skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anything but silence.

With silence I don't know if you are still considering candidates, haven't gotten my resume, or whatever.

Other than a yes, we are interested, I would prefer honesty. You are welcome to make it brutal if that pleases you, but I can read through the lines if you feel you need to soften it up (I have gotten the nicest, most corporate speak, email saying basically that they consider me so completely unsuitable for the position that they would rather not hire anybody than hiring me, but they are still advertising it.).
Yep, given a set of rules and the means, people and companies will use them to reduce their bills.

The biggest problem with our tax laws is that they have moved from a way to raise income to being used to control behavior which results in "rule lawyering" to get the best deal. Simple rules mean actual income, complex rules means a lot of employment for accounts and lawyers to get a lower bill.
Where I work, we put a lot of effort into giving honest, actionable feedback to anyone we interview or phone screen. (We don't do it if we choose not to phone screen someone, though.)

We tell you why we didn't proceed and what we think you could do to make a difference if you choose to try again in a few years.

This is for our own benefit as much as the job seeker's. We don't want to leave a sour or even neutral taste in someone's mouth just because it didn't work out. Someone who is a bad fit now might be a good fit in the future, as they change or as we change, or we might be wrong that they are a bad fit now.
That may be true and maybe I'm taking a biased point-of-view as someone who is shy/socially awkward, but I'm pretty sure that people who fit that description are going to have a hard time distinguishing themselves in an interview as someone who is going to draw a crowd on a Sunday. Unless the kind of folks you like to hang out with on a Sunday are the kind who are quiet, keep to themselves and can help you debug your code. But if that's the case, then you're just looking for good engineers who aren't jerks. That's not how I read #1.
Optimal solution assuming that you've got perfectly accurate arbitrary precision arithmetic.

Which is as likely as a unicorn that poops Haagen-Dazs.
How exactly would a nominee with $100 in her bank account even let you know she exists?
There really should be some sort of movement to shame apple (and hopefully other California companies) for doing this. They've benefitted immensely from the infrastructure we've provided and are doing nothing to invest back into it now that they're on top. At the very least they should help with the rising tuition costs at public schools (UCs, Cal States, etc.)
What is the Taste Graph?
It depends on the interview process. Most interviews are arms-length, with some code on a whiteboard. You don't learn about people that way. You only learn whether they can answer your clever little questions. You've got to create a situation where people will let down their guard a bit. Most companies will never do this because it requires effort.
I thought about this a little bit, and I don't think this would be very trivial. CoffeeScript is designed to map easily onto JavaScript. A transcompiler that compiles JavaScript with matrix extensions to performant plain JavaScript would likely be significantly more complex than the CoffeeScript transcompiler.

Consider that you want to translate the matrix operation A * B into A.times(B). You have two options:

1) Figure out what's a matrix before runtime, using static type inference.
2) Translate the code into JavaScript that determines whether to treat the code as a matrix at runtime.

In the first case, you don't need a JIT at all. JITs exist largely because you can't do perfect type inference in dynamic languages. If you can do perfect type inference on all acceptable code (a la RPython), or if you require type annotations, you can compile straight to C or machine code.

In the second case, you take a speed hit of 25-50% on scalar operations for the guard, at least in modern versions of SpiderMonkey and V8 (see http://jsperf.com/cost-of-multiplication-via-function).

You can probably get acceptable performance out of combining static type inference with guards. My understanding is that this is what SpiderMonkey does internally. But at this point, it might be easier to integrate your functionality into an existing JIT than to write your transcompiler with type inference, particularly since you will have to implement matrix and vector ops inside the JS engine to achieve acceptable performance anyway.
There is a really important lesson from all of this, and it is not that Apple is wrong for rationally exploiting global tax laws to avoid paying US taxes.

The fact that California has no tax jurisdiction in Nevada, and that the US has no tax jurisdiction in Ireland, is an unassailable fact of life. Tax laws are subject to regulatory competition like many other things, and ignoring that -- insisting that this is an issue of morality or fairness -- is silly.

