skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's still a big advantage to holding employee-level stock during an acquisition. Even if you've only ended up with 0.5%-1.5%, that's still enough to pay off a good chunk of your mortgage and put you in a spot where you can start your own business.

In terms of a reasonable retirement plan, it can set you ahead by a decade.

There's also advantages to coming in as a non-founder. You significantly reduce the risk of failure by coming into a startup that's made it to the point where it's hiring and you can chop off a year to a year-and-a-half on the timing of an exit.
> The problem is that more skepticism means less action, and it's obviously very important to act soon.

It wasn't important enough to get the science right the first time....

> None of these news stories call into doubt the fundamental science (global warming is real, man made and has dire consequences)

Actually, they do.

> we've been doing nothing but debate these established facts for the last 20 years.

Actually, during 10 of those years, we've had stable to decreasing temperatures, which CO2 has increased. The models used to argue for global warming don't predict that.

> George Bush (Senior) knew it in 1989

In what universe is Bush an authority that I should accept?

However, by asserting that I should accept him as an authority, you've accepted him as an authority. I'll keep that in mind for future discussions.

What? You're not willing to accept him as an authority?
Outside of fields like "music, theater and writing", the ones MIT is really serious about, it's only fair to hire the very best. In those fields, at MIT you don't get tenure unless you are #1 or 2 in your sub-field (sometimes maybe but very rarely #3).

"Furthermore, it is clear that the value placed on gaining a diverse faculty is not high."

Damned straight: "the very best in their fields" has nothing to do with a "diverse faculty" as defined in this study.

Anyway, we're talking about pretty small numbers here. MIT has 1,003 faculty members, I don't think any departments are significantly/disproportionately larger than say the "average" (MIT has a strong policy of not letting the facility and graduate program of a department get too large because fields tend to go bust, witness aero/astro in the early '70s, nuclear engineering a little later, and EECS at the beginning of this decade; in the sciences physics has seriously declined and chemistry is smaller than it used to be).

So you have to be very careful about drawing conclusions. See the comment by Jack Olson: for many departments the pool of black scholars is nonexistent.

Bottom line of the report, as summarized in this article: MIT may be imperfect in its pursuit of its ideal of meritocracy, and discussion of meritocracy along the axis of "diversity" is discouraged at best.

My comment: Too bad, if you want to play the academic game by different rules, the majority of universities and colleges in the US will be delighted to accommodate you. MIT will never do so.

Or as commentator "mb" put it, "There is no such thing as 'black thermodynamics,' 'women's calculus,' [or] 'hispanic quantum mechanics'".
> The problem with removing the GIL seems to be garbage collection.

I'm not sure this is the real problem; after all, reference counts can be atomically incremented and decremented.

The real problem is that primitive operations in Python (like "foo.bar") cannot safely be performed in C without locking, because you need the hash table to remain consistent while you are doing lookups and/or insertions. This forces you to either wrap all such operations in locks (which has been tried, and slows down the single-threaded case by something like 2x) or reimplement them with lock-free data structures. The latter could be an interesting experiment; you could probably implement a tree-based map using RCU.
Who gives a damn if it's racist, the entire site is a joke!
I know some people still minimize the importance of good design, but it seems particularly important for games. The site that this article is about is http://www.hackwars.net/ and it's very poorly designed. It's simply not exciting or intriguing, even though the game itself sounds interesting.
Well you can of course. It is just a pain to do it.
Not to mention that they're going to need nearly all of the material in order to properly study, so it doesn't make much sense to break it into pieces (at least in the case of the bar exam).
It's a pretty weak paywall: Disable javascript, the article displays fine.

(Aside: Won't that approach - 'hiding' content from visitors - get them penalized by Google?)
Buying topo maps for handheld GPS devices can easily cost more than the device itself. Garmin charges $120 for topo maps of the northeast alone, for a device that costs 100-200.

