skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great writing.

One issue with "Forward exercise" tough: by forward-exercising and converting to "Restricted Stock Unit", you avoid the high tax risk, but you also need to pay a substantial amount of cash in advance and bet on the future value of the company. Let's say you get $10k options at strike price $20, you basically need to pay $200K in advance to forward exercise. If the company dies in the future without anexit, you basically lose your $200k.

So perhaps the best strategy is to:
1) Forward exercise in several batches as you are gaining confidence of the company (but before the world has much confidence of the company...yet), and try to exercise before the next valuation increase.

2) Delay exercise as late as possible (closer to exit or IPO). But this usually works only if you join a late-stage startup, whose fate is more predictable.

If you are a startup, try issue Restricted Stock Units, rather than Stock Options to poor and hard-working employees. That will make your company more employee-friendly.

If you are looking for a startup to join, prefer those who issue Stock Units (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, which are not necessarily startups anymore though).
That was a great video! I feel inspired!!
Why I Love Clojure
Agreed on the responsiveness issue. You don't even have to open hundreds of buffers, either. Emacs has given me embarrassing pauses while auto-saving a text file only a few kilobytes in size. Emacs will also make the text flicker as it redisplays the buffer every few minutes.
I'm far more worried about the plaintext password being stolen from someone's insecure database. But that only reinforces your argument.
In section 4:

The next day, you forward-exercise your four-year option package and quit. The company will simply buy back all of your restricted stock, and you’ll end up with nothing.

Isn't it likely that the company will actually leave you with your Restricted Stock until just before the vesting date, then buy it back (unless the company has completely tanked in the meantime, in which case they'll be happy to leave you with your worthless stock)?
"falling down" - does that mean gravity is an attractive force between matter-antimatter or antimatter-antimatter (or both)?
Welcome to our sunny island!
I know very little about system administration, but the comment I want to add to this conversation is: wow, this is a tremendously good product website.

1. Show the glamour shot (even just a screen shot of text makes it compelling).
2. Quickly explain the problem you're solving.
3. Quickly explain how you solve the problem.
4. List the most compelling RTBs ("reasons to believe")

Just a heads up: it wasn't immediately clear that I could click on the screenshot for a demo. I'd make that a huge call-to-action. The product can sell itself.
From my understanding (disclaimer: I'm neither a lawyer nor an accountant, but I have been thoroughly advised by both on the topic), there is an important distinction between ISOs (Incentive Stock Options) and NSOs (Nonqualified Stock Options) when it comes to tax implications for the employee.

First, ISOs are not taxed at the time of grant or exercise. Instead, they are taxed when the stock is sold. NSOs, on the other hand, are taxed immediately upon exercise on the difference in value between the fair market value of the stock and your exercise price.

Second, ISOs are eligible for long-term capital gains treatment so long as the employee holds the stock for at least two years before selling. NSOs are always taxed as income.

From the employer perspective, there are implications as well, but I'm less versed on that side of things. It has something to do with tax deductions for the business when issuing NSOs that are not received when issuing ISOs.

For more info on this topic, here are a couple of links, but I'd of course recommend talking to a lawyer or accountant if you're serious about the topic:

http://www.naffziger.net/blog/2007/03/31/startup-stock-optio...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-qualified_stock_option

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_stock_option
I thought it got changed to anonymous?
In-flight Internet: the view from 35,000 feet and three years
Sorry, not really into the dashboard for businesses thing at the moment
My mother was working for a (now extinct) biotech company that was developing a cancer 'vaccine' using a retrovirus to do targeted removal of cancer cells. One of the big problems they ran into was that the patient's immune system had a tendency to kill off all of their cancer-killer viruses.

