skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Potentially bad indicators.

The tax issue may be real but workarounds include giving you a grant of options exercisable at current fair market value, which gives you the opportunity to get the 1% equity without taking any immediate tax hit (you would have to pay more for the equity at the time of exercise than founders did at the beginning, and your ultimate tax consequences would be more complicated than you would have gotten through a simple early-stage grant of, e.g., restricted stock with an 83(b) filing, but you could still profit significantly in a success case).

Can't comment on your specific situation but, over the years, I have frequently seen "string out" situations where companies used people while never intending to follow through on their promises. Legal remedies in this situation are limited in a practical sense, with fraud being very hard to prove (especially where proving intent to defraud is a requirement and where the written offer letter does not contain the item you claim they represented they would give you) and with such cases often taking a six-figure sum, and a year or more of miserable fighting, to process through to verdict.

On the other hand, many startups are notoriously slow to document things when the founders think of the legal stuff as simply being a process of "papering" things they know they all agree upon.

The important thing here is to push to get the equity grant documented in some form as quickly as possible. This will flush out the company's intentions now, when your risks are less, as opposed to later, when you might be so committed as to be trapped. Tax issues do come up in this context but have never stopped any early-stage deal (in my considerable experience with this issue) where the parties truly desire to implement it.
It doesn't work with https.
I was employee #4,256 (sequential badge numbers!) at a major Japanese megacorp and didn't get a contract until well after I had passed the point of no return on the job offer. Not having a contract yet is bad only to the extent that you believe it to bad. (Americans are taught that paper is magic, but it is merely one dispute resolution tool among many, including exercising persuasion, social ties, and reputational capital.)

Run the math on whether the difference between the bonus and the equity matters to you. If it does, time to negotiate. Simply say "I took this job in consideration of the fact that you offered me a package with X, Y, Z, and 1% equity. Your letter indicates that 1% equity may be infeasible for legal reasons. I think we can come to a mutually beneficial resolution which compensates me adequately and addresses your concerns. The sale bonus you have proposed doesn't quite get us there. What else can you offer me?" (Feel free to give suggestions, but talk topics, not numbers. First rule of negotiation: the first guy to give a number loses. Which is good news for you, because you have already heard one number. I can guarantee you, you won't get any worse than that!)
The former. It shows the reader not only where I'm sending them, but even gives them an idea of what to expect, not to mention the whole dead links problem that will inevitably occur when these sights finally go down.

What I would normally do is something like this "<loads of text> Check out my map here [1] <more text>" and at the end put "[1] http...", that way a giant ten page url doesn't interfere with the message, yet I don't have to shorten it either. If I think the precipitant won't understand what I mean, I'd put more details in, eg [1 below]

The ONLY place where I'd consider using a url shortener is printed material, since its easier to type in by hand than a giant url, but this has the same dead link problem, especially if printed in magazines.
The stay-tuned-to-find-out message of the last paragraph seemed kind of out of place. Made me think there could a reality show in this mission somewhere.
Bad Code Offsets: An Update
: EZUnsecured.com Review - Jade Rock Enterprises LLC - PPMP Group 
: I just wanted to let everyone know that I found this Company called EZUnsecured.com when I needed Financing for my Business and they helped me obtain a significant amount of Unsecured Working Capital. If you need money for your Business, then I highly recommend them for Business Loans and Lines of Credit, and they also do Personal Loans as well but I did not go that route. If you want to check out some references, they have some Video Testimonials - Just click on the Link below and check it out:
Twitter, Amiando, Obopay, And Playfish Are Named Technology Pioneers By The WEF
Tried to register http://to./index.php

Succeeded, but sadly http://to./ rewrote it to http://index.php instead.
> I tend to start with quick, easy questions and work toward much more difficult ones.

I've noticed that trend in many interviews I've been in and had interviewers bluntly tell me they will keep asking harder questions until I miss one, so see my technical depth.

