skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This can happen when a startup has a ton of money. Many startups are founded by guys who are already rich as an odd sort of hobby, or attempt to stay relevant. It's not good but not as abnormal as some of the other posters are implying. You should leave sooner rather than later. The only reason to stay is if they are rich because they have a great product they are making money with, and it would be worth vesting a portion of your options.
I hate javascript because of broser compatibility issues. Web programming is fun for me if I can stay away from them, which is why I've recently started doing all my web programming in GWT.
I have thought about it for awhile and I can't help but think it's anything besides management error. I don't think they have any reason to employ me only to see if they could do better somehow. The job market in my area is very much in the control of the employees right now so making weird bets isn't likely to get you anywhere.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469965

Yours has a more direct link to the full article, though.
What's funny is that one of the new junior hires is being given a pretty big task.

The system itself is pretty complicated and they use a lot of jargon to describe things so it really helps to have someone at least define what these terms mean.
I think most rational people have a schizophrenic response to bits like this. It’s glib and cliché for the player to beg forgiveness because the game itself is corrupt. In a different time I naively thought that if the contest is crooked, don’t play. However, you get older and realize nobility is shortsighted, and that one of the trade-offs we willingly accept, to live amongst endless possibility, is the reservation of veto power for those prepared to pay for the protection of their self-interests.

So I remain realistically optimistic. After a hem and haw, I’ve settled on believing that business with a capital B-for-billion is a much different animal with greater responsibility. But only in that their duty is to succeed for their shareholders, for their employees, and for their customers; in that order.

Taxes suck, life is short, and none of us ever feel that our share is spent wisely. Seeing a company do their homework to pay less shouldn’t feel any more like salt in a wound than meeting an octogenarian. If you knew that was your future, you’d play a similar game.
I basically agree with this, but I can’t help thinking it would be stronger if it were softer in places.

For example, I couldn’t say that “for homeopathy to be effective, it would have to work in violation of the principles of biology, chemistry, and physics” actually means. Surely it would be just as damning and clearer to say that it can’t beat a placebo in well-designed tests.

Likewise, “Its devotees don’t concern themselves with evidence” is awfully broad. I think some of them do, they just aren’t very good at it. There’s no need to call people stupid when you can show they believe something false.

Quibbles, really. I look forward to seeing more things like this.
and free libraries, etc. You're way better off being poor in the USA than in the middle of Africa, for example.
Five Mistakes Vim Beginners Make
did I miss out on bee sting algebra class?
My take is that irrationality (by somebody) or bad luck (by somebody) leads to poverty. Which leads to more irrationality. Which leads to more poverty. And so on. It can be a vicious cycle that is hard to escape from, mentally and financially.
if you have specific feedback we'd love to hear it.
Healthy Food Habits for Diabetics | Hi Health and Fitness
It looks like this slide isn't intended for internal Microsoft use, so likely they are trying to get across the intentions/direction of focus to the audience.
In the USA I think $2k/month for a single person, who had the foresight and willpower to not get married (yet) and not make babies (yet) is actually quite livable and hardly poverty.
If your income comes from capital gains or creative accounting, yes.

But if you're a salaried worker earning over 150-200k, the percentage of your income going to federal income tax is greater as your income increases - more of your income falls into a higher bracket. (Also, FICA doesn't drop to nothing, it drops to 1.45% from 7.65%, saving you 6.2%.)
See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_income_tax_2008.svg

You are assuming that as income rises above 150-200k, it takes forms that are taxed at a lower rate, not just "potentially".
Ask HN: Asking my boss for a piece of the pie
I have been working for a IT Managed Service Provider for several years, and have helped bring in several bigger clients and expand the services we provide. I like the people I work for, and I am thinking about approaching the owners about partnership of some sort. I don't have money to invest, but I think they want to keep me and know that I could make more money elsewhere.

Any ideas about what specifically to ask for or approaches to take?
MUTIARA KATA CINTA « Dwiki Setiyawan's Blog
Run for the hills. Take the first job you can get doing real work. You'll make yourself crazy otherwise.

I'm at the point where I've had some good jobs and some bad ones. In every single one of the bad ones, I could tell you exactly the same story you've shared above. You've been hired, these guys are "ramping up" but have no idea where they are really going and zero expectation that you can help them get there.

Here's the thing that I've found - it's a huge red flag if you see a smart and capable person not really doing anything. Something is wrong organizationally and you can't fix it. On several teams, I found myself defending managers or the "people in control" saying to myself and others things like "their vision is good, we just need to pull it together." Or "so-and-so is really smart, but needs to figure out how to better sell the solution to the higher-ups/customers/whoever."