I've seen a lot of commercial uses for rugged palm pilots too, the special case software for that is probably quite expensive.
I just created this account (and one on startuplinkup) b/c while I didn't mind having my email on the Google Doc, I don't want it sitting on the wiki. According to the User group rights only Admins can delete. Care to help (Startup 155)?
Background story: this game was built for the Amiga by my friend, Rabah, when we were in college in Iraq. He brought together a team of a graphics designer and a music composer and they built an amazing product, but they couldn't sell it due to the economic sanctions on Iraq at the time. Then the Amiga just died after that and the game basically went no where. It was a sad story of a dream that didn't materialize. But now after all these years, Rabah brought the team back together along with new members to port it to the iPhone. More details here: http://babyloniantwins.com/background/
As handsets become cheaper for the computing they deliver, this will become an accepeted norm for specialized software (my computer costs less than 10% of the value of the software on it)
Can you point to anything that indicates a consistent trend towards "big tech companies", especially ones that stay successful for a long time? Relational databases are the only one I can think of at the moment (Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server being the Big-3 here). And note how people are using non-SQL databases to get a lot of things done that were once the domain of relational databases.

(In the data warehouse/OLAP field, don't there continue to be a lot of small and medium players?)

One thing I noted about Microsoft before the Ballmer era was that the secret of Microsoft's success was consistently writing software that basically works. Microsoft in large part "won" by default, too many of its competitors lost that ability (and many would say Microsoft started losing it with Longhorn).

Let me explore this a bit more: I say that there's something fundamentally different between the middle two companies/areas you cite and Oracle's with databases. Oracle has a large core of code it has to keep working. If Sun went poof, the Java ecosystem would continue without much pause. If/when Yahoo goes poof, will anyone significantly outside of it really care?

(I don't know enough about PhotoShop to comment on it, and while it's non-trivial to become a big search engine, enough companies continue to try at something like Google's scale (e.g. Yahoo, Microsoft ... and look at Wowd for a disruptive attack on the problem) that I'm not too worried as of yet. Ah: PhotoShop is a sticky application, switching to another vendor is expensive, search is not. Advertising is in between.)

I think it's more than new markets. E.g. Java was aimed at one new market (appliances), released for another (web browsers), but ended up being wildly successful in the second oldest (data processing; only number crunching is older ... and Sun is addressing that with Fortress in the Java ecosystem).

Search was not a new market when Google appeared on the scene, e.g. it replaced AltaVista for me. This is a field where creative destruction can renew a sector instead of just replacing it.
I can vouch for this from personal experience. If you aren't getting a percentage comparable to one of the founders, then you shouldn't settle for anything less than near-market salaries.

Startups bring on employees for their expertise. You should be compensated appropriately for it...especially if you're facing as much uncertainty and risk as the founders without the potential for a big payout.

Also, when negotiating and judging a compensation package, remember that few startups have successful exits. Most of the time - statistically speaking - those options will end up being worthless. Salary (i.e. cash) has little risk associated with it.
Since he never answers the most burning question ("how much equity should I expect?"), I'll throw out some numbers based on my experience:

If you're being hired as a C-level executive, you might expect up to 2% - 3%. If you're being hired as an engineer, expect more like 0.25% - 0.5%. I'm sure it varies quite a bit, but that's what I've seen personally and heard from friends.
I agree completely, I think that the site for HackWars (which I happen to be partially responsible for maintaining) is a horrible usability failure. We went with the Drupal CMS early on, which has a template system that, with my limited CSS skills, I find really annoying to work with -- I've tried a couple times to enlist someone with a panache for design and usability to rework the website, without any real success. Having said this I'll attest to the fact that the game is neat.

Look What You've Set in Motion ;)

[8:39:32 PM] johnny_heart: Internet people are really ragging on our shitty drupal theme.

[8:39:45 PM] johnny_heart: I sure agree that it looks like balls.

[8:39:55 PM] draconisravenix: Why do you think I said that in my Twitter.

