misadventures.

I think I know a lot about Android, but it ain't gonna cost that much if I'm wrong.
My wife and I are going through this right now. My wife has a senior director position in a multi-billion dollar financial company, and I am a programmer at a startup. We just had a child several months ago, and it's been very hard trying to balance work and life. It's actually the hardest thing we've both had to do in our lives.

Her job is a minimum of 60-hrs per week, but luckily I'm able to limit my work to 40-hrs per week, my company has been incredibly supportive. But truth-be-told my productivity has been affected by at least 50% over these past few months, especially after my wife and I both went back to work. There's been a lot of guilt from both our ends, due to how much slips through the crack both at work and at home because of trying to raise our kid as best as we can.

The key, I hope, is to keep focused as a team, meaning we try to pick each other's slack with no resentment. It's tough living and raising a family in Silicon Valley, due to the demands of work, and given how expensive things like houses in decent areas are.
Ruby: Treat everyone like objects equally.
Door Closes to Open Internet, But All May Not Be Lost
There is nothing about the poster that implies that the poster is particularly young. Simply that the developer isn't part of management.
Additionally, it is a fallacy to confuse entitlement with rationalism. The developer rationally knows that based on their skills they can go elsewhere easily. The question posed is an interesting one. The manager who has been brought on certainly has the right to make changes. But don't fall prey to the assumption that the manager is a good one. Companies fail all the time because they make human mistakes.
The tragedy here is that chances are this cultural shift will probably kill this company if it is too small. Most developers these days have the privilege of picking workplaces based on the culture and companies that don't account for this won't succeed.
There is a reason that google has a fleet of private busses that take their developers to and from work.
> The solution, at least for me, is as elusive as ever.

If you define "the problem" as "I want to work 80 hours/week + have a healthy family life", well, yes, that's always going to be elusive. I.e. impossible.

Pretty sure the answer is to just not work 80 hours/week.

> but it's not something I can decide to change either

It is probably convenient for you to think that, but unless you have some sort of mental health condition (delusions of grandeur, etc.), I doubt it.

One way or the other, you're making choices you want to make.

And that's fine, but you might as well be honest with yourself/others about why you're making them, and that you must implicitly be okay with the trade offs.
Your culture and values are not universal. Children can adapt to and thrive in much worse environments than mostly only see Dad at the weekend.

Your kind of judgmental attitude is of a piece with the helicopter parent Amy Chua bullshit that makes so many have fewer, more stressed, stressful kids rather than have more and just let them be.

There is more than one acceptable combination of parental responsibilities and time outlays, even in America.

We don't have any obligation to live up to your ideals.
It's a compensation for opportunity cost. Even if it may be really fun to build things that make others rich I'll still need food, a roof, and healthcare.
Javascript, Erlang, Ruby, Python. The main languages I've used this year. Part I
> I think what the author misses is the large institutional structure that restricts the supply of experts and (as a result) enhances their prestige. These days, with the growing availability of technical information, existing systems of licensure, credentialing, and professionalization are breeding resentment on both sides of the lectern.

I don't think you're correct. Ph.D.s are being produced at a 10:1 ratio relative to actual tenure track positions. If anything, Ph.D.s are being massively overproduced for a society that does not know what to do with (or want to pay for) the overqualified.

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

http://www.astrobetter.com/nature-on-phd-overproduction/

http://mikethemadbiologist.com/2013/02/01/the-overproduction...
You're a new parent, you're working 40 hours per week and somehow your employers are incredibly supportive?

I don't know what the psychological term is. Cognitive dissonance? Stockholm syndrome?
Yes, that's the right talk.
The deactivation is probably due to the recurrence of the <$1 charges, not the value itself. Sub-$1 transactions are very common for verification purposes, IIRC PayPal uses a random amount in cents to verify you.
Well it's possible for people to obtain negative learning, e.g. learning things that are false.

I would consider anyone who studies Marxism to be in this category.

For most people, it is a blend of positive knowledge, and the political prejudice of their discipline, so one should neither reject or blindly accept the views of an "expert" in the social sciences.

My PhD is in economics, and I would love to be able to pull rank on people who talk about "buying locally" or putting people before profits. But there is no way to consistently enable such rank pulling, since there is a Professor of Marxist Economics somewhere would could accuse me of being ignorant of 100 years of Marxist thought, and give me 1000 books to read before I'm qualified to speak on the topic.

So the only way forward is to reach out to the public and convince them that one's discipline knows the truth.
The cynic in me can't help but think that this so called "velveeta shortage" just in time for the NFL Playoffs/Superbowl is in reality nothing more than a lame guerilla marketing tactic from the Kraft marketing team in an attempt to drum up sales. The last few times I've gone grocery shopping I've noticed an abundance of Velveeta on the shelves, I would have had no clue there was a so called "shortage" unless you told me so.
On ethics and international relations, my previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7071033
Yeah, after the first part of the article I spent the entire last bit vaguely hoping to see the remorse of having implicitly forced the developers and other executives to make the same decision he made, considering that were I in his shoes I'd feel terrible about how I treated my own family life but even worse about what impact it may (even potentially) have had on other people's families since they had less explicit choice in the matter.

Didn't find it. I guess I'd make a horrible modern CEO, I lack the unflinching confidence to be so self-absorbed.
It has to be supported by the other spouse. If my wife is working extreme hours to bring in the income, I have to make sure the kids know that's why she can't be here now.
One key thing that I've noticed consistently is this happens when I have my headphones plugged in. Unplug them, put it back to sleep and wake it.
Opera seems to allow this (and it seems to give a bit more fine grained control over when/where extensions are allowed).
But who plans a New Year's Eve datacenter migration? What kind of major site maintenance is needed on Christmas?

It's one thing if it's an unplanned emergency. It's another entirely if it's planned. Planning for work on Christmas or New Year's Eve would be enough to convince me to find employment elsewhere.
In my view, this applies not just to CEOs, but other people too. I've seen many around me and myself included, concentrate work so hard to achieve what we thought was best for ourselves and to keep our family happy. However, it would take a toll that our mislabeled 'needy' other halves would bear the brunt off. Switching off from work is absolutely necessary to keep a work life balance going and its necessary to keep in mind that there are other things that are just as important, like our spouses, family and our health, without which all the hard work is essentially meaningless. I personally tell myself at the end of the day that the work never ends, there is always something to do, and it can wait for tomorrow.
I agree with you.

Moreover, I understood over the years that it's always better to communicate with people using their favourite means of communication: FB? MSN chat? mail? SMS? phone call? Whatever it is I just use it because it reduces friction.

Personally I favor email. I don't like being called on the phone but I find it convenient that I can call someone (like most people I suppose).
I took a look a DOCSIS 3.0 modems available on Amazon when I last got a cable subscription. At the time they were really expensive, so I decided to go with renting one from my provider. That was a long time ago, and they are now available for cheap, but people should always consider how they expect costs to go down in the future. In hindsight, going with the company's modem was the right choice.
I think the motto of this story, at least here on HN, is thanks for a) highlighting this rate hike which many may not have noticed and b) highlighting that TWC is ok with you buying your own and prepared to easily let you add your MAC address with a single call.