skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll provide a counterpoint. I have a corporate job that pays pretty well and I am very happy with it, to the point that I wouldn't consider leaving it outside of a ludicrous offer. I love managing people and complex projects involving wide variety of variable inputs. I love a global organization. I am enthralled with coming to work everyday and being able to pick any number of opportunities for a) improving people's lives, b) streamlining business process, or c) creating new business opportunities. I'm only one step removed from CIO and I have a boss who encourages me to run my org (currently 60 people) like a startup. I am encouraged to learn about customer development, cutting edge technology, business law (mostly contracts at this point), and all sorts of semi-random business processes. I love the chaos of it all, and I especially love that I am trusted enough to be autonomous. I feel like I'm running my own little company... that just happens to be inside a Fortune 200 global mega-corp.
One person its great for is Google.

I bet they save a bunch of cpu resources by 'directing' people to the right search queries (which are cached) instead of dealing w/ misspellings and running searches that the user doesn't really want anyway.
A reason why I would join Microsoft / Google rather than Apple.

I have found employees of the former two to be much more interactive with outside world, compared to Apple employees.

Also Microsoft, Google and other companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Twitter go to great lengths to make sure that they provide best compensation and benefits to their software engineers, somehow Apple always makes their software engineers look like secondary citizens and i doubt if they even pay well.
Recently a team won the DevDerby (" were challenged to create as usable and fully functional a program as possible in only six hours")

http://www.lmcalpin.com/post/1109835129/dev-derby-2010

They did it using the Play Framework in pure Java. Incidentally the Play framework supports Scala, but this example goes on to show that Java is'nt quite out of the game yet.
I assume you made that analogy hypothetically, but consumers buying PCs subsidized by overpriced network service contracts was actually common practice 10 years ago.

Most of the major ISPs did it — the consumer would get a ~$400 instant rebate on a PC sold at an inflated retail price, in exchange for signing up for an expensive multi-year contract for dialup internet access. Some of the vendors even had schemes where the PCs showed advertising!
I first encountered this in Apple Pages with the templates for various kinds of documents. I assumed it was meaningful text and that I had somehow set the default language wrong, and I spent quite a while trying to find out how to fix that before finally Googling "lorem ipsum" and getting straightened out.
I'm an introverted hacker. I want to join a frat.
[niceFirstPost]

Let's start here: I'm a college freshman, and introverted and sheltered as hell. I've always been a shy, timid, geeky hacker.

Introversion-wise, I can't handle extended amounts of time with people, or large crowds. Both drain me like no other. I've always been shy and mellow. Sheltered-wise, I never party or get drunk or any of that.

But now I'm in college and I want to change. I want to be social and party and so on.

[b]So I rushed a frat.[/b] And I got a bid. (Probably cause I look good more than anything else.) And tonight I went to the first meeting.

And here's the problem. Getting in was easy because it was just an alumni panel and an interview. [b] But I'm not sure how - or if - I can get through the pledge process.[/b] I'm just so far behind everyone else: I'm not good in crowds; don't know how to act at parties; don't know how to drink and drinking games; don't know how to dance; don't know.

[b] Here's my first question: [/b] Do you think I can improve and should try to complete the pledge process? (It's not a hardcore frat, so there's no hazing and such.) Or should I work on my social skills for a semester and pledge again?

[b] Next question: [/b] If you guys think I should go for it, how can I "catch up" socially? What do I need to learn and how? (Talking? Being in groups? Drinking/Games? Partying?)

Thanky.

[/niceFirstPost\
The youth of today are Internet savvy. As time goes on, there will be less and less people that don't know how to find software, music online (for free).

That may be true, but free musics and software are often inconvenient. They might be willing to fork over cash to save time when they're older.

However, it is much possible that free software continue to drive up the standard and decrease inconvenience so long as they have the incentives to, displacing paid software.
really really this analysis is so lame, if you take any product review and applied this analysis it would give similar results.

This is equivalent of all those spamfographics
what's even more frustrating, your own measure stick is constantly changing; what I thought was important two years ago is completely trivial to me now and vice versa for what I thought was trivial.

Life loves to subject us to the useless positional (numbers) measuring sticks that mean nothing in the long term. Case in point: Someone name (off the top of their head) the ten wealthiest men - in the correct order - back in 1970.

