skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would much rather have a comfortable chair than free lunch everyday. Free lunch would save me some money but a good chair will save health problems down the road and make me feel better while working.

Why don't you trade the free lunch for better chairs?

I recently went ergonomic chair shopping and find it extremely hard to believe you can get a decent chair for $60-80. The price range was 10x that where I looked.

The chairs in this photo - http://dontrepreneur.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/office2.jpg - do not look anywhere near ergonomic. If it only goes up and down, it's not ergonomic.
> In fact nothing is hard in the computing world.

Allison's point is instead that the combination of the perception that compilers are difficult and the relative paucity of tools to make writing compilers easier is a vicious cycle which writing better tools might fix.
Regarding these comparisons I am always tempted to refer to the: law of the handicap of a head start [1]. America being (many times) on the forefront of (partial) technology adoption; gets also the legacy backslash when technology advances. I don't believe there are easy solutions to this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_handicap_of_a_head_s...
Run-of-the-mill caching proxies are no good in front of a distributed progressive streaming system such as this, because they would have to be modified to stream progressively and also to authenticate requests, which would increase the complexity far more than the comparatively minor changes Last.fm had to make to MogileFS.

So I say it's cheaper and less complex.
Well, I'll start by saying that I'm assuming the story is accurate, there's no point discussing it otherwise. She specifically mentions that she applied for identical jobs as both personas.

What if she had to meet a client face-to-face? Or even by phone?
Thanks, great job. I often load up the icombinator.net site when lying around the house, but it crashes frequently. One thing I do like about that site is the instapaper link that quickly lets me save a bunch of articles for later. It'd be a nice addition to your app.

Are there other HN readers I should be aware of? Anything that makes it easy to browse comment threads on a small screen without a lot of zooming and panning is great.
UnTab+ for Google Chrome
These SSD streamers only hold the most popular 10-20% of Last.fm's content, so they are effectively just holding the bytes which are most likely to be streamed.
Titanic was a terrible movie and should have been a dud. It was not enjoyable to watch for me, and it was the first and only movie I walked out on.

Say what you will, but Titanic was the best thing that happened to my youth: every girl wanted to see it, over and over again, and no guy could stand it. Perfect.
And what's significantly different?

We are still stuck with the x86 architecture. All operating systems are just new versions of the same products. Sure, the web got rounded corners, dial-up is completely gone, and the dot-com bubble burst, but computing has not changed a whole lot.

The changes of the last decade have been mostly bug fixes. Not that this is a bad thing.
"So your explanation for the iPhone phenomenon is that Apple use its (certainly smaller) ad budget supernaturally better than everyone else...?"

No, I didn't say that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man ). The closest thing I did say to that was "Part of it might be a love-affair with Apple due to their exceptional marketing and the near mythical status of Steve Jobs." A big part is certainly the UI. People love the Apple/iPhone brand for a lot of reasons-- many of these reasons are perfectly rational.

My point was that consumers tend to over-estimate how rational their decisions and their brand loyalty are.
No, that is feet.
I think you're missing my point. Chair quality is a red herring. It's "visibly splurging on the founder" that's going to kill you.
> This is simply a related hypothesis to the selection of politicians back then based on the postulate that it was easier to be educated to a useful degree relative to the general population.

Even if it was (and I see no reason to believe that it was or wasn't), it doesn't necessarily follow that politicians then would have availed themselves of it more than they do now.

> Anyways I find this argument quite pointless.

My apologies. I thought that you made those claims because you found them interesting, which surely includes whether or not they're true.
That is crazy-ass cheap. URL?
DIY Canadian SEO - Chapter 3
I'm pretty used to browsing websites on the iphone. Zoom works fine for little buttons. It's pretty usable IMHO
I use the one that is already in the app store, and has been for weeks. Made by someone in the YC community.

