skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All other things being equal, the big "brand name" company is better. Seeing Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft on a resume is a big green flag saying to take another look, something that a small company won't get you.

Again, that's all other things being equal - if the line item is "Yahoo Inc. - Performed performance testing and bugfixes on the company's intranet calendar" vs. "Defunct Startup Inc. - Designed and built the entire UI of our company's sole product", the startup candidate is more appealing, because they've done more. (That was roughly the difference in responsibilities between my big-company internship and small-company internship, BTW; though the big company is a lot less well-known than Yahoo.) Of course, this requires that the company you're applying to gets few enough applications that they can actually read each one, instead of just skimming for keywords and places of employment. That's perhaps another reason why startup-people tend to keep working in startups, and big-company people tend to keep working in big companies.

Another factor: there's diminishing returns in brand recognition. If you've already got Yahoo on your resume, I'll be taking another look anyway, and so you don't get much additional benefit from having Google as well. Meanwhile, if there's another candidate who also has Yahoo but also had significant responsibilities at a startup, I'd probably give the position to him, because he has a bigger breadth of experience.

(At my last employer, one of the parts of my resume that my boss picked out as particularly good was that I had a really wide variety of experience - I'd previously done desktop UIs, I'd done websites, I'd done build automation & testing, I'd done network programming, and I'd done Intranet calendars and such.)
If he's going to be keeping a dirty house and "calling people douchebags or bitches for fun", he should probably mention that. A lot of us men (most, in my experience) are going to be turned off by that, too.
holy shit, you nailed the signup experience. I'm wondering though, by not verifying emails or even having a captcha, are you worried about undesirables turning your site into a spam/link farm?
It makes perfect sense. Out of all the available smartphones on the market it is the only one that has service requirements. I have owned 4 different smartphones and have had data service on none of them.

I would also guess they don't count usage of Exchange servers because I would think that the Blackberry would trump the iPhone users in shear amount of information moved to mobile phones.
Solid State Fan to cool your laptop and other electronics
Tell us a bit more about what you can do - maybe someone here will be interested.
Ask YC: startup or traditional work experience?  
If a founder works on his company for a year, but can't seem to make it work, do future hiring managers see that time spent as a negative (couldn't find a way to make the company work, why would we hire them) or a positive (imagine all the lessons and skills they have developed in that year)?

Would that year in the startup put you ahead of the pack, or behind it, since you would essentially have one less year of traditional work experience.
How to protect the source code?
I'm interested in learning what software companies are doing to protect their source code. Assume basic security measures (login, VPN, etc.) have been taken - are developers being prevented to "take software code away"? If so, how?
Here is video: http://gizmodo.com/369860/video-rsd5-solid-state-fan-in-acti...
Can you please elaborate?
"102. Increase the font sze of your web site."
You're not having a personal conversation with someone else over bits, you're having that conversation with someone else through an intermediary, specifically the hardware of your respective ISPs and any other third parties between whom the packets route. That isn't so much a personal conversation, as a very accurate game of Telephone.

As an aside, I apologize for not responding sooner, I did not know how to find my old posts.
I am in a similar situation, so I can't offer you any opinion from experience, but I'll share the reasoning I used in making my decision:

A large company can afford to hire you as an investment. Most lower-year students can't offer a whole lot to a company, but to BigCo it's like buying options in you as a future full-time employee. (Not that you are not obligated to keep going on full time, but many students will) I've heard many stories of people spending their summers at the big companies, getting paid well, but working on things that never saw the light of day.

A small company, on the other hand, can't afford to do that. Any work you do will have to be important to the company.
"to offer" != "is reportedly considering offering"
A Song of Ice and Fire -- George RR Martin
Electronic voting, properly engineered does have the potential to work, but this kind of lack of transparency absolutely kills any desire I have to see this technology ever used again. Period. It's just too much of a black box and I don't see how to change that.
Yeah that customizable themes idea never worked out for myspace, or blogs, or web stores....

Regular people go crazy for that stuff. They should expand on this feature even more.
His motivation is just being himself... you could correctly predict every single project Apple is secretly working on and he would adamantly deny every one, then confirm them all 2 days later at MacWorld. That's just how he is.
Good idea, good execution. High five.
Rob,

You definitely can track more than three - the article is referring to the initial homepage where anyone can just get started finding a show by typing in three bands.

Use the plugins, or even begin adding bands manually to the Tour Tracker, and you can track as many artists as you like.

One user is tracking over 4000 artists right now. I'm tracking a more modest 477..

