skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
could also finance via an earn-out with founder involved for a period of time

IMO it's a good writeup on how a financial buyer dots the i's and crosses the t's on a deal but the main driver of a deal isn't that, it's just, can it be grown into a much bigger business, and what are the potential risks and rewards.

Do the buyers love the business and are they willing to do whatever it takes to realize that potential? If the buyers aren't thinking like founders and are thinking like financial buyers worried about the last few percent, it's a recipe for problems.

The risks are sufficiently large in taking over someone else's code and customers, that only reason to buy it is if you think you can make it worth multiples of what you're paying.

As a seller, it might make sense to do an earn-out or retain a small equity stake and involvement with the right buyers, but being a minority partner without the type of protection VCs get (board seat, liquidation preference, pro-rata follow-on rights / anti-dilution) is a terrible position to be in, unless you are very sure of who you are dealing with, so typically not with this type of financial buyer.
Square: Developer Platform, San Francisco. Full Time. ONSITE. VISA sponsorship.

This is our team: Developer Platform. We are hiring! https://www.squareup.com/developers

Server Engineers - we use mostly Go and create the platform that makes Square a Platform, we also own several products, and are releasing many new primitives for devs to build businesses on top of Square https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Square/98588966

Frontend Engineers - owning eCommerce API for websites to accept payments (and do card on file) without PCI effort, dev experience, dev portal, and new not-yet-released products! https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Square/96291400

iOS Engineers - opening up Square's Hardware, so anyone can build their own Point of Sale, plus new not-yet-released products! - https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Square/96175757

Technical Writer for the platform - be the voice and create an industry leading dev experience https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Square/96148491

Interview process is a phone screen or two, then onsite, then offer.
Also "learn from mistakes" is taken for granted with quantity here, but it is very far from reality that learning comes inherently from practice. In the example, I would assume a student graded solely by weight couldnt care less about learning. I would create 10 pots reaching the minimum quality possible to be considered a pot and move on without looking back.

Also, it is very reasonable to assume that a student graded by quality would practice a lot and discard (and learn with) the worst pots.
> I carefully curate the people I follow, roughly for any given day, I can read the tweets in my timeline written on that day - all of them. When twitter's algorithm "surfaces" certain tweets, it removes them from the regular timeline, so if I dismiss their seemingly randomly selected "While you were away", I wont ever see them again! How brain-damaged is this?

I have the exact same issue; I follow less than thirty accounts, and I want to read everything from all of them. When I tried dismissing the "While you were away...", I was missing many tweets, so I was forced to turn it back on.
People are afraid to share anything that talks bad about Samsung, because they believe it will affect them negatively in the future when searching for jobs or such.
I'm not sure the big companies actually track you based on browser/machine fingerprinting. It's certainly entirely possible that they could, but it's relatively expensive to develop and maintain the infrastructure that does so, all to track a bunch of paranoids who aren't lucrative subjects of targeted advertising.

Sort of a cold comfort, I know.
Spanish keyboards work like that too. If you want the accent by itself, you tap it followed by a space (same as in a type-writer).
Downvoted because you offered a uselessly simplistic characterization of many peoples' responses to complicated phenomena.
Google has too much, not too little cash.
Some services will geolocate you by looking at your DNS server's geolocation, so when you try to resolve their endpoint www.example.com you'll get back an IP address pointing to the closest datacenter.

How do you know how is your DNS server geolocated? I made a tiny proof of concept of a DNS reflector with a little extra:

$ dig +short whoami.fluffcomputing.com txt

Or in Windows:

nslookup -type=txt whoami.fluffcomputing.com

Or in PowerShell:

(Resolve-DnsName -Type txt -Name whoami.fluffcomputing.com).strings

The DB used is MaxMind's GeoLite2; so the system is as (in)accurate as the DB might be.

If you just request an A record you'll get just your DNS server IP address as other services do (e.g. whois.akamai.net).
The Webpack story is interesting because its author isn't (well, wasn't) even a JS developer in his day job or was part of the JS community. I don't hate Webpack but I really have no idea where it came from. Browserify was made by one of Node's ecosystem top contributors, so at least that makes sense.
I hate to be "that guy", but you are talking about the Unicode space.

UTF-8, UTF-16, etc. are just different encodings of the exact same Unicode space.
I was aware of NTVS but not the other, thank you! Although it's still hard to keep getting a full team to keep installing plugins ;).
Doesn't the same apply to plants?! I don't know about you, but I'm quite attached to my indoors plants... Obviously I won't eat them (I don't know any recipes involving orchids), but I'd be quite sad if they died.
> Doing that sort of work now feels like I am sabotaging my career.

