skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Startup versus "startup-like" environment at a large company?
I'm being offered a 3 month contract to hire software development position at a local startup, while waiting to hear back about a likely offer from a local large company promising a startup-like environment.

I've been informed that it reached profitability last year, and has roughly doubled it's income rate for the first quarter of this year. I worked briefly at one last year that went under, and then took some time off to focus on my life (got married, bought a house, etc.).

I probably have an offer for a test automation position coming from another large company who is offering a "startup - like environment : innovative, minimal legacy technology, high energy but safer funding and saner work hours", but I haven't been able to confirm it yet.

The salary is competitive, the technology is cutting edge, and the coworkers I've talked with have been amazingly talented. As a small startup, I know the hours are likely to be intense, the technologies and learning curve broad and steep, and the rewards potentially greater.

Both positions are interesting and if I didn't have both options, I wouldn't hesitate to take the other. If I lean towards the startup, I'll probably have to be convincing my wife, parents, and in-laws that it is a good idea, but I don't like that being the main deciding factor.
I definitely relate to the teenage angst of college rejections, and still feel it sometimes (now in my third year). My school is considered one of the "New Ivies", and many of my classmates were similarly rejected or waitlisted at all the other (top tier engineering) schools they applied to except this one. We've ended up with a student body that's apathetic, and still somewhat resentful. I wonder how common this is at other "New Ivies"...

But you know what? To the entrepreneurial types among us, it only makes us work harder here. :)
Completely agree. It is terribly annoying being linked to a website, looking up at the url, and seeing some bullshit aggregator or other url-forwarder. I feel like I'm being taken advantage of, and immediately bounce.
Site that searches Craigslist for you
Yes I know there are other sites out there and I know it is easy to set up an RSS feed, but the site is not for the hacker. Because of this, usability is a high priority.
Any suggestions are helpful:http://www.notifinder.com/
The nontrivial differences are more interesting. To make declarations look similar to use was a gigantic mistake.

http://cdecl.org/
Everything I look at through Digg is frustratingly slow to open. I'm presuming this is something to do with the DiggBar rather than the sites having trouble coping with the Digg traffic. I'll be glad to see its back.
Cartoonqin
If you need your customer to define your product strategy, you're in the wrong business. But listening to your customer to decide whether your product benefits from cup holders instead of cigarette lighters is just refining your strategy.
No, they don’t.
Although the entire premise is a little absurd (either A or B), I'd much rather have the FCC making stupid decisions than a private company (Comcast/Time Warner) block chunks of the internet that are not in their best interest to show. Public entities have at least some measure of accountability (yes, I know about corruption and influence and lobbying) -- but companies have absolutely no accountability until they start to flagrantly violate the law (which again, they often influence a great deal in any case).

If we had a real market in the US for choosing different service providers, the equation would change quite a bit, but right now with effectively monopolies (or sometimes duopolies) in the majority of regions in the US, losing Net Neutrality is a very frightening prospect.
That's not really true. You would be encouraged if you made 8K off a crappy product with no advertising. You would think that making money is easy and that you could do much better with a less crappy product. True or not, that's how I'd read that statement and feel about that situation (which is actually pretty similar to my actual situation).
The point is not actually negotiation, but a perceived deal to be had. You don't have to think you can argue for a lower price, you just have to see that the TV is being sold for $10k, then see the "SALE!" sign next to it that tells you the TV is on sale for $3k. By then, you've already anchored to 10k, and the "negotiation" took 3 seconds.

Full negotiations will definitely drive some people away, but to use anchoring effectively, you can definitely advertised a "standard" price and the real price. With that, I don't see how you'd lose somebody based on that original, and you'd gain a few based on the perceived deal.
Nice resource, thanks! You should also add iwantmyname.com, a good resource with excellent internationalization support...
Predicting the Future With Social Media
XZipit.com - XZipit Video Game Rocker with Boise State Broncos XZipit Panel
People who look at the iPad and declare the death of hacking remind me of the people who in the middle of the internet boom saw the AOL-TW merger as the death of independent content.
Do you think a company like Comcast will stop with a little bit of price discrimination?

The FCC can be held accountable by the public to a much larger extent than any company.
I'm very much against the government enforcing "net neutrality", I'd much rather see regulations that eliminated the monopoly companies like comcast hold over a regional area and in turn lets the marketplace turn net neutrality a non-issue
The first thing I did after the DiggBar was released, was to turn it off.
There is a similar "Gray hat" SEO strategy, which involves buying domain names that include keywords you want, and then 301-redirecting them to your site--without updating their whois information. I wouldn't do this kind of thing unless you can devote a lot of attention to it.

You can create content-light pages like the ones Patrick does, for, e.g., encryptedbackupsonline.com--each page on the site would have another title from the same keyword cluster, and each one would end with a call-to-action like "Tarsnap offers [encrypted backups online] for security-conscious power users." (Where the brackets indicate a hyperlink.

