skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm assuming that questions about dilution hit Fred's radar after folks hit the theaters this weekend to see The Social Network. Although the actual numbers in the dramatic scene with Eduardo might be slightly exaggerated (I am not sure what happened in reality and how it got handled) - it's critical as a startup founder or startup employee to understand how dilution works because this can and will happen. It's natural. The one thing Fred did not mention is how some of the more aggressive investors out there will have contracts written that will limit the amount of dilution that can affect them when shares are redistributed - that was a new one I ran into with a recent startup of mine. Ultimately it's all about reading your contracts thoroughly and having not a good, but a GREAT lawyer who specializes in startups with you from the beginning.
'"self" posts, posts that do not link to another website have their own category in the top menu bar, they are all grouped under the 'Ask' entry...'

But that doesn't happen for every "Ask HN" I've posted. A good number move there, but not all, and not immediately.
I don't think the books he was destroying were of any real value physically. A lot of them where probably massively distributed. Like the article says, publishers over produce and end up destroying tons of books all the time. Even years later when they are stuck with unsellable stocks.
Good call, let me try to figure out what the logic is behind that. Thanks!

edit: re: the not immediately part, that's logical, the ask page is also ranked, try looking at the second or third page if you don't see your question listed.
I think overall it is a good list, one I take issue with is "Head First HTML" I don't know if it is fixed now, but about a year ago, I tried to teach someone using that book as a manual and the first chapter was incomplete, It literally was missing the text so the individual could not continue without me. Which defeated the point of buying a book so that they could do projects and learn while I was not around.

For most of the rest that I have read, they are great books first or second best on their respective subjects. This is one of the better lists I have seen.

We really should have this kind of post 1-2 times a month as this one (books) comes up just a little less frequently than "whose hiring". We should also have one for "tools I use to develop with" I always scrounge out a gem that I did not know about in those tools posts.

I tell you what would be nice Daniel, would be to have these kind of posts and have your blog scrape the post for products people recommend and then add those products to your list, if you could grab their votes you could get a sudo weight to their product recommendation.
I find Silverlight less offensive and obtrusive than Flash, but probably not for the normal reasons.

Since every single online advertiser out there uses Flash to make the most Flashy (no pun intended) ads to grab your attention, I promptly install Flashblock on any new machine I work on.

Silverlight however seems to have too low adaptation for it to be useful or "bulletproof" for advertisers, so whenever I get on a site actually using Silverlight, it's for something I need or want (video, interactive games, apps, etc).

I'm aware of that HTML5 covers part of that game pretty well by now, but still I find it non-obtrusive enough and generally don't mind. It's security-record and stability compared to Flash would be another reason not to mind it, but even to me, a techie, that's really secondary.
Its interesting but I can't bring myself to trust the motivations of IBM.

There are two possible scenarios here: First IBM is being straightforward and they are trying to help redevelop the US education system. Second they are trying to develop a cheaper source of US labor.

The recent history of IBM would indicate the latter scenario is more likely.
Yepp.
And, by the way, the source of HN is open, everyone can read how it works =)
Starting point for any SE Michigan startup folks: http://a2newtech.org

More about the Ann Arbor scene: http://www.slideshare.net/dugsong/ann-arbor-startup-communit...
Throughout my career, I've met many developers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, network engineers who couldn't network their way out of a paper bag, sysadmins who couldn't sysadmin their way out of a paper bag, etc.

I propose a new interview question: How would you code your way out of a paper bag? You will be given several constants, such as the strength of the paper bag, difficulty of tearing, etc, and will be expected to write your own Tear() function and call it properly.

The best part is that when the recruiters/headhunters ask why you rejected a candidate, you can honestly say "he couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag."
Does Netflix work with Moonlight on Linux? I would loze to be using Netflix on my second monitor while playing games or just surfing the net, but they don't support Linux... :(
Is HN really the new place for book spamming aa links?

Which books don't matter. Half those are outdated or will be by the time they're read.
I believe he missed a few situations:

* If it is Tuesday - leave.
* If your house is yellow - leave.
* If someone sneezed in your building - leave.

The resume you build would be a nightmare for any employer. Once you become completely competent in your job or become a key player, promptly resigning seems like the worst possible thing.

Could you imagine the next HR interview?

HR: "Why did you leave you last job?"
A: "I learned everything about the product, was completely productive, and enjoyed the work. So, I had to leave."

