skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a throw away account for a couple of reasons...but I wanted to make a point from the engineering grunt point of view...

>The value of incentive stock options is simply the value of
>being able to profit from increased market cap without having
>to actually risk or tie up any of your own money.

That may be true of the value of the option from a purely market point of view. That said, unless you are part of the rare group who is part of a facebook, twitter, or related that can actually trade on the private markets before an exit event.

The reality is, most engineers working for a startup are gambling their time and efforts for a single investment. More often than not, those investments of effort and time do not always result in much of a return.

From experience - a number of startups will push for rates that are "below market" for the promise of returns. That said, in the same time, day to day engineers (not the founders) who have experienced an exit has been on the order of basically $20-30k/year (over the term of one's employment). Often finding an arrangement with a more established company will result in a better return during the same time.

If you are in the market to join a startup for the exit, weigh your options closely. If you are in it to learn, work with a close bunch, and want to build something interesting, by all means pursue it.

Joining a startup is an investment of time and effort, you should not enter as a non-founder with the expectation of a monetary return. Most fail.
Using Websockets is a nice touch. However I haven't gotten my tests to work yet. Tried from my Gmail, and also manually SMTPing in.
Assuming that the act of learning doesn't 'grow' the brain in a meaningful way as part of the process. I think that's probably an assumption too far though.
Ask HN: Tech/Dev meetups in NYC over the next ten days?
I am visiting NYC for the next ten days. Any interesting tech talks or dev meetups or hack nights happening over the next ten days in NYC? I am trying to figure out a way to meet a few developers in the area, and get a sense of their interests.

My general interests are in machine learning, computer vision, and graphical models. I am a software engineer, currently working at a mid size startup building a digital advertising and data aggregation platform.

Thanks!
For the mind: Mindfulness in Plain English - Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

For the body: Born To Run - Chris McDougall

For fun: REAMDE - Neal Stephenson

For business: What The CEO Wants You To Know - Ram Charan
Options are priced, when they are awarded, to have no present value.

Let me introduce you to my friend Black-Scholes.

An option with a strike price equal to the current stock price very easily can have value, and the ones given to employees frequently have a lot of value. Even though the current strike price is the price of the stock.
The string in my URL is different but very similar to the string in the email address. Curious. 1QdVfTRH vs 1QdVfTS1
I think everything will remain the same. Tech will not be a source of innovation in 2013. I see 2013 as a bad year for tech.

For the first time I have doubts about going to Rubyconf or Railsconf in 2013. I still remember how excited everybody was on Baltimore 2011 and then, in austin 2012, I felt a lot of contentment.

Same for Javascript, all of the sudden, everything seems to have slowed down. You go to conferences and people (and speakers) are still a bit stuck on end of 2011. There is nothing really moving fast. Even shiny new things like meteor and ember seems to be moving at a very slow pace.

Also, the economic crisis is hitting the real economy hard and it influences open source projects directly.

That said, 2013 will be a tech hiatus.
Taking a look into it. My first thought is that some DNS servers are not updated yet :(
http://mailinator.com/ has been around for a while, and allows you to pick your own inbox name, as well as many alternate domains.
>there is a huge class of bad hire that starts strong and decays rapidly.

Exactly. Also, startups = growth. As you grow, the game changes and usually gets harder. Someone you hired to take you from 0 to X^10 customers may do an ok job in the first 4 months when you have to go from 0 to X customers but may be terrible at getting you from X to X^2 in the next 4 months.
Why? It seems like you are escalating a war AGAINST your users. Most folks who use a disposable address are trying to make sure their main address doesn't become a fount of spam. If I continue to visit your site/service, then I will probably decide to "update" my address on my own for the convenience. Am I really being naive?
In the "follow the money" line of thinking, looking at who takes most benefits from terrorism explains a lot of things. "Terrorists" didn't get much I think. Politicians, law makers, government agencies got to push forward their agenda by leaps and bounds.
My favorite disposable email provider, by far, is 33mail.com, mainly because the addresses don't have to be disposable. You give a different email address to each service, and, if you get spam, you know the culprit and can block them right away.

Brilliant.
That's not your mailaddress in the URL. It's like a password to access the inbox later :)
Sounds like Snow Crash! Snow Crash was one of the best I read this year, I'll put Ready Player One on my list!
I can easily imagine that "hunger for fame" is a component in these shootings, but that's not the same thing as "I have evidence to support" or even "is likely."
As well as guerilla mail: https://www.guerrillamail.com/

Given some of the other comments in the thread below, it seems like the more of these you have, the more likely one of them will work.
http://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html

is also quite nice.
Thanks, it looks very useful. However, if I want to reuse an address several times, it would be nice to be able to delete individual messages once I've read them.
Like anyone follows the TOS of any service they've ever used :P
One thing I like about receiveee more than mailinator and 33mail is that you can start using it without signing up. The user interaction is very smooth.
mailinator does this too.
The craziest Craigslist posts of 2012
New emails showed up really, really fast. Consider me impressed.

