skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The judges received long sentences for their involvement. Robert Powell, co-owner of the facility and Robert Mericle, the developer who built the facilities, only pled guilty to failing to report a felony, failing to disclose money paid as a finders' fee, and conspiracy to tax evasion. They face one to three years each, but those sentences are consistent with the felonies to which they pled guilty.

The plea deal is light for the two developers probably because the prosecutor didn't have as much evidence to pin on them, and because they needed their cooperation to get the judges. Remember, news articles about a crime are not admissible as the factual record in a trial. Just because it's obvious from a news article exactly what happened does not mean that the prosecutor didn't need to bargain for certain peoples' cooperation to bring all those facts to light.
> Engineers should be told what to do.

It depends, no engineer wants to be micro-managed.
setonia.com get job listings geographically located near you.
How to Copy Successful Forex Traders
Then don't write meaningless types. If you're needing to constantly test parameter types - Then you need to work harder on ensuring your input is the correct type before calling a method. It should subconsciously tell you to put more effort into knowing what you're working with.

Unit tests are meant to test behavior - When I do X, I want Y to happen.

Rspec is great for this - I did X, I should see A, B, and C get called - and if they return to me this value then my final result should be Z.
SaaS Sales & Marketing: Lessons I have Learnt
I have questions about the OP's motivation for writing this but more on that later.

The real fault lies with both parties for not setting expectations. A lot of the requests from the founders seem very reasonable; I fully expect them to be telling their friends about this bad hire who never executed on the details for them. Neither of you seem to have done the hard work up front of conveying what you needed and expected from the other side. I can see the other side of the data points you show - weekly revenue need not be the right thing for the company, startups need detail often more often than execution and guess what, VCs do care about the actual idea. It also sounds like you were surprised by the risk profile of an early stage startup (and your notion of VC vetting might be in for a harsh reality check).

What I don't understand is this post itself - you seem to blame YC for what seems to be a typical startup experience (not raising funding is the median outcome and even folks like AirBnb struggled with this for a long, long time). I'm wondering whether the way you've constructed this post with an anonymous post on a blog, the callouts to their funding situation, etc is meant to hurt the company's future prospects by making them identifiable (and maybe take a swipe at YC too). I hope that's not the case here.
That's amazing, I never knew this existed, thanks!
Mixed Content Blocking Enabled in Firefox 23
I think as a .org, you have to be a nonprofit.

I just offered $1000 to for b.org, to host a nonprofit effort to develop positronic brains. It's kind of a silly idea of mine, for now, which is why it's a nonprofit =)

https://github.com/ityonemo/positronicbrain
I don't think it's an issue of faith. The US Government keeps demonstrating, in an overwhelming fashion, that it can't keep itself in check. Hardly a day is going by at this point where some new scandal or abuse isn't crawling out of DC on just privacy alone.

Short, recent list: TSA abuses; IRS abuses; Benghazi; Iraq & Afghanistan; droning; right to assassinate; NDAA; SOPA; PIPA; fiscal discipline (complete lack thereof); constant military intervention across the middle east, helping to put theocrats in power; supplying Al Qaeda with money and arms; hyper scale NSA abuses spanning all electronic forms of communication; indefinite detention; enhanced interrogation; fast & furious; arresting people for freedom of speech issues (eg recent federal terrorism cases against several young people for what they said online); abuse of the espionage act, using it to attack leaks and whistleblowing. And on, and on and on it goes.
I think the main point is you should never ever let someone do the vetting for you.

I don't care if the company is two guys in a garage or has thousands of employees and is on every single list of "Best Companies to Work for". You should diligence the hell out of any opportunity: meet as many people on the team as you can, get external references, do online research on role, ask for key numbers, and even ask fired employees for their opinion on the company.

If you come from a top tier tech company and you are skilled, you can afford to say no to any startup as supply & demand is completely in your favor. I'd also vehemently disagree with the post Series-A remark; there are many companies with these exact same issues at Series A.

I think the key point is always vet the company. Always.
> Being good at engineering doesn't in any way qualify you for being good at building products.

Being good at engineering is exactly being good at building products, whether its civil engineering and the product is a bridge, or software engineering and the product is an application.

Being good at engineering may not be the same as being good at deciding what the product should be, but no one should mistake "deciding what the product should be" with "building the product".
Gold being valuable isn't the point. In fact, I think calling bitcoin deflationary indicates the belief it will actually be more valuable in the future.

Question for you regarding your reference to forced inflation and consumerism: Do you believe there would be even a temporary economic collapse if the world were to suddenly move to a deflationary currency? If so, how many months/years would the collapse have to last before you would say that the transition to a deflationary currency isn't worth it?

