skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your CEO, CFO, and COO are either completely ignorant of finances, or are cold-hearted jerks. It is simple and easy to grant you options (or even founder shares, although that would be unusual) in an S-corp right now (if you'd said LLC, then there would be a case to be made that they didn't want to issue equity until they converted to a C-corp, which is expensive - but it still means they're selfish and/or dumb for doing it that way).

Once you've got revenue, your company value is materially higher, and they can no longer easily transfer you shares (since you have to pay taxes based on the value of the shares). And any options they grant you must have a strike price of the current fair market value, which will be provably higher if the company has gone from no revenue to some revenue, which just takes money out of your pocket for no good reason.

I generally go by Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." With the huge caveat that I've only heard your side of the story, it sounds like your cofounders are well meaning, drunk with power, and ignorant of how to do their jobs. Find a new job first, then tell them you're leaving. If they ask nicely and your new employer doesn't mind, you might give them 4 weeks.

But most employees err in the direction of too much loyalty to their last job, so resist the urges to extend further, do consulting, or otherwise fail to break the bond.
You are probably doing the founders of this company a huge favor. They cannot run a successful company the way they're running this one. Giving them the wakeup call they need - politely, reasonably, and professionally, by departing gracefully - will leave them with enough runway to rethink their strategy and could save their endeavor. And it's definitely the right thing for you.
I was introduced to formal reasoning about programs in an introductory course on algorithms and data structures in March. Most of the curriculum was from CLRS,[1] which presents proofs of correctness for many algorithms but doesn't explain how to develop such proofs. The curriculum for the last two weeks of the course, however, was a handout titled Transition Systems,[2] which I found to be an excellent introduction to the subject.

Since that time I've been interested in the idea of proving programs correct. On weekends I'm currently making my way through David Gries's The Science of Programming. Similar books include

- A Discipline of Programming by Dijkstra

- The Evolution of Programs by N. Dershowitz

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/algorithms/

[2] http://www.cs.au.dk/dADS1/daimi-fn64.pdf
Ugh, this is just a rewrite of:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652263

OT: ...can't people come up with something original to say?
What font is #14?
This works even better if you don't build a campfire.
Its like Back to the Future! I feel like I'm in 1985!

This is very cool.
Think about the boring guy at the sailing class. Later on you find out he's a doctor, or a builder, or a fraud investigator or a republican or likes watching hockey or went to college at Stanford. What if he didn't tell you any of that until you had known him for a couple of weeks or even months during the course of that sailing class vs if he had told you that all up front?

I usually find that nobody's eyes light up and get excited when I tell them I work as a software developer. I'm now a nerd, or too smart, or boring, or a member of the
"technical professional" social class.

If I had some really exciting job like being a movie star, I'd be stuck having to repeat answers to the same frequently asked questions every time I met someone new. The idea of the zen levels is to get to know other people first as humans before socially categorizing them. It's about showing them your personality instead of telling them all your credentials up front.
Ask HN: does playing the "social media game" help you when starting a startup?
Just a thought I was making to myself.

I noticed that some of my friends who also want to be entrepreneur are playing what I call the "social media game" very hard. Which means they're tweeting quite intensively, they follow "important" people, trying to answer some of their question so they can get noticed etc.

I'm just wondering if this is a massive waste of time, or does it actually help ? To me it seems all fluff and makes me want to open my IDE and start typing code so I'm actually building something. Am I the only one having this behaviour ? Should I adapt ?
Free body diagrams, people.
If only I could understand what is going on in the code...the variable names make my head explode :(
I rather wish their forum was open. I'm only receiving a blank grey window when I run ShowGame over a game's text.

Alas.

Edit: I suppose the outage was momentary; the forum is rather hopping.
I tend to think that trends.google.com has the best approximation of traffic:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=getrichslowly.org&sa...

In any case, yes, this blog has a decent sized audience, and would generate a fair amount of income.
but what you're saying is that the spring can't distinguish between the setup on the right and the setup on the left. that doesn't seem right.

if you detach one of the weights and anchor it on the other weight, the balance should read 2kg. and if you anchor weight A on the string of weight B, it would also read 2kg. as you move weight A's anchor point closer and closer to the balance, the reading remains 2kg.

what happens when the anchoring point reaches the balance?
Rotating Quine
I completely agree, which is why I wanted someone to give me a task they would find useful vs just academic exercises.

Also, I don't know where to begin with projects that need help. Can you suggest a way to find those projects more in need, or is there one using perl/c/python that you're familiar with and needs help?
Ask HN: How to convince someone that building a Facebook killer is a bad idea?
I have a friend who is set on building a better Facebook. I've tried explaining that getting Millions of people to switch seems unreasonable but he continues on.

