skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I burned out at BigCo.  Am I a fool for thinking I can avoid this at a startup?
(been on HN for half a decade, but posting anonymously because I could be perceived as damaged goods and hence unemployable)

The story is a familiar one to readers here, so I'll spare the details. Abusive management, perpetual "crisis mode," promises repeatedly broken, entrenched technical incompetence, smothering bureaucracy, vomit-inducing organizational politics -- the whole nine yards.

I started as a wide-eyed youngster desiring to prove myself, went through the denial phase, and ultimately suffered a total loss of motivation. Since then I've left the job to spend some time recovering, soul-searching, and gathering what I can as lessons learned.

Right now I'd say that I have the (financial) risk tolerance to work at a startup, as well as the desire to work on challenging and meaningful tasks, especially with growth and learning opportunities and a level of ownership such that I can take pride in my work. But I doubt I have the dedication or interest in the business aspects necessary to start a company of my own, hence my willingness to give the startup employee route a shot.

However, given my experience with burnout, I feel that I may be excessively skeptical of what any employer would have to offer. Of the problems I mentioned before, everything other than the red tape could just as well happen in a startup. The obsession with "rockstars" and "ninjas" who have unwavering "passion" just smells like a search for naïve, exploitable labor willing to give up evenings and weekends for foosball games and beer. The prevalence of social bubble-worthy companies whose value propositions are little more than "cat pictures" suggests an inflated sense of self-importance among the founders, and I can't expect to keep my level of enthusiasm in line with their irrational exuberance. And while I don't need much job security, having the specter of financial instability looming over the office tends to be at minimum somewhat distracting and most likely quite demotivating.

Perhaps a startup that has gone through the vetting process with YC would have less of these issues, but even then I have some doubts. I'm not in any position to question PG's judgment, but after seeing some of the announcements of companies funded and the infamous "YC company seeks brogrammer" job post, I have a feeling that his evaluation metrics for founders may significantly diverge from mine.

I recently passed up an opportunity at a very high-profile technology company mainly because everyone on the team was required to carry pagers. It just didn't feel right, especially for an established business that claimed it was being run like a lean startup. But it did get me thinking -- why would an actual startup not require the same?

tl,dr: Can I expect to find a position with the potential professional rewards of working at a startup, while still setting strict boundaries on work to preserve my sanity? Or am I trying to have my cake and eat it too?
Ask HN: Any founders here on H1B?
I have been debating for the last few days whether I should start my own company to test a product idea I have. My problem is that I am currently on a H1B visa in the US and I've been told that I can only work/get paid by the company which sponsored my visa. Is it possible for me to keep my current, full time job (hence my visa) and still own 100% equity stake in my own company? I don't mind not getting paid by my own company for a few years till I become a US resident.

Anyone else been in a smilar situation? If you're a startup founder did you face any legal hurdles along the way because of your visa?
One of the CS blogs I read is Embedded in Academia, which has lots of posts on C compilers, what they optimize and where they can break

http://blog.regehr.org/
Another take on the LED incandescent bulb replacement, although in this case they use a fluid inside the bulb to aid in heat convection outside of the bulb.

I'm always curious to know if anyone is working on a high temperature LED material which would not be as susceptible to heat death as current LEDs.
Web Design blog
Web design blog featuring posts on blogging, monetization, internet
marketing, technology and design
Y U No Support SPDY Yet?
You _would_ screw it up - but only that mirror. The systems are designed for safety - the car would likely stop.
That's kind of a cop-out, don't you think? After all, when we embark on from-scratch coding projects, we must not be perfect experts in the domain or we'd already have code we can use, right? How are we supposed to become domain experts without writing the code? Attend night classes? :) The design the author winds up with has plenty of technical debt, but it's not hard to imagine winding up there, even with partial knowledge of the domain that is constantly increasing.
I don't see what Google's role is going to be, aside from pushing forward legislation for unknown reasons. The auto manufacturers don't need them for the technology and research... they've all had access to that for just as long. We'd have self-driving cars today if the public (and regulators) were ready for it.

But they're not and aren't going to be overnight; what makes more sense is to gradually introduce the features a little at a time so that the move to complete autonomy is a small step instead of a leap. First, automatic parking. Then, collision detection warnings. Next, lane assist that steers you back into the lane when you drift. In the next few years, you'll start seeing "smart cruise control" that will drive for you on well-marked roads in mapped areas.

"Cadillac To Release Self-Driving Cars By 2015"

http://www.inquisitr.com/227496/cadillac-to-release-self-dri...