[8:42:31 PM] johnny_heart: honestly I'd love to basically have your template rather than ours ;)

[8:42:38 PM] johnny_heart: it looks about fifty times better.

[8:42:39 PM] draconisravenix: >:D

[8:42:44 PM] draconisravenix: iWin.

[8:43:07 PM] draconisravenix: I'll get it to HW (with some modifications, small ones) asap.
Two potential problems:

1) I don't recall who it is, but someone who is not google holds a patent (sigh) on using the URL path after the host as the search string.

2) If it was my property to control, I would not want google.com/{*} to accumulate links on the internet. That is to say, before there was google.com/maps, one would expect some people to link to that URL directing their users to search for maps. Now that google is so big, that could be a dicey prospect, because substituting their own property for what would have previously been a search could reasonably be seen as anti-competitive.
Vim Color Scheme Test
You mean the database shards didn't give it away? :P
1. Wouldn't it be better/safer/something if it were easy to find such sites, so that nicer people can know just what they're up against? If I wanted to do something about cockroaches in my house, I'd like to be able to find the cockroaches.

2. karzeem, in another comment, says that the site is within the bounds of free speech. Sincere question from a non-Australian: does Australia have constitutional or otherwise legally protected free speech? In other words, is free speech a strong legal argument in Australia?
I'm pretty sure someone built a Python like that, but it did not work out. Someone whose name I don't recall from the #python freenode channel. I think perhaps C module were one of the issues, or sharing of global scopes (which then need fine-grained locks to synchronized access).

BTW, there's one multi-processing shared objects module here: http://poshmodule.sourceforge.net/
Let me point out something that I meant to emphasize about Silicon Valley that will, I think, continue to be a key to it's health: non-competes are essentially unenforceable in California. This helps the sustaining creative destruction, starting with the first two silicon companies (Shockley Semiconductor -> Fairchild Semiconductor -> a constantly cross fertilizing diaspora).

Yes, another state that has other good SV style characteristics might adopt that, but I suspect none will.
children were probably the ones who created that content in the first place
Yes, I deleted startup155. A solution to this problem may be to enable the deletion of past revisions, I think there is an extension that allows that.
The linked page explicitly asks you to link to the top level: "Do your friends a favor. Link to the front page instead. Thanks!" Which makes more sense anyway. So:

http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/
I guess I can say that's a game with history about history :)
here is a question, do people actually have to go to google.co.au, or does Google redirect them there when they go to google.com?
Java game, drupal default website, pass.
Why does everything jdh does involve so much hate and vitriol?
Bitswiki, a simple but useful wiki using Rails.
No you do it on the browser level. Crome for example when you mistype a domain gives you a 404 page combined with a google search.
Apple's tablet computer to focus on content consumption and content creation?
Google redirects you.
Here's the cool thing about a Java-Applet-based game, it can run OpenGL in your web-browser, that's all I'm saying ;) also, the game was built three years ago, around the time my friends and I were insanely addicted to Runescape in the computer lab at university (this certainly helped drive the technology choice that has been haunting me to this day).
What "evidence" is there to trust, other than Rothbard's amateur philosophizing?
Google redirects you.

Are you writing that from Australia? To the contrary, I find that I can search with any country's version of Google, including non-English versions, from here in the United States.

Could Australian participants confirm or deny the quoted statement? I thought other comments posted to this thread earlier already stated that Australians can search Google from any of Google's national sites.
Thanks Waleed for sharing the story. It has been a long time. Looking back at the old days of hacking software under the sanctions in Baghdad and how our small group was keeping the spirit high with all the sufferings and the lack of infrastructure, it was amazing. Every few months we used to get a photocopy of Byte magazine and/or CGW and circulate it among ourselves and then discuss and analyze every peace in it, that's was our source of energy. Also, I won't forgot when you learned Prolog and wrote a complete class scheduling software on paper when we were without electricity after the first gulf war.
For those interested in the history of Babylonian Twins, you can also check http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwshihab_en.p...
Sorry, I scrolled right past that. Unable to change the submitted link, so thanks for the correction.
Very interesting story from the author. Fun!
It might be a little different than your use case, but Yongfook (another entrepreneur here in Japan) is working on a very nice-looking survey app called Seashell.

