skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I probably should have said that I don't think this is any indication of a shortage.

I think engineers generate economic value for their companies commensurate with their compensation by any benchmark...
Firstly, how do you know he would never want me? I consider myself the perfect startup employee.

I actually have worked for one startup before and am doing my own right now.

I know about long nights, tight deadlines, and no money.

I know about creativity due to constraints and responding quickly.

I also know about abusive bosses and unproductive labor practices.

I would be hard pressed to find ANY software developer that agrees that they perform best under a boss like Jason.
You were over qualified for the position.

They didn't want a programmer, they wanted someone with known Drupal experience, who could hit the ground running, and wouldn't fall back on writing new software to solve a problem that could be quickly (if not perfectly) solved in Drupal. PHP based content management systems job are only tangentially related to programming. Drupal (and Joomla, etc.) exist so that companies can manage their websites without a programmer.

That may not be fair, but it's how the hiring companies (direct or recruit) will look at. If you want those jobs get a Drupal site or two under your belt, and downplay your 10+ years of PHP on your resume and during the interview conversation.
I started this thread what seems like forever ago. What's interesting is that it's had over 2 million views in that time, and nothing has happened. In that time, an app for iPhone, iPad, and PS3 (twice) has been released, but Netflix is still absent on linux. Android (linux based!) has support before linux does. I omitted the Roku box (also linux based) because it handles the DRM in hardware.
getting out/taking a week off may help injecting some mental power it's like trying to run away from problems, they are still there when you come back.
One think you should avoid is being alone and/or trying to bear what you're going through alone. If the root cause is related to your company and if you have friends there, then you should open up with them and solve it together.
If you and your friends want to get out of that company, why don't you try to build something together?
Can anyone make the case for why this was a smart idea? The only argument I can think of is that the founders would rather continue the fun of growing their own business rather than having to hand it over to Google right at the peak of its hype.
>The software to send samples to my Akai hardware sampler only runs on Windows 98. I have a Windows 98 PC just for this!

Doesn't it run under emulation, like virtualbox, or even in WINE98 or such?
Racket would make a great web language...
Not sure if I should laugh at myself for not knowing if this was a joke when I first read it.
CINEMA: Estreias da Semana - 3 de dezembro  Cinema | Omelete
Thanks, new link works, but how can I tell you my suggestion? I guess you could you just check the e-mail address the donation comes from?
solar power? It'll help somewhat.
Radio? Amateur radio. Use either the existing satellites on the vhf+ bands, or get really good at antenna design and make a good, small hf antenna (good part is the hardest, you don't really want to be putting out more than 5 watts), and hope for good sun activity.
This was smart. Let's be clear: Google needed Groupon's local advertising smarts more than Groupon needed anything from Google. It's not like free AdWords would change the limiting factor on the Groupon model - the limiting factor on the Groupon model is the speed with which Groupon can add cities and salespeople: two things where Google can't help one iota. And, to date, Groupon has shown an ability to expand faster into new cities/countries than LivingSocial and all the also-rans.

I also don't think group buying is going away in, say, 20 years. It's such a ridiculously perceived risk free way (no cash upfront? fuck yeah) for local businesses - really, any businesses - to get additional visits/customers that it'll be a part of the marketing mix forever.
The deb conflict could be solved rather neatly by using dpkg diversions: http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ap-pkg-diversions.ht...
I enjoyed it, thanks!
Solve the P vs. NP problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem
Nah, -f will prompt for password before backgrounding the process.
I see a similar sentiment in this comment section that I saw around the time Facebook rejected the 2 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo.

The fact is, this company has executed well enough to reach a large revenue number very quickly. It's easy to say if you don't work there that they should have sold, but putting myself in this company's shoes, I think their growth potential is actually much higher not being a Google subsidiary.
all you people calling them idiots, did it not cross your mind that they may just enjoy running the business as it is and don't care for the massive payout?

as long as they are making good margins they can do whatever they want.
The Holy Grail of software engineering — the one true approach to building software systems that can be applied, universally, to any and all software projects.

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~se4921/PDF/CACM/p15-glass.pdf
Lesson -- the 24 hour fitness gym in SOMA is a strangely small world. Hi Jason.
A programming language that does exactly what you want, exactly how you want it, exactly when you need it.
I'd go to Central America, study my brains out, and learn Spanish. Knowing another language is invaluable. It's very doable to become very proficient (not fluent though)in another language during this time - I've done it. Antigua, Guatemala has some of the best and cheapest one on one tutoring in the world.
Enormous unspoken point in the article: masterful publicity scheme! Kudos to you dude.
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Hotel Washington
With $2 billion revenues that are likely to continue increasing YOY, it looks like an embarrassingly low offer.

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20101203/exclusive-groupon-annual...
> Google needed Groupon's local advertising smarts more than Groupon needed anything from Google.

