skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even in a meritocracy, those making the decisions need some way to both gather and screen candidates. Properly utilized personal relationships (as opposed to nepotism style situations) can be a good way to do both.

Maybe Dropbox and Airbnb wouldn't have succeeded without those recommendations, but those recommendations could certainly have led to a MORE merit based process. When it comes to judging quality, it can sometime be hard to beat a personal opinion from someone you trust. That may narrow the field a little bit (nobody has personally experienced all the alternatives) but it may also improve your decision.
The purpose of copyright and patent law in the US (as stated by the Constitution) is to promote the progress of the arts and sciences by granting a temporary limited monopoly to creators. While I don't disagree with the sentiment, things have gotten wildly out of hand in the past few centuries.

I get it. People make content, and they want their rightful monopolies to be protected from people who would copy and sell it. That's fine. But attacking the rights of those who are not copying or profiting from your content simply because the new method they're using to access it doesn't line your pockets with money is going too far. At that point you're going after all competition, rather than unfair competition.

You have no guaranteed right to a lucrative business model. You have no guaranteed right the control any and all actions of those with access to your content. The only thing you should have is the limited monopoly you've been given, and if that isn't enough to protect your business against the the onslaught of new technologies then so be it. (I should point out that I think the length of the monopolies themselves has gone overboard, but that's an argument for another day.)

> But could you sue someone for putting up a big fan to blow the aroma into the air and charging people to stand in front?

No, I don't think I should be able to sue. It's my own horrible business decision to release my aromas into the public air where everyone can access them. If I were a more astute businessman, I would keep my aromas in a privately-owned enclosure where I could create the rules and charge admission to boot.

I don't see how it's the government's place to step in and create laws that curtail the public's right to use the air as it pleases for no other purpose than to ensure that my crappy business model is lucrative.
Experience has shown me that poor hiring practices == poor team (in general).
I watched the video on the site and still didn't really get how the game worked. I couldn't find any written instructions on the site.
What you're receiving is a bunch of Minimum Viable Job Applications. It's a rational strategy that maximises coverage and minimises disappointment.
I think evil is a little strong. It's similar to the "pay with a tweet" and the "sign up to our newsletter for a discount" schemes companies regularly run.
These "property rights" you speak of are not natural rights. They were spun from whole cloth very recently. They have changed before, and they will change again.

What we're seeing here is the social pressure that will drive that change, for better or worse.
Linden Lab, Second Life.
"Oops something went wrong!"

If anyone is seeing then same error and wants to make some quick youtube playlists while waiting for youfm.org to overcome the "HN spike" you could check out my little thing at http://www.cueyoutube.com/ :)
> Consider about an hour of your day eaten up by the commute, every day.

In my experience, it's about an hour one-way, so two hours daily. Assuming SF-PA-SF, express Caltrain, ~10m walk on each end.
not underpaid.
Yes, indeed! supplybetter.com is our landing page. We're always looking for feedback on our service and site, so feel free to hit us up!
I don't think 110 is low for a front-end engineer. Whether or not you are underpaid is more of a question on how much money you need to be happy. Will increasing your pay by 30k per year significantly change your current lifestyle? You should examine if you are happy at your job first, understand how different your life might be if you added 1200 more per month, and determine whether or not that increase will make you happy?

I've always been a believer that if you are truly happy in your work then the pay will not matter much. If you are unhappy in what you do a little more will only make you happy for a short while.
Thanks for the tspring link. I'm a bit worried about selling anything with the Tekken brand on it but I suppose I could see if people wanted to buy stuff related to the Tekkenpedia brand.

The blog idea is also interesting, I could branch out somewhat from the core game and maybe into other fighting games.
Ah shucks. If you find anything to the contrary, I'd love to hear from you! If not, next summer it shall be.
Show HN: Chrome extension to annoy the grammar stickler in you're life
Fox News' misleading infographics
Become full-stack (learn backend and database) and make more money. Better still, become a DBA consultant if you really want to pile up the money.
Big Data and Rise of Predictive Analytics
Based on the thousands of offers from hundreds of start-ups that I've seen DeveloperAuction, that is definitely a little bit on the low end for a "late stage" startup (Series B+?) company, but you're not horribly far off.

You could probably get $125K-$130K elsewhere, maybe even more, and potentially with a signing bonus as well.

$100-$115K is a typical salary at a seed stage company which would offer a significant equity stake
This looks great. I have no experience with selling physical products and so not sure what it takes, but I would think selling these on various specialty websites and specialty stores could work great. Thinkgeek.com is one that comes to mind.
you are underpaid if a single bedroom costs around 1500-1600$ per month in your country
I don't get to maintain exclusive ownership of my car if I don't keep it locked in a vault?

