skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great tips and I would definitely add another one:

"Make sure your marketer is readily willing to implement automation tools to increase their efficiency".

As many new tools, MixRank included, become available, you want to be sure your marketer is not armed with a knife at a gunfight.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with MixRank, but know one of the founders fairly well and fully endorse their vision and product.
This looks like two issues:

1) Founders de-risking a successful but still growing company at a series b or later financing (or even a late series a). I really don't see a problem with founders diversifying their personal portfolios (otherwise, many have 100% in company stock AND debt from school, etc.). You don't want them to get distracted, but being short on cash doesn't help you make a successful product.

2) De-risking via a special dividend, vs. secondary sale of stock. Yes, it lets founders avoid selling some shares. If you're doing it at a $1b valuation, it doesn't seem like a major factor either way, but if there could be a precedent for people raising $20-50mm rounds, dividend vs. sale might be a better way to put $1-2mm in the pocket of each founder after a few years, so they can shoot for a >$1b exit.

I'm curious if this form was suggested by the AirBnB side (or their law firm) or the VCs.
Enjoyed the article, I couldn't help be reminded that the same thing (but at 10x scale) has been going on in Canada (the tar sands) for at least a decade.
> For example, Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure, said recently at the Strange Loop conference "We say, “I can make a change because I have tests.” Who does that? Who drives their car around banging into the guard rails!?"

Rich has spoken about it other time with an interview with Fogus:

http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/

Hickey: I never spoke out ‘against’ TDD. What I have said is, life is short and there are only a finite number of hours in a day. So, we have to make choices about how we spend our time. If we spend it writing tests, that is time we are not spending doing something else. Each of us needs to assess how best to spend our time in order to maximize our results, both in quantity and quality. If people think that spending fifty percent of their time writing tests maximizes their results—okay for them. I’m sure that’s not true for me—I’d rather spend that time thinking about my problem. I’m certain that, for me, this produces better solutions, with fewer defects, than any other use of my time. A bad design with a complete test suite is still a bad design.

He said something on the similar lines about development on CLR:

Fogus: Clojure was once in parallel development on both the JVM and the CLR, why did you eventually decide to focus in on the former?
Hickey: I got tired of doing everything twice, and wanted instead to do twice as much.

His explanation on both fronts boil down to he doesn't find it(TDD and CLR/JVM parallel development) a worthy investment of time, given there are only so many hours in a day.

I don't understand why TDD advocates get all worked up when someone says TDD doesn't work from them. Well, if TDD is silver bullet of software development, they should be delighted that the ignorant singletons fail to see it and they have an edge over the fools.

These reactions remind of this:

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence
in. (No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise
tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.) When people are
fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds
of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in
doubt.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
2 second google showed this http://www.ndoiljobs.com/ but I bet there are analyst jobs to be had writing software to manage operations.
The article is short on substance, but I really like the concept of the luck surface area. The author does appear to be the coiner of the term (top hit on Google: http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...).
No one's forcing you to write your tests first

That is very likely not true. If TDD is your "process" at work, then you are being forced to write your tests first.

If TDD was chosen to be your process because of erroneous assumptions about the values of TDD, its strengths and its weaknesses, and those erroneous assumptions are a result of religious zealotry squashing the heretics rather than reasoned debate, then you have a problem.

Religion belongs in the church, not in software. It frustrates me how poor the technical debates in software can be because people get so attached to their technology. It is directly analogous to an artist demanding a specific type of paint for all their work who freak out when somebody says "you know, a gallon of latex paint might be better than that tube of acrylic for painting the walls in here."
Public relations is public relations, the venue does not matter as long as it has traffic.

And it's not about monitoring HN as much as it is about Google Alerts and real-time-search for keywords that trigger one of their shills to post.
If we're averaging 50 people/km^2, that puts our footprint at around 91.6%
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The idea of 'luck surface area' is that by making an effort or putting something out there can increase your odds of having a chance encounter with a positive benefit to yourself.

Jason is giving an example about how a blog post he wrote ended up leading to him making a connection with a high-powered financial trader. It is pretty cool to think that you can write 500 words, hit the front page of HN, and suddenly have the attention of someone whom you could never get an audience with normally.
Why would anyone want to vote to spend money on anything that will be a net loss?

Subsidizing public transportation is an economic drain on society. The correct answer is to have self-sustaining, profitable public transportation. This can only happen in cities with sufficient population density, such as NYC.

