skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, people use version number to communicate a lot of things that aren't captured by the strict, rigid form of semver. And when you follow semver, you omit communication about all of those other things. Now, if you think that the only things worth caring about are what semver says matters, then you don't view this as important.

But there's a lot more to the world than package managers, and expecting people to do things the way that's most convenient for package managers is just a little bit silly, no? Package managers are there to serve us, not the other way around. So maybe instead of "fixing" version numbers so that they're the most convenient for package managers, maybe we can fix package managers so that they use something better suited to handling dependencies than version numbers, so that we can use version numbers to communicate with people, not just package managers.
I'm a stay-at-home dad. Last year I was a math teacher. The last time I worked a "tech" job was in grad school nearly a decade ago, assisting my department's IT manager.

I'm here because I like to learn about things. Not just products/services that I found out about from here that helped me in life (airbnb, hipmunk, leaky, freelancer) but simply ideas (I've learned relevant things about religion, games, science, warfare, education, driving, the basic income, and so on.)

I'm also here because my wife is a hacker and I like to be aware of what she's reading and thinking about.
A list of attacker IPs (from, say, the last 7 days) to block in iptables would be a very popular item.
That's pretty much completely wrong, for better or worse. It's called at will employment.

Edit: I wonder if the downvoters who have not bothered to comment realize that every state in the US except Montana has some form of at will employment. The person I was replying to couldn't be more wrong. (The very obvious claim about not being able to fail to pay people is of course true)
Based on the comments here and those that appear under the article, people in general are not at all impressed by these ideas.

I don't think the hatred is as universal as it is for, say, Australis, but it's close enough that it should be discomforting.

What is your response to this? Do you think it's right to continue work on a project that the majority of people dislike for a variety of very legitimate reasons?
certainly they arn't all the blame, but they are also not blame free. for some reason, engineering programs over favor test scores. In China, their schools prepare their students to take our tests such as the GRE. also in china, they take paper exams (because that makes it easier for them to cheat). As an engineering student, i met several chinese students who got perfect verbal scores for the GRE but could barely hold a conversation. i asked, they said they were lucky. i pressed, they said they bought the questions and answers prior to the test. I'm honestly perplexed that US universities even allow chinese GRE results.

with that being said, engineering programs want to have entrepreneurship in their programs, but 80% of their cohorts are from countries that are risk adverse. the above commentator's students gave up at VISA, you really think they have the chops?

How about just re-evaluating the acceptance criteria. look for other criteria besides standardized test scores instead of complaining that they gave up at VISA so thats why they're struggling to have alumnae who started their own companies. Americans are 'supposed' to be entrepreneurial. not sure if that's true but the top engineering/cs programs are eager to over look them.
Could they effectively DoS the IPs on the blacklist[1] and still play good defense?

1. http://www.norse-corp.com/darklist.html
> certainly unethical and indicative of someone who should not be trusted in a business relationship

Not necessarily. What if a major investor pulled out and they aren't going to have the capital available to hire this guy? What if hiring him meant not paying people who had been promised salaries after working for free? What if they could have hired him but others would have had to be fired?

They certainly made a mistake, but we don't know why they did what they did. It's unlikely to be malicious "Let's just screw this guy", and far more likely to be for reasons that each one of us, if we were in their shoes, would consider to be very good.
They don't have to pay it up front; they can draft an agreement to defer compensation to their next round of funding or to their first $N dollars of revenue, pay him the immediately owed "salary" number today, and pay the delta later.
The bigger problem has always been when the version number is marketing.

I worked in one team, and there was a contractual requirement that v 1.16 was the last version we would ship. So, where before we would increase the number at certain steps, we stopped at 1.16 and shifted to a third digit. Since we were a continuous build shop, we ended up with 1.16.110 very quickly. At that point, we shifted from 3 digit versions to a version number which was marketing controlled and a build number which was controlled by engineering (hashed from the tag+date).

This pattern repeated over and over. The version number would be communicated to the customer, a new version would be needed and so the version number would grow a digit. It ended up at X.Y.Z.A.B rev C. Yes, it was silly.

So, no matter what you use, make sure you keep your externally visible version numbers separate from the numbers you use to talk about them internally. :) Internal numbers should remain completely opaque to the customer.
I think that Go does not lock the version numbers by default. However, you have to sync manually - its not like Maven that attempts to download the internet on every build.
I think it would make more sense to try to clear up the parts of SemVer that remain unclear. You are quite right that the areas that require the most judgment and thus cause the most problems are pre-1.0 and patch releases. I think that specifying that pre-1.0 minor releases are like major releases while patch release are the same would clear things right up.

