skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: As an employee, should I take equity or options?
I've recently been employed by a fast growing, successful startup in New York. We are currently doing ~$3M/year in revenue, and are on track to double again this year. As the first technical hire, I've been offered around a 2% equity stake in the company (valued at $4M), which I can take as options or equity. The issue I'm having is that I don't currently have the money upfront to pay taxes for receiving equity. Due to that, I may have to take it as options. However, I'm a bit concerned about taking options, because I feel that if the company becomes successful, but not necessarily acquirable, my options won't be liquid. The company founders (it's privately held, no VCs) in this case have shown interest in issuing dividends to shareholders in lieu of trying to sell. If the owners decide to issues dividends instead of reinvesting profits and selling the company, could my options become worthless and ineligible to participate in the dividends unless I purchase the shares at the strike price?

Long story short: I have the option to take equity or options, and no one is trying to screw me over, I just want to make sure I make the right call based on my financial situation and what's likely to happen to with the company company (more likely to issue dividends and remain private than sell or go public) For lawyers: I believe it's an S-Corp.
Pentagon weapons-maker finds method for cheap, clean water
The World Has No Room For Cowards
There are legitimate ways that follow the letter of the RFC to prevent spam over SMTP (greylisting, etc.), or to overlay sender/server validation on top of it (SPF, etc.), but most of these lessons aren't cross applicable to XMPP

Sure, Google could spend a lot of time trying to come up with a technological solution that doesn't break federation (except for in spam cases), but it would be difficult to do on a service that fundamentally doesn't make money.

This sounds like blog trackback all over again - useful, a nice idea, but nearly worthless once spammers figure out how to pee in the communal pool.
Cool...definitely a tough challenge...even computers have a tough time with it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem).
The learning curve of Chef is pretty steep. The article touches on that, saying that documentation is bad, and I would add that the community provided recipes aren't very good either. But, the whole interest is that it's a one time investment. Once you've figured out how to handle your deployments with it, and have a few helpers/examples, you end up saving quite a bit, both in time and money.
Exactly one, a healthy man who'd had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a "tension pneumothorax"), walked out of the hospital.

I was recently witness to exactly this situation. The father of a friend of mine, an otherwise healthy man in his late 50s, collapsed when his heart stopped due to what was later diagnosed as some heart rhythm problem (I'm not sure exactly the cause). A friend of the family performed CPR until the ambulance arrived (which took a while, this being a rural location).

Less than a week later he was back on his feet.

I'm not a medical professional, so I can't say for sure that he would have survived without CPR; but I don't doubt it was key to his survival.
Some people have definitely figured out ways to fix this issue (sounds like you have), but for others the service that Swapbox provides means the difference between getting your package ontime and maybe never getting your package. I don't think that this solution is right for everyone, but I think that there are so many pain points in this space and Swapbox can solve some of them. Also, if there's ever anything perishable or you don't want to lug it home from work, check out Swapbox :)
That's a very weird statement. As if in 2005 it was easier program for your so open phone, or your not existant tablet.
Don't mistake me for some old timer hammering away on his BSD box. I love the web, but I don't go around farting rainbows and claiming that Javascript is the be all and end all of all programming.

There's a reason Git is written primarily in C; it does a lot of heavy-lifting, and we want something that performs.
Why would that sadden you?

If you worked there, wouldn't you do something similar?
This is fantastic exposure. I am so excited to see this reach its first Final release. Please keep up the great work.
I disagree that healthcare is an inelastic demand, it's obviously quite elastic. There are levels of service and of care. Take something like a broken femur for example. One person may opt for a cast and crutches and little else while someone else may opt for a motorized wheelchair and extensive hands-on rehabilitation therapy afterward. Or look at, say, prosthetics. There are amazing cutting-edge almost bionic prosthetic hands and legs these days, but does it make sense to bankrupt the public in order to guarantee everyone access to those who might want them? Or just look at something as simple as diet and exercise (what we know to have one of the biggest impacts on health), one person may be able to afford a personal chef and dietitian who can plan all their meals and to hire a personal trainer to keep them in shape, but many wouldn't be able to afford that or even necessarily want it.

