skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless you're another multibillion dollar company, you are a resource to Google, not a customer or a peer.

Also, this is a good lesson in why people should be careful about how they license out their music in the first place.
I really liked John Oliver's take on this. The term "Climate Change" (edit: specifically as part of the public discourse on the topic) is an invention of the American right wing, in an attempt to rename "Global Warming" so as to make it sound less alarming.

On the one hand it worked. The Senate, this year, happily passed a resolution that "climate change is real and not a hoax", but of course Republican reps gleefully pointed out that, of course the climate changes, no one is disputing that...

But now that "Climate Change" is, to the public, basically just "Global Warming", Florida is now working to ban the very term their political wing invented.

The schadenfreude is strong in this one.
Answers to those questions indicate an inquisitive mind. An aptitude that would possibly make a technology company thrive. It's not for what they know - it's for what led them to know it.
This is a good point and one worth making. Unfortunately neither politicians nor renting residents look that far afield to the detriment of the area and future residents.
Agreed - what I don't understand is why most of the discussion here is about high valuations. The big reveal of the article is that the valuations are known by investors to be illusory - and (colloquially) the VCs are ripping the faces off the entrepreneurs.
Depends on the price. One would rather own a cheap Clorox than an expensive Snapchat.
Is that why the same few programmer women are mentioned in these discussions?

It seems really simple to me: where are all the programming languages designed by women? Why is open source 95-98% men? This does not match gender in CS or IT at all.

Answer: because women as a group are overwhelmingly not interested in it. The patriarchy isn't telling the men to clock 80 hour weeks or selflessly maintain repos through the night. So why don't the women do it at any level close to men?

Almost 10 years since FLOSSPOLS showed this massive imbalance. Feminists still in denial.
> I don't think being frank will affect my ability to get references from the people here.

That's a mistake. You may see it as frank and constructive feedback, but they may see it as complaining and acting unprofessional. Is it really worth risking it?
I sometimes wonder if we did ourselves a disservice by focusing so much on the likelihood that current climate change is (in part) human-induced - it's very easy for people to get defensive when there's a blame game. Perhaps we should have marketed it as "human-mitigable climate change" - regardless of who or what is responsible, there are concrete things we can do to slow it down and prepare for it.
Yeah, this kind of pathetic and creepy attempt to cash in on the 50 Shades of Grey success is precisely why the whole IT community is so repulsive to women in general.
Yes, we decided to do exactly that in the end. We'll see whether it will work out.
No the philosophical musings have proven to be worse than a distraction IMHO.
To those in Chicago, Richard Stallman will be speaking at Loyola tonight. http://ccug.chicago.il.us/fsm.html
Some do. Unfortunately quite a lot of those are either spending other people's money or have a poor grasp on their own finances. In some ways it's going back to the arcade model where a small currency unit buys you a few minutes of entertainment, rather than a big upfront investment buying you hours.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bugs offered solution some 60 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98

Anyway right now it is global warming or Cthulhu ... the article describes well both of them
Keep in mind that an enormous amount of business is done through personal relationships. Future job offers, sales, and other opportunities will come from people you have worked with in the past and who respect you. So, focus on that.

Keep the formal resignation letter short. It's perfectly fine to include a few pleasantries (unless you plan to sue them for something in the future.)

Then, if you wish, have some private conversations with management and give them an honest assessment of how they could better achieve their own purposes. Keep the focus on helping them. Take your former bosses out for coffee they next time they visit. Give them insights that they would not other get. Keep up your relationships with your former colleagues as well.

That's the purpose you should keep in mind. It's more than not burning bridges. It's about creating future opportunities for yourself. Create lemonade from today's lemons.

Edit: do this even if they're all evil bastards. You never know what will come of it in the future.
I don't know these rules apply exactly in consulting. The industry and my skill set is extremely competitive. I get offers pretty frequently.
Hey! That is sort of the beginning of class-consciousness.
> "the Earth is a big place, it was here long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we can't really be harming it!"

Both of them are true, the missing part is whether human is any part of either of those processes. I've been wondering for a while that whether the common slogan of "save the Earth" would have served better had it been "save the Human". Yes, it's just semantic, but it's the same as the change to calling "climate change" rather than "global warming" - human easily get caught up in language, most of the time probably just subconsciously. It also helped with not being on the extreme: it's also bad if the changes wipe out 50% of the human being on earth, which is probably magnitude more likely than wiping out 100% of us.

Even if we literally nuke ourselves out of existence, chance are something will still be leftover on the Earth (unless we can actually blow up the planet into pieces, which I don't think we are capable yet).

Cockroaches are damn resilient.
Based on the fact that you've never met me, or seen a line of my code, I don't really give a toss.

You are the one who asserted that users of dynamically/weakly typed languages require unit tests, implying that users of staticly/strongly typed languages don't.

