skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Compressing PostgreSQL JSONB data 12x using cstore_fdw
Ya, makes sense. What about all the trendy open source stuff that have the TLD .io as their suffix like socket.io etc? How did the .io trend start anyway?
Moving pictures in the developer console
Sheryl Sandburg just changed her Facebook cover photo
Assuming a $100M exit, no dilution, $150k/yr elsewhere, no gains from investing the salary difference, same salary raises per year, no additional equity.

after 5 years, you net even. Anything longer than that you lose out. Anything shorter, you make more (sans taxes.)

Seems like a risky bet to me.
Anyone in here working in Africa in the kind of project the OA mentions?

I'm wondering about bandwidth for updates and installing software. Ubuntu 15.04 is good for 6 months with updates. Debian current stable with a three DVD iso download (and a DVD drive!) would provide access to the whole software repository offline. There is a delta update DVD for each incremental ISO set.
> Because it's a market and prices of their time should be as high as their skills can be priced, not as low as possible to survive.

In an efficient competitive market, the expected behavior is that each seller will set the price they are willing to sell the next unit of what they are selling at the cost to them of providing that next unit (including the opportunity cost of what they give up to provide it.)

> and when they don't understand it, their price demping hurts whole market.

I think they do understand it. Its just that the people who have higher costs don't like that it prices those sellers out of the market. But welcome to a robust competitive market.
Cedars-Sinai CIO ‘Watching the Data’ from Apple’s New Health Software
Amazon Prime Instant Video, Plus Rentals and Downloads, Come to JetBlue
> I was saying my question was unrelated to a stupid decision their former employer made

"Former employers" don't usually make decisions in a vacuum -- chances are that engineers were involved at some point, and if it wasn't OP maybe it was a colleague or even a friend. Engineers are as lazy as anyone else, and telnet is an easy protocol to support. Also "let's not talk about my opinion of X" is just a passive-aggressive way of stating your opinion without accepting a possible critique of it, which in itself is off-putting. If you really didn't want to talk about the subject, you wouldn't have mentioned it right away. The only safe use of "let's not talk about X" is as a way to move on after a topic has been discussed and agreement could not be reached.

> The link was NOT for the benefit of the OP to whom I was asking a question, it was for reader

that might as well be, but 1) both OP and HN readers will likely be familiar with the concept and/or can google it themselves, and 2) playing to the peanut gallery is patronizing in itself.

Note I'm not criticizing your positions, I'm just describing how your tone might come across as patronizing. And that's more than enough meta for a week, I think :)
Two key considerations:

- Does the company (and it's investors/accelerators) have some sort of prestige that many people outside of the company would recognize? (i.e. if you put it on your resume will it look good later)

- Ignore equity at this point (as the chances of it really paying off massive dividends are unrealistically low). Is $130k range in line with what you expect to earn?

(note - $130k is comfortably livable in pretty much anywhere in the SF Bay area)
Much appreciated A.Ninja
Should You Learn a Little-Known Programming Language? Why or Why Not?
It's reassuring to see that HN has had ten design articles... ever :)
Where did you get the piano score for the Tocatta?
The title seems odd to me -- the Single Founder? Maybe I'm missing content somewhere, but I was looking for something related to you, as an individual entrepreneur, going it alone.

This would do just as well for me as "The Entrepreneur's Handbook."
Developing cross-platform ListViews using Xamarin.Forms
Prior, books like The Founder's Dilemma and The Lean Startup are geared towards people who want to build the stereotypical startup. I have no desire to take on those kinds of risk, even for the possibility of the outsized rewards promised. I just want control of my time, where I spend it, what I do with it. This book, more than any other book I've read since The Four-Hour Workweek promises to deliver on that wish.

The problem with The Four-Hour Workweek is that Tim Ferriss is a productivity monster and his muse method only really works for people like him. Four hours a week after months / years of 80 hour weeks.
> So if, say, someone is getting called out on "rape culture" language for demanding "full disclosure" from someone talking about sexism... instead of retreating into the comforting arms of "victim culture" and "1984" references, try asking some women what they think. Don't tell, don't lecture, just ask.

Listening uncritically amounts to accepting the other person's worldview uncritically; it's a very bad practice that will lead to believing a lot of nonsense (e.g. it makes it easy to fall victim to a religious cult). If an idea or ideology is sound, it should be able to explain itself in plain language to an actively skeptical listener.

> Have you heard of the Bechdel Test? It's a simple feminist film critique. In a movie, is there at least one scene where two women who have actual names and roles have a conversation that is not about men and what the men in the movie are doing?

