skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, this article doesn't seem to offer any insights into what factors made the game so successful, or even really present much new information that couldn't be found in one of the many other links on HN over the last several months.

See, e.g.:
[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740289
[2]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2107773
[3]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1718023
> I'll put this plainly: pirated software is often more user-friendly.

I'm not sure to what extent it's still done, but I was fairly impressed by some of the improvements warez groups would make to stuff in the 90s. The Radium audiowarez group used to actually add features to their versions of audio software, e.g. the ability to import/export more formats than the official version. Many groups also found ways to make games much smaller in size than the official version, e.g. reencoding all the wav audio as mp3 and embedding an mp3 decoder, which was a nice win in the days when I would sometimes have to uninstall a game in order to fit a new install on my hard drive.
> There isn’t really such a thing as code that is “avant garde” or otherwise susceptible to influence and taste.

Oh... if only he knew.
The Guy Who Says He Owns 50% Of Facebook Just Filed A Boatload Of New Evidence
You can perceive them because they 'burn into' your retina and leave an after-image. Your eyes act as a queue or buffer of sorts; by the time your brain registers the character (especially characters outside the latin alphabet, and arabic numeral system- characters your brain sees and recalls much less often), several other characters have already flashed by.

You don't notice this effect with contiguous video, but 25fps becomes more of a problem with high-speed action flicks and their ilk.
The takeaways seem to be disconnected to the article. Do we have evidence that the phone calls mattered a hill of beans? That sounds like a post-hoc justification to cover an employee's sudden unexpected possession of reliable market data.

I love tradition as much as the next guy, but I think there is virtually no advantage to employees from our cultural norm that comp information is as sensitive as health information. The advantage to employers is, ahem, fairly straightforward: they get to pay systematically lower salaries to people who don't realize that e.g. failing to say one sentence when you're 22 costs you almost a hundred thousand dollars by the time you are thirty. (The contents of that sentence is essentially "Your offer plus $5k.")
Jewelry: Boogie Down Navy Enamel Ring
I feel like I rage on titles all too often, but I can't resist this one, particularly since this one comes from businessweek which is currently putting a grotesque pop-up to win 1000$ for a survey in my face.

There's nothing _improbable_ about the rise of minecraft. It hit the right notes, took the right steps. What it was, was _unexpected,_ particularly to an audience/demographic (excuse the coming absurdly broad brush I swear it's just for hyperbolic humor) that relies on men in suits making decisions about what sells and what doesn't.

Hopefully I got over my pedantic streak for the day via that one word.
This kind of action is essentially an admission that the allegation is true. I'm sure there is a handy politician who could pipe in here and say "If you don't have anything to hide, then you have nothing to worry about..." Besides, it's the UN :)
I am happy for GeoHot that this is over.

I am also sad that a law like the DMCA exists and is not challenged.
If you can correlate semantically-parsed log data with time series to automatically understand that particular problem, you're solving problems harder than server monitoring and applying them to server monitoring, IMO :) Not that there's anything wrong with that!
Yeah, that's not how it works. The part that the Palin story leave out is the excise tax (courtesy of the intermediate sanctions provisions of the IRC) that Bristol Palin paid on the salary she received, in addition to the income taxes she paid on it.

Also ignored is that the majority of the corruption in Bono's charity was siphoned off by government officials in the countries where the charity was intending to offer its services.

Non-profits are not revovling doors for cash. The IRS rigorously audits charities that take in more than $50,000 in doanations in a year, and they are very zealous about levying hefty sanctions for abusive transactions. The scanrio you laid out would not qualify as a non-profit for many reasons, including the lack of public support, the lack of sufficient spending on exempt purposes, oh--and a big one--pervasive self-dealing.
> BTW: I think I know you from @misc.

If you're talking about misc@openbsd.org, yes.
Chernobyl cost several hundred thousand lives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Assessing_th...). Let's hope and pray Fukushima will not exact a similar cost.
Don't worry I'm sure Arianna Huffington will let them continue to work for free!
The Winkelvi have made a career out of suing Facebook. They can't stop and they will take this case to the Supreme Court if they can. It's unfortunate, they should take the freaking money, but they won't it's not about the money for them. It's about the fact some middle class kid beat them and they can't let it go.
None of the players are tied to Ruby, but the agents are often written in it (not ideal, as the usual 35MB memory footprint adds up over many servers).

In any event, don't take my call for research as a call not to join the party. The fact that you haven't heard of them means that none of them have quite solved the product/market fit stage and made it to ubiquity. Being intimidated or imitating them would not be the way to go, but knowing about them would probably be useful, and they have some good ideas.