Maybe 10-15 years from now we'll be at the complete autonomy point.
Apple, Samsung drop 'impressive' number of patent claims against each other
I'm not sure you understand how the Internet works.

Any publically available website is open to... well, the public.

At best a public website can ask the user to verify their age, which is hardly reliable.
More evidence that business schools blindly lead the seeing
I don't really get this at all.

I saw Star Wars when it came out, at the cinema, and it was great. But that was 35 years ago. There have been a ton of films made since then and the original Star Wars is OK, but nothing great. It should just be one film among many that children get to see.

If I were a teen today then I'd likely think of the Harry Potter films as the defining films of my childhood and maybe when I grew up I'd be deciding on when to tell my children about Harry Potter and working out how to watch them etc. Or perhaps it would be some of the Pixar films.

I enjoyed Star Wars when I was a child; but today's children don't need to be introduced to it as if it were some sacred document.
Ask HN: When you started your company what were the major technical hurdles?
I'm trying to get an idea of some of the technical hurdles, challenges and pain points you experiences when starting your company. What tools or products did you need to build to overcome them?
The Online Ordering System
Google Translate Beatboxing (click on the speaker icon)
Interesting that the JavaScript interface is very similar to Android's own intents. From the example in the spec:

var intent = new Intent("http://webintents.org/edit",
"text/uri-list;type=image/jpeg",
getImageDataURI(...));
navigator.startActivity(intent, imageEdited);

http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview...

You'll notice that all of the editors are Googlers.
Memory paging is the major bottleneck if you're on a Macbook Pro running Lion with no SSD.
Boston, MA- Jana's hiring: Full-Stack Web Developers, Web Development Interns, Head of Engineering

Jana.com is disrupting the advertising and research industry in the developing world. With our mobile platform we enable big players, like the World Bank, The Economist, or Microsoft, to get crucial customer feedback in days instead of months and have consumers test innovative products with the push of a button. We're engaging 2.1 billion people in emerging markets, earning revenue in 50 countries and have raised almost $10M from premier VC investors.

Our team bursts with talent from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Google but we're pretty relaxed, except during weekly Settlers of Catan battles in the office, ice-cream runs on Wednesdays or beer runs every Friday.

In short, we're having fun disrupting century old industries through cutting edge mobile technology.

Right now we're looking for full-stack web-developers. So, if you think you could have the same kind of fun come talk to us!

You can view all our open positions and apply at: http://jana.com/about-us/careers/
I think that's largely because languages, libraries, and frameworks are advancing, and methodologies are not. Better methodologies are becoming more widespread, but there's very little that's being invented that's actually new.
I find it interesting that there is no mention of using dependently typed languages or proof engines for this application. Something like Coq, where you write the formal proof of correctness as you write the program, would fit the bill nicely if you really care about safety over ease of implementation.
According to Urmson, Google doesn't want to be in the car business - just the software business.
Perhaps it's for the same reason as why we like to help others in an area we're knowledgeable about. We are experts of ourselves, we love to talk authoritatively on subjects we know lots about. It'd be interesting to see if we get the same "pleasure sensation" from teaching/helping.
NYU's hacker club motto: just ship it.
what is paper?
Actually, your reputation does not actually suffer. You have been up-front with your customers from the very start. If you use Internet Explorer, then you should be blocked or else you will probably come against a bug that causes you to:

* potentially lose work

* have a product that you paid for that doesn't do everything you want it to do

* get frustrated when things don't work and nobody will fix them ("Why don't you care?")

Bottom line - if you don't want to support Internet Explorer, I'd say feel free to detect it and then block it. Preferrably not via a referer string, but via something you can't change like one of Internet Explorer's own bugs/incompatibilities. Like, for example, detecting document.all, or via something proprietary or broken in IE.
Useful, Saleable, Buildable: The Role Of UX In Defining Product Requirements
Yes, what you are correct.
It's not good to scroll and see 150 pages.

I still haven't look at handling tags/categories/timelines. These are some pretty standard so I think I should also need to follow this. With this I can add filtering in the /u/blog.

currently /u/blog is the only delivery point. But I would like to add more delivery points where people can easily transform this into a HelpDesk, Tutorial Section ....
Use agile for R&D, apt-get install for D only.
Does anyone know what languages are used to build the software brains for the car? I haven't found any information on the actual software architecture, more on the hardware.
Just awesome! :D
Agreed. I can imagine a situation where GapList might perform better if you were alternating requests to the beginning and ending of the list and GapList happened to store them close enough in memory that they were both on the same cache line. But by their names, none of the benchmarks seem likely to test that case.
It's not an "adult content lock" for vodafone. It's actually called "content control"... I commented about it before, but I have no idea how they decide what to filter and what to pass. I kept running into blocked blogs and random programming pages, but when I tried to browse a random selection of porn sites, they were all allowed.