So for a while there, they were seriously working on making a virus that would be completely invisible to your immune system- and this was maybe eight years ago. I'm sure there are dozens of little biotech companies in the bay area alone trying to do the same thing now.
Required email registration ships by default with Wordpress and works well enough. Something like Akismet or antispam baked into Disqus or Facebook comments works better, but isn't strictly necessary.
I'm currently burning time learning new programming languages and looking to learn hardware development.
tl; tisfl (this-is-still-fucking-long): I'd like to pre-apologize for this rant, but Gruber is killing me. He's trolling for pageviews/loyalists and I hate that I keep reading his articles expecting insight and objectivity. Learn from my mistakes.

Also, I'm using grown-up words. Be warned.

Also, I stopped reading TFA at the "What I Hope..." section because my head started to throb.

From TFA:

But in short let’s just think about the ways that iCloud
might be a major, dare I say game-changing, step away from
USB tethering between iOS devices and iTunes running on your
Mac/PC. Consider just the new out-of-box experience. Rather
than “Take this out, plug it into your Mac or PC (after first
making sure your Mac/PC is running the latest version of
iTunes), wait for it to sync before you actually play with it”,
you might get something like “Take this out, turn it on, sign
into your iTunes account, and start playing with it.”

Really? Not plugging your phone into USB and then fucking about with iTunes is "dare I say game-changing". What decade are we in? Oh wait, maybe this quote was missing some critical bit of context... If so, fill me in. If not, FTFA.

But wait, there's more:

If Apple can work out (or, if we can dream, perhaps secretly
already has worked out) a deal to allow movies, in addition
to music, to be bought and stored permanently in your iCloud
account, then the Apple TV 2 suddenly changes from a machine
for renting movies into a machine for buying or renting
movies. I like to buy movies, so here’s hoping.

The point of the cloud is that I don't have to "store permanently" movies in the cloud. A bit of data is stored that says I have permanent access to the movie. [I know that some might yell about DRM and what, but I really dig this access model and don't give a shit if I lose access to Top Gun. GrooveShark + PSN + NetFlix => no media files in my life.] And how could studios possibly agree to this insanity?! Oh wait. Netflix. (To which someone says, "but they don't have everything"; to which I say, "they will".) "Apple TV 2 suddenly changes from a machine for renting movies into a machine for buying or renting movies"... If I wait longer, will this sentence become not-dumb?
My brother had a friend who was diagnosed with
schizophrenia in his teens. He spent the years 14 to 22 on various drug cocktails and going in an out of treatment facilities. He'd be ok for a bit, but then do something like smash a TV with a hammer and he'd be sent back. Finally after exhausting various drug options, they took him off all drugs. He got better almost immediately. He's been fine since, and end up joining the Marines and serving in Afghanistan.
David, thanks for writing this as well as your excellent guide to stocks and options. I am convinced that I cannot miss any article by you.
Updated in real time? So I have at least ten years before my embarassing newbie posts arrive.

I want a fork of this that allows me to reply to me. ;)
bcrypt doesn't work like that. The outline is:

work * costfactor
finish

The finish step is irreversible, so you can't unwind it and add more work later. In practice though, even low cost factors for bcrypt are tons more work than MD5 or SHA. It's not a big deal.
Bash environment variables that set themselves on cd
I already said I'm not talking about correctness only modularity. Early/eager verification breaks modularity.
Dear down voters, parent is accurate (except possibly for saying "big").
Touching the word will also remove the bubble. You don’t have to touch the X. That’s the problem.
I agree with this sentiment, but not the expression of it.
Is this yours, how about email alerts at certain prices? Perhaps an rss or twitter feed...
Bit.ly Service - shortens links and works with Bit.ly Pro.
http://snippets-tricks.org/proyecto/bitly-service/

Google Sitemaps - easily generate XML sitemaps.
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/googl...

Lockout - good for when you F* something up and dont want anyone to see your site temporarily.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lock-out/

Robots Meta - lets you easily control what is followed and indexed by search engines.
http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/

Simply Show ID's - shows page ID's. Something WP should do, but doesn't.
http://sivel.net/wordpress/simply-show-ids/

Simple Redirect - makes 301's really easy.
http://www.scottnelle.com/simple-301-redirects-plugin-for-wo...

