skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Have you had trouble getting a job after a failed startup?
The article about the successful female Japanese entrepreneur got me thinking. I've been working for the man my whole life. When I was younger, I had someone turn me down for a programming job because they said my GPA was too high. I thought that particular employer was an idiot but it is their call. I'm curious if there are similar biases that are faced by failed entrepreneurs. Someone can have a bias that if you did a startup once, you will likely not be a stable employee and quit after a little while to do your next startup. I'm not worried about the major markets (Silicon Valley and New York) but about the rest.
Surveillance as a Business Model
A couple other oddities of geography I have noticed as a geospatial system developer.

- Outside the US and Europe things tend to get really wacky with geography and geospatial data. Many GIS products are licensed per country for this very reason.

- In the US, zip codes are the most terrible type of geography to use for any meaningful analysis, as they are constantly changing and do not actually have defined borders. Zip codes are basically just labels that get appended to street segments.

- If you look in the back of the ~200 page pdf that comes with most digital geographic data, you will find an appendix. 99% of the appendix is a section typically called "disputed territories", and 99% of the disputed territories are China claiming to own another nation. I never realized quite the extent of the megalomania until I read a few of those.
The canonical example of DM hypocrisy is its stand "for decency" while filling its pages with image after image of semi-dressed celebrities:

http://cdn.recombu.com/digital/images/news/M10326/1335269711...
It's a interesting presentation but can anyone tell me why you would build an analytics tool and an advertising tool when there are already tools out there to do this? (Chartbeat, Doubleclick, etc...)

Maybe there have very specific use cases or have grown to the point were it makes economic sense to rebuild these but seems a bit redundant.
Out of curiousity, what is the division you know, and where did you get it from?
My uncle and aunt in New Zealand once moved their house to another street. It's quite common there, then again most houses are made of wood and easier to move than concrete.
Perhaps that's true, but you can be sure they're not getting their fix in the Mail, which regularly takes ferocious swipes at that element of society.

Which is another reason I have a kind of grudging respect for them. You'll never read a word against the 1-percenters in the Murdoch press.
You can have your event, flight, hotel and restaurant reservations, orders and parcel deliveries, and prompt for reviews or custom actions in Google Now by adding meta-data to your notification emails:

https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/google-now

From the other direction, you can have Google Now call back into your Android app, triggered by hot words, as demonstrated in the new version of Todoist:

https://todoist.com/blog/2013/11/todoist-for-android-adds-su...

I can't find any published API for the latter.
> If this current incarnation of the VC-funded bubble hasn't crashed, in 3 years he'll be part of the "tech" in-crowd and people here will be discussing his new venture capital fund.

> I, for one, will never take investment from any VC firm that employs Hunter Moore as a Managing Partner.

Surely, there's no chance of that actually happening? He's going to end up bankrupt behind bars, right?
Dude, how about this line from the OP Guardian article? It kind of is Manna...

> A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the scanner beeped.

> "We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said.
Ugh, this post is a minefield of logical fallacies
Is Comet ISON Heading for Interstellar Space?
This looks pretty good, I could imagine using this to do preliminary user tests or even full blown studies.
I haven't yet - but I'm planning to ban the smart phone and tablet computer from the bedroom.
"The scandal is that it would take so little effort on the part of Amazon to significantly improve the working experience."

I have observed bait n switch as a labor force management technique... lure in "good" workers by promising awful pay and benefits not, but 4 years in its pretty awesome. Then make actual conditions, procedures, and policies such that everyone is fired or quits by 6 months in.

Used to see this a lot for health insurance. Nobody gets insurance for first 90 days, coincidentally everyone is fired for cause or quits in disgust less than two months in.

A business can save a lot of money that way. Not saying its right, just explaining why a business would intentionally boost their turnover rate or refuse to make the simplest change to lower their turnover rate. Its not a bug, its a performance eval oriented bonus rewarded feature.
...with the caveat that there's negative cost associated with retaining bad ones instead of cutting them loose and finding better fits.
The Leek group is doing some fantastic things, pushing for better transparency and coding integrity from statisticians. I met with Jeff a little while back and was just really enthused by his desire to change the way traditional statistics/biostatistics is viewed and interacted with.
Man, sometime this union bashing must get old.

Maybe unions don't have the leverage they had because China.

Maybe unions don't have the leverage they had because per-worker productivity went through the roof while production did not keep pace.
Sorry, looks like this is a repost of a Nov 20th piece Schneier did for CNN -http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/20/opinion/schneier-stalker-e...
It’s Time to Play Moneyball: The Investment Readiness Level
> Scanning books for public good would be fine, if was done by library of congress, but its evil if its done by the big brother that is called Google.

