skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First off, it's probably not lack of respect. If you really think that and you can't get it out of your head, then don't join the company. To me, that seems like a market salary. For better or worse, experience doesn't count for that much in the market for software engineers.

You could probably trade some salary for equity. It's all about your personal situation and how much cash you need. For me, 130k would be a bit overkill and at this point I'd try to trade 30k for an extra half point or so (I'm betting they'd cap the equity at .5% total or something though).

That said, if they're hiring a 20th employee at 130k and you're confident that there's enough money in the bank + revenue that doing so makes sense (that's something to check), then the risk factor is a lot lower than a 4 person startup burning through seed capital who will offer you the 1-2% you're after. There are a lot of those in SF that you can join. You probably won't have a nice office or free meals but you'll make a bigger dent at a smaller scale and therefore get a bigger piece of a smaller pie.

In short, from the info you gave, I don't think they're necessarily low-balling you. But if you do, don't join. If you're good, there are at least 50 other companies in the bay who will give you an offer like that tomorrow.
> I would be curious to see some objective measurements of job satisfaction from the FBI, then compare that to the US Army, NSA and some private organizations with good and bad morale like Google and insurance companies.

A government glassdoor.com if you will?
Are you able to get the payout for that equity if you leave that job? That is, are you vested and can you exercise the options without significant pain?
What about ARM and POWER? Google is deploying Power in its data center and I thin Nvidia is working on POWER CPUs for datacenters/supercomputers (they are both members of the recently formed "OpenPOWER Alliance").

As for ARM, I know there's a big reluctance to use ARM for the big names, because "meh, x86 is almost as good and we already have all the tools for it". But I think ARM is going to grow in a grassroots kind of way, from the very low-end (Raspberry Pi) and up. It will happen slowly, but a decade from now I think ARM will have a decent market share in the server market. x86 didn't kill the previous architecture in the enterprise overnight either - it took 2-3 decades to displace most of them.
Ask HN: Would you pay for a personal email server?
I am trying to validate if hosting people's personal email servers would be a viable business.

In short, you just buy a domain and point it to the service's name server. Everything else is taken care of including updates etc. What you get is your private email server, not a mailbox on a server, but a server that's 100% yours. Would you pay for something like this?
Seems like Sky has a thing for Microsoft - first they were forced to rename SkyDrive to OneDrive and now this.
DTMF isn't transmitted in secret. Of course they could eavesdrop on what you entered through a keypad. Keying it into a machine listening to an unsecured phone line is the equivalent of sending it in plaintext and just as vulnerable as telling it to an agent on the other end of the call.
Your grievances about your current company:

> This current company has a highly dysfunctional development culture, no automated testing, poor choice of deployment vehicle, a VP high on the DK spectrum.

That sounds EXACTLY like Silicon Valley Generic BigCo to me.
Pretty impressive app. But mainly, this is demonstrating to me how hard it is to sound like Vladimir Horowitz while using a mouse.
I assume this blog is not just about the strictly academic jobs (postdocs, fellows), but all the other jobs (engineers, administration, civil construction, ...).

If you apply for a fellowship (or even as a summer student), the process is roughly (from hearsay, I have no inside knowledge): A few hundred people apply via web form. This is whittled down by formal criteria (completeness, qualifications, publications) to a handful, or a few dozen maybe. Then they might do video interviews with various groups (sometimes they don't know where the new hire is going to work exactly - a fellow gets to choose his/her area of interest). Then there is probably a lot of internal discussion an politics. If you are already well-known, or one of the groups is interested in you, you have a great advantage at this step. Finally, they invite you in for an in-person interview. From what I've heard, if you get that far and don't screw up, your chances are pretty good.
I also believe a lot of interview questions are poorly conceived. I can't, however, see why anyone would be surprised to not get many (any) detailed hardware questions in a typical software interview process. And absolutely, there are important questions you must ask about process, testing, deployment, tool sets.

But understanding algorithms and data structures is fundamental to the job, even if you spend most of your time not thinking about it at all. This is important, and failing to realize it is a prime source of hard-to-analyze, hard-to-extend, hard-to-test, and hard-to-maintain code.

An application developer (I'm leaving aside the can of worms opened by "web-app") absolutely should understand at least roughly how a red-black tree works. They shouldn't have to be able to implement one properly for you on a white board, and they shouldn't remember all the details or even the definition off the top of the head. However, given a description and a implementation (perhaps partial) they should be able to work out and describe how it works, why i works, and say something sensible about the issues in properly implementing and testing one, sure. Bonus points for knowing a couple of places they come up in practical use. Obviosly, some exception for the most junior positions.

