skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I am, but I live in the US: we have illegal drone strikes against US citizens, NSA wiretapping against US citizens, and so on (the glasses are rose colored for some me thinks)

Are you seriously claiming that a government which has been ruled by a strongman for decade and which regularly throws people in jail for criticizing the regime is morally equivalent to the US government in its treatment of its own citizens?
I assume your comment is directed at me, the OP, as it was not in reply to anyone.

>> You're not getting "ripped off" by having a base salary of 125K USD (with benefits and equity) fresh out of college.

Nowhere in the thread has anyone used the term "ripped off" so I'm not sure why you put it in quotes. Your assumption that I am fresh out of college is wrong.

>> So boo-hoo to those making only 125K with equity and benefits.

I think you are misunderstanding the point of the discussion. No one is seeking any sort of pity, as you seem to be suggesting. No one here is suggesting that $125K is nearing poverty.

What we are doing is questioning the paradigm of employers enjoying a superior bargaining position in salary negotiations as a result of a social dynamic that we ourselves are furthering. Specifically, a reluctance to openly discuss compensation.

>> Tell you what, with a Bachelor's in Chemistry (in my year 176 people started, only 42 finished the degree so it's not a free lunch) I can expect to make between 40K and 60K CAD out of college and pay higher taxes than in the US. With a master's that I'm working towards, I'd be on the upper end of that spectrum.

If you are unhappy with your career choice, why don't you do something else?
Sam given the huge volume of applications you guys have to go through and the limited time you have to look at each one do you think that you are in a position to accurately judge if an idea is compelling or not? You can judge traction quickly, but it takes much more time to judge the quality of a pure idea.
Why are you so in favor of nuclear energy startups when solar+batteries seems to be the cheaper and more immediately implementable option?
Machine Zone (Game of War) is a YC company. I don't know why they never talk about it.
Hype springs eternal
for filename in *.txt ; do ...

has no issue with spaces in filenames. If *.txt matches "foo bar.txt", then that's what the filename variable is set to. In the body of the loop you have to make sure you have "$filename".

You don't need play games with IFS to correctly process filesystem entry names expanded from a pattern.
From your experience, which personality traits are the highest predictors of success or failure in startup people?
100k vehicles/year is 1/2 to 1/4 of capacity of a vehicle production line; any automaker would retool for 100k guaranteed sales, if the price was right.
Think about it -- you clearly decided your home country was not as conducive for building your future as the US may be

Hi, as a Canadian, I also take issue with your statement. Your ancestors came here for the same reason as him, and with far less scrutiny, same as mine, and were provided many benefits not recieved today, including land grants.

Why does a person migrating today deserve to be treated as second class?
Personally I find that the application form is not adequate to "hard tech" companies.
Ya I agree. Sounds really low to me, depending on the job, skill level, and experience (that I don't know)
Hello HN Community! My name is Rose Afriyie and I am one of the founders of mRelief. We are a team of software developers that emerged from #chihacknight, Chicago's weekly event for civic technology. V1 of mRelief was built in partnership with Chicago's Innovation Delivery team to address backlogs in programs like rental assistance where 10,000 applications are filed but only 400 people qualify. We use a simple Web and SMS platform to help people find out if they qualify and are excited to use our platform to take people through the entire process of receiving needed benefits.
What would you personally consider a good failure percentage of YC backed companies?

Is http://yclist.com/ a valid source of data? If so, it seems like YC could be at the cusp of a large amount of DEAD companies starting from S10 to current.
You are probably right as far as 'morality' goes... as far as the betterment of the Cuban people that are still living on the island then probably opening up trade is going to be more beneficial to them...
Great to see more competition in this space! (Aside: Can you comment on why this is happening now? ForUsAll, Captain401k, Betterment's 401k, now you, etc.)

Who is your third-party custodian? Wealthfront uses Apex Clearing and makes this explicit.

What ETFs do you allow employees to choose from? Again, others (e.g. Captain 401k) make this explicit.

Can employees choose their options in a fine grained manner, or does everyone need to opt-in to your rebalancing and changing of ETF options?
WW3 IS SYRIAN WAR BACK ON
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.

Another principle is that you should always counter.

So I'm _extremely_ surprised to hear that 95% of the time, people have refused to continue talking with you. I can't refute your experience, but I can say this has never happened to me or anyone that I've worked with to negotiate a starting salary.

Patrick's writing, which you alluded to, was a big inspiration for me to write and think more deeply about this subject. He knows what he's talking about.

