skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every company incentivizes its employees to behave in certain ways, and one of the main ways to incentivize is through monetary reward. We're big believers in keeping our employees happy. And research* shows there's a big correlation between commute time and employee happiness. So we've made the decision to try to encourage, through a bonus, all of us to stay close to the office.

I see it as similar to the way FullContact is trying out a program to encourage its employees to take real vacation time - paid, paid vacation. They believe (and we do too, actually), that people SHOULD take time off work to go cool places. But they often don't. But if you give them money to do it, maybe they will.

Of course, you don't have to agree. And maybe it means we wouldn't be a good culture fit for you. Sounds like you're okay with that?

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-rese...
http://www.fullcontact.com/2012/07/10/paid-paid-vacation/
Maybe it would help if we decided what the problems really were? Everyone seems to agree that it is completely broken; I'm not seeing it. I see a few, what I consider to be, very bad comments occasionally and they tend to be down-voted out of visibility, so it seems like the current system sort of works? Is the problem more related to there being people going against the accepted groupthink? It feels a little like "grass is greener" to me. No community is perfect; to me it seems like the main issue, and I don't think it's a real problem, is the there seems to be a growing amount of non-technical people, which is OK but it will tend to change the content of discussions quite a bit if the trend continues. Overall, I'm obviously in the minority, I don't think there is a dramatic problem.

The post that started this recent wave, someone was, I suppose, genuinely upset about not receiving good comments to a "look at my project post." However, a user looked through posts and actually found a lot of praise ... So, I don't know what to think about that.
> There's no reason you can't have the normal UI act like a giant textarea.

Sounds like you're describing Workflowy: https://workflowy.com
I think what he's actually complaining about there is the search - in Win7 results from apps, settings, files, etc. get combined by default, in Win8 you have to click on the individual category (or remember the keyboard shortcut to it).
I caught the second half of this and enjoyed what I saw. Pretty interesting getting some insight into the setups and what is going on for us Aussies. Now to catch the first half.
Not with Metro apps, on the desktop everything works the same though.
A startup incubator?
Someone mentioned that Glacier uses standard HDDs, not tape.
I've heard good things about Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. It is on my "to read" list.

http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Light-Edison-Westinghouse-Elec...
I think in order to stay positive one must ignore reality.
Until you're profitable (i.e. while you're still dependent on venture funding), my thinking is that equity is cash: the two are convertible quantities, with the conversion rate being based on our company's likely next valuation or cap.

If, as a founder, you give up so much equity that your option pool is totally depleted at the next funding round, then 10-20% will need to go to an option pool top-of -- and there's that much less equity to sell to the new investors, meaning less cash can flow into the coffers. Spending equity costs the company cash.

Meanwhile, if you spend double the cash of another startup in the same stage, your runway depletes doubly fast, and you need to raise sooner. Spending cash costs the company equity.
Apps with background tasks are generally supposed to pop up a notification when they're done (the APIs for the new notification popups are available for use by desktop apps too btw, although admittedly they probably won't be widely implemented for a while if ever).
Good story, thanks for sharing.

Would you mind telling us how your IAP is working out for Groups: did anyone buy the "I really love your app!" option at $9.99 -- cool idea, btw.
Shit, that's what I got as a first employee at a company that has <$1m in VC/angel investment. Market-rate engineering salary, too.
in my experience as a developer/user the plancast API hasn't actually been very well maintained
350x350 would keep 30 people busy for what, a couple hours? Certainly not weeks.
This made things much clearer for me. I just read the blog post for the first time and wasn't confused.
introducing mu4e for email
This applies to so many fields. IT and security are two common examples from more technical areas. Both are invisible unless they screw up. Programmers get this a lot, too. Good software is often invisible to its users, and programmers mostly get attention when users hit bugs or bad design.

The way we see marketing is often the way a lot of people will see us, so it's something worth learning more about.
Ethernet's future: How fast is fast enough?
A fantastic read. Don't miss the audiobook if you're into audiobooks (great for long commutes and if you're not English and want to improve it)[1].