The notion that everyone should be guaranteed equal health outcomes is a very seductive one, but once you start digging into the details it falls apart quite rapidly.
Google is shutting down everything that has fewer than ~50M users.
The true costs of food are hidden in the heavy toll it takes on our environment, the poor or illegal labor situations used to harvest it, and the subsidies given out by the the government.
And....that blog is going offline in a few weeks. Thanks Posterous/Twitter!
I dont buy it. Unless your wasting your time on pointless busy work like trying to decide what color a link should be, hard work has always worked for me.
Smoking is a choice that makes someone more likely to have health problems later. Under nationalized health care, taxing cigarettes is just aligning incentives.
14 Adults Have Been “Cured” of HIV
This is brilliant! I've had to do a lot of work creating queue based systems in recent years, and i really like off the shelf solutions to problems like this. Cron is a great tool, but its a mess once you have a bunch of machines and it really just does not scale.
You know, this actually, just this once, sounds like a sensible use-case for civil deployment of surveillance drones! Not pre-emptively, mind you--but when someone reports something like this, it'd be great to be able to send a robot ahead of the police to see what they're up against.
Seems like Chronos covers a lot of the same functionality as Rundeck.
This is an oversimplification and the type of thinking that gets IT labeled as nothing more than a business cost center. IT shouldn't just be limited to preventing downtime and making sure things continue to work. It should also be focused on making employees more productive. You might say allowing Chrome cost the company $6 million due to downtime, but are you factoring in the potential losses from having a more draconian IT policy. For example, how much more productive would employees be if they could automate part of their normal workload with a good browser extension or how does a more employee focused IT policy alter employee moral and in turn employee retention?
According to http://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html, less than 1% of all businesses have more than 100 employees.
Well, I think we actually agree on what you say, though I'd point out I don't ever really feel awesome having a traffic cop behind me on the road no matter how awesome I'm driving. BDU's wouldn't make me trust him/her less, button-up shirts wouldn't make me trust him/her more.
You overlook that US Americans still pay a lot more per capita (or as a fraction of GDP) than citizens/residents of other countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_heal...

While you may be paying more in taxes, the average American will in the end pay more for healthcare (as a combination of insurance and out of pocket expenses). That this goes to healthcare providers and private insurance companies does not matter much; it comes out of your paycheck either way. If you're really uncomfortable with paying taxes to the government, you can pick the German system (where public health insurance is handled by non-profit sickness funds) or the Swiss system (where health insurers are private companies, but get told by the government what they have to offer and how much they can charge for it; they make money from providing non-essential addon insurance). In the end, though, either is still equivalent to a single-payer system in practice.

A major reason for the higher efficiency is that a single-payer system (economically, a monopsomy) can negotiate much better prices; prices also tend to be much more transparent, whereas in the US American system, the actual costs are often obscured. This is because normal market forces tend to work poorly in an unregulated or loosely regulated healthcare and health insurance market (e.g., ask yourself how much are you willing to shop around or bargain with a doctor when your health or even life is on the line).
wow, this is must be the first and only one of those cheesy stories that I can actually relate to. thanks.
I'm surprised there aren't more things like this, because Cron replacements are really valuable.

We wrote a small C program that serves as a scheduling daemon with Redis; we have a keyspace in Redis that can be used to schedule millisecond-granular periodic or one-shot tasks with a flexible "Chronic"-like specification syntax.

It is hugely more convenient and usable than cron. Once you have it, you immediately spot lots of opportunities to factor systems into scheduled jobs that you might have avoided doing if it meant you had to deal with cron.
In the past I investigated compiling libgit2 with emscripten. Didn't spend a lot of time on it but I wonder if that could work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5373287
US journalist suspended after charged in hacking plot
pls...they used a custom domain and they have plenty of time to migrate to a new blogging service and point their DNS to it
Obvious fix here: only allow chat invites from people you have sent an email to. Google could return an error to blocked invites to inform them that they must get the recipient to send them an email first.

I can't see any downsides and it definitely solves the spam problem. If they could make it apply to other gmail accounts as well, even better. I've gotten annoying gchat requests from sweety69@gmail.com as well.
This also means that if you are in, say, a wilderness survival situation where help is not coming, CPR will not save a life, but it is still recommended that you perform it-- the emotional impact of just watching somebody die will be dangerous to the survivors.
The World’s Most Sarcastic Product Review: Samsung Galaxy S4 vs. iPhone
It always irks me how those news of ground-breaking improvements in this and that actually never translate into improvements in greenhouse gases emissions or cleaner air (or do 10 years later in another form without my being aware of it maybe).

There's already a few companies (one of them is Tesla Motors, an American company) working on cars that actually cut emissions dramatically and do in fact put a dent into the polluting, gas-guzzling model of the "modern" car paradigm.
From the Coro intro docs-

Using only ready, cede and schedule to synchronise threads is difficult,

Coro supports a number of primitives to help synchronising threads in easier ways.

Coro adds threading to Perl but falls short of being a concurrency practice- it's tooling for doing concurrency.

Go establishes two fundamental primitives, goroutines and channels, and gets rid of old-worn notions of threads.

This isn't a novel runtime, because it's been done- in Newsqueak, just to name one- but the entire platform built from the ground up to be mobilized around not giving you the tools to find your own concurrency solutions, but to have a deliberated answer to all concurrency problems, a masthead banner saying "THIS IS THE ANSWER" is the differentiation and novelness I'm ascribing to Go.

