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mjdwitton Ask HN: Does this kind of arrogance get job applications?

But if they're that big and growing that much, they can't be that stealth…

Hence the ironic-quotes.

You do have an interesting theory though. Not that I totally understand why somebody would want to hide the fact that they're a YC alumni...

mjdwitton Ask HN: Does this kind of arrogance get job applications?

I acknowledge that they could indeed be that successful, but I still maintain that I have no reason to believe their claims until they provide me with something more solid than that ad.

mjdwitton Ask HN: Does this kind of arrogance get job applications?

Indeed. I myself only put faith in the personality of a company if I know and trust somebody who works there (or in the case of larger ones, in the department of interest.)

mjdwitton Ask HN: Does this kind of arrogance get job applications?

no reason at all to think this is a real company

That said, I definitely have no faith that the graphs are real or even loosely based on reality.

mjdwitton Ask HN: Does this kind of arrogance get job applications?

That seems to be the point. I'm guessing they're trying to be "stealth."

mjdwitton Ask HN: Does this kind of arrogance get job applications?

Considering that the only companies allowed to post job ads here are YC alumni, you can trust that they are a real company. If I saw an ad like that posted anywhere else, however, I'd have the same reaction.

Doubts of their existence aside, I still agree with the OP; ads like this make me think that I'd hate working for the founder posting them. If he wants me to try to prove my worth as a candidate, I want to know that its even worth my time to send him a portfolio/resume/cover letter.

mjdwitton Megaupload to Sue Universal, Joins Fight Against SOPA

In that sense, record labels are like VCs that also provide PR. For the amount of the investment that both labels and tech VCs make, its quite normal in our society to take an equity cut rather than a flat rate. Making the analogy to VCs also relates a lot better to the odds of failure, given that labels lose money on most of the bands they sign. And similarly to founders that don't know how to negotiate for good terms on their funding, many bands are also poor negotiators.

mjdwitton The $150k Solution

'doh

Although, that really just pushes the same decision down to the talent's former employers. After enough poaching, I'd expect that the price of local talent would increase until it became more cost-effective to relocate candidates.

mjdwitton The $150k Solution

It's all well and good if you can find good candidates who already live where you are located, but the article that Garann is responding to here is about how there are no such candidates in Austin without a job. The only choices left to companies there are now (1) relocate candidates who most likely don't want to live in Austin, or (2) relocate the entire company, likely losing the employees that you already have because they are the ones who do want to live in Austin.

It seems to me that, unless you're a two-man startup, relocating the entire company is clearly going to be more expensive.

mjdwitton The $150k Solution

While it may be correct that "folks who want to make a lifestyle choice of going to Austin from California should get paid less to do it," that is not what this article is about. Instead, the author is talking about Austin companies trying to bring developers there that otherwise would be somewhere else (i.e. people who do not want to live in Austin). In that case, its a simple matter of value to the potential employee as to how much extra they need to be paid in order to relocate to somewhere that they had no intentions of living.

edit: repeating myself

mjdwitton [dead]

I agree that they have no incentive to help others take their power, I just don't see that their desire to hold onto such power is directly preventing women from taking it. I think it is far more likely that the fact that there are so few female role models in such positions of power is to blame for the extreme gender bias in addition to societal pressures to sacrifice a career for children–because obviously men can't stay home with the kids. That'd be unmanly.

mjdwitton [dead]

Honest question: did you notice any differences between the reactions of your male coworkers vs. the reactions of your female coworkers?

I've noticed while watching my sisters and various girlfriends interact with other women that women seem to be faster to label each other negatively than most men I know would label other men negatively. Perhaps, however, I just hang out with mean women.

mjdwitton [dead]

I don't know if you saw Sarah Mei's talk[1] about getting the female population of SF Ruby from 2% to 18% in a year, but she presented a lot of interesting (and effective sounding, based on her experiences) methods of how to attract more women to conferences.

[1] http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/02/20/scale-8x-slides-post... The audio is a bit long, but it's worth listening to over the slides.

mjdwitton [dead]

What makes those male power figures focus on excluding women specifically from their roles? I doubt they care about the gender of their competition; they just want themselves to be the ones in power and nobody else, man or woman.

mjdwitton [dead]

I think you'd be pretty safe to generalize that out from men to society at large. In most cases, women are shunned for being individuals and taking risks. A girl who is slightly different from her peers as a child faces far worse ridicule (most of it being from the other girls) than a boy who is equally different. Both of my sisters experienced this in all of their schooling while my brother and I managed to be fairly popular, even though all four of us were known to be odd.

mjdwitton Show HN: elegant open-source pastebin server (node.js & redis)

In chromium on linux, I can only ever see two lines of text at a time. If I type more than two lines, they scroll off the top of the screen. When I move back up with the arrow keys, I can see those lines again, but I still only see two lines; those further below just disappear until I move back down.

mjdwitton Library News (HN for Libraries)

Installation shouldn't be too hard. The instructions say that it only runs on top of mzscheme-372, but I've heard that 3.1 runs on top of the latest versions of plt. I haven't tested that, however.