How do I convince him that this is a battle he isn't going to win....or should I?
On formal principles, we'd expect that robustness and expressiveness are inversely related, on the principle that low-entropy data can be recovered with better fidelity than dense data, but I think I can name a counterexample to this principle in practice: I think Haskell does a phenomenally good job of being both expressive and robust if we consider a practical definition of robust, whereby pain is not measured by likelihood of error but the cost of an error. Compile-time errors are extremely cheap in comparison to run-time errors.

You want an "almost right" program to fail, but you want it to do so at compile time. Runtime silent failure is the worst.
Successful open source projects need to be promoted just like for-money projects. They also need to be polished much more than the standard, which is "write half a readme file and throw it on github." In this, what users say they want is opposite from what they actually respond to -- which, if you sell software for a living, is something you are probably prepared to believe but may not have thought about vis-a-vis programmers.

1) Create a web page which promotes your product. Heresy: don't put it on Github. It should have attractive, professional design, market your software effectively, and have a clear call to action. Think "what would 37Signals do", and copy liberally.

http://rubyonrails.org/

2) Get a unique visual identity for the project. Same reasoning as #1. Humans are visual creatures, and projects with e.g. logos that do not look like they were made in MS Paint by a drunk chimpanzee communicate professionalism, safety, popularity, ongoing maintenance, etc.

See http://www.abingo.org (disclaimer: my site) for my take on doing this for an OSS Rails project. Points of note: professional logo, selling the product through benefits, 1-minute install guide, live demo, copious documentation, video, etc.

3) If you build it, that means absolutely nothing about them coming or not. "Make it so good they can't ignore you" is horsepuckey which engineers treat as a magic talisman to ward off evil marketing demons. If you want it used, you are going to have to talk to people and tell them to use it.

4) "Make something people want." Does it solve a problem which is preventing businesses from making money, in a fashion much better than currently existing alternatives? If not, it probably isn't going anywhere, since OSS adoption among end users is close to zero outside of a few headline projects.
PLOT: Programming Language for Old Timers (2006)
I understand the industry (well, from what I can glean)

I don't think that's going to cut it. I think that if you are going to be taken seriously by investors of the scale necessary to get something like this going, you're going to need a management team made up of airline industry professionals with proven track records. So, if I were in your shoes, I'd begin by talking to as many high-level people in the airline industry as I could, and seeing how many you can convince to jump on board your project.
Most Palantir installations don't automatically generate or analyze the graphs. It's installed as essentially a very large, hand curated, semantic graph store and retrieval system with a nice client interface. Most of the work done with Palantir is manual.

If you watch some demos on their site you'll see that the workflow is almost entirely manual save for the moments when they retrieve sections of the semantic graph from the datastore.

Also notice that they never talk about the excruciatingly long process of how that data got jammed into the system. Imagine the target goal for an entire day's work for one person is to import 10 news articles into the system and you'll understand why they aren't doing the kinds of things Schneider was talking about (even if their brilliant marketing and sales departments sell it otherwise).

edit: word on the street is that they are still cashflow negative which is very worrisome considering all the fundraising they've been doing + they've almost saturated the government market
Commercial games with Linux versions often still use this (or a variant). Not too sure why; perhaps because it's the closest Linux equivalent to the self-extracting installer archives they use on Windows?
"From a bit to a few hundred megabytes, from a microsecond to a half an hour of computing confronts us with completely baffling ratio of 109! The programmer is in the unique position that his is the only discipline and profession in which such a gigantic ratio, which totally baffles our imagination, has to be bridged by a single technology. He has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before."
— E.W. Dijkstra
BUG Labs (NYC) hiring Senior Web Developer
Easy reading is hard writing
Although unlikely to be supported by the context, I think the quote would have been stronger if the ! in 10^9! were an operator and not punctuation.

While the Large Hadron Collider is experimenting with particles less than 10^-10 m in size over distances on the scale of 10^4 m, computer scientists can easily run into combinatorial explosions that would make 10^9! seem puny. (Not just computer scientists, too -- you can probably find code that tries to operate like that on the Daily WTF.)
Emails are just getting hotter
Beautifully written. Note however that mentioned Hula calendar is also very dead today (so there is an additional story to be told!):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_(software)

And for those who don't know (international readers like me) the expression "albatross around the neck" which JWZ used here comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798):

In the poem, an albatross starts to follow a ship (...) the mariner shoots the albatross (...) which is regarded as an act that will curse the ship (...) To punish him, his companions induce him to wear the dead albatross around his neck indefinitely

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albatross_(metaphor)
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thanks a lot for this
Ack! left/right != communist/capitalist.

