skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for clearing that up. I'm quite surprised to see how large the salary cost is. That and the 400k for consultants ( was this for computer vision experts?)

I'm kind of impressed looking at the landing video, it's a neat idea, it's sophisticated using CV to organize photos. However, the market just didn't respond enough to cover the payroll costs.

Did having a VC funding in anyway impact your decision making to grow faster than you should?

I guess it starts with an idea, does it fit? if you have VC money you can see the answer faster but I fear that it puts an expiry date on your product if the answer is still no by the time you can't find another investor. Shame because investors are not always rational. Maybe the next investor could've seen the vision behind your product and pushed. Sad to see a seemingly great product disappear from the market and reducing consumer choice because they had to 'go big or go home'.

I also wonder what it would've been like if you started in a market where tech salary was on the low side, such as Vancouver, BC, where there are laws set in place so that you can work your developers and designers to death out of fear of losing their job in the scarce market and not having to pay any bonuses or overtime.

I wonder what the outcome would've been if you weren't funded, and grew customer by customer. Doing this would've fine tuned the margin between cost and profit and forcing you to grow at a rate that is right for your size at the right price at the right time (where supply and demand curves intersect) just like mom and pop's business.

Thanks for sharing this boatload of information on how a company works for those that never ventured out to startupdom. It really is in the spirit of hackernews. Brutal honesty.
Note that Bitcoin is purposefully not turing complete. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/17258/turing-comp...
Ask HN: Help with counter offer for a stake in company
Hey guys,
I have been approached by a friend with a startup idea. He has no technical skills but he has marketing skills and he has resources, both financial and potential customer wise. Project itself can be built in a few months with a ballpark of $30-40k.This is not the first time I have been approached by people with startup ideas. Actually, I have relatively good experience at finding teams overseas and managing / building technology with them as I am a developer as well. I delivered a few projects before with this approach. However, I have always quoted the cost of project to those who wanted to get it built and didn't pursue an ownership. I am considering taking a different route this time and considering doing a counter offer and ask stake in the company for part of my services instead. This is the part where I am clueless. Is there some written or accepted formula for technical people like me, so we can at least calculate the percentage we should ask in these type of situations. There's definitely some hard cost for outsourcing parts of the project and things like servers etc as you can imagine. I will clearly won't pay any of it. ideally I would like to get paid to be able to feed my self and have some cushion too should things go sour and it fails. How should oneself approach to these kinds of situations? I would really appreciate any feedback.
the best thing DDG could do is to simulate Google's UI as much as possible without getting sued. Think about it.
The thing that always annoyed me about Aereo is how they restrict who can "rent an antenna". If they are to stick to their legal argument that they're just renting an antenna, then why can I not rent an antenna based in New York City, even though I live in Wisconsin?
Remembering Aaron Swartz, Who Passed Away One Year Ago Today
> Honestly, I would rather find out that being Mormon and having 2 kids at age 25 is a problem sooner rather than later.

FYI, none of the things you mentioned is (in itself) something that a company can (legally) choose to factor into their hiring decision. Experienced recruiters and/or interviewers will avoid those topics entirely because, while they may be able to ask questions that happen to reveal that information indirectly, they're risk-averse, and they'd rather not open themselves up to a lawsuit.

That said, this is one of the reasons I get uncomfortable when people use the term "culture fit" - it's not a bad idea in general, but it can oftentimes be a euphemism (perhaps even unconsciously) for inadvertent discrimination. (Why is Joe not a good culture fit? Is it because his hobbies include taking care of his two kids, rather than rock climbing or bar hopping, or something else that the rest of the 20-something office enjoys doing?)

> In my last job, the fact that I don't drink came up in the interview....they wanted to ask me if I was comfortable with the somewhat alcohol focused culture of the company.

I can sympathize with this.

I once had an interview where I asked why my interviewer (an early employee) left his previous job to join this company. He said that he felt "a strong culture fit". When I asked why, he said, "Well, the founder was drinking a 40 while he interviewed me". I waited for him to finish his explanation, then realized that that was the extent of it. I asked him to tell me more about the culture, and he made more some general statements, but was unable to give any other concrete examples.

The only thing that an early employee at that company could say to sell me on the company was that the founder drinks during job interviews. I'm glad I dodged that bullet early.
Homeless kid to High-Tech career
All this talk about facebook advertising not gener
Great question. To be honest, when I was doing my research I was able to come across multiple quotations of a study talking about these numbers. However, attempts to actually find a copy of the study in question led me to two different dead links. It's why I didn't bring it up in my blog post. I simply couldn't find a copy of the source; as compelling as a statement regarding toilet seats may be.

I hate that it's so hard to find a copy of an academic study.