Pete, Songkick
You call yourselves hackers? That's four more phones than you should need.
There are a lot of variables involved here.

Hiring Managers == Humans == Emotional Logic

There will never be a 100% case, the closest you might get is that a hiring manager who is startup oriented could see that year as valuable productive time. A hiring manager who feels that only time spent in the ranks at BigCo is worthwhile might see that as a wasted year.

The reality though is that there are all kinds of companies, all kinds of hiring managers, and all kinds of opportunities out there.

Taking a shot at your own idea for year will open some doors and close others if you suddenly decide to go the "traditional" route. It is my personal opinion that working for a halfway decent organization for a year will open more net doors for you than working on your own in solitude for a year (assuming that after that year you are likely to seek different employment). So, if you don't have formal experience I would guide you down that path first, unless your idea is a really-super-killer-1-person-can-build it sort of thing.
Besides having a gruesome case of election fraud that may or may not even be detected?
Seems like this will affect startups at very late stages in their growth. How many of us have even put ads in before the product was effectively done? Not exactly cutting off innovation at the source.
An Ingenious Video Game That Looks Like It Was Designed by a Third-Grader
Stock charts, by itself without a history of what is being traded, is a bunch of hooey. Data without context is worthless.

Even though 2 different charts look the same, the reasons may be different. One could be because a company is doing so well that they are constantly running out of stock (Nintendo) versus another company who's just had their 4th lead paint recall (Toy's R Us).
Design thing that irks me: Seems like a number of mouse hovers trigger an object to get duller rather than brighter. That seems like the opposite of what you want to happen.
It was a joke based on the grandparents use of bad English.

:-)
I believe we have the whole top floor to ourselves. I think Phil Tadros of metroproper might stop by (if you know what he looks like) since it is his shop. Other than that, we'll probably be taking up the space towards the the front of the top floor, its not very big up there so we should be pretty easy to spot.
Pentagon's Cyborg Insects All Grown Up
Cool. Both of those are on our todo list. Using an arbitrary domain works, but we haven't put it in the ui because it requires some work from the user and we want to make sure there is appropriate help so that it does not confuse anyone.
Google Drive: drive around Google Maps
I've used Tada Lists for something similar
Mastering Linux debugging techniques
Absolutely, but I've been seeing a trend here. Two kinds of great hackers
a)-Great writers and they write good stuff e.g. PG.
b)-Great hackers but they don't write a thing e.g. RTM. Yeah, I know he and other such hackers write plethora of cool academic papers but I always wish if more great hackers like RTM & others would write stuff for public en-masse. May be, this is just not possible. Just a mere wish.
Free audio/video downloads from Webstock 08
<ResumeEntry>

April, 2007 to March, 2008. XYZ Company. Web Progammer.

One of 2 on development team that analyzed, designed, developed, tested, and deployed XYZ's primary web application. Grew application to 10,000 uniques per day in 8 months. Used <abc> framework, <def> language, and <ghi> testing facility. Wrote 450 original <def> programs and maintained several thousand <pqr> programs. Excellent references upon request.

Reason for leaving: Business failed.

</ResumeEntry>

So, what's the problem?
A lot of factors would contribute to this. If I'm not mistaken, the US has been seeing record levels of college application / enrollment due to all the boomers' kids being at that age, which leads to increased competition. Another thing that I've heard from previous generations is that academic success more often now is measured as 'doing better than the other students' rather than actually learning the material well. I know I've had classes where I really didn't know where I stood until the end of the semester when the professor sat down and worked out his curve.

Not saying that college was previously a walk in the park, but, especially with all the talk about the declining worth of an undergraduate degree, I'm sure many of us are concerned that merely having a degree with a decent GPA isn't enough anymore.
Do you know if it's against the ToS to create image ads that resemble the text ads? I can see this working great, though split testing would be a bit harder since you wouldn't be able to tell which of the 'ads 'the user clicked.
I like "The Last Answer" also. It says a lot about Asimov's religious views. My first exposure to Asimov short stories was Robot Dreams which has both The Last Question and The Last Answer.
Completely useless, but cool.
That's great, I didn't know this existed! I had heard people retell Fredric Brown's version of this story and thought they were talking about Asimov's story. Thanks for the link.
high five back.
I would assume you'd get both kinds of reactions. I think a better question might be, which kind of manager/company would you prefer to work with in the future?
1. Divide the money into several prizes.

2. Make some sort of contest. Perhaps for a slightly academic challenge that has immediate applications? Eg. recommendation algorithms, AI problems, compression, encryption, p2p problems.

That should give you maximum return on this money.
Clever, and a lot of fun to play around with for a few minutes.

