skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with a lot of the sentiment in this blog. There are however exceptions. Some small companies get some guy in charge who was previously mired in the bureaucracy somewhere and starts trying to impose that on the little company. Disaster ensues.

On the other end, you can get a good startup feel by finding a good team in a big company/institution (usually you see this in Academia, but some places in companies have this too). A well built group will have some admin staff (secretaries, hands off project managers, etc.) to insulate the core team from the crazy. When done well, this admin group will fill out the crap forms, hide various money absurdities, deflect outside poisoners and otherwise do amazing things to keep the non-admin folks blissfully ignorant.[1] The bosses in such a group will create or emulate a flat reporting structure, and not let the external politics apply too much pressure or influence to the team. The core team will then get to do their thing in a way that feels very much like a small company or startup.

There are benefits and drawbacks to this of course. Benefits include having a giant name behind you, and the awesome funding and legal resources available -- I was once told "you think you need a cluster... we can buy one, just make sure first". Awesome. Customers say "Oh $BIG_NAME no need to jump you through these sill hoops to prove yourself". And of course, the feeling of stability provided by being in the employ of a giant. On the drawback side: you do more work than a lot of your peers outside the group -- not a big deal but sometimes mentally taxing. Politics can creep in, so you need to maintain high productivity and always do a good job, so the bosses can preserve the group by selling it as "ninja rockstar team alpha" to everyone else. And no matter how good the shielding, sometimes the crazy still can creep in.

So basically, this is a long winded way of saying: if you are careful, you may be able to find the startup feel in a big company, or at least the good parts of it.

[1] I'm fully convinced that good admin staff are worth the same as good programmers in this type of situation. In my current employment I travel a lot, but have never filled out an expense report, I dump some receipts with the admin, answer a few questions, and she takes care of the rest of the voodoo. Similarly with the HR rep for insurance we have. Purchases are a simple "hey I need, can you charge it to...". I know there are forms and procedures -- I've heard horror stories. When we need a new person we tend to churn a bit til we find a good one, then it's a quick raise and lots of flattery to keep him/her around. (On a personal side it's always good to be very nice and friendly to these folks, they do magic :) ).
100 Ways to Get More Done
From having a focused, attaining flow, optimizing your work environment, plateau busting, using a task list and working on the right thing. A rich list of hacks.
I've had both. They're different. One can lead to the other, but there's nothing scarier than looking at a screen and realizing you're incapable of programming past a basic loop.
Lookin' good! Came here from IRC.
SEEKING WORK - Remote/Freelance

seo

i particularly enjoy scaleable seo.

example work: (deliberate obfuscated) 1 2 3 p e o p l e, b w i n, r e d b u l l, t r i p w o l f, t u p a l o, f a c e s a e r c h, p o k e r r o o m, a u s t r i a p r e s s a g e n c y, ...

github: https://github.com/franzenzenhofer (just recreational)

contact see hn profile

work for startups only, no big, boring companies
It certainly sounds to me that "designers should code" is the argument some are making.

http://andyrutledge.com/web-design-is-product-design.php

The graphic designer who lacks html/css skill is insufficiently prepared as a web designer. A designer who lacks competence should address that issue rather than seek refuge within embarrassing debate.

Sounds pretty clear-cut to me.
How to Price Your Startup's Product
I don't consider $310 'cheap' or 'mindblowing'.
Google introduces happiness survey. Possibly uses Microsoft technologies.
Can someone clarify for me, what does "no first use" mean? Does it mean you can't sue a small start-up for being the first to use a patent you already own?
Having been employee one and started 2 companies - I strongly disagree.

It is hard to find employees/co-founders that (a) have the right skills, (b) the right interests, (c) the right industry knowledge/contacts, and (d) are in the same place in their life to make the same amount of commitments.

And even when you do you find such people, it is hard to give them 10% equity in the beginning and then tell them that they are under-performing, and only deserves 2.5% equity.

Now, I agree, that the definition of under-performing is very different for a startup compared to a more established company. I have also found people are willing to accept when they are under-performing, but contracts and equity that is given is harder to change.

However, I would love to have the right cofounder, and even share the equivalent equity with him if he can take over half my burden.

Perhaps the answer is to find people with a very good fit, start them with low equity (~1%), and tell them how they can get more equity. And then doubling equity multiple times as they are able to rise to a founder level responsibility.
I wouldn't consider it better, no. For one thing, I don't think it will improve user engagement. For another, I think users who are enticed by these adverts are not the users you want to engage (not to say they aren't worth anything, just not much).
Pretty sweet. I'll give it a try!
The Oracle Racket: Why Business in California is Just Like Russia
OK thanks, fair enough. I had thought he was responding to the latest one that made the rounds here - http://flyosity.com/application-design/if-you-can-think-desi...

