skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but you have to consider the difference in costs...
Keep in mind that there were deaths in the development of our space program in the past.

http://www.spaceanswers.com/space-exploration/heroes-of-spac...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast...
Personally I don't think religion has a palace in things like this. To me it's not motivating. Your best bet as business is to stay neutral as it's a touchy subject for a lot of people.

Also what is the reason you feel your team needs to be motivated? Actions speak louder than words, so if you're trying to fix a team with low moral, you're better off trying to actually fix the problem.

Just my two cents.
That's a problem unique to the bay area. You don't have to live in the bay area to be a developer.
> It doesn't mean we need to further help the valley avoid the consequences of a lack of investment in domestic education, or their wild irresponsibility with respect to housing and transport issues in the bay.

Exactly!
We were kind of casually considering Zenefits (we have our own insurance broker we are happy with and don't want to change) but this makes me want to use them for the rest of our HR system.

I expect a lot more of these legal / lobbying group confrontations now that Benefits, Tesla, Lyft, AirBnB etc have moved onto these regulated sectors.

I have some sympathy for the taxis and hotels in the Lyft/AirBnB cases. Taxis are generally required to pick up any fare and deliver anywhere as long as they can be paid. That can be scary, dangerous, or un lucrative. Lyft (and those assholes Uber) cream skim this business, offering better & cheaper service to a more lucrative subset.

Likewise AirBnB can provide a great service (I love it) but can mess up a residential neighborhood.

The fix isn't banning them of course, nor is it fettering them with the same stupid rules that favor the incumbent.
My skepticism isn't based so much off of my age (I'm in my 40s) but rather NASA's track record when it comes to manned spaceflight.

I'm fairly confident that I'll see humans on Mars before I die. I just don't believe NASA will be behind the effort.
Sure, but you don't need to send humans from the first try, though. First send the robots to build up the bases, then you can send humans in those comfy bases with Internet connection, large screens and 3D-printed pizza.
How much of the CV/pattern recognition talent shortage you're describing is because of an unwillingness to consider candidates who don'match exactly. That is, do you have a condition where something like only "PhD in Machine Learning with extensive CV experience" resumes are considered when it is arguably the case that, e.g., "MS/PhD in math/engineering/physics with programming experience" would be equally able to do the work with a (very) modest learning curve to adapt to the specific jargon/processes?
I cannot use TextSecure on Android because my friend uses iOS. So there is no TextSecure for me.
I'm not making a comparison, I'm simply pointing out the stark contrast between law enforcement tactics in Russia versus the United States.
Since we don't know, we can speculate.

One, they are expecting that it will become difficult to raise money in the future and they are not yet profitable.

That implies they do not see an IPO in their future.

Two, they have been doing this a long time and some of their early investors/execs want a bit of liquidity, and since they haven't (or can't) offer shares to the public, they are using a private markets to provide that liquidity.

Three, they are planning an IPO and some banker convinced them to do "one more round" in order to fill their coffers with some stock outside the stock they could buy as part of the deal to bring them to market. This is a hedge against a 'soft' IPO like Facebook's where the IPO shares available to the bankers were not able to be sold at a profit given the lack of a 'bump.' The hedge would work by them using that stock to sell into the IPO (at say $5B valuation) and thus 'lock in' their payoff without relying on the stock going up at all at the IPO.

Take your pick.
I wouldn't say that professional services firms really create the most value - far from it actually. They're just able to pay more because there's relatively little risk involved for them.
How to Hire When Everyone Wants to Found Their Own Startup
Amazon SES is dirt cheap. Trying to send mail yourself is a waste of time and money.
Project Loon: How Google’s Internet balloons are actually working
ASK HN: What are some tools/resources to help me value my business?
I'm looking to sell my dropship business and wondered what tools or advice you have to help me value/sell it?
There are definitely DC area companies paying those salaries, but they are much more established and well funded (of course) and for seed size companies in the area we are competitive. Note what I mentioned about our team size.

Our salaries will rise as we grow past the bootstrap/seed phase.
Graphic Showing How to Hide Affiliate Links – Affiliate Switchblade
If you want your comparison to be equally valid wherever you make it, you have to use the same basket of goods everywhere you go. Otherwise, I can't tell whether you are comparing apples to oranges or pears to grapefruit.

When I look at the numbers for that basket of goods that I currently consume, and price it out for San Francisco, I find that it is completely unattainable for anything less than 3 times what I currently pay, and could be difficult to reliably source for less than a multiple of 4. That's the fact.

