skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fundamentally I think startups overvalue the risk of coming up with a product vision and undervalue the risk of executing on that vision. It's arguable harder and more risky to go from "lets make a social network" to the entire product that is Facebook, and a majority of the people that bridge that gap get relatively shafted on equity.

As to your point about joining a post-YC company, employees #1-#5 are generally defacto cofounders and are often given similar equity. I'm not disputing that. I'm talking more about (roughly) employees #6 -> #30. At that point you have a product vision, but no concrete product. Since the major work of a startup is discovering the details of what to build, a majority of the work isn't done yet, and the real risk hasn't been mediated. However, a majority of the equity has already been passed around.

The risk and reward are certainly correlated. To say for certain you'd need a rather complex economic analysis that factors in opportunity costs to really say what the monetary sweet-spot is on the founder<->enterprise-employee spectrum. My suspicion is that the startup talent market isn't very efficient; As an industry we haven't really found a good way to judge technical skill other than working alongside someone for months. This hurdle means all the good jobs come via social connections. All the good positions are taken by the founder's network, and all the great devs already have a good gig.
Ask HN: Better organizing a site with many articles?
(This is a throwaway account and I won't mention what site I run, because I don't want this post to smell of self-promotion).

I run a fairly simple site that has about 100 free articles on it, all for teaching readers about a certain topic.

As I've added material over the years, I've gotten more and more concerned that the amount of information on hand may be scaring off new readers, or making them feel overwhelmed with the topic.

At the moment I have all the articles listed on the home page, organized and divided by categories, with a disclaimer saying which ones people may want to read first.

I think this is better than what a lot of blogs do, where older posts are hidden away in unorganized, hard to navigate archives. I also think it's better than some other sites where the content is divided among several areas, but you have to click six pages deep to find certain things.

I feel I can improve further though. My number one priority is helping visitors effectively learn about the topic. Any ideas?
I find your setup very portable. Thanks.
How Ninite.com (YC W08) was named by a program -- code included
With what do all these apps sync with on your laptop?
I think there's just too many stories about Apple. Apple always makes for intesting topics but other sites will always cover Apple... I go to Hacker News for the deeper, rarer stuff.
When comparing Java and Objective-C, which one is higher level and which is lower level? The fact that Java uses bytecode doesn't necessarily increase productivity.
Embeddable tweets do this? Not as straightforward, but: http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/
Why worry about a million a year in revenue (or did we mean profit here) - what you really want is probably the lifestyle you think you will get when that happens.... perceptually, what's the difference between a million a year and 10 million a year in revenue? What really matters is what you, as the owner, take home, and the life you live while doing so....
I've heard the exact opposite point being made about the US: they have a large-ish trade deficit, and quickly increasing debt, but everyone who sells what the US people buy buys US state debt, so everything works out in the end.

As an entertaining thought, try to picture what would happen if Greece, or even the US, would go bankrupt (i.e., default on state bonds).

I like the idea of "restructuring" bonds by asking people to give up a part of the face value against being insured from the default. (This sounds a lot like the scare game, though... if Greece defaults, the non-insured bonds are nothing, and if enough people exchange their bonds, everything works out and the folks who stuck to their non-insured bonds have the higher face value and get their money).
Noted mathematician Rudin dies at 89
I use init. Most of my services manage their own daemonization and forked workers. It's easier to design a correct system to detect failure, issue alerts, and restart as necessary than building unkillable workers. Coupled with some basic init scripts, it works pretty well.

I like monit, but it has a weird habit of running super-slowly, failing to restart services, or otherwise flaking out.
I might be hypersensitive here, but my first thought is "is it time to jump ship"?

I refer to the "Branding" section - for the first time Twitter makes it clear who owns the Tweets in their opinion. And it is Twitter, not the users.

Bummer :-(

(Speaking as a developer of Twitter apps)
Got a good box there Scott.
Tell HN: Flesh out your profiles please
There's an old internet joke, that on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

The way to let people know that you're not a dog, is to establish an identity, maybe a short blurb about yourself and a way to contact you out-of-band.

Lots of HN profiles are blank, and the nicknames used are anonymous. Of course, the theory is that since we are all judging your writings by their merits it is just as good to get that information you just wrote from an anonymous source as it would be to get it from a source that has an identity.