Except cash.

This was by far the best possible hope of returning money to the investors and shareholders. Their fiduciary duty is to return money to investors. They failed.

It was an absurd home-run valuation that any venture firm would be happy with. And they are all but begging Google to compete head-to-head. Remember that Google knows everything about you already (Gmail, Google Checkout, Google Maps...); it would be easy for Google to target a buying service not only to your city, but also to your exact buying habits.
A quick Google for "The Science of Architecture" turned up results in several library catalogues around the world, though none close to me.

I really enjoyed the videos. Now I want to tinker with balsa - bridges seem to be intrinsically beautiful.
Balls of brass.
Holy grail, eh? Well, if you really want to swing for the fences...

* Programming a computer in plain English.

* Teaching a machine to compose (real) music, or draw (real) art.

* Simulating a brain -- or, even better, emulating one.

* A programming language that makes it possible to write code that's worthy of being read as literature.
This is pretty neat. There's also a nice video of Bach's Canon #1 from the Musical Offering on a Möbius Strip: (around 1:45)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU
A $5 billion buyout for a company with $2 billion revenues is not a good offer.
Did Groupon Just Spurn Google’s $6 Billion In Favor Of An IPO?
It's not a zero-sum game though. You can be professional and ethical to all persons you have business dealings with, it just usually means saving your breath/actions for things that are more important. :-)
Only the future will tell if it's a smart or stupid move. I think the article don't give an in-depth knowledge about the acquisition, thus, since we don't know the ins and outs, we can hardly decide/predict.

I also thought that it was a good offer, however, when I read that their earnings are at $2Bn and they have 3,000 employees.. that's already huge. They might have bigger plans, they know better the market and if they can double or triple their profits.
A self programming, learning computing machine.
They had multiple founding rounds. I doubt it was people actually running this business day-to-day making this decision.
I would say water transportation. Even in places where well are dug and clean water is provided, many of the societal problems still exist because transportation in still rudimentary. For instance, in many Haitian slums the water source is at the bottom of large hills. What this means is that water must be carried in 5 gallon buckets to the top of the hills to provide water for the family. The way they accomplish this is by using restaveks, or child slaves. I'm not saying the restavek system would completely dissapear if there was proper water transportation, but the need for it would be severely limited and there would be significantly less child slaves.
I've pursued many acquisitions and I can tell you from experience that your assertion of "continue the fun of growing their own business" is pretty strong for a lot of founders.

Contrary to popular belief, the exit from a startup isn't on the minds of a lot of innovative people.

[edit: spelling]
Is it just me or does anyone else think that the logo on the back of the truck looks like goatse.cx?
Confirmed: The Groupon/Google Deal Is Off
Groupon isn't a personalization play; it's an anti-personalization one. Literally the deals only happen if many people want them. While interesting and valuable, incredibly detailed targeting is kind of tangential.
> Or you could take the opportunity to consider whether $FOO was right; perhaps your idea isn't as good as you think it is.

Yes, this is true. I think you're taking what I said a little bit more literally than I intended. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I left out some of the nuance, in the name of conserving time & space (or because I'm lazy).

Yes, there are times that rejection should be treated as a sign that it's time to stop, change plans, etc. But if I were to offer a more nuanced version of what I said before, I'd say "When rejected, it's up to you to determine the merits of your plan and your abilities, etc., based on the feedback you have received, and decide if you should still go for it or not. If you sincerely believe you are right, then go for it, and succeed so damn well that you buy the rejecting party's offices and turn them into your ping-pong room."
How #FollowFriday is SUPPOSED to work - The Oatmeal
SpaceX to launch Dragon capsule December 7
A port of the original 1979 Unix to modern hardware
>> it was an absurd home-run valuation that any venture firm would be happy with

If that is the case, then why aren't the investors screaming bloody murder?
Does anyone know how the police found him? (The Ars post mentions the police visited him while he was doing it, and you can see the police at the end of the video)

Someone phones in to 911 an RC Plane buzzing buildings, etc... but with the tools at the police's disposal, how would they have found where he was?
This is one of the best blog posts I've read all year, I love getting to look deeper into data.
"Except cash."

Like Twitter & Facebook, they have access to all the money they could ever want. Plus, Groupon's revenues are through the roof right now, right on par with Facebook's.
The founders are already going to be super-rich. This isn't Twitter, Groupon is already profitable and raking in the dough.

That gives them the freedom to ride this thing out and see where it goes. Truckloads of money are great, but this is a chance to build a legendary business.
Does anyone remember PointCast? In 1997, they rejected an acquisition offer of $450 million from News Corp. Two years later, they sold the company for $7 million.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom)

Google's reported multi-billion dollar offer for Groupon seems like a pretty good deal for the company's founders, investors, and (presumably) employees.
They probably took the address from the caller and looked for the plane near there. Once finding it, they likely looked around the area for a guy with an RC remote.