Of course some languages are safer than others, more expressive than others, faster than others, or whatever. You asserted that software written in dynamically typed languages is unmaintainable, an assertion that I strongly dispute.
Fancy Hands unveils Orri, an on-demand assistant you can pay as you go
My actual résumé is written in BSD mandoc: http://r.dakko.us/
How to support 10,000 paying customers
From the title I thought this was going to be a deep belief network hype piece.
Mysterious Spy Cameras Secretly Spying on Post Office Customers in US
HeyLets was extremely helpful on our last vacation. We used the app to locate restaurants recommended by locals. We had no interest in going to Yelp to read through someone's dissertation on the terrible service they received.
I fear that you, as well as a large portion of the HN community, are prematurely marking GPL software and the GNU movement as an outdated idea that has less of a place moving forward. You look at society today and say, "well, tech has moved so much in the past 25 years, and it's far too developed to become closed now. The point has been made."

That's bullshit.

We live in a far more closed world than we ever have before. Most people (eg: those not on this website) use their phone as their primary computing device. They access software primarily through closed source app stores. They give their information to servers which are almost certainly closed source.

This industry is far too young; the war on general computing is far too powerful, to be able to have this opinion and think it does no harm. We have seen all the good that the GPL has done for us, and we've seen the damage that BSD licensing can do. I'm not saying that BSD licensing doesn't have a place, (I actually use OpenBSD on a daily basis, and I'm aware of many of the difficulties that they face with regards to GPL'd stuff [1]), I'm only saying that it is not superior to the GPL in all cases.

[1]: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070901041657
We've heard a lot about how inflexible or even terrible GNU/GPL is lately. Whether you agree or not, I think it is important to remember that we would probably be living in a very different world technology-wise if it wasn't for GNU & GPL.

In other words, open source in general, even including popularity of other licenses, would not have spread and become so popular if GNU and GPL wasn't there as an extreme, far out example. For those younger here, sharing software by big companies (Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc) was pretty radical and unheard of back in the day. Now they all share so much of their code which is great.
Membership in a Box with PG-Auth
Congrats, you're a Puritan who thinks themselves progressive.
Pretty egregious, and something which one would hope you could sue Google for. In this case aiding in the infringement of Copyright because it is the Content ID system, with a borked refusal policy, that are allowing UMG to pirate the artist's music and to make a profit from it. Not only from the artist but anyone who was paying license fees to the artist are now having their video revenue get hijacked by UMG.

Seems like class action status might be possible.
There are good reasons to care about markets, though it needs to be recognized that markets serve humanity.

If you go to the Marxist extreme of a centrally planned economy people aren't taken into account.

If you go to the extreme of a completely unregulated free market economy people aren't taken into account.

The happy medium is a free market that's regulated to prevent coercive and abusive practices. The US had a much stronger overall economy and greater general prosperity when it followed that model. The neoliberal extremist policies that have been been adopted since the 80s have been a series of unfolding tragedies for the poor and middle class in the US.

Rent controls don't appear in a vacuum, they are a response to the unfolding human tragedies of rentier exploitation that harm actual people. They may not be optimally implemented in SF, but to label them Communist is extremist.

The neoliberal shock-treatment approach in Russia was a human disaster as well, and the horrors in Chile, parts of the EU, and elsewhere show why extremism that cares more about ideology than humanity is a vice. It doesn't matter if the ideologues are Marxists or Capitalists, ideologues always promote policies that are bad for humanity, since they care more about ideological purity than practicality or humanity.
Well, the trouble is, even the "center" positions are pretty scary. Conservative projections of sea level rise leave Florida inundated.

So is all life on the planet going to be destroyed as a result of global warming? No, of course not. Life is far too resilient for that.

Are humans going to wipe themselves out? Doubtful. We're remarkably adaptable animals.

But it's gonna be pretty frickin' miserable for a lot of people, particularly the 40% of people who live within 37 miles of a coastline.
100% failure rate here. It is convinced I work at McDonalds despite setting my work address to home.

At least I always know how far I am away from a Big Mac.
Don't put it in the resignation letter.

If you really want to let them know why, tell them in the exit interview.

If they don't perform an exit interview, well that tells you they give no fucks about what you think anyways, so you'd be wasting your breathe.
A lot of focus on zoning and new construction limits when the housing crises comes up -- but what about foreign investment? I'd be curious to hear an argument over residency requirements. It's very appealing for a foreign investor to park their cash in real estate. The more that gets bought up and remains unoccupied, the tighter the market, and the more that prices continue to rise...
We don't talk about water vapor. Ever. OK?
Nice article, thanks for sharing your experience.
I agree, I overreacted. We had 20% rules for few years with mixed results, but put this practice on hold till Summer. Maybe we will not see such problems when it will be back.
Ask HN: About to sign job contract, need inputs on the terms
I'm about to sign a job contrat at a very promising startup. They give me a fixed salary, bonus and stock options for an unlimited amount of work hours per week. The average work week, where I live is 40 hours. Past that, the employer should pay overtime at 1 1/2 the hourly rate. Which won't be the case if I accept the job. Is it common practice in the startup community?

