skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never really applied to the larger companies. It seemed like most of the really cool opportunities there were full-time positions only. My friends that had done internships at bigger companies hadn't enjoyed it very much, so I was looking for something small.

When I met Rich and Bill, WePay jumped out at me because it was the most startup-y of all the startups there that day. Every other company had a product and was trying to build it up. WePay was just an idea at the time, and it was obvious that I'd be deeply involved in the building and shaping of the product, rather than adding on to something that already existed.

Asking me to describe the experience is such a broad question that it's hard not to answer in a similarly broad manner. If you've got specific aspects that you're curious about, let me know. As for generally, I absolutely loved it (which is why I'm back here now). I certainly learned way more during three months than I had in two years of school.
My dad took loan to build our house and for my sister's marriage when I was in college. When I started working at the age of 21, within three years I was lucky enough to pay those loans back.
It's consistent with the (IMO misguided) philosophy that merely caring about a topic constitutes a conflict of interest and thus experts or other interested parties shouldn't participate. It's probably also a pragmatic (over-) reaction to the constant gaming of virtually all Internet polls.
How are they trading money? They removed a promo image of one of their products (probably the iPad), but the links up top are still there and anyone going to Apple today to buy a product will still buy the product. It's not like they took down the site.
I meant the concept, not the people.
Partway through the thread, one of the dropbox founders tries to get him on board!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35095
I think that last line is even more telling. "I consider this prediction to have been proven correct." Credibility: zero.
You could talk about the point more, I went through 18 iterations and never found the "$80M" color -- which is what I wanted to see in the first place.

There is no right answer or wrong answer, or end of the tunnel, or goal. There should be.
Wow, after reading through this thread I'm pretty impressed with some of the folks here.

As for me:

* I worked on software that was used to design a small part of one of the sexiest consumer electronics products in the world.

* I built a browser game five years ago that's stil running, with a few hundred active players.
The RFS made it sound like any YC company could have special access to Twitter, but I don't see any reason why Tweet Bracket would. I guess they might use it for other parts of the platform in the future, though.
If you're a parent who needs practical advice on this, The No-Cry Sleep Solution is great.

Also as a parent it is surprisingly easy to learn to tell genuine distress apart from other types of cries. I have no problem walking away from my daughter when she is crying to protest being put to bed earlier than she wanted to be. But I am back instantly if I hear an edge indicating real unhappiness, or if she makes a genuine request (eg for water). A created request (eg her stuffed toy is out of the crib) gets a response as well, but more slowly.
You, sir, are an inspiration. Graduated at age 16? Wow. I only managed to drop out twice (undergrad) but some how ended up in graduate school (took my first midterm today (MS CE)).
I couldn't help having the same reaction myself. I hope they offered equity that was more indicative of a pre-funding-no-salary employee, even though he's technically a post-funding-salaried employee.
It's not that simple.

Suppose you ran an A/B test like you say.

User 1 goes to website, it's site A. Dislikes it. Nothing happens.

User 2 goes to website, it's site B. Loves it. Tells friends.

Now how do you track that 'virality' element? How do you know if User 1 was the cause of increase traffic, or user 2?

How do you know if I tell my friend "Hey checkout bing it has this awesome blue color", and how do you know if I was an A user or a B user?

I think there's just too many untrackable elements in a case like this.

And in any case, the story still sounds like there was no A/B testing involved. Just "we changed a color", and later, stuff happened.
keep pushing it, I'm working from home 80% of the time.
I don't know, but I'd like to know how I can invest in your URL embiggener startup
I would not mind as much if the policy read like it was intended to prevent ballot stuffing. Instead, it reads like an elitist minority realizing that they are outnumbered and setting up barriers to the participation of opposing viewpoints.
I meant non-smart phones. Check this on switching phones:

http://www.crowdscience.com/blog/article/android_battles_iph...

Users of phones other than iPhone & Android are quite willing to switch.

True that Office+Exchange+Servers is bigger than Windows. But Windows 7 is stronger than ever. Just see last quarters numbers for MSFT.
“Open is only better if it's technically better” is not the argument Gruber made. Open has only a chance to be successful if it’s at least as good or better than the alternatives. That’s the argument, and that’s not the same.
The Science Reader: A Crowd-Sourced Profile
I haven't seen the medal, but she's on WP, so it must be true!
Map Design: Why the Magnifying Glass is a Terrible Symbol for Zooming-in
A fascinating little beastie that loves prime numbers
First quantum effects "seen" in visible object
elance.com?
After you assemble your star team, why not carefully select profitable projects instead? The team probably costs you $50K-$100K per month. It seems that a more typical consulting or product business would be more profitable.
All the talk of h264 and not one word about AAC? h264 license is actually very affordable for small companies (free for less than 100,000 users) and large. (capped fee per year) AAC is less friendly.
Just out of interest, what was the one in 2001?
I can't speak for OO, but I definitely prefer Gimp's interface to Photoshop. On the other hand, I use weird window managers.
Could you explain the difference? Cos I just listed several open thing that succeded despite being worse than the alternatives.
"It was cooler before you people showed up"