The reason I ask is because while fundamentally I have a lot of problems with our financial system, I've come to the conclusion that historically there were periods of recession that lasted hundreds of years. I just don't feel that my lifetime in a bad transition economy is worth the sacrifice of moving to a "better" financial system. I'd rather just keep the status quo as it slowly degrades to something worse and worse since I think that's the best outcome for me. It's a selfish outlook, but I have to believe it's the outlook of most people and that's why we are where we are right now.
Maybe a small stretch.. But if you expect your company is going to be rapidly growing going into year four, you are going to go from zero software cost to very high software costs. After three years of commitment and investment are you going to spend the time to switch platforms? At that point you are stuck. Better to commit to free from the start.
Would you mind explaining what domain controls offer? I've never worked with a large windows desktop install base, so I have no idea what domain controls do exactly.
Seems a number of companies going this route, here's one I haven't seen mentioned yet: https://launchkey.com/
Most(probably all) early startups are in chaos.

Growth solves all problems. If the startup mentioned in the post had a healthy/steady growth, no one would have complained and the OP would still have stayed with the startup.

If you are looking to join a startup, join one that with explosive growth. "Get on a rocket ship.", Eric Schmidt to Sheryl Sandberg[1], early Google.

1: http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandbergs-full-hbs-spe...
Putty on linux has been very useful to me several times, when preparing screenshots for documentation for windows users.
Have you considered going to university for 1-2 years, then taking your gap year, then coming back to finish your degree? Many universities are OK with their students doing this.

As a university student you'll have more information, travel opportunities, and potential outside funding than you currently do. There are some organized programs that only take university students. It can be easier to find work or an internship as well. You may know what you want to do better by then.

Good luck, whatever you choose!
AMBER Alert: The Noise That Scared the iPhone Users - Stabley Times
This reminds me of the famous "Phil Collins sound", which basically is a gated reverb applied on the drums, and was discovered by accident during a studio session.

http://thecollectivereview.com/hugh-padgham/hugh-padghams-ga...
Bigshot: The Camera for Education.  DIY Digital Camera Construction
The New Innovation Battlegrounds Are City Hall And The State House
Regarding the author's original intent let's be honest: we simply don't have enough information to go on.
Not to mention Google has a better office in the city, and hires a lot of the high-end IBM talent fairly quickly as it becomes available.
Sometimes I wonder whether someone's split-testing their article, because it seems like you're getting a completely different one.

Right before the 'significant impact' sentence is this one:

One of the first things I did was steer the company
in the right direction from a strategy perspective.
I constantly butted head with one of the founders
but my strategies were clearly impacting the revenue
numbers. For example one of the tactics doubled the
weekly revenue.

Seems pretty day-to-day to me. He's apparently in there as some sort of product manager / biz dev guy, but somehow you have the impression that he's a wet behind the ears engineer.
sometimes "having empathy" can get in the way. Surgery, as a possible example.
You're right. I meant to say "being good at engineering doesn't qualify you for managing product". I fixed that sentence.
TodoMVC 1.2 released with apps for Polymer, Flight, React
they'll have to find a compelling nonprofit use for b.org
The last time a geomagnetic reversal occurred on Earth was 780,000 years ago (with a possibility of a brief one occurring 41,000 years ago) [1]. I wonder what it will feel like when it happens again...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
Apple & Amazon
Incidentally, we will be adding a cached test in a later round [1] and leaving the implementation particulars in large part to the best-practices of the platform or framework in question. So on Rails, use of memcached is anticipated. On a JVM platform, by comparison, use of a [distributed] in-process cache is anticipated.

Preliminary results suggest an even wider spread of results than seen in the existing single-query test.

[1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/37...
I think they should be executed by ling chi.
Mock-police Twitter account dupes local press
I sell my nature photography: mikewiacek.com :-) Drop me a note and I'll give you a hackernews price :-)
but no one should mistake "deciding what the product should be" with "building the product".

At particularly early stage startups, it not unheard of the developer having a decent say on what product to build. But it largely depends on company to company.
Does GoDaddy strike you as the kind of organization that would give away a 2-letter .org domain out of the goodness of their hearts?

This whole "project" strikes me as a way for GoDaddy to charitywash a campaign to sell some squatter's (eNom) 1- and 2-character domains. Naturally the "right organizations" will be Fortune 50 companies or VC-backed startups; which is why we're reading about it here, I imagine.
The BIG POINTs of his whole article were that

1. He was sold on promises, hindsight is 20/20

You make your points with the hindsight of having actually been in that position. The OP made the clear point that he's coming from a stable Job, and the expectations outlined to him when he was hired were different form those he experienced.

2. The Article is meant to educate those who don't know 1

He was HIRED as an EMPLOYEE. The whole issue feels like a testament to how bad startups are at employing people.
I've been dreaming about this for so many years. A DIY digital camera, back to the basics of lens and sensor.

They are shipping now? Has anybody purchased one?

