skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Boils down to, of the 18 XFN relationships, only rel-contact and rel-me is being used. For those of you that never heard of XFN, http://gmpg.org/xfn/intro, http://gmpg.org/xfn/11

I'm not sure I entirely agree. On one hand, I agree with author that that at this stage, XFN needs to stick to simple, and just have rel-contact and rel-me will work for quite some time, as it gets adopted. However, on the other, I've always found social networks' descriptions of my relationships to people wanting, because it isn't binary. I don't want all my friends on facebook to see everything I do. Even with limited profiles, I resort to rejecting acquaintances.

Rather than specific roles in the XFN relationships, like rel-sweetheart, or rel-colleague, it might be easier to specify a degree of intimacy rather than the actual role, because unless you're building a genelogy tree through XFN, I would venture to guess that when an application imports a contact list, it mainly cares who they are, and how intimate you are with them so it can set privacy measures correctly.
I had the opposite reaction: a negative article making blanket statements. The guy is angry. In my experience, anger does not usually create wisdom.
They don't need to but it succinctly highlights the fact that there are two different ways of commenting code in Python.
Great stuff, way to go Peter and Immad!
Steve Jobs earns $1 a year though

Well, yeah, but god knows what he makes in bonuses, and his stock options are out of control. Not to mention the stock he owns, and its rising value (the past month notwithstanding).
http://www.zeitstudios.com does a good job adapting to the feel one's attempting to achieve. (I don't work there)
See what YC gives you and what they get:

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html
How much do you invest?
Usually $5000 + $5000 per founder. So $15,000 for two founders, $20,000 for three. Occasionally we invest more. The goal is usually to give you enough money to build an impressive prototype or version 1, which you can then use to get further funding.

What does Y Combinator get out of this?
Stock in the startup, from 2-10% of it. Usually about 6%.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9256

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18026
This is awesome. It should definitely be converted to HTML and hosted publicly. I'll rummage through the .pdf in the mean time.
Can you go by again and take a pic?
MOST of the teams in the current crop that I know of (ours included) have someone on the team who is a fair shake at design. Another way to say this is that "most startups don't have room for specialists".

If you want my opinion, design is not a "coat of paint" to be applied after the fact. User experience (UX) design should be baked into how you make your product.
It really depends on the state of the company and potential earn outs, etc. So it is completely dependent on the situation.

I have personally taken less than market value. I would never do that again. I would suggest that a founders value is much higher to the acquiring company than it is to the market. Hence a higher market value. On the other hand you are worth what you negotiate. Their job is to negotiate the best deal for themselves.

Make sure that there are escape clauses if your liquidity depends on a promised liquidity event. Mine has not happened yet and may never happen. Also if earn outs depend on anything outside of your control make sure that if those events don't happen your earn out goals are adjusted accordingly. We missed an earn out by less than 10% . The acquiring company did not sign deals they committed to signing that would have facilitated at least 30% toward the earn out. Ouch.
What's your position after the acquisition? CEO? Lead Developer? Founders shouldn't get too much special consideration-- they should be paid a fair rate for the position they'll be filling.

Presumably the extra consideration for your startup is baked into the cash/stock part of the deal.
Peter Nixey: The UK's prodigal son, no? Congratulations to Clickpass. Looks like a good service.
There are also tax reasons to heavily overweight his compensation in stock options. See IRC § 162(m)
http://www.cuoma.com does good jobs too. They are very professional.
How an information system helped nail Eliot Spitzer and a prostitution ring
I'm a designer myself and I lean towards very simple layouts focusing purely on the text/content and using it as the framework of the site, not shoving content into the framework. It tends to be better from a usability standpoint, SEO, and even aesthetically. Less is more.

This is probably my favorite article on the topic:
http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typogra...
Congratulations to Drew, Arash and Aston! As a happy user of Dropbox, I'm glad to see more people get a chance to use it.
"I mean, most of the algorithms described are already implemented by libraries for the most famous languages."

Not everyone's so lucky as to lack a Not-Invented-Here syndrome and a drive for using esoteric languages and know how the "non-trivial" librairies are implemented.
Good strategy. Without someone on the team you have to conract out:

http://ourdoings.com/2008-02-12
Mathematicians Model Social Voting — What Scheme Works Best?
I'm afraid we'll have to do much more than just breaking your legs for a 100 trillion debt...
Hey! I actually wrote this article, so I wanted to make a point -- angry is the very last thing I am.

Other than not really having any context to be angry within (I am not speaking about any startup in particular), I generally agree that anger doesn't make innovation.

My point was that many young entrepreneurs have strong misconceptions about what it means to build a business. Every single one of those points are things I have heard from other entrepreneurs, things they -wish- they had known when they first started.

