skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’ve got Google alerts setup for our ad, and I’m seeing it being cloned all over the place by different recruitment agencies. Basically, they copy your ad, remove all your details so candidates don’t know who you are, and then post it up all over the place.

This happens for people who post resumes, too. My experience was so bad that I ended up removing my entire profile from LinkedIn after one-too-many harassing phone calls from agencies. They are evil, but I haven't found a way around them yet. My current employment gig is one where an agency is marking up my hourly rate 100 percent; they indeed charge the company double what they pay me. It infuriates me, but there is very little I can do. Agencies specialize in one thing only and that is: information distortion. Doesn't matter if it's a recruitment agency, real estate agency, or "talent scout" for one of the glam professions like music or acting. The wider the distortions become between buyer and seller, the more the agency can leech.

They're good at it too: flooding job boards, cloning candidate resumes or company job descriptions and twisting them however they wish.

And it works! Good for them, crappy for us. Agencies are very good at convincing one party that a "Senior iPhone developer" or an "MBA who knows Linux and is an accounting whiz" is an elusive and rare creature, while simultaneously shaking their heads at "this job market" where any job offer is a good offer, and by golly -- stick with the agency, and they'll find you something better; once they're done sucking you dry for an hourly rate, they find you something "permanent" for 30-40 percent of your yearly salary offer, of course.

P.S. I think the agency doesn't know I know how much they're robbing me: they're big on "keep this [hourly rate] confidential" which I am, technically . . . the number is; the percent is not. The only party that confidentiality benefits, though, is the agency. Makes no sense.
The exploit was not anything to do with PHP. A section of their site was allowing to users to execute commands under a user which they should not have been allowed to. This could have happened under any programming language.
Ask HN: I've been offered 5% stake in a startup. What should I think about?
Hi Everyone,

This community is great at giving advice on various topics. I felt I should post this to see if you can help me with my decision.

A couple of months ago, I was approached by a founder of a new startup to help build his company's online presence and build software to integrate with his partners. For this he offered me a 5% stake in his new company, an LLC, for 1000 hours of development time. As I get closer to making a decision, I would like know what I should be worried about in these kinds of deals? What questions should I be asking? Are there any legal ramifications I need to think about?

I don't have any experience with startups, besides what I read about on HN, so any questions, comments, recommendations are appreciated.

I won't be going into too much detail about what the company does, and I'm using a throw-away account to post this, but I will try to answer any questions you may have.

Thanks!
That cuts both ways, though. A certain company around here was, at least for several months, advertising a large number of job vacancies with far above-market salaries quoted that got them to the top of the various agency lists. However, it became clear during the interview process that they had no intention of offering anything close to that level of salary under normal circumstances. They were also the kind of place that got very stressed if you declined to disclose your current compensation arrangements (as opposed to discussing what sort of compensation you might consider accepting if they offered the job). I'm not sure what happened with that round of recruitment; they were still advertising for a lot of similarly generic positions last time I looked, but all the specifics about salary etc. seemed to have disappeared.

An agency that cut through that level of deception and advertised with a more realistic salary indicator might not have attracted as many initial candidates, but would probably have been more efficient for finding candidates who might actually accept a position if an offer was made, and it would have avoided degrading the employer's reputation in a "small world" employment market, too.
Changing the salary is obviously wrong.

Other than that, finding developers for you that didn't see your ad and bringing them to your attention for a fee seems like an honest business (if not one I would be interesting in being in).
Why Women Rule The Internet
phpfog's setup was insecure. It was completely unrelated to PHP. EC2, or anything other than phpfog's sysadmin's skills.
I've been using Slicehost for a while now — since May 2008, according to my email records. I use my slice mainly for development work, as a static media server (w/ nginx) and it has occasionally hosted the odd Django app.