Thank you
How Important Is Support in a Startup?
Depends on the valuation. If much of the upside is already baked into Snapchat then there's a lot of downside risk (hence the downside protection that these institutional investors are demanding). I wouldn't touch Snapchat at that valuation with anything more than spec funds. I certainly wouldn't view equity comp as valuable.
I've found the best way to do this is:

* Have a proper emergency fund (6-12 weeks). You should not be counting on any pay after you give notice.

* Have references outside of your immediate current manager

* On Friday, "today is my last day"

* Still be honest why you're leaving

Two weeks notice is a courtesy you're not required to extend to an employer (EDIT: This is US-centric advice, please verify this is true in your non-US jurisdiction), and you should only do so if you're on good terms.
As long as your chosen employer doesn't tie you into a restrictive NC agreement, then try them for a year and see how it goes. It sounds like you're already fairly sure of what you want to do now; if Ippon want you this much now, I'm sure they'll take you on in a year, if you decide to move again. Honestly man, at this point in your career (and life, you're still young), you should be as selfish as you can. You don't owe anybody, anything. Be ethical, conscientious and assured; but that doesn't preclude taking a few risks. You have no dependents, after all. When you're in your mid thirties with kids and a mortgage, you won't have many choices at all.
Couple of anecdotal factoids for you from a career veteran.

#1 The tech industry is small.
#2 The circles you move in are smaller.

Keep it professional, keep it simple, and always resign with decorum.

Many others have stated here the purpose of a resignation letter, but I would add that I extend it to verbal too.
I'm just as astounded that GNU is being mentioned in what I would consider the mainstream media.
> It always seems to decline into the size of a celebrity's arse

That's the type of issue I typically encounter. You can only talk one subject for so long, especially if the conversation has more than two participants (as diving too deep into a specific subject risks boring everyone else).
Volunteers Needed for Wimborne Model Town
Why parking spaces shouldn't always be wasted on cars
What Cockroaches with Backpacks Can Do
Childcare expenses and lack of affordable housing options for a family of four are two of the primary reasons my wife and I moved away.

I really didn't feel like being on the hook for a $6,000/mo mortgage for the next 30 years. It'd still be a mediocre home at best and I'd never see my kids because I'd be out hustling trying to pay for it.

No thanks.
remember that, it had no good 1st party games.
Who exactly made a fork of Theo's code?

Also, I don't see how you can read any ill intent out of the email alone. It shouldn't be unreasonable for the OpenSSL devs to share vulnerabilities with LibreSSL. I don't think he would use it for any malicious purposes. Though I guess it makes you want to err on the side of caution when he comes up with such classics as declaring Apache 2.0 proprietary for no other reason that it has more lines of text than the previous version.
I'm guessing you think that because you didn't experience the dotcom era first hand. Companies that have raised huge sums of money can go under. It's not happened recently but when it does it'll be horrible to watch. I'm not suggesting that we're in a bubble either - the fact is that companies die for a bewildering variety of reasons, and it is inevitable that one or more of the unicorns will die eventually.
Freedom is an old idea. But somehow it never seems outdated. So, put down the iPhone and pick up the GNU Manifesto and enjoy software freedom -- as good as it is gnu
No one is making "world optimizations" engines. The concept doesn't even make sense when he wheels hit the road. No AI research done anytime in the foreseeable future would even be at risk of resulting in a runaway world optimizer, and contrary to exaggerated claims being made there would be plenty of clear signs something was amis if it did happen and planty of time to pull the plug.
"unconscionable" that banks should be expected to understand security well enough to know that not using any verification was stupid?

It was mandatory 4 weeks before the launch, so it's been 6 months since then... and yet we're seeing how banks haven't bothered to fix it?

I think Apple could have said something sooner, but in order to throw the word "unconscionable" around, I think that they would have to have done something deliberate or secretive.

I view that 90% of this rests directly on the banks' shoulders for not implementing good security in the first place, then sitting on not implementing it for months.
This article is trying to express that "valuation" has different meanings for different companies.

For most companies, valuation is based on the price investors are paying for the stock alone. The point of the article is that, for some tech companies, it's based on the price investors are paying for the stock plus some form of "downside insurance" which pays them back if the stock loses value.