Regarding patch releases, the only thing that has "absolutely no chance of breaking anything" is no change at all – keeping the exact same version. Deciding what constitutes a patch-release bug fix is a matter of exercising good judgement about what won't (reasonably) break people's code. That could definitely be clarified in the SemVer spec. Asking yourself "is there a chance that this change might screw someone over?" and if so, how crazy was what they were doing?
Grocery shopping/delivery?
My point is that you don't understand your own source. The "links, measurements, graphs" are in the paper you referenced, they just say something different from what you believe they are saying.

If you're struggling with understanding the paper, there's really nothing more I can do to help.
Thank heavens for Microsoft!
> Most of the world is richer than US poor people these days.
> Based on your account name I find it hard to take your comment seriously, but:

Yeah. If you spout shallow nonsense like this, I cannot take you seriously. But out of pity, here goes:

Don't let my username fool you. I am probably much younger than you are. I grew up poor in a third-world country in awe of the average American. Now, people like me are being called "techie scum" by the same kind of people I used to adore and envy.

My point is this: Don't hate on people more hardworking or just plain lucky than you are. If you are commenting on the internet you are probably at the top of the world.
State law trumps this. It's not stealing to expect a company to adhere to the law in terms of employment and pay.
> They didn't withdraw an offer, they terminated someone who had accepted and was actively working for the company.

You're right. It's even worse for OP: he just got canned.

> Yes, they did. Is it okay to let the OP go quickly because they made a mistake: no resources to deal with visa issues, wrong domain expertise, etc? Yes.

Agreed.

> Is it okay to do this without compensation, especially after rescinding other offers, working his personal network, etc? No!

He took a job, and got fired. Every time you take a job you rescind other offers. Every time you get fired you probably look back and think "damn I wish I'd taken one of those other offers". The proximity is the issue here, and the insinuating that they could have known this earlier / not made the hire in the first place.

> The OP din't just do some code, he worked his professional network and went out on a limb for this startup.

He didn't go out on a limb, he had a job there as you point out. He was a salaried employee.
Sorry I made a mistake. ~10mm for preclinical ~100mm for clinical. (I'm used to thinking only of the 10mm number because I only intend to do preclinical stuff) Oncologics are individually cheaper to develop because the sample size can be smaller for efficacy studies but are reported as higher because there are reportedly more failures. I'm not sure how to judge these things though... How much can be saved by working smarter not harder?
The Google/Arbor Digital Attack Map[1] provides a similar view based on data from 270+ ISPs around the world. Hovering over an attack shows details, and sliding the timeline indicator to dates in the past lets you view some very large attacks (>400 Gb of attack traffic).

[1] http://www.digitalattackmap.com/
Ask your politicians to remove artificial building restrictions which are helping only the landlords.
There is fairly rampant infection of something which uses port 21230 for its activities. I use the port numbers and verify that my iptables aren't passing any of them, which is generally useful. And it is interesting to see the ones being "attacked" (as in people trying to either open them or send data to them via UDP)
There are many definitions of hacker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto

Wark defines hacking 'as an “abstraction”, the construction of different and unrelated matters into previously unrealized relations. Hackers produce new conceptions, perceptions and sensations hacked out of raw data. Everything and anything is a code for the hacker to hack, be it “programming, language, poetic language, math, or music, curves or colourings” [3] and once hacked, they create the possibility for new things to enter the world. What they create is not necessarily “great”, or “even good”, but new, in the areas of culture, art, science, and philosophy or “in any production of knowledge where data can be extracted from it.”
Wark argues that (new) information comes from the hack. It doesn’t matter if you are a computer programmer, a philosopher, a teacher, a musician, a physicist, if you essentially produce new information - it’s a hack [1]. In this sense, hackers are creators and they bring new ideas into the world. The aim of the book is to highlight the origins, purpose and efforts by this emerging hacker class, who produce new; concepts, perceptions, and sensations out of the stuff of raw data.'
But no one in the article demanded to be employed.
To me a blade is a server that you have to have a blade chassis in order to use it.
grow nuts,
Be a man
Shout very loud on next twin decision
quit
breathe
Tesla is at Def Con
I think it's likely that notch disagrees = he thinks there should be no patents in medicine.

he is saying that the most convincing case for patents is in medicine = I do understand why some people thing patents are good in these areas.
The lowest ten percent thing was also a GE, Jack Welch thing. Interestingly, I'm pretty darn sure they always positioned a mass firing as a layoff, even though they applied the ten percent policy.
The important difference between traditional RISC and what we have now in either x86 or ARM is the instruction encoding. You have to have a compact instruction encoding or you waste memory bandwidth. That's part of why x86 eventually beat the old RISC designs and that why ARM has the Thumb encodings.
Masters student doing botany/pedology.

