skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Three cheers for calling this article what it is!

Quoting from a comment I made previously:

----------------------------------------

A good friend of mine described the articles displayed here as a "rat's nest" which does not lead anywhere. At first, I thought he was crazy; then I began critically looking at said articles.

I signed up here looking for what the original post posits providing; what I found were articles about startups, business, marketing, the current/next great gold rush, followed by the token (recently it has been improving) programmer/hacker article. And the articles about startups, business, and marketing were not great on any scale; in fact upon critical review, said articles advocated rather bad strategies. Strategies which amounted to little more than legalized scams, strategies which optimize for the short term, strategies promoting win at any cost, strategies which advocate me first and to hell with the consequences; in short, strategies of which Phineas Taylor Barnum would have been proud.

Before joining the Hacker News community, I was interested in starting my own business. Now that I see what is advocated as "startup culture", I want nothing to do with starting a business in the United States (because my conclusion is the culture and laws of the U.S. have optimized for short term gain, with the resulting push towards the strategies mentioned earlier). What happened to a business (either startup or established business) having integrity in all of their relationships, being a responsible citizen of the business ecosystem it operates within, and providing a legacy beyond the generation within which it was founded?

----------------------------------------

So now here is my dissenting opinion of the linked article: if all you are concerned about is the money, then you have already lost.
Thanks for the reply. Now I will read it. I assume it was a "that popular dude had this and that" post.
Putting Text in Window Title Bars
Archive.org has an "open source audio" section that contains a lot of CC licensed music.
http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_audio
I'm not an iPhone user, but I clicked on this (the comments, not the iTunes link) because I wanted to know about the app, how it looks, what features it provides, how a fellow HN reader envisioned a piece of software, despite the fact that I would never use it.

I would have appreciated a link to a website with this information, but the comments here are just as good :D
Password security without a password manager
If that's true, then an overflow movie could gain a great advantage over the other overflow movies by lowering its ticket prices.
Whatever you end up with, make sure to double check it's legality. People like to put copyrighted music on free music websites.

I too recommend archive.org and jamendo.com. Also check out http://www.freesound.org/
Agreed. But like I said, you won't get the benefits of the history incremental search. Also, I maybe should have mentioned I have a lot of other one letter shortcuts like that so "g" fits rights in.
Taken from "Time Management for System Administrators", however I feel this particular principle applies towards your situation:

Figure out if you're a "morning/mid-day/late-afternoon/night" person when it comes to your brain activity. Some people, for the life of them, can't get their brain functioning when they get up. Others can't seem to concentrate until they've gotten lunch and feel "established" in the day.

Figure out your natural cycle and make sure you attempt to get good quality coding time in during your best times. If this is not possible, then apply the other response suggestions and hopefully you can increase the range of your concentration time.
God, is this the only thing you can comment on after reading the article? Let people use strong language in a blog post or a comment if they want to emphasize a point. We're all grown up and can talk directly to each other - no need to make yourself look like a smug.
I'm an apps developer (I work more "end product" than services) and architect who deals day to day with system engineers (who build the tools we build upon), product managers, project managers and testers. So i'm a few steps down from yourself and also have a step "lower" in regards to system engineers (who are programmers programmers and know more about the system than the requirements, if you get what I mean).
Sorry my world isn't start up world, I work for a big 'ol transport company but I hope this helps.

- How do software engineers perceive business types?
- How do they come to respect or disrespect someone in this role?

Depends, but the easy trap to fall into is that they will think that you are making decisions that effect them without understanding their problems. They may not understand the sales process, they may not understand the considered risk you took when you sold that feature YOU KNOW you didn't have even though clinching that deal was strategically essential.

Therefore you really need to ensure that you communicate effectively and listen to them effectively. Most mis-placed anger is just a massive misunderstanding.
You can also mitigate this by having a reference in their development-sphere who backs you up if your decisions are brought into doubt (which you need in companies that are so large that you don't have the time to give to them).

- How can I best approach a software engineer with an idea?

Slow the fuck down. I mean sure build it up a bit but don't pile on the features, it needs to be a challenge but business types seem to be very good at talking about a huge number of features which makes projects sound like death marches. Work on the core principles of the project and leave the star-gazing out of the initial conversation.

Oh and have a plan and some work done that looks like work. A lot of devs impressions from such meets are: "he wants me to do all the work". Especially with tech start-ups. Some devs don't appreciate how much work the rest of it is.

- What can a business type do to build trust with a programmer?

Listen, same as with anyone. You may need to poke them a little more than other people to get their "real" opinion sometimes but most coders are the same as everyone else.

