skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds like a pretty terrible culture you want to create. Why control what people do with your machines at all? (on separating email from development) It's a completely arbitrary rule that makes no sense. Hackers tend to question those :)

If you really want to make developers happy, give them a budget and let them buy a computer. Several people in the comments said they like Mac laptops. I personally love my Linux desktop machine with a good keyboard. Which is the point: we are all different, and have different preferences.

If you don't trust your developers that much, at the very least let them configure their software the way they like. I'm sure your startup needs the coders to be productive. Don't prevent that.
Is it safe to clean & optimize registry and how to choose one?
Compare the pros and cons for you select a best registry cleaner & optimizer, as a registry optimizer can really simplify your virtual life by clean up all registry errors and keep your computer hearty along at peak efficiency without blue screen or crashes.
70 megabit and 30 seconds and counting...

Also the lack of explanation and lorem ipsum text throughout doesn't inspire confidence, sorry.
Might want to add that I pay myself about 50 grand a year beyond business expenses (which admittedly covers my "luxuries" - mostly my auto lease and eating out). Without leveraged overhead (mortgage, student loans, business loans, credit card, etc) it's surprising how little money I need to live a comfortable life.
NASA's LCROSS Impacts Confirm Water in Lunar Crater
Definitely ditch flash for your website, go to http://www.themeforest.net to get an inexpensive head start.

Really happy for you over here, I imagine it must have been a hard decision.
After I installed NoFlash in Firefox, I was surprised at how many sites have the Flash cookie thing. I never knew :)

Personally, I don't really care about the tracking all that much. I'm extremely boring :) Which is why these cookies persist. I think most people simply don't care, even if they know about them. The only reason I block Flash is because it crashes Firefox on a regular basis.
Maybe, but I can't imagine they would be very upset by the interviewer continuing to take a little more of their time either. At the very least, it gives you the feeling that the interviewer fairly assessed you instead of dismissing you because of one flummoxed question. When I interview someone who quickly seems unlikely to pass an intervew, I try to use as much time as possible to make sure my initial impression was correct and the candidate just didn't get unlucky and/or just happens to be overly nervous. Some people are great employees but are bad at being interviewed.
your site is a disaster

even after it loaded, which took forever, all i got was a bunch of phb pap business "copy"

a laughable quote from your site:

"we are tired of the old corporate way of doing things"

so your response is to write a flash site?????

you should beg your former employer to give you your job back
Ask HN: What are the things you check before launching or upgrading your site
What are the normal checks you do before upgrading or launching your site?
I think it's a pretty specious argument.

Cookies are all under your control. This is a lot more than you can say about all the rest of the data that is collected about you daily. For people who are concerned about this sort of thing, there are plenty of tools manage cookies to a policy of their choosing. The fact that cookies are automatic just mean things are convenient enough to be useful for average people. If every site required an account that had to be logged in to every time you visited it, you wouldn't fundamentally have any more privacy, you'd just be a lot more inconvenienced.

The bottom line is that if you want real privacy you have to know what you're doing every step of the way and you have to work at it (a mountain cabin off the grid is a pretty good start). On the Internet you already have an advantage over any physical world transaction. Finding unsecured wifi where no one knows you is already more work then clearing your cookies.
Ask HN: How do you prioritize your features?
We launched our site http://roorky.com recently. Its a desktop application. We have a set of features planned. But we don't know which one is more useful to our users and how exactly it gets used.

What is the usual approach you take to decide which features to put in which release? Currently we have a web page where in users can vote for features they want. Any other creative ideas.
I wish Google would solve the drivers issue by doing something along these lines:

Simply do not issue "works with Chrome OS" stickers/certification to hardware with closed drivers.

After the device ships, most hardware manufacturers don't want to continue paying developers for maintenance, and making sure it keeps working after OS upgrades, etc. And they seem to want to protect "secrets" of some sort by not releasing the source. I think Google has the power to fix this particular problem that's plagued Linux for a long time.
Congrats! Where are you located?
Interesting piece. Among other things, the origin of Common Lisp's infamous, love-it-or-hate-it LOOP macro is unmistakable here:

# loop in 'for' mode
for i from 1 to 10 do print(i) od
# ...and in 'while' mode
while i < 10 do print(i); i := i + 1; od
# ...and in both!
for i from 1 to 10 while checkWhetherCancelled() do print(i) od
# ...just loop, no counter!
to 10 do print("Ten times!") od

Personally, I love LOOP; it's just so damn flexible and intuitive, even if there is something a little illicit about it. But no question it's as un-Lispy as you can get. How fitting that it turns out to have been embedded Algol all along.
Congratulations and Good Luck!! Just curios to know. Do you concentrate on specific domains like web site development, or RoR or PHP etc., Or are you planning to gain vertical expertise.
Thanks for the feedback on the site design, everyone! It's far from finished, that was another reason I didn't want to link to it, but I should have been more clear about that :)

With all the actual project work I've been doing, the site become almost an afterthought... Which is not a good idea, I know. I will definitely rethink the whole Flash concept and make it a lot faster. Thanks!
Impressive! I was about to post "Quitting is the easy part" after reading the title, but you've done much more than just quit your day job. Kudos.
Congratulations. Any time you get lazy/bored just think back to your box...err cube.