To me that would matter, for one when someone is attaching their name - and by extension their reputation - to their words they automatically have something to lose by saying it.

Second, it helps to verify that they are real people with relevant experience, instead of posers.

Anonymity on the net has its uses, for instance for whistleblowers and to ask embarrassing questions.

But for the most part it is used as a shield for cowardly attacks, sockpuppets and to create a persona with a reputation that is larger than the one the person is really entitled to and so on.

Being yourself is more than enough. So, to all those that are for whatever reason anonymous here, step out of the shadows and tie your HN identity in with your real-life persona.

Anonymous cowards belong to that other site :)
Dustin Sallings says, "Don’t start programs, run programs."

See: http://dustin.github.com/2010/02/28/running-processes.html
That's a lot of words to say "because there's too damn many characters".

BTW, the Japanese also believe they speak the most difficult language in the world. Probably a lot of others too. That means very little.
Discs still exist? I haven't installed an OS from a disc in years. And I haven't installed a compiler from one ... ever.
To quote both Warren Buffet and Naval Ravikant (startupboy.com): "It's the people, stupid". It could very well be worth it to invest 4x in a company started by proven startup veterans than to invest in some plucky college grads.
I gather you're against just excluding both categories entirely. Why? (I don't have an opinion.)
You should first consider ethical implications of being able to cure aging-caused diseases, and choosing not to do so.
I am by no means an authority on this subject but does the whole concept of a 'monopoly' (or such) on advertising not strike anyone else as as bit... silly? As in, to advertise one only needs some sort of property and then no one could stop you using it to host advertisements.

I suppose you could say the same about any industry - if you own property then you can attempt to enter the market. But something strikes me as different about advertising, can't quite put my finger on it.
If you listen to the TEd talk, he also mentions federal funding.
Reading offline, like on my ipad
What about the case where successful YC alums become angel investors in their own right?
Also, people hate to hear this, but a jailbroken iPhone provides a much better experience and much more competitive than Androids.

And according to Jobs, the jailbroken iPhone even includes free room and board for a few years.
Japanese is missing. Does anyone know their equivalent?
HN readers who want to get their startup into BizSpark can contact me directly to get signed up without hassle.
As a study abroad student in Japan I was encouraged to buy an electric dictionary that came with a stylus. You write the character you see and it gives the definition.

(unfortunately these are designed for Japanese people so it doesn't get the character if you write it with the wrong stroke order, and it brings you to a page of japanese text explaining all about the character and its uses in different contexts, but still, pretty useful)
Google vs Apple Headlines
Does anyone else feel like news orgs are just making these crazy headlines to get people to listen. It doesn't seem like Android 2.2 is really that much better than iPhone/iPad OS 4.0?
Linux> Love it.
* Their strategy seems dominated by short term market share grabbing in the mobile space, rather than long term product innovation...*

Even in light of the iPad?
I don't envy their position by any means, and I only hope them the best. However, there is nothing wrong with regularly updating the people that are making it possible to start your business. Due to a limited budget ($30k or so from YC?), the pre-order was necessary to get hardware ordered and shipped to the first customers; in essence it is an interest free loan to kickstart their business. As a result, I want to know when my loan is going to be 'repaid', hardly a standard situation.
evo_9 I didn't see any contact information in your profile. Send me an email and I'll get you guys into BizSpark.
"Now that we have much more money than we asked for, our situation has changed a little." --Diaspora Team O.O

What does HN think about gift donations instead of money as a funding platform? A site that simply allows startups to request the raw materials/skills they need and people pledge those things. Kind of like a potluck but for funding.
Ahh that's pretty elite too. Thanks for the link.
I'll be showing my exercise bike connected to an xbox. Come say hi.
This has nothing to do with who owns the tweets. Rather it's an indication that Twitter want to make it easy for people to recognize a tweet across the web.
I agree, I don't see it either. The whole point of my previous comment was to show that OS X ships with so many things that you don't have to install anything to start programming in PHP, Python or Ruby. "Until you have to compile something" refers to the fact that this claim doesn't hold anymore when you have to compile, for example, a native extension to those languages.
I've always wanted to like openID, FOAF, etc., etc. - but failed. After reading about it for 2 minutes, I <3 XAuth. It focuses on a single use case, and it works transparently to users. That it doesn't require actually doing anything gives me confidence that it can take off. What a nifty hack.
While I don't disagree with some of the author's analysis, and the thought behind some of his solutions, one premise of this article is flawed.

