skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As long as the email isn't as fully formulated as an actual contract I usually tend to see them more as a declaration of an intent that isn't 100% fixed yet and is missing some of the details. (such as: you won't get it after you decided to quit and work somewhere else).

That's usually the nice thing about startups, you don't have to fill out gobs of paperwork and have hours of meetings to get these small perks figured out, it's more of a "good will" thing imho.

But I guess I just have a different opinion when it comes to things that don't have 2 signatures at the bottom of them.
Looks like I'll be spending a lot of time on here...

First impression feedback: while quickly looking at a bunch of the Essential Mixes, many of them don't have the location where it took place. Personally, I've mentally sorted a lot of these by location && artist, so might find it hard to find something specific I'm looking for.
> Moving to the US and having to deal with health insurance makes me nervous.

Don't worry, your nervousness will be replaced by anger soon enough.
I've had customers "threaten" me with the same. Some people get really unlucky(had a customer receive two defective products in a row and the third time we were OOS). I've never begrudged a customer for sharing their experience with others as long as its a factual account. In fact with that customer I confirmed his account of events and apologized publicly.
Medical Care != ER
If you have access to those papers I'd be curious to check them out, just send me an email.
I honestly couldn't tell if this was tongue-in-cheek or genuine.

Between the name and 'ninja coders' and the changing backgrounds, it was very hard to take seriously.

On the flip side, it's a solid idea.
I like the design.

I really like the idea, questions I'm walking away with:

Who is behind this?

Are they experienced in giving the advice from first hand success or talking the talk?

How can I get advice from someone who's already done this?

Is this trying to start a marketplace of sorts connecting people with no real bar of quality?

I signed up to find out more..
The engineer communicated very professionally too. Just because you don't HAVE to not be an asshole, doesn't mean you SHOULD be an asshole. I agree with the engineer here since really this is something they promised at least informally and not delivering on it out of spite is just douchey.
I'm going to guess here that you're talking about the recent bubble. I think so, yes, it was very predictable.

I wasn't being so specific though. It's a fact of life that expansion and contraction cycles must happen in most Western countries, given the generalised policy of having a (very) fractional reserve and resorting to "the printer" regularly to "stimulate" the economy. These cycles have been happening for many decades and will continue to happen as long as things work roughly the same way.
Grooveshark, AWS (S3, EC2), Github, Linode, pgrmr, slicehost (I have a lot of pet projects,) Netflix, Dropbox, Hulu Plus.
The problem with that is that emergency care is absurdly expensive. I was in an accident last year that put me in hospital for one night for observation, and I was billed almost $20k. Where illness rather than accident is the problem, people postpone going to a doctor or hospital until they are really ill, even though it would be much cheaper to address a minor illness before it becomes a medical emergency - a stitch in time saves nine, and all that. But people without insurance find access to non-emergency care difficult because of cost, and so the emergency spend half their resources dealing with completely avoidable medical problems.

And even if you do have insurance or the ability to pay, or (AFAIK) if a hospital waives payment for someone indigent, there's still a metric ton of paperwork to be filled out, which makes doing my taxes seem simple and fun by comparison. Don't even get me started on the catastrophically bad state of medical record-keeping.
In Richard Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class", he describes an experiment, complete with empirical data, that show an overwhelming positive correlation between gay-friendliness and positive economic outlook.
A bit dissapointed that all the live events and checkins are scheduled for San Francisco. (I read about the online thing, but that's not the same) Would be nice if we could alternate between San Jose and San Francisco, or at least meet somewhere on the Peninsula.

As others have mentioned: very cool and slick site pitch. That earned my signup alone.
It serves to inform potential employees of what they should pay attention to when negotiating with this company. Is it that it puts some tiny bit of negotiating power into the hands of potential employees that makes it distasteful for you?
Cool! A friend and I were working on something like this in nyc. Maybe we can join forces as a few of us have had some similar idea. I'd organize a NYC chapter if thats possible. Not sure who to contact but i'm frank @ startupthreads . com
Reminds me of those pages where there is no content, but links to more results for the term you originally googled for. Just there to drive views and clicks, no original content.

I'm baffled at how they justify using these kind of tactics. A YC company no less…
Hello, needed in NYC where there is NoCombinator.
I agree with that, but I also know that we all make choices about which things we defend either directly or indirectly. Lawyers defend clients regardless of the repugnance of the allegations because it serves the greater good. Those of us who are not lawyers have the luxury of picking and choosing our battles.

