skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. After some probation period, fire only as a last resort or for really terrible behaviour. Have a plan to correct behavior in all other cases.

This is a great way to earn loyalty from the person not being fired and at the same time alienate multiple other employees who may have to work with someone who just might be a bad fit or incompetent. I've seen the situation happen too many times where a company's reluctance to let one person go without a long, dragged-out process of formal correctional measures caused several other, much more valuable team members, to leave instead.
"you are buying yourself a job?" Bingo. And the prospect of growing the business to a point where it can sustain a team and be less reliant on you.

If the business can run without any input from the founder a) why would they sell it? and b) if they did they would sell at a much greater multiple.
It's a two-sided market, and seeing only 1 side project listed there (from August 2014) makes me think the marketplace is dead.

Two thoughts:

1. If there are prior successful sales, show those!

2. If possible, try to show more (even if this means linking out to projects for sale on different sites until you get some traction).
>The ad industry in its current state is built on foundations we think don't make sense. For instance, the whole idea of abusing cookies, a useful technology, to track where users go around the internet so that the data can be traded, so that others can make guesses about what ads to show... sounds a bit in need of a change.

And how do you propose this would stop that?
While I applaud your effort in creating such an extension, I find it trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. The registration process on reddit is so simple it really doesn't take anytime to setup a throwaway account
Sounds like they failed to have a plan to correct said behavior that caused the others to leave.
Why are you concerned? It's an approach. It seems to work pretty well. It's possible it could be improved, does that mean we should not display the results of this because it might not be the most efficient result?

I didn't downvote, but it's tiresome to hear "Yeah, that's all cool and everything, but I'm concerned that it might not be the absolute best." Nobody claimed it was the most efficient approach ever possible, only that it was cool, surprising, and reasonably ground breaking.

You can't really tell if it's the most efficient approach until you try it, and compare it with a model that you think might be a more efficient approach.
I wrote something similar a few months ago: http://www.yegor256.com/2015/03/02/team-morale-myths-and-rea...
I'd like to see a "Firefox subscription", a monthly automatic donation model like NPR and PBS use. Give people who "subscribe" a custom Firefox theme to show off that they're supporters (like KQED bumper stickers on Volvos ;).
Sometimes it's just not correctable. Bad hires happen. Not everyone can do well in a given position. The idea of dragging things out until firing is a "last resort" makes it sound like it's a long process and that is a bad thing. It can create a poisonous working environment.
SEA3D: Open Source file format for games
They do support many more platforms, though I suspect that's still the lion's share of their deployments, they're still very active in that community, and they still support Ruby development through Matz's paycheck. On the flip side, Heroku is still a major deployment option amongst many startup and shops that rely on Rails. If anything happened to Heroku (I doubt it would) it would have a very significant impact on the Rails world.
I worked for a small company with 20ish employees during the post 2000 tech downturn. There were a number of layoffs and I got a 25% haircut and was happy to remain. It was a struggle for us financially but not a catastrophe. Eventually (3 years on) the job market got better and I got a position at a different company that took my pay beyond what it had been. I have no regrets and no hard feelings. I can envision returning to that company some day in the future as the environment was interesting and challenging.
Frequently employers are so casual about references they either a) don't check them, or b) only check the ones the prospective candidate gives them.

See, that's a problem. That stands out more than any of the good things that he might say. People talk and things come out and shit happens, but deliberately going behind someone's back for back-channel references is just plain unprofessional, if not unethical. This is the kind of behavior that has the rest of the country (in which ethical standards aren't seen as old-fart ideals to be "disrupted" but are actually considered important) thinking that we, in tech, are a bunch of immature psychopaths.

The back-channel reference check is an unprofessional show of power-- like waving a gun around at work-- because it takes social access to get any information out of it (people don't just offer candid opinions up to complete strangers). What's communicated by the back-channel reference check is "your colleagues are more loyal to me than to you". There's a fucking reason why people outside of tech consider it unprofessional and borderline unethical.
This happened to me in my 2nd job, a long time ago. Customer went tits up owing us £150k, we were only a small firm, around 10 employees so would have meant significant layoffs.

So the owner asked if we'd all take 20% or so paycuts, with some of the older/better paid staff and the owner himself taking bigger cuts. As the business was otherwise profitable (being in a pretty niche market) we all agreed. Something like 9months later we all got paid back with interest and a bonus.

Smaller scale, and a bit more recently at a different (also small) place, all the non-management staff offerred to forego the (expensive) christmas party so one of the contractors could get paid back pay they were owed due to problems with a difficult client.

It's obviously very situational, but in both cases it felt like the right thing to do and both places were smallish firms where loyalty and morale etc. at the time, were high.
> This is a great way to earn loyalty from the person not being fired and a way to alienate multiple other people who may have to work with that person who may just be a bad fit or incompetent.

