skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to think I'm a fairly passionate programmer, but I prefer cash prizes. Maybe not obscenely large ones (I'm looking at you, Salesforce), but all the prizes at major university hackathons seem totally reasonable.

A well-organized hackathon is fairly bifurcated. You have new hackers who are there to learn and experienced hackers who want to tackle an ambitious project. For both groups, I think large cash prizes are useful. For the newbies, even if they're not planning to win, the prizes reinforce the message that hacking is something useful and worth pursuing (helping to counteract the societal narrative of geeks being lame). For experienced hackers, prizes are a way of affirming that you've accomplished something amazing, particularly since most of the coolest hacks will never generate other compensation for the creators.

My personal reason for not liking product prizes is an objection to the accumulation of stuff. I really don't need yet another Arduino (won too many already) and would much rather use the money to take my family out for a nice dinner/etc. Most people don't need more things.

The idea of experience prizes (a trip somewhere) is a good one though.
I worked at a startup, was employee number 4, and the 2nd lead developer after the CTO, I got offered a pathetic 0.025% over 4 years. Options like that are disheartening and really don't make you want to stick around for 4 years getting paid dirt to eventually be able to claim your $20k worth of options.

I left and now am getting paid close to triple my old salary with options getting close to 10% in a business model that is far more profitable than the previous. I think lots of people just starting out in the startup scene get taken advantage of and taken for a ride.
Could be the processors as well, better to forge the chips by hand to be sure.
The valuation is the expected value. And since we're talking about investors who get preferred shares, the actual valuation for determining the value of the common shares (which employees get) is lower than that, still.
> Most of the rest of New Zealand’s productivity gap…appears to come from an underinvestment in knowledge-based capital.

I'm from the 'West Island' (Australia) but the culture is very similar. Money is made from physical things, technology is a semi necessary, semi dubious expense that should only exist as part of 'doing real things'. This is one reason a lot of Australians and Kiwis who have an interest in technology leave.
Code is easy to read if you understand the domain.

Code is nearly impossible to read if you don't understand the domain.
What is the "representative American high school student"?
How can I know if coding is something I really want to do?
Be sure to normalize the TDP when looking at Nvidia SoCs; it's not fair to compare a 10W chip against a 2W chip.
Computation. So what is computable, algorithms, analysis of algorithms etc

Non of which you need a computer for.

An operating system in its self is an application of computation. It's like physics and a car. There is stuff in a operating system which is computer science, like how to schedule tasks etc but learning a specific os is not computer science.

Programming languages are computer science since they describe computation. Compilers are fuzzy

People have been doing computer science, long before computers existed.

I think at its core computer science is solving problems using mechanical steps(algorithms), although some people would say its even more general then that.
> the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with

OK, then tell me what day of the week May 4th, 2054 will be.
It's analogous to the current situation with the metric and imperial unit systems - yes, it would make sense to switch away from imperial units, but it would require many people to fundamentally change how they think about distance, volume, speed, etc. (or time, in the case of the calendar).

Although in that case, we sort of have a wrapper, in that many labels list both types of units, but I tend to just look at the unit that I know, and haven't built up a correspondence between the two, so that doesn't really help adoption.
> avoid even telling employees what fraction of the total company their options represent

Actually that's pretty telling. If they don't give a number it means it's ~0%.
We need to be able to timestamp stuff still, right?

If the 28th of Bichat is 2014-13-28 and the 1st of Moses is 2015-01-01, how do we timestamp those "uncharted" festival days? Would they just be 2014-13-29 (and 2014-13-30 on leap year) but just not have a day of week name?
folding@home? hardly nefarious
I was lucky that my first job was upfront about what I was getting (%, # options, and outstanding shares). I like to think that I have enough confidence at this point that I would refuse a company that wouldn't tell me what me equity is worth.
Introducing jsfmt
It's about as meta-strategy as you get. It doesn't just make YC look good for advocating better incentives to attract better employees, it makes YC look like a leader. And makes them look extremely smart for seeing the way to look like a leader.
Sounds like a PR move to me. With all the legislation attempts around the country targeting Uber and those opposed to Uber complaining about lack of oversight, lack of insurance, lack of background checks, etc. This looks to me like a "yes, we do perform background checks and verify (or provide) insurance" statement.
As a heavy Uber user, this would have gone down a lot easier if they had just messaged it slightly differently:

We're adding safety checks into our process for UberX drivers. In order to do this, we're increasing the base cost by $1. [Click here] for an explanation of how we're going to improve your safety.
Dear lawmakers, this is what it's like to be a doctor today
Good question. In the library, intercalary days are just their own month. So it would just be 2015-14-1.
(author here)

This book was created both from my experiences and the experiences of teaching 3rd year operating systems classes.