Don't forget to keep HN updated.
Ok, so nothing. Just leveraging your contacts better. Cool.
IMHO, all of the supposed advantages of a middleman can be provided by an optional (important word) neutral third party (cnet downloads.com virus free downloads for example). I agree with the article, I see very little value in middlemen.
How to lose a customer in two lines
It is good that you quit doing something you hated just remember to not burn yourself out working on your new projects that they become a new problem.

I guess what I mean is don't pour yourself completely into these two sources of income remember to take outside interests in unrelated fields/hobbies/entertainment so as to keep your experience diverse in order to avoid quick burn out.
Maybe that is only what happened after we observed it. The title alone of this post blew my mind at the possibility even if not possible.

Although the hypothesis that the brain is a quantum computer is biologically and computationally
implausible, there might be psychological phenomena not amenable to a neurocomputational
explanation that are explicable by appeal to quantum theory. Penrose (1994,
598 A. Litt et al./Cognitive Science 30 (2006)
1997) and Hameroff (1998a, 1998b) argued that mathematical thinking and conscious experience
are two such phenomena.
My own expertise is RoR and Java. But, I've partnered up with some freelancer friends whose skills sets are vastly different. Loginaut is a partnership of independent devs and designers, the idea being that nobody has to pass up any business - if you get offered a project that is completely different from what you do, you still say "sure, I'll do it", and pass it on to others in Loginaut, in exchange for a %.
All kidding aside, an IE6 frame would probably do more to get rid of IE6 than Chrome Frame. This is because, it would give IT departments an excuse to upgrade to IE7 and IE8 yet still retain the abilities to load their old shitty intranet apps that they run their business accounting and payroll on.

The only reason IE6 is such a huge thorn in everyone's side is Microsoft's fatefully stupid and incompetent decision not to allow IE6 to be installed alongside IE7. If it weren't for that, IE6 would be dead and buried.
NYC. Planning to be as location-independent as possible, though :)
People, it's not that difficult. You do not include Apple icons, Apple, logos, screen shots (edit: or pictures) of Apple products, Apple trademarks, other trademarks... OK, it sounds like a long list, but it's really not that bad.

You can blame Apple, but part of the blame also has to go to trademark law, which requires them to do this in order to protect their valuable trademarks. Yes, there are other issues besides trademark issues for which the App Store rejects things, but it's amazing how many stories about this boil down to someone not having read the Apple guidelines, or having read them but not believed them.

Even Android has rules relating to trademarks:

http://www.android.com/branding.html

Edit 2: I've read the RA "refutation" of Lamarche, and it is close to delusional with its implication that a screen shot could not be considered a trademark infringement. The matter is totally open to interpretation, but that is not the point. The important thing is that any company, including Apple, is required to take the strict interpretation if they want to do the best job of protecting their trademarks under the law.
Hear hear! After a few months of working 15-16 hours a day total, I'm going to force myself to work 10 hours a day max, and focus on having a life in the other time :)
wow that sound when the site loaded was awful.
I recommend Redmine.
Great to hear that things are working out for you.

What is your plan? Are you going to attempt to grow the consulting business to full time?
Google.co.uk - Please enter to search
I think googles new advertising concept
Before I whitelisted it, it was just a grey screen. You might want to put something in a <noscript> tag. I like how Stack Overflow deals with that, for example.
I am actually working on a startup to help people decide where to direct their charitable givings to. In the US alone there are over 1 million registered charities. It is very tough for someone to figure out which charity is in line with their beliefs/hopes/aspirations. And on the other side, charities want to get more exposure to the kinds of people that would be interested in donating to them. We want to be in the middle to act as a matchmaker.
Pasadena Dental Implant Surgery- Los Angeles Cosmetic Dentist Periodontist
I think googles new advertising concept.
No, don't cut your consumption, that's just burying your head in the sand and lowering prices for someone else. This isn't a situation like reducing the amount of trash you throw out, where every little bit makes a difference. (throwing out less trash doesn't incentivize other people to throw out more.)

The only solution to protecting a limited shared resource is through agreement (government regulation and international treaties).
Why is there a review process at all? There's no review process for OS X

Um, you can bet there will be a "review process" if you approach Apple and ask them to distribute your OS X application.

