Datasets:

ummagumm-a

/

cup-it-ds-classification-pairwise

like 0

{ "score": 0, "text": "You know, I understand your situation. I was in startup mode and a girl came along and I told her straight up, \"My startup is more important to me than a girl. I don't want a girlfriend, I want a startup and I want a business and my #1 priority is making my business work. You are my mistress.\"I was totally honest with her. She knew from the beginning what I wanted and I let her decide what she wanted. She decided to stay and \"tolerate\" my startup mentality. I'm an entrepreneur. I have been since I was too young to work legally and I probably always will be.She has stuck by my side for over three years now and I am going to marry her -- I hope. You can never predict the future, but through all this, I have fallen in love with her more than my startup and I want to be with her more than my startup and I will be.I'm no expert in life, advice is all recycled life experiences and my life is different than your life. But really, think about it... a startup is just a peacock feather that will help you be happy with the woman you love and spread your genes and procreate. That's what life is about.If you find the woman of your dreams, then a startup doesn't matter as much anymore. Your happiness is the goal. What makes you happy? Finding someone you can talk to and love and cherish and be with forever, or a startup you can flip?Maybe it's the former, maybe it's the latter... you don't even know yet or you wouldn't be asking the question. Give it time, figure it out. Be honest with your partner. Don't expect to be steve jobs or lance armstrong... do you want testicular cancer? Probably not.Just live life and try to be happy and treat people with respect and honesty and let them decide what they want. If she wants to be with you while you focus on entrepreneural persuits, then that is what she has decided and then she is the one you want to keep around.If she says, \"No, I want you to focus on me and not your company.\" Then maybe you should let her go if that's what you prefer." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Seems to me like you are putting the cart before the horse. Don't waste your time living solely for the future. You aren't Lance Armostrong or Steve Jobs yet, and you may never become them.Life is what happens while you're busy planning other things. Don't waste an opportunity." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Seems to me like you are putting the cart before the horse. Don't waste your time living solely for the future. You aren't Lance Armostrong or Steve Jobs yet, and you may never become them.Life is what happens while you're busy planning other things. Don't waste an opportunity." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Your argument is a good example of survival bias. How many people pursue their passion and let everything else in life behind, just to find themselves alone and unsuccessful at the end of their lives. Enjoy the opportunity, see where it goes, and stop looking for excuses to avoid intimacy with other people." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Your argument is a good example of survival bias. How many people pursue their passion and let everything else in life behind, just to find themselves alone and unsuccessful at the end of their lives. Enjoy the opportunity, see where it goes, and stop looking for excuses to avoid intimacy with other people." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Seriously dude, all your fame and wealth will mean nothing as you take your last breath. Neither will your friends and family, but there is a better chance they will be around to comfort you as you transition into the void (or where ever you believe are going).I derive a tremendous amount of courage and strength from my wife, I wouldn't have been able to achieve what I have with out her." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Seriously dude, all your fame and wealth will mean nothing as you take your last breath. Neither will your friends and family, but there is a better chance they will be around to comfort you as you transition into the void (or where ever you believe are going).I derive a tremendous amount of courage and strength from my wife, I wouldn't have been able to achieve what I have with out her." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "This is cargo-cultism at its worst. The way to become the next Tesla isn't to copy his faults. The people on your list didn't get there by having unstable relationships and it's more than a little presumptuous to make start planning your life around being famously successful." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "The former Enron people in the article claim the company had great, hardworking people in it and ready-to-implement software.I see no inherent contradiction between a company having fraudulent, criminal leadership and hardworking, well-meaning people in it. Nor in a company having sellable products and a bankrupt business plan to implement it.I doubt anyone has any problems acknowledging Enron had tens of thousands of well-meaning, hardworking employees, ignorant of the disaster its decision-makers were fomenting. Everyone knew the company had salt-of-the-earth employees among the criminals -- they were the ones who lost their retirements.The article didn't change my opinion of Enron." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I had a funded streaming media startup from '99-'01. We built overlay multicast software --- the kind of middleware code that Enron is accused not to have had to back up their CDN.What I can add to this thread is, Enron very much was talked about in '00 as a real CDN player. Not just in our own internal meetings, but in bizdev discussion with other large media and CDN companies.That doesn't mean Enron-the-company wasn't a giant fraud (EBS was a tiny portion of Enron as a whole), but I plausible the idea that some senior guy at EBS could truly believe Enron was a legitimate enterprise." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I had a funded streaming media startup from '99-'01. We built overlay multicast software --- the kind of middleware code that Enron is accused not to have had to back up their CDN.What I can add to this thread is, Enron very much was talked about in '00 as a real CDN player. Not just in our own internal meetings, but in bizdev discussion with other large media and CDN companies.That doesn't mean Enron-the-company wasn't a giant fraud (EBS was a tiny portion of Enron as a whole), but I plausible the idea that some senior guy at EBS could truly believe Enron was a legitimate enterprise." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "One demonstration from 1999 narrated by Yeager appears to show an early concept of cloud computing, in which a user could access online applications or \"apps\" through an Enron networkA user accessing applications via a network is an innovation in 1999? Try 30 years earlier with Telnet, and probably many other examples.And yet another presentation from 2000 includes a demonstration of an on-demand movie service similar to those available on most cable TV systems todayThe Wikipedia article on VoD cites existing commercial services already having launched in 1998.I don't doubt that there were a lot of smart people at Enron; but whether they were ultimately producing value is in doubt. These examples don't seem to provide much evidence." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "One demonstration from 1999 narrated by Yeager appears to show an early concept of cloud computing, in which a user could access online applications or \"apps\" through an Enron networkA user accessing applications via a network is an innovation in 1999? Try 30 years earlier with Telnet, and probably many other examples.And yet another presentation from 2000 includes a demonstration of an on-demand movie service similar to those available on most cable TV systems todayThe Wikipedia article on VoD cites existing commercial services already having launched in 1998.I don't doubt that there were a lot of smart people at Enron; but whether they were ultimately producing value is in doubt. These examples don't seem to provide much evidence." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "For me, the key problem here is that these are very peripheral insiders indeed. Here's my company's study of the Enron corpus:http://blog.lumino.so/2011/11/07/enron-evil-versus-football/Just look at all that orange at the top of the first image: that's traders talking to each other about trades. Energy trading is what the company was about, not the tiny internet company that they may have spawned or the HR department. Those people don't deserve to have had their reputations ruined by the fraudulent hedge fund blowup and C-suite malfeasance, but that doesn't mean their parochial views are the correct overall view." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "For me, the key problem here is that these are very peripheral insiders indeed. Here's my company's study of the Enron corpus:http://blog.lumino.so/2011/11/07/enron-evil-versus-football/Just look at all that orange at the top of the first image: that's traders talking to each other about trades. Energy trading is what the company was about, not the tiny internet company that they may have spawned or the HR department. Those people don't deserve to have had their reputations ruined by the fraudulent hedge fund blowup and C-suite malfeasance, but that doesn't mean their parochial views are the correct overall view." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "\"...a small but increasingly vocal group of ex-Enron employees\" This 'group' consists of two people who's reputation is tied to Enron's demise.Most of the people reading this article will have seen the thoroughly researched 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room'. I don't think anyone who's seen that documentary is going to be swayed by a couple of consultants crying foul." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "I'm a little surprised by all of the anti-VC sentiment in this thread so far, especially from this community. I'm perhaps even more surprised by the \"what do they need 100 million dollars\" sentiment that is being floated around.Github is an impressive company that has, so far, blown away its competition in many aspects. The fact that they have been self-bootstrapped up until this point and that they are profitable to boot is a testament to Tom's incredible leadership and their absolutely exceptional team.Tom has made it abundantly clear that he is not against venture capital. He just thinks it is starting off on the wrong foot if you try to build your company with the expectation of relying on venture capital from the start.So he's taken Github to profitability, and in four years they've all managed to transform the way most of us collaborate online. That is a profound achievement, but those responsible for such a radical change aren't generally the type to sit idly by on the backs of their previous accomplishments.They want to do bigger and better things with Github. They're not quite done trying to change the world. Now they are not only profitable, but they have substantial capital to invest in further innovations.With 0 dollars, a couple of guys built something amazing. I can't wait to see what they can do with 100 million." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I can't help but think that this investment marks the Pets.com point in this investment cycle.GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS. The switching costs to using another DVCS such as Mercurial (which I personally prefer) or another Git hosting provider are minimal. There are no barriers to entry since Git is and always will be free. There are very few network effect benefits to using GitHub for paying customers who by definition want to keep their code private.GitHub is a good service and I use it myself, but I'm now increasingly cautious about using it since GitHub are now under serious pressure to deliver pretty spectacular returns to their investors.In the end I think this investment has less to do with GitHub and more to do with the fact that e.g. yields on 10-year Treasuries are currently under 2%. Investors are desperately looking for any decent returns on their money and throwing it a company like GitHub is just a Hail Mary pass." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I can't help but think that this investment marks the Pets.com point in this investment cycle.GitHub is essentially a web interface to a single open-source DVCS. The switching costs to using another DVCS such as Mercurial (which I personally prefer) or another Git hosting provider are minimal. There are no barriers to entry since Git is and always will be free. There are very few network effect benefits to using GitHub for paying customers who by definition want to keep their code private.GitHub is a good service and I use it myself, but I'm now increasingly cautious about using it since GitHub are now under serious pressure to deliver pretty spectacular returns to their investors.In the end I think this investment has less to do with GitHub and more to do with the fact that e.g. yields on 10-year Treasuries are currently under 2%. Investors are desperately looking for any decent returns on their money and throwing it a company like GitHub is just a Hail Mary pass." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I have to imagine that a chunk of that money is to provide liquidity to the founders, which they very much deserve.I don't really see how this is a bad thing. They were very much profitable, and were likely able to dictate the terms of the deal. Also, the money came from one of the most, if not THE most, reputable and respected VC firms." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I have to imagine that a chunk of that money is to provide liquidity to the founders, which they very much deserve.I don't really see how this is a bad thing. They were very much profitable, and were likely able to dictate the terms of the deal. Also, the money came from one of the most, if not THE most, reputable and respected VC firms." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I hate to crash the party, but this is a very odd move for an awesome company and a service that I use and <3.Github has always been against taking money. Actually, TPW has used some very harsh words criticizing startups that choose to take VC money.Now, Github raises 100 gazillion dollars? How the f*ck do they plan on spending that wisely? Sure, it's nice to have that sum in the bank. But, in all honesty, someone has to explain how this is a reasonable move, because I simply don't get it." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I hate to crash the party, but this is a very odd move for an awesome company and a service that I use and <3.Github has always been against taking money. Actually, TPW has used some very harsh words criticizing startups that choose to take VC money.Now, Github raises 100 gazillion dollars? How the f*ck do they plan on spending that wisely? Sure, it's nice to have that sum in the bank. But, in all honesty, someone has to explain how this is a reasonable move, because I simply don't get it." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Many people do not realize that Github has an enterprise product called github:enterprise. Aside the money they raised for this round, there are also help comes together from the VC, Andreessen Horowitz in this case.I don't have any experience in enterprise sales. But, from what I know, enterprise isn't a market that the best product always wins. Yes, Github definitely has one of the best products out there. But, they definitely don't have the required experience to push their enterprise product to the market(look at the developers heavy team). The VC will definitely help in this case.Now, look at another similar product in the market, Atlassion, which raised about 60 millions almost two years ago from Accel. That was also after years of bootstrapping from Atlassian itself. 2 years ago, the funding market was definitely not as good as the funding market today. Yet, Atlassian managed to raise 60 millions. So, the 100 millions Github raised today seems reasonable to me." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "\"I am much more impressed by the genius of the finished product rather than the expressive beauty of its implementation. \"Sridhar's whole argument hinges on this dichotomy between choosing great tools and having a great finished product.It is a false dichotomy - In some situations you don't have to choose one to the exclusion of the other. You can have both, especially in startups (PG specifically mentions startups in his essay, as a context to where powerful languages would be effective). Use AND instead of XOR and this post falls apart.If you start with the intention of building a finished product with \"genius\", it might help to look for the best tools to build that genius product with, which would also give you expressive beauty (and effectiveness). Again AND, not XOR. Sure you could end up with a beautiful creation using crude tools, but why would you want to if you have a choice of tools??Extremist positions about a largely artificial choice between great tools and great end-product aren't very convincing. I don't buy this argument anymore than I buy the \"I am cooler than you because I write in lisp and you write in C\" argument.From Sridhar's post\"I bet that the vast majority of the world’s programmers, want an “easy” language, not a highly expressive, poetic language Contrast this view with Paul Graham’s Hackers & Painters.\"Interesting rhetorical device(again) but there isn't as much of a conflict between their views. There isn't a conflict between \"easy\" and \"poetic\". The same language can be used to produce works which are either, neither or both, with all sorts of intermediate positions and shading.From Pg's essay\"Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So to write good software you have to understand how little users understand. They're going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will, because they're not going to read the manual. The best system I've ever seen in this respect was the original Macintosh, in 1985. It did what software almost never does: it just worked. [6]Source code, too, should explain itself. If I could get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be the one at the beginning of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.You need to have empathy not just for your users, but for your readers. It's in your interest, because you'll be one of them. Many a hacker has written a program only to find on returning to it six months later that he has no idea how it works. I know several people who've sworn off Perl after such experiences.\"Software should make sense to both users and other programmers? Oh horror, PG does seem to be focusing on the end result after all.Now PG also seems to imply that in some contexts (startups with a few skilled hackers competing with larger companies with not so killed hackers, say) choosing powerful languages (or generally \"running upstairs\") would get you to the desired endpoint faster/with less resources etc. Debating that point is fine. Mischaracterizing it isn't.The problem again seems to be the artificial divide between \"simple and easy\" vs \"poetic \"(and by implication NOT simple and easy). The only real argument offered for this dichotomy seems to be based on his personal experience in learning two languages. One learning experience seems to have focused on learning with simple sentences and the the other on learning via/with classical poetry.If the two languages (and teaching styles) were interchanged, so if you learn English by/with analysing Tudor poetry and Tamil by learning conversational and practically useful sentences, I suspect you would find the latter easier.That doesn't say much about which language is intrinsically better for a given purpose in a given context.English can be taught simply or in a complicated manner. So can Tamil. You can read/write complex, layered poetry in both, which are nearly untranslatable into the other. You can write simple , clear prose in both.\"After all, if you are doing wireless communications systems simulation [as I was] or writing a web word processor [as we are], what matters is the particular domain, and the language in which it is developed is not the most important issue. \"But no one (least of all PG) ever claimed it was the most important issue, taking precedence over domain. But it is an important issue.A programmer who didn't care at all about his tools and didn't have clear preferences, not only about programming languages, but also about other tools like Editors, Version Control Systems etc is hardly a professional. A preference need not be absolute and fanatic. Use AND when you can and XOR only when you have to.A web word processor can be written with Clojure or Python (say) and JavaScript or with (say) PHP and JavaScript.[1]Given that choice, I'd expect good developers to tend to one choice over the other if they had the choice (Once you have a large enough base of legacy code/a large enough company, often you don't have that choice).My nutshell reaction: Bleh what a terrible post. It hardly holds together in any logical fashion or says anything insightful.[1](Here I am using the same rhetorical device of setting up two arbitrary extremes and forcing a choice - Domain XOR Powerful languages, Clojure XOR PHP. In the real world you could used Clojure, JavaScript and some PHP, or none of these etc, but then how would we argue about irrelevancies? ;-)) ." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Fascinating. This post illustrates precisely what -- in my opinion -- is the attitude that makes someone a Blub programmer. That's what Paul Graham was originally talking about: people who learn and develop their skills as programmers up to a certain point and then say \"That's enough, I'm comfortable.\"Don't get me wrong, you can get to be a damn good Blub programmer. You can also work at an international company, headquartered in US, without being skilled enough at English to appreciate Shakespeare's work; or, for that matter, loathe it, since you need the same level of proficiency.I do believe that you'll never get to enjoy English to the fullest, if you don't explore its poetic reaches. In words of Wilhelm von Humboldt:The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.I believe that the same applies to programming languages. Yes, you can be really good with just Java. But just by learning C# on the side, you can gain valuable insights without stepping too far from your comfort zone. Learning Lisp, Self, Python and Factor, to name a few, will give you whole new worldviews, make you think differently. You don't really need that stuff to make software (or money). But it can make you a hell of a lot better at it and, more importantly, it can make you enjoy it more." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Fascinating. This post illustrates precisely what -- in my opinion -- is the attitude that makes someone a Blub programmer. That's what Paul Graham was originally talking about: people who learn and develop their skills as programmers up to a certain point and then say \"That's enough, I'm comfortable.\"Don't get me wrong, you can get to be a damn good Blub programmer. You can also work at an international company, headquartered in US, without being skilled enough at English to appreciate Shakespeare's work; or, for that matter, loathe it, since you need the same level of proficiency.I do believe that you'll never get to enjoy English to the fullest, if you don't explore its poetic reaches. In words of Wilhelm von Humboldt:The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.I believe that the same applies to programming languages. Yes, you can be really good with just Java. But just by learning C# on the side, you can gain valuable insights without stepping too far from your comfort zone. Learning Lisp, Self, Python and Factor, to name a few, will give you whole new worldviews, make you think differently. You don't really need that stuff to make software (or money). But it can make you a hell of a lot better at it and, more importantly, it can make you enjoy it more." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "\"LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot.\" -- Eric Raymond (How to become a Hacker).I wonder what percentage of people who \"get Lisp\" manage to stay happy working in other languages." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "\"LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot.\" -- Eric Raymond (How to become a Hacker).I wonder what percentage of people who \"get Lisp\" manage to stay happy working in other languages." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "What a case of assuming your conclusion. If Lisp is poetry, and poetry is beautiful-but-archaic-language-completely-divorced-from-ordinary-human-communication, well then obviously Lisp is for a tiny minority who like to speak Elizabethan; meanwhile the much larger population of practical people will simply prefer to get things done in vernacular.It's nonsense, of course. If Lisp weren't good for getting things done, I for one wouldn't bother with it. But having assumed his conclusion in the first three words of the second paragraph, the author need offer no argument, and doesn't. In fact he doesn't even mention Lisp after that." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "What a case of assuming your conclusion. If Lisp is poetry, and poetry is beautiful-but-archaic-language-completely-divorced-from-ordinary-human-communication, well then obviously Lisp is for a tiny minority who like to speak Elizabethan; meanwhile the much larger population of practical people will simply prefer to get things done in vernacular.It's nonsense, of course. If Lisp weren't good for getting things done, I for one wouldn't bother with it. But having assumed his conclusion in the first three words of the second paragraph, the author need offer no argument, and doesn't. In fact he doesn't even mention Lisp after that." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Say what you will about pg's writing. But he's been involved in the funding of plenty of startups that didn't write Lisp code. I think you should pay attention to where his money is going before you read too much into his essays." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Well, Command-Shift-F fullscreen mode in mvim (Mac's vim gui, i'm not sure if it is also supported in gvim variants on X11) gives you the same if used with an appropriate colorscheme (I use vividchalk)" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I read one of pg's essays not too long which had a section along the lines of, \"too much in your view = too much to process.\" I started putting this idea into practice with a purging of nonsense in my work area and noticed a slight improvement.I've been looking for something like this for a while. This app just needs to have a preference to disable alt + tab" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I read one of pg's essays not too long which had a section along the lines of, \"too much in your view = too much to process.\" I started putting this idea into practice with a purging of nonsense in my work area and noticed a slight improvement.I've been looking for something like this for a while. This app just needs to have a preference to disable alt + tab" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Too late for me, as who wants to learn a bunch of obscure keyboard shortcuts? has already happened for me, and as a result, the keyboard shortcuts shown here are obscure to me as a result.I approach this with emacs by turning off the menu bar and the icon bar.I am not fond of the green on black." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Too late for me, as who wants to learn a bunch of obscure keyboard shortcuts? has already happened for me, and as a result, the keyboard shortcuts shown here are obscure to me as a result.I approach this with emacs by turning off the menu bar and the icon bar.I am not fond of the green on black." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Sometimes, I will use vim in a virtual terminal instead of my normal ubuntu desktop. The switch back and forth takes more time than a standard alt+tab which seems to trigger something in my brain to stick with it longer than using vim `normally'." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Sometimes, I will use vim in a virtual terminal instead of my normal ubuntu desktop. The switch back and forth takes more time than a standard alt+tab which seems to trigger something in my brain to stick with it longer than using vim `normally'." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "There's also q10, which is basically the same thing, I think.http://www.baara.com/q10/" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Strongly agree, not withstanding the gratuitous swearing. Mobile browsing has radically reduced my tolerance for designer cruft; if things don't improve soon there's going to be an opening for a mobile browser that specializes in filtering and caching web pages to speed up navigation.Note to admins: if my browser string indicates I'm using a smartphone, then I'm going to be gone after about 20 seconds. 80%+ of my mobile browsing is for the purpose of reading news, but 80%+ of what I'm downloading is eye candy. I've started blocking the worst offenders." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Everyone has a smartphoneFuck. That. Shit.You know who always says this? People with smart phones. It's amazing how having a smart phone convinces you that everyone has one. You also are convinced that they have your exact model of smart phone. Buy an iPhone? Guess what, suddenly everyone has one and you should be writing iPhone apps. Android? No way, nobody has one of those.Mobile is definitely an interesting area to look at, but always trying to be on the cusp of the next big thing just means you'll spin your wheels a lot chasing stuff that doesn't pan out. Just ask everyone who touted Wave as \"The thing you need to f-ing know right now!!!1!11!\"Don't be scared of getting passed over by the next hotness. Just look at all the plenty of companies making money on stuff that's old and tired. Wanna make money? Look at email! Groupon, Mailchimp, and a whole host of other companies are making money hand over fist. Try tell them about how email is dead." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Everyone has a smartphoneFuck. That. Shit.You know who always says this? People with smart phones. It's amazing how having a smart phone convinces you that everyone has one. You also are convinced that they have your exact model of smart phone. Buy an iPhone? Guess what, suddenly everyone has one and you should be writing iPhone apps. Android? No way, nobody has one of those.Mobile is definitely an interesting area to look at, but always trying to be on the cusp of the next big thing just means you'll spin your wheels a lot chasing stuff that doesn't pan out. Just ask everyone who touted Wave as \"The thing you need to f-ing know right now!!!1!11!\"Don't be scared of getting passed over by the next hotness. Just look at all the plenty of companies making money on stuff that's old and tired. Wanna make money? Look at email! Groupon, Mailchimp, and a whole host of other companies are making money hand over fist. Try tell them about how email is dead." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "What is with the non-stop vulgarity? Trying to be \"hip\" somehow?Your message is lost when one can't respect how you are saying it." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "What is with the non-stop vulgarity? Trying to be \"hip\" somehow?Your message is lost when one can't respect how you are saying it." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I've been trying to convince people to design and code for mobile devices first for a while now. I'm always amazed at the corporate resistance against this. I'm so forwarding this, swearing included. Good thing is that in my startup I do whatever i want." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I've been trying to convince people to design and code for mobile devices first for a while now. I'm always amazed at the corporate resistance against this. I'm so forwarding this, swearing included. Good thing is that in my startup I do whatever i want." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Can we please not have these inflammatory and uncivilized things on HN? I'm sure if there was a point to it, someone else would have written it down with less drama and more substance.Thanks." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Don't fix email. Fix communication.Why, on my iPhone, do I have:1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes)2. A \"messages\" app (which abstracts out two different message systems)3. A phone app4. A contacts app5. Twitter6. Facebook7. SkypeWhat I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my messages (both incoming and outgoing), and -- as the writer of the article points out -- (d) manage my attachments.On the iPhone (which is by no means the worst case) I might end up doing something stupid like looking up a contact, phone them, get sent to voicemail. Go back to the contact. Use a slightly different path to send an SMS. Discover it doesn't get sent. Switch to mail, and send a message.Meanwhile the recipient gets a missed call, an empty voicemail, eventually gets the SMS, and then receives an email -- in three different apps on their iPhone.Tiny incremental improvements to email will only nibble at the edges of the larger problem. Let me communicate with a unified UI and unified contacts." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This guy has teeny tiny letters hardcoded into JPGs on his web site. I can't read it.Fortunately, this means I can disregard what he has to say about UI/UX. Sometimes the medium IS the message." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This guy has teeny tiny letters hardcoded into JPGs on his web site. I can't read it.Fortunately, this means I can disregard what he has to say about UI/UX. Sometimes the medium IS the message." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I comfortably ignore any comments about email and what it should be from anyone who hasn't used a text email client (well configured) like mutt, mh, elm, or an emacs mode for at least 100 hours.The only real complaints I have about email with a well-configured text client are:\n* HTML mail from idiots\n* Syncing on multiple machines, with offline mode (IMAP is ok, but you want to keep full repositories on laptops for use without network, and ideally to process email more quickly than network access)\n* Mobile clients -- Android has K9Mail, haven't found anything great on iOS yet. The keyboard-based mail workflow doesn't translate to the tablet/phone form factor, but triggers do even more so, so there should be something there\n* Handling attachments well\n* Global directory across organizations (FB/LinkedIn/etc. integration could help a lot)\n* Multi-user mailboxes; you need some kind of ticketing/tagging/CRM on top of it, and these are all standalone, sometimes web based, and fairly universally suck. There are ways to tie them into plain email though." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I comfortably ignore any comments about email and what it should be from anyone who hasn't used a text email client (well configured) like mutt, mh, elm, or an emacs mode for at least 100 hours.The only real complaints I have about email with a well-configured text client are:\n* HTML mail from idiots\n* Syncing on multiple machines, with offline mode (IMAP is ok, but you want to keep full repositories on laptops for use without network, and ideally to process email more quickly than network access)\n* Mobile clients -- Android has K9Mail, haven't found anything great on iOS yet. The keyboard-based mail workflow doesn't translate to the tablet/phone form factor, but triggers do even more so, so there should be something there\n* Handling attachments well\n* Global directory across organizations (FB/LinkedIn/etc. integration could help a lot)\n* Multi-user mailboxes; you need some kind of ticketing/tagging/CRM on top of it, and these are all standalone, sometimes web based, and fairly universally suck. There are ways to tie them into plain email though." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "This person needs to try outlook. You see, there's a little flag you can click on next to the email with a task priority. And a todo bar/list which shows them in priority order. Not only has it existed before, but it really doesn't help that much. You still need to apply yourself to use it correctly. This doesn't change that.Sigh... but then I knew I was in for wheel re-invention as soon as I saw the \"modern creative workflow\" sales bullshit. Perhaps there's something to be gained by making it prettier than outlook, I dunno. I feel like Alan Kay -- read about your history folks. If you're going to \"re-invent email\" you might want to, I don't know -- try out many different existing email clients?