This is why it's so important to develop a set of principles that you want to live by, and let those principles be the compass that guides you through life. You'll never know the path that you'll be taking, but at least you know you're headed in the direction that you want.

These principles I'm referring to are things like love, honesty, integrity, etc. For me, I think the example provided by Jesus in the Bible highlights the best example of human principles I've ever seen, so I try my best to follow those.

I will add though, very easy to talk about this concept, extremely hard to do.
That can be the worst of both worlds though... it's late enough stage that your equity isn't really worth much even if the company has a relatively successful exit but still less salary because 'it's not a BigCa'.

You'd be working mainly because a) it isn't a BigCo and b) the startup culture is still apparent.

Sadly both of those things are only going to get less and less true as time goes on if the company is successful.
GPL apps arent allowed on iphone you know that right?
* No time for bullshit, please just put the salary there. A range that is open to bargain is fine too. Prorated is fine too. We just want some idea as to how much you want us and how much we'll be making. No point beating around the bush. The 5k or so that you might lose from not having bargain space might actually turn a great investment if you end up hiring a better candidate.

* Don't list every technology you may or may not use as required in the job posting. Either post for a specific job or spell it out that you want a fast learner and wearer of many hats, and say "these might be useful".

* Don't require X years of experience. This is as stupid as the drinking age limit: You aren't suddenly much more mature the day you turn 21. What does "experience" mean anyway? Experience in what? Spell out what sort of skills you need.

* What are we going to be working on? What is interesting about it? Hopefully it's something more intriguing than "building a blog engine" for the billionth time. It doesn't have to be cutting edge, but even the most seemingly mundane tasks can have interesting technical aspects if they are nontrivial.

* What sort of environment is it? Can I show up in my jeans and take a break during the day? Do you care what days / hours I work as long as I put in my 40h / week? What are my peers like? Are they young up and comers or grizzled bearded veterans of the unices? What sort of development process do you have? What points of the Joel Test (look it up) does your place pass?
So, is there a way to safeguard against this? I assume when I connect to an exchange server at home it doesn't have root access to my laptop, right?
On further inspection, the jasonwoof code is quite a bit simpler not only because it has a better approach (which it does!) but also because it leaves out the checks for 0 and off-by-one. So it crashes on 0 and gives the wrong answer for 6, saying 3 when the answer correct to two places is 2.45. You can correct the wrong answers with the same dup dup * n @ > if 1- then business that I was using, assuming you want floor(sqrt(n)) instead of, say, round(sqrt(n)) or ceil(sqrt(n)).
And this article is from the same guy that predicted that the Kin would be a massive success.
Estimates sucks, especially when I pay for them
then he wouldn't be asking, and LOL would probably be in at least 30% of his brainstorming ideas...
why not make this site it for all cities?
So you could visit any city you want to
GPLv3 is looking better and better.
From 0 to 20k hits per day: Interview with fashion blogger 'The Cheap Girl'
I would love to see this happen in Boston. I'll be the first one to offer up my couch.
Jeff Bezos is a great example of someone who had a high-paying job, but quit to go create a startup (Amazon.com).

"...and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called -- which only a nerd would call -- a "regret minimization framework." So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, "Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have." I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this..."

- quoted from http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0int-3
I disagree. Oppression is a loaded term. At he very least it implies a certain unreasonableness. For example it is not unreasonable to expect me, when visiting Italy for example, to realize that certain hand signs are offensive and to avoid them. In the same way, it is not unreasonable to expect that Europeans, when visiting an American website, understand that Americans have particular sensibilities and respect that. The fact that many Americans don't realize that this is a two way street makes them jerks. The fact that Americans are a majority on the Internet and most successful sites target them is an inconvenience to non-Americans. But none of this is oppression. To claim otherwise is melodrama and hyperbole at best.

Letting different website set their own rules about what is appropriate on their pages, is no more oppression than forcing to have to look at your ugly torso whenever we look you up on Facebook.
I thought it was neat when I first came across it, and thought, 'well, why not?' but the fact is that the only time I am typing into the google search bar in the webpage, and not built into my browser's address bar, is to tweak the results that I have gotten out of a search. And I tend to do that while reading the results themselves. After I had those results pulled out from under me while reading several times in a row, I turned it off.
Sounds like you have a great gig, but real entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship (which is what you are) are very different beasts primarily because of risk:reward.

