skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always thought that equity was motivation for joining a startup more than motivation to work hard once you've joined. It serves as a way to make up for a lower salary both directly—potential money is still, virtually, money—and as an excuse for yourself.

There is often a lot of mental and social pressure against taking lower-paying jobs, and equity is a handy way around that which helps you make the plunge if you have other reasons for joining (culture, product, technology... etc).

So I, at least, wouldn't be surprised if equity doesn't get you to work harder or longer, but does help you join the startup at all.
(Apologies, I'm really replying to your post deeper in this thread -- HM isn't giving me a reply there.)

On learning music, I'm wondering if you ever tried to learn to play by ear? If someone beats out a rhythm, can you repeat it?

One of the weird thing about most music education (at least in the US and Canada) is it focuses heavily on learning to read music. But if you poke around the corners of the music world, it turns out that loads of fantastic musicians have never learned to read or write music. One of the features of written music notation is it tries to reduce musical rhythm to math, so it might make sense if both things were weak spots for you.

(What do I mean by "tries to reduce"? Consider, for instance, swing. Lots of times the ratio of duration of the lengths of the two notes in a swung pair varies pretty continuously depending on how fast the music is going.[1] There's really no good way of notating that concept in standard music notation, other than just punting and writing "Swung eighths".)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_%28jazz_performance_style... starting at "In swing the division is inexact"
Driverless Cars Debut Soon–But Will We Be Ready for Them?
Miami tries transforming itself into a tech hub
Or could the very salty water be used, somehow, for renewable energy storage for off-peak hours?
You are correct, I believe they also feel for any lumps or irregular growth of the testes.
Largely, they don't, without a great deal of training. http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
So to paraphrase...

Facebook: here's some free internet.

Angry people: Boo! Not enough free internet!!!

See also every free app in every App Store. It seems that this is just wired into human nature.
Heh, I know one prime example. A guy with a Masters degree that for some reason really fell in love with linked lists in one of the courses. Ever since it is THE data structure he uses no matter what.

And yes he starts coding away while reading the specs. He gets something up and running quickly, but it is rarely close to the spec and expected solution.
Sounds like a disaster. Also funny how anyone discussing PHP's flaws gets met with "oh THERE'S your problem, you decided to use this terrible awful piece of shit thing instead of not doing that". Well why in the hell was that an option in the first place?!

The golf course is full of landmines, and if you bitch about how shitty it is to step on one, nobody goes "yeah it sucks how this course is full of landmines", you're just an idiot because you stepped on one, like an idiot.
> Simple: residential watering provides no economic purpose

You have an impoverished notion of economic purpose. Eating almonds make people happy, so almond growers grow almonds and sell them to people that want to them. Riding horses make people happy so alfalfa growers grow alfalfa to sell to people to feed to horses. So too, lawns make people happy so they spend a whole lot of money making sure they have neat, green lawns. That money gets translated into jobs and economic activity just like the money spent on buying almonds because they taste good.

There's no moral and immoral uses here, just satisfying preferences. The way to sort this out is through market mechanisms. It might be a different story if we were talking about pricing people out of drinking water, but that's not even close to what's going on here.
Good question. I'm not sure.
Seems like there is already a constant called emailPattern. Don't know enough C++ to know if they would be conflicting though:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#search/&q=Emai...
How Hackers Can Crack People's Uber Accounts to Sell on the Dark Web
Tesla pays for charging at any of their Tesla SuperCharger stations. So free to the Tesla owner.
I'll campaign for them if they put this in the tag line: "Free internet at the cost of your privacy". And change the domain from "internet.org" to "3rd-world-sucker-book.com" or something. I abhor the "social good" PR spin that Facebook is giving to this initiative. Otherwise, I'm all for providing connectivity to the billions. Just skip the charade. The whole initiative is a great pun on the word "free"

In the real world, this task should be best left to organizations that are truly working to keep the internet free & open (like mozilla).
> I only guess they didn't want to compete against themselves, which is understandable but shortsighted

I work on vCloud Air (VMware's IaaS offering) and this is just a guess (since I wasn't here at the time) but I imagine it wasn't about "competing against themselves."

It's easy to sit here in 2015 and say getting into IaaS early should have been obvious but that's ignoring the reality of what IT departments were saying they wanted. In 2008 88% of IT buyers preferred on-premise deployment, by 2014 that had declined to 13%[1].