- What motivates programmers? Success? Personal fulfillment? Money?

Tech, interesting tech or an exciting sounding project, then money. Sometimes its the other way round.

- What do programmers think motivates business types?

Money and politics (Alpha-malism)
It's interesting. My wife has recently started using linux on a regular basis, and this is what she hates about it. She doesn't "get" it.

For one thing, the package manager has horrible descriptions for the stuff being installed. "core libraries and binaries for all KDE applications" might make sense to us, but she doesn't know what that means at all.

For another, she's used to going somewhere to get an application to install it. Forget apt-get, forget launching a package manager, why can't she just go to the website (ie: google earth), download the executable, and run it? Why does linux have to make things so different and hard?

Lastly, there are more updates coming from the Ubuntu package manager than I ever saw in windows, again with those horrible descriptions for a standard user.

Having said all this, I do like it, it's a huge advancement from where linux was when I started using it, but for those people that haven't used linux before, it's sometimes more confusing than helpful. Possibly because software updates in Windows or OS X are software updates for Windows or OS X, not software updates for "samba-common - samba common files used by both the server and the client"
This has never worked for me. Everytime I try to sleep for a few minutes I end up taking a whole hour or more. Just my personal experience.
The reason they only lift an object only an inch or two (and usually less) is that magnetic field strength falls of to the cube of the distance.

I think you'll be learing a lot about servo systems, search for PID control loops.

And good luck, that's a tricky thing you're trying to do there.

Be sure to post it if you got it working!
Table with licenses: http://textbookrevolution.org/index.php?title=Special:Ask...

So yes and no, depending on the book.
I do not agree because I don't know how 10% stake and "third world" developers may kill. I'm not saying they can't, just being curious.
Look, I delete all kinds of unfinished or mis-entered things on the computer all the time, including emails, comments, blog entries and pages in employee training manuals. Why leave something up that's in error?

When I was writing my comment originally, I wrote the first line, tabbed over to the article to get the quote and tabbed back to this site and saw that I couldn't submit the comment. I hit the back arrow and then cut and paste my quote into the comment. Then I saw a comment was already there, cursed the fact that light accidental taps on my ASUS laptop's mouse pad get interpreted as clicks, deleted my comment and posted the corrected version. It was then that I saw a response to the [deleted]. Then I refreshed and finally saw the multiple downvotes and your comment along with odd insinuations about my personal motivations.

The cruftiness of the delete functionality and the entire... fuck it. This is just pissing me off. Forget it.
The butterfly effect gets entangled
"Expecting everyone to make a big modification like installing a Java-based browser to their infrastructure is crazy."

I agree. Google is (IMHO) doing this because they view GWT as the near-term future of web development and it seems likely this will be baked into the framework sometime soon (see http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/source/browse/br...). Katharina Probst and Bruce Johnson are both GWT team members, and as far as I can tell Dr. Probst is leading the engineering effort on the GWT side to support this.

It seems to me that if you're not using GWT, this will be far too much effort for you to implement.
A little far from news. But after a few days using the site I find it to have an excellent community of users.

There are quite a few questions I would of loved to post for general discussion. Alas the discussions are limited to the posted news item.

Perhaps adding a general/daily discussion form where users can talk about general issues would greatly improve the experience.

Keep it up
Boris
To build a million dollar business, you only have to convert 300K out of 30M, which is only 1%! Unfortunately, there are numbers less than 1%. It's entirely possible to only convert 0.1% or 0.01%. Are you okay living off of $100K? What about $10K (0.01%)?

See: http://sivers.org/1pct
Thanks for taking the time to give such a detailed response.

"I'm saying that if money (long term) is the motivator they should go for whoever offers the biggest royalty rate."

If you re-read what I wrote, I was specifically talking about the "very niche book" that would not likely earn back the advance (hence the royalty rate is not something to worry about). For other situations (i.e. the book you expect will be very popular) then of course I agree with you. If money is the primary motivator and you still want to write books then do what you said: get ready to write several books.

All together, a fun diversion for my day. Thanks, Peter!
Voted back up, because the post about taking methamphetamines has more points than the post about taking adderall.
Probably better to ask this question on lambda the ultimate ( http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ )
Champaign. But yeah.
if "unknown" + "known" | md5sum is your password recipe, then a single site with a poor lockout policy allows me to launch a brute force attack to determine "unknown", at which point you lose access to
I'll answer the ones I have answers for:

- How do software engineers perceive business types?

The stereotype is that you guys are a bit jockish, and/or that you tend to have good social skills but less hard/technical skills.

- How do they come to respect or disrespect someone in this role?

