skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know it's not exactly a company, but the linux kernel (and other big open source projects) managed to do quite well with its "employees" being remote, which proves that a big project can be successful without face to face communication - and since you mention the emotional content of the communication, I'd say Linus is quite good at conveying that in his own way. IMHO the employees engagement to the project can be inversely proportional to the communication quality. If all the workers really believe in the project they are building, they won't need complicated process and will be fine working remotely and communicating by email. On the other hand, if the project is another cats picture sharing app...
Show HN: Snk – preview your markdown as if it was on GitHub/npm
The War Photo No One Would Publish
> I was trying to argue from a moral point of view.

One might argue that it is moral (if not legal) for parties to by mutual consent expressly agree to conduct an economic exchange under terms other than those set by the law of the jurisdiction in which the exchange is conducted (even if the law prohibits such waivers and alternations), but I think its a much harder case to make that it is generally moral for one party in arms-length exchange where no such waiver is expressed to simply elect to ignore the governing law, except when one makes the case that what the law demands would be immoral even as a term agreed to by consent, or that the change in the law which occurred after the agreement violated the fundamental premises on which the agreement was based (and even in the last case, only if the the party acted timely to notify the other party of their objection and to either terminate or renegotiate the relationship based on the changed context.)
For browsing the web and simple development tasks, 2GB is sufficient. More is better, but if you're working on a budget, then 2GB will get the job done.
sweet... this should be dangled in front of those who keep criticizing whites-only startups.
If there's a status-quo bias, it runs the other way. In college, I led a website rewrite with team members in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, France, and Australia, with the site owner in Florida. For my first startup, my cofounder and I usually worked remotely, though we were within driving distance so we could easily have meetings. I've worked on both distributed and colocated projects at Google.

My personal preference, as a developer, is for remote work. But when I look at what the team actually accomplishes, the level of creativity in its solutions, and how quickly it accomplishes them, a colocated team almost always beats the distributed one. There's an energy that you can get when everyone is in the same room that's impossible to replicate when they're 1000s of miles apart.

The cases where I think remote work can do fine is when you have a simple tool or interface that needs implementing, or if you're just trying to optimize one number (eg. performance of a library). These are the same situations you'd use a contractor for.
Microsoft Launches 1994 Website
I'm a researcher I guess. I'm doing my Post-Master's in renewable energy economics and market analysis at a DOE lab. I use Python pretty much every day, so there are plenty of things here that are relevant to my working life. I've just always loved tech, and have a few app and game ideas (like most people) whose many skeletons, design docs, and outlines litter my harddrives and commonplace book. Although I also do spend a fair amount of time reading and writing policy analysis.

I wouldn't consider myself 100% not a hacker though. My weekend list is to get some webscraping done to support a future project, and check out Home Depot for materials to build a cold-brewing setup.
You will soon. This itself is a hack ;)
You're assuming that development and production version ranges will always be the same, which is false. This is what npm shrinkwrap is for, and not pinning during production is stupid. But pinning everything in development is unnecessary until you stage/deploy.
You'd probably be better off trying to fix these issues by addressing them directly -- for the sake of your relationships with the other parties. That said, you won't be blackballed for leaving a floundering startup your heart is no longer in, regardless of your role.

Make an earnest effort to fix all the things that are bothering you and then re-evaluate your situation.
Not unethical.

The internet's a gangster's paradise. The best companies have mobsters in their ranks.
Gif.js – JavaScript GIF encoding library
I generally reply that I let the market decide. I apply to several positions in batch, just as they interview several candidates in batch and I take the best offer, taking into account the learning opportunities and the company culture.
I am a doctor working in a pharmaceutical company. I used to code before starting medical school. Still do. Here mostly for the scene, the point of views and the people. I love the posters here and the feeling of community. It motivates me to keep trying new things.

(I count myself as a hacker. I code and maintain a number of (poor quality) projects.)
k. unethical. It's the reality of the internet.
Windows tried to do that with their search (in Vista, 7, and 8). It has been a disaster. Hidden functionality is a UI and UX anti-pattern.

How do people know to type "bm:" for Bookmarks? Google? Is a Google search now part of the UI's workflow? Or will people simply stop using Bookmarks because it is so obscure (you're seeing this with mobile browsers, Bookmarks are hidden so go unutilised).

