skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Hiring on to a key position at a well-funded startup
I am considering taking a position at a startup that already has a couple of engineers on staff, but the position I am considering would be unique at the company (for now, at least). It requires both software engineering skills and the ability to read relevant academic scientific/engineering literature to understand and implement ideas as needed, in a performant and numerically robust way, to solve problems for customers. So this could potentially be viewed as (or at least develop into) a lead scientist kind of role, and requires math skills that most engineers don't have.

If you run a company, what sort of arrangement would you prefer to set up for a (key?) position like this? What kinds of things can I do or offer as a potential employee that would make you feel more comfortable I'm somebody that can walk the walk, and not just a good talker looking for a nice title at a small company?

If you've been through this as an employee, what sorts of things do you wish you'd known, thought about, or asked for up front?

Also, I am curious how one finds solid legal advice about non-compete agreements, so that I can be fairly certain that my current employer would have no case against me. The work is in the same general field, but the applications are completely different, so I'm not looking to get around the agreement or something (i.e., I'm not going to be competing against my previous employer, just wanting to dot all my i's).

Thanks in advance, and if I need to provide more details, please ask.
Yup.

It's nice to be able to make ideas, instead of just having them.
Not all lawyers are good lawyers. Not all clients are good clients.

Far more important, not all judges are good judges, and hardly any jurors are good jurors.

Hence the (correct) advice to "Be afraid."
Try replacing the words "photographer" and "images" with "programmer" and "software". Or "writer" and "article".
Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012
I think you're taking "artistic freedom" a bit too literally. It's meant to inspiring and show their goals and mission. I don't think they have the intention of deceiving anyone into believing the car is actually invisible to the environment.
What does that say about the people participating in this thread?
looks not bad.
If can provide more benchmarking d be good
This suits me as someone that already knows another Python web framework. I am struck by how similar the class based views are to the new Django ones.

Have you shown your videos to people that have never seen a web framework or Python before? What kind of feedback to they give?
Inventing the Pulseless Artificial Heart
When I first saw that phrase while watching the video, I thought to myself: "I bet the top-voted comment is a pedantic reaction to that."
> Unlike JavaScript which can take hours to debug, haXe has a very strict compile-time type checking feature that allows you to catch errors before testing your program in the browser

It's great that you invented a new programming language. haXe is very cool. But why do you feel the need to disparage other programming languages?

If you personally don't like dynamic typing, that's fine. But putting that in the blurb for haXe will annoy a large potential audience for your language. For what?
Save lives, or cost lives (or both), depending on who's in charge and what their aims are.
Exactly. I wonder how many threatening letters the average Starbucks location receives per month?
I should mention too that if anyone's interested in Haxe and would like to talk to me for a few minutes about my experience porting the games at http://www.bigblockgames.com and the feasibility of swapping to it from your current solution, hit me up at michael@bigblockgames.com.

I don't do contract or consulting work, so you don't have to worry about me trying to sell you something. :)
Looks really cool.

If I understand it correctly, the first call to lthread_create() in the main thread will create a new pthread with a local scheduler. Each call to lthread_create() in that lthread will create local lthreads in that scheduler, so in essence each lthread pool is actually single threaded unless there is a non exclusive or blocking operation you can run lthread_compute_begin()/lthread_compute_end() on. This is opposed to something like Grand Central Dispatch where you can assign "tasks" to the scheduler which will schedule them on an available thread pool.
Are you saying that in the whole month you spend 2.5 hours on open-source. Which was really installing and looking up the docs for Wordpress?
There is something wrong with working 11 hours on a constant basis. Peak performance is realized on a 40 hour schedule. Doing more hours just gets less work done in more time, even if it doesn't seem that way. Those extra 3 hours are better spent playing video games, because then they produce some value, as opposed to no value. Of course, crunching works, and there are times to do that, but you can't crunch all the time.
Very nice :)

http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/17112393354/a-sol... might be an interesting distraction ;)
The only account of pair programming that made me spend time considering it was the story of Guy Steele pairing with Richard Stallman. My overall takeaway is to treat pairing like mind melding, and if you can't get your minds to meld it's going to be disastrous. From http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch06.html :

"We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was also telling me what to type.

The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."

The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer, Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time. "My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."
I can answer that last one: "Why would a photographer want to shut down someone who is helping to spread the word about their work?"

