rams

BBC News Low Graphics Page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565470

What time zone is the hosting centre located in ? I always wondered about those posting times (x hours ago, y minutes ago, etc).

PG is shown cooking pasta in the movie. But it's mainly about FogCreek.

I have never laughed this hard when checking out the HN front page everyday morning.

Check out browsershots - http://browsershots.org/ . I think you can submit a job to check how a page renders on a specific OS-browser combination. Otherwise you can download and check it out - it's open source.

Can someone suggest a browser-independent way of handling login pages that require javascript ? Twill doesn't handle javascript.

Here's the 'Jazzers and Programmers' blog post:

http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2008/07/19/jazzers-and-p...

From the 'Hacker News Guidelines':

"If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

From the 'Hacker News' guidelines:

"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter. "

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You mean sites that have not been publicly launched yet ? As the other comment points out you can install the browsershots code - it's open source. It has a stand-alone mode which doesn't even require you to install the server. Contact me off-line if you require any help in setting up the browsershots.

I am planning to go to proto.in as well.

NaughtySVN seems to a similar project: http://naughtysvn.tigris.org/

Seriously, how does Joel make both ends meet in an expensive place like NYC ? Selling bug-tracking software ?

unsourced ? It's right here: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/001.html and linked from the post as well. And it's Andy Hertzfeld one of the original Mac developers who related this incident. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld)

What's wrong per se with anecdotes ? It's a great part of the craftsman tradition.

"All it takes is a few beachheads in your economy that pay for performance. Measurement spreads like heat. If one part of a society is better at measurement than others, it tends to push the others to do better. "

There is little evidence of that - Car companies, investment banks, etc, etc

"A lot of students dread Hindi (an artificially imposed third language in South India) and to a lesser extent English."

I am voting you for that one,though I am not sure about the first part of your post.

Completely agree. Maybe scientific research needs the equivalent of angel investors, or maybe just rich patrons, because investors tend to be impatient, etc. We need to go back to the days of great experimentalists like Rayleigh, Faraday, etc. The publish or perish way of working does not advance science most of the time.Scientists resort to all sorts of tricks to stay afloat. I remember reading somewhere that 80% of papers published in even reputed jounals like Physical Review Letters do not advance our understanding by a millimeter. It's wonderful to read stuff like this.

Andy Hertzfeld one of the original Mac hackers was once working for a company called Eazel, that worked on GNOME before it went bust. They folded up in 2001 iirc - I bought their T-shirt to help them out. But after ten years of the GNOME UI, I don't have high hopes. Check out John Gruber's post titled Ronco spray-on usability that's very critical of open source attitude towards designing UIs.

Andy was not very impressed with GNOME: http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2005/10/andy-hertzfeld-on-gnom...

The problem with GNOME is the programmers who think they are UI experts. At least with a web UI, you can be minimalist (like Google) and not expose your lack of design skills. But it's very difficult to do that on the desktop.

Mark Shuttleworth spatial Nautilus experiments don't inspire any confidence in his taste. Even before Ubuntu the Ximian stuff (that ended up in Novell's distro) was pretty polished.

Hmmm ... those numbers are kind of depressing. But I had kind of come around to the same conclusion. Unless you are a founder, it's just not worth it most of the time.

Your observation is for the most part correct, but your attributing it to the caste system is typical western stereotype.You say you were in Chennai- Chennai is in the state of Tamil Nadu which has the one of the lowest populations of Brahmins in India - they are less than 1% of the population and the majority of employees in sw companies are not Brahmins. On the other hand if you had said that if this slavish attitude is due to being subjected to outside rule (the Brits and before them the Mughals) it might make more sense.

Overall I agree with your observations, especially "they'll follow you right into hell".

More relevant to HN readers is the fact that RMS's efforts have been a major factor in lowering the barrier for starting new companies. Almost all startups funded by YC are based on free/open source software. Sometimes people let his personality come in the way. But RMS has permanently changed the game.

lol, did you mean reddit material ?

Raising questions of that calibre is a job in itself. I am glad he is not coming up with half-baked hypotheses. This whole thing about 'Not asking questions till you can propose solutions' doesn't cut it for me.

For instance in Blink, he points out that a very successful golf player doesn't even seem to understand the reasons for his success. This has important implications. Do successful people really know why they are successful ? Do we take them a little too seriously ? After all self-improvement is big business.

Harvestman is written in Python.

http://www.harvestmanontheweb.com/ http://harvestman.everythingability.com/

Not having downmods lets new stories have a better chance of survival. Reddit started going downhill when they failed to control downvoting. Stories posted from outside the American time zones are especially vulnerable, since a couple of downmods can push them into oblivion. I think PG made a very wise choice in not having downmods. More importantly it poisons the atmosphere. Reddit in the first few months was just plain incredible, much better than even the current hacker news.

While working on a project about five years back using mainly Microsoft technologies, I discovered that there were a few consultants who had built their business around Windows error messages. Maybe you need to focus on the right segment of this market ;-)

Actually Blogger met with pretty much the same fate as other companies. Check out Evan's blog post about freeing blogger from Google at evhead.com - it must be in the archives.

Though the project is a failure, there are some of ideas from Chandler that might worth a look.

They had this notion of items - everything is an item and you can stamp an item into an item of a different kind. For instance, you get stamp a mail as a TODO item.

"Starting to flip is starting to flop" - Who said that ? Dharmesh Shah ?

"In the wrong environment a year or two could be soul-crushing." - Very well put. That's the reason, I left the previous start-up I was working with. Honestly I think if you are not one of the co-founders of a startup, it's just not worth it, and not just for financial reasons.