FWIW early access to vCloud Hybrid Service (the original name of vCloud Air) was available in June 2013[2] and obviously something like this isn't put together overnight.

[1] http://www.softwareadvice.com/buyerview/deployment-preferenc...

[2] http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-vcloud-hybri...
I think it's for helping you determine how many characters you have typed. For those times when you think you may have pressed multiple keys or didn't quite press a key.
You can either use === to stop conversion or you can understand how conversion works.

It has been my experience that, to a first approximation, no-one fully understands how conversion works in such languages to the point of never getting it wrong in practice.

Of course we didn't know that would be the case when some of these languages were first created, but I think it is a compelling argument for making an actual-equality == operator the default in any new programming language design. There are enough plausible differences because of things like reference vs. value semantics already, without breaking basic intuitions about what comparisons mean as well.
I'm generating some HTML. I would like to create a new row on every third element. How might I do this?
Ask HN: What to read for three months in the woods?
I just graduated college, but before starting a programming job in the fall I'll be blissfully without electricity for a few months. I'd like to read some books to make me a better programmer while I have the time.

Books that require a computer to do exercises would probably be a wash. I will have paper and pencil.

What can I read that makes me think in new ways about programming, or will give me practical tools to work with in the future.
Wow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_H._Mair
>What percentage of Linux users do you think have the capability or the desire to spend their time tracing calls through various libraries and kernel source?

A minority, to be sure. But ultimately I am worried about the ability possessed by myself, my team, and potential hires. Not that of the average Linux user not working on the problems I am working on.

The argument for how the ability to do this is beneficial is not predicated on general users being able to do it, but the people administrating the services in question being able to do it.

If you have the ability to do so, it's possible in Linux (or the other open source OS). It's simply not possible in Windows.

Whether or not that's a huge deal is up for debate, but you're not really attacking a part of the argument that's relevant to their original point.
Mutability implies caring about order. I think that's why GP used this example.
You then use PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrapper (aka SQL/MED)
> You're doing something to cause the behavior you don't like

You mean, like clicking the Start button? Clicking the 'Start' button in Win8 brings up a metro-style screen which annoys me every time I see it. You can pin as many programs on the taskbar as possible, but if you want to run a one-off program, the only alternative is Win-R and knowing the name of the executable. Can you get back the standard Win7 start menu? Possibly, but like I said, I don't use Win8 enough to bother trying to modify it back to Win7.
If you don't want someone else to own the fruits of your labor, don't work for someone else. Programming offers you an unparalleled opportunity to do that.
> So why do we clamp down on residential watering while allowing almonds to be grown? Simple: residential watering provides no economic purpose

Residential watering of, e.g., vegetable gardens serves exactly the same economic purpose (food production) as agricultural watering does. The difference is in who benefits -- agribusiness vs. individual residents.
> Any programmer's own code is open to whatever they want to do with it.

Here's a hypothetical. Apple hires someone and pays them handsomely to build critical software for the iWatch. After he leaves Apple, is he allowed to take that code to Samsung?
Use: refactoring! I imagine:

You have an actor A13 that communicates with actor A2. The guarantee allows you to break up A13 into the two actors A1 and A3 that now both communicate with A2 and be done with it.

In erlang, you might not've done so, because you know nothing about message ordering in non-tree-shaped topologies.
Ask HN: What product or service would you be willing to pay for?
What better way to find out what people want than to ask them? :)
Reddit AMA WithLee Byron, Previous Data Scientist  Facebook Codmentor- 5/5
Remote work friendly (up to 100%) and reasonable working hours (read: full time actually = 40 hrs/wk).
Equity is the risky bet 401k substitute (FN1). It would be great if I could trade equity with other engineers to slightly lower the risk of the "all in one company" issue.

It is a myth that I can work longer or harder on demand. If I do have extra energy, I spend it keeping my skills up to date or working on personal side projects (which also keep my skills up). I am definitely not going to work extra for equity just like when I get a 10% raise, I'm not planning on working 10% more time.