We see this with twitter, message boards, and (heck) anywhere people gather. I want to be in the cool club, but no one after me because "those people" don't get it or are lame. Who is "worth" following? Same feelings, different groups.
I think the best organizations are the ones that can extend the curve as long as possible without "rolling out the red carpet on the way out". So when a talented developer gets to one of those places, they'll stay much longer than they would elsewhere.
> The syntactical errors in the ad suggested that it was written by a
> self-educated man,

Do I need to say anything?

> This wasn’t the way women of my acquaintance talked ... But those women had
> all been to good schools

Hopefully I don't.
This all sounds kind of lame compared to the other comments, but you asked:

- Converted a car to electric drive when I was 20

- Was a contestant on a reality show pilot that aired on Discovery

- Built a motorized rotisserie out of two old bicycles to cook ~100lb of lamb for my friend's wedding

- Built a weight-controlled electric longboard (3wdm.blogspot.com)

- Built my own Mazda 323 GT-R (not sold in the US) out of imported parts and a US-spec AWD Protege

- Gutted and renovated a 1914 house, including all wiring, plumbing and heating, not to mention stripping eight layers of paint off of every last bit of the original woodwork and windows.

Although countless other people have done it before me, I most proud of the last one. A project like that completely takes over your life. I was working to the point of complete exhaustion on it during every moment that I wasn't at my day job for well over a year.
Calculating LTV of a user
A job is absolutely unlike a romantic relationship. I think this is exactly the problem most bosses have with employees leaving: they treat it as a breakup, or a divorce.

The reality is, company loyalty is nothing like family loyalty. Here's the key difference: the moment an employee stops being a net win for the company, they are let go. Yet somehow management expects employees to stick around because of some imaginary "loyalty". It does not exist.
If you don't mind me asking, what offers did you turn down?
I agree with the way you have broken the statement up. Begging the question is not so much a logical fallacy as a tautological argument. The issue is that item 1 is not so much stated as assumed en passant. It's kind of like asking "When did you stop beating your wife."

The statement is couched as being about point number two, but if we say either "yes, there are music executives who understand" or "no, you're wrong, no music executives understand," either way we are forced to agree with the first point.

For the record, I agree with both points, but I also acknowledge that the matter is subject to debate.
keep pushing 100% of the time which now fits in a very nice 4 hour slot
No, but I was a child once and having a neglectful parent -- either real or perceived -- is something that is remembered forever. I hope you do better,
Can someone explain #14? Is it really the golden rule?
Lately, I've been seeing "having said that, ..." or "that being said, ...", a little much in comments and blog posts. Having said that, I'm trying to avoid it myself.

Just noticed that jackowayed below has a variation of it in his comment.
Interesting. Is it posted somewhere? Can we see it?
I recently had a telephone interview with Google for a systems engineering position. I'm not incredibly impressed by their process of finding talent.

Background: I provided the hiring guy with architecture diagrams of some pretty large scale systems that I had designed: database clusters with 1TB of RAM and 72TB of disk, 10GbE network, etc. I not only designed, I also implemented these systems, so I'm a pretty senior architecture engineer with 18 years of solid UNIX/Linux, SAN storage, and networking experience.

Long story short, I missed a very basic question "what does setting the sticky bit on a directory do?" I blanked because I wasn't expecting to answer basic sysadmin questions, and hadn't honestly set the sticky bit on a directory for several years.

So, they sent me a nicely worded email that after careful consideration, we don't have a position that matches you, etc.

The hiring process at Google is really messed up. I gather that the only qualifications they are really looking for are:

1. Fresh college graduates that memorized man pages.
2. Willing to work 80 hour weeks.
3. Don't care about salary because we're not going to pay much.

I mean seriously, you don't turn down a senior architecture engineer with 18+ years of experience because he blanked on a stupid memorization question that can be googled in 10 seconds.
Ask HN: Linode servers not responding. Is anyone else having issues?
Some of my Linode servers are not responding. Is anyone else having issues? I see on twitter some people complaining but nothing on their status site.
To some extent, that's the Wikia model. (To the extent some deleted topics eventually wind up in Wikia wikis, aggressive deletionism may make money for Wikia.)
Profitable?

Oh wait a lot of us fail in that regard, don't we?
I would be interested to see an analysis of how frequently people prefer the color on the right over the color on the left, independent of what those colors are.