If you watch the Salary Negotiation workshop (linked in my original comment), you'll see a section on "The Dreaded Salary Question" and there was a 15-minute discussion on it in the Q&A. (Both are linked in the notes below the embedded video.) You might watch those segments to see if anything jumps out at you that yo haven't' tried before.

Thanks for the question!
Do you really drive a mclaren to work everyday?
What's riskier? Systems that are never patched with still plenty of potential surface attack area, or systems that have a way to obtain fixes, including fixes to the patching system?

If a system has an options for untrusted I/O (radios, network, unmonitored physical access), I would take the later over the former every time.

Granted not all companies are created equal in how they handle security, but that doesn't change in either scenario. The same team developing a fix are also typically working on the original implementation, so it's unlikely that the system code/design quality would be drastically different.
You mentioned that you are interested in AI.

Chris Dixon made an interesting post about how some AI ideas are better suited for bigger companies because of the data and compute needs.

http://cdixon.org/2015/02/01/the-ai-startup-idea-maze/amp/

What are your thoughts on what classes of AI problems are better for startups vs. big companies?
This is a really uninformative answer. Every peer reviewed conference/journal also does this. The NIPS study was special because they did more. They ran a controlled experiment to determine the exact variance in acceptance rates and then published the results. The GP was asking you to repeat the NIPS experiment.
I wonder how microblogging works in China/Japan?

With Kanji/Hanzi 140 character limit turns into a 140 word limit.

That's like a friggin essay.
But it's not his money, right? Because it sounds like this is Kickstarter-funded...

"Fail with other people's money, kids." I suppose that is a powerful lesson...
I don't know if taking down the video was just part of perpetuating the narrative that the video was somehow relevant, or if they actually believed the video was relevant and thought taking it down could somehow help matters, or maybe they even thought taking down the video was "right" in any case because, heck our govt is so keen on censoring "offensive" speech...

My only point is the choices are "dumb" and "dumber" so it's pretty depressing no matter what you choose to believe they were thinking at the time!
The example given in the article:

grep some-string /some/file | sort

is a good example of why -e and pipefail are dangerous. grep will return an error status if it gets an error (e.g. file not found) or if it simply fails to find any matches. With -e and pipefail, this command will terminate the script if there happen to be no matches, so you have to use something like || true at the end... which completely breaks the exit-on-error behavior that was the point of the exercise.

Solution: do proper error checking.
Ask HN: Understanding expectations of introductions
I find myself often being offered 'introductions' to people who have similar industry interests to me. Unfortunately, only after the introductions have occurred do I fully understand the motivation of the parties involved. From step one, it is assumed that my primary goal is new or different employment. Although this can be a topic on the table, I often would rather talk to someone to better understand their interests and problem space without muddying the waters with intents like 'employment' or 'opportunities'.

These assumptions tend to put me in the position of prematurely offending someone or require me culling my speech at risk of missing out discussion of a neat topic or possible future work connections.

Is this a common problem for developers? (curious if I'm feeling this only because my sample size is relatively small)

How do you gracefully handle industry introductions that stray dramatically from your expectations?
The way that case was handled is shocking. Officials were dealing with an obviously skilled and curious kid. He should be slapped on the wrist, lectured on chemical safety, and then referred to a chemistry teacher to steer his curiosity safely.

Instead they wanted to lock him up and connect him to the boogeyman of the decade. And, in doing so, exposing him to the world at large, including the very kind of people who could convince him to do not-so-good-stuff.
Cuba is a bit more complex than that.

- It's true Cuba is a disaster in some aspects, regardless of the embargo. You have a point there.

- On the other hand, it's hard to argue some disasters were made even worse by the embargo.

- Some aspects of Cuba are a success, like its approach to universal & free health care and education.

Finally, let's not forget Cuba immediately before Communism was an even worse disaster. This too is part of the lesson.
I'd guess most are more concerned that if they give you a private office, others will request one and they aren't equipped to give lots of private offices. And if they give just you one, it will cause resentment in the team that isn't worth it.
Sam! Hello, How do you foreseee your Universal Basic Income analysis plan working with with politicians and public policy officials?
No. I'm saying every country has its problems, and that to say one specific problem must be focused on before any of the problems can be solved is disingenuous. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Not the parent's author, but as a fan of Atlassian products here's some feedback:

- All of your tools feel dated and cold. The blue "metro" style design reminds me of Trello's design, and not in a good way.

- Each individual Atlassian tool has enough minor style differences to make the ecosystem feel less cohesive.

- Administration of your software is opaque, to put it nicely.