I can’t read the man’s mind, but I do know that he has made a choice to discuss the subject and a choice to poke holes in an argument made by one side of the subject, and the choice to leave that comment right there without any attempt at balance or qualification.
A friend and I almost did a travel-search startup, but I'm we didn't, we wanted to do something like Wanderfly (before we knew it existed). Seems like Wanderfly made somewhat of a pivot though, so that either means the idea (of selecting interests and a price range or even certain geographical areas and doing relevant searches) didn't work at the time, at all, or the execution was flawed. I very much doubt that bad execution was a factor, it looked very good to me.
Pentagon CIO Teri Takai Talks about Security, Mobility, & Budget Cuts
That thread shows that all of the particulars of your claims about Riak are actually false. Further it seems you didn't bother to understand how Riak can solve your problem and thus decided that it cannot.
Black voters divided on gay marriage
Probably because the javascript require to change the background would pause the scrolling or slow down the browser.
Ugh.

I had someone not pay me $9k, and have filed a lawsuit. We're closing in on 4 years now (aug 2008) and still no court date. Courts take time.

I wrestled with 'name and shame', and in some respect, wish I had named. I found out that this company/person had done this to others, and one of the guys 'named' him publicly on a blog. He got a threatening call, telling him to take it down and he'd get paid. Of course, he took it down and didn't get paid - that was < $1k from what I remember.

I hear this a lot - "don't go public with these sorts of things, you'll get a bad reputation, blah blah blah". I'm really torn. I get it, but... if more people started doing this - going public when BS like this is perpetrated - there'd be far less resistance to hiring/contracting with people who have air this sort of stuff.

I've been self-employed for 5 years, have contracted on dozens of projects, and have 2 instances where I got shafted out of money owed. If I was to publicize those, but also have, say 25 other projects under my belt with fine referrals, wouldn't that say more about the 2 shafters vs me? And again, if everyone was doing this, it would seem a lot more normal.

Yeah, if I publicly trashed every company I worked with, my 'trashing score' would be pretty high, and people would want to stay away from me. But really, I'd prefer people know that I publicly praise good clients and trash bad ones, and if they think they're going to be a bad client, to not bother reaching out. I'd rather there be a filter there which keeps crap clients away in the first place.

The thing is, we all have to start doing this at the same time. I do agree that legal proceedings are worthwhile in some cases, in many cases, people are getting shafted out of hundreds or thousands, and it's often not worth the time to 'go legal'. The habitual scumbags know this and take advantage of it, continually rolling through contractors. They know most of them will just leave and won't make a public fuss, because they want to be 'employable' and not be known as a 'troublemaker'. Someone who doesn't pay me for contractual work done is the troublemaker, but somehow that seems to get lost.
Even if it's not, you just ask for the limit of the small claims court. $5k is still better than a kick at the table leg, and it's probably more than you'd get were you to hire a lawyer and sue for the full amount.
I agree with you that the MPAA claim is silly. But in this case, you're actually consuming the product - using their bandwidth, their servers, etc, all of which costs money - and denying them the revenue they use to support that service. The argument with the MPAA concept is that you're not denying them a sale, nor are you increasing their cost of doing business, but here you're you're doing the latter.

Do you really believe that advertising (which is only part of what marketing departments do) is "zero value-add"? How do you learn about new products? How do you think the press who review products learn about them? How does a product become available for your to buy at Walgreens on the corner? All of that is "marketing"...
I liked the bird hierarchy of combinators, myself.
According to:

http://searchengineland.com/the-new-bing-microsoft-tries-aga...

Bing has a deal with facebook and twitter to access the data.

> However, Google still has an argument that it cannot get all the same data on the open web as Bing. Twitter actually closed itself off to Google last year, blocking Google from even getting open web data. Even if Google renews a deal with Twitter, it’s now gunshy about building features around something that might disappear. Meanwhile, Facebook doesn’t seem to allow public posts out to the open web.

> Bing doesn’t have these issues, with a deal in place with Twitter and Facebook and no apparent blocking by Google.
The older Dell laptops seem to fare much better than the newer ones.
> a recent study estimated that these drugs were killing
> 300,000 - 500,000 Americans each year

Looks like sloppy epidemiology to me. The only way to nail a claim like that down would be to establish a control group with very similar life stressors, something you couldn't do from medical records. People take sleeping pills because they're under stress bad enough to keep them from sleeping, and that has an impact on survival rates.

> what is clear is that the longterm use of them is terrible
> for you and that they have zero longterm efficacy in the
> first place.)

This is interesting. What's the evidence?
Quite correct - religion isn't a problem, it's only those that believe in them that cause any sort of difficulty.