There are few if any parallels between independent PC/Mac distribution and iPhone distribution. A better comparison would be with game consoles, where each manufacturer has a strict list of requirements before they'll give you a distribution key. In that light, Apple's policies are downright liberal.
Google and Partners Revise Terms of Digital Book Deal
I've been dreaming about this since the first time I tried Lala more than a year ago. Yes, the article is very overly sensationalist, but the idea of really cheap music streaming in the cloud is a good one for me.
Concurrent ML exists already, with typed synchronous channels, etc., very much like what I've read of Go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_ML
http://www.amazon.com/Concurrent-Programming-ML-John-Reppy/d...
Rgkotep@mail.ru: Напоминание пароля - Служба уведомлений motoklad.ru
Ask HN: How Can One Correctly Assess Their Own Ability?
I am sure that most of you have, by now, heard of "Unskilled and Unaware of It."[1] This paper, authored by Justin Kruger and David Dunning in 1999, describes how the least competent tend to overestimate their abilities while the most competent tend to underestimate. The eponymous "Dunning-Kruger effect"[2], referenced on HN from time to time, serves as an explanation for those unfortunate individuals in our field and in others who possess that toxic mixture of ineptitude and intellectual indolence (they lack the drive to improve, because they see nothing that requires improvement). While providing us with a compelling warning against hubris, it does not seem to provide any further clarity concerning self-assessment; according to Dunning-Kruger, you likely succumb to illusory superiority or illusory inferiority, but either way your perception of yourself is likely to be illusory. One of the authors, Dunning, described how the study shook his confidence: "I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn't know it."[3]

One might conclude from Dunning-Kruger that since accurate self-assessment appears difficult, you ought to just err on the side of caution and try to underestimate your abilities. After all, what harm can come from that? Unfortunately, this advice seems to contradict insight gleaned from other cognitive bias studies. Take the Pygmalion Effect[4]. Teachers were told that certain students chosen (unbeknownst to the teachers) at random had high IQs and would turn out to be high achievers. The result: those students ended up becoming the high-IQ high achievers that their teachers had been led to believe they were. It would seem from this that one should do the opposite of what Dunning-Kruger intimates; you should overestimate your abilities, assume you are among the elite, and with enough time and effort your reality will come to match your perception of yourself.

I feel somewhat torn between not wanting to end up as one of those arrogant incompetents but also not wanting deprive myself of whatever benefits positive thinking might bestow. After all, can you really be successful without some confidence? How do you manage self-perception, confidence and humbleness?

1. http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/unskilled.html

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

3. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
Having the clarity of mind to see things for what they are, is really necessary to understand so many things in life deeply. Calling Robert Greene a "self help guru" and disparaging his work fails totally in that regard.
For launch, I personally try to decide whats essential to the application at hand - if this feature isn't in the application, is it still the same application?

Example: If you're making a todo list, you need to be able to add entries and mark them completed. Thats it. Reminders are nice, but not essential. Same with tagging and organizing todos, logbook to see when they were completed, searching the todos, etc. Very useful to have, but not essential to the application. A todo list is still a todo list without them.

After launch, its much more guided by A. What I personally think would be a nice addition to the application and B. What features are commonly requested by the user. B takes priority over A, if its a paid application. After all, you want users to recommend your product. What better way then to give them something that you know they want?

Example: I would want a way to see how often I complete tasks, what days that I'm most productive on, etc. Users request to be able to search todos and edit details. Thats what gets implemented first, and what I want gets done later, when there is more time.
Bram Cohen: Comments on Go
Oh believe me, I've customized both extensively. My annoyances are extremely minor, but annoying nonetheless.
Um, you can bet there will be a "review process" if you approach Apple and ask them to distribute your OS X application.

The difference is you don't have a choice for iPhone distribution. You have to distribute through Apple.

There may not be many parallels between PC/Mac distribution and iPhone distribution-- but there should be.
A tour of $135 million startup Etsy's Brooklyn offices
Point number 2 is what is the biggest problem. Unless there is an all-at-once unanimous decision to stop working on the iPhone platform by atleast 80pc of developers, nothing is going to change. The only way that can happen is if someone builds a phone better than the iPhone, and offers developers some kind of massive incentive to shift (which is not likely going to happen in the near future).
The other point here is that Rogue Amoeba's frustration and ultimate response was exacerbated by the process, not just the result. The process was marred by vague, unresponsive communication, insanely long wait times, and inconsistency.