Students came in to that class having done a 2nd year class (data structures and algorithms I think) that was done with a lot of C. They really learnt "high-level" C, enough syntax to get by in the their course, but most didn't really understand it -- not enough to read the source to any kernel at any rate. I don't imagine it's done like that today; this was a long time ago.

And most didn't really understand binary and hex, and how it relates to code either. You'd be amazed most 3rd year students didn't know how 2^10, 2^20, 2^30 relates to kilo, mega, giga bytes.

The book needs a lot of editing, something I occasionally get to. But apart from the odd times someone posts it to here or reddit and people consider it like a text book, it's really only ever accessed by people googling for a specific topic. But suggestions are welcome and I'll consider it when I get some time.

And on the "it's not computer science". The first commit was 10 years ago and people have been telling me that ever since. It was originally dreamed up as a course I'd teach to high-schoolers over 10 weeks to prepare them better for university -- the "computer science" degree they were planning to take. Yes, the book is really more about what would be called "systems" in the outside world.
Tax laws make this more complex than it needs to be. It would be ideal to eliminate options altogether and compensate employees with stock.

Take the market value of a job minus the amount the employee is actually paid (the startup discount) and pay the discount in stock -- common shares (VC's will be in preferred). All employees should get 2% of salary as a starting point in shares. Allow employee's to buy additional shares by forgoing comp or simply investing. Peg share price and timing of share grants to Rounds or any investment (Notes).

Perhaps have repurchase rights only if terminated for cause. Doesn't matter if someone comes in for 8 months but adds value during that period, so vesting concept is eliminated.

Would need IRS to change grant from ordinary income to capital gain type of treatment where taxes are paid when some actual liquidity/transaction occurs.
This isn't a US only site so do we really need the "USA is exceptional" rhetoric ?

Please kindly read my entire previous comment (the one in the link that I provided in the text that you are responding to)... note that I said that I was, "Speaking as an American, here [...]" before I said the quoted text. I believe that the context of my entire previous comment is important.

Respectfully, your interpretation is incorrect. That was not my intention at all, and it does not represent the type of person that I am.
Well, for one, you get a completely crossplatform method of executing and deploying what would typically be especially painful to distribute to a wide user base spread across various hardware families. Think of everything you can do with openCL then take the subset of that which is applicable to games, or spreadsheets, or novelty,- a non-trivial amount- and make that portable via browsers to create a much better experience for you and target users. Worst case is it provides an easier to use way to learn opencl for beginners in that area.

If I remember correctly, and I may be terribly incorrect, the MIT jersey kids were going to have you mine bitcoins instead of look at ads; I think it got shot down due to ability to abuse it rather than inherent badness.
Ask HN: Ex-Intuit Engineer Building Free Income Tax Software. Join as cofounder?
I'm a well known developer in San Diego (where TurboTax is made). I spent the last 2 seasons on TurboTax as an engineer and learned how to make free software that still pulls revenue - about $20M at scale.

Looking to transmit returns for next year's tax season.

Our team is 3 looking for a 4th: myself, another full stack dev, and a NYU tax attorney.

We're looking for founders with full stack abilities and good communication. Remote OK.

Interested in joining? Check the site & blog for more! http://taxcompactor.com

Email me: ecolner at gmail dot com
Please include your Github portfolio in email :)
Ask HN: When do you need sales pipeline saas products?
Is it overkill to be using tools like close.io before company reaches $10,000 monthly sales? Trello.com or excel are 2 other possible low tech solutions.
From how I understand it, when you decide to exercise your options (pay the strike price), you owe taxes on the different between your strike price and current fair market value even if you don't sell the stock. Most of the time, this counts as AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) if you don't sell the stocks within the same tax year.
Portland to me feels like a smaller Melbourne. So maybe we've come full circle.
You forgot the payment administration fee,
Technical Debt, a case study : tags
tl;dr: you can't necessarily change the troublesome technology, so you might have to leave. But in order to have a viable alternative to that "bad" technology, you need other people (case in point: mindshare of JS). In order to get more people to "your side", you might need to point out what is wrong with the original technology.

> But for heaven's sake, if you're not going to improve on it, stop whining about it and be grateful for the amazing things it does enable.

Sometimes you're not in a position to even be able to change something, even if you wanted to. The ideas you have in mind for a technology might fly in the face of how the community around that technology, or the guardians/maintainers of it, thinks of it - introducing these changes might break too much stuff that is dependent on it, the changes might fly in the face of the culture around that technology.

So if you have some technology that you think - subjectively, or even somewhat objectively if you have conviction enough - and you can not do anything about it, you only have two choices. Embrace it and try to work with it despite its flaws, or to abandon ship.