Otherwise, looks nice.
I wasn't able to find it on the site either, but it was in their lumber department. I read about it on a couple blogs: http://www.johnmurch.com/2007/10/20/diy-whiteboard-on-the-ch...
I don't think so. There were virtually no apps on the iPhone that were important to me (though it is a touch faster than the Droid in terms of data speed). My iPhone was, for me, first and foremost a phone. And it was TERRIBLE at that (dropping calls constantly). (note: I'm in Seattle-- from what I understand, it's a problem that's most common in NYC, SF, and Seattle)
Also see "On Understanding Data Abstractions, Revisted": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917065
No, we don't put photos on CVs. Only if you want to be an actor or model :/
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. You assert that the discussion is immediately over once the word 'sexism' is mentioned, with no proof to back up this assertion.

Why does 'sexism' immediately and irrevocably equate to "vague 19th century ideas about gender"? What word would be more productive? Why?
I live in Europe, UK, and we grow plenty of grains here.
You can't of course. Why the jump to enforcement and legislation?
I really don't understand the desire to make computer programming more appealing to those for whom it is not appealing. Yes, it should be accessible; yes, things should not arbitrarily be harder than they need to be; yes, we should be mindful to be inclusive of all. But somewhere along the line reality sets in. If you're turned off by typing lines and lines of code with semicolons and complex syntax, then maybe the root issue is that computer programming just isn't for you.

There's nothing wrong with that. I don't enjoy learning about surgical procedures; it was nigh miraculous that I made it through high school biology. I'm all for better biology education, but let's face it: I'm not cut out to be a biologist, or most likely a medical practictioner of any sort. (I might be able to handle, say, dentistry, but would surely have to put up with loads of classes that I really don't care for along the way.) I don't blame the educational system. I don't think biology is too hard, or too unwelcoming to outsiders. I just don't have any interest in it.
They're feet - whiteboard is cheap. (I don't have any experience with whiteboard paint.)

A whiteboard room may be the best investment you can make.
I don't get what the point of hiring more employees if you don't outfit them with the most productive tools. Great machine, great monitor, great chair- 5-6k max.
>>My point was that consumers tend to over-estimate how rational their decisions and their brand loyalty are.

So you were not talking about the iPhone but about people's explanations for why they bought iPhones?

Edit: If I wasn't clear, I still need a good motivation for why Apple would be such a special case, if you are going to make a case.
She's surprised that she had better success as a writer for "Men with Pens" when she chose a male pseudonym?
One wonders if the then-common use of ligatures, abbreviation and short form substitution could account for the apparent discrepancy with the character counts?
From what I got from the pseudonym's blog is that 'he' is a Canadian, and suggested French Canadian. If this is true for the real author then there's all the reason in the world for not hiring her.

I want English copy, I don't want it from someone I believe to be French whether my assumption is correct or not. I'm going to hire John Smith over Jean Lefevre at the drop of a hat, however Anglicize Jean Lefevre and you have the employable writers name of John Smith.

I have a very English surname, which has never given me a problem when applying for a writing gig.
SourceForge.net: Flashlight-VNC: Topics for Public
> a) All of MySQL is currently available under the GPL, so any pure open source business model can take that and fork it and have the big fun.

While this isn't Monty's concern, it is mine. I think it's quite possible to kill a GPL project. Not in a lawyery sense, but strictly by mismanagement. Maintaining a project like MySQL seems a rather big undertaking. I doubt anyone will take it if Oracle doesn't completely abandon it. That's a lot of leeway to just screw it up...

> b) It seems like all of the concern is Monty wanting to wrestle back control so he's assured of a non-"pure" open source business model (which MySQL used to generate revenue in the past. Specifically, licensing MySQL under a comercial, non-GPLed, license).

I'm generally not a fan of assigning someone an "evil" motive when other explanations do. It seems Monty is mostly concerned with people that have bought an enterprise license for MySQL, so they don't have to release their own source code when distributing binaries. Forks don't help these people.
You're right, if the crime was clearly committed by multiple assailants you need to find another killer. But the OP throws out the evidence that indicates multiple assailants.