There is a bunch of research indicating that people's attention is drawn to the right and they are more likely to like things that appear on the right. (It has been verified that this preference switches for left-handed people.) And I'm curious how strong the bias proves to be in such a simple neutral test.
Anything – especially if created in the open – will always be inferior in the beginning. That’s just how it is and not the least bit surprising. Gruber makes the argument that open things which made it were – at the point were they started to gain traction – as good or better than the closed alternatives.

Consumers and companies will use open technologies if there are no (cheap, available, fitting) closed alternatives or if the open stuff is as good or better than the closed stuff. They won’t use open technologies just for openness sake. That’s the gist of the argument.
>>but I definitely prefer Gimp's interface to Photoshop

wow, maybe it's just that I got used to PS before using GIMP, but I find GIMP's UI to be nothing short of ghastly.
That's ok, I probably don't want any money from you if you can't even keep your own website online ;)
Even with added traffic, the conversion rate (visitors/buyers) given the tribute and no products on the front page has to be extremely low. Low enough that I tend to believe they are losing money for the sake of this.
Hurray for http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
This is a good introduction. I'm interested in finding articles that speculate about just how aligned the design requirements are between graphics, and most matrix-based scientific and data mining computation.

For instance, Nvidia has introduced double-precision support and L1 cache, which has marginal value in traditional graphics. This is going to hurt their profitability on the Fermi chip compared to the simpler ATI alternatives.

I am gonna enjoy watching how all this plays out.
Privacy in the Age of Digital Glass Houses
The private e-mails and texts that keep you connected could quickly turn embarrassing if made public. How much privacy can you find, and will courts let you keep, when more and more personal communication is electronic?
By that same logic, you might as well put nothing in the center of the screen.

Whatever's in there usually gets them money, you can count on that.
Safest (as in least likely to offend) ways would be to use "he/she" or rephrase w/o the gendered pronoun as in "when was your child born?".

Traditionally, male-gendered is used for unknown sex, though some object to that.
"This growth continues exponentially… [a graph follows]"

That curve there doesn't look exponential, buck-o.
The Theora/VP3 code cannot be substantially improved without breaking backwards compatibility. While there are some gains to be made with better encoders, some of the choices, such as small fixed block-size, permanently hobble the codec.

There are those far more qualified than I to go into the technical details (I think there was an article by one of the FFMPEG devs), but the situation is not analogous to early versions of Webkit, Linux or Mozilla.

This is not a situation where it can substantially improve over time, which is one of the major advantages of an Open Format.
Scale It Back and Ship It
Good point, I will update it right now so it logs this data too :)
There is a lot of priming going on.
Real-Time Bidding for Cloud Computing
Agreed. We've used the "let them cry it out with increasing times between consoling visits" for all 4 of our kids and they hardly have any of the symptoms the author claims.

This is the kind of science I love: figuring out what's right for everyone by looking at averages.

Babies have different kinds of cries and parents have different needs. I'll say for myself and my wife that letting them cry it out seemed to help them learn to sleep alone in a far shorter time than any of our peers' kids. Sure, maybe our kids are different, but when I see the kind of entitlement parenting that often goes with the "cater to every cry" method, I'm less and less astonished at the self-centered attitude of the modern teen.
My co-founder and I had been working almost a full year before we got accepted to YCombinator, and we made some pretty substantial progress building out our back-office financial partnerships and getting savvy in the payment space.

Bill had walked away from a very lucrative job in finance, and I left a pretty prestigious scholarship at NYU law.

We were far from conception stage when we brought Karl on board. When he agreed to work for us, he knew he was going to learn a lot, get the YC experience, make some good connections, and see what it was like to work for an early-stage startup without having to make a life-changing commitment. If the company went belly-up, he could just go back to school in the fall. In fact, he did go back to school at the end of the summer.

If we went belly up, Bill and I would have been shit out of luck. Karl only came back after we raised money and offered him a salary.

There is no way we would have hired Karl had we not had the opportunity to work with him over the summer. But he did choose to work with us, and he was rewarded with a position that he would have had no chance of getting otherwise. He still has the option to go back to school, but if he does, he will have a head start on most of his peers.

Karl has been an incredible part of our team, and I am thrilled we have him. That being said, we did not need Karl to get where we are, which I think is the one prerequisite for giving anybody founder status (and the commensurate equity).

I worked for a startup (poverty level wages) right out of college. It was one of the best experiences I have had, and without it, there is no way I would have started this company. I wasn't doing it in the hopes that one day I would be anointed a founder.
Advice For Entrepreneurs
I thought it was a great article, but how do you actually apply the "up or out" principle in the real world?

The thing I have found is that in most work environments the good engineers accomplish great things, get burned out, then leave, while the bad engineers become exceptionally good at playing political games. You know, the same engineers that have appalling work performance are the ones that are ass-kissing all day long, forming alliances, playing the office politics game like they are desperate to keep from getting voted off a reality TV show.