It makes sense that the stock-plus-insurance basket would be more valuable than the stock alone, especially if there is a small probability of the insurer folding and thus a small probability of losing money.
I've heard about but never seen 'accidentally factorial' before. It was at a well known SV company - apparently it was rarely noticeable in prod because the arguments were usually fairly small.
Boom, I was expecting to find "Programming, every kid should know how to program" at any point in the article. Glad I didn't.
the games sucked, but it was a good idea. if only someone like, nintendo for example could do it right.
Not sure what you mean with "datacenter". If you mean using co-location or similar it probably works out as a small price difference. If you start with an empty room or an empty piece of ground it might cost you a lot to start building everything and hire people to manage it all. Remeber that the big cloud providers can get a scale benefit where a lot of virtual computers share a small operations team. I do think that physiccal servers usually are faster than cloud computers meaning you might be able to use fewer of them to compensate for the price difference.
There is absolutely no harm in putting in a polite sentence expressing your gratitude for being given the opportunity to work at $COMPANY, and expressing your best wishes for their continued success. But perhaps I'm just an overly polite Englishman...
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That's nice.. I hope, now, they will respond to developer queries also..
"To <Manager>,

I've decided to resign my position as <position> at <company>.

My last day of work will be <2 weeks from today>.

Sincerely,
<name>"

During the exit interview your reason for leaving is "decided it was time to leave to pursue other opportunities."

Public leaving letter you send out to coworkers:
"Hi guys, it's been awesome working with you. I've met some truly exceptional people and you all have lots to be proud of.

I've decided to move on and pursue other things, but I truly wish everybody here the best and continued success and good luck!

Feel free to reach out to me at <personal email address>"

Your employers aren't stupid and people leaving right after they decided to do this will be an obvious cause and effect. Bonus, if they're contacted later on by a future employer for a reference, your outgoing personnel file won't be filled with bridge burning that could harm you later.

Everybody gets dissatisfied with their job at some point and leaves, it's part of being a working professional. Learning how to do it in a professional way is an important skill to develop.
> Also, is rent control even a good idea?

Let me put it this way: the rents dropped sharply when rent regulation finally ended in my country. After 15 years of doomsayer horror stories from the left how unregulated rents would make the poor homeless, it turned out, within a year, that the exact opposite was happening.
Self esteem is a double edged sword as it does not consider empathy and may lead to narcissistic values. That's the flaw with the self only aspect.
In a market where people buy a $600 iphone, i'm sure something of the ngage's price point would break the bank.
Compilation speeds are largely dependent on the type of code you're writing. At London's Scala Exchange last year, Odersky claimed he can get 10k lines/second (10x slower than javac, but still not bad) out of scalac by writing simple imperative code, but libraries that make heavy use of the type system and implicit scope can be as slow as 1 line/minute.

I consider it fair to expect the compiler to be slower when it's doing more heavy lifting, but it would definitely be nice to see the exponential blow-up on the tail curbed in future.

edit: To clarify, the numbers above were what Odersky claimed; I haven't verified them. The 1 line/minute was claimed of trying to build Shapeless - I've never seen anything approaching that in the wild.
Spark Gift founders here, happy to answer any questions!

We’re supporting fractional shares, so you can give a gift of as little as $20 of stock with just an email. You can receive a gift from family without giving up your SSN (unlike savings bonds or other investment gifts) so if you’re lucky enough to have someone who wants to give you or your children such a gift, you can do so with some privacy.
Ask HN: What was it like writing web apps / sites in the 90's and early 2000's?
Domain Theft: The New Internet Scourge
Celebrities are an important part of generic conversation... they give us someone to gossip about that neither of us actually know. Public shaming is an important (if offensive) social ritual.

That said, just about anyone can talk about something other than Kim Kardashian. No one actually cares about her. Talking about something like a celebrity's arse is a way of avoiding talking about stuff we actually care about - as someone else noted in this thread, the fear of being seen as uninteresting, or weird, or an outsider, if you talk about stuff that matters to you.

The way to get people to talk about what they care about is to ask them. Your friend the physicist/pilot? Ask him about physics. Ask him about airplanes. Ask him about his clients as a pilot. Pretty soon, he'll be talking about much more interesting things - interesting to him, and probably interesting to you.

And all you have to do is listen, and he'll think you're awesome.
Goodbye var: ES6 variable declarations with let and const
Show HN: Instagram feed in Chrome's new tab
Thank god we have Climate Change as settled science, like the damage that animal fat does to our diets.
So why aren't startup valuations published as a range? This is like a measurement with no error bars.

I know the "real" reason - same reason why TVs are compared on the diagonal measure. But, why don't later investors insist on also learning the lowest possible imputed value, taking into account how investors are acting to protect themselves. Risk is hard to compare, but isn't this what Wall Street does all day?
Perhaps we could blame it on the prehistoric life forms that turned into fossil fuels. Then we can sell it as DGW using CGI of battling against rotting zombie Utahraptors that are coming out of the ground to destroy us.