False written statements are often signed in police stations.
I find it very ironic!! I feel bad for these guys but before you get my full sorrow, Mow your grass!!
It's an interesting approach, and the 'plaintext'/plant matching looks convincing. Many of the words she derives require omitting letters or adding letters to the anagram text. There go standard frequencies. In some cases one letter stands for several (x=>ver). Add to that the likelihood that the author was poor & uneducated, throw in bad spelling but great knowledge of flora.

It'd be awesome if the solution was going under so many heads for so long.
4G Has Arrived But I Am Still Waiting For 3G
Feedburner: Socializing your feed with Twitter
Legal and law resources for startups and entrepreneurs
Instead of painting your office, you could print posters.

Assuming you can find a cheap printing place, there are tons of high resolution creative commons images on flickr and elsewhere.

My university has a super cheap copymat, it may be that a university near you has similarly cheap prices.
You should think about keeping an offsite backup if possible. A second disk won't necessarily help if your computer gets dropped in a pool, house catches on fire, etc.
Creator of MySQL calls on Web users to help save MySQL from Oracle
"Let me spare you a lesson I am still gradually learning the hard way: whatever day-to-day pains and frustrations your team is dealing with, you should be sharing."

This is a great lesson. People only fix problems when it affects them directly. If you are sitting in a better chair and a developer says that his chair doesn't suit him, you will take it as whining. After all, there is nothing wrong with your chair.

However if you are sitting in the same chairs, you will experience what it is like. After a few weeks, you may realise that these chairs are horrible for your back.

I lived in Kenya before where the roads are terrible and full of potholes. To avoid this problem, the President had special shock absorbers installed on his limousine. After all, he is President. He must deserve it and splurge on himself. Now when he goes anywhere he doesn't experience the same things others do. Since there is now no problem for him, there is no incentive for him to fix the roads.

Don't be a leader who only solves his own problems.
Just because they've built a few modern airports in Asia does not mean the US is suddenly a 'third world country'.

Reporters: Do us all a favor and once you get over oo-ing and ah-ing at the airport (which is the FIRST thing you see) take some time to actually live somewhere in Asia before writing and publishing crap like this.

Shiny airports and soy-sauce filled chopsticks do not a modern country make.
I believe you're correct, however they pull this tactic in Canada however the majority of property sales are made through RE/MAX which IS a faceless corporate machine.

It's as if they're saying "Hi I'm an independent contractor, oh just ignore those 99,999 other independent contractors because I'm smiling!"
Goo.gl: Making URLs shorter for Google Toolbar and FeedBurner
One thing I disagree with in this blog post is the implicit idea that you should know what you're doing before you try to do something. Unless you're building rockets, often times the best way to learn is by just jumping in and making something, even if your first attempt is poor.
Didn't remember it was greatfirewalled in China: http://blog.plurk.com/2009/04/27/china-bans-plurk/
I've been having a thought recently that Google is Microsoft done right. Sure, they have massive influence. But I never find myself switching to a new Google product because I have to--I switch because they're better products.
This seems to be the same, but at Lowes. Correct me if I'm wrong:
http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=productDetail&prod...
Huh? I'm all but certain that a default squid install would work fine. "Progressive streaming" at the server side generally doesn't require any configuration at all in TCP -- the client reads what it wants, the buffers fill up, and the transmission stalls on a missing ACK. And the authentication layer is almost certainly downstream of the backend storage anyway, so I'm not sure how that would matter.

Swapping hardware is a really expensive expensive change in the IT world, significantly more so than deploying new hardware on an existing infrastructure. That you somehow think otherwise is surprising to me.
That's what I'm waiting for before buying a hacker news app.