It's read by Simon Prebble[2]. I absolutely love his voice. His 1984[3] is probably my favorite audiobook (I listen to audiobooks a lot).

He is great. From Wikipedia:

In the U.S., he also began narrating audio books,and to date (2012) has recorded well over 450 titles. As one of AudioFile Magazine's 'Golden Voices' and 'Best Voices of the Century', his work has gained him five 'Listen Up' awards, thirty 'Earphone' awards, and in 2005, he was named 'Narrator of theYear' by Publishers Weekly. Nominated fifteen times for the 'Audies' (the audiobook 'Oscars'), he was finally awarded a coveted 'Audie' in 2010, the year he was also named Booklist's 'Voice of Choice'.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Times-Nikola-Biography-Genius/d...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Prebble

[3]: http://www.amazon.com/1984-New-Classic-Edition/dp/B000Q6ZLOI
The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator’s S12 Demo Day
Facebook's high costs are driving game developers away
Yes, actually quite a few people bought it. Almost every day someone buys it, which makes us quite happy :)

I should make a graph showing how many of each are purchased on average.
The companies should be able to deduct it fully.

The museum aspect, non profit status etc doesn't matter. It's a legitimate marketing expense - they're paying the money to get on the front page of The Oatmeal, the same as if it went straight in The Oatmeal's pockets.
Are you really arguing that the 'java' way in your example is superior to Scala's
It actually is an interesting game (in the game theory sense). I make no claims about whether or not it is a good business idea, or how people will actually play, but a quick and incomplete theoretical analysis follows.

First, some simplifications:
* an infinite number of players
* everyone agrees on the ordering (quality, utility, etc) of shirts
* only look for symmetric equilibria (where everyone plays the same strategy)

Some notation:

Let there be N shirts (N=5 for this application). Order the shirts by their utility (that everyone agrees on). x1 < x2 < ... < xN. Let the utility from the bonus shirt be z, where z > xN.

The most simple strategy is for everyone to randomize and put equal probability on each shirt. If everyone plays according to that strategy, then the expected payoff for any given player is avg(x1, ... , xN) + z/N. But this can't be a Nash equilibrium because an individual player could deviate and choose xN with probability 1 and get payoff xN + z/N.

The (maybe not the only) Nash equilibrium is probabilities p1, p2, ..., pN such that sum(p1, p2, ..., pN)=1 and x1+p1z = x2+p2z = ... = xN+pNz. These probabilities make a player indifferent between choosing each shirt with certainty.

I haven't spent the time to see if there is a nice formula for the probabilities, but for the case of N=2, you get

p1=(x2-x1+z)/2z and p2=1-(x2-x1+z)/2z

This doesn't take into account that people have different tastes, or the sequential information that the star creates. The game gets very complicated with these added in.
Minority Births Outnumbered Whites for the First Time
Show HN: Timekeepr - Super simple time-tracking. No sign-up required.
I am sorry but you already had a fan base. So you already had 1000s of users. And you told them before launching this app is coming. How is this not marketing?

This is why I don't like to read and believe things on internet. You leveraged your prior advertising. And the rest of the things you mentioned was basically, build a great product. Everyone here knows that. But we have also heard so many times no product sells itself irrespective of how great.So I don't know what was the point of mentioning all those features etc