Improving "behavior" (I would say "fit" -- the problem can often be on the company's end as well as the employees, and if you want to take the family analogy even semi-seriously, the employer needs to be able to be introspective enough to recognize this) needs to be taken just as seriously as "fire only as a last resort" in these cases; and if you don't have a credible plan to improve fit, you are at the last resort.

(Lots of places that give lip service to an ideal like this, especially places that are still afflicted by heavy bureaucracy, take it the wrong way, and it amounts to "never impose negative consequence and just try to sweep any performance problems under the rug as long as possible"; that's at least as bad as "fire at the first sign of trouble, and never try to understand what went wrong and how it could be improved".)
Microsoft is definitely a lot friendlier to Linux and open source these days, though I think a Microsoft-owned hosting platform atop Linux and AWS would be .. strange. I suspect they might even divest it as part of the acquisition.
Probably to weed out people who are prone to complaining about trivialities.
The "forget having a kid" in San Francisco thing is a serious issue. If you have rent control, great. But if in 5-10 years you want to have a family, it's not like you're going to be able to move to an apartment whose price is equal to:

((current rent under rent control from 10 years ago)/(current number of rooms))(current number of rooms + 1)

Instead it's going to be:

(current number of rooms + 1)(current rent per room in SF when you decide to move)

In other words, if you don't lock in an extra room now and sublet it until you decide to start a family, then you're shit out of luck.
Why did the bad hire make it past the probation period? The purpose of that period is to weed out the bad hires.

Internal processes only take as long as you make them. Correct the issue in 2 weeks. Not solved? Let them go. It doesn't have to be some 6 month ordeal of trying to get things worked out. The point is to have a process to deal with these things rather than telling the employee to pack up their shit and get out.
San Francisco rents are bad. San Francisco purchase prices are balls-out disgusting: 30 to 50 years' worth of rent. Typical in the US is 15, and that's only because of the mortgage interest tax credit (which drives purchase prices about 30-50% higher than they otherwise should be).

Buying at current levels would only make economic sense if you expected rents to keep going up. Right now, buying is a bad move unless you expect the extreme rent situation to worsen (rather than mean reverting) in the long term (20-30 years). Given that it'd take just one genuine progressive mayor to crush the NIMBYs and allow new development, I think that that's a bad bet.
Ask HN: Unpaid internship followed by unpaid work with equity. I'm a student
preface:

- I still have 1 year to go in my CS degree from a Top 5 university in Canada that is not Waterloo or Toronto.

- Canadian citizen

- Living in Canada in a big city

current situation:

- The only opportunities I got from any place for the summer are unpaid ones in start-ups that have no founding. 3 weeks of 'seeing how things work out' time and then no payment 'until they get funding' but an offer of ~1% equity. I got three offers like these and went with one of them.

- Let's not kid ourselves here, my GPA is super low, going from 3.5x to an atrocious GPA after a break up.

- I am no rock star developer but I am diligent in what I do. And frankly, I can code at least a little, had OK grades before messing up my life, and I answered the simple interview questions that they gave me.

my ideas (options):

- Suck it up for 3 weeks, learn tons and be 100% honest that I won't be staying, even as a part-time person because it makes not much sense to do so.

- Suck it up for this summer, improve my code, make personal projects and actually show that I could be hired by a bigger corporation.

- Still be honest and stay even after the 3 week trial, if they let me

more details:

-I have lived very comfortably for around ~8k per year for the past two years, including rent, as a student.

-I live at home now. I have no student debt, and 20k in the bank from inheritance.

therefore:

Minimum wage is fine, but I didn't interview with any big company or anything because I really feel inadequately bad compared to other developers out there. I would also not mind ending up cleaning or anything like that, but I just really like coding and stuff.

bottom line:

what's your advice for someone in my position?
It might simply come down to terminology, but things like "last resort" and, honestly "plan", bring to mind those terrible corporate HR programs that poor performers are put on that take forever to culminate.

It's alright to fire as a "last resort", but make the process to come to that decision a swift and confident one - your other employees are watching.
F*CK security vulnerability
You know what can make your life really stressful? The inability to pay rent or afford clothes/food for your spouse and kids.

Pay is hugely important in determining your quality of life. You can't just completely ignore the subject.

If the job opportunity being offered doesn't pay enough for you to afford your house or apartment, you can write it off no matter how interesting you might find the work.
In this case it's Title Case though.
> Given that it'd take just one genuine progressive mayor to crush the NIMBYs and allow new development

Well, in an alternate reality where the City and County of San Francisco is a mayoral dictatorship (and using a suitably special definition of "progressive", though that's somewhat tangential) this might be true.

