skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair enough.

I still have my doubts about how much the gain from that experience, that will lend value to any specific future potential investment, unless the firm that failed was in a very similar business. And you also have to consider that VCs frequently sit on multiple boards, and have routine "vc firm dealflow" stuff to deal with, so their attention gets spread around a lot.

Anyway, I don't mean to say that they don't have anything of value to add. But I will stand by saying "you claiming to be an expert in my business is a red-flag", barring some specific evidence to the contrary.
I'm pretty sure if you just ask anyone who has ever contributed a driver to the Linux kernel you can find someone who is willing to do "revesing work or special-case driver stuff" for WAY less than $2000/day.
The recreation of the Earth 1:1500 scale
Should you not be drawing the bitmap in a background thread so that it isn't bounded by the UI thread?
NV has an area of approximately 286,367 km2. Only the lower (Southern) third of NV can be described as 'desert'. From this one may safely subtract the area of the Nellis Test Range and the City of Las Vegas.

The result is a density of about 12 GPS co-ordinates per km^2

At a single square km per day, it takes 288 years to clear them all. (And order of magnitude reduction.)

At a square mile per day, it takes 88 years and 2 months.
Well you have me there. I'll fall back on the fact that Colin's code is available and that he's published papers covering all the maths and computer science that leads up to being able to dedupe without sending stuff to the server or decrypting on the server side.
Unless your client requires approved vendors only (usually big corps), you can just register your own corporation, and ask your client to rehire you via your corporation at a better rate for both of you. Even at a $15/hr difference it adds up to $30K/year.

EDIT: read your contract with the vendor before you do that.
While you make some interesting arguments for a basic income guarantee, I think your post would be better as a top level comment.

You don't seem to have addressed anything I wrote past the first two paragraphs (which were a kind of introduction). E.g. I explained precisely what I meant by the concept being "unhelpful".
This is the first article I've read that mentioned what the typical return on a fund is. I have had educated guesses, but why don't we see this broadcast more broadly. Is it that only LPs care?

I'd generally prefer to get investment from people whose judgement has proven they know how to get a good return on an investment, because founders typically get the same "return" from that stage on.
I think you mean English or Mandarin, since nobody (probabilistically speaking) speaks French.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...
I think you're using an unconventional definition of a bounce. For as long as I've been doing analytics (10+ years), a bounce has been defined as "a user visits one page, then leaves the site." The length of time spent on a single page was never incorporated in to bounce rate.

What you're speaking of is the inference that is often (incorrectly) drawn from bounce rate; owed to the misunderstanding of the precise definition.
Funny you say that, Sam just had his second successful "exit" since then (the first he wasn't quite a founder, but this one he was). Even if he didn't get "lucky", he was doing fine at ~150k/year salaried at BigCorp. I think if you had trouble in this market, the problem was probably not your lack of a degree.

Honestly, if I were you, I would have considered companies or managers discriminating over that (in the face of evidence of skill/talent) someone you wouldn't want to work for anyway.
I think a major hurdle we have to overcome with big data is separating causation vs correlation. As the data set scales, we gain ever-increasing confidence in the correlation, but an ever more complex set of causations.

Take their House of Cards example. Netflix saw a strong correlation between David Fincher, Political Thrillers, and Kevin Spacey. Fantastic. But why? What did people like about these things? Why did this 'work'?

Let's try to replicate this decision: take great directors (Wachowski siblings), a strong cast (Emille Hirsch, John Goodman, Susan Sarandon), and nearly unlimited budget ($200m) to reboot an existing, well received franchise. Should be a hit, right? Wrong - it's a complete and utter failure known as 2008's Speed Racer.

When we say we want to be data-driven we actually mean we want to be insights-driven. We want to understanding the "Why?" from the data's "What"; it's the 'Why' which lets us know how to react next. It's easy to confuse the data's specificity with insight's certainty, but they are distinctly not the same: We can pinpoint conversions down to 6 digits of significance without having a clue why it occurs.

What we really need is Big Insight, but that's a significantly harder problem, not because we don't have the technology to create a solution, but because don't even know what the right questions are.

I'm optimistic about the possibilities of a system like IBM's Watson in helping solve this, but as it stands, Big Data's utility is giving us 99.755% certainty that we have no idea what is going on.
A Surefire Way to Mess up Your Investor Pitch...
The person who does driver reversing for less than $2k a day is egregiously shortchanging themselves.
Well, yes, what you call "power", I'd call "freedom", and it isn't what comes to mind in the context of "power-hungry federal agents."
Done. This should be fun :)
my fawking god.

I know you think your coming off as a "professional" here but as a developer myself your just coming off as a scam artist. I mean really? "pulling up" vms, "getting" your notes, "finding" an xp laptop?? Fuck you and the people that are turning this profession into auto repair. Everyone thinks their getting lied to and everyone knows their getting ripped off.
Google happens to be one of the companies where getting in without a degree is possible. It also happens to be one of the places where your advancement has pretty much nothing to do with your degree.

