skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scientists create self-assembling, working robots
If there is no technology play, at the minimum it should be a signon bonus that the company would pay engineers joining at that position in the company. How much higher than that would depend on other factors that everybody is discussing.
Right, at the company I currently intern at this is all done manually by the software librarian. It seems like there is a lot of room for automation in meetings; bonus points if such a system could tie into the issue tracker/SCM (whatever that may be, we use Accurev). Although Watson sounds like it would be helpful in cutting down on the number of pointless arguments in meetings where not everyone is on the same page.
I notice that the pricing is very similar for extensions and application servers. Can you clarify that extension pricing is in addition to the core server hosting?
Especially true for a bootstrapped company with no customers and no revenue. In fact, in this case I would actually wonder why the acquirer needs to do an "acquihire" at all. Perhaps that term is being misused here?

An acquihire is generally a buyout of the team, not the technology, the product, or its business prospects. As the team, I would think about how uniquely skilled you are in the domain for which you're presumably being acquihired. Think about your own BATNA, but also think about the acquirer's BATNA. How many yous are out there? How crucial is your team to the acquirer's business objectives? Do you have a sense for specifically why they want you? Is it to build out a new business practice or vertical strategy? A new product? Are you better qualified to do that than the market at large? How much better? How long would it take a deep-pocketed company to assemble a comparable team?

Many (most?) acquihires are indeed VC-mediated. The rest are usually because a team has managed to distinguish itself as a uniquely valuable and concentrated source of talent or domain expertise, such that finding an alternative on the open market, or building one internally, would take a lot of time, money, and false starts. In that case the acquirer's corp dev team probably has a specific calculus it uses to value acquired teams versus building new ones, multiplied in some way by the business upside of the domain or skill in question. If your team operates in a domain with major or mission-critical upside to the acquirer, expect a more generous offer. If your team operates in a nice-to-have, but supporting or uncritical domain for the acquirer, you have less leverage.
@pkallberg yup, it's entirely on DigitalOcean
I'm pretty sure that kind of organized industry-wide boycott would run afoul of antitrust laws — and if it weren't organized and industry-wide, the publishers who defected would probably just be shooting themselves in the foot, because they would not be able to get everyone to buy a new e-reader that couldn't read any of their existing books.
Random lyrics generated by a Markov Chain algorithm
I sincerely wish you the best...

Thank you!

if you had a similar offer in a month, would you do it differently?

You know thats such a good question. There are many excellent suggestions in this discussion. I would definitely add a cost in the contract - a cost (e.g. severance etc.) in case I am asked to leave for reasons other than performance. This should mitigate the casualness which hurt me last time.

What won't change is that startups are looking for great people, and some people are looking for great startups :) But I would definitely structure the deal with a startup very differently, as a result of this discussion.
I'm guessing s/he doesn't want to go back to T9 for texting, or use a phone with a hardware keyboard.
It is from 2008 though, things have changed. Just today a domain was seized by the UK govt on grounds of copyright infringement just because it was running a proxy. In Austria someone was convicted for running a Tor exit node about a month ago.
I might be willing to concede on this but you also have to take age into account.

Let's look at this useful spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmenB57kGPGKdHh...

And here are the numbers:

Hacked:	880,575,016

Inside job:	137,714,840

Accidental:	63,322,485

Lost/stolen:	206,237,702

Misc:	1,825,350

Things like government-issued identification numbers and whatnot are the most severe, so how many people have been affected by that since 2004? If we break it apart by category we start to see how these breaches have become:

E-mail addresses:	530,991,405

SSN/PII:	327,471,624

Credit card:	335,772,083

Authentication:	430,756,146

Bank records:	4,270,000

For the first line, it's just a list of e-mail addresses. The latter four are the most severe. Out of that list, what is the most useful? I'd wager the SSN/PII, authentication, and bank records; credit cards are only useful for so long really.

This means we're at over 750,000,000 records that may be usable. However, with the authentication portion, we're looking at that being even more useless as time goes on. Accounts from 2004 may not be usable in 2014 either.

So yes. We have had over 1.2 billion records leaked, but really how much of that is at all useful? None of these take duplicates into account however.
Who disrupted McDonalds?
A growing number of users think HN is Wendy Williams for Startups. They love gossip, drama, and revenge. Don't bother trying to convert them, "name-and-shame" is a growing new attitude in Startups. Every problem and issue is now being aired out in public because it allows people (completely unrelated to the issue) to opinionate and play hero.
I got a new MacBook a few weeks back and have been thinking of getting some kind of cool decal for it after seeing the commercials. My daughter always puts stickers all over her computers when she gets a new one.
I don't like keyboard stickers, or stickers that go on the inside area where you rest your hand. It might look cool initially, but they quickly fall apart.

