skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really understand your point. Is it that staff shouldn't have to remember interactions with other staff? If so, I can't agree.

Good staff I have managed are fast to interact with verbally, remember what is asked of them, remember what they are taught, remember what they have promised, remember advice they have given and don't repeat themselves etc.

The bad staff claim no knowledge of what was asked, haphazard claims of what they agreed to and require to be shown how to do things multiple times. Some other bad staff refuse to agree to anything verbally and demand everything to be written down slowing everything down to a contract negotiation.

With care, even someone with poor memory can operate like the good staff. The bad staff are unemployable.
Depends on the country (UK for example, severance is more or less required by law). In the US, I would suggest something along the lines of: (if it's in written form)

Signing bonus: [brackets is some notes]

"Dear CEO,

I appreciate the offer of COO for X amount. [be polite] I've taken some careful consideration over the role and what it entails for me personally. [remind them you're a human] I've reviewed not only this offer but many others that have come as a result of my merit, ambition, and drive to enable the success of any organization. [remind them why they hired you and why its gonna change their world] I am prepared to move forward with you and your team, however ask that a bonus upon signage be applied to my overall compensation package. [in general, I would suggest leaving out the "why" - let them ask you personally and then go into convo]"

Severance: [brackets is some notes]

"Dear CEO/HR person,

I appreciate that a decision was made regarding the future of my relationship with the business and you've done everything in your power to ensure that I walk away standing proud of my merits. [be polite and thank them for being nice people] Unfortunately, as demonstrated by your actions to let me go, I am not a match for the future success of XYZ company. I would, however appreciate some form of severance upon my departure. As you can imagine, having unexpected circumstances can lead to personal hardship. This situation is clearly not ideal in the short term for me and my family. [remind them you're human] Any appreciation and goodwill you may have towards my situation will go a long way. Thank you for your time"

Note - these are nowhere near perfect or will ever be contextually correct, but are a good starting point.
Reminds me of “The 50 Dollar Logo Experiment” (http://www.logodesignlove.com/the-50-dollar-logo-experiment). Sometimes $50 isn’t worth it either.
having been a bridge burner i can say that most employers are not competent enough to discover that you burned a bridge if they care... and if you volunteer the information its a great way to filter bad employers too.
Blow minds in the browser with WebGL
Transloadit – Upgrades and Goodbyes
In only 20 short years, we've gone full circle back to AOL, but now with an amazing new interface.

Feh.
He is right.

Tree-style tabs is something the desktop manager should provide. And autosave for all documents like SublimeText does.

Whatever we do with the tabs in our applications is up to us.

Honestly, we don't know what the limits are until we try it.

All I get from your argument is: "we have not tried it, therefore it will fail".
You absolutely need to go back through your contacts and explain exactly what happened. Especially to those who you advised to use this startup's service and those you asked about potential investments. After hearing this story, they may reconsider such involvement---I certainly would.

These are not "good guys". They are at best short-sighted, unprepared, and unprofessional. Hiring decisions are important and difficult; the best spin I can see is that they do not know who they need and are very unprepared for this step. (Want a worse spin? Someone they know has suddenly become available and they wish to give them the employee #1/Coo badge.) This behavior is a big red flag.

(I've been in similar situations before---I'm thinking of a research group at ORNL right now---but rescinding an offer is significantly worse.)

As other people have said, don't worry about your personal situation. Most of your contacts will likely have understood your original decision and find the thing offensive as well.

On the other hand, I don't think you'll be able to convince your wife to move to the US again. Tell her we're not all assholes, though.
I'm going to come out and say it. HTTPs is borked, in a functional way. On a social/technical level, it has become a false sense of security. The PRISM revelations let us know that the three letters and any corporate wannabe was doing MITM not just on http but on HTTPS whenever possible. I would say the ISP's and the CA's should all be considered compromised.

We need something new and better, not to push HTTPs on everything as an imagined stop gap...

That being said though, I do understand that if this was pushed to wider adoption, it would create a higher cost to perform such attacks, for ISP's and three letters?
It is plagiarism. Plagiarism is using the content of others without appropriate attribution. Copyright infringement is using the content of others without the rights to it. Copying can be either, neither, or both.

Whether attribution is needed is situational but in a 'design' context it's important.
In reality it isn't of course. But appearances do matter, and to many people it can look like it was bridge burning, sour grapes, or otherwise vindictive. So it's something that should be considered very cautiously.
This CVE seems to be empty, and a reserved number on other databases. Has it not been disclosed yet?
The important factor is "without sleep." And, in fairness, it's not entirely about "just walking."

Though it's counterintuitive, humans really do have more endurance than most large mammals.