Car and gas taxes? Tax the hell out of them, since the costs right now are so over-externalized. Eventually, that will start to force more population density, and then we can talk about sustainable public transportation.
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> I find that people that have the hardest time writing tests have poorly-architected applications that don't lend themselves to easy testing.

It's generally good to start with some framework which provides capabilities to easily mock most of the objects. You sure can architecture your application as such, and have your dependency_injection_thingie to mock objects, but I don't think it's a worthy investment of time.

> (Who would have predicted the day where I started writing my HN examples in Python!)

So why is that? Working on a Python application? While you are there, check out decorators and co-routines/generators. You already have checked out decorators(which are basically function composition - same in Perl other than the syntactical sugar) - I see your @memoize example.

Decorators along with Python introspection are super cool. I used decorators to implement a small contract system - https://github.com/thoughtnirvana/augment

I recommend this talk on co-routines http://www.dabeaz.com/coroutines/

EDIT: Perl has coro. But the language integration(generator expressions, convenient yield) makes it a bit more natural in Python(YMMV). And Python has gevent if you are looking for a threading equivalent.
If anyone is interested in more about the Luck Surface Area concept, I believe it was first mentioned on Jason's podcast TechZing.

Ep 59: http://techzinglive.com/page/295/techzing-59-jasonism at the 65minute mark
The Vanity of Wealth and Honor

" If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness, do not be amazed at the matter, for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them. But this is gain for a land in every way: a king committed to cultivated fields.

He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes? Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep. " - Ecclesiastes 5:8-12
"Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are"

It's funny, ancient systems of metaphysics from the east have been saying this for countless years.

But we all rush to the entrepreneur's words because he conforms to our idea(s) of success.

In one word: 'satsang'
I got an offer a few months ago from deviantART after doing the coding test and phone interview; I replied with some questions about salary/benefits and never heard back. Highly frustrating.

(Throwaway account, as I would rather not publicize that I'm looking for a different job. If you're looking for the same type of person dA is looking for though, feel free to reply to my comment with contact info.)
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Why is this language continually hyped to no end on HN?
No, and there couldn't realistically be one either.

JITs compile to native machine code, but this is transforming LLVM IR, a typed assembly language.

It might be possible with http://bellard.org/jslinux/ , but I wouldn't expect great performance.
I keep thing separate by doing only Google things in Chrome and everything else in Firefox.

I will continue to shun Google+ because of the stories about people being shut out of it over the 'looks like a real name' rules because I have an Android phone and can't risk losing access to it.
Part of the problem is people don't realize that they are doing it poorly.

You would think the 0.16% success rate would be a pretty big indicator.

Based on my own experience, there were a number of points in the article that I have found to be not effective ways to hire programmers. And that is fine. They are free to hire people as they wish. But placing all of the blame on 99% of programmers being unqualified seems to miss the mark. It is more likely the hiring process causes them to miss out on the really good programmers.
Check out this blog from one of the founders of Yipit, starting here: http://viniciusvacanti.com/2010/09/07/guide-to-finding-a-tec...

Also, hack! Not just code, but think of ways to validate product-market fit without actually having to build the whole damn thing. Set up a landing page with a button or two that mimics the feature you want to test. If someone clicks on it, at least you'll know there's interest. If not, no big deal. Assuming they click on it, instead of sending a 404 error, put something like "We're building [description of awesome, world changing web app]. If you want to be one of the very first users and brag to all your friends about how in the know you are, sign up below." Then just put a nice tidy email field with a big ole' submit button. Done. You've proven people want what you're building and you have a list of emails of people you know will use your product once you've built it. Use that to convince some superstar to become your technical cofounder.

Startup Weekends and that sort of thing are a great way to meet potential cofounders as well, where people share their idea for a startup, form teams and hack all weekend. Whatever you do, don't waste your money on outsourcing, especially at this point. Startups are a long road. Get out to events, get to know people, and share what you're working on (no one is going to steal your idea). Good luck!
I love CoffeeScript. The only thing that seems unintuitive about it is how functions get defined, and perhaps the meaningful whitespace (no 'end' on blocks).

I've always wondered why they made coffee-script syntax so close to ruby without going all the way. "Write javascript in ruby" would have been a killer feature and tagline, but instead we're 80% of the way there with occasional expectations still being broken and new quirks to learn. Anyway...still a huge improvement overall so don't want to sound negative. Just something I was curious about.
Certainly no disagreement that suburbanites commute. And once they arrive they spend bucketloads of money on a daily basis & tend to work for companies that spend bucketloads of money locally for office space & all the goods held therein.

