skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I "work from home" at least two days a week. I often head to one of the two nearby libraries to work for a couple hours, mostly just to change my environment. Despite all the books and a few roaming kids, it's less distracting than being at home. Plus, I hate the smell of burning coffee at most cafes.

For some reason our local libraries block instant messengers, some webmail (but not https Gmail), and VPN connections. If it weren't for our http/https VPN setup, I wouldn't be able to do any online work there.

They also have few laptop-friendly seats. The big library near me has just two grown-up sized tables and you usually have to squeeze onto a table with a couple others. The smaller library has 8 study cubicles, most without power outlets, but it also has a park next to it where you can catch the wifi from some picnic tables.
I must say, I'm completely fine with this sort of thing. Doesn't bother me even slightly. I can't image what Palm could use this information for that I would not be OK with (although I'm sure there are examples), but the fact that they are pretty clearly using this as part of improving their software -- I'm all for it. I would, however, prefer it to be sent when it's connected to a computer or something since... well, don't waste my bandwidth :)
i had a similar idea to this a little while ago, but couldn't think of how to execute on it properly.

basically a prosper.com for investing in companies.

i'd love to see it executed upon.
Help  Should I trade my secure job at a bank for a startup?
Ok, so I'm a Sr Developer at the bank where I have been working for two and a half years, and I'm getting really sick of the corporate culture and how long it takes to get anything done. My team is great, my manager is great, the product is alright, and I am paid alright considering that it's a conservative bank (and region). I just wish I were doing more hacking and less meetings/requirements proofreading/blah blah blah.

So I got a job offer from a local startup that has a product out there and some paying customers (although they aren't breaking even yet). This startup has made me an offer for only a little more then I am currently making, and the location change will add about 30 or 40 minutes to my daily commute.

On the plus side, I would be the second developer to join the team, so I'm getting in pretty early, and they have plans for a strong bonus program, once they break even (which probably won't be this year). I would have a lot of freedom, and a lot of input into the direction of the product and the development process.

My brother works for another smaller company who's founder is also one of the partners on this startup, and he has strongly suggested that I take the job. From what he's seen at his company (with a common founder) has been great and he really enjoys the culture and effectiveness of the organization. I am really excited about the opportunity but because it's not a very large salary jump (money being one of the main factors in my job search) I am having a difficult time convincing myself and my wife that this is a good move for us. We lose the known security and face the unknown.

I feel like I can get in there and help them get more of their product up to speed and get things really rocking that I could really see a possibility for some big returns, both monetarily and in my career, but it's scary to leave the security of a bank for a startup.

I've put together a list of pros and cons, but can you guys give me any additional insight, for or against?

Pros:
Quarterly Bonuses (possible)
Work from home more
Startup culture and opportunities
Ground floor, one of the first employees
Launching board for my own ideas

Cons
Only a little more money then I am making now
Small/unstable
What if they don't pan out?
30 to 40 more minutes to the daily commute

Thoughts? Other pros/cons?

Thanks!
I meant the first interpretation. If you think post-Civil-War sharecropping meets the standard of "completely voluntary", you need to do some reading. You can start here:

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-3590
Sorry -- strange as this may seem, I don't read Dvorak. I don't know him from Adam.

Seems like a lot of other people do, though, and have strong opinions!
It's gonna be funny when Leo Laporte lambastes him next week.
This is a good point... the first step is getting ahold of the right person, but after that there will probably need to be some sort of dialog or coordination as the on-call person tries to gather more data about the issue, reproduce the problem, tests the fix, etc. Providing that sort of system would certainly be very useful for your customers.

Overall great idea with PagerDuty though, especially if one's business relies (survives) on their website's/system's uptime. Reducing MTBF is often very hard, especially after a certain point, and reducing MTTR is therefore very important for improving availability.
On Writing: Hacking Your Brain
I didn't know that, so I guess you have a point, but it does indeed sound like splitting hairs.

