skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found, more often than not, when a company takes a hard negotiating position upfront with engineers, it ultimately proves to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Many times, what a company "saves" in negotiations is immaterial relative to the hiree's compensation. In exchange, the company immediately begins a relationship with an engineer on a sour note and sends a huge signal about company loyalties and values.

I'd recruited an engineer to join my team, and he tells me his comp requirements (90K salary). For the position, we budgeted 96k. A stellar engineer and ideal team fit, I thought he was underpaid at that, but that's what he asked for so I prepared an offer.

In preparation, the CEO (who signed off on such things) sets our initial offer to 85K. I was surprised -- why would we not offer the candidate 90k salary? The conversation went something like this:

CEO: Offer him 85K.
Me: Why? He asked for 90K, and we've budgeted 96K.
CEO: I want to leave some room for negotiation.
Me: Room?
CEO: Yeah. I think we can get him to come down from 90K.
Me: You haven't met him yet. Why do you believe he would accept a lower offer?
CEO: I never take the first offer at face value.
Me: I've talked to him, and he earns 90K in his current position. He doesn't want to
take a pay cut.
CEO: Well, let's see how much he wants this job.

I make the offer, and the candidate responds "I don't want to take a pay cut, and can't accept your offer." The back-and-forth begins, and we finally come to agreement -- at 90K.

And while the engineer accepted and joined our team, I could tell that the offer negotiation made him uncomfortable and left a bad taste in his mouth. He did a great job for well over a year, until he left for a new position. He explained to me that he received a better offer, and that the other company was "more inviting".

After his departure, the CEO lamented how engineers seem to have no loyalty.

Indeed.
> I mean, it runs on a Mac.

I'm not an MBA number-cruncher type, but all the product managers at my (otherwise Mac-heavy) company insist on running Excel through a VM or a Boot Camp installation because the Mac version of Excel doesn't offer a lot of the functionality that they rely on in the Windows version.
A/B testing is fine and all, but you might want to think of it from an ethical standpoint.

Are you okay with requiring someone to shout "I like this service" to be able to use said service, on first use? Does it feel right to disclose the like requirement after the user has already put time in using the service?

It sounds backwards to me at least and you're definitely alienating some people, but if you think it's no big deal then you're entitled to your own opinion.
For Chrome users on the dev channel, try http://silentorbit.com/kiss/
Sleep Cycle is the best $0.99 I've ever spent.
There is a term which describes that mode of thinking, "Not Invented Here Syndrome."
Doesn't 1) contradict 3)? If freeing memory is expensive, and memory is full, then there is certainly a cost of having full memory.
>Playing lottery in groups can increase your chances of winning by 4000%

Can you explain why?
If you ask me, alarm clocks should be going more low-tech than high tech.

I need an alarm clock with decoy snooze/cancel buttons. All of them would be metal plated, and wired up to whatever circuit those "trick" pens use (the kind that gives you an unpleasant but safe shock).

I would attach a hammer to this hypothetical alarm clock too if I could figure out how...
"Arduino: The Documentary" free on the Internet Archive
How to Spot a Fake Online Product Review
Banks Taketh, but Don’t Giveth
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I partially agree with a slight modification. I write a lot of free software / open source software. This relies on copyright of course, to enforce the freedoms. I don't want an onerous registration environment, but if it was "copyright terms to 4 years after last publication without registration" but registration with a fee after that. So if I continue to make the software, it gets the copyright and if I get bored, it turns into PD - and that's fine.
They are not very effective... yet. At this point the 'click through' rate is a fraction of a percent. The reason we're doing it is so that we will be prepared - the day that Android or IOS includes a QR code reader built into the OS (it will happen) usage will go through the roof.
Clicking on "Show Images" is no faster than clicking on a verify link. ...and although you and I know that loading images requires an extra HTTP request, it's not intuitive.
André Kuipers is also blogging from the ISS: http://blogs.esa.int/andre-kuipers/?lang=en

His Flickr stream also has some great pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/astro_andre/
How about a couple of strain gauges mounted between the sink and the underside of the counter?

You could just weigh the contents of the sink instead of doing all this runaround to tell that something is in there.

OpenCV is cool, but do we really need it to replace simpler means of input?
I pirated Downton.

I pay for BBCA; moreover, when stuff is available on iTMS I buy, even when I buy the premium cable channel it runs on, even when it's available on VOD, even (for instance, with The Sopranos) when I own much of the physical DVD media for it! I've spent many many hundreds of dollars on iTMS for content that I already had legitimate paid-for access to.

This is of course rationalization; the BBC is entitled to monetize their content however they see fit. That's capitalism. I rely on congruent norms, contracts, &c to make my living, and so do you --- even if you don't sell your own software directly, your wages are effectively subsidized by the defensibility of IP; we are all of us in the business of selling content for (on the face of it) unjustifiable premiums.