Outside of the laptop seems fair game unless you're in an environment that is very client-facing or tends to be a bit more buttoned up (Wall St?) then you should be mindful of that.
It's refreshing to read comments from someone who gets what cryptocurrencies could represent in the wider world, especially someone with former government connections.
>“I recommend eliminating Kawasaki Robotics.” When Watson was asked to explain, it simply added. “It is inferior to Cognilytics in every way.”

Getting some serious M5 vibes right now.
How it [really] feels to deal with customers
@filearts the extensions is a standalone server that can operate with or without an application server. Only our base server cost for application, load balancer and extensions are the same.
Living in Philadelphia's suburbs my whole life, hardly anybody I know (or have known) has owned guns. Maybe 10% or less if I had to guess.

I'm sure that some people I know have guns and simply don't talk about them, of course. But the gun owners I do know aren't stigmatized in my social circles or anything, so I wouldn't say there's much incentive to be secretive about it in my social circles.

This is all highly anecdotal of course but it just shows how regional the gun ownership thing is in America, along with pretty much everything else as well...

> I'd guess that 70% or more of households there have at least one gun, and most of those would have multiples.

All of the gun owners I know have multiple guns as well. That's actually probably part of the answer right there with regards the rate of gun ownership in America.

There are apparently about 300 million firearms in America and that number, due to controls on manufacturing and importing, is inexact but probably more trustworthy than self-reported ownership numbers.

So you figure... there's about one gun for each American... but most gun owners have multiples... so it makes rough ballpark mathematical sense to me that the majority of Americans don't have guns. Unless we think that there are more like a billion guns out there instead of 300 million.
Or Forth support?
You can see this framework in action on this terminal.com container: https://terminal.com/tiny/kADIkZGJrv
I also created a simple blog to show how it works!
> TripAdvisor's boss, Stephen Kaufer, denies he wants to take on the big two. "We are a media site," he says. "I want Expedia and Priceline to thrive because they are my clients."

Looks like the boss agrees with you.

> But soon, holidaymakers will be able to book their entire trips without leaving the TripAdvisor app. Rivals beware.

The Economist is known for making bold predictions. What do you think this one is based on?
I imagine the costs of trials, and who paid them, are well documented. In the event of a dispute about which company discovered which drug, could a company not point to its investment in research or funding of a specific trial as evidence of its discovery, rather than trying to spam system with provisional patent applications? (By the way, there's no such thing as a "provisional patent" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_patent#cite_note-1)
There's way too much libertarianism, if not outright objectivism, in this industry for just about any kind of organized labor to exist.
Some carriers will let you have two active sim cards for one number simultaneously.
We use Lob for Amicus Post (http://amicushq.com/nytm) and have had a great experience so far. It's such a delight to be able to focus on improving our product and not on the logistics of fulfilling the printing & mailing part. Lob reminds me a lot of Twilio in this regard.
There's a typo in the about page: "you're application"...

also there are no contact information (email?)
Cures aren't really binary things. Something like "stomach cancer" is probably a whole bunch of (perhaps at present indistinguishable) diseases. Add to that that event amongst cures for the exact same malady, there can be differences in side effects, efficacy, and treatment length.
> Even in Haskell values must be tagged with types, and the type tags are inspected at runtime.

This does not fit my understanding of pattern matching in Haskell. Say you are matching over a value of type `Maybe String`. The type of the value is always `Maybe String`, it's just that its value might be `Just "foo"` or `Nothing :: Maybe String`. It is not to my knowledge tagged with type information at runtime in a compiled program, merely value information. The different values an ADT disjunction can take on all have the same type as each other.

> Otherwise, pattern matching wouldn't work (pattern matching is always based on type reflection).

What about pattern matching a String against a series of literal values? I don't see how this is based on type reflection, merely inspection of values.
They have, but it only concerns the USA, completely ignoring the rest of the world while still calling on everyone to open their networks. Understandable as they're an American organization, but annoying as a non-American. Almost as annoying as the NSA considering anyone with a non-American IP address a potential terrorist.
Js.js sandboxing third party scripts
Thanks for sharing, Idan. It is very important to ask questions with an open mind. Seems like that person was making a lot of assumptions about what you're having to deal with. It's an easy trap to fall into, but it's an important lesson that we can all learn to try and avoid.
Interesting, how was this done without installing addon? Is this bundled into Firefox? I also can add DDG doing this but not for some other search engines though.
The author's attitude towards UB is wrongheaded and dangerous. He argues:

> The Get() function can initialize the variables A and B. Whether or not it has done so is marked in the variables getA and getB. Regardless of whether or not the variables A and B are initialized, their values are copied into TmpA and TmpB correspondingly....Formally, as far as I understand, undefined behavior occurs. In practice, however, just some garbage will be copied.

