skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you do not have an excellent relationship with your current employer, i.e. they know you are looking and are helping you to find another job by serving as references; then only give as much notice as you are comfortable being out of work. Do make sure that you have everything organized and ready for the next person.

If you have an excellent relationship then it won't matter since they will be happy for you and are aware you'll be leaving.

Do make sure you have the other job prior to giving notice.
Probably this is becoming most clichéd question :)

Generating a totally unique idea and selling it to people will probably get you another "Apple"(I don't mean it literally). But till the time it does not happen, there is nothing wrong with working on something which is shared by someone else too, its just that yours should be better than others and should have enough differentiators to "rock". I am not going to quote "Google", "Facebook" et al. here again because everyone already knows the story.
I'm fairly sure those behind Wikileaks are as concerned about their opinion in the eyes of the press as much as we'd still care what an elementary school teacher thinks about our penmanship.

Apart from using Knight as a possible funding source, I assume the whole purpose of the Wikileaks project is to move beyond the realm of requiring a handful of national newspapers and a few wire services to give the news to local outlets too lazy (or poor) to do their own investigations.
well, the state is bankrupt. partly because companies that embody its dreams are not chipping in with the bills.
I know pg is an advocate of 2+ founder teams, and that there are some arguments in favor of it, and I respect his experience, but in my mind and from what I've observed in life this post is like a poster boy example for why the ideal is to have only 1 founder.

Just start with 1 founder, with 100% equity. Then incrementally grow it out from there, see if you get traction, etc. If you need to raise cash, exchange it for equity but still retain as much equity and control as you can. It's ideal to always have a single "benevolent dictator" who has final say in all things, for cases exactly like this. As soon as you start bringing in a 2nd person, a 3rd, more equity partners, especially big ones like in this case, all kinds of seemingly intractable problems can arise.

Can 2+ founder/partner startups work? Of course. But this situation is a classic example of what can go wrong with it.
I think the fairest solution and surprisingly the one not used here would be to "Grandfather" the revenue sharing pages in ~ but not allow any more pages to be built on that model.

I am sure that it was thought of and discussed internally and then they went with the "I bet we can take it a little farther and never pay recurring feeds again.." which will save the company a lot of money per month..
Ruby on Rails v. Django
Discuss.
Of course, if Java 7 tanks Oracle can just say that all the wrong decisions were made by Sun before the acquisition. Then Java 8 becomes the real test.

Also, I think most open source people are happy with OpenJDK; only a small minority appear to care about the Harmony hypocrisy.
Physics Envy Can Kill You
Like a laptop, desktop, netbook, or phone? I do not follow. What do you mean?
Numerical Methods for Rapid Computation of PageRank
technology of the past (OS, installable apps, etc)

Except it turns out that obsolete stuff like local storage and direct hardware access and being able to run offline is actually sort of useful, which is why everybody is falling over themselves trying to jam all of it into HTML5.
Would you care to elaborate?

I'm about to move to a Java shop and for a long time I've just been taking the criticism of Java at face value. Now that I will have a stake in it I am really interested in what people who have been with Java a long time are seeing as the trends.
In fact, I'm more curious is I'm correct about gtech and yahoo.
xobni? They have a interesting and useful product, but in the shareware days, they would be just that -- shareware software. But somehow, they were in the right place, doing the right things and they got something like 10 million (?) in investment?
Agreed ... where are the techniques that drove traffic and how did conversion turn out on this product. This is one example wich proves the title alone can sell a post.
Hi. Sorry I thought this was a troll post initially; it just had that smell to it, but your later posts cleared that up.

Is it possible to ask interns to work different hours? For example, some interns might love the chance to work an 11-7 or 12-8 job instead of a 9-5 one. And that way, you'd better align your cofounder's schedule with theirs.
Also, they are planning to conduct the largest-scale of correlations between intelligence and genetics so far.
The electrical engineering thing demonstrates that you're unlikely to get a particular discipline to change its own notation. It would have made much more sense in retrospect to change current to something other than i, but that's not what happened.
Yes. If someone else is doing it, don't bother.

Does that sound right to you? No? Well... :)
How To Spend Money
The state just needs to pass a better law. Apple is obligated by its contract to its shareholders to avoid taxes as much as possible; they are just avoiding a lawsuit. (I don't like this, but I understand it. The law just needs to catch up with the market, then everyone will be paying their fair share again.)
I couldn't disagree more. Those behind wikileaks are obviously very concerned about how they appear to others. Did you read the New Yorker profile of Julian Assange a few weeks back?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_...