Also, stringing off to create your own product would be even worse advice. The moment your complete the first rendition of a project, you would meet all the requirements to quit working on it. Your manager, yourself, would want you to stay, which means you would violate the "If your manager wants you to stay - leave." rule.
Clojure Protocols (JAOO slides by Stuart Halloway)
One that's not included, and that I can heartily recommend if you're curious about OpenBSD: http://devio.us/
Try playing games from this http://www.ludumdare.com/, http://www.tale-of-tales.com/, this http://www.impulsedriven.com/ or this site: http://store.steampowered.com/. That's what I mean.

Or, to go with the Kongregate example look at what's hot there: http://www.kongregate.com/games/kupo707/epic-battle-fantasy-... Humour is fine, but this variety gets old after 5 minutes. And this kind of thing is no substitute of the games it is trying to mock, only supplement.

It's not that you cannot play any games on Linux or web. After all, there are fine games like Tux Racer and Quake III and there are really lists like "25 Linux games". But it's like the selection you have is like the menu in prison canteen vs all the world's restraints. Chefs don't come there. All the new and exciting stuff is happening elsewhere.
This is a pretty good list, thanks for putting it together. Definitely going to have to bookmark it for the times when new people complain about the way of the world here.
Consulting = contracting, but you make more money. You basically sell yourself as someone who adds value, not just someone who fills in the blanks.
This was posted just 7 hours before this second link.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754281
Show us your code. ^_^
In 1955, COBOL was the cat's pajamas. The fact that you're unimpressed fifty years later - when COBOL is still the most widespread single programming language on the planet - is precisely because it established the very foundations of your world.

The "pipe dream" fails because it is implemented by people who honestly believe programmers are superfluous if you just automate them away - people who don't actually know how programming works. Excel being a case in point. Have you ever tried to shoehorn an Excel spreadsheet into an enterprise software maintenance program? It's really hard.
This is a great article, Jacques.

Somebody should put together a list of meta-HN posts. These guides written by the users have as much or more value than that the stuff pg and the rest put together. I think part of the reason why is that fellow users are more likely to see things from a user's point of view.
This post obviously assumes one can simply afford to leave a secure position for an insecure one.

What about the wife, kids, mortgage, and bills?

Clearly not very practical advice.
Ryanair probably don't care. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if they chose it purposefully to make things difficult. The more hoops you're willing to jump through, the more they can generally get away with. Plus never underestimate the lengths people will go to for a £1 flight (I include myself in that, even though every part of my being tells me I'm being ridiculous).
Not as good, but way closer :)
Ask HN: Somebody was able to tune Linux Kernel for C1M problem?
I'm using sysctl.conf settings from [1] and [2], but still I only able to open ~520K connections on largest cluster compute EC2 instance with CentOS. The same number was reported in this older thread [3].

[1] http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application-with-mochiweb-part-1/

[2] http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application-with-mochiweb-part-3/

[3] Linux Kernel Tuning for C500k

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740823
So how much should one expect to pay as taxes off his, say 170K salary?
I think that Effective Java by Josh Bloch deserves to be added to this list.
If the arrow is back after reloading the page, the reference ID of the upvote URL timed out. This occasionally happens to me with long articles - I'll open the HN comments page in one tab, read the article in another, then come back to upvote it after the page has been open for a while, especially if I ended up doing something else in between.
Tech stumps business owners
Was this written by a freelancer by any chance?
To be honest, I know exactly how it can get rusty. For a little background, I'm a sysadmin at a large healthcare company. I'm no slouch when it comes to scripting. I've written my own automation scripts that use Perl:DBI and a MySQL back-end to automate most of my daily functions. I know how to create a database schema from scratch, populate the tables, and generate CRUD apps from them.

Still, even getting that deep into it, there are 1 or 2 month stretches of time where I do no scripting at all. I might be deploying a 100TB SAN somewhere, building Oracle database clusters (using automation scripts I wrote months ago in cfengine), doing firmware updates, fixing network issues, helping VMware admins figure out their boxes, etc.

The problem with a sysadmin's life in general is that there is way too much stuff to do to focus on scripting or coding 8 hours a day. Some of us love that stuff, but when you've got a brand new SAN, blade chassis, or servers to deploy, they don't just deploy themselves. There are probably only a few shops that actually embrace the sysadmin coder, or devops as I've heard it called.

