skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm having an incredibly hard time mustering up sympathy or concern for someone who feels they were "scammed" into interviewing for a job that could come with a $2 million signing bonus.

Even if it were the "golden handcuffs" situation someone posited in this thread, where the money would come over three or four years, it's a situation most people would be pleased as Punch to find themselves in.

Naturally, everyone thinks they're Tom Brady, and they're going to be the ones to be the next golden boy getting courted by M&A and feted by TechCrunch and all the rest. But most of us are really just the Danny Aikens of the world, working hard, in the game, happy to be paid for what we love to do.

The author wrote an app. By all accounts, it's a good idea, reasonably well-executed. Not world-changing, not something that's going to build a new industry and launch dozens of careers, or a service that will transform people's lives, or disrupt a market. A nice app.

For that, he's indignant that he might get a multi-million dollar signing bonus and a secure job at one of the largest and most influential corporations on the planet.

If there were ever an example of the arrogance and entitlement outsiders pin on Silicon Valley and the startup / tech community, this would be it. Work because you are passionate about it, because you want to build great things and meet great challenges. Be grateful that you have a good life. Life isn't a lottery.
Yeah, dedicated is definitely the way to go if you can afford the ops staff. Actually, if you're really big and can afford the hardware engineers, building your own DCs and computers is the way to go. I've seen the profit margins of some major cloud providers; they're insane. About the only industry more profitable are the telecoms.

I was targeting my comment toward a startup that'd likely be building a product like the OP suggested, though, with maybe a dozen devs who are all generalists. Setting up a bunch of EC2 instances to pull videos out of SQS/S3 and run them through ffmpeg is something an ordinary full-stack developer can do in a morning, and scaling it up just involves clicking a button. Running and scaling a dedicated server farm reliably usually needs a dedicated ops person to keep it all working.
Living in San Francisco Means
I understand his educational status. But my point was, for example, dismissing an idea suggested by a child simply because the idea came from a child, not on a qualitative basis.

Clearly higher learning institutions can, have, and do serve an important role in modern society. As one would expect from a concentrated collection of intelligent, educated people.

Maybe it's not a new phenomenon and just indicative of the information age, but there seems to be a trend where they—large reputable institutions that would have previously been a source of innovative ideas—have become increasingly been a source of suppression (subjugation, even?) of enterprising, forward-thinkers who upset the status quo.
L-Theanine since you are already drinking caffeine.
Quartz's Digital Media Strategy Begins to Crystallize
Good stuff about having a North Star, something that gets you up in the morning, why you're doing this in the first place.

I've worked on too many projects that were very tactical just because it sounded like a good niche opportunity at the time.

When time comes to doing the boring and difficult work (and it always does) you don't want not to be passionate about what you do. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it's true.

When you run a website for making gift certificate templates and you frankly don't give a damn about it, it's hard to get up in the morning and keep writing these articles, reaching out to small business bloggers or the million things you need to do to promote a website.

So choose your North Star wisely.
A level 5 engineer can pull $170-190k base. $30k bonus. Depending on RSU grants and refreshes, you'll can be vesting at least $100k per year. That puts you over $300k total compensation. Combined with benefits and perks, as well as good culture, you can imagine it's pretty hard to convince yourself to go elsewhere.
The median VC fund doesn't even beat the S&P. It operates under power laws, so the top 5% get basically the money and everyone else goes broke.
It's sickening, the state of things these days. Back in my day Download.com used to be reputable.
Where has the Harriss spiral appeared before?
Most things that look crazy from the outside probably had very good reasons for existing. There's usual some weird technical quirk that made it work the way it does, and working around the problem (or doing it right) would have required a few thousand more gates or a couple more pins which would have been expensive.

Making something correct with no regard for cost is relatively easy. Making something that works at all but costs less than $5 in bulk can be a lot more difficult.
250k is way above the upper end of what you've heard? I knew a guy who was at $200k at one of the usual suspects straight out of undergrad. It's easy for me to imagine twice that for people with more of a track record.
Some additional information on processor state control is available in the docs including some sample scenarioes

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/processor...
Obviously, the solution is to just assign a numerical index to every file, and require filenames to be contiguous integers. Problem solved.

In reality, there is a sliding scale between usefulness and complexity in filenames, and where one person thinks the optimal trade-off point is may not match what others think. Many filesystems have chosen (rightly so in my opinion) to just allow as much as possible, and let convention and the application layer sort it out. There are many, many complexities to character normalization and casing (think unicode and languages where multiple characters may be combined into a single separate character, or where there are choices to make on the correct way to change case based on the word itself), and again the problem is to be where to draw the line at what the filesystem should do for you.