I've never understood what this is supposed to indicate. I tend to watch more animé than western cinema, and you'll often see cases that would fail the reverse Bechdel Test - i.e. a movie or series that never has two men having a conversation that's not about women. But Japanese culture is if anything more sexist than western culture.

(Heck, I can think of more than one borderline-porn piece that contained several women who had substantial conversations with each other, but one or no male characters.)
If Debian is a distribution and Linux is just the kernel, what do you say if you run Debian and people ask what OS you use?
I have met a number of people over the years who have had similar transformations. They went from doing what they believed the should be doing, to something they believed in/wanted to be doing. The transformation is huge.

Life is way to short.
Yeah, but they'd rather get a 10% cut of fifty $10/hr engineers than a 10% cut of one $300/hr engineer.
I've received equity in three companies in my 10 year career thus far and have seen exactly zero dollars from any of it.

Maybe I'm jaded, but I'm not sure I would ever again consider the equity portion of a job offer unless it's a stock option at a publicly traded company.
Google Ventures’ Bill Maris: Uber Is the Fastest-Growing Company We’ve Ever Seen
Thanks, we updated the title from "Microsoft Offers New Security in Features in Windows 10".
Thanks, right on. It's a huge organization - I think small potatoes like my dev shoppe need to be wary of just doubling down 'because Google.' Angular was hopefully an outlier! Looking forward to seeing how Kubernetes evolves.
No, that is not my point. My point is that the term "native" has a very narrow scope where, by definition, the skills must be learned or acquired from birth(and certainly before the critical period[7-10 years old] is over). In this sense, for example, many people can be native English speakers, but it means nothing with regards to their actual skill of speaking or writing English. That's my problem with asking for "digital natives". "Fluency" would be a better term to use, because it doesn't differentiate on when a person learned a skill, just their talent regarding that skill.
Talk to them about it.

Are you excited to join the company? Do you believe in their vision? Do you find excitement in the problems that they are helping their customer's solve? Do you feel good cohesion with the founders and the engineering team?

Answering those questions are far more valuable in deciding to join a startup vs compensation. The compensation piece, if you feel is low, research and negotiate for it. If you can't find a common ground on compensation that would make you happy to work there, then don't join them.
Thing is, three previous startups turned out not-so-bad (net positive) for me. Not home runs, but they made a material difference. I also like the small-company environment and challenges -- but perhaps that's only because I have worked only in startups. I look at "HN Who's Hiring" posts by outfits like Walmart Labs and wonder what the difference would be.
I know nothing about farming, but I wouldn't have guessed the farming lifestyle would afford more free time than many programming jobs. You can get a good (but boring) programming job at a megacorp/bank/government and work 35 hours a week and still have lots of time for family. You don't have to succumb to the 80 hours/week startup mentality. Also, money is not meaningless. Even if you eschew the material lifestyle, you still need to consider the financial demands of raising children and saving for retirement.
CoffeeScript from Hell
Buckets: NBA Shot Visualization
For those interested in constructed languages, I recommend checking out Mark Rosenfelder's website http://zompist.com/. His Language Construction Kit in particular is a great resource: http://zompist.com/kit.html
> Sounds like the OP was never a "programmer", but rather a farmer trapped inside a programmer's job.

I don't know, we keep getting these stories about people that burn out and quit the industry, just when they are beginning to get good at the trade.

I think the ones that drop off might be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. Many, many of us feel some sort of "ennui" with the realities of the job as it is, but only the most sensitive individuals are quitting now. Just as a token example, earlier this year I felt really down after realizing I might never get paid to work on a code base that I can truly love. I am not sure if this is something that happens to every profession or is just a programmer thing, but I am sure as hell I am not the only one.

It might be misguided to label those that quit as "not real programmers". They are telling us something about who we are and what we are doing, and it's as tempting as self defeating to pretend we didn't hear anything.
Court says Skype's name is too similar to Sky's
0.2% is way too low IMO - it's possible to get that type of equity from a post-series A startup.

That salary is also low for SF based on what I've seen too.
> (note - $130k is comfortably livable in pretty much anywhere in the SF Bay area)

That depends on a ton of things.
It has a limited time range.
Umbra for Everyone: From Call of Duty/Desnity Teams to Indie Devs
Ask HN: Is the JVM deprecated in the x86-64 world?
In the past world of Sparc, Risc, x486, x86-64, Itanium, etc ... the JVM seemed like a great solution to the problem of recompiling code for different CPU targets. But in today's world of cloud based commodity hardware can't we just optimize for x86-64 (C/C++) and be done with it? "Write once, deploy everywhere" has come full circle.
Fun game where you can win Almost anything. From Dates to lunch with a VC
I've been decently happy with Toptal.com, which really works hard to carve out only the high end of the market (devs and clients both). Email's in my profile if anyone has questions or would like an intro.
Interview with Audrey Tang, part 1
BeCode – A community for web designers and developers
I love the writing, it's very direct.