Just a minor suggestion: you could wrap the email address in a link prefaced by "mailto:" to make it super easy to test the service.
You can do the same with http://spamgourmet.com.
in practice instruction level parallelism and data access patterns make a big difference. if each memory access takes 100 ns but you can do 100 at a time, most of the time there is no practical difference from each memory access taking 1 ns where you can only do 1 at a time. an observer (either a human or another computer over a network) will not notice 100 ns. the numbers listed in this chart are pure latency numbers. what most people care about when talking about cache/memory speed is bandwidth.

on an intel sandy bridge processor, each L1 access takes 4 cycles, each L2 access takes 12 cycles, each L3 access takes about 30 cycles, and each main memory access takes about 65 ns. assuming you are using a 3 GHz processor, this would make you think that you can do 750 MT/s from L1, 250 MT/s from L2, 100 MT/s from L3, and 15 MT/s from RAM.

now imagine 3 different data access patterns on a 1 GB array:

1) sequentially reading through an array

2) reading through an array with a random access pattern

3) reading through an array in a pattern where the next index is determined by the value at the current index.

if you benchmark these 3 access patterns, you will see that:

1) sequential access can do 3750 MT/s

2) random access can do 75 MT/s

3) data-dependent access can do 15 MT/s

you might guess that sequential access is fast because it is a very predictable access pattern, but it is still 5x faster than the speed indicated by the latency of L1. maybe you'd think it's prefetching into registers or something? but notice the difference between random access and data-dependent access. this is probably not what you expected at all! why is random access 5x faster than data-dependent access? because on sandy bridge, each hyper threading core can do 5 memory accesses in parallel. this also explains why sequential access seems to be 5x faster than the speed of L1.

what does this mean in practice? that to do anything practical with these latency numbers, you also need to know the parallelism of your processor and the parallelizability of your access patterns. the pure latency number only matters if you are limited to one access at a time.
I too think nonstandard vesting schemes are a good approach. From an economical POV, http://blog.hariseshadri.com/irrationality-of-linear-equity-...
Well, I certainly want kids asking me for my password when the iTunes account is attached to my credit card. You can always switch back and forth between two iTunes accounts and use the apps on both. When you want to download a paid app, switch the account on the phone (using the same method as above), download the app, and switch back the account.
I experienced the same thing in my masters degree.
Know an entrepreneur? Give them the Gift of Code this holiday season.
Startup fail? Here’s how to close up shop with dignity
mailinator does not require signup
This is interesting; thanks for sharing.

It's only useful until websites start filtering out the receivee domain - that's been happening with a few disposable email addresses.

And the highlight on " We even automatically click on common activation links for you" was a bit confusing. I was expecting a link to a page about the pointlessness of Challenge Response.

And what I really dearly want is an anonymous way to send an email - I don't mind having to sign up; I don't mind having to pay; but I really want a method where sending an email to $Person means they have to work very hard to get my real identity. (This is for good, not bad, reasons. But I can see the potential for abuse.)
Your tone isn't helping your argument. Just saying.
"Support Entrepreneurs" commands Jeff the Great
I bought an Edimax N USB wifi adapter for my raspberry on amazon. It was like $11 and works out of the box with raspian. Now the damn thing boots and connects to my network faster than I can enter my 25 char password on my primary machine.
Just a side note, this only works for third party collectors (i.e. after your debt has been sold). In-house collections is pretty unregulated.
Very nice! I need one that's also a Mozilla Persona provider, maybe I'll write my own one weekend...
How so?

- Purchase a new device.
- Power it up.
- It asks you if it should be setup individually or as part of a group.
- You select group and enter the credentials.
- It then navigates you through a set of sensible startup options to configure the device's primary user
- Anything else you do online or through a dedicated group management app

In the case of getting an iPod for a kid, you power the thing up, choose group, enter her name, check off the allowed apps from a list, enable other options (can they make purchases?) and you are pretty much done. Hand it to the kid and walk away. You can refine other setup items at a later time.

I don't want my five year old to have an Apple ID or iCloud account. I just want her to have access to a dozen apps and that's it.
Yesterdays version.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4963838
Does Mixmeister work still?
This CNN article appears to be a re-post of the Mashable article, linked on Hackernews here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4963838
Your comments make a lot of sense to me. I agree about the 'jackpot' unknown. I do not use chat, yet I have a 'InitialChatFriendsList' that seems plausible to be "who views me" moreso than "who I view". What do you think?
It is much harder to position a book than it used to be.