Here because of reason A from OP, but also because I am always keeping an eye out for new tools I can use for data analysis in my thesis.
Flexible particle system – how to start with software optimization
I'm an actuary as well! I would dispute GP that "as an actuary you have to program". The overwhelming majority of actuaries I know barely know how to use VBA. I quit chasing a career in Comp Sci at uni (I started programming at a very young age, and always wanted to be a software engineer) to switch to actuarial science, but now, even though I'm a Fellow, I've quit my job to go into entrepreneurship. I think that being an actuary places us very well to go into startups that take advantage of our analytic and risk management skill set. With the amount of data being collected, that means about 90% of startups.
3B$ is around 11k$/year/programmer[1], which is less than a 10% raise at the salary levels these developers have. Sounds quite fair or even low for what they could have gotten had they decided to move.

[1] Assuming 4 years and 64000 developers, which after some googling seems to be what's at stake in the lawsuit
Seems taken out of context.

Do not hire is different than do not poach.

The wisdom I subscribe to is, if you have common investors, it's bad form to actively poach from portfolio companies.

For companies that are later stage, it's bad form to poach key employee's from portfolio companies.

Do Not Hire agreements between companies, however, seem unreasonable, except when there is clear cause for conflict of interest.
If you made your contract with that law as the understanding, you might have demanded more if the protection wasn't there.
I think fired employees are eligible for unemployment, so I wouldn't think it would effect unemployment insurance liability. As far as I am aware, you are eligible for unemployment so long as you did not chose to leave.
The Psychology Behind User Satisfaction
I'm a chemical engineer, working on my PhD currently. My research is in molecular dynamics (I get to use supercomputers like Titan), so I learn a lot about high-performance computing and programming from HN. Really though, I like this site for the high-quality discourse compared to other websites.
I'm an economist who builds Fed stress test models for a bank.

But I hack too, it's fun.
Agreed, most people won't use them. But that doens't mean more people won't use them. Tools that are easier to use means less technical people can use them. This is why websites like Weebly, Squarespace, and Simplybuilt exist. Technical people who build websites will be recommending these tools to those clients they can't or won't take on.
Unless you checked every possible result for every possible function call you use then the 3rd party library could have been changed in such a way which would break your program. There's no way to prevent such situation in general, e.g when the input value space is non-finite.

Other kinds of specification would seem very hard to test, for example rendering a 3D scene, if we used a bitmap as test data then we'd get false positives when the rendering is improved in some minor way, and the spec will fail, we'd need to use some perceptual metric for image similarity instead.

Version numbers aren't so bad, given their ease of use.
File this under “no duh”, haha.
This is absurd. So rdxm is a "shill" merely because he or she pointed out some very real and important issues surrounding this sort of technology, and then also pointed out the fact that established players are best prepared to handle such challenges? Huh?

If you're going to make such accusations, or even just hint at them, please provide us with at least some real evidence to show that rdxm is being directly compensated by one or more of the industry incumbents for posting that comment. Since I doubt very much that you can provide that evidence, I think it would be appropriate for you to apologize to rdxm and to the rest of the community here.
No need when there is Reaver: https://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/
I should have added a conclusion to my post but I sometimes feel they don't always further technical discussions because once a conclusion is applied, dissenters tend to ignore the logic leading up to it no matter how valid.

But I do agree that package managers are there to serve us, not the other way around. The unfortunate thing is this issue is one of differences in human nature and how a given person prefers their system to be - rigid and concrete maximizing efficiency; or fluid and communicative adding overhead but increasing understandability.
I'm an industrial-organizational psychologist. I design selection systems, HR programs designs at affecting outcomes (like attrition) and do the data analysis relevant to those ends.

An HR guy* and a social scientist! I could make an easy punching bag.

*More on the strategy and data-analysis end, less on administration. I barely know what HR Generalists do.
I don't see anything more than a launch e-mail request?
If Web Development was Rocket Science
I've literally never heard a musician , mathematician or engineer refer to themselves as a "hacker" or anyone outside of computing for that matter.
I'm an applied mathematician, working on my PhD at the moment. I do a good deal of programming(HPC) but I wouldn't consider myself quite at the level of a hacker.
What do you think about replacing most fighter pilots with unmanned drones? Way of the future or will never happen?
Uber for mailboxes.

