skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This advice (and much of the advice in the thread) pooh-poohs what they've done and says that you should be a cofounder. I think that the offer does not fairly reflect your value, but this advice also doesn't fairly reflect what they've brought to the table.

If the company has created a prototype that's received $150,000 in crowdfunding support, that's a tremendous accomplishment. The existing founders have conceived of a product, prototyped it, and validated it in the most significant way possible - with customers who are willing to not just pay for it, but pay for it far in advance.

Let me put this in perspective: on Kickstarter, raising $100,000 puts a company in the top 0.2% of successful campaigns [1]. If you include all campaigns, they're rarer than 1-in-a-thousand. Due to selection bias, we hear about these >$100k campaigns preferentially, but the company is breathing rarified air. That indicates there's real value that's already been created by the founders.

That said, 2% and a smidge over minimum wage isn't right either. The compensation hit you're taking is so significant that the equity position should be larger. I would be looking for something in the 5-10% range. The question I would ask them is this: the accelerator put in $50k. You're forgoing much more money than that. The accelerator got 6%. Do they expect you to provide more or less value over the next four years than the accelerator did in 3 months?

Also, while verbal promises are legally binding (in the US and I believe in the UK as well), they're hard to prove. The suggestions to get the "salary after funding" agreement in writing is a good one.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats
Entrepreneurs Today Don’t Need A Big Budget To Start
Sokoban rules, you can get it for free here:
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/231/Sokoban.html
You need DosBox to play that.
But there's probably a multitude of online clones as well.
What percentage figures are that? I have to assume it simply relates to the Android version installed, not to the Android browser market share. Android has multiple browsers available; Chrome and Firefox work on Android <4.4 and support IndexedDB per the linked page.

I have no idea how many people use "Android browser" versus Chrome; Google is certainly pushing for higher mobile Chrome adoption. -- Okay, http://www.netmarketshare.com/ seems to indicate that Android browser market is pretty much split two-thirds Android browser, one-thirds Chrome. No idea how reliable their dataset is.
HOPE X: You've Lost Privacy, Now They're Taking Anonymity
This reform doesn't require a conviction for forfeiture, or even a charge. It only changes the burden of proof required for forfeiture (but still below that required in a criminal trial) and addresses the perverse financial incentive.
"there are a bunch of things that are only implemented in Adobe Reader"

this is actually accurate (for ex how many know that the reader has a Javascript execution engine integrated into it?) - when people say that there are other free 'alternatives' anyway, most miss out on this fact. Like you mentioned, good alternatives cover 95% of the use-cases, so almost no one discovers this by hitting a wall.
And yes, I've certainly had friends who are 40+ and barely hold down a job and live off friends and family because they were/are addicted to marijuana. It definitely happens, don't kid yourself.

Cause or effect?? Marijuana isn't addictive in the since that cigarettes and heroin are. It's highly likely that your friends that are unsuccessful are merely using marijuana to medicate for other issues.
I don't think excitement or passion or pride require fanaticism either. When I ask my friend who paves road about a project he's particularly proud of, he'll have an answer and it's not because he's paving roads in his spare time.

What is different about some other professions is that there are ways to develop that passion during apprenticeships or entry-level jobs while learning from those with greater experience. Mastery is far easier to acquire with a teacher on hand who can give timely, guided feedback and correction.
Basically it's when you realize that it's just another bullshit town. (Though personally, I still love Paris.)
The marketing department apparently has no scruples or is incompetent.
I absolutely dislike the pdf viewer in Chrome. It fails at even the basic things a pdf reader should support. E.g., it lacks a concept of pages. You can't jump to a certain page. You can't even know the total number of pages. It doesn't support the pdf's TOC. For any pdf which contains more than one page it is therefore useless. I can't understand how the Google folks ever thought this was a good idea.

I prefer Okular or Evince for Desktop viewing and pdf.js for in browser viewing. pdf.js is a bit slow when loading the pdf. But the user interface is quite nice in my opinion.
I made a web based one a few years ago which I'll take the opportunity to shamelessly plug: http://sokobanjs.com
Yeah, I sorta feel like "everyone" is interested in making money. Why not? :-)

I'm curious about those who really want to quit their day jobs, or who have already quit their day jobs to start a company, who are still struggling to turn a profit.
This is great. I'm especially impressed with how the game teaches its own mechanics without ever spelling anything out.
I definitely am not here to argue against pedestrian friendly environments (which I'm all for) in favour of suburbia and car-domination, just to point out some of the shortcomings of the exact view expressed. The will to change the way the development industry works is great, but you can't do this with naive views.

In this vein, I don't disagree with a lot of what you say, but just to touch on a few counter arguments:

* Historic cities with good public transport systems are great, but building new public transport is not something governments (taxpayers?) seem to want to spend on in the west at present. You have to build public transport before people will stop driving cars.