He may have just killed life on other planets. Or at least a fair proportion of it, if you have to have a star that outputs mainly in the water-transparent, ideal-for-photosynthesis spectrum.

Of course these evolutionary things seem to somehow fix themselves. Some other chemical might be a more suited to light from a different star, or something in the water may change its spectrum. Or simply a brighter/dimmer star might jiggle things.
what a bunch of crap
I tried to offer a physical book with every order during the pre-launch several weeks ago, but international shipping was brutal. It was nearly $900 for shipping alone, plus the cost of the books themselves. The book is 327 pages long and since it's print on demand, it's a bit more expensive than the run of the mill printed book.

I'd like to find a solution to this long term, but in the short term I don't have one yet.
Ultimately it needs to sit well with YOU, right?

Negotiate for more equity and weigh

- the final offer vs. what you think you could get in the rest of the market

- how much happier you'd be at the new gig vs. waiting around for another gig

I know nothing of how much equity is 'fair' for early hires but ultimately it's about where you'll be happiest, money / equity aside. Do what makes you happy and you won't have regrets.
This is the most interesting thing I have ever agreed to in order to download something:

As an added bonus, I'll also send you a few follow up emails to help you along on your entrepreneurial journey and you can ask any questions you like about the book. I hate spammers, so feel free to opt out at any time.

I've always argued that entrepreneurs should be clear and give readers the ability to opt out in advance. But, I'd assume that this kind of statement has been a/b tested. Interesting...
I highly recommend Carter's biography of Tolkien. I read it in my teens and thought everybody (and especially Tolkien fans) knew Tolkien started working on many of his fictional languages many years before and that both the languages and the stories evolved together.
Correct, I didn't submit it. I hadn't planned on it either, but when it hits the front page, you sort of have to pay attention and go with it.
https://github.com/lilspikey/django-background-task/issues/1...
first thing i see is a spinner for about 5-10s, most users will just hit the back button and leave your site
And no dilution is not realistic given that they haven't even raised a Series A yet.
Synfig Studio 1.0 is out – A new frontier for open-source 2D animation software
Fiorina as Tech's Min-Viable Candidate 1.0
Internal value representation in PHP 7, part 1
>>In the real world, adoption is not only driven by how cool a language is, but the ecosystem of tools and developers around it.

If it gets even half close to where Perl 5 is we can only expect great things from Perl 6.

>>The true lesson learned for language developers is: Don't break backwards compatibility. Ever.

If you look at the whole grammar system and the compiler design of Perl 6 you will see this is precisely what they have done.

>>Guido said this won't happen again.

Not that easy. To compete with newer and powerful tools you have to add features that you need. You can't do that without bloat or breaking things. Again look up the Perl 6 compiler design.

>>Migrating a relatively complex project from 5 to 6 is extraordinarily hard.

This is like saying migrating from C to Java is hard. Of course it is, because 5 and 6 are two different languages.

>>There is no incentive for migration.

There never ever was and should never be, Perl 6 is for new projects. Perl 5 and Perl 6 are two different languages which will have their own evolution path.

>>But Perl 6 while being a nice language, doesn't seem to have any killer feature compared to mainstream languages.

Seriously?? Have you even looked at Perl 6.
Did they find the story of how Data's head came to be found in that abandoned basement?
A Programming Primer
Equity is worth nothing, especially when it's that low. Don't even consider the equity when you make this decision.

Honestly, a healthy company that really believes in a strong exit in the future should be willing to match your previous salary. You should ask for $150k and skip the equity. If you work there for 5 years, an extra $20k/year is worth more than 0.2% in a $50M exit.
The salary is low and the equity is hella low too. You'd do better to negotiate some sort of bonus structure instead of equity.

What do you want outside of financial incentive? Is it something you're excited about?

What's your background? A lot of us are hiring.
What would be a "fair" amount for the first 10-15 engineers of an early-stage startup?
Are you there for the money or for the love? If money, stay and suck it up. If work represents a large portion of your happiness, bail.

2 years is not really a long time to live in suck-it-up mode, although your perspective will depend on which side of 30 you're on.
A few things come to mind - football is big sport outside of US, so many of the persons here could be fans.

Also we care about freedom of speech ... and freedom of investigative journalism.

And no last of all those kind of news put a few places on the - "do no accept work offer" country list.
This is quite a surprising perspective. Thanks for sharing it!!
WeWork’s A.Neumann on the Importance of Community That Build a $5 Bill Business
There's an interesting defence of Joyent here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9491547
I believe the distinction suggested is not real vs imaginary, but real vs constructed.