If the US had a globally competitive corporate tax rate (say 15%), it would make most of these tactics irrelevant. There's no need to shelter income in Ireland if they have the same tax rates. Because of the reduced sheltering, such a reform would probably raise revenue on net. But even if it didn't, it would have many ancillary benefits, such as repatriating many billions of dollars in corporate profits and increasing the degree to which they are deployed in the US, which would far exceed the costs.

Even better would be to reduce corporate income tax to 0% and increase dividend and capital gains rates to personal-income-tax levels to make up for it. The main reason dividend income is treated preferentially in the US is that corporate profits are already being taxed (in theory). Those multi-level nature of the US tax code creates unnecessary loopholes, as well as costs and confusion. Counter-intuitively, eliminating the corporate income tax would make it much easier to tax corporate income, because those profits necessarily flow back to investors either in the form of dividends or capital gains. If you are a resident of the US (and california) and you own 1 apple share, you pay taxes on your share of Apple's income. Even better, it would be progressive. Rich people pay more, poorer people pay less.

Simple, right?
Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful
I don't. I didn't have a high idea of Stripe to begin with, but I certainly can't respect a company that won't acknowledge that they are going to be hiring a lot more males than females and that most of the females they will be hiring will not be for developer positions but for support roles and maybe design.

There are properly more transgendered people involved in development than there are females. So they should stop lying and be honest about it.
So is there any formal process when you get hired for you to choose which team you get to join? For example, maybe talk to a few teams and then choose which team you get to work on and stuff?
Why Aren't There More Engineers?
It may be obvious, but don't buy a used mattress from someone you don't know in NYC. The bed bug risk means that it isn't worth it.

And I don't think that $500 for mattress + bed frame is ridiculous, given that you spend roughly 1/3 of your life on it.
It would pretty much hand overseas corporations the US market given the fun of "licensing fees" paid to a parent company overseas. See Monster Cable for a great example. I also believe the Japanese and German car makers pull this one.

The "Buffet Rule" is a pretty good acknowledgement that our tax system is way too complicated, will end up like the problems the AMT is causing, and shows how broken the the discussion is on the news of "amount" and "rate".
Here is an interesting take on the formula from The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb:

> Things got a lot worse in 1997. The Swedish academy gave another round of Gaussian-based Nobel Prizes to Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who had improved on an old mathematical formula and made it compatible with the existing grand Gaussian general financial equilibrium theories—hence acceptable to the economics establishment. The formula was now “useable.” It had a list of long forgotten “precursors,” among whom was the mathematician and gambler Ed Thorp, who had authored the bestselling Beat the Dealer, about how to get ahead in blackjack, but somehow people believe that Scholes and Merton invented it, when in fact they just made it acceptable. The formula was my bread and butter. Traders, bottom-up people, know its wrinkles better than academics by dint of spending their nights worrying about their risks, except that few of them could express their ideas in technical terms, so I felt I was representing them. Scholes and Merton made the formula dependent on the Gaussian, but their “precursors” subjected it to no such restriction. /.../

> And the option formula went on bearing the name Black-Scholes-Merton, instead of reverting to its true owners, Louis Bachelier, Ed Thorp, and others.
Uhm... the other problem increasing taxes on capital gains is that most Americans in the under 50 crowd are going to use those for retirement.
Show HN: Neighbourhood sharing startup
Checkout a neighbourhood sharing startup myself and a great team are working on at Ottawa Startup Weekend. The basic idea is neighbourhoods want to share and create a community around the space they take care of. We let neighbourhoods share high priced items like snow blowers, lawnmowers, gardening supplies, camping gear etc. with their neighbours in return for borrowing their stuff. Take a look at us at http://signup.moochable.co or fill in a survey at http://app.fluidsurveys.com/surveys/josh-m2/community-sharing-website/. Any advice or questions are appreciated.