Your risk is lower but so is your upside.

And that is one thing that entrepreneurship/startups offers - the chance at building something and being rewarded big (albeit generally at insanely high risk)
From my answer on Quora (http://www.quora.com/What-made-you-quit-your-comfortable-sal...)

Jeff Bezos' Regret Minimization Framework:

"...it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called -- which only a nerd would call -- a "regret minimization framework." So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, "Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have." I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that's very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, "What will I think at that time?" it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That's the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later."

See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ

A big payout is definitely a large factor in jumping ship if you're arrogant enough to believe that you can attain such a thing. If you just want to "work at a startup" without having much of an idea about which startup and no intention of starting one yourself, then frankly in my opinion, jumping ship isn't for you. If you're this concerned about your financial status today, at a company you don't drive the vision for you're going to find it harder to drum up the ambition and drive it takes to get through times where a huge financial payout is not as certain.
This issue is the philosophical equivalent of Apple's App Store censorship, for Android fans. Android's partisans are so fixated on victory over Apple that they ignore or excuse the fact that carriers are steadily chipping away at the 'openness' that Android is supposed to embody.
> Most of my desktop programs already work that way

Well, sort of. If I start a search for "go" on my computer, it looks for that text specifically. Google looks for "google maps" -- which is more distracting to me personally.
I missed that, that is pretty awesome. I'm not a fan of figs, but the significant other and friends are. For me, losing an old tree due to not knowing it's proper care was the bit of a downer.

I don't quite feel pigbucket's hate. :)
skip the video and forget ramen profitability. the real standard is the Costco hot dog. $1.50 for an excellent treat with unlimited soda refills.
Mostly true, but... it depends on personal values. For me, the lower risk rewards me with consistently high quality (and regular) family time. That said, I am granted enough flexibility that if I come up with a saleable product/service idea I am allowed to pursue it with company financing. The odds are extremely low that any idea at all relevant to our operations would end up with a huge payoff, but the odds are much higher that my work will payoff in incremental business wins, and I'm ok with that. I'm not in it for the money [as long as the money is stable and my income has a positive slope].
To be frank Google wants to actively discourage, native app development. And they are right, their vision involves everyone using Web as their source for information or applications.

The only issue is that internet is not as ubiquitous as they would want it to be. But wait for 2-3 years and then we will live in truly internet filled world.

Regarding iPhone, Apple wants to own all parts of their users experience, which is even worse than having crapware.

Apple is one of the most old-world corporate minded corporation. and wants resurgence of old large corporate entities like newspapers, etc. They want an internet which is about selling stuff by large corporations to general consumers and not about sharing information between people.
They are the ones who slept with crappy companies such as EMI.
Especially relevant after recent news that Apple is working on bringing MacRuby to iOS:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1684403

Which is finally possible now that Apple has eased restrictions on development tools and languages for iOS apps:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1675131
here is the difference, with android you can erase the O.S. from the device and re install a clean version, and still all applications will work.

Can you do that with iOS.

Comparing Android and iOS is like comparing freedom in America to that of Iran.

US still has death penalty sadly, but they are not stoning women for adultery.
Seems like we need something like vmware on phones. Then I can run the company's phone on my device. They can wipe, er, administer it any way they must. And I can still have one phone.
Actual salary range. Important. A "competitive salary" in 2010 for an embedded systems designer is not the 50th percentile for HTML coders from a 1996 salary survey. If you have incredibly specialized skills that you've been unable to hire for, competitive is going to be 6 figures and not the low end.

No long lists of very narrow technologies each which really only require a few days to get up to speed.

Brief description of work environment such as offices with doors that close, book account or some sort of library, reasonably modern computers with dual monitors each at least 1920x1080 plus a laptop, and no complaints about getting whatever text editor and tools the developer prefers to work with.

Relocation paid. If you are looking to hire someone who is good and with specific skills, he is not in your weird city nor does he wish to subsidize your cost of hiring.

Pay for cost of interviewing for final candidates that you need to come to site interviews. For those ones you'll want to sell the area as well since they have no idea why anyone would want to live there, wherever 'there' is.

Not paying the above two tells the candidate you probably won't be able to make payroll either.

