skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Six Ways to Boost your revenue stream by changing the definition of "revenue" and "six".
> I joined as employee #1 of a YC startup

Which one is it?
I agree. If Scalzi is saying that the cost of production should not alter the price of the product, then I would ask him why paperback and mass market prints of books are less than hardback books in regards to the price. According to his argument, paperback books and hardcover books should be set at the same price regardless of what it takes to produce them.
The statement above is the very reason there aren't more of these good jobs. Seems a very defeatist attitude.

Start a business and employ some people.
What Not to Ask
I see brainfuck all the time over at http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/

It's... weird.
Neat repo to plot these dates on a timeline. https://github.com/cheeaun/life
I'll repeat (2). Assuming you politely declined, those bridges are still around. People get things yanked out from underneath them through no fault of their own. If they went through the hiring process enough to decide that you are a good candidate, the fact that they were your second choice shouldn't upset them.
> You do, as it happens. In order to operate, all machines must pass fairness and randomness testing. They are also under a spot-check regime to ensure there are no post-manufacture changes or defects.

Many of the machines actually aren't random. Rather, large batches of results are (semi)randomly chosen such that there's a particular distribution of results in the next several thousand (or a million) results.
He addresses this in the comments on his blog:

"Yeah. I use GMail too. Fortunately, switching browsers is easier than switching hosted services ... for now ... and I think it also has more impact."
You're reading too far into motivations for posting this story. I certainly didn't get that this is some reassertion of the equality humans and thinking machines, rather a lighthearted thought experiment about the possibility of life existing very differently than ours.
Why isn't LOLCODE more popular? [A few possible reasons] [1] I can think of:

* The benefits it offers over C++ are (or were) not significant enough to make people invest in the switch

* Library availability lacked compared with C++

* It is unsure whether there is "Garbage Collection", and whether it is optional.

* It's not backed by a big name - and our industry is obsessed with big names.

* Perhaps a lack of literature and interest by academic institutions to teach it.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7692230
Lightning-streaked photographs of the Cordón Caulle volcano
An artist paid in stock options to paint Facebook's HQ made $200M
I'd seek compensation for whatever time you were formally employed by the startup. I'd also reach out to some of the other companies I'd passed up job opportunities with to see whether they're still willing to discuss working for them. Be open, and honest as to why you're getting back in-touch with them, and perhaps explain why you chose the US startup over their opportunity to completely clear that question-mark in their minds.

Your situation is frustrating, but there's plenty of opportunity for smart, motivated, talented people. To help with your frustration, try to flip the story in your mind. This company is going to have to find a way to succeed without your knowledge, experience, and help. That's their problem now.

Good luck to you.
Grue3, It's just your opinion, please don't speak from all people.
You need to confirm your words otherwise it's your parallel reality.
When minimized the app goes into 'pause' -even mid battle. Also, they've added a 'bookmark' feature which is a single-load save anywhere. so when you have to go, you can bookmark without finding a save point (just not mid battle). If your party dies, you cannot reload the bookmark point. you can't bookmark and continue, its bookmark & exit to main menu - i guess think of it as a longer term pause? where state is saved in your save game list?
I believe the phrase is "retired".
That's how humans hunt their prey everywhere (before we had tools.)
Launch a competitor.
>First of all, it wasn't so much a specific reason why Australis is bad as it was an example of how it broke existing addons.

Australis was in the pipeline for a long time, and all work was done in the open. It's one of the reasons there was such a huge fuss made about it.

Addon/extension authors had plenty of warnings and opportunities to make sure that their code didn't break.
Also ask Investment Banking people. From what I hear, they lead a life at least as busy as ours, and what's worse is that they often cannot control what urgent tasks are shoved into their faces.

I call the talk on "programmer working long hours" stereotype and myopia.
Yea, in most cases a recruiter would be VERY happy to not have to try and find someone else to fill the position. Granted, you're going not going to get the same salary as before, but it's a start.
HTTPS is Now a Ranking Signal
Read through the translated comments on the page.

I presume turnips are packages and swinging means working, though I'm not entirely sure.
It's implied. If it needs explicit mentioning then probably there's something wrong with the culture because there's no reason that normal person wouldn't consider it.
Even here in America you are required to pay wages for time worked unless there are extreme other circumstances. Even if the company has gone bankrupt, he is first in line behind secured creditors for claims on wages.

IANAL.
I read them all, and I think you and Baez are making a mistake. Not on the science, on the style.

When a person "invents" something that is obvious bullshit, and uses that as a means to milk money out of investors or consumers, that is fraudulent. Over the past 30 years a style of communication has been developed that uses sarcasm and outright mockery to attack these people. James Randi practically invented this style of communication, or at least greatly popularized it, and now it has been adopted by a number of science bloggers.