The point is not to discourage people from building business', that's absolutely ludicrous. The point is to get people to see what they are doing without the rose colored glasses and to bring up some common traps that entrepreneurs the world over fall into.

If you have been in business for any length of time, I am sure you realize that putting yourself in perspective is absolutely crucial to your success.

Cheers!
I tried half a year program of doing small game server rentals instances. Not reselling, exactly, but providing slices of (good-priced) dedicated servers.

Very low margins, lots of support headaches, lots of competition.

It probably depends on the strength of your niche. We had a semi-big brand name to bank on, and, even if we had thousands of customers, it wasn't going to pay off much in the long-run because of the market saturation and low profit.

If you have some really solid provisioning technology, a strong niche, volunteer support staff (or a PROVEN automated support model), then you can shave some more profit out of it and make it successful.

YMMV, of course. The best entrepreneurs succeed where others fail, so you may want to pursue it.
But how many ways does have of hanging or crashing?
Rather than "fight", I think I'd humbly suggest something more in line with market rates, and if that fails, become much more aggressive on the escape clauses, and shortening the vesting schedule dramatically...they might even do the math and realize you plan to leave as soon as possible if they don't value you as an employee post-acquisition. Of course, if the acquisition makes you rich, by your definition of rich, and not just on paper in the form of options in another startup or slow-growing established company, I wouldn't worry too much about compensation.
"If you want my opinion, design is not a "coat of paint" to be applied after the fact. User experience (UX) design should be baked into how you make your product."

So true !
Since the web came along, design has been hijacked by graphic designers - "coat of paint" - whilst important, its really just one part of design (perhaps the easiest) - UX is sooo much more.
"... 'You're brilliant? We're hiring. Come work at Google,' ...'I found an idea, and I can go to Google and have a demo in a month and be launched in six.' ..."

So is spruiking for new-hires the point of the article?
Because of Utu's resounding success as a replacement for IRC, it now does HTTP! Oh wait...
How well does this work with large binary files? (I'm not interested in using this to share DVD rips, I work with legacy blob databases at my day job at the salt mines which are usually several hundred MB in size)
Seconded. I recently read 'The Undercover Economist'. I kept thinking that everyone in every field needs some grasp of basic economics.
Web Conferences: Where's the outrage?
Thanks for taking the initiative - works very well on the iPhone. I'd ask you to do the recently added 'comments' stream but I'm afraid (ok, certain) that it would make me use the interface more (which is bad in a way - I have 8aweek on my computer(s) limiting access)
These are two questions really - is discounting the salary in your situation normal ? and should you do something about it ?

The answer to the first question is a "no". Slightly below market average is OK, but taking, say, a 20% hit is not.

Whether to fuss or not really depends on how much you are getting out of the actual acquisition. Just do the math. Assume you are going to stay with an acquirer for 2 years, add up what you will not be getting in salary and compare that to what you get from the deal.

All in all though .. this sort of an attitude is unhealthy and you should not endorse it. There could be two reasons for it:

# they think they are making you a favor

# the deal is so marginally beneficial for them, that the size of the salary makes a difference

In either case, I would be prepared for further surprises.
Could have at least used a dict.

Makes me want to do one of these now though.
For those that want to experiment with the KML file you can download it at http://www.sharcmedia.com/kml/PatentsPerMillion2.kml

Regarding a finer grained heat map it would be cool, but I couldn't find any finer grained data (eg. by US Postcode) on the USPTO site.
I can't seem to get this to work on news.yc, at least with my self-hosted OpenID (http://openid.dfranke.us). I go through my portal and then the Clickpass portal and get redirected back to a news.yc closure URL, but it just gives me a blank page and doesn't log me in.
Actually, it didn't for me. I click on "log in", then click the Clickpass drop-down, type in my own OpenID, it goes through to MyOpenID and verified that.

Then it takes me to the "merge with your existing Hacker News account", and I type my correct username/password, but then I get redirected back to News.YC and a blank page at something like http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=j3tO1pS8ox
Experience in a company is not nearly as valuable as you might think. It mainly teaches you to deal with BS and politics. You can probably do without that skillset.

You'll learn far more from working for yourself and trying to grow your business than from putting up with crap at your internship Unless you happen to have some awesome mentors at work, it's not worth it.

QUIT! Focus your energy on your business and on meeting like minded people. Want to interact with people? Find user groups meeting in your area, do some hacking at Starbucks, find some conferences and attend some sprints, hang out here when you get bored.
Ask YC: How many of you have Blogs?
Many users have a lot of different interests so I'd like to check out your blogs and add some of them to my RSS reader.
If I stumbled across it on the net I wouldn't assume it was made by a spammer. I think form follows function beautifully.
" "We also have people do things like Snippets. Every Monday, all the employees write an email that has five to seven bullet points on what you did the previous week. Being a search company, we take all the emails and make a giant Web page and index them."