Online documentation, both first-party and third-party, is far better than when O'Reilly started publishing. This makes beginner's books a difficult market, and there is a glut of books for beginners.

So you have to make an intermediate/expert book, for a more-demanding market, that hangs together over several hundred pages. You have to get the market to be aware of a non-beginner's book to capture a large share of the people who stay with a topic long enough to need their second book. And you have to do it quickly on short money.
I've also just contacted providers of apps on Google Play. Usually, they either provide an APK file or push their app onto the Amazon store (it's been 50/50 on the places I've contacted).

I know it would be easier to get a Nexus 7 in some respects, but I'm unfortunately heavily invested in Amazon Video, which isn't available there.
Stuxnet targets Iranian Power Plant
> Is this something I should try to avoid with my son, or should I encourage it

Avoid.

I would avoid spending time learning the names of things. Learn the thing itself, but the name tells you very little.

Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05WS0WN7zMQ
Wait, DevTools could do THAT?
Just from an efficiency standpoint, you don't need other levers for new grads. A reasonable engineering salary will already be highly motivational for someone who is coming off a student's budget, probably with loans just kicking in.

Some percentage of them are going to flake. That happens when you take people who have spent their lives in an environment with one eval loop and place them in a new environment with differing expectations.

Of those who would flake, some of them can be made into great employees. But a bigger carrot is almost never effective at accomplishing this. The real need is generally along the lines of "effective mentorship" - which is far harder to implement than a revision to your employee benefits plan.
Mechanizing git-bisect: Bug hunting for the Lazy
Makes me wonder how hard they worked those 4 years, or perhaps just that last year they didn't necessarily care to be kept on afterward.
Isn't this a great tool for spammers? It even clicks activation links for you?
This is a great idea:

"Your Private Inbox

Only you can access this inbox by returning to this web site using the same browser or by saving the link for this page. Others are not able to read your mail."

Props to the progger/designer.
The terrorists did get a lot of what they claimed they wanted, though.
Obviously there are a number of use patterns for Dropbox. I just don't use it as a "live" store. The whole concept scares me. As far as moving to another computer and having access to the latest files, I can always VNC into a machine or VPN into the network if I am outside.

I just couldn't bring myself to using it that way. Our files are our work product. There is no way I could consider having the only copies of the files connected to a service that could cause total loss of data. It is, in my world at least, an absolute non-starter.

With regards to the idea of sharing files with a coworker and not knowing where the latest files are, well, that's what Git is for, isn't it?

As a matter of principle I have a bad reaction to the idea of calling a data loss event "Another Dropbox horror story". And this has nothing to do with Dropbox or any other service. Dropbox is not responsible for your data. You are. If the data is important enough that total loss would be catastrophic, what are you doing placing all the eggs in one basket? It isn't a Dropbox horror story, it's a story about someone who didn't care enough about their data to safeguard it and then the blame is shifted towards whoever last held the data. That just ain't cool. I own my fuck-ups. It isn't fun, but I stopped blaming others for my crap a long time ago. In the end it works out better that way.

Does Dropbox have issues to fix? Sure. What piece of software doesn't. Knowing that software is imperfect is more of a reason to not, again, place your valuable eggs in one basket.

I have a feeling that there are a lot of young and inexperienced people surfing HN who have never lost anything of significance. They come across someone like me who calls bullshit when he sees it and is willing to stand for what is a solid position and they don't understand it. The only tool they have to express themselves is to mindlessly down-vote cargo-cult style. That's fine, with that approach they'll learn soon enough.

I don't know of anyone --not ONE person-- with say, twenty or thirty years of successful work in computing who would trust the only copy of their projects to any one service --no matter what they claim or how good they might be. Hell, most of these people, just like me, would not trust the only copy of their projects to any single device, local or not. Shit happens. And some of us have seen it happen and have had to clean-up the mess on more than one occasion. Eventually you learn.

I do love Dropbox, but they are not going to come and redo two years worth of work if something goes wrong. And that can happen. And, if that were to happen, I would not blame them. I'd blame myself for being a moron and not having my own backups. Maybe I'll figure out a way to use their active sync technology while still satisfying the requirement for solid redundant backups. Until then, I have enough problems with other stuff to have to worry about having only one copy of our projects stored anywhere, local or not.
They make sense in the same way that dollar cost averaging makes sense. Whinging that a year is too long to wait for the vest is pretty shallow. Now if it didn't start vesting for a year, sure that would be something, but since your 25% vested on the day of the 'cliff' your good.

But the bottom line is that shares are compensation and compensation is money. A startup needs to extract the most mileage out of the money they've got, this vesting schedule has been shown to be a reasonable choice over the last 50 years.
> Have you met the republican party? Their entire base lives off fear.