It would be really impressive if they can analyze where overpasses are and include that in the system. Right now you are able to drive off the side of an overpass onto the lower road. Google Maps certainly factors those kinds of things into its paths, so maybe these guys can find a way to integrate Google's data somehow.
Ditto. Providing the ability to integrate such a link sharing/voting app into an existing website would make slinkset stand out! May I ask why the name slinkset? I don't get the name.
Hiring Managers == Humans == Emotional Logic

Nothing will ever be more true than this when it comes to the problems in the work force.
I've seen a number of resumes which significantly over-stated the experience someone had gained while self-employed, but it's difficult to verify what the person accomplished without being able to contact clients and/or coworkers.

Just don't over-state what you did, and try to stay in touch with any collaborators or clients who could serve as references, and I see no reason why a startup can't be a great piece of experience to put on your resume.
Can someone kindly provide some history of this to those of us that weren't here in 2007?
Au contraire! You should be able to get more responsibility at a startup.

Startups don't have room to pay you to work on something that's not mission-critical. Big companies do.
Good point. And those iPhone data plans are UNLIMITED plans, as well, so users aren't concerned with excess charges for downloading content.
I played the beta a while ago on my tablet PC; it was clever, a good concept, but kind of buggy and not that fun. Maybe it's gotten better since then.
How did they know?
My only complaint - the turning radius on the car is not tight enough to make it through the roundabouts at full speed. You can also drive through malls
I live in Austin, TX. I'm young-ish (26), team lead of 10 engineers on several shipped products. I've written production code: linux kernel C, userspace C, python, ruby, win32 c++, java. I've rewritten the build system of a 500k LoC C project. I've maintained a Linux From Scratch cross compiling distro. I'm in chapter 4 of SICP, so I'm starting to become proficient in Scheme, and I've caught the lisp bug.

I'm currently working in the Storage (SCSI) industry. At a previous job, I wrote shipping code for medical image processing.
I'm a huge fan of this sort of game. If interested, you should also check out Phun:
http://phun.cs.umu.se/wiki

Not crayony or goal-oriented, but a lot of the same physics sandbox concepts. Oh, and you can download it right now.
Hilarious. When are the divorce lawyers going to start advertising, "Wife leaving you over video games?"
some of the required plugins for this are not really open source. They are under a license Lovd By Less made up that says you can only use them with this project.
Math and the Current State of Coarse-Grained Parallelism in Python
Definitely cool. Anyone estimate how fast the car is going?
Like most problems, when you scratch the surface, it becomes clear how deep you could dig.. We took funding to give us the time to solve these technical challenges.

With 1 million active bands currently on MySpace, the challenge simply to get the database of all concerts is huge. And that's before we even start on the discovery piece to connect fans to these gigs..

Pete, Songkick
This belongs on reddit.
And at least three more than I can afford.
Former Yahoo Ad Chief Joins Startup as CEO
Silicon Valley's Bubble 2.0
Why not do both? I work for a large internet company during the day. When I get home at home, the coding continues on my personal projects.

I think that's what Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft mean when they are looking for people with "self-started" projects.
High Definition Slowly Coming to IPTV
Next up: Grand Theft Google, where you can steal the cars from Google Street View and drive them around.

Seriously, though, they should turn this into a game, kind of like road rally: you have to get from X to Y, touching waypoints P and Q, in the shortest time possible. Allow users to submit courses for other users to drive, and keep a high score list and some movies of the fastest drivers that you can play back on demand. Everyone will compete to have their best runs appear on the high score list!

They'll have to do something about the car's handling, though. It corners like a tanker truck.
employment contracts and/or non-disclosure agreements.

if someone really wants your source code and they have access to it, they'll take it. the best you can do is make their life a legal nightmare if they decide to use it in a way you don't want them to.
Awesome! As mentioned in the grandparent post, we're using it for family news, and we have a suggestion: give users the ability to hide certain links from certain users for a temporary period of time. For example, if my dad has a birthday coming up and we want to throw him a surprise birthday party, we can start a discussion link about organizing it, and have him not be able to see it. That news item would be hidden from him until 1 day after his birthday, or something like that; same thing for anniversaries.
Facebook app to discover cliques among your friends
I was just substituting one variable in Matt's.
Well this may make much Ning less attractive for programmers who want to throw up a social network (which, I think, is not always stupid).

How can Marc Andresen compete?
I have to entirely disagree with you; Apple could have Flash on the iPhone trivially if they wanted it- Adobe has begged to port it, and is trying to find legal ways to do it once the 2.0 firmware ships. There is no obviously legal way, however, as Apple bans all code which can run or compile other code.

