skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't know if you're serious, but there's a problem here: an enormous rent, in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, is now being extracted from the students sent in for "socialization" -- both in direct costs to the college, and indirectly in the reduction of their earning potential during those years. Furthermore, it is being extracted specifically from a class of people who probably have a hard time laying their hands on that money, and being paid to already upper-class people. We managed to socialize ourselves in the past just fine without doing this.

"Free" college, by the way, does not solve this problem; all it does is slightly improve the lot of the poor by instead spreading the rent over the class of all taxpayers, while making the payouts to an unproductive administrative class even bigger. I suspect the second part explains the popularity of this idea among the administrative class, though.
sonar keylogger enabled
Allegations are circling the web that a side effect of the (also alleged) startup bubble is that there are more good founders than good ideas. The purported effect is to water down the societal value of the products and services that are produced by companies exiting accelerators and incubators.

A few obvious counter arguments come to mind right away, such as YC's startups in fusion energy and non-profits like Watsi. If I could, I'd Google up a histogram of funded startup business models as granular as 'restaurant food delivery' or 'pre-packaged home cooked meals' and see where the ideas are concentrated.

What is your opinion on the aggregate? Does YC have any formal or informal policies aimed at balancing the mix of weighty vs. frivolous businesses?
It's not snarky. People who seem to me to be qualified and serious have suggested both that the initial converts to agriculture were less healthy and happy than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries, and that modern humans are less happy than hunter-gatherers. The first claim seems very plausible to me, but the second claim seems less so.
I believe that the reasoning for this is probably that they'd rather spend time on their work or creating something than hang out with their friends because it gives them a nice creative outlet which they need to keep their mind at peace from all the inspiration and ideas racing through constantly.
You don't think TWTR is a good buy right now?
I've never heard of Gamocosm before but it looks very interesting...
I think the vesting schedule is back loaded because they give you a pretty large sign on bonus in the first two years.

Your total comp in year one would have been 112.6k which seems about right. The stock price doubled last year, so you would have been looking at at least 125k in year two.
Does anyone other than those evaluating applications (i.e. YC staff) have access to these applications, the ideas they contain or any prototypes which may have been submitted?
Could not agree more. With all this talk of data and ideas, you would think he could include some data to back up his ideas. He can't, because this is all just opinion.
"He’s skeptical of bootcamper applicants and is more inclined to hire four-year CS degree graduates, especially for the most in-demand positions: “full stack” developers who possess a range of coding skills. He compares the skillsets of bootcampers to performing auto repair on a car, versus the kind of large-scale, architectural skills of your standard CS degree holder, who can do everything from small repairs to making deep structural changes. “You emerge from a bootcamp fit to do an oil change, but not design a car,” he said."

If employers prefer actual CS degrees, they should be pushing to make obtaining said degrees not require people to go into massive amounts of debt. The "gold rush" might be part of the issue here, but the cost of bootcamp certs vs degrees is not insignificant, as the article states.
SOAP + Oauth is a weird combination but you could definitely work with it in R.
I believe that orik was referring to the particular students at school. Read the whole comment, not just take the last sentence out of context.
There are still hunter-gatherer groups existing today, and their happiness levels can be studied. I wonder how their level of snark compares to more modern societies.
If an idea is a good business opportunity, it's common for multiple people to be working on it independently at the same time. It's also common for many people to fail working on that very idea before you get to it.

One of the values of VCs and networks and experts is that they can tell you how other companies in your space have failed (running out of money, founder breakups, "people won't pay for it", "it really needs X but X doesn't scale", etc.).

If you watch the start-up space for long enough you start seeing multiple teams with the "same idea" but only a handful succeed at it; even at small a scale as university incubators.
If so, is that a feature they were forced to add by the government?
> the initial converts to agriculture were less healthy and happy

Land ownership and class separation didn't start until agriculture.
You are right, and you also don't know Amazon (as well as many other powerful corporations).
The fractals at the heart of African designs (2007)
Revealing that would reveal my identity so I can't say the company name.

I ended up going to a mid sized startup in SF (50-100 people) that was very very well funded and had a ton of potential along with one of the best teams I've seen. I'm still there and love every second of it and am being given amazing opportunities that I know I wouldn't have gotten at Amazon.

Ironically I got paid more on every single vector (base pay, equity, relocation, sane vesting schedule) from this startup than from Amazon. Just goes to show...
I remember using two resources:

* Paul Ekman's course on microexpressons
* Whatever came up when I googled resources on body language for shy people, people with anti social disorder or people with aspergers

This was in the mid 2000s, so I may have had more academic/professional results than you'd get now. I imagine results now would be cluttered with blogspam.

