skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not even disagreeing with you, so much as I'm saying "it is probably a common misunderstanding that less capitalized startups have lower 'employee risk'†".

No; the reality is that the "employee risk" is complex and has as much to do with revenue growth and market conditions as with capitalization. Some firms capitalize on spectacular growth, and some huge capitalizations also create strategic leverage for the whole company that improves outcomes for employees.

But in every case, equity in a financed startup is freighted with enormous risk. The fundamental issue is simple: corporations are managed by boards of directors chartered with looking after the good of the shareholders, but, in virtually every financed startup in the world, the actual board puts employee outcomes low on the list, invariably below investor outcomes.

This is actually as it should be. You could no more demand a more "protective" board for employees as you could a 50% increase in valuations; market conditions and pricing are what controls board makeup.

One of the few gratifying memes emerging on HN over the last two years (just after "use bcrypt") is the notion that startup employee options are very risky. I'm writing noisily to combat any implication on this thread that you can mitigate that risk by picking undercapitalized startups to work for. If you want to avoid the conflicting interest risk with startup boards, avoid financed startups.

Or, don't; financed startups are also the ones that (rarely, very rarely, but still) return huge rewards.

† Imprecise, but let's have it stand for "risk that employee stock options are worth zero".
Mozilla Launches Developer Preview of Its Web App Platform
I really liked it - tried it out for my hometown here in the UK and got some pretty pertinent results. One thing though - why is there no persistence of my facebook opt-in choice across the session? For instance, if I tried 'Oxford', and then 'London', I was prompted for facebook permissions both times - was that by design?
Ask PG: Please can we have a way to merge items?
It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes there's a topic that gets several submissions. Today it's the trillions of frames per second camera, last week it was something else.

Please can we have a way to combine items so that the discussion doesn't get split, and so the different reports (which often have different details) get linked?
This stuff would probably be pretty useful for turning your iPhone into a remote control if Apple makes a TV
Strange. I expect this impersonal stuff from Google, but always thought of Amazon as being better than that.
Always happy to see projects coming out of my hometown. I like the idea, but I hope that there's good moderation for submitted bounties so it doesn't become another Rent-a-Coder like cess pool. It's also be neat if the bounties could be free form, so people could barter goods and services. Personally, being offered $50 is worse than not being offered money at all for something that I'd want to work on. On the other hand, for some tasks I wouldn't mind if someone were willing to trade me design work, or treat me to a lunch or a beer.
Twilio launches SMS service for Canadian numbers
how does this law protect the innocent bystanders?

By making drivers a bit more paranoid.

Massively increase police presence on all roads

Not needed. Police manage to enforce seatbelt laws quite effectively without any special technology or vast budget increases. It's pretty easy to see when someone is using a cellphone; I notice it all the time without having any special training whatsoever. You could also use evidence of a phone/text conversation as evidence in accident lawsuits, leading to increased damages or charges of criminal negligence where it can be shown that the driver was operating a phone at the time of the accident. This would probably provide an even larger disincentive than issuing tickets: where the action is unlawful, then liability for an accident involving that activity is much easier to prove and win damages for, so the cost of causing an accident becomes much higher and insurers start looking for ways to discourage drivers from engaging in cellphone use too, such as refusing to provide coverage where it is shown that the driver was on the phone. Emergency use would still be available as an affirmative defense.

So really, what is this Fed law going to stop?

It's not a fed law, it's an encouragement to the state governments to pass laws against cellphone use (and similar). If you read the NTSB report (executive summary: http://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/2011/gray_summit_mo/index.ht...) you'll see that they've anticipated many of the issues you raise and considered the problem in context. Personally, I think the NTSB is one of the best government agencies, along with NIST and a few others which have a strong engineering focus.
Hang in there, Avner! I'm also in the middle of a divorce which would have seemed like a very bad joke had someone told me about it 9 months ago, but that's life.

I don't have any good advice, I can tell you a couple of things that I'm currently doing that sort of help me go through this pit of despair.

First of all, I'm trying to leave my past life behind me, that is I try to connect with my future ex wife and her parents and friends as little as possible, and when I do I do it only for "administrative" reasons (like collecting my books from our apartment and stuff like that).

Second, and I don't know if this applies to you, I'm lucky enough to have smart co-workers who kind of understand what I'm going through and they always try to cheer me up. That makes me feel guilty about displaying my depression at work, so that for the duration of the 8-9 hours of daily work I try my best to be a normal human being, reacting to jokes, small chatter during the cigarettes break etc. I don't know if medically speaking this is the best take on the situation, but at least I get to "cheat" on that feeling of emptiness for around a third of the day.

