skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never got over the 25 employees mark and probably that is one of the reasons why this problem never occurred but I can see your point and I think that once you reach a certain threshold (50 employees or so?) that it could be very hard to maintain such a culture. I'd also argue at the same time that once you do reach that level the moniker 'start-up' no longer applies to you. By that time you should have a solid business, the biggest risks should be behind you and you're transforming into a 'normal' company.

This line of thinking leads to yet another way to delineate what a start-up is: a start-up is a company where everybody knows everybody else.
This always seems to happen. They do stuff that is illegal for about 5-10 years prior to even lobbying to make it a law, and then Congress makes it a law, and nobody ever punishes them for doing it illegally before.
I don't think short practice does anything for you when it comes to something like coding.

I can't see anyone benefiting from less than a couple of hours of coding
That depends on a lot of factors, for instance how much money the tech team invested and how much money the other shareholders invested as well as on the moment when they joined and what what other compensation there was. Hard to make a judgment about any of this without knowing all the particulars. It is very well possible those guys were being exploited but it is also very well possible that this was done by the book.
>Still one can see how few people are willing to support FOSS developers, when looking at how much money they donate, or how quick someone comes up with a fork when money is asked for

Do you have any examples of forks being made due to someone asking for donations?

As for the problem of people getting paid to write open source software, I really don't think that the 'hiding the source code and selling binaries' method is the only viable option.

I also don't think people are unwilling to support FOSS developers, I think it's mainly a problem of convenience (as in payment) and exposure.

Things like Kickstarter helps a great deal here and I think this is a much untapped resource for funding FOSS development. One very successful venture was Openshot, an open source video editor (GPL licenced) which had a goal of $20.000 but which reached $45.000.

Granted we aren't in a situation where it's possible to make a full-time career out of developing open source software through Kickstarter style donations, but I think it's not such a big step as one might think.

I would happily pay a small sum each month for someone (or someone's) to work on FOSS software I use a lot, and I think a large number of people out there would do the same, atleast enough for someone to make a decent living out of it.

Again I believe the key aspect is to make the payment convenient/safe and of course have a way for projects to gain exposure.

Paying a small lump sum each month for continued free open source development of software you use/rely on for your work is in my book a much better long term solution than to pay a larger sum for the latest update of 'proprietary software X' where you are solely dependant on that provider and have to accept their conditions in terms of price/licencing not to mention the intrusive DRM mechanism which are a de facto part of proprietary software today.

Compare that to the FOSS situation where, given that the source code is open (and due to copyleft any forks will also remain open), you will never be locked-in to one provider and their whims even if you are totally dependant on that specific piece of software.

Anyway I'm not pretending that this is the 'perfect solution', but I dare say proprietary software certainly isn't (and I make a living off writing proprietary software and have for the past 8 years) and I think that a shift from relying on proprietary to instead relying on open source code is of great importance for many of the reasons RMS outlined. YMMV and all that.
The Replicator & Symbrion robots
Vehicle remote key security
You can drag them out of the toolbox directly to the position you'd like.
Imagine a world where we don't have to convert between multiple charsets, or even think about them, beyond "text" vs "binary". That world is perfectly achievable, it's basically already happened outside the Microsoft ecosystem.

OSX and Linux default to using UTF-8 everywhere, Ruby on Rails is UTF-8 only, the assumed source encoding in Python 3 is UTF-8, URI percent-encoding is done exclusively using UTF-8, HTML5 defaults to UTF-8... The list goes on and on. "UTF-8" is becoming synonymous with "text".

In an all-UTF-8 world, if you want to build a URI parser, or a CSV parser, or an HTML parser, or really anything that does any kind of text processing (except rendering), you can just assume ASCII and everything will work as long as you're 8-bit clean. Even non-US codepages are all more-or-less supersets of ASCII. The only major exceptions are EBCDIC and UTF-16.

Because of UTF-16, we have to build charset conversion/negotiation into every single interface boundary, where we could otherwise just be 8-bit clean except in places where text actually has to be rendered.

It's completely unnecessary friction that undermines one of the big motivations for creating Unicode in the first place: coming up with a single standard for text representation, so that we don't have to deal with the mess of handling multiple charsets everywhere.

None of these decisions is a big deal in isolation, but it's a death by 1000 cuts. When you have mountains of unnecessary complexity, it only serves to make programming inaccessible to ordinary people, which is how we get awful policies like SOPA, software patents, and the like.
Docker is awesome, but specifically NOT ready for production.

From Docker's website "we make a point of saying that we’re not production ready".http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/getting-to-docker-1-0/

While I love your enthusiasm, I worry that you'll mislead others into thinking that its a good idea to replicate your setup and run something important.
Pardon my ignorance but doesn't apple own rights to the term 'app store'?