You also used SEO tactics to get people find your app. That is also classic internet marketing
I actually really like Windows 8, and, at the same time, agree with a lot of the points that the author makes in the article. I think the big difference is that I am actually really excited that Windows 8 is a touch first OS. Yes, this makes it less than ideal to use with my existing hardware. But, I am completely fine with that. I plan on upgrading my mouse on my desktop to a multi-touch mouse and I plan on taking advantage of the new track pad gestures when drivers become available. Long term, I do not imagine ever owning another device that does not support touch. In my opinion, if you are viewing Windows 8 through the eyes of current day hardware, you are missing the point.
...and Hacker News makes the news again!
How Dolby Digital Plus and Android tablets could set standard for mobile audio
I usually let someone else handle financial negotiations if I referred someone into a company (even if I'd otherwise be the one doing that), unless it's a totally mechanical calculation. I'm not sure how I would do that with a fiancee.
Project Wide Conversion to Ruby 1.9.x Style Hashes
This article is literally just a digested form of the HN thread from earlier today.
Loveopolis.com - NEW SOCIAL ONLINE DATING STARTUP looking for feedback
Looking for feature feedback. Any suggestions would be awesome!<p>Thanks
You don't need a CS degree to become a web developer. Here's why.
CSS Font Stack: A complete collection of web safe CSS font stacks
You can afford 1Gbps for as little as $70/mo. Currently only in Kansas City, but it will probably expand to other cities soon.
"Export" is not "sharing".
I think it is referring to the tape library retreival robot.
$100 million on censors?

How about legalize some of the softer drugs they are flying so it becomes less profitable for them to carry out such operations in the first place?
Assuming you already know other languages ...

Pick a smallish but difficult problem, and solve it. Maybe best is to make a personal utility that you would use, even if you already have that utility.

Don't worry about getting every idiom right, or fitting in exactly with the language's culture (but do pay attention to it).

Try all the things! This is your chance to try all the language features, without embarrassment, even if they aren't the most appropriate choice.

Get something working the very first day, preferably the first hour. Could be the equivalent of hello world, doesn't matter. Always have something working, and something next on the list for tomorrow, to help you wake up interested. That way you'll keep at it.
That's intentional. You can mark an item as "done" in text mode by prepending an X. It's even in the instructions.
54,000 refugees, no questions asked
Yes! This is exactly what I was thinking of, but didn't know existed. Thanks.
samviixii@gmail.com
I'll buy Arq immediately when Glacier gets added
I think the case you are making is a little exaggerated. It is not impossible to judge whether something you created is any good or not, without charging for it. The feedback that Joe is getting in the app store is not entirely worthless.

Additionally customers who are not willing to pay aren't necessarily "better" customers. For example in the case of Twitter verus App.net. I'm guessing the people who are willing to pay for App.net are a very selective group of geeky tech nerds. (I'm one of those people.) Listening to those people will lead you to develop a version of Twitter that appeals to them. If you want to develop a version of Twitter that appeals to normal people, charging money will attract the wrong crowd.
Story update: An Amazon spokesperson says "For a single request the billable peak rate is the size of the archive, divided by four hours, minus the pro-rated 5% free tier."

From tc's excellent analysis http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4412886

----

In that case, the math would work as follows:

After uploading 3TB (3 * 2^40 bytes) as a single archive, your retrieval allowance would be 153.6 GB/mo (3TB * 5%), or 5.12 GB/day (3TB * 5% / 30). Assuming this one retrieval was the only retrieval of the day, and as it's a single archive you can't break it into smaller pieces, your billable peak hourly retrieval would be 3072 GB - 5.12 GB = 3066.88 GB.

Thus your retrieval fee would be 3066.88 * 720 * .01 = $22081.535 (719x your monthly storage fee).

----

Using the new Amazon (unexplained) numbers...

The billable peak hourly retrieval would be (3072 GB / 4) - 5.12 GB = 768 GB - 5.12 GB = 762.88 GB.

Thus your retrieval fee would be 762.88 * 720 * .01 = $5492.74. Still pretty expensive.
I think her methodology was sound, and knowing to use it at all was great. I just question the CEO/founder for low-balling to begin with, and I'm not sure if the whole thing raises the perceived awesomeness of keen.io as an employer (which is what you'd want on a corporate blog).
it depends and the amount can vary. I buy season tickets for my colleges football team and the seats I request have a minimum donation value required with them. all goes to a 501 3c, but if I recall its deductible at 70% of donation value.
One benefit of having many different jobs is that you meet a lot of awesome people in your field. And if you actually are good, then these ex-colleagues will probably invite you to new opportunities when they hop themselves.
The Personal Touch.
I have seen the opposite the case sometimes, too -- people overcompensate and treat their friends/spouses worse than they'd treat an arms length employee.