Communters do tend to also help support public transportation systems that are made available, in effect subsidizing them. Afterwards they leave & cost the city absolutely nothing beyond some infrastructure.

I can name ten(s) of cities in the United States that absolutely die the moment 5-6pm strike, but were couriered money in by suburbanites during the day and would have zero infrastructure otherwise.

I too am generalizing, of course.. I couldn't imagine seeing suburbanites as vultures.
Although it dignifies your question, I'd say it's because it's the first breath of fresh air in client-side development people have had in a long time. Having a real choice in that space is a big deal.

Do you have specific criticisms of CoffeeScript? That would probably have made for a more productive comment.
I think the consensus on HN is that your company's hiring practices are not normal. While some percentage of good developers will put up with your practices; I think a much larger percentage pass on you before you ever hear from them. As you alluded to, everyone working at your company has self selected themselves to work there and must fall into the "some percentage" category. Of course all of you think this hiring strategy is a great idea, since all of you put up with it. However, if you really want to increase P(we hire you), it might be time to break out of the groupthink and try something new.
Actually he seems legit.
There's a really good article about this from Alex Papadimoulis, the founder of thedailywtf -
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Tur... which pulls in a lot of the ideas from the "Cravath System"[1], a hiring and "employee/career management" process developed by a law firm some 100 years ago.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cravath_Syste...
Confusing constants and variables: Accounting fallacy in programming.
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I don't think a direct translation of Ruby -> Javascript would have made much sense, though. It makes much more sense to custom mould a new language to the needs of Javascript, than to try and fit Ruby into a whole new context.

I started looking into making a parser that took CoffeeScript and parsed it into PHP, and the farther I got spec'ing things out, the less the CoffeeScript syntax made sense for the context of PHP. So it would make more sense to start new, and create a new syntax that fits better. I'm assuming the same process may have occurred for CoffeeScript.

Anyways, as someone who greatly prefers Python over Ruby, I love using whitespace for blocks.
If emscripten could run in the browser, we'd have a js-only alternative to PNaCl.
Here's a trivial example:

Let's say you have a class that writes a string to the database. You abstract out the actual writing to the database of this string thinking it's always going to work, it's just dumping data after all. Your test passes, everything is good.

Now you optimize your database and add a restriction to make the string at most 50 characters. Your test still passes, but you now have a bug. OK, so you should've had a restriction in your BO. You add that restriction and move on.

Your DBA comes along and adds an integrity check or a trigger that makes the insertion fail if some weird condition is met. Your test passes, but you have a bug.

This can get even more interesting when you hit some basic database rule that you didn't even know it existed. You assume the insertion will work, but it won't. You now have a bug.

You've tested that 2 + 2 = 4, and it works, but when that code is linked with the actual database you realize that in some cases 2 + 2 doesn't equal 4.

I'm not saying don't have unit tests, but when it comes to bugs, the fast majority of these bugs, in my experience, come from the glue, from the assumption that the piece you're integrating with should work one way, but reality begs to differ.
Oh, there's definitely some prior art here.

Woody Allen (80% of success is showing up) and Pliny the Elder (fortune favors the bold!) come to mind.
http://paulgraham.com/heroes.html
Well, you've heard of us now, right?
You're hiring... the ones willing to subject themselves to this
ridiculous process, pretty much some desperate developers

That's EXACTLY the employees they want.
Might be interesting to run another quick campaign without that, and see what kind of A/B results you get.

Requires quite a lot more effort than the web to actually do, though.
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Hi Ryan.

Yup. Making a generalized statement about a widespread, general phenomenon:

Urban centers subsidize everyone else, suburbs are freeloaders.

This is really basic, uncontroversial information.

Example county level:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/welfare-state/Content?oid...

State level:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923084.html

Same thing happens at the local level.
Except Google Apps.
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This is awesome. It would be nice if you could choose to display real estate for sale as well.
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By deadbeats, I mean people too damned selfish to carry their own weight. You think because suburbanites pay some taxes, they're paying their own way?

Suburbs would depopulate if we urbanites withheld our largess.
I'm failing to see where some of these conclusions are coming from. I grew up in a cul de sac and it honestly made me closer to my neighbors because we could play in the street more often, and adults have block parties and stuff in cul de sacs. I also disagree with the whole miles and miles to see neighbors a few blocks over point. In almost every neighborhood in my town there's tons of bike/jogging trails everywhere that makes this a nonissue.