* I question your point on high-rise living. Why is this bad? What makes you feel bad in New York? New York is not the only possibility of high-rise living.

* The cost argument is definitely there. See my response to another comment.
Kind of makes sense. I do not know anyone actually using it on Linux, there are much better alternatives. Only problematic part was PDF Forms, now probably obsolete.
It probably is. Sure they have a good R&D department. But it's still a collection of many books on just one device. Good for ecological reasons and so on. But if you just think about it, it's still fun to have a physical overview of all the books that you have bought and read. I can see a future where paper books will have no place. Or am i wrong about that?
I use mupdf. It has a quite minimal user interface but it's fast and has really good rendering. It's written by the ghostscript guys.
Of course, it depends if the 1.4k a month is NET or GROSS pay.

Might sound strange to some - but my salary is currently paid NET (i.e. what it says on my contract is what I actually get in my bank account), which is why I bring it up.

(Honestly, it took me a while to figure out a lot of these comments - for a moment I thought I was horrifically underpaid, or everyone else was overpaid.. until I realised that it was probably a gross salary rather than a net one)
> But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event. If your neighbor is thinking about how to make a bomb, or how to kill someone, or how to commit suicide, or how to defraud and deceive others, wouldn't it be better if the secret police put a stop to it there?
> We could live in a post-crime society. Where everyone is un-corruptable and all humans treat each other as lovingly as we treat our own bodies. The problem with this is that the secret police only enforce the rules of the rulers, which has a thicker script for the lower classes than the upper classes.

In the past, philosophers have been discussing about "The problem of evil"[0] - which is the paradox of an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God allowing (morally) evil to exist. Obviously, it's normally discussed in a theological context, but one argument would apply to a non-theological context as well: the defense of free will. Since free will is the more important/ preferable than non-existent of evil, you can't have human with free will but without the choice of being evil. So as long as free will exists, you will have to be content with having evil/ crime etc as well.

Just to be clear, "evil" in the previous paragraph is being used in the sense of morally bad, and not the invisible, flying, human-haunting type.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
I really wonder where this attitude from Adobe comes from. I mean in the past they seemed always close with Apple. That could have explained the attitude. But then Apple refused to ship Flash and released alternatives to Adobe products. It really seems like a bad business attitude from Adobe.
Most frustrating is that any amount of cash holdings on your person in excess of a hundred dollars or so is often twisted as evidence that you MUST have committed some crime.

In a day and age when ATMs routinely dispense $300/day this is quite absurd.
SF 49ers Levi's Stadium Breakthrough App
This sounds terrible. 2/10

However, since you have such low self confidence ( because you're posting this here and wasting your time with a BS offer) you should probably take it.

This offer doesn't even pass the giggle test. What the heck is wrong with the economy and labour market there that would have you consider something like this?

Move to Canada already
But on the other hand, every app is just as free to be disregarded by a community of developers even if there is still lots of end users who need it. Or for the software to never reach the level required by intense professional use. Or a understaffed and underfunded community that provides a critical but unsexy part of the infrastructure coughheartbleedcough.
For me the biggest shock about visiting Paris the first time was that it was a "real city", and not a boutique town where everything is perfect and manicured. Although, what was most impressive about it was the fact that a real city could be so nearly perfect and manicured (at least the rich parts).
I really like in-shell floating point operations.
But this:

> / 1 0
+Inf

Is not the correct answer - even as a limit - since the limit of 1 / x (when x -> 0) can be +Inf or -Inf.
execute on the spot any law enforcement agent caught in the act of violating person's civil liberties.

Yeah, there's no way that could go wrong.
For information BT's 5 year share save that matures in a month or so is returning 80k tax free.

So employee no 1 who by definition is an experienced role your not paying much more than the minimum wage and in fact the London living wage (ie what cleaners are supposed to make) is about what your offering.

I would pass on this role.
I have a question. How do you connect two optical cables as opposed to copper wires? Can you melt the glass together or do you have to put a repeater inbetween? I have no clue how you can repair glass fibers.
Be blunt with the company, negotiate something better, or join later, after the raise, if you really like them.

If they can only pay this price, they should get a junior intern, not an employee. I don't know which incubator they went through, but no mentor I know would have told them this is a good offer to give to a developer. 1.4k a month is what you'd give to your best friend helping you with your startup because you can't afford more, not your #1 employee.

I can totally imagine how it feels like on the other side, and it's hard, and they probably do a lot of very nice things, and may be very nice people, but giving such a low salary is not a good move, and they should know it.

I didn't mention equity so far, because, well, as @MehdiEG said, it's only icing on the cake, nothing more.