I heard about this (from Batelle's book?) a while ago and thought what if more companies did it - at the end of every week publish a list of what you accomplished..then I realized most people would be scared because it makes everyone accountable for producing something. Nowadays, we do scrum at our company now so it wouldn't be a stretch.
Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: a Rosetta Stone
seems more like www.instapaper.com to me...
Used to run http://waziwazi.com, a blog on robotics. I haven't found much time to update it now though.
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/ <-- mostly FreeBSD related, but some of it is of more general interest.
They (Electric Pulp) also did Truemors and Alltop, which I can't speak highly of for the amount it cost.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134252
This is an interesting idea. It's a variation of intelligent betting. However it seems that mods with mainstream interests will end up with huge karmas, while those interested in more quirky subjects will not get any.
A friend of mine had this same issue
You might have better luck with just referring your contacts to LT and getting a referral bonus. You certainly can't compete with other providers on price (chances are you're a lot less efficient so your costs are higher) and definitely can't compete on service (since it seems LT will handle all issues, or your clients will call you and you'll have to call LT).

The only advantage I see is that you know the clients and they might trust you even if you can only provide less service and for more money than other alternatives.

The web hosting market isn't as bad as it sounds. Sure, there are hundreds of providers, but just ask around and you'll see the same handful of names coming up over and over again. The remaining are often people like you that decided to get into hosting to make a little money.
Very interesting reply; you are right of course.
I have two blogs http://theperfectbalance.blogspot.com and http://yourteamonline.blogspot.com
How would you make this better?
Is it a good idea to incorporate your startup in a tax haven country?
I understand that there are many tax implications before and after your company is acquired. So isn't a good idea to form a legal company in a country like cayman island to begin with and save tons on taxes?
Google-DoubleClick may bode well for Microsoft-Yahoo deal
Here's an idea. Please bear with me for a moment, I'll explain how it's related to the karma.

The system could group users based on their voting patterns and account for these grouping when computing a point score of the submission for specific user. For example, if A, B and C are voting up and down same articles, then if A votes something up, this should mark it up in B's and C's view in some fashion.

It is a form of a dynamic interest profiling, which should increase per-user quality of the top articles. This way karma can be an indication of how compatible you are with a general population .. though it wouldn't be karma strictly speaking.

Thoughts ?
Used correctly, this could speed up some web apps by helping them to avoid ajax calls back to the server.
You should; be sure to post the fruits of your efforts online for everyone else.
thanks for the thoughts.

Does anyone know if Google Calendar supports invites from other systems? Outlook for instance.

Lots of lawyers with black berries as clients, but few tech savy ones.
you don't by any chance work with me on a new venture? Less -is- more and I need someone who can help me/us there ;)
I have one at http://www.empoweringhealthykids.com (news, info and tips on childhood health) and I contribute about once a month to http://www.sharcmedia.com
Think Looking for Coding and Marketing Interns
Think Computer, my company, is looking for two types of interns: coders who might be interested in working on some PHP/MySQL software that's already in progress, and marketing people who would be interested in doing what it takes to sell it. We're located in Palo Alto, CA one block away from Stanford.

Send resumes and a short description of why you're interested to aarong at thinkcomputer.com.

Disclaimer: Think Computer Corporation is not funded by and not associated with Y Combinator.
Ask YC:  Do you feel bad when some users spend way too much time on your site?
I know it's a strange question but I'm curious.
Thanks for the quick summary and the link.
These are too complex for the need.
I could hack one down to the right size, but I'd rather not be in the barber support business.
If someone were spending all their time on http://dfranke.us, I'd not so much feel bad for them as be rather scared and probably call the cops.
As a practitioner, I'm going to chime in and agree completely.

Shaw has created a merit badge sash of crypto exotica: Needham-Shroeder key exchange (oh, sorry, "ISO IEC 48798783 without the Helsinki vulnerability"), a bizarro block cipher mode, a custom PRNG, and no explanation whatsoever of the motivation behind his choices. Of course, this is all just libtomcrypt under the hood, which probably explains the showy idiosyncrasy.

You'd be able to take something like this more seriously if Zed "So Fucking Awesome" Shaw had ever contributed any findings against TLS, or even SSH. But that would be Hard, Harder than "fighting the cargo cults" --- people much more demonstrably competant than Shaw have already shaken the bugs out of TLS.

Generally, I find Shaw's arguments and reasoning about security unconvincing. For instance, there's a place in that article where he argues that "binary protocols have fewer buffer overflows" --- he might as well just write "I don't pay attention to vulnerability research". He seems to believe that Ragel, an obscure regex-modeled lexer, is a talisman against vulnerabilities. His "Hate" protocol assumes that attackers originate from single sources, not from armadas of compromised machines.