But if you want to abandon ship, you probably want to find a safe harbor, eventually. ie a place where you can develop or utilize some other technology. But that place might be sparsely populated, because everyone else is working with that other technology. So what do you do? You suggest that others jump ship. :)

Assuming that there is actually some kind of objective merit to complain about a specific technology, it might be wise to complain to others about that technology. That way they can hopefully use that info to make an informed choice, and perhaps abandon their current technology for another technology. In time, you might even get enough people to come over to this other technology that that community is big enough to support that technology as a valid alternative to the "bad" technology. But what if everyone just stfu'ed about what their "negative" thoughts are on a technology? Would that other technology be able to get enough "acolytes" in order to be a viable alternative? Probably not, because everyone was too "positive" and polite to point out how that technology might be better than the old technology.

Would JS even be so controversial if it wasn't for that it is so entrenched in Web development? Is that not a great example of how important mindshare can be?
A whole dollar's worth!
No but at least if I lose my regular job I don't lose the pay I've already received.

If I'm paid $100k pa at Regular Corp and I get laid off after 1 year, then I keep the 100k I've already been paid.

If I'm paid $50k pa and 5,000 options at Startup Inc and I get laid off then I'll probably end up forfeiting the options which leaves me 50% worse off than if I'd worked for Regular corp.
So is the extra day, or two days during a leap year, simply appended to the year, waited out and ignored?

It's an interesting concept; similar to the Time-slip in Red Mars. Wanting a Martian day to equal that of an Earth day, colonists define the time between 00:00 and 00:01 as being 39 minutes 40 seconds in length.

I guess most peoples' minds go immediately to, "do I have to work it?". Mine did.
Another mathematically elegant calendar is the 7date:

http://tylerneylon.com/a/7date_spec/
And the result is that important information is now silenced. The comment is now greyed out. Disagreement should not lead to silencing.
Judge halts spread of zombie Nortel patents to Texas in Google trial
I understand this is a bit of fun trying to rethink a very old thing, but the benefits are really bare even when looking past all the damage of a potential transition.

Basically, you're consolidating the unevenness between years/months/days of the week to one special 1 or 2 day period. Ok, that's alright, but it still requires a bit of extra help. You still have to think through calendars understanding "Oh! I have to add a day for the epagomenal. Oh, it's a leap year, so it will be 2 actually."

That might be preferable to having to think through 31 or 30 or 28 or 29 days, but not by that much. Is aligning months and days of the week to the same time every year a good thing? I suppose it's easier to determine what day Thanksgiving is every year, but otherwise, it seems like a minute benefit. On the other hand, I wonder if there are some benefits of that not happening. The only one that comes to mind is it would suck for your Birthday to be on a Monday every year, but I suspect there might be other reasons where enforcing a day to occur on the same place in the week could be harmful.
Ask HN: Semantic relationship distance between terms
We've been trying to hunt down a data source that might have semantic relationship data about the conceptual distance between terms. Example:
Cancer and Tumor, being closely related would have a value ~1. Cancer and Healthcare would also be closely related, though maybe at 0.8, Cancer and Nurse might also be more than .6 related, Cancer and Space on the other end, would be completely unrelated and thus closer to 0. (obviously the data may be in a different format and weight, but if it carries the right information I can translate that to the graph database we are considering). We've looked at Wordnet, Freebase, Wikipedia scraping, expert system databases, even TF-IDF algorithms we could let loose on data. Synonyms don't work. Is there something out there that sounds like it would be useful or should we build something on our own / start a new project?
We heard that, which is why the post went back to the top 10. We're not experts, so it takes feedback to get this right.

You make a good point about stuff sitting on the front page for hours, though. I've been wondering whether the mega-popular posts of the last day or two are choking out good new stories.
Nowhere did I advocate "taking away tons of important tools", in fact I specifically said my point wasn't necessarily an argument against Tor. But what I think is lazy is the way some people pretend that there are no tradeoffs involved in things like Tor and that they only benefit "the public".
Personally, I'd be fine with SpaceX being on the front page every day.

Google/Facebook/Twitter are on the front page all the time, every time they make some little burp. I like those companies and what they do, but SpaceX is 1000x more interesting to me than any of those.
> Having a 13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations to having consistent day of week/month boundaries that I can't see any real down sides.

It seems like that would complicate the business practice of dividing your fiscal year into quarters. I guess each quarter would be 3 months + 1 week but then you don't have quarters starting/ending evenly with months.
Two units totally unrelated, one of which is basically random in progression (30 / 28 / 31 spread unevenly across the year) and the other matches only one of the other three (and is also non-humane to track). Adding to the problem, you are forced to use at least one of these weird units, because nobody knows which day of the year it is - it's either "day of month" or "day of week".
Yup. This is really all that needs to be said. We need tools that can help bridge this gap. Good code visualization could help here. I'm surprised there's such little activity in this area.
The problem with this is that they set themselves up for a down round. The smart money will clearly come in at no more than $50 billion :).
Article leaves out important point: they raised their commission from 5% back to 20% at the same time as the implementation of the $1 safe fee [1]. (They had dropped their commission to 5% in January with the price drop [2].)

