skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This exact situation happened with me prior to starting my current position. Let me tell a short story.

I received a formal offer from the new organization, gave my notice at the previous employer and closed out my projects, and made plans to spend a couple of weeks having a proper several-years-delayed honeymoon with my wife, and then a week visiting family and getting my head ready for the new role. As I was waiting to board the plane to visit my family, I saw on the news that the organization I was joining (government-funded) got a surprise during a weekend political negotiating session, and had their budget for the remainder of the year slashed by a ridiculous amount. This hit them hard enough that they were already talking about furloughs and layoffs to the media, and had an all-hands meeting about the issue scheduled.

By the time the plane landed, I had voicemail waiting for me from the fellow who was going to be my new boss; as soon as he heard what was happening, he immediately started asking his superiors about outstanding offers, and was informed in no uncertain terms that already-issued offers were being honored (but obviously, no new offers would be issued), and he made sure I understood that he was available for any questions I might have. I, along with everyone else in the organization, experienced rolling furloughs for the next few quarters, and a round of voluntary layoffs and additional emergency funding finally helped them make it through until the next budget cycle.

That is precisely how you handle a situation like this: you honor your obligations, and preferably do so proactively, and with a keen eye to how you are impacting people who have placed their trust in you and your organization.

Reneging on your obligations, especially in a situation as nuanced as the posters' (a suggestion to simply "move on" is much easier said than done when you're on an H1B), is the definition of unprofessionalism, and is a direct reflection on them as businesspeople. While I don't recommend he "out" them because of how it might reflect on him later in his career, I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a little voice of schadenfreude in the back of my mind hoping he lets their name slip.
Don't Let Your Startup Trap You
Yes. It kinds of sucks how he got it - he basically spread damaging false rumors until FB was forced into giving an interview to clear it up. But in the end it resulted in a great interview and - amazingly - I came away with slightly more respect for Zuckerberg at the end of it (starting from a low base).
Cool, will check it out. And how unanimous are these views amongst sociologists? I'd imagine there is disagreement on the subject?
Mike Arrington is selling newspapers. http://goo.gl/fb/PpyhK
The Scvngr Chief Ninja is the real deal. http://goo.gl/fb/UdZzx He is absolutely right about the gaming layer as the next big thing after social.
tl;dr Just In time for the movie!
And no mobs at night (edit: single player?)? Not sure, there might be a glitch, or you've got an old version. It's pretty easy to get killed the first night.

Another possibility is that you're too high up. They seem to cluster in the valleys, the "mountains" sometimes almost empty.
In case you haven't noticed, charter schools have far more interest from parents than there are spots open, that's why they have lotteries to get in. In fact there is a documentary specifically about this, called simply [1] The Lottery.

Also New Jersey schools are some of the most corrupt in the nation, which there is also a documentary about called [2] The Cartel. In The Cartel they actually have a scene from one of the charter lotteries, which is one of the saddest scenes I've ever seen in a film as it literally brought tears to my eyes watching parents and kids celebrate when they were chosen, and brought to tears of anguish when they were not.

Also it would be nice if you could show us where the public school system is supposedly "functioning just fine," as I'd love to see the evidence for that. In fact, there is a movie being released this Friday called [3] Waiting for "Superman" that argues the opposite, along with former NY state educator of the year [4] John Taylor Gatto that argues in his books that the entire system should be abolished and started over from scratch. Sure, there are the very rare few teachers that are actually doing good work, but the system is flawed from the top down starting with the goals (essentially to produce factory workers with no individual thought [5,6]).

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1515935/

[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1433001/

[3] http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/

[4] http://johntaylorgatto.com/

[5] http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm

[6] http://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Mass-Instruction-Schoolteacher...
I see what you mean now; you can see it as a point of view change (or as a value-system change.)

I feel I've been a bit callously analytical, like the "Life goes on, folks" post near the end of A Fire Upon the Deep, but I'm not happy about how Oracle is acting, or what it may do next. Like the Blight, it is very powerful.
No idea what the startup is or what you are trying to do, so no idea what you would need in a CTO or why you'd need one before you have anything else.

I worked for a startup where the president/founder of the company's friend created a single webpage for the company with a way to contact him. The domain name was good enough, so that was the start of the tech side. Hard to believe in this day and age, but that was the late 90s. After that, a (young) teenager wrote the webapp that ran the company's primary service. This person became the CTO, then was replaced by the former person who wrote the original webpage (that's right- just a page), but who was a Linux guru, could do the site, basically somewhat handled marketing, etc.

I recently read this:
http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/13808/The-Magical-Found...

which basically says the founders should be in this order:

1. Developer.

2. Designer / UI / UX person.

3. Inbound Marketer.

4. Sales Person.

One thing I can say for sure is that if you aren't technical and you are going to rely on someone you just picked up to basically run the engine of your company, you may just be dreaming.