Third (even though I think the counting doesn't matter anymore), I've tried to set up some tasks for me to accomplish in the near and medium term. For example for the upcoming holidays I plan to finish one of my personal projects which would be of really valuable help for at least a dozen of people, and during the winter months I plan to put enough money on the side to buy me a VW second-hand van, so that I'll go around the country when summer comes.

And last, before this becomes too awkward of an answer, I've given myself "proud-of-myself" points for not opening that wine bottle that has been sitting on the kitchen table for 2 months, since I moved out of my former apartment. Maybe you can find something similar to cheer you up and make you feeling proud of yourself, it doesn't have to be big.

Hang in there!
I went through a painful divorce a couple years ago. As others say, there is life on the other side. I'm as happy now as I've ever been.

Also, Reddit Suicide Watch was helpful to me: http://www.reddit.com/r/suicidewatch
One possibility is that if you're in an accident, and it can be proven you were on the cell phone at the time, that the presumption will be that you're at fault for the accident. Even more, your insurance would not be on the hook for any claims.

This should be a fair discouragement for the practice.
> you have no right to drive a car

When roads are the sole form of developed transportation infrastructure in an area that's too sparse or weather-adverse for practical biking, one's right to travel implies a right to drive.
Believe it or not, my $hit meter was too insensitive to notice the visual similarity to a four letter word until it was repeatedly pointed out by readers. Now that we're all on the same wavelength, let's call a spade a shovel, or even a $hovel, and, well, now we have $hovel and $hit to work with. Imagine the possibilities.
Did you login to Facebook before adding the second location? We can't personalize data for your results unless you connect into Facebook. Our goal is to encourage people to connect to get richer results.
I guess I can only really say hang in there. I was divorced before 25 and embarrassed about it, and there were times when I really struggled with wondering whether I had done the right thing to break something that was mediocre but not horrible to find a happier future for both of us. Within about 18 months, I had met someone new that pushed me and inspired me, and we travelled the world for a full year, through 20+ countries and varying experiences. About 8-9 years later, we're married, have built a new house and I can barely even remember that time during and after the divorce. Stay busy and social. Time alone mulling it over is often difficult.
Viral has a meaning distinct from extremely popular.
Assuming you're right, the absence of evidence is not evidence to the contrary. The article that you say rebuts it, certainly argues for polyphasic working but that article isn't a good rebuttal at all. It actually mocks facts! The author rails against the anti-polyphasic article's author for saying that people who need an alarm clock are sleep deprived and that people shouldn't need one. Well, sorry to break to him but that's true. Any doctor or sleep expert will tell you the same thing. This rebuttal just sounds like typical Internet ranting against something a person disagrees with.
Is it just me, or did the 5 use cases proposed in the article immediately give you the reaction "Yuck, I'm kind of glad that none of those things actually broadcast that crap (yet)."
Clickable: http://gtrot.com

Personally, I would just go to the results page and encourage the user to connect to facebook in a less obtrusive way.
Also when clicking on an event it would be nice if you could pull in some more information through some API be it the specific event information or details about the artist playing.
Interesting to think about how/whether this applies to open source.
Fullstack engineer? Join Hyperink’s core team (YC W11)
About Us

We're a hacker-friendly team of six with big plans to grow and disrupt the publishing industry.

Hyperink’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Lerer Ventures, and SV Angel.

Here are some problems we're working on -

Publishing for Developers: Our applications and services include a collection of web APIs and interfaces to enable our team, self publishers, and developers publish more quickly.

AI + NLP: We use AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to make publishing a hands free process; to automate article summarising, uncover leading topic trends, assist in content quality control, and semantically tag documents.

Big Data + Analytics: Driving our systems and processes are hundreds of book-loads of valuable data.

Enhance the reading experience: We want to make books social, personalized and interactive. Share, recommend and experience books with your friends. Clothes aren’t “one size fits all”, let’s make books more personalized. Redefine how people interact with books - let’s add images, videos, annotations and music to deliver a more engaging, informative experience.

Become the biggest publisher: How do we publish thousands of books every month? How do we reduce the traditional publication time from 18 months to less than 1 week? We want to achieve this in a short time AND keep the content quality high.

---

And if you REALLY want to knock our socks off...

* Advenjure

Create a simple MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) text game in Javascript (coffee script, clojure script) which makes AJAX (JSON or XML) requests to a central server. For brownie points, generate a basic infinite map.

* Auto-meme

Write a RESTful web service which takes a random image url, analyzes the image, and intelligently stamps it with appropriate, generated meme text.

* Hacker News

Write a program which analyzes hacker news posts and determines common attributes of successful posts (topics, dates, events).

* Command Line Equalizer

Write a command line tool which plays a song and streams its equalizer in ascii.

===

Please send:
* résumé
* github
* your interest in publishing and hacking
* (optional) programming challenge

...to engineering@hyperink.com

We'll get back to you in 48 hours if interested. Thanks!
The first bundle (and possibly second) was bootstrapped, they took funding after the idea was shown to work. That's all I know, not sure why they have funding.
Wonderful post. Thank you.