Should you a find a copy of the study that explored and expounded upon this, I would love to see a link.
This article is crap. When the evidence does not fit your theory you don't complain about the evidence: Stupid American don't want to move to the rust belt and get rich!

Perhaps ideology is getting in the way of thinking. What about cost of living, actual job opening, baby boomers retiring, skills mismatches, cultural preferences, etc.

BTW-Internal migration has actually been studied for more than a century. This recent paper from the Fed has a good survey:

http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.173
Is India Ready For The Hybrid Retail Market?
The offline-online(hybrid) e-tail segment is picking up traction in India. Will it survive?
Perhaps I should have put "damsel in distress" in quotes. It describes the attitudes of those behaving as "white knights", not that of those calling them out on it.

"Harassment" describes a very broad group of behaviours. It's fine as a descriptor for that class of behaviour, but that doesn't mean specific terms to describe specific behaviours shouldn't exist. That's like saying you shouldn't use the term "knock" to describe premature ignition when "engine trouble" also describes it.

That said, you're correct in saying that the use of the term tends to be sexist and dismissive towards women. I don't have a solution for that.
This is so true. Companies complain about not finding talent, but with this kind of behavior, it is understandable.
Recruiters are just like that, they send you plenty of offers and do not even bother follow up.
I got the silence treatment as we'll from Thomson Reuters for a golang developer position:
1: phone interview that goes well.
2: technical interview that goes very well. The guy is very excited and barely can hide it.
3: formal phone call for logistic details
4: silent

After 3 unanswered mails, I dropped it. And for the best. I then joined Docker, I do work with Golang and I have a lot of fun.

It is not the first time this kind of thing happen and it is very frustrating. I think it just filter companies where you do not want to go work.
I think the clever idea here (IMO) are the fees. An argument against implementing a Turing complete language inside Bitcoin or an Altcoin might be that it's hard to determine when execution should end. The fees allow arbitrarily complex constructs without any hard cap, while preventing abuse.
Absolutely incredible transparency.
Texas is... well Texas.

Some things are awesome, some things aren't:

* Highest percentage of employees at / below minimum wage [1]

* Highest percentage of uninsured [2]

* 4th highest poverty rate [3]

* Lowest percentage of high school graduates [4]

* 4th most citizens in jails / prisons per capita [5]

* Most CO2 emissions [6]

* 6th highest obesity rate [7]

They have a lot of work to do before I'd consider them awesome (I say this as someone who's spending a lot of time there, and will potentially be relocating with a company there in the near future.)

[1] - http://www.bls.gov/ro6/fax/minwage_tx.htm

[2] - http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-population/

[3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_poverty_...

[4] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_educatio...

[5] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incarcer...

[6] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_carbon_d...

[7] - http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
Assuming your window manager has some overall spatial layout of desktops, or a preview that highlights the current desktop: why not add a 9th one? Then you can arrange them in a 3x3 grid in your window manager, the same way they already are on your numpad.

I do this and it gives an incredibly tactile feel to desktop management.
In US, you mostly hire for specific roles....developer, or QA or some such thing, even if straight out of college. Most colleges here are good..you can trust the grades to about 75% accuracy. In India, in college recruiting, your plan is to hire relatively bright people and train them later. And you don't trust the college's grading. For this purpose, you also conduct an aptitude test. If they pass a cut-off mark, then you consider them for a programming interview or for in-person interview.
I did a bit of Excel modeling of this, based on Everpix's hiring timeline and published numbers. My count is that they had 157 employee-months prior to shutdown at a fully-loaded cost of approximately $9,200 per employee-month. An employee-month is one month worked by a founder or employee, but not a consultant. Fully-loaded costs includes recruiting, healthcare, salary, and taxes, but (for the purpose of this calculation) does not include pro-rated costs for rent, hardware, software licenses, or what have you. Those are all numbers I'd be careful to bake into my planning as a founder but which I don't need to reverse the math here to salary packages.

I would ballpark the average package at Everpix as what Americans would understand as "$90k plus healthcare plus equity." This is not straight-line comparable to "$90k plus healthcare" at other US-based software firms, even those with baseline perks packages for working professionals rather than those competing in the Valley perks arms-race with Google and Facebook. For example, if one were to take "$90k plus healthcare" at an insurance company doing Java EE XL mappings every day, it is virtually beyond question that there'd be 401Ks with employer matching and whatnot in the picture as well.

If you were to do a straight-line comparison with e.g. Google or Facebook, this is substantially below their pure-cash offers for fresh graduates with no professional experience, and both would add both substantial cash bonuses and incentives plus equity grants plus perks with non-trivial cash value. The compensation packages employees capable of solo-shipping e.g. iOS applications or non-trivial image recognition software would be offered are substantially north of that. $140k cash-on-the-barrel plus industry standard perks isn't even an eyeraising number for intermediate engineers with no skill more specialized than shipping working software.