Wikileaks is an interesting and (I think) mostly beneficial presence in the world. But it's activism not journalism.
Indeed, this is an aspect of poverty often overlooked: when you have no money, everything is so much harder and more expensive. You can't just hop in the car and go downtown for the cost of a little gas; you have to do something like dig up bus fare and wait at a stop for two hours. Tossing a load in the washer instead of hauling it to the laundromat, dishwasher meaning a device rather than a person, buying and storing in bulk because you have an extra freezer. When you're poor, time and money saving devices like these sure would be nice. And then there's the neglect of routine car and house maintainence that becomes acute and expensive, doctor's bills when you couldn't even afford insurance, late fees for missed payments, credit cards that hike the rate on you when you become a "risk". Seems only the rich could ever afford to be poor.

I don't know much about life on the cheap in the UK (which, from your references to nappies and TV licenses, I gather is where you're from). It sounds to me like you know what you're doing.

Over here (in the US), if someone complained they didn't have enough money to eat healthy, I'd be awfully concerned. Unless you have an exotic notion of 'healthy' that involves concepts like organic food and complex carbohydrates, it really is pretty cheap to eat healthy. If you're so poor that you're giving up things like spaghetti, potatoes, rice, beans, carrots, cheese, and milk for ramen, and you've been doing it so long that it's impacting your energy and lifestyle, you're in a really bad way.

Over here I'd encourage you to apply for EBT and look at local food banks. No shame in it. Helping people avoid that kind of poverty trap is what those programs are there for.

There definitely is a level of poverty where the money saved starts to be destructive, and it sounds like you're in it. Sorry to hear that. Sorry to hear you're committed to a mortgate in the midst of that; that makes it hard to downsize, match your income, and take some of the pressure off. Mortgages and creative lifestyles can be a bad mix.

I hope you get the cash flow going the right direction sometime soon.
Maybe. Depends on if you can do something different and gain some users that they don't have, or if you can do something better and take some users from your competitor. For the second option, you can take users they already have or users they would have gotten.
The presentation of this framework is quite good, but I don't really like the semantics of Vows - I find them too unnatural and complex, this is probably more rooted against BDD than Vows. What's wrong with testing the old way (e.g. like py.test does it)?
I don't think he means empathy as in "well, guess we can't fault them for their behaviour, so let's let them go" but rather that they got a bad roll of the dice, and that sucks, (but we have to lock them up or control them anyhow...)

A different but illustrative analogy is a dog who's been abused, or chained in a small yard, and that dog attacks a small child. I will have empathy towards that dog, and I'll still want it destroyed.

Empathy and societal self-preservation can both exist simultaneously.
As eloquent as this manifesto is, it fails to actually address some of the arguments against tau.

In 2.1, it points out that d/dx sin(x) = cos(x) only holds if x is in radians.

This is key

Once you switch to expressing x in diameterians or tau-radians (or whatever you'll call them), this identity falls apart:

d/dx sin(x) = cos(x) / 2

d^2/dx^2 sin(x) = -sin(x) / 4

...

And so on. The trig functions lose their cyclical nature.

(More explanation on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigonometric_functions#The_sig... )

I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but you can't ignore these things.
This is a 1h video, with no summary. Abstract taken from http://web.mit.edu/alo/www/Papers/physics.html

The quantitative aspirations of economists and financial analysts have for many years been based on the belief that it should be possible to build models of economic systems—and financial markets in particular—that are as predictive as those in physics. While this perspective has led to a number of important breakthroughs in economics, "physics envy" has also created a false sense of mathematical precision in some cases. We speculate on the origins of physics envy, and then describe an alternate perspective of economic behavior based on a new taxonomy of uncertainty. We illustrate the relevance of this taxonomy with two concrete examples: the classical harmonic oscillator with some new twists that make physics look more like economics, and a quantitative equity market-neutral strategy. We conclude by offering a new interpretation of tail events, proposing an "uncertainty checklist" with which our taxonomy can be implemented, and considering the role that quants played in the current financial crisis.
Ask HN: What do you use to Unit Test your Web app?
I've been working on a web-app with a team for the past 2 years, and we are trying to move into a fully continuous integration model. Currently we have no unit tests - however our app is fully tested and we have a good amount of happy live clients. We are at a point where it's becoming increasingly important that we maintain a well working system with each update.

- I'm curious what test harness you would recommend?
- For a web-app, what exactly do you test and what do you skip?
- How do you structure the tests? Do you break it into separately testing the UI, data objects, helper classes, etc. - or do you do functional testing and just test specific features?
- Do you unit test your web app? Why, why not?

Our app is (unfortunately) in ASP.net/C#, but runs well and development has been quick.