But whatever, I'm human. This is perhaps a good reason for media companies to stop doing region encoding and staggered releases and such; it socializes people to piracy. If you've even got me torrenting stuff, you're probably doing something very wrong.
One of my favorite aspects of that is that they're actually going to make a ton more money while making us feel like they're treating us like adults. Don't kid yourself: it'll be $20 rather than $19. So they make an extra cent, which isn't much, but if you multiply that by all the product lines and each sale every day ... at JCPenney's scale, that's significant.

I'm not criticizing it at all: I think it's better all the way round.
Academic survey about delayed propagation on Twitter
Amazon merchant caught bribing customers for five-star reviews
The IR sensor module should really be a standalone unit (as small and as discreet as possible and running off a battery) and it should hook up to the phone via Bluetooth. I don't have a nightstand and even if I did your dock/sensor base wouldn't fit in. That I would buy in a heartbeat.

(edit) Looking at your stand design - there's something distinctly un-Apple about it. Apple products have rounded feel to them, but they are squarish in their lines whereby your design is not. Try and imagine this [1] being featured on apple.com - you probably won't be able to, because it is off.

[1] http://www.idreamsaver.com/uploads/1/0/1/5/10151350/280100_o...
Free book on Bayesian machine learning by David Barber
Of what comfort would a daydream ark be for the rest of us? There are 6.8 billion of us. What good are my feelings of camaraderie if an impactor happens to snuff most of us out? "Oh boy, I've been blasted to ashes by an inbound comet, but it's all OK because someone else made it out alive."

I also dispute the utility calculus you're performing.

At what cost could we move a sustainable colony elsewhere?
What is the probability that we'll all be expunged by a bit of rock zipping around the solar system?
Is there another way we could allocate those resources to achieve a better expected outcome?
Because you don't know what you don't know. That's why.
Does it work with more than one sleeper in the bed?
By "looks an awful lot like" WadeF actually means "looks exactly like"...

I had to really concentrate to see the difference.
I can't seem find a citation for the actual study, seems like link bait to me.
I've always found estimating hours for a project to be somewhat difficult, especially when the client wants a concrete number right at the beginning for the entire project. I usually roughly estimate how long I think it will take, and then raise that by 1/3 to account for changes in specification by the client along the way.
This is how you do it in the internet era.
Honestly I thought it was quite prescient when this guy wrote:

"Hey inventor, I need a drone that will pick up mice (but not other animals), locate my ex-girlfriend and drop them on her head. Give me a budget and a time estimate."

For a good amount of software (excluding boilerplate, plumbing e-commerce-type software) - this is what it's all about. I had a long argument with an uncle of mine who's getting into the field of software project management. I get the sense that among the project management types, there's a sense that software can be constructed by building gantt charts, costing spreadsheets, and "staff months". They claim computer science degrees "don't teach the practical stuff" and it's as if they are completely unaware that there lurk hard problems.
You really should give an example of the steps and what things will look like.

I have no clue exactly what you're trying to do. My guess is to make the timeline look a bit fancy, but I can't tell. Your second step is to upload a photo without telling me what else to expect. If you ask for a credit card number in step 3, you already have my personal photo, which I have no clue what you'll do with.
I used git at the command line for two years before trying (and later buying) Tower.

I am a very visual person. It gives me greater confidence in what I'm doing when I can see a polished visual overview, it makes me more willing to use powerful features like picking individual lines to commit, to avoid any single commit containing a mixture of use cases.

But I always make sure I know what the GUI is doing on the command line before trusting it to be doing the right thing. I made sure I understood rebasing correctly before setting it to be the default pull behaviour in Tower. Similarly, I never feel comfortable using a one-line deployment script before running through a deployment by hand first.

Any tool that makes our lives easier and less likely to make silly screwups is a good thing in my eyes. It doesn't matter whether that tool is a GUI or a script. I prefer using a GUI for databases too, because the command line is woefully inadequate at letting me grasp the shape of data quickly.
Right now, it may well work out better for creators who are not as famous as Coelho and C.K.

Exposure is always the biggest problem when starting out, and even when talking about someone like Coehlo, he is certainly going to be read by people who would otherwise never even have heard of him... Which must almost certainly translate into increased sales.
To give one example, there's Brad Sucks http://www.bradsucks.net/about/ , who has always distributed his music online for free. Over ten years, he's built a following and been able to switch from having a day job to being mostly a full-time musician.
Time-lapse of a designer working on his agency's website
Though they do pose an interesting avenue for protest/civil disobedience. I could easily post QR codes on fast food restaurants that go to PETA or on the back of bus seats that link to pages about transportation system corruption.

