skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask PG: Do you have any plans to record/livestream future demo days?
It would be interesting to see the demos of companies that launch.
How to Say "No" to an Economic Frankenfuture
> You're not going to get the money back.

Indeed, that's my read too, but he shouldn't just shrug his shoulders and give up.

An option: Call them up, tell them you're short on cash and really need the money, and offer to take 1/4th of the salary you're owed if they can pay you shortly and it'd be a huge favor to you and you'd appreciate it.

This removes the small chance of getting the full amount, but it gives the very-important closure and gets the pay off the top idea on your mind - http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html

The cost to thinking about bullshit like this isn't considered enough. Offer to take two weeks pay and sign away the rest. Then be very, very grateful about it, thank them and say it's a big favor to you and you're rooting for them. You lose the small chance of getting full pay, but you get something and can move on with your life and devote your mental energy to other things.

Edit: The other nice thing about this route is that after going through that process, you're no longer a creditor to them and can call them up more freely without them tensing up and feeling the pressure. Depending on how valuable the contact/reference is for you, that could be better than going more hostile. If you did want to go hostile, small claims court might be a better bet than the wage board, depending on what the cap is in California. Small claims doesn't require a lawyer and is pretty straightforward to navigate on your own.
It's evidence, but I don't think it necessarily counts for a good, rational reason.

If "most people" are concerned about protecting innocent lives then a rational extension of this line of thinking contraindicates the death penalty given the risk of executing an innocent man.
"Those of us who work with the Japanese are often amazed at how so much schooling leads to so little learning, but with the millstone that is kanji I am surprised that so much is achieved."

As an American, I'm just really hesitant to agree with this given how much better China and Japan seem to educate their students at math and the sciences.

Perhaps you come from a country that educates your people much better than Japan and China, which is why you can say such things.
Ballpark, what's a 'decent chunk of change?'. In my other comment, I mentioned I got stiffed for about $9k. Perhaps your situation is more? or less? I realize everyone's perception of 'decent change' is different, but I can tell you that at that point, for me, $9k was huge. I'd passed on other work for that contract, and then not getting paid was a pretty big hit. However, I managed to scrape through it (barely), have diversified, and am multiple times better off than just 2 years ago. I suspect now that you have a new job, you did get through it, or are starting to. Should you forget about it? That's up to you. Can you forget about it? I'd suggest if you're through the worst of things, you indeed can.
Ctrl-f only works if you know what you are looking for though.
I really don’t want this to turn into a discussion about criminology or, goodness forbid, whether the death penalty is right or wrong. Those discussions are always very predicable. I think the history of the abolishment of the death penalty and current efforts to abolish the death penalty are much more interesting.

I made that assertion (no rational reasons for the death penalty [+]) only to show why it might be easy to convince technocratic politicians why they should abolish the death penalty. That’s easy. I wouldn’t put much hope in grass roots movements which want to abolish the death penalty. Those run on public opinion and moral convictions which are much harder to change.

[+] “Rational” might be misnomer, I’m not sure about that. What I mean is that there is no evidence which suggests that the death penalty leads to better deterrence or reduces cost. You will have a hard time finding criminologists who don’t agree with that.
I think you can at least take some credit for telling your employees to look for other jobs.

Our CEO would come into our office and say, "I just had a meeting with a potential investor and he's committed $25k!" He always had our hopes up, but our CFO would paint a different picture. Even our president told me he was starting to pick up work on the side.
"Compare that with this: http://ruby-doc.org/ruby-1.9/index.html

I have on my recklessly large to-do list plans to update the API docs on ruby-doc.org with YARD.

The template seems a bit easier to navigate and the overall results better. But I'm always open to concrete suggestions.

[note: I run ruby-doc.org]
print version (single page)

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-softw...
Many people took positions in government when it wasn't anywhere near a high-paying job. I know an engineer friend who took a job with the government in 1994 for a 40% pay difference (45k vs 75k) -- how the lower wage was justified: (a) more job security, (b) an actual pension plan with ~28 years service. The two were viewed at that time as being equivalent: with the government compensation a bit less than working for a contracting firm. I know of teachers who choose their profession, not based on the yearly compensation, but based on the idea that "yea, so after 26 years of letting children beat down on me, I can retire and not have to worry so much". I'm sure police/firemen who agree to risk their life every day for 20-some odd years make similar calculations. It's a rational choice -- and a promise of compensation made.

I simply don't understand how anyone could justify retroactive gutting of plans. Can we do retroactive taxation on those that went without the pension as part of their compensation plan?