It's been rock solid, they have a simple (yet great) administrative interface, and the two times I needed their support, I had a response within minutes (even at 2AM in the morning). Plus they contribute some great docs to budding sys admins and devs, and make it easy to pick up some sys admin basics. Very happy with them.
I was 19 and in my first year of college when I finished my last contract programming job and started working for myself. I launched my first product with a $10 domain name and $17 web template for the site design. It made well over 50K in net profit its first year. I paid my way through college without debt, and run several profitable web apps now.

There are others on HN with similar stories. I recommend checking out the profiles of commentors. A lot of people have their sites in their bios so you can see what they've built.
> The biggest single advance seems to have been a movement away from words as the unit of language, and towards phrase-based models, which give greatly improved performance.

This really struck me, as someone who both teaches and studies language. If it works better for computers, I wonder how much better it would work for people. If there's anything I've noticed in my time in Japan, it's that the Japanese approach seems to be to nail down every single word with a single Japanese meaning and stick to that meaning all the time, which leads to a lot of very Japanese-sounding English.
Also notifies you when one of your former colleagues changes jobs.
- Do you vest?

- If you vest, what metrics determine if your vesting stops? Can they do it arbitrarily, etc

- what if you finish your work in less than 1000 hours?

- you should have some benefit if you finish the work and then continue with the company.

- Does the 5% already have a value? In which case, if you get your stock up front you might have a tax implication.

- whats your anti-dilution rights? You should have the opportunity to participate pro-rata in any dilutive event (eg. a fundraising)

- the other founders should have a non-compete (so they cant sell the assets to a brand new company)

- if vesting, they should vest immediately on any change of control

- what if your responsibilities change so you are not doing development but some other work (biz dev, sales, etc.

- i would do basic due diligence on founder and current investors. background checks, etc.

- what does "5%" mean? Do they have an option pool set aside already? Can they issue arbitrarily more options?

If you have any questions on these I'll check back and answer.
IANAL either, but in light of casual conversations with those who are: you own copyright in any work you create by default, including any communications you send, and furthermore there are expectations of privacy attached to many professional communications by default, though this varies a lot by jurisdiction and the nature of the parties and relationship or potential relationship involved.
5 Killer Ideas Apple Should Steal From Microsoft
How is that constructive? Or, phrased differently: how does doing this enrich the world in any way?

The entrepreneurs are trying to do something, while the author of the article only waits for them to trip and fall.

I'm sorry, but I find no value in that. Actually, I find it rather sad.
Quinoa’s Global Success Creates Quandary in Bolivia
Tell HN FYI: Play.com registration emails leaked
Just a FYI for the community: it seems that Play.com registration emails have been leaked to a spammer who is now trying to spread malware by using (probably hacked) gsn.com email servers.

Play.com is a major online retailer in Europe. Hopefully it is only emails, but be sure to keep an eye on your credit card bills if you have used Play.com :)

I can confirm this myself, and here are some threads to follow:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?s=b7d8a85718e5b61b56c770329305c035&p=42142988

http://www.gsn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=891

http://twitter.com/search?q=play.com%20spam
I learnt this in programming pearl. There are a lot such tutorials for beginners so to pretend to be pragmatic experienced one, and even with, it is just a first step to be really. Now you know the rule of 72, but it is pure your skill when you can remeber this rule.
Unrelated to the improvements in seismological monitoring, no doubt.

I'm quite sure that the number of major earthquakes we are aware of has nothing to do with improvements of seismological monitoring.

Next time please read the original article before replying with an excess of snark. Because they raised the specific issue that you are talking about and then brought up major earthquakes as well.