Bonus points for having a landing page on your own site that targets those keywords.

(As is probably clear from the above, I do SEO. Patrick's advice is extremely good, so if you have the time, you'll probably do best by just doing what he says. However, if you'd like to know what you might pay to outsource that process to a third party, well, my email address is in the profile.)
Digg’s Kevin Rose: DiggBar Is Bad For The Internet, So We’re Killing It
Why Vector Clocks are Hard
IIRC Apple has made public a lot of these private APIs that they've used in the past.
That guy has way more courage than most people.

I never understood the sheltered life of the ultra-rich. Don't they realize how fake it all is?
If I write on my blog about Comcast doing something bad, what is stopping Comcast from simply blocking all connections to my blog?
This article threw me off for a while before I figured out that the guy wasn't talking about iBooks (pl. iBook), but an app named iBooks.
I ended up changing sites - wrapping other people's content was creepy.
I'm fairly sure that Ars is trolling its own readers on this topic because they know this gets them riled up and it doesn't fit with the sites political angle.
It's amazing to me that the guy actually changed his mind on the issue. It's like getting some Vatican Cardinal to convert to atheism.
Wikileak
Ask HN: input on the idea please?
Hi HN. I wouldn't ask you, but I had a pitch about this idea with some tech and non-tech people and all of them said they really like it, so I'm really confused. And also I'm excited as this might be finally the thing I'll be passionately working on. I'm not emotionally invested into it yet, so please crush it if you feel like.

Summary of the idea: a web-service that makes it easy to plan an education program on any discipline and share it with the world. People may search for specific keyword, for example "Ruby On Rails", then they'll be handed a list of plans created by others. A plan is a document that describes what a person should learn (subjects, concepts, books, articles, other plans) in order to become a "novice", then a "mid-level" and finally a "senior" specialist. A plan by default is editable by others (with author's supervision) and others may, thus, contribute and rearrange it.

Full description and profit models: http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddr4mr7n_30d52n2hgw
What makes their reality any "less real" to them than yours is to you (or mine to me)?
While I hope to never be negotiating for a salary again, here's what I'd say when asked about a salary in a hypothetical job interview (to have my cake and eat it too):

"What kind of salary do I want? That's a hard question, especially in light of the fact that working with you guys is the most interesting opportunity I'm evaluating. I'd expect offers around [insert aggressive number], but again- let me stress that I'm really excited about the idea of working with you. So if you guys can't afford that, I'd still really be interested in hearing your best offer."
Heidi Montag Underwent Uncommon 'Back Scoop' Surgery
Certainly that's a grey area, but I don't see why such posts couldn't just replace the user with "Unknown User" and leave the actual data there. Definitely there'd be a problem with conversations when some posts disappear. But I should still be able to detach myself from those things.
The first and probably only programming book I've read completely.
Apple's distracting iPad could choke Android development
By any objective standard you (and me and everyone else reading this) are ultra-rich.

I find this fact to be singularly depressing.
I'm going to start asking this in every HN review request: what's it written in and how well is the technology working for you?
Digg is nothing short of pollution of the Internet.
Microsoft was also bundling. E.g. Internet Explorer.
To its (very slight) credit, Apple doesn't ship the iPad with iBooks installed by default.

Their control of the App Store is perhaps more-problematic (Microsoft couldn't actually stop competitors from using those undocumented APIs, once discovered). But at the same time, Apple doesn't dominate the mobile market like what Microsoft had on the desktop. (Similarly --obligatory bad-car-analogy-- auto companies exercise far more control over their dealership networks than Microsoft ever did over its resellers. But the FTC/EU took issue with Microsoft because of its monopoly status.)

Also, there's always the inconsistent treatment of game consoles to consider. The FTC has never investigated a dominant console supplier for not allowing any app from any developer onto their console. And Apple's App Store is wide open when viewed through the lens of that market.
It's only when you see a 16:9 tablet that you realize why Apple went with 4:3 proportions. It seems no one else has the systems in place for someone to say this looks odd, let's rethink.
I wonder if the figures are the same now, after the housing bust.
Would it be possible to make a license - "PGPL" - that included something to the effect of "If you assert any patent against any PGPL-licensed project, you lose all rights to all PGPL-licensed projects forever"?
I don't wanna come across as a spammer or anything, but I'm building something that'll hopefully solve that pain for you.
He isn't exactly giving everything away; he'll be "surviving on $1,341 a month". Which is very wise; using money to buy things rarely leads to happiness, but using it to provide financial security eliminates many potential sources of unhappiness.
They don't have it pre-installed, but as soon as you open the App Store for the first time you get a system alert message prompting you to download iBooks.
Very interesting article. A little too tidy, though. For example, I wonder how his wife felt about this?
I think it says something that K&R C, as a book, is significantly more readable and concise than most programming books nowadays. Part of it is the language, but part of it is simply how the book is approached. Simple statement, simple example, move on.

