skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Megacorp sysadmin here - we do on-call for weekly rotations, though technically anyone can get woken up for the service they own. Weekly is easy to schedule, and it lets our boss know who the contact is for the week (since the schedule is on the wiki).

Never page if it's not an absolute dire emergency. One server out of a cluster - Next Business Day. Failed disk - NBD, unless you're out of hot spares.

As much of your work as possible should be automated to fix it without you having to touch anything. Service down? Try restarting it. Still down? Maybe then consider an email or page.

Other stuff

+Monthly or quarterly sync up meetings between all pager people. Doubly so during super critical times for the business to ensure stability.

+Single email list/PDL for the on-call (+ manager) so they can communicate about issues, as well as be cc'd on vendor support tickets (helps with hand offs)

+FAQ for your services so you don't have to wake the DBA or web admin until you know it's really hosed.

+(Sounds silly, but bears mentioning) During pager hand-off, last week's guy and this week's guy should talk about what happened and if there's anything they should know
Mission Bit needs a logo designed
Mission Bit, a free computer programming school for youth living and schooling in the Mission SF, CA needs a logo designed. Submit your entries via 99designs. Contest ends in 24 hours.
This post seems like a half-truth in itself (with a tinge of sour grapes). Furthermore, there seems to be a lot of self-contradiction. E.g.:

"The leadership was struggling with the vision of the company. It was pulled in many directions - sometimes ad-hoc based on customer feedback or angel advice."

and

"I wanted to have a significant impact so I was constantly asking the founders to work on the long-term vision and culture for the company. I also told them that VCs invested in talent and not the idea."

Being pulled in many directions at once is characteristic of new companies. Furthermore, you yourself were pulling it in one direction (it would appear). So, then, were you also guilty of this ad-hoc influence? I'm not sure what to take from this apart from "my pulling was good, their pulling was bad."

Also,

"The culture was bad. Engineers were constantly told what to do."

I think that this is pretty status-quo (you're an engineer, not an idea guy/founder after all). Not only that, but someone needs to hold the reigns. I couldn't imagine being a founder and not telling engineers what to do. Like the other HN'er, I need some clarification here. Were you being micromanaged? (And even that may not be a bad thing..)

Let me make a small aside about culture while I'm at it. I don't really buy into this "company culture" bullshit. It seems (to me at least) that it's mostly self-gratifying mental masturbation. Instead of being so obsessed with "culture" -- it's mentioned two or three times in the essay -- why not bring up more substantial issues up? After all, maybe it just wasn't a good fit (but that has nothing to do with culture). That would be like a girlfriend breaking up with me because of my "person culture." It's a meaningless platitude that's thrown around far too much in startup circles.
As an alternative to PuTTY, MinGW with the OpenSSH package has been great.
I have to ask: do you find you have a lot of applicants who turn away after this conversation?

In other words, other factors aside, does this negatively impact your hire/interview ratio?
True - you would have to set rules in place that would prevent any kind of incentive for increased occupancy, and then create government bodies that enforce these rules. Also, you would have to set rules in place for many kinds of standards for living conditions for inmates, and set up bodies that enforce those as well.

The thing is that when commercial incentives come into play, companies will go out of their way to find ways to increase profits. Privatization essentially starts a race to the bottom; a race that can only be slowed down by regulatory institutions. In the end, the company always wins and society loses. Banks have showed us that.
That "only thing that's missing" is a very very big thing, and difficult to get correct. And where does it say it's storing font data for the symbols?
> YC doesn’t necessarily mean sure shot success. Paul Graham is a human and bound to make mistakes.

It sounds like he made the poor assumption that YC = Success = Millions for everyone involved.
Lying about the numbers is never ok - when you ask people to take on risk for you it's inexcusable to be anything but transparent about what exactly they're taking on. The rest of the issues don't really surprise me, but dishonesty is a doozy.
I think that its a case where a lot of people had the same idea at around the same time. As recording technology advanced in the 1950s, people realized there was some creativity to be found there.

Many people attribute backwards recording to the Beatles and George Martin, but it had been done nearly a decade earlier (on purpose even) by André Popp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Popp with delirium in Hi-fi. Im sure this is not even the first instance.

Certainly there is significance here with the invention of the fuzz tone, and it definitely inspired a new wave of guitar effects, and most likely effects pedals. I think it demonstrates how the electric guitar is one of the most versatile instruments ever made and has a wider sonic palette than most any other thing out there when you account for playing styles, effects, and expression. Either way this was a great read, and I love to nerd out to audio, production and recording.
ah, cool! I guess it's all a gamble. (rim shot)
I think the common phrasing is, "If it's important to you, you'll find time. If it's not, you'll find an excuse."
Bezos Letter to Washington Post Employees
This is a good point. I'm Bengali (but from the western part). People I have met from the eastern part (Bangladesh) identify themselves culturally as Bengali, but politically as Bangladeshi. So the adjective is Bangladeshi (Bangladeshi government, Bangladeshi flag, Bangladeshi Army etc etc).

