skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haa ha ha! Beautiful troll.

But for those who aren't familiar with the situation, I'll lay it out.

Taiwan was formed when a bunch of Chinese aristocrats fled the mainland.

Their big mistake was, at the time, not declaring themselves a new country, but instead declaring they were the rightful rulers of all of China, and that they were, in fact, part of China.

At some point, a few years later, it became obvious that wasn't going to happen, and that China was going to be its own place. So Taiwan finally realized they really needed to give up this "we are part of China and the rightful rulers" and just become their own country.

However, at this point, they were a fairly prosperous state, so China found it politically-expedient to turn it around and say: "Actually, Taiwan is part of China as they've been saying all these years. We will pull them back into the fold."

All sorts of political shit-storm went down at this point, and hasn't really cooled off ever since.

People who frame Taiwan as being part of China (as parent did) are on the side of Mainland China. People who frame Taiwan as being an independent country (as many UN members do) are on the other side from Mainland China.

The debate is very much not settled.

SOURCE: was married to TW citizen for >10yr, have lived in TW for >1yr of my life. Have way more details on intricacies than I've laid out here.
Hey, thanks for the questions! I'm Rikin, also a founder.

We actually have relationships with several custodians - depending on the investment options the company wants to make available in the plan.

We don't explicitly list the ETFs because we're not tied to a single fund family (e.g. Vanguard). We pick the best of breed funds for each asset class quarterly - our portfolios currently have ETFs from iShares, Vanguard, Schwabb and PowerShares. We can accommodate requests if employees are after something in particular.

And finally, yes, employees can build custom portfolios. Investment flexibility was one of drivers of us starting this, but we make our portfolios/rebalancing the default to encourage participation from inexperienced employees. We don't have any restrictions on the ETFs/funds or even single-stocks that can be added - but we are careful not to unlock funds that aren't risk appropriate.
Addictive pay-to-win mobile games aren't exactly glamorous, and in some social circles are pretty heavily frowned upon. Maybe bad PR, not sure.
support biogerontology/aging research
Didn't a Google employee catch heat for doing this at Google a year or two ago?
It is more like "brag about your salary".
> Why does a person migrating today deserve to be treated as second class?

You don't go into someone else's home and then expect to be treated like family. I don't think immigration policy is really centered around morality or what people "deserve" but, like with most government policy, looking out for the interests of the country.
I think that's very true, but it makes the situation even more frustrating. Going all the way back to books like Peopleware, it's been well-known for a long time that even in dense urban areas like Manhattan or San Francisco, it is more cost-effective to provide private and quiet space for knowledge workers than to attempt to "save" short-term money by buying open-plan office space and increasing worker density.

There's a ton of quantitative evidence supporting this. Yet employers persist in only ever buying open-plan space. Established companies that already had private offices sometimes even spend money to tear down the privacy features and remodel the office to function as a type of fashion signalling that they are "cool" like what they perceive start-ups to be. So they actually pay money to destroy productivity, so they pay money to move their business into a state in which the business makes less money.

Then you also see firms spending money on needlessly opulent lifestyle masturbation, like moving their office to some expensive downtown location with a roof deck. Or building a rock climbing wall in the office.

So you know it's not an issue of lacking the money for buying real estate that would support private working conditions. It's just a lot of issues about status and opulence.

So while you're correct that given their current office layout they might be unable to accommodate giving someone privacy, it's disheartening that they were ever in that situation to begin with since it would have been demonstrably more cost-effective for them to have built privacy features into the workplace from the beginning.

It has really caused me to see office space as a major red flag about a company. It says a lot about what the management of that company cares about.
He has a working product with this blog. It's so entertaining he should get into doing a satirical Silicon Valley rag.
I'm not saying what you focus on. I'm looking for solutions I can contribute to on the ground. Political revolution is not one of them. I don't have that sort of capital to expend.
Is Robert Morris still involved in YC? Does he read applications and provide office hours ?
Are all YC companies incorporated in US? If not, what other countries are acceptable for YC and investors that cooperate with YC?
See, I find the reverse to be true.

I too don't have the disposition to patiently wade through fixing tons of tons of broken tests over and over again. IF I have to I can do it, but I know better than to unreservedly trust my judgement about how things are progressing.

But what this has taught me is to stop trying to push water uphill. If testing is hard because of questionably coupled code, refactor it NOW instead of waiting for things to get bad. The refactoring almost always suggests new features we could add to the code (or makes me backpedal on pronouncements that certain things were 'impossible'), and the number and kind of tests that break is reduced.