It's because landlords don't take payment in public appreciation of the tenant's genius. Although it can lead to some odd outcomes, copyright tries to treat expression as territory so that creatives can eat.

That seems perfectly reasonable to me, and I can understand why photographers don't want Pinterest profiting off their hard work for exactly bupkis in return.

Last year Computerworld just boosted a photoillustration off my website (the top one here: http://www.scissor.com/resources/teamroom/ ) without payment or proper credit. I didn't say, "Yay, eyeballs." I said, "What assholes," and invoiced them. They paid me $250 and apologized, as they should have.
Question: What was the conversion rate—how many users were asked to leave a review vs many actually did it?

I wonder if you could compare the quality of different cohorts of users based on how willing they are to go say nice things about you once prompted.
I am against IO event loops :).

Scroll down to the bottom of the README and look for fibonacci(35) to see how I solve the problem mentioned in the link. The example is a naive HTTP server that computes fibonacci on every request and replies back.
This article begins with the premise that Atul Gawande's insights may apply to programmers. However, Gawande's writing has dealt mostly with the work of people like surgeons (he's one) and airline pilots. There's a crucial difference between this kind of work and the work programmers do: surgeons and pilots have to get everything right in real time -- a very brief lapse in attention could lead to disastrous consequences. Programming is different: you can review code after it's been written and get the benefits of a second pair of eyes (or several extra pairs of eyes) examining it at leisure. So if pair programming makes a particular programmer more productive, that's fine, but if it makes other programmers less productive, no tragedy will result if they use code reviews instead.

That said, one of the major techniques that Gawande advocates is the use of checklists, which can be useful even to programmers working alone to make sure they haven't missed some important step (e.g., verifying that their code works against a live server, vs. just passing unit tests). His article in the New Yorker on checklists is interesting in its own right:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...
Original article posted yesterday: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/anonymous-supporters-t...
Most of the discussion seems to be about whether or not it's "bad" that the Samwers are "copycats." I was more struck by the culture at Rocket, which sounds quite nasty judging by the article. (“team meetings are full of insults, non-performers openly bashed in meetings as well as via e-mail.”) At least one top Rocket employee is cited as leaving due to the "climate of aggression" (the bad, inwardly directed, self-destructive kind).

Don't we at HN usually say that it's the people that are most important? If culture is destiny, then the Samwers' copying of website layouts is the least of what's wrong here.
Subdomains over subfolders for sub-webapps
No problem! It took me a long time to realize how important the examples are, both the positive side (that it makes it way easier for people to get rolling with a library) and the negative side (that your example code is probably going to end up being a template for 99% of your users).

Mostly, those realizations came from conversations with co-workers:

Me: "Why on earth did you write that code that way?"
Coworker: "That's how the example showed..."
I say it because of things like http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iceland_passes_proposal...

There are other reasons as well such as the way Iceland decided to ignore the IMF and default rather than go the Irish or Portuguese route when their economy blew up during the credit crunch.

Check out www.1984.is - I have a couple of .is domains registered through them and would consider their VPS service if I had something controversial to host.

Edit: forget to mention you don't need to be an Icelandic resident - registration is open to all.
How Hypothes.is is going to fix online Identity and Reputation
Y Combinator is sort of a Proprietary Investor-only Launch Conference
We don't know an actual conversion rate because the email blast was sent to our entire user base, and many will not be Chrome users, etc. I suspect, though, that we'd have to have many times the user base we have now to do a true cohort test of it. Even then, something like this is very qualitative, right? What if more people wrote love letters or reviews from one group, but the other group spent significantly more time writing much more enthusiastic material?
Few points:

(1) I don't think Apple would buy Nintendo but...

(2) If Wii U flops worldwide (as many expect) then Nintendo's default option is to go the Sega route and just produce software.

(3) Unlike Sega however, Nintendo's IP is worth substantial market share so I'd expect a major bidding war for exclusivity. Exclusivity would also allow Nintendo to continue to develop for a single mobile and home platform as they do now.
In fact, it says very little. The very fact that they are commenting on it generally suggests that they don't take the article as fact.
Surely the reason the browser cache argument fell down is it is a temporary cache to improve performance. How is a server side cache any different?
Yes I saw before I posted :)

You move it explicitly to its own thread. What would happen if you didn't do that?