Why, though? Because fraudsters are good at attracting attention, so to counter it, critics have to generate controversy. And there's no better way to generate controversy than to make things personal. In other words, it's done with a purpose.

But over time that communications strategy has been warped by people who don't understand it. They think the idea is to personally attack and mock ANYONE who reports a surprising result. We saw it with the FTL neutrino results, we saw it with BICEP2, we see it all the time.

It's a major problem. For one thing it trains non-scientists to auto-reject any scientific result that seems weird to them. For another thing it gives greater license to people who are not critiqueing science in good faith (like, say, Rush Limbaugh or Ken Cuccinelli) to attack scientists personally. It reduces its utility as a means of countering fraud, because people come to think that that is just how science communication is done. And it makes it harder to obtain sufficient funding to investigate areas of science that are not as well-known to the public.

What's happening here is not attempted fraud. A team at NASA [1] that is specifically employed and funded to test out crazy ideas, tested out a crazy idea, and published their results. That's it.

So, critique their methods and results? Yes. Critique the press coverage? Absolutely. Attack and mock the researchers? NO. Doing so is a fundamental mistake in communications strategy.

And some of the critiques are even self-contradictory. For example you suggest that they should go back and do it right, but you also don't want them to spend tax dollars on it. Well, the quality of an investigation is directly affected by its level of funding. The NASA crazy ideas lab is minimally funded, so of course not every detail can be worked out. The researchers explicitly state this in their paper.

[1] And yes, they are employees of NASA...saying "this is barely 'NASA'" is a nonsensical statement.
My blog doesn't need HTTPS
Note that Fiverr (who are the people I was saying are being disruptive) are not committing fraud. Some of the designers who sell through their platform might be, but that's not really any different to people who sell stolen things through eBay, or install pirated Wordpress plugins through eLance. It's definitely wrong for those people to be doing that, but focusing on the plagiarism aspect is a red herring. That's just some small (or large) number of users, not the platform itself. If you could eliminate all the fraud Fiverr would still be a disruptive platform.
> I like the founders - they are good guys.

No. They're not. You don't get to screw around with other people's lives and continue to possess the title of "good guy". If they were good guys, you would be receiving tens of thousands of dollars for your difficulties, and such would have enough of a runway on that such that you wouldn't need to ask us for advice. Please do us all a favor and let us know who they are beyond "a YC startup" so that none of us find ourselves in your shoes.

As it stands, if you had one of the other offers you were interested in, let them know that the company that you had taken reneged, and that you would love to work with them. Hiring good engineers is hard (and expensive) enough that any decent company won't mind being your second choice.
i'm halfway through on my iPad. The pad-stick control did take some getting used to (its a fine line between run/walk), but i think its a pretty common control for iOS games that need a joystick
2nd that ... it be miserable if you had actually moved :)
OpenSSL CVE-2014-3508 Information Disclosure Vulnerability
Life sux. And being a nice person with good intentions does not mean you are unlikely to do no harm to anyone.

That is the major reason why I first learnt to avoid «charismatic/nice» employers; I was fed up of being f*cked in the ass nicely. Then I matured and learnt to trust but check.
I've been a CTO/CEO and have hired many people over time. Some of this has already been said, but:

1. Those jobs may still be open, reasonable people wouldn't hold taking another job against you. Work is work, and those who step back into discussion with you will show you a reasonableness that you will value more than before.

2. Situations like this is why sign-ing bonuses were invented. If you're COO of anything, you should also be able to negotiate a proper separation agreement, something like 6 months severance after 6 months of service. The signing bonus covers the initial bump, and then everyone has a window to see if things are copacetic. After that, it's a real relationship with consequences for dissolution.

3. You should be interviewing and considering companies as much as they're evaluating you. There's gotta be more to this story, some of which may be evident as you ponder what really happened. You've gotta develop that antennae. Asking to speak to a company's founders or advisors is a reasonable thing to do, certainly for a COO role that involves international relocation.

4. The "best guys" I've ever worked for f*cked me or our companies over. It's an important qualification to an extent, but character and vision and stability are secondary factors that will wag the dog, so to speak. Especially in startups. Startups are risky, and not always due to market forces or the brilliance of the business idea. Give yourself a good long notch in your work belt.
You can always ask (accelerated vesting, golden parachute, etc), but it's doubtful you'll get anything.