(alternately, it means that most people prefer to do this in-house, and there's just not a market there. But I don't believe that, this is such boring stuff that happens on every project...)

anyways, good night and good luck
Someone should do an American Idol Reject show.
Does anyone have a reference for the camera transforms this is doing? I've got as far as figuring out that it's using an asymmetric frustum, but plugging the "obvious" numbers into OpenGL gave me obviously wrong results.
To me the title smells of the case of "10 years to an overnight success" since Notch has been building random games for years, this was just the one that happened to take off.
> failing to say one sentence when you're 22 costs you almost a hundred thousand dollars by the time you are thirty.

Wow. As a CS-grad about to take a full-time job offer, I'd surprisingly never thought of this at all. But how easy is it to say "Your offer plus $5k"? What could be the possible consequences of this?
I fear I'll spend more time on HN reading every single comment. Good for the less well-known posters who don't get upvoted by reputation alone, but bad for me and my work. However, having observed and stated that fear, I can now work to counteract it should the post counts remain hidden.
Distraction free writing on the web
It does count as taxable income. A charitable donation can only offset a max of 50% of the donor's total income for public charities, or 30% of total income for a donation to a private foundation charity,which is the type of charity described in the OP sample.

And of course, if you get to the point of donations and other deductions resulting in $0 tax, you get hit with AMT, which frequently results in a higher tax than you would owe if you had never made any deductions at all.
Me and my co-workers always share how much we make. It's not a big deal. We understand that some make more, some make a lot less. Most often it's how well you negotiate. It rarely has to do with how great your skills are.

If that spreadsheet happened to be in my hands, I wouldn't know how to exploit it. What the author did is ruined the relationship with his manager over a crappy 2% raise.

I would just return it, make a joke, and started interviewing. If you're at the bottom while they tell you that you're great, it's a long way up.
You beat me to it! I have exactly the same bent - atypical but not improbable. The game is successful because it's a great idea, recursively refined into a great implementation.
Subtitle: the benefits of paying everybody the exact same base salary.

Managers, read up. Do you want to make your team members feel like this? Communicate clearly beforehand about what leads to incentive pay (good code) and disincentive pay (chatty phone calls). If you didn't communicate clearly, you don't get to skimp on labour costs.
You can't write off donations to fully offset income -- only 1/2 of your yearly income can be offset by charitable giving (or 30%, if you're stupid enough to donate to someone else's private foundation charity).

This would also not be "blatant tax fraud". Indeed, it is the transaction underlying the private foundation form of charity, which is the oldest type of charity recognized in the US.
Ask HN: Any startups not based out of India but having developers in India?
Just wanted to know if there are any startups/small companies that are not having an office in India but have developers (as regular employees, in their payroll) based out of India. Am trying to understand the legalities and taxation details involved. Would it cost a lot for a startup in US/Europe to maintain a workforce of developers in India?

Disclosure: I am a programmer based in India.
There is virtually no downside to this. Your university/college has coop advisors and employment offices. Go and get some advice for salary negotiating.
You'll get a mark on your permanent record.
I often get the feeling that I'm significantly less well paid than others in the company. I've seen pro formas for certain management positions and some ideas on wages in a company we just acquired, and I'm sure I'm pretty low on the list.

Part of the disparity is likely negotiating tactics (I know one employee who got a nice raise after getting a competing offer), and the desire of the company to pay the least amount possible.

For me, another big part is that my job can't be directly attributed to a revenue stream (we're in the services industry). For those who's jobs are directly paid by contract with the client, they'll pay whatever the client will agree to. For those of us in "overhead", they'll pay as little as possible because it's difficult, if not impossible, to assign a dollar amount to the value that we bring to the company.

I would venture to guess that devs that work for software development business get paid more than those that are just in IT at a non-software company.
sliverstorm, I don't want to take this too far off topic, but what are the rates you're hearing of that you have trouble believing? I read at a little over 1,300 words per minute (and I keep getting faster). As to comprehension, without taking a test it's hard to say, but by reading a section of material for a few minutes, writing down everything I can remember without looking at the book, then re-reading to see what I've missed, I seem to get roughly 80% comprehension, which I find acceptable for most things (and it keeps getting better through practice).

Disclaimer: That's depending on the material, I read at about half that rate (around 600 wpm) if it's extremely technical or dense, or a good deal faster in anything at or below a high school reading level.
Why backing up your website is important
Websites are synonymous to company reputations today. Businesses, companies and services are evaluated on the efficiency of their website. If the website is not impressive enough, the institution loses its credibility. The site must provide the right amount of information, appeal to aesthetic sense and yet not over do it.
Advantage of PHP Programming for Dynamic Web Pages
Ask HN: Any YC-backed teams have listed their space on Airbnb?
The fact is that while you have the right to negotiate what you're paid, that negotiation works both ways. The truth is that the company will pay you the absolute minimum required to get the work they need. So, it's up to you to know the market rate, and negotiate accordingly. If you aren't paid what you think you're worth, there's no one to blame but you.
Worst case, their reply will be "no", and then you can still decide you want to take the original offer. More likely, they'll agree to give you some more money.