All that said a degree will make it easier to get to the interview stage at Google so even though I work there and don't have a degree myself I recognize that having a degree does give you an edge over someone else.
The same amount of information exists, but is normalized. The variable _definition_ absolutely will have a "name" annotation, but copying that name to each binding site is brittle. To render a binding, just dereference the pointer to the original definition and use its name.

I'm working on it.
> So I just throw a huge cash pile into savings paycheck after paycheck, year after year.

I hope you're generalizing here and not actually wasting your money in a savings account. Throw that in some IRA's, CD's, and short-term index funds.
If you mean michaelochurch then no not at all.

"I must keep doing this until Google does the right thing and one of the two founders issues a formal apology, and not only to me but to thousands of other affected people."

I don't mind his Google bashing all that much. I just hope that he's accepted the futility of it. He can't really do any more damage to his reputation so he may as well keep going. This is a good place to broadcast to prospective/current Google employees. There could be people reading here who've already been slotted and don't even realize it. Whether Google accelerates your career or uses you as a disposable code monkey is determined entirely by their incentives. How would it benefit them to tell an under-performer that they're not going anywhere? Using the ambiguity of an eventual promotion as an implied carrot would generate better returns on their investment. It sounds like it'd work pretty well actually...
Use Google's reputation to bring on a flurry of the most desirable new graduates and use them to do grunt work while they're motivated to prove themselves. Promote the top performers to "Real Googlers". Keep the middle around until they run out of steam or quit in frustration. Google gets cost effective grunt work and a larger share of the very best talent as a long-term strategic advantage against Apple/Microsoft/Facebook. If michaelochurch is as abnormally dauntless/foolhardy as he appears to be this could be a really big problem. Most people negatively affected probably go the "professional" route and quietly move on.
I use Capistrano (https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano) for our deployments for zero downtime. It's rails heavy (and requires ruby) but with tinkering I've also gotten it to deploy my Node and Go apps.

The versioning system is great too, if a deploy is bad, you can simply cap rollback, which will revert the changes.
I am sure there are plenty of SEO people working for $10/hr.
Ask HN: LinkedIn network for business leads?
I was just curious, has anyone here on HN successfully used LinkedIn for a business lead that led to a sale?
$700/hour? Do you have Cooley reviewing your contracts or something?
First set should be in your inbox. Good luck! It starts out simple.
Though I have too much of it in a money market account, I was being over-general

tangent: I never saw the point in CDs if I could get a better rate on treasury or muni bonds
Google Glass for sale for Bitcoin
Yeah, I would include late fees in a contract. But delaying 90 days is sleazy.
The cold fusion testing team, real or ringers?
I was surprised to find that it's a somewhat diverse team with a fair amount to lose if the paper turns out to be a fraud.

This leaves the last two possibilities:

- Rossi was somehow able to hoodwink fairly capable scientists (inject extra power into the E-Cat without them noticing),

- or he's actually built something interesting.
My personal opinion is that by the time you have a business you want to build, you should already be close to several people who you'd like to work with. The feeling should be mutual. That means building a relationship -- trust, rapport, history, etc. -- before there is any extrinsically motivated need to find and know someone, whether they are technical or otherwise.

I'm sure some people can make things work with a team that is in essence a group of mutually hired guns [1]. I don't think I can succeed in that kind of relationship, and so I actively shun it.

[1] admittedly, I can see how such an arrangement can at times be valuable.
Have you ever hired, worked with, met, talked to or at least seen the bill from a top corporate attorney? They're expensive for sure, but not that expensive. Much of the cost of those cases comes from the army of junior associates reading through thousands of pages of evidence, etc.
I'm thinking of actual court appearance fees, but I'm ready to be utterly wrong (I don't retain many QCs).
You are not allowed to resell Google Glass
http://www.google.com/glass/terms/
Disclaimer: I am a Google employee, but I do not speak for Google.

I'm not offering an opinion for or against the decision to drop XMPP, but I wanted to offer some corrections to what is being said.

I think you've misunderstood how scale works. At scale, problems do not shrink, they grow.

I do not work on anything even closely related to Hangouts, but I used to run an ejabberd server myself, and I've worked with SIP a bit.

XML does have problems, both with bandwidth, (even compressed), high CPU utilization, parsing code is more complex (which leads to more security issues). XMPP also has issues, and I'm not just talking about how hard it is to get multiple Audio/Video clients to communicate[1]. (e.g. kernel resources, the incredible number of failure states, etc.)