Or perhaps what would be even more fun, is I could put download links for movies on their own posters.
I had never looked at sales forces' P/E before. It's at 7700 right now. Insanity.
Not sure if you refer to the mode of thinking on my post, or the thinking that causes the "reinvention of the bridge."

Not Invented Here would be rewriting bridge4j because you feel like it. A good software engineer does research, and invents what needs to be invented because it doesn't exist. If it exists and it's freely available, you use it and write glue code.

The reason web startups can pop up so quickly is because we all do this. IndexTank was an example, the list of open-source technologies we used is very long. Big companies on the other hand are prone to unnecessarily rewriting stuff, sometimes just to keep developers entertained in between meaningful projects.
A better tool for cubic-bezier() easing
That's a very good point. Four-square (the car sales strategy BS not the site) is one of the most dishonest tactics ever devised to subvert the buying process. Why should I have to deal with a gauntlet of crap that has been tilted so much in the favor of the seller due to decades of salesmanship trial and error? The basis of a good deal is mutual benefit, which can't be reached without honesty.
If someone won't tell me their comp requirements to start, there is no possibility I make an offer.

I need to know first-hand if we're in the same ballpark. If the candidate's comp expectation exceeds the range we've selected, we can either move on or adjust our pay scale for the position. If the candidate's comp expectation is lower than the pay scale we've set, we need to evaluate if the candidate really meets the position (assuming lower pay = less qualified candidate.)

Not to say the strategy doesn't work for some people, but it definitely fails with me.
The truth is many pirates download the work and never actually pay for it, clearly feeling no real appreciation for the author. Maybe I'm a cynic, but the problem has never been those of us who will, discovering an artist we love, buy all their albums. The problem is with those who download for nothing but selfish consumption.

(Which is why DRM is insane: it only affects those of us who actually buy the product, while those who (inevitably) pirate it have far more pleasant an experience.)
Ballsy, yes.

But ballsy doesn't imply desperate. Maybe they are ambitious and want to get ahead.
They forgot to price in the cost of a politician's power into the life of an astronaut, which is worth everything the politician can put to bear to keep it...
I'm not sure whats going on in your browser, but I've never seen gmail have more than one scroll bar.
Certainly all true points. However, for the people without the luxury of 16GB (I'm running on an old machine, with 3gb of RAM), Chrome consistently freezes the computer due to the resource hogging. I've learned my lesson and switched to Firefox.
++

"Silly" probably wouldn't be the word I'd have chosen, but it's a good point. If I'm building a system, I want it to be quality work, and I don't want the programmer who has to deal with it in 2 years to be cursing my name :). Thus I sometimes become very concerned with things that seem to have "no business impact".
It does -- this was very important to us as well. By adjusting the location of the dock on your nightstand, you can position the sensor so it will only see your body movements. In addition, the App provides a setup screen, which allows you to look at the raw sensor values so you can do your own testing and adjust the sensitivity if needed.
It already is, hence the lawsuits.
Would be neat to see numbers about how many people actually have trouble with alarms. I don't. I actually tend to wake up right before the alarm goes off even. Just saying, we may think it's a large problem because people who have the problem complain a lot, but there may not actually be enough people out there with the problem to support a business...
A worrisome mentality in the post and in some comments here: the words "should" and "shouldn't", the concept of "fair", "feeling sorry" for people who have to negotiate, the word "ridiculous".

I think you should be careful with sentiment analysis on a forum like HN. This place is overwhelmingly populated with people for whom the concept of salary negotiation is repellant. One could get a seriously skewed idea of what to expect from negotiations from comments on HN.

The fact is, a huge number of places that you'd actually want to work at are going to treat salary negotiation as the business transaction that it is. Not taking the transaction seriously is going to cost you thousands and thousands of dollars.

It's true: the worst places to work will be the ones who are most aggressive about negotiation. But that observation totally misses Patrick's point. You don't have to get screwed by a hard-nosed negotiation to lose out on thousands of dollars of comp. In fact, if you don't take negotiation seriously, you'll lose thousands of dollars without even noticing, because your social norms will blind you to what's happening. Patrick isn't just talking about how to handle stupidly tough negotiations. He's talking about all of them, even the nice and friendly ones.

The range between your negotiating floor and the employer's negotiating ceiling is the spread. Any dollar figure you accept below their ceiling is a dollar you gave them. From the way people talk about negotiation on HN, my guess is that 9 times out of 10, HN'ers take a number smack in the middle of the spread --- meaning, they've coughed up high 4 digits (and often 5) back to their employer. And they feel good about it! They write blog posts about it!

If you think you work on a team where you don't have to negotiate, because everyone's grown-up and knows the score and pays people what they're worth, seriously consider that you may (probably not intentionally, but still) be getting played.
It seems odd that you want something to go viral, but you explicitly request people not to share it without checking with you first.