I came across a quote recently from Bertrand Meyer (the Design By Contract guy), where he suggested that code for making decisions and code for acting on those decisions should be separated. I found myself nodding along to this because it was something I knew intuitively but had never articulated: Decisions without actions don't need mocks, and actions without decisions need at most one or two (often none). Decisions can be tested (possibly in parallel) with unit tests, and actions tested with functional tests. Then all your integration testing is that decisions lead to actions (basically that event dispatch works) and that catastrophic failures are handled gracefully. A proper testing pyramid.

Now I want to figure out which of his books or interviews this was in because I want to read the rest of what he had to say on the subject.
From the article, it didn't appear that the decompiler was required, just the disassembler.

IDA Pro disassembler (professional edition) is $1129.

So it's somewhat less expensive.

I wish Hopper (hopperapp.com) were more publicized; it's only $89!
Is this really the place/time to ask such questions? Or are you hoping for an answer because you feel Sam is trapped into answering here?
Hi Sam, Two of my college buddies and I applied to YC this week, we're looking forward to growing our startup idea. What do you think is the number one thing that most founders don't think about that ultimately hurts their company?
Not a SWE is the catch, though my primary job responsibility is coding. Also messed up the job search and had no competing offers. Now trying to figure out if it's worth leaving Google and getting a job hopper stigma over the fact that I'm well paid but not as well paid as others.
One piece of advice I can give is to try and line up interviews at the larger, more slow-moving places before you do the interviews at smaller firms which move a lot faster. Bigger places have more of a process in place for hiring so it can be a while before they can get an offer out to you, while smaller places can have an offer out in a day or two.

By following the above strategy, you can narrow the window within which you receive multiple offers to a few days, making it easier to ask for more time from any of the companies if you need it.
Read-only DB. Think of it as read-only memory mapped key/value store.
I think the idea is that you use a topic branch and each incremental piece is authored by the individual that authored it. Then the branch is merged in when the feature is done. If someone helps substantially at the atomic commit level, then they get greetz in the commit message; the person with 50%+ responsibility should get the author flag. If commits are in small enough units, that should be pretty doable and all code remains properly attributed.

I do sympathize that not enough attention has been given to this, though, and there are probably people who don't want to follow the branching model. Would be nice if you could identify multiple authors in git. Here's a bug discussing that: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=451880
Dentists are often crooks.

When I was younger, my parents had to change insurance plans, so I got a new dentist. In the first visit, he takes a quick look at my mouth (with no tools, mind you) and confidently says I had 8 cavities that need drilling ASAP.

My previous dentist mentioned no such thing, so my mom took me back to him for a second opinion. He used tools to check, then told us the other dentist was full of shit and that this was surprisingly common.

The new dentist would have drilled 8 healthy teeth out of greed.
I use microwave oven to cook Rice and Buckwheat. Half of cup rice, then cup of water. Wait at least 15 minutes for rice and about 3 minutes for Buckwheat for water to soak in (important step). Then I program oven to cook 4:10-4:50 at full power (800W), then 11-15 minutes at 40% power. Piece of chicken, or one or two eggs (at then end of cooking) are welcome.
Wait until you have an idea.

We once tried funding companies with no idea. It didn't work. I'm not totally sure why. Perhaps the time pressure of YC is bad for coming up with a really good idea (the best ideas often start out seeming bad). Perhaps the best founders always have ideas.
You're making an excellent point about languages. 140 characters in French or German might not be enough to make a quick point, given how convoluted written French is supposed to be for instance ( I'm french ). "SMS writing" in french is almost like the worst offense possible to the language. I wonder what Balzac would have thought of Twitter.
I work at a podunk Santa Clara, CA startup. 20+ years experience. Working remote from southeast U.S.A.

Tenure so far: 2.5 years

Salary: $150K

Stock: purportedly .75% of company 4 years 1-year cliff, with small follow-on grant later, don't know what recent dilution is, though I think more recent funding has been "debt" at low interest with preference

Not a regular VC situation, company funded through other means.

Outlook -- real uncertain, market has definite need, execution so far has been very mixed, company willing to re-do things the right way
Bezos did it, I believe.
Do you agree or disagree on each of Rand Fishkin's (Moz) 10 SEO/marketing/business predictions for 2016 as posted here a couple months ago:

https://moz.com/blog/10-predictions-for-2016-in-seo-web-mark...

???
You have to hook up a router to it right? It just provides the upstream connection, you could of course hook your computer up to it, but how did you do it?
I get that, I used to own a couple rice cookers, both a super low end $20 version and a higher end version from japan that required a transformer (very old, like from the mid 90s I think).