Even if they get things wrong in the details it can be fine. But not being able to speak sensibly about such a data structure is a significant red flag. Done right, questions like this can reveal a lot about a candidates ability to do the job, even if they never directly do this. (the caveat there being on "done right". This sort of question isn't pass/fail, it's the discussion that is useful)

On the other hand, understanding the details of a TLB really doesn't to me seem to have the same sort of halo effect -- getting into details on this in a software position (with certain exceptions) seems to be more a waste of the time.
Great that you are trying! I understand that the international shipping is pain. Just wanted to take it to my vacation next week, but I will wait!

Thanks for the response. I hope you will get good reviews and feedback!
Even SV clients get as cheap as they can. I had one -- from SF bay, not exactly SV -- which agreed to pay me 75$ to create a function to write text into images at two different possible positions (bottom and centered). Ok, cheap, but it was a 1h or 2h work. Done. Then he started asking more positions, gradient backgrounds, a command line interface, then a REST interface... when I asked him JUST 250$ for the whole deal, he went nuts.

Now I'm back to consulting, where I get more than the double of that per day. odesk and similar crapy sites suck.
World's Largest Swarm of Miniature Robot Submarines
HN Admin: your rewrite of the title is incorrect, my original title was more accurate. The engine has already been merged.
That's a great news :) All the best Julia and team!
Ask HN: What does it mean to “leverage the envelope”?
Well, if she's much smaller than 20 (basically: not a teenager interested in boys and music and such yet), then this does't apply. And of course there are always exceptions to the rule...
I was employee #10 at Palantir and received and accepted an offer in this ballpark. I'm pretty happy with it at this point. Frankly it was absolutely life changing, both from a learning perspective and a compensation perspective. Of course that's an outlier — but this is why you should treat what company you join the way investors think about investments. Only they get to diversify and your choice is even more important — you only get one shot at any given point.

rgbrgb's point is also well taken. You should be able to swap equity for salary, since for a pre Series A company that's a chunk of coin.
French parliament approves new surveillance rules
> Don't you pay to get electricity?

That depends. For example, Tesla operates Supercharger (that's what they actually call them) stations where you can charge your car for free. There are other free options as well.

However, most people will charge the car at home, so let's look at what it costs you to charge an electric car at home. I don't have this data for Europe, but I'm sure you can find it with some digging. In the US, the price of electricity is typically charged in kilowatt-hours (kWh), and varies based on your location. This table tells us the average cost per kWh by state:

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm...

I live in Florida, and in a market where the cost per kWh is particularly low. For off-peak times, I pay $0.09/kWh. While that's exciting for me, let's round-off the Florida average to $0.12/kWh and do some math with that.

Some searching around on the internet tells me that a typical Tesla driver will get anywhere from 2.5 miles to 3.5 miles per kWh. Let's go with the median at a flat 3 miles/kWh.

From here, most people jump straight to equating cost per kWh to miles per kWh, but charging is not 100% efficient. I found a reasonably well researched source [1] that puts efficiency at around 80%, which we'll factor in to the cost.

Making some more assumptions, let's look at the cost to drive this theoretical electric car 12,000 miles per year:

Calculate annual kWh:

12,000/3 (total miles/miles per kWh) => 4,000 kWh

Factor in charging efficiency:

4,000/0.80 (annual kWh/charging efficiency): 5,000 kWh

Calculate the cost of electricity at local rates:

$0.12 x 5,000 kWh => $600 annually

Monthly?

$600/12 months => $50

Weekly?

$600/52 weeks => $11.54

How does this compare to petrol powered cars?

Calculate annual gallons of fuel:

12,000/30 (total miles/miles per gallon) => 400 gallons

Calculate cost of petrol at local rates:

$2.85 x 400 gallons => $1,140

Monthly?

$1,140/12 => $95.00

Weekly?

$1,140/52 => $21.92

So, do you pay? In most cases, yes. However, the monthly cost is lower by almost half. The value equation for electric cars is strongly dependent on the input factors. If you drive a lot more miles, or if you pay a lot more for petrol, your value equation changes significantly.

I published this comparison as a Google Spreadsheet as well [2].

1: http://www.teslarati.com/charging-tesla-model-s-cost-higher/

2: Published version:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15PbqSFB7ubis59AecCkV...

Source (can be copied):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15PbqSFB7ubis59AecCkV...
Ask HN: How useful is "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" today?
How useful is Martin Fowler's 13-year-old "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" today?

Are there some newer content (web, books etc.) on the same subject you would recommend?
Rather, Rupert Murdoch "owns the uk."
Where is the Late Peter Cook when you need him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyos-M48B8U

For background there was a court case back in the 70's (the leader of a political party was accused of arranging a contract killing on his gay lover) a high profile court case with an outrageously biased judge.
Absoluely. Both their news and their opinion pieces are excellent, and I would recommend a subscription to the print magazine, for a good weekly summary of world news, albeit with a slight UK slant.