Ditto with Windows. In Windows 9x you had a nice UI for search that allowed the user to: Search file/folder names, search within (contents), and to filter by file type and file date(s). In Windows Vista+ it is now hidden strings like "filetype:" (and that is the least obscure example, try doing the between-dates thing WITHOUT googling how first). Plus now "unknown file types" cannot be search within at all (even if you alter the indexer's settings it no longer works, you have to add each file type in the registry as a "text file").
A jazz musician might easily fit the definition of a hacker, but still might be more likely to describe him/herself as "a cat who can blow".
It seems to me that your argument relies very heavily on survivor bias. Expensive failures are an entirely necessary part of the research process. I picked $5 billion because I think that's the minimum cost of developing a general broad spectrum anticancer drug, which seems like the overarching goal. I should have distinguished between that and the more limited purpose of developing 9DS in particular.

Generics manufacturers, incidentally, do just fine

Well obviously, they are in the business of manufacturing something already proven to work. Some of them do move towards doing their own R&D but they have to deal with the same success:failure ratios as existing pharma companies.

I feel like you think bi pharma just wants huge margins out of greed and that the failures or research that goes nowhere is somehow costless. There's not only a direct cost of losses incurred on a drug that doesn't work out at the clinical trial stage, there's also the opportunity cost of options foregone which might have brought successful therapies to market faster.

I don't own any pharma shares and am not a particular fan of the industry, but it seems to me that your criticisms involve a huge amount of hindsight bias. If it was as easy as you suggest the market should be awash in pharama startups. Instead, the number of biotech startups (a reasonable proxy, though not an exact mapping) is about half of what it was a decade ago due to a dearth of funding: http://www.xconomy.com/national/2013/11/18/biotech-startup-c...

I suggest to you that this to a large extent reflects the risk in this sector.
Technical accuracy aside, it's a great marketing tool. Nicely done.
I don't really see the difference to any of these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbYNAZxcWh4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iyeUcFKRv4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7kJfb7MkAs

Fake or not, this is not really limited to a specific country.
Congrats and thanks for sharing the story. The Lob team does a great job and is extremely responsive to customers.
SemVer isn't broken, and you already outlined the obvious solution:

1. Don't depend on 0.x.x version modules unless you are willing to accept the pain of updating versions constantly.

2. Bump major versions liberally.

If enough people just get used to this reality, then everything will be fine. The problem is trying to impose artificially conceived notions of how things "ought" to work on top of this.

Until someone invents a viable system for checking invariants and interfaces on codes statically, semver is pretty much the only show in town for specifying compatibility between code modules.
Fired employees are not always eligible for unemployment:
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/unemployment-benefits...
I'm here because I find the various news and discussions about assorted programming languages fascinating. I often find, either posted directly to the site or in the comments, new resources which help me learn more about the languages and technologies I either use or have a passing interest in. A happy side effect is that I gain an understanding of what my numerous friends who make their living by programming are talking about!

I don't particularly care about startups, but then, the beauty of this site is that I don't have to! There's enough here that I find myself perusing the RSS feed and culling stories that, if I had enough time available, I might be interested in. For those articles that I do select, however, I usually read through the associated comment threads, as I find the various opinions and clarifications most enlightening!
There is a difference between active poaching and simply getting a resume (or some other expression of interest) from somebody for an open position.

a) If you get sent a resume in response to an open req and you reject them based solely on the current employer of the applicant being a "friendly company" ("do not hire" list), that is illegal and wrong.

b) If you realize the applicant is from a "friendly company" and so you make a subtle threat along the lines of: "We are going to call your current employer to get a reference check before we decide to extend any offer, are you sure that's ok with you?" (also recommended in Horowitz's book), it's also wrong and unfair. I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if that is overtly illegal however.
I find comments like this often far more interesting than the original articles. NYT and other publications spend far too much time focusing on the "backstory" of some individual and how they feel that a strong high-level picture of the issue is lost in the noise.

You should consider submitting an opinion piece based on your experiences and your understanding of the situation. (Also with your replied comment about Amazon's retail pricing at a loss; very insightful!)
You're assuming "no duplicate dependencies" is equivalent to "install globally", which is false. In the article's context, the argument is against duplicate dependencies per project
> "firing" reduces the amount of unemployment insurance you get

Could you describe how this works? Do you get unemployment for a longer period of time or larger payments if you were laid off?
Some companies aren't lasting brands. Mine happens to fall into that category. Nobody has ever given a shit about my logo except from that post.

The service I provide, if it does its job well, is something you never should need to go back to ever again. Almost all my visitors are one time visitors and there is little/no return value on what I do. So, in this instance, customers never think of my brand. So it really doesn't matter.