That approach, over our discussion, I've come to realize is more characteristic of the standard library of Go than it is the runtime. That said, you're holding my feet awfully cruelly to the fire and I take issue with you using this newly gained outlook in such a mean-spirited and cruel fashion to stab at me.

Talking with you is incredibly frustrating as you toss away my points with a single dismissing wave and do not cite material things; you pick tiny little fragments to quip at as springboards to launch into whatever you wanted to start talking anyways. As I said before, masterful trolling, it's very hard to hold a conversation with you. I'd beg of you to yield, because otherwise we might indeed find ourselves on the field of Ragnarok, at that end that never comes after all infinity.

You also seem very ill informed about Coro- which you champion-

Fortunately, the IO::AIO module on CPAN allows you to move these I/O calls into the background, letting you do useful work in the foreground

So, no, _You do IO in the regular way and the scheduler is automatically invoked_ is a bullshit claim; this has all the weaknesses of Node.js's event loop, and the need to write small things that yield, or here in Coro world, cede, regularly. And if you use a CPAN module that does block, you are toast, making this fundamentally incompatible with everything else ever done in Perl in a very serious way.

a simple module that implemented a specific form of first class continuations called Coroutines. These basically allow you to capture the current point execution and jump to another point is in no way a parallel to the runtime of Go because the stdlib of perl is not meant to operate in a non-blocking way, and Go is. That, I think, is safe to say.
Funny considering the main issue we had with EC2 was amazons horrible support. Even spending a lot (lot) per month our only option was to post on the forums and wait. We ended up at Rackspace after a few years of frustrating issues.
My bank requires firefox, for what I only assume to be for that reason.
But by default, doesn't Android refuse to install APKs that don't come from the Play store?
One doesn't generally have a sudden and unexpected need for a very particular type of food that only relatively few specialists know how to produce.
When I reported my license plate stolen, they told me that, should I ever find it, that I should not put it back on unless I wanted to be pulled over at gunpoint.

I never did find it; they sent me a new one. By carefully examining the holes, I was able to help them determine that it had been unscrewed, rather than having somehow come out on its own.

We only have rear plates here, so I had no plates for a short time.
Obviously not. But anti-spam measures are decades old at this point and well known.

The argument is a "the technology isn't there yet and spammers are running rampant, so the obvious solution is block it, which isn't ideal", not "Google is doing this because they want a monopoly on chat, and broke the protocol to do it".
> AEDs don't actually bring you back to consciousness. They just make CPR more effective. (much more!)

Perhaps a trained medical professional will correct me, but I've worked closely with the technology for years and I don't believe this is accurate. An AED can indeed bring someone back to consciousness if the shock is successful. If it isn't successful, then it wouldn't affect the efficacy of CPR one way or the other.

The rest of your comment seems spot on.
Awesome! If anyone's ever had to use Ctrl-M or AutoSys, you know well the supreme horridness of other solutions in this space.
Prioritizing Deep Thought in a Distracted World: A Case Study
Gopher is now in its post-apocalyptic "Thunderdome" phase.
I was prepared to be moved to some novel point of view on the nature of money, but the article doesn't ring true.

We do get to choose how to spend our money, and rich Americans who accrue millions or billions of dollars of personal wealth especially do.

What do people choose to do with their money?

* Often they invest it, so that their net worth goes up rather than down, while perhaps supporting a company or cause they believe in. It's true that when you put your money into something, it's no longer liquid. If you inherit a few million dollars and immediately buy a few houses as an investment, you don't have the money, you just have the houses.

* They set up philanthropic foundations. This involves allocating money to ongoing aid. Yes, the money is earmarked, because you (the foundation) earmarked it.

* If you want more money going to innovation, that's great, but it is not an axiom that money, where it exists, should be used to fund particular innovative projects that will transform society. For one thing, people disagree on how important it is to spend money on innovation versus other things. If you want to see a manned mission to Jupiter, say, you can either fund it yourself or convince other people it's a good idea and work out where the money will come from. You can't just complain it's not happening, despite all the money everywhere.

* When wealthy individuals decide how to spend/blow/invest/donate a million dollars (say), I don't think they are ruled by social pressure, their hands tied by the ever-present danger of being shamed into oblivion -- so they decide it is safer to just buy a yacht. This sounds like an externalization of the feeling of self-consciousness some people may have.