Good luck!
Since no one has referenced it yet, The book Blind Man's Bluff details many of these submarine espionage missions and discusses the birth of nuclear-powered subs. Definitely recommend it!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/006097771X?pc_redir=1406267244...
Let's talk about RTL
" Chinese " No offence but they copy everything
It's been replaced by dbus. Which does indeed have strict types and other features that might be desirable (multicast?). You raise an interesting idea: A shell that pipes materials around from process to process through dbus, and a set of command line tools that accept input over dbus.
I wonder if there is an ironic mirror syndrome, for Americans who grew up on Japanese media, working as English teachers in Tokyo. Symptoms include a sudden need to acquire custom bingo cards.
The London Living wage is £8.80 they are offering less than a office cleaner for a local council would be getting.
Generally that happens when the company is not acting like a conpany. A simple example being when you don't have and/or document yearly meetings and such. LLCs are commonly used to shelter individuals from things like rental properties.
Define "KDE-independent" - Okular works fine on other Linux desktops (it's also set up as the default PDF reader on my Windows 8 install, actually).
Is it worth it to be an App developer? How about versus working at Google or Apple?

From their perspective, the purpose of your work is to enrich their platform. The difference is in the distribution of payout and work conditions. Rather than having a stable 100k salary at said company, you have the chance to earn absolutely nothing, or be an outlier and beat the 100k. Is it worth it, by expected value? Well, according to the article numbers,

Expected Monthy Payout = 24%0 + 23%50 (using half of max of ranges) + 22%500 + 19%5000 + 9%50K + 3%200K (using double the greatest lower limit)

Which gives an expected monthly payout of $11,600. Not bad! I think 30% of this goes to the respective platforms, so an expected yearly salary for an app developer might be something like $97,500. And I believe this matches up fairly well with what companies are willing to pay app developers (on average it seems higher, aside from maybe in the Valley).

What's interesting is the distribution of payoffs into the "haves" and "have nots". There are few app developers pulling that $100K or so salary. Instead, two thirds of everyone is below poverty, and a select group are killing it. This seems to be the new modus operandus of the tech economy. The implication is obvious: extreme economic inequality (especially as non-tech jobs become less relevant), which by necessity will increase social inequality.
I actually live about 100 miles north of the WIPP site. I'm fairly unconcerned about danger.

This area was an inland sea ~250 million years ago (the continents were gathered together in Pangaea at the time). The salt deposits in the mine that WIPP occupies are precipitate from this sea drying down and are very deep.

If the site were collapsed (which I understand it will be at some point) people with primitive tools won't be digging it back up. It is simply too deep. It isn't going to erode down to the level they can either in any reasonable period of time....i.e. millions of years. A society technologically advanced to dig this stuff up presumably will be aware of some history and/or be able to decipher what is written on the marker. Unless civilization disappears in which case it will take a long time to re-develop the technology needed to dig that deep starting from ground zero.

Also... people need a reason to go to great effort. I just don't see future people digging that far in the earth out of curiosity and with no immediate economic benefit.

But just in case.... if you need a marker to discourage them, how about instead of abstract symbols we put some pictures of the effects of radiation on humans with the material containers notably present in the picture?

The one thing I guess that could become an issue is the amount of oil well activity in the area. It is geologically stable, there are no earthquakes, but maybe fracking could change that. I hope they are taking future fracking into account in their equations.
It looks like that isn't changing under this reform.

Which would seem to be one of the worse problems with current law, no?
even short-time readers of HN know, if the law wants to get after you, it will find something to charge you with

For more, see "No One Is Innocent": http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/no-... . I think this part is particularly relevant:

Remember, under the common law, mens rea, criminal intent, was a standard requirement for criminal prosecution but today that is typically no longer the case especially under federal criminal law.

Everyone intuitively knows that you shouldn't hit, kill, or rob someone else, but there are now innumerable nominal "crimes" that are neither obvious nor intuitive.
Adobe wasn't really that close with Apple, Adobe's customers were. Adobe wanted their customers to move to Windows.
A rocket carrying nuclear waste exploding 50 miles above the surface of the earth would rain nuclear waste on a very large area. Given how much of the earth's surface is water, some would probably land in the water of the world's ocean, possibly dispersing it around the globe at all levels of the ocean food chain, maybe not.

If we had a more reliable means of getting the waste into space, I'd be all for this.
The next day, Twitch will play it.
It's hardly fully representative, either, but for a bit of contrast, one can watch the recent series "Engrenages" (English title: "Spiral").
Stealing and copying are part of the Xiami's DNA, you will be even more suprised when Xiami's CEO copy the way how Steve Jobs anounce new product: http://cdn.unwire.hk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/xiaomi-one-m...
It's the same feeling I had while visiting New York.