One interesting thing is that their columns have no by-lines, so the writers are anonymous, to prevent readers being prejudiced or biased by the identity of the journalist. http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...
Or does Microsoft have a thing for Sky? I don't see in this case how their could be any confusion considering how long Skype has been around and how well known it is but in the SkyDrive case I can see how that makes sense considering Sky is an ISP and it is possible they could have a product named SkyDrive.
> He may have just killed life on other planets

Not so much. Here's a different article posted to HN recently: "Can life exist on a planet without a star?", http://aeon.co/magazine/science/can-life-exist-on-a-planet-w...
I'm still befuddled that you can trademark a name like Sky or Apple. I'm more befuddled that the EU courts would block registration of a trademark that is already widely known as a brand name and that the plaintiff in this case isn't even challenging as an infringement on their trademark.
I think you missed my point.

I don't like advertising, and that whole website is a particularly nefarious form of it.

"Buy FRAX! Douglas Adams would have!" Oh, ffs.
That's well said. Upwork would rather get 10% of $100 than 10% of $10. And hourly rates are actually going up. US average hourly rate was up 18% (comparing Q1 2014 to Q1 2015).
Not literally; otherwise, they could charge you to breathe in the EU. They own the trademark and its association with the sky.
Internet.org doesn't support SSL/TLS (at least initially)
It doesn't sound like it's your dream job. It might or might not be good enough for now.

I wouldn't take the low equity offer personally, at 8 engineers, you're not their first hire, and the position is more or less "need another engineer" at this point. On the other hand, it does mean that hiring you in particular is not the priority.

It's ok to be ok with that and its implications for the way your role will be perceived in the workplace over the short term. It's ok not to be ok with that. Working remotely may or may not be worth it.

In the end, I suspect that top pay and wow! equity aren't going to attach themselves to many advertised remote positions. It's when remote work is how a company gets the specific individual they want that those are more likely.

Good luck.
It's probably inexperience. I'd try and talk them up a bit.

But other commenters are right: pay attention to the salary, the benefits and the position itself. The equity is a lottery ticket. I do believe they should correct the amount to make you feel valued, but that's the only reason.
Website seems down, so here's a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vXdZ-Ls...
x86-64 isn't the only platform that matters today (as higherpurpose notes, ARM and POWER are significant in various spheres), and its relative dominance in the mainstream of the market isn't guaranteed to be enduring.

The kind of native-platform independence that the JVM offers may be less important right now than it was when Java was introduced, but it hasn't completely stopped having a point.
HOOLI.XYZ
> hippy commune / kibbutz concept

It's been tried over-and-over-and-over for centuries and there's a ton of research. If it's not based on a religion, it fails, is the long and short of it. Only works with religious people.
FCC's Wheeler Dishes on Comcast, Time Warner, Net Neutrality
I also spent a good amount of time on the farm. I sit here, a successful tech entrepreneur that now never has to work again after an exit. I achieved my life goals (at least the ones I set in my twenties). I took time off to break the need to work, then once again I'm on a new adventure starting a new tech company. I really enjoy my daily tech challenges, but how many lifetime memories have I made in my tech career? I'm not so sure, but it doesn't compare to my childhood and college years. This article is a good reminder that we need to connect with life.
To be honest I have not had great experiences with them (slow response time, lower number and quality of devs). I compared them side by side with Crew + Toptal, and would recommend either, but ended up going with the latter.
I appreciate the understanding. The book is 1 lb, 4oz and a bit over 3/4" thick. USPS has a tiered pricing structure that puts the book into another tier. Shipping costs jumped from under $5 to nearly $20 to virtually all international locations. I thought shipping was going to be straightforward but it really wasn't at all.
Low-energy collisions tune LHC experiments
I'd ask for either more money or more equity. Don't short change yourself. If your overall goals are just looking for more experience then go for it if you think it would be fun.

Corporations assert their power all the time. There is nothing wrong with you asserting your worth. Good luck!
On the way-later side of 30!

The current company is legacy-land as far as development tools goes (though they're reliable and in the right hands do very well). The prospective startup would involve new tools I need to "keep up-to-date".

I did a short (paid) project for them involving some popular scripting significantly-hipper-than-Perl language and delivered it in serviceable, idiomatic form that I know they were very happy with, using all the right libraries. I picked it up the tool/language quickly enough. I feel I need that experience and exposure to maintain my longevity in the SW market. Sticking with the current company is 2 more years I become more of a dinosaur.
That is low, but that's a big headcount for pre-A-- did they raise a huge seed?