As an aside Bangla = the ethnicity, Desh = Country, so country of the Bengalis.
Medidata - New York, NY, Hammersmith, UK, other locations or REMOTE
http://jobvite.com/m?3baUZgwZ (All listings, select Engineering for the dev jobs)
http://jobvite.com/m?3DiUZgwz (Application link for NY Software Engineer)

We're an established company, we're doing good work, and we're in the middle of a hiring drive. Medidata's web services are helping make clinical trials faster, cheaper, more secure, and more effective. We've already helped some new medicine get approved and released to the world, and we have close to twenty open-source repos on github (https://github.com/mdsol/ and /mdsol-share) with more on the way.

We're looking for developers who are willing to spend half an hour discussing whether a certain method should be a PUT or a POST. Experience with some kind of MVC framework is a plus.
That's an excellent point, but they could have implemented something generic and gotten the same order of magnitude of protection for a lot cheaper.
Due diligence. You'd do it if you were investing money. You should do it if your going to invest your time. Especially if you're taking a big pay cut. In which case you're investing both your time and your money.

At least four of the five problems listed near the beginning of the article could've been discovered without leaving the cushy job.
I received that kind of anti-pitch before I joined CrowdFlower back when, and I found it very compelling.

It did in fact turn out to be an accurate representation of the cofounders' culture of transparency, too.
As I've read about this story for the past couple years not once have the bribers been mentioned. How much time will they be serving? Are these really people that should be trusted with the incarceration of minors?
Oh, I have absolutely no doubts about that! And from at least the review article they had on this page [1], it seems like the do some solid psychological assessment of gratitude. What does concern me though is when neuroscience is thrown into the mix just because everything seems more convincing with brain scans[3]. The articles <del>cited</del> referred to in the blog posts linked in the original blog post however often follow this pattern: (1) Assess X (say, gratitude) with an established or new questionnaire. (2) find a condition to vary (3) do a fMRI in both conditions and (4) correlate the contrast with the questionnaire. If you found a correlation, you found the neuronal cause for X! Publish!

This is just a huge waste of money. And also often enough poorly done [2].

[1] http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JYj4KStQjhIC&oi=f...
[2] http://www.edvul.com/pdf/VulHarrisWinkielmanPashler-PPS-2009...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465018777/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
I would be amazed if this was not the norm!

A cozy job at a top-tier tech company != start-up life (YC or otherwise). Larger companies have a culture, well define pathways for information to flow, you get acclimatized to this, etc. Startups typically have none of these, it is like a culture shock, imaging moving to a different country.

ps. no comment on the numbers bit.
It's base-62, just using the 52 alphabetics and 10 digits. Using just those characters ensures it can be typed and won't be mangled by international, HTML, or URL encodings.

>>> log(62)/log(2) * 32

190.53428193238003
The .js file is actually included in one of their templates (using include()). So the <?php code is executed at that point.
WGPCGR
I'm a big fan of Northwest Coast Native American art, which you can get for under $500 framed at places such as www.thelegacyltd.com
And that you feel personally targeted when you're snapped
Just a note: I just searched HN for this because I couldn't find a quick, easy and clean image upload elsewhere. Well done!
A clean bill of health will be given[1].

All parties involved with be granted immunity, possibly retroactive, even though no wrong doing was found[2].

More payments to data providers will be given[3], not considered bribes. This is after issuing them said (retro)active immunity from attempts at legal recourse.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cia-chief-w...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/supreme...

[3] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/07/10/us-pays-companies-big...
As It Shrinks In A Growing Market, Does IBM Have A Strategy?
From this list only 2 companies aren't VC-funded. StackOverflow raised VC funding later, when it got significant traction.

And I think ASP.NET has a good performance comparing to rails (not sure if they used C# or VB, C# obviously not a dynamic language).

The other one - 37Signals obviously experts in Rails - so they knew how to scale it. And even they took external funding later.

I think that dynamic languages like Erlang/Elixir, Clojure (and maybe Go) offer a good performance/productivity ratio.

Anyway, I think that Rails is OK for paid B2B web applications, not so much for free consumer stuff.
That looks interesting, if somewhat abandoned.
The IRS. He was convicted of wire fraud and tax fraud.[1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?pagewanted...
Top Apps on the Mobile Blacklist
I'm inclined to agree with you. Gay Marriage isn't a civil right's issue, it's a solution to a set of civil rights issues. Legalizing gay marriage doesn't help the child raised by his mom and an unrelated "auntie" who can't visit the kid in the hospital. It doesn't help the two best friends who have been living in a non-romantic domestic partnership for 20 years who can't both live and work in the same country.