Given the title I expected it to be much worse than it was.
Yeah, something like that. But the trick is with 60,000 subreddits and more being added every day, we'd really like to figure out a programmatic way to generate it.
The complete works of Leonhard Euler available online
Linode. No downtime so far, awesome support.
Linode and arpnetworks are what I use at the moment. Arpnetworks is more on the cheap side but I use them only for freebsd and for linux I use linode (I was a customer of prgmr for a year before and only had 1 minor downtime with them for a hardware failure.)
The name sounded interesting, so I visited the site, but I have no clue what it's for. I noticed, in order:

1. A Cory Doctorow quote about killing noobs. I'm a noob.

2. Ten blog entries to help me learn to use the site. I still don't know what it is.

3. Only a few of those ten are actually linked.

4. The first blog entry still doesn't tell me why I'm supposed to be wading through all this...
It only works when you need to calculate some round numbers or to quickly see if the calculations are logical. When it comes to a real life Rule of 72 is too approximate.
That would be Waterfall, in a prettier format. What's the point of this?
People that do get in do not seem to think this way. As the yc backed founder rmorrison said[1]: If you think you need YC to succeed, then you won't (and shouldn't) be accepted

[1]http://blog.rmorrison.org/advice-for-yc-applicants-on-the-fe....
That is a nice product that fits in the category of something I had no idea I needed until I saw it.
Who does say there isn't solidarity among hackers? Is that a thing? I've always thought of my fellow hackers as a supportive group.
It sounds like the info it sends is all publicly available--and not from some sketchy stalker service but from LinkedIn, twitter, etc. In other words, it's not sending anyone anything they couldn't find out themselves in a few minutes.
The salary is inline with market rates. It's crazy to compare salaries across cities and sectors let alone across countries without taking into local factors (for example paid holidays and sick leave).

Plus I think you have a vastly skewed market view, even in places like SF and NY very very few companies are hiring iPhone developers for $165k USD (feel free to post examples if you disagree). What do you think the average salary for a developer in the US is ?

(disclaimer: I run a developer job board; the company in question Engine Room Apps advertises with us)
"It's better me break in and make the fact I did public, than someone break in silently and wipe the box, losing hundreds of hours of both the team's and clients' time."

It's better yet to break in and discreetly notify the folks involved. Show a screenshot at Twitter.com that you COULD have tweeted. Voila-- you've done something positive.

Going public is an immature ego play that doesn't consider the feelings of lots of folks. Even if you want the the ego boost, post a "How I saved PHPfog" post-mortem when the issue is resolved.

Shame on you.
Thanks! Everything from scratch; no UI/design framework used.
I actually had an idea similar to this and wanted to implement it sometime in the future.
Compatibility with the platform is excellent and it's comfortable for anyone who's familiar with Red Hat or Fedora.

I'd compile my own web server stack, but it's as good a foundation to build on as any Linux distribution.
> Do you really use the resume and referrals to shortlist a candidate? I don't.

LinkedIn is one way to build an initial list, especially if you vet folks first through your mutual contacts.

Instead of trying to ask all the folks who you trust "I'm looking for {specific}, can you help?", LinkedIn lets you mechanically look for folks who might satisfy {specific} and are connected to folks who you "trust".

The LinkedIn list is probably a bit big, but it's a mechanical filter, so you don't miss someone because you didn't contact the right people or they didn't remember someone when you did.

That's a much better starting list before you make a single contact. And, your contacts are far more focussed. Instead of "do you know?", it's "what can you tell me about {person}?"
I see:

"I was proving that the system was horribly exploitable."

but I read:

"I was exploiting a horribly exploitable system that, had I notified the admins, almost certainly would have been dealt with fast by some guys who obviously care about their service. If it wasn't, I could have still released it publicly a few days later like every other pen tester anywhere. Instead I went for the lulz. Now I'm backpedaling by justifying bad behavior with worse behavior, editing posts, and blaming people who I told, instead of just admitting I handled it really, really badly."

Personally, I didn't know PHPFog beyond the name, but your jackass move makes me want to actively support them.