My article is applicable to `lthread` too. Its a discussion about what happens to fib(35) or any blocking task running in a multiplexing-tasks-in-a-thread setup really.
Then don't waste your time commenting on it?
Forget Your Past
How so?

By making people lose hours and hours of life (combined) when they clicked on an EE link from Google that lied about the contents of the page. There's a reason why I blocked the site from the search results before I even heard of Jeff Atwood.

if you consider Mr Atwood's (or Mr Spolsky's, for that matter) characterizations as Gospel

No, I just agree with them on that.

Evil, in my view, is telling you that you're always going to get to use SO at no charge

Can you please point out to where they claimed that? If they did and they do start charging for normal use, I agree that it'll be wrong. But Tu quoque is a fallacy, you know?
Why are you so sure? Did you not read this:

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold Cold Brew Labs, its officers, directors, employees and agents, harmless from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including, without limitation, reasonable legal and accounting fees, arising out of or in any way connected with (i) your access to or use of the Site, Application, Services or Site Content, (ii) your Member Content, or (iii) your violation of these Terms.
I don't think the sarcasm is warranted. They could be actors, but they don't appear to be. The more likely explanation is that people think it's cool despite the low resolution. Do you know how many people would think it was straight-up voodoo if I just wrote a Node.js chat app and ran it for them?
Even better, just use iptables to drop any connection that is outside of a certain ip range or your static ip or your domain name. It will eliminate all of those attacks and port scanning won't help them. It doesn't mean someone can't get in, but it will eliminate the script kiddies.
This is a much more sophisticated version of something that's been tried off and on since 1943 — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffused_lighting_camouflage
Ten Tips for MOBILE WEBSITE USABILITY
The 10x comes from the fact that you have 10 fingers. The real number is going to depend wildly upon the context. I've been on projects in which some members contributed zero--and so the ratio is NaNx. On the other hand, if you're writing COBOL crud, the fastest typist will typically be the most productive.
http://haxe.org/doc/intro says "C# and Java targets are coming soon!", and links to the following tweet: http://twitter.com/cwaneck/status/15486381623091200, which is dated 16. December 2010.

In other words, I wouldn't get my hopes up :/
Very valid points. People will forgive all kinds of mistakes and failures - except for ethical ones. There are always reasons to take the short cut in prisonner's dilemma but work and life is a repeated game where trustworthiness pays.

In the first example (staying loyal to a lower valuation) financial incentives are on the aide of ethics. The later example (tossing out a signed term sheet to get a better investor) is where it's a real test. It's not an ethics decision until there is downside.
Ok, so you were doing what you loved, because you love it. That's fine. But at the same time, you were working for a business, and the manager of that business should have known that they were hurting their bottom line because they allowed people to come in on the weekends.

For the reason why, read peopleware, or http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons

It keeps amazing me how clearly peopleware spells out how you're supposed to manage software teams, and how few teams are actually managed that way.
Probably not completely fair but... have you visited Orlando recently? Literally no public transport at all (ok, there's Lynx, but that's too nightmarish to really include). Sure, Orlando's not as large a metropolitan area, but with the amount of tourism we get from Disney, you'd expect a slightly more developed infrastructure.

But point taken, probably not the best comparison to make.
It will not create a new pthread in the local scheduler but a local lthread scheduler gets created in the thread context. So if you want to create more than one lthread scheduler, you just have to create a pthread first and the new lthreads created in the pthread will be bound to that pthread.

lthread_compute_begin()/end() moves the lthread into a separate pthread and resumes it there. That pthread is called lthread compute scheduler, its job is to resume lthreads that will take relatively long time to finish a task. lthread compute schedulers are created as needed and they stay alive for 60 secs after which they die of inactivity. If it fails to create a new pthread (max pthreads reached for example) to resume the lthread, then it will get queued in the least busy compute scheduler. When few lthread compute schedulers get created, they act as a pool accepting new lthreads and resuming them, when they cannot handle the load, the pool grows until the pthread limit is reached and jobs will get queued up.

I believe this is close to what GCD does but probably not exactly the same.
From a performance perspective, you can split the work here into two parts:

1. Reading and parsing HTTP requests, miscellaneous book-keeping.

2. Transferring a (cached) 1 MB file to a socket.

Netty is plenty fast at #1. At #2, both the Java/Groovy code in this benchmark and the corresponding code using Netty (versions >= 3.2.0) will be doing essentially the same thing: they will have the kernel do a zero-copy write from the filesystem cache directly to the socket. (The node.js version given here repeatedly copies from the filesystem cache into a buffer in its heap, and then writes that to the socket. This involves more memory copying and context switching. Neither Netty nor the author's own framework has this issue.)

