skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the github repo [0]:

#!++, A CrunchBang revival project.

Philip Newborough -- Corenominal -- has officially discontinued his efforts with the fast and light distro. While Philip believes that the project no longer serves the Linux space in the way he had originally intended, we believe that #! still has great potential and serves the Linux community as the perfect combination of elegance and efficiency.

So far, we're still only just finishing our 'Jessie-proofing' of the #! metapackage. While we intend to keep the distro very much the same as it has been over the years, some changes must be made to adapt to newer dependencies. Most notably, #!++ will have a new gtk theme (by xoraxiom) and a new default iconset using the faenza-crunchbang-icon-theme package from the #! repo.

A few more changes have been made under the hood, but stay tuned to our website at crunchbangplusplus.org for further updates. We look forward to bringing further fixes and enhancements to the project and documenting our methods and progress along the way.

Lastly, we'd like to thank Philip for all his hard work through the years, the legacy he's created, and the bar he's set for sleek high-performance distros.

[0]: https://github.com/computermouth/cbpp
That's why companies who have raised any serious funding in B-round or later or have revenues to justify it ought to raise early engineers' salaries to bring them (closer) to marker rate on a continuous basis. There is no good reason not to do that.
I tend to think that buying any of the big silicon fab companies would probably be in Apple's interests. They generate the kind of cash you need to be able to invest in the huge R&D costs needed to sustain Moore's Law, and they have clearly indicated that they want to keep their iOS SoCs at or very close to the leading edge of process technology, because it gives them a huge competitive advantage.

However, the problem there is that it means you really need to be buying Intel, TSMC or Samsung. Clearly Samsung is a non-starter, and TSMC seems to be fiercely independent, leaving Intel. I can't imagine a healthy world where Apple has bought Intel, so that seems to also not be an option (I can well imagine that regulatory authorities might want to block anyone from buying Intel).

Maybe they could use their piles of cash to build their own fabbing capabilities from the ground up, but that seems like it would be a very risky and very drawn out task.

So, yeah, not sure there isn't anyone worth buying, but they may not be able to actually buy the companies that would help them pull further ahead in owning their core technologies.
9 apps that can change the way you work
In the USA, unemployment was elevated for several years, and is only now coming down to reasonable levels. More so, if you lack a college degree (and 74% of the USA population lacks a college degree) then your chance of getting a good job is non-existent. In Europe, the unemployment rate is still elevated in most of the 27 countries in the EU. So what could possibly justify this sentence:

"Admittedly, the dynamism of Western capitalism depends upon people who work with missionary zeal, who refuse to accept that a job is merely a job."

Is it the "the dynamism of Western capitalism" that causes people to pretend to like their job, or is it the scarcity of good jobs, which forces workers to engage in an exaggerated pantomime of missionary zeal?
Google really should have some (advertising/content) variable in their rankings. Websites which have lots of advertisign are generally the ones with poorest content, and currently they are SEO winners.
A huge percentage of stock options expire worthless (one common assumption is that 90% of options bring no value to the holder).

That's offset by the fact that a meaningful fraction of the 10% that have value to the holder can sometimes generate life changing wealth.

To me, substitution of stock options for cash is a function of how much financial risk you want to take or can afford.

If you have fewer financial obligations (eg. unmarried, no mortgage, no kids, no or low debt) and want to take a risk at a company by taking options in lieu of cash, do so.

If, on the other hand, you have financial obligations (any of the Big Financial Four above), it's probably better to get a salary that keeps your nose above water, take the token sign on equity they offer and then earn more shares by being awesome.

In any case, it's wise to objectively evaluate the value of your equity every six months or so. If it seems to you that it's got a lot of value, try to get more (ways to get more include being awesome and asking). If you think it's not worth much on two consecutive bi-annual reviews, see if there's another place where you could get a better deal.

It's no one's job to manage your career but yours.
I've worked with at least two people who commuted in from out past Sacramento (1 from Elk Grove and 1 from Lincoln).

They tended to remote when they could, but also stayed with family or motels in the near east bay certain weeknights.

That also didn't include the people who flew into SFO every Monday morning from home 1000+ miles away. They always won the "how awful my commute was" game.
So you're essentially trying to protect against a hypervisor attack? That's never going to work unless you put the primitives in the hypervisor. Assuming you own it.
I really like this idea. A range of cars from Tesla, deeply integrated into the Apple ecosystem, would seem like a pretty sweet place to be.

Apple can certainly solve Tesla's cash problem. Distribution probably takes care of itself when you put those two names together, in the sense that it's two exceptional brands that people will actively seek out, regardless of what their local dealers are trying to push.
Ah, right, sorry. I completely misread your post.

