skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The great Devin Hunt of Fuzzwich.com (with contributions from the also-great Laurence Honderick of Fuzzwich). It's amazing, isn't it?

Was it only the visual design that you liked or did you like the workflow/feel of it too?
Good book? I haven't read any decent sci-fi in awhile (last good one was re-reading John Scalzi's Old Man's War series) and I've been looking to read some more of the genre.
I hadn't heard the "pea in a football field" one. As a former marching band geek who knows well how big a football field is, that definitely helps get some perspective.
Why do I think this belongs on Hacker News? Because 1) this poem itself is one crazy hack of densely packed meaning within meaning and 2) the site is the best of all lit resources I've seen online, period. If you want to be a great hacker, you've got to know how people think around you, and to do that you've got to understand our culture.

Why this poem matters: If you've read a significant number of classics, you'll notice we've recently undergone an extraordinary change in the way we view reality. This poem is about the fall out of this shift and where we are going next. However, the cultural currents are not something you can just say explicitly. They have to be experienced to be understood, and that is what this poem is for.

Website background: If you've read the Wasteland before, you probably know the poem is basically a collage of reference upon obscure reference to classical and contemporary poetry. Very confusing, yet mysteriously intriguing, for the literary novice like myself.

This kind soul has done a very good job hyperlinking all these references to their sources.
I just went through a three week gauntlet of interviews (~10 companies who each do at least 3 1-hour interviews). This slide set is pretty accurate in terms of what to expect but I'd weight the API's/language/philosophy sections down a bit. I only got a few language questions and absolutely none about development philosophies (except for maybe "emacs or vim?"). Algorithms & data structures are what you should be studying. Puzzles too but that's more about doing a lot -- you can't really study per se.
2 year olds have not reached the age of reason. Reasoning with them only gets you a restatement of their desires without any logical context whatsoever:

Daddy, I want to play over there! Son, there's a constant stream of cars going by at 40mph, you will die instantly or be hurt worse than you can possibly imagine. But I WAAANNNT TOOOO...

Spanking (when administered carefully and without angry reaction) seems to be a valid form of behavior modification for a creature that does not have any reasoning ability because it allows aversion to be stored directly in the same part of the brain that is motivating desire. Its probably better to reason with a 9 year old than spank but as the parent states, anyone who thinks that a 2 year old can reason, doesn't have one.
Dude, what's the deal with the Donald Rumsfeld-like statements (known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns)? See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126828

I like the thoughts, but personally don't think they belong on Hacker News. If they do impart great words of wisdom, some evidence from the startup world would be nice, right?
We are using GWT ... in particular GWT-Ext which stands on the shoulders of the Ext JS library. It is an amazing environment to develop in ... and the UI is slick.

The google folks have done a great job putting the core of GWT together. For me, it is the most interesting framework in the Java playground for front end development ... the productivity gain compared to traditional java web frameworks is working out really nicely for us.
Entrepreneurship in Michigan: Nerds & rich people
That's very interesting, thank you. But how does one go about partnering up with specific sites like New Egg or Tiger Direct?
Exhaustive unit and integration testing - our testing is sparse and only for things that need it worst

Agreed, and I don't think we suffer for it.

Something we do that has a bigger bang-for-buck imho is a lot of monitoring. Just about every one of our live systems gets automatically and regularly tested to make sure it's always working. I sleep better for knowing this.
The Female Eric Schmidt
Thanks, staticshock. We're aware of it. That's Opera in Windows, right? We've seen it work fine in Opera on the Mac.
I twitter, but I have to agree, the Pownce API is brilliant. I already blog, and I stopped tumbl-ogging because of twitter, but I might just start to use pownce in lieu of twitter...

Sure twitter is designed for something different than pownce, but I dont have unlimited time in a day to update like 5 different sites. Not to mention my facebook status! ;)
Of course, don't overexercise...like running 10 miles at track practice after sleeping 2 hours the night before because you were programming for that big project of yours?

Ah, the joys of being a hacker.
I heard that Roleof Botha of Sequoia is also a straight-forward, respectable person.

You can also check out The Funded (www.thefunded.com) for more info.
Most of the "evidence" for autism caused by vaccines is statistical manipulation, anecdotes, and scare-mongering. There is perhaps a very remote chance of a correlation but its almost certainly a case of "When I changed the windshield wipers on my car the AC quit. You wiper-villains owe me a new AC!" When bad stuff happens, people desperately grasp for a simple cause they can understand.