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "This person needs to try outlook. You see, there's a little flag you can click on next to the email with a task priority. And a todo bar/list which shows them in priority order. Not only has it existed before, but it really doesn't help that much. You still need to apply yourself to use it correctly. This doesn't change that.Sigh... but then I knew I was in for wheel re-invention as soon as I saw the \"modern creative workflow\" sales bullshit. Perhaps there's something to be gained by making it prettier than outlook, I dunno. I feel like Alan Kay -- read about your history folks. If you're going to \"re-invent email\" you might want to, I don't know -- try out many different existing email clients?" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Uh, let me see. Attempt nº 5712 to revolutionize the way we use email. Tell me more.\"Mark as read\" is useless? I thought nowaday we had \"archive\", \"search\" and such from gmail... no mention of that. OK then, let's see what you offer...\"Clutter-free interface\", \"clean typography\" and the mystery option \"what you really need\"? Are you (f) kidding me? This can't scream \"I'm thunderbird but made by graphical designers\" any louder.Oooh Actionsteps! I have NO idea what you are, but you must be \"what I really need\"!\nScroll, scroll, still no idea...\nAha! I have Favourites (why didn't I come up with that?), and Actionsteps, which \"organize\" my stuff. So like, categories, but with a mysterious name.And, it can handle attachments! What year is this?Plus facebook etc integration like that's something I'd ever not want to disable.Attempt nº 5712 archieved." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "I just want to add the author of the article, i.e. Hal Berenson, is one of the key architect behind SQL Server 7.0 which is a rewrite from the legacy Sybase code. More information can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/SQL-Serv..." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "> What is the negative business impact on with entire Windows platform associated with making a key member of the server product family available on nix?I suspect this is close to the heart of the matter. Building a flagship application for a competing OS hurts Microsoft's interest as an OS vendor. Without a really compelling business reason to take on the technical hassle of porting, this danger becomes a deal-breaker." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "> What is the negative business impact on with entire Windows platform associated with making a key member of the server product family available on nix?I suspect this is close to the heart of the matter. Building a flagship application for a competing OS hurts Microsoft's interest as an OS vendor. Without a really compelling business reason to take on the technical hassle of porting, this danger becomes a deal-breaker." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "This was really fascinating. It just goes to show you that there is a whole lot more than just code with something like this. My gut tells me that a unix SQLServer would have been a the poor stepchild of the family if they had gone this route. That said, it would be very nice if MS made genuine, supported drivers for SQLServer on unix. I know about FreeTDS, but that just doesn't cut it for something mission critical." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "This was really fascinating. It just goes to show you that there is a whole lot more than just code with something like this. My gut tells me that a unix SQLServer would have been a the poor stepchild of the family if they had gone this route. That said, it would be very nice if MS made genuine, supported drivers for SQLServer on unix. I know about FreeTDS, but that just doesn't cut it for something mission critical." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "This is a great cost-benefit analysis that shows that it wasn't a technical/software/programming question." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "This is a great cost-benefit analysis that shows that it wasn't a technical/software/programming question." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "The discussion of admin tools is somewhat interesting - SQL Server's have been abysmal until recently. Seriously, if they couldn't have ported it to unix, at least offering some decent admin tools would have been nice.I had a recent job where a very old NT4 box with SQL Server 6.5 was still installed. Getting the data off it to a modern platform involved the following upgrade version chaining.6.5 -> 2000 -> 2005 32-bit -> 2005 64-bit -> 2008 R2.So, 5 conversions, as there wasn't a simple \"dump to text\" tool. The silly thing is that database was under 100MB in size. (we did try dumping it into Access but certain saved procedures and other stuff in the DB wouldn't come over)Then, after all that trouble, we realized that the client program was 16-bit, so they have to do a rewrite to run on x64 platforms (or run VM's, great...). And nobody has the code as the guy who wrote it fell off the planet." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Having skimmed through the summaries, the general trend is they're trying to solve a non-existent problem, or a problem that isn't painful enough that people would be willing to pay to solve. I mean, who wants to pay for their Facebook statuses to be backed up? They're about as valuable as old voicemails and the threat of loss isn't palpable.There's a lesson to be learned in all of this: don't think about ways to make money, but think about painful problems that you can solve for someone, and figure out whether a viable business can be created with that idea." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Original post from almost three years ago:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190974" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Original post from almost three years ago:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190974" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "My favorite blindingly obvious business plan straight from HN discussions: (insert non-US country X here) clone of (insert successful US-only business that HNers constantly whine about not being in country X).Examples: Stripe for Norway, Twilio for New Zealand, etc." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "My favorite blindingly obvious business plan straight from HN discussions: (insert non-US country X here) clone of (insert successful US-only business that HNers constantly whine about not being in country X).Examples: Stripe for Norway, Twilio for New Zealand, etc." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Can't face the copy/paste, but I should add my 'idea dump' posts: http://willgrant.org/category/idea-dump/" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Can't face the copy/paste, but I should add my 'idea dump' posts: http://willgrant.org/category/idea-dump/" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Phosphorus recovery is an important problem indeed, but there already exists a solution:http://www.grontmij.com/highlights/water-and-energy/Pages/pe...The main problem at the moment is a lack of incentives to use it at waste water treatment plants, but I guess this will come with increasing Phosphorus prices. Still it would be beneficial to start recovering more Phosphorus already now but this is a political issue rather than an Engineering issue in my opinion." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Janke assembled what he calls an “all-star team”: Phil Zimmerman, a recent inductee to the Internet’s Hall of Fame, who in 1991 invented PGP encryption, still considered the standard for email security. Jon Callas, the man behind Apple’s whole-disk encryption (which is used to secure hard drives in Macs across the world), became Silent Circle’s chief technology officer.Yeah... that might actually qualify as \"all-star\"" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I've always had this sneaking suspicion that Microsoft bought Skype solely under the direction of the government so that it could be centrally administered and monitored by a vendor that is willing to do the job. There certainly has never been a business case for it that would support the obscene valuation even the first time around. I usually see about 20m users logged in and most of them are probably not active let alone terminating calls to a telco so they represent zero revenue." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I've always had this sneaking suspicion that Microsoft bought Skype solely under the direction of the government so that it could be centrally administered and monitored by a vendor that is willing to do the job. There certainly has never been a business case for it that would support the obscene valuation even the first time around. I usually see about 20m users logged in and most of them are probably not active let alone terminating calls to a telco so they represent zero revenue." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "It's good to hear they will be releasing the source! A tool like this would be rather insane to use by anyone serious about security without the ability to inspect the source. The article states it will be under a \"noncommercial open-source license\"." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "It's good to hear they will be releasing the source! A tool like this would be rather insane to use by anyone serious about security without the ability to inspect the source. The article states it will be under a \"noncommercial open-source license\"." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "If people are interested in this type of thing for Android, I recommend checking out the RedPhone and TextSecure apps.They're free to use, all the source code is GPLv3 on GitHub, and RedPhone already has global calling coverage. The apps have been translated into 15 languages, and in my experience they're really dead simple to use." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "If people are interested in this type of thing for Android, I recommend checking out the RedPhone and TextSecure apps.They're free to use, all the source code is GPLv3 on GitHub, and RedPhone already has global calling coverage. The apps have been translated into 15 languages, and in my experience they're really dead simple to use." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Can't believe people are getting so jazzed over proprietary encryption technology! It's a truly horrible idea, especially as there are already existing F/OSS alternatives, such as https://chatsecure.org/ for iPhone." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "This is an excellent overview article on an important topic. It mentions many of the most influential authors on the topic of accuracy of scientific publications.Hacker News readers may enjoy "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[1] by Peter Norvig, a LISP hacker who is now director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Norvig's essay is my all-time favorite link to share in a Hacker News comment. That's because we see submissions here every day of preliminary studies that can be analyzed by Norvig's checklist on research issues to look for when reading about a scientific finding.I discuss psychology research weekly with a group of psychologists who study human behavior genetics in a "journal club" (graduate seminar course). Those researchers have told me about other researchers who are trying to clean up the published literature in psychology, for example Jelte Wicherts, whose article "Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science"[2] in an open-access journal suggests general procedures to improve scientific publishing, for example by changing the incentive structure around reviewing papers submitted for publication. Another helpful researcher on statistical tests to verify results is Uri Simonsohn. The papers he and his colleagues produce[3] are thought-provoking, pointed, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.[1] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html[2] Jelte M. Wicherts, Rogier A. Kievit, Marjan Bakker and Denny Borsboom. Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science. Front. Comput. Neurosci., 03 April 2012 doi: 10.3389/fncom.2012.00020http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338...