Hacker News Reader

I adore that customs clerk!

jjson David Moon's Programming Language for Old Timers

> We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each of the cans."

CONS

jjson How iPhone Gaming Should Really Work. Mock Up Included.

The other problem is that the touchscreen lacks the tactile feedback that a gamepad has. On e.g. old-school 2D action-platformers, you end up using finger-feel and "twitch" more than conscious thought.

jjson Tell HN: I think I'm quitting my job today

If you've got a decent cash cushion, then go for it!

(Just don't blame me later ;-)

jjson California the Worst State in Which to Start a Business

"Granted, you might not want to take the magazine’s findings too seriously; there’s no information about what, exactly “business friendliness” or any other non-quantitative ranking criteria means."

Nothing to see here; move along.

jjson How Rich Countries Die

Your earlier post said, "Effective lobbying turns welfare or health care programs into cash cows for government workers or health care providers."

I took that to mean that false inefficiencies were being created to divert public money into private hands.

jjson How Rich Countries Die

Not quite: all of them represent a theft from the public good for the benefit of the few.

jjson HN Member on Frontpage of Today's NY Times

The picture on the index page tells an interesting story: the lady is trying to hide her horror as she slowly conceals her escape from the sinister-yet-well-dressed man and his killer jellyfish.

It's an excellent play for the Bond villain market; I hear those guys are loaded!

jjson Starting up with a friend

Everyone loves the Nike Companion Cube...

jjson Impossible to compete with free software

Free software is a common bogeyman on the Business of Software forum. It's a handy scapegoat for when your new µISV experiences disappointing sales.

You'll note that the guy who asked the question was trying to find an excuse not to start a business, and how quickly cooler (and more experienced) heads prevail.

jjson If Programming Languages ran the Airlines

Python: You spend 10 minutes building a plane, and feel very satisfied with yourself, until you notice that location.teleport() is in the standard library...

jjson Entrepreneur sells bottled New York City tap water

The reason this works in NYC is that their tap water is basically mountain spring water, piped in from the Catskills.

jjson 8 "frat-boy" business ideas

> Then they convince themselves on the concept by how much they'll enjoy the lifestyle, not how viable the business idea is.

On the other hand, if you don't price out the lifestyle you want (in terms of money and time), then you have no metric to determine whether a given business will be viable for you.

jjson Ask HN: Is a team of work-at-home employees realistic?

To make this work, you need frequently-measurable goals, even if the measurement is subjective.

This isn't a matter of trust, it's a matter of motivation.

It can be something squishy like, "Let me take a look at what Bob's checked in so far this week", or something more quantifiable, like, "Bob has closed n tickets today".

[Even if you don't have a hard number of how many tickets someone should close in a day or week, you can generally eyeball it and if there's a discrepancy, look at the descriptions to see how hard the problems were].

It's best to make this as transparent as possible to all members of a given team, and provide a system of rapid feedback and especially fast positive feedback for all progress.

Try and keep communication focused on whatever channel everyone actually likes using. If you're using a wiki, trac, and basecamp to keep track of overlapping items, quickly ditch whichever ones nobody actually uses.

If you can keep everybody motivated, communicative, and measurably productive, then you will actually be far better off than large traditional companies that rely on the ass-in-chair visibility metric to determine whether "work" is working.

jjson Ma.gnolia.com crashes hard -- no backups?

Tell us what the future is like! ;-)

jjson How to Sell More Software by Adding 12 Characters to Your Homepage

More importantly, with those numbers, you could decide whether it's really worth the hassle (or expense, if you're hiring sales people)...

jjson Working from Home: Why It Sucks

That could get really creepy, really fast..

jjson Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?

IIRC, the spate of hauntings in the movie was brought on by the imminent return of Gozer the Gozerian (or by the same rare set of conditions that allowed Gozer to return).

By the sequel, the Ghostbusters had mostly closed up shop due to the collapse of the haunting bubble.

jjson Ask HN: Good Hacker Cities

Pleasanton, like Oakland, is in Alameda County, and the two are connected by the BART Dublin/Pleasanton Line.

Santa Clara County is car country.

jjson Why monads have not taken the Common Lisp world by storm

SLIME, perhaps.

jjson Ask HN: What do you want to be able to customize?

It would be nice to be able to view stories submitted within a given date-range (and possibly insert a false date into the decay algorithm), to generate an approximation of what was on the front page n days ago.

jjson Sad Day For Microsoft: 5,000 Laid Off, Earnings And Revenues Down

> Maybe now they will be able to focus on creating competitive software like they did in the late 80s.

I hope not!

I'd much rather eat their lunch while they eat their dogfood...

jjson Ask HN: When do you code?

"In a given week"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/quotes#qt0386869

jjson Congratulations PG on the coming child

And raising them to be emacs contributors, even more so!

jjson Ask HN: Resume Video

When deciding on how formal to make it, just ask yourself: Is this the sort of video that would be appreciated by the sort of company I want to work for?

jjson Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup?

"Dear Sir:

If you wanted to discourage us, you probably should have done so BEFORE we became fabulously wealthy. Please remember this for next time.

Regards, ..."

jjson Liquid Wood Is Plastic of Tomorrow, Say Scientists

Someone needs to figure out how to mass-produce this stuff from algae farms and sell it as "LiqWood"... :P

jjson Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup?

You should have mailed him a letter saying that you were sorry that he didn't like the game and to please find enclosed one (1) plastic spork.

jjson A Seasoned Linuxer Switches to the Dark Side

Accurate summary: He likes his MacBook that is not a MacBook Air.

jjson 6.184 - Zombies drink caffeinated 6.001

For this particular course, use these:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

(These videos are also under a Creative Commons license and available on YouTube).