Joining a startup is a risk, period. Part of that risk is that the company (or your job) will be gone in weeks/months/years. However, the upside is usually there. So if you can tolerate the risk, go for it... but always have a plan B.
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." -Calvin and Hobbes

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NIK_Cl9UvPE/UVNQLCNSQwI/AAAAAAAAAC...
Thanks for offering your guide for free for a few days. These techniques are so important now with responsive frameworks taking over the web.
I'm talking about the mockery and sarcasm, which add nothing to the substance of Baez's posts.
What kind of pervert, anti-human-nature "culture" and "philosophy" you are talking about? Haven't they victimized and taken the happiness away from enough people already? Not to mention that being a Brazilian I suppose you should appreciate the positive value of sex very well?
There were some attempts in the early 2000s at "SETI@Home but commercial" type systems based on distributing work packets and scavenging unused desktop CPU time. DataSynapse was one (they later became a more standard cloud-computing company, and are now part of TIBCO): http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,102871,00.asp. However, I don't believe any such systems have become successful.

A more recent variant is renting out VMs, a more cloud-computing take on the idea rather than the utility-computing one: https://secure.slicify.com/. But it remains to be seen whether something like this will catch on either.
This. You'll have another job sooner than you think. A lesson that I picked up from some people I respect is that they don't announce big life/job changes to non-family/extremely close friends until they've already been in that change for 1-3 months.

Also I wouldn't give the Founders the benefit of the doubt of being "good people." Even if they are a YC startup, morons come in all shapes and sizes so even YC isn't moron-free. And yes, only a moron makes decisions to hire people that will have to go through a lot of change to take the job without being absolutely positively sure that they are the right person.

This sounds like an episode of "Hire Slow, Fire Fast", which is a cool way of saying: "We fucked up. Abort! Abort! Abort!" Despite how nice they are being to your face, they've realized for some valid-to-them reason that they made a mistake in hiring you. Don't take it personally, just get back on the horse.
If this is how the company goes about employing their first employee, I don't think they will be around for long. You might have dodged a bullet.

If you got this job, it's extremely likely that you will get another. Don't get me wrong, it's going to suck to explain to people you promoted the startup to that you actually don't work there after all, but it's not the end of the world.
This is one of the most comprehensive and reasonable explanations of the situation that I've read in a while. Thanks!
Engineering feats have brought Qt to Android and iOS, but it's not the same as being a first-class business citizen of the platform.

Very true. At one point I was considering a Qt application on top of Android to let some legacy products continue to run on a modern platform. Until I saw that Digia was pretty much asking for a full Qt license royalty on that platform. At that point it became "screw this, I can just contract a Java developer to port it and it will come out WAY cheaper".
Do you need a Programmer or an Engineer?
It's easy to do with a helper function. For example, this works:

var objectToMap = x => new Map(Object.keys(x).map(o => [o, x[o]]));
Only up to a point in the UK the race and gender discrimination laws still apply for unfair dismissal.
This is one of the most comprehensive and reasonable addendum to an explanation of the situation that I've read in a while. Thanks again!
I suck at css.
Did I miss something? It's not developed by Chris Morris...

> The language was created in 2007 by Adam Lindsay, researcher at the Computing Department of Lancaster University
Discussion from when this was posted four days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8134498
It's called cursorial hunting; wolves do it as well.
Hell yeah it is!
haha, that is crazy!
That's fascinating. The letters resemble Inuit writing a bit. EDIT: seems that script was created by missionaries in the 1840's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut_syllabics

Here are some pictures of Viking longships. It looks like they are not strongly longitudinally segmented, which is against the theory.

http://www.pinterest.com/judah55/viking-gokstad-and-tune-lon...
Not exactly. Many people don't realize the situation at all. And also, there are many ways to find and reserve time for things you love, which are not necessarily related with/constrained by your work at all. People just fall into a vicious cycle so that they gradually forget to do those things altogether, and let things continue deteriorating.
Thanks for the clarification. It's pretty appalling for Perl, though, and I don't agree with your claim that this holds true for most languages.

A lot of languages have specialized structures for arrays and on the JVM, there is even close to no penalty for using ArrayList over a regular array (it's actually recommended for a bunch of reasons).

There is really no excuse for taking so long to populate a hash table (as long as the hashcode implementation is reasonable), especially if the indices are integers.
Show HN: Stochastic – JavaScript library for simulating stochastic processes
Trained Tile Cleaners in Sydney
"I decided to not participate in the startup I mentioned longterm and instead reconsidered your offer from (a few weeks ago?). Coffee?"
Yeah it happens to me, and now i don't refuse other offer as long as i haven't signed anything.

In french we say "un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l'auras".
"One given is better than you'll get two."

Bref, you have opportunity and to your wife telle the things frankly and breath you'll find job soon.

I wish you well for the next things.