Gravity Forms - a super powerful form plugin. It is not free, but well worth it's price.
http://gravityforms.com
Regarding your second point, you two could be talking about the same thing. You are talking about it on a technical level, he is talking about it on a user experience level.
Hm, why? Lion was already distributed to the developers through the App Store.
good point. i'll have to read up on how sony's db got extracted first then.
Lady Gaga and Mother Teresa on Leadership
Mysql.com hacked
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2898
I think an under-discussed ethical issue is whether or not some technology/knowledge should be off-limit, or only be available to qualified people. Synthetic Life has a massive potential to benefit or destroy the human race, and we're gonna let just anybody learn about it? Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Another issue is that of whether machines can ever be sentient. The unconscious view of most atheists (i.e. the majority of people) is that consciousness is purely an emergent phenomena. I disagree with this view, but I think within a hundred years we'll consider strong optimization algorithms to be non-human people. The question then becomes, what about animals? I think humanity's treatment of animals will become an important moral issue before I die.
Life would be oh so sweet, if I was a bicycle seat...
HN is definitely a place for experts to interact with 'everyday' folks in tech. But it doesn't even aspire to be that for any other vertical.

Quora arguably has a marginally lower caliber of tech experts, but much higher for many other verticals including business, journalism, media, etc.
Zynga launches 'Empire' within days of its IPO
How have I never heard of this before? (Oh, no Firefox or IE support).

Also, I don't believe your claims about WebSockets are true. I thought wss:// would allow for SSL secured WebSocket connections...

edit: Googling indeed seems to indicate that wss is ws over TLS. See: http://websocket.org/echo.html for an example.
The Whitehouse release a cyber security plan
I really want to say "that's a nice point", but I'm having a hard time because PSN did this like 4 years ago (but why you would try to "own" a cloud-based piece of media is beyond me). That said, I've only ever bought incredible movies (of course, I'm talking about Fletch, Raising Arizona and Ace Ventura), so I don't understand the desire to "own" movies. Especially since they get re-mastered and HDed and 3Ded and what. It's like owning an LP (which is basically silly (if you consider logic and reason to be friends)).

That said, I'll say: that's a nice point.
Using a debugger has been useful to me lately. They can take a while to learn (depending on the language and environment), but they're well worth it. You get to step through everything that the interpreter sees. The only drawback is you can get lazy, as it lets you read only what you need to read. You won't be disappointed unless you know the codebase well enough for the debugger to be tiresome.
Alpha Geek [Stephen Wolfrram]
Building a social media policy
I believe you are thinking of strange matter / strangelets :)
The more important qualifier is "from time to time".

What I miss most about Usenet is that there were always interesting conversations, that were expected to take place over time. Here how many conversations are still going on a day later? A week later?
Ask HN: How could I make things change in my crappy CS department.
Hey HN,

I'll be finishing college in a week. I attended what we call here in Quebec, Canada a "Cégep", which is between high school and university. It's a 3 year program in computer science. Unfortunately, it's overally worse than your worst nightmares. Now that I'm about to finish, I feel very bad for any future students of this program, and I want to save their lives.

My teachers have absolutely no interest in "staying up to date", and they've all been teaching there for over 10 years. So they will either teach this very outdated stuff, or pretend they know something new and give us links to look for. I don't need those links, my Google skills are much better than theirs, and so is my interest for newer technologies. I love programming and I'm lucky I'm one of the 4 students (out of 34) who will finish without failing a class, although I've been highly unmotivated all the way.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it is, exactly 1/5 of the 3 years there were spent on learning Oracle Forms Builder 6i. If you don't know what it is, here is a link to a sample web app built with this: http://technology.amis.nl/blog/wp-content/images/jhsmig0.jpg . It is deprecated, will only run on windows XP or lower, keeps crashing, and is not similar to anything you can think of.