Of course they could have also used a radio direction finder.
"$0.5Bn"

(Allegedly) That's just per quarter. So x4.
Actually, the chemical imbalance theory is largely a fairy tale that persists because (a) pharmaceutical companies want it to and (b) patients want pat explanations from their doctors. A few months ago there was an interview with a psychiatrist (I think on Fresh Air) who said that honesty would compel him to say, "Take this drug, there's some evidence that it may help you but we have no idea why," but patients won't stand for it.

It's pretty interesting that an idea that dominates popular consciousness so completely right now (depression is a chemical imbalance, take a pill) has such a flimsy basis.
Ask HN: real time forum software?
Do any real-time forum platforms exist? Forums where threads and posts appear in real time? If not, would there be an audience for such software? What kind of things would have to be avoided for this type of forum to prosper?

What do you think?
How do I get a company registered? How much does it cost? I have used Legalzoom once and Harvard Business Review once, to start two companies. They’re both in Delaware (it’s the new hotness or something). It cost me <$400 each time.

Don't do this. I don't see a reason in having a corporate entity for making apps, let alone more than one. Get a DBA (sometimes called Fictitious Business Name or FBN; in California, this would be ~$80 one time vs $800/year if you incorporated and had to pay the franchise tax, which is owed regardless of state of incorporation or net income). If circumstances require you to establish a corporation (like a very rapidly growing service), establish a C-Corp and not an LLC. And go through a lawyer, not LegalZoom.

Never ever establish it through a service like LegalZoom. Pay an attorney $2k-$3k and do it the proper way. Any Silicon Valley lawyer (and investor) will tell you the same thing. Before any investor invests in whatever it is you're doing, they will require you to restructure the entity and issue shares all over again. Intellectual property belonging to the corporation may become another issue (I've heard some horror stories about this; make sure you transfer all IP to the corporation). This will end up costing more than if you had done it the right way in the beginning. I've even heard stories about people incorporating through LegalZoom and never actually issuing stock to anyone.

Also, there is a reason for incorporating in Delaware. Delaware's General Corporation Law is very flexible and is the most favored by businesses. The court also works better for businesses since your fate is decided by a judge rather than a jury. Other advantages include some tax advantages, a cheap filing fee, and privacy laws for executives and directors.
Huh? The guy you responded to shows exactly the opposite, to the tune of vitamins being a larger industry.
I saw this $2 billion number in one report, but nothing close to it in the others. I hope this one report doesn't count gross merchandise sales as revenue. Anyway, EBITDA would be much more relevant and I didn't see anyone claim that it's close to $2 bil.
given -R&D, seems logical that it may be the case.
Enterprise software perspective - IT managed directly by business users. In that, the system can accept natural language descriptions of business logic, resolve ambiguity, and can self-modify, maintain, and heal itself. In other words, a virtual software architect.
Racket is highly underrated. I wish more people would use/talk about/evangelize it.
Ask HN: Help me find a piece of advice given here about avoiding time-wasters
There is a great comment here about weeding people who are time-wasters.

Someone described how most people that always want to meet and discuss things over coffee are all talk and no action. To separate the wheat from the chaff, the advice is roughly:

Say you're keen to meet up, but ask them to complete a small preparatory piece of work (this was phrased slightly differently). Ask them to get in touch when they're done. The majority of people don't follow through.

I have been searching for a good hour and can't find the source, which I remember as being a very well written piece of advice. If you have it bookmarked I would very much appreciate you sharing it with me.
This video clearly shows what might happen when a single engine aircraft at <500 AGL hits an object.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN_Zl64OQEw

This was an F-16 that ingested a bird after takeoff, engine relight failed and pilots ejected after pointing the plane into a field.
Who says they're not? Quietly screaming, of course. We only have vague reports that there was ever even a deal in the air.
Online personas visualized
The people I feel sorry for are not the founders, who are going to be rich whatever happens, but the early employees who might have wound up rich immediately with a Google buyout, but now have to face ongoing uncertainty.
There's really three problems I can think of, in decreasing order of difficulty:

1) writing an AI,

2) proving P=/=NP, and

3) founding a 200-billion dollar company.
Wants anybody buy an aircraft carrier?
I think it's been around for a couple of decades:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC
Building software like we build bridges.

There are a lot of things wrong with this analogy, but I think it still encapsulates a nice ideal. We'd like to get it right the first time, and make it last with minimal maintenance.

(This is for software engineering, not computer science)
Another damn student of the Jerry Yang school of acquisitions. #fail
This is great. How are you licensing it?

And what do you plan on for the cases where people have disabled JS?
NASA is looking for a Sr. Django dev
I don't really have quite knowledge to give you advices and suggestions, however, having a close family member (I was close to the scene) that has had a nervous break down (at 19 or 20, I think), I would say "Be careful, it's not that easy that it sounds".