Your point about ad-hoc scripts is well taken. I use one-liners on a daily basis, even for general computing tasks like renaming files, or to manipulate data using awk or sed. This is not what I would call real scripting, but it does require a fundamental understanding of the tools.
I used to live in Germany and I gotta tell ya, the cheap beer here will deeply disappoint you.
Sadly I am overworked, stressed and the job just does not excite me as it used to (at least in this sector that I work in) - there are some pros at my current place of employment as well; I just need to figure out if seeking new opportunities is worth it and especially at my current rate of income. Since I am seeing a lot of people mention positions that pay higher then I am also starting to think I might be underpaid. More things to add to my stress :)
Progress Quest is great for playing in work. I "played" it for months!
That's exactly why it's valuable to you as a reference for a future employer. "I built this whole thing" is way more impressive than "I helped align the dropdown menu on this one FireFox options window".

As to giving back, there's nothing stopping you. My latest for-profit venture has spun off two open source projects that "the community" can use in the future. Past projects have done the same.

The key is to do things to benefit yourself, with open source being a side product. That's how big companies do it. Why shouldn't it be the same for us little guys?
Sent an email :).
All the criticism of the post is centered on how unconventional the advice is, and how impractical it would be for one to follow. Both criticisms are particularly evident in the missive that following the advice "would make for a bad resume". And yet, that is exactly what is being taken to task here.

The author is suggesting that you release the practical & conventional wisdom surrounding your job and how it routinizes both you and your life. The first requirement is that you throw out thinking about your resume. You reject staying somewhere you're either not happy or not growing just because it might look good on a piece of paper, or because you think you're actually going to get somewhere with it.

In another author's words:

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your f*ing khakis.
I'm fine with that. I bought it, $3 isn't much.
Agreed - while it seems to be a nice lifestyle for some, the stress of not having a steady paycheck, the constant seeking for new work and the obvious role of being a debt collector makes it something that I'm not sure if I personally can do (I am dealing with a client who owes me money from March and I am still having a hard time getting them to pay up at this point).
An obvious choice would be ridiculously large Neural Networks. However, any problem where you start with a random seed and converge on a solution benefits from starting at several different random seeds to avoid local minima. Also search algorithms (chess programs etc) often paralyze vary well.
They need to make a new rule in the US judicial system: if someone comes up with a stupid lawsuit it just gets dismissed without a hearing and the filing party has to pay the fees of anyone involved.

Sued because you weren't spying on your employees? Insane. The worst part is I can't even dismiss this possibility out of hand with the wacky lawsuits in the US.
My experience has been that once you're completely competent in your job, that's the job your stuck with. You can try to grow into other areas (and end up doing 3 people's jobs) or apply for different positions but you're out of luck since you've become a 'key employee.' Whether that's bad management or my inability to play office politics, it's happened more than once.

Which made it time to leave.
> "I think it all boils down to the fact that those two are BS questions."

Useful if your goal is to hire people willing to put up with BS and looking to put their own BS skills to work within your organization.

At a deeper level, the problem is that a person who actually hates features of their favorite language is likely to be miserable using the one their job requires, and a person who views languages as a tool for getting things done (rather than tribally) can't give an honest answer. A better version of the second question might be, "Are there any technical shortcomings within your favorite/current language?"

Likewise many honest answers to the third question are entirely inappropriate within an interview, e.g. "I'd like to try a nudism for a week." A better version is quite possible. For example, "If you could try any other position within our organization for a week, what would it be?" is open ended, relevant to the context, and provides useful feedback about the candidate's career and growth objectives.
Ask HN: Use OpenStreetMap in paid service for start-up?
I have an idea for a project which is based on using Open Street Map and the tile drawer on tiledrawer.com. However, this is licensed with a Creative Commons license.

Can I still make this software using Open Street Map data as a paid service on the Internet?

And if I decide to use data from the Open Street Map project, will I have to release all my source code with the Creative Commons license?

Thanks!
America's smartest cities
The really cool thing here is if you click a few links in the article, you find an API to write your own Starcraft AI, and a competition for them.

This is the ultimate programming game!

http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/
Fair question - I would be more realistic in my future job opportunities and take a better view at my current job. I would obviously strive to make the most I can with my skill-set, but I wouldn't price myself out of jobs that I am qualified for.
You are not taking into account the viewpoint of many of our elites.

A loaf of bread is not produced in order to be eaten and satisfy hunger. Instead, people get hungry in order to stimulate demand for bread and create jobs.
You may want to add a section on alternative or mobile interfaces to HN, such as hckrnews.com and icombinator.net.
It's rather interesting that he chose the faction requiring the least micromanagement, at least as far as base-building. Seems like a pretty neat tech demo, though.
Jerry is the one making up all this martial arts nonsense...Bob is just humoring him.
A hacker cheat-sheet written by someone with a hotmail address. I don't mean to judge a book by the cover, but... hotmail?
Nobody can downvote posts. Only comments can be down voted.
Could you email me your list of rejection ideas? [my username] at gmail dot com

I promise not to post them in this thread, and if you do I will reply to your comment saying thank you. You could think of it as a publicity stunt.
Google's speed need: 'instantaneous Internet'
Wow, living in Oklahoma these numbers are mind blowing to me.