I've found that if you say you know language/api/framework X you had better be able to answer all the basics with concise answers in a friendly (non-condescending) tone. That may mean some studying and practice on the job hunter's part, but it pays off two ways: you're already ahead of the arrogant candidates and you may convince an interviewer you know your stuff quickly, so they skip the hard questions.
What are the chances of using the rover's arm to pull it out of the sand-pit when it gets stuck? Or is it to underpowered to be of any help?
People are willing to pay for indepth reporting - this type of content can be sustained by subscriptions. People are not willing to pay for newsbites or breaking news, since this type of content is widely available for free - this kind of content can be sustained by advertising. But can these two models combined match the pre-internet revenues newspapers are used to? Probably not because of the cost models of pre-internet news gathering and also because of the choices advertisers now have.
I would assume that it is fake - it is just an estimate, "real time" therefore has nothing to do with it.
Searching for "google" returns a lady in a bikini as the first result.
This also highlights the point that it is important as an employer to write good job descriptions as well. I find this point often neglected.
Which payment solution for my business?
Hey, I need a robust/simple and reliable solution to charge my website's users (developped with Rails).
I need to do a recurrent payment and my business is based in France.
So I tried Paypal which I like but not available for recurrent payment outside US/UK.
I had a look to chargify.com but they don't support foreign currencies/credit cards/merchant account.
I just discovered spreedly.com which seems to support foreign countries but I don't know anyone who had already tried it.
So, do you have feedback on spreedly or another good idea to accomplish it ?
A valid point. Perhaps genuine interest is asking a bit much. Willingness to at least get a little enlightenment as to what the interview is talking about is what I'm looking for.
I think this is one strategy. Start with a high price for something, then iterate lower to find the sweet spot -- particularly if your product is new or beta, and you deliberately want to limit your initial user base.
Actually I specify tar.gz. This is actually a subtle test -- the job requires *NIX fluency and those who had ever compiled a few packages would have noticed the convention. That's my train of thought anyway.

As for resume format, it is an open source job and my main machines are all MS-free, so it is extra trouble (especially if it is docx). Just a preference, that's all. I didn't advertise otherwise.

Tip for maintaining multiple formats: asciidoc/markdown = text you can generate html with. And once you have html you can print to pdf from a browser. 3 formats for the price of one.

Bear in mind I wasn't trying to write a list that's canon -- just what I like to see. I'm not going to chuck applications simply because they missed a point in that list of recommendations.
Has anyone been Approved for more than $200,000 with EZUnsecured.com?
I used them and got $175,000 but I was hoping I could have gotten more. I saw the Videos on their Website and it looks like some People have gotten more than that - If you got more than $200K please let me know how you did it. My Business is 4 Years Old and my Credit Scores are all over 700. Below is a video I found on them - Just FYI:
The key is to get them talking instead of you. That does help find what their pain points are, so you can address them as the mentalist above noted, but you also find out what they are really looking for so see if you're still interested.

Here's an example of what I mean. Suppose you're a Java/Struts developer historically, but have some serious Ruby on Rails experience recently. You come across a job listing for a RoR developer, with all the right RoR talk in the description with "experience with Java/Struts a plus" at the bottom.

You go into the interview and just nail all the RoR questions. They are happy, you're happy, and they ask you if you have any questions, so you ask them to describe their project. As you play mentalist you discover that they really are using Java 1.4 and Struts 1.38 and want someone to come on and maintain that old code while hoping that some day management will let them rewrite the whole app in RoR. They want you there in case management agrees and to "train" the others in RoR just in case it happens.

They extend you a job offer. You decline and go after a real RoR opportunity with a hot startup. Life is good.
Send me cookies, or really, do anything that shows you're more (better) than your resume. Fresh homemade chocolate chip cookies are probably best though unless you know my humor or work and send me something even more personalized.

My opinion is unlikely to match with big corporations. Also, I'm not a skittish woman, so I don't care if you Google-stalked me to figure out what to give me. Besides, I think everyone I've interviewed in the past year has anyway, so I'd rather I got something out of it.

I did send my HR contact at my last employer cookies, and she just loved it. It's not a huge place, but it's big enough to have an HR dept.
I'll assume up front that thee scores on the two tests are independent, since that's the scenario in which regression to the mean applies. (It also applies if they are correlated but have some independent "noise" component, but that complicates things.)

Your mistake is here:

"If you do poorly on the first test... you're then expected to do better on the second test, so the y-coordinate is high."

Actually, under my assumption, a student who does poorly on the first test is no more or less likely than anyone else to do well on the second test. Their y-coordinate will not be "high" in absolute terms; on average, it will be the same as the mean for the whole class. The regression exists because the group has a low starting point, not because it has a high ending point. As a group the high scorers will regress to the mean, not past it. (In the case where scores are partially correlated, the group will regress toward the mean.)

For example, suppose scores are independently, uniformly distributed on both tests. Then your scatterplot will have dots distributed uniformly over its entire area - obviously this does not change if you switch axes. And yet there is regression to the mean. Divide the graph into quadrants. If you look at the right half of the plot (high scorers on first exam), you'll see that there are as many in the upper quadrant as the lower (their mean on the second exam is the class mean). Same for the left side of the plot. This isn't order-dependent; you'll find that the high-scorers on B also regress to the mean when you look at their A scores.
I Heart Joel on Software
I like your footnote idea, though I think it seems fairly unnatural for casual communication. To me, short URLs seem like the more user-friendly solution.