That aside, you earn equity with risk, so my question to you would be: "What are you risking?" Certainly there's an opportunity cost (you're risking not working somewhere else). If you think your work-remotely-market-rate for a non-startup (i.e. no stock) is X, then you are risking X - 130k per year for 0.2%/4 (vesting over four years). So if X is $150k, you're buying those shares for $80k (4 years of salary difference). Is that a good bet in your eyes? It'd only be a good bet in mine if I had fairly heroic belief in the startups shot at "unicorn" status or if I was really excited about the work/team.

However, if you think $130k is a reasonable salary for remote work and the contribution you'll be making (it could well be), then the stock is a high-risk bonus.

Regardless, you should certainly negotiate for more salary OR equity (whichever you care about more) every time.
What you are proposing is analogous to the minimum wage argument. While the intentions may be good to help the lower paid workers make more money, what actually will happen is that anyone who isn't worth being paid $50/hr won't be able to get hired. It ends up hurting the very people you are trying to help.
Sorry I just downvoted you, fat fingered on an ipad. They really need to fix those on mobile.

Anyway, intended to say that in my experience, all 4 major decompilers get tripped up on slightly different things. Between dotpeek, reflector, ilspy, and justdecompile, none could get everything right and I have to take pieces from each to get something buildable again.
Mike's blog is at http://www.singlefounder.com/ so the book name must be playing off that. www.entrepreneur.com was probably taken!
Show HN: Get live UK trains JSON with station names (not codes)
For a seed funded startup, that's a nontrivially high salary. It's common for Series A companies to pay market, but a little unusual this early in the company's life.

Bonus structures are great for cash generating businesses, but have limited upside for startups that have the potential to grow 100X to 1000X.
Status Malfunction
I had the same feeling - plus the broadband there was terrible. I would never live in a suburb even if I was paid to. The middle of nowhere though, would be even worse than a suburb as it's the same problems but more so and without the (relative) proximity to work.
buying server form 3rd party dose not equal it's yours...

i would rather get my own one, push the IT team to do so etc...

hard to compete with cloud services anyways...
EU Court: there exists a likelihood of confusion between “SKYPE” and “SKY” [pdf]
Very true, although Palantir is probably one of the top 10 most valuable and technologically interesting startups of the last 10 years so you made a great choice.

$130k is a lot of money and, like you said, being in the first few employees is a great opportunity for personal development. I just feel like you have to consider the 0.2% to be a lottery ticket because most of the time it will end up being worth nothing or very little.
I personally avoid this hiring strategy and hire people I can mentor and build up. Companies that don't want to do this do our society a disservice by only hiring people who already are at the position they want (or less). In addition, it signals to me that they are not likely to promote from within or compensate fairly as time goes on.

I have no interest in working for a company not willing to do this.
Ok,ok but "own the term sky" doesn't sound as nice.
They were right to give you the offer they did looking at your reaction.

$130k is not lowball. 0.2% is not lowball. Both are on the mid-to-low side of appropriate if we take you at your word for skill and fit.

More than that, respect has nothing to do with it. Just rm -rf that whole train of thought from your head. Compensation negotiations are negotiations, which means this is a conversation. Conversations go two ways. If you're not happy with the offer, counter.
Very meta here, but I don't understand your confusion. That's exactly what it is. It's "Single Founder" as in solo entrepreneur/solopreneur. Does that clarify it?

I do include a discussion of taking on a cofounder in the book. Personally, I don't think that having a cofounder is bad per se, but having a bad cofounder is significantly worse than having no cofounder at all. The downside to taking on a cofounder is that your ambitions for what to build need to increase proportionately because now it has to support 2 people, not just one. It's no longer just a matter of getting 2x the work done. Basically everything doubles.
Depending on the evidence I had, I probably would sue.

The plural of anecdote is data. The important question is: "Data about what?".

Sometimes it's data about human psychology, sometimes it points to facts.

One complaint without evidence can be overlooked by every judge, but how about two independent? How about five? How about ten?

Even if you have nothing but eyewitness testimony, there is much value in filing an official complaint.
Here is an example.

Do you have children and an ex-wife?
The live still life: streaming still live art 24/7
The Future of Authentication
Castles That Are Cheaper Than an Apartment in San Francisco
I agree you need a decent multiplier for the given up salery 5-10 minimum.
I pay DreamHost for web hosting and e-mail hosting and managing domains for me. This is just for family and personal web sites. I don't have a dedicated server. There are a few downsides. DH provides SpamAssassin, with configuration via their web control panel. I've never been able to get it to work very well, and the junk mail it collects is only accessible via WebMail, not, say, Apple's Mail.app via IMAP. So that's not well-integrated with how I often use mail and it means I am driven to use Webmail more than I'd like to. I would pay modestly more for decent spam blocking!
How to Optimize Your Workflow for iOS Development
Writing a basic clang static analysis check
What's wrong with movies online?