skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course there are "startups" and there are "startups." Which is to say that 3 founders and 2 employees is a 'startup' but so is 50 employees and 2 founders. That is why I dislike generalizing about "startups" and prefer to talk about values.

But I agree whole-heartedly that some jobs are just painful. Sometimes they start out great, and the company changes, and then they are painful. Sometimes its the other way around, and sometimes they are all great or all painful.

So lets step past the 'burnout' part, the damaged goods part if you will, and talk about who you are. Try to come up with times where you felt really great about your job, could be a task completed, feedback received, or even just the amount of light in the office. Let those memories inform you about what you really value (as opposed to things you think you should value). Now armed with knowledge about what you value, think about ways to interview companies which would help you know if those things are likely to be there.

I joke sometimes that people often spend a lot of time interrogating a potential boyfriend/girlfriend but don't invest the same energy in interrogating a potential company. While it is true that as a job seeker you are in the 'inferior' position to the job offerer, but both of you want exactly the same thing, a happy, productive employee. That occurs when you love your job and knowing what it takes for you to love your job and being up front with that with your potential employer will pay big dividends.
Too many brazilian accounts for a spammer list. There is no reason to use UOL/BOL over hotmail/yahoo/etc.

I think this is from a third-party service, back when OAuth was not common, or maybe from a fake service someone created just to steal passwords.. There are many accounts that couldn't possibily be created on twitter:

12:12
A:A
ANJO_SO@RES .COM:
917048566:2252
I was forwarded this email from one of the producers before it aired back in 2009. No mention of equity. They probably wised up after they saw how successful some contestants were:

From: TrXXX <XXX@gmail.com>
Date: May 27, 2009 12:46:22 PM PDT
To: TriXXX <XXX@gmail.com>
Subject: Shark Tank on ABC

Hello,

My name is TrXXX and I'm contacting you from Mark Burnett Productions and ABC regarding a new show called Shark Tank. See the trailer here: http://abc.go.com/primetime/sharktank/index?pn=index

It's incredibly hard to get a small business loan from a bank right now. This show provides the opportunity for a smart entrepreneur or inventor to pitch a product/idea or established business to a group of billionaire investors. We are looking specifically for a up and coming fashion designer, someone who has a line but wants to expand their business.

The premise of Shark Tank is simple: you would approach a panel of billionaire investors (see list below) to explain how much money you would need and how much stake they would receive in turn, and get your company, project or invention more capital to either get started or expand the business. The panel invests their own money if they decide to go with your proposal, and the outcome could be an amazing opportunity.

If you are interested in being on this show or have an email list you can circulate this announcement to, please do so. We are trying to extend this opportunity to as many people as possible.

Directions: each interested person should email me directly (XXX@gmail.com) with the following information:

Name
Occupation
Description of Business/Invention (non-confidential)
Phone number
Email
Photo

Once I receive this, I will send an email that you need to reply to. From there, you can receive an application. Don't wait, we are filming this show in July and are screening applicants now.

Panel of Investors:

Robert Herjavec (Tech Genius)
Daymond John (Founder of FUBU clothing)
Barbara Corcoran (Real Estate Mogul)

Kevin O'Leary (Venture Capitalist)
Kevin Harrington (Infomercial King)

This show has been previously produced in Japan, the UK and Canada under the name, "Dragon's Den." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVo6e7Y8wBo <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVo6e7Y8wBo>;
While we kind of like Less' approach to CSS, we were not thrilled with the performance and also found it not really enough for serious development.

We opensourced our attempt at CSS generation in a java environment.

The website is a little outdated http://dynamic-style-sheets.org/dss-website/index.jsp but might give a rough overview. The SVN is more up-to-date ( http://opensaga.org/svn/opensaga-dynamic-stylesheets/trunk/ )

In addition to rule nesting and mixings, variables, expressions, etc, DSS allows user-defined functions to be written. Some come with it, including a system do imagemagick or so like processing of images in the CSS.

