skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, maybe he would not want to work with you either? Did you consider that? That you may be so one-dimensional that your programmer with slightly more diverse interests would find you and your job a boring place!
How is the statement is dishonest? My guess is that she meant "affected searches that were limited by group" while you heard "affected searches within this one particular group".
Making a grand piano talk English [video]
Karma/Reputation systems on website are to reward a desired behavior. Part of HN's value is it's active useful conversation (vs /.,digg etc). So it makes sense to give the community the tools to reward what they want and create positive self feedback. (Also like the other reply, simply posting doesn't give you karma)
I think Markham makes a good contrast between Agile with a capital 'a' invoking the marketing masses and high book sales, and agile with a lowercase 'a' alluding to simply quick and coordinated movement by a team. Markham would agree agile is different for every company, but I'd like to point out that if you want to implement agile for a student team of developers working on a software product, your timeboxes are stretched out--so you're still using agile but you make it work for your developers.
One of the newer technologies (there are several ways to skin the nuclear-battery cat) is refered to as "betavoltaics". Presumably this make them sound enough like solar panels to sneak by. ;) The name actually is related to how they work at least (beta particles into semiconductors).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaics
I wouldn't be offended at all if anyone finds my personal life too boring and one-dimensional for their tastes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/3983773743/in/set-721...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/15825489/in/set-72157...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/525184427/in/set-7215...
A friend of mine always asked the following question in interviews: "What was the last program you wrote that wasn't for work or a programming assignment?" He just wanted an answer that wasn't "I have never programmed just for myself".

Every other craftsman will use their talents for their own purposes, so it is generally a good sign if programmers do the same.
Isn't it interesting how the many-windows paradigm has come and gone? Desktop software for the first ~15 years of personal computing was full screen, single "window" for any given task. And then, for the past fifteen years or so, we've been dealing with the increased complexity of many-windowed interfaces. Seems strange that nobody noticed that some of the changes that windowing systems brought were negative until a whole new generation of developers came along and reinvented the single window model.
I'd like to add a little here.

Agile, whether big or little 'a', is about some kind of stressors and some kind of adapting to meet those stressors. I described those stressors in general terms as "business value" -- making something quickly that people want -- but you can fit a lot of things into "business value"

For instance, on a student project, those stressors can be incremental timeboxes (if you have 3 months, why not have 2-week or 1-week cycles with a demo to one of your peer groups? After all, there's a difference between a build/demo iteration and a release iteration)

What I'm getting at is that you're always making some kind of sub-optimal trade-off for the greater good. That's why agile is so tough in schools and large organizations -- the lack of stressors means a lack of impetus to adapt. Many times the first sprint looks just like the last one, or you stretch your sprints to meet the class deadline, or you slipping schedules is routine, etc.
Oh memories. It was not just about English - even if you knew what to do, you had to use the exact phrase game creators intended.

It could become very frustrating, especially as in those days you couldn't just go to web and find the walkthrough.

I remember being stuck on the top of volcano in Larry 2, trying to create a bomb to get inside:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QQRuRiPp6I#t=50s

Sometimes, the only option was to search through the game resource files, looking for strings that could be used.
ha, i remember learning english with SQ1 and a dictionary :p
Difficulty and adversity are frequently conduits to enlightenment if the recipient will forgo bitterness and seek to be taught by his experiences.
I think company reps and even top management should keep blogs--but perhaps for a different reason than talking about their personal lives. What happens when your product starts a nose-dive in sales or customer satisfaction? Listen to your customers! Open a line of communication with them--they're people too. When Michael Dell started blogging about his computers, it gave unhappy customers a chance to vent and get their problems out there. Almost nothing is worse nowadays than an unhappy customer, who can use the internet as a tool to destroy the PR dollars spent advertising your product. Blog to talk to your customers and routinely check what works, what doesn't and what they want to see.
It is also available online, with full consent of the relevant rights owners: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/accelerando/
Why IBM is in trouble with the antitrust police
Good point.

It also applied to the music industry. The latest Britney album would have cost a lot more to create and market than the album of a obscure indie band.
Google Group search was horribly broken for months, across many or all Google-hosted groups too, not just Usenet. It would only return results from the previous few weeks.

It seems to have been fixed sometime in the last couple weeks.
My company's clients are all big banks...and when you get into these places, you wonder, why on earth are they still running on that system? (especially when you are trying to interface with them).

I don't know how true this article is, but it makes sense from where I'm sitting.

Anyone know how much truth there is to this? Curious to hear the experiences of those who may work more closely with these mainframes...
People can get addicted to their rating, creating "karma whores" and the like.