Seems he wasn't though.
Kinda boils down to timing of the opportunity and how much risk is on the table before you sign up.

Employees generally come post-funding, get paid, etc. Co-founders work with free with no assurance of EVER getting paid, have to pony up when the company needs cash, etc.

In spirit, though-- I agree. If your risk level is the same as the founders, you should be a founder. If you can't handle or afford the risk but still love the idea of startups, try being an early employee.
Differences between Co-Founter, Investor, First Coder:

Co-Founder:
- Starts the compamy, has the idea/initial impl
- Takes risk, may work for a while with zero salary, investing personal time for nothing.
- May wind up getting ZERO (total) for the investment.
- Company does not get paid, co-found does not get paid.
- Big potential payout
- Health benefits? Post funding, or from other job while building startup.

Investor:
- Puts money into company.
- May lose everything, that money is just going to the founders for some food and servers or something of that nature.
- Payout depends on investment size. However lets say compared to co-founder, small payout.
- Minimal invested personal effort compared to co-founder.
- Invested time assisting the company and connecting the company to personal contacts to help it grow.
- Provides advice when needed (hopefully)

First Coder:
- Gets paid less than average coder
- Gets potential payout less than investor
- Gets paid or laid off. There is no in-between. May agree to not get paid this month and instead get paid later in hopes of assisting the business during a tough month.
- Has to be pretty close to the business since it's so volatile, so will see the lay-off coming.
- Probably coming in with benefits provided to employee.

As you can see risks/benefits are quite different for everyone. So its not just "you are getting screwed".

I think that getting a very small % is actually practical depending on how far along the company is. The question is about how much risk is being taken, and how much is being contributed.
A smart co-founder will see the contribution of a very valuable employee and offer more % to that employee especially if they are so critical to the company. Its not about employee #1 its about the fact that during the early phases, each individual person has the ability to make big things for the company, and they should be rewarded for those big things. Keeping life static is quite boring and no incentive. Yet having incentives for employees transforming the business early on is quite good.
There's an easy solution here: Load Google Analytics locally. There's no urgent need to load ga.js from Google's servers; there are benefits, namely speed, utilizing client cache, and getting updates, but its core functionality does not rely on where ga.js comes from.

Then, the only resource loaded form Google's servers is http://ssl.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif, and that's just loaded via a new Image(), so even if you MITM that resource request, it doesn't execute as a script or anything similar.
Paywalls and Kettlebells
A lot of the IBM Developer articles are apparently crap, but I found this one interesting and well done, some years ago.

The article date looks different, now, and IBM has redesigned the site since I originally read it, but I think -- at a glance -- that it's the same article.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-finitemach1/

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-finitemach2...

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-finitemach3...
Any enum with clear transition logic is effectively a state machine. However, if you try to implement SMs as separate classes/objects with explicit transition functions, than it does become an unreadable mess. The logic in your code stops representing behavior. I think that's what the grandparent post refers to. Also, "explicit" state machines don't allow to use recursion, which can made code much more readable.
this post is so sad..... :D
When it comes to hobby boards, "Defacto standards" don't mean a thing to chip companies. We might like to think it matters...but Broadcom is selling hundreds of millions of parts a year to companies like Apple. Does 50,000 or even 500,000 Raspberry Pis over it's lifetime mean anything to a company like this?
Palo Alto, CA (willing to consider relocation or remote work) http://suitabletech.com

Telepresence Robotics

Suitable Technologies is a startup working to create an innovative new product for something called "remote presence." (Another common term is "robotic telepresence.")

Our first product, in development now, is similar to video chat on a computer you can drive around. Unlike videoconferencing, you’re not stuck to a wall or desk. It becomes your physical presence, anywhere in the world, with the freedom to move and interact with people as if you were there. Our technology has already been seen by millions of people, and we think the potential impact is substantial.

We're looking for great engineers and designers. We need help in C++, multimedia, web frontend and backend, UI/UX design, electrical, networking, and more. We think this could be a unique opportunity for someone with experience in web or mobile to work on something a little different.

We have funding and offer competitive compensation.

More information is available on our site:
http://suitabletech.com

Contact:
jobs@suitabletech.com
We have full blown censorship here. Some titles like Mortal Kombat 1-3 [1] are still illegal to sell, even to adults.

[1] http://www.bpjm.com/ (§ 131 StGB, bundesweit beschlagnahmt / confiscated nationwide)
Requires a lot of click-through in German. Sorry, but I couldn't find an more accessible list.
The example screenshots are almost unreadably small, even with the little zoomed-in area. I realize you can click on them, but why not just zoom the inset full-size to begin with?
>100+ person startup

No.
Can you please elaborate a bit more?
The price drop after the class is over may be higher than the increase.
"A typical 22 year old developer is not capable of creating a foundational product."

Yes that is what I said. I'm not sure if you're restating my point as a rebuttal or if you are agreeing with me though.

