skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How much increase from negotiation?
Either for salary or for equity, when negotiation your salary at an early-stage startup, how much % increase over the initial offer is reasonable to ask for, and how much should you target?

For example, should you ask for 2x the shares and target a 50% increase?
In this case novices which assume it is the all powerful magic bar which they can type anything into and it will take them where they want to go.
"Posts" in this context isn't a word that most people would grok. "Popular news" isn't clear, while "Top news" does make sense next to "All news"
RIA Screen Design
> Have them bookmark your site. Many of them will not understand bookmarks. Teach them to understand.

Isn't that really advocating that each and every website on the internet should teach their users basic computer skills?

I mean if these people had bought a magazine from the news stand, and it said "Popular Mechanics" instead of "Playboy" on it, do you think that they would just say to themselves, "I guess that Playboy changed their name, logo, and stopped showing pictures of naked women. Interesting. I'll have to tell me friends about this?"
He's saying run rate (meaning annualized revenue) not burn rate.
I was replying to your statement: "It just seems people use it to sound smarter, and thus fail miserably 99% of the time."

I'm saying they fail to sound smarter with you but perhaps succeed in sounding smarter [not at being right] with the vast majority.
Ask HN: feedback on rescuetime plugin
> by being extension-focused it's been able to iterate the entire language many times over and make basic semantic changes without worrying about backwards-compatibility.

This is a very good point - Lua seems to have improved quite a bit since (say) 4.0 - it's small enough that maintaining an in-house fork of on old version is an option, so the language designers can make major changes when it's a clear improvement.

As library maturity goes, there are some really good ones out there (such as LPEG and LuaSocket), but for some things the documentation is a bit thin. The situation is getting better, though.
Bing StreetSide Demo Combines Flickr, Live Video, And "Bing Sky"
In support of you: your first competitor validates your market space.
Yes, although Java's reflection is somewhat of a pain in the ass and limited in many ways. But you can take a Class object and call newInstance(), and it will invoke the class's no-arg constructor.
Maybe users that type in actual addresses are in the minority, but then I consider this to be a basic literacy issue, just as I consider it a failure of basic science literacy when people say that lasers work by focusing sound waves (http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/public_knowledge_...). The Internet has had a transformative effect on society, and to not even know the first thing about it represents a failure of the educational system to prepare people to participate in what is now a very connected world.
That is a failure of the imagination. They certainly could -- whether it is worth doing or not is another question, but hey, that is what God gave us A/B testing to figure out.

"Hey user, it looks like you came to us today from Google searching for [Facebook login]. Did you know that there is a better way? Type facebook.com into [blah blah blah]. Try it now and we'll give you 5 free credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!"

"Great job! You should do that every time. If you do that to log into Facebook the next five days you use the service, we'll award you a Facebook Diploma and give you another 10 free credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!"

On the back end, you show the above prompts to N% of your users who you detect coming to the login page from Google search results (this is trivial -- check the referer). You then compare any user metric you want for the "Was Shown Facebook Login Course" population and "Complete Facebook Login Course" population with the population at large. Kill the test if it hurts your metrics, deploy it sitewide if it helps them.
It's offered for sale in Australia for about $21k ($24.5k for developer edition) which is pretty outrageous.
There is also another parser combinator library called fnparse at http://github.com/joshua-choi/fnparse
Today I made a small app to test if time management folks, eg users of RescueTime, are interested in a feel good financial incentive: donate to charity for every hour procrastinated.

Feedback greatly appreciated!

(We're also looking to expand our summer intern team. Shoot me an email if you interested :-)
I wish there were a organization one could get a originality certificate from. I wrote the LoseThos operating system with it's compiler and I am forever arguing with scoffers. I want a Stanford teacher to certify my code. http://www.losethos.com

I wouldn't be surprised if teachers were a little annoyed with me for posting code their students might plagarise. I wonder what the ethics of posting such code are.
Programming with multiple paradigms in Lua
Adobe to Rush out Another Critical Reader Patch
BTW - I don't think that you understand the scale of the US, how much larger our federal govt is. Ohio, a fairly middling state, is comparable in population to Finland.

The EU has 170% of the population of the US. Both together have less people than India.

All together I would say that Europe has more government than the US (which is not necessarily a good thing) because of the duplication of function between the member states as well as the central bureaucracy.
VC just needs to get out of its parents basement and spread out more. Why not open offices at major universities?
The average person would only have to work a couple of hours a day for all of humanity's basic needs to be met. With robots, we may eventually reach the point where people don't need to work at all in order to meet humanity's basic needs.