I mean, compare that book to the other programming books on your shelf. It is positively minuscule. And if you compare the writing to that in a more modern programming book, there's certainly a lot of wasted text in newer books.

My latest programming book is The Essential ActionScript 3.0 by O'Reilly, and there's way too much embellishment in the text. Not only does it make it longer to read, but it also makes it harder to find particular information, and quickly absorb it.

I learned C almost exclusively from K&R C, and I know many others did too, and to this day I wonder how it is that all these new programming language books can be such monolithic texts.

"Essential", they say.
I'm sure many unhappy broke people would prefer to be unhappy rich people.
Once THAT happens I have no problem with the idea, until it happens, however, we need protection from those monopolies.
Grandolf, assuming the FCC doesn't fall down that slope, do you support forced net neutrality?

Remember in the case that censorship does become an issue you can fight that, but there's nothing about net neutrality that gives the FCC that power. I want net neutrality and I'll be quite specific about what the FCC can do about that. Plus if the FCC is already headed towards the censorship department, blocking net neutrality isn't going to stop that.
The thing that has always struck me about K&R is that it contains no fluff. You get so much information for each paragraph, that you often have to re-read them to get all the information contained therein. Probably the programming book I've used the most.

In contrast, the C++ programming language is a mouthful, and ended up being just another pretty book on my bookshelf.
How is it a mistake? In C, if you know how to use it, you know how to declare it, and if you know how to declare it, you know how to use it. I don't see how one can make even a remotely plausible case that doing it otherwise would be an improvement.
Further - what is preventing them from changing the html and removing their name from whatever they serve?
I'd like to at least try being rich though, just to see if I like it ;)

Seriously though, I believe I'd be most happy with just enough money to be able to work on the things that really interest me and not have to worry about making money from them (which is to say a lot of money, but not nearly enough to qualify as ultra-rich).
File Sharing with an iPad: Ugh
Seems like maybe iBooks was intended to be a "first class" app but they couldn't make the schedule to make the OS image, so they decided to distribute it over iTunes.
You are arguing entirely for the sake of arguing, because Portugal didn't legalize cocaine, heroin, and meth; it legalized personal possession. You will still go to prison if you open a heroin store in Lisbon.
19-Year-Old Buy iPad Just To Smash It
AOL Will Sell Or Shutdown Bebo In 2010
See also these Fake Steve pieces:

http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/why-ibm-is-in-trouble-with-...

http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/case-against-ibm-continued....
Their monopolies exist precisely because of these municipal restrictions, which I'll refrain from calling shakedowns. The higher the barrier, the fewer competitors you'll have.
Yes - as I mentioned regardless of quants there will always be heavy demand for mathematically-minded developers in finance. As far as enterprise development goes, it's a great (well funded) industry to work in. Technologies tend to focus on proven fault-tolerant methodologies - think .NET/Oracle stacks instead of Ruby/Cassandra or whatever the flavor of the month is on the internets.

Don't sell yourself short on mathematics before undergraduate - the nature of mathematical talent changes the deeper you get into a particular topic. But yes: if your goal is to become a quant, do not think it will be easy to get into the industry without a PhD.
"I think it's important to point out that firms like Google which have supported net neutrality, have done so to support their own business models."

Right - business models which depend on competition. As opposed to those that depend on blocking customers' access to your competitors.

Comcast is welcome to steal market share from Google the old fashioned way - by building a better product. I'll use it. But if I log on and find I have no choice - well then I'm pissed.

Everybody lobbies for their business model. But which kind of business model did Adam Smith have in mind? Which kind creates value and which kind destroys it?
Reimbursement for prosthetics can vary a lot depending on the patient population you're talking about. An elderly diabetic who rarely leaves home and loses a leg would be lucky to get something halfway wearable. But for young, active people, a lot of insurance companies regard a C-Leg (which costs something like $50,000 altogether) as pretty much standard. (I say that as a C-Leg owner.)

Prosthetic legs aren't phenomenal, but they're way ahead of arms. I think the combination of this new arm (which may be the first that's both highly wearable and produces serious functionality improvements) and a high-visibility patient population that skews young and active spells good things for reimbursement.
I wonder how he got so rich by being so misguided.

If everyone feels fake to you, you can resolve that by putting yourself in situations where you will meet real, genuine people. There are many places where you can do that in the world. Hint: five star hotels in Hawai aren't it.

Go do some charity work. Go spend time helping people who are poorer than you. Go around the world without checking into five star hotels. Go and do what everyone else does. There's no need to give your money away to live a genuine life. Having the money available also makes things possible that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. When you see an opportunity to make a difference, having $5m in the bank allows you to make things happen that would be simply impossible otherwise.