If you can create a foundational product, you are worth what I say. If you can't, then it appears the founders don't know what they are doing and the equity is worth absolutely nothing because the business has no chance of success.
Learning made fun and easy with Khanacademy.
Bah! I don't want ads that are fun. I want ads that are selling me things I want.
Hell, for DOD systems on secure networks, you're required to remove all of the non-DOD root CAs. No DigiNotar or GoDaddy or the hundreds of others allowed.
I've worked at both, and said the exact same thing.

Now I find myself at a big company (Netflix). How did this happen?

When I was looking for a job, I was mostly looking at startups, but the Netflix job caught my eye, because they are solving a very interesting technology problem.

I brought up my concerns in the interview, and they convinced me by pointing out that a lot of people here had come from big tech companies that had transitioned from startup to big and corporate (two of those being Yahoo and eBay), and most of those people wanted to avoid that.

So a lot of what is done here is done as a way to retain top talent -- engineers are respected, process is a dirty word. That's really important. When something goes wrong, the response is not "what rules can we put in place to prevent this". The response is "how can we educate new employees so they have to knowledge to make sure this doesn't happen again, and how can we give them to tools to make this easier?"

That is why I chose to work for a big company again.

Also, it was pointed out to me that if you look at most people in the silicon valley, they didn't make their money working for startups -- they made it working for bigger but growing public companies like Yahoo and eBay and now Google and Netflix.
Looks more like a general statement than advice. Most users would tie their dick in a knot if the browser let them. Tell people to use NoScript, at the very least for the XSS countermeasures.
Libya and the world we live in
State machines are useful because they're
1) computationally fast
2) simple to implement
3) easy to read [up to a certain size]

The big problem with state machines relates to the number 3 and regards the general concept of "state". Managing state is the challenge of computation! As you add states and transitions, the complexity increases dramatically, exponentially in some cases. This is why novice programmers struggle to manage developing large applications: they depend on global state and side-effects to perform computation rather than creating isolated components (classes, methods/functions)

That is why we use higher level abstractions provided by programming languages. We use state machines unknowingly in our code every time we have a switch or a conditional statement. When we use design patterns such as the GoF state pattern, we are implementing a state machine. When we build closures in functional languages, those can be considered state machines (in an abstract way). It's just that we're doing it in a more intuitive, higher-level way.

What I'm getting at is that computer programs inherently contain state machines. Recall from computer science that a a stored program computer (e.g. Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture) is just a state machine with an unlimited memory. When we deal with more complexity, it's not wise to attempt to model the problem with a state machine. Using the constructs of a high level language are easier to deal with and underneath the hood, the appropriate state machines are being created.
DNSSEC advocates (not saying you're one) tend to talk about the idea of cryptographic authentication of DNS records as if it were free. But it's not free. It will cost many tens of millions of dollars. It will contribute to the instability of the Internet as a whole as well-meaning but necessarily inexpert administrators misconfigure their zones. And because DNS is at a lower layer of the stack than TLS, those failures will be more severe.

For instance, read any tutorial on socket programming, or browse socket code on Github or Google Code Search. Look how a DNS name is normally resolved in code: by calling gethostbyname(name). Look how the return value of that call is handled: either the struct hostent it returns is NULL, in which case "host not found", or it's non-NULL, in which case the domain name is good. Where's the error channel?

There are DNSSEC advocates --- presumably none of whom have shipped a product in C before --- who talk as if this is a minor detail. But look at Daniel J. Bernstein's "ipv6mess" article:

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

How do we reach the magic moment? How do we teach every server on the Internet to talk to clients on public IPv6 addresses? How do we teach every client on the Internet to talk to servers on public IPv6 addresses?

Answer: We go through every place that 4-byte IPv4 addresses appear, and allow 16-byte IPv6 addresses in the same place.

Isn't it the same deal for DNS? Aren't we talking about either forklifting out or breaking huge amounts of deployed code?

And to what end? DNSSEC doesn't solve the PKI problem we have on the Internet. When people in the Czech Republic go to Google, aren't they often going to GOOGLE.CZ? When people in Italy go to Amazon, don't they go to AMAZON.IT? Who controls .CZ? .IT? .COM? Certainly not Amazon and Google.

What we have on the Internet is a failure of security policy. It's a human factors problem and a UX problem, not a failure of the core Internet protocols. By acting like a band-aid on those core protocols is going to fix the problem, we:

* defer the real solution to the problem for another 10 years while we wait-and-see whether DNSSEC helps (hint: it won't really)

* make it even harder to apply UX solutions to the problem by pushing the decisions that need to be made further down the stack

* incur costs and instability and yes probably a good deal of security flaws to no good end.
I find this post a bit too anti-climax. I was hoping to hear a longer story for the first part, at least. Well I'm looking forward to the second part!
SEEKING WORK (remote - USA)

C# MVC web application developer. Tons of experience developing custom CMSs from scratch, scheduling applications, and line of business apps. Currently working on an iPhone/Android app using sencha touch and phone gap. Background is primary with MS technologies - SQL Server, C#, ASP.net, ASP.net MVC, a little bit of VB.net when forced. Well versed in general web technologies - jquery, ajax, google maps, html5, etc. I've dabbled in many other languages including python, ruby, C, actionscript, and even did some mainframe coding when I got out of college.