Heh, I feel that way and I'm 22. Unfortunately the only language I know is JavaScript and the stuff I am interested in and learning isn't quite there yet in terms of jobs.
This is basically what smartmontools does:

/var/log/syslog:Oct 6 08:14:10 hostname smartd[573]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel changed from 61 to 62
/var/log/syslog:Oct 6 09:44:10 hostname smartd[573]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel changed from 62 to 61
/var/log/syslog:Oct 6 10:14:10 hostname smartd[573]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel changed from 61 to 60
/var/log/syslog:Oct 6 18:44:10 hostname smartd[573]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel changed from 60 to 59
Recently I was interested in a position with a large and reputed to be IT-savvy company. Their online application gave applicants the choice of "fill out tiresome form with data they already have" or "log in with Yahoo." I thought there MUST be some other choice I missed. I reread the page. searched the page. Refreshed the page. Nope.

Just Yahoo. WTF? The 90's called, etc... And, when I did a search for similar application forms, I found out it was hardly an outlier.

I started to get interested: More searching uncovered a significant percentage, maybe 10-15% overall, of major technology employers use a job application system that only accept Yahoo identities. It must be some quirk of job application portal vendors. But there it is. Anyone applying to more than one position will find several of these. And since you can't re-use the manually entered identity information across companies, the incentives to use a Yahoo identity are pretty strong. Time-to-payback is the second one you encounter.
There's a middleground between those extremes. There's lots of knowledge that isn't relevant most of the time, but when it is relevant its worth its weight in gold. (And often these things aren't so obvious that people will google search them.)

When I'm trying to evaluate a candidate, I want people who proactively search out knowledge in that middle zone. People who understand complexity theory, and CPU caching behaviour, and the C10k/C10M problem just because they know they might need it some day. Because they want to work on problems where this stuff is relevant.

This sort of knowledge is the difference between hearing "our website is slow - I think its the database?" and "our website is slow - I took a look and our database server has run out of open file handles. But I'm still confused - that shouldn't explain the latency we're seeing."

The CAP theorem is a great example of this sort of middleground might-be-useful knowledge. Understanding how your database will behave in the face of network partitions is exactly the sort of thing that separates good engineers from great ones.
There's engineering challenges in frontend but they only apply to Facebook-tier scale. There's also cooler stuff like data visualization, advanced animations/design and WebGL but those seem to be done by designers. For most of us, it truly is gluing X framework to Y backend over and over again.
Has anyone managed to install the Color Emoji font on Windows? Getting something about it not being a valid font file
>I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of directors tweeting often too.

What does this mean?
Uh huh. Stephen Fry has you pegged, I'm afraid. http://youtu.be/J7E-aoXLZGY
Data Centers are great for the tax base, multi-million dollar businesses that bring in loads of tax revenue, but not lots of people, which reduces infrastructure costs. The additional tax dollars thus goes out to hire people, etc. etc.

Virginia is on a huge high-tech growth track due to the increased tech thrust in the Fed Gov space. The state is even reviving towns with tax benefits for computing centers in remote parts.

While this isn't along the famed "Tech Corridor" in Virginia, it could be the beginning of a "Tech Triangle" that could quickly grow to a second place tech hub to SV.
Ask HN: What's the best way to manager email campaigns
I am totally new to email marketing. And I wish I can get some experienced marketers to explain me about how to manage the email marketing campaigns.

Currently, I collected average 10 contacts (email, first/last names) from 30+ brands, and put them in Google spreadsheet. I am planning to use MailChimp. Before I jump on it, I have two questions.

Q1:
I want to know which one is good idea (practice) to manage these contacts

1) keep these contacts in google spreadsheet and update/organize them according to campaigns status (open, bounce, click etc)

2) totally rely on MailChimp to manage the contacts.

Q2:
I am a little worry if there is one day I need to migrate these contacts to another email marketing tool or sales tool, or it's quite normal that people manage contacts, campaigns across different tools at the same time?

Thanks in advanced.

Try not be discovered by my boss, I registered this new account to ask. Sorry about this.
Hurricane Matthew Visualization
i'll speak to what i know -- an equinix datacenter probably employs about 20 people, most of them security staff.

most of the people who work on the actual facility are vendor staff, i.e. hvac specialists, power system specialists, the people from caterpillar that maintain the diesel gens, etc. for that matter, even security is outsourced (but they are still full time @ the facility).

everyone else is a customer, coming in and out to do internet-y things in the cloud aka working on computers in datacenters, same as it ever was.
I became CTO quite young and I was running around doing technical stuff when my colleague pointed out that was not what I should be doing. I was co-founder of the company, so after I read what I should be doing (which is more like what you say), I appointed my right hand as CTO and I became head of our small R&D dep. That was excellent. Now i'm CTO again; older and wiser and I fit the role now, however, when we grow more that might change. I really do want to keep coding for fun and business.
> livestock is livestock, pets is pets

I had a Korean friend that explained dog meat in basically the same way: pet dogs are pets, food dogs are food.
>The program you're piping to can certainly parse "import foobar", but how will it know what's in "foobar"?