The real problem is that people think that filesystems let us name files with words, when really we are just tagging file with characters. Words, as used in language, are an entirely more complex beast, and IMHO, entirely the wrong think a filesystem should care about.
VC investment vs. Gartner hype cycle
The only wireless keyboard I use is for my HTPC... Interesting, and somewhat scary thing. Thinking it would be easy enough to plant other electronics (surveillance devices) in such a thing.
The article has changed (without mention of the previous mistake) and now correctly describes Gruber as author of Markdown.
6 Questions You Absolutely Need to Ask About Your App
Context-Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding
I still think that is a rather literal interpretation of what he is saying. Forcing companies to allow access to data seems much more realistic, though admittedly doesn't meet the condition "no safe space for [terrorists] to talk to each other". But maybe he is a complete moron.

Presumably he is going to ban the XOR operation since with a one-time pad...
Maybe I am being a bit naive, but I don't think many of those games in the good old days were made with the intention of making huge profits. Most of the people were hobbyists who just had an itch to create the game they wanted to play - and they lucked out that a lot of other people wanted to play their game too.

I think the state of the game market is good -- let the hobbyists of today create the game they want to play - and maybe it will make them a boat load of money. Or maybe they will be happy because they had their vision come true.

Now the big corporations -- well they will just push whatever makes them money.
A Liquid Nitrogen Cocktail Party
CNN Reviews the Worst Gadgets of CES 2015
This is incredibly good feedback, and if there is anyone here from InVision, they should be paying close attention.

There's also a larger lesson to be learned about finding the integration points that make the most sense to the application you're building. Things like email and calendars are obvious, I wonder what else should be considered from the same point of view.
$2M for an acquisition on top of an employment offer vs. $1M-$2M in salary and RSU's are vastly different in value.

The acquisition pathway with your numbers would be 2-3 times the value before you discount the present value of the salary and RSU's because of the additional risks associated (even assuming the acquisition amount would be similarly restricted and spread out over time). It seems like you assume that an acqui-hire would mean he'd sell and then not get a salary for four years.
Looks like the equity the startup offered those employees was clearly not enough to keep them around if the big company was so easily able to poach them while their equity was literally in the process of being turned into actual dollars. Being horribly cheap with equity to employees is endemic in startups, maybe that will change it. So, still not seeing the problem here.
Well in my case, I don't have to worry about filename spoofing, or even filenames being too similar, for my own directory of records/archives.

The strangeness of a normalizing filesystem, is that you can try to open a filename (with accent, NFC), and it works. Then, a readdir() doesn't list that exact filename byte sequence (you happen to get one that's extremely similar, but NFD).

On linux it always does, there's no normalization, exactly what you open is exactly what's listed. This really is an awefully nice simplification, for this layer of abstraction. But you could argue that I'm just accustomed to the tradeoffs of it by this point.
Focusing on the non-technical details… case-sensitive filesystems just seems horrible for consumers!

At my day job, I work with people who have barely used a computer before. I could see an 80-year old woman having three versions of a letter she typed in Pages or Word, simply because she had mixed use capital letters, and then mistakening the versions and deleting the wrong file.
I'm curious to know how the author managed to take a screenshot of the site? I know there were methods to actually recreate the DOM via some 3rd party library. Not sure if things have changed with HTML5 or others means of doing it.
Yep my cousin was named George as was My late Uncle as the idea was that he would carry on the family trade as a turf accountants (book makers)in Birmingham.

Note that this was pre legalisation so watching peaky blinders(uk version of Atlantic boardwalk) on the BBC was interesting shall we say
I feel that I see these types of posts come up every few months.
Excellent article! Though I'd say, somewhat, that it's still as difficult to make an engaging game as it's ever been.
Just the bar has been lowered so much that poorer games are made by people with less ability. I like that anyone can make games now, some cool stuff has been made because of that...but yeah, as I said it is hard.
I'm a pro and I've been made homeless because of lack of work (and a moral stance against predatory IAP's).
I'm a damn fine developer, but that don't save you from the bottom line of what makes money.
Made in Taiwan?: An Eighteenth-Century Frenchman’s Fictional Formosa (2013)
Personally, I'd like to think that the good games will still rise to the top. Monument Valley wasn't a fluke; it's a game based entirely about the art and the content, rather than stale one-off game mechanics that could be cloned in an afternoon. It got noticed because it was deep and unique. (Did they even do any marketing?) I've rarely found a game with that same level of quality that got no attention[1].

Most of the time, whenever somebody complains about their games getting no sales and I look at the stuff they've made, I see games that are fun and clever, but very one-note. Like, you can already see how the rest of the game is going to go just by looking at a screenshot. That's not a bad thing, but I don't think it's the kind of stuff that sells anymore. (With obvious viral exceptions that occur unpredictably every so often.) Whereas with a game like Monument Valley, you want to get in and explore it because every single level is unique.