A counterpoint to this: If a karma system reliably rewards beneficial behavior, "karma whores" can potentially create a lot of real value for more casual members of the community (at the cost of possibly some irritation from active but not addicted members). This may not be possible in all communities, of course, but here's at least one example: http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
Interesting tidbits:

Q:If i have a business plan, how do you want me to send it to you?

A:Have someone who already knows us refer you to us. If you don't know someone who knows us, we are highly unlikely to fund your company as a practical matter.

Advice: I would skip the networking events and spend your time building your reputation through hard (and brilliant) work.
Okay, I'm almost there. Now can anyone tell me how to get rid of that pesky search box?
And the logo. It would probably be best if it just responded with HTTP headers and no document at all.
Nice point. But I would argue that the stressors are the same kinds of deadlines as you would see in any professional organization. From my experience working on a student developer team (attempting to use agile), the reason it doesn't work in a school setting is the lack of daily updates and meetings among team members since it's hard to coordinate the schedules any decent-sized team of students and to convince them to reorganize their workload to meet the weekly or bi-monthly deadlines. The worst case scenario is a lower grade on your project, rather than the stressor of losing your bonus or worse--getting fired.
Ok, so you are no good at statistics (your anecdote means very little), why should we trust you to judge a programmers ability.

You know how hard it is to actually measure how productive a programmer is, he could be writing absolute crap, that just gets the job done. The projects he has could be very simple.

And someone smart might just be someone who can switch a computer on, to a lot of people.
Just a shot in the dark, but it might be because while everybody is looking at Mars, they don't have to race for Venus.

Also, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and I guess Russian space geeks want to go straight to the source...
You can start by not driving them away. Seriously.

There are a lot of really good programmers who don't tinker or blog in their spare time. If they come across an employer who makes a categorical statement that "their kind" is not employable, do you think they'll even bother to send in their resume?

As another commenter noted, tinkering with programming on the side is a positive indicator, but not tinkering is not a negative indicator. Good programmers notice the logical mistake here, and it is off-putting.
There is no point in just reading maths books. That would be not much different to reading books about celebs. You have to get your hands dirty, start exploring theorems, or even start modelling them in the computer. That would be impressive.

Someone who just reads maths books is not really bragging about much.
I'm not so sure multi-windowing is quite dead when it comes to drawing and CAD programs. From a practical perspective, the paradigm of being able to move your palettes around, and pick which ones are displayed, is rather valuable regardless of how big your display is.
Amazing? Hardly!
Because MySQL's cozy like PHP.
Do you guys already know about this?

http://www.infamous-adventures.com/index.php?page=projects

Still not QFG, I know, just an FYI.
Yes, the extra complexity (and it is there) is the biggest strain on the analogy.
"First Pictures Of Single Window Gimp - It Looks Vaguely like Photoshop."

FTFY.
And the spam filter is broken. Lots of user created group are marked as spam and can not start or reply any topic. One of my group were marked as spam and locked up seconds after I just created it.
64 people using '123456' out of over 10,000 people (who were caught in a phishing scam), doesn't mean that most people don't get password security.
Guy Steele: Organizing Functional Code for Parallel Execution [video]
Ultima would be a good game to multiplay. Black
Gate in particular.
Ask HN: Pre-Incorporating Founder Split
Hi,

If (this is mostly hypothetical at the moment) a startup has a pre-incorporation founder split, what kind of documents should you sort out to cover the future of the startup?

For instance, let's say that two founders have been developing a concept (mostly theoretical to date) and business plan. However, one founder decides they don't want to pursue the idea (let's say grad school comes up or something) but is happy for the other founder to continue with the idea.

I assume it's good to sign some documents saying that the leaving founder surrenders all claims to the startup, implementation ideas etc.? What about from a future competition standpoint too, would the surrender of rights to the ideas be enough to stop those ideas being used at a later date?

I'd love your thoughts.
0 to $170m in 2.5 years: Mint.com's Aaron Patzer's keynote from Juicepitcher
Thanks for the info. I didn't know.
then you are not really intersted in really mastering programing, or maybe it is just a sign of a 'blub programmer'

There are so many things that are not solved yet. AI, in a human context comes to mind.
Speach recognition, text to speach, image recognition are solved problems. Combining them into a seemingless intelligent experience (robot is optional), is not solved.

Master that, and you might become rich if you do.
IANAL, but I have spoken to lawyers, and from what I gathered, if you want to be funded at some point it is important that you tidy up the intellectual property situation. You probably just need a paper that says that whoever's leaving did own the IP put into the start-up and that they're transferring all their rights to the company. Investors like to know that you own what you're selling...
I think I was unclear. Student agile and big-corp agile can have a lot in common.