I understand cost of living comes into play, but 2x-3x what I make currently? If I was making 6 digits where I am would be living like a rockstar, seriously.

What is it like living in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, etc with $120k - $180k salary lifestyle wise with that high of a pay check? How comfortable financially are you?

I'm about $52k or so at about 4 yrs out of school, comfortable (so I think), living in a one bedroom apartment and saving about $2k per month after all my bills, expenses, taxes, food, etc. I don't think I get a bonus. I really don't keep track that much as I don't spend much, I don't think about it.

Edit: spelling/grammar
There might be some truth to that statement in general, but in Up In The Air, usually it was obviously hollow, pacifying bullshit. (The guy with the cooking aspiration was an exception.)
Ask HN: Working one month in NY (and its problems)
Hi,

Me and a good friend are thinking about returning to NYC for a month to get some work done. The city was inspiring to us back in 2008 and we want to feel it again.

We still need to find a place to stay (rent a studio?) but there are some other problems, some of them we're not yet sure how to handle. For example, what's the best way to have a good internet access for a month only? Any ideas?

So I'm wondering, any tips from people who have been through it?

Thanks in advance!
It would be amazing if people would be more open about sharing their salaries - but sadly it's just something that is sometimes better left unsaid. I know I make more than my father in law, but he doesn't need to know that. I know that I have coworkers that I somewhat oversee, and they may be underpaid for their actual skill sets. But should they know what I make - probably not as to avoid jealousy.

If only we could all just be open about it. (and of course this all coming from someone hiding behind an anonymous account...)
If I understand US law correctly, the constitution can be amended at will, through a process not exceptionally arduous - certainly more difficult than passing ordinary legislation, but not exceptionally so.

It's orders of magnitude higher in difficulty. We've only amended our Constitution 27 times since 1788, and the first ten were all at once towards the beginning. We've probably passed at least tens of thousands of federal statutes in that time period.

Many other federal states have similarly strict requirements when passing federal legislation, but have gone as far as to rewrite their constitutions from scratch.

The Constitution defines and protects many of our essential civil rights and liberties. Many Americans are loath to allow the current political system to redefine those. Seeing the kind of hash "many other federal states" have made out of simple concepts like freedom of political expression, I'm inclined to think we made a better decision than they did.
Gnome Partition Editor: The Dearly GParted
Isn't the release schedule for Windows OS updates once a month (on a Tuesday, I believe)?
Browser Penetration is at 62%... guess HN hates MS extra hard.

http://www.riastats.com/

And for all the haters... it's better than flash.
Great list jacquesm. I had no idea Hacker News was open source! I guess you learn something new every day.

And thanks for mentioning Resourcey. I've added your FAQ to HN's Resourcey.com page (gotta love circular recursion!)
Would be a great list to compare opinions on with various people at http://www.5ftshelf.com/, sadly the computer & internet section (http://www.5ftshelf.com/mini_shelves/books/6-computers-and-i...) is dominated by the head-first series. While I think they're good intros, they wouldn't rank high on my list on "must own" books in that genre.
Ok, done that. If there are others please let me know and I'll add them.

thanks!
Samsung U600
Samsung U600 rationalized instrument by Samsung with incorporated every one the indispensable skin texture which you want, as well as will provide all the service. Samsung U600 is offered at cellhut.com at an inexpensive price. The receiver gives you the 3.15 MP of camera to shatter all your constructive moments by high declaration superiority 2048×1536 pixels, video recorder and lots of more.
Sorry, I suppose I worded confusingly, however I was offering that as a non-Flash option. My point being that if they assume that Android will offer that soon because of Flash, it will also offer it natively.
the SL enabled Bing Maps is amazing. Try it if you haven't. - hit the 3D button.
Have you used hotmail any time recently?

I had a hotmail from way back and was going to swap (only held back by the lock in of my current email address being everywhere), but honestly now I don't see much reason to. Hotmail web interface is close enough to the gmail one now and windows live mail integrates nicely if your running and windows machine.
http://www.paycheckcity.com/netpaycalc/netpaycalculator.asp

I have used this calculator in the past - it seems to be pretty close to accurate when I have attempted to determine what I should ask for in terms of future raises.