If God wants to stop gay marriage or contraception or abortion then that's fine - all he has to do is appear in the clouds and say so.
How economic growth (and the 1%) left the middle class behind
Let us be generous and consider the possibility that downvotes reflect the opinion that my question is off-topic in a thread about his health rather than agreement or disagreement.
Yep, totally useful if that's what you wanted. But like I mentioned in the article, I didn't want to turn off all re-targeting since some of those ads are relevant. Also to change your "preferences" you need a Google account, I have 100 of those :) I also don't want to manage categories of ads, I just didn't want to see specific vendors.
I agree. It sounds like the OP wants some attention, even if he claims he's doing it for the public service. His ego is bruised, he just wants to recover from it.
Any money that comes to me a result of this post goes straight to charity. You guys have my word.
What do you think is in a KFC family bucket?
> You may want to consider putting the $10K towards a good cause (if Miso eventually steps up), to show it was never about the money.

Why wouldn't it be about the money?

Why is this guy under any obligation to give away money he EARNED by making a referral?
Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) at BigOmaha: Build products to scale yourself
My understanding, rb2k_, is that if I make an offer for compensation in return for a service, and you then go perform that service, then we've made a contract. I "signed" my name by making the offer. You "signed" your name by accepting and completing the service. We've both acted out of free will and we've had a "meeting of the minds." If I back out and try to avoid paying you, then I have broken this contract.

Think how many things in our society would break down if this wasn't the case.
> You may want to consider putting the $10K towards a good cause (if Miso eventually steps up), to show it was never about the money.

Why in god's name shouldn't it be about the money? He delivered incredible value by finding the company some talent in a talent-scarce environment. $10k seems like a pittance – but definitely one he earned.
His blogpost was quite questionable imho.
Things like these really read as very professional, at least to me:

- "Impeccable logic."

- ' At this point. You might as well just tell me "fuck you. you didn't sign a contract. boohoo." '

- ' I was starting to feel like they were determined to screw me.'

- 'No. I'm not proud of threatening, but I was pissed.'

- ' The rest of this chain of emails consists of me double checking if he understood what I was saying, and him giving me some more BS.'

- 'This is unethical practice. Period.'

- 'Somrat. Tim. Was this worth the 10k?'
Do we really have to have a debate about "don't follow lone women into elevators at 4AM to ask them out at tech conferences"? I'm sorry, I don't think we seriously have to debate this.
I know lots of startups that use recruiters, including some YC-backed ones. Recruiting can take a lot of time, particularly if you're expanding rapidly. If you're the CTO it may not necessarily be the best use of your time to look through hundreds (and yes, you'll get hundreds) of CVs from a post on StackOverflow or HackerNews...

Of course, there are some that don't, but it's certainly not unusual for startups to use recruiters.
> Taking it public like this comes across as really petty and childish.

I'm sure that everyone who would screw an engineer out of $10k agrees with this.
Ah nice. I didn't realize they had this as I only use Hulu on my TV with a Roku.
Taking this "public" seems like a lose-lose. Miso doesn't come off super awesome obviously, but as a disgruntled employee, you're not setting yourself up for success either.

For example, should some future employer decide to Google your name before making an offer, they're likely to come up with an old spat between you and your employer. Even if you're in the right, it will make them think twice about hiring you. This disagreement may follow you forever (Google doesn't forget) and cost much more than $10k.

A better tactic may be to try and leverage your relationship with your friend who is still employed there. If this quarrel is detrimental to his morale, they may be willing to come to an agreement.
While publicly posting about this probably feels good, it reflects badly on you as well as Miso.

* The lack of backups is partly your fault. You were an engineer there after all.

* Nuking a production database can happen, but the default assumption is that you are sloppy.

* Based on the timeframes one could assume you were fired from Miso.

* You have no problem revealing confidential information about your former employer's infrastructure and operations.

* You publicly post private emails between you and your former employer.
I would see the wall street types more fitting into the "looter" category of Rand's philosophy. They are not directly creating anything of value, but instead skimming money from the ventures of those who do.
Stay off of HN. :)
I'd love to have tuesday dinner meetups in several cities simultaneously. Would you be interested in organizing one in the valley as well?
I'm assuming his company actually makes revenues since they charge, so most of the salaries may be covered by revenues already and the funding will make up the rest.
> putting business logic where it belonged in the first place

I've been thinking a lot about where to put business logic, and I think the models are the closest, but not the best place for them.

A significant portion of this logic for me affects more than one model, and while you could solve this by using public interfaces, you still need to put in any of the models, which seems like a suboptimal approach.

The ORM is already responsible for several layers, and custom business logic is not relevant there imho.