[edit: I guess I should have googled a bit to see that this isn't the first DIY digital camera kit commercially available]

[edit: "Low battery? Just rotate the hand crank a few times and continue to shoot your photos!" - that's also pretty cool if it works, I missed that feature in the OLPC that shipped]
Hit the nail on the head

A big way those companies stay profitable is by NOT hiring people.
A boycott is not the same as ostracism; nobody said anything about kicking people out of society.

Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?

Somalia is not some country who had an anarchist society; it's a country which had a state and a government, and where a civil war broke out, eliminating all possibility of a stable society regardless of its political system.

Judging anarchism by the state of Somalia makes even less sense than judging non-anarchist societies by the actions of the Third Reich.
Really the thing incentivized should be pushing down the recidivism rate (maybe in an x year period after release).
"The remotely operated MQ-9 Reapers have already been flying over a large swath of northern New York since October 2011. The Federal Aviation Administration has recently expanded that air space further south to include some of Central New York's most densely populated regions."

Is there anyone from this area around? Thanks to Parastoo[1] and Kingcope[2] I have gained some interest in how drones communicate(C/Ku Band) and who they operate with (SAIC[3]).

For those interested in partially decoding drone communications, particularly around where they are known to be operated in the US, it may be worthwhile to look into a setup like this[4]. It is a cheap $20usd-ish rtl-sdr tuner paired with a still cheaper 'Avenger' PLL LNB, allowing the operator to tune the cheap usb dongle into Ku band, which drones use out non-line of sight communications.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038657

[2] http://privat.bahnhof.se/wb907234/pics/skygrab.pdf

[3] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/06/14/news-saic-wins-95-mil...

[4] 'Crossband QSO, receiving EB5EA at 10GHz and transmitting EA5KGD on 432MHz. With SDR RTL2832U E4000 ("ezcap" stick) and PLL LNB ("Avenger" PLL321S-2), Digital KU Band Single LNBF' http://youtu.be/Sdmo-FtHtGU
But MIT did this, so we should carefully point that out in the title so it is newsworthy. </unbridled snarkiness>
FWIW: http://www.ebay.com/sch/Desktops-AllInOnes-/171957/i.html?_s...

Costs more than the Raspberry Pi though.
the code in general is not that great, imho.

as well as the header count (which i came here to post), there's another suspicious hard-coded size limit in the number of servers (1000). although you could only crash the system in that case by configuring too many.

there's very little error handling. good c code returns error codes all over the damn place. this hardly has any.

i wouldn't use this.
Blatant link bait

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Unicode and UTF-8 explained to a six year old
Facebook Adjusts Its News Feed to Bump Up Older Posts
Wow! I remember these guys from Micheal Moore's movie "Capitalism a Love Story".There is part about private jails for teenagers. It says that 6500 kids were unjustly convicted. Some kids were locked up even when probation officers objected to detention.
You can watch that part here: http://vimeo.com/39118828 00:30:30
I agree with the idea that we are in general too mindlessly harsh with prison sentences. But that shouldn't prohibit exceptions. These guys, judges and prison profiteers, are an exception. They ruined and took lives for profit, and they are society's last line of defense, the supposed reason for us not to indulge in vigilantism. They are fucking civilization. They deserve to die in prison, and not the one that paid them. They're a cancer.
Agreed. I see many people that aren't that good at anything concrete and just sell themselves as "good at building products". If an engineer is not qualified to build a software (the product), who is?

I get that not everyone is cut for figuring out markets, sales, etc. But this crap about "you're only an engineer, you have no clue how to make a product" is a blatant lie.

Good engineers are all about the product. Coding is just part of it. The assumption about people that don't graduate in business can't create businesses is just pure ignorance.
I guess the problem of high-percentile latency is not widely understood; I'm not sure I understand it myself. Can you explain in more detail? In particular, are you talking about requests that take a while to complete because they have some complex processing, or requests that take a long time to complete because they can't be processed until some other long-running request finishes? The bit about everything being serialized suggests that the main concern is the latter. Does this apply even when using multiple threads under the C Ruby implementation? Why does running multiple web server processes on the same machine not mitigate the problem?

BTW, I don't use Rails or Ruby, but I do use Python for web apps at work (currently CPython, GIL and all). I'm curious to find out if this problem of high-percentile latency applies to Python as well.
NoSQL is my least favorite buzzword of the decade. It means absolutely nothing but being counter cultural to... SQL culture. Many NoSQL "databases"—and I use that in the lightest term possible—even have SQL engines.
>a quartz movement that is more reliable than your cell phone service

Is this talking about being able to make a call, or the time reported by a phone? The former is a non-sequitur and the latter is a lie. This would not make me very impressed with the seller.
But if you're pretentious about it, you can sell certification and licensing.

http://holacracy.org/
This doesn't make sense. Why are new payments companies like Square and LevelUp allowed to operate but FaceCash is practically forced to shut down?
I don't know how valid a test of five milliseconds is to one of six milliseconds (much less one requesting a single known resource with no keep-alive). Though practically, even if those results held in a realistic test, is it still a viable alternative to nginx? You eliminate an enormous amount of flexibility (I admit -- I ♥ nginx) and proven trust for a margin-of-error theoretical speed advantage?