As an aside I was a little turned off by the overly hostile tone taken by the article.
I'm not pg, but let's see if I can give this one a shot.

In response to your question, you want people who are all awesome (although it looks like you've already come to this conclusion on your own). Skill can change but determination generally doesn't. 2 founders are ideal, don't look for more people just because they're warm bodies or allow you to fill out an extra checkbox on the "list of skills that people in this startup have".

That being said, there is a baseline level of experience/competence (ideally as a programmer, I assume you're doing a software startup) necessary for a determined person to make a contribution. This isn't very high though.
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1 and 2. we are a tech company, yes we are growing, and like most serious places in this industry we never stop hiring qualified developers. this is not a monthly ad for same single job. we are growing the team, and have been successful doing that.

3. we get very few off-topic applications. most who apply do have some level of experience to qualify for the position. yes, the first screen is subjective, and we clearly make mistakes if all we have to go on is the CV without a single link to one's work. Thats why the position description suggests submitting code samples like a link to the github account would be very beneficial.

we do respond with an automated message acknowledging the receipt of the application and it spells out what to expect. We contact again to request code sample and exercise of those who pass initial screen. unfortunately sometimes those emails get trapped in spam filters. We did used to send rejection messages in the past, but this also did not work very well because many applicants expected very personal response and coaching on what went wrong. As all of us are also full time developers, we just dont have bandwidth to do that. but based on your guys's comments we'll see how we can do it again.
It just wreaks of fanboyism when every comment or question that doesn't give praise to coffeescript is downvoted.
Javascript is fundamentally an awesome language at its core, as powerful as lisp in many ways. But it's hampered by a few bugs and mis-features that were baked into the language definition early (due to high pressure to release the language early and marketing pressure to make the syntax a certain way, even if it didn't make sense). Coffeescript is a very successful attempt to remove a lot of that pain and let the underlying awesomeness of javascript shine through.

Considering that JS is one of the most ubiquitous and popular languages today this is kind of a big deal.
I went through this application process before I had this test dropped on me. I simply didn't have time to complete it. I was desperate enough to actually warrant writing PHP again, but I was able to find a better position elsewhere. One without a "trial" period.
Onswipe - NYC

Engineers can work anywhere they choose, but they should choose somewhere with hard problems. We reach one of the largest audience of iPad readers in the world and have worked with publishers like the New York Times and Slate. Come push the boundaries of what's possible in the browser.

We're hiring for two main tech positions:

Backend - Mongo + Node
Frontend - Javascript in a touch environment. Come work on Swipecore, our JS framework for touch interactions.

Linky: http://blog.onswipe.com/jobs
Does anyone know when apple are going to release their own iPa?
Mass residential here tends to spawn more and more speed-bumps over time as community action groups and similar demand "safer roads". Even considering that, they're very common routes for taxis and private vehicles that want to avoid blockages or traffic-lights. About the only thing they reduce is non-essential trucking.

To the other point, regardless of average traffic, it's perfectly possible there'll be a bit of a queue during peak commuting hour(s), and secondly, it seems quite odd that a whole neighbourhood could be disconnected by something like essential road-works or a fallen tree.

I'm with you on the somewhere-inbetween approach. Balancing accessibility, traffic density, noise, and fault resilience is tricky, but much moreso is the cost of alterations to existing neighbourhoods built on one style or the other.
I always wonder who came up with this stuff. I have been cooking for a long time and I can't imagine the circumstances and life experience that would make you think "Hey, lets inject a maggot into the cheese". Or "Let's drown these song birds alive in brandy".
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TrueCar's an awesome company, they host the SFRuby meetups every other week.

The people there are some of the most intelligent people I've ever met.

If you get the chance to work there, do it.
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>But it's definitely true that dense expensive places are dense and expensive because people want to live there.

It's just as likely for every person who wants to live in a dense city there's someone else who lives there for career reasons but would rather live somewhere else. The second person drives up the cost of housing just as much as the first.
I think it's because it delights two kinds of people. JavaScript lovers, because it make JavaScript beautiful, and JavaScript haters, because it makes JavaScript palatable.
It's called having some common courtesy. Companies such as yours that think it's beneath them to spend the 10 seconds to respond back to people is a huge redflag that they're filled with arrogant pricks.