I think it's a reasonable point. One of the useful tests for "realness" is what lasts, what is sustained without human effort. Artificial environments are in some sense a fantasy made real. Sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic because we are always trying to construct our dreams.

Our civilization is in many ways a collective fiction. The clearest example is money, which works only as long as we believe. But there are plenty of other essentially imaginary underpinnings to our constructed world. For example, the US's national ethos, the American Dream: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream
Ask HN: Should I consider a startup based on scraped data?
A friend who is a sales associate within this particular industry complained to me about how hard and time consuming it can be to search for a particular item. He said if I could build a search engine that searches the top 500-1000 sites for this industry, it could be 'really' valuable. My target market for this search engine would be the owners and associates of the sites I would be scraping.

The data I would be scraping are images and its associated description. I would only store and display thumbnail images. Without an image, the description would be fairly worthless. For each image/item, a link would lead directly to the original website.

One business model I am considering, and the most obvious, is a subscription based web app.

While at PyCon last month I showed a few people a prototype. One person, an employee at Google, said, "Be careful." He was alluding to potential copyright and legal issues. "But," I said, "I'm not really doing anything different than Google." He countered, "Google has lots of lawyers." Ahhhh, message heard loud and clear!

I understand, in general, copyright and fair use [0]. But, I don't want to be writing letters to the owners of the original content arguing this fact let alone wind up in court. What advice or experiences can you share that might helpful?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Browsers also don't let you apply your branded CSS to my address bar, or to the clock in the corner of my screen, or to the plastic framing around my monitor.

Is that "taking over" your brand?
I've never worked at an early-stage company, so I have more questions than answers. Isn't 0.2% basically nothing? Even if GoogleSoftBook buys the company right now for $100M, you get (at best) $200k. And that's not going to happen. Probably more money will be raised, your 0.2% will be diluted, and a $100M exit is rare. So you'll end up with less than 1yr of salary for all that risk and lost salary/benefits in the meantime.

I know it's not all about the money, but in this conversation we are only talking about money.
Their vision is great. They don't do rocket-science and they're not involved in social. Their market is positively boring, and it's something everyone needs, and nobody seems to have updated software addressing this market. Their approach requires a good core and also a lot of reliable peripheral development. I don't think there are any technical misgivings on their part toward me (I've proven my ability, programming-, vision-, and communication-wise), and I like working with them. I'm not sure we can settle on anything after the lowball though ... it betrays their lack of respect for the position or else for engineers.
$130k is well above average for a pre-funded startup in SF - Where are they getting the cash to pay you? Are they profitable?

0.2% sounds a bit low.

IMO it's not a bad starting point for a negotiation. If you're expecting something significantly higher, it might makes sense to look at later stage companies (or a company like Google or Facebook if you want to maximize your earning potential)
Whenever I need to call Virgin to try and get some info, I need to:

- Type in my account number
- Wait for an agent
- Get an agent. Give my name and account number
- Explain my problem
- Get transferred to another agent
- Wait
- Get an agent, give my account number
- Give the third letter of my password (which got me confused, as I thought they were asking for my account password)
- Explain my problem
- Get transferred to another agent
- Wait
- Get an agent, give my account number

In the end, I talked to three persons, in the same company, and gave 4 times my account number, and one time my "password".

Can confirm, does not save time at all!

Note: this is for Virgin Media UK. Did not experience that with Virgin Media in Canada.
Do you have something specific in mind? There's the option to download a sample chapter from the book on Idea Validation on the page. Or were you looking for something else? I thought about putting together an e-course or something like that as well, but I simply haven't had the time.

Any thoughts or suggestions are more than welcome.
Blockspring is hiring its first Product Marketer
Wow, they literally "own the sky".
It is right there in the spec:

<dt>A start tag whose tag name is "image"</dt>
<dd>
<!-- As of 2005-12, studies showed that around 0.2% of pages used the <image> element. -->
<p><a href="#parse-error">Parse error</a>. Change the token's tag name to "img" and reprocess it. (Don't
ask.)</p>
</dd>
1) No, price in any market is as high as buyers of this market can afford.

2) No, employers are not so naïve :) Everybody understand who you can hire for $5/hour and what to expect. I'm not interested in such employers and they are not interested in me, so it's just not my part of market and I don't care. As employer (sometimes I'm employer) I have to filter out people with low bids without even reading their profiles. I know what to expect from low price.
>Thats a problem with messed up North American culture. Kids should be able to go outside by themselves in cities. They do exactly that all over the world

They did exactly that in the US too, up until the eighties -- and at a time when cities had crime rates even higher than today.

There is this nice article from the Austin Chronicle about it (pdf):

http://michaelventura.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/This-Is...