Elimination of pension going forward -- perhaps. I'm curious to see how recruitment of these positions works... likely, the Government won't be able to attract as good candidates as it might otherwise.
I'm a bit surprised whenever someone says that Excel is functional programming. It's more accurately described as dataflow programming.

To illustrate, Common Lisp directly supports functional programming but not dataflow programming (though it's possible to implement as a library).
We can send them on space ships to colonize other planets...
The amount owed me is roughly the same as yours. I have positive cash flow in my personal finances so I'm above water, but if someone gave me that much right now it would almost feel like winning the lottery.

What do you mean when you say you have diversified?
Umm, no. You said that there was "no rational reasons for the death penalty" because it was a straw man argument that mischaracterizes those you disagree with in a way that appeals to you. Period.

I am also not arguing about the death penalty. But there is rationality on both sides. Not just your side.
Ask HN: android distribution per country
Hello guys,
I'm thinking of building some android apps.

However the ideas I want to explore have a tight connection with some specific countries, so I expect the typical user to originally be from one of those countries.

It it possible (any website? (an android version of checkfacebook.com ? ), any reports?) to find out the number of android devices per country ?

Cheers,
Ze
Thanks for satisfying my curiosity.

And yeah, sorry about the 'wall of text' -- I was trying to be very clear about why I was asking, and the fact that this was a request for information, not an accusation of age discrimination.
That is my fear in pushing too hard. I actually do want the company to succeed, but I just don't have the wherewithal to give the company this free loan.
(Please Help) Using Social Networking to Find a Lost Child
Bah, I read 'AAI' as 'AAAI' in my morning pre-coffee blurriness and was in eager anticipation of an AI talk on simulations and world-building, or something. Would have made more sense on HN.
The kicker here is usually the tax liability depending on your jurisdiction.

Would you be looking at a large tax bill in addition to the cost of the options? If you have to pay taxes based on the current valuation of the company even if you can't sell the shares then exercising becomes that much higher risk.
We'd had a not bad year - our first six figure project was earlier that year. However, the sales cycle was proving to be much longer than we'd anticipated (selling to higher ed) and then we had a couple of projects cancel (mid-late 2003). Everything became too much.

Later, I went back to working for others for a while. I smelled a bad burn rate at this company, but only after I'd sold my house and moved states. :/ We were supposed to be impressed with announcements of $x projects and $y investments, but it wasn't that hard to see that 20+ people at a company, being paid full time, would eat up those $x and $y in just a couple months, but the $x was for a 9 month project.

I ended up being extremely cynical and distrustful of others (as I'm sure a few people ended up distrusting me earlier) and it's taken years to get back a modicum of faith/optimism again. Working for myself seemed about the only way I could have a degree of control and not be left in the dark on finances. Yeah, my boss is a jerk, but I'm sleeping with his wife. ;)
We are trying to spread this video and other information around Georgia and California, I have help here in Georgia, but we need somebody to start trying to spread this in California in hopes somebody will recognize her. Please help do something real and useful with Facebook and you tube, you could save her life.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Find-Teuta/154076771275315
Agreed. Also why did you make an initial offer?

People have debated the merit of "he who says a number first loses" on HN before, but in general there is a lot of truth to it. If they are interested in purchasing, show them whatever info they need and let them make YOU an offer. The final price can only go up from there.
Don't you mean

forall f g xs. map f (map g xs) = map (f.g) xs

?

As for filter, I presume something like

forall f g xs. filter f (filter g xs) = filter (\x. g x && f x) xs

would work.
MUSh - a multi-service URL shortener in Ruby
It is possible to skip the first half of the Dragon Book if you are not interested in front-end stuff. (I am not.) Chapters 8 and onward are far more interesting IMO. You will encounters topics such as SSA, data-flow analysis, points-to analysis, binary-decision diagrams, call graphs, Datalog, etc.
Ask HN: Small apps ideas to learn Node.js?
Hey, so I've been reading a lot about Node.js and want to jump in with a quick (multi)weekend project to learn it. What apps would you suggest building to learn the basics and just have some fun?
I'm guessing you are on Windows, so I'd recommend Keepass (google for official web-site). Store all your passwords in there or any similar password store.