This "in practice" is assuming a naive compiler that dutifully outputs a copy instruction. But the reality is compilers exploit undefined behavior for optimization opportunities.

A likely outcome here is that the compiler will see UB if getA is false, and therefore optimize getA to just always be true. Not what the author intended at all!

Chris Lattner explains it beautifully: http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...
s/Related/outdated/
I would worry about making promises about scaling applications you don't know anything about...not every problem can be solved by adding more hardware. If someone is doing the business software equivalent of the travelling salesman then it doesn't matter how many dynos they spin up: it will be slow
You'll be hard-pressed to find an acquiring company that would be willing to pay $1-1.5m / engineer for a bootstrapped co :). But sure.
This is the Harvard Business School case study mentioned in the article:
http://hbr.org/product/TripAdvisor/an/511004-PDF-ENG

Another fascinating article on how TripAdvisor took $4 million of invested capital to build a company now worth almost $14 billion:

http://www.businessinsider.com/scaling-is-hard-case-study-tr...
Coming from IBM, I am sure it is green. :-)
I guess I'm one of those people who tells my friends that KiCAD is "much better now". Bear in mind that this is a comparison to oh, five years ago, when it would crash roughly as often as OrCAD... EEs are accustomed to buggy tools that crash at inopportune moments, so to be clear, I think KiCAD is doing quite well.

I do stick to using it on Windows though. If the situation on the Mac is as bad as you say, perhaps they should drop their OSX claim until that gets fixed.
I'm also surprised we don't see more remote work in the more computational bits of academia, but there's still a widespread view that remote work is bad for team cohesion and serendipitous collaboration.

Were one cynically inclined, one might wonder if remote work is unpopular because it lets people bypass some of the status-signalling systems that tend to develop within organisations.
Ah yeah. The advertising isn't, you're right. The wait is, though; visa allotments run out fast. Apologies for getting confused.

In some cases you're not applicable for a H1-B (I was a dropout) so my only route was another type which had a several year waiting list. Can't remember the visa name right now, I'll do some googling though.
The US bombing its own guns perfectly sums up America’s total failure in Iraq
> Companies would (justifiably) still want provisional patent protection for the very long period between the idea's conception and FDA approval

I disagree. For drugs this wouldn't be a problem.

The company that invented it is forbidden from making money off a drug that is not approved, so they have every incentive to get the approval as soon as possible.

Other companies would not be prevented by patent law from producing the drug during the time, but they would be prevented by FDA regulation. And they would not be inclined to invest since they would know that the patent would issue as soon as the drug was approved.
In this context "tag" refers to the part of a value of type Maybe a which indicates whether that actual value is of the form Just a or Nothing. In other words, it's entirely runtime information distinguishing between various members of the same type
Hey sorry about that, somebody posted this prematurely for us. But you can contact us at info@fortheon.com.
I can imagine the morning news channels shouting out, "Experts say, don't let stray animals into your house, they may contain viruses. Several home owners say they've been infected with the lucrative HazCheeseburger virus."
1) For example, the polio vaccines, which were developed and even whose distribution by the private non-profit that is now (the somewhat corrupt) March of Dimes. Incidentally, the polio vaccines weren't patented, either.
Thanks Tim. I'm definitely not innocent when it comes to making assumptions on the internet. I feel like we've all come to expect a certain standard and forget that companies spend massive resources to provide for those standards where a smaller company may not be able to match up.

Definitely surprised me that this came from a backer through. We get this kind of response relatively often from people who buy on our website, and from that vantage point they don't know it's only 4-5 people in a small office somewhere. But crowdfunding was meant to empower the underdog after all.

Glad you found it useful!
The Restaurant Menu That Nudges People Toward Healthy Food
Ask HN: Who isn't in the software industry/not a hacker?
I work as an Associate in the commercial real estate industry and wonder how many others like me are out there on HN. Is there a community here like me who have an interest in technology and entrepreneurship but aren't hackers?

I love this site because:
A) I get news on average 2-3 days before it makes it's way through the news cycle.
B) Technology interests me and I can see what new tech could benefit my industry
C) I am a wantrepreneur and like reading about startups, hopefully wanting to start one someday.

Why are you here and what do you get out of the community?
> For example, Clojure does not have dynamic dispatch (except for multimethods, which are a limited form of dynamic dispatch) other than that offered by OO polymorphism (interfaces/protocols). In other words, it lacks the most important mechanism that lends dynamically typed languages like JavaScript and Ruby their power.

Multimethods are actually a rather powerful form of dynamic dispatch. From the context, I think what you're referring to is late binding, which is when an identifier is resolved to a storage location / function implementation at runtime rather than at compile time. It's easy to get them confused, since late binding gives you dynamic dispatch "for free", but it is possible to have dynamic dispatch with early binding (as in C++, for example).