This is probably a controversial view, but I don't think this guy is brave. I think he's just stupid. He's greatly limited his own freedom, and that after having worked like a donkey his whole life to expand it. What a pointless thing to do.
There is, essentially, nothing to be known about C beyond what is in this book. If you can read those 272 pages, and understand them all, then you are well on the way to being a C wizard.

Say what? This is like saying that once you know what all the commands in Illustrator do, you're well on your way to being a professional illustrator. The reason that K&R is so small is that so much of C programming happens outside/above the language.

I like K&R a lot, and I won't argue that it's the best soup-to-nuts C book (though I recommend C Interfaces and Implementations more heartily). But if everything you need to know about C is in K&R, how do you implement a balanced tree?

(I caught myself typing "how do you implement a hash table", and remembered that K&R actually has a hash table in it. Damn you, K&R!)
As cliche as it may sound, I think that the publishers are simply afraid of that which they don't understand. I rarely use Google Books but the few times I have I immediately noticed that what I am looking at is not the entire book. The fact that this isn't well know by the publishers makes it clear; they have no clue what Google Books is, but they don't like it.
How to thrive among pirates
Oh! I forgot to mention:

1.5 If the hard drive is so badly failed that you cannot even get ddrescue running, try again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. I cannot explain why a hard drive would come back to life, but I have seen it happen a number of times. I have seen a hard drive that was clicking and irrecoverable for two solid weeks suddenly show up just fine one day in the device list. It mounted and everything, and we promptly pulled all the data off. I'm not much of an optimist, but when it comes to failed hard drives, I've seen miracles occur.
It is not free to move, and it is unlikely that a person in this situation can find work closer to home.

You miss the problem of selling old house, getting new house or (more likely) rental versus low additional payment per week. Maybe you have kids, and the school where you are is better than the one you would move to. Maybe both spouses are working and you had to make that "whose work do we live closer to" decision.
Wikipedia linked to this article with some details on the arm: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/dean-kamens-luke...
New Paltz is a sweet town, but that bus costs $20 one-way. Doing that everyday adds up to a lot of money very quickly.
Thanks for taking the time to write all this.

Question: Is there anything keeping you from living closer to where you work?
Stroustrop is, or at least in its later editions became, a pretty indespensable C++ book. Most of the topics in C++ are best addressed by it. Unfortunately, C++ is a nightmare of a language, so there are many, many topics, and you don't read it cover-to-cover any more than a cook would read New Pro Chef or McGee cover-to-cover.
I remember a paper that asked participants to note down the last two digits of their social security, and subjects anchored themselves to that (statistically significantly- one of the authors was Dan Ariely).

Do you have a link? I am very skeptical that merely tossing out large-sounding numbers during an interview would have any influence on your likely salary range. In situations like that, your potential employer usually has a preconceived idea of what a "reasonable" salary for the position is; intuitively, you'd need to make a fairly strong suggestion to get them to anchor on a different figure (rather than, say, the salary they are already paying to other employees in a similar job function).
This is one of the few books I've kept on my bookshelf for many years and still read through it every so often for a C syntax refresher. It's a great read since C syntax and conventions are still so pervasive in many of today's languages. Perhaps, it is one of the few programming books that can be passed down from one generation to the next.
HP Slate Specs, Prices Revealed?
Go for Rose-Hulman, it may be less expensive now but the way the California economy is going, UCLA may catch up. I have a friend in the honors program at UCLA for econ and he had hard time even getting into the intro econ class last year because there were too many people vying for a spot (something that being in the honors program is 'supposed' to help with).

UCLA may be more well known all around, but if you want to study any discipline of engineering, Rose-Hulman is the way to go. And in fact, RHIT probably has a better reputation when it comes to engineering anyways.
I guess the question can be rephrased to: Do you have a destination?

If your aim is to just "keep climbing to the top", then you're on a threadmill.

If your aim is to "get to a specific place in your life", then you may be on a ladder, though it's arguable whether you're on the right ladder. If the ladder doesn't involve doing the thing that you want to do once you get "there", you're probably on the wrong ladder.
A big problem with listening to your customers is that you're often listening to individual customers. The problems they would like you to solve can't be fixed the way they suggest because it would cripple the system/community as a whole.

This is because users will often have a pretty egocentric view of how their experience can be enhanced. They do not understand this will never work when it's applied to all users.
U.S. court rules against FCC on Net neutrality
I recently moved and reduced my commute from an hour and twenty minutes (one-way) to about twenty-five.

It has made an incredible difference. I'm much more relaxed, and I feel like I actually have a life during the week again. I'd probably take up to a 20% pay cut to avoid doing it again.