Sigh. Yes, and nuclear weapons are also a useful subject to raise when arguing about gun control.
You should see the kind of messages I get from recruiters.
> So you'd be cool if someone ripped off your source code at siasto.com and started charging for the service? Good to know!

Invalid analogy. Siasto does not sell or distribute its source code. Quite the opposite: our code is locked away on a privately-owned server. You'd have to illegally force your way into this server to access the code. What we sell is a service that happens to depend on this code.

And no, I would have no problem whatsoever if you cloned our service and attempted to sell it to others. In a general sense, we certainly aren't the only team collaboration software out there. And in a specific sense, we certainly didn't pioneer the vast majority of the visual interactions that define our service.

> But if I copy your work and start charging people to listen to/inhale it, then you're infringing.

Yes, but the company in question is not making copies. Hence the separate antennae and storage for each customer.

> What you actually need is one that doesn't blow.

:-D
> One way this is put to the test is by letting people relax in a comfortable reclining chair in a quiet, dark room during daylight working hours. Many people fall asleep in this condition, signaling that they are sleep-deprived, even if they have no regular habit of taking a nap in the daytime.

That is not a valid way to test that people are sleep deprived. Most people will fall asleep with plenty of sleep. Put them in a warm room with little noise and nothing to keep their attention and they'll fall right asleep no matter how much sleep they've previously had.
"being respectful" is entirely contextual, subject to trends (as with this code of conduct), to cultural bias, and can be tweaked to mean whatever you want to say at the moment and place.
I'm guessing you live in the Klang Valley? I didn't think property was ridiculously priced in Malaysia.

Also out of curiosity, what's the starting engineering salary at your company?
For full time, I don't think you are.
For contract… definitely.

If you are into money, go freelance today!
Big Frame | Front End Engineer | Los Angeles, CA

We’re looking for someone who loves to build things with the latest web technologies. The ideal candidate will be 75% engineer and 25% designer. You should have a portfolio or github account that you’re proud to show off.

* HTML, CSS (SASS), JavaScript (jQuery)
* A client-side framework like Backbone.js, Ember.js, or AngularJS
* Ability to figure things out, get things done, and adapt to frequent changes
* Bonus points for experience with Ruby on Rails and other parts of the stack

About Us

Big Frame is a leading media company in the video entertainment space. We’re building sustainable brands around YouTube’s best talent and connecting advertisers to targeted audiences. It’s a radical time in the video business and Big Frame is driving the evolution. Join us!

To apply, send a brief note including your portfolio or Github profile to jobs@bigfra.me
This "entitlement to not be threatened" trope is based on the fallacy that all threats are the same.

The neighborhood coffee shop is not entitled to prevent Starbucks from opening across the street. It is entitled to protection from people throwing bricks through its windows.

Similarly: movie studios are not entitled to use their market power to prevent people from recruiting from the vast population of talented underutilized actors to make content under more consumer-friendly terms. But they are entitled to protection from other companies that would take the content they paid to generate to slap unauthorized advertising on it.
Why should prices rise when demand drops? Decreased demand yields lower prices.
A tale of two electric car companies
You may good sir! Fooled several friends with my use of the subdomain. Even after I told them I wrote it, "how'd you get an article on cnn?"
A very thoughtful post. I especially like the discussion of the difference between sensitivity and specificity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity

(the post uses other words) or in other words the difference between type I and type II errors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors

There are so many interesting ways to think about this. Some of us may have Venn diagrams in our minds' eyes, thinking about the set of {all highly competent programmers} and {speakers invited to programming conferences} and just how those sets overlap.

Of course the important policy point here is that we have no idea how much more flourishing of human developed talent there could be if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities. I think there are probably a lot of diamonds in the rough in communities all over the world that never get picked up, much less polished. Programming communities can thrive by being welcoming to people who are other than the usual suspects just like current programmers. Props to the author for reminding us not to neglect anyone.
Go to enterprise, and/or to a lower COL area.
Thanks for the suggestion! I usually recommended the Oxford abridgement of Das Kapital to ease the pain. I'll start recommending this one instead. :)
Lets hope so, best wishes to you.
Ask HN: what is a reasonable salary for an iOS developer?
I'm a twenty-something iOS developer living in Chicago. Currently, I'm working with a mobile development shop as an "hourly" employee, and being paid $30/hr. I am hoping to move in soon and transition to a salaried employee.

My skill level is pretty exceptional when it comes to iOS development and general programming and software design principles. I don't know how many iOS developers there are in the Chicago area, but I'm willing to bet it's a pretty low number.

I don't want to go into the meeting dumbfounded when they make an offer. What is a reasonable salary to ask for?
Poll consensus on million-dollar logic problem
Show HN: Miofeed, an RSS Dashboard
Great post. The only thing I was missing is finding out whether you managed to do it in one day after all (including all the research?)
I am not sure about namecoins. Nobody is developing namecoin for a year, there are bugs and security holes and tons of weird decisions in the design.