I'm also still not sold on the dead link problem for two reasons.

1. You're already relying on one site (in this case Google) not to go down or change its dynamic URL patterns. Certainly adding another layer increases the chances of a dead link, but any time you link to something on the web you're taking a risk of sending someone to an error page.

2. Most instances in which you'd use a short URL -- such as email -- are for instant communication in which the recipient is likely to visit that link in the next day or two. In other words, you wouldn't link to a short URL in the body of your web page or blog (something with more permanence on which you want to be sure the link works months or even years from now), but for email or Twitter messages, which are generally fleeting and timely, that matters less. As long as the link works right now then all is good. If the person visiting the links wants to save it for later, they'll more than likely bookmark it, cutting the shortener out of the loop anyway.
Some wonderful quotes in this one:
"The days of investing in Web sites we love are over," said Lanny Baker, a Salomon Smith Barney analyst. "People rave about Google. But as a business, it will take an awful lot for them to catch up to Overture."

I wonder where Lanny Baker is these days?
Also here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974342>.
Preview of the new Erlang site
I could be wrong, but isn't this what 83b is for-- so you don't have to take the tax hit until you can actually sell your stake?
East Anglia's Climate Research Unit source code
"If you take ordered pairs where there is no connection between a and b, then you won't get any regression to the mean, you'll get points essentially randomly placed on the plane."

This is exactly reversed. If A and B are perfectly correlated, then you will have no regression to the mean. If they are perfectly independent, then you will have full regression to the mean. If they are only partially correlated, then you will have only partial regression to the mean.

(This is easy to see if you run a simulation of each case.)
Background info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_h.... Basically, hackers stole a lot of internal e-mails from the research institute, and some of the e-mails contain dubious code and data from its climate research.
Maybe it's something with my corporate routing/firewall/who knows, but I just get an error saying my browser can't find it (no matter the browser). For that reason I really hope this doesn't catch on.
I appreciated the article, but I didn't find the reasoning compelling. What I took away from the article was the following line of reasoning:
1. You strongly prefer functional programming to OO programming (no reason given other than personal preference)
2. You don't have enough experience with any languages that are well-suited to FP other than CL that you would be comfortable undertaking a large project
3. You confirmed that many languages you are familiar with (Java, Python, Ruby) are better suited to OO than FP style (not a surprise at all except perhaps Python as I touch on below), so as a direct consequence of (1) and (2), you were left with CL.

CL is my first-choice language for certain kinds of projects as well, but I didn't come away any new insights from your article. Your choice seems to hinge around two key conclusions for which you give very little explanation: FP is better than OO for your project, and Python is not a good language for FP. I single out Python because I don't think anyone would argue that Java or Ruby is well-suited to FP. Guido insists that Python is not an FP language, but many users (myself included) would argue that it is reasonably well-suited for FP.
That FP was better for your project does not require any further explanation. As others have noted, for a project where scalability of the development team is not an issue (i.e. you are the primary or only developer), it makes sense to choose the style and language you are most comfortable with. If you were starting a project that was going to require several years and a large number of developers, I would have found it more surprising if you committed to a functional programming model. But, given the nature of the project, it didn't seem like there was any need to defend that decision further.

All in all, I'm very excited to see CL being used for more commercial web apps, but I didn't find any insight in the thought process you laid out.

I am, however, much more interested in Pt. II - your description of rolling out a web app in CL. I learned CL ten years before I learned Python and would prefer to write in CL when possible, but for web apps, I have turned to Python for a number of reasons, most notably the obvious availability of libraries. I would love to hear what you used and hear a cogent argument that rapid commercial web app deployment can be done in CL as easily as in Python.

Thanks for sharing your story.
Ever wanted to ask Neal Asher something?
Nice Online Marketing Primer - Pour and Stir
Prosper (php dbal) 0.6 released
Yes, there are several reasons it's called the benchmarks game and although you can read it the way you have, it's more to do with having a lot of spectators and some regular players, and more to do with a weariness with fatal shootouts.
What if Tweeter and other places that have message length limit ignore the length of the URL in you post?
Ask HN: Is age an issue?
I am an old coder. I've being coding since the TRS80 model 1.. bla bla bla..

My question is: Honestly, in today's "hackers news" world, is age an issue when hiring developers ?

I ask not because I have trouble getting jobs (For years I've been a contractor at various Fortune 100's and I'am doing good), but because I keep getting asked crazy stuff at interviews.. like:
"what is my favorite Java class" or What is the signature of XYZ class or the kind of stuff that my IDE does for me..