Moochable - Share. Care. Grow

PS - I am a long-time lurker on HN. Basic background is I am an Aerospace Engineering from Canada learning how to program.
"There are many reasons you might not be able to cope with a CV in a format other than Word, but all of them imply a high probability that I do not want to work with you."

This. When I have recruiters calling me based on my very plain CV done in LaTeX, especially when I'm not even looking for work, I don't really feel any urge to respond to an interview request that starts with "please send us your resume in Microsoft Word." Some firms use strict criteria to whittle down their list of applicants; I feel justified in doing the same.
Computational geometry??? That's a new one for me. Do you mean only linear/convex programming?

Incidentally, I would really like to hear about the kind of Real Work that data scientists end up doing with TBs of data, because I'm always fuzzy on the details. MCMC? Variational methods? SVMs? Or is it more oriented towards frequentist statistical methods, applied at "web-scale"?
Just glancing at the front page, the SFW boards on 4chan outnumber the NSFW (18+) boards. Of the top 4 boards in terms of 4chan's traffic, only two are in the 18+ category.

/b/ (the very NSFW board responsible for 4chan's notorious infamy) accounts for 30% of 4ch's traffic but the next two most popular boards /v/ (video games) and /a/ (anime and manga) are both SFW. Not that I would recommend anyone to lurk 4chan at work.

The traffic and popularity figures I mention are on Wikipedia with citations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan
I have to say, while Chrome has a few issues on OSX, I was really impressed with how quickly they added full screening, Lion-style scrollbars, elastic scrolling, and surprisingly polished two-finger swipe gestures. Hopefully Firefox will get up to speed soon.
I agree mostly except about your semantics. I would stick with the term "developer", not programmer. Being a good programmer is certainly correlated with being a good developer, but probably not by 1.
Where do I find these small consulting shops?
Whoa, that last line just came out of nowhere.
For something as straightforward as this, I think you shouldn't load jQuery and use native JS instead.
The actual appreciation of their investments would be higher if you eliminated corporate income tax. And you would still get to defer payment until you sell the actual investment.

Properly designed, it all evens out.
Shaming them for what? They're simply taking advantage of the confusing and loophole filled tax laws you provided them.

Nobody pays more taxes than they absolutely have to. If you don't want people to abuse loopholes, fix the loopholes.
Using a deprecated technology to create a list of achievements seems odd to me.

Any firm that would want me to convert my resume to, say, Microsoft Word, just to apply to them, I don't want to work for. Double for any firm that ignores a technology because they think it's deprecated. Just for point of reference, I started getting more interview requests when I converted my resume from HTML to LaTeX and put the PDF output online in place of the HTML.
You also get tons of blank lines, right? That would annoy the heck out of me.
My personal feeling on this is that the moment the tax system becomes so complicated that you've got to employ lots of people to figure it out then you've turned taxes into a business expense which is as susceptible to optimisation as any other part of your business.
Or better, get rid of jQuery completely.
> If the US had a globally competitive corporate tax rate (say 15%), it would make most of these tactics irrelevant.

Until Ireland further lowers its taxes. Your argument leads to a race to the bottom.

The problem with only taxing dividends is that corporations only pay out a small portion of their profits in dividends. I may theoretically be a billionaire in my holdings, but I only need a million in dividends per year to live my preferred lifestyle. Thus I only pay tax on the million dollars instead of on my billions. You can try and get at the money via capital gains, but what if the bulk of the money is being held by a foreign company, with only a small amounts to pay dividends to the owners filtering into the main company?
When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End?
This is depressingly common. No one seems to take interviewing as seriously as they should.
Oddball Job Interview Questions for Startups
I’m reminded of an old poker saying: “The more wild cards and crazy rules, the better the expert’s advantage."
Steve Wozniak: Why I Love My Windows Phone 7.5
That's generally the problem when multi-platform software wants to "feel" the same on every platform. It just doesn't work. Mac users are used to a different UI, so even if you think that you approach is better, just don't do it. When it comes to usability, try to do it how everyone else developing for the platform is doing it.
You must not have understood my intention: Where are the applications that people use that were written in modern, free Smalltalk?
This is the most uppity, narrow-minded, thoughtless post I have ever seen on HN. I can't downvote it, but for the first time I wish I could.