And you say it's awful. I don't think it's awful. It's functional. It doesn't distract from everything else, it doesn't add anything special. That's good enough. I don't want people thinking about my logo, I want them getting what they need and leaving.
This is not exclusive to China. There are some vidoes on YouTube of guys doing the same thing in America, with pretty much identical results. In one of them, the guy doesn't even talk to the girls and they still get in.
Would love to talk offline and hear more about how you're handling this. I'm only just learning about home healthcare deals with this stuff. I'm noga at picnichealth if you have a minute to chat at some point.
China Will Install More Solar This Year Than The U.S. Ever Has
TL;DR: Don't drink 4L of the stuff per day.
Why the Apple iWatch Won't Go Straight to the Bottom Dresser Drawer
Check the parent's profile, its all in there.
I really agree with what you said about convincing yourself there are other things to do. Certainly we were guilty of this. A great company culture is fantastic but wont mean anything if you don't have any revenue :)
How Webknox monetized their APIs
This may be staged but Vitaly, a popular Youtuber, did that in the US without even saying a word https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbYNAZxcWh4

It's science http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19302732
I have seen where foreign students who are very well prepared by an excellent high school education but who would not make it into an elite school at home due to pretty much infinite demand for a constrained supply get a quality university education here, and I have seen both graduate and undergraduate foreign students cheat their way in, and in too many cases, through a US university education, and everything in between. Though it looks like the numbers favor the former being the majority.

I think we can agree any visa program would need a way to distinguish among them. But also consider that George W. Bush graduated from Harvard Business School. If you have the juice, anything can be made to happen.
We're not going to become gods by making simulacra of perfectly obedient servants. If anything, this is more likely to support the development of a hostile AI that considers total submission a desirable end state to impose on others.
To me this is really simple. You should tell Hacker News who the company is. An employee has the right to leave whenever he wants and a company can terminate you whenever it wants.

Big companies usually do not fire for no good reason because of liability. Small companies don't have to worry as much because they don't have any money to sue for.

However these "good guys" are establishing their corporate culture now, and we hacker don't want to get dicked over too.
Woah, my doppelganger!

I work in user acquisition, specifically in SEM (AdWords/Bing). Same reasons here: cursory knowledge of programming I self-taught when trying to automate tasks, but nothing formal. Trying to learn more because I want to go the Product Management route.

This place definitely piques my curiosity in things I sometimes never knew existed. I've been lurking for a few years and can say that I've learned so much more about technology, business, etc. from here that I otherwise wouldn't have (I didn't even know what a PM was before; now I want to be one, heh).

Also echo the desire for non-programming jobs in the Who's Hiring thread, but I guess that's a double-edged sword because if it gets too diverse, it can become like a regular job board and thereby lose its relevance, for employers and employees alike. At the same time, my selfish side wishes it to be so since I would love to work for companies that frequent HN, i.e. more forward-thinking companies doing really cool things (usually).
The series is "Decrypting Rita".

http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/01/
a similar concept exists in audio hashing called acoustic fingerprinting [1]. i've used software like Picard [2] to de-dupe my music library based on similarity. Also Simiilarity [3] incorporates this as does Shazam.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint

[2] https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard

[3] http://www.similarityapp.com/
John Gruber: Apple will announce its ‘wrist wearable thing’ next month
"Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it." -Santayana

This is yet another iteration of American labor politics. That it involves workers with greater skills than in previous iterations is not germane. The reason that labor unions arose in the first place was that capitalists actively exploited workers. And, guess what? Capitalists still exploit workers, even when the workers tools are laptops and VMs rather than steam engines and Bessemer converters.

How easily we forget that our grandfathers fought and died for the forty-hour work week. How easily we give that up, because we're working for "disruptive startups".

If you want to know what previous iterations of no-hire agreements looked like; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(employment)
Neither have I, but I find myself recognizing hacker traits in musicians, mathematicians, lawyers, chefs, spangers, legislators, tech recruiters, modern bohemians, and grant writers.

These are all people that reason about systems. The systems and the tools vary, but the process doesn't.
Great question; I'm following the responses you get.
It is lawful to maintain a "do-not-hire" list of companies from which you disqualify candidates.

It is possibly even lawful to do that with the intent of avoiding poaching and ill will.

What's definitely not lawful is to conspire with the companies on that list to determine its makeup.
Does your area have anything like 4G LTE? I wonder if cellphone tethering would actually give you better performance.
Adobe made $290m last year
https://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ADBE&annual
I did and gritted my teeth the whole way through.

It looked like a lecture from Rembrandt telling a young Matisse the "correct" way to paint.
Ask HN: What is the avg age of your startup's employee
Ours 39.5... (Cognitive Networks)
Quite the opposite, it was university housing for faculty and graduate students. The most expensive residential plans at the time had a 20GB/month cap, IIRC.
Regulatory capture is the word of the day.
Wait, when I was recruited into SV I was told that the Lamborghini I would eventually own would allow me to do this. You folks didn't get that pitch?