[3] http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "In my experience at the university performing graduate research -* Newness is prized* Replicating old science is not prized* Funding and papers happens for breakthroughsIn software engineering -* many bugs in code creep through exacting peer reviews.Recapping the short list: new things make you money, reviewing things is error prone, replicating old things doesn't make you money until someone wants to rely on them. Hmmmm. The disincentives to replicate unapplied research speak for themselves.What then is to be done beyond hand-wringing and moaning?Several things have to happen: First, grants need to be given for replication of research- replication needs to be an thing that is frequently done. Second, papers (dis)proving prior results (or disproving, period) need to be a recognized category in journals. I do not mean that disproving someone else's pet theory in favor of yours; I mean disproving the result, period; regardless of whether it helps advance your particular line of work.From someone who's currently in industry (and is looking towards going back for the PhD), I encourage the academics to open up and/or push the area of "negative results" as a recognized category of paper. If you have graduate students that can't reproduce prior work - please have them publish that!There have been occasional comments about Journals of Negative Results; maybe those could come to fruition sometime. :-)" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "In my experience at the university performing graduate research -* Newness is prized* Replicating old science is not prized* Funding and papers happens for breakthroughsIn software engineering -* many bugs in code creep through exacting peer reviews.Recapping the short list: new things make you money, reviewing things is error prone, replicating old things doesn't make you money until someone wants to rely on them. Hmmmm. The disincentives to replicate unapplied research speak for themselves.What then is to be done beyond hand-wringing and moaning?Several things have to happen: First, grants need to be given for replication of research- replication needs to be an thing that is frequently done. Second, papers (dis)proving prior results (or disproving, period) need to be a recognized category in journals. I do not mean that disproving someone else's pet theory in favor of yours; I mean disproving the result, period; regardless of whether it helps advance your particular line of work.From someone who's currently in industry (and is looking towards going back for the PhD), I encourage the academics to open up and/or push the area of "negative results" as a recognized category of paper. If you have graduate students that can't reproduce prior work - please have them publish that!There have been occasional comments about Journals of Negative Results; maybe those could come to fruition sometime. :-)" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "What a weird article. I agree with nearly every individual fact within it, but after reading it, I still don't know the point of the piece. I don't want to jump to conclusions, but given that this piece is mostly criticism of science the part of me that associates "conservatives" with "anti-intellectual reactionaries" suspects a hidden agenda to undermine science or give climate change "skeptics" something to point at and yell about [1].Do scientists get funding to replicate research? No, not usually.Does replication still happen? Yes replication of a previous work is often step 0 of new research. It happens all the time.Do replication results get published? No, not usually. Unless it's a clear rebuttal of a famous paper.Does this matter? Debatable. Science proceeds slowly, and bad papers tend to be forgotten unless they're easily replicable. It just takes time.Does this mean that we can't trust science? Absolutely not. You just can't trust individual papers, prima facie. This is something that scientists are supposed to learn as undergrads. Just because it's in a journal (even a "good" journal, like Science or Nature -- some would say especially if it's in one of those journals) doesn't mean it's right.What does this tell us about armchair science? It's utterly useless. The reason that you have to be a professional scientist is not because professional scientists are smarter, but because they have a huge depth of knowledge about a particular field. Any working scientist can point out published, cited papers in their field that are total crap. But you can't tell that a paper might be crap unless you've spent years reading all of the literature in the field. Yet people on the internet persist in thinking that they can cherry-pick a single paper from arXiv or PubMed, and make sweeping conclusions about a field.[1] indeed, the usual HN climate-change critics are in this thread, pointing at and yelling about how science is "broken"." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "What a weird article. I agree with nearly every individual fact within it, but after reading it, I still don't know the point of the piece. I don't want to jump to conclusions, but given that this piece is mostly criticism of science the part of me that associates "conservatives" with "anti-intellectual reactionaries" suspects a hidden agenda to undermine science or give climate change "skeptics" something to point at and yell about [1].Do scientists get funding to replicate research? No, not usually.Does replication still happen? Yes replication of a previous work is often step 0 of new research. It happens all the time.Do replication results get published? No, not usually. Unless it's a clear rebuttal of a famous paper.Does this matter? Debatable. Science proceeds slowly, and bad papers tend to be forgotten unless they're easily replicable. It just takes time.Does this mean that we can't trust science? Absolutely not. You just can't trust individual papers, prima facie. This is something that scientists are supposed to learn as undergrads. Just because it's in a journal (even a "good" journal, like Science or Nature -- some would say especially if it's in one of those journals) doesn't mean it's right.What does this tell us about armchair science? It's utterly useless. The reason that you have to be a professional scientist is not because professional scientists are smarter, but because they have a huge depth of knowledge about a particular field. Any working scientist can point out published, cited papers in their field that are total crap. But you can't tell that a paper might be crap unless you've spent years reading all of the literature in the field. Yet people on the internet persist in thinking that they can cherry-pick a single paper from arXiv or PubMed, and make sweeping conclusions about a field.[1] indeed, the usual HN climate-change critics are in this thread, pointing at and yelling about how science is "broken"." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I am sometimes amused to read failed replication studies which do not calculate their own statistical power -- so they do not know whether, assuming the original study was correct, they will have the sample size to reliably detect an effect. A failed replication then says nothing about the original conclusions.Statistical error is a hobby of mine. The Economist mentions a few pervasive errors, but there are many more. I've been writing a guide:http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/One amusing example is the oft-quoted statistic that 3 million Americans use a gun in self-defense each year. The true figure is several orders of magnitude smaller. Follow the link for more details:http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/p-value.html#taking-up-ar..." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I am sometimes amused to read failed replication studies which do not calculate their own statistical power -- so they do not know whether, assuming the original study was correct, they will have the sample size to reliably detect an effect. A failed replication then says nothing about the original conclusions.Statistical error is a hobby of mine. The Economist mentions a few pervasive errors, but there are many more. I've been writing a guide:http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/One amusing example is the oft-quoted statistic that 3 million Americans use a gun in self-defense each year. The true figure is several orders of magnitude smaller. Follow the link for more details:http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/p-value.html#taking-up-ar..." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "The truth machine is broken. How do we fix it?And why is it that whenever I see a list of the "top 10 most important problems" to solve, this isn't on it? Most educated people take the veracity of published science as given, and we clearly know that's a false assumption.I know we need more transparency in science - sharing of data and code, and negative results. But institutionally, I don't know how we get there with the tools we have.Part of the reason the current system stays in place, despite failing at its charter mission, is billions of dollars of annual subsidies. Changing the way research dollars are allocated would change the structure of the academic enterprise, but that is incredibly hard to do. Few systems have as much momentum." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "They are telling the truth. The source code to stuxnet is in the email archive stolen from HBGary Federal that belonged to Aaron Barr." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Source or object code? The article doesn't specify." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Source or object code? The article doesn't specify." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I'm no security researcher, but it seems to me that there are two interesting parts to Stuxnet: 1. The infection mechanism it uses to spread (no idea what the technical term is for this)\n 2. The payload it uses to damage nuclear reactors\n\nThe vulnerabilities exploited by (1) are supposedly already patched, so that isn't going to do anyone much good. And unless anon hopes to take out a nuclear enrichment facility (and since they probably aren't all the same, we're only talking about some portion of those) I don't see what good (2) would do them.So while this is probably a great way to drum up an 'OMG HACKERZ!!' scare, I just don't see why this is really a big deal. To say nothing of the fact that, being a virus, Stuxnet can't really be all that hard to find a copy of.Edit: Changed reactors to enrichment facilities in the list and fixed the list formatting." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I'm no security researcher, but it seems to me that there are two interesting parts to Stuxnet: 1. The infection mechanism it uses to spread (no idea what the technical term is for this)\n 2. The payload it uses to damage nuclear reactors\n\nThe vulnerabilities exploited by (1) are supposedly already patched, so that isn't going to do anyone much good. And unless anon hopes to take out a nuclear enrichment facility (and since they probably aren't all the same, we're only talking about some portion of those) I don't see what good (2) would do them.So while this is probably a great way to drum up an 'OMG HACKERZ!!' scare, I just don't see why this is really a big deal. To say nothing of the fact that, being a virus, Stuxnet can't really be all that hard to find a copy of.Edit: Changed reactors to enrichment facilities in the list and fixed the list formatting." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "One disturbing bit: Anonymous has a lot of members who work currently or used to work in IT and at ISPs. Of those no longer in such positions, a lot of them are close friends with others who currently still work in such places. It's totally like that bit from Fight Club, but instead of being the ones that make your sandwich and vacuum your floors, they're the ones that install your code and backup your databases.In another way, this is very reassuring. With Internet access being spread between 200,000 ISPs in the US and Canada, the prospect of a top-down commanded Internet blackout seems awfully slim.Universal lesson -- if a part of your society is built out of bullsh#t, it's going to be riddled full of holes and secret passages. If a part of your society is built of bullsh#t, there will be a disaffected contingent looking for meaning, who will find the time and the means to communicate. It's been true for thousands of years, and I don't see it stopping." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "One disturbing bit: Anonymous has a lot of members who work currently or used to work in IT and at ISPs. Of those no longer in such positions, a lot of them are close friends with others who currently still work in such places. It's totally like that bit from Fight Club, but instead of being the ones that make your sandwich and vacuum your floors, they're the ones that install your code and backup your databases.In another way, this is very reassuring. With Internet access being spread between 200,000 ISPs in the US and Canada, the prospect of a top-down commanded Internet blackout seems awfully slim.Universal lesson -- if a part of your society is built out of bullsh#t, it's going to be riddled full of holes and secret passages. If a part of your society is built of bullsh#t, there will be a disaffected contingent looking for meaning, who will find the time and the means to communicate. It's been true for thousands of years, and I don't see it stopping." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "I doubt that HBGary had the source to Stuxnet. Even the source is not that useful. Its infection vectors are known. It does not really use novel worm techniques. They would not be able to sign a different rootkit payload without the stolen certs. The source does not give you control of the command and control infrastructure, so they cannot use or update any of the currently infected machines (this is speculation, I do not know the specifics of Stuxnet in this regard). The PLC payload is useless and would have to be rewritten and tested for a different target. Basically, having a copy of Stuxnet and/or the source for it is useless for using it as a weapon.The source would be great for the people looking for evidence of who wrote it and what their intentions were, but that is about it." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "I published the same link a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88544Anyway it's a great link so I guess it doesn't matter much." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Here's a pdf version of the book:http://www.freewebs.com/maestro_mr/barnum1.pdf" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Here's a pdf version of the book:http://www.freewebs.com/maestro_mr/barnum1.pdf" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Spectacular article! Here's a bit that could use updating for our modern age:Encouragement to advertise when you've got something good:\"In a country like this, where nearly everybody reads, and where newspapers are issued and circulated in editions of five thousand to two hundred thousand, it would be very unwise if this channel was not taken advantage of to reach the public in advertising. A newspaper goes into the family, and is read by wife and children, as well as the head of the home; hence hundreds and thousands of people may read your advertisement, while you are attending to your routine business. Many, perhaps, read it while you are asleep.\"Is there a modern equivalent? Television? Still? Is there any one thing that truly touches entire families today?" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Spectacular article! Here's a bit that could use updating for our modern age:Encouragement to advertise when you've got something good:\"In a country like this, where nearly everybody reads, and where newspapers are issued and circulated in editions of five thousand to two hundred thousand, it would be very unwise if this channel was not taken advantage of to reach the public in advertising. A newspaper goes into the family, and is read by wife and children, as well as the head of the home; hence hundreds and thousands of people may read your advertisement, while you are attending to your routine business. Many, perhaps, read it while you are asleep.\"Is there a modern equivalent? Television? Still? Is there any one thing that truly touches entire families today?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "\"Give a boy twenty thousand dollars and put him in business, and the chances are that he will lose every dollar of it before he is a year older.\"" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "\"Give a boy twenty thousand dollars and put him in business, and the chances are that he will lose every dollar of it before he is a year older.\"" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "This reminds me of the book \"The Richest Man in Babylon\", it has similar parables and written in context of ancient times. Some advice is timeless.In this book, I love how he talks about financial security as achieving independence.\"It is this go-aheaditiveness, this determination not to let the \"horrors\" or the \"blues\" take possession of you, so as to make you relax your energies in the struggle for independence, which you must cultivate. \"" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Perhaps, but the cost of serving them probably approaches zero faster." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Why are ads on social sites so hard? They know my age, location, favorite bands and movies! It just seems like it should be really easy." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Why are ads on social sites so hard? They know my age, location, favorite bands and movies! It just seems like it should be really easy." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Its time to go back to the business-model drawing board. Get rid of the ads and start charging for the service? It would be interesting to see how many social networks could justify their existence based on utility alone." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Its time to go back to the business-model drawing board. Get rid of the ads and start charging for the service? It would be interesting to see how many social networks could justify their existence based on utility alone." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Why don't they do this?http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210434" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Why don't they do this?http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=210434" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Most of the applications are so clustered with ads, so that everbody is probably ignoring them.I do however sometimes find the facebook ads (the main site) highligy targeted (I even clicked twice on those). I bet they charge more than a few cents per 1000 impressions." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Quick! Something interesting. Let's mark it for deletion!(Sadly, it looks like they've already made two attempts on this article)" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "The collection of sample programs is fun to look at:\nhttp://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "The collection of sample programs is fun to look at:\nhttp://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I am so tempted to waste half my day playing with this. One day this will replace 3D barcodes and people will get mobile phone apps from soda cans." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I am so tempted to waste half my day playing with this. One day this will replace 3D barcodes and people will get mobile phone apps from soda cans." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "This is really cool. Lots of possibilities, and just imagine what the steganography crowd would think if they got ahold of it." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "This is really cool. Lots of possibilities, and just imagine what the steganography crowd would think if they got ahold of it." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Obligatory esolang wiki reference:\nhttp://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "I'm sorely tempted to order one of their super-strong magnets, such as http://www.supermagnete.de/eng/K-26-C but I'm almost certain it'd lead to personal misfortune.I wonder if this one of those \"regret the things you do, not the things you don't do\" situations, or simply a \"don't be an idiot\" situation...EDIT: Just seen this one. Bloody hell. http://www.supermagnete.de/eng/SALE-038Also interesting, this page http://www.supermagnete.de/eng/faq/price about how the price of neodymium \"increased about fivefold between January 2011 and June 2011\" due to china reducing export quotas." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "The striking thing about this is not just that it works but that it works so well. That I did not expect." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "The striking thing about this is not just that it works but that it works so well. That I did not expect." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Wow that beats the heck out of disconnecting the joints, rolling it out by hand, and then soldering everything back together. That would have saved me hours in high school. Plus, magnets." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Wow that beats the heck out of disconnecting the joints, rolling it out by hand, and then soldering everything back together. That would have saved me hours in high school. Plus, magnets." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "That's very clever. Their \"reverse hammer\" is reminiscent of the climbing world's funkness device:http://books.google.com/books?id=vNyk_tSE2mUC&lpg=PP1&#3..." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "That's very clever. Their \"reverse hammer\" is reminiscent of the climbing world's funkness device:http://books.google.com/books?id=vNyk_tSE2mUC&lpg=PP1&#3..." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "That reverse hammer is fascinating. I'm a little confused by the diagram, though -- I think the magnet stays on the instrument's surface for the entire motion. It never comes away from the instrument, even after the hammerhead hits the stopper." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "1. A/B/C test it on your actual users. Everything else is a just a guess.2. Having said that, my guess is that the first would generate the most opens. The second seems spammy and the third sounds invasive plus \"more work.\"" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I would A/B test, but they all sound spammy, sorry.I'd recommend coming up with a totally new headline" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I would A/B test, but they all sound spammy, sorry.I'd recommend coming up with a totally new headline" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I say 3.2 sounds like something I have to read and I probably wouldn't be bothered." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I say 3.2 sounds like something I have to read and I probably wouldn't be bothered." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "2" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "2" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "I vote for 2...\nbut you should submit this as a poll:http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Full quotes:* The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.* As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Beware of cynics.Despite this being on hacker news, Krugman's incorrect prediction actually doesn't harm his reputation significantly. Pessimism and pointing out of flaws elevates your status, while optimism can be construed as being naive." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "Beware of cynics.Despite this being on hacker news, Krugman's incorrect prediction actually doesn't harm his reputation significantly. Pessimism and pointing out of flaws elevates your status, while optimism can be construed as being naive." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "He actually wrote a new post today, saying that "Bitcoin is Evil" was supposed to be a joke. Allegedly, nobody in the Bitcoin community understood it and now he complains about the lack of sense of humor that the Bitcoin community demonstrated.http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/the-humor-test/" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "He actually wrote a new post today, saying that "Bitcoin is Evil" was supposed to be a joke. Allegedly, nobody in the Bitcoin community understood it and now he complains about the lack of sense of humor that the Bitcoin community demonstrated.http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/the-humor-test/" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Yet another example of Amara's law, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara\n(sometimes also attributed to Arthur C. Clarke in the form "When it comes to technology, most people overestimate the impact in the short term and underestimate it in the long term")." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Yet another example of Amara's law, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara\n(sometimes also attributed to Arthur C. Clarke in the form "When it comes to technology, most people overestimate the impact in the short term and underestimate it in the long term")." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Hate to be that guy, but what is the purpose of digging this up? To say "ha ha, the Internet is amazing?"" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "The Wikipedia page on the \"greenshoe\" gives more detail on how Morgan was able to safely buy these shares: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GreenshoeBrief summary: Morgan oversells the offering. Facebook gives Morgan the right (but not the obligation) to cover its short position by buying shares at the offering price. This is a defensive maneuver.If the stock pops, Morgan buys the shares from Facebook at the offering price in order to cover its short. Otherwise they'd have to purchase at the market price (which would cause them to lose money). This is the hoped for scenario.In the unexpected case, where the stock's price trends below the offering price, Morgan covers its short by buying shares directly from the market (instead of from Facebook). This stabilizes the price of the stock at the offering price and ensures that public investors don't go underwater soon after the offering.It sounds like there are some complicated maneuvers that the underwriter can pull to make some money off the greenshoe (it's not all flowers and sunshine: http://dealbreaker.com/2012/05/facebook-ipo-goes-nowhere-in-...) but this particular implementation seems relatively good to Facebook and the public investors." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "A lot of misunderstanding about the greenshoe...It's really simple: The IPO sells X+Y shares, where X is the big IPO number of shares and Y is the \"over-allotment\".If the stock trades above the IPO price, the money from selling Y shares is given to the IPO company along with the rest of the money from selling X shares.If the stock drops below the IPO price, the underwriters start buying back (up to Y shares * IPOprice) using the money from the initial over-allotment.It is one of the few times outright price manipulation is allowed (which should be a completely different discussion, and likely why MS declined comment.)" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "A lot of misunderstanding about the greenshoe...It's really simple: The IPO sells X+Y shares, where X is the big IPO number of shares and Y is the \"over-allotment\".If the stock trades above the IPO price, the money from selling Y shares is given to the IPO company along with the rest of the money from selling X shares.If the stock drops below the IPO price, the underwriters start buying back (up to Y shares * IPOprice) using the money from the initial over-allotment.It is one of the few times outright price manipulation is allowed (which should be a completely different discussion, and likely why MS declined comment.)" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I love it. Stock pops after IPO, greedy bankers taking the company money. Stock doesn't pop, overhyped failure. I wonder what a successful IPO would look like. Price doesn't change, no trading volume?" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I love it. Stock pops after IPO, greedy bankers taking the company money. Stock doesn't pop, overhyped failure. I wonder what a successful IPO would look like. Price doesn't change, no trading volume?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Anyone know if FB employees with shares can sell them immediately after the IPO or do they have to wait after a certain period?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Anyone know if FB employees with shares can sell them immediately after the IPO or do they have to wait after a certain period?" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Single page: http://ca.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idCABRE84I0162012..." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Impressive how the most voted comments are rants about the browser.If that's insightful or useful comments hit me...I really don't understand this hate towards Mozilla that has been going around lately.Edit: Why am I being downvoted? It's a sincere opinion of a person who doesn't see a relation in critizising a project of an organisation in an article that talks about other projects.If you dont like Firefox its fine, but it's a wonderful project with millions of users and that cannot be denied.Sending my opinion to oblivion because of pointing how unrelated the firefox rant comments are to the article makes no sense." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive.I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running.(I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive.I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running.(I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "My first question is why? Do they have a real vision other than \"me too\"?Does anyone else remember when Phoenix was first released to fight bloated browsers? Now it is that bloated browser and running an OS developed around its technologies isn't too appealing to me.Find your roots before you start off on some other project if you hope to have any significant success." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "My first question is why? Do they have a real vision other than \"me too\"?Does anyone else remember when Phoenix was first released to fight bloated browsers? Now it is that bloated browser and running an OS developed around its technologies isn't too appealing to me.Find your roots before you start off on some other project if you hope to have any significant success." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Already being discussed here:\nhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805708" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "Already being discussed here:\nhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805708" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Boot To Gecko is not a project to build an operation system.IIUC, Mozilla is planning to reuse Linux and core components of Android. If anything, I would think Boot To Gecko would be better thought of as a shell around the OS. Using process separation (underway for a while now in the Electrolysis project) bugs/leaks/crashes in Gecko should be isolated and not significantly more disruptive than in normal Firefox.I think the major value provided by (and work required for) Boot To Gecko will be on creating open standards (in the open) for access to the device so that web platform can be a first class citizen of the device." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "For more on Normalize.css, see \"About Normalize\" (http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/), esp \"Normalize vs Reset\"." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This looks nice - will have to try it out later to see how it behaves. It's good to see a detailed breakdown and justification for each of the rules instead of a blanket styling dumped in with no thought.I'm working on a project at the moment that has div {float:left} in the reset and it makes me weep." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This looks nice - will have to try it out later to see how it behaves. It's good to see a detailed breakdown and justification for each of the rules instead of a blanket styling dumped in with no thought.I'm working on a project at the moment that has div {float:left} in the reset and it makes me weep." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I'm kind of suspicious of these kinds of things. Especially the \"subtle improvements\" can have unintended effects.Can I really just include without worrying about it?" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "I'm kind of suspicious of these kinds of things. Especially the \"subtle improvements\" can have unintended effects.Can I really just include without worrying about it?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I'm torn on this. There's a lot of code in here that most sites will never need. I hate bloat, especially on the frontend which is responsible for 90% of site speed. On the other hand, using this as your starting point for a new project will probably save you a fair amount of time. Perhaps start with this then rip out the stuff you don't end up using?" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I'm torn on this. There's a lot of code in here that most sites will never need. I hate bloat, especially on the frontend which is responsible for 90% of site speed. On the other hand, using this as your starting point for a new project will probably save you a fair amount of time. Perhaps start with this then rip out the stuff you don't end up using?" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "They make textarea display in sans-serif?[0]No thanks. rows and cols should mean something :([0] https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css/blob/master/normali..." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Notice the link at the end of the infographic. Boosting with backlinks is fun. I never used infographics for SEO, but that sure does seem to work for link/keyword juice on these types of sites." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "FWIW - I made \"the simplest possible Wordpress theme\" in an effort to understand what the bare minimum Wordpress theme requires (to get into their theme directory). You can see it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/simplest" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "FWIW - I made \"the simplest possible Wordpress theme\" in an effort to understand what the bare minimum Wordpress theme requires (to get into their theme directory). You can see it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/simplest" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Ugh, there's a tide of spam that slowly erodes HN usability. It pains me to say it, but it's almost on every site.I am not sure if an idea of a power user simply deleting this type of content, banning/warning the submitter helps. Mods on Reddit cause as much havoc as they fix.I would gladly pay a small fee for a clean non-spammy HN. Let that fund be used for a couple part time mods." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "Ugh, there's a tide of spam that slowly erodes HN usability. It pains me to say it, but it's almost on every site.I am not sure if an idea of a power user simply deleting this type of content, banning/warning the submitter helps. Mods on Reddit cause as much havoc as they fix.I would gladly pay a small fee for a clean non-spammy HN. Let that fund be used for a couple part time mods." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "This proves that sufficiently advanced spam really is indistinguishable from content:http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_..." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "This proves that sufficiently advanced spam really is indistinguishable from content:http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_..." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Wordpress, despite it's \"n00b\"-y feeling, makes it really really ridiculously easy to get your MVP out the door. Simple account management, simple CMS'ing, and well documented enough so you can spend your time on your business and not your framework.Groupon's MVP was an WP blog and we used it for http://playlookit.com" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Just a few hours before, I commented on few bloggers linking their own blogs with anything/everything. They almost treat HN like their auto-post to everywhere.perspective: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog (the submitter)The content may be(or not!) worth reading, but I'd rather have 'discovered content' please!" }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I think this post seriously misses the mark. For R&D (actually, I think lumping R and D together like that is a serious mistake, but that's another issue) I don't think coding matters very much at all. What matters more is raw problem-solving ability, understanding of core mathematical concepts, etc.Project Euler is a good source of questions for R&D candidates." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "I think this post seriously misses the mark. For R&D (actually, I think lumping R and D together like that is a serious mistake, but that's another issue) I don't think coding matters very much at all. What matters more is raw problem-solving ability, understanding of core mathematical concepts, etc.Project Euler is a good source of questions for R&D candidates." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "If the talk turns immediately to formatting issues, that's not good.Amusingly, however, I've noticed that bad/newbie coders tend to indent stuff all over the place and have no consistency in the whitespace (this is C++ so the compiler doesn't care). Often you can tell the code is bad because it literally looks bad.I prefer the suggestion commenter 'John' gave rather than the OP's: \"Can you draw me the architecture of your most complex project?\"" }