I don't know enough about litecoins to say.
I used Bitcasa for a bit, back in the free version. The UI left a bit to be desired, and their encryption is lacking. (See http://blog.bitcasa.com/2013/03/18/we-dont-show-and-tell-inf...).

Right now it's not 100% cloud-ified, but my current favorite is AeroFS for syncing between machines. It works quite well. Here, the security risk is that someone gains access to your account and syncs all of your files to their system. I'm planning to work around the lack of a web client by installing a WebDAV server for myself, when I finally get around to it.
I don't have 5 years experience, and I'm at 105. I'd say you can probably swing at least 10 more a year.
If you are a Microsoft Office user, Skydrive is pretty great, I use it to keep my documents and pictures in sync between my desktop and tablet, they even have Android and iOS apps. 7GB of free storage is also pretty great.

MS's price breakdown http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/compare
That seems interesting. I agree with the ideology. I don't like resume culture (do I have to list projects I didn't like or disagreed with?) and I don't use LinkedIn much because it's too wedded the old, broken way of doing things.

I feel like most career-related websites are obsessed with the past, because they're targeted toward risk-averse bean-counters because that was who one needed to impress back when people still commuted to work on the backs of pterodactyls. That's why a LinkedIn profile is a resume and the game (for those who choose to play) is about trolling for endorsements like it's Downton Abbey and one needs a formal Letter of Introduction to get a job.

What approach are you taking to this? I assume the problem is related to "hidden node discovery", i.e. taking queries like "I want to be a data scientist in 3 years" and turning them into action plans. Is this going to rely on human curation (from, e.g. employers) or will it be done with machine learning/"big data" approaches? Or do I misunderstand the problem completely?

Anyway, cool stuff. I look forward to the next version of the home page.
I think there might be some selection bias going on there. I know plenty of (non-software/computer) engineers who know very little about programming. The non-software/computer engineers who are interested in programming may be as good as or better than the average CS major, however.

I might agree if you change your statement to "Many people, especially coming from an engineering background and who have an interest in programming, have the requisite programming and computer science experience to do what you need."
We didn't want to confused anyone. You can try us on Twitter by tweeting something like:
#agolo drinks in the west village with @m_altantawy

But anyhow, here is our url http://www.agolo.com
Reading Capital is still totally worthwhile. I've read volume I four or five times at this point, and I always find new things that are relevant to today... that said, it is difficult for a new reader.

When you decide to climb that mountain, you could do much worse than have David Harvey as a companion: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/
Bitcoins are in a speculative bubble. This bubble is attracting fringe merchants, which provides a veneer of legitimacy to the dramatic speculative rise. Note that there is no way to effectively short bitcoins at this point, so there's no counterbalance to the speculation. When the bitcoin market turns south, it will fall hard as the shallow liquidity evaporates quickly.
Harvey was how I went through it.
Working as a software engineer at a non-tech company would be a refreshing change of pace for a lot of people in tech. Could you elaborate a bit more on what exactly an engineer would do on a daily basis and what the size of the team currently is?
The Pallet Office: Most Recycled Office You’ve Ever Seen!
Not to start a pet language fight or anything, but the suggestion that Rails is better than Django due to its community made me piss myself laughing. What are you saying here? The lack of a code of conduct makes Rails better?

You guys have significant problems in your community. Even if the sexism is less -- and that's one big if -- there's a whole plethora of other problems.
Duly noted, thank you. Email me if you'd care to have your name and/or URL I can credit.
Oh, one byte is fine for the level. No one will ever come close to reaching anything higher!
Batch #3 of Avalon ASICs were 75 BTC each. They sold out in 15 minutes.

http://launch.avalon-asics.com/
Don't really see many items in the "Observations and Lessons Learned" categories, as he titles them, it seems mostly focused on how quitting Google makes him feel..
If I'm reading you right, I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I don't think it refutes my point. Yes, there exist situations in which competition is unfair. This, however, is not one of them. This is a textbook case of fair competition being attacked simply because it's competition. It's an abuse of copyright law.
Money you are saving that isn't being used for monetary exchange is effectively dead weight in an economy. Due to modern inflation rates, nobody really "saves" in any modern economy by just hoarding fiat currency - and because of this, the vast majority of the monetary supply is being used for exchange and commerce, and you get peak utility of the currency that way.

If you sit on money you get from the economy, you are taking it out of the exchange system as long as you don't spend it, which slows exchange.
Something slightly related: the timetables made by E.J. Marey, shown in the middle of this blog post:

http://marlenacompton.com/?p=103

They're also shown in Tufte's "Visual Display of Quantitative Information."
Can India become a great power?
I'm one of those depending on the team I'm working on.