FN1: I'm not kidding myself -- I invest post-tax money into mutual funds at Vanguard for retirement.
"People can like whatever they like or dislike whatever they dislike." -- Imagine if the above woman was a white guy publicising his thoughts on another group being ugly. People cannot like/dislike whatever they like/dislike, they are only allowed to dislike their own. This touches on black usage of the so-called n-word, and the white guilt - privilege and self-loathing. People do like/... whatever they like/... , but god help them if they say so - political correctness. You can get away with saying you dislike something like a sharia based culture, but anything more subtle than that and you're in trouble.
>Montessori isn't the end-all be-all of "student centered learning"

I agree in theory, but have yet to see another system as flexible or robust with any actual, measurable history of good outcomes at scale. All other systems seem to be on either extreme - either too much "freedom" and the kids never learn, like Summerhill, or are too focused around some oddly specific dogma, like Waldorf.
> what constitutes stealing code?

Creating an archive of code, encrypting it, then uploading it on your last day at work.
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The Haskell School of Music – From Signals to Symphonies
When wearing many hats, your knowledge is more likely to collide / integrate with other people who are wearing many hats.

If the interviewers are silo'ed and aren't familiar with such a variety of things devops, team management, feature releasing, then there is less of an opportunity to learn about a wide variety of things.
The problem with setting one price for water is that very rich people will always be willing to shell out what's needed while poor people who lack the means will suffer. Some kind of dynamic pricing based on a wealth/income/property value proxy might solve this.
> Why does this school track the kids off campus?

So they don't get lost on field trips?
- Location/remote.

- Work/life.

The two are very closely related as overall quality of life is effected by both. Life is too short to:

- Overspend it at work

- Overspend it on a commute

- Delay it due to cost of living (ie: delay having a family)
> 99% of the software that actually matters - medical devices, air traffic control, credit card processing, phone switches, you name it - is written by people who work 9-5 and don't think about their jobs outside work.

I don't think anecdotal experience from 2 jobs is a sufficient sample size to make such strong broad statements about a slew of industries.
I don't think it's the states problem. You find this kind of alarming situations all over the planet. The development pattern is always the same: Use it to the end as fast as possible. The poorer or weaker the state the faster it goes. But the development and the direction takes place with or without state.
What did you find out? When I scanned through the code, I didn't see anything jump out at me as being Wrong.
C port of Facebook's Pop spring solver for animations (INTUAnimationEngine)
It seems like this analysis has independently identified locations of long-term concentrated high poverty in the US. It's also interesting to note how much smaller the effect of growing-up in a location has on the future earnings of those in the upper classes.

Counties are a crude way in which to break down this data, however, as many urban counties comprise a huge variance in income.

In metros like the Bay Area, where people routinely commute across county borders for work and housing, this analysis doesn't show how upper-middle-class to wealthy areas like San Mateo effectively outsource the housing of the working poor to places like Alameda county (mostly to places like East Oakland), thus compounding the concentration of poverty.

At the least, I'd like to see the actual income/wealth (and race) breakdown of the population of the counties highlighted, to give more context to the maps.

EDIT: clarification
The set of people who believe programming ability is bimodal and the set of people who believe they're in the higher of the two modes is pretty much identical.
> bog-standard.

Are you British? As an American, this is one of my favorite esoteric expressions, along with the even more marginal "bog-stock".
You make some very good points. I was hoping HN would pick up the story, but it didn't. It reminded me a lot of

http://marciovm.com/i-want-a-github-of-science/

edit: Oh, never mind. The story did pick up! I don't get HN's rankings at all. Usually if you don't pick up within the first 30 minutes, the story is forgotten forever.
Author here. I too, thought that the idea of equity encouraging overtime was foolish until I met several founders promising great success (via equity, of course) if only I worked incredibly long weeks. One even said "If you don't want to work 100+ hour weeks, don't think about responding"

This is a horrific thought. Burnout is a very real thing (as well as career stagnation). I hope we can realize that some founders & managers still think this way.

As to said studies, did you notice the one I talked about near the end? It showed a counterpoint to Dan Ariely's work (which isn't nearly as clear a parallel in this case).
Why not just log directly to a scan_results.log file from your PHP script? Then you avoid the overhead of a database, but also avoid all the hackery involved in an extraction operation on your web server log files.
It's the online services network that telcos have been trying to build since the late 1990s, but nobody wanted because it wasn't the Internet. What irritates me most is that the Wikimedia Foundation is whitewashing the whole effort, and complicating the public understanding of "net neutrality".