Wow, what an absurd thing to say.
Software Mines Science Papers to Make New Discoveries
BlackBerry Cleans House As COO, CMO And CFO Depart
It's actually a very interesting problem. It depends entirely on the person and the extent to which they are conscious of the multitudinous implications of their statements.

But really, whoever has been giving you that advice is a dunce. I expect your being seen as a jerk has a lot more to do with how you negotiate people's feeling than how you interpret their statements. The people giving you that advice probably want you to stop being a jerk but can't quite articulate what they mean.

This is actually more interesting than whatever the fuck this thread was about. Hermeneutics is funnnn.
10 CSS Tips for Beginner Web Developers
You can make anything look good by only considering the good aspects.

You can make anything look bad by only considering the bad aspects.

Neither of those is particularly better than the other.

I live near Detroit. I can see by metaphorically looking out the window that it's not all good.

(Note for the purposes of this post I'm not saying "Unions 100% caused Detroit's collapse"... it is enough merely that they had a non-trivial hand in the collapse by pricing themselves entirely out of the market, and that's merely the easiest manifestation of their problems to put in a post like this. Nor am I making the claim I just said in my second paragraph is a bad thing; I'm not saying unions are all bad. I'm saying it's a great deal more complicated than edent makes it sound, and without understanding both sides, you can't understand what's happening.)
I actually like 'Hello world' examples, as long as they are very short. That way I have a basic program in an unknown language and can continue from there. Finding out how to make a very simple sample program myself was frustrating in the past sometimes. (Where should I put the files, what is necessary to load the main class etc.)
I think Letwin turned out to be right. I can't find the Usenet thread. It was from the early 1990's.
I posted it. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=346005.0
What would also be interesting would be an explanation of how this then ties in to the "headline" short term interest rate that the Fed, ECB, Bank of England etc. set.

All the ground work has been laid - and I think many people would be interested to know the mechanics behind what happens when the Bank of England "cuts rates" or "raises rates".

The only other place I've seen this explained well is at the start of the book "Pricing Money" by J.D.A Wiseman - but that's not available online.
I learned this fact from the temp in an episode of the Office.
Scheme, SML, and Haskell are all >20 years old, and pretty strongly "functional". ML (the original one) is over 40 years old.
E-dreams. about kozmo.com: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/
I actually agree that a GM is not necessarily the best teacher. But there are people with decades of TEACHING experience, and they are the best teachers.

He's certainly within his rights to go around saying you should listen to him. Just like every other useless self-help blogger is.

The fact that my calling out his authority and credibility seems to rile up so many people says something about the crowd here. The crowd here is anti-intellectual, anti-credential, anti-experience, and anti-expertise. The crowd seems to be a lot of overpuffed young men who read Paul Graham essays and feel superior to others... for no reason.
Out of interest, how many people here have been in a startup company where it has been really hard to gain new customers, but once they realise what you are doing for them they love you forever?

This was my position ten years ago. The company folded because it was just so expensive to get new customers and the bubble burst so we couldn't get any further investment.
I've been using this format recently and appreciate the additional fidelity from simple rows. The flexibility makes it good for the raw stage, but I usually have to extract tidy subsets for real analytic work. I have written many little scripts to pull arbitrarily deep keys out of these structures and produce tidy tables for further analysis.

actually, this format is also nice because iterating over the lines of a file is very similar to running through a mongo cursor. that makes it easy to reprise choose to work with both inputs.
Wow. This is fantastic to get that much feedback on how users are using an app. Are there any other tools like this on the market currently?
Show HN: Deploy your Sinatra and Padrino stacks on Cloud 66
The next social network should not be site or app at all, but instead be a protocol.
>The one about "buildings do not move" is hilarious.

In Sweden, the whole city of Kiruna (complete with church, town hall, schools, shops and a station) is moved two miles to the east.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/and-you-thoug...
Having done a startup has significantly increased my job opportunities, in fact took them from roughly 0 to roughly I could have whatever job I want in my field any time. In the United States, things are incredibly different from Japan, your resume is rapidly becoming what you're done.

If you're worried about failing as a startup, consider that the company failing won't mean that the PRODUCT failed - you may fail with a beautiful product that people love and use that attains reach that many profitable companies can not. The only way I can see failure as a startup to be seen as a negative is if you did something unethical or built absolute crap, or perhaps didn't launch at all.
I don't think poorly run unions are a satisfactory justification for the belief that "unions are bad" (PG's contention, not yours.)