I guess there's something funky in the unicode handling on the site.
This sounds very similar to Baumeister's idea. See the Earning Manhood section in his essay. Excerpt below.

So perhaps Baumeister's essay wouldn't be a revelation to some feminists. But is Baumeister wrong? Perhaps I am missing the difference. The main difference seems to be the feminist take is more normative.

--------

http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

" The phrase “Be a man” is not as common as it once was, but there is still some sense that manhood must be earned. Every adult female is a woman and is entitled to respect as such, but many cultures withhold respect from the males until and unless the lads prove themselves. This is of course tremendously useful for the culture, because it can set the terms by which males earn respect as men, and in that way it can motivate the men to do things that the culture finds productive.

Some sociological writings about the male role have emphasized that to be a man, you have to produce more than you consume. That is, men are expected, first, to provide for themselves: If somebody else provides for you, you’re less than a man. Second, the man should create some additional wealth or surplus value so that it can provide for others in addition to himself. These can be his wife and children, or others who depend on him, or his subordinates, or even perhaps just paying taxes that the government can use. Regardless, you’re not a man unless you produce at that level.

Again, I’m not saying men have it worse than women. There are plenty of problems and disadvantages that cultures put on women. My point is just that cultures find men useful in these very specific ways. Requiring the man to earn respect by producing wealth and value that can support himself and others is one of these. Women do not face this particular challenge or requirement."
The MicroPilot: validation in the real world
Are there really SV dev salaries as low as $60k? That struck me as a bit low coming out of school even in Chicago, and I did not go to a "top-tier" school ("flagship" but nothing special state school).
If I wanted to go work for a startup, how do I find them? Usually when I go job hunting, startups are more difficult for me to find because using my university resources only leads me to big companies (i.e. Google, Apple, Cisco, ...)
In my opinion, 1.0 is about the language specification becoming stable. That said, some experimental features have actually been gated in preparation for the 1.0 release.
> You telling me a Nurse or teacher provides less value than a dev working for a Startup that dispatches food quicker? Please make that argument for me because this idea is what is wrong with SV.

Leverage. Its all about leverage. The more people you affect, the greater the value.
Not a particularly new thing for Jason ;)
> The tone of your messages make you sound a little bit demanding, or difficult to work with.

Strongly disagree. OP clearly knew exactly what he was looking for and actually got it. It's the startups that wasted time on interviewing him but didn't make their hire that clearly lost out.

I don't doubt that some of those companies could have perceived an attitude problem, but that's a huge reason not to work for those companies. They're looking for serfs, not collaborators.

When I interview a senior dev, I deliberately test to see if they will contradict/debate me on something technical. If they won't, they're not really senior or they're just yes-men who won't call out my mistakes and make the organization better.

Everybody talks a big game about giving employees responsibility and autonomy, but many lack the guts to follow through and hire smart people who have actual spines and opinions.
The only reason I didn't immediately go to basically what you have said is, it appeared it wasn't too difficult to remove the battery and clean the contacts. You'd think this could be a troubleshooting step. Oftentimes systems are like this because they aren't serviceable at all, which I understand. Dashboards are funny, I've run into the same thing and they really are awful to remove and work on.
One way would be to try to get an offer from one of the big players - Google, FB, Amazon, etc - even if you don't want to work for them. They all pay about the same starting, and since they're so visible they set the market, especially for recent grads. Of course, their numbers are also inflated with the cost of living in the Bay, so scale accordingly if you don't live there.
How are message boundaries handled?

WebSockets are message-based. UNIX streams are not.
Amazon is not responding from 6.20PM UK time
>In fact, one of the reforms of the last Tsar was to unbind (legally, if not in practice) serfs from their estates.

Serfs were freed in 1861[1]. A year before slaves were freed in the USA[2]. By Alexander II - the grandfather of the last Tsar.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation
I think most attempts to support mysticism using quantum mechanics are made by people who know very little about either, but know quite a bit about what people want and how to make money from it.
That would be illegal. What they will do though is offer you a discounted refurbished battery from the last car that came in for $3,000 and take yours. Then the cycle repeats.
That's true, this can happen. At Mixpanel, we proactively true people up throughout the year, each year. It's not that hard of a pill to swallow when you weigh the decision of that person leaving vs paying them $10-20K more.
There are huge databases with all your text messages and emails. The government didn't create them. Software engineers did. And once you condition people to accept that, you'll sound like a nutter complaining about the government having data that's already strewn all over the Internet.

That's why I'm hoping Tim Cook runs with what he is saying here. In principle, I can send iMessages that even Apple can't read. If you condition people to expect privacy, they will demand it from the government too.
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough that my code was intended as sarcastic. It's obviously silly to zero variables because the compiler is free to ignore you. The point is, the underlying machine is going to do the same.