That's the "understanding which language you're in" part comes in.

> You could argue that it could parse foobar, but then it would need to recursively parse all of "foobar"'s dependencies too, and so on, which seems pretty inefficient if you're doing that a lot compared to a program keeping it in memory. Sure you could create files to cache that data, but at that point you're sort of waltzing into IDE territory anyway.

The whole point is that "Unix is your IDE". If a specialized tool benefits from caching, it can use it. If more than one tool can share the cache, pass it as a parameter or pipe it in. If it speaks in a universal language (ideally, simple text) and it's a specialized tool, it's certainly following the Unix way.

> Besides, the "unix as an IDE" idea is based on using general purpose utilities, not specialized language specific ones, and those utilities make no strong assumptions about the input text.

That's another arbitrary line. It makes sense that awk or grep work with any type of text. It doesn't make sense that gcc or a tool like I just explained "makes no strong assumptions" about what's coming in.
The biggest gap for the recruiter is between no and yes. The tiny increase they get for themselves for negotiating hard on behalf of their placement rounds to zero in most cases. If it costs them a placement, the opportunity cost is huge.
FCC Proposal: Internet Providers Must Ask to Share Your Data
Apple and Facebook are both establishing datacenters in Denmark. For the Facebook one they estimate 1.200 jobs building it, and 1.000 new jobs both working there and around the datacenter.

I think they are going to be very disappointed if that is the amount of jobs they expect.

There is some interesting information from Facebooks datacenter in Oregon from 2011 here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/prineville-data-center/press-...

> Over the course of the project, more than 1,300 people have worked on the site – an average of 250 workers a day. When completed, Facebook has committed to hire 35 full-time employees to run and maintain the data center.
Are you saying that there aren't any jobs using long-term established stable ecosystems in the hiring market? No J2EE CRUD apps, no standard LAMP websites, no .NET stack-based jobs?
Digital anonymity protected by “web of trust” for authentification
Mylan overcharged Medicaid for EpiPen for years, despite warnings
On top of 54 jobs there are additional tax on profit + all indirect benefits, more computer hardware maintenance, HVAC install and maintenance, etc...
Chrome style tabs for qt quick pleeease, I think they have proven that ui paradigm is here to stay
Why don't you publish your revolutionary findings in a peer-reviewed journal? You will be hailed as the father of a completely new field of scientific inquiry. (Since current science cannot explain how the same food can taste different just because it was raised organically.)
I'm about to hit 40 as well, and I completely identify with the pressure to keep up to date with new languages and frameworks, with the fact that I've lost memory of many things I haven't used recently, and that despite the proliferation of the new new thing, there really aren't that many new ideas out there.

But the thing is, I really like that I must always be learning. I just have that kind of brain that is attracted to learning new things, so for me this career has always been a natural fit.

In the last few years I learnt Meteor.js and built an issue tracker from scratch; I made several attempts at gaming projects using C++, C#, Swift, and others; I played Microcorruption and Cryptopals and Starfighter to learn a bunch about assembly, reverse engineering, crypto and security; I learnt Go and built a compiler with it; and right now my attention is moving towards lua to do some pico8 games. I did all this on the side of my boring corporate java developer job, and for no other reason than I wanted to learn new things. (OK, maybe I had big dreams of a startup with the issue tracker, but the others were purely for fun.)

I'm probably never going to be well known for any of those things, and I really haven't built up the chops to be considered an expert in any of them. But I'm content being a dilettante. Perhaps one day I'll get exhausted of exploring new things, but until then it's just fun to just dabble in whatever takes my fancy.
Beautiful rejoinder. That was a fun video. :)
From the demo filmed today vs that demo, it feels like they've made a lot of progress
Marc Andreesen talks how AI will change the future
SMART stats are only one source of data though that can be predictors of drive failures. Hard drives can experience latency spikes and erratic performance compared to peers before SMART records problems, for example. This is part of why predictive monitoring can be so difficult - the data you didn't know you needed is probably among the ones you didn't ingest into your metrics, and you can't dump literally everything in /proc every other second to your metrics system without sacrificing some CPU or network bandwidth either.
Yes, you've just described economically unproductive enterprises, i.e. those who offer a service or product that nobody would consciously pay for at a market rate if faced with the prospect of doing so. Another way to describe these are pyramid schemes, since they require ever-greater investment (like an IPO) in order to subsidize a product nobody deeply values. If your business model relies on the consumer believing that the product is free, then clearly the consumer doesn't value your product.
> The question is whether there is actually good refactoring support on the UNIX command line that can compete directly with the likes of ReSharper or IntelliJ IDEA? I haven't seen anything coming close to that yet.