Regards.
You're not going to get the same salary? Really?
has the amount of value he can provide decreased after his failed YC backed COO stint or is it just some petty 'loyalty' thing? That would be insulting, especially because the recruiter tends to get paid more if you do(so why would they do that?). I don't doubt that there are people who would do that, but idk how they can they get away with it in such a hot market for technical talent.
hmm .. I don't know. I feel differently. They may be nice people. But hiring and firing is a purely business decision. It might be that they needed a different skill set. Or had another candidate who was a lot cheaper. Investor money drying up, lots of things. Its a job at the end of the day and he was let go.
Yup! You might have to eat some humble pie, but if they were serious about you they'll easily have you back.
Woooow. Thank you for that. It's so bad that it sounds like parody.
This was my thinking exactly. These are data points and while the test itself in isolation may not be conclusive, when combined with other factors that may be measured, inferred or analyzed as trends over time, this may have had me tested years ago. Standard for colonoscopy screening is to start at age 50. I'm 44.
Someone asked for this elsewhere, it's really simple. Kinda odd that it's not in the standard, though. EDIT: It's because Maps preserve insertion order, so the standard doesn't advocate use like this.

var objectToMap = x => new Map(Object.keys(x).map(o => [o, x[o]]));
Why would you think you could get any sort of creative work at all for 5 dollars?

Even at just above minimum wage, wouldn't the time this person spent communicating with you about your company consume at least $5 of wages, before any actual graphical work began?

At the very least I'd hope $5 worth of thought went into it before $5 worth of actual drawing work commenced.

In other news oh my god my $5 shoes fell apart.
SBIR grants can also be quite defocusing.

In a long-ago materials startup, we had 30+ Phase I, 6 Phase II and 3 Phase III SBIRs. The money was helpful (VC funding on topic was thin at the time).

Very few of our SBIRs were exactly on point with our product development goals. This created resource allocation tensions around pushing product development vs. performing on the SBIR contracts. Something to consider when thinking about SBIR funding.
But clearly you are mistaken that we have seen "the end of the hunt."
If the name doesn't ring a bell, DigiNotar was a CA whose root certificates were used to sign some bad things, like certs for ..com, ..org, addons.mozilla.org, sis.gov.uk, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Update.

(Should be asterisks in there, how do you make HN display them instead of doing formatting?)

All of their certificates were blacklisted by major browsers and OSes, causing security warnings on all of the legitimate websites using DigiNotar certificates.
Toga: A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
Certainly on iStockPhoto there is a license restriction clause which states it can't be use in any logo or trademark.

http://www.istockphoto.com/help/licenses

I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of restriction is common in most stock photo sites.
Another simple explanation for the decline might be economies of scale or economies of scope (or both) . Thirty years ago they might have had a smaller effect on small businesses (like coffee shops and retailers), whereas nowadays complex logistics (economies of scale, ie. walmart) or versatile production facilities (economies of scope, ie. starbucks) have a bigger influence on profits.
Sorry to hear about your situation. Unfortunately, this likely happens more often than you'd like to think.

If I were in your shoes, I would immediately re-establish contact with the recruiters who previously made you offers, and let them know you were grievously misled by this other company, and you are interested to know if their offer is still available.

You may also consider engaging a lawyer. If it were me, I would demand payment for all time worked, plus additional monies to compensate you for your opportunity cost of turning down these other offers, especially if you left a previous job to work for these guys.
That logic doesn't quite work in this case. As of 131 day ago, pg was the main programmer on HN. So, while implementing Markdown is easy, it is also the case that:

(1) He had very little time

(2) Markdown was just one potentially easy feature among many other potentially easy feature.

(3) As he stated many times, his focus was on reducing the amount of harmful comments.
Sorry to hear your story. IIRC the lean startup differentiates a "start-up" from a small new business by the idea that the former operates under gross uncertainty. Generally HN smoothes over this but stories like yours help keep things in perspective.
By original syntax I meant Map({a:1, b:2})

Yes, I wouldn't want to change the syntax for array of arrays.
The only thing I'd add to what you said, is that another common problem with using stock images for a logo, is that sometimes the rights of the stock image that was purchased excludes it from being reused in such things as logos.
BTW, the movie of this, featuring the brilliant Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey is online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ .
Do you really know for a fact that it will make life miserable for people around you? I think you're being a little hard on yourself!
Although IBM's hardware implementation does not support the current hotness in neural models, I still think that this is a big deal, both for applications with the current chip and also future improvements in even less required energy and smaller and more dense chips.

I was on a DARPA neural network tools advisory panel for a year in the 1980s, developed two commercial neural network products, and used them in several interesting applications. I more or less left the field in the 1990s but I did take Hinton's Coursera class two years ago and it is fun to keep up.