There are many ways to dig out stale memory if you're running at sufficient privilege, for example. Direct cache introspection, for example, or bypass. Zero-izing alone is not sufficiently strong to mitigate the threats people imagine it works against.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9052478

previous discussion when it was on the front page a few hours ago
This is because you are looking at startups. These are products that no one is sure will work, and the company is trying to get a product to market as quickly and cheaply as possible.

The codebase doesn't have to look great and the product doesn't have to be perfect. The question is: is there a market for this thing? Why pay more than you have to just to get the MVP out the door? This isn't cynical, this is how it works.

Once the product is proven, then you can bring in a second group of people to take it from V1 -> V2. Since this is HN, no one really talks about what happens once a company moves beyond startup, but there is a second market of developers that are brought in once a product is proven and needs to reach the next level of maturation. A lot of people reading this post are in this market right now: there are companies which you can hire that will help you re-architect your code, architecture, development process, devops, etc.

It used to be a lot harder to get a job at a company as an unproven developer. Now there are a lot more options. If you have a lot of experience and you are thinking of entering the startup market, you should look at starting your own company.
amazon.com dropped support for 256 bit ciphers a week ago, I wonder why.
If you'll note, I didn't trash on his work, I think it has a lot of value. My problem was his characterization of feminism as not having talked about these things and therefore implying they are a bunch of boobs. [edit] What is the cause of this system? What ideology is sustaining it? Is it on the whole good or bad? Normative description is not enough for many feminists, who have identified it as a problem and want to change it. It may be enough for him for his work, so that's a pretty significant difference.
The code doesn't run in-browser. It runs in a sandboxed environment elsewhere.
Running all on debian stable I might add.
> There's an underlying assumption that we know what walking or a taxi are. We don't.

Of course we do! The idea that every task involves some groundbreaking research into an entirely novel field is ridiculous. We often know a great deal about what it is we're about to do. Yesterday I needed to fix some chef recipes to get some monitoring working on a different OS, I could give a fairly decent estimate about how long that would take and it had some uncertainty in it. I built a simple site with stripe integration and had a good idea about how long it would take. I know more about doing that next time, too and have a better idea about how long it will take.

> We may be able to apply past experience inventing similar things to our estimations, but there is always some amount of uncertainty.

Having uncertainty in an estimate does not make the estimate pointless. Even having a lower bound can be enough. If I know a feature will not be done in under a week (because similar ones take two weeks, and this has a few extra complexities so my base assumption should be "longer than two weeks") then that might be enough for someone to not choose to implement it. I've had that before on projects, where I've given a minimum time and the feature has been dropped.

> If I don't know what a car is, asking me how long it will take to invent one so that you could use it to get to the train is inviting trouble.

But if someone said "Invent a car for me, I need to get to the station tomorrow" you could easily say that it's not going to happen within a day, and that information would still be useful.
This was the sense I got too.
Megaupload programmer pleads guilty, sentenced to a year in prison
This article is misleadingly written...I am a scientist, and I disagree with the author's liberal use of language. Especially regarding the "low-probability events"...
Supercomputers vs Human Brain
The world's fastest supercomputer (TH-2) requires 24 million Watts of power, but still needs to be about 100,000 times faster to match our 20 Watt brain.

I compare this to Vacuum Tubes vs Semiconductors specs. Aren't we somehow reaching limits of semiconductors as well and should look for better alternatives instead? #AskHN
Show HN: Pipeshout – Allowing you to filter, examine and debug multiple streams
If you're in the valley, networking. I can hardly pick up lunch at a Specialtys without running into startuppers that are trying to solve interesting problems.

If you're not in the area, it gets substantially harder. Some random sources.

https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

AngelList: https://angel.co/jobs

StartupHire: http://www.startuphire.com/
"At some point in the next few years we are going to start getting HDD
failures on our blade server. It has ~30 hard drives plugged into it
after all (and ~12 SSDs as well). When that begins to happen I will
probably do a wholesale replacement of all HDDs with SSDs. Once that
is done I really expect failure rates to drop to virtually nil for the
next ~20-30 years. And the blade server is so ridiculously fast that we
probably won't have any good reason to replace it for at least a decade,
or ever (though perhaps we will add a second awesome blade server at
some point, who knows?)."