It does not matter that I would in reality have to substitute down to inferior goods. It would still be objectively worse than what I have now. The value of my willingness to substitute counterbalances the savings I make by substituting. If I move back to the cheaper area, I won't keep the SV basket; I will substitute right back to the best goods that I can afford.
There is a escalator for bikes in Norway
The problem with H1-B is that it's not even a speed bump for those it is supposedly trying to stop, while it's a total road block for everyone else.

If all you care about is rotating in another 19000 warm, cheap bodies every year then you have no worries: just submit 40000 applications every year and roll with whatever comes out of the lottery.

If, on the other hand, you are like the author and want to hire one particular person with a specific skill set, you have a roughly 50% chance of being able to do that in between 6 and 18 months from any given point in time. (Note that there's no way to do it in less than 6 months.)

The system works well only for the very companies that are exploiting it. I know that the US missed out on 2.5 years of tax revenue that it could have had from me had I not moved to another country that made getting a work visa trivial because of this issue. That worked out great for me, but I still struggle to see how it made America better off.
Perhaps, but I feel like NASA is at a point where if they don't "ship" something big they're going to fade into the night.

Robotic space exploration is awesome, but it doesn't capture the human imagination the way a human mission does. I also think -- and the academic types be damned -- that there is a difference between sending a robot and actually going somewhere.

In the long term I think Mars will be settled by humans. Sending humans to land there for a bit is a first step, a fact-finding mission.
We're already scheduled to spend a similar amount on simply maintaining our (US) nuclear deterrent. Not that I think we should abandon it or that it lacks strategic importance, but I do wonder about scale, in the same way that I wonder if NASA could find more efficient approaches.
Common Craft: Net Neutrality [video]
Do I have to do this for both the emails generated by the server and the ones I send from my personal account?
I'm not sure NASA has the budget to accelerate things the way they did during the Apollo era.
I feel like "agile" has come to mean "get shit done fast" in today's programmer culture. But just as "agility" and "speed" are not the same, agile development does not necessitate a race to the finish and similarly is not the antithesis of the slow programming style (as some commenters seem to be suggesting).

I think people have wrongly used agile as an excuse to implement first, reflect later, refactor never. In the original agile movement, there is a lot of time devoted to refactoring. You hack something together that accomplishes your goal. You get to see how it's working, get user testing up and running, and then reflect. But underneath the hood the program is a complete mess. This is the time for an agile developer to go back and majorly refactor the program into a neat, well-organized system. Maybe even rewrite. The problem is people on the business side of things see a near-complete project that they want to launch ASAP. It may even feel that way to the developers. I think the refactor part of the process gets cut short because of the desire to push the product out the door or work on new feature sets. You're only doing half the agile process in this case.

I'm definitely not in the "plan first, build later" vein of thought. It's not how I program or do artwork (I'm a hobby artist as well). I need time to play around and experiment with different ideas in real-life implementations before settling on my plan of attack. There are so many ideas that may seem great in your head, but don't do well IRL. Additionally, you may stumble upon a new idea in the process of experimenting.

The thing I long for the most as a programmer is more time to refactor. Time to refine my code. There is something to be said about craftsmanship as opposed to mere production. One thing I've enjoyed about my own personal programming projects outside of work is that I have time to sit back and reflect. Is this the best way of modeling X? Is there a more simple way of expressing X? And then I can do major refactors/rewrites that would never fit into a sprint at my workplace. But I do believe the investment will pay off in the future when it comes to maintenance. And extra day refactoring now could save weeks of debugging later on.
I was the lead engineer of this project in 2012-2013. To anyone thinking of getting into Intel or these types of technologies STAY AWAY. This project caused a huge scandal among the Silicon Valley elite on whether or not Hawking should be allowed to use microwave-based mind reading technologies (which are classified and he obviously cannot use). I got ensnared in politics and it has ruined my career. I have become a targetted individual like Myron May and Aaron Alexis.

Technology behind closed doors is 1000x what your typical HN reader can even imagine. The elite are good at making you think your C++ compiler, web browser, and iPad are "advanced". They aren't.

I live in constant fear now, far away from California. Don't mess with these people!!

I love Hawking and hope he gets the best, but he is being used like a pawn.

http://i.imgur.com/t2bolYC.jpg
AWS Simplifies EC2 Reserved Instance Pricing
A decent home in a good school district is around $2.5m in the Bay Area, so $250k before taxes might get you qualified for a mortgage (provided you saved $500k for a down payment). $100k, while above U.S. median household income, would not go very far in the Bay Area.