If Windows 7 now has the ability to securely store passwords ala MacOSX's Keychain or a Java's Keystore, that could also be an option worth investigating.
I highly suspect that you are projecting the experience of other auto-updating software (such as Adobe Reader) onto Chrome. Chrome's auto-updates are incredibly efficient and very non-intrusive.
I'm still a broke hacker living in flyover country, USA but I've always had wild success in everything I've done in some way or another. Usually, it's in lessons learned, contacts made and people helped. Kind of disappointed at the narrow scope of "success" for this poll. Should have been labeled "How many times did you fail before getting rich?"
Rate my startup: Mindstream - A better way to manage projects
Dunno about that but I am just hoping to either re-live a memory or, waste some random time virtually driving between cities I may not be able to visit anytime soon.
Take the intersection of the three things you know most about and are passionate about. If you're not sure about this simply look at your most visited sites.

Then use those are your "base" and try to find ideas that combine all three.
This gives a partial picture (percents, not actual numbers, and it's just mobile browser share, not total smartphone usage):

http://connect.icrossing.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/mo...
maybe you'll run out of this quote some day too. try making one of your own.
Mindstream is a project I've been working on [alone] for a few months. I'd like co-founders, but can' afford it without funding / customers. Let me know how I could improve and what I can do better
I wonder what the mean age for "Have never honestly tried" is, and a follow-up question: "By what age do you plan on trying?"

I'm only 20, I haven't tried to go it alone because I would like to graduate from University first.
Haha, I guess if you want to take it that way, people are just as passionate about beer and wine as about music and science. I think your critique applies equally.

http://tv.winelibrary.com/about/

http://www.chow.com/food-news/54939/obsessives-winemaker/
I definitely would not recommend starting from page 1. You can pick at it gradually. Personally, I've gravitated more toward the second half of the book where it gets far more interesting. (I have the 2nd edition, where coverage of the back-end is vastly improved.)
You could put the blinking caret in price field.
it's a good start! Thanks
Ask YC: Do you take startups in the same space as ones invested-in in the past?
I've been considering applying to the upcoming Winter 2011 YC intake.

The problem my startup is trying to solve, however, is quite similar to one of the startups you have taken-in in the past.

Both of us are tackling the same problem, albeit differently. I was curious to know how you guys think about this, for e.g conflict of interest, whether it would decrease my chances of enrolling, etc...
Tough call. Let me tell you two stories.

Story one: a friend of mine worked at a startup that lasted ~5 years. He left in year four and exercised his (substantial) options. The company was, as I understood it, pro-forma cash flow positive, in a bright industry. And indeed, just over a year later, they were acquired for many tens of millions of dollars.

Unfortunately, they weren't acquired for enough money to sufficiently offset VC liquidation preferences. To mitigate this problem, the company and its acquirer created an incentive pool to create a fairly decent "earnout-style" return for existing employees. Former employees holding common stock? Zilch.

Story two occurs right around the time I heard story one. A guy joins a startup, sticks around for just shy of four years, leaves with a nice chunk of unexercised options to start another company. "Buy private company common stock and wind up like person one? Never!" Besides, person two needed the money for the new company.

Fast forward five years, and company two is acquired at a... non-negligible... price per share. Person two is out a fairly big chunk of cash. Person two's old boss makes douchey comment on IM! Person two is sad.

Well, for a few seconds; then he's happy his friends did well. He also rationalizes:

* The investment at the time was anything but risk-free, even if the company was acquired.

* It's not like the money didn't get invested; it just got invested in a company that hasn't 10x'd the investment yet.

* The money that would have gone into exercising the options would have been locked up for five years.

Before I bought private company common stock, I'd want to know everything about:

* The number of outstanding shares and as much as possible about the terms the current investors have. What preferences do the VC's have? "We're shooting for 100MM" might be code for "We make fuck all unless we hit 100MM" --- and note that not many companies can pay 100MM for other companies.

* The likelihood of future investment rounds in the company, which will have deliterious effects on the value of your shares.

* How stable and reliable the management team is. Is the current CEO new? Is the company making its numbers?

If it's not "real money", and iff you can't put the same money to good use in your new venture, I'd go ahead and exercise.
Except, you're very likely not going to get the money, so I hope the "don't have the wherewithal to give the company this free loan" is an exaggeration. You should cut your losses. This is a sunk cost for you. Use your creativity to work on furthering your ambitions and career from here. Live for the future, not the past.
Is it really necessary to use a shortened link here? There's no reason to save space, so shortened links, to me, seem like their main purpose is to conceal the destination.
I'm still not sure I follow your reasoning. Admission to YC does not guarantee ramen-profitably nor does it preclude the possibility of earning a lot more.
Actually, that's not exactly true. The japanese system relies heavily on confession, and without the presence of lawyers. They are sometimes denied food, toilet usage, etc... for days. Several people sentenced to death following confession were acquited in the 80ies...

