skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One reason that small companies so often beat big ones is that if you have 10 startup teams competing agains one big company team, one of the 10 will probably make the winning product.

So a big company that is open to doing 2-3 similar things at once should be more likely to produce winners.

That said, as an ex Googler, I agree with others here that this is probably more an accident of internal dysfunction than a brilliant strategy. It might still work though.
And I'd be happy to pay for car insurance IF AND WHEN I get in to an accident in my own car. You don't get an insurance discount for naively believing that you won't make mistakes, or for believing that undesirable things won't happen to you.
Yea, those "legacy managers"... always trying to harsh our mellow. That's surely the only thing getting in the way of the ideal 100% remote-work-everywhere nirvana.

If remote working was really the slam-dunk productivity panacea that its supporters claim it is, then companies would be switching to it overnight to beat their "legacy" competitors. Shareholders would demand it! Soon, you'd have a hard time finding companies with physical offices. But that's not happening. Is it because of these old stodgy legacy managers, or could it be because there are major down sides to remote work that tend to get get glossed over by people singing its praises? What's more likely?
NYC Open Data Plan [pdf]
UK Banks are failing to satisfy mobile customers
Really, a (re-)post from 5 years ago?
Why would you assume that such permission would be "special" to Debian? It's an icon. There is zero reason for a search engine to restrict such use (and distribution).
FBI chief warns encryption emboldens would-be Islamic State attackers
get fucked dude every single country on the planet that has the capability is doing everything they can in cyberspace, and those who can't are trying to get there, might as well be the best at it.
As a female who will never have children, I'm even more angered by the new coverage. Being self-employed, I went from a $5k deductible for around $80/month to a $10k deductible and $230/month (and my new plan doesn't have good coverage all over the country, which sucks because I travel a lot).

I have never used my health insurance for any reason in the last 15 years, I eat well, exercise, get plenty of sleep, etc. - so the whole situation makes me mad every time I see the bill.
I saw that deal, but I'm wary of buying crucial ssds as every single one I've bought has failed on me within 18 months. As far as SSDs go, I thought the advice was to stick with Intel: is this still true?
> As an employer however, we've found it hard to always keep our developers ... executing on time.

There's something off about this -- it has the whiff of micromanagement or waterfall; perhaps I'm misreading your point. Far better than micromanagement is hiring good, trustworthy people and collaborating with them together on incrementally building something out.
Better click quality on display ads improves the user and advertiser experience
Technically a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9881672

...which makes me confused what YC's content marketing strategy actually is. Since TechCrunch already does exclusives for batch companies, it seems redundant.
I'm looking forward to reading his most recent book: http://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Being-Expendable-Experiences...
One of the many signs that things are getting toppy is that everyone stops working. Or rather, they "work from home". It wouldn't surprise me if many of these tenants are underutilizing their space because most of the people who were supposed to fill it are out somewhere else goofing off, sleeping, etc. There's no need to worry about being productive when (a) your employer can't readily hire a replacement for you and (b) there are 50 other possible employers who would fall all over themselves to give you a job (and a raise!) regardless of your competence or diligence. Besides, who cares if you're leasing twice the space you need for a bunch of employees who don't come to the office and do no work? It's not like you can't just raise another huge round whenever you want.
Do you know of any blogging platform that beats Wordpress from 2005-2010? ;)

After 2010, Tumblr was pretty big but it was really a different project.

http://automattic.com/about/

There is also that.
Older submissions should have a (YYYY) in the headline to indicate they're old, but posting older things is a common practice on HN. It just means, "Hey, I ran into this older thing that I think is still interesting, and I thought the community would too."
Mozilla Kills Flash on Firefox as Adobe Rushes Patch
I was actually going to reply to that point, as well. This guy, despite his somewhat unique circumstances (and superb writing) isn't really alone in that he has to do what he needs, however unfulfilling, to get by.
As a woman who uses Lyft often, I can confirm that I've been treated like shit by a number of drivers in ways that I can't imagine a man would be treated. Stuff like how they would park a block away from me and make me walk the whole way to their cars (invariably, the people who do this are men who come from countries where women's rights are unheard of).

I'm at the point where I'm seriously upset that Lyft doesn't allow women to specifically request a female driver. Hell, I'd be willing to pay extra to guarantee that my driver be a woman.
The effects of marginal tax rates materialized in the 70's and early 80's. It was often smarter to have just one person work in a family because the take home from a second job would be entirely absorbed in taxes and the costs of working (car, gas, etc).
How did you find this out?
I ask because in every case I'm aware of no one except key people was even aware that they had decided to sell until the deal was done. So either you are a key person or the founders don't know enough to keep this to themselves.
It's not like I have a lot of experience in this (and the UK may be different), but:

> what's the shortest transition-the-product-to-new-ownership period I can reasonably look for?