One thing I'd like to add. A realization I've made only a few days ago:

The is no shame in being poor. Don't feel embarrassed if you don't have good food to eat, or a nice place to live, or have to work long hours to make ends meet. You are as good as anyone else. Your life is beautiful too.
Doesn't that not allow for "strict liability" rules?
I'd definitely like to see this happen.

I agree with a proper blackout that presents the use of some/most of the site, and a detailed reason about why it is happening and who's responsible in the senate/house/etc for the bill so people know not to vote for them.

If you do nothing, its too late. One day of no Facebook won't be so bad.
Crashes on startup on my Leopard 10.5.8 machine, just me or anyone else?
The point is that the hardware works quite well. I don't remember who makes our telepresence system, but connecting to a branch office over 1,000 miles away, the audio & video quality is still "like next door."
(I'm actually a Berkeley transplant, only moved here 3 weeks ago from Boston!)

The bartering goods and services idea is interesting, but it seems to only work for local things. The one thing I think would be interesting to use that for is for tutoring. I'd teach somebody Django if they could teach me Node, etc..
You can already have user-to-user connections through BlueTooth.

One way is to use GameKit (http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Networ...) but I believe you can just go with a BlueTooth connection.

Are you thinking about something else? Is it some specificity of GameKit that's limiting you?
I'm thankful someone wrote this. I've been seeing a lot of people talking about how depressed and/or suicidal and inadequate they feel quite frequently around here lately.

Suicide is a topic that people sometimes "take on" in a hamfisted attempt at some cheap feel-goodism, and the results are almost always counter-productive.

You can't rationalize away suicide via a blog post. More likely it will actually bring to mind something that might not have been front and center.

Forgotten that you're suicidal? Well raganwald is here to remind you.

I may come off as a giant ass downer saying this, but it's the cold hard truth. This does the opposite of good.
Very nice looking, but you should consider having descriptive URLs. So instead of:

http://gtrot.com/explore/2517446

http://gtrot.com/explore/new-york
"For every $1.00 generated on iOS, the same app will generate $0.24 on Android."
I like the colors :D
Yet.

Seems like a really good technology for, say, an Apple TV remote.
Exactly! That is one of the odd things about how people couch this. They always talk about coming to them for help. It has to be an intervention, not an offer for help. If my goal is to remove my cranium with a shotgun, and you have just offered to "help" (prevent me from achieving that goal), why in the hell would I ever seek your help? If someone comes to you for help they aren't seriously considering anything, buy them a beer and let them bitch, help them get in to see a shrink.
great UI, and decent results. Can you code a filter for 'free things to do' since most of the 'awesome things' were shopping related. Also, the placename box was case sensitive, where 'Davis, ca' required correction to Davis, CA. I tried a search w and w/o Facebook sign-in and the results were the same. I was expecting the results to be catered to info from my FB profile. Great job!
They might appear on desura - just not day one - it was like this with introversion bundle.
He means iOS apps, not desktop apps, right?
Desktop apps aren't "silos". The PC/Mac is a personal systems-integration device with mechanisms like pasteboards to transfer data between apps. Unfortunately iOS (so far) has very little of this.
U.S. Agency Proposes Total Ban on Talking and Texting While Driving
Why is one startup worth $10MM and the other $20MM?

Because prices, like terms, are set by the market.

Is there any fundamental reason a VC gets participating preferred stock? No! By all means, when you fund your next company, refuse that term.

Obviously, every VC you talk to may then walk away. But maybe not.

The question of "why do VCs demand this term" is closely related to your question (and maybe what you intended). The answer appears to be "to protect from the risk of putting $5MM into a company and having an outcome that is lucrative for the founders but loses money for the VCs". The idea is to align the interests of the company operators and the investors, by taking the money the VCs themselves put into the company out of the equation for the outcome.
>lots of potential-employees-turned-founders

If there is trouble finding people to hire because they are all out starting their own companies that means one or two things:

1) There is an over supply of management. Developers/engineers are able to manage themselves effectively enough that they do not need to spend their time enriching someone else.

2) Engineers are turning to their own business plans because that is the only way to get adequately compensated.