I would appreciate any feedback.
It's a wonder that Apple is still a primarily American corporation at all. Really big companies like Accenture are multinational corporations, generally incorporated in a tax haven with decent legal standing and running its HQ in the US as a domestic subsidiary.
It makes sense that one who felt a certain sense of curiosity about the act of being a serial killer would work in a field that studies them. The conclusion that the researcher and his subjects share certain traits is, to me, hardly surprising.

I wonder if the researcher's brain scan is a product of his environment or an inevitable genetic conclusion.
MS does the same, though they have to buy off statesmen to get away with it: http://boingboing.net/2010/04/23/microsoft-wins-its-1.html
The question that the title brings up, but the article fails to answer until the very end, is whose "due diligence" review Wikileaks failed. Well, here it is:

the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation considered and rejected an application from WikiLeaks for financial support

So that's the foundation of the article. An exciting and technically true "fact", a bunch of ranting about why the author doesn't like Wikileaks, and finally the source of the "fact" that the article is based on. Good whining, poor reading. Yawn.
Thrifty 'property guardians' live like kings
More advice: if you do part ways, I woudn't worry about or do any fighting over him "taking the idea". In all honesty, despite what the USPTO might have you think, nobody can own an idea. Lots and lots and lots of people have been independently coming up with about the same exact ideas for centuries. The trick is execution, and timing, and luck, and polish, and firing on all (or enough anyway) cylinders. I have dozens of notebooks full of ideas --- sitting on a shelf, and therefore worthless. There's a very very high likelihood that there is somebody already out there executing on the same idea as you are now. They might be a little ahead or behind, or a little different in various ways, and you will never escape that contextual reality. The trick is what you do, and what you make of things.

Fighting over ownership of an idea will just lead to more grief for you, for him, and for the community -- except for lawyers, because they'll love the billable hours thank you very much!
Schrödinger's kit: Tools that are in two places at once
The time I used it (which I think was right after they launched) the paper was incredibly low quality and the print quality was lacking compared to what I'd consider most laser printers capable of. This was for novel-type text. This was also something like 7 or 8 years ago. I'm sure they've improved by now!
I agree the YP industry is dying, but that is happening regardless. I doubt YP print is losing market share to print papers, and I'd like to see sources showing that newspaper websites are taking share from yp.com ... my guess is that they're both losing market share to Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and (soon) mobile ad networks.
Might it just be that you got a new, faster computer?
I hardly think the states issues with money are Apples problem to solve. The state is bankrupt because its congress spends more than it takes in.
Freakonomics: Asia's Millionaires - The Millionaire Not Next Door
libxml2's parser (which lxml uses) was written before HTML 5. It generally works quite well, but I've found a bug or two in it, and it doesn't get updated much. For instance, weird things can happen with tags after the </body> tag (I think maybe you can get a second body or head element). lxml can't parse Google's homepage as another example, but it's an extreme example.
Don't liberals hold contradictory views with respect to this issue?

On the one hand, they believe in civil liberties. On the other hand, they also believe in science.

These two things tend to clash and will do so more frequently in the future as scientists learn more about the brain.
Can Implicit Learning be improved over time?
Has there ever been a lawsuit where the shareholders sued a company for not evading taxes?
That highlights a fundamental error many people make - you can't average percentages. A graph of an index fund on a percentage basis for the last 20 years tells you nothing useful (at least not directly).
Run a distributed face book in your plug and then access from anywhere. The plug is built for running 24/7. So it will be available always.
Good, glad it came up here. I was looking forward to this, but I'm getting total corruption on all of my books. I tried uninstalling and re-downloading the books and tried more than 10 different books. All come up scrambled and crash the app like so:

http://i48.tinypic.com/fcmmq8.jpg
Three points:

1) If someone else is doing it that's good, in fact preferable. You are probably not the only person to have had a given idea, ergo if someone else is making money at it you probably can too.

2) Focus on the building core of the product. Don't worry about the attendant features, just...distill your idea down to its barest essence and start with that. Forget scalability, fee structuring, user account management...just put all that stuff on a shelf for now. Get a proof of concept working. Have other people look at it. Float it to your friends here at HN.

3) Think about how much you need to make? You don't need to be "the next XXX" to have a lot of fun and make great money. A million in revenue isn't worth any of the company's you mentioned attention (well, maybe MySpace), but it's a big deal to a tiny company.

This book here mentions a lot of what I'm saying:
http://www.amazon.com/Business-Software-Manager-Programmer-E...

It's well worth the money.
I'm late to the thread - but along with all the good advice here, my advice would be "don't actually trade any REAL money for the next 5 or 6 years, just sock your cash away in safe banks and currencies". Practice, study, try out your algorithms and systems, and watch what unfolds for the next half decade before you start trying to game the market - because it's very possible that those with liquidity a few years from now will be the ones in the best position to reap huge rewards.
I don't want to be a downer, but the last time I looked into OCR it was a real bucket of hurt, and that was on non-hand-drawn images (checking if text rendering worked).