Would you know of another less painful, very minimalist, web oriented lisp dialect?

Unfortunately, no. As much of a joy as it is to program in Arc Lisp, development of the official branch seems dead and I have some doubts about anarki's stability.

mjdwitton Library News (HN for Libraries)

barely any documentation

Ah, I've only recently begun to overcome that myself. Even though the docs at files.arcfn.com/doc are a bit dated (they were written at version 2) I found them to be one of the only resources besides pg's minimal tutorial. You could also try anarki as well; it has a useful help function that prints some documentation for many of its functions and macros. You can clone the anarki repo from github.com/nex3/arc.

how the requests are handled

Look for the defop statements in news.arc. I don't know news.arc as well as I know the blog.arc file, but there's probably a statement that begins with something like

    (defop news req
      ; ...
      )

nor where data is stored

There should be a variable defined in news.arc named

    arcdir*

and another named

    staticdir*

I'm not entirely sure how posts and comments are stored as files for news.arc, but they're probably stored as templates in a folder inside the arc directory. Any images or css files that you want to use need to be kept in the static directory, typically named static. When you reference images or css from you page definitions, you'll need to treat the static directory as the root of your server.

Hope that helps; I know the community is kind of a mess for arc.

mjdwitton Library News (HN for Libraries)

It's written in pg's arc lisp, which you can find at arclanguage.org. The install instructions there are a bit dated, however, as you can now download arc3.1 instead of 3.0 as they say to do.

Once you have that installed, running news.arc is detailed in a rather simple text file labeled how-to-run-news. Edit: Note that it's not quite the same version that is running here at HN; pg has modified this version slowly over time.

mjdwitton Ask PG: Are there IP blocks?

That sounds more like your work added some new rules to their filter that bans some of the the content here. Using https would encrypt that content and keep the filter from scanning it. Now you just have to hope that they don't ban it by url.

mjdwitton Linux Fundamentals

From my experiences with Gentoo a couple of years ago, the documentation is mostly outdated, (although a number of articles have been updated to tell the reader that large portions of the article are out of date and not to be followed.) I eventually gave up working (and failing) with Gentoo at the time because I was rather inexperienced and could never get a working X system using their docs. That said, I still learned a lot about Linux during that period and do not feel as if I wasted that time spent working with Gentoo.

mjdwitton Google Sues Itself With Help From Intellectual Ventures

I agree completely. This is, in fact, the difference that I am pointing out. In the case of paid parking, most people would agree that the trade of money for a parking space on land which someone else ones and maintains at cost is a fair trade. Similarly, most people would agree that debt collection as a whole is a fair industry in that it seeks to make sure that those who owe money for value received pay that money owed.

My point is that–especially in the world of software–this general consensus does not exist for the patent industry, (that a large majority of everybody else is already convinced that it is time to change the rules,) and that this general dislike for the rules is the real source of the anger directed at patent trolls. This aligns with your earlier point about there being no difference between outsourced and in-house torture, in that I would say that people are just as upset about Microsoft's, Oracle's, and even Google's patent portfolios as they are about Intellectual ventures. The only difference between IV and those others is that they manage to win people over (or at least mollify) with the rest of their work.

Edit: I would say that seven_stones cutting straight to the morality of software patents in general pretty well illustrates my point here.

mjdwitton Google Sues Itself With Help From Intellectual Ventures

I think that it's possibly an even more basic difference. Many people are still quite unclear to adamantly opposed to the concept of paying for an idea, which means the very purpose of patent trolls is at best ethically murky to these people.

mjdwitton Ask HN: What Android apps do you use?

something ... which searches across the entire phone

You can actually use the default Google Search app that comes installed on most versions of Android. You just have to go into its settings and tell it to search more than just the web.

And as far as removing those default apps that you can not uninstall: since you already have your phone rooted, you can just delete or rename their process files and they will be effectively uninstalled.

mjdwitton Find apartments by commute times

You can find what I believe he is talking about buried in the last level of padmapper's menus along with it's crime and walkscore overlays. It's mostly just a text box where you type some number of minutes and a location and it highlights the area you can reach by walking from the provided location for the given number of minutes, following roads and paths on google maps.

mjdwitton A More Detailed Look at Facebook Music

This just goes to prove the point that Numair Faraz in this post that's still on the front page (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029872):

Don't build your product on a platform you can't own. Even the AOL guy's preferred developers lost to integration with outside music apps in the long run.

mjdwitton Why Entrepreneurs Can't Sleep

And for Linux users whose distro doesn't have a F.lux package, redshift is often available as a nice alternative in your package tree.

mjdwitton Ask HN: I need you but have no money. What can I offer you instead?

I was under the impression that most Linux contributors were actually paid by some other employer who happened to use the Linux kernel in their own products and contributed their patches and drivers back upstream. That said, there are still a large portion who do the same sort of work completely for free.

mjdwitton The $700 Million Yogurt Startup

That plain yogurt is still sweetened in most American brands, just without the extra flavors like strawberry or key lime added.