I think #2 is more likely. I believe we are seeing the start of a shift towards engineers making as much or more than the management/CEO types. Engineering bargaining power is on the rise and will only continue to get stronger.
They don't have to know what a torrent is to search for "How do I watch season 4 episode 2 of MY_FAVORITE_SHOW for free?" and eventually find a torrent or working video stream.
Great series. I wonder if he plans to cover NowJS?
>It's disturbing to see that this is an all-too-common pattern with the large internet companies. Stories abound of companies like Google, eBay, PayPal, Facebook and Amazon closing down accounts with what I would characterize as "violence". No explanations. No recourse. No way to reason with a human being. The approach seems so "anti-internet" that it is hard to come-up with justification for the behavior.

it is doesn't matter internet or B&M as [quasi]monopoly is a monopoly. Just imagine how it would feel if your electric/gas company decided to "close your account forever". Because of such great power they weild, they are regulated as public utilities. The platforms you mentioned are formally not yet there [mostly i think because the standard metric of what monopoly on the Internet is hasn't been yet determined], so they allow themselves all kind of behavior that is no-no in the other well established areas of business.
Yes. That's how I look at HN. RSS is the bomb.
Android SDK/ADT 16.0.0
Biggest features:

* Lint tool
http://tools.android.com/recent/lint

* Sensor & camera emulation

* Extended pre-clean target in build.xml for NDK builds

* Can now pass custom arguments to java compiler
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=21525
How to Spot a Black Hat SEO Company
Apple might buy Anobit, making a considerable investment in flash
Actually, they did recommend that for commercial vehicles. The NTSB doesn't issue mandates because it's an investigative agency rather than an enforcement one. But none of the news reports include that information because it's boring and doesn't get as many eyeballs.

http://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/2011/gray_summit_mo/index.ht...
I think the "In the industry" sections shows the user that Node is something awesome and stable, which is reassuring to new developers. Chances are if you're hitting the homepage you're a new-comer to Node, existing developers may be likely first hitting the site in the API docs from a Google search.
My guess would be they have some cool (hardware) stuff waiting to be released when iPhone 4S sales start to slow down and people start to consider holding out for the next iPhone.
Shunning Facebook, and Living to Tell About It
That is something that has been on my radar forever and was just waiting for me to find a free weekend to code out the script to set everything up.

I finally found a free minute and got it all setup so it should be live this week

Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for checking it out. Good catch on case-sensitive cities.

Results will update based on friend check-ins. Can take a minute or two to load. You can also add your Foursquare profile if you have one to help influence results.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned a great technical solution for this: Hangouts (disclaimer: I work for Google).

Other posters are correct in that there is friction with Skype or in fact any solution that isn't always on (you could keep Skpe up of course) but I can tell you from experience that if you get in the habit of just keeping a Hangout open it gives you much of the benefit that physical proximity does.

Remote debs can keep a Hangout open on a second screen or possibly a dedicated machine. Your main dev site should just hang a monitor on the wall and hook up a Mac mini to stay always on (per room). You may need a decent mic for this.
(Python) Generator Tricks For Systems Programmer (pdf)
Thanks for your opinion - you've just inspired me to work on commercial terms!

Actually there is a way to export data from LStack - use EXPORT button on your account page.

There's no way to import links now. What service do you use?
Why you can't hire
That's why the bit worked (but, let's leave the frog gently steamed instead of boiled). But I'm saying, I don't think he was making that up. I think he was able to sell the bit because everyone, himself included, believes it to be fundamentally true. Which very simple math corroborates. The first Louis CK show I saw was at the Vic, a tiny theater, which sold out 1000 seats at $35+/ticket on a two-show night.

The second show I saw sold out the Chicago Theater on another two-show night.
It took a decade or so of driving and killing for the first laws against drunk driving to be passed (1910). It took another 20 years (1930s) to really work out what "inebriated" meant in a legal context and set definite limits. Another 30-40 years passed before the "inebriated" limit got refined enough to have its greatest impact (impaired vs. stumbling drunk).

Please pass the law, then in 10 years we can all laugh about how people used to actually drive a car while talking on a cell phone as if that was acceptable!

(Although I hope not to be driving my own car in 10 years. That's robot work. I'll be reading a book or napping until the robot fires the "human attention required" alarm.)
The Sad Story Of The Town Called 'Effin' That Facebook Won't Allow To Exist
All you need to do is write a regex to match. Currently supported languages are:

BibTeX, C/C++, html, java, ObjectiveC, Pascal, PHP, Python, Ruby, and TeX.

More details can be found in the gitattributes(5) manpage
Just a stream of notes as I go through the first time around.

The fixed bottom footer could use a bit more contrast. When the white text from the main body slides over it, it gets garbled and messy looking. Also, there feels like too much space between each section when I scroll down.

I like that I can see results without having to sign in with Facebook. It lets me try out the service before I commit.

The color scheme is cheerful, but a bit too harsh. The nav elements within the results also lack contrast.

The animation on the place name on hover is neat the first time, but annoying every time after. The tiles are just jumping around all over when I move my mouse.

Filtering by category could be faster, but I like that it does it via ajax and stays on the same page.

Overall, good job! Best of luck
Reading "Hacking Scrabble (part 1)" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3347720>; source, I remembered about this presentation. I learned a lot about it and thought you guys might like too.