Additionally, noone even tried to check my age when I wanted to unblock it (well - they can't, can they?). Standard phone verification of access to the account (address, date of birth, everything that the whole family knows) was all it took.
The bit on the yield is a little thin. The other day I noticed that generators have a `send` and `throw` method which provide interesting ways for controlling flow.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0342/
> That is the absolute major issue with doing safety-critical development right: it has a cost, that cost is very, very high, and few want to pay it.

This is absolutely true. The costs to manage complexity now seem high when software is being built. The costs of managing that complexity in the future are far higher and may have to be paid in lives.
According to the people at Ada Core Technologies, that develop gnat, the GNU Ada compiler, all compliance tests has been done using the -O2 flag with the compiler. Thus that mode should be the most tested and reliable option for generating code.

I have no problem believing that aerospace people distrust optimizers. They are in fact unlikely to trust anything before they have inspected the assembler output from the compiler.
I would probably pay $250 without thinking twice. I'm happy using a really old version because it does everything I need AND it runs faster than the new versions.
What you have to say about it probably won't be positive if you use Internet Explorer and it doesn't work. No loss to Paydirt! In fact, a gain - they don't have to spend any development or support time explaining why they don't support the Internet Explorer specific bug you encountered.
Making the front page on HN is a sure fire way to get a SO question closed.
I would also add Matt Might's blog http://matt.might.net/articles/ we see articles from it on HN from time to time so you may already be familiar with it.
> So, to minimize losses caused by piracy, make your movie not suck.

Yes, but it doesn't work exactly like that. s/not suck/profitable.

This just means that instead of taking chances on a film which is a big risk (think Inception), we will simply see more and more super hero movies and more and more sequels. There is much less of a margin of error when people are downloading things.

I think there's little or no room for a "Requiem for a Dream" type of film in the coming years. Maybe kickstarter will have to be the avenue to make movies like that.
It's not quite that simple. There also needs to be demand to create those new job opportunities. I'm all for more people working in highly skilled sectors and getting rid of the need for menial labor. The question is: given how the economy works these days, where is the demand for those highly skilled jobs actually going to come from?

Most things that actually push the boundaries of what we can do - such as 3D printing, space exploration - have very little effective demand going towards them these days. The one exception may be medical research, I'm just not sure about that.

So I agree that society wins if the level of education can be raised and more people work in highly educated sectors. However, this is not going to be some kind of inevitable outcome of the market. The effective demand needs to be there to enable this transition, and there is no automatic market mechanism to make it happen.
Namedropping Google, Facebook, Apple (Microsoft, Oracle, Rovio, Netgear, OMGPOP, Path, Foursquare, Twitter, ad nauseam) as a supporting argument for/against the right designer/developer mix in your theoretical generic startup is lazy, and ultimately pointless.

What type of startup? Is it a native app-focused endeavor or will it be browser-based? What if it requires NO developers and can run on some out of the box solution or SaaS/PaaS? What if you use Twitter bootstrap and outsource/contract your minimal design needs??

There is no secret sauce, people -- success is a highly-variable mix of hard work and luck. Period. You could do everything right and still fail. And vice versa. Just look around a your local brick and mortars. How many establishments have been making a go of it for years, even decades, with subpar products and services?

This has been, is, and will be the case for every type of business for a long time.

Get over yourself, get out there, and fucking do it anyway.
On Sunday, using my latest version of Firefox, I opened a single page loading it only once to check how it looked in Firefox. Then I forgot I had Firefox open for the rest of the day. Eventually my Macbook Pro became slow and looking at Activity Monitor I saw Firefox was taken hundreds of MB of RAM and just eating some 20-30% of CPU% just idling there.

Every time, Mozilla devs claim all the bad bugs will be fixed in the next version. I heard it for v2, for 2.5, 3, and 3.5 and now of course whatever crazy version number Firefox is on now. It still sucks, but now I don't care any more because now I have Chrome.
Also, design of emotion things by has don norman has affirmed what you said. People will prefer find visual/aesthetically beautiful things to be more "usable" than its non visual/aesthetically pleasing counterpart.

Universal Principle Design calls this "aesthetic-usability" effect.
I keep seeing box-shadow used as an example in projects like this, but my understanding is that all browsers which support box-shadow now support it without any prefixes. If this is the case, aren't we better off to only have the generic .box-shadow, and not including any of the vendor prefixes?

