Hacker News Reader

twozon If your site needs an FAQ, you have failed [END]

See example of success: http://example.com/faq

twozon Why charging for access to news sites won't work

Arrington has a breaking story about Twitter planning to colonize Mars?

Actually, that would be Google and Virgin :)

http://www.casadeblundell.com/jonathan/misc/google-and-virgi...

twozon Social design explosion: Polls, quizzes, reviews, forums, oh my

It’s a powerful indicator that the product roadmap is overly focused on short-term user engagement versus a long-term market position.

What if "short-term user engagement" is their "long-term market position"?

twozon How to Get Hired at Fog Creek, Part 1

pretty much everyone who has touched a computer is familiar with who Google is

And they'll also generally think you're somehow in charge of search and e-mail at Google. :)

Kind of like having been in the Air Force and everyone asking you what kind of jet you piloted.

twozon [dead]

Even the mobile cache ain't workin':

http://www.google.com/m/search?ct=fsh&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2...

I get this funny message from Le Google:

Oops. Something didn't work quite right and we are unable to show the page you requested right now. Rest assured, Google engineers are already springing into action to solve the problem.

twozon Here is the robots.txt of Google

Update: Some Yahoo! subdomains have 'em.

Yes:

    http://search.yahoo.com/robots.txt
    http://groups.yahoo.com/robots.txt
    http://realestate.yahoo.com/robots.txt

No:

    http://maps.yahoo.com/robots.txt
    http://omg.yahoo.com/robots.txt

twozon Here is the robots.txt of Google

Does Yahoo! not have a robots.txt file?

http://yahoo.com/robots.txt Sorry, the page you requested was not found.

twozon How to Motivate Employees

Try this.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/under-armours-kevin-pla...

twozon [dead]

“Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza? We work for Limewire.”

“Oh ok. Well I work at a record label so fuck you. You’ve stolen from us enough.”

In Kosuke's and Paul's eyes, Limewire turned stolen music into pizza and proceded to call the pizza entirely theirs.

Is it not, in some way, ironic?

twozon [dead]

I don't quite understand.

You have an OpenID. You've forgotten your password. How do you get back into your account without requesting an e-mail to reset it?

twozon [dead]

I'll take a stab at this.

Click "forgot password" link.

Message: Modify your HN profile to include the phrase "RandomTextPleaseLetMeIn".

Click on "Verify me from HN".

The system lets you in. Now change your password.

Edit:

Instead of HN profile URL, you could also use Delicious ala 'save the following link with this tag "RandomFunk" to your Delicious profile'.

The goal is to prove to a website that has read-access something to which you have write-access.

This something is shared between you and the website before hand (at registration).

twozon Ask HN: Should I give up?

I know Hayward's pretty cheap although it's been awhile since I've lived there (mid/late nineties).

twozon Google Tries to Patch Its Talent Leak

Having a company full of alpha dog, intellectual talent can present unique situations. Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants to foster that young company feel as the company tries to make it possible to be "part of a start-up within Google."

I believe alpha dogs leaving to do their own thing is quite normal and should be expected. Accepting that some of your brightest talent will leave the nest to pursue their passions should be an embraced value. No hard feelings, okay?

I think Eric misses the point in saying "being part of a startup within Google". How do you stop a monoculture from creeping in and taking over your organization? Big companies have this problem and Google, I would guess, is no exception.

Maybe foster an environment where new ideas (coming from the outside) are brought into the fold (in the form of more startup acquisitions)? I'm sure this causes it's own problems where founders must now deal with the internal workings of a giant acquirer.

I would call this "organizational drag". Too many people with too many inputs into too few decisions. This provides just the right amount of friction to squeeze out anyone who truly wants to scratch their itch. Put another way, if you put up enough barriers, some will attempt to navigate your organizational obstacle course but others will simply see your barriers, and the organization itself, as the problem to solve.