Here's a wikipedia on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
"The problem with Crowd sourced reviews, is that quite often, other people might like quite crappy books. The job of a publisher isn't to just find a book that they like, but that the general reading population will love."

I don't care about the "general reading population"; I want books that I will enjoy. Recommendation engines provide a lot more value in this area than publishers (at least for fiction).
SQL Injection Training
Haha I wrote a (partially complete) compiler and virtual machine for it a number of years ago. I'll have to dig it up.
Not so, actually - humans are one of the best at endurance walking out of all land animals. Trained humans regularly beat horses at long distance races - there's am annual one held in England, for example. I'd give links but I'm on mobile.
What are your thoughts on not uprooting before you have a formal offer of employment, and a contract signed. Personally, I wouldn't put any wheels in motion until I had a contract in case something like this were to happen, and then if it did they'd be breaking it.

I'm not saying it's this persons fault, but I don't necessarily think saying the founders are not good guys (aka bad guys), I think it's more about being assertive and protecting yourself.

In my experience, I've never handed in notice without a formal offer and that's for local jobs. If you add moving abroad to that, then there are definitely some extra steps needed to protect yourself.

I sincerely wish you the best in finding somewhere else, and it's a horrible situation, but if you had a similar offer in a month, would you do it differently?
Childcare is a thing people feel really strongly about and there is clearly no right answer. It's all about what's best for the kid(s).

"They need focused attention and the cognitive difference between kids that used childcare and had focused attention (at 2 years old) is very visible."

I think this is true for some kids, but not mine. My kids both started daycare at 13 months. The caregiver to child ratio was 1:2 until about 20 months, then it was 1:4.

My kids at 3 and 5 are more verbal and handle social situations better than any other kids I know. The have the ability to focus on tasks like no other kids I've spent any amount of time with. Maybe this is genetic or was a result of being home full time with their parents for the first year of their lives. (The norm in Canada)

We decided against a nanny because of what we saw in the neighbourhood. The nannies we saw were most of the time detached from the situation and not paying attention to the kids. The interactions were generally not positive. It was rather sad to see.

An accredited daycare on the other hand is staffed by professionals where non-positive interactions are not tolerated. Staff can take breaks and get help when they need it.

It took us a long time to find a daycare we like though.
Hey Man, that short term action on a perceived long term decision is rough.

Suggestions:

Know exactly what skill-set the founders were looking for; what lifestyle choices they were looking for is probably also related. You can turn this into a conversation that helps both parties ask better interview questions.

Ask that you stay on, making your salary for several weeks as a contractor. If this isn't possible ask that you get paid reasonable living expenses for a few weeks. This provides a little runway for your job search. (Be wary though that this might raise your hopes.)

Always ensure that you get paid. For that one week before they hired you, for the two weeks you were on.

For your network that you asked for investment from, you need to secure that a) you are no longer part of that company b) if an investment is made, you deserve an advisor's fee (5-10% pre round is typical)
Not to mention that counting the number of companies says little about their cumulative impact.
What sort of projects do you have in mind? I say try to tackle one of them and look for answers to your questions along the way.
Pretty nice idea.

I wish there would be an app, where you would pay for example $1 and other persons phone would get blocked for 1 hour - and they would got this $1 as an incentive.

This would solve a lot of social issues with people reaching for their phones when out with friends while still provide incentive for people to actually install app.
yeah, been using that so long I don't know what HN 'really' looks like.
They should have tried http://www.horriblelogos.com/ - $5 for a hand-drawn logo, so no stock artwork involved.

(Logo will still suck though :)
Show HN: Presentation Karaoke – Procedurally-generated Business Slides
Employee #1 isn't going to get a signing bonus at a startup. What you should get is equity. Then, you need to negotiate an exceleration clause if you are dismissed without cause. Basically, you should vest a slug of stock immediately upon being fired.

But, the only real answer to this question is to talk to a lawyer. And, don't be afraid to negotiate aggressively. After all, this is your first chance to show your new bosses that you're a tough negotiator. Be fair but never be a pushover.
The perpetuity model allows for a clear illustration of what the possible return on a constant stream of book sales might be. In reality, for virtually all works, the actual story is that you'll see a few sales in the first few years, and virtually none afterwards. A very small number of works hit the long-term publication lottery.

Which means that you're looking at a future payment stream that's both decreasing nominally AND is being discounted to an ever increasing amount.

But in order to support the increasingly perpetual duration of copyright, for which only a handful of works benefit, the public is enjoined from having access to _any_ works published in the past century, unless the copyright holder can be found, identified, and persuaded to publish the work.

This has a number of profound effects.

There's a hole in the sale of new editions from Amazon (not "freely available downloadable books", mind you, but sales) from 1920 to 2000. There are more books from the 1840s available than from the 1930s.