In really large organizations, developers can be multi-allocated to several different development teams and be working on 5 or 6 projects at the same time. In addition, slipping schedules is the norm. And you can have multiple channels of managers, making accountability problematic. So the stressors don't always apply at big companies either.

That's why I use the startup metaphor. In the startup world, you produce value or you die.

There are techniques to use, of course. You can insist on daily stand-ups and an hour or two of co-located time per day -- to the point of refusing to be on the team if it's not done. But that gets into a whole other area of courage and agile teams which is probably another thread.
I'm reminded of the story told by Randy Pausch where the assistant coach said to him (regarding being yelled at by the coach): “That’s a good thing. When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you any more, that means they gave up.”
Avoid it like the plague. Get a lawyer and issue convertible notes instead. Valuing a seed company with half a product and no customers only ends up in tears.
The bay area seems the nation's capital of naming consultants, too. Here's an old article from Salon about some of the agencies:

http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print....
How can one be intense but low-key?
I can't stand single windows for graphics stuff. ideal is to have the image take up one whole monitor and all the pallets and tools take up another.
Well, Wired is no NGO either... and yet its article prompted Google to do something about it, as reported by nebula [http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/usenet_fix/]. A nice example of two "evil" companies benefiting the public good...

I must confess to being a brainwashed Googlevangelist, but anyway... if it wasn't for Google's (lucrative) actions, maybe non-profit projects such as the Internet Archive might not have saved those magtapes in time.
Don't some ISPs still have their own USENET servers?
you've just reinvented the invisible hand concept.

for the record I agree completely. checks and balances on negative behaviors is stupid and has never worked. what you need to do is set up the incentives so that everyone's goals are complementary anyway. then the users police themselves because everyone is benefiting. you've turned a zero-sum game (status) into positive sum.
Free Twitter Backgrounds And Custom Twitter Backgrounds
Twitter is no different from any website online if you want to stand out. That’s why having a custom Twitter background is the answer because every website has a theme, so why not your Twitter.
This? http://bit.ly/1Yl9Su This looks amazing? Really?

It looks fine... but maybe the linux dudes have standards lowered a bit?
I think your hostility is a bit overboard...

The idea that doing intense work could sap your energy totally matches my experience.

I would find it hard to believe that you love solving problems with code, but never find the opportunity and necessity to do that outside of work. For periods of months perhaps? Sure, but over years? Never doing anything other than what's expected at your job? I'd find that hard to believe.
That's why it's going to be optional. I, for one, can't stand multi-window interfaces (after almost a year of using a Mac, I still find parts of the interface annoying).
What if the employer says: "I would never hire a programmer that sucks"?

Seems pretty reasonable to filter out people who are bad at their job.

So your argument is really one of breadth - breadth of the filter. From my point of view as a programmer, I certainly do believe that programming outside of your job is an extremely good predictor of passion, which is a great predictor of ability as a developer, particularly for younger people. I might consider a 40-year old who doesn't program for fun anymore, maybe. I wouldn't bother interviewing a 25 year old who never saw a point in coding outside of university/work.
I feel the same way. Too bad no company in their right mind would release a game with intentionally outdated graphics and physics. Imagine the public outcry. Maybe the current game-playing mainstream is so devoid of imagination that they're unable to play games that leave things to it.
Yahoo's Site Explorer is pretty amazing
In my experience, the main advantage of bash is conciseness for certain tasks. I don't have much experience with Python, but I have found the shell (and associated command) less verbose than Perl in certain cases.

Obvious things like "find" and "grep", but also things like doing things with the output of a command. In Perl, you need to open the command as a file handle, which takes a couple lines of code. In bash, you just use "|".

I wouldn't write a multi-thousand program in bash, though. Not again, anyway...
Great article - thanks. Naming is all over the news down under at the moment because one of our most beloved brands - Vegemite - just released a new product and called it 'iSnack 2.0'

Truly a name chosen by a committee only because nobody hated it ... nobody except the consumer.
That's probably the case. Also, all of them being supersets of the Bourne shell doesn't help either.
i've changed my opinion about it several times as well. it seems that when you're on it, you find things you don't like about it (particularly the anti-social bit). but when you're off, you can see flaws in substitutes like caffeine (legitimately turns you into an insomniac).
Why bother? I'd go with Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/other Linux best supporting particular netbook. Seems much more suitable choice for that hardware.

What I'd love to have is proper graphics on netbooks (like 9400m.)

(I've been Mac OS X user for the past 4 years, Linux before that)
As far as I know, those cases are pretty hard to win (in my non-lawyerly observations of the law). It also varies from state to state, I believe.