Update: apparently I'm wrong http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/legal-privacy/15714.h...
It's a matter of sample size, not of principle.
If you use this for hotkeys in your application make sure to return false or set e.handled to true or something like that. I don't remember the exact details right now.

Otherwise features from the browser like "incremental search" in firefox will get priority over the key captures in your app. In fact both your key capture and the incremental search will trigger which is very frustrating as the page starts scrolling to the first match of the letter you just typed.

But be very careful while doing this. Only do it for for your own hotkeys and make sure they are not used for other hotkeys in most common browsers! If you always swallow the keypress, normal hotkeys like ctrl+t for new tab will stop working for the user also.
Any modern course on formal methods in software design should at least mention modern tools like coq, however, in this course there're no mention of them.
That's exactly what I thought as well.

I'd very much prefer having the 10x engineer meme replaced by that of the 0.1x engineer: the one that gets the same task done with 10% of the code and effort.

The times I've felt by far most valuable is when I found a way to make that multi-month project simply obsolete by just changing a couple hundred lines of code in an unexpected place.
Is it just me, or could the people in a majority of these places (except very south) actually prefer the global warming situation to the current one? The projected map seems rather acceptable.
Yep: http://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/a...
I too believe that our civilization should be build on free software and I think the best existing financing solution is crowdfunding. The idea is based on free market capitalism and while it has been around for a while we now know that it works. Kickstarter has demonstrate that it can not only raise millions to finance hardware development and commercial games [2] but also substantial money for free software [3].
I truly believe that at this point, all we need is to propagate this idea and help FOSS developers to crowdfund their projects. Once a project has collected enough money for a first working version, subsequent development can be financed by donations, support or merchandizing. Major updates could again be financed over crowd funding.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper...
[2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-anni...
[3] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...
And here was have a prime example of why, despite all the opinion to the contrary[1], there is a clear need for a more stringent review process for Android apps. This is exactly the kind of thing which could have been caught by some kind of run-time analysis, either by hand or through some automated process that's part of the "approval" needed to be on the Play Store. Given Google's technical chops, I doubt they would have a hard time checking for this automatically at submission time, so they wouldn't have to hire a staff of human reviewers like Apple does. It might slow down the process of posting things to the store just slightly, but in the end it would benefit users.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329490
Agreed. For example, if your environment is Google App Engine, your choices are more limited, and Go suddenly becomes a very attractive performance option.
> So it seems extremely shortsighted to choose a language because it's easy to learn and similar to what you already know!

But the benefits are that many new people will be able to pick it up quickly and easily. Other people's code will be easy to understand and maintain. So it's good for everyone in the long run. Being able to express complicated ideas in simple ways is very valuable.

If you think it's an advantage that it'd take someone else years of learning a language before they can understand the code you wrote, Go is not for you. [1]

[1] http://commandcenter.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/less-is-exponen...
can I ask a few questions as I am struck by this comment

- How much of his contribution would you rate as technical vs understanding the domain, understanding of the systems and seeing through explicit requirements to the underlying need (you might see where I am leading).

actually that's several questions right there.

I am just fascinated by the idea of 10x: my personal assumption is it is like professional football stars - there are those who are paid 1000x, who probably win 10x but as athletes and players will be only a fraction of x better than the lowliest professional player and into the Sunday leagues.

However in these fraction of x cases other things come to play - like coach, team spirit, team quality, tactics etc. and in the software field I expect a similar disjunction to occur - knowing the system under maintenance perfectly, understanding / influencing the business requirements, as much as raw technical ability.

for example David Beckham is probably 10x player compared to say a professional in the first division. this does not mean he scores 10x as much or retains possession 10x or any other metric you like. but that teams with him in win 10x because of the leverage of the in tease in ability he does have.

and leverage is out of this world in software.

so just interested - is your ex-Collegue a david Beckham of c++ ? or is he truly a god?
I never said Docker is production ready or not. What I show you is how to run(and use) mongodb with docker.

BTW: We don't need version 1.0 to use it in production. See NodeJS.
Google calls theirs the Play Store. Of course, that's not going to stop everybody else calling it an "app store".
Speaking as one who had to use it for six months, Microsoft Office 2008 for OS X was a disaster, particularly Excel.

Microsoft Office 2011 for is pretty much close to perfect, and is certainly as capable as Microsoft Office 2010 that I run on Windows 7.

I run them side-by-side all day (PC Desktop with a big honking Monitor, Mac Laptop, 13" screen) - and I don't see any significant functional/usability issues with the Macintosh version.