And the reason we are having this conversation is because Dvorak screwed up pretty badly and implied he had no degree at all. No one would have noticed a post alleging that he committed the crime of omitting the name of his college campus from his resume.
In defence of Apple
Clickable link: http://www.looklookbuy.com
This must be old because ma.gnolia, now defunct, is #12.
As a long-time blogger with a decent readership, I felt the need to post on a regular basis (to keep my blog active and readers happy). But coming up with stuff to blog about always proved to be a challenge. I did not want to blog about stuff that everyone else was talking about ("echo chamber" as bloggers like to call it) and I wanted to write about stuff my readers would enjoy and actually read/comment on. Coming up with unique topics is not easy.

The idea for a user-generated content suggestion tool (as i called it back then) was born. Fast-forward a few years and you have http://Skribit.com, the startup I'm working on, with the slogan "Cure Writer's Block" :-)

In general - most of my ideas that I work on come from frustrations I have in my daily life.
Jimmy Fallon Demos ShopSavvy
I have 10 or so large-ish problems that I encounter on a weekly (if not much more frequently) basis. I would gladly pay money for a solution to these problems, so I can only assume that others would pay money to me if I solved one of them. Bam! Idea!

The hard part is finding the time to implement said ideas.
I really didn't know that there were two kinds of people one who thought they were moving thru time and the one who thought the time was just passing by. I cannot decide in which category I belong to.
Also, entering the app store costs more: you also need a Mac and at least an iPod.

You can also just dual boot/virtualize OSx86 on a non-Apple PC.
Saying you made a few phone calls does not constitute proof of anything. Dvorak put forward more evidence to support his claim than the author of the nextgov piece. Yeah, that claim is from the article, but are we supposed to simply take his word for it?
Makes sense, we will fix the user number thing.

As for the getting started steps looking godaddy-ish, is that a compliment? :P
This type of blog post (and headline) is completely ridiculous. Its a useful resource if you don't know how to use a search engine. The only reason to visit it to help focus.com pad its pageviews.

Social media is as simple as this: Do what you can manage, interact with your customers in a way that you enjoy and that doesn't feel like a chore, and be on the sites that your customers are on.
Is this a mylivesignature.com knock off?
Freakonomics: Q&A with 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki
Nice UI.

There is a bug on the price slider limits where there are no results, it shows "+/- Infinity".
I had exactly the opposite reaction, and almost as strongly.

Wouldn't saying "the meeting was moved back two days" have to mean Friday? I guess I'm pretty passive ...
Well, they have done some innovation, but my memory includes them buying a C compiler company, buying an operating system, hiring Cutler to do an OS after he had already done two or three, doing C# which looks a lot like java in most all respects (and hiring the author of Turbo Pascal to do that). My recollection is also that they have been very behind on the web, and may still be.

So in my book they are a bit behind in the innovation department.

IE 5 was some time ago. A more recent view on the approach to standards is at http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/03/02/On-OOXML particularly in the paragraph titled "Con: Standards Process Abuse".
I don't see how this is shady.

If I like the product and people ask me about it I don't mind evangelizing it. However if so many people ask me about it that it becomes a burden I can see why people want a little love back.
Rails Rumble 2009 Teams Map
We just decided not to support IE6. We might lose some customers, but we figured it would cost more to support it than we would make in lost revenue.
I don't know anything about him either. My opinion has nothing to do with Dvorak. It has to do with your painting him as a victim of defamation when he obviously was the one doing the defaming.
A map of the Rails Rumble 2009 Teams. If you're in it, you should definitely add yourself!
Well since you asked, let's see if can't get this for you :). Also I found your site through Netflix itself which I take to mean that they don't wholly disapprove of such a venture. Did you have to get your app concept cleared with them at all?
They're only accepting money from Regulation D accredited investors, meaning people with 7-figure bank accounts. This isn't substantially different from seeking angel funding.
Lol, I have plenty of time yet not so plenty of ideas! :P

Shout out a few ideas? I'd be glad to consider developing them. :D
So what was it? So intriguing.
I was disappointed when I found that you can only trigger an alarm via email from a separate monitoring system. I was expecting that there'd at least be a way to trigger an alarm if an email wasn't sent on schedule.