Cheers,
Doug

#1 At least early versions of iChat used XMPP with SIP. For those who don't know SIP, it stands for Session Initiation Protocol, which means that it doesn't transfer the audio/video, it's just a language for making connections. You have to negotiate a transport layer (which was often but not always RTP or SRTP). You have to exchange connection ports via SDP. If you're lucky and manage to get by all firewalls at this point, you now have to hope you're able to use compatible codecs. Interoperability was a nightmare.
Want to transform your economy? Instead of bailing out banks, bail out student loans. :)
Starting is much much much harder than continuing. If you've made the decision to write, it's better to post something, anything, to get on a roll. For example, today I posted a book review[1] just to keep on a writing stretch. It's not my finest work, but it's enough to keep me going.

[1]: http://bugsplat.info/2013-05-25-book-review-tubes-a-journey-...
"they can kill it if only they had a"

Nine times out of ten, if you find yourself thinking in this pattern, you're making excuses not to start.

Find a way to get started anyway. Do something. Make a mockup out of pieces of paper. Find and talk to potential customers.

There are things you can do now, and they're usually things you really should do before bringing on a developer, or taking investment, or whatever you're blocking yourself with.

If you get to "if only" and stop, you may be in love with the idea of being a successful startup founder, but you're finding excuses to avoid what it means to actually become a startup founder.

Or a jazz musician. Novelist. Whatever.
Petition to the European Union ("Citizen initiative") for Basic Income
Obviously the founders has a reason to borrow money from you (second time) but you too were already 75k down and would have wanted it all to succeed. So my guess is that your 50k further investment was partially in your favor too. So I think if you get back 2-3 times, that should be good enough and you should give them a fixed time frame to pay you back (nothing less than 6 months and nothing more than 1.5 years).
I feel like your return on investment is sorely lacking. A good app or post, and you can easily pull off the same results for free.
I think you're confused. Later in life, it becomes less relevant. If someone is gainfully employed and earning a living that they are satisfied with, I think the only "moron" is the one calling them a moron for not getting a degree. The whole mentality of "one size fits all" for paths through life is pretty narrow minded.

That aside, your post is missing the point. Nobody is advocating for not getting a degree or saying that they are a waste.
I find this reply entirely convincing. Thanks for sharing your experience—it's obviously relevant to the topic at hand.
One thing I can't really get used to are those short, one-two character-long variables/symbols. For some deity sake, why Br and LF? Line Feed? In Binary Tree? T1, T2, T3? There is Fatboy on T3 in Supreme Commander, that's what I think of when I see this.

Is writing "Tree" that hard? I don't understand why should anyone burden himself with deciphering abbreviations when he can just write the full word.
Selling is hard because most devs aren't used to it. That's why agents exists; they can often get you a higher rate even after their 20-40% cut.

Most companies have a preferred list of agencies/consultancies, but they are not obliged to use them. If they find the perfect person, they can hire them.

As a career contractor you need a really good agent, or ideally master the skills of a really good agent (ie sales). You need to build and maintain a network of previous managers who know how good you are, and actually call you for work. It takes time, but is by no means impossible for the average HN user.
+1 for ARQ. Best S3 backup I have found on OSX. Sorry TARSNAP, I will only backup to an account I control.
Holy shit. 500 megawatts? in a single missile? That seems to more than what Nimitz class carriers produce(190MW).
Or am I reading this wrong?
The tohoku shinkansen in Japan can have trainsets with up to 1600 people in one 16-car train, and can slam them down the line at 250+kph, one every 3 or 4 minutes. A couple of E5s could do 1400 people at 320. If that isn't efficient then I'd love to know what is!
Why do you have to keep going?
IIRC some work was done to evaluate shielding only the relatively small area around the crew and avionics, saving considerable weight. However, it was soon discovered that radiation exposure can dramatically reduce the fatigue life of metallic materials. So, some (large) amount of shielding is still necessary.
I like my office. It's a place I go to do work. I love my job, but I also love to get away from my job, completely, when I step out the door of my office.

I've tried the work-from-anywhere thing and it sucks. It really just turns into work-all-the-time for me.
I don't disagree with you. If I were CALPERS and needed to throw around money $5 billion at a time for it to be worthwhile, I might avoid VC entirely. My point is more about what it says about the industry as a whole. Total Silicon Valley VC investment is in the neighborhood of $11-12 billion/year. If the rate of return on that relatively small investment is, on the whole, less than the S&P 500, then that really calls into question the whole narrative about how much economic value is really being generated from VC-funded startups. Blue-chip companies might not be able to yield Facebook-like returns, but they can apparently yield VC fund-like returns, and do so while absorbing far more capital.
It's an interesting problem, looking for a solution to it myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5767447

I think a platform which allows you to work on smaller projects to build up your credibility could be useful.
I don't have to keep going, I want to keep going. Writing is something that I've decided to try to get better at and every article I write gets me incrementally better.
How to save $5 million running a Node.js application
I've never used OCaml, but Haskell isn't as bad as you describe. When you use Maybe, you do not have to deal with the Nothing (ie. Null) case until you want to escape the monad (even then, you could still ignore it, and just crash if you do have Nothing).