I consider myself a progressive and am pro-capitalism.
http://ai-contest.com/problem_description.php
Thanks for this. Locality is not an issue for me. I would gladly incorporate in the US and then ultimately move out there. Most of our customers are in the us anyway.
Typically (say on Ebay), gold coins sell (eg, are bid up to) for the same amount as that weight in gold on the global market.
Any time I meet some of these stuck-up physicists, that's what I'm going to lob into their face.

And they'll get even more stuck up, because physics as such deals with (but doesn't control) processes which range more orders of magnitude.

And the techniques of computer science and physics are similar: deliberate simplification. Planets are turned into mass dots, or at best spheres with uniform density; and customers are required to have an all-ASCII name. The difference is that physics relegates anything that can go wrong - building bridges, machines, cars - to people called engineers, whereas the likes of Dijkstra would rather have hyperintelligent theoreticians sort out these problems.
(You can tell that he's never had an angry lynch mob of customers banging at his door because he implemented an incorrect specification instead of using common sense to find the specification error and getting back to the customer).
The article has been edited since I wrote my comment. That was an exact quote from the article at the time. (And I'm pretty sure there was no mention of integration testing at that point, either.)
Sometimes it's better to let things be...Facebook is far from perfect and while your friends idea seems impossible he just might end up carving up a niche service...not necessarily a Facebook takeover but something that delivers stuff people will find attractive.
This was covered in our C classes in college, and it is probably more interesting for programmers here if you understand what the bug actually was.

The "software error" Wiki alludes to is that the Patriot missile kept track of its internal clock with floating point numbers. When the machine had been booted in the recent past, such as every time in testing, the floating point number spent most of its precision to the right of the decimal point. This let it able to do the designed behavior, which was calculate very small delta(time) to be able to do velocity/position calculations and get fairly close to fast moving objects then go boom.

The problem is that floating point numbers have a limited amount of precision available to them, and if you are using a few billion milliseconds (2 weeks), almost all of your precision is lost to the left of the decimal point (and, given that this is precision-intensive work, you didn't need to wait that long to see anomalies).

Lower precision meant that taking delta(time) got increasingly less precise as time went on. Which meant that velocity/position calculations got progressively more screwed up. Which meant the missile did not go boom in the general vicinity of incoming missiles. Which killed Americans and allies.

Thus the moral of the lecture: a) your computer is a powerful, tricksy beast which has many ways to trap you in even straightforward code and b) you should treat software quality like some 19 year old's life depends on it, because it might.
The scale reads zero. Or, if you pull up on it, bringing it above the "horizon" (or bringing the pulleys closer together and below the horizon) causes the scale to approach 2kg.

The force of each weight is converted to a horizontal direction.
The scale really measures force, not mass. On the left the scale measures 9.81 Newtons applied by the weight, which is labeled 1kg because Earth gravity is assumed. The ceiling applies an equal but opposite force on the top of the scale through the suspending string, otherwise the scale would accelerate downward. On the right the force from the ceiling is replaced by force from another weight; this doesn't change the reading on the scale.
The house isn't in a particularly hot place so I'm not sure, but I suspect there are ways of defeating that.
I actually just did this!

I just got back from a long weekend camping. We hiked 8+ miles Saturday and Sunday, and I was so tired last night I went to bed at 8PM (no joke). Thursday night, I went to bed at 1AM.

More generally, I've found that exercise helps a lot with moving my schedule earlier, just because I'm tired. If you're out camping, you tend to be active all day (there aren't many non-active activities in the woods), which helps a lot.
Locality is not an issue for me

It may not be for you, but it might be for the people on the other side of the equation. Relocating to the US is not as easy as you might think, unless you've already got citizenship/a green card.

I'd recommend you look local; many Angels like to fund projects close to home, wherever that might be.

Are you close to Cambridge, perchance? There's a nice startup community there.
A James Bond villain data center
In case you, like me don't know what free body diagrams are, then:
"The only rule for drawing free-body diagrams is to depict all the forces that exist for that object in the given situation. Thus, to construct free-body diagrams, it is extremely important to know the various types of forces. If given a description of a physical situation, begin by using your understanding of the force types to identify which forces are present. Then determine the direction in which each force is acting. Finally, draw a box and add arrows for each existing force in the appropriate direction; label each force arrow according to its type. If necessary, refer to the list of forces and their description in order to understand the various force types and their appropriate symbols."