Even in Eastern Europe, there are places with very high standards of living for talented developers, such as Prague or Warsaw. With the EU, Berlin, Vienna and Munich are now possible as well and have a very high standard of living.
This is like Kickstarter campaign. I don't believe until I see some serious things happening.

I have more fate in SpaceX or Chinese to put man on Mars then NASA.
Except that I'm pretty sure Elon's life goal is to make an impact on humanity, not die with a ton of money. He's repeatedly shown that he's willing to go all in to change the world.
How big is the difference really? Another month or two travel time? Humans have spent over a year (Mir) and routinely do six month stints on the ISS. If you've got the tech to get to Mars and land there, then an extra month or two flight time is not going to kill you.

I say go as soon as we have the flight hardware built and qualified.
Thank you very much. The need is certainly there, and we are happy to address it.
They didn't hit any of my pain points.

The payment schemes weren't particularly complex/annoying. What is annoying is that when you purchase a RI you cannot just point at an existing VM and have the RI both bind to that but also select the right availability zone and location (e.g. 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, East, West, Central, Europe, etc). I've had to go through the painful process of migration from 1B to 1C because I mistakenly purchased US-East-1B instead of US-East-1C.

Plus there is something to be said for Azure's "you can always upgrade it" model. RIs are great price wise, but Amazon won't let me buy e.g. a small RI and then pay the difference to upgrade the RI to a medium or large (even if they have to extend the RI to do so).

This is really the most welcome change (NOT listed in the blog):

> On February 2nd 2015, Light and Medium Utilization Reserved Instances will no longer be available for purchase.

Light and medium RIs were too complicated. It was also too hard to track your RI usage in the way you'd need to to manage those plans, it is just easier to do on demand pricing with a few heavy utilisation RIs.
The real value of this video being on Hacker News is not for us. It is a tool we can use to inform our non-technical friends and family to understand the importance of Net Neutrality.

By far and away this is the best explanation I've seen. It cuts through all the political noise and corporate spin.
Whatsapp right now hides all of the encryption from the user, doesnt have a way to do key verification, so its trivial for the whatsapp server to do a Mitm on your conversations.
I know they are working on that and I fully expect whatsapp to be the best messenger out after they are finished.
But right now, by an objective measure, it would seem like telegram is more secure
I wouldn't say that professional services firms maximize productivity; they just have good relationships and are more effective at selling their services than an individual developer can ever be.
Just as you can delete emails in Gmail or delete your Facebook account ...
Thank you -- this comment made my day!
I think that's the wrong comparison, because companies like Redhat are pretty much by design forcing down margins in the spaces they are operating in by lowering the bar to compete. E.g. to compete with Redhat, you can start by learning their products and offering consultancy services on them, and then gradually forking each one of them to offer specialised products; but conversely so can everyone else.

We should not expect to see open source companies get to Oracle sized valuations; instead we should expect to see them chip away at the market share of companies based around proprietary software until said companies margins shrink, and either their valuations shrinks with them or they expand into new areas in time to delay it.

But ultimately we should expect larger and larger parts of the software space to be commodified and margins driven down for core features like this.
Sorry, misread the reply. Mars, if found to possess materials we deem valuable, will be mined mercilessly.
I agree that it would be completely possible in principle to make an AFL-style fuzzer for binary, and that then it would risk being either brittle or slow (depending on the instrumentation technique used to measure coverage), two properties that AFL explicitly set out to avoid. So a hypothetical AFL for binaries is not really AFL any longer until someone proves it's possible to make one with the same good behavior.

A modified hypervisor that would use the features initially intended for “replay debugging” for measuring coverage instead could be cool, though.
Our company has more than 125 private repos on GitHub. It just requires contacting their sales department first.
IPO certainly not - it's extremely unattractive in the current regulatory regime (death of the IPO [1]). I wonder what their long-term strategy looks like given their margins can't be very high as a front-end for credit card companies.

[1] http://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5837638/the-ipo-is-dying-marc-a...
The core problem is bribery is both a way of life for more than 1/2 the worlds population and a huge economic drain. If you mix say 200 million people from China and 200 million from India you would quickly end up with yet another society where bribery is the norm.

Granted the cap on immigration is probably well below the cultural assimilation rate, but just because we could accept say 2 million people a year does not mean 20 would not be a huge problem.