And don't kid yourself - nothing you did after finding the vulnerability was in the best interest of PHPFog's users. This isn't pen testing or stumbling across a vulnerability. Telling someone else who released stolen code makes it quite black hat.
Amazing article I think a lot of people have a misconception of what it means to rich.
Theoretical/mathematical physics:
Not Even Wrong
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

The reference frame
http://motls.blogspot.com/
(not only physics, but also climate change)

Collective blog on mathematics and mathematical physics:
n-Category cafe
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/
I suppose what I meant is that, unlike Apple, there's no cost for a user to start using a competitor. But I suppose switch isn't even really the right word here; there's no reason they even have to stop using Twitter.

Basically, if something else did gain momentum, it could happen pretty fast. As opposed to an iPhone competitor, which Apple can see coming and make strategic moves to plug leaks.
Thanks; this is one of the challenges I run into with marketing and trying to find traffic sources. I've had good success with word of mouth, integrations and giving away free templates for users feeling the type of pain my product solves.
Entrepreneurship during Japan Disaster
"...the Japanese, in bootstrapping and crowd sourcing solutions, are enterprising"
By sometime next month we will break $50k for this year alone. We have some more work to do on two B2B license contracts to get our next couple of installment payments. We should be launching our B2C pay product by next month as well. So far, customers have donated $15k in the last year, so we expect to clear minimum 4x that much this year in recurring subscriptions.

The site in question (http://ridewithgps.com) is a niche site for cyclists, or anyone who wants a way to track their workouts using GPS. Garmin has a large line of fitness related GPS computers with wireless heartrate, pedal speed and instantaneous power output sensors, so the log files are fun to play with :)

It took three years of work, but I now have a real (small!) regular salary...
I am not much of a designer myself too.

What I did was to get a WordPress theme from ThemeForest (http://themeforest.net) for my project's main web page, I just added pages for login, register and pricing.

After login, my users will be redirected to my app's UI. Downside is that I have to update WordPress ever once awhile.
Open-source, JavaScript JSON  HTML viewer released
In my own tests compiling and building code I found that the OS X disk cache is very efficient and so the SSD advantage disappears after the first run.

Still the best bang for the buck upgrade by far but for the purpose of compiling much less difference than I had expected.
The idea of agencies copying and pasting your ads is a bit shady of course, but the takeaway from this is pretty simple - you need to pay more.
You cannot claim "copyright" to prevent a reporter from publishing an email you sent them.
> My feelings of safety and immortality quickly gave way to scarcity. After all, I thought, if I could make 10 million dollars then it must be too easy. In fact, I honestly thought, everyone else had probably already made 11 million dollars. So then I felt poor again. I now needed 100 million dollars to be happy.

Reminds me of this article - http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/why-so-many-ric...
HK share: what do you do at your business that can help a startup save money? 
Reddit has something similar but I thought it would be nice to orient this to startups:

I'll start:

Learn some Photoshop. Really get a book and learn just the basics.
It makes a huge difference when you have the ability to change a wording or color on the fly versus waiting for the graphics person.
I think you may have accidentally replied to the wrong comment.
It's interesting he uses Andrew Wiles as an example. Perhaps FLT would have been proved faster if Wiles had not mostly shut himself away.

His achievement was exceptional, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he went about reaching the goal in the optimum way.
20 to 40 hours per page? That absolutely baffles me. I used to freelance design, was charging $100+ per hour, but that's based on the fact that a 1 page website would be around $1000 (10 or so hours to nail down a wireframe/design/build the CSS framework) then 4 or so hours per page after, depending on how intense they are.

I'm not a super duper awesome designer though, but 20-40 hours per page seems absolutely ridiculous.

As for finding a designer, I know of people who ping startups and ask them who did their websites, then if they used a freelancer, they'd set up an intro. Perhaps try that, and you'll reach designers more used to working with cash-strapped startups.
Good to know, thanks. I'd only ever run it in manual mode anyway. How is the computer supposed to know whether power or speed is more important at any given time?
Claiming you represent a company when you don't isn't honest.
In all honesty, this is probably fairly rare. I'd imagine about as rare as a cooking oven burning out, running out of a specific ingredient, or having your head cook call in sick. Making the system more reliable never hurts, though. A "rocket stick" or tethered phone could tag in when ever there may be issue.