Also, a caveat is that I've seen some doubts expressed against Ekman's microexpressions theory. However, I was just using the course to get feedback on the expressions themselves and develop an intuition for them. The microexpressions in the course are the same as macroexpressions you'd see people make over a prolonged period. I haven't seen anyone say his facial categorizations are wrong.

So I did the course, and got feedback identifying expressions. That was one element. Then I'd also go through the other resources and practice things I was bad at individually.

For instance, eye contact. I'd have weeks where I just paid attention to eye contact during conversations. I used to not do any, so I focussed on making more. Then I'd pay attention to how people reacted. Too much or too little eye contact will weird people out, in different ways. So you can use reactions to calibrate. Then after doing it long enough, it becomes intuitive and you don't need to work on it consciously. Move on to the next item.

Another I remember was smile lines around the eyes. Genuine pleasure will make people smile with their eyes. Fake smiles are mouth only. So I'd pay attention to when people laughed, and check the eyes. Do this long enough and you get an intuition for real smiles vs. fake. Then you don't have to think about it anymore.

And so on.

1. Identify weakness
2. Devise way to get feedback
3. Focus on it for a bit
4. Once it becomes intuitive, move on to something else

If done correctly, you can learn to do everything at an automatic rather than an intellectual level.

I didn't find body language books that helpful, because they don't have focussed practice. I think something that categorizes expressions + asks you to correctly identify expressions is essential. Then something which just lists things involved in social skills, and practice them to mastery.

As a result I went from being far worse than average to better than average.
> I read it that the husband threatened the would-be adulterer, not that the police officer did:

You are right; I was wrong.
There was a HN story in which the author had the same "big data claim" (it was his intention to show there is very little big data in the real world, for most people out there) but instead he only needed to process couple GBs. He just used standard Unix commands and the performance was proven to be incredibly awesome.

Here is an example for SQLite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359568
I find it hard to take his work seriously. Here are detailed criticisms of some of his other papers: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kana...
If your reaction to this thread is "wow I am really underpaid" then it's working. The playing field for your next salary negotiation is now a little more level.
Also curious, as I ran a $10 droplet to host a Terraria server and the ping-times were >200ms from Vancouver, BC to San Fran. Was basically unplayable, with usage spiking out. Now, it was simultaneously hosting Mumble and an (effectively blank) node site, but still.

For what it's worth, I also hosted a Starbound server, and so long as people weren't doing anything crazy and the population never exceeded ~4-5, things were fine.
SWE, L6, 11 years experience, hired at L4
225 base, 90k bonus, 260k stock (grant size has been going up each year).

Google gives fair increases on promo and even if initial salary was in the low end. Pretty common to get a high bump after a year if one negotiated badly.
Microsoft GDC party includes “schoolgirl” dancers
Your website seemingly doesn't load at all for me. Firefox on Win7 with uBlock Origin and Disconnect plugins. Just shows a search bar that doesn't work and the rest of the page is blank.
Not at Google, but VMware.
MTS SWE 1.5 years out of school.
Base: 120k
Stock: 20K/year
Bonus: 20k/year
are you suggesting that companies can get around labor regulations by declaring your compensation to be confidential? I'd check with a lawyer if I were you, that's some pretty thin ice you are skating on.
The idea of an 'exploding offer' seems a bit odd to me.

What makes it one-sided exploding? Are people being asked to actually start work in three days time, or just accept the offer?

What happens if you say 'yes' and continue interviewing? Does a big guy with a sword turn up at your front door and chop your head off?

Are people just trying to be polite and not burn bridges? Why would you want to be polite towards such a ridiculous employer?

'Negotiating' in this situation just feels really odd to me. Reply: "Okay, I can start in a few weeks' time". Phone down.

I am exceedingly uninterested in bending my life around employers - that's a world I left behind when I left my job as a retail clerk.
It's certainly possible. But how would I tell? I learned the social skill stuff to such an extent that it's now intuitive, rather than something I have to think about intellectually.
Only if you are happy.
So they can just fire you, have an escort and done?
I believe 117 base is low for SWE3.
Since Jason gets a lot of flak (not that he cares):

Jason was one of the first and most helpful investors in Rapportive (YCS10, acq LinkedIn). He believed in us when there was no obvious reason to.

Jason was one of the first investors I went back to for Superhuman. (He negotiated hard, but then so do I — that's just part of each side getting what they want.)

I'd work with Jason again in a heartbeat for my next company.
Hulk Hogan Gets $115M Verdict Against Gawker at Sex Tape Trial
The UK has different legal systems for Scotland and England, so there isn't a "UK Libel law".

English defamation law has several defences:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law

> Allowable defences are justification (i.e. the truth of the statement), fair comment (i.e., whether the statement was a view that a reasonable person could have held), and privilege (i.e., whether the statements were made in Parliament or in court, or whether they were fair reports of allegations in the public interest).