Every single time I've seen these signs, I've seen teams that fell apart, projects that were never completed, and most important to me, wasted my time and effort trying to help.

I'm not saying that there isn't some chaos that can be coalesced into a real product or experience that you can be proud of and build on, but my personal experience is that what you describe is a usually a big fail on the way. And it will only continue or get worse.

Your only hope there is if you can take charge of a project that is customer-facing and iterate directly with those customers on delivering usable software to those customers. Otherwise, you gotta get out.
They do. Sorta. It is called "Windows XP Mode" (XPM), but it has some fairly significant limitations: it is only available to Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions. It also suffers from the overhead limitations of VMs - for instance, the video "card" is emulated so video-intensive programs suffer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC#Windows_XP_M...
Do you plan to add length? ie localstorage.length, etc.
I'll like to implement this on http://readmelater.com

Looks great by the way!
I have kj mapped to Esc here. Right on the home row, and almost never comes up in the english language.
I know, I know, it is meant to be funny (it is) and it's lame to make a serious comment but:

The problem is by now many households have hand-me-down iphone chains in the family and have spent much money not only in the handsets but also in apps. So unless really this is your first smartphone, the comparison is not a level playing field - you are not selecting purely on the basis of feature comparison.
Can you give a more specific link to the bureau of labor statistics?

Assuming you're using the typical "500 employees" definition of small business, US census data doesn't seem to bear you out. For the period 1988 to 2003, see table 2c here: http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/smallbus.html

The percentage of paid employees employed by organizations with 500+ employees increased in the period 1988 to 2004, to 49.1% - as the total number of employees has increased by 30%.

Are we looking at different things?
When I first saw the title I assumed it was about Wall Street.

I kid you not.
Because there is competition in the smartphone market, and someone has already raised the ante from "not fun" to "fun".
The NYT link is just a short snippet doing summary. This is a better link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/06/23/128047942/more-mon...
There are lots and lots of hotels in any city that serve
different niches of the market. Not just one. Some marketing analysis might reveal niches that can be exploited cheaply
by you.
If you fix-up a poor person's house. They usually still let it fall into disrepair. Some poor people will begin to take pride, but not most. You need to get in touch with the real world and not propose governing by idealistic notions which we all want to believe.
The real problem isn't that people are poor (they lack money), but that people are broke (they have debts they can't clear).

Those debts can be actual money owed or other essential expenses (i.e. insurance, repairs, education, etc). Once you are broke, then paying off your power bill won't make a big difference, because you will still have to fight off the credit card company ... and you will still be broke.

Think of it in terms of a GPA. If your GPA is 1.5 (poor), you still have an incentive to work hard and raise it to 2.0. But if your GPA is 0.3 (broke), then even if you work hard you still won't pass. So why bother?

People do drop out for other reasons (drug issues, mental health, and so on) but the article raises a very important point - people drop out when they are broke and can't make ends meet (in the near future) even if they work hard.
Thanks for the thought provoking discourse.
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We assure quality delivery of cakes, Gifts and flowers to all major cities in Kerala.
I'd really like to know what is so unHN-like about my post. Maybe my information is wrong and/or outdated, but I was just presenting the information that I had, hoping it would further discussion and/or be useful to someone.
I've always seen the words broke and poor used in the opposite way you are using them. Being broke is a temporary situation, being poor is more of a state of being. e.g. Elon Musk is broke but he's not poor.
Forgot to mention, I have working knowledge of Haskell and LISP. Not worked on any "project" as such, but coded a few things in both.
Should I go ahead with functional programming then?
I still don't understand what you are trying to say. We already have laws dealing with mental illness. If a person is determined to be an imminent danger to themselves or others, we act proactively to treat them. I don't think that is particularly controversial, provided the assessment is competent, objective, and has a high standard.

It's clear that few people fall into this category, since most people navigate life fine without being committed. "Having serial killer genes" does not and will never qualify.
Tail Recursion in Haskell
Aldiko is one of the best around, on any platform.
Isn't it so easy to outsource your moral thinking to others. You can justify almost anything that way!
The whole "programmers are no good at X" argument, even coming from other programmers is getting tiresome.

Nobody is yet good at things that they don't know how to do. That's what practice and learning are for. The implication that non-programsmers will somehow be better at practice and learning of things like interaction design is just bunk. It's like saying that blacksmiths can never be good pastry chefs.

I mean, have you tried a pastry made by a blacksmith? The only difference between that example and interaction design by programers is that sometimes programmers are forced into trying, even though they aren't given any education or support in that realm.
FTA: "Of note, these slides were apparently leaked or inadvertently released after being given to one Derek Goode at HP. Likewise, many of the discussions throughout the slides address HP."
What's funny is that further down the page they present Push Button Reset, for when your Windows installation deteriorates to the point of being unusably slow. Instead of fixing their OS they decide to burden the user with re-installing the system and then all of their apps. I would face-palm if I weren't laughing so hard.