> Calling Clojure "dynamically typed" in this context (or any context), is confusing, as it is more of a mashup of a few ideas from functional and OO languages than a typical dynamically typed language.

A language's type system (or lack thereof) has nothing at all to do with dynamicity of dispatch nor binding.
It does indeed use Quil and was really happy to see there recent (May of this year) addition of ClojureScript support. It is a great library and made building up this tutorial great fun using the repl.
Sounds like a very cool demo, but the optimism of some of these ideas is quaint.

If Watson is good enough at speech and context recognition to accomplish these things IBM can/will sell truckloads of Watson as a Service for the purpose of monitoring employees.

WaaS will read everyone's email and parse conversations recorded by their desktops and phones to identify people who are off-task, leaking information or talking about unions.

That's the sort of thing Executives care about it. When I set up email retention systems they were primarily interested in being exempt from journaling. When I set up physical security systems they wanted to be sure the executive board room cameras weren't mic'd and faced away from the main presentation area.

In practice, both systems were primarily used to keep tabs on employees - who was dumb enough to send an email to the news from work and who's leaving early.

This is how 'intelligent' systems will be used - electronic overseers with distributed eyes and ears - long before it's confined as a guest boardroom showpiece that gets tossed for suggesting the CXO get off his soapbox in a timely manner or correcting his knowingly incorrect assertions.
If technology like this really had a basis in reality, one would think that some early prototype would be delivering positive business results.

When I think IBM, I think accounting tricks to maximize stock price. Not seeing deep insight.
How to Deal with Right-Wing Assholes, by Andrew W. K
> Amazon doesn't HAVE that kind of overhead ...

Apparently servers, bandwidth, electricity and developers are free now?
It's better than window clings on a car, in my opinion. My 2007 Gateway "Convertible Notebook" (what used to be called a tablet, back in my ancient college days of 7 years ago) is rocking a black and white Stemage logo (a one-man band, best known for his Metroid Metal series), a stylistic B&W Metroid (both round stickers from some Stemage album I purchased years ago), and an Evol Intent logo--a fantastic drum 'n bass group. http://cdn.doandroidsdance.com/assets/2013/10/evol-intent-lo...

They take up about a third of the overall screen height. Having the bleeding red heart separating two black and white logos makes for an interesting aesthetic. My image of the impish young hacker is enhanced by some weird-o stickers. If I was presenting an image of the buttoned-up, sophisticated C-level software architect, I'd prefer an unobstructed view of my generic, high-end laptop's brushed-metal screen backing.

Or you could go for the TV approach and just put one big sticker to cover up the manufacturer's logo in the middle of the top.
No, it's a tool, and like any tool it's intrinsically amoral. The morality is derived by the wielder. When capitalism is used as an excuse for immoral behavior, the tool becomes how it is wielded.
Kevin Simler, the post author, also blogs at http://www.meltingasphalt.com/.
Good idea. A few tweaks...

Most of the tracks do not load.

You cannot delete songs from history.

You cannot delete providers whose songs do not load (grooveshark, namely)

EDIT: I have a test HN channel here: http://allwax.track.tl/
It keeps annoying me that nearly everyone (including Richard Posner [0] and notch [1]) says that 'medicine makes for the best case for patents'. I'm not convinced that patents are necessary for pharmaceuticals, and I'm trying to prove that's the case [2].

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/why-ther...

[1] http://notch.tumblr.com/post/27751395263/on-patents

[2] http://indysci.org/projectmarilyn
Yet he's no manufacturing guru... "[...] graduated with a triple major in economics, international relations and political science." Aside from helping start the DHS, wiki says he's chief strategist for... Morgan Gold, a company which I can't find out much about except their "F" rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Who would be dumb enough to stick a USB device a stranger hands them into their computer? After all the press on BadUSB?
Ask HN: Which other HN threads to include in startup-law page for students?
1. Early next month I expect I will do my annual "Legally Lean" guest-lecture presentation at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business, for an MBA entrepreneurship class taught by a friend. [1] I give the same presentation to the RED Labs startup accelerator course at the University of Houston's Bauer College of Business. [2]

2. Sometime back I posted the substance of my slides as a page on my blog --- along with links to several HN threads as well as useful posts from other lawyers. [3] I'm going to be adding an HN thread that I just saw, on how much a bootstrapped startup should ask for an acquihire. [4]

QUESTION: It occurs to me that I should ask the group: What other HN threads would be useful to students in these entrepreneurship programs?

[1] http://courses.rice.edu/admweb/!SWKSCAT.cat?p_action=CATALIST&p_acyr_code=2015&p_crse_numb=629&p_subj=MGMT

[2] http://redlabs.bauer.uh.edu/

[3] http://www.oncontracts.com/legally-lean/

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8154213