I'll respect a business person who makes the effort to understand the engineering (and I don't mean humoring me by asking for a one hour programming lesson - it's more important that you understand technical issues on a high level), as well as give comprehensible and straightforward answers to any questions I have about his. A smart programmer has to know when to put business before his sense of engineering elegance or desire to make a cool product, and if you can be sensitive to how hard/frustrating that can sometimes be, so much the better.

- What can a business type do to build trust with a programmer?

Try to understand what I'm doing and what's hard about it, and explain to me the same about what you're doing.

- What motivates programmers? Success? Personal fulfillment? Money?

Depends, but I'd say success and money in a startup are nearly, if not, the same thing. Desire for personal fulfillment is probably a little more common among programmers than business types, but that might be my own stereotype of business types talking (though I knew a lot of business students as an undergrad, and dated one for two years, so it's not totally unjustified).

- What do programmers think motivates business types?

Money.
That is great information. Also, when it says "GNU Free Documentation License" does it mean that anyone can use the text for commercial purpose?
I use http://cookieswap.mozdev.org/screenshots.html
The submitted link currently isn't working for me after repeated attempts (too busy?). Is this link

http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings

a path to the same ranking list?
Um, except that they are all in the same theatre?

The theatre owner doesn't give a damn what you watch, as long as you're watching something and buying $10 popcorn.

In other words, blockbuster hits entice you to enter the theatre, his job is to make you stay. If he fills up all his theatres with non-customers paying $3, he is unable to achieve this task. Knowing that it is extremely rare for you to make it to the theatre and not see a movie, there is no incentive for him to offer any lower prices.

If you make it to the theatre, the sale is but guaranteed. Lowering prices after the sale is guaranteed is a stupid way to do business.
Are on Adderall speed, or something else? I'm still sorting out Adderall dosage and right time of day.

But I'm seeing improvement.
The gdb "attach" command is handy for those too.
You don't know how transferring your development offshore to a group that reports to an outside investor can kill a company?

Just asking for clarification here... Honestly sounds like a What The (Cluster) Fuck in the making...
Engine Yard Raises $19 Million In Series C
I think Google is going to get behind Apps in a big way - it's just natural progression for them. We've been using it for three years and absolutely love it. I don't understand why people think using Google Apps and Microsoft products are mutually exclusive - I still write contracts w/Word and use Excel for forecasting.
ATT's network is already ridiculously overloaded, not adding tethering yet is absolutely the right move.
Since when was Caltech a large enormous entity? MIT admitted 1500 freshmen last year, about the size of all undergrads+grads combined at Caltech (~2000 students total).
>>"Fundamental lack of understanding of programming the languages (one project C++, the other Java)"

99.9% of the time , I doubt if engineering has a say - who takes the project. The failure of the project according to me , is when biz guys decide which firm/person gets the project depending on the cost !
Well, you have to consider that there's no way to determine the recipe.

If your recipe is known + url, then that's easily discoverable if you know one password. With hashing, it's (sufficiently) impossible to guess what the recipe was. This sounds like security through obscurity, but it really isn't... at least no more so than a password is. It's just that instead of a password or passphrase, you have a passrecipe. It's still a secret key that only you know.

The problem I see in this is that you have to generate your password all the time. That means it shows up in plain text on your screen all the time. May as well just write it down somewhere.
I was thinking from more of a concentrated, documented library of your productivity tips instead of a social blog, but I definitely see your point and commend you on your "productivity > x" mindset.

I'll just have to start saving clips I've read that have been very inspiring for reference.
If you re-read what I wrote, I was specifically talking about the "very niche book" that would not likely earn back the advance (hence the royalty rate is not something to worry about).

Good point. Sorry, I missed that reference. In that case yes, I agree on the math, though gleefully accepting a (relatively) big advance for a book you believe won't sell too well could burn some bridges ;-)
Agreed, I can't sleep during the day, I can hardly force myself to calm down for bed at night as it is.
If you read up a bit on how mp3 compression and GSM work then you'll find that in essence they rebuild the sound from a very limited number of frequencies.

Very nice find, and extremely impressive the speed with which the keys are manipulated.

I wonder if it is possible to have a human learn the key sequences of the dominant frequency bands and make a piano speak a word or two.

In neuromancer there is a head in villa straylight that speaks with organ pipes iirc.
Is your email ID in your HN profile current? It just bounced.
> but the Apress contract states that if you don’t, they have the right to do it without you, have someone else’s name slapped on the book

Trying to find the original interview, but I remember reading an article with Laura Lemay (of 'Teach Yourself HTML' fame) of how they basically abused her name to sell books (even after she said she didn't want to write any more books). She lost control and there ended up being a whole franchise of 'Teach yourself X with Laura Lemay' books.