- It seems as though you use color as a crutch for poor layout. GitHub is fixed width and Bitbucket is fluid but I see so much more on my GitHub homepage than on my Bitbucket homepage.

- There is a stark difference in the experience in navigating both sites. GitHub seems to have to put a lot of thought into page real estate value. Bitbucket in contrast is much more spartan.
+1 from someone who has been on H1-B, I recognize it as a great opportunity and privilege.

The option to return to my home country was never taken away from me, and at every step I knew I retained the freedom to simply quit my job and leave; I did not do that.

No, an H1-B does not afford you the privilege of switching jobs or careers easily. There's no reason to think it should, and that is made very clear during the application process.
I think $7500 is their net loss. They raised $35,452 on Kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/583591444/mineservertm-...
It also encourage low quality interaction between users and messages taken out of context. Twitter needs a way to convey context in a message. Twitter is definitely not a way to have a meaningful discussion with other users. Worse, any discussion on Twitter is almost impossible to follow. I personally do not understand the UI. I don't know who is speaking to whom or who is answering to whom. Twitter isn't a forum, I get it, but the horrible UI definitely works against Twitter as a medium. It silly but I believe the core product has gotten worse as time went by. unfotunatly,since any attempt at an alternative client is being shut down, Twitter can't even profit from experimentation of third parties. They are shooting themselves in the foot, just like Facebook.
The President of the United States of America can personally call you and request that you take the Trump sign off your lawn. That is an informal request unless he can specify what law he is enforcing that you must be in compliance. You can politely or impolitely respond in any way you wish regardless of the fact of the position the man currently holds.

If there is a threat to you for non-compliance of his request, then he has likely broken the law.
In the German source[1] it is very clear that the order is under the condition that Mercedes delivers an autonomous self-driving vehicle.

It is also clearly stated there that Daimler is not expecting to be able to deliver such a car before 2020.

Basically, Uber said: "Once you're able to build a self-driving S class, we will buy 100.000 of them".
And Daimler said: "We will come back to it."

[1]http://m.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/autoindustrie/a-1082...
But not any reason.
What public companies have you invested in?
You're acting as if there are a fixed number of jobs. More people with jobs -> more people with money -> more demand for goods/services when they spend that money -> more jobs to produce those goods/services.

How do you expect it would work otherwise? Countries with too many people would run out of jobs? Is it population density by land area that determines whether we run out of jobs?
Yes! We've had great success with weird ideas.
Call it second class is different than comparing it to being in prison.

People in actual prison might take issue with your statement.
What is the payback period YC looks for? i.e. How many years does it take for a home-run to become a home-run?
Empty Statistics
The lowest I could imagine them selling for is 45k per car. 25k isn't a discount, it's a loss.
Ah! Interesting. That count of t.co URLs must have changed at some point. I see how it works now. Still, I don't think a URL should count against your character consumption at all. That is what led to URL shorteners and the damage they do to begin with.
Any plans for YC to get into seed rounds e.g. both to support startups with high potential as well as to potentially offer some of the benefits of YC connections to those who might've gone through another incubator?

(I know YC's policy on incubating startups which have already been through other incubators, which I believe if I recall correctly is a very data-driven "no." My question comes more from the standpoint of whether any YC benefits might be available to startups which already have some success but are still very much in the early stages)
Hi, Sam! Don't you think that AR/VR is overvalued by large companies? Microsoft has not created Google, Wal-Mart has not created Amazon, Ford has not created Tesla.
Seconded. It is quite off mark. This will break code which depends on splitting, like when you have a some variable called FOO_FLAG which contains "--blah arg" that's supposed to expand to two arguments. Observing proper quoting is the way (except for internal data representations that you can guarantee not to have spaces).

And also, the newline and tab is not explained! What is with that?

"We don't want accidental field splitting of interpolated expansions on spaces, ... but we do want it on embedded tabs or newlines?"

Huh?

If you don't want field splitting, set IFS to empty! (And then you don't need the dollar sign Bash extension for \t and \n):

$ VAR="a b c d"
$ for x in $VAR ; do echo $x ; done
a
b
c
d
$ IFS='' ; for x in $VAR ; do echo $x ; done
a b c d

No splitting on anything: not spaces, tabs or newlines!
I don't think employees in (most?) at-will states can be terminated for violating pay secrecy rules.

(I think the only state with a meaningful divergence from at-will is Montana).
Don't take things personally. My intent wasn't to belittle you or whatever. We are having a simple technical discussion.
thanks! We were wondering if it was worth applying.