If you have to pick anyone, make sure it is:

1. Not a friend

2. Someone you'd want to go camping with and vice versa (Sorry, I can't find the link for where that was suggested.)

3. A combination developer and server/networking geek. For a CTO this day and age in a startup, they should know Linux in and out, OS X in and out (seriously, a good sign is a macbook pro as client), know whatever your site is to be developed in (PhP, Ruby, Java, etc.), DNS, Apache, Passenger, Mongrel2, Tomcat, JBoss, etc. (depending on PhP, Ruby, Java, etc.), understand hosting and cloud services in current day and age, etc. They should live that stuff. There is no major for that. It is just a matter of interest and talent. It could be an English major.
With source code available attackers are white-box testing as opposed to black-box testing.

Black-boxing is where you throw known arguments at a system and measure the responses, and hence deducing what the system is doing

White-box testing is knowing what is happening internally, so you can immediately skip to step two of a security test - which is exploiting.

With black-boxing it takes a very very long time to learn the entire system and its workings, but it can be done. Having the code just means skip that test. For eg. with Diaspora from it launching to it being exploited was a matter of minutes.

The Twitter URL escaping bug from this week was from within one of their public source code repositories. While they don't release everything as open source, they have released enough to give an attacker a good view of their stack and how it works. Bugs not detected in the open source code are likely to also appear in other parts of the platform that are closed source (since they weren't detected in the first place)
Yes - it was fantastic to hear him endorsing HTML5. These days all I hear is chants of "apps, apps, apps" from everybody and I just keep thinking - don't you all know what a disaster this is? Zero interoperability, colossal wasted man hours for all of humanity building duplicated native apps across different platforms everywhere, all to do the same thing, just to pander to the vanity of giant companies like Apple, Google, RIM, etc.

I must say, it feels quite strange to be agreeing vehemently with Mark Zuckerberg, but I hope he keeps talking like this. What he should say is that Facebook will always build a first class HTML5 client before anything else, so it is in the interests of every platform to have a first class HTML5 support.
I'm aware of the Superman movie & I mostly agree with your criticisms, and again, my objection was that I thought you overstated your criticism of the "United States public school system." Obviously, not all public schools are bad.

For example, my hometown of Montville, NJ has a wonderful public school system which has very good outcomes. As does Bergen County, NJ. And many of my friends and family have attended Rutgers University and received outstanding educations. These are public schools, functioning just fine. Rutgers is arguably better than most private universities, and our high school arguably better than most private schools.

Again, I agree that our public schools aren't great for the most part, but I think this is a complex problem and that we should try to remove ideological arguments and drastic, unrealistic solutions (like taking a hatchet to our entire public school system). And again, yes, charter schools are great and more are necessary to meet demand, but I don't think that necessarily means we should ignore efforts to attempt to improve the public school system which many kids are stuck with.

tl;dr: Yes, charter schools are fantastic, and we need more, but we should also try to improve our public education, especially in the poorest of our communities.
Under the current system, the worst students cost far more to educate than the best students. Because of this you can slice the numbers to say everything from money is harmful, meaningless, or beneficial. The simple truth is in education resources matter but like all things there are significant diminishing returns after a while.
Does "Big Enterprise" Have an Unfair Advantage?
You have a point about the passage as a whole.

And also, yes, clever wordplay intended to amuse the reader is not narcissistic.
Know how they get to be low SES? THEY DON'T STUDY!!

In the US, IF you work the educational system, you can pull yourself into the middle class with as much in student debt as a high end toyota. Today. With no money. Bust your ass in school, take out a loan, and go to a 2nd tier college in engineering or accounting, and voila -- you are middle class. This is the worst case -- if you are actually talented, you should be able to get scholarships and/ or go to a top tier university -- voila, you are UPPER middle class.

HOWEVER, if you are born to a rural working class family, your mom and dad tell you school is a waste of time, that you can't afford it, your teachers assume you are doomed to failure, and you can hit a local maximum in prestige by being a smart aleck and a decent football player and working early. Nobody is going to encourage you do anything else -- not your teachers, parents, or age group friends.

And you are screwed, before you even showed up in kindergarten... It has nothing to do with race or money, just culture. The classic guy on the interaction of culture with education with class is Pierre Bourdieu -- look him up.

I know about these white families some -- I imagine it is a little worse for black and hispanic kids. But the working class whites prove my point about culutre better, since they are supposedly the power group. (Well, in terms of race, sure, but what matters is class -- go Karl!)