Question: What percentage of the work done in modern Western societies actually qualifies as "meeting humanity's basic needs"?
Perhaps they have managed to get a Master's without actually becoming "educated." It's not like it's not possible—you can become an expert in a very deep-yet-narrow field without ever having to learn how to think and problem-solve in the general case (which is what a liberal arts degree was supposed to be for.)
Indeed. That's why they put the best solar panels on space probes and satellites, and why they use those with the best performance/price ratio for solar farms in the desert.
I advocate a transition to a basic income grant(BIG) policy precisely because wage-earning work seems to be tapering off as a sufficient means of income for the lowest earners.

When food and retail services go automated - and that might take some more decades to be cost-effective, though it's already been piloted in various ways - we'll really be staring this problem in the face. You'll have one person manning the counter, and then perhaps nobody at all - just outsourced security, delivery, and maintenance systems. And at that point, one person could potentially run an entire chain of businesses, and have them stay open 24 hours a day, with super-high reliability. Global franchises will be demolished in the same way that national newspapers are right now.

This really is a new era, isn't it?
The VC time bomb is ticking for everyone else.
CyberLisp: A Lisp to JavaScript compiler
Prejudice (1) : preconceived judgment or opinion (2) : an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge

Yep, sounds like you are prejudiced.
Depends what virtual good your paying for, more content in a game I'm spending a lot of time playing would be worth it, although I don't see myself liking any of the flash app games on that level.

Google ads can be useful from time to time, random ads not really, I think most of the random ads I click on are non purchase interesting looking things or ads for physical stores I know because they have a decent deal in the ad.
Game theory is as useful as you question the problem to be. The problem is never as simple as it seems on the surface when you couch it in game theory terms.

It is not the end-all solution to anything. It is often illuminating, and shows how at least some of the problem set acts, but it's a very hard-edged theory that, to work perfectly, requires a hard-edged theoretical problem (like the pirates). Knowledge of it, though, is fantastic at helping predict things. Helping, not doing all the prediction for you. Nothing is ever as clear as theories need.
I think it's better to approach this from a different perspective. "Engineering relationships" doesn't work in general - if you approach people because you want something from them, they'll sense it very easily and push back. It's much better to approach people because you genuinely like them and want to learn from them. Many rich people have a ton of knowledge and experience that most of us don't, and it's genuinely interesting to learn from them. It's no good to expect anything, it's much better to try and learn from them just like from anyone else. If you approach it this way, it becomes an activity with very positive connotations, as opposed to schmoozing.
Well, sure, as of 5.2.0 there's a new __ipairs metatable, but you're swimming against the current of the existing libraries.
One Lesson From The Twitter Grader Screw-up: OAuth Rocks
This is just another case of a major problem with user generated video sites - nobody has figured out how to make any money off of them. Maybe Google will eventually make Youtube profitable, but how much time and money have they invested already?
Andrew is definitely a special case when it comes to creating lots of engaging long form content.

That being said, we see many people adding their videos to youtube, vimeo, and hosting them with Wistia. YouTube is the worlds biggest video search engine so it's a no brainer. But if you're a business, the key is understanding who is watching your videos on your own site and how they're watching them.

We also see many other people doing much more than just hosting video. You can see many of the other sharing uses here: http://wistia.com/product/tour
It's much, much worse on the GTK version of Firefox -- inspired by the X default of mouse3==paste, on such platforms they make the middlemouse.contentLoadURL config default to true.

This means that if you middle click anywhere in the window that isn't a link, it instantly redirects you to the "I'm feeling lucky" result for the contents of the last text selection you made. I cannot think of a single creepier usability clusterfuck.

Added fun: until a few years ago, http://www.microsoft.com was the first google search result for "http". This meant that malformed links (missing the colon, for instance) almost always pointed directly to Microsoft, on all platforms. It's a bit less baffling than it used to be, as not the wikipedia article on HTTP is the first result.
I don't see it on LuaRocks ATM, just the Kepler / Xavante stuff. What was it called?
Cell-free biology
"To fund Veoh’s YouTube-sized ambitions, apparently. Sources familiar with the company tell me that during its go-go days, it was spending as much as $4 million a month on a bloated staff and infrastructure.

But Veoh only generated something like $12 million in sales over its 5-year life, and most of that was in the past couple years, sources said."

source:http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100211/universal-music-gro...
Netflix used to make it very difficult to find any of their customer service contact addresses or phone numbers.

I have an old blog post with a title that includes the word 'Netflix' and the phrase 'Customer Service', where I ramble on about a whole bunch of things; the content of the post is about a general principle that I think Netflix was illustrating, not about Netflix itself. The title, though, resulted in the post showing up high in search results for 'Netflix customer service'.