I don't know if funding actual startups would be something Google should look into but I don't think Google could ever bring back that small startup feeling; that's just wishful thinking.

twozon Ask HN: what unwanted domain names are you sitting on?

coredumpster.com onebigcatch.com matchisle.com

twozon How to Build a 100-Million-Image Database

If you want to actually do some searching, these links might be of interest:

http://mufin.fi.muni.cz/imgsearch/

http://multimatch01.isti.cnr.it:8765/CophirSearch/

http://mipai.esuli.it/

twozon High Population Density Triggers Cultural Explosions

High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations.

Loss of life and innovations can still happen with high density population centers, although less often (as long as information is also exchanged/shared between centers).

Higher population density also means more expensive and more deadly natural disasters.

If, today, a devastating earthquake/hurricane/volcano eruption/mack truck sized meteor hits NYC there would be enormous consequences.

The same or worse event occurring 100,000 years ago wouldn't have been such a big deal with no people around.

I think the future is very bright yet any sort of disaster your can think of will be leveraged against us that much more by increased population density.

twozon Ask HN: Ridiculous Coding Practices by companies you have worked for

    <?="I","smarty pants"?"don'tget":"see";?>it.

twozon List of C functions banned by Microsoft (in SDL)

So instead of using the unsafe strcpy function, you now use the safe strcpy_s.

Joel had some thoughts on this a while ago (2005); prepending s for safe and us for unsafe to variables.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html

Interesting.

Sometimes I scan the titles and give my votes to these articles on the frontpage thus having these links saved in an easily retrievable list for later consumption.

It would be nice to have a separate bookmarking capability distinct from the ability to vote.

twozon Darwin validated: Missing link found

Contrary to what you might have been told, there is a lower limit to physics.

I agree. But...

There is no limit to the determination of people defending their beliefs against any theory for which science provides evidence.

    Creationista Lisp v1.0

    CL-BELIEVER> (= evidence truth)
    nil

twozon Darwin validated: Missing link found

There are those who have split the theory in two: micro vs. macro evolution.

http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~do_while/sage/v1i4f.htm

Some people who have normally shunned the entire concept of the evolution theory in the past have now integrated micro-evolution into their belief systems yet vehemently oppose macro-evolution.

No matter which path you take (creationism vs evolution), I guess it's just turtles all the way down. ;)

twozon On the need for a Hippocratic Oath for programmers.

What of programmers/architects who are also users?

Moo back to you. :)

twozon Why is it that a single vote can make a huge difference in social news sites?

I'll take a stab a reframing the OP's question.

Why not start posts at zero karma instead of one?

Does the current initial karma setting (1 point) affect user behavior in any way?

twozon Ask HN: quickest way to earn some hacker news points?

Or reply to comments with more links to Erlang.

http://www.reddit.com/r/erlang

twozon Rules no one teaches but everyone learns

"His battered old canvas fishing hat"

Sans-comma Questions:

  Is it a battered old hat used for canvas fishing?

  Does he have two battered canvas fishing hats of which this one is the older of the two?

twozon Looks Like a Cow,Swims Like a Dolphin,Quacks Like a Duck,It Must Be Enterprise Software

More goodies from the comments section:

"Enterprise software" is a social, not technical, phenomenon

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/0...

twozon Looks Like a Cow,Swims Like a Dolphin,Quacks Like a Duck,It Must Be Enterprise Software

Worthy link from the site's comment section:

Zawinski's Law

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the Law of Software Envelopment) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

twozon [dead]

Perhaps these are of interest?

PHP in Erlang: http://github.com/blog/354-php-in-erlang

Erlang / Ruby Bridge: http://www.rubyinside.com/erlang-ruby-bridge-its-erlectricit...

twozon Paul Graham: The 10 Secrets of Selling Online (1997)

Why post the archive.org version when http://store.yahoo.com/secrets.html is still up?

twozon Announcing HackStars

Dark comment: Could this be the perfect opportunity for a genious hacker with enough "fuck you" money (yet doesn't care about their own reputation afterwards) to sneak behind enemy lines (whatever that means), work for nothing, and provide a totally unexpected mentor experience - possibly have them running around in circles and setting up a bunch of startups for failure?

"You're using PHP! That doesn't scale! You'll need Java. I'll show you how."

"You're using Java! Performance will grind to a halt! You'll need PHP. Lemme see that keyboard."

An infamous HackStar, indeed.