I halfway expected there to be a portion of Nagios' features built in, at least the ones that make sense for services open on the internet: like ping, socket, and HTTP availability.

I guess your intended focus is to be purely a distribution mechanism for existing alerts -- which isn't very useful for just one person -- especially since I'd have to set up separate offsite monitoring systems to generate the alerts I care most about.
Thanks for the heads up! I'll take a note of it and fix it tonight.
He's trading credibility for ad hits. If that's his intention, he's doing a great job of it.
There's a difference between a 20 percent increase and a 20 percentage point increase.
Thanks for reporting this!
10 must-have virtualization tools
My apologies, I had this confused with Qflip.net, from the Rails Rumble 08 competition, not even close to the same idea. I guess my memory is not as sharp as I would hope.
Right, but many startups don't know where to find angels. And perhaps angels would pay for organized access to good ideas like this.

Accredited investors can be others besides those with 7-figure bank accounts:
http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm
Yes, if you don't mind pushing it.
This provides an interesting counterpoint to one of the classic anti-free-market arguments, which is that the free market economics is based on the approximation that customers have a lot of information about a product and can successfully use that information to negotiate price. The counterargument is that we do not have such perfect agents creating our system. The counter-counter argument is to observe that it often works even so.

(As you can probably guess from the shortness of that paragraph, I'm not actually making those arguments right now, just setting up some context.)

Having truly pervasive electronic agents in the market working on people's behalf changes that argument chain. Maybe I can't study everything about, say, a given brand of hard drives, but my agent can learn a lot more on my behalf. How does this change the way the market works?

Honestly, I have no idea, I'd need way more time to think about this than a single HN post can be given. I just thought I'd toss this out there, because I think it's a very thought-provoking question, to the point that I'd say that if you think you can figure it out in 5 or 10 seconds I feel pretty confident you're probably off base. (For one thing, there are clearly second-order effects that will emerge if this ever becomes pervasive.)

You can look to the stock market as an exemplar, but there are a lot of potentially-relevant differences between the stock market and an economy full of pervasive use of agents. Price aggregators are another exemplar, but there are also potentially-relevant differences there. I think a large population of people using these agents for a lot of consumer goods would have a new effect of some sort.
Five easy free ways to protect your identity online
I think that would be great if it happened, but I don't think it will.
John C. Dvorak vs. the White House spin doctors. Sit back and watch the mud slingers and the muck rakers do battle, and just have fun, because it doesn't matter who wins.
Funny, we're on opposite sides of that !

In the case of police brutality, especially when grounded in racism all the details should be as public as they can be made.
Greasemonkey script: sort the Hacker News homepage
Nice idea! Good luck.

I would make "phone calls, SMSes, and emails" much more prominent though. It took me too long to find how I would actually be alerted. There is a lot of fuzzy text on the site that makes it hard to scan.
I mostly skimmed your long post.

Take the job, or do not take the job. The answer lies in your sense of adventure, not in the details.
A good point, by the way.
It sounds like a no-brainer: already has paying customers, has enough cash to be offering a Real Salary, and the founders have prior successes.

But the family one is a huge issue. You're probably looking at longer hours, with more uncertainty, and possibly a drop in quality of the health care plan/general benefits. If the home front can't buy into that for the potential upside of a happier + possible bonus-enhanced you, then it's going to be a very stressful situation.