Three people attempted to address Netflix customer service via the comments box; one of them posted his phone number. Another posted his postal address and credit card information.

I posted a comment making it explicit that all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this blog post was not, in fact, Netflix customer service HQ.

A year later another guy posted another Netflix customer service request, right under my 'This is not Netflix' message.
Objective C 2.0's garbage collector works just fine tyvm
My experience is not that it's a matter of being busy, or even lazy. These people have simply convinced themselves that working with computers is hard. They got lost because they assume they'll get lost. They stop at an error message not because it takes two minutes, but because they assume dealing with the task is insurmountable. It's almost like testing anxiety--they think they're going to fail, so they fail, and it entrenches a response of frustration for no rational reason.
I didn't say it was solely Google's fault; you make a good point re:Mozilla/Firefox, but they're both complicit. Google is the one that added the 'feature' to show recent news at the top, instead of just search results, and Mozilla is the one that added the feature you noted.

However, what leads you to conclude they're using the address bar? The default Firefox homepage is a Google search page. You open a Firefox window and start typing and the text will be entered in the main text box on a Google search page.

I'd actually argue that Firefox's awesome bar feature is actually _for_ computer novices. Start typing 'facebook login' and before you even hunt-and-peck your way to the double O it shows a list of Facebook related pages.

Hell, what's got me confused is type in "facebook" into the Firefox address bar and press enter. It goes to http://www.facebook.com. I'm curious then - why add the "login"? (That they should be forcing ssl is a whole 'nother problem.)
Yea, but people also have to fail at understanding the bookmarking functionality of browsers as well. You don't have to understand the location/address bar to understand that you can bookmark a page to come back to it.
Proposed autism diagnosis changes anger "Aspies"
Some take months to go up, from what I hear. It was an okay talk.
I did just admit it. Many of the worst-behavers I've encountered act similarly or worse on the internet, and the reverse has been quite accurate for the few I've encountered in that manner. It's certainly prejudice, but that doesn't make it wholly (or even mostly) invalid.

Prejudices have a prejudiced opinion applied to them. That snarling dog? It may not bite you, but it's rational to be prejudiced towards believing it may harm you. Though it may often be wrong, it proves valuable in the long run. The same goes for the person with a knife out, glaring at you, looking drunk. It could be totally harmless, but it may not be. By all means, go into the dark alley with them if you are wholly against prejudice.

Unless, of course, they're never examined. They can be wrong or detrimental just like anything else. But broken down, all rational behavior towards anything alive is effectively prejudice, because you can't have sufficient knowledge to predict it perfectly.
No, but I do think that it can't continue for ever. At least, not without a bunch of technological advances that don't show any sign of being about to turn up.
Climate change scientists losing 'PR war'
Being a college student I think a great note taking app is very necessary for the ipad. It would need to be able to switch from sketching ability (drawing pictures,and writing quick notes with your finger with different colors) to keyboard input with a seamless touch of an onscreen icon. The thing that would make a superior application for taking notes would be multiple-angle keyboard text input. Basically, with a swipe of the finger you should be able to dictate the angle at which text is entered on the screen (e.g. Swiping my finger at a 45 or 60 or 70 or 90 degree angle, or any angle, would thus make the text be input at that angle on the screen). This would be idle for entering text around a picture you have drawn on screen, or entering a note in the margin just like you would if you were taking notes with pen and paper. I think that ability would make the ipad the ultimate school electronic device hands down! Obviously, there should be an elegant start up screen holding multiple notebooks. For that I actually like the startup screen for the iWork apps that have been shown. Finally all this would be for not if there is not a very simple way to put your notes onto a home computer. Well this is my little idea, I think it could be an extremely useful app for the ipad for students as well as the corporate world. Not to mention, that if done write, meaning keeping it simple and not trying to make it more than it should be (because, think about it, a pen and paper doesn't do much, but they do what they do absolutely flawlessly) could be very profitable for the creators of such an app.
Thats confusing to me also, did you mean the product development? I could see outsourcing the coding would be easier then having people run around and interview people for you.
Millions of Buzz users, and improvements
I think it isn't just people that are doing startups that have this problem. I see it in almost any project. Usually it starts out small but as you go you feel like you can build more and more into it, and that that will produce a 'better' product.
Moreover, reflection is less of a language feature and more of a very low-level library feature. In ObjC, one can write

Class c = [SomeRandomClass class];
id thingy = [[c alloc] init];

but Java won't let you do the equivalent:

Class c = SomeRandomClass;
Object x = new c;
Slightly akin to getting in a taxi, saying "Joe's place", ending up at in a house that is entirely unlike that of your friend Joe's, the furniture is different, etc and still being confused at why those in the house aren't happy to see you.