I mean, seriously, it would be obvious what a farce this is if it didn't come with Wikipedia access.
I found:
Clebsch, S., & Drossopoulou, S. (2013). Fully Concurrent Garbage Collection of Actors on Many-core Machines. ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, 553–570. http://doi.org/10.1145/2509136.2509557

See p558, "Example 3"
What 'Semantic' Markup in CSS Really Means
Ask HN: Should I unplug my laptop charger at 100%?
I have talked to numerous people and there is no set consensus on whether I should be unplugging my laptop charger when it is fully charged.
It's an attitude, and while definitely harder to develop than technical knowledge, it's not innate ability that one cannot acquire later in life.

On the other hand, some people never develop this in their whole lives.
Windows is not free software, so there is certainly risk in building out on a proprietary O/S.

Increasingly, many tools and environments work best on Linux - which is quite an amazing shift from a decade ago.
I was attacking MSs non-open-source data center software, and of the brands you just name I also avoid some.

Some proprietary software vendors are not _that_ bad.
Nice post Randall!
May the fourth be with you
Sure, so multiply above example by the relevant number of sub-specializations within programming. Same principle holds.
I believe there's even at least one production deployment of Docker on a different stack of underlying container technology, the one Joyent runs on top of SmartOS (which uses Solaris/Illumos zones as the container tech).
> Fizzbuzz actually tests if you know what % does. Is that critical knowledge for a webdev?

The point about fizzbuzz is that some people fail it even when you give them a list of functions and how to use them.

Finding out whether this is relevant to how they do when actually working rather than in a high pressure interview situation is an open question.
Who funds the code keeps the code.

You fund yourself have fun doing whatever you want with the code.

Company funds the code they are the owner of the code since they paid for the code.

If your analogy holds you write code for a client on contract. After you give them the code you can't just give/sell the code to the compeditor or put the code on paste bin for everyone to see. You would be unethical and open for a lawsuite.
You have some good points. I didn't realize that lithium-ion batteries didn't actually contain metallic lithium! I thought they did, just like nonrechargeable lithium batteries, but you're right. Thank you!

However, I don't think it's true that the charge controller is just a cheap way to improve efficiency; it's actually necessary to keep the battery from exploding like a firebomb when you try to charge it.

The bucket of molten salt has a much higher energy density for cooking purposes, although you're right that this only becomes an overwhelming factor if you consider joules per dollar instead of joules per kilogram. Lead-acid batteries are 0.17 MJ/kg; the particular molten saltpeter mix commonly used for energy storage is 0.16 MJ/kg just from the melting, plus another 0.3 or 0.4 MJ/kg from melting, depending on the temperature range. The practicality difference is that saltpeter costs US$1/kg, while lead-acid batteries cost about US$6/kg.
> I actually don't believe in that principle. If there is a spec that everyone agrees upon, violations should be accurately and loudly diagnosed and rejected.
Both preparation of the data format and processing of that data format should be conservative. Being liberal in what is accepted has unintended negative consequences.

I agree on principle. But when Marie in accounting opens the CSV that Bob from customer X sent her, if software A opens it and software B screams "error!!!", she's going to use the one that "works". And that means B's vendor will make their tool liberal of what they accept too.

Similarly for websites, that's why browsers fixes what they see rather than not showing what you are asking it to show.

Does it lead to a worse state of things for clear format, with more errors in the wild and no actual reference to base yourself on ? Yes. But it is still what end users want.
>Put it simply, I believe anyone can be taught the basic's of web development/CRUD, OOP, basic flow-control just most people can be taught how to play "Chopsticks" or conversational English.

Someone who can do web dev/CRUD is employable, someone who can only play chopsticks is not (in fact you wouldn't even listen to them for free).

Even if I agreed with everything else you wrote you brought no reason why people should be able to acquire more proficiency in programming than they can acquire in piano playing.

Also, I think learning how to program/paint/play is nothing like natural language acquisition, from an evolutionary point of view there is no reason why this should be.
I read (but can't find the article now) about the internal fights about LG smart TV UI. The webOS team created the simple UI that shipped. LG's design teams hated it because they had bonus incentives such that managers would get bigger bonuses the more widgets their teams shipped. The webOS design won mostly because it was done in time for CES. I think there are some good product lessons there. :)
Well, if I had to spent 3 months in the woods, I'd certainly would want some books about survival in woods, a good book about edible mushroom identification, how to build traps and hunting weapons, stuff like that.

If you survive the 3 months in the woods, then you will have ample time to revise your programming skills later in your long live.

Programming is also about knowing your priorities...
Sure dude http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20633919

Summary: Can be bad, but effects localised to tens of metres when done properly (i.e good flushing).