As a rule, if I would rather my colleague not to write code at all, I likely prefer them not to do TDD either.

Bad code is never fun to maintain. With bad TDD code, you just get twice as much per feature.
Apple is a company that created a lot of real value during that period. Bitcoin is a currency that claims to offer some marginal advantages over other currency, but certainly not enough to justify the rocket ride. The biggest advantage that Bitcoin is offering these days is that it will be worth 50% more next month than it is today. That's a hard advantage for speculators to ignore, but it is ultimately an unsustainable pyramid scheme.
Well, two bytes is quite the challenge then, isn't it?
SoundGecko: Turn your favorite articles into Podcasts
Whenever I see anyone uses "M$" or "crApple" in a discussion, I stopped listening to that person.
I think you may have misread. The article is upset because his user data is being taken away. Punchfork acquired their data by scraping recipe publishers. Hugspoon wanted to liberate the user data by scraping punchfork.
Any tips for a new hire in the Bay area? (I just accepted a full-time job in SOMA starting in late May).

Specifically - any tips on securing an apartment ahead of time, possibly remotely? I have a week in the corporate apartment, but if I could line something up beforehand that would be preferred.
Feeling a bit ___? There's a word for that.
I didn't address the last remark, it's not a direct relation.

It's the same stuff the other way around: a small sexist joke (or to rely on the news, a joke about penis) doesn't lead to violence against women or lower salary for them at work. It's accumulation, generalization that leads to that.
All excellent points. My understanding is that fee waivers are granted more or less automatically for any plausible candidate, and no school would ever take anyone to collections over a denied fee waiver request (they just wouldn't process the application until the fee is paid), but as you point out, low-income / first-generation-college applicants are unlikely to know this stuff. There are also programs like QuestBridge which attempt to streamline the process of applying to multiple schools, fee waivers, etc., but again a lot of students don't know about them.
As one additional data point to consider, anyone who has had their information posted to any of the job boards, or ever submitted once to a consulting company, gets dozens of solicitations a day where it is obvious that the person (if not robo mailer) saw a keyword and thought it wouldn't cost anything to send a "personal" request for you to reply. Even if you are a 100% match you often won't hear anything back.

Given that, I can't say I'm surprised that many people feel that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander...
Dolphin Lite

but also happens on default android browser (Android 2.3)

It happens in a lot of sites, I wonder what it is that people do that cause that.
Most of which I doubt have even glanced at my resume. From the job listings outside of programming, and those for entry level positions, to those well below what would be a reasonable salary for anyone in the area they are looking (Usually coastal cities for less than is common in Phoenix).
Why do you embed the video anyway? Wouldn't it make more sense to insert the video /after/ the user has subscribed?
Be ready to write a check for deposit + 2 months rent on the spot if you find a place you like. Have copies of your credit report with you and a "rental resume" with phone numbers of HR at your new job and your old landlord.
"Rockstars" may be a myth... but developers who are exponentially more effective than others, with more maintainable code are not.
Assuming they pay you back in the same currency, they're actually paying you 2% on top of the 3%, giving you a 5% return.

Today, with dollars, you can get a risk-free return by investing in T-bills. Riskier investments pay a higher return in exchange for higher risk. The risk-free return from holding a deflationary currency plays essentially the same role as the risk-free return in T-bills.
Come to Singapore?

Arguably worse situation with cars and property, but at least you get paid.
Essentially yes. Day one had all the ghost AI's and power pellets and lives and death. No sound and no score, though. It was completely made possible by the game engine (Löve) and the excellent Pac-Man analysis by other authors like Chad Birch.

You can see the exact state of the game at day one:

git clone git@github.com:tylerneylon/pacpac.git

git checkout 4abf17ca62dffd2ac3245f6ab06cc28fb9021791

You can return to the latest commit later via:

git checkout master

You can get the game engine (required to play) from http://love2d.org .
If gold rose as fast as Bitcoins are rising, people would be shorting it hand over foot. They don't have that opportunity with Bitcoin, so the ship of fools sails on unimpeded until the supply of fools is exhausted, as in any bubble. Which could nonetheless take awhile and make some people very rich, provided they are smart enough to get out in time. Not everyone lost in the real estate bubble.
The links for your website are broken. Especially when clicking next.
I'm confused as to what is meant by "low-level coder" here. Is it programmers who work with C or assembly and maybe on embedded systems or programmers who lack much ability? (My intuition and a google search suggests the former, although many comments and the contrast with 'rockstar' (unless that refers to another programming domain :)) suggests the latter.

Edit: It is especially weird when the post then refers to people with an engineering background, since those people are more likely to be working on low-level embedded coding.