Get vaccines. Not only is it the responsible thing to do for your own children, it is the socially responsible thing to do for everyone else's children as well.
so, if i tell you (and provide evidence) that I am a parent of a 2 year old, will you concede the point? or if i produce other such parents of toddlers who agree with me, will you concede?
I seem to remember Emotional Intelligence being strongly against ferberization. Not positive though. In any event I'd recommend taking a quick look through the relevant journal articles to make sure you aren't going to be stunting your children's emotional development.
The Ferber method involves leaving your child, alone, even if he's crying. And you do it for progressively longer periods of time no matter how unpleasant he finds it.
The reagents are extremely expensive and the computational requirements of the assembly require access to a cluster.
I wonder how much shared accounts complicate recommendation engines like these. My wife and I both use the same account for netflix and for amazon purchases. I can't imagine that an outsider looking at our movies and purchases could make much sense of it.
Agreed, spanking is viable as long as the child is still young. Also, it should only be done on the flat of the palm or on the buttocks, and not too hard. The goal isn't to inflict pain, but to send the child a message that what he did was wrong.

The kid will most likely cry even though your hitting his/her hand will not really hurt. Its the fact that you're hitting them that they don't like, cause its a negative connotation.

Aside from it, lots of love and affection! Kids need attention while they're young or they'll claim you're a bad parent. They need affirmation.
IHateCamelCase
What criterion did you use for determining which are the best places to hit children?
Help out the Lisp newbies everywhere.
I've heard the praises of lisp long enough from enough smart people now to know that as Akhmechet states, there must be something there.

I wish to walk the path of the masters but I know not the first step! There are so many Lips dialects and variations, I can't even figure out how to set up the environment.

What I want is to simply set up my centos server with apache that I currently use for perl development to hello world through apache with lisp.

1) What lisp dialect works best for web programming? Where should I get it?

2) Is there anything special that I need to do to httpd.conf? Any apache module I need?

3) I use Kdevelop now for perl and python, is there a better editor for lisp?

4) Are there vast repositories like CPAN for lisp? Where doe one find these?

5) Finally, is there a good guide that contains a lot of concrete examples of basic lisp idioms and best practices?

Sorry if all of this seems redundant but this seems like the place to ask without getting a "what is google broken?", or a "do you want a fortran manual as well?" response.

I hope that there are others out there in my situation who can benefit from the answers as well.
Woz finds flaws in Apple's latest offerings
you know. the first course of the computer science degree at my undergraduate university (rice). was a lisp course. and though i wasn't one of the many who griped and groaned about working in something other than c/c++ or java, five years later and i'm only starting to appreciate the perspective it's given me.
First spam felony conviction upheld: no free speech to spam
Nah, it's just that the karma doesn't mean anything to me, I'd come back with a different account.
and plus, having started and failed at 5 startups, you learn a lot! your chances for the 6th one will definitely be higher than 10%.
It's risky in the sense that the chance of a meaningful payoff is much smaller. I don't mind living on ramen for a while if it made the "dream" tangible.

If the difference between a founder and an employee were, say, 5x to 10x the equity, being an employee may make sense, but if it's 100x-400x range it just makes the employee stock options look pathetic.
Very much so: job ads.
Further confirmation that you have not tried to reason with 2 year olds.

Hitting children for discipline is a touchy subject because without a proper motivation behind it, it becomes very inhuman. However, sometimes a child doesn't have a large enough sense of the world to be rational.

For instance, "don't stray very far from me" is a very reasonable command to give to a child because of safety concerns. However, what does a child know about kidnappers, careless drivers, or even the feeling of being lost? The child has to have some experience of these things (not direct, could be through stories, etc) in order to be able to reason why parents give that command. Because you don't have 3 years to explain to the child about the world, you have to have a more direct way of making them obey, and it is hard to think of a better way. Most of the ones you can think of involve some form of pain for the child because humans respond the most to pain first (and reasoning as an afterthought). The non-pain alternatives include letting your child do whatever they want to and take the consequences themselves, spending a lot of time enlarging their sense of the world, or making sure they understand that you mean to do good for them. Granted, nothing is perfect in parenting, and you really have to work with what you're given - that said, if your child won't listen to something that affects their wellbeing, you need to give them a reason to listen.

Discipline is also only a part of parenting. You need to give them love, praise, and someone to look up to. Children dislike their parents when discipline is the only thing they remember when growing up. I want my kids to remember me when growing up, not as a family figurehead, but as a role model for them to grow into or beyond.
I'm not sure how the equity is currently divided, but these are very good questions, thanks. The company had an A round and it has about 10-15 employees.