It's a funny little thing that kind of just wanted to be written that way.
The thing that actually scared me the most was this:

> Release of Unknown Claims. I acknowledge that there is a possibility that after my execution of this
Agreement, I may discover facts or incur or suffer claims which were unknown or unsuspected at the time this
Agreement was executed and which, if known by me at that time, may have materially affected my decision to execute
this Agreement.

...

> I have been advised
of the existence of Section 1542 of the California Civil Code which provides:
A GENERAL RELEASE DOES NOT EXTEND TO CLAIMS WHICH THE CREDITOR DOES NOT KNOW OR
SUSPECT TO EXIST IN HIS OR HER FAVOR AT THE TIME OF EXECUTING THE RELEASE

...

> I and the Releasing Parties knowingly and voluntarily waive the provisions of Section
1542, as well as any other statute, law or rule of similar effect, and acknowledge and agree that this waiver is an
essential and material term of this Agreement...

What the actual fuck. Can a contract lawyer chime in on whether this term is enforceable? Can a release release the very laws that regulate releases? In California?

IMHO lawsuits are like an exception handler--they're what you do when the normal way of doing business fails. There are people who use exceptions as part of handling normal conditions and there are people who use lawsuits as a normative way of doing business, and I try very hard to work with neither with about the same level of distaste. Documents like this make it pretty clear what side of the line they're on, as this clause only comes about with an army of lawyers with nothing better to do.
Not worth it! If you have a good business the quick airtime you get from ABC show is not that valuable. There is a huge gap between watching something on TV and converting that into customers, especially for product-based businesses.

Websites are a bit different. Remember the grandma nanny? I actually looked them up out of curiosity, but even then, 5% is a lot for a few hundred maybe thousand viewers.

If anything, the show should pay the contestants. They are getting lots of viewers and selling a ton of advertising from hard working entrepreneurs.
Working with files in JavaScript, Part 1
Why Location-Based Apps will Create Multiple Winners
It's interesting to think of someone using this for their current bf/gf, breaking up (not sure if there is a button for this yet), and then using it again with their new significant other. It seems like some people might not want to even see the app again after a painful breakup, but I guess it's not so different from Facebook with relationship statuses.
Did anyone decline an offer to work at Instagram?
I actually worked on mobile and online ACH payments system for one of the largest Banks in the United States. The entire mentality of startups of "get it going and refine it later" does NOT work with banking. Before you even launch you have to get your risk of fraud and security breaches down to 0.001% or less. The bank I worked with had risk on the order of 0.00001% (1 dollar was at risk or suspicious for every 10 billion dollars transfered).

On top of that take into account integrating into existing payment and collection systems and you've got a whole lot to overcome at a relatively high price.

This is not a place I would even WANT to disrupt. The banks have established, high quality, insured, and regulated ways of handling ACH (you can even do it on your mobile).

The whole instant transfer thing seems downright crazy to me, as the banks still would have to do eMoney/Fed verification on the transfers which has mandatory delay times. I don't know what Dwolla is thinking...
>"car companies could just as easily operate by directly leasing the cars"

...which is finance. So why don't they do that, if it's just as easy? And where does the money come from to front the cost of building the car that is to be leased? Because the lessee won't cover the cost for quite some time. Yep, finance.

I realize there's a populist movement, especially among the younger crowds that frequent the interwebs, that influences people to hate everything Wall Street. But I don't think people realize what a fascinating and, more importantly fundamental, role finance has played in history. Present day Silicon Valley does not exist without it. It does, in fact, create capital.
That doesn't change the fact IE started its life by pretending to be Netscape.
There are a lot of ambitious projects on Kickstarter. Here's one that I hope makes it but which has a long way to go:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mightytreehouse/dome

Anyone here from Kickstarter? I was thinking that a cool feature for the site would be to have groups, kind of like SETI @ Home groups. People from HN or Reddit, for example, could have groups then we could see how much each group contributes. There was a 10" rocket engine that recently got funded (barely) and it seemed like a great HN sponsored project.
That's what I thought. IndexTank was purchased by LinkedIn and open-sourced their engine it appears.