Germany's industrial expansion from a series of disjoint states to the powerhouse of Europe in the 19th century is thought to have been greatly promoted by weak copyright.

I explore both here: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/23xrkd/copyrigh... (with some bonus entertainment thrown in).

Freakonomics has looked into the question of whether or not copyright makes books disappear: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wp3o8/freakono...

And noted copyright jurist and author Pamela Samuelson, of UC Berkeley, has stated: "Copyright has become the single most serious impediment to access to knowledge"
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wssas/copyrigh...
A secret society is a club or organization whose activities, events, and inner functioning are concealed from non-members. The society may or may not attempt to conceal its existence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_society
By that logic, Google should only care about their sites working in Chrome?

Also, any web developer should be thoroughly embarrassed if their unintentionally have Times on their site. That is an unequivocal "something got fucked up" error, especially because it means you didn't care enough to make a fallback.
We're the only "animal" that collects water to consume later and doesn't need to stop to drink.

I think that's a major factor in endurance hunting - we can replenish hydration lost by sweat whereas others cannot.
When you can't win
Your biggest challenge will be with users. Just imagine if you tell someone "Just email me using shortwhale.com/danariely". My mom and most non-hn friends would enter that in the "To:" section of their email client.

Users are stupid, and email is unfortunately an overdeveloped idea from an age long past. Attempts to replace it invariably face resistance from the multitudes of users who wouldn't react well with change.

I like the idea and recognize the need for a service like this, however.
> They withdrew an offer of employment.

Doing this without compensation is ABSOLUTELY doing something wrong. Maybe not necessarily tortious, but certainly unethical and indicative of someone who should not be trusted in a business relationship. The YC company made a mistake and is sticking someone else with the bill.

FWIW, There's a certain amount of "foreigners are expendable" mindset that seems to exist in the American tech sphere that might factor into this situation as well...
I think there was a Lem work like this. Many of his works had robotic societies and cultures, and I think in one there is a reference to a creation myth about how robots formed. The idea that non-robots formed the robots was considered rubbish. I think it might have been a story in a compilation like the Cyberiad.

Edit: I don't think this was the story I was looking for, but there is "Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal," contrasting robots and the general disgusting nature of squishy non-robots.
I also believe it is the visa issue. You're the COO and they are just going to figure out the visa situation, eventually? A small company doesn't have the money to get an E-visa and as COO you probably wouldn't qualify as H1B nor would you want to be when they start doing funding rounds.
Tango secondary financing values company at around $1.5B
Nice work!

While this thread is active I'd like to mention Hacker News Enhancement Suite (HNES). It's a Chrome extension that applies a stylesheet like this and also adds a bunch of nice features to HN (such as inline reply).

Its all open source at github.com/etcet/hnes. I've contributed a few times and the owner is very open to PRs.
Of course it is, don't be naive. The people he's talking about are in a position to badmouth him right back, end even if they don't he can get a reputation for being a whiner who will turn on people who hire him the moment things don't work out. If you think that publicly criticizing your ex-employers isn't harmful to your future prospects then you're crazy. No one wants to hire someone who might turn around and complain about them to all and sundry if things go poorly.
What exactly is the argument you are trying to make?

Your initial position of;

"This scenario should never be possible."

"An autonomous vehicle should never be traveling fast enough to not be able to stop for any objects that could potentially jump out in front of it."

Seems to flatly contradict your following statement that;

"Someone will die from an autonomous vehicle eventually, there's no way to prevent that just because of the odds of some fluke happening. If someone trips or purposely jumps in front of an autonomous vehicle then there is nothing that could have been done, don't kill the driver for the pedestrians mistake."

Do you really think you have thought through your argument here?
The B Corporation: A Novel Structure for Mission Driven Startups
Could he send a private email to PG and partners at YC? Not as a complaint but more like, "hey, just a heads up, this just happened at one of the companies you guys sponsored."

I don't know anything about investing in startups but common sense would suggest that this would raise some red flags.
I think that really patronizes both people. The person buying the time for a dollar now knows their time is worth a dollar, and the person getting the dollar knows they can be bought for a dollar.

Invert this idea, do a 'swear jar'. You put your phone into dumbphone mode, and if you have to break it, the other person gets a dollar.
Though I find his point intriguing about corporate America entrenching itself, the graphs he has chosen to represent it are a bit misrepresented - most notably, the graph about startup failure rate. I disagree that the rate of failure in startups has risen significantly in the last 20 years - he cherry picked his data point from 1991 to 2011. The first fifteen years of that interval remain almost entirely flat. The spike in the last three are easily explainable as part of the housing bubble bursting that sent a bunch of businesses in the US to the deadpool. Conversely, the declines in new businesses in the early 80s and late 00s can be easily attributed to spikes in the price of oil and the housing bubble bursting. The rate seems pretty solid at about 10 percent before that.