First off not all in the republican party can be characterized this way. You are painting with very broad strokes. Many turn the republican party because they are the closest they can get to their economic beliefs.

> It's not fear of death or injury, but fear of "other", of change, of being marginalized.

Do you honestly believe this? Do you get your views of republicans from reddit and articles you read about people talking about fox news?
Mastery, by Robert Greene!

It's the result of years of his research on the process a human goes through to achieve mastery in a field. It breaks the process down to key components and stages and examines masters of various disciplines that exemplify these concepts. The subjects were pretty varied, from Leonardo to Darwin to PG!

In short this book is everything I had originally hoped for in Outliers.
Mailinator also has a neat one-way alias, so if you want to use MyName@mailinator.com you can have email sent to an alias mailinator generates like 321randomfoo@mailinator.com. That way, the people (spammers) that get the alias can't even check your inbox, which is still under MyName. http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/03/introducing-alternate...
I'm not the OP, but: Yes.

And on top of that I'm claiming that the singularity will never happen.

We have incredibly fast computers with enormous amounts of memory, yet are no closer to AI.

And even given infinite computing power, we still wouldn't have AI, so the race for computing power is a red herring. (It's not like we know how to do it, but the computers are not powerful enough - we don't have the slightest clue how make AI.)

(I define AI as the ability to learn any topic at all with unstructured instruction - like reading a book, or being told verbally. Additionally after learning the material an AI must be able to invent and synthesize new material from the old.)

And on top of that computers aren't getting any faster, that's basically stopped. (Although if AI is parallelizable it might not matter.)
> Very large sites would love to see a 'noindex' parameter in robots.txt; sadly it's not there.

Isn't

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

enough?
Hotelier & PMS developer & Booking.com user here. Booking.com does call us immediately if there's any dispute between the hotel & the travellers.
Irrelevant question: Expedia has HotelExtranet and Travelocity has a nice API. Why is it so bloody hard to integrate with booking.com? (Directly without using CRS)
FB and Knight Capital: Tech is 2 of 5 Worst Trades of 2012
While quix is quite neat, I don't see how it's really comparable to Bedrock.
Very good points. I appreciate you taking the time to make them. I'm not very well versed in the aeronautics market or its financials(aside from knowing to not buy airline stocks).
Some services, like Facebook, normalize the mail address (turn all letters to lower case). Can you make sure that mails to the normalized email also reach my inbox? (They don't now!)
" Linking to any web page on this Web site is prohibited absent our express written permission. "

That still doesn't seem reasonable to me. Simply making this link: http://www.victoriassecret.com/site-terms-and-notices/ is linking to a web page on that site and I didn't, in fact, get their express written permission. Does that 'prohibition' seem reasonable?
DabKick has a unique twist on photo sharing- real time
4Chan is down
Forget Photo-Sharing; DabKick Is All About Photo-Showing
The type of coding that can actually help 'humanity' usually happens in universities. For instance, I have a friend whos been 'coding' for a decade algorithms to help find a cure for dengue fever. He got 2 PhD degrees and may die before there is a cure for dengue.

My suggestion is: find a local college or high school and help with their programming projects (or start one).

Education amplifies. Software is just one thing.
How much money can you make from a YouTube video?
Google Chrome blocks access to PLOS-ONE.
Does anybody know what's going on with PlosOne?
How comes nobody is saying anything about this? A lot of research in my field is published on PlosOne, I suspect a lot of people are now stuck with their job.
Mortality, Christopher Hitchens
Which contributes neither enlightening discussion nor useful solutions to the discussion at hand.

You have expressed your contempt for people who don't run their own mailservers; but your contempt is only an ego assertion. Your contempt, unless based on facts, and rational arguments taking into account the reality of people who have other things to do than learn whatever esoteric skills you've chosen to base your self-worth around; is of no interest to the rest of the people reading HN.

I run my own mailserver; therefore you should listen to me.

if the above statement seems ridiculous (which it is), it is merely the mirror of your original assertion.
As far as technology is concerned, I am really looking forward to 3D printing. I am interested in seeing how 3D printing will be commercialized and what difference it can make (if any).
For someone who sees 1 year as a long time, the one year vesting cliff may be a reason to discount the equity portion of the compensation package altogether, especially at a small startup where the chances of cashing out are low anyway. After a couple of months at a company, a new grad may think “hey, this isn’t THAT great’, and not stick out the next 9, 10, 11 months, because that seems to them, an insanely long time.

1) From the employer perspective in a startup: do you actually want an employee who's going to stay longer than a few months, based on any reason except the company and the work?

2) From the employee perspective: unless you're an extremely early employee, discounting the equity portion of a startup compensation package is probably the correct thing to do...