This looks really cool, kudos to the guys that built it. One thing that's worth pointing out:

Google Site Search and Google Custom Search are two different things. The former is free and a "wrapper" as was noted, the latter is incredibly powerful and easy to implement/tune.

That said, I'd rather give my money to these guys assuming they have a sane pricing model.
Bill. Just wanted to let you know that Microsoft has been auto-updating all users that have opted into MS updates on their Windows machines since January. A majority of XP users should now be on IE8, all other Windows machines should have IE9. http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/microsoft-decides-to-...
If you aren't a permanent resident you are almost always tied to your current job, and can technically be required to leave within two weeks if you are laid off or fired. (Getting a new job that would accommodate your visa requirements on a two-week notice might not be trivial.) If you are a permanent resident, you are subject to many of the annoyances discussed (i.e., IRS) without the benefits of citizenship...
Announcing Immediate Availability of RemObjects SDK for Java
Would American Idol demand rights to future royalties of all auditioning acts?

I'd actually be shocked if they didn't demand future royalties of all acts that actually end up on the show. I don't really like it, but that's just how that industry works.
Why not just change the passwords yourself then? While you're at it, unfollow all those people.
I was going to add something similar. Chomsky and people like him pander to fear mongering about the 'loss of jobs' to a population of people who don't seem to understand that the number of jobs offered in this country has steadily and inexorably gone up. If technological progress was a net killer of jobs there would have been increasing unemployment from at least 1903 forward.
> No, no really you don't. Perhaps to be some sort of archetypal "Real Programmer",

So, are you saying that if you asked a candidate during a job interview what malloc is or why inserting things in a linked list is faster that inserting things into an array, and he gave you a blank stare, you'd still hire him?
If anyone from Heroku is reading, that page is a great example of how poor contrast results in poor readability. Blue-on-blue text makes me close the browser tab, and not actually see what you're trying to sell.
Be that as it may, it remains the case that the right solution is "we don't support older versions of IE" (unless the client is willing to pay extra for that of course), not "we don't support IE at all". In the real world, you get much better reactions from telling people "we don't support the old versions, you need to upgrade" than from "we're on a crusade against your platform in its entirety". This remains true _whether or not_ the people in question are willing to upgrade just yet.
Sortbox: Privately Collect, Organize and Review People.
Certainly -- but if someone owns a stake in your entity (however small) it's in their best interest to at least put things in a good light.
Not a lawyer at all, but I'd guess that's a no.

It doesn't really matter, though; putting blatantly unenforceable clauses in contracts is fairly common practice simply because they _seem_ enforceable, so someone who feels they were wronged is less likely to "waste" their money on talking to a lawyer. (This seems to be most prevalent in employment contracts, especially in regard to non-competes.)
I'd assume that a driverless taxi would have an "I want to get out, please drop me off at the next safe opportunity" as well as some method of disputing the fare.

Besides, it would not necessarily even have to redirect you past a different location, it could just stream an advert to the speakers in the car.

It could also be possible that some routes would be subsidized, like you could enter the location of one restaurant and a rival restaurant could offer to cover your fare if you went to them instead.