Several years back, the developers of Sword and Sworcery talked about how their business model was entirely about chasing the long tail rather than aiming for the mass market. It paid off wonderfully for them, and I think — I hope! — it still makes sense.

[1]: Hey! If you liked Monument Valley, you should totally check out Windowsill. Short but gorgeous. Listed as an inspiration by MV's developers. Demo in browser: http://windosill.com
Can somebody tell me again about how awful web apps are? I've used hundreds of those of the most dubious provenance and they have never done anything to my os.
Make free calls to any mobile in India US and canada for free daily 100 minutes
"generally sucks as a job" probably means that someone who is good at it is extremely important to a company's success.
I think he meant attacks on the Western world by Islamists not Wahabist/Salafi affiliated.
The best-liked and most effective managers that I have worked with did not always show support for the company's decisions. Instead, they would say "we have to do this, but:
(1) here is how I can make it as painless as possible for you
(2) here is how we can make sure that you still achieve your personal objectives"

Sometimes (depending on the sensitivity of the issue) they would also tell the team what they were doing to try and get the decision changed.

I have been fortunate to work places where the higher levels of management welcomed dissenting opinions - maybe that is one of the key bits to look for when determining if a (traditionally-structured) company is a good place to be a mid-level manager.
It would be fairly humorous if the #1 download.com app, Avast, then proceeded to block every other download.com link (instead of just a few of them, which in itself is funny).
In this case, it probably means that people named Elwood are more likely to (a) be older and (b) live in rural areas, both of which are correlated with being a farmer.
Despite Scrutiny, Police Chokeholds Persist in New York City
Building with Node.js at linkedin
I think "weak" is far too kind. Inappropriate at best, disgraceful at worst.
> Maybe I am being a bit naive, but I don't think many of those games in the good old days were made with the intention of making huge profits.

They weren't -- but the dream people had was that their games would generate enough profit that they could make a living making them.

I read the post's message as being that they did, for a while, but those days have receded due to the collapse in what people are willing to pay for games. In a world where $0.99 for a game is considered expensive, it's hard to make a living making games unless you come up with some way to consistently make absolutely massive hits -- and that's a nut that nobody has ever cracked.
I believe that the niche of the lone game developer is in the bleeding edge. The two examples given show this: a mode of computing was created, individuals made games, then were pushed out. The individual proves the viability for the larger groups who do not want to commit the time or treasure to a venture that will not survive.
The same question was asked on their mailing list https://www.mail-archive.com/user@flink.incubator.apache.org...
Unsurprisingly, it's Bruce Kushnick that's doing the urging: https://www.google.com/search?q=kushnick&sourceid=ie7&rls=co.... [1]

The irony of the article is that it's kind of right in a way that really undermines the whole premise of the argument. Suppose that Verizon did use "Title II money" (i.e. revenues from rate increases on wireline subscribers) to fund FiOS deployment. That may very well not be kosher according to the rules, but that just goes to show that the rules are ridiculous. Should we launch a federal investigation to see if Apple subsidized iPhone development by increasing Mac prices?

I like Ars, but they've been beating an anti-telco trumpet recently that's totally detached from reality. Ars paints telecom service as this cash cow, but the fact of the matter is that nobody in the U.S. is making money on fiber on deployments of any substantial scale. It's not clear that Verizon is even earning a positive return on the thousands of dollars per household it has invested in FiOS in many markets: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_13/b42210461... (In the PNW: "He estimates the project will end up having cost Verizon $4,000 per connected home. Moffett calculates the present value of acquired subscribers at $3,200 each. That would give FiOS a negative $800 net present value per customer.")

Wall Street wants Verizon to get out of the wireline business entirely, and it's precisely because there's little return on the billions in required investments, coupled with the regulatory swamp that is Title II.

[1] Kushnick's whole shtick is that there's some rate that's okay for a telecom carrier to charge, and any price increase beyond that rate is a "subsidy" from the public to the carrier. Hence, Verizon raising rates on its own customers to pay for its fiber network is some sort of questionable act. Applying Kushnick logic to another industry: if Apple raises prices on Macs and uses that cash to bankroll iPhone development, well that's something that requires a federal investigation.
I work with a software engineer named Charles and a project manager named Eugene. They go by Chuck and Gene, respectively.
How to Make Application Framework Using AngularJS and Django
> So a small portion of that 95 percent is going to be taken up by those installs.

More! I have burned through four Android phones and three tablets with one google account. Everyone who upgrades their device makes "one pirated copy" by the logic of this study.