Still puzzled how to organize my code. MVC has started to fall apart for me. Just my two cents.
Hackatrain: The 1st Hackathon Inside a CTA Train in Chicago
skype, rightsignature
We already did. S. mutans has been genetically modified to excrete water instead of the acid that normally wears away enamel.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Dental/story?id=98080&page=...
FTC Investigating Facebook's Instagram purchase
Wow, I fell for that too! Double-speak insanity. Thanks for catching that.
You are under absolutely no obligation to do or say this, but if that's where you want it to go, good for you. I would be equally supportive if you promised to buy a hot tub with the money. You earned that cash.
Are you also going to quit visiting every site that is subsidized by ad revenue?
Almost exactly the same thing happened to me. That's when I installed Adblock and Ghostery. (Hmm, I should install Ghostery in this browser, actually...)
I do like how this post is bringing out some me toos. There are a lot of great ideas that are not coming out of the valley.
Notice that Miso is not actually denying that they pay the money: "However, we only pay bonuses to employees." They are being hard-nosed about paying someone that is not employed at the current time, even though he was eligible when he was employed.

Fail for Miso.
RubyMotion Book
My first product, 3 months after
Let's Increment i, Logic Gate Style
I'd go a step further and recommend looking into HTML5/Canvas and the frameworks that are starting to go up for that platform.
Yes. I do want some attention. But really, I think anyone here can see that I have a lot more to lose here than to gain. If this was a matter of pride I'd leave it as a Facebook post for my friends and call it a day. To me, this is the right thing to do, not the smart thing. Unfortunately the two don't necessary come in pairs.
I was going to contact them about it too but this wufoo thing just returns 404.
I tend to agree with @rb2k. There are payments you are entitled to by law (salary, vacation, personal expense reimbursement) and payments that companies do out of the goodness of their hearts (annual bonuses, lieu days, extra days off, referral bonuses). Don't quit under bad circumstances and expect to get money you're not by law entitled to. Should have gotten the money first.
Oh yes, because 6 dead babies have more "value" than half a million dead elderly. How dare the author make such a comparison!
On a somewhat related note, my dad (a dentist and scientist) recently discovered that there are stem cells that are almost as easy to manipulate as embryonic ones .. in our mouthes [1][2]. He always wondered why our gums heal so quickly, even as we age.

[1] Sorry for the PR-ish link (I'll ask him for the actual paper) - http://singularityhub.com/2012/05/10/toothless-no-more-resea...

[Edit 2] Here's the original publication (free) from Stem Cells Journal http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/stem.425/abstract
adwords. just make sure you have a business plan.
GNOME Design Update, Part Two
There are four elements of a contract:
Offer - "Have $10k for referring employees."
Acceptance - "Here is an employee."
Intent - "Have $10k"
Consideration - "$10k" -> "refer employee"

The OP's case is even stronger if he sent an email back saying "Thanks for offering $10k! I have a friend who would be interested!" as that is clear acceptance.

Signatures aren't needed (there's plenty of case law around). Courts are more likely to get involved where money is involved, as that shows firm commitment to a contract.

I am not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, of course.
Yes, because it results in employers "playing games" with the distinction between full-time and part-time to avoid having to give a living wage and benefits.
Pro-tip: look for the triangle in the top right of the ad. Usually clicking on it will provide an option for opting out, although it doesn't appear on all ads.
Verbatim, from the mailing list:

"If large-scale mapreduce (more than a few hundred thousand keys) is
important, or listing keys is critical, you might consider HBase."

"Riak can also collapse in horrible ways when asked to list huge numbers
of keys. Some people say it just gets slow on their large installations.
We've actually seen it hang the cluster altogether. Try it and find out!"
I agree that a lot of this stuff is informal, especially in the startup world. However, as far as actual legal implications go, this counts as a contract. It would even count as a contract if it were spoken; verbal contracts hold as much legal weight as paper contracts. I think we all value the relaxed atmosphere in smaller tech companies, but it's very much worth remembering, I think, that emails like this have weight, and promises are promises even when the company is small. There's a certain level on which we have to maintain professionalism even if we're small and dynamic.
3 days before elections, largest German state censors Pirate Party from the net
I could see Apple releasing a 7" "iPad mini", but certainly not a cent lower than $299. Apple would need to reprice the current iPod touch from $199 to $149. Also, at that price, I can't see it having a retina display. The 1024 X 768 resolution would look sharper than it did on the iPad 2 just by virtue of it being two inches smaller. The Kindle Fire is a legitimate threat to Apple despite their stranglehold on the rest of the tablet market. It's not farfetched to think the release of a smaller iPad is nigh.
> As long as the email isn't as fully formulated as an actual contract I usually tend to see them more as a declaration of an intent that isn't 100% fixed yet and is missing some of the details.

Does this mean I can ignore these four e-mails from my boss that formulates his intent for me to work on X and Y, and skip on off to work on Z instead?