I'm mostly doing this math to say that "Lavish expenditures on employees were not a contributing factor here. They paid substantially below-market wages for employees doing similar jobs locally." I know that this might cause people who are not located in the Valley to feel a bit of heartburn given the absolute numbers, but that's another discussion entirely. (It should be noted that I live in an area where $90k cash packages would be unusual for engineers with 20+ years of professional experience.)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

wiki here
With my limited understanding of processors, it seems like a lookup table would be significantly slower. The command itself seems like it can be executed very quickly in hardware. More importantly, the command can operate directly on the registers. Memoizing, at best, would require loading the relevant value from cache. Not only is this slower then registers, but it also pushes 256 bytes out of the cache. Additionally, using a single command may allow the cpu to do some form of out of order execution to get additional benefits.
The lunch interview is supposed to be mild and mostly for selling on Amazon and the team (e.g. you talking). Trying to do a real interview where you drill in is a mistake some people make. You are there to have lunch and make sure the candidate has a good time, there is plenty of other feedback from the real interviews that you shouldn't feel the need to add to that body of evidence.
Who's the bigger unaccomplished arbiter, the arbiter, or the arbiter arbitrating unaccomplished arbiters?

:D
Interesting. I found I got a lot more productive when I switched from a large monitor with multiple windows to a smaller monitor with a single window switched via keyboard. And that was specifically because it was faster and required less thought to flip through windows than to remember where the window I wanted to look at was and to move my eyes to it.

However, I have poor eyesight and very poor peripheral vision, so that might have something to do with it. If I'm trying to watch for movement out of the corner of my eye I frequently get false positives from visual aberrations.
Merchants are required to scrub the card details as soon as the business need for them has passed. In the case of a retail store, I would think that would be as soon as the accept or decline response from the payment processor is received.

To make a charge, the POS terminal packages the mag stripe data (and the encrypted PIN-block if doing debit) together with the POS terminal's ID, the amount to be charged, and maybe the CVV2 or the billing zip code, etc., into an HTTPS request to the payment processor. A second or two later, the payment processor responds, and the terminal completes the transaction.

If that's how Target's POS terminals work, then the hackers probably managed to push a "software update" out to the terminals causing them to tee the data off to the hackers' server whenever a transaction was made.

The reason the debit PINs were safe is that the PIN pads on which the customers enter their PINs are separate self-contained devices which encrypt the PINs before they leave the pad. Only the payment processor has the key needed to decrypt the PIN blocks, and PIN pads don't accept "software updates". PIN pads have been hacked in the past, but such attacks are far less scalable because they require modifying hardware at each affected POS terminal.

The new news about Target breaching contact info for 70m customers simply confirms that the hackers had free reign on Target's corporate network.
Isn't that the only way for dotcom wealth preservation?
Tips for Unbeatable WordPress SEO in 2014
Is there a dedicated forum or mailing list for further discussion?
I guess I'm part of the small minority who love Path. It's my favorite app, I use it almost every day. I use it strictly with my immediate family - my brothers, sister, their spouses and my parents. I barely have time for Twitter, I don't use Facebook, but I use Path. Their pitch about deeper connections and about being real and authentic rings true to how we use it. I'm quite disappointed to watch them flounder.
Site is down. How do they manage to go down with probably static content, I have no idea.
>"Exactly as I'd write it on Computer, - AND - which is ready to go into production"

From experience, I learned that you should just ignore what they are stressing on and just write the code as best as you can. Its an interviewer's way of saying I want to see if you can discuss the finer points of an implementation.
How about : http://www.businessinsider.com/lyndsey-scott-model-and-coder...
> Still I don't think Cloact nor Om DOM syntax is particularly unapproachable for designers

It's not just designers who appreciate using declarative markup over programmatic syntax! Of all the people who might understand this, I'd have thought you would be the first in line (as a fan of your work on core.logic and inspiring me to learn prolog)!
>For example, just because a college has different standards of admission for different races to promote diversity is not racism but to give preferential treatment to the group of people who have more social and economic power. That's racism.