The sad thing is, it actually works in most companies. The really unqualified employees will never be let go, or even disciplined, because they are "friends" with the management.

I think this creates a low morale for everyone. In some companies, the really talented engineers just quit because they get too frustrated with the general lack of motivation and laziness of the "political" engineers, and either drop out or burn out, knowing full well that the "political" engineer will probably be promoted to become their superior, even though they are grossly incompetent at their present job.

How do you solve this problem?
Full text search with MongoDB
Hacker News > Lists > Most Active Theads > "Ask HN: Cool Things You've Done (Brag Thread)"

187 Comments in 9 hours

haha I guess everyone's favourite subject ultimately is themselves
Try out git. Force yourself to use it for a few weeks. I didn't like it at first. I used to be a Mercurial guy until I really learned git. I still don't know what it is, but there's something about git that just makes me want to love it.
But--does it represent the least fixed point?

And isn't it rather the fixed point of the unzip function? (Is `zip' even a function (i.e. is `unzip' injective?))
Is it really so much more expensive to hire someone than to find a contractor, though? In theory, you don't have the risk - if they don't deliver, you don't pay - but in practice money isn't the only resource you're wasting with a bad hire, it's time too. Missed deadlines can be extremely costly. So you need to vet your contractors almost as much as your employees.

OK, depending on where you are, hiring an employee can drag you into a ton of legal obligation (as I mentioned in my original post) but typically that burden is reduced if the employee doesn't stay for too long. So as long as the company knows what they're getting into, I'm not sure why hiring a mediocre performer for all eternity is preferable to an overachiever who gets bored after a couple of months but hits the ground running. Sure, someone has to stay longer term, but that could be a pretty lean team.

I guess it's assumed that people job-hop because they're not good enough to hold down a job, and it's assumed that contractors know what they're doing. Why is that? You choose your contractors based on their reputation. You should be doing the same for your employees anyway.

FWIW, it may sound like it, but I'm not arguing out of some kind of bitterness here, I quite enjoy contracting because it means I always work on something that is important to the customer - I'm just genuinely curious why such different standards are applied, and if that's rational and sensible.
I might be the minority here but I didn't really find this article worthwhile.

On one hand it was a nicely documented theory that 'makes sense' but I have my doubts about how connected to reality it is. On the other it was written by someone who has had a series of bad managers and is pointing out the flaws with them.

From the studies I read, the biggest correlation between leaving a company and variables is the relationship with your direct manager.

Good managers will take the time to understand an employees ambitions and goals, and work with them to meet those exceptions in their current role or provide a path to a new role which will meet the employees goal. Neglecting to do this due diligence with your employees will leave them feeling isolated and itching to switch jobs.

That's where I think this guy's theory falls apart. There is no value apex, software is software everywhere you go, the only variable is how it is managed. Instead of a value apex I would replace it with a fulfillment meter, consider is each of your employees fulfilled at their current position and if not why not? That's the question you should be asking and those are the problems you should be solving.
Perhaps more appropriately titled "How map software could be more consistent with the magnifying glass metaphor".
He claims Mozilla only have a mobile browser on Maemo. Which is both untrue, as they've got builds for WinMo and Android, and a bit cheeky for an Apple pundit since it's Apple that is the main blocker for that happening on their platform.

(Mozilla claim they do better on Javascript benchmarks than the bundled Android browser, which is surprising).
Disappointing. Didn't live up to its promises of exposing aspects of the business which could only be gleaned by "going into the belly of the beast." The author might not be granted much literary license on most projects, but he sure took it here. (As much in the flowery prose as in the broken promise.)
Are you referring to this?:

http://www.fogcreek.com/Kiln/learnmore.html#hist_BranchAndMe...

That's about standard, the free 'gitk' does that much, too, for git.
That's why i will never run my webpage on your server :)

In all seriousness, does anyone have a cache or mirror?
Kings Of Flow is Latin Music and Entertainment
I've had the pleasure of working for one such company. My experience was exactly as described in the article: even though I enjoyed the team and the environment, eventually I was simply not getting what I needed out of the job. My manager was very understanding, and didn't try to feed me any HR "career" BS - he knew that there wasn't enough room for the growth I wanted, and that it made sense for me to move on. He simply said I'm welcome back at any time.

The word "alumni" in the article really hit me. Three years later I still occasionally join that team for a beer, and I'm actually introduced to new members as an alumnus. So, yes, such places do actually exist.
Invisibility cloak created in 3-D
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8574923.stm
Apture redefines the Search Bar pretty slick
"I'm Feeling Lucky" costs Google a lot of money too: http://hubpages.com/hub/Im-feeling-lucky-button-costs-Google...