I'd like to start a union that did things properly whenever I hear about RMT being Trotskyites on the radio again - but then, more civilised alternatives do exist in the UK, like Propsect.
Beware the trademark trolls.
This is really cool and great execution
Jobs Just For Javascript Developers
Maven commands in batch file scripts
>Why on freelance sites, market isn't friendly to companies, and how to fix?<

- Supply and demand varies in different markets
- Quality of freelancers and employers varies in different markets
- Freelance sites need to create loyal followers
Bicycle Shop Online
>Instead of complaining, wouldn't it be more productive to take your own advice and post some of the resources that you found useful?

No. Pointing out the low quality of this article is pretty easy and helpful. It's not like the opportunity cost of my very simple (but powerful) criticism is precluding me from making my contributions to the world.

I think we should all spend a lot more time shooting down people who don't deserve attention.

I'm sure he's a nice guy. Maybe he's a great friend and sincerely loves his mom. If these things make you uncriticizable on HN, no wonder the place is full of trash.

P.S. It's blogspam because he's selling his book.
Show HN: Include this JS library to enable cross-origin requests
My point was that if you are making a decision explicitly on salary and interesting technology it was a good choice. I'm sorry if this was not clear.

Were you asking me to explain my point because you find the existence of a rational explanation for intelligent people working for the company extremely offensive?

It's a common fallacy to assume that political beliefs are connected to intelligence.

You should always consider the possibility that there are smart people who hold different political/ethical positions to you.

The engineers that joined might not consider the publication evil, and they might not like the grossly-offensive insinuation by you that they are like western prostitutes in Saudi Arabia (?!).
Thanks. I did not know this.
Majority of Silk Road's Bitcoins may remain unseized
Std::min Causing Three-Times Slowdown on VC++
In my experience this is false for SaaS products. This is because you can get new customers by improving the amount and quality of passive traffic you get, or by optimizing ads. This has a very good return on investment. But if a customer is somewhat unhappy and wants to leave but you persuade them to stay by building that "one small feature" they really wanted your return on investment is terrible. The feature will take several days to build and test and in exchange the customer will be happy for a only month or two after which they will again come with unreasonable demands.

Retaining a customer makes a lot of sense when you are a consulting shop where customers pay you for the work you do. In a SaaS world where a small percentage of the customers is already responsible for 80% of the support load trying to retain them is often just not worth it.

How much effort you should put in retaining a customer is a function of the cost to require new customers (CAC) and the LTV of the customer. And for SaaS focusing on customer acquisition works much better. Or to put it really simply: if your goal is to grow your SaaS business at 20% month over month the few customers that want to leave but could be persuaded to stay are simply a distraction.
We want Sid back, bring him back to us! :D
From the article:

The researchers also report on the possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, may have been connected to DPR. Nakamoto, who invented Bitcoin in 2009 and provided the computer power which ran the network for the first year of its life, stopped communicating with colleagues in 2010, and hasn't been heard from since.

But the researchers find that one account, which sent a thousand Bitcoins to DPR in 2013, is linked through a string of high-value transactions to an account which has been active since 16 January 2009, and so Ron and Shamir argue that it is "reasonable to assume" that the account was owned by Nakamoto. They speculate that the transaction "could represent either large scale activity on Silk Road, or some form of investment or partnership".
5 Lies Guys will always tell their Girlfriends
Employers find any reason possible to turn someone down if they want to. It sounds like in your case it was just an excuse on their part. If you just don't "fit in" with the culture of the organization they will try to find something tangible to deny you to save face (and for possible legal reasons).

IMO regarding the startup thing, it all depends on what/who/where you are interviewing for. I've talked with hiring managers who saw it as a major asset and others who saw it as being akin to an excuse for being unemployed for a couple years. It all revolves around the manager's perception of entrepreneurship. It's not a global perspective but rather much more individual.
The Essential List of Employee Christmas Gift Ideas
In college, when we were hanging out all around a TV watching a game or something, we would mute the TV during the commercials.

It was strange at first for new people, but surprisingly effective.
You've completed missed what I'm saying. I'm saying the best teachers for brand new chess players are those humans who specialize in rapidly training new chess players. The people who should write books on chess training are the people who have been doing it for 20+ years and actually have some authority. These people DO write books but apparently they're less interesting than some 19 year old posting his completely untested, unrefined, invalidated hunches. It's low quality content in a field where there is a LOT of high quality content.