Whatever you can get away with, but a small number of years is what I'd call "normal".

> Is there typically any short-term payout for acquired employees or will everything be in salary and slow-vesting options?

The latter - the whole point is to try to get you to stick around, after all.

You can expect to get a good price for your (non-option) equity immediately though.

> Is there any likelihood of an acquirer being interested in purchasing the product but not its developers?

If the product is profitable, then yes, but they will certainly want the developers for a transition period.

> Assuming I do stick it out as an acquihire, what's the likelihood I'd be allowed to remain in charge of my product vs having to execute on someone else's vision?

How good are you at office politics? There will be people above you, unless and until you can get yourself promoted above them. Your working relationship with your boss is what you and they make it. By all means try to find and sound out the person who's going to be in charge of you, but realistically the acquirers probably don't know themselves who'll be running your division in 3 months' time.

> When, if ever, is it appropriate for me to ask to be included in negotiations with acquirers? Most importantly: how do I best stand up for my own interests here, without being the asshole that ruins the deal for everyone?

Honestly, any deal is going to be about the (monetary) interests of equity holders. The current owners have nothing to gain from treating the employees well and will not negotiate particularly well for the employees' interests (and why should they?). The acquirers will give the employees whatever terms they think are in their own best interests - which may include some form of slow-vesting golden handcuffs, but that will be determined solely by how much they (the acquirer) want you to stick around.

As an employee you don't even get a seat at the table - you get what's in your contract with your current company, plus whatever you personally negotiate with the acquirers. By all means negotiate that, but that's for after the sale is agreed, and treat it as what it is: an employment negotiation with an entirely new company. Remember you can always walk away.

As a shareholder, on the other hand, the board should be representing your interests as a shareholder. But that probably boils down to selling the company for the highest price possible, which is what they'll be aiming for already. So I don't see any real value in inserting yourself into that negotiation.
I think that part of the problem is that security is not explained in layman terms. There is a slang in security circles that it is not shared with the rest of the world.

Here is an example on how to explain SSL in simple terms. I have not seen many of this kind of water down explanations

http://relprog.com/blog/internet-ssl-certificates-explained-...
No API? No problem Fake it with browser automation and web scraping
Morlocks and Eloi discussion again:

the Eloi have their pre-digested clickbait content fed to them in a stream of thought-free celebrity drivel.

The Morlocks spend their time reading and writing text, some of it code.
In such a world, I imagine a good number of investors will only want to trade when there's an overseer who can promise violence to right wrongs, because trading is historically a great way to get scammed. At the moment, given the state monopoly on violence, an organization like the SEC is a good way to do that. There are other ways to accomplish this without a state monopoly on violence, but the ones that come to mind don't sound like worlds I want to live in.
Depends what you mean by "not declared". Haskell doesn't require you to provide type signatures, so if you don't put a type signature on a function, you can have parameters that aren't explicitly declared (though they still have an inferred static type, so you could use ghci to see what all the parameters are). If you do put any type signature on the function, then all parameters would have to be included.
Your company already submitted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9887183

Also, don't linkbait.
It is indeed still relevant, as it is not "security advice". Rather, it's advice to the security community on how to consider what advice they give to general users.
Did you read the article? It's not about security best practice. It's about human nature and how that relates to security best practice. Until human nature changes this article is going to be pretty close to timeless.
Probably the answer is to have a non-technical manager _literally_ breathe down their necks, rather than over digital communication channels.

/s i.e. I fail to see how this is a problem specific to remote work.
In fairness, the advertised prices for the London ones are surprisingly competitive, but then that just raises the are they making enough to ensure they keep the lights on if they're not too busy? question...

The real problem for the valuation if not the business itself is that apart from free beer, they're not really doing anything differently from most of the other spaces, and their brand and scale really isn't much of a draw for their audience. And they're notionally valued at over 5x the value a firm operating essentially the same business on a much larger scale...
I say keep doing it, because it's a good heuristic for enthusiasm, lines of code, and perhaps quality.
Jesus, I thought we had it bad, but some of these other comments are making me rethink that. We're paying ~$640/mo for a $0 deductible, 0% coinsurance ACA Gold HMO, purchased off CoveredCalifornia. That's without any subsidies - like most on HN, we're just not eligible. That's covers me, my wife, and my infant daughter, and includes maternity coverage.