I find the evidence he presents inconclusive at best. If anything, I find it encouraging - no huge sea changes in the ability to start a business in the US over the last 30 years, except for macroeconomic factors.
Thanks for the feedback. Agree, if you say it in a conversation, but it works well for Dan because he links to it from his website: http://danariely.com/about-dan/
Don't ever do this. It is blackmail and will get you into a whole lot of trouble!
It's kind of you to say that, but in hindsight it's pretty obvious given the writing style of the show. I was just being epically stupid (I blame tiredness but really there isn't any excuse :p)
It is indeed in the best interests of nearly everyone to explicitly state the company that is acting in a undesirable manner.

Unfortunately it is not in that companies best interest for him to state it.

And because it is not in any companies best interest to have employees that when let go will put the common good above the good of the company, it is not in his best interest either to publicize the name of the company.

With that in mind, yes please do us the favor.

As someone engaging in a job search, I know it would be appreciated by the general population to receive this information.
Hiding Variables From PHP's var_dump()
Microsoft is finally killing support for old versions of Internet Explorer
If you like this you'd like the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun (Kim Il-sung Mausoleum). It has a very curious mixture of their possesions. From expensive gifts from foreign friends, to craft from schoolchildren, to everyday stuff. I think there is a photoshop CD on display for instance.
> $5 bus driver

Five dollars per what? The bus here costs $1.75 and children are half price.
That reminds me of this advertisement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smwd8b0ycBg
then take the cash, move on, and don't look back...in 6 months you will barely remember this whole event.

startups are risky...high risk high reward...it didn't work out but man, if you were good enough to be hired like that you can find 100's of opportunities.
The author of the egg, Andy Weir, recently wrote a full-length novel (The Martian).

The book started with Mr. Weir planning a series of mars missions, thinking about possible emergencies and what equipment should be sent to handle those contingencies. Eventually this turned into a story.

It's not really like the egg at all, but I enjoyed it a lot.
Yes, maybe. The main idea was to influence behavior (on the sender's end) somehow. This is along the lines of a lot of Dan's research. It goes a long way to tell people how you prefer email, what topics you're interested in, etc.
Because the individual needs something, and the startup does not. what do they care if he is pissed? He's some unemployed dude they'll never have to deal with again. Meanwhile potentially having them as a resource who will say 'oh yeah Ex Employee was a really great guy, we regret losing him, definitely hire him if you can' is pretty much the only positive he's gonna get from this experience. Complain about them and you don't even get good word of mouth from the, just a ton of wasted time and an angry story to tell.

YCombinator people talk to one another. they go to meetups. San Francisco is an incestuous little town. It's hard to break into and having bad blood with people on the inside can make it harder.
> I let all job offers go (I had a few good ones)

Hopefully, when you turned down the job offer, you did so in a classy way. As a hiring manager, if a candidate I extended an offer to, reach back out to me after declining, and said their situation changed, I would consider making a new offer. True you lose negotiating leverage, but I would expect a percentage greater than 0 of companies that would re-engage with you.

> Told my friends/family about the job, and that I will be moving to America

This is a minor issue. Plans change. They'll get over it. Hopefully they didn't throw you a going-away party yet :)

> Reached out to all my contacts (including everyone who was trying to hire me) and attempted to sign them up for this YC service

No good deed goes unpunished. But seriously, you did the right thing by trying to help out this company. I don't see this as a problem.

> I reached out to several people (e.g. at Google, FB, Partners at a management consultancy (i.e. my former employers)) asking them for a potential investment into this company ("Use our personal networks" was a key strategy), some of these helped me find a job that I turned down

I'm sure those same potential investors will circle back around to you, and decline investing, given that you are no longer with the company.
I was hoping for a bit more Markov-generated business slides and a bit less meme spam.
Disclaimer: I have made mistakes hiring people, and have paid them for their troubles, even going so far as to be a reference for the other opportunities they had available and telling them it was our mistake.

I really respect this.
Name and shame these guys, totally not cool.
You are not quite right, to put it mildly.

The real problem is energy efficiency, it shows its head everywhere, from embedded systems and tablets to supercomputers. Even desktops are affected - you can cut cost of machine by having less costly power supply.

Most of the time you are not constrained by information stored in instruction cache for RISC CPUs, because most of time is being spent in some tight loop. And you can see how hard it is to create an energy efficient implementation for x86, partially (and in noticeable part) because x86 decoder is complex.
I like this idea. I was wondering how to procedurally-generate business slides and I thought I'd start with this.

But it's just a start. Hoping to get some good feedback from the community.

Got any ideas for a corpus I could train on?