If the article was targeted at expert chess players I wouldn't have said anything. Because expert chess players don't need to be told that there are better experts than 19 year old newbies. The fact that the article is targeted at beginners is what motivated me to speak up--beginners might not realize just how much quality information is out there and that they don't need to settle for the afternoon musings of a newbie.
The sad truth is that unless you're language is a big improvement over existing solutions, it won't be adopted. You have to understand that the major benefit for someone beginning a new language is the libraries, and you wom't have any. This is why there are so many languages with so few having been adopted. If you have a real benefit that can ouweigh the _enormous_ disadvantage of using a new language, we'd be happy to hear.
It would be worth noting geography in the answers to these questions. Japan is very different than Silicon Valley in terms of work culture and expectations. Silicon Valley is very different than Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Interesting question, I hope it gets some traction.
We've had this issue with our startup since our competitors are either a Goliath in the space or well-funded startups. Yet we probably get at least a few emails each week from users who just love what we do. We've also had a fair share of users email us asking us how they can give us money, because they don't want us to disappear. So, I guess, we're doing something right.
"I'm not worried about the major markets (Silicon Valley and New York) but about the rest."

I've worked for employers that have gone out of business but not as an entrepreneur. I've never worked more than 300 miles from Chicago. No one cares, no resume stain. You're going to have a lot of trouble collecting more than anecdotes.

Outside major markets, the market is smaller and subjectively better connected and personal relationships are going to be pretty important. People will know you and what you personally did and that narrative is going to be more important than the narrative in company financial papers etc.
http://www.appsee.com/ is another company that does something similar.
Failing is hard. It hurts. You go into a tailspin of destruction.

If you built up skills that are marketable and achieved great things along the way, you'll be pleasantly surprised - I came out worth almost 2x on the market as what I did when I quit. It was incredible.

That said, being an entrepreneur will change you - you will become a maverick, you will lose your fear of authority, you will be a value creator as you're so used to the survival mentality you used to foster in your startup. This alone justifies why any company that cares about innovation would want you leading their team.
That's not actually better for the employees, unless they're just part-time students looking for a side job. You can't support yourself or a family on 4 hour shifts a day. Also, and I never actually directly dealt with the paperwork of hiring so I can't confirm this, but it's my understanding that it is actually more expensive to hire someone new than give a current employee more hours due to now having to provide benefits for two people.
Fighting off a DDOS attack at the moment :(
That and the fact that Pinterest is actually exploring how to gain revenue. They've used Skimlinks (http://skimlinks.com/) before to affiliate the content posted on their site. Probably the best idea out there.
Yeah, it's typical of Ars these days. Not particularly artful rehashing of existing info.
After Usable failed I applied for several jobs and was turned down by more than one for sounding likely I'd get bored and leave after a few months. It's a fair comment - once you've experienced the freedom of the startup industry going back to a normal job is tough.
>You can disagree, that's cool, we can have different opinions, but aren't we supposed to strive to a slightly higher level of discourse on HN?

I would prefer to strive for a slightly higher level of actual empathy and morality on HN rather than tolerate the "Fuck you, got mine" attitude you're displaying.
It will certainly be appealed. The results of the appeal are anybody's guess.
It's a tight line. As someone in Sales, it is helpful to know people's email. But sending spam just creates more powerful spam blocking email systems, which ultimately screen out real email too.

The hack is cool. Public directories of everyone's email address (which is the logical extension) - maybe not as cool.
In big corporates, your startup experience might not count for much, but I doubt that many places would consider it a downright negative. For SMB's I would expect it to count as a positive. At least when I have been hiring (in SMB's) I would certainly prefer a developer who had some non-tech perspective over someone who's strictly technically strong. A lot of programming jobs are really something like 20% programming and 80% figuring out what the customer wants.
Automatically backup your server config file automatically before editing it
It looks interesting.

On a presentation note:

1. Use a tripod for your camera.
2. please fix your lights! You probably aren't hung over, but the lighting suggests baggy eyes. Lighting is easy. Use window light. Heck, you are even shooting with with a front-facing camera on your phone, so it should be easy to pick some lighting that works nicely :-)

Both of these things are cheap or free, and will drastically improve your presentation, IMO.

Cheers!
Spam is in the eye of the beholder. When my wife goes through our (physical) mail, she complains about how 90% of it is "junk," but her eyes light up at the 20% off coupon from Bed, Bath, & Beyond addressed to "Current Resident."

If your message is relevant and valuable, the receiver doesn't see it as spam, regardless of whether they've heard of you.
My first Bill Gates review
YouTube, You Need A GIF Creator
I actually phrased my comment in the style of a marker who is marking some academic work, like an essay. The norm here is to address your points to the content of the paper itself and not appeal to outside information.

So my comment is more clearly saying, "This essay would be stronger if you used evidence or authority of some kind to back up the assertions you are making." This is actually a polite way of saying "You don't know what you're talking about and shouldn't be proclaiming yourself an expert on this topic."
Well, you need to work out how to convert "we're doing something right" into actually being popular and making buckets of money. There are countless companies that folded even though they were "doing something right". It's hard.