It's still about double what we were paying before the ACA, but it's a far cry from the $1500+ premiums some others here are paying.
Have you tried Thunderscape?
He talks his book like everyone else. He's a trader, not an oracle.
True, maybe a good follow up to this would be some use case studies. It would be so easy to pick any given set of companies for my narrative though. I feel like that is just as dismissable.
Has the Greek Crisis Increased Bitcoin Awareness?
The bank always wins. It's funny we talk about central bankers, but they are like a shadowy supra-government syndicate pretty much always winning at the cost of everyone else. And yet no one asks why.
I don't think we can easily argue that "it this was good, people would have done it long time ago". Culture changes slowly, and people don't always make the best decisions.
How iOS 9's Safari View Controller could change your app’s onboarding experience
Can you draw the link from central bankers operations to the inflow of cash to VC's? Because most CB operations are either setting rates (where I understand they at least have to stay in between some bandwidth the market will appreciate, or else face a situation like Switzerland), or transactions buying assets (mainly bonds).

Both do not directly accomplish the inflow of money into VC. VC's don't leverage (no banking license). I guess VC-firms don't borrow money at 1%, because no collateral?
Ah I see, thanks for explaining.

So, though this does allow one to safely circumvent the hosting cost associated with bigger third party scripts, it means giving up some of the advantages like dynamic updates (as the hash would now be incorrect), right? This would therefore not work when ad providers want to be able to supply content they get dynamically from others right?
Darkode forum raid – 60 hackers arrested by FBI, NCA, Europol and other LEA
Through the looking glass of CRM
Prisoner's Dilemma for Extra Credit Points at UMD
Blockchain Investment Firm Coinsilium to IPO in London
If someone wants to try it, the Nim language already has that implemented, you only need to enable it. The manual calls it "strong spaces".

http://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#syntax-strong-spaces
I currently work on a team that is about 50/50. For some reason it doesn't seem to create any issues.

I think the reason is that the team has always had remote workers, so there was never a time where teams were 100% in office.
PCG is not simply Marsaglia's xorshift applied to an LCG. I'd recommend reading the paper on the site - it's quite good.
Indeed, what would you do - perhaps this should be a poll instead?
Hire a reputable lawyer that can look over your stock purchase and employee agreements as well as give you general counsel on the situation. There are so many variables that it's really tough to answer your questions specifically. That being said most acquihires that I've seen tend to be for the team itself and not the product. It's a straightforward way for a company to buy a talented engineering team that's already worked together.

Depending on things like board control, voting rights, how the seed round was structured, etc. will determine most of the answers you are looking for. The term founder doesn't have a lot of legal meaning and if you have a sizable amount of equity in say restricted stock, that's what most people would call a founder. Something else to find out is your vesting schedule and what your triggers are for acceleration. Unfortunately if there are investors there is probably a clause that they get paid back first and acquihires aren't usually lucrative amounts but again it depends on all the specifics.
A nice piece of writing. Personally I hate feeling obliged to talk to bus drivers and taxi drivers but when a conversation happens it is often rewarding.

That said, whilst the tech industry is certainly booming, the average tech worker is not getting an uber to their house in Palo Alto. Even on $150k salaries they are living quite ordinary lives in small rented apartments in the city or maybe a townhouse an hour away on the commuter train.
I worked for an insurance company with the whole cubical world, then switched to a 100% remote office. I can attest to the following being true from my experiences:

They prioritize communication and collaboration by necessity
There is a lot less wasted communication
You get a huge portion of your life back
They tend to be more flexible in general

I see no evidence that there is any more or less posturing, or the caliber of workers being better, and it is pretty moot on reaching out for help, no real difference.
A tool to help build Quantity Queries for your projects
Wow, that is a great read. It hits on a lot of points about our society these days.

Though I was surprised to read that very few people talk to him. I always chat up the taxi or uber or lyft drivers. You will meet the most fascinating of people.

The Nigerian Uber driver who also runs a West African Chamber of Commerce to facilitate trade and business among the local immigrant population. The motorhead Uber driver who explained to me how to drive a motorcycle from Atlantic City to Philadelphia in under 45 minutes. The Lyft driver who was in school getting a masters degree in physics. The taxi driver who is a fanatical Chelsea fan and almost comes to the bar with you on a Sunday morning to watch the games, but can't quite do it because the last time he did that they lost.
Iron law of wages? I thought that debate was over a hundred years ago, together with all the Malthusian doomsday predictions. I guess I was wrong.
Satellite Maker Planet Labs Acquires BlackBridge's Geospatial Business
There is also http://eudyptula-challenge.org/ which might help in familiarising with the codebase in sequential steps.
I'll promote your project then - http://www.mapdb.org/ - this kind of "competition" is what makes OSS so right
Nice "not-planets" montage by Emily Lakdawalla here:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/0714133...
couldn't be open source projects a good example? almost everybody contributes remotely.
Why couldn't work the same way for private software ?
I see that could be a confidence problem and effort mesure problem because it's hard to mesure effort in number of lines of code or commits, even user stories, right ?
Don't listen to politics in the comment. Here are some real life examples:

I am married and have 2 kids. I got a gold plan through the marketplace for $1250 a month. I got no subsidies since I make more than is required. It's a pretty good plan but expensive.