Many things can occur in a restaurant that can cause hiccups, but overall I think the benefits outweigh the cons. A great idea.
I suspect that if you think this article was "amazing" you still have a huge misconception of what it means to be rich.
Yeah they're big among teens, because there's a lot of older (cheaper) models out there, and so they can BBM each other. (And yes, that last one is a vicious cycle)
What constitutes "off the record"? Is it exactly and only those words? From Mr. Yavonditte's Twitter stream:

http://twitter.com/#!/mikeyavo/status/48902730730844160

"@EvilPRGuy the only part of email they didn't print was me saying that I was not willing to comment publicly - you live and learn"

It's also pretty obvious that his response was meant to convey some intent to sue and not a challenge to a gunfight at high noon.

Anything for some hits, I guess. Slap a custom wordpress theme on it and call it journalism.
How do you compete with MapMyRun? Everyone I know uses that...
These days, few things beat WordPress as a platform to build a Webiste - quickly. ElegantThemes.com has a suite of templates for $39. StudioPress and WooThemes are a bit more expensive, but well worth it. You get a wide range of designs, and a day of hacking the CSS will get you a custom design. 99Designs is great for finding logo designers - had great success with that. oDesk and vWorker (formerly RentACoder) are also good sources - though quality may be a bit hit or miss. I'd use WordPress, buy a stock template, and customize it to my needs.
> I can't find it now - which stated that the Soviets were to send a cosmonaut to Mars, knowing full well he'd just wander around and die with no way to come back. They had volunteers.

What makes you think that it's just Soviets?

Lots of folks have knowingly made one way trips to "new territory".

Heck, I'd do it given reasonable resources for "just wander around".
New 2011 MacBook Pros Having Issues - Freezing, Crashing, Home Sharing
For those of you who have reached this milestone:

1) What type of business model did you use? (SaaS, ecommerce, etc.)

2) How long did it take to get there after launching?

3) What was the biggest hurdle you faced in getting there?

4) How many people were working with you?
James, in my head I read all your articles in Ted Mosby's voice. On a more serious note, I think that safety, among with freedom, is the number one reason I'd like to increase my income by an order of magnitude. And by safety I mean the safety net that money can provide. It doesn't make you immortal or immune to disease, but it can help in several ways. If you are in any type of legal trouble, you can hire an awesome lawyer who'll increase your chances of remaining free. If you are sick and need a surgery right away, you can go to the States and pay for it, and so on.
Something doesn't add up "could not contact sales reps to run another promotion." and "Customer retention was very low."

Why would unhappy business run another promotion?
I think it's strange that the percentage is tied to a set time period for your contribution. Who knows exactly how long it will take at this stage?

If I were you, the biggest question I would have would be posed in the mirror: do I believe in this company? 5% -- or better yet, 100% of nothing is......nothing.
Google releases Anthill to bake VP8 into hardware
Not sure what the typo referred to is but “cappuccino“ is the correct spelling.
I love Pratt parsers (or Top Down Operator Precedence parsers rather), I recently re-wrote the IronJS lexer and parser by hand (from using one generated by ANTLR) using the techniques described in this blog post and saw some pretty hefty performance increments http://ironjs.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/new-lexer-and-parser-...

Edit, I also have a generalized version that can take pretty much any input and any output (F#) here: https://github.com/fholm/Vaughan
PNG optimisation using a genetic algorithm
> Note: English is my only language, which makes it hard for me to construct translation examples!

Ouch.

Building MT systems without knowing foreign languages is a bit like deaf people building a speech recognizer. No offence meant to anyone, but it works much better when you know what you're doing.
Oh and one more, always ask the designer for the psd (Photoshop) files not just png or jpg - this way you can easily modify it.