His state complicated and needed around 15 days stay at the hospital; It also took him around 1.5 year to return to his old mental state. However, the time and also the quantity of Medicines that he did took are still affecting his life deeply.
well said but these deals tend to be more complicated than just the figures. google might have put in the conditions or groupon might have their own wishes.

When they raised money last time, most of the decision making folks(founders and such) cashed out already with $160M http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/the-rest-of-the-details-on-... So they are not in hurry

Looking from google's point of view, not sure how they would have answered their investors. 500M revenues -> 150M-75M income(assuming 30%-15% profit margin) http://www.businessinsider.com/what-are-groupons-real-number... that is a 12x - on revenue and 40x - on income. Just doesn't make sense.
Most people don't have $2-3k to just blow whenever they start a new company.

Also, if you already have previous documentation from a previous company you started, it's easy to reuse it, given that you change the specificities and you're not involved in a legally contentious arena (such as music licensing). So that pretty much obviates the need for an attorney.

If you find yourself making thousands of dollars a month, then it may make sense to make a C-Corp and transfer ownership of the LLC you have over to that. In any other situation, especially for a 1-day old startup, it's overkill.

Edit: I realize I didn't mention what I think of DBAs. I think they're a great idea if you're the only owner. If you're getting involved with someone else, an LLC established through a registered agent is a good (and I dare say necessary) legal safeguard for the price.
There's a little "HEY YOU" on the second page, which you click and tell me your idea. Or you can send me an email!

Either works. Thanks for the support!
As soon as I saw the photo I doing this in the last year of Primary School (UK equiv of Junior School) - then realized that it would have been around 1990.

Now I know where the inspiration for the teacher to set this challenge to the class coma from.
I'm aware of IRC. I've hosted my own IRC server since 1999. But, I wasn't asking about IRC. Although, IRC is my inspiration for this question. I'm talking about a forum, accessible from the web obviously.
Magnetic particle inspection as per AWS D1.1
Funny, the instant I read the headline, Pointcast came to mind.
I don't feel sorry them at all. Not one little bit - it's a job, you work, you get paid, life is good.

Who I feel sorry for is people who are not employed and are trying their best to keep their heads above water.
I really hope they understand that a large in use medium such as google itself or facebook will simply clone functionality of groupon and tweak it for it's user base ultimately killing groupon. Groupon has no 'stick' some person in rural anywhere won't have a clue what groupon is or will use it but will know what and might use google or facebook, and that's what counts - worldwide recognizability with everyday use.
Let us not conflate computer science with software engineering.
"Likely to continue increasing YOY"? Says who? Groupon?

At least one compelling academic argument why Groupon's 'deal hawk' business model is not built for sustainable growth:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:cpoGFpYf78oJ:w...
Becoming more than human.
Do you have any concrete evidence why using a service like LegalZoom is so bad? It seem like all they do is fill out some standard forms for you and issue boilerplate paperwork.

What value would an attorney offer beyond this?

I've started a profitable business like this and never had any trouble.
Right now, if you're responding to something on most forums (Stack Overflow excepted?), you can't see other responses which have come in while you're typing (not on the same page, anyway). I think a few years from now this will seem like the horribly broken behavior that it is. I wish you well.
These are computer science, not software engineering.

Oh, and #3 is neither...
Someone else also mentioned these Standford courses in a previous HN thread:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/developing-apps-for-ios-...

http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/iphone-application-developm...

To help get started with iPhone programming. I havent run through them yet, but they look interesting enough to check out...

UPDATE: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1924578

UPDATE 2: I didn't see a link to Evan Doll's video's in Sahils post, I think this may be them: http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/iphone-application-progr...
I should really have learned by now to hit searchyc before submitting.
Users that read the manual
Yep, indeed. We just need to train users to pay for good software. I used to be in the "I don't pay for software, ever" camp, but then I realised people are worth my support and now buy things regularly (especially Android apps, even if the pro version does nothing more than the free version, e.g. Twidroid).
Ahh, yes, my bad.
Web sites are stealing browser histories
The MATLAB GPU implementation is seriously flawed. For a better approach, see http://www.accelereyes.com/products/compare
I assume you mean something like the front page of hacker news but where you could watch the positions/scores change and old items fade out as new ones take their place? I think that would be pretty slick. However I can imagine people wanting a "pause" button in case they don't appreciate the idea of things they were planning on clicking on disappearing. Were you planning on implementing this?
DHS tribute threat level indicator
That CEO guy looks as douche-y as the Facebook guy.
Steambirds: How handcrafted levels prevent game design iteration
i wonder hows it like working with NASA but i'll envy the fellow, by default
A general purpose memory manager that doesn't suck.