Be very willing to receive screening calls that ask lots of personal specific questions and answer them enthusiastically, just like you are trying to sell an expensive item to a very important customer.

And finally, don't rely only on ads. For specialized skills you need recruitment, and there's no way to figure out who you want to woo unless the recruiting is done by someone who knows development, not some know-nothing recruiter from an agency, nor some HR drone. Again, recruitment has nothing to do with recruiters. Recruitment is saying you need someone with the ability to build System X, then you find someone who is already doing that and pay him $20 million to buy his company as a talent acquisition.

I am no longer an employee but an owner. When I was an employee I looked at ads but found them useless for many of the above reasons. As an owner I write ads and do recruitment and we have little difficulty hiring exactly the talent we need. Pretty much all companies that have problems finding talent aren't offering enough money and are not good places to work in many ways. Places that pay competitive and are good places to work have no shortage of highly qualified applicants. Yes, you'll also get a lot of unqualified applicants, but how to tell the difference is a topic for another day. (In short, if you can't tell the difference you're doomed since you'll hire a bunch of duds and then the few with actual talent will leave because of the clustering effect: very talented people hate to work with idiots.)
It really depends on the frat. If it is a frat that is oriented around academic excellence (are there any of those?) then don't worry... just being in the frat will help you in this regard.

I think the secret for this whole process is this: Learn to not care about being humiliated. Humiliate yourself, in fact. IF they give you a chance to tell your most embarassing story, do it. And try to do it well. By doing so they will know that the story can't really be used against you, and that you have the guts to tell it.

The trick is, people are naturally shy and insecure. Frats and "hazing" are all about getting over that, in a typically hamfisted male-bonding sort of way.

If your conscious mind can take control, and if you can be super rational, you can excel socially. Most people your age do not know this, and are afraid. But if you have nothing to fear because you realize that what you're afraid of is really inconsequential, then this gives you immense power.

You can actually hack the frat knowing this.

The bully whose always picking on you? Well, he's doing so because he's insecure. In fact, he'll telegraph to you what he's insecure about in the nature of his picking on you.

Same thing with arrogance.

Shy guys? They'll be your best friends if you are nice to them.... you can buy a lot of loyalty with a little bit of niceness. (And loyalty is a valuable currency.)

for dealing with crowds, just pick one or two people to focus on-- initially anyone you've had any previous contact with. Don't be clingy, or follow them around, but don't try to relate to everyone.

If you walk into a room and know nobody, just walk up to the cutest girl and ask her name. That's it. If she doesn't start talkign to you, or looks nervous or makes an excuse then wait and see if anyone approaches you after a few minutes and if not, just find someone else and introduce yourself.
on a sidenote GPL v3 or any other GPL license is not allowed on apple iOS.
Every country is different, but coming back into the US is a uniformly annoying experience. From my experiene, US Customs/Border agents are at the very least lacking any sort of friendliness with some sort of powertrip being the norm.

Given these are some of the first people visitors to this country encounter, I would hope they would be friendly and professional rather than surly and on an power trip.

Every foreign country I have been to (mostly Europe and Canada) has been friendlier and more welcoming than every single instance that I have had in dealing with US customs upon re-entry. And, for the record, I am in the "here's my passport" and answers questions crowd.
Hmm, identical URL too. I thought HN had duplicate-URL checking? Or it's only for duplicate URLs within some recent timeframe?
Maybe you should separate out search by topic and search by book title? On searching for something which is not there yet, how about an option to create (suggest) it?
Good stuff, otherwise!
Outbound VC Dialing Programs - Total Disrespect for Entrepreneurs
you dont want to work there.
The Best Anti-Penny Rant Ever?
I was an active, very satisfied Billmonk user with 9 or 10 friends. It was aggravating when Billmonk started choking; worse still when the degradation made the app more or less unusable.

If you're in the same boat, we've since moved to http://www.splitmybill.ie -- a service that has more or less duplicated Billmonk's use cases. Very basic, but meets our needs.
My main reasons are spam filter, imap support and inability to use my own domain.
Minty is new. They only released the internal testing recently.
this is basically my point. The things you look for in great programmers are not the same things you look for in finding great people to spend a weekend with. In order to make this a truly great experience they should put some time into finding a way to make good matches both in start-up-employee-potential and enjoyable-person-potential.