> An offer of amends is a barrier to litigation.

> A defamatory statement is presumed to be false, unless the defendant can prove its truth.

> Furthermore, to collect compensatory damages, a public official or public figure must prove actual malice (knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth). A private individual must only prove negligence (not exercising due care) to collect compensatory damages. In order to collect punitive damages, all individuals must prove actual malice.
I think there's a more common reason why companies end up with "awful-to-work-with messes": ETL is deceptively simple.

Moving data from A to B and applying some transformations on the way through seems like a straightforward engineering task. However, creating a system that is fault-tolerant, handles data source changes, surfaces errors in a meaningful way, requires little maintenance, etc. is hard. Getting to a level of abstraction where data scientists can build on top of it in a way that doesn't require development skills is harder.

I don't think most data engineers are mediocre or find their job boring. The expectation from management is that ETL doesn't require significant effort is unrealistic, and leads to a technology gap between developers and scientists that tends to be filled with ad-hoc scripting and poor processes.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Etleap[1], where we're creating tools to make ETL better for data teams.

[1] http://etleap.com/
You collect a lot of data about people - their location (and therefore travel patterns), license plate etc. What's your privacy policy with regards to location data collected? Will you disclose if your database is requested by the authorities? How long is the data stored for? Will you be monetizing that data? Your FAQ doesn't address this.
Curious, why're you President of YC? Just to be clear, this is not intended to be why you vs someone, but if there's a story behind why you ended up where you are today. Thanks!
The Selling of the American MBA
Offcloud: Your cloud-based BitTorrent client and download manager
No OS-X support? :(
Of course...

I think everyone should have to spend the first 40 years of their life in some kind of government run institution being learned....

Only then can they be true productive members of society...
Yes. But not just suits. This is a cutting observation that applies to all "professionalized" organizations, but the form of that professionalism depends on context. It could be standard-issue to be wearing a blazer and jeans with spikey hair in your loft office, but you're still just acting important, using buzzwords, and doing basically nothing.
I have gone through some of these shifts and they made a profound impact on me. I'm still learning to integrate many of the things I learned into my life in such a way that I can function in a modern society and remain authentic. It's very, very hard.

Can you give examples of the other shifts you're referring to? I realize many of them may not have names (or may not have names in the western culture), but it would be very meaningful to me if you gave it a shot.
Tox: High Performance Template Based XML Parser for Ruby
FWIW I am basically in the same situation. My base pay is in the same region you describe for yours, and I rarely see offers that are even 80% of what my salary expectation is, let alone other forms of compensation and other benefits.

I am in scientific computing and machine learning, and I actually love being an implementer and a coder. I don't want to be a people manager (mostly because I think all companies force managers to treat their subordinates in unhealthy ways, and no matter how good your intentions are, being a manager will ruin your humanity).

I worry about finding any job, and then further worry about what growth path there could possibly be.
Xbox chief: Company party’s hired dancers “not consistent with our values”
see, rights for any group are always an end run around rights somebody else would naturally have.
It isn't just the demands of the process that was the issue with Mr. Reich. Rather, to be polite, the tone of his voice is not universally recognized as being pleasant.

Audiobooks are a very intimate media, and the wrong voice can really put off the experience. With training I think he could do it, but to just give a public speaker the task of narrating a book he/she wrote without such training is usually a recipe for disaster.
In 2011/2012, I was a senior sde (or equivalent, don't remember the specific title) at the Google office in Seattle (Fremont), and my salary was $140K.
Here is an offer for someone with 5 years of experience in San Francisco:

Base 180k
Sign on 80k over two years
189 RSU over four years with 5-15-40-50% vesting schedule.
I'm reasonably intelligent, would not call myself smart compared to some other people I know. My entire life I've always had just one or two close, low-drama friendships at any one time, and hardly any wider circle of friends. Not sure I can explain why, but it's always been that way and feels natural. I can't really relate to groups of 5-10 or more that get together and all seem to know each other and have fun.
Nor do we have any proof of a lower bound > O( N ) for 3-SAT.
This is what I was told, but others ITT seem to have heard differently. In the examples that you know of, was the person relocating to Seattle or somewhere else, like SF?

It may be that what I was told was correct, but they were referring only to Seattle and not places like SF where cost of living is very high.
Replying to all below posters:

Yes, I know that there exists a tax deferral. Sometimes employers even match funds.

The statement I am making is that this seems like a complete scam by the Government - forcing you to perform suboptimal manoeuvres by withholding your cash otherwise.

Is it worth participating to reduce taxes? Possibly.

Does it outrage me that I'm treated like a child in this respect? Certainly.