Suggestion: For UI consistency, I would put the upvote for stories on the left of the title, in the same spot it is for comment upvotes. It might just be a personal taste thing, but I could see myself downvoting something on accident, by pressing the button where the submission upvote usually goes. I like that the up/downvote buttons are on opposite sides of the comment. It should keep fat fingers from miss-voting.
This is the type of stuff I love to read about. Thanks for posting it.
> a new camera that has already changed film making

http://www.red.com/ will make more of a difference. You can buy one for what it costs to rent others for a week or so.
In My Backyard (IMBY)
Behold the power of an open market (assuming Apple is okay with it) where you-too can create an app with basic functionality and charge money for it. I have no issue with these types of apps as I know many people who will pay for simple, effective apps.
Also, I've always enjoyed this GapingVoid cartoon on sociopaths and the corporate hierarchy:

http://gapingvoid.com/2004/06/27/company-hierarchy/
Sounds like a better role though, not necessarily pushing Microsoft products.
Why don't more parents tell their kids about Krampus?
Wikipedia. The best compendium of knowledge in the history of mankind.

Google. From a lab project to revolutionize finding information.

Youtube. It's now possible to share video with everyone around the world lacking information.

iPhone. Real, useful smartphones are finally here.

And that's just what I thought of off the top of my head, in a minute, from the field I work in. There are thousands of examples everywhere you look. They're just hard to see sometimes, because they're "normal" now.
Fair point. I thought it would be fun to compare the mortality rate with an issue with another organ that has slim chance of going away: the pancreas. It looks like the appendix is more-or-less a trouble-free organ in comparison. I wouldn't place any bets on the emergence of an appendix-free homo sapien offshoot any time soon.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pancreas+cancer
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=appendicitis
> An invariant across societies is that when the value of land and real estate becomes high (relative to incomes) the culture and civic values are in decline

Umm, the value of land and real estate is high relative to incomes only in a few places in the US. In large areas of the US, land and real estate is very inexpensive.

The US is not its coastal population centers.
Congrats! Soho Haven looks fantastic.

Here's a list of most co-working/shared office spaces in NYC, btw: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtSul34GwrVBdExHMHh...
The Book of Xen - Slashdot book review
If you like that, you might also like http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
Making URLs shorter for Google Toolbar and FeedBurner
>You need to make sure the name is actually girlish sounding, of course.

Such as:

Geekgirl89

Girlgeek5

Grrlgrrl

Emilygeek8

Sleepygrlgeek

shygrlsam

lonelygirlphil

How am I doing?
There is no such thing as "more guilty". You are or you aren't.
Have you employed this tactic?
You know, succinctness is not something I look for in C code. Unless you're artificially going for obfuscation; I think 50 lines is barely enough to check arguments, open descriptors, test results, setup signal handlers and sit tightly on a loop. You will need at least another 50-500 just to implement ICCC.
Not long before 2000 I saw my first live webcam, streaming video of a fish-tank. It was incredibly grainy, very low resolution (the video display was roughly the size of a postage stamp on my monitor), and the frame-rate wasn't much more than one fps. It was unwatchable for more than a few seconds, other than as a curiosity.

There are now many websites I can go to watch video (live or archived) at a higher resolution than I used to watch "real" TV content at, and a comparable frame-rate. Choice of content to watch is now almost unmeasurable, whereas it used to be I could count my options on the fingers of one hand.

Most of this progress is just due various forms of exponential growth and decay (cost of bandwidth and storage, speed of cpus, etc). It was probably pretty easy to predict, but I wouldn't categorize the change as a mere bugfix.
That's cool that you guys were able to work it out. There seems to be an increasing number of checks that a name has to pass to be "valid".

Can you get the domain?
Can you get the twitter account?
Can you get the facebook account?

Depending on the market there are probably others.

What checks does a name need to pass for you?
Just when I thought the URL shortener fad was on the way out...
hey...good stuff, JVR!
Does any other hner can point me to other materials related to this series?
I really think this series are, at least, a great intellectual exercise.
This reminds me of "Remington Steele" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Steele).