I wonder if they did any market research on that feature. Every time I tell someone non-techincal that they should re-install Windows to fix their problems the answer is almost invariably either "You can do that?" or "No, that sounds hard."

I guess it makes the local/family geek's job easier when we have to help someone out though. If it's 100% reliable.

In any case piling more hacks and bloat on top of the OS is not the way to mimic Apple. To be fair they would probably need a much bigger reset than the one in 2006 to fix such deep problems.
I thought it was telling that many of the slides are full of the same kind of meaningless waffle you see in management or sales/marketing presentations at other big companies. I'm actually a little surprised at that. For all its past transgressions, Microsoft does have a reputation for hiring smart technical people, and in recent years a lot of the technology it has produced has been respectable again. I somehow assumed the people running the show would be of the same calibre, with clear ideas and well structured plans for realising them, but that doesn't appear to be the case if whoever wrote the presentation(s) used here is representative.
Hm, you actually may be right, assuming no accounting and no income from capital gains, high-paid salaried workers do pay more in taxes. And they're probably earning their pay. So I was wrong on that part of the math.

Meanwhile, people who are supremely highly paid (in the > 500k -> millions range) usually get a big chunk of it in options. That's fine as a payment plan, I even agree with it, but they should pay the going rate on their income. And that's not even getting into my real beef, which is the culture of "tax avoidance is honorable" that's pervasive in higher-end business - it diverts labor into parlor tricks and disadvantages actual innovation.
In Search of Purpose: the Pre-Conditions for Finding Your Life's Mission
Wait, are you being sarcastic? Whenever I use Windows I feel like it's trying to hold my hand the whole time (you have unused icons on your desktop!) and won't let me do basic things like setting up a custom backup script or picking a different window manager.
The intersection of open source and cloud computing
It means we're arguing different points. A duty to shareholders is one thing, which probably has a reasonably objective answer (though laws can be fuzzy). My argument is that there is no "duty to shareholders" to jurisdiction-shop in order to minimize taxes. (I might be wrong on that, but I don't think I am.)

The "right thing to do" is a much fuzzier question, which can include a lot of possible concerns. Perhaps there is an "ethical duty to shareholders to jurisdiction-shop", but certainly you'd have to analyze more than just obligations to shareholders, since there are potentially conflicting ethical obligations to all sorts of other people as well. In the other direction, there might be an ethical obligation not to jurisdiction-shop, depending on your ethical precepts.
Yeah, and in an anarchic system, power and money flow upwards until it's unsustainable and it collapses.

We're not living in caves, definitions of fair should include upward mobility.

And who says they're not getting the same service? Wealthy corporations and individuals get a ton of services from the US gov't, from subsidies to infrastructure to direct benefit from the State Dept and military.
The Will To Slow Down
Encrypted Connections with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
The state is "bankrupt" because it cranked up spending during the boom years, giving ridiculous pay and benefits to public employees instead of saving for a rainy day. Fighting the war on (some) drugs and passing out free services to illegal aliens hasn't helped much either.

Of course there is currently no legal way for the state government to file for bankruptcy. But I except that within the next 10 years it will default on its sovereign debt.
According to one of these slides, "humans" is short for "mainstream consumers".

http://msftkitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Windows-8-...
Improved Google Chrome Plug-In Security
As I understand it, fractional reserves doesn't mean that banks "loan out more money than they have on-hand". They loan out most of the money that they have on hand, and keep a small fraction in reserve. However, they end up "printing money" because the people who receive the money from those loans immediately put it back in the bank, thus the total credit and debits grows to something like 1/fr, where fr is the fraction that gets held in reserve.

I doubt Paypal invests their deposits (or if they do, they only put it in cash-equivalents), unlike banks which have the privilege of taking on short-term liabilities while they only hold long-term assets and a small amount of cash.
Every time I go to start a new project I have the dilemma of wanting to try something new, while at the same time wanting to produce something quickly. This is my take on how it's affecting my current project.
Pet peeve: It's "APIs" not "API's"

Also, mike@algxchange.com or mike.curry@algxchange.com would inspire more confidence in me than mikecurry74@gmail.com.