Now, one thing I'll say is that money is not necessarily being spent on big projects in a way that reflects what people want to see. Kickstarter is helping change this (see http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-m...) -- by tapping into discretionary money!
Sorry to hear that:-(
I think it's a religious belief to think splooge has lots of tiny people in it (and therefore one should refrain from pleasing oneself), but it's really just unicellular organisms (which I think may outnumber all the grains of sand on Earth).
Are you sure you're being LITERAL? I certainly remember some google acquisitions where it was stated straight up that the product would be discontinued in the initial press release.

http://xkcd.com/725/
Health care companies seek a profit because innovation takes capital investment, and the only way to build capital is to make a profit. The article admits to the value of this when it talks about how U.S. consumers subsidize innovations that have global benefits (like MRI machines).

I totally disagree with the idea that health care companies actively seek to drive patients to bankruptcy. Can you provide any proof of this other than your own opinion?
This could work, and is much better than blackholing all the federation requests.
Farewell, Dear Google Reader
Control Pandora.com with Alfred 2 and media keys
But this is not where the vast majority of health care costs come from. They mostly come from the care of chronic ailments.
Not all Jabber services provide e-mail. How would you write an email from one that doesn't?
The steaks have to be at room temperature. Pat them dry first. Put them on a plate. Sprinkle with salt. Get a clove of garlic ready in a press. Keep the butter nearby. Use a frying pan on Medium High to High heat that has been oiled (Grapeseed Oil or other oil that is safe at high heat). When it gets hot put in some butter, stir that around and then put in the steaks. Cook them on both sides for a couple of minutes. You can turn them more than once if you want. While they are cooking squeeze in the garlic and add more butter if you want/need it. Brown the edges if you want only just before you are ready to take them out of the pan. THEN put them on a plate or cutting board and let them stand for a few minutes (while you plate up whatever else you cooked with them). They're ready!
Exactly. As an example: One does not comparison shop for an ambulance service after a car accident, nor a surgeon after arriving at the hospital.

And those charges for blood transfusions: Anyone up for a startup to find the lowest bidder?
Tabs are a great starting point since they're so close to your thumb, but that's not enough. And Dropbox can afford the best.

I haven't put much thought into designing a file system app, so here goes nothing:

* The Camera Upload tab assumes that you're using it. Make it a list item in the main content tab.

* Create a special folder called Clipboard, give it its own tab with a big plus button. When you add a file to the Clipboard, you can instantly copy the link to it.

* The current sharing screen is daunting [http://d.pr/i/8v2r], and doesn't keep up with the SDK [http://d.pr/i/5Z1g].

* On Mac, let people add files to Clipboard by dragging files to the menu bar icon like getcloudapp.com.

* As a bonus, I'd like a visualization of your largest files and folders vs. those that are are accessed most often.
But does the language you know best always have the best debugging tools? Not necessarily.
What Really Makes a Distro? The Difference Between Linux Distributions
iOS App We've Built For 47 Hours - So That You'll Never Be Lost Again
Japan is an interesting example of how interpreting statistics can be difficult. Japan is MRI crazy. It has a ton of MRI machines and people get scans all the time. However, does this lead to better care? As it turns out, a lot of Japan's MRI machines are older and cheaper and in many cases not as diagnostic as newer machines (for any given condition). But Japanese doctors give these scans because it makes people feel like they are being cared for, even when they're not. To a certain degree the same effect is taking place in the US, but I don't think it's nearly as significant.
Always happy to see more tools like this - the bigger the toolbox, the easier our lives are.

Of the various approaches I've had to depend on in recent memory, from perl scripts querying a central Db right through to eye wateringly expensive Control-M or Autosys in larger envs, It's plain old cron, fronted by config management (cfengine, puppet, chef, salt - it doesn't matter which) that has proven most dependable, easiest to train others on and simplest to debug.
100...hours? Wow, the documentation for Chef must really be bad because I guess I still don't know what it's meant to do, despite going through the Hello World process. I thought it was just a framework for the batch commands needed to set up a machine. What was the hardest part to feel comfortable with? The syntax? The conventions for maintaining and executing recipes?
I reiterate :-) its hard to explain for folks on the outside. There are so many shiny toys inside of Google that yes, you could easily go 2, 3, even 5 years before you even thought to yourself "Hmm, I wonder if we could make Reader do this ..."

More often than not, if you had touched the code, it was because someone had decided to replace the way services do user credentials in an incompatible way and someone told you had to make this code work with the new scheme, by the end of the month because it was holding up shipping the new user credential protobufs... so you ended up in the code with a gun pointed at your head saying "go fix this code you've never seen to use this new API that the code never anticipated calling."

Probably wouldn't make you want to go back "just for fun."
An event's possibility is not evidence for its occurrence.
It's no more than a wrapper around Kombu; it shouldn't be hard to get one going yourself :). It's far from the level of quality of the OP's product.
Libraries, police, roads, and the army are great examples in favor of government. All you've done is demonstrate that there are exceptions, as there are to anything.