stoney

Wow, that might be a little creepy but it's very eye opening. Especially as maukdaddy lists "information security" as his business, so is presumably not too reckless with his details online.

I'm assuming you started with his HN profile, googled his name, found what appears to be his blog and took it from there?

Maybe these days having a common name is a good defence against ID fraud!

And this is one of the reasons that I don't like the idea of facebook being my universal log on for lots of different sites. It takes things from mild irritation at having to find another way to waste time, to a potentially major problem when I can't access services that I use every day.

The limit of 50 does seem like a bit of an awkward conversation waiting to happen. Surely someone must have pointed out to the developers that someone out there has a large close family and a lot of close friends?

I'd also be very worried about the even more difficult conversation: "sorry, you were in my top 50, but I've bumped you for my new friend Dave"

Grigori Pereleman would be doing mathematics with or without the prize money.

I think sp4rki's point is that it's a waste if not taking/making the money means that you have less time to do whatever it is you're good at. E.g. the artist who could make money from it but chooses not to, and as a result has to work at the convenience store, and as a result produces less art. Though that last bit is a bit contentious - maybe working at the convenience store is a good source of inspiration for that artist.

I'm pretty sure the phrase itself played a part here. Just imagine it - you've figured out something that fits using only one letter. You're probably feeling a little bit excited, but it's a bit of a gamble to guess - how many other phrases might fit? Do you have a good feeling about it...?

As I understand it, taking a list of FB contacts and turning them into a mass email list would be a violation of the CAN-SPAM rules - people need to explicitly agree to be added to a mail list.

What happened when the next annual review came around? Didn't everyone try to game it to maximise their scores? Did managers feel bad giving low marks knowing that it would mean people getting fired and potentially claims of discrimination?

I think the problem is simply their size makes it very difficult to identify their top performers. There is no objective measure that can be applied across the entire organisation, so they have to rely on humans to identify the top performers. Their top 10% of staff would come to 2,300 people (assuming the 23,000 mentioned elsewhere is correct), which means no single person in the organisation can identify the top people (and probably no single person knows all of the top people).

So you need to rely on mid-level managers to identify the top performers, but each mid-level manager is likely to be biased towards their own staff and their area of responsibility. And of course the mid-level managers may not be in the top 10% and so may be unable to identify who the star performers are anyway. So then you try to add some kind of normalisation scheme, maybe you take the top 10% from each department. Except that doesn't account for one department being better/more important than another. So you have to add that weighting in,... and you end up with some complex system that no-one really understands or agrees with.

Add to that the evidence that performance related pay isn't always beneficial and this becomes a very difficult problem.

I generally save the Pomodoro technique for when I've got something I really need to do but really don't want to do. The shortness of the 25 minutes can be quite useful in those situations.

Sometimes I find the shortness of 25 minutes blocks of time works well as a kind of challenge - "holy crap, only 2 minutes to go... got to finish..."

See my other comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1885543) - I use Excel+Python all the time, and yes, it's freakin' awesome.

Funny you should mention that. I use Excel+Python extensively and have developed my own plugin for embedding Python in Excel. Basically it lets me easily write worksheet functions using Python, and also with some multiprocessing magic lets me calculate them in parallel (which VBA doesn't let you do).

I was debating whether I should clean it up enough to share it (or maybe even sell it!). Seems like there's some interest in this, so maybe I will.

Thanks for tip 4 - I had completely underestimated the power of Compass. I started using it recently mainly because I wanted to use Blueprint and SASS. I missed all of the cool mixins that Compass adds.

If anyone from the Compass project is reading - improve your documentation!

Wherever you draw the line on who to take and who not to take, you will end up with a spectrum of abilities being accepted - there will always be the person who just made it in and there will always be the person who could have done it in their sleep. I meant "less bright" as a relative term (relative to the rest of their group) not as a euphemism for being objectively stupid.

Though I do agree that there is a case that too many people are going to university these days. But maybe that's just because I have a degree so I want to create scarcity!

I think this article misses the point a bit (for the record - I do believe that humans are contributing to global warming).

The article basically relies on listing a load of bad sounding things as evidence of our effect. Yes, we have hellish smoke stacks. But the fact that they are ugly and offensive to environmentalists doesn't mean they are contributing to climate change. Yes, X billion tonnes of CO2 sounds bad - it's a big number! Yes, it's fairly incontrovertible that those X billions tonnes of CO2 will cause the planet to warm up. What is debatable is how much warming they will cause. Is it even an observable effect compared to the natural cycle?

Maybe this is the kind of article needed to persuade the non-technical skeptics, but as a technical non-skeptic, I didn't find it very convincing.

I was wondering about that too - would the two opposing bots slug it out until the end of time (or the end of Twitter at least)?

It really is bizarre to think of two machines sat arguing with each other.

In the UK it's also likely that the students are living away from home for the first time, which takes a bit of getting used to for some.

It's difficult to strike a balance between not boring the brightest and losing the less bright completely.

Which means you are in an excellent position of having too much time and not enough to do. Don't waste this opportunity!