This is a pretty big bet on their part that they've locked drivers into the Uber platform through enough volume/earnings.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2014/04/18/did-uber...
[2] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/01/09/uber-cuts-price-on-so...
Sounds like it's time to plug CRLs into BitTorrent distribution.

Also, isn't CloudFront supposed to be way, way cheaper than $10/Mbps?
Great post by Sam. For employees, I'd also refer to Alex MacCaw's An Engineer’s guide to Stock Options[1]. Alex used to work at Stripe, and at the end of his article he shares some intersting bits of stock tax alternative not covered by Sam:

If you can’t afford to exercise your right to buy your vested shares (or don’t want to take the risk) then there’s no need to despair – there are still alternatives. There are a few funds and a number of angel investors who will front you all the cash to purchase the shares and cover all of your tax liabilities

And he goes further:

If you’re interested in learning more about financing your stock options then send me an email[2] and I’ll make some introductions. I’ve set up an informal mailing list, and have a group of angel investors subscribed who do these kinds of deals all the time.

[1] http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/an-engineers-guide-to-stock-optio...

[2] the link is to alex at alexmaccaw.com
This headline seems like it was dreamt up by a PR version of The Onion.
Cashflow is cashflow is cashflow, it doesn't matter if it's more cash in or less cash out. They're mathematically equivalent.

When pursuing a startup cashflow is the biggest problem of all, you're bleeding out and trying to staunch the flow. Someone plugging a hole is just as valuable as someone providing a pint.
I've noticed some stories hang out on the front page for days recently. Is that recent change?
You Don't Write Code, You Develop It.
Since paying Dropbox is not an acceptable solution for me, I've asked Loom to refund the money I paid them (perhaps foolishly, I signed up for the $50-per-year plan and paid up front).

So far, they've refused: "Thanks for writing and we appreciate your position. Unfortunately, I am very sorry but I cannot offer you a refund at this time."

This is very disappointing.
It seems to me the more secure you want your data, the more arcane (and less secure) the password rules are. I recently got in an argument with the bank, that doesn't allow special characters "These rules are here for your protection" Then why are you limiting the input space. "It is for your protection, so it is more secure."
Rules like these, (limited length, limited set, etc) scream to me incompetence. And I wonder what else is broken.
cryengine and UDK have far lower monthly subscription plan, and superior graphics and performance. I love unity but it just seems very expensive just to be able to port to iOS and Android on top of the unity pro plan. Maybe if they included iOS and Android in the $75/month (which is still much higher than UDK and Cryengine have announced) and lowered it further, it could stay competitive.
My technique for reading code is to find out where execution starts and go from there, following what the code does at runtime.

If you do it any other way, it won't necessarily make sense. This is really the only way to do it. (Though I'd be interested in hearing other perspectives.)

This was a hard-won lesson for me because we programmers tend to make the control flow of our programs start at the bottom of source files.
I'm curious: what is "founder-like work" to you? Is it 50–80 hour work weeks? Or does it mean 40 hours but making the initial, architectural decisions of a new piece of software? Serious question.
Number of shares you have does not mean much, if they close another round your shares will be diluted.
"about to bud"

I see what you did there
My CS teacher has a similar saying: "Easy is what you know"
How often do you really need to know what day of the week a specific date in 40 years will fall on?

The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough.

Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days. That is another hack that would probably end up doing more harm than good. How would you model that extra day (or two)? You wouldn't have (13) 4 week months. You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.
Law is consulting. The business is selling hours. You can only sell as many hours as you have lawyers. Highly motivated lawyers might bill 2-5x the hours of less motivated ones, or at a much, much higher rate.

The "enterprise value" of a law firm is very near zero because as the partners stop paying attention to everything the company falls apart.

Most startups make a product which can be sold largely independent of the number of hours worked by the employees. Certainly in a non-linear fashion. As a result a startup might have a substantial non-zero enterprise value.
Can you rent time from a non-military agency? I know NASA has at least one Global Hawk.
"Cassandra [...] isn't real-time in the sense that you can do immediate, fast queries about the relationships across those records as they are hitting the system."

That depends on how you are using Cassandra. Typically, you are expected to know your query patterns up front, and so you will lay your data out accordingly when ingesting. When done properly, this allows for ~1ms queries that return completely up-to-date results.
How to spot fake Samsung Phones
Can't like this one enough. Very similar experience over my career here
But do you blend?