This is how regular, non-tech, non-hipster people communicate! Do you think she should host her own linux-server, run a web-service, write some code and create her own site? Should she should upload the pics somewhere else and send links out via facebook that no one will click? No.

She posted the pics where her social graph is most likely to consume and interact with them.
Just one tip about finding rooms on Craigslist. Listings usually get ~50 responses within the first couple hours of going up, so there's fierce competition. What this means is you'll need to stand out somehow as a good choice in the email, but primarily that you'll need to respond to them as soon as possible after they go up. So prioritize brand new entries over ones that look nicer but are a couple days old.

Try to line up a ton of them because most are going to "interview" a bunch of people and choose one among them.
meetup.com has a good mix of tech meetups happening in NYC and the bay area.
That's great. If apple makes $1b, if the bulk of the money is held by a foreign SUBSIDIARY, my stock will go up, and I will pay capital gains. If they give it to me as a dividend, I will pay taxes on that. If they reinvest it in the company and the investment makes money, my stock will go up even more. And if they reinvest it in the company and squander it all, no taxes will be collected on the income, but they won't be able to write the loss off anything either.

The only thing that truly captures the vagaries of 'where money is held' is the stock price. Wall Street don't care if that money is in New York or Guatemala, if Apple has it it's making the stock go up.
Privacy Laws and Regulations 101
This is a very good quersion, and made me think a little. Here's my stab at it:

If we define the shortage as "shortage of people willing to do X for $200,000 a year", that's clearly a bad definition. You should just pay more (as earl suggested) to get what you want. But what if that's just not possible on a macro level?

Consider if you have an aggregate demand of "the market needs a total of 500 Data scientists". If there are only 250 data scientists in the world, their salaries will be bid up, then I can see somebody crying that there's a shortage for affordable data scientists (whatever that means). But any capitalist will tell you that they're just looking for a free sailboat. On the other hand, the 250 data scientists are being paid a lot, and on some level skills are somewhat fungible, so you end up with non-data scientists (maybe vanilla statisticians/actuaries) moving sideways to get in on this payday. So you have some retraining, and in the long run things tend to work out. So there's no shortage.

But in the long run we are all dead. Thus even if we define a shortage as the shortfall in supply at _any_ price, this isn't sufficient. In the short run there can very well be a shortfall.

If it takes 3 years to train a data scientist (I'm just making stuff up here), and there are 250 data scientists on the market, if you have an aggregate demand for 500 data scientists _today_ --- completely price unconditional --- you just cannot fill it. Price is almost irrelevant (on the macro level --- you as an individual can always outbid your competitors). There is a temporal shortage that cannot be filled.

I think this is the precise definition of what a shortage is that you are looking for. Shortages exist in the macro scale. Shortages do not exist for individual companies (they should just pay more, and if the benefits are not worth the cost of hiring, there isn't a shortage, they're just cheap).
Besides that - why would you actually rotate between a lot of devices? Is anyone here doing something similar? I get that it's nice to have a work phone and a private phone, but why would you rotate them?
I can understand that someone wants to try something new, but in the end, I would stick to my favourite - not going back to an old one I didn't like.
In a world of short attention spans, I don't want to listen to a podcast, and I doubt the podcast would have skyrocketed up the HN page.

Increasingly, smaller articles about other articles get much more traffic than the original source. One such example is the well-researched NYT article about how companies learn your secrets, and then the Forbes article that cut the crap and got to the real shocker of the story and got more pageviews (possibly $$$) http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...
How useful is a Physics degree?
I will graduate with a physics degree in a few years, since starting I've become more and more interested in programming.