It takes a very long time to become awesome at something, so I'd suggest you start now while you have plenty of spare time.

Is there something similar to Simulink available for Python yet? That's pretty much the only killer feature of Matlab for me these days. Any other number crunching I do in Python.

The quality of UK university courses varies tremendously. I studied engineering as did lots of my friends. The standard course length for an MEng is 4 years, I think that might even be a requirement to get the course accredited.

But what happens in those four years can be very different - if you are at a less good university, you will probably be working less than 20 hours a week on your engineering degree. If you are at a top university, you will work at least full time if not more.

So if this proposal was followed through you could end up with a slightly odd situation (or maybe a good situation?) where the less good universities offered shorter courses than the good ones. So the brightest students would be in uni for longer.

I thought the global warming comment was a bit odd too. From a quick Google it seems that Bin Laden does indeed have something to say about global warming. It was on Fox News, so must be true:

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/01/29/bin-laden-blames-glo...

You don't mention any concrete alternatives in your post (i.e. other job offers or project ideas). Assuming that you don't have anything else lined up then I would take the job - you can always quit if the work pans out to not be what you wanted or if they treat you like an intern. Worst case just use it as a stop-gap to earn some cash and buy some time.

Quitting a job too soon after taking it can look bad on your CV, but not always. In your case you've kind of been employed by them for a while, so I don't think you need to worry about CV damage there.

What looks good on your CV really depends on who is looking at your CV. I don't think corporation vs start up makes much difference. A broad range of experience looks good, loyalty looks good. You can give the appearance of both whichever way you go.

As for asking for a higher salary... decide what you think you're worth, decide how much you want the job, guess what you think they'll pay, then adjust your request accordingly. If you really want the job then be a bit conservative, if you're not that bothered either way, and it sounds like you're not, then aim high.

Ok, so we have a mysterious device that looks a little bit like a cell/mobile phone. Except we know it's not a mobile phone, because there are no towers. But it could be something else that is transmitting to someone from the future, it just looks a bit like a phone. Maybe it evolved from the phones we have today and it's more convenient than using a discreet in-ear device. Maybe it has a hi-res multi-touch screen.

But then I guess if we're entertaining the idea that it's some kind of mystery future technology, maybe we should open our minds to the possibility that it's not transmitting anything to anyone, maybe it has some other purpose that we don't understand yet.

So what we have is footage of someone holding an unknown object near the side of their face. All we really know is that it's some kind of unimaginable technology.

Or maybe it's something completely mundane that they had in their hand.

It largely depends on your goals and also the work required to develop & run this startup. You wouldn't have to get too many of those businesses signed up to earn a full time salary.

Take a look at http://www.softwarebyrob.com, which is all about micropreneurial software businesses (basically targeting very small niches) - his book Start Small, Stay Small is interesting reading. Patrick McKenzie's (or patio11 on this site) Bingo Card Creator would be another good example (http://www.kalzumeus.com/).

Income tax is probably always marginal, but in the UK at least this kind of thinking does apply to selling houses - when a house is sold in the UK the buyer must pay "stamp duty", which is a percentage of the value of the house, with the percentage changing at certain thresholds. For example at £250,000 the stamp duty changes from 1% to 3% - but the percentage applies to the entire value of the house. So if you sell for 250,000 the buyer pays 250000 * 0.03=£7500, compared to 249999 * 0.01=£2,499.

That introduces some distortions into house pricing, making it very difficult to sell a house in the £250,000 to £265,000 range - because you are competing with houses just under the threshold which work out significantly cheaper for the buyer. As someone selling a house which falls into that price range, you might be better off asking for slightly less from the sale (versus asking for just over the threshold and waiting much longer to find a buyer).

There's the no procrast settings, or alternatively there is your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on windows). I added the following line to mine:

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com

That means that if I open a browser and try to come here I get nothing. If I really want to visit here I need to open up the hosts file and comment out that line, which is slightly painful because you have to get administrator privileges to edit it. I find that the extra effort involved is enough to stop the mindless "I'm bored, I know, I'll check HN" kind of time wasting and make me realise I should be doing something productive.

Also http://hnrecap.com - you can get the day/week/months top stories in one visit.

In Australia things are routinely priced at e.g. $4.99 (including tax), but the smallest coin here is 5 cents. They just round the total to the nearest 5c, it's really not a problem.

It's one thing to put it in your apps, which can be updated when they get tired, but if you put lol in your name you're pretty much stuck with it (or facing an expensive rebranding exercise)

Android vs iPhone definitely reminds me of PC vs Mac. It will be interesting to see if things play out the same way in the long term.

I'm planning to do some app development stuff and my thoughts were that maybe in the long term Android will be the bigger market simply because of the variety in Android phones from cutting edge to mid-priced (and eventually I expect to see some cheap low-end Anroid phones).

I think the productivity increase is more than the time saved waiting for stuff to load. That few seconds pause can be enough to interrupt my flow, at which point I think, 'hmmm, let's check out HN while I wait for that'. Of course, by the time whatever I was waiting for is done I'm deep into an interesting thread about how a faster computer will change my life...