{ "score": 2, "text": "If the talk turns immediately to formatting issues, that's not good.Amusingly, however, I've noticed that bad/newbie coders tend to indent stuff all over the place and have no consistency in the whitespace (this is C++ so the compiler doesn't care). Often you can tell the code is bad because it literally looks bad.I prefer the suggestion commenter 'John' gave rather than the OP's: \"Can you draw me the architecture of your most complex project?\"" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I was asked if I had any hobby projects and would like to explain their architecture on a whiteboard. In addition to the benefits of seeing into the candidate's mind, it eases the nervousness quite a bit to talk about something you definitely know more about than anyone else.I was then asked if I drank beer. Then I was hired." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I was asked if I had any hobby projects and would like to explain their architecture on a whiteboard. In addition to the benefits of seeing into the candidate's mind, it eases the nervousness quite a bit to talk about something you definitely know more about than anyone else.I was then asked if I drank beer. Then I was hired." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "That's really his one question he'd ask to someone working in R&D, and writing code?How about asking somebody about the problem domain he'll be addressing? Past experiences on that field, or related fields?Recognising bad code might be nice, but I'd pick someone with 20 years of real and relevant experience over someone just new that can say \"whoa, that looks like bad code!\"" }

{ "score": 0, "text": "Another recent doom and gloom piece about Google. I think they've dropped (or dropping) the ball on some fronts but, don't write them off yet!Let's make the analogy more clear: What does it mean to become the \"next Microsoft\". MS's profit per employee is awesome (http://www.interknowledgetech.com/profit%20per%20employee.pd...) and they still control a number of cash cows. They pulled off Bing quite nicely. They're totally clueless in the consumer mobile space but just ask how many enterprise mobility customers use Android (pretty much none, but could change in the near future).One of the biggest markers he points out is the fact that Google is no longer the place where the \"in crowd\", the best of the best want to work. This is indeed similar to how MS lost its similar coveted position to Google some years ago. This is troublesome, but is not by itself reason to short Google, at least for the next 5 years at least.The culture point he makes, I think, is more important: If everybody in a group starts to think alike, it's not good for the group, irregardless of what culture prevails. AFAIK, Google has a radical democracy approach to project management determined by peers, as opposed to the leader with a vision approach of Apple. This is good but needs to be reigned in a bit.IN short, I think the big G can use some master strategizing of its many projects." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "How much things have changed, where \"becoming the next Microsoft\" is seen as an undesirable outcome." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "How much things have changed, where \"becoming the next Microsoft\" is seen as an undesirable outcome." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "\"They argued that growing nascent mobile revenues will take significant time, especially since there aren’t many sizable acquisition targets available in mobile after Google’s purchase of AdMob.\"If you're about to venture into the exciting world of startups and don't know what you should build this sentence would be a good starting point." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "\"They argued that growing nascent mobile revenues will take significant time, especially since there aren’t many sizable acquisition targets available in mobile after Google’s purchase of AdMob.\"If you're about to venture into the exciting world of startups and don't know what you should build this sentence would be a good starting point." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "DuckDuckGo is at risk of becoming the next Google." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "DuckDuckGo is at risk of becoming the next Google." }

{ "score": 4, "text": "Is apple at risk of becoming the next orange? These analogies don't even make a good headline anymore.Google is at an extreme risk of staying Google in a world that will not tolerate that any more. This by itself is enough trouble. Leave MS alone." }

{ "score": 0, "text": "never ask for permission for things you know are vital to your workI agree to an extent. It can be easy to fool yourself about what constitutes good code -- in the sense of making a product better or work on it easier. Sometimes bad code is better left as is. Even working totally unconstrained, I prefer not to refactor something unless I have a pressing reason in mind.My rule of thumb is this: as a programmer and an employee, I am professionally bound to produce quality software efficiently. If I know I can complete an assignment faster (or in equal time, but leaving behind a better code base) by rewriting something, building a tool, fixing something architectural . . . I will silently do it. No point in asking permission. It's in my charter.On the other hand, if I want to take a lot of time to rearchitect something -- an order of magnitude more than it would take to just do whatever it was that brought me there -- at that point, it's a strategic decision and management deserves to know about it.The way I see it, management has no right to require me to produce an unprofessional product in my day to day work. And I have no right to force management to use engineering considerations only in strategic decisions." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This is something that took me 2 years or so to learn. One day I realised nobody was really looking at my timecards in depth so I started allocating extra time to things and using the extra time to fix the things I thought needed fixing. Once I started delivering on this I showed my manager who agreed that it was a good use of time. I was given free reign to fix anything I felt would add maximum value, provided the bug fixes continued to be delivered without any major compromise.Since that time I have refactored quite a few of our codebases; added unit tests, fixed some build processes, improved performance and generally feel happier at work for getting things done that are important to me.Dont get stuck in constant bug fix mode would be my suggestion. If you cant get approval to fix things then change jobs because bug fix after bug fix is depressing and will bring you down." }

{ "score": 1, "text": "This is something that took me 2 years or so to learn. One day I realised nobody was really looking at my timecards in depth so I started allocating extra time to things and using the extra time to fix the things I thought needed fixing. Once I started delivering on this I showed my manager who agreed that it was a good use of time. I was given free reign to fix anything I felt would add maximum value, provided the bug fixes continued to be delivered without any major compromise.Since that time I have refactored quite a few of our codebases; added unit tests, fixed some build processes, improved performance and generally feel happier at work for getting things done that are important to me.Dont get stuck in constant bug fix mode would be my suggestion. If you cant get approval to fix things then change jobs because bug fix after bug fix is depressing and will bring you down." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "The reasoning behind not cleaning up your code is that if you wait long enough, the problem will often go away - literally! Technology moves fast enough that your feature is usually obsolete within a year or so; if you're not on the critical path that everyone is building upon, chances are your project will just be canceled and all the time spent polishing your code will be wasted. Better to get stuff out there so you have a better chance of being on that critical path, and dealing with the inevitable messes and complaints of \"this is shit code!\" later.This is the \"cascade of ADHD teenagers\" development methodology, which is much maligned by professional programmers, but actually seems to work quite well. Google, FaceBook, and Twitter all use it to varying extents, and the entire valley startup ecosystem is based around it." }

{ "score": 2, "text": "The reasoning behind not cleaning up your code is that if you wait long enough, the problem will often go away - literally! Technology moves fast enough that your feature is usually obsolete within a year or so; if you're not on the critical path that everyone is building upon, chances are your project will just be canceled and all the time spent polishing your code will be wasted. Better to get stuff out there so you have a better chance of being on that critical path, and dealing with the inevitable messes and complaints of \"this is shit code!\" later.This is the \"cascade of ADHD teenagers\" development methodology, which is much maligned by professional programmers, but actually seems to work quite well. Google, FaceBook, and Twitter all use it to varying extents, and the entire valley startup ecosystem is based around it." }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I'm sorry to see that the owner of promosthatrock.com has let the site they set up at colindevroe.com fade away (presumably the domain expired).It included a full archive of his email exchange(s) with Colin Devroe, chronicling the frustrating experience of paying a developer thousands of dollars and then getting the runaround for months and ultimately getting nothing for their money.If you have the patience to use the wayback machine, give it a look. Perhaps the customer Colin ripped off will see fit to comment here as well.[I'm a longtime HN user with a handle connected to my real name - I don't want to get into it with Colin, but I know him (he took me for a couple grand also) and it bothers me enough to see him on the HN homepage giving advice to a community I respect that I'm posting this]" }

{ "score": 3, "text": "I'm sorry to see that the owner of promosthatrock.com has let the site they set up at colindevroe.com fade away (presumably the domain expired).It included a full archive of his email exchange(s) with Colin Devroe, chronicling the frustrating experience of paying a developer thousands of dollars and then getting the runaround for months and ultimately getting nothing for their money.If you have the patience to use the wayback machine, give it a look. Perhaps the customer Colin ripped off will see fit to comment here as well.[I'm a longtime HN user with a handle connected to my real name - I don't want to get into it with Colin, but I know him (he took me for a couple grand also) and it bothers me enough to see him on the HN homepage giving advice to a community I respect that I'm posting this]" }

{ "score": 4, "text": "From the article: “Can I take some time to clean up this code? It is horrendous.” The answer should always be yes to this question.No, it shouldn't. This entirely depends on the long-term prospects and importance of the code. Assuming that your boss is doing his job, he might understand the trade-offs between having you doing 'code gardening' in subsystem A vs. building new functionality in subsystem B. He may even understand them better than you.Mileage varies, of course, depending on Pointy-Hairedness." }