I personally worked with a married couple as founders, and would never do this again (a lot had to do with them in specific, but the general failure mode of any relationship problems spilling over into business, on top of them always ganging up on others, seems general). I'd probably work at a company with siblings as founders, and maybe at a company where a couple were in different roles (founder + employee).
For curiosity's and an cryptography newb, how does the lithium PHP framework stack up against the methods discussed in the article?

Password hashing:
http://lithify.me/docs/lithium/security/Password::hash()
Rental Subsidies for Employees
I've noticed a few start-ups that offer or did offer rental subsidies for employees who live near the office.

How does this work from an accounting / legal standpoint?
You're right! Why complicate things by saving?
Supreme Court of Victoria on the liability of ISPs for copyright infringement
Hey, best of luck with this - I really like the idea and it seems like something you're passionate about. Congrats for shipping it, I'm excited to see what reputation it builds.

That being said, I'm excited for my minimalist bicycle t-shirt!
Totally. :)
Not to be a spoil sport, but it's rather easy to raise money and buy land; it's much more difficult to get a probe built and onto the surface of another world.

Plus, does that estimate include support satellites (it apparently doesn't include the costs of getting the probe there)?
Why not legalize all of the drugs? We've proven that we can't stop people from using drugs. What advantage is there in ensuring that the billions spent on drugs gets funneled into the hands of hardened criminals?
I'm in roughly the same camp as you here. I depend quite a bit on things generally working in a Unix-y sort of way. Not necessarily everything, but POSIX compliance is pretty important for me, since it means I can rely on a wealth of software that's already been made, in particular for command line use. Time Machine, disk encryption, and the applications already available for OS X are excellent as well.

Font rendering is also an important point of OS X for me. Generally speaking -- qua someone judging the OS based on whether I like looking at it every day -- Mac OS has the best font rendering. This in turn makes it much easier to stare at code, a terminal emulator, and many other tons of text all day. This is even better with the HDPI display on the recent Macbook Pros, which makes the screen really comfortable to use.

One of the biggest point for me is that Mac OS comes with bash and a terminal emulator. The flexibility that a shell on BSD, Linux, etc. offers me is far beyond what I could do with the Windows console back when I still used Windows as my primary OS. This is also somewhat more important on Mac OS, as Finder, the file manager (for those who don't know it), is absolute garbage. Windows still has the best graphical file manager I've seen, but I preferred to get around in the shell, so the Windows console was always inadequate.

That's probably changed a lot since then, especially with the advent of Powershell, but I'm still not convinced that Windows is any good for someone who relies heavily on a shell. Piping output into other programs and treating them as little functions to build up bigger things has saved my ass a lot. It's saved me often enough that I don't want to end up on a system that has a passable shell but lacks all the tools at my disposal on Mac OS or Linux. As such, I'm pretty committed to any OS that offers that same level of flexibility, and I've never gotten the impression that Windows could give me that.

Additionally, I also love Apple's APIs, at least Cocoa. The older C APIs are far less friendly, but they work and offer some very powerful tools as well. So, working in Objective-C (or MacRuby) is the way to go for me for a lot of personal projects. This is largely the only thing that keeps me on Mac OS now aside from it simply having all the software I know well.

All that said, it's troubling how much harder it's become to use all of my tools as I'd like. For example, in Mac OS 10.8, the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file, used to set environment variables in applications launched via Finder and such, was deprecated. I can work around this by editing a system file, but it's not a good fix, and I imagine it's only going to get worse. So far as I know, that sort of thing wouldn't happen on Linux, and is largely a result of Apple locking down large chunks of the OS, I think.

