I guess the ads would depend upon what you uploaded.

Next, you need to figure out why the company you are working at has allowed you to hang around for six months without helping you get integrated, or--if you really are too inexperienced (not 'dumb') for the startup, then why hasn't anyone fired you yet?

If you've been stuck for two months, and are in a resource constrained environment (which most startups are), then you need to figure out who is steering this ship, and why they are willing to let you stowaway on it.

Maybe you are being more effective than you realize, which would be great, but I think its more likely that no one has a firm grasp on what is happening, and that isn't a reassuring sign. It sounds like the people around you aren't communicating with each other, and its hard to believe that will lead to a successful product being put together.

It doesn't sound like you have a strong personal relationship with the other people there, because otherwise you probably would have just asked someone. My advice would be to first dig up your resume and update it to the extent possible, then see if you can establish a friendly relationship with anyone there who would write you a recommendation (or more likely take a phonecall on your behalf), and then ask the questions you asked here to whoever is in charge at your startup.

In the long-run it isn't worth being miserable and frustrated just to keep collecting a paycheck. Finding someone to talk about your concerns is better in every way. First, you look like you care about the quality of the job you are doing (which it seems like you do, otherwise you wouldn't be upset about it). Next, it will force the organization to figure out why its communicating poorly, or otherwise make it very clear to you that its a sinking ship.

Also, I think its a bad sign that people are snidely disrespecting their coworkers work. That kind of thing can fly in a larger company, but petty rivalry and negativity will kill a small group of people.

Best of luck!

It would be easy enough to do, but my gut tells me it would be a mistake, because it would make it easier for the site as a whole to deteriorate. As long as everyone has to see every story, there's a lot of pressure not to have bad stuff.

Paul Buchheit dislikes optional settings in software for similar reasons. He thinks they're usually just a way to punt on hard design decisions. Nearly everyone is going to use the defaults anyway, so you should just work hard to make those are right.

Looks pretty cool and original, and seems to fit the "create value" rule more than most of the others. That said, I am under Linux and haven't tried the product.

Microsoft is interested in acquiring companies in markets they don't have wrapped up-- like the internet. Xobni makes outlook better? Great. Except that it's not about Outlook. It's about Gmail.

It isn't necessarily "corrupt" to reject double-blind peer review. In my experience, most scientists who are qualified to review a paper will be able to infer the name of the researcher behind it, based solely on the content.

This is particularly true in areas where software packages or novel algorithms come into play, because people tend to name their ideas for maximum recognition. It's silly to hide the name of the researcher when the paper refers to their pet algorithm a dozen times by name.

I used to dislike both Flash plug-in launches and PDF Reader launches equally. Now, the combination of Adobe's work on making the Flash Player launch faster (helped along by the format's ubiquity -- it's probably already running in another tab), plus FlashBlock, means Flash is much less annoying than PDF.

So: bravo, Scribd, for marginalizing PDF even further.

And then he spends the rest of the article explaining why the file formats are so demented and impossible to read or create correctly.

Which isn't the same thing at all. Just because there is a rich history of it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time decisions doesn't mean the end result is any good.

There is a serious, deep, and interesting problem of scaling and complexity management that could be discussed here. But Microsoft's approach seems to have been one of embracing complexity. And Joel's role, today, is just defending that approach.

Major news stories are, of course, of importance to everyone, but I personally would rather have a hacker news which is focused on hacker-ish stuff.