On top of that the US has a huge investment in infrastructure roads, bridges, railroads, water, sewage, schools, etc which needs to be expanded when increasing the population. So, while allowing lot's of doctors to emigrate is probably a net gain, adding migrant workers is probably a net loss to the economy on average.
if you want to get smarter, read hacker news on a daily basis -- especially the comments, eat healthy, and get a good nights sleep.
ODP.NET works just fine. :)
After the company I worked for raised something like $280mm with a $+1b valuation, I don't think it's that impossible.
yes, and if weren't going to happen in my lifetime otherwise, 20-30k.
“Men Wanted: for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”
I agree with you about the religion thing but it is something I can project my ideas to and this is why I put it here + it is part of the culture in Egypt, the idea of atheism is not so big here.

About motivating the team, it is just a reminder, I wasn't trying to fix anything.
The "destruction of mars" for the purposes of resource exploitation is a major theme in KSR Mars books[0]. Although the actual evil of resource exploitation and terraforming on Mars is highly debated in the books, with many perspectives represented.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Trilogy-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0...
Yikes, are you worried?
HigherMe helps retail and service employers find, screen, and hire better employees faster. We're YC funded and based out of Mountain View.

We're looking for front-end designers, Laravel developers, and sales hustlers to get our product in the hands of employers.

Email rob@higherme.com - we'd love to meet you!
I hate to be that guy, but "Raphson", not "Rhapson" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Raphson). It's also worth noting that no one ever actually forms the inverse of H, even if H is dense. At worst you would compute some factorization of H and use that to solve for the update d.
One of the first things I learned about programming was to write the problem down on paper. Diagram it. Don't even start coding until you have a good map of where you're going, at least at couple levels of detail.

Most of the problems I've encountered myself or seen with others is directly related to coding too soon.
The domain is even more misleading: this isn't the 'HTML6 spec', it's one person with little support or peer review (completely unlike whatwg). It's worth flagging the article.
He's referring to the Ellis Island of course.
> We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating.

This just smacks of exclusionary racism. Like, 'us white people don't need folk from other countries coming over here and associating with each other, eating their own food and speaking their own language'.

You might be surprised to learn that if you're moving from another country, it's highly beneficial to your adjustment to be around other people from your area; in fact, it can accelerate assimilation because they have a source they can turn to for all kinds of cultural, bureaucratic, or social questions, so they don't have to re-learn everything from scratch.

Admittedly, that still doesn't change your original claim of 'we don't need cheap foreigners coming over here and taking American jobs', or the inherent racism there.
If your goal is science send robots, if your goal is the eventual colonization of Mars still only send robots for now, if your goal is adventure send people.
WhatWG are still a lot more diverse than this singular person. 'HTML 6 spec dot com' is misleading.
Exactly! Earth wasn't explored by sitting around worrying about the hazards!
Higher level product concept aside, here is some minor visual feedback.

I think one or more images overflow the main content container, causing the site to look broken on my iPhone 6 plus. I don't know how much cross platform testing your done, but it's a data point. I wasn't too excited to read the marketing copy as a result.

I don't love your logo. It's a book on a cloud with some kind of diagonal line for some reason.
"if they don't "ship" something big they're going to fade into the night."

If that is true, they have already lost. Doing "something big" for the primary purpose of "avoiding fading into the night" is doomed to failure. (Again, per the other comments.) Take all that money and give it to Elon Musk and we'd probably get further. And I mean, just give it. Free and clear. To spend on hookers and blow if he wants to. We'd still probably get more out of it as a species. He doesn't want to ensure the continued existence of a big bureaucracy... he wants to get to Mars.

I'm sure there are people within NASA that want to get to Mars... but are they the ones in charge?
Harmful Security
NASA's budget over a couple decades isn't anywhere near $1 trillion. It's a skimpy little agency, relatively speaking.
The NASA went to the moon because the russians wanted to do it.
Today's space exploration is shaped by cooperation, but sometimes a little bit of competition is needed to achive great thinks.

This is why i'm really hoping for the chinese to announce a manned mission to mars. It's the red planet afterall ;), and this could be a modern sputnik shock for the NASA.
Note that there's no value judgment being made here. Nor am I claiming that H1s are low paid. You're still arguing against the same strawman.

To reword: if an H1 gets a job, a qualified citizen is not getting that job. Except in very exceptional circumstances, this hurts said citizen, and by extension the labor pool of people who could be substituted in for said citizen.
> If we start to avoid every word because someone think it is offensive we better start building our own kind of Neusprech right away.

Yet that is how humans always have communicated, avoiding saying offensive words; it's a tradition at least as old as the Ten Commandments and probably as old as human culture.
Sadly not an alternative if you weren't too comfortable with your genetic data being stored in the US. From the .uk privacy policy:

>By agreeing to our Privacy Statement and Terms of Service, you consent to the storing and processing of your personal information, including sensitive information, in the USA and countries outside of the country you live in.