(With asian kids, there is a reverse "Pygmalion Effect"; I knew a girl who got through a second tier UC NEVER doing any homework -- if she were black, she would have failed out early because every little thing she did wrong would have been fodder for preconceptions. Or if she was working class "country" white.)
Compared to a hacker's salary, the difference between $700 for a Thinkpad and $3000 for whatever they want is negligible.
Minecraft uses a Java-wrapper for OpenGL. On all platforms. I say this primarily using OS X day to day. I've been running it on a Mid-2010 Mac Mini without issue. Most of the slowdown for the FAR render distance is I/O related.

The performance issues (and any graphics shortcomings) are due to the engine design, and probably a minimum of effort being expended on optimizing the game for performance, especially when the feature set is still amorphous.
What annoys me is that this will advance the state of the art of virii to no end when the bad guys get their disassemblers on this
on a side note, is there anything good coming out of vancouver right now? I haven't heard of anything since the bootup labs debacle.
Wait, so I need to kill enemies to obtain something besides flowers, meet?

I just need a HINT. I have no idea what to do! I've seen one day and one night and I am in the same place. Am I looking for something?
Bomb shelter datacenter: 360˚ panorama shots
I was very confused at first too.
This tutorial helped:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=19065
Larry Ellison is also more liquid than Zuckerberg.
If you're looking to build something really simple, I wouldn't touch Magento with a ten foot pole.

My recommendation? Look into FoxyCart, CS-Cart, Shopify, BigCommerce, Interspire - in that order. You will be very happy.
http://github.com/cpinto/python-couchdb-paginator

haven't used this but i saw this on SO the other day ... I just started looking at the whole NoSQL paradigm to experiment in the near future and i felt it was helpful to track some tags on StackOverflow to learn about issues people face...
Oracle has 25 years of cash flow to finance against. I suspect he gets good terms.
General starting point: punch some tree trunks to get wood, press "i" to open your inventory, and turn it into planks => wood. Build yourself a sword and some basic tools (arrangement of items matters), and start digging around in the stone areas / exploring to find caves. Digging totally randomly is unlikely to be too productive, so find caves to start. Find stone blocks with black specks, and use your pick to get coal - combine with sticks to get torches. Enemies spawn at night anywhere it's dark, so lighting caves is important to your safety.

Beyond there, it's mostly an exploration / building / sandbox game. It's not an appealing game model for everyone, though, so it may just be that it doesn't click for you (though give it a bit of time).
Some details:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-de...

want :D
> That was 11 years ago.

The problem is, these kids are from college. They don't teach you stuff like "writing a secure web application" in college, or even try to.

(Not that this is unreasonable, though perhaps I'm suggesting that there should be different career paths for CS majors and people who intend to be professional programmers. (I say as a CS-educated professional programmer))
I wonder if it's a function of "I already have enough money doing this for the love of it"?
Excellent! have another upmod for catching me out as a cranky old man :-)
MyHurricane, Stormpulse now has an HTML5 competitor.
Hey boss, I worked on a similar site a while back called Audiolizer (http://www.audiolizer.com). Pretty much the same thing, we used the Youtube API for songs. Its a pretty crowded space, so don't expect to make big money or traffic out of it.

But yeah, keep the interface clean and simple (and not bright pink please!). IMO, I would put the search results in the center column and the playlist off to the right. Its a bit unintuitive the way it is now because when a user searches for something, they expect it to pop up immediately in front of them.

You should definitely build out playlists (if you haven't already) and what you can do is create a few and link to them on your homepage (ie. Coldplay's greatest hits). Integrate Facebook/Twitter logins for higher registration rates. Have fun.
The Darwinist solution: the cards will eventually evolve into something that will sort itself

The creationists solution: Let God sort it out
I'm starting to think I'm running a buggy version, because punching trees does NOTHING.

Unless i have to punch it 10000 times, in which case, fuck this.
It's OK, you're allowed to have fun.
For that to happen, HN update speed would have to slow dramatically.

(I favor this and agree with you, incidentally.)
For big, hyped-up tech companies, I don't think 5x becomes the norm any more, though 30x is still definitely pretty unheard-of since the bubble-1.0 days. But the last tech IPO that I think hits Facebook levels of investor interest was Google, and they IPO'd for $23 billion in 2004. Depending on how you count, that was a 7x-15x multiple on revenues (their fiscal-2003 revenues, the last complete ones at the time of the IPO, were $1.5b; their fiscal-2004 revenues ended up being $3.2b).
Uh... for users to discover new, cool shit.
Wow, it was NOT obvious that I needed to hold down the mouse button.

I have a macbook so I just kept clicking. Doh!
Our infrastructure is also totally Linux based. But we don't mandate what the developers use. Personally, I prefer to use a beefy desktop machine with multiple screens instead of a notebook. When it comes to hitting the road, I prefer the MacBook.