I would prefer if we just make it illegal for anyone (IRS, immigration, employers, etc) to discriminate based on marital status. Problem solved.
Sony Rejects Entertainment Division Spin-Off
Curiosity is 1 today
No, really Yes but No... I dont think that if your corporation purposefully bribes judges to imprison children for profit, i dont think a civil court fine is sufficient. These guys should be going to jail for decades.
Go for post Series-A. VCs have already done the vetting for you.

Seems like you thought the same about YC: that they'd do the vetting for you. And yet you're set on making the same mistake again by relying on someone else to do the vetting.

Almost every start-up is a huge gamble. Naturally, the later stage you join it, the lower the general risk. In that case, why stop at Series A? If risk is all you care about(and it sure sounds like it from your post), why not just join profitable companies that are no longer startups? Much lower risk, promise.
I'm not even sure what a I just read. Did the author really mean to imply that statically typed languages don't require unit testing? Did the author really mean to claim that a low position in a single benchmark is a disqualifier for ever using a piece of technology?

These are not reasonable things to say. Its just religious zealotry basically.
As I understand it, companies get to keep any licenses they procure during the three year period at no charge upon graduating the program. Procuring additional licenses then starts to cost, but those are discounted for a two year period post-graduation.

Saying it's analogous to shady adjustable-rate mortgage practices is a bit of a stretch.
Caching ActiveModel::Serializers on Heroku
"Help others – 100 hours a year is the magical number."
Although all of the comments here have been valid and interesting, I'm gonna poke this reply thread with a Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAqTrbuxCRI

James Cotton - Cotton Crop Blues, on Sun Records. Recorded 1954, with a guitar solo harder/heavier than most records up until the late 60s (with a few exceptions like Dick Dale). And it features distorted power chords. Pretty much the first really heavy track out there, I figure. It's my go-to point to show people the origins of heavy, distorted guitar music.

I also like to show them some Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, as he had a lot of electrified instruments (electric guitar, electric mandolin, pedal steel) and was a big influence on Chuck Berry and Elvis. Plus I love Bob Wills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_rock_and_roll does a pretty good job of covering the important records that led up to the explosion of rock music in the 60s. Not sure about how it is beyond that.

Pretty glad a musical topic came up here on HN, though. I'm more passionate about music history than I am about computer science (though there are no career prospects there, so CS it is).
coming up with a consistent voice and narrative is actually quite difficult.

Yep, especially so for a startup who is still figuring out their place in the world. This is something that we constantly struggle with, and there's no solution other than putting in the effort to keep rebuilding your narrative as your audience changes.
Sounded implausible to me too. Perhaps its the number of videos currently being viewed such that e.g. viewing a 60 second video would effectively count for 60
Exactly. Happened with me too. Got paid twice. Told the project manager and he said he'll tell the Accounting department. A year later, and still nothing happened.
Bart! Stop shocking your sister! Bzzzt! (non-lethal version for ongoing fun & games :-))
Real-world comparison of Go, Ruby, Python, Clojure, ObjC + JSCocoa
Some companies hire, some fire. As long as the hiring exceeds, there can still be a shortage. I know very few EEs that have trouble finding jobs.
Some even better low hanging fruit would be to teach it to yourself first, because I doubt you can. Great marketing is incredibly seductive, and it invokes psychological principles which you simply can't get rid of. So your only path out would be to resign yourself from ever buying anything, and retreating to a heremit lifestyle. Not a feasible option in my opinion.

Let me tell you a story. About a year ago, I started getting into online marketing in preparation of starting a business. Fair game, right? Split testing, Keywords, the whole google-fu. But the most important aspect of online marketing isn't ninja-SEO, or conversion secrets out of Japanese dojos. It's copywriting. And copywriting is like all other writing. You improve by practice, and you improve by studying the masters. So I set out to find some masterfully crafted ad copy.

Now through my previous study, I stumbled over the ads of John Carlton. One of them, "Testosterone" caught my attention. It was one of his best converting, it was older, and I was incredibly far removed from his target market. After all, he was trying to sell body building supplements, and if there's a thing I don't do, then it's bodybuilding. I mean look at me, I'm skinny as a twig. I look at gyms from the outside, and that's that. So I thought, perfect, I'll start with that one.

So I started chewing my way through this 5 page ad, this machine gun feed of bullet points. I was trying to reverse engineer what he did. I get exited by it. This is good. I like this. I...I want to buy it? What the hell?
That moment, I knew Carlton had me. I'm wary of ads. I toss most of them without reading further than 3 lines, the words BS written all over my face. But there, he got me.

So you think you're dealing with low hanging fruit there?
Seems like a pretty common early stage startup to me--they look like sure shots from the outside, but internally everything seems like it's imploding. I remember joining my first startup back in 2007, and even after it received funding by some of the best names in SV, it felt exactly like what you described.