/s
I can guarantee you that the web from the 90's was <BLINK><FONT COLOR="#00FF00">less frustrating</FONT></BLINK>.

But at least there are some nice tools[1] that lessen the pain :)

[1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/inlinestyler
Chesscademy – Learn How to Play Chess
How would an adversary break this?

My first idea would be to rotate it by something that's halfway between the steps used. Say, 360/32 degrees. How does that compare?

Also: because it discards the high frequency data one should be able to construct something like this: http://cvcl.mit.edu/hybrid/CatDogHybrid.jpg - where to us at a close distance it looks like one thing but to this it looks like something else.
Hey I don't work at Picnic but I do work at Prime.

Picnic and Prime do similar things. I've met the Picnic team. They're great, and so is Picnic. They understand HIPAA. I'll let @nogaleviner speak to the specifics of their HIPAA considerations but I do want to clear up some general things up about HIPAA since we've (as has Picnic) been working on this for a year or two now.

1. It's HIPAA, not HIPPA.
2. The "P" in HIPAA stands for Portability (h/t @katgleason). The salient parts of HIPAA for this conversation are:
a. HIPAA makes what Picnic does possible. The overall point of HIPAA is to open up data, to let patients say to their doctor "I want my medical record" and require doctors to fulfill that request. The September 2013 update to HIPAA even said that if a patient asks for their records electronically, their doctor has to provide them electronically. Without HIPAA, Picnic probably wouldn't exist.
b. HIPAA does stipulate two Rules: the Security Rule and the Privacy Rule. In a nutshell, these rules don't prescribe specific implementations but do require general considerations. The high-level overview is: data has to be encrypted in transit and at rest, all data access has to be logged (for auditing), and employees have to be HIPAA-trained. Generally speaking if you build something that meets a decently high level of conventional web security standards, you could probably meet the technical requirements for HIPAA.

Now this is important: while b) is true, this actually only applies to entities who are required to be HIPAA-compliant, i.e., medical care providers. Technically Picnic isn't a care provider and therefore does not need to be HIPAA-compliant.

That doesn't mean Picnic doesn't take security and privacy very seriously. And I can tell you they do: their site is SSL-enabled and they know what they're doing.

Again, just speaking to the HIPAA points here, not the business considerations. Hope that helps clear some things up.
The article directly describes the phash algorithm presented in the Hacker Factor post, while your second link is an implementation of the ahash algorithm in the same post.

libpHash's implementation is slightly more sophisticated (and slower) as it adds a box filter over the image before downscaling and uses the median of the AC coefficients rather than mean for computing the hash bits. It also offers a few alternative hashing methods.
I work in IT for a school district in the Bay Area and I love HN for keeping a finger on the heartbeat of what's going on around me! It's one of my virtual portals into a world I feel comfortable within.
I expect to be paid by the ratio of profit and my contribution to a realization of it.

Working on what exactly? I ain't gonna invest my time, work and good will working for peanuts on some dead end shitty project.

The amount starts at X just for joining your company and is NEGOTIABLE upwards regarding duties, projects and technologies that I'll be working with/on.

Every programmer can be an entrepreneur - not every entrepreneur can be a programmer.
Haha, thanks for the closure, that's interesting to know.
> Wu recalls that one of his 20-something co-workers became the mistress of a wealthy, middle-aged man. "One day she quit the job. The man was a public servant, working for a government agency."

At first, sounds like she was fooled. Then it makes sense.
Setting your angel round up to fail
I'm a quant trader working at a hedge fund. I write a lot of code, but not in the same way that I think most people here think about code. A lot of it is hacky Matlab scripts to test some new research idea. Some of it is hand-crafted C that implements some numerical routine that we need to call a few billion times. Occasionally I throw something together in Python to do some web scraping or parsing task, but that's becoming rarer nowadays.

I come to HN because I enjoy coding, and the level of discussion is still probably the best out of any online community I know of (excepting a few very specialized ones... the r/haskell community comes to mind).
Artificial selection for structural color on butterfly wings
Why Are 2M People Still Signed up For AOL's Dial-Up Internet?
It's easy to explain to lower/middle-class Americans outside of tech who are in union jobs. That's because they understand that one thing a robust union does is help prevent (or at least mitigate) this kind of collusion before it starts. My wife earns 1/3 of my salary, but does a far more important job for society. She comes from a state in which the unions used to be strong. She immediately understood what the implications of this collusion were, and didn't need me to even explain why the lawsuit is a good thing.

They understand that different workers earn different salaries, and they get that "paid below fair market wage" means what it means, regardless of what "fair market wage" is the calibration.

But we can't have unions or talk of unions in the software industry, because that might upset the rather hilariously mistaken insider perception of this industry as being a meritocracy.