My last job which was pre-obamacare they were deducting $450 a month every 2 weeks for just my wife and I. So nothing really changed for me.

On a sidenote my cousin is low income and she got a killer plan through obamacare for 75 a month. So now she can afford to go to the doctor and not "walk it off" :-)
Inside VMTurbo’s Newly Expanded Downtown Office- Check Out the Photos
"Most importantly: how do I best stand up for my own interests here, without being the asshole that ruins the deal for everyone?"

You're one of the few people with the experience and know how to take the product quickly to whatever direction the new owners will want to take it. That's worth money.

That would be the angle I would play if I were you.

How much it's worth is a trickier question. Personally I think it's worth a premium, but only if your company doesn't have lot of people with the same expertise and assuming they want to keep developing the product.

If it's a pure acquihire situation, the product and your equity in it has no value. Your value is what value you personally bring to the company.
My 3rd Year in the App Store: Highlights and Numbers
I signed up.

The link to terms on the subscription confirmation page is broken. There's an extra slash at the end.
How tight are your schedules? How much do you overcommit developer resources? How much do your salespeople promise that you can't realistically do?

I just left a position where remote was impossible because of the workload. The office culture had strict hours, and developers were expected to work on new projects AND bug fix tickets at the same time. (They would tell the architect "You can use these 2 good developers this week" and then tell the developers "You can't work on the architect's project this week, you have to do bug fix tickets.")

Essentially, a remote culture is a more laid-back culture. It's about herding the cats...not about herding cattle, or milking cats.
> We can't get it without shipping. Don't quote prices that are impossible to achieve.

This, exactly.

When I first glanced and thought "Oh, $150 a year? That's not too bad." Then I looked closer and saw the shipping cost was extra.

It's not that the extra shipping cost was necessarily prohibitive, it's just that there's some sort of psychological effect (sticker shock, I guess?) where you think you know what the price of something is, and are disappointed to learn that's not really the price at all.
Didn't see that one coming.

Except, there was this: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/07/10/new-ipod-touch-nano-shuf...
I would echo this point, our remote team has hired good and bad and it's a lot more about the people and less about being remote.

It does seem that remote works shines light on the core of a team members work ethic and productivity.
Its an Overton Window issue.

Open offices are a bad idea but at the "Popular" stage of the fad its possible for both sides of the argument to rationally discuss open offices.

The idea of intentionally creating noise drifts into the "Unthinkable" range of the window so its not even possible to debate, the only people who can speak are the folks who like it loud and distracting and the quiet people are literally speechless. Honestly I find the idea of an intentional noisemaker as trolly or something loud people would use to tease or punish people they know don't like noise.

I guess the only comment I can make is someone needs to make a parody of the parody noise generator for riot background, crying baby, next door neighbors having sex, random gunfire/arty/mortars, low flying jet aircraft, and boom car background sound generators. How about a die grinder machine cutting steel at 20Krpm? The sound of a chainsaw clearcutting a forest. Or the sound of a refugee camp? Because if a little distraction is good, and a lot is better, then huge amounts must be awesome. Just like adding salt to cooking.
Coding Epiphany: How I spend my time coding
These days?

I think it's always been like that, and these days we're starting to recognize that introversion isn't a deficiency, it's just how some people are wired (and doesn't necessarily equate to "shy" or "awkward")
I've used older 256GB crucial SSD's, and they're fast, but that laptop eventually developed stability problems. After I stopped using that laptop, I found info on the TRIM problems seen in some SSD's. This is a long but excellent article from Adam Surak at Algolia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723066

I'm not sure if the "trim list" link in the article (libdata-core.c) is current or not, but it's worth reading:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/e64f638483a21105c7ce3...

Unfortunately, the product name "CT512MX100SSD1" in your Amazon may not match what the device actually reports to the OS.
In the long run, an increase in minimum wage doesn't really raise the standard of living. In the late 1960's, the minimum wage was at it's highest inflation adjusted rate in history. Just a few years after that, as the effect of those wages propagated throughout the economy, we hit our highest non wartime rate of inflation of the 20th century.
The surface pro is not running on Atom processors, it uses the UltraLowvoltage versions of i3-i5-i7
I forgot to add that one thing that benefited me from obamacare is that my wife was pregnant at the time and we didn't get penalized for a "pre existing" condition and the plan covered a lot of the pregnancy cost. Without it I would have been in the whole for $10k or more.
You're paying for no lease. You can get a 3-10 person office in a downtown SF with no lease. No other place offers that.