Please consider the many suggestions for using virtualisation and the suggestions of nazism. Personally, if a developer was fantastic and preferred to use Windows, then as long as he observed security requirements it would be all systems go.

Anyway, most software that runs on Linux is also ported to OS/X and Windows (support levels may differ) so perhaps setting up your dev env on other platforms could be instructive.
Say hi to Gimli for me then.
Similarly:

"...secret squirrel double-plus alpha unrelease..."

Mind if I use that? It would be a terrific title for an animal fighting game I've been itching to make.
Anytime someone announces that they will invest X million into a public charity, always ask, over what period and under what conditions? This reminds me of how BP pledged $20 billion to help the Gulf states affected by the oil spill, but they didn't mention the tax break they got out it and how it was actually placed in an escrow account with conditions favorable to them.

I applaud his actions but question his timing and motivations.
I'm also not familiar with what you're doing, but I think you'd be lucky finding anyone that would be willing to work for just equity for some student. I think you should focus on finding a partnership with someone with some technical skills rather than trying to fill a cto position.
2 points to be noted:

1) NJ is very notorious when it comes to unions. this extends to public schools. not many people care about actually teaching as much as they care about the 3 month vacation and a very steady paycheck + a very healthy pension.

2) Up until this point, the NJ state controlled Newark public schools. Now, the gov has agreed to hand over the control of the public schools in Newark to the mayor, Corey Booker (who's the best thing to happen to Newark in recent history).

Recently, Gov. Christie cut higher ed funding to divert it to the public school systems. Now this doesn't help public universities like Rutgers in the state. Being a recent alum, I know the first hand effect of the state's constant budget cuts to the university since 2006-07 (about 61 million $ then through about 20 mill in 2010) ..

all in all, it's pretty much a cluster%^
Haha, it's fascinating to see someone in the security field talk about purchasing exploits. It sounds only one step removed from discussing the price to purchase a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.
What if you were to create RAM sticks with a small amount of flash and a controller onboard, and then swap these with generic RAM sticks?
Poll: What does the HN community believe about AngelGate?
I believe that Arrington uncovered that the 'super angels' were colluding to further their interests, and it has changed my opinion of these super angels.
I believe that Arrington uncovered that the 'super angels' were colluding to further their interests, but it has not changed my opinion of them.
I am uncertain who or what to believe as yet
I believe there was a dinner, Arrington reported it, but there is/was no real collusion or conspiracy
I think Arrington made this up to get pageviews
Too late. Already went through data structures in C++. It's what I am most comfortable with right now, which is not saying much.

I don't understand what actually happens at the kernel level but the language makes sense to me for some reason.

My professor thought I was insane when I signed up for C++, Java and VB.Net all in the same semester and all with no prior programming experience.

I started the Google pyhton tutorial.

Thanks.
Good luck! I've been trying to hire him for months now. ;p
One of my earliest jobs involved Lotus macros. When I got to port them to VBA-Excel it was a joyful thing.
The report about the phone was true. Here's (yet more) confirmation: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-23/facebook-is-said-to...
Right, but I'm assuming that there are controls over nuclear control machines. That would seem to render this method of "attack" rather impractical unless you had an inside man. In which case it seems a rather round about method of sabotage vs just planting a bomb or yanking some wires or something.
Yeah - I usually come on here to find the technical sorts of articles that I learn from and have been seeing less and less of these lately.
Ask HN: How can I use memcached as in-memory index
I have 5TB of data and 20 machines with 16GB ram each. I want to create an in-memory index of this data (a financial time series which looks like <timestamp: tick values>) so that I could query the data by time range very quickly (in hundreds of msec).

I thought of using some distributed key-value store for the in-memory index, and I'm guessing it is impossible to construct something like the traditional B-tree index using hash table, so the indexing must be done differently from typical databases. What are some simple ways you can think of using memcached or other distributed in-memory key-value store for in-memory indexing of sequentially ordered data of this size.
"And how unanimous are these views amongst sociologists? I'd imagine there is disagreement on the subject?"

As far as I know there isn't much disagreement about the fact that school funding doesn't correlate well with outcomes, but there is obviously a lot of disagreement about how to translate this into actual reforms.

In terms of assessing the validity of the original research though, I get the feeling that in this case the answers you get are much more determined by the questions you're asking rather than by the methodology of the studies. Unlike, say, when you are trying to understand how the results of surveys on self-reported drug use correlate with actual drug use, and you need to read a 594 page PDF worth of research before you're able to say anything intelligent.[1] (Which I read last night for fun, which is why I know this.)

[1] http://archives.drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/Monograph167/Mo...