Another aspect is that you would need an easy way to split the fare amongst multiple passengers, I almost never take a taxi if I am traveling alone.
Oh the irony:

"Cannot play media. You do not have the correct version of the flash player. Download the correct version"
GCC can now be built with a C++ compiler
Ziptastic - We added more countries
Really enjoying the game, but the leaderboards seem to be who has played the most games/put in the most time. An average would be better, I think.
"If APIs are copyrightable in U.S....startups will come to Europe."
vCider is mostly a cleverly marketed VPN. It could be useful when you have servers mixed across different IaaS providers or IaaS and your own physical infrastructure. I don't see how it solves much of the problem of migrating off an IaaS or PaaS provider.

http://www.vcider.com/vpc-overview
If you're interested in how information diffuses through social networks like Twitter, take a look at Truthy (one of my projects):

http://truthy.indiana.edu

Truthy is a system to analyze and visualize the
diffusion of information on Twitter. The Truthy system
evaluates thousands of tweets an hour to identify new
and emerging bursts of activity around memes of various
flavors. The data and statistics provided by Truthy are
designed to aid in the study of social epidemics: How do
memes propagate through the Twittersphere? What causes a
burst of popularity?
Both of these are great tools I didn't know about. Thank you!
Designer brand names at discount prices | Bali Pratama
They are being really transparent about their visual design process. Whether you agree with them or not, its very interesting to read about their reasoning.

I'm mildly excited about Visual Studio 2011, but I see a lot more radical changes coming in newer IDEs like Cloud9, or of course, LightTable.
You're spinning a little bit too much hyperbole. It would be nicer for the entrepreneurs if ABC didn't take a cut but clearly they aren't that nice. However they are getting 15 mins of national exposure to a captive audience - that's worth something.

Doesn't YCombinator give pittance amount of capital for an equity stake in the companies it invests in, with the value proposition being largely in introductions to VCs/Angels and some strategic help? Are they coercive?
IMHO, this is bad advice. It is like saying if you want to teach how to change oil in the car, teach the entire automotive engineering curriculum.

Introducing extreme complexity so early in the process turns off people; they give up easily and (falsely, in many cases) start believing that programming is not for them.

The first introduction should have enough fundamental programming concepts to enable the students to make something useful and tangible, by themselves. As the interests and the objectives grow, they can delve deeper into the domain.

I think with Khan Academy, Udacity and others, we are entering a new paradigm of "Just in time learning". Schools should focus on teaching smart learning techniques, critical thinking etc instead of cramming more and more topics in their curriculums.
Bathing in the Glow of Quantum Dots
How about iPhone/iPad version of Space Quest before this grand project?

Also, their physical/digital pledge structure is extremely confusing, gonna do $30 pledge, seems like a nice balance.
Stuff like congestion would probably be left to computers operated by the local traffic authority rather than the general public.

Of course you would need some form of hazard signaling which could be open to abuse (although it could be abused by human drivers anyway).

You can always monitor what cars are doing and if you find that some particular persons car is always behaving in a way that causes problems then you can potentially take legal action against them.
This doesn't make sense for many American cities where the downtown only houses the municipal government, museums, and boutique shopping, but the city itself has several other major shopping districts, not to mention residential and industrial districts. These different districts are often miles and miles apart with no easy walking routes between or often within the districts. For example, Anchorage, Alaska, is 1,704.7 sq. miles (4,415.1 sq. km) [1], and it can sometimes take over 2 hours to drive from one end of the city to the other.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by...
“Why I Declined An Offer To Work At Instagram” Via Quora
They don't "take out" anything, they will own 5% of all that future growth too.

Five percent of Facebook is (in theory) worth ~5 billion, while ABC itself is worth around 3-4 billion. If Instagram had been on the show they would have gotten $50 million a few weeks ago. For half a million dollars you can buy your own 30s commercial, and that's a bad deal for nearly every startup in the world.
I do leave Firefox open for days at a time (usually start it up when I boot into Linux, and close it when I reboot for a kernel update). The Firefox team seems to have fixed most of the leaking that was occuring back in the 3.6 days. As things are right now, there is no way Firefox can use enough RAM to have any impact on my system. Using something like TMT would probably end up slowing down Firefox for me, since stuff would have to be read into RAM from a magnetic HDD instead of being in RAM already. I don't think that Linux has used more than 1MB of the swap partition since I installed it on this laptop. I guess TMT would be useful for those people who have less than 768MB of RAM (what my old laptop had), which doesn't tend to be many people nowadays.