If an intermediate calculation results in Nothing, then the final value will be Nothing. Handling this is as simple as:

foo :: Maybe Int -> Int

foo Nothing = 0

foo (Just x) = x
Why not assign something like http://try.github.io/levels/1/challenges/1 as homework instead?
Simply put, python doesn't have any (non-terrible) built-in capacity for mapping HTTP requests to code like PHP does. At their core, python web frameworks are all about adding that capacity to the language. Full stack frameworks like Django go on to add a lot more, but the simpler frameworks are all about the request to code mapping, like bare PHP is.

If you're intent on understanding 100% of your codebase, you should consider one of the single-file frameworks, like Bottle or Flask, and spend some time reading and understanding their code.
It's very simple - you buy a house.
Didn't mean to be flippant as I'm not an expert either, but through the course of my career I've spoken to a ton of attorneys including a few who routinely represent companies all of us know well. The top corporate litigators I've met charge in the $1000/hr range, but not much more than that. Their rates tend to be somewhat negotiable as well depending on the task.
My BLT drive just went AWOL!
while that's true, you notice that there's no "innocent" pleading in any of our courts; only two versions of "guilty". If you're charged in a court, you're either guilty, or guilty with the dishonor of a trial.

While 100% exploitable by criminals, provisions like Section 11 are there to mitigate actual miscarriages of justice while keeping all parties in honor.
Its okay to like office and work there just don't force or enforce your co-workers and employees to do the same by assuming that they love their offices as much as you do. For example, May be you are that loud or annoying co-worker or extrovert who keep interrupting them from their work.
Sure, but if it is what is required to get a job...
Very possibly. And either they're going to take 10x the time (and cost you far more at the end of the day) or they're way underpricing themselves.
You have way too much faith in the justice system. Surely, you know there are a non-trivial number of people wrongly convicted every year.
*edit --> "lament not having"
I would imagine too. I'm not really asking about imagining though.
Running a web&mobile devshop in India, $20/hour
The State of Web Security
You have a good point. Let me check the actual server logs.

Shoot; the destination is a static site served with a rack app and Google Analytics does not have data yet (too old for real time, too new for normal). I'll have to check back later.
There is a fucking huge problem with this idea (excuse my french). The majority of jobs in this country, nobody wants to do- but they need to be done. If we just freely hand out a living wage to everybody, nobody will be working the crappy jobs and our world will fall apart.
This is a pretty hillarious article, you're unlikely to read anything like this for a while since Weev is in jail.
Were you paying attention to the Aaron Swartz mess?

Typical numbers if you're charged with a federal felony are that the statutory limit might be 50 years, if it goes to court and you lose it might be 5-7 years, if you declare guilty it might be 6 months, and the cost of defending (which could wind up with 0 or 5-7 years) is about 1.5 million.

Even if you're in the right, the cost of fighting frequently exceeds what you're capable of, and the risk of fighting may as well. Thus plenty of innocent people are likely to settle.

(Kafka would be proud. But that is reality today in "the land of the free".)
ABET's predecessor described engineering like this:

The creative application of scientific principles...

Programming primarily applies logic and mathematics, which is why I have always considered programming/computer science to be more of an "applied mathematics" field, than engineering.

Christ, computer science and mathematics are the only two fields I know of that care about graph theory. To my understanding, graph theory is a post-graduate discipline in mathematics, and a computer scientist's bread-and-butter. What does that tell you?

Anyway, this all kind of hinges on whether mathematics is a science. Personally, it never seemed like a science to me- and I don't mean to denigrate mathematics. Rather, it seems completely apart.
A big chunk of that $1m will be gone to taxes, as someone in another comment has already mentioned.

Also the taxes at the time were much higher; so the impressive $1m starts to look much less impressive when you add in the fact that it probably vested over a very long term and that he was going to be put to work on something he didn't like for a long time.
There are a few numbers on Quora submitted by anonymous people but not a very large set of data points.
>As a career contractor you need a really good agent, or ideally master the skills of a really good agent (ie sales). You need to build and maintain a network of previous managers who know how good you are, and actually call you for work. It takes time, but is by no means impossible for the average HN user.

I get managers I've contracted for in the past calling me, but they always make me go through a third party agency for the pay, so I think these preferred lists are more important than you think. (I have a corporation with 4 employees, 3 fullish-time, counting me, and the total revenue would make what I'm getting paid as a consultant look small, so I believe I'd be on the correct side of Section 1706.)

I have not heard of contractors in my industry having "agents" - I mean, sure, there are body shops that I can call or that will call me; is that what you mean? The body shops work for the clients, though, not the consultants.
Sure. It's a textbook example of the problem I'm talking about, in fact.