http://seashellapp.com/
Governments (courts) also enforce judgments for defamation, but we don't call that censorship either. One way I like to exercise my free speech is to be careful in my use of legal language, and to remind readers here that not every action that keeps something from being Web-indexed or posted, even if it is an action taken by a government, is properly called "censorship." What happened here appears to be Google responding to a citizen complaint under an Australian law that I might indeed disagree with, but which does not constitute a prior restrain on what is published on the Web, and indeed has not stopped the website in question from continuing to be posted.

After edit: Google also removes on its own initiative spam links from its search results. No one seems to complain about this except the spammers. I think that is great customer service, except that Google recently needs to do more of that. That too is not censorship. It is simply Google deciding what its business model is for delivering search results. You have the right to operate a website. Google also has the right to operate a website. Google decides whether or not to comply with applicable local law if there is some legal issue raised by its serving up search results in a particular place. If Google really doesn't like local law, it can use its bully pulpit to advocate a different law, or hire lawyers or lobbyists to change the law.
Not keen on #120 or the rest of that designer's work. The gradients seem to be there just for the sake of being there and aren't subtle. There is little harmony between the icon and the type and the shapes appear too irregular also. Looks okay at a small size.

I like #111 and #44. #111 needs to have a thicker font and different colors. I don't like the tick in #44. #88 is okay but I'd be worried people thought the 'c' was an icon and the app was called Pre Eden. I would prefer if the c symbolized a clock instead. It has shades of Nike. I'd rather the cuts on the 'r' and 'e's weren't diagonal.

#59 and #60 look well and fit the brief but may appear a little generic.
The article says of Consolas: "Too bad it’s not free … if it was, it would be #1 on this list."

Consolas actually can be downloaded for free, legally. If you're on Windows, you can download an installer for the font directly from Microsoft at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22e...

If you're on a Mac, slightly more effort is required. Instructions can be found at:

http://www.wezm.net/2009/03/install-consolas-mac-osx/

Though, actually, you don't have to use the Terminal. You can just right-click the XML File Format Converter installer, "Show Package Contents," and navigate to the font installer package.
How do you motivate basic maths, though? Not everything can be directly connected to drug couriers and what not.

Ultimately I suspect the only way to succeed in maths early on is to consider it to be a kind of game. That is, puzzle solving for fun.
I wouldn't pick one with the name in it. It's a hard name to read, hard name to remember, and makes for an awkward logotype.

I'd go with something conceptual instead. Too bad you didn't contact an actual design shop to do that for you, because none of the presented specimens go in the right direction -- conceptualizing the branding instead of visualizing the rather meaningless (by power of ambiguity) word.

You asked.
Wow, the game says "Babylon" in some many ways. If you heard 1.5 seconds of the sound track you would immediately know it's from Iraq.
Silicon Valley is a lot like Harvard... Why not give yourself the best possible opportunity if you can have it?

Crikey, you are nearly giving me flashbacks to high school. I was speaking to an admissions officer from Harvard and, after answering his questions about myself, he asked me whether I had a question for him. I asked "Well, you know, I probably have a bit of ability to pick where I go to school. Why should I go to Harvard?" I remember his response exactly: "If you can get into Harvard, why would you go anywhere else?"

That line convinced me not to apply, on the theory I'd have to spend four years of my life with people who thought like that. (Which, come to think of it, is one reason I would not love to live in Silicon Valley.)
Ask HN: Anyone have a good accountant?
Hey All,

Tax season is coming up and my partner and I are getting to the point that we need to find someone legit to do our taxes. We have two startups and have worked with many freelancers so we have a ton of questions. Does anyone have anyone they would recommend, preferably in the New York area? I dont know if you need an accountant to be in the same state, but we are technically a New Jersey company.