The second add-on you have linked is interesting due to the many possibilities it opens up. I am certain that some people who read Hacker News will find it useful for their purposes.
The Reverse Job Fairs at the Dojo have been great for all involved. I think it would be nice to know which recruiters have a vested interest in our community.
Is this an about:config setting? Can you please share?
Have you used the tab grouping feature?
I'm sorry to sound very negative on the author, but I don't know how you could have the knowledge to write this article, but not have the knowledge to understand the basics of costs on the Internet.

A few points that are horribly wrong FTA (reasoning explained below):

"In order to use as few network resources as possible—both to keep costs low and quality high—these providers typically attempt to get as “close” as possible to end users, often forging agreements in which they directly connect to provider networks."

The "close"-ness that they are talking about here is not geographic closeness but network closeness. And this isn't just in terms of the distance traveled geographically, but the cost to send that traffic across some other network. That is, it is more expensive for Netflix to send traffic from their provider to (for example) AT&T to Sprint to Comcast to you, than it is to have Level3 send traffic from Level3 to Comcast to you. In fact, because of the peering agreement between Level3 and Comcast, Comcast has to pay Level3 to send them traffic (or so I believe).

The cost is not how many links it has to traverse, but the cost of the peering agreement that that network has with where it is sending the traffic.

"The only appreciable differences between the Xfinity streaming service for Xbox and e.g., Netflix, are that the source of content is within the Comcast’s “internal” CDN instead of on a third-party CDN, and that Comcast requires you to be using their own Internet service. (This is much more likely related to their agreements with content owners rather than any technical reason.) "

This is wrong. The reason is entirely financial. It is cheaper for Comcast to send traffic only within their network. If I traveled to China, it would cost Comcast much more to send the traffic to China and almost nothing to send the traffic to my computer which is Comcast's network.

"As you’ll see, the cap-exempt content is likely even more expensive for Comcast to deliver than the third party content!"

"All of these third-party streams almost certainly originate from third party providers in the Bay Area, all via direct connections to Comcast. Even though they count against my bandwidth cap, they almost certainly traverse fewer fiber route-miles and physical router ports (Comcast’s two primary costs of delivery) than the stream which originated in Seattle(!) and does not count against my cap."

Completely wrong.. Even though it is a further distance away, sending traffic from Seattle to somewhere in California is almost no cost to Comcast, so long as it stays within their network. With retrieving content from Level3 (such as Netflix movies), it has to _pay_ Level3 to send them traffic that its users want.

Again, sorry to bash on the author so much, but the author was misinformed concerning cost. Also, DSCP is kind of meaningless when traveling between networks (any network router can overwrite them and change their priority).
Because that would be illegal and easier to trace than dumping them publicly. This way Twitter does the work.
That's strange. I forgot about the Sony site. The best one was the Exchange program. Was cool to see a connectdb.php file with 3 credentials to 3 different servers...
Will the real programmer please stand up?
They should probably be a lot more involved than "talk to some teachers before we push it up".
I agree.

Think about what "too much" Heroku spend is. Think about what level of adoption/success it will take to reach that much Heroku spend. Then consider if you actually get to that level of adoption, are your Heroku costs really going to be "too much?" Don't spend more than 90 minutes on the whole exercise.

My guess is that, for most apps, worrying before launch about migrating off of Heroku is a premature optimization.
That's assuming there is only 1 person in the car.
A car that does 60mpg with 5 passengers can move people 300mpg (of course you will lose some mpg due to the extra weight)
Can you elaborate technically on how you went about this? Thanks!
It's always a treat to hear Alan Kay go on about how smart Alan Kay is. Those were the days, I guess? Sorry about this whole PC-internet revolution thing.
Will there be a video of this? That would be very awesome.
Great work. I'll be following your updates. I'm building a platform for developers to crunch such APIs / data sets..