Something less human-readable might be easier to handle (e.g. print out something analogous to a bar code and stick that anywhere on the whiteboard). Tie that bar code to a list of recipients and you're set.
Speaking simply and not going into every possible nuance... someone else doing the same thing is practically not data at all. If they're succeeding, that means you should do it. If they're failing, maybe you shouldn't.
You prefer VAT increase of Apple paying CA taxes ? Moron...
Judge Learned Hand: "Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands."
My, these headlines can get difficult to parse. "What is an 'interactive raise'? And what does it mean for one to seed?"
The last time I did something like this, I made a point to never scale upwards to the target size.
Supreme Court Issues Mixed Ruling On Method Patents
Not sure, but there have certainly been CEOs fired for not making earnings.
The point of tau (or pi) is to do calculations with angles. One of the main uses of angles in physics is calculations having to do with torque. Basically, using pi for calculations that might involve torque is giving away one of the situations where tau would be most useful.
The usual contract is at-will employment...

This is usual in the US. It's definitely not usual everywhere (in the UK for example, pretty much nobody works without a contract).
The funniest part of all this is that if he would've posted on an MBA forum everyone would agree with him and bash the hacker!
It would be pretty trivial to get Fuse - http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/wiki/FuseOverAmazon - installed on the SheevaPlug, which would give you a mountable "directory" to your S3 account which you could then share on your local network.
Read The Innovator's Dilemma for a number of examples of how following the data lead companies off of nasty cliffs. (The follow-up, The Innovator's Solution, had a lot more useful detail.)
No. My windows 7 is a quad-core desktop with 4GB memory. My macbook is a dual-core with 2GB memory. I don't mean to say that I don't get the occasional beach-balling and slow app start time, but generally speaking much more responsive than windows 7.
Switzerland's 'Mr. Swatch' Dead At 82
Yeah, might be eBay's problem soon though.
Congratulations guys. I am very impressed with what you've done so far.

By the way, I didn't know joshu was part of this round?
Ask HN: Need some advice-trouble at my new job at a start-up
I joined a startup recently after leaving a job I was very well liked at. I've had a very successful career so far and I haven't left a job yet without the people I was working being very sad about it.

It seemed like a good job and I got no warning signals going into it. The trouble I'm having is that there is no work for me to do there. That's a bit of an exaggeration but not by much. I mostly sit around all day and try my best to keep myself busy optimizing SQL and reading some documentation.

I've been there over a month and while having asked for work repeatedly I'm told there either is nothing or that I will get some bugs assigned to me--then the bugs never come unless I complain more. I'm happy to get any work I don't really care but it seems weird that they even hired me. They're continuing to hire in my group and I've been wondering why exactly. I also have had no one explain to me anything that's going on in this system. Normally they have an orientation process but for some reason I wasn't given that when I started.

So I'm left with little to do all day and no real knowledge of the system so it's hard for me to come up with work on my own. So I guess my question is:

- Is this even close to normal for a start-up?

- Should I seriously consider bailing after such a short period of time?

I'm not really looking for direct advice but just help processing what's going on. I don't really know too many people who have been in situations like this.

Thanks!
Competition is a good thing. It proves there is a market for the product. If the competition is big, they are doing part of your marketing for you, letting people know they have a problem that needs solving. You can also use their product as a way to position your own product. There are some markets that are saturated and difficult to stand out, but it sounds this may not be the case.

The only thing that worries me in your post is "But I am concerned about trying to convince investors of this." I've chased funding before and its not a fun position to be in. Better to boot strap and have total control. In most cases you are going to need a product, active customers and some revenue to get a foot in the door for investors and even then, the odds are not in your favor.
Doesn't this just beg the question of letter vs. spirit of the law?
Essential Vim
Safety Net Frays in Spain, as Elsewhere in Europe
Good point. It's totally plausible that he's coming in late so he doesn't have to deal with the intern.
I think you are right. If I have several application minimized under windows and I try to go back to one app after few hours it not only takes a long time to maximize its stop everything else from working. The performance get worse as you use your computer longer. I remember my fresh window7 install was a nice change over vista but it has gone worse in last few months and it gets slightly better every time I defrag HD and register, it gets worse again after few weeks/months.

This never happens on OSX. They are obviously doing something right.
They are only avoiding some california taxes as well, at least according to the wiki page.

This is nowhere near as bad as IKEA, which is the largest charitable organisation in the world, pulling in billions of dollars a year, and paying out a million to help design new furniture.