Also, be sure it's a product / technology you like to work on. Every hiring manager I know will tell you you're going to have a lot of "freedom, input into the direction of the product, and the process" - even the several I know at IBM & Microsoft. The caveat to that is, "within the bounds of what we feel are appropriate." If you're making this change just for the freedom, look for something where you're a founder and the technical lead. If you're doing this for a change of pace from the bank and the potential upside/startup experience, then I'd say consider it strongly :-)
That's the thing that surprised me: "the meeting was moved back two days" meant the same thing to me as "the meeting was moved forward two days." The only word that made me think the meeting was moved to Monday was "up."
Justin.tv Signs Deal With Fox, Gets Serious About Copyright Problems
this made me think of a 2 things

1, the event doesn't even seem like it should be newsworthy. isn't there more important stuff happening?

2, even for the most unimportant of events, it seems the different outlets' bias shows. As usual, Fox portrays Obama in a negative light and the Times makes him seem heroic.

At least that's what i took away from it. I mean, it's nothing Earth-shattering and we all knew this already.
According to websites that monitor live AIS signals, the Arctic Sea, built in 1992 and owned by a Finnish company

... I strongly dislike them for naming their boat in that manner.
It was only a matter of time. -sigh-
Not at all. As far as I can tell, Netflix is very supportive of FeedFliks. They did want me to change the name from FeedFlix to FeedFliks.

And yeah - if you can get the ZenMaster to post what his stats look like on FeedFliks, that would be great too!
I've been thinking of writing a blog post about this for a while... probably with the title "Who Watches the Watchers" :).

We use Wormly to monitor our site, email and DNS. We also have an exception reporting system which alerts us about any 500 errors in the site. We also alert if phone call or SMS messages sit in our event queues for more than 3 minutes after the scheduled delivery time.

We also have redundant data centers and rapid rollover to the backup systems in the event of a data center outage.

We don't use PagerDuty to do the alerting and schedule the on-call though. We alert everybody in our team via SMS and phone if any of the aforementioned alerts go off.
python has a better designed interpreter. it has a big sugar daddy behind it (google). it all depends on what you are into.depending on which you might consider some forgotten languages like earlang and lisp and simply use python as a glue language.
Damnit, that's cool.

I recently read "Masters of Doom." It's the "stories" of John Carmack and John Romero. I enjoyed it thoroughly and recommend it highly.

In the book they describe a "android like hum" that Carmack makes when he talks. I'm wondering if this is the "Iiiiii" noise that he makes in this video.
Me? I run a new Macbook Pro 17 (+ VMWare + Boot Camp + Win 7). But the sub-notebook class is attractive for way more than email. That's the whole point of having a machine that can run Windows. This would be like trying to sell as scooter that was banned from the freeways. Most people are going to pass it over for more practical models.
Maybe you could set up an SSH server on port 80.
Wow!! This is nice. I like the simplicity.

Can you please add an "All" for the category section? Sometimes I'd like to see all the results for a certain search term.

Instead of using the slider UI for the price range can we have text boxes, the slider is not very user-friendly when I am trying to pick a range of 0-300 when the whole range is 0-5000.
If Microsoft were to "go away and die" it would be because their competitors were, in fact, "polished diamonds".
Only one good question in there about gene methylation. Nothing about how/if they plan to increase the accuracy while reducing the costs. Nothing about plans to make it a real mass market product. Nothing about life time tracking of methylation and mutations.
There are also cases where you're not allowed to solicit investments publicly under Regulation D, which could hurt the "crowd" part of this "sourcing".
Someone already pointed out his "screw ups" so I will not repeat them.

Anyone who "screws up" quite a lot I think it is fair to call him a jackass. ie, Arrington
Bring your own snack, and coffee in a thermos bottle. Then just step outside the library for a few minutes to eat/drink what you brought.
Props for a very concise, amusing story.

At this point, they may as well ask for WEB TWO THOUSAND experience (see http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1491).
Truth, according to the law, is a complete defense against slander. With that in mind: Dvorak is a moron.
You're right, that works too. Now I've learnt two things.
This gets directly into motivation, as I pointed out. If Dvorak purposely defamed somebody, that's one thing. I'd love to hear evidence about that.