Enough ranting, my goal is to do what has already been attempted before, make things change. I plan on writing a letter to the school direction, backed by many other students, bringing many of the problems and solutions. Some other students have already made this attempt without success. I also plan on writing an open letter in the local newspaper to talk about the subject. The thing is it's difficult for me to explain what is wrong without giving any technical details, which would not be understood or taken too lightly. The whole department, every teacher, is problematic. So there is no one else to understand the technicality behind all this.

I don't want to fail like others have and I want to do something which will bring real changes. It cannot continue like this, I've seen too many students fail where they shouldn't have and lose faith in their future in this field because of this. What else can I do and how should I do it? I'm looking for any advice.

Thanks you
Y Combinator: Dinner, Advice & Comaraderie - The Airbnb Blog
I did my first (short) triathlon today! I was pretty nervous getting there this morning, but everyone involved was awesome, and some friends showed up to cheer me on. It turned out great, and now I'm looking for the next big challenge.
He didn't say "unwind it". He said "on top of it".

bcrypt( bcrypt( "foo", c1 ), c2 )
That's just not true. To oversimplify a bit, let's say BCrypt is a function b(data, cost) that returns a hash.

Right now, I have b(password, c1) = hash_a stored in my database. To increase the cost to c1+c2, I just replace that with b(hash_a, c2) = hash_b in my database. To verify a user's login, I just compute b(b(password, c1), c2) and compare it to the hash_b I have stored.

Am I missing anything?
My first time being downvoted, I think. Humor falls flat == bad. Got it. Sorry for dragging you down with me.
I think what he means by run C2 on top of C1 is something like this. Let b(k,w) mean bcrypt with work factor w on input k.

So, initially, you are storing b(pass,C1). Running C2 on top of C1 would mean replacing that with b(b(pass,C1),C2).

Later, when you want even more work, another layer could be added: b(b(b(pass,C1),C2),C3) and so on.
What do you do if your HD goes kaput and you need to restore?
> Is the module functor compiled only once, or once for every parameter type?

Only once. It does in fact miss optimization opportunities in OCaml (where ints and float arrays are given special treatment). In theory this can be overcome with whole-program optimization. The MLton compiler for SML (which also has functors) is such a compiler, though I do not know how it handles this particular case (I would presume it does).

I know of no other languages that allow type modularity beyond the ML family (including various derived formal logic systems). Racket (PLT Scheme) provides "units" which are a similar idea to functors but use contracts instead of types (since Racket is currently untyped). The analogue of a type in Racket is a type membership function from any value to boolean; this function can be used elsewhere in the unit. See for example: http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/Signatures_and_Units.html
A preset list of salts would still show a different hash for 2 consecutive bcrypt executions. Your example proves nothing.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying you didn't demonstrate proof, so you shouldn't act like you did.

I'm extremely interested why bcrypt is much more secure than SHA1 + extremely long hash, so perhaps you could shed some photons on that?

Also, in order for bcrypt to generate a unique salt on two different computers, it needs a unique source of randomness. Obviously seeding by "current time" is insufficient, as this would generate the same salt for two different computers at the same time. So what does it use? Mac address of network card + current time?
Doctors claim to have "functional cure" for HIV
Protocol jokes collection (#protolol)
I think this "Adjusted CSOI" nonsense is tantamount to Groupon admitting that they're not profitable.
Yes, but once you are in to the point where you have the db...what else are you going after?

If you can dump the db then (most likely) you also have the credit cards, other information that is useful to you?

This assumes a hacker has a financial motivation.
Hm, I think you are a bit too focused on bringing other companies into this. Going back to the first point you made, sure, not having to plug in your iOS device is not game-changing when you are looking at the industry and specifically at Android but that’s not what Gruber said. Let’s take a closer look:

“But in short let’s just think about the ways that iCloud might be a major, dare I say game-changing, step away from USB tethering between iOS devices and iTunes running on your Mac/PC.”