(Why age 55? What if I want to retire at 50? What if I'd rather take a year out now and work 55-56? What if I want to leave the country? What if tax rates change?)
260k stock vesting per year? That's an insane amount.
Most of the time, when your employer truly thinks that about you, they'll work on your improvement informally. I don't like saying this, but I think most people's best interests are served by the assumption that a PIP signals their employer's transition from "working to retain them" to "working to manage them out of the company".
Taleb is not at all a "snake oil" salesman, he is very great.

) very much cited https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=64BtMdsAAAAJ&hl=en

) http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html <-- Silent Risk

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIR1o1dnk5ZmRaaGs...

) http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
probability theory is the theory for dealing with what we do not know, and that's what his criticism of GMO's and such are based off, it's a rigorous field.

His paper on Pinker's work was accepted into a peer reviewed journal. So it's not by any means "outlandish".

Cirillo P., Taleb N.N., 2015. On the statistical properties and tail risk of violent conflicts.

) Daniel Kahneman probably the most celebrated intellectual/scientist of this specific modern era calls for his inclusion among the world's top 100 intellectuals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMBclvY_EMA

Not to mention, you know, actually predicting the financial crisis of 08 in print?

Those were just articles that people get when they're in the limelight and have positions that are hard to follow.

It's just dishonest to criticize him like that.
Why you believe that a workforce prepared for the 21 century requires at minimum 16 years of education?

This over application of degrees for jobs that should not need a degree at all is one of the problems. Vocational Training should be the path the vast majority of people take, and should be all that is required for the vast majority of even 21 century jobs.

We do not need government provided schools, we need to restructure our very idea of what education is, and employers need to stop over valuing a degree.
Website Design – Interview with Colton Mathieu from Coco the Bear
TInder for salaries.
Given the competition, I don't think the sign-on bonus is that large. It only barely makes up for the difference in salary that you can get from a competitor.

E.g you can easily pull $100k to $110k in base pay from similar companies out of school (think LinkedIn, Twitter, FB, Uber). Even well respected startups pay more than $90k (and that's not including any additional bonuses they will surly pay)
I find it interesting which people you chose to label with their company and which you didn't.
Why Hadoop Must Evolve Toward Greater Simplicity
The migration pattern for the smartest people appears most likely to be growing up rural, moving to the city during peak earning years, and movng back to rural areas after. [1]
[1]: http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/07/the-smartest-people-move...
"Two almost always over-looked characteristics of terrorists, mass shooters and perpetrators of other violent acts are the chronic displays of either contempt and/or disgust."

Craniometry and phrenology were based on the physical shape of parts of ones noggin and their supposed links to behavior; this is based on habitual behaviors.
Trading Strategy Review: Price Breakout with NR7
I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11316187

Also, as for different culture, race, gender: not really. I learned expressions that are universal. The cataloguing system they were based on did extensive cross cultural studies.

Obviously there are certain tendencies (Italians often do talk with their hands! Even they say so), but nothing you'd want to take as a hard rule.

You'll certainly notice body language based on social status though.
It's senior sde level. Not everyone is expected to make senior, and they only have something like 10-15% at that level or higher.
> You can easily extend your time whenever you want

The city will lose a lot of money with this. The amount taken in meters is a small fraction of what they make with tickets.
Gigabytes under management
This already happens. The glass on the curtain walls of many skyscrapers is held in place by structural silicon adhesive. Example: Frank Gehry's IAC building in Manhattan, referenced here [1], using products like this: [2]

[1] http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=185

[2] http://www.portafab.com/curtainwall-connecting-adhesives.htm...
The audiobook editors at Audible used SoundForge. I started out on SoundForge, but I led a real charge to get the department to switch to Wavelab. I was able to get Audible to buy me a license for Wavelab and I never really got anyone else to switch, but it made me super efficient. At that point though I was heading into a more dev role at the company so I was already drifting away from audiobook editing at that point.
>> Do you have anything you'd suggest I read

Sorry, my opinion is formed only by observation and discussion with related parties. I don't have any direct experience of Toyota, except with one of their trading company's subsidiaries. Uniquely, this company does have a visionary leader at the helm, yet I believe there is no correlation with the parent's leadership style because Toyota Tsucho is run at arms length.

My rather uninformed opinion of Toyota Motors is that they are succeeding exactly as other Japanese companies used to succeed. If this is right, and I hope not, then they may be fated to see the same stagnation in time. A more optimistic view is that Toyota have something unique. If so, I don't believe it to be charismatic leadership. It would be baked into their culture.

Of note is Toyota's recent decision to invest $1B in AI research in Silicon Valley and Boston. They are trying to get ahead of the coming tech for autonomous driving and factory automation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/technology/toyota-silicon-...