Product Hunt has a list of current Uber for X products past the idea stage: http://www.producthunt.com/e/uber-for-x
Online Marketing Manager. Marketing and advertising stuff here can be pretty useful. Mostly I stay for the decently intelligent discussion.
I'm a big bad patent attorney (please be kind). I have a computing engineering degree and like to do a little iOS coding in my free time. I like keeping up on what's happening in the tech industry.
I want to agree with the sentiment about the human side of versioning being unreliable, but when the author "pins" the argument on the fact that pinning all versions is "annoying" s/he loses me. Pinning (and vendoring) everything is the only way to know that exactly what you expect to be deployed will be deployed when you deploy it. Anything less is inappropriate for production environments.
None of this reflects on YC. People on HN have a weird understanding of how much control YC has over portfolio companies --- which, in reality, is practically none whatsoever. YC can't compel startups to do anything. Presumably if they could, they'd compel all the companies to ship earlier.
+1 thanks,that is the best comment. I have worked as a consultant for about 15 years, and as a (mostly remote) consultant, being told to take a hike after two weeks would be acceptable (I think; it has not happened to me yet) and a minor inconvenience.

It is so very different however with a hired employee.

I agree that it is not in guybrushT's interests to name the company, but he should definitely send them an email referring him to this Ask HN discussion, just in case they have not seen it yet.
If you don't have a visa, you can't stay in this country beyond a certain point. That has nothing to do with having killer chops for entrepreneurship.
I agree that's a good idea but in the context of this story...

Who lives in this ultra expensive real estate? The execs stiffing the developers on pay while making bank on their work.
I'm a lawyer, with a split practice between IP lit and tech trans, and tried some modest entrepreneurial ventures pre-law school that ended up failing, and I read HN for largely the same reasons.
I'll second anmonteiro90.

Just a few points. Put your work in a version control system (optimally Mercurial or Git), study the request-response cycle for a few hours (no need to get very deep, but understand what programs are involved in your site, and how to configure them), and yeah, do it.
Shift – Software Engineer – San Francisco, Castro district – full time – VISA welcome

Shift is building a new way to buy and sell cars. The founding team includes the co-founder of Taxi Magic; an experienced Google and Dropbox engineer; the founder of Google Fiber; and the former lead designer at Dropbox.

We are looking for engineers who have strong product sense and are passionate about technology and user experience. This includes full-stack, frontend, backend, and mobile engineers. Join our team, come in at the ground level, and shape a product with great potential to transform an enormous market!

Our tech stack is HTML5, iOS, Android, and Go.

Cars are the largest retail vertical in the US – consumers buy almost 50 million new and used cars every year, totaling $1 trillion in value. Yet technology has barely touched the market; Americans buy cars in the same, burdensome ways they did decades ago. Selling a car means either letting the dealer collect a huge margin in a trade-in, or significant hassle selling to a private party. Our goal is to create a delightful experience for every person buying and selling a car, similar to Tesla’s customer service.

Shift is extremely well-funded (with a seed round as large as many A rounds), has strong partnerships with key strategic players across the value chain, and has done dozens of sales in San Francisco. We are lean and hypothesis-driven, led by engineering and design. We work hard together, have fun together, and our culture is healthy and respectful.

talent@shiftcars.com
Market signing bonus language rescinds the bonus if the employee is terminated within a year. A signing bonus does not, as a general rule, insure against early termination.

Obviously, everything's negotiable. It doesn't sound like an unreasonable strategy to demand an "insurance bonus" of some sort if you're a high-value employee and the company is pre-revenue, or if your role commits your network to the company, as this person's did when he used his network to sell the company's product.
This submission was most likely flagged to death. (likely due to both a) lack of product, and b) Yo had its 15 minute of fame already, stop trying to make it happen)
We are really close to having it done. We YO you once it is up and running!
It's a wonderfully painful reminder of what the web was like back in the 90's - isn't it?! Hopefully these open source templates will help lessen the pain and encourage more people to contribute and create their own awesome templates!
I am putting together a site that catalogs all the benefits a company can offer their employees, can I run it by you to see what you think?
You have my sympathies and I wish I could give any solid advice.

As far as I am concerned, the whole "you'll never work in this town again" I would just see as "the company is in trouble if you leave". If you don't have any customers there are probably very few that actually care if you leave the startup. There are likely more people in your surroundings that would rather see you happy :)

The real dilemma you have to face is that you'd like to stay on your two co-founders' good side and keep working with them on other projects. Going with what you say it looks like you are on opposite sides here. They obviously don't want you to leave, while you want to leave. The only thing you can do here is talk to them, find a middle ground somehow. Maybe you can do consultancy work for them? Is there a chance that they might be better off if you are happy?

I like being happy. :)
For those of us who don't recognize it, can you (or the GP) give us a clue? Titles? Name of series? Some hint?
I didn't see that problem. http://virtivia.com:27080/1omz54cqhj8ms.png
I would use Reporter app if you're on iOS. Here is a recent Ask HN thread: What apps or tools do you use to track things about your daily life? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8146114

It allows you to quickly fill out customized surveys (Your questions would be like: "Are you having a migraine right now?") and export the data in JSON or CSV formats.