I should have said that founders are exposed to greater risk in the very early days of the company, but afterwards the chance of meaningful financial payoff for employees becomes much smaller. Most startups won't be the next Google or Ebay, and I think they should take that into consideration when incenting their employees with stock options.
I'm not really a VC. There's no specific name yet for what YC does, but it's closer to angel investing than VC. VCs are fund managers. That makes life very different for them.
Been lurking here for awhile, but this article compelled me to finally register. It's the best introductory article I've ever read for any language. The XML analogy instantly illuminated the basic Lisp ideology for me, and it's a great example of how seemingly obscure language concepts can make immediate sense when presented in a familiar way.
Microsoft's Google-killer strategy: Finally on the way?
If you get to a decent size you can get sponsorship from companies and sell your own ads. They'll just be images/text on your site with a link to their site, so you can avoid hitting adblock default list. If the the ads are for good products people might even appreciate them.
University of Va. student, hackers crack credit card security code
The biggest problems in healthcare are bureacratic, but something has to be said about the mindset of doctors, too. They seem to hate change, and right now it seems like the only way the healthcare space will change is through the passing of generations.

No offense to any doctors out there.
> Here is an extreme example to prove a point: I write a business plan and successfully raise money from investors. Then I hire people to do all the work, pay them salary, and give them much less stock than I take. I have the largest employee stake, but haven't done any of the 'real' work (unless you consider fund raising to be the real work).

Since I've actually done both "founding engineering" and "fundraising", I think that I'm qualified to claim that fundraising is real work.

Note that the fundraising created a structure for the engineering to take place. If the engineers feel that the structure is of no value, why did they show up?

Besides, the most likely outcome for fundraising is 0. Founding engineering is almost always compensated. The extra payoff is, in part, compensation for the extra risk.

Don't confuse effort or time with value. Or rather, if you do, make sure that the janitor makes more than you do.
if in that 'extreme example' you're putting the wheels in motion to create that value (i.e. creating a business out of nothing that otherwise wouldn't have existed), you arguably deserve the equity. turns out it's usually not that simple in practice, and most successful founders have to work their asses off and take significant risk.

that said, no one's stopping you from starting something and dishing out equity however you want :)
I would be more worried if real estate was boring and stagnant. Real estate looks bad right now, I'll admit, but oftentimes a shakeup is useful for companies entering the market space. (Decouples people from old methods and products, and also allows for new business processes).
> It seems more reasonable to have a system where ownership is determined by contribution... otherwise there will always be the risk of the opposite: contribution being determined by ownership.

Nothing is stopping you from determining ownership any way you want for your biz.
If you're not a co-founder, it's difficult to rich off of stock options in. It happens once in a while (ebay, paypal, etc.), but not very often.

How many employees does it have, and what's a recent valuation? If it has something like more than 10 employees, a valuation in the 10+ millions, and it's in a great market, it could be reasonable.

Another thing to consider is the overall experience. Would you be learning technologies that are unique, and valuable in the future? Who is involved in this startup, and how valuable are the connections you could make? For instance, if the startup makes ROR apps, you could probably spend your time moonlighting and become competent in the technology yourself.
To all those who commented negatively on the book (and especially the person who voted me down):

Have you actually read it? And have you tried the methods? I have read the book, and can vouch for its methods. Yes, the baby cries, and you have to let it cry. It's not easy. But after a while, the baby stops and goes to sleep. And after a few nights (it took mine ~3 nights, with less crying each night), they learn to fall asleep by themselves.

Believe me, when you have a baby who needs its parents by its side for hours before going to sleep, you might view the book differently.
That's true, but culture, equity, are not tangible. The hours and the effort are very tangible. Startup employees put in a lot of effort, in some cases as much as the founders, depending on the culture. There are few circimstances where you'd want to put in such an effort for a negligible expected reward.
"don't object to making children cry until you've tried it"
Working with actual paying customers on another system I found they liked new features even if the new feature took an hour to develop. I believe the reason is that they felt like they were paying for something when new things were being developed often.

There were times when we didn't develop a new feature in an extended period of time (6 months) and people would just jump ship. They had more then enough features, 7 years worth of development but still if they didn't get there dose of a new feature every once and awhile they were as good as unsubscribed.
Open Cognition Framework Released
I'd say you're just too late to that particular party. Go start your own or find one that's really early (so you can be a 2nd tier founder). Those are the only two options I consider personally.
systems (-8)

I am downvoted
>:)
I can only upvote nodes, so I am not sure how I was downvoted.
Working at a startup is not more risky for employees than for founders.

Consider that the startup you are applying to already has funding (I'm assuming it does, since it sounds like there is already a team). The founders started with nothing but an idea, probably invested their free time to implement v0 and then sold it well enough to attract funding. They could have failed at any time, and would have had nothing except experience and pissed off investors to show for it, not to mention the loss of any personal investment in the firm.