I'm no expert on the state of the art in salary negotiation books, but http://www.amazon.com/Negotiating-Your-Salary-Make-Minute/dp... is decent for getting you in the right mindset.
Decision maker: Alright, let's talk numbers. What is your desired salary?

You: I don't know, you're in a much better position to judge my worth to the firm than I am.

Decisionmaker: But in terms of an actual number?

You: [Polite nothings. Repeat as necessary.]

Decisionmaker: Alright, how would $80k do?

You: That's interesting. Would you do $85k?

Decisionmaker: OK.

That is literally how simple it is, and your downside risk is "Alright, in that case, $80k is alright" and nobody will remember this conversation 2 weeks from now except your checking account. You can do more complicated things, like demonstrating value to the firm, or treating any no as a suggestion that you negotiate some other aspect of the offer instead, but the simplest way to improve outcomes at negotiation is to actually negotiate.

The marginal $5k gets compounded at every annual raise you have, virtually certain to be calculated by an HR drone's spreadsheet by multiplying a contentious number by a very non-contentious number (your current salary -- now $5k larger). It will increase other benefits you receive, such as employer match to your IRA. If you actually treat questions about salary history at face value when switching firms, it will also act as an anchor for your pricing for the rest of your career. (Giving out salary history? Yeah, that's another thing that can't possibly help you. Anyone asking you for salary history is saying, in as many words, "Please give me a reason why I should give you less money.")
I suppose it depends on your definition of "social media". The other day i heard someone say "if you're not on facebook, no-one will find your product." I suppose that depends on your market. If you're buying wide-body jets for national airlines for long-haul service, I suspect Facebook is not your first port of call. That's not an isolated example, I suspect most B2B type sales are not affected by Facebook.

On the other hand if your product is social, or the latest hip thingy, or relies on some sort of "fashion" driver (fashion in the broad sense, not necessarily related to clothing) then obviously facebook, twitter, blogging - anything at all - is good. If you're starting out, and no-one has ever heard of you then social media helps spread the word, but it'll take more than that to build something of substance.Fashion, by definition, is fleeting.Lots and lots of stuff is "famous for a day" and then sinks without trace.

Of course the author of the article is writing a blog post about blogging - to people who (by definition) read blog posts. Blogging is important for "really small businesses" to build at least some sort of profile, but it's by no means the best, or only, way to build that audience.

Those of us who "do" tech all day, every day, assume that tech is the way to solve all problems. Sometimes that's true, but in many cases not.
yeah, most definitely.

I used to work for what was basically the largest company in the fairly small country that I live in.

Time and time again, new developers (with similar skill sets) would come in off the street at a vastly higher rate than the current herd of developers. Every time the annual pay review came around, any permanent staff would get a token 2-3% raise and that would be it. Team leaders would be given 3% to spread around their team, so the only way for any individual developer to get a more-than-inflation raise, would be at the direct expense of another developer in their team. Not exactly conducive to good team moral!

In the end, the only effective way to get a reasonable pay rise was to either change jobs (giving you a chance to jump salary bands), or to leave the company, wait for 6 months or so, and then reapply for another job. The advantage being that this time around, you would know the likelihood of getting a decent raise after you started, so you would be a lot more insistent about coming on-board at a decent rate.

Whenever HR was questioned about this policy, their answer was basically to shrug and say something to the effect of: "We need to pay market rate to acquire new talent - once you're working here you're unlikely to leave a stable job, so we don't need to pay you as much money to retain you".

Personally, I left (with the intention of coming back in 6 months or so). Five years later, I've yet to get around to reapplying for a job back there =)
The key to understanding this is to knowing that only foreign profits (earned from non-American customers in non-American jurisdictions) are subject to the lower taxes through this scheme. This is income that, strictly speaking, the US government does not truly have a right to tax since it has only the most tenous nexus to an American taxpayer.

The money Google makes in America is still subject to the normal American tax rates applicable to corporations.
I suspect that if you wanted a job at Google it would not be terribly difficult for you to get one. ;-)

Anyway, I bet there's probably somebody in search quality whose job it is to track these numbers, but I don't know who it is, and it's easier just to ask you. Plus, this way the HN community gets some interesting numbers. Thanks. :-)
Have you ever used the iPad keyboard for a few days? After a while I found that I could touch-type on my iPad with relative ease.
Not as good as a real keyboard, but certainly in the same ballpark.