Of course, in that alternate reality, you'd still need the mayor with that preference to somehow get elected in San Francisco, which might require even a bigger divergence from the universe we live in than San Francisco having the kind of political structure which would empower a mayor alone to impose the changes you describe.
It means the petition was withdrawn. My guess is that that person left the company.
Personally, I don't want IPO money and all the headaches that come with it. I'd rather have more time, good people and freedom than money. That's why I was asking for examples of such cities/companies.
An issue here is that providing general advice about increasing income non-linearly is much more difficult and less reliable than decreasing expenses. Almost anyone can decrease expenses, but how many will succeed at increasing income outside of extra work? (Remember, something like 90% of new businesses fail).

There are a few ways that are reasonably reliable. Owning multi-family housing has a pretty easy to understand cost and revenue, and property ownership can be leveraged to purchase additional property, and so on.

If someone I don't know (we're talking about internet forums here), I don't know their personality, their strengths or weaknesses, they say "I want to become financially independent". Well I can almost guarantee if they eat out half as much, walk/bike to work instead of making car payments, they'll be in a much better financial position. If I tell them to create a tech startup ... well, that could end in several ways but probably not good.

Additionally, what does it cost them to follow the advice? Spending less, by definition, has no cost. But saying "buy an apartment complex" or "start a tech company" has real cost. How do they get to the point where they can do those things if they can't afford it now? That's again where the "spend less" comes in.
Poppy Humanoid 3D-Printed Open-Source Robot Platform
I actually had a conversation like this with a freelancer a few weeks ago. He was cutting back expenses to achieve financial independence (you know, 10-20 years from now).

When I asked him why he didn't just increase his (seemingly low to me) freelancing rates by 10-20%, he said that was impossible. Little did he know I charge nearly triple his rate for sort of similar work, and spend about 50% less time than him working.

You don't build wealth by saving on small purchases, you do it by earning.
Elon Musk Didn't Like His Kids' School–So He Opened His Own
Blame games don't solve problems.

Misanthropy and careless childish avocation of destruction rather than constructive aims is the macro issue here.

Maybe we can learn from history and rather than brutishly lash out in anger or fear we could attempt to build new bridges least we forget why the old bridges failed.
Yup. Interestingly, my brother works in NYC staging the most expensive apartments in the city in preparation for sale. The last apartment he staged sold for something like $12.5 million. I don't think anyone is going to actually live in in.

More and more, NYC, London and SF are the real estate equivalent of buying gold, but way more profitable. The most interesting thing about this property my brother recently staged is that it was on the market for about $5-6 million until just before the 2008 crash. After the crash, it and many many apartments just like it skyrocketed in value as the economy crumbled. Basically lots of very very rich people, often Russian and Chinese, but not exclusively those nationalities, expatriated money to SF, NYC and London to buy real estate as a relatively safe store of value.

A good friend of my father (who lives in Brazil) is worth several hundred million and he owns an apartment in NYC worth several million that no one lives in. Between he and his family, they probably use it for at most one month per year.

That only counts for part of the problem. Something like 5-10% of the SF housing stock to which rent control laws is applicable is kept off the market because landlords prefer not to deal with the hassle of tenants rights. I forget the exact figure.
It just leaks which category of sites I've been visits.

Why is it so hard to understand that leaking any bits not necessary for the retrieval and presentation of the link I clicked on is absolutely unacceptable? Anything that sends data that could not be learned form the server logs is spyware and will be treated as such.

Some companies like to claim that this spying is necessary because the data is useful. I'm sure it is, just like I'm sure a thief find the goods they stole to be useful. For similar reasons claims - like your explanation of this firefox misfeature - relating to the amount of bits leaked are not actualy a defense.
In a wider social- and group-context it is sometimes best to maintain the view that you are a victim being manipulated by outside forces.

In a strictly personal context it is often better to maintain the view that you are a fully empowered actor.
He had a price put on his head by the British Crown.
Sorry but I disagree it's fault of everyone else. True Bush invasion started this. But as far as the collapse of security forces in Iraq (which allowed ISIS to gain infamy), most of the blame lies with the Iraqi govt.

You can't stop a few hundred (or a thousand) guys with AK47 with pickups when your solders have M1 tanks?
Title Case is an Abomination that Obscures the Meaning Imparted by Differences in Capitalization in the English Language.
My financial security is way below someone who went balls deep into debt in 2000 on housing.

That may be true, but that doesn't mean opportunities for FI disappeared with depressed home prices after the dot-com bust.

Unfortunately real estate is often the go-to option since it's (relatively) easy to get a RE purchase financed, whereas good luck getting a loan to e.g. buy into index funds.