Sigstoat isn't the first person to comment on this "top 10 list of signs of bad security" --- this is a point Schneier makes, often.
Follow up to YC Designers, Can You List More?
I really like the designers listed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134703

Can you please list even more designers? I would really really appreciate it! Thanks!
All due respect, but the "security through obscurity" argument went out the window when Shaw published his source. His propaganda is fair game, and sigstoat is right.
The acquisitions I've seen typically have the following components to the compensation package to negotiate before closing:

* Salary (should be market for your new skills and position)

* Retention bonus (usually paid out over 1-2 years)

* Conversion of equity (either to cash or to new stock)

The above depend a bit upon the acquiring company. If you are acquired by a large public company, then you should expect a competitive salary, reasonable bonus to keep you around, and some combination of cash-out and new stock to keep you strategically aligned. If you are acquired by another smaller company then your salary may be lower (but fair for that size of company), bonus may be given in stock, and your equity package is probably pretty flexible depending upon how long they want to you to stay.

As a founder, I took $1/yr salary with the expectation that I'd get a market rates when we secured funding. As an acquisition I negotiated what I thought were fair market rates for salary and stock in the new company with a bonus to keep me happy to stay. When acquiring companies we would offer competitive salaries, retention bonuses (stock, cash, or both) for people we wanted/needed to keep around, and stock conversion (we were public by that point).

In your specific case, I believe that your salary should be market rate for your skills and your new position. The acquisition price is independent of your salary and should be treated as such.
Getting closer to an answer
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=...

Looks like I can invite anyone, but still not sure if anyone can invite the google calendar.
If Zed Shaw was interested in having people review his weird chat protocols, he'd probably:

* Document them without the "mixture of humor, ranting, code, and specification language." The "specification language", presuming it's not in something Zed invented (like Stackish franken-sexps), would do nicely.

* Use well-understood, well-tested primitives, and where he deviates (ECC might be mainstream, but CCM and Needham-Schroeder public key exchange aren't), explain why.

* Describe things in terms of the cryptosystem and the goals, instead of using the least intelligible, most intimidating acronyms he can come up with (seriously, "ISO/IEC 11770-3 Mechanism 6"?).

You're exactly wrong, of course. Zed's using CCM, and an evaluator would want to know what properties his system expects to achieve from doing so. Talking about CBC (or CBC-MACs) would make him look more savvy. Instead, we get "I’ve decided to send it back as Er(Nr) but I’m not sure of the security of this."
"... There is. Duplicate URLs are not allowed ... There is a subtler variation on this. Two different urls resolving to the same article ..."

Here is an live example I just spotted:

original ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html ~ post ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133430

dupe ~ http://paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html ~ post ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134775
alright, I figured it out.
Set up a gmail account for the barber.
Set up a standard email request on his site.
They click the button sending him the request.
gmail is smart enough to recognize key words (like event) and tag them.
Right click to add them to his calendar.
gives him "approval" rights
allows anyone to email a request for a specific time.
shared calendar can limit everyone to free / busy to keep privacy clean.

good suggestion.
I'm going to give it a go.
http://aaroneous.tumblr.com <-things that go through my head that others may find interesting. :]
Your name doesn't seem familiar, but I am open to new ventures if you'd like to contact me. My email is in my profile.
My favorite quote about the Axiom of Choice[1]:

"The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the Well-Ordering Principle is obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn's Lemma?"

Of course, AOC, WOP, and ZL are all logically equivalent.

[1] Possibly the nerdiest thought my brain has ever formed; this site makes me very happy.
Reminds me of my favorite quotation:

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
-- STEVE JOBS
in PDF
The underlying muni's aren't faulting, right? You're losing liquidity, not assets --- why are people taking writedowns on these?
ratemycop.com: New Website Has Police Furious
The buxfer version is actually much more functional as well. It allows you to reply as well as vote stories.
I was the CTO of a company that was recently acquired. Before the acquisition I was being paid less that a Sr. developer should (my primary role), and way less than a CTO should be.

Post acquisition I was given a raise to above what a Sr. dev. would make, but less than a CTO. Coupled with the acquisition price, I'm very happy, and my stress level is lower.
Are you on twitter?
I'm starting to love using Twitter. There is something liberating about the constraints.

I'm @tipjoy

http://twitter.com/tipjoy
Website apparently was taken down. Here's the google cache:
http://209.85.207.104/search?q=cache:M5rAytKxvkUJ:ratemycop....
Viacom can't seek punitive damages from Google
Empirically the answer seems to be no.
I worry about it, yes. Particularly when the user is me.
TIOBE Programming language popularity
Ruby back in top 10
Wal-Mart drops $200 Linux PC--lack of interest