I'm early 30s and already prone to delegating rather than learning new technology, but I at least make the effort to read instructions, warnings and errors so I know what's going on.
Target to use mobile barcodes for customer loyalty rewards
Startup rule #4080: Never... everevereverever... require a download of anything unless it works a) in the browser and b) on countless other websites. In other words, you better be Adobe if you're gonna push a standalone player on users.

See also: joost.
Don't go into Google to learn to code. Go into Google to learn to lead. That's what you will need the most as a founder.
Nick gave a nice response in the comments.

http://romanroe.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-i-hate-everything-y...
This article is just begging to be trolled. Just sayin'.
Beyond the examples of virtual goods and ads, my point is that I'm not necessarily a typical user which makes it sometimes difficult to grasp the way people work.
Depends how good the offer is. If the offer is low, you should obviously ask for more. If not, you don't need to. But you should have an idea what you think you're worth. Otherwise how do you know when to say yes? If you always ask for 2x, how do you know that the other guys didn't start by offering you a quarter of what you're worth?
It's a sliding scale for priority. More space per watt takes up more space for sun-power farms, and they often cause more heat, making the eco people go nuts, what with migrating geese turning into popcorn chicken above them (</exaggeration>).

For many individuals, who just have roof-space (for instance), space is really at a premium, and increased output means more money saved / made per time period, so it can pay for itself and more over time. Power companies could go either way, as they need a LOT of space. Doubling the area they need may not sound too good to them, as land costs money every year in taxes. If land is cheap enough though, cost per watt likely wins out.
Well, that's fine and all. I think this approach was called "market research" or just "common sense" for a few decades, at least before Mr. Blank came along.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I just fail to see how it is a new idea in any way.
Cold-Fingered iPhone Users Switch to Sausage-Based Styluses
Interesting. How much effort have these people put into acquiring computer literacy though? It is hard for me to believe that anyone with average intelligence who applies him/herself for a day or two cannot master browsing the web. I mean, if you can look up a road directory and navigate to an address, or consult a phone directory and find a specific phone number, you already possess the required skills to understand web browsing. It is not really that alien, is what I'm saying.

The fact that it appears alien to the people you mention is probably due more to having some sort of mental block against exploring computers than to computers being actually alien to them. My mother, for instance, had for the longest time an aversion to trying stuff out on a computer for fear of damaging it. She only started getting it when I gave her an old laptop and assured her that it was ok if she totally junked it. She would still have her desktop and I no longer needed that box. Now she's happily discovering and playing games on Facebook and wasn't even fazed by the recent change in the UI. :)
"Even with selenium this type of cell has materials cost advantages over existing commercial thin films from First Solar made of cadmium and telluride. Also, this cell has advantages over the CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) cells of the newer thin film manufacturers since indium and gallium cost more and CIGS also uses selenium." (source: http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006938.html)
Put simply, trees make sugar, not electricity. We could burn the sugar... as coal...
Sounds just like computer programs.
I started using Lua as an embedded scripting language to drive a pretty complicated process. After a few weeks, i ended up switching to Python. The Lua libraries were pretty weak, the datastructures and builtin functions were wierd and inconsistent, and swig+python made for much faster scripting then exposing c interfaces to lua.
"It seems that the sausages, electrostatically speaking, are close approximations of the human finger."
Ask HN: Startups while working and Assignment of Invention
Like a lot of hackers out there; I have a job. And like most of you guys, I had to sign an "Assignment of Invention" clause when hired. So now I have some great ideas that I want to work on, but have anxiety about the "what-ifs".

My brain just says to go for it; because it is pointless to worry. My gut is turning over the idea of having success only to be cut down by the man.

For what it is worth, my particular clause makes it very clear that anything developed outside work and not using their equipment is excluded from the clause. However, those exclusions are excluded if they are 'related' to the business. So what comes to my mind is, .. What does 'related' mean?

Anyway. Sorry for the rant, but this is making me nuts.

(throwaway account, obviously)
Yeah. For about 1 week I was totally paralysed by this list of my competitors. Then I realised that

1. They totally validate my value proposition

2. None of them offer multi channel, web enabled, real time power monitoring

3. I am the bomb.

Okay, perhaps 3 is exaggerated, but I've got to stay sane somehow!

The list:
http://blog.mapawatt.com/2009/10/07/list-of-energy-monitorin...
However at that price 400 views at $40 is like 10 cents a view, thats probably your whole profit margin if your an ad based business.