I might go back someday, but I have new found love for portable skills, no machine necessary. If I ate more rice, I'd probably get one again.
I was working in one of the Indian offices and was recently offered a move to Seattle. I had 1 year experience(was still an SDE-1 but my manager was considering me for a SDE-2 promotion) - they offered 110K base pay with 25k signing bonus which vested over 4 years + around 86k worth of shares which again vested over four years.

I chose to not take the offer but went to join a different company.

I just want to say that if you're quitting for reasons other than compensation, then don't ever listen to competing offers from your current team/company. That way you save yourself a ton of regret if your new job doesn't go well. #lesson-learnt-for-me
Did anything ever come of YC's "one million jobs" RFP?
"New features are recognized for promos far more than existing improvements."

Seems like the solution is neither in engineering nor product, but marketing- companies need to get better at explaining when a low-new-features iteration is intended for stability and streamlining of existing features.
Perhaps one strategy would be to give them a baseline salary (higher than your current salary, of course). You could tell them that in general based on the kind of work you are doing, responsibilities, etc. you would expect more, but under no circumstances would you consider any offer less than that.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314923 and marked it off-topic.
re investments, we can include several fund families, including Vanguard and DFA. However most customers prefer our Octave portfolios which are built using best of breed funds from multiple providers, using a sophisticated optimization process.

re craziness, our team already has tons of experience managing billions of dollars at scale. I wrote a large part of the portfolio management system that manages BlackRock's iShares, and my cofounder was responsible for trading $6B/day of flow for large pension funds.
I agree with most of what you said about the bureaucracy, but the Pax Americana was achieved the old fashioned way, the same way as the preceding Pax Brittanica and the Pax Romana, to put it crudely, "Peace through superior firepower."

The real question is, does the UN or anything like the UN have role going forward, or must we suffer further degradations till we may arrive to some Pax Sino.

I've often speculated in my head about the desirabilty of closing down the UN to replace it with a "United Democracies" based as much on the carrot of trade as much as on any cudgels, but I think that's just a fantasy, you're always going to run into problems like "should Turkey be in or out of the EU and/or NATO, which way are they headed", and when do you ever let Russia or China in.
I've applied like 3 times already. The second time we had a follow up question but nothing else, should I give up applying with this company?
I think we left the topic of "science" about 4 posts up. I don't know what's being described here, but it's not science. Yet somehow, I get the feeling that I'm paying for it.
Congratulations on constructing two straw men so you can polarize the discussion, declare "a pox on both their houses" and position yourself as the moderate. That's a refreshing new technique that irritates no one.
Hi Sam. Two questions:

1. I'm a little in the dark about what happens to applications that have already been seen (because they were submitted early) that are then edited pre-deadline. I've been putting off submission because I'm very close to having an MVP demo video, which I think would be strongly to my advantage to include, but I also know that early submissions face a strong advantage as well. Do you have any advice on the balance between the two, specific to the YC application process? Would it make sense to submit now and edit in the demo later?

2. Are you aware of any publicly available resources for founders to do their due-diligence on investors? I've met a couple of investors by chance (at bars, amusingly enough) that, after hanging out for a few hours, I knew would be a bad fit -- but it would be a waste of both the investors' time and my time if we didn't learn that until the first face-to-face meeting. Do you have any advice on how to maximize search utility (for both an investor and my company) when I'm building my list of potential investors?
I work at a podunk Santa Clara, CA startup

20+ years experience. Working remote from southeast U.S.A.

Tenure so far: 2.5 years

Salary: $150K

Stock: purportedly .75% of company 4 years 1-year cliff, with small follow-on grant later, don't know what recent dilution is, though I think more recent funding has been "debt" at low interest with preference

Not a regular VC situation, company funded through other means.

Outlook -- real uncertain, market has definite need, execution so far has been very mixed, company willing to re-do things the right way
The RFS list is strong, but general.

Are you excited about any specific ideas for the S16 batch? If so - what and why? (genuinely curious. Already applied... so I can't go and change the idea now :) )
I have practiced that part and read just about everything I can find about it.

Generally I say something like, "I appreciate the need to consider salary as an important part of the process, but since we have only just started talking about the position I feel it would be best to make sure that I really am the sort of technical and cultural fit you are looking for. If we can determine that I am the right fit for the role, then the salary information will fall into place at the appropriate time. But if it seems that I am not the right fit for your team, then no amount of salary discussions will be able to help us."

I have a few variations on that kind of description that I use. It's entirely possible that the way I say it can come off as rude, and I think that did happen to me especially a few times when I first started doing this.

But I have practiced it, asked friends for advice about how to say it better, how it sounds, etc., and researched a lot about this online. So I have some confidence that it is coming off as strong and assertive, but not rude, and it is communicated clearly in good-faith because I truly am primarily interested in whether the cultural fit is a good one.