I understand the desire to get software out there, but webserver is a ridiculously hard nut to crack. nginx broke in through a new architectural paradigm.
The Leaping Startup
I laugh at mongodb, but every time I've seen a shootout between Hbase and Cassandra, Cassandra has won.
failing to disclose money paid as a finders' fee

Umm .. they paid bribes to judges to enslave children. This isn't some tech startup recruiting employees.
To be clear, the particular test cited is expressly designed to exercise the framework and its ORM+database connectivity. None of our present test types permit the use of a reverse proxy cache because we are specifically interested in measuring the performance of the frameworks/platforms and not the performance of reverse proxy software; you can find such tests elsewhere. Further, reverse proxies are only suitable for a subset of real-world applications where it is acceptable to cache output for consumption by a wide audience.

In other words, Rails wasn't unique in being tested without a preferred reverse proxy. Every single framework on that list was tested without a reverse proxy.

A future test type [1] will exercise back-end caching (e.g., memcached in the case of Rails), but we are not planning to ever include reverse proxies (of any form) in the project.

[1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/37...
> not being a chip engineer, i wonder while 3D chip layer stacking isn't in the wide use.

Short version: The process to make a 2D layer of transistors requires something like 20-30 masking steps, and many of those steps require significant heating. Adding a second plane of 2D transistors on top subjects all of the transistors underneath to more heating, so it is hard to build that structure on top without making the transistors underneath nonfunctional.
When privacy dies and encryption is illegal
While your advice at the end is good, what precedes it comes across as "I am perfect and always right, and these guys were a bunch of dishonest incompetents."

I have a hard time believing that view. At the very least, you did not do a good job of evaluating your future employer, and once in there, you did not do a good job of influencing them to follow your lead (without pissing them off).
He loved Big Brother.
> When Twitter receives a new login request with a username and password, the server sends a challenge based on a 190-bit, 32 character random nonce, to the mobile app — along with a notification that gives the user the time, location, and browser information associated with the login request.

Presumably the user must sign not only the nonce, but also the request notification details displayed in the app, so Twitter can verify that the user approved the request it actually sent.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/solutions/cloud/

They are. IBM's mainframe business is quickly becoming a dinosaur, cloud or not.

The furlough is a way to prevent another round of layoffs. By furloughing a division, you can save X%. You cant have two rounds of layoffs within 3 months and not destroy existing projects.
The Making of Facebook’s Graph Search
First California AMBER alert shows AT&T's Emergency Alerts System to be a mess
Find a company you want to work for and then find people on LinkedIn that work there. Some people might see it as stalking, but to me you took initiative so I will most likely respond and assist you on getting past the HR block.
Abbott would be the first to tell you not to try and use Ensure as a substitute for food. Some YC kid thinks you can live off his stuff, hope he doesn't kill too many people.
* Try networking through LinkedIn.
* Try going to meetups

It does not matter if your formal CV does not reflect your true skills. Once you start talking to people, eventually they will refer you to their colleagues and invite you over for interviews.

From what I am told it helps to be able to jump past the "HR filter" which unfortunately places a lot of weight on keywords in CVs.

The fact that you have been working in industry means that you now have a strong "experience" component, which many places really appreciate!

Best of luck and just keep at it.
Genetic Code Shows Bird Flu In China Spread Between People
Thank you for sharing this. I've been very interested in building my own Gmail client the past few weeks, and this looks like a nice starting point.
Those who prey on children tend to have a real bad time in prison when the prison population finds out.

Considering the number of people sentenced, good luck keeping their identities a secret. Neither of the judges is going to enjoy their stay.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/24/node-at-google-mozilla-yah...
ARM is an "open" architecture—it's fairly easy to roll your own if you have an FPGA and patience to read through arch specifications for a couple months. I would be highly surprised if you could get equivalent documentation for POWER without a significant bit of cash. Not that I blame them, even open standards can cost a couple hundred.

I don't think this would change anything, though, there's not enough gain to justify an architecture switch for either hardware or software people. And that's a damn shame. I cut my teeth on PowerPC and I couldn't imagine a better way, it's a beautiful architecture. Altivec STILL makes intel's vector processing look like a toy.
Robert Powell claims the judges extorted him: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/11/04/ex_own....

It sounds ridiculous, but remember, the standard of proof at a criminal trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt." In a situation like this with four people pointing fingers at each other, giving the owners a plea deal probably ensured the prosecutors' ability to get the judges.