There's nothing stopping people from making it. IDEA Community is open source; I haven't looked at the code but I trust it can be decoupled and made into a separate utility.

If you want an example that's out there, Go has support for refactoring via tools like eg and gorename, and you can use them in an IDE, in a text editor or in a terminal with nothing more than GNU coreutils.
I use Booky.io and Pinboard.
Feeling it here in Sarasota, FL, mildly. It's forecast to do a strange loop, heading north and spiraling back to approximately where it presently is, but a bit N/E. It will be interesting if it does. And Nicole is right on its tail.
I'm not sure what the average salaries look like for data center employees, but assuming a reasonable, round figure of $50k/year, that's about $2.7mm/year in additional area income. Which has a multiplicative effect as it gets spent in the local economy and supports other area jobs. It also costs a lot of money to build out a data center and get all the infrastructure in place to support it, and that money gets spent (idealistically) on local contractors.

Plus, once the area infrastructure, local zoning/regulations, and talent pool gets built out to support this type of project, it becomes a lot more attractive for other companies to bring similar projects.

Tax exemptions to attract business can get real shady and dubious, but it's not just the permanent, direct jobs you have to factor in. The potential positive externalities in this case seem like a solid case for tax exemptions. And the grant helps absorb some of the cost of getting local infrastructure in place that'll be needed to support it; infrastructure that'll benefit more than just OVH.
Actually not. If you google the debate you'll find there's a history of using the word this way that goes back a very, very, long time in a variety of literature.

I have to admit I thought the same as you until someone pointed this out.
I didn't mean in any way that QML was a worse solution than what qt4 offers. More that it's not accessible (not shipping along with current 3d software) so it is off the radar for most people. 6 months ago I was at a place where all code had to be compatible with Python 2.6 (we had moved off of Python2.5 only a year or so before). When I've looked at playing with PySide2 using Python2 I see that it's not there yet.[1] I feel like I'm in the minority of people I work with who have even seen Python3, let alone know what features it has. At my current place we don't compile anything.

Most of the work I see are forms, running inside 3d software, that are basically arguments for a process...maybe read from a database or your local scene/environment. Designer UI files or hand-written UIs seem to be good enough for most people (it's way better than the alternative scripting UIs used before Qt). It needs to run inside and outside of Maya and other packages, which usually means is compatible with Python 2.6 and 2.7, likely need to support PyQt and PySide, and might need to work in Linux and Windows (ideally following that OS' conventions). Performance isn't a huge concern since loading the data takes way more than drawing the UI. Also, people are really averse to learning a new language.

The understanding I had for qt5 was focusing on UI elements for alternate devices like cellphones and touch. While a lot more flexible, in many cases you'd have to reimplement normal UI widgets from lower-level pieces. At the same meeting, the few people familiar with QML were asking about getting a QML Tree View.

I'm curious to know more about qt5, but like Python3, it's currently not an option.

[1] https://github.com/PySide/pyside2/wiki
This is the first time in history there are a huge number of "old", nay, wizened, programmers around in comparison to young ones.

Make of that what you will.

As a 40+ programmer, who knows what becomes of those who move into management, I am seeing lots of my cohort falling back into actually making things, as a way to preserve our hard-won value.

This makes me happy. And you whippersnappers better watch yourselves ;)
So Facebook's take on VR is that it is going to be all about people. I am not seeing their vision but I didn't 'get' Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or even Chat Roulette... I will need some persuasion that this will work for the selfie-obsessed narcissistic world, just wearing a VR headset is not a good look.

I can see how Google's take on VR works, you re-use the phone in a budget way and have apps that make sensible use of the format - games, 3D immersive stuff exhibition tour stuff and other Google goodies that are good toys. Really this brings to life what Google do anyway with StreetView, photosheres and so on, so it makes sense. I can see a large army of casual VR users making occasional use of that stuff. I can also see hi-end gaming going for VR, that makes sense too and seemed the obvious market for the Oculus product. Facebook seem to think they have some special transformative take on that, a bit like how the Wii took the games console out of the teenager's bedroom and put it in the front room for mum to do her fitness training games on. Until we see the product and applications some belief is required and even then I will not be an early adopter. This VR stuff has evolved slightly the 'cardboard' way but the fundamentals have not changed in the last 20 years. The problems have nothing to do with nausea from immersive VR, people probably had the same concerns about the horseless carriage. The problems are more to do with what exactly that use case is that compels people to be wearing VR headsets for hours every day and whether people really do want to block out their sight to wear some immersive headgear. This isn't going to happen on the commute home for a while.
So I'm a customer of the DPT when I get a parking ticket?
APL is finally gonna take the world. Thanks to google.

Wait, does it have APL symbols?
Tech Talent Sourcing is our Business. You need to experience it