"very boring conservative Vanguard index funds and a __rental house or two__."

It's still possible, depending on what real estate market you look in, and if you're ok buying somewhere out of state and having someone manage it for you. A friend who lives in the bay area bought two rental properties in Dallas ~2 years ago and (even with a property manager fee) it's been a great supplement to her income. I've been thinking about doing something similar.

Must be nice especially if you have a family slaving away in your rental houses for you so you can capture all their labour.

This is a weird thing to say... makes no sense, really.
Charging more can increase sales without changing the quality of your product, assuming the product is already "good" or marketable. An increased price adds a perceived 'quality' or 'prestige' and you'll get bigger spenders, although fewer spenders. This is because of the bad reasoning that "more expensive = better".

My mother did this with her home business by slowly increasing her prices. The product she delivers hasn't changed in the slightest - but she now makes 5x more than she was before!

People fall into the trap of lowering their cost to increase buyers without paying attention to how much they are working. They see an increase of price "would ruin them financially" because they would get less clients.

Of course, finding the balance is important.

There was a story on HN where someone was setting up custom sites for $75. They quickly realized this was more work than they expected and began charging $2,000 a site (after charging more and more per site, from $200->$500->$1000).

People were still purchasing. Same work. $75 --> $2,000.
For a post-doc? That's likely $43,000.
Big Ideas (don't get any) [video] (2009)
The old fashion way, by not commenting.
Any idea how to cleverly check data integrity over some distributed services? (without downloading everyting)
Check out "Let My People Go Surfing", Chouinard's business text, for a recounting of Patagonia's history.

Their history is also recounted here: http://www.patagonia.com/us/patagonia.go?assetid=3351
Money (and it's alternate form, stuff) too often ends up being read like a scorecard, when it's really a means to an end. I love MMM for the exact same reason as you do - he gets that money is what lets you do things that you find enjoyable or rewarding, not something you flout around as a status symbol.

Thank god MMM is a subversive, because his is one of the only revolutions I could see myself subscribing to.
The yellow pages
Just created perispomeni.club
Nice work Phil!
According to this site, my company has LCAs with salary 12% to 26% MORE than what I'm making for the same title! I didn't know I was getting screwed like this. I was happy with my job until I saw this site today.

I'm not sure what to do now. Should I tell my boss about this and ask for a big raise this year? How would they react if I showed this data to them and demanded that my salary at least match these numbers?
Going to church
I have a Patagonia fleece that I received as a gift in ~1997. Still in good+ shape, and keeps me warm.
I was always wondering what the difference between the two was. Now I feel like an idiot for not knowing this up front. Oh well, $100 I may or may not ever see again.
> If you clean my house, I'll give you 50e. Do you think i'd give you 50e out of the blue if you refused to do the job ?

Ignoring the "out of the blue" part, which is entirely off-topic, actually yes: "How about if I wash your car?". As mentioned downthread, it would be a hugely bizarre interpretation to assume that there are no circumstances under which you would ever give me 50e other than cleaning your house. In this example, it's trivially possible that there are other jobs that I can perform that you might give me 50e for.
Security Analysis of Android Factory Resets [pdf]
I don't see how calling Google Wear a "better platform" than the Apple Watch is a defensible position at the moment. The Apple watch out sold all Google Wear devices sold in one year on the first day.
Absolutely. I live by this.

In contracting or consulting, you want to find critically important projects to work on and then almost shock people by what you're charging. Then overdeliver.
> Tooling [...] compiling the 4.3 BSD compress program, which is no longer part of modern Unix systems, in order to decompress the 386BSD distributions.

I don't think this was needed -- gunzip can actually read that format.
>Retired in his 30s to have a family. Must be nice especially if you have a family slaving away in your rental houses for you so you can capture all their labour.

I will never understand this kind of thinking. A rental agreement is beneficial to both parties - otherwise it would never have existed. You're no more "capture[ing] all their labour" than they are "squatting on your property".
I had your line of thought until I got a smartwatch. On my second now (Pebble first, then LG Gear) and yes, leaving your phone in your pocket IS the killer app. Knowing if that email alert is important, glancing at a text and flicking off a quick reply, being able to feel notifications in a noisy environment. Most importantly, my phone now goes all day on a charge due to the decreased amount of screen on time. I know the form factor isn't for everyone, but it can be very useful and shouldn't be outright dismissed.
In publishing, it's the editors who compose the titles, not the writers. This is why the writer's lede is so frequently a more reliable point of entry to the story.
Since you asked: You should consider them. Their stuff is generally well-designed and holds up. I still use Patagonia shells and jackets I bought in the 1990s. Try to find a brick-and-mortar store.