It would be irrational for Apple to support Flash on the iPhone, for several reasons. While performance and drain on battery life are certainly factors, I believe that the stronger element is that Apple wants to own the development environment.

Currently, if you want to develop for the iPhone, you need to use Apple's APIs, and Apple's runtime.. You can choose either Web development (Safari Touch), or Native Development (Cocoa Touch), but either way, Apple owns the process.

Adobe wants Flash on the platform for the same reason that Sun wants desperately to port Java- Controlling the Dev environment gives you tremendous control over the future of the platform.
Reading good prose helps. Also, rewriting.
To see Phun in action, do a search on youtube. The (mostly) Japanese rocket makers are especially fun to watch.
Read the whole set:

We

1984

Anthem

Brave New World

I love dystopias, and these four have always seemed to work together, to me.
The car even goes faster when you get it on a motorway - nice attention to detail.
To spell out the analogy, they both:

1) Are young and have started or been part of successful startups

2) Have blogs where they exhibit a strong personality through their writings, which are sometimes controversial but always tinged with elitism.*

3) Were/are darlings of Hacker News, with a high percentage of their blog posts making it high on the front page

*Not that there's anything wrong with that
I think that's an awesome idea. I've wanted to do much the same thing. I think putting the money out purely as a bounty will probably work fine, and if it doesn't you can always try something else instead.

A few ideas I've had for plugins I'd like:

A browser plugin that makes zip files transparent, so you can browse them and open pieces of them.

A browser plugin for native multiple file upload (credit to Paul B. for this one)

A p2p file transfer app built into the browser.

I have more specifics on each if you're interested.
I wonder if they pull a profit from that campaign. That's likely a pricey keyword. Humor value aside, I'll wager it's not very effective.
I'm with you, but I think the trend is in the other direction. As a lifelong book collector, my eyes were opened when I heard Cory Doctorow (an even more obsessive bibliophile) state that he was thinking of selling off most of his books -- the logic being that, in a world with digitized libraries, eBay, Amazon and ABE books, it's easier and cheaper for him to just obtain a used copy of anything he wants to reread and sell it on the used market after he's done.

I don't actually believe this enough, yet, to put it into practice, but it shocked me into thinking about it.

It is grossly inefficient for me to have to keep a physical copy of Star Wars around in my house just to prove that I bought the darned thing. It is grossly inefficient to have my own, personally recorded collection of every single Alton Brown Good Eats episode. These things are not rare: They are treasured by zillions of fans. They are unlikely to become rare in my lifetime. I have, or will soon get, all the bandwidth I need to download them on demand. The only reason I have to cart them from one apartment to the next is that our stupid copyright laws make it easy for their creators to jerk me around -- raising prices, charging me over and over again, editing the films to make them different from what I remember, taking the films off the market for ten years, inserting artificial roadblocks that make no sense in the high-bandwidth era (like physical DVDs from Netflix instead of digital downloads from Youtube HD) -- unless I buy a physical copy and make it my own.

I don't think that's going to last. Time is not on the side of that model. It's not as efficient and the people who still believe in it get older by the day.
Investment banks (Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros, Morgan Stanley) are borrowing from Fed
Though the revised number is still 23% higher than 2007’s total, it shows the economic downturn will impact the Web.

A projected 23% annual growth doesn't sound like something to worry about.
http://slinkset.com/signup_and_create

The vertical divider in the page made me think I only had to fill out one side or the other. "Setup your account" or "Setup your site" I thought. So I figured I could create my network just by entering title/URL/privacy option. Only after a little confusion did I realize it's not "or", but actually "and".
Twitter Is The Tech Water Cooler
I asked some managers this once, and they all said that startup experience was at least as good as big co experience. It's in an essay I wrote; I forget which.
I can't help but feel that Nardelli has no idea what it means to be at a startup: some of the execs having some of their compensation tied to performance doesn't really cut it.

I'd suggest having them put their mortgages on the line (yes, even the vacation home(s)) along with their pensions and their golden parachutes.
Gene Wolfe's two 'Sun' series, though in many cases you might be hard-pressed to recognize that his work is actually sci-fi.
VC confab: Please, no more social networks
In other words, not like a startup at all.
If only you could drive at that speed through London.
Newspapers Beware: Blogs are A Disruptive Technology
Mine is that it's spectacularly easy to fail at grad school...tons of my classmates left college figuring they'd get a Ph.D and are now dropping out after (or sometimes just before) getting their masters.