Thanks. I prefer you post in case this post can help anyone else, otherwise feel free to reach out to me directly.

Leo Efstathiou | leo@groupie.mobi | 404-368-5160
Criticism should always be specific. (And should suggest a way to re-mediate the issue)

No: "You look fat", "You suck at maths", "RTFM"

Yes: "That dress is wrong for your body. It makes you look fat. Try this one", "You need to work on your fractions more - here; I'll help", "Rather than asking it here, this manual over here (link) answers your questions. Try chapter 5"

// I forgot to add a reason. Truth is important. I'm much harsher on those that I love than strangers - the reason is that hearing any truth gives you an opportunity to grow. I never lie to my wife / close friends because I care about them, and not just about their feelings. I'd rather hurt their feelings in the short term, than damage them in the long term.
The only thing that can break that cycle is a carrier that offers decent rates independent of a hardware purchase. This kind of carrier doesn't seem to exist in the US.

T-Mobile charges $20/month less for their "Even More Plus" contract-free plans. That makes it a better deal to buy the unsubsidized Nexus One for $350 more, because you can save $480 over the next 2 years with the same plan as the subsidized phone. And you won't have to deal with ETFs if you need to cancel.
Your last line had me blinking. Is there a mass exodus of Australians to Estonia planned or did you just happen to stumble across my earlier post my plan to do exactly that?
Paper hacking. Respect!

Are you guys still back in Iraq or are you expats now?

Congrats on the game, akh raba7, looks good :-)
I am in Australia. If I type google.com I end up in google.com.au.
Both NYT and WSJ has a product good enough to pay for, but WSJ subscribers are a lot more likely to have their subscription paid by their employer.

Same goes with the Economist, who's doing great at a time where Newsweek and Time face serious problems. IMHO we're entering the age of expense account publications, which will mean quality journalism will have much more limited worldview and target audience.
I don't think advertising for "a paper" will ever be as lucrative as the old paper days, because it's too easy to drift over to the billion other sites on the web.

The old paper days allowed for virtual monopolies because it was physically inconvenient to have more than three or four papers at hand, and most people only had one. It was easier to convince an advertiser that a reader was going to at least glance through every section and be exposed to the ads.

These days I never read a news outlet's site all the way through[1], not in the way I used to sit on the floor on Sunday with paper and coffee. A news outlet has at most two or three articles' chance at getting my eyes to glide over an advertisement. I will never see 99% of what's on a site before I move on to some other site. Google is the only one making money this way.

[1] Except for Hacker News. I think aggregation points the way to where the money is in the future, both aggregation of content and aggregation of ads.
For me, requirements for a good programming font are:

- Easy to distinguish 1, l, and |

- Zero with a slash

- Lowercase g open on bottom (two circles is too cluttered)

Surprisingly, with those simple rules the only font on the list that gets all 3 is Monaco. (My personal choice, Menlo, also gets all 3.)
Outrageously cool. Out of curiosity, did you guys also participate in the Amiga demoscene back then?
Never let reality get in the way of a good moral panic.
And where do you think the LEGAL basis coming from? Thin air? It's backed by and enforced by the Aus government.
To agree with mahmud - Just fired up a chrome incognito window:
Type in www.google.com

Google redirects me to www.google.com.au

There's a link on the page to go to www.google.com

If I want to type something like www.google.co.nz into the browser I can search NZ fine. But getting to www.google.com is a two step process.
What a great idea!
Any news on the FTA N3 Hack?
Looking for any news on the N3 Hack? ThanX
I agree, 89 is my favorite as well.
Searches to google.com aren't redirected, just requests for the front page. If you specifically want google.com (and not google.com.au) you can go to google.com/ncr instead.