We went from zero revenue to generating revenue after our old accelerator and was looking into YC to grow now that we had a solid, validated product-market fit.
> As for "Japanese" stuff, that's true: there's a bunch of Japanese-branded stuff that's made in China, and it's definitely not of the quality of Japanese-made stuff of yesteryear.

There are also problems with literal counterfeit Japanese products. One example I'm familiar with is Hakko soldering stations; it's apparently not to hard to find Chinese kock-offs who duplicated the case, packaging, and branding but otherwise use a substandard design with substandard components.
The Prophylactic Extraction of Third Molars: A Public Health Hazard
Question is, do you work in the same geographic area? Pay ranges are extremely regionally-based, because cost of living varies wildly.
You're always wearing running shoes... how often and far do you run each week?
We looked at our data here last year--we fund founders from a very wide variety of schools, and no school at all, but many of our most successful founders went to 'top schools' and thus it's easy to get the mistaken impression we select for that.
Oh man how could I make such a mistake? I got thrown off by the lack of zeros. I can't even edit it. :(
I've wondered about this for awhile. Obviously it's been a bit since I've been involved, but you guys have such scale now that solving some obvious problems for founders might be beneficial. Housing being the big one. It was merely annoying back in '07, but now I feel like it'd be a significant distraction and expense for anyone not from the bay area to find a place to live there. Maybe an official Y-scraper would make economic sense!

YC's done a lot to take the legal headache out of starting a company, raising funding, granting options, etc. I don't see how other things are philosophically any different.
Simple question on a similar topic: how "real-time" is the source audio that you work with? I always imagined that voice actors would have arbitrary pauses between the delivery of every line, and it'd be the editor's job to tighten all of those up.
Which is why companies treat salaries like state secrets. If you don't have a reliable baseline you can't use "I'm underpaid" to your advantage in negotiations. You may not even know you are underpaid! Information asymmetry.
The YC Fellowship funds companies anywhere! Kevin does remote office hours.

And yes, I think they're well-represented.
Presumably he's referring to the "two brides" analogy. It's discussed more elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11307425
I completely understand that SMS compatibility is a big reason for keeping the limit. I just don't think it's a good enough reason now that most users aren't using SMS or are on MMS where they have more than 160 total characters to play with.

They could provide an option to SMS users to see a truncated tweet or a URL with the complete tweet, deprecate SMS but keep it around, and not let themselves be constrained by it.
Hah! Enjoy being able to drink orange juice while you are still young!
I didn't think it was necessary to be more specific in my post but I was wrong. By 'they' I meant the US government.
Any interesting new verticals where you think YC will expand to the degree it has in hardware?
P.R.China has a strong policy to control information and policy restriction. What do you think of the possible problems for YC to cooperate with Chinese companies? Does that impede the growth of a startup?
Heart of Africa on Commodore 64?
I'm having some trouble parsing your intended message. Is this an agreement or disagreement?
I assume so, though the part where yum could not figure out the server's architecture was really odd.

I would love for them to move to CentOS, or Fedora or whatever. The problem is that they are a huge healthcare company, and I am a part time subcontractor.
And if you making 30k you would feel ripped off even though some guy who works at Walmart for 20k would feel jealous.

That said, amazon pays new grads pretty okay, and if you get a promotion between 2 and 3 years your new salary should be pretty competitive.
Hi Sam, does age of the founders factor in much in an application? I'm an older developer (40+).
You state the problem space clearly -- many employees don't choose to take advantage of tax-deferred retirement plans.

To whom do you have access for investment? DFA has a great portfolio of so-called "unmanaged" index funds. They have a low burden, much of it not front-loaded. And they've been around a long time. There are other similar funds.

How do you avoid the Zenefits craziness as you grow?
I'm from a team of first time startup doing a hardware medical device company. We have computer science, mechanical and electrical engineering background but very little experience with medical devices. Is this a big red flag for you guys?
Facebook Offer:

iOS Developer

Base Salary: 140k
Signon Bonus: 25k
Stock / 4 yrs: 200k
Annual Bonus: 10%

The job I took this year:

iOS/Android dev
Base: 190k
Stock / 4 yrs: 3%
Bonuses: tied to company revenue

Work History: 4 years over 4 different companies (startups and one big co)

Gender: M

Native English Speaker: Yes
They raised $35.5k on Kickstarter, and I'm assuming they have spent all of that plus $7.5k out of their own pocket before shipping a single unit.
This is going to sound crass, but if a founder can't make the sacrifice to spend 3 months in SV for YC, are they really prepared to build the next billion dollar company?
Why should employees who were smart enough not to wind up with mounds of student loan debt get less compensation?