If you're looking to join a startup and expect the same experience as a large company, I don't know if you'll find it. It doesn't excuse bad behavior. The CEO at that startup I mentioned was pretty bad (at the time; I'm sure he's better now because he has moved on to bigger and better things) and got fired by the investors a few months after I left.

Early stage startups are probably not going to feel much like a normal job, based on what my friends tell me it's like (Google: you can work 30 minutes during the day and you're basically done).
You're missing the forest for the trees in this post, and being overly-literal. The author is actually being very clear in his side of the story.

>Being pulled in many directions at once is characteristic of new companies. Furthermore, you yourself were pulling it in one direction (it would appear).

The author was being pulled in many directions, then he wanted to help the founders and the company's direction as a result of being somewhat misinformed. He was trying to solve the lack of direction by pointing them in the direction of their vision. Saying they were being pulled in many directions is kind of like saying they had no direction, so your analysis is baseless.

>I think that this is pretty status-quo (you're an engineer, not an idea guy/founder after all). Not only that, but someone needs to hold the reigns. I couldn't imagine being a founder and not telling engineers what to do.

Secondly, it's not the status-quo, or at least, it doesn't have to be. You're being too literal - I think it's clear he means micromanagement and arbitrary instruction without needing to say that, not that he thinks engineers should exist in a utopian state of telepathic productivity where nothing needs to be said to them for them to accomplish their goals.
As someone who has been on night-shift on-call for end-user support while working the day job at the same time, let me assure you that you don't lose 'near to nothing'.

Most of the comments in this thread assume that the cost of support is trivial. It's not. Support is a product unto itself, and shouldn't be trivialised into "come on, it doesn't take much!".
This is something from one of my previous write-ups for startups, specifically ones using rails:

1) If you KNOW FOR SURE your startup will face a lot of page views, requests etc. before hand (Example - Real estate portals like Airbnb, Trulia, etc), then you should not make the serious mistake of ignoring high performance frameworks beforehand. This could literally be anything, but the alternative I personally recommend is something Scala based [Read section 4 for WHY].

2) As usual, use Rails (or django/similar) ALWAYS to build your v1 prototype. I say always because you will be incredibly surprised to see how much rails gets stuff done for you. While this is a huge advantage initially, this can also become a nightmare, later. Hence, I suggest you use rails only initially and not forever.

(It's too long, please follow the link below)

continue reading:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6129107
back of napkin, $2 CPM, CPM = 1000 banner impressions. 3 Banners per page, mean $6 Page CPM. $3000 / $6 = 500, therefore you will need to generate 500,000 page impressions per month. 3 page impressions per visitor means ~166,666 visitors per month

Lots of assumptions made, but gives you somewhere to start.
Maybe I'm wrong but I was under the impression that content_for works correctly with caching from rails 3 onwards.
That seems like a standard that is not really applied to any other post on HN. Why should it apply in this case?
Is this part of a larger issue of the company shrinking? http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2013/06/14/as-it-shri...

My perception is they give a lot of money back to shareholders while milking long standing businesses. I would think aggressive cost cutting is normal for them.
> I think that this is pretty status-quo (you're an engineer, not an idea guy/founder after all).

Er, no. A good leadership knows how to frame questions and let the engineers find the solutions. You don't come the engineering team with a solution already decided down to every last detail. It's what they're good at, after all, solving problems. Ideally you have someone who's leading the tech side who can call shots on the product AND work on the technical stuff.

Too many biz-dev types starting companies treat their engineers like code-monkey servants, to the detriment of the product and the company.
If chrome ever removes that setting, I will make chromereveal.com with one-click idiot-proof password dumping tool, and step-by step instructions. So hiding that button will not make it harder for your friends.

Just logout and give them guest access...geez.
If you right-click the taskbar and select properties you can choose the grouping behavior from Always, When Full or Never. You can also change the size of the taskbar buttons to small if you don't prefer the default.
It is very interesting to see Twitter has the similar idea with ours.

We just submitted a research paper 2 weeks ago to SPSM'13 (http://www.spsm-workshop.org/2013/). We proposed a password-free login system, of which Twitter's new 2-factor auth solution is a special case. We also discussed about the solutions to vender lock-in and 2-factor auth in the paper.

I put the paper in public for interested readers.
You can download it from http://about.bozhu.me/paper/loxin.pdf

PS. We did a conceptual Android app about password-free mobile payment, under the same idea, in last year when we participating in the MintChipChallenge by the Royal Canadian Mint. The source code is available at https://github.com/Xecurity/EasyChip
Chinese firm paid insider 'to kill my company,' American CEO says
Holding a patent doesn't mean you have to enforce it. https://blog.duosecurity.com/2013/08/welcome-to-the-push-clu...
Don't forget the $30000 every year thereafter for the maintenance contract.