I have been developing web apps for over 10 years now, dozens upon dozens of completed projects, small to large, all successful.
If only that were the case... When I was in high school, replacing a lost Calculus textbook would have cost $120.
The term "coder" is a demeaning one that is solely used to denigrate the contributions of product developers.

If you are the only product developer at a company, you are not a "coder". The correct title would be Director of Product Development, or VP of Software Engineering.
Why The UK Startup Scene Is Doomed
SEEKING WORK Remote/Freelance - Specialising in Facebook Apps and Fan Gate (Reveal Tab, Like-Gate) on your Facebook Page {increases SEO Ranking} - html/css js/jquery php - See profile for contact
"One thing to keep in mind, is if the 2 co-founders see you as just a code monkey, chances are they don't understand how fundamental you will become to the success of the product. This means if the product becomes wildly successful you'll have an enormous amount of leverage down the road to renegotiate your compensation."

If they view this guy as a code monkey now, when he comes in to renegotiate they'll tell him to take a flying leap on the assumption they can just hire some random off craigslist to replace him. Assuming he's a good developer this is of course not true, but they won't know it. Eventually they will realize the terrible mistake they made when the replacement screws the pooch, but that's like 6 months later after the original developer is long gone.
I would agree with you but clearly it does mean something to them. The Raspberry Pi is getting a chip that is currently not available to the public

As well, as described by Liz in their comments on the Quake 3 post, "Eben works for Broadcom (and they’re giving us some great support – we wouldn’t be able to have got the project this far without their generous help)"
http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=106#comment-1764

Maybe it is only Eben's employment at Broadcom that is helping them get support and the chip sourcing, because otherwise I agree, Broadcom would not care about this.
Encounter: Open-Source Cryptocounters for our PETs
The Evolution Of The Web
I've often been through stretches where I feel burnt out at work, can't seem to pick up steam on a project, and end up 'wasting' a lot of time looking at my favorite websites and doing other non-work stuff. I've found that these end up being balanced by periods of very high productivity. It's like there is some sort of subconscious self correction mechanism at work. I used to fret about it, but now I just accept it as part of my work habits.
http://letterstodavenavarro.com/ MeanSite1

http://saltydroid.info/naomi-dunfords-death-threats-and-hate.... (This is MeanSite2)

http://saltydroid.info/letter-to-two-dave-navarros/ more background

I stand behind my comment from the original post here. Her account was fictionalised to the point of not being recognisable. The other side of the story could have be its own fiction for all I care, but this isn't about a strong successful woman. It's about some fundie religious guy stalking his brother to prevent a divorce caused by allegedly falling into the "internet marketing lifestyle" that MeanSite2 rallies against.

Internet drama is a great way to relax at night.

Edit: And after upon further reflection this Dave Navarro fellow didn't like his life and found a new family unit online, which includes our heroine. Not agreeing with the fundie's methods (which do seem psychotic) but it does seem this guy ditched his family for the fast and furious world of internet marketing.
Care to offer any tips on how to get started with this $10k/day gig? Pretty eager to walk in that particular door.
Aliyun Cloud OS powered K-touch smartphone
Unredacted US embassy cables available online after WikiLeaks breach
Wow. It's really impressive how responsive the interface is and how much it feels like a native IDE.
There are two ways in which we plan to do this.

1. Your friends can "share" ads with you, so you get to see ads recommended by your friends.

2. Some ads will have rewards you want and so you'll interact with them. Some will have rewards you don't want and so you'll ignore them. We will learn from your interactions what type of ads and offers you like the most and try to serve you ads you are more likely to interact with.

Plus we'll also use information you share with us to present ads to you. For example, if we know your location we'll be able to show ads from local businesses.
Free Cloud Storage from Symform
Sorry for the delay! We actually got a bunch of orders, so we're in the process of running brainstorms for all of them.

Since the blog post said that most of the iterations were a few days, we originally opted not to have a follow-up email, but I think that was probably a mistake. I'll modify our systems right away to do that.
People really can be naive sometimes. Yes, the content of those cables should be public knowledge. But the names of informants should not be released- I dread to think how many people could die as a result of this.
I'm not sure about paradox as it's used here.
Maybe Alanis Morissette had a hand in writing the title,
although that would be ironic.

Maybe more accurate would be, "12 Aphorisms of graphic design", even then I had to use google.