That's taking the long view. :-)
Similarly, I turned down $60k to start in DC, and my school was probably worse for engineering than yours.
Other nations considered top threats in this area include friend and foe alike: China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, France, Venezuela and South Korea are all listed along with Israel
Basically, people are full of shit and trying to cheat you. Generally their businesses fail in a competitive environment.
Sarcasm, guys.
In JavaScript you can't make any backward incompatible changes, let alone remove anything. Because what browser would want to implement stuff that breaks websites for its users?
In New York City I was just offered a job at a startup, as a senior engineer. The company is small (only 5 people) but they have many customers, they are profitable, and it is fairly certain they are going to be successful. They had, for years, offered sysadmin services to companies in New York City, but during that time they built a meta-framework on top of Chef, a framework that allows the automation of a fantastic range of sysadmin tasks, and now they've built a GUI on top of it, so less talented people can do a wide range of tasks.

They plan to grow for 5 years and then sell for something between $25 to $100 million, depending on how much growth they get.

I was offered $90,000 and 1% of the company. This is a startup where the risks are fairly low, considering that they already have customers who love them, and they are cash flow positive, and they are growing quickly.

For a risky startup, I would have asked for 4%.
What's the evidence that "still needs to be about 100,000 times faster to match our 20 Watt brain"?
Crunchbang, I'm realizing as I read your question was a one-man Linux distro project. The creator announced its end a week or few back.

Which somehow the various stories here are failing to elucidate.

Which gives me yet another opportunity to trot out one of my most popular HN comments of all time: "Please Forward to Marketing":

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...

Tell me what your product is. What it does, where it works, how it does it, what it requires. Is it a physical product (or is it shipped in one), an interactive application, a Web service, a programming language / tool? As a reader notes, don't make me use Wikipedia to figure out WTF your company does.

(Originally on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489870)
Equity in the form of options is usually worthless. Even in the off chance that the company is wildly successful, your options will only be meaningful if you got them early enough to have a ton of them or a ridiculously low strike price. I've worked places where the total number of options offered to new employees (vesting over 5 years) were fewer than what the early employees and founders vested (and exercised) WEEKLY.

RSUs tend to be better because, unless your company goes out of business, they're usually at least worth _something_ when they finally vest. One thing about stock, however, is that after they're all vested, you're effectively seeing a decrease in your overall compensation. An RSU package that fully vests after 4 years incentivizes you to start looking for a new job after 4 years.

When I get an offer that contains options, I usually mentally value it at $0 and THEN consider whether the salary still seems competitive.

EDIT: I generally value _options_ at zero.

I also LOVE kasey_junk's strategy below of asking companies what they'd hypothetically offer in cash instead of equity. That's pretty much guaranteed to make the company get real about how they value their equity. I remember once negotiating ~$5K more in base salary to "give up" what OMG COULD TURN INTO MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN OPTIONS!!!! The company eventually went bust and sold for pennies on the dollar.
This is rather silly.

The CrunchBang maintainer's reasons for discontinuing the distro are spot on. It's absurd to fork the entire distro, adding a delay on package updates from the upstream distro just for the sake of defining a default set of packages.

Create a complementary apt repo for any packages you need that aren't available upstream (CrunchBang has very few of these), and perhaps spin an installer image that installs Debian with your preferred default package set, but for the love of god, stop adding lag to the process by which your users receive security updates and bugfixes from upstream.
Not Born to Die
Add me to the party, I'm downloading now and will be hammering away at it on my distro-testbed machine.
Relevant(?): http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/for-one-second-a-supercompu...
I don't suspect most people have any problem with worthless options. Quite the opposite, those are easy to deal with. What most people have a problem with is the requirement to exercise the options for real money when leaving a company before there is any proof that they are worth anything.
OP here: Couldn't see the post because I have noproc set, but wow - front page and many awesome comments.

I wanted to clarify a couple of (perhaps erroneous) assumptions in my original question:

- I see many comments comparing these salaries to recent grads hired by i.e. Google, but I didn't intend to use the words "skilled" and "talented" interchangeably. Recent grads aren't usually as effective as people with experience, and salaries tend to reflect that. I can see many reasons why a founder might be interested in hiring someone with little to no experience, but the job postings didn't specifically say "junior" in them.

- I see many comments referencing the realities of what is affordable. Yet some of these startups are advertising more than one job opening. Therefore, it would appear they are considering hiring three people instead of one person for 3x the salary. My question is informed by real world experience and written material: advice, essays and quotes including obvious and much repeated ones by Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, and Bill Gates which emphasize the concept that great employees are magnitudes more effective than good ones. Every knowledge-industry employer I've talked to agrees. Much startup advice emphasizes how bad it is to grow your team too quickly, and how a low performing employee hurts far more than a high performing employee helps. Given some of the companies are hiring for multiple positions, this could imply the salaries are considered competitive, and paying more wouldn't get a better employee.