EDIT: Found the link. Thanks archive.org!

"I wrote a lot of books from 1994 to 2000. Both my HTML and Java books did really well, and I had a series that I didn’t write that nonetheless had my name on it. It felt like I was riding this wave of popularity, I would probably never be this successful again, and I felt that I had to milk it, to push it as far as it would go. My publisher was all too happy to accommodate me in this goal. They reworked my writing over and over again, customizing it, repackaging it, reselling it under different titles and for different purposes. I cheerfully and naively agreed to a lot of this repurposing, but a lot of it happened without my knowing it under the terms of existing contracts. I would go into bookstores and find books there with my name on them that I had never seen or agreed to or had any idea they existed.

With this much writing being produced not all of it had to be great. Towards the end not much of it was. By the end I didn’t feel like I had much control over my own work. even with the writing I was actually doing I was so stretched and overworked that the quality wasn’t there. Eventually I felt I didn’t even have any control over my own identity.

Who is this Laura Lemay person who has her name all over all these books? Me, I think I’m an OK writer, I’m good at explaining stuff to people. Laura Lemay just produces huge numbers of not very good books. I felt really overwhelmed and disassociated from my own work and from my own name."

http://web.archive.org/web/20061027193901/www.dispatchesfrom...
PyOpenGL_LAB: A Small Lab for OpenGL Tests Without Compilation
You paint a plausible scenario. But the ticket price isn't all going to the theater owner. Most of it goes to the studio (theaters make most of their money off of concessions as I understand it). Since different studios are competing with each other in the same theater, there is definitely room for price reduction.
Why's it's not technically what most people would consider a 'textbook,' I'm surprised Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby isn't there. I would recommend it to anyone interested in a solid (yet quirky) introduction to Ruby. It's license is CC-Share-Alike, so it clearly fits under the category of 'free.'

You can find it online here: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/

or buy the paperback ($6+shipping) here: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/whys-(poignant)-g...
Works great for me, but only if the music in question has no lyrics. Baroque, bebop or pretentious Philip Glass-y stuff seems to work best.
SGI on their demo truck once were showing a database... or was it filesystem... system that know how to keep things in memory, HD or tape, depending on the data usage.
My understanding is that the biggest risk is acclimation/addiction.

I can live with that, insomuch as it's a trade off of that risk versus problems right now with focus and concentration.

(That said, pretty much anyone routinely taking any drug needs to have their liver functions checked regularly, and periodically evaluate if the drug is still doing doing anything useful.)

If you are not currently fighting cognitive problems, then the risk/benefit balance is different.
One thing I had to work hard to figure out is that I code in two different ways, and I need to alternate them. They are physically incompatible -- I can only be doing one or the other in a given hour or so.

One of these is design. When designing (software, not visually) I need to avoid getting into ruts. I need to rethink constantly and brainstorm frequently. I should consider wildly different or thoroughly impractical structures for code and programs, because those frequently lead to more practical but non-obvious ideas. Design mindset is facilitated by having enough sleep/rest, having eaten reasonably (especially protein, but not too much), and not having much else on my mind.

The other mindset is for execution. I need to take that design and churn through it. I'm not rethinking, I'm building. This mindset is excellent for churning out a lot of code fast when I have a good understanding of it. I do less of this in Ruby than in C (less grind-work!), but it's still important on occasion. Execution mindset is helped by minimal distractions, caffeine or other stimulants, and being slightly tired and undernourished, as long as it doesn't get too extreme.

These states alternate, and different coding tasks call for different proportions of one versus the other. Planning which and making sure I'm physically well-adapted to the appropriate kind of work for the task help me a lot.
I love to work on things that interest me, like coding up a back-end for a site. If it's interesting, I start thinking about solutions, I get in the zone automatically and just code away.

Be careful to not overdo it by having balance between hacking (analytical) and dreaming (creative), lest you get burned-out, in which case concentration becomes impossible.

my 2cents
Yeah, what about the scroll-wheel? I hardly ever touch the scroll bars anymore.
Trips to Mars in 39 Days
Oh the irony... Apple pulling out because they're too "principled" for things. Hilarious!
It's not quite the same, sure, but this is almost what my Twitter/Evernote/Delicious trifecta have become ;-)

The resolution is "good enough" for now. I can usually figure out where I was and when, what ideas I was working on, and recall Web sites I was looking at by mere keyword/tag alone.. it comes in very handy sometimes!