From your Terms & Conditions:
"You may not create a link to this website from another website or document without trickedouttimeline.com’s prior written consent."
Neil Gaiman has the same opinion as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI

I think one of the effects we can observe here is cognitive dissonance. If people pirate a book or a movie or an album they like but did not pay for it they will have to cope with cognitive dissonance. A lot of people with then buy the book they downloaded to 'make up for it' and/or will as Neil suggested buy the future books of the newly discovered author.

The web is a great place to discover new things and it seems that Paul Coelho and Neil Gaiman really see the upside of having their works out there on the web for free and embrace it.
Yeah… if only anyone actually used qr codes.
Great commercial and easily relatable.

Just yesterday I was looking for shirts at a top3 US retailer and encountered something I'd never seen before:

- there were six rows (shelfs) and about 7-8 columns
- there was a maybe 14x10" "70% OFF" sign at eye level
- HOWEVER, there were two qualities/brands contained in the cells
- one brand had the clearance 70% off marked on their tags
- the other brand DID NOT and was marked full price
- the clearance and full price cells were randomly placed

So the display resembled this simplified matrix:

[FULL][sale][FULL]
[sale][FULL][FULL]
[FULL][sale][sale]

I had already carted four shirt designs before realizing three of them weren't on sale. Tricky bastards. ;)

edit: formatting
Productive work and 9-to-5 work are two things that don't always overlap.

Oh and read this if you're not convinced about the Guaranteed Minimum Income: http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-inc...
But those that only download for consumption, wouldn't necessarily buy those works. Also when speaking about music, some people will end up going to concerts - and good bands are earning more from concerts than from CD sales.
Rather than A/B test the conversion rates of liking before-or-after, think really hard about what you want to convey. What does a like give you? Is it worth alienating potential users?

You don't need an A/B test to tell you that "If you enjoyed our service, please Like us on Facebook." is a friendlier, more positive request. People have already tweeted about it more than they liked it on Facebook without additional prodding. Let the site stand on its own merits, rather than trying to force promotion through potentially sleazy methods.
Need advice on newly launched startup
Advice on spreading a word and any critique of a concept and site are appreciated.
The irony is that if ACTA passes we'll probably have to VPN INTO China to freely watch delicious delicious western TV shows on PPStream and the likes.
While I largely agree with your comment, I think the story of you and your cell phone differs from that of the user who calls you asking to fix the website, in that you know that you do not know what is causing the signal to degrade.

I have nearly infinite patience and can completely understand someone coming to me with the following:

"hey, I have no clue what just happened, and you probably aren't even the right person to ask this question anyway, but I figured that you might at least be able to give me a better understanding of what went wrong if not: I tried to access my payroll today, and it didn't work; is that something you can fix?"

That is the kind of message I have myself sent on occasion when I'm "in over my head" in a field I don't understand, and have run into issues that block progress.

However, the kind of message I get on a daily basis is:

"you are a piece of work: I should report you and your organization to the police. how dare you have given me this error message! I demand that you fix this situation in the next 24 hours or I am going to go on Twitter and Facebook and make it clear to everyone what kind of crook you are."

(Meanwhile, they are complaining to me that... their bank account is out of money... and the error message came from PayPal. I even get users complaining to me that my software took a $35 fee from their account because of their lack of funds, which is obviously an overdraft fee from their greedy bank, and has nothing to do with any of the software in the stack that is billing them.)

This person believes that they know the things that they in fact don't know (or possibly isn't even able to contemplate that there might be something that they don't know about the situation) and so is willing to go in with "all guns blazing" against that one entity they seem to believe is in charge of everything.

I am honestly not certain who is to blame for that: poor schooling, bad genetics, developers who believe software should be "intuitive" (and thereby put the moral equivalent of a cartoon-laden control panel that anyone could believe they could operate on what should have been a very scary buzzsaw in a woodshop)... the cause of this phenomenon is clearly in my "I know that I do not know this" region.

Whatever it is, though, it is simply not fair to state that you, in an analogous situation of being quite far and even fundamentally outside your competence, would act similarly to these confused users; I just don't buy it.
The design looks like a standard wordpress template. And it looks like it actually is based on your gallery images here: https://img.skitch.com/20120128-1gbrkerrmatub6d6c461xku3ht.j...

As far as the idea goes, it seems like you could come up with something that finds a better niche in the market than this.
Techcrunch is hosted on wordpress.com - sure it's the VIP service but there are tons of big sites on WordPress. Either spend some time customizing a theme or look to spend $50-$100 on a premium theme - this will make you look much more professional, and there are many themes out there that don't even look like WordPress. If your idea will work on WordPress (or tumblr) then I think you're crazy not to use it.

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/