Ironically, Microsoft Office is not a reason to use the Microsoft Surface instead of the MacBook Air. In fact, I'm willing to wager it runs better on the MBAir than it does on the surface. (Keyboard on MBAir laptop is probably better than one on Surface)
Hmm, that is unfortunate. However, since my university recently canceled its only class that covered formal methods in any depth, I haven't been able to find any great options for learning about this area in a structured way. Perhaps you could provide an alternate, superior option?
For index based operations code units are more useful than code points.

a = s.indexOf("e̬̱ͤ̈́̿̂̅́͟")

b = s.indexOf("m̛̮̩͙ͦ͗͆̄̋́̄")

s[a:b]

This operation is fast with code unit indices and slow with code point indices.
That´s seems a very small part for a founding team.. We are a team of 5 (+1 cofounder-investor-accelerator), 2 cofounders and 3 of the founding team. All of the founding team are getting paid below the market, but they also maintain side jobs. They get around a 3% each. If they have accepted to work for no salary, it would have been around a 10%.
Just take in to account that almost all the angel round is going to pay them, but I don´t feel they can have less than that. The part of the team is a 10% and if the team grows it will also grow (they´ll only take dilution once/if we get a VC round). I don´t know if that´s close to the norm in SV.
Nokia Chief Gets Record Speeding Fine
Professor Develops 'Brain' for Robots
The opposite of what you would lose by playing SMB at 30 FPS [1].

http://www.testufo.com/#test=framerates

Smoothness, feeling of fluidity and responsiveness. Being very timing-sensitive and twitch-skill-based, SMB would gain a lot more from 120 Hz than a slower paced game would.

[1] Of course, the gains of going from 60 to 120 fps are much smaller compared to 30 to 60, but still. People have PCs and monitors capable of running SMB at 120 fps, so being bottlenecked by the software is frustrating.
>The reason seems to be that programmers use the expressivity of the former (which seems to be of a particular nature or natures: functional construct, higher-order types, meta-programming) to model their own thought-process, which may be hard to replicate for someone else maintaining the code.

I agree with that. Working on code in a large and ever changing team is very difficult, and it seems to benefit from less abstraction, even if it leads to more verbose code. That's the whole secret of Java. I've been implementing a small part of my current project in Go and it has similar benefits.

That said, when working alone or with one or two others, I feel kind of dumb repeating some things over and over at the same level of abstraction. There are lots of things like this little piece of C++ code that I tried to translate into reasonably efficient Go:

template<typename V, typename R>
R defaulted(const V& val, const R& default_val) {
return val == V() ? default_val : val;
}

I came away scratching my head a little, probably because I'm a Go newbie.
How to earn 80 dollars over and over in your spare time.
For example Ryan Air is quite open (at least compared to other airlines) and it´s very big. With some thousands of employees, they send monthly letters informing on how many people is joining, how many will go, if a base is closing due to poor performance, etc..
In traditional airlines, all this info is purely gossip, and you never know what is really happening.
Once you solved "real problems" you made a lot of choices you're going to regret. But it's too late.

We have enough solutions for real problems but few good ones. Good enough is not good enough. Time to think up front.
Typo. Should be: You can't SORT all the words...
sumo.fm used to be my go to solution for drawing online. This is simpler! Sometimes simple works!
Great advice Patrick. Thank you!
You can export to SVG and "post-process" into Inkscape, don't you?
Looking at regex101, the layout of the page looks awfully similar. It seems that the author took Rubular and made it more generic. So yeah, props to Rubular.
Careful in your enthusiasm, you might sound like a fan boy :-)

Ah, only Android and Apple stuff can be praised? Sorry, but I don't care about their latest "innovation" or marketing hype unless it's worth it. And I don't care how I sound, as long as I'm being honest. I have Windows 7 on desktop and laptop and an Android tablet ~$100 range to check some news. If I could undo it, I'd have a Surface Pro to replace the laptop and tablet and do all an operating system can. That's all.

But I will buy one when it can do what I miss on my iPad -- run Debian/Ubuntu/etc with good hardware support. Unless the Android pads seduce me first.

That is probably less than 1% of the user base. On the other end, I still have Photoshop 6.0 installed and it does the job for the things I need. I don't know when I bought it but I keep transferring from machine to machine as I upgrade.
Everything is awesome about this except the bloody OS. They gotta do something to populate the app ecosystem more.[at least comparable to Android and Apple]. maybe forget about their proprietary code for once and allow developers to code through some open sourced tools.
My personal opinion, which might not line up with anyone elses: GCC is a 'part' of GNU/Linux because of the goals/aims of GNU/Linux, which is to have a freely modifiable and distributable operating system. If you put yourself in the time when this project was started, there was no free compiler, they simply didn't have one. But in order to meet the goals of the project, they would need one (you might not need one to run it, but you sure do need one to develop it), so it's therefore a very core part of the project.

You don't need a c-based tool chain installed to run a GNU/Linux system or make it usable for a non-dev though, no, Ubuntu doesn't have it by default for example.
Very nice for electric/electronic/logic diagrams!

Is there a way to connect elements (logic gates, transistors, etc.) inputs to outputs with auto-routing wires?
Always good to see research of course!