He says that it would be game-changing for iOS devices. That’s most definitely true. I don’t think he says that it would be a game-changer for the industry.
Indeed, typeclasses in languages such as Haskell and Mercury can be (ab)used for many of the same uses as functors. I've used both and there are merits to each, but I still can't put my finger on when one is better than the other.
San Diego / La Jolla California
http://nettle.com

Nettle has three openings:

2 backend infrastructure developers
1 frontend html/css/js engineer (yes, engineer)

We're building large systems of components and functions that interact in near real time on the web and mobile platforms.

Seed funding includes names you'll know, but we can't say just yet.

The company has three employees today, all engineers and very hands on. The co-founders have five successful startups behind them and are angel investors in the local community.
Apple is clearly playing catch-up here. Their overall user experience is more polished but it's going to take a big leap of faith for them to bridge to the net as well as Android.

If their cloud service is an "ownership" model rather than a subscription access model like rd.io or Netflix they won't be getting much cash from me.
I know you're a domain expert and in this thread you've suggested both bcrypt and scrypt. Is there any advantage to one over the other? From my POV it seems that bcrypt has more implementations and seems better-known (in a good way).
How can you have a game with only one player?
How do you install it?
It all comes down to frustration. Having autocorrect "fix" things that aren't broken say 1% of the time, consistently, forever, is a constant frustration that I have no way to remove without either turning it off or changing the way I type (by watching the cursor for the bubble to come up.)

On the other hand, I've noticed simply turning autocorrect off results in less overall frustration, despite less efficiency at first, since the mistakes I make are my own and its my responsibility to improve my typing accuracy so they approach zero.
Ask HN: How long will it take to make an iPhone app w/ no experience?
I'm a programmer. I know Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, Javascript/CSS, but I have no experience developing iPhone apps. I know it uses Objective C, and Cocoa, but other than that, I don't know anything else.

Let's say I want to build an iPhone app that's fairly complex to use, such as an app that keeps track of spending and budgeting. Suppose I have 4 hours per day to work on this. How long do you think it will take me to complete the entire app (from learning Objective C, design, implementation, etc)?
Group buying - think bigger.
I'm referring to the verticals I know and about which I do ongoing research, which mostly aren't tech verticals. I've checked facts on those issues on Quora, which has been disappointing as a source of information on those subjects.
This would be awesome as a plugin/add-on for Heroku - if that's not already in the works.
You might want to consider leveraging all that knowledge you already have with something like http://www.phonegap.com/
That's true. I painted with a broad brush. There are even examples of gender equality in traditional cultures. Not all 1st or 2nd world countries as far along the way either. The 3rd world grouping here is pretty arbitrary to my point.
Crowdsourcing firm puts $5k bounty on app patents
This article uses NTLM passwords.

Can anyone compare this to the actual MSFT recommended Kerberos security protocol?

Also, how does one go about getting a list of NTLM passwords to work against? You steal the domain controller or somehow get access to it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLM MSFT does not recommend using NTML which is very old.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc236715(v=PROT.10)....

Implementers should be aware that NTLM does not support any recent cryptographic methods, such as AES or SHA-256. It uses cyclic redundancy check (CRC) or message digest algorithms ([RFC1321]) for integrity, and it uses RC4 for encryption. Deriving a key from a password is as specified in [RFC1320] and [FIPS46-2]. Therefore, applications are generally advised not to use NTLM.<68>
Modern HTTPS uses TLS too.
Can a cyber-attack really be considered an 'act of war'?
3 hours of commuting a day isn't practical. You won't last. Maybe your options should thus include moving?
Ask HN: Any hacker houses in the city have roommate vacancies?
Hey Hackers

I am back to the area and looking for a place to live in the city for couple of months(til August, maybe Sept). A decent human being, a pretty good hacker, can read fancy maths, amateur photographer(hipster alert, I know),toy sword fighter, long island ice tea drinking competition winner 2007. Move in as soon as humanely possible. Ping me.
Only to have it co-opted to mean doing anything. "Hey, I just hacked my resume together in Microsoft Word!", "I just hacked dinner together with some pans and some food!", "That was a great hack putting together that email!"