I have been using my own version of something similar to this for other CSS properties. This looks more complete than my own, so I look forward to trying it out. Thanks for putting this together.
Well it is true that ("sequential") Erlang is a functional language. It was built as a functional language and has pretty much all the features usually associated with functional languages. It does not just "have first-class functions".

But it is important to understand what "pure" is and is not, that almost no language is pure (because it's hard to produce useful pure software, or even to define how it would work precisely) and that very few strongly encourage purity (at the language level, many do as a social level but offer no help or support for actually doing it when writing code)
I applaud the MemShrink team for their effort in finally fixing FF. Forgive my ignorance but why are these leaks possible in the first place? Shouldn't the browser manage and constrain plugins (sandbox?) to prevent issues like mem leaks from even being possible? I understand the high level description of the patch but I don't understand why this wouldn't have already been part of FF's plugin management system. It seems like a pretty basic and core concept.
The Integrated Navigation and Weapons System (INWS) developed by ATE Aerospace for the Hawk Mk.120 was written entirely in C, was DO-178B-certified, ran to a million lines of code and cost approximately $100 million for the development of the software and hardware combined.

The software includes integration all the standard military navigation and weapons targeting and control functionality, along with a secure datalink using the Link-ZA protocol and a nifty radar simulation system (basically an airborne LAN for air-to-air training) that runs over it.

They just delivered the latest iteration of the software which allows them to receive data-linked air picture information from other aircraft, such as an AWACS platform. Throughout all this the project has had no major snags, has missed no deadlines and has come in on budget.

So my point being that it's possible to write complex safety-critical software in C if your processes and programmers are good enough and you're willing to pay about $100 million for it.
Anchor everything
From what I can tell as an outsider: Loeb thinks the company is valued at $18 - $20 range or possibly higher (thanks to its Asian assets). If he can drive down the price, he can load up some more.

Once he gets a significant voice in the company (via more board members), he will force them to sell their Asian assets, quickly driving up the price to the desired range. Having loaded up at around $15 and assuming it hits $20, you're looking at a quick 33% ROI. That's what hedge funds do; they don't usually invest for the long haul.
Thanks. This seems pretty perfect and seems like everybody is happy about this. Which is great.

I wish I could attend to this conf. But I couldn't be able to arrange air tickets for the conf :(
Good Job. And looking forward for the videos or live stream.
So, in other words:
Be constructive. Be assertive.

Okay!
A few others:

Machine Learning (Theory), http://hunch.net/, is a good place to learn about new machine-learning papers. It doesn't really do research exposition on the blog, but it posts about recent ML conferences, highlighting some of the papers the author finds interesting.

Embedded in Academia, http://blog.regehr.org/, is about 50% personal stuff, but 50% posts on John Regehr's work on C-compiler fuzzing, with some interesting examples if you're into compilers or the finer points of C semantics.

Proper Fixation, http://www.yosefk.com/blog/, is by an embedded developer (not academic), and not always about research, but it has some good researchy and expository posts. For example, it has the best concise overview I've found of how SIMT/SIMD/SMT relate (http://www.yosefk.com/blog/simd-simt-smt-parallelism-in-nvid...).

While it's a mathematics blog, Terence Tao's blog, http://terrytao.wordpress.com/, has a lot of content likely of interest to computer scientists as well. In particular, his blog-exposition versions of papers are often a better introduction to recent research for nonspecialists than anything in the official published literature is.

Tomasz Malisiewicz's computer-vision blog, http://quantombone.blogspot.com/, has intermittent but often quite good posts on object recognition and similar topics.

Of course I can't refrain from mentioning my own quasi-blog, http://www.kmjn.org/notes/, though only about 1/4 of it is on computer science (about 4/5 of my day job is computer science, but online essays end up being mainly an outlet for everything else).
"* I have more than once recommended that people who are very very concerned about platform security (ie, about the likelihood that there are memory corruption bugs in their language stack) use JVM languages."

I thought general consensus was to stay away from the JVM if you mind about security. Isn't that the case anymore? or never was?
Intricately tied to the choice of the OS.
Curious kids like me, with Christian parents who would be terribly opposed to such things.

Speaking as someone who nearly got excluded from school for trying to get around restrictions...
Don't start giving them ideas...
Jake based this article on the work he did on our offline HTML5 mobile app ( http://m.lanyrd.com/ ) - doing offline right is surprisingly trick and full of edge cases, and I haven't seen them documented in as much detail anywhere else.
Color's next act: Teaming up with Verizon