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/u2l2c.cfm
What an awesome blog name...
Looks similar to 'Transit Back Positiv Normal': http://www.fontfont.com/shop/view_product.ep?id=15745
ROSFORTH.com
Counterpoint: http://www.grist.org/article/food-this-Labor-Day-will-Trader...
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511332
That's the first place I've looked and it contains no clear information about the questions I'm asking.

A. "the number of ships on non-neutral planets increases according to the growth rate for that planet."

What does "according" mean - simple addition? And what happens to the neutral planets - no growth? In which case, how many fleets do the neutral planets start with?

b. "If the result is less than zero, then your bot gains control of the planet."

And how many losses have you incurred - exactly the number of defenders? If the defenders win, do they suffer losses equal to the number of attackers?

The reason I'm asking is that, if all the game does is simple addition and subtraction (no defense advantage, no Lanchester-type law for combat), then there probably exists a very simple optimal strategy, and it's more a problem of mathematics than AI.
There was a scene depicting this in "The Wire". They simply put the suspects hand on the copier surface, he had never seen a copier before, and the lights freaked him out.

I don't know if the show took inspiration from the urban legend or if maybe the legend can be traced back to the show. Either way, I highly recommend the Wire.
click bait, real content link:

http://news.cnet.com/2300-1035_3-10004733.html
37signals' Smiley using Nicereply API in 24 minutes
Potential Droid HTC Smartphone hits the FCC for inspection;
Where's the html5/javascript package? :\
chicken and egg indeed. It's easier once you have better self-control to learn better self-control.

I've discovered that practicing meditation helps me a lot with self-control.
I don't like that ars usually don't test in Windows. At least for the photoshop and itunes articules I have read.
More Benefits of Rooting Your Droid, and More of What to Do Once Rooted
Do they read HN?
Is there an office of four people (A programmer, a CFO, a COO and a CEO) all looking at each other thinking - is this us?

If I was anyone but the programmer I'd probably be crapping myself. Which tells you something about the position you are in. (i.e. one of power)
I'm pretty sure that there is no actual difference. Reconstruction is how memories work. To find the difference you have to look at the content of the memories.
About My Job: The Businessman
I downloaded the source from Google Code, and found the invocation in a .php file there. (Grep for "ShowGame"). After adjusting for the fact that I had the python starter kit, the invocation worked without problems.
If you're counting important things (money, inventory, etc), being up with the wrong answer can be worse than not being up.
Simplifying the shape of planets to dots is a simplification, but amazingly you don't lose accuracy by it wrt to their movements due to gravity. If the planets were turned into dots, their trajectories would be the same.
although you are right but i think you are out of context..
Well, it wasn't everyone, but it was a large enough segment of the movement to be worth mentioning, I think, including many of the prominent leaders: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Frances Willard, etc. Many organizations overlapped, as well; for example, the Women's Christian Temperance Union was heavily involved in suffrage organizing after Willard became its president.
My love of apt (ubuntu/debian)
Also setting i twice, I'm not sure why.
I don't think it's such a great thing that the freshmen linear transforms for 3d manipulation are finding their way into the top-most level of the web stack(Javascript + CSS)

These transforms are already built into the the lowest level in the video hardware and accessed directly through specialized drivers.

While the imaginative side of me wants nothing more than to see web designers go buckwild with 3d, the engineer side of me want to congratulate everyone on slowing down the web even more.
Who's hiring: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659409
oops my bad.. seems like you are right. I'm really ashamed now.. I go and play more as a punishment:D
Yeah, I don't understand why that link wasn't posted.

My blog post was just meant to get it on Planet Lisp and make the Lispers aware.
Comparing the Size of Online eBook Stores
I think that idea may come about because every YC launch or development usually hits front page and gets coverage while some others do not. This is fair. I believe it's the user's voting that appears to "game" the system, not anything unethical. A lot of people here have applied to YC or at least have a favorable opinion of it. We are on news.ycombinator.com after all, not hackernews.com. Some others who don't have as many natural followers will find their submissions less popular?

Quite honestly, I'd find it fair if posts that were anti-YC were quashed but I've seen enough I dont think that could possibly be the case.
Would you say Stephen King or other writers are also not doing anything? What about teachers?
This is why more languages should adopt the every-form-returns-a-value paradigm.
The particular scenario in the article is one in which denormalizing would be not only more efficient, but more correct as well. As the author points out, an invoice should always reflect the order at the time that it was created, not including any subsequent changes in pricing. However, this is strictly a matter of correctness! In order to denormalize, it should either be demonstrably more correct (in which case it is not technically denormalization at all), or a significant performance bottleneck where the cost of maintaining two copies is overshadowed by the savings. Doing so in the name of performance without any proof that there's savings to be had is folly.