So, building women founders, is, as is building male founders, a way to create a few more people with "social and economic power" to rule over the rest of us.
The article is suspicious as an Amazon employee. The recruiter would never talk offer in the final interview, there is at least a day+ afterwards before feedback is submitted by the interviewers and they meet to discuss the candidate. Only after that would there be offer talk (assuming the interview was positive). The silence part is sometimes possible when recruiters bail out suddenly and don't hand things off, unfortunately that seems to be an area in tech companies where people move companies every 6 months.
One thing that happens in American public schools is that because they're so worried about catching the average student up, exceptional students feel bored. Male here; question for females: is something similar happening now? That is, is it the case that so many programs are catered to stereotypically feminine girls that girls who just want to, independent of their gender, learn how to code, are feeling unaccounted for?
With the availability of free CDNs (CloudFlare setup is 30 seconds max) I'm not sure why static sites have issues with bandwidth these days...
The term "white-knighting" isn't specific to women.
You may not be able to make everyone happy always. Instead of suing your customers for negative comments, it may be better to try and improve your product/service.
Actually MLK acted perfectly (if a little too quiet at times, though he was portrayed much more obedient that how dynamic he was).

The problem is with priviliged upper middle class white PC police, that are nothing like MLK -- and their "rage" is all show off and conforming to the social norms of their peer group.
Hmm. Maybe he took it down? Here's a story about him:

http://fusion.net/modern_life/story/ethereum-bitcoin-currenc...
Yeah, I saw the article on TheNextWeb after posting my comment, but I figured I'd leave it up. Either way, I'm happy to hear that Drop Box wasn't compromised.
The Writer of this article needs to perform some fact checking. There are nowhere near 1600 Millionaires in Twitter - closer to 600 to 700 is the number most common heard in their offices.

A lot of those are not at the end of their vesting periods either so "Getting Out" is a meaningless term, not feasible for the next 2-3 quarters.

The quality of Wired articles is really plumbing the depths these days.
My question still stands, whether they are using a transparent or normal proxy.

If a proxy is used to intercept and modify HTTPS traffic, the server certificate used for the connection between the proxy and the client would be invalid (I mean it would not be signed by a CA trusted by the client). Desktop browsers report an error in response to this condition. I don't know about mobile safari.

How do they deal with this?
First paragraph:

>It is purposefully not Turing-complete, with no loops.
The NSA 6 Years Ago: Already Listening
You should ask if he's open to that and see how much value he places in your contribution. I've been in his shoes to some extent, but in the end what matters is his perception of the cash trade off and to what extent he wants to get you committed to the company.

If he is open to it, ask what he thinks it would be worth as a % and what form it would take (options, restricted stock, ...).

If you do reach an agreement for equity in lieu of pay, be sure to get good contracts in place. It's impossible to know all the twists and turns that can come along when you are doing a start up and you'll want to ensure your contribution and sacrifice are rewarded.
I think the timing of the terrorist attacks is eerie and the fact it's concentrated on Sochi before the Olympics start next month. Enough for US to issue travel warning.
>The lesson I see from this: AWS hurts bad if you are using it heavily, but salaries... salaries kill. Automate, outsource and self-build as much and as long as you can possibly stand it, and then push on a lot longer than that.

Going off on a tangent here, but if (a) "software is eating everything" and (b) "salaries kill", wouldn't that mean a society of mass (30%+) unemployment in the future?

I wonder who would have the money to pay for stuff like Everpix or any other offering at that point...
The strange, shady world of $1,000 iOS apps
Yes and no. I imagine (yes, that means I made it up) that with a big enough brand, venues can piggyback on your life-style mass marketing. Both in terms you brainwashing their customers to ask for it, and in the more subtle way that carrying your brand will allow the venue to associate itself with your image (eg. Bollinger, Carlsberg etc).
For me, more the number of splits a commit can be divided into, the better. Even for simple 2-line cleanup, I'd not do it with the current patch I'm doing. This irks my fellow programmers sometimes though, who just want to get the work done.
NDAs for interviews? Is this common in the US? I would feel intimidated and not sure I'd sign that.
I'd rather scroll than tilt my head up and down to read. And I can only read one thing at a time, so it doesn't give me any benefit to have both documentation and code on screen at the same time.
This was a nice article.

In the comments Jarek Duda discusses some of the more technical details of the implementation and of his ANS paper that enabled this writeup. One cool thing I noticed is this:

Another advantage of ANS is that we can slightly perturb
the initialization procedure using a pseudo-random number
generator initialized with cryptographic key (e.g. and
also the number of block): for example choosing between
the lowest weight symbol and the second best one.
This way we get simultaneously a decent encryption for free.

Does anyone know what modern compression tools use for entropy coding? Do they all use huffman and would this help them increase speed? What about gzip for HTTP transactions?
I don't see why people are complaining...facebook's job is to get your product/services in front of your would-be customers. It's your duty or the duty of your marketing department to brainstorm winning strategies to engage your audience.
It sounds to me like the latter(9%) but does that matter much? The point seems to be that it is roughly twice their calculated industry average, which presumably uses the same metrics.
So true, in the end, it's not pg's fault if there is sexism and racism in the tech industry. They are doing their bit to improve the situation. Others should also try and do the same.