I might be suffering from early ICRS disease.. but don't see the value of memorizing ever changing API's (strut,spring,hibernate,ibatis, etc ) when google is one click away.!

Anyway.. be brutal, give me your thoughts...
That problem should be solved in the 'reader'.
If a url looks long, get your email client to show a small version of it. Get it to show the full URL when you hover over it. Whatever. Just do it in the client.

Even on twitter it's a stupid artificial restriction. It would be pretty trivial to show minified links for SMS alerts (Which is a tiny amount of twitter anyway now), and show full URLs for everyone else. Then clients could show the urls how they like.
This demo looks really great, is the software driving the site written in erlang?
Cambridge Innovation Center turns 10; a look inside an entrepreneurs' haven
Browsing Your Personal Web: UI design for Firefox 4
Prostate Cancer - Treatment Options
I think it's interesting, definition-wise. "Statistics" seems to imply that it's high-level information; but real-time implies the opposite to me. You don't have a "fuel level statistics" meter in your car, you have a fuel gauge that you expect to reflect the current fuel level.

From the FAQ on the site, they use various intra- and extrapolations based on what their sources tell you, based on your computer's current clock. They suggest setting your time to December 31st, 23:59 to see the total for the yearly values, for instance.

I don't think it's "real-time". It's displaying statistical information "smeared" out over the entire year, and updating the current value as time passes several times a second.

But if I were to buy a cigarette, or become overweight, you wouldn't see the number change directly to reflect that.
The former. Even though it's 355 characters, at least it tells me it's a Google maps link. Which the shortened version doesn't.

There are some situations where URL shortening is arguably useful. But there's absolutely no reason why "microblogging" should be one of them.
TDD is not about finding defects, its about minimizing work (you code to pass tests and no more - as a side effect, you should always have 100% coverage) and about preventing working code from being broken through bug fixes, refactoring, or extension because your existing tests will then fail. Its a guarantee that what works now will still work later - or the test will fail, not the test will find bugs.
Without blathering on too much...

Yes, age is an issue.

If you are too young, there is a worry that you will be some combination of immature, inexperienced, difficult, unreliable.

If you are too old, there is a worry that you will be some combination of less productive, untrainable, unreliable, demotivated, coasting.

When dealing at either of these extremes, you may find it helpful to adjust your resume to be short with an entry at the end "further detailed experience available on request" (ie: to hide your 20 year work history, or your 5 year work history), and/or do a phone interview first (so that your apparent age is less obvious) to build interest.

YMMV
There is an API for both communicating data explicitly, and for allocating shared memory data structures which can be shared implicitly.
How to become programming expert. Few video talks.
I think I've seen the a picture of an PDA attachment that uses a laser to project a keyboard on a flat surface. Of course no tactile clickyness, but it's got to be better than 2 finger typing that happens with most smartphone inputs these days.
Game-guilds and street gangs both driven by team formation
They can't do that due to text-message length restrictions
3 ways Bing is ahead of Google
Family Attorney Marsha Freeman: 'The System is Broken'
Would it even work to monitor all the internet traffic? Couldn't the pirates just encrypt it?
Some companies want someone who is already an expert at a particular tool. Some have good reasons for this, some bad.

Also, you'll find that a bunch of programmers these days basically consider Java to be the entire programming universe. Many of them have gone through university and several jobs without being exposed to anything else. They don't really consider the fact that could be experienced programmers who have no Java knowledge, and they don't consider it a fad or a passing thing. I suggest seeking out companies that are working with Python, Ruby, Perl, Scala, etc. - not because of the tools themselves, but because they tend to expect that candidates will be learning new tools and languages all the time.

Yes, you will probably be discriminated against by some companies. Fortunately, there are companies out there that don't. I expect the latter category will grow as the overall developer population ages. (Remember, our entire industry has grown from almost nothing in just 30-40 years.) At my current company, at least one engineer is a grandfather and several people have children near my age (and I'm a parent myself).
I think this is the wrong advice. If the company is losing money or is a cash-strapped startup it isn't going to want to pay lawyers and accountants extra cash to restructure the business just to hire a developer. And the developer #1 position is critical enough no-one is going to want to screw them over lightly.

If he's a new employee he should give his company the benefit of the doubt for a short time. And use the time to demonstrate his value. The thing to avoid is a drawn out process where it isn't clear what constitutes a reasonable timeframe for getting this problem solved and so it always gets pushed back.

So get the milestones figured out. If now is not a convenient time, when is a convenient time? When you've been employed for three or six months? When the company hits major development or business milestones? If you can't get an oral commitment on this front I'd be concerned enough to look elsewhere.