So, I doubt there would be any significant performance advantage over Netty.
Ask HN: Your thoughts about a job hunting startup
Hi HN,

I would like to know your thoughts about my new startup idea. It is a job hunting / search site.

A little background:

It would operate in a rather small country, about 2 million people (where I happen to live).

The reason I'm interested in building that kind of startup is because the competition is small. Only 2 real competitors. And I genuinely believe I have unique ideas, which should give me that should give me an advantage. I have talked with a lot of people who have been looking for a job and I think I have a solution for the problems they are facing with the competitors. I'm not here asking to validate my idea, rather than ask you opinion and some questions.

My question is that how should handle the beginning. It's a bit of a egg/chicken problem, because in order to get people who are looking for jobs, I need job advertisements and vice-versa.

A solution would be copy some amount of job advertisements from competitive sites.

But is it legal? Or ethical? Your thoughts and opinions.

And maybe someone has any advice to give me regarding my start-up, what to avoid, should I even start it all? Has anyone been in that kind of business maybe to share some of his/her experience.

The main reason I'm so interested in the idea is because as I stated above I truly believe I have good ideas to make job hunting more pleasent for job seekers and for the people who are looking to hire.

Thank you in advance.
On many cases they are top cumbersome to change. Classic Innovators Dilemna. It has to be someone new without top of the market profits to protect. That entrant will serve you and me.
Whether or not Pinterest are protected by the safe-harbor of the DMCA, their terms have you agree to reimburse them their legal fees in defending themselves for any content that you posted. That may not stand up contractually, but I can understand someone deciding that's a risk they'd rather not take.
At TIM Group, I've followed the advice in your last sentence by hiring the very best developers I could possibly find and imposing minimal "management overhead". Interestingly, at some point they tried pairing, and decided it made them much _more_ productive; they continue to use it extensively even though it is not at all required (these days it is a cultural norm, but not dictated practise).

Just a single experience - a proper academic study would be very interesting if someone could manage it - but it doesn't seem to match your theory.
rather than queuing in the least busy scheduler, they could perhaps be queued centrally waiting for a scheduler?

Knowing when a long-running task finishes is not easy to guess.
Google’s Web Search Quality. A picture is worth a 1000 words
What happens is that it will block the other lthreads, bringing down the RPS to its knees. lthreads are simply coroutines and cooperation/trust are required to maintain fairness.
That's the whole point of a VPN: A Virtual, Private Network which runs on a Physical, Public Network, i.e., the Internet.
Hey PG - I always tell other people interested in accelerators that I like Demo Day being split into three pitches because you get a chance to mingle with everybody, whereas mingling with 450 people at one event is much harder. How do you see the change from three 175-person crowds to one larger one impacting the results of Demo Day?
If you're making so little, why not ask for some equity? Then do a financial evaluation, ask for a leave of absence in your college and perhaps give the start-up a 12 month tryout. This short time span can give you the space for adequate reflection.
Pinerly.com launched, gets 6k Twitter followers overnight
I understand you completely, so nowadays I try reading the second and third comments before leaving. Sometimes the very good comments end up buried in a mess; we might need a way to highlight those with a lot of votes somehow.
This article is from February 28th, and on February 29th Kirsten (the lawyer/photographer) wrote a follow up post to clarify her original post:

To clarify something from my last post — I did NOT delete my Pinterest account.
I merely deleted my inspiration boards that contained work pinned from around the web.
And because many of you are asking, yes, I DO give consent for my work to be re-pinned if you are so inclined.
I will be adding a “pin me” watermark to my work from now on.

http://ddkportraits.com/2012/02/my-date-with-ben-silbermann-...
Government use of force allows corporations to exist. Carried to its logical conclusion your argument calls for the elimination of corporations as legal entities. Corporations can't use force to control people without force of law, and if the corporations themselves control the law then the corporations become governments and suddenly you have the same problem.

The "core problem" is powerful leaders seeking more control over the world. That problem can't be addressed with a philosophy of government, it can only be addressed by holding leaders like Steve Ballmer accountable for their actions.