1.) But why is there a "leader" to begin with? In swarms of birds the older birds do have some specific roles, but real "leaders" seem to me a brittle approach.

2.) Reinforcement learning, and an actor-critic system is nothing new. But what is an "active critique"? Never heard about it...
> "It helps explain why the free software community has not yet delivered things like Google Docs, Github and AWS."

I'd bet that each of those has benefitted hugely due to FOSS. I might even go so far as to say they wouldn't exit at all without it (though I don't know what underlies Google Docs).

FOSS is great for things 'under the hood' but very few things in the mainstream are FOSS throughout. I find that interesting, as it's indicative of the different pressures in open-source vs closed-commercial environments (remuneration is one such issue).
Poll: Freelancers/Consultants – What's your yearly income?
There has been lots of polls about freelancers/consultants hourly rates; but I think they miss a point. You can have a high hourly rate but work little hours; or the other way.Here are the rules:

1. This poll concerns any freelaner/consultant/contract that is working on a hourly/daily/weekly rate (or fixed rate).

2. Income after subtracting business related costs (like Office rent, work related hardware...)

3. Passive income should be excluded.<p>4. Your yearly profits before Taxes.
$20k or less
$20-$50k
$50k-$80k
$80-$120k
$120-$150k
$150k-$200k
$200k or more
Except that the US is not the world </snark>
Because you can have extremely long strings without worrying about overflowing a fixed-size length prefix.
You also get a 1080p screen on the Surface but no Thunderbolt. Depends on which is more important to you i guess.
Neuromarketing Is The Fundamental Secret Of Success
A bit off-topic, I posted the same link 4 hours before the OP and it got only 1 upvote. Oh the unpredictability of HN!
SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 Launch Status & Live Video
I don't know about that. I would think a rising tide could lift the boats of PC OEMs. There is still the Baytrail chip that can be exploited for a lightweight tablet. They just need to step their design game up. Something like the Sony TAP 11 that uses Baytrail could be big.
Anybody knows or have any reasonable guesses when Rust will be ready?
You seem to be under the impression that you own the content, as opposed to it being rented to you at the whim of the companies involved.
But comiting suicide is not a logical decission in that situation. I don´t know you, I don´t know your case nor how to improve the situation. But being dead will not resolve the problem, and it will hurt the people you love much much more than any harsh comment you are able to do.
There is always the possibility to find a way out, and then realice that that dark hole you where in, was just a solvable problem.
You seem a techical guy, don´t use your analytic capabilities to rationalize and confirm your feelings, use them to get new information that is able to help you.
Quote: "The respected broadcaster and naturalist, Sir David Attenborough, told the BBC recently that population growth was "out of control" - but one expert says the number of people on the planet could peak in 40 years. Who should we believe?"

Wait -- isn't it obvious that both statements are true? That world population will peak in 40 years, and population is out of control? Where's the conflict between those two statements?

If population had peaked 30 years ago, I might have been willing to hear that population isn't out of control, but I would still argue that it's a serious problem. Why? Because that earlier population was already unsustainable with existing resources.

Many have argued that a world population of 500 million to 1 billion people is the carrying capacity of Planet Earth, if we expect not to strip the planet bare and then face a crisis we can only imagine. Any higher population only postpones an inevitable day of reckoning.
Bum-a-Cigarette App Idea. Thoughts?
My first thought was "what, again? Didn't they learn from the last one?" Then I saw that the dateline was 2002 - this was the last one.

FWIW, that record has been broken several time since 2002, both in Finland (Jussi Salonoja had to pay $200,000 for driving 50kph in a 25kph zone) and in Switzerland ($290,000 for driving 137kph through an 80kph zone).

See http://jalopnik.com/the-eight-biggest-speeding-tickets-ever-... for more details and more examples of high speed limits. The highest they list is $1 million, also in Switzerland, but everyone references the same article in the Telegraph, which isn't substantial enough for me.
20 Things I Learned While I Was in North Korea
iikanji looks good, but have you seen wanikani? The concept seems similar.
http://www.wanikani.com/
Some feedback: I know how to read all of the stuff I tried (the first 10 kanji), mostly thanks to wanikani. But I haven't studied much gramar, so I'm not always sure what the sentences mean. You should probably add translations for these in the back of the cards.
Shannon is more like the Feynmann of Computer Science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Hobbies_and_inve...
That claim was only correct in the US, and while Gruber thinks the US system has unfairly aided Android, it's fairly clear the opposite is true.
> Mandating more gas efficiency means you necessarily get less of other important things people like and want, such as safety and cost savings.

...or cup holders. See parent post.
Shin Bet: Iranian Revolutionary Guards spy arrested in Tel Aviv
"and you would get Java performance from your Python code."

Nah, I doubt it would ever use _that_ much memory.