So, yeah, Mac OS for me, but only for as long as Objective-C remains mostly unusable on other platforms. That may be a long time, though, so I'm probably in this for the long haul. Either way, for the majority of the work I do -- mainly writing articles and software for my own use -- Mac OS is my preference.
It's different if you're actively involved in the business, vs. soliciting people for investment. It's fine for someone who makes $25k/yr as your security guard, who inherits $50k and doesn't know what to do with it, to buy an extra $5k of equity if he wants.
NT "branch" releases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Releases

And that was:
* NT 3.1 - Had Windows 3.x type UI
* NT 3.5 - Had Windows 3.x type UI
* NT 3.51 - Had Windows 3.x type UI
* NT 4 - Had Windows 9x type UI
* Windows 2000 (NT 5)
* Windows XP (NT 5.1 - XP x64 was 5.2 though)
* Windows Server 2003/R2 (NT 5.2)
* Windows Vista/Server 2008 (NT 6.0)
* Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 (NT 6.1)
* Windows 8/Server 2012 (NT 6.2)

I remember NT 4 was used on the main server(s) at my highschool.

I think it's safe to say, XP was the first consumer/"home" user version. Though, Windows 2000 (Professional) was used in corporate environments.
It's different if you're actively involved in the business, vs. soliciting people for investment. It's fine for someone who makes $25k/yr as your security guard, who inherits $50k and doesn't know what to do with it, to buy an extra $5k of equity if he wants. (this is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer)
The case concerned the liability of an ISP "iiNet" for the copyright infringement of its customers via BitTorrent.

The actual judgment is worth a read. It goes into some detail about the technology involved and is in my view a pretty good legal analysis of the implications for ISPs.
Thank you for the reply. I think I need to use very different styles for the submissions for HN and Reddit.
Re: no-signup approach

I really like the fast start, but I would MUCH prefer them to allow me to give them some login info (maybe even just Google login or something) so that I wouldn't have to save a funky URL someplace. In addition to that, the option to have multiple trees (hit the holly button) is useless since only the browser that's seen all of your trees can access all of them (without the funky URL). It would almost be a feature if you could also forget trees that you've seen (keep a work tree and a home tree, perhaps, but no work at home). I think it badly needs the option of having a login or at least an unsecure custom URL option.
I remember Mitch Kapor saying the same thing after IBM bought Lotus.
Actually, a startup doesn't even need a website, or be anything software, a startup is a new company trying to create a new service or product that will bring revenue. No revenue, no company, no startup. Tesla motors is not a startup?
Obviously it wasn't clear to you that the comment was not from me, but taken from the site linked below. Try reading that link before you post again, little fellow!
A startup is a company that has captured a small percentage of the overall market it is attempting to fulfill. For example, I would say Tesla Motors is still a startup.

By contrast, I would not consider crranky's Blogspot website a startup because I suspect it has captured most of the small, shrinking market it targets.
I was disappointed to find out this wasn't about a revolutionary golf tee design.
By success, I mean "make money for the investors". That seems like a reasonable criteria for judging the success of an investment.

I don't think I see where you're coming from, actually. Do you object to YC investing in 9gag because:

It won't be a successful investment, aka make money for its investors

OR: It might be a successful investment, but if so it's only because they bamboozled someone. It won't ever make much money, though someone might acquire it (or it might IPO).

OR: It will be a successful investment, but it's trash as a product.

OR: It will be a successful investment, and it's OK as a product for some people, but it's not innovative enough

OR: something else? You mention a lot of things, but what's the core reason you object?
Literally speaking, if you have "started something up", it is a start-up!
Exactly. Plus there are a lot of companies that will get to that level, then grow slowly but profitably over the next 10 years. Aweber was started by one guy in his basement right around the time the dot-com bubble peaked. He was up against competitors that had raised tens of millions and a few were already public. (I sold my company to one of them.)

Those competitors are all gone now and Aweber is basically a giant ATM for the founder.
Understanding Circumstance
9gag certainly illustrates how hard up the Internet is for high-quality humor. (Just now, browsing the site, I didn't find anything I would want to share with my friends.)

Fundersclub sounds quite disruptive.

Bufferbox might be useful (at the right price) once it is within walking/bicycling distance of my house, as a UPS store location already is.
Why? They are completely different games that share a few similar themes (mining & construction).

Minecraft owes more to Infiniminer, but it has been its own game ever since development on Survival Mode started.