I've had to sign a couple of documents that said that any work I created, at work or outside, that was in the domain of the company was owned by the company. This company happens to do software engineering, but I'm not particularly scared since my job has absolutely nothing to do with software engineering. I do, however, do "software engineering" outside of the company on my own time. I believe in order to prove that they own the IP to whatever else I produce, they'd have to prove that either I created it on their time, or that I created it using skills or tools I gained while employed there. They'd also get the IP under the work for hire law, if, say, I happened to be hired to produce some piece of IP, but I'd say that's pretty obvious.
Anyone else notice this amusing form of malware spam?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls...

(spam bot A asks for anti-virus software recommendations. spam bot B follows up suggesting a link to some malware)
Don't surf the net at work. Don't take long breaks. Don't waste time on useless things. Only show up when you are healthy and well rested. Only work with talented people who get stuff done.

6-7 hours of real work a day x 5 days a week x 48 weeks a year x 7 people can get huge amount of stuff done.

PS: The longer most people are at work each day, the lower percentage of the time they are actually getting stuff done.
I still believe that the best definition of what agile is is to be found in the agile manifesto: http://www.agilemanifesto.org/
Your intent is laudable, but your argument seems to miss what I actually said, which was that I personally would never meet them, not that they weren't qualified or weren't employable. I can't hire someone I don't interview.

My experience is that "hiring practices" is a very touchy subject. No matter how precisely you express yourself, people will take things personally because their self-worth is loosely connected to whether other people value their potential inclusion in a team.

So I'm not even remotely surprised to find comments like yours.
"I certainly do believe that programming outside of your job is an extremely good predictor of passion"

Yes, I think that's the point. Is this a good predictor? If you are a young, single male, then maybe so. There are many other reasons besides lack of passion that can prevent a passionate programmer from programming outside of work.
Actually, no. I think that's almost the definition of a passionate programmer: there's very little that cna stop them from programming outside of work - not even a full time programming day job.
"Your intent is laudable, but your argument is flawed."

Yes, you are correct. In my passion I got carried away and started constructing a strawman. My apologies!

"What I said was that I personally would never meet them, not that they weren't qualified or weren't employable."

True. I think it touched a nerve with me because I've seen job posts specifically state that they would not consider any programmer who does not have a blog (!).

Thanks for bringing up the subject; it's a good one. :)
Paul Kedrosky: Why I Love Venture Capitalists
Ask HN: paying rent and bootstrapping - what alternatives are there?
Hi everyone,

I run a company with a core product that is bootstrapped and a bit more than ramen-profitable. We are a small fish in a big market. Our customers love us, but business is growing slowly since other players dominate distribution channels and we are only slowly starting to change that. I've thought about taking investment to try and grow faster, but it doesn't seem like a great move without a solid plan for converting cash into revenue. And I'm concerned that the need to return multiples on any investment would screw our existing business if we weren't able to push beyond slow organic growth. So current strategy is pouring all income back into the company and trying to grow existing and new product lines with the cash we have. In short: more bootstrapping.

Here's the rub: I'm running this business from a rented apartment that is large enough to host the people I have who come over at times and has certain kinds of other dedicated space necessary for the business. I sleep in a room in the back so it doubles as an apartment. There aren't zoning problems with any of this, but paying rent every month grates. Surely there's a better way. I've started wondering if it would make sense to look for investment to buy a place and pledge the property as collateral to the investor? That would free up cash on our side, and reduce the downside risk to any investor. Sort of like dealing with a bank, only without the bank, and with an equity stake or convertible loan taking the place of what would be the interest payment.

Has anyone gone down this road for purchasing housing or other fixed assets? As a bootstrapped startup? I've never heard of anyone doing anything like this and don't know if that's because it's a patently stupid idea, because it isn't a common growth scenario, because the market is covered by existing mortgage products, or because angels are generally disinterested in this sort of thing. How off the wall is the idea and are there any better ones? How do I stop paying rent, or at least get a better deal for it?
I agree that voting systems on the web end up favoring the most persistent, rather than the most worthy or highest quality. This is something that I've seen on Wikipedia and Digg. And to an extent with the trolls on Kuro5hin.

I think moderation is important, but that it should not be the central aspect of user interaction.
You are a mother with two kids.
I have got a copy of "The Art of Prolog" sitting on my desk :) It is pretty good, but I agree with you, it is dated.
Adoption was hindered by the word "nuclear."

I propose we change the term from 'nuclear' to 'fusion' in all future nuclear (fusion) marketing copy.
Now that I think about it, I'm upmodding your original point. Whether the argument was flawed or not, the very fact that hiring is a touchy subject makes your point necessarily valid: While there may or may not be merit in my practices, blogging about them may be a poor idea.
That, plus the fact that he is basically indecisive about selling his co-founder down the river or not.