If, on the other hand, he was just being sloppy, then it's a mistake. Let it go. All this name-calling says more about the name-callers than it does about Dvorak.

People who are sloppy and get slammed don't "deserve" it. Screw-ups happen. I'm perfectly willing to let some columnist I don't read the benefit of the doubt of screwing up. In return, I'd appreciate it if people gave me the same benefit of the doubt. This is just common sense.

Look at it this way -- isn't this an excellent example of the net publishing bad information and then correcting itself almost immediately? With any other story, people would be talking about how much better we have things now than when we only had printed media.
I did read the article, but I didn't see where it said that there was no automation on the receiving end. Maybe I missed it, it was a long article.

When I noticed this for myself, 2007 sometime, I had a common problem where every Nth disc would take an extra day to be received, and that would really throw off my pattern, which mostly was just to have a couple movies for the weekend.

So soon hypothesized that it'd happen on days the barcode was not visible. So to test, I put 1 of them wrong intentionally, mailed all 3 at the same time, and the 1 that was wrong did indeed take an extra day to be marked as returned.

So I didn't have any real facts, just an observation that seemed plausible to me.
> ... drawing a distinction between the two in clear-cut cases (such as HTML versus C).

If anything, declarative languages (or markup languages if you prefer) are a sub-category of programming languages. Imperative languages are another sub-category.
I'm defending the context of the article.
It is good to be in an environment where others are hard at work because you'll be less likely to screw around.

There is tons of psych research on the effect of isolation on humans. Basically, it drives you insane. It is literally a form of torture. We are social creatures, designed to live in packs and tribes. Even an antisocial human is a relatively social creature.

It isn't easy to believe this until you've tried it. But I spent a year working out of my home office, and now I have a cubicle in an office again, and it is astonishing how much happier and more productive I am when I'm surrounded by other people, even if -- indeed, especially if -- they don't interact with me very much.

Of course, there is plenty of other research (not to mention lots of anecdotes from folks like PG) on the benefits of not being interrupted when you're trying to program. So what you really want is the library, where there are fellow humans around, but nobody will approach you or even speak in a loud voice. (Or perhaps you want a fishbowl office like the one Joel Spolsky built, where you can see lots of other people but you can't hear them.)
For me it would get a lot more than that. I only drive more than 40 miles in a day about a half dozen times a year.
I imagine their compete.com graph will look like scribd's after they kill their live sports traffic
Greeting cards printing, cheap greeting cards printing, folders printing
Can't connect. "Connection was reset"...HN effect?
Confirmation that we, in the UK, are fucked.
Didn't the semantic web folks try to hijack the term at some point?
Sadly, it nukes the "show 5 new items at bottom of main page" that the HN Toolkit gives me...

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Gross irresponsibility, incompetence, and total disrespect for the truth aren't enough for you?

Please demonstrate this is the case. All I see is a guy who thought he had a hot story, made a few calls, and published before he got all the facts. Looks like the confusion in school names is what led to this.

Where is all of this terrible negligence you mention?
The fresh crop of ARM / OMAP3 netbooks coming out may be a release valve on some of the design pressure that Microsoft is exerting -- not just the gimped specs to run XP, but the bog-standard hardware that everyone uses.

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ is pretty close to perfect for me, though I wish it had a lot more RAM, and booted off a standard mini-pci-e / SATA SSD.
Hmm, very nice. I like the layout, nice UI, very clean.

I would be nice if you tapped into some geolocation to provide my default location (let me change it of course) so I only had to fill in two fields (or possibly even one) to see some relevant results.

Congrats on launching, and I wish you the best of luck!
The all category seems interesting, we'll look into it.

We've been toying with this idea because of exactly the reason you mentioned. It's even worse if you search something and all the results are $0-$200 except for one that's $1000. We've also considered removing from the list the ones that are larger than a certain percentage of the average, to help keep the list more on target.
I'm not seeing this, try refreshing.