You on the other hand will draw a salary from day 1, and you already have a better idea of the company's trajectory than the founders did when they conceived of the idea. Even if the company goes under, you will have earned $X in addition to the experience gained.

And you have the luxury of not having to worry about how to get funding, sign deals, etc.

If you don't like the risk/reward, the best way to change the equation is to become a founder, or build/lead something so amazing that your rep alone compels startups to offer you a significant percentage.
The "Python Paradox," Redux
Where the rubber meets the rock : tools matter
"working at a startup is riskier for employees than for founders."

That (honestly) is ridiculous. If the founder is taking the standard path, they are going months or years without salaries, oftentimes accumulating debt to do so. When they get a little slice of angel funding, they usually pay themselves pennies so their early hires can get non-insulting salaries.

You seem to assume that a "cash-out" is a foregone conclusion. 99% of startups go belly up. No payout for the founders, "modest" or otherwise.

A fraction of a percent for an engineer is not uncommon. I'd need to know the company size, how far along they are, what sort of salary they are offering, and how senior YOU are to know if it's unreasonable. But for a funded startup offering a non-insulting salary to a relatively junior person, it's common. And (honestly) plenty fair.

What, exactly, are YOU risking as an employee? The 10 minutes it'll take you to go find a new job if the startup flops? Do you know what the founders have on the table? If not, you could probably ask them.

If you want more equity, offer to work for free or ridiculously cheap. Many smart founders will happily trade a little more equity to avoid a monster salary.
Startup pros:

* great people, unique culture

* influence a wide range of issues from tech to office location

* great experience for founding a company later

Note that I didn't include "huge potential financial gain" in that list. A non-founder at a startup really has to value the experience because most likely there won't be a huge financial win. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to negotiate a fair compensation package, but really you are using the opportunity to gain skills and experience to use when founding your own company where you will have more ownership and potential financial gain. If you don't believe that the founders take more risk than the employees now, you will once you found your own company :)

If financial gain is your main goal, you may want to take a serious look at getting into the financing side. This will take a different approach, but good analytical skills plus good networking skills are in high demand. Alternatively, you could go down a more corporate path and aim for senior management at a good firm. I'm not necessarily recommending these paths, but it's worth exploring the alternatives so that you can really appreciate the (in my opinion) extraordinary benefits and privileges of working at a startup.
Woz should be careful not to piss Jobs off... Steve Jobs is really sensitive.
I've tryed few names yesterday and it reports false positives - domain was marked as available while `whois` said it was already taken.
By intent, sure, but it's often used that way. I'm mostly just wary when I hear it used — even though I've used it myself.
Healthcare, as many others here point out, is difficult, bureaucratic, and potentially unstable do to the political climate; however, medicine is no so bad overall. There are medical technologies growing constantly and while it does involve a little more initial investment some of these areas approach "startup" levels of innovation and risk.

I'd suggest there may be more variety on the "healthcare" side the real estate.
Mac OS and Safari marketshare
Web 7 here I come!
Interesting. It hadn't occurred to me that there might be a distinction there. I had always kind of equated VCs with "funds new businesses".
Awesome! Thanks for the link and the name.
For your situation - you are, ultimately, selling yourself not just as an employee but as a package of value contributed to the company. Now, if you are valuable - that means, if you can provide experience, work or code to the company that will drive it forward that not many other people can provide, then yes, you should consider asking for more equity.

Really, its all about selling. You have some goods or services. They want/need it. Is the current deal fair in both parties' eyes? Founders will say all sorts of things like "I bear all the risk", "I've been here since the beginning", and "I've contributed the most work", and many of these things will be true. However, you have cards to play like, "employees need compensation for their efforts", "good hackers are rare" and "I can add value to your company" (we assume you can). There's an argument to be had here about how much employee should get, but really, its all about how you negotiate. You have to show them why you think the deal is unfair to you, and offer up one that you think is more fair to both parties. If you like the deal, just take it. If you don't like the deal enough to take it, offer up your own, and if they reject it, you weren't going to take the original deal anyways.

But I will admit that like everyone else here has said, the negotiation here is skewed heavily towards the founders favor - still try to get what you can.
I think the distinction here is that the YC partners are investing their own money and the VC are funded mainly by limited partners. In the case of Sequoia, Harvard is a huge limited partner. Though I heard there was a dispute between them because Harvard only wanted to invest in Sequoia's US branch and not the foreign ones. I'm not sure how it was resolved.