Madame Tussauds and MOMA were wonderful and yes, it has some other very nice parts like Grand Central Station. I didn't feel ill enough to leave America, but I did feel let down a tad.
If he only works 40 hours per week.
the new pension regs are more about what you can do with your pensions I think the mandatory employer contributions haven't changed much.
A tangential nitpick, but perhaps interesting from a history-of-symbols perspective:

...the skull and crossbones permeated culture as a symbol of danger. By the late 1800s, it was starting to be used as a symbol for poison. Then in the 1940s, the Nazis adopted it for their SS death head divisions.

The chronology here is a bit off: The death's head was not introduced into the German military by the Nazis, but by the Prussians, in the early 1800s. It was then used periodically by both the Prussians and later Imperial Germany. Following the fall of the Kaiser, it was used by the Freikorps (right-wing paramilitaries) during the Weimar Republic. And finally by the SS. The Nazis did introduce some new symbols (especially some runic and pagan stuff that the SS liked), but the totenkopf is a classic symbol of German militarism that they merely continued, as part of their glorification of Imperial Germany and especially the Freikorps.
When I visited Paris I felt like crap because the pollution was horrible. It was apparently so bad that they made the subways free for several days to encourage people to avoid driving their cars.
> that building general-purpose compression/intelligence is hard.

Yes, but my point is. that we seem to be doing better at general-purpose intelligence than at compression despite the apparent equivalence of progress.
L.A.'s Skid Row Through the Eyes of Pimps, Prostitutes, Dealers and Dope Fiends
I've been happily filling out forms with [evince](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince) for the last few days. When I just need to read a pdf, I use [zathura](http://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/).
Exactly. The Chinese refuse to acknowledge intellectual property. It seems embedded in their culture.
llpp is lovely: http://repo.or.cz/w/llpp.git
Fun story : i used to live near the "moulin rouge". Every time i walked to the subway station, from which you can see the moulin rouge, i could see the face of tourists as they climbed up the stairs : first they were a bit surprised because they didn't seem to see it. Then, as they walked up a bit more i could see their face decompose as they realize that that small red stuff stuck between a giant coca cola ad and an old building was actualy the moulin rouge.
Radiolab is an American show. There's no problem with the spelling.
There are game stats: http://gameaboutsquares.com/statistics.html
As a potential employee (that you're asking as) I'd say you turn and walk (and not look back).

The total salary your getting is 8.08 per hour. Which is less then a janitor makes in the city. Even if they throw in 2-4% equity (which as the company is currently worthless, I.E.: No profit, No product, no anything) is worth little unless you really believe in the company.

Lastly these two lines are very telling.

>hire employee #1 (software engineer) at ~£1.4k/month

>The employee is an intermediate-senior level developer and would be tasked with building a significant part of the product. There currently exists a rough prototype and design docs.

Basically your getting paid a janitors wage to write their entire business from scratch, this is a horrible idea.
Just some general info: Evince and Okular (the successor to kpdf) both use poppler under the hood (which is maintained/released by the Okular maintainer), so their performance and behavior will be somewhat similar, though you can make a difference at the app level with things like tiled rendering and smarter prefetching. I'm not on top of how the two compare there, though. Okular also has pluggable backends and there's an in-development mupdf backend around.
I simply run virtubox+windows under Linux for adobe-form/turbotax etc that are too hard to do under Linux anyways. Hard to be 100% Linux still, but I'm close to 99% I think.
In the UK have seen a gang leader for groundworkers post advertised at £35k - that's what used to be called a navvy.
Round up a number to greatest 10s place
Cheat sheet for Black hat USA 2014
> Transactions are instant unless the sender double spends.

Sure. But if we don't need to worry about double spends, we wouldn't need Bitcoin in the first place. Bitcoin solves the double spend problem, which takes, roughly 60 minutes.

> Wait ten minutes for anonymous senders.

A single confirmation is not sufficient for large-value transfers. The larger the transfers the longer one should wait (up to about 6 confirmations).

A miner with, say, 5% of the global hashing power has a 5% chance of finding the next block. That means someone working with the miner has a 5% chance of successfully pulling off a 1-confirmation double spend. If I transfer 100,000 BTC to someone as payment for something, and the recipient delivers to me a product worth 100,000 BTC after one confirmation, then I have a 5% chance of successfully scamming someone of something worth 100,000 BTC (~$60M). That's an average profit per attempt of 5,000 BTC (~$3M).

If I instead wait, say, 7 confirmations (~65 minutes), the probability of pulling of a successful double spend with 5% of the network hash rate is around 0.000000078%. That's an average profit per attempt of $0.05.
Lawsuit Filed to Prove Happy Birthday Is in the Public Domain (2013)
The link to the downloads page is broken. Anyone?
How much of the Spanish border does that fence cover if I may ask? Does that include the borders with Portugal, France and Italy?

It seems its main purpose is to stop the refugee processing system from being overwhelmed, as that doesn't place them on Spanish soil proper.
Look at pages 22 and 25 of the report: http://www.developereconomics.com/reports/developer-economic...