My question is will I be able to compete with Computer Science graduates, assuming I know the relevant programming languages and have some experience?
I'm on this path right now. Working simultaneously on a MSCS at NYU and a full-time developer gig at Knewton (a company which truly understands the value and risks of data R&D).

I'd really start with this awesome curriculum[0] by Joseph Misti. He nails the mix of modeling, algorithms, math/stats, development, and distributed/Unix skills one needs to become comfortable around these problems. More importantly, his advice agrees with my experience on the data team at Knewton--we really use a bit of all of the above skills to solve our problems.

My email is in my profile if you (or anyone else) would like to chat about this a bit more. I'm also in NYC, and totally willing to grab tea and chat in person.

[0] http://www.quora.com/What-skills-are-needed-for-machine-lear...
I think it's mainly because of the availability and popularity of very easy software to slap together something in your own computer. The influx of new people playing with sound loops and their close networks, basically.
You mean like Linux?
Not really. Companies of every size have been taking advantage of stuff like this for decades. Stuff like Delaware's corporation laws [1] are pretty well known. It's common sense, really. Why would anybody pay more taxes than they had to?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_General_Corporation_L....
Campaign Finance Visualization
We always look over websites and github when available, because it provides a pretty good signal and makes for the most useful phone screen. Happy to discuss your case over email, if you'd like -- I'm gdb@stripe.com.
Well in the case of ICS, it's more accurate to say that Matias Duarte re-used his earlier ideas than "copied" from himself.
Ireland can't lower it's taxes to the point of unprofitability, so it will lower it's taxes until revenues raised == cost of services + small margin. That's a good thing.

Don't complain that others provide the same service at lower cost, try to innovate and outcompete them.
I find Firefox has much smoother scrolling for me on OS X, compared to Chrome. The rubber band effect for me normally is quite a slowdown.
Social Media Text Analytics and US Politics
Does performance really matters? I rather have richer libraries (like R has) than performance, since it's impossible to plot for example, all your Apache logs or any other big data problem, you just need a subset of the data and plot them, and with that you don't need a super fast language.
I'd just like to say that I'm very thankful Firefox has neither invisible scrollbars nor inertial scrolling. F11 is full-screen in Firefox.
I think it depends. In a rational team, the unilateral vetoer carefully explains their reasoning, and they know their belief has to be reasonably strong. (Otherwise they'd just step aside, after mentioning some objections.)

But unfortunately, this article doesn't give the least clue of how their hiring process actually works. Does the candidate present in front of the entire team? If so, then (pretending I'm on the Stripe team) my teammates know whether my objection is totally outside reality, because they saw the exact same thing I did. Then I'll be under pressure to justify it.
I personally think that this may be interesting, but it really shouldn't effect your own personal opinion on smartphones. It is really sad to see people completely change of mind based off of someone else's personal opinion on smartphones.
its unfortunate hes comaparing all companies flagship phones but when it comes to Android , he's using the Droid RAZR. I would like to see his impressions with the Galaxy Nexus or even the Samsung galaxy s2
Maybe Steve is obsessive/compulsive about maintaining separate identities.
You use a custom git parse branch, while git has a much more powerful prompt function : __git_ps1 . It's readily available in git's default bash_completion.d file.
It shows the current branch, but also the state of the git tree (during rebase, am, bisecting, cherry-picking, etc.)
There are will not be a shortage of Computer Science jobs for quite some time, but Computer Science is a lot more than just programming, as far as I understand.
That does look like a very nice service, but it seems to be much lower-end, not "roughly the same". The CPU is an in-order 1.8GHz Atom, which is not roughly the same as a superscalar out-of-order Athlon 64 or Core i7, and their RAM tops out at 4GiB, which is not roughly the same as 64GiB.