Even so, these kinds of HR-approved ways of talking only ever result in about a 95% chance of immediate rejection.

Whenever I have made it past the initial question about salary, and eventually salary comes up again towards the stage when an offer is made, I have a different way of talking about it.

At that stage, if they ask me again, I will usually say something like, "I have spoken with the team and had a great chance to learn about your company and how I could fit in with this role. If you have a particular salary range that you'd like to share with me, I can definitely let you know how it will match up with my expectations."

Again, I have some slight variations on that, but it's more or less the same idea of changing their question asked of me into my question asked of them. They can't keep coming back and specifically asking me for a number without seeming very awkward, and if they do that it's sometimes a red flag and I would usually be happy walking away if they were to heavily press me at that point.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, when people have been OK with all of this and they have actually come back with their offer, it has been not just a tiny bit below my ideal, but way, way off base from what I was previously earning, let alone what I was actually seeking to earn in the new role.
I know that price elasticity is a commonly known, and well-studied field.

I wonder if wage elasticity is similarly studied. I'd expect that in the short term, more qualified candidates suddenly entering a field (due to institutional barriers being torn down), would drive wages lower. In the long term, things might stabilize towards the previous status quo.

However what is 'short term', and what is 'long term'? This is something I'd love to know if it has been researched, or if we're still floundering for an answer.
Most days I take Uber or Caltrain.
> One of my negotiation principles is "Don't disclose your current or desired salary" during the negotiation. With persistence, the recruiter or hiring manager will usually just move on.

Honestly, discussing desired salary is a good screening tool and when following advice like this I find ~50% of job applications are a waste of my time.

So desired salary is an important filter if a job doesn't state the salary range.
> heavy-modded Forge server

That's probably the problem. I've run a vanilla Minecraft server on a DO droplet just fine for a handful of people.
What would you value more for the application: a potentially huge, innovative idea plus a weekend-hack prototype/demo but no market validation yet, or a more mature, somewhat validated product but with existing startups on the space, some YC-backed?

I have a very clear vision of what we want to accomplish, but we're selling a much more down to earth service to our customers and prospects. I do think there's a path leading us to our vision (think Netflix going from CDs to streaming). Should we describe our vision in the application?
Sources: Sony Is Working on 4K ‘PlayStation 4.5’
Most companies we fund don't have a referral.
Read the email the whole Xbox team at Microsoft just received about sexism
If relationship breakdown between cofounders is the reason for so many company failures, why does YC not proactively solve that by requiring all founders to attend weekly relationship counselling, for which YC pays?

Could such a thing prevent more breakups and therefore greatly increase chances of company success? And the cost is pretty small for YC to employ relationship counsellors.
I'd read from various sources that a team and their execution are more important than ideas, but wondered how would you handle a startup with a (hypothetically) brilliant idea, but with less than brilliant team performance?
Making car software updates available via the manufacturer's web site (downloaded to a usb like they mention in the article) and making it the standard practice during normal car maintenance (by dealership, mechanic, or owner) to update the software might be better than remote updates.
No one else reported the story unfortunately.

Basically it says that all smart meters that were to be introduced in the UK would have shared the same encryption key, which if compromised would have allowed an attack on the grid system. 2 millions installed out of 53 millions planned.
I'd say it still starts at zero, even if the zero itself doesn't correspond to anything physical. Everything not quite zero still corresponds to something that may actually exist. mHz (small m) radio waves are real things.
I don't run that much. I do walk a lot, but mostly I just think running shoes are comfortable.
... and, btw, shouldn't you be out there making bajillions instead of answering questions?

EDIT: That was facetious.
When you are a hammer, everything is a nail

The government is a hammer, people are the nails....
Based on what I have seen elsewhere (other distros and other major software projects), I am saying it would benefit greatly from a better approach.
Did you read http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/ ?
Between TANF/SNAP and Medicaid expansion -- for the states that have gone the route of removing the asset tests and increasing the income thresholds, we're getting close to effectively already having UBI. A "true" UBI isn't phased-out directly, but rather is merely eclipsed by marginal taxes, but the end-result is pretty similar. It's not money in your pocket to spend on whatever you want, but it's a substantial safety net.

I guess the real mental switch is instead of allocating these subsidies to specific buckets like "food", "health care", "housing", and having massive programs to administer and oversee the spending, can government actually get its head around the concept of just writing a check to be spent however? Maybe the problem is... who are the special interests greasing the wheels in congress to get the subsidy passed, when no industry in particular is benefiting from the subsidy?
Class inheritance in C – The Python way
He titled the post AMA. If he doesn't care to answer here, I'll email him in private.