Also, the way death row works in Japan is particularly horrible: as in the US, people may stay there decades before being killed, but they only know it the day they are killed, and their family is only notified after their death.

I would also note that the incarceration rate is not ridiculously low - if you look at developed countries, the outlier are the US, not Japan. I suspect the French figure to be typical in western Europe, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration
I don't know the full story about Apple and GCC; I haven't read all of the mailing list traffic during the relevant period, nor was I around to hear about offline conversations. Certainly I can see Apple modifying bits of GCC to make it more suitable for IDE integration and upstream not caring about that. Apple did have ways of getting such changes in, though; it's possible they didn't care enough to push them upstream.

As for "elitist arrogance", I think what you are getting at is that you see the FSF's policies as erecting a moat and a wall around GCC and telling the rabble to stay out while the nobility quietly hack away at their desks. If I have understood you correctly, then I see the argument, but I do not agree with it. As long as GCC is an FSF project, that's just the way things are going to be. I don't think the FSF has set out with the intent to be "elitist"; it's unfortunate if that's the way the policy is perceived. Feel free to correct me; it's possible that I've misunderstood you.

The FSF does not, on the whole, dictate the technical direction of the project. So the goodness or badness of technical changes and any "elitism" associated with acceptance or rejection of such changes is another issue.

Perhaps things will change if GCC ever disassociated itself from the FSF: another egcs-style fork or something more dramatic. There have been small rumblings of such a change, but I think such an event is quite unlikely.
Why are you comparing a framework's documentation to a language docs? I would assume people using rails would already know ruby so it wouldn't make sense to categorize their documentation using some kind of arbitrary categorization. If you prefer docs on how "X" should be done, you should get a language/framework "cookbook".
depends.

if we are talking individual ideas, I went through 4 before I found something that was actually profitable(~$2-3K of affiliate marketing). 5, before I found that "million dollar idea"(it's not making 6 figures/mo yet...but it'll get there)

if we are talking individual projects that number is closer to 50-60(since I made like 40 2-3 page made for adsense/affiliate marketing sites and 10 Q&A sites)
Ken Perlin's Java Applets
PG has said in the past that they've funded startups in the same areas and don't have a problem with it.

What matters is execution, not idea, and it sounds like your execution is different anyway.
“Rational” really might be a misnomer. It wasn’t meant to be an insult. “Moral convictions” are fine reasons.

It is, of course, imaginable that there would be “rational” (again, might be the wrong word) reasons for the death penalty. I can imagine a universe where the death penalty increases deterrence, reduces cost and where wrongful convictions are exceedingly rare. I would imagine that it would be very easy to convince technocrats to introduce the death penalty in that universe [+]. All I asserted was that it seems to be consensus among criminologist that we are not in that universe.

[+] My own strong moral conviction – which, in this imagined universe wouldn’t be, in my parlance, “rational” – would be to not introduce the death penalty, all those reasons be damned. I can certainly sympathize with those wanting to keep the death penalty in the real universe for moral reasons.

I’m nevertheless not really sure whether I really would oppose the death penalty in the imagined universe because I also happen to believe that policies with regard to at least certain human freedoms (I would include “life” and “opinion”) have to have some sort of useful effect on the world beyond making me happy (i.e. being congruent with my moral convictions).
I am going to have to go against the grain on this one. Yes you are owed money that is rightfully yours. But you wanted to be part of a startup with all the associated glory and rewards. That means you also assumed some risk and realized you might have to be flexible based on the circumstances handed to the startup. Remember, Amazon almost went under.

The founders are not jerks. They spent what they had on you and treated you well. Now they have nothing but your loyalty and goodwill. They probably want to pay you (maybe even before they pay themselves!) but they can't. Yes they are trying to keep plastic smiles so every one doesn't jump ship and you can live to fight another day. Perhaps, at this point they should be more honest, but I imagine they are afraid to see the dream vaporized.

Obviously, if you worked there for some time you at least kind of believe in what you are doing. Now is an opportunity to gain more control/equity and maybe even help steer the company to profitability. On the other hand if you are sure it is going nowhere, even if everyone tightened their belts and rolled up their sleeves then it is time to let go and write it off.

Yes you are entitled to the money. But you are probably not going to get it. You are only going to destroy relationships. Be up front with the founders. Either leverage your position to change your circumstances or walk away in good faith.
Does Chinese not use 化 or something similar to mean "ization?" If not, how do they turn "global" into "globalization?" (I'm just curious)

In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English "ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化 is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old-age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society."

That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table (figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in the same space.
There is a difference between vocational school where you learn how to get a job and YC where you learn to create an expandable company.