And a huge portion of the current (licensed, not the chinese ones without a valid Google license) Android phones are likely to be upgrades for older or broken devices.
Meet DoGo maps, a lightweight UX tool that gives a high-level view of site IA
Don't forget TDSSKiller and Norton Power Eraser. Super useful tools for checking MBRs.
This is really great news. I hope that the Open Access movement will continue to grow, so that one day, the science community gets rid of all those toxic restrictions imposed by the current big publishers.
Stolen iPhones, back in the days when there was no option for remote wipe/disable, or used iPhones (some friend got a 1st gen iphone for ~20€) can be dead cheap.

And honestly, I'd choose a working-order 1st gen iphone over any brickphone.
Why does it take 3 days to get to the moon?
>It's only boring if you don't like making software

I think that's at least somewhat dependent on personality, and at least as much dependent on what sort of enterprise apps you're writing.

Personally, there's only so much enjoyment I can extract from writing CRUD code at work, especially when I'm literally handed a multi-page document detailing exactly how the program is going to work, right down to pseudocode.

I think a better comparison would be programming as a hobby versus job. I'm sure many game developers working at development houses like EA get burned out just like the guy working in the salt mines grinding out CRUD code. In both scenarios they lack a vested interest because creativity, in various amounts, is not allowed. Compare that to somebody writing 'boring' apps as a hobby where they have complete creative control.

For me, programming is an art. It's a creative exercise. I'm much more vested when I'm allowed to flex that creative muscle. The kind of application doesn't matter as much as the amount of creativity I'm allowed. Your mileage my indeed vary though.
According to this (probably sugarcoated) article, the average person in the US works more than 40 hours per week. Attendant to this claim is the assumption that salaried employees are paid the same amount regardless of how much they work.

We work more, and earn the same. We get zero guaranteed vacation days. We have labor policies that are worse than many impoverished countries.

Our politicians are absolutely not working on solving this problem. What is needed are large scale strikes with a few simple demands, but it won't happen because people are too afraid of being cut loose and losing what little security they have.
Developers have to be paid. When people paid for software with dollars, this exchange was much more straightforward.

There are plenty of services I pay for that sell data about me and/or show me advertizements.

So this is an appealing story, but it only works until someone decides "I could get paid, AND sell the user to advertizes/data harvesters." It's always easy to make now-impossible scenarios into appealing hypotheticals, and I'm sure that market forces COULD mean that none of the software or services currently supported through advertizement and data harvesting invasive and advertizement wouldn't do so, but nobody can say for sure.
As another commentator points out, (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8881131 )the actual results appear to be a heavily human-edited "6 of the top 37" list. In which case most of the interesting patterns would reflect the biases of the people that compiled the chart.

Chances are that there are largely unsurprising gender/age/class/race biases in the full dataset too, but these have been selected for effect
(I bet most of the rest of the disproportionately common football coach names are pretty regular names for men born between 30 and 55 years ago with some of them possibly even having additional syllables, and similarly and wouldn't be surprised to find that Jim and Bill, for example, also featured high in the list of people disproportionately likely to be electrical engineers, possibly even above Eugene)
Satisfied to contribute towards it - I try to upload a copy of all my papers there before it gets published.
> Tolerance is not just "allowing" people to believe something, then thinking them insane or idiots and treating them as such.

"Treating them as such", maybe not; it certainly can include thinking that certain beliefs are insane. I'd say, in its best forms, it doesn't include dismissing out-of-hand everything from followers of a particular belief system because you believe some elements of that belief system are insane, though.
No the select statement of go. It is way more capable that rust's select macro.

The tone of your previous comment made me feel that this thread is going in an unproductive direction, so I'll stop here.
Prototype to Product - O'Reilly Media
> if you get cell service through the ceiling, you'll get GPS signal through it.

Download one of the apps that shows individual GPS satellite signal strengths and tell me if you still believe this. Definitely not true for my phone.
> Even if it's a $100 million business, if the company is not growing things will stall. People will start to leave. It'll be over.

I think it's time we (the people actually spending the sweat equity) start considering alternatives to these unreasonable expectations we blow up our companies to make them worth BILLIONS. That's an impossible task for all startups to accomplish and making it seem that it's possible is not good advice, IMHO.

Besides, people leave when they are ready to go, even in a successful startup. If you look at older companies, the founding teams left long ago because they got bored or rich, or both.
Yes the "argument" is not new at all, but the story is well told with good visuals. I just thought it deserved more :)
Yeah all the comments on here about being tricked into job interviews just seem so crazy to me. Is google really so desperate to interview people? I've always heard they get tons of applications and that it's incredibly difficult (and time consuming) to get an offer after an interview with them, so why would they be going through all of this trouble to get people in the funnel? I'm really not sure what to make of it all.