Fun show, from the 80's.
Why did the word "Start" disappear from Start Menu in Windows Vista
Code Sparring: a fun way to practice programming
Was never hereditary in the Heiliges Romisches Reich Deutscher Nation.
Seeing advice to the tune of "don't do it because it's bad!" causes my Hacker sense to sound off alarms. I have to tell myself "You are not the average user!" three times a day, and I'm just making stupid Facebook games.

HTML email is absolutely something you should test. Take 10% of your email list and hit them with an HTML-ized version of your marketing email. How did they respond? Did they buy more or less? Did they unsubscribe?

Asking "Do people want an HTML email?" is the wrong question. Asking "Do people spend more from an HTML email?" is the right question. Anything less from a startup is leaving money on the table.
What happens if Amazon runs out of machines, has a system-wide corruption that was noticed too late or decides to be dicks about something or other?
If you stopped by our office I think you would say there isn't any splurging anywhere-we aren't VC backed
Support for Instapaper is something I'm hearing a lot. It's definitely on the list, and something I'd like myself.
You raise a legitimate question here and I was so inspired by it that I wrote a blog post, comparing behaviors to custom events.

It's here:
http://things.rodpetrovic.com/post/283585362/why-jquery-beha...

In short: I'm well aware of custom events but I don't think they provide me with object-oriented encapsulation of functionality.
The implicit claim is that the people running Google are not sociopaths, yet he presents no evidence to support this claim. He attributes these upheavals to the "march of technology" and expects the reader to swallow this without objection.

What exactly makes Eisner a "sociopath" and Brin & Page "normal decent people"? It's apparently that Google makes things people want and Disney does not. I'm not sure this holds up. Disney doesn't make desirable things?
This is a great idea that fits our budget
Facebook's Frugal Home - architectural review of new Facebook headquarters
They modestly omitted mentioning another point in favour of goo.gl:

* Chances are, we're not going to go out of business and break your shortened links any time soon.
Looks more like kindergarten than an office space. Where are the crayons?
Probably because the first button you had to press in order to shut down your computer was 'Start'.
I think you should definitely make it as clear as possible in the cover letter that you are looking to move and what concessions you would be willing to make.
Of course you get the best hardware - this article was meant to show that even a non VC backed company could get an office up and running. Were the other tips helpful?
Agreed, but speaking as someone who has only done patchy X programming, it's still nice to have a stub of a window manager with notes about the absolute basics. I've used a fork of dwm for a while, but a typical comment from its source is, "To understand everything else, start reading main()." That's not terribly helpful when you're just starting out.

Look at how many windowmanagers are based on aewm, too.
To be honest, I don't give a shit about his friend/business partner.

But I do like his idea. So I appreciate that he omits pointless personal details and just sticks to the meat of the article.

When a writer expects me to read a bunch of self-indulgent cliche boilerplate I usually hit the back button.
I don't buy the argument that the past had a higher rate of quality scripts. To me, that position has always smacked of selective reporting combined with the old 'back in my day' argument.

The undeniably great stories of western civilization total a hundred or so works over the course of our history. So the works of any given decade or generation will always be found wanting in that comparison. It shows nothing.

If anything, the old studio system was designed to shovel out disposable content even more so than the current configuration.

Now I don't have a comprehensive study to support my position, but until commonly accepted wisdom has one for its stance, I disagree.
> I quickly learned not to mention I had kids. I quickly learned not to mention I worked from my kitchen table.

Maybe the false assumption was that she's a partnered dilettante (who might get bored and not deliver your work) rather than a professional (who takes your work seriously, in part because it's keeping the lights on), along with the assumption that mothers are more obsessed with parenting.

On that note, anyone else think it was weird that she only talked about supporting her kids, as if she herself didn't eat?
By any means: use the visibility you gain from this for your PR/advertising game! Now is the time for a smart play, get the public behind you (in terms of: target audience goes Plurk 'cause it's cool). Granted, this is not 'the solution but an opportunity you can manage to get a win out of this. (Remember, PG wrote the $$ he spent on PR was worth it.)
I found out about his after I purchased white boards