Also, I tried some of the calculator iPad apps out there that utilize custom keyboards. Quite frankly, the simple fact that they have the screen space to lay out keys in a sensible way made up for the shiftiness. Contrast that with dozens of tiny keys, half of which are always unrelated to any one task. Personally, I prefer the iPad as a calculator.

Please note that this is my very personal experience as an engineer and programmer and it might not apply to you.
How is SSL hopelessly broken? Let us count the ways
Deferral is the basic premise of tax planning. The goal is to defer taxes, not avoid them.
Actually, I think what he did with it was what he should have done. I doubt it ruined the relationship, and from the sounds of the article, nothing indicates that. If anything, it could have strengthened it because he kept his word and approached the situation level headed.

He didn't go on the offensive when talking to the manager. It would have put the manager on the defensive and surely ruined the relationship then.

Instead, he tried to take the approach of what can he do to make more. He finally got constructive feedback, got a clear explanation of why the differences, and asked for harder assignments to prove himself.
If another country blocked a UN human rights investigation you know what would happen. The country would be instantly labeled as cruel dictatorship by the media.
Just found the YC group on Airbnb after asking the question. Not sure whether the list is verified...

http://www.airbnb.com/groups/ycombinator

Any suggestions/additions?
Yes, averaged across the entire population thinks work reasonably well, but among critical subsets of the population (like the technologically savvy) the picture isn't so rosy. For example, does almost everything work well in the realm of P2P mass lawsuits and college student settlement shakedowns? Are there millions of college students successfully defending themselves against shakedown letters not getting any news attention?
If you are interested in a startup, see if you can do small tasks for them while you are in school. Realistically, you probably are slightly inexperienced compared to CS grads, but perhaps you can do the odd jobs like minor testing or bug checking.

A lot of college students get jobs anyway while in school, so there's no reason to think you couldn't do some part time work for the startup.

The big advantage of this is you get some real-life experience and, come graduation time, you might have a job waiting or will get kick-ass referrals.
Also, unless my system crashes I tend not to close Firefox.
KILL THOSE THAT ARE Not FOLLOWING U ON TWITTER -NEW WEBSITE AND MORE TECH NEWS
Well, it's like buying a car or a house but in reverse. The employer isn't going to pay you more than they have to so they'll make an offer at the low end of the reasonable range. Unless it's some minimum wage job, there is a range of valid salaries and they probably have budgeted 10% or more higher than their initial offer.

Now, you may have to convince them you're worth getting paid higher in the range for that role but you should definitely counter-offer.

Also, my general rule of thumb while negotiating is to counter with a number higher than you'd be happy with and then negotiate to something near the middle of the two.

(I learned all this the hard way in my first job, but fortunately my manager was awesome and I got a 50% raise after a year.)
AlgoRythmics - sort algos as folk dance
The interface has nothing to do with it. It's all about how much they can get paid for offering tax advice.

But most of the solutions that the ultrarich use require significant amounts of monetary investment to achieve tax deferral (or income nonrecognition) results.

The general wealth point at which it starts making economic sense to employ a tax advisor is $250k-$350k in yearly income (depending on whether the income is salary or from capital investments). Less than that, and you'll pay more in fees than you will save in taxes.
Tell me about it.

I came out of college in 2002 and was looking for a job in Dallas while my wife went to school. This was the lowest of the lows, right after the telecoms in Dallas had folded and just flooded the market with thousands of developers. Not that there were many jobs.

Thankfully I had some rather unique experience, and that helped me find a job. I took the first number they offered ($48k/yr I think).

That was a HUGE mistake, even in those times. After all, I had some fairly unique experience.

My second mistake was a couple of years later at the same company. We were recently bought and I took that as an opportunity to negotiate my salary. They asked me what I was looking for, and while I had done my homework on market rates...I really undersold myself. A part of me hoped that they'd come to a more competitive number on their own.

They didn't.

It put me in the weird position of asking for a proper market-rate adjustment just 6 months later. I got exactly what I asked for the third time too, but this time it was much more fair.

Over that period I probably lost $70k all told.

Huge mistake.
We have no idea whether Ceglia's claims are credible (I'm minded he is a convicted felon for fraud). And Henry Blodget's tabloid approach to journalism/blogging means he'll cream himself over a story like this.

But one thing that sticks out for me is that highly respected law firm DLA Piper are representing Ceglia. They are obviously expensive and high end - they can only be representing him in return for a %age of any settlement from this. My point is they wouldn't be doing this - including risking their reputation either way this goes - if they didn't feel the evidence was compelling.
As I understand it, a judge can make a preliminary decision that a case, or elements of a case, are without merit, before hearing the complete arguments of the plaintiff.
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