I think the GoDaddy logo at the bottom should be removed.
Introducing Gaka (SASS for Clojure)
@gmail.com e-mail address does not look professional to me, especially for a site which deal with money. You should use the free Google App to get e-mail adresses @algxchange.com easily
some genetic frontal lobes deficit or just Asperger's syndrome + childhood abuse + violent environment = psychopath. That's why no one count psychos in Russia. ^_^
I would recommend some backtesting results so people can see
what they are getting into.
Apple isn't even a Delaware corporation, as maybe 99% of publicly-traded companies are, but is still a California corporation after all these years.
Nokia mocks iPhone 4
"Nowadays, journalism all over the world is becoming part of the entertainment industry. It's becoming a circus. And in doing so it is forfeiting the constitutional role it had in a free society. This role was to educate, not to entertain." - Amos Elon

WikiLeaks is necessary because, generally speaking, journalists no longer monitor the centers of power. If what WikiLeaks does is activism, then mainstream journalism is propaganda. You are playing with semantics. The truth is the truth, and revealing the truth is almost always noble, regardless of the mechanism being used to reveal such truth. If the powers that be use the media to deceive the masses and that is called journalism, then journalism is itself biased, which invalidates pseudo-moral arguments against WikiLeaks' bias.
Thanks, that was much more informative.
Option grants are taxed as income too, the advantage to options is that any increase in stock price can be taxed as capital gains if you exercise the option immediately and hold the stock for more than 1 year.

Direct stock grants are also taxed as income, with the same caveat that stock value appreciation can be taxed at the lower capital gains rate.

It sounds like your beef is with the capital gains tax rate, not income tax itself. :)

I can't speak to the culture of "tax avoidance is honorable", but if the federal government is trying to incentivize people to behave in a certain way (say, to invest in stocks in the long-term) by giving folks who do that a tax break...then your beef is really with the government wanting people to invest long-term in stocks. That seems like a more difficult argument to make.
Do Love and Sex Naturally Go Together?
The Secret Powers of Time
Even I can't get discounts on our products!
MRI Scans Are Better At Predicting Your Behavior Than You Are
How To Make An iPhone Back Button With No Images
Installers on OS X have a manifest of files they install. I'd be surprised if MSI didn't do the same, but I guess not everyone uses MSI. On OS X most apps still leave prefs or other files around too so it's not perfect, but it's something. Tools like AppTrap can help clean up cruft when you delete apps.
Tesla Prices IPO At $17 Per Share
Profiting from open source -- without selling out
Request HN: Please implement forgot password option
This is the second time I have lost my password. Have mailed to pg quite a lot of times, but it looks like he rarely gets the time to respond to them. Ergo, why not implement the forgot password feature? Simply send a new password if the guy has mentioned his email address in the HN account. I see no reason or difficulty as to why this should not be implemented.
I'm using them in a similar way. Elon Musk won't solve his problems by getting a part-time job at Wallmart, so why should he bother? The same is true for a lot of people who are also broke, but happen to be poor as well.
MSNBC.com redesigns story pages and eliminates pagination
I think the point here is that he "paid back toward society" by creating jobs and charities, not by forking over his money to the government for it to waste on inefficient pork-barrel projects and other ill-chosen boondoggles. Why do you apparently think we can only help society by giving money to the IRS?
You make a solid point. My analogy was certainly over-simplified.

It's interesting how some assertions sound good on the surface but have greater implications when you start to really dig deeper into it.

HN-quality reply.
Really reminds you of the nightmare that was the Old World of mobile development. Especially that pink RAZR story, which really hits home how much developers were at the mercy of fickle handset manufacturers. Of course, if they actually tried to sell their app they would be beholden to the carriers too, which is its own world of hurt.
Just changed it to do "Re: {{original subject}}". Thanks for the feedback.
Except if your internet goes down. Which happens to me often enough that I only really pay for my service 8 months out of the year, the rest being comp'd. Gotta love Cablevision.
Also, what happens if/when, for whatever reason, your node gets a flood of traffic? It can kill all your bandwidth, since most people in the US don't have that much to begin with. And most people would not think to pull the plug (heh pun) if that were to happen, rather they would blame it on the ISP, I'd think.

But it's certainly a cool thought. I'd be more interested in it being used for P2P file sharing, but restricted to friends. Like wirehog.

EDIT: It dawned on me that file sharing would take up a ton more bandwidth than 99% of social networking. In either case, I suppose some software limits could be set to throttle requests.
Child Abuse is an Ideal Topic for Essay Term Paper
Child abuse is an interesting topic to write any academic document. This is due to its controversial nature. There are many ways to handle a topic of this nature and providing the justification of beating a child is one of them. Whichever form you write your term paper, remember all arguments should be backed by sound evidence.
There's a much simpler way to say this, I think. It is already the case that we relate everything to the unit radius---hence "radian". (If we tried to relate everything to the diameter instead, a lot of things would break much more deeply, starting with the very convenient derivative of sin(x).)

Given that, ask yourself this: do we want a measure of the semicircle, or of the circle? The former is \pi. The latter is \tau.