If this whole back and forth between RA and Apple had taken a week instead of almost 4 months, their response probably would have been very different. They probably wouldn't have left the platform. The process is broken, and it makes things worse for both developers and users.
Both replies are making it out to be like I said the deal was stupid. It was a very smart move on his part leveraging his fame to reap such huge rewards. The debate was whether his fame had anything to do with it, and it did. He would not have been able to make such a move had he not been famous. The fame made it possible and easier for him. You or I certainly wouldn't have been able to effectively promote such a product based on our own personal brands. That's all I'm saying.
This article brought back haunting memories of Cuil. Pity, because I wouldn't mind more competition in the search market, particularly since Google has gotten less relevant for programming related queries.
Congratulations! I just made the same leap myeslf.
Better to generalize from one data point than to generalize from none.
Some fishes are ok, right?
I like this a lot. Nice job taking an idea and running with it. At $1/letter this doesn't work, at $3/letter its an enviable opportunity.

I find most of the comments here to be quite pessimistic, so here's a few things to consider:

There are proven economies of scale here. With any volume, a bulk postage rate will start saving you money. There's no reason to think Paul will continue to pay 44 cents a letter. Furthermore, the cost of printing is being grossly exaggerated: I picked up a laser printer from Dell that included a 1500 page toner cartridge. That's .08 cents a page, with a free printer. Its easy to do get cheaper than that per page with a more expensive printer.

Also, all of this can be automated. I share an office with an attorney who sends out hundreds of letters per day, and it takes about 2 hours of his assistant's time to setup the Mail Merge in Word and start the machines. All stuffing, labeling, stamping, etc. is done by the machines.

Here's a tip I picked up from them: if you can mail every few days instead of every day, you can get a nice break on your rate. I know you gaurantee a 24 hour turnaround now, but something to consider.

Paul's found customers and profitability from day 1, and he can just work hard until he generates enough cash to buy machines to handle it for him. It wouldn't be hard to completely automate the entire thing. I like it.

Feedback on your website: you knocked it out of the park. The domain is obvious and makes sense, the website is to the point and immediately conveys the benefit. There's no loose ends, from the privacy policy to the API. I'm seriously impressed.
You should have a vision for your product that is your north star, but for less 'big picture' features, let your users do your prioritization for you. Proactively communicate with them and keep track of feature requests. The frequent requests will bubble up - focus on those.
But what are the relative probabilities that each method will result in exactly one good employee?
and while you're at it, check this article out:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cent/make-everything-your-own_...
Ask HN: Should I return back to studies or continue to work?
I have a master's degree in social science. My minor is in business administration. In addition to that degree, I have also studied about a third of a BSc degree in computer science. I currently work as a programmer.

I'm having hard time deciding should I continue with my BSc degree or just continue with the programming job. The job in its self feels just fine to me, but I'm concerned about the long-term perspectives of my career. Will it limit my potentiality if I keep on advancing my IT career without a degree on the field? Or will it hurt my options more if I now drop out of work for a couple of years to finish my studies?

I'm less than thirty and financially I'm quite well of; I would not have to fund my further studies with loan. I have over five years of experience on my field of programming, and I'm comfortable with the basic cs stuff. I don't know how to write a compiler but I can reason about algorithms and discuss programming languages rather well. The programming I do does not require advanced cs knowledge, even though it never hurts to know them.

What insights would the HN community offer to this kind of a situation? Thank you in advance!
Pivotal Tracker http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ and You Track http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/.
I agree. The sound actually made the fillings in my teeth hurt. A sensation of physical pain when your site loads is REALLY something you do not want.
The idea of "let the developer pick his own rig" had been mentioned by a lot of people - it's a fair point and has me reconsidering.

My two thoughts are:

Software
Granted, the most important software is probably the IDE and those tend to be cross-OS (you can get eclipse or VIM to run on any OS) but you get issues on other software like Word. Suddenly that 5-seat license of Office for Mac doesn't accommodate my windows 7 developer so now I have to buy more licenses for him cos he uses Windows. And my Linux developer can't open the document in OpenOffice because it's using change tracking that his version doesn't support, etc.

We also can't use stuff like SubEtherEdit or Coda for join-development,

2) Scaling a dev team's needs - if we're designing for scale then we might have 10 developers by the end of 2010. It becomes a nightmare when half of your dev team is on mac, thee on windows, one on debian/ubuntu, one on fedora, etc.

But maybe these are not good enough reasons...
If your HTML/JS/CSS stack isn't as platform and browser-agnostic as it can be, ultimately you end up with a platform-specific way of writing apps that competes with native apps

You mean like browser-specific CSS? Or IE6 hacks? Or layout and rendering inconsistencies?

Web apps are the future of mobile applications for the same reasons they're the present of desktop applications. Ease of distribution. Ease of iteration. The freedom to do what you want, how you want it, in a market that's guided by users, not a big company acting as gatekeeper.
Don't require people to get approval before installing new software. That's a pain for the developer and the person who needs to do the approval and will likely just result in your developers not trying out tools that might help them be more productive.
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