He promotes the notion that: 1) Germany creates wealth better than other countries, and 2) by saving and investing that wealth rather than consuming it, Germany does a disservice to the world and impoverishes its neighbors. [1]

By the same logic, we should applaud billionaires for building mansions and enormous yachts rather than living modest lives and investing in startups and other businesses. And what of all the arguments about the US and other first world countries consuming such a disproportionate share of the world's resources? If we were to consume less, and by necessity save and invest instead, we'd be impoverishing the rest of the world!

Germany is perhaps culpable here -- culpable for making bad investments which enabled wealth destruction. And they're further culpable for bailing out Greece, which perpetuates the problem and supports our world's already out of control situation with respect to moral hazard.

[1] I'm ignoring his point about currencies here, because I don't really disagree with the notion that Germany engaged in a counter-productive vendor-financing scheme on consumer goods. That's the same boat that China's in with the US. What I'm trying to emphasize is that the problem is who they loaned money to and for what purpose, whereas the author seems to imply that any increased German consumption would have been better than increased savings.

[2] The author also seems to think it is misguided to blame the spendthrift politicians in Greece. Whatever you think of the economy of Germany, I can't see what's mistaken about blaming spendthrift politicians.
I somewhat agree. So I think in future, if I visit the front page and see a lot of fluff, I'll check out /newest for things worth reading and upvote them. (And try to find things to submit, though it's not easy when most of my news is from HN or reddit in the first place.)

I'd encourage you (and others) to do the same, if you're not already.
I'd say the standout feature that puts Java at a higher level than Objective-C is garbage collection. You could also say that Objective-C is lower level becuase it's a strict superset of C. Admittedly, it's a murky distinction. Is there a good argument for why one might consider Obj-C to be the higher level language?
Clear bugs me because of their pricing; they charge less for "home" than for "mobile"? WTF?

The main reason I went with Sprint is because the cost is almost the same as Clear, but I also get 3G access. I don't use that much in Chicago, but it's great when traveling; Sprint's 3G network is pretty comprehensive. It's really relaxing to have Internet access anywhere. For me, anyway :)
Re: public investment in banks:
"That strategy worked in the United States, and there's no reason it can't work in Europe."

Isn't it a bit early to say that the strategy worked in the US?
I guess either you announce it after everyone's already seen it anyway or you announce it before it's released everywhere.
The number one lender, by far, to Greece is France, not Germany.

Germany is distant third.
Worked for Balsamiq.
I agree with that. By accident the volume on this machine was still way up from watching a movie, and it must have woken up the whole damn building.
We have the internet, Unicode, and powerful computers now, so I suspect the dictionary situation is quite different from 1991. I don't know much about Chinese in particular -- my foreign language was Japanese -- but I have recently looked up kanji using a variety of search engines, including tools that allow you to draw characters. (For example: http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html) If you have the kanji as text, it's not much more difficult to look up an unfamiliar word in Japanese than it is in English, although it may still be difficult to figure out the exact sense if the writing isn't literal.

For example, suppose you're trying to read something on the Japanese Wikipedia. I'm horribly out of practice, but I can still go and take something like "第六回執筆コンテストの入選記事が決定しました。結果発表をご覧下さい。" (found on the front page of ja.wikipedia.org) and reason that it means something along the lines of "The best articles of the sixth writing competition have been chosen. Please look at the results." just by copying the parts I'm unfamiliar with into a kanji search engine like Jlex (http://jlex.org/) a bit at a time until I get something reasonable back.
I like the 'Ask HN' post a little more than the average post. I did not know there was an automatic penalty to an 'Ask HN' post, maybe that is why I like them a little bit more... only the really good ones float to the top.
Sure looks like a pre-approved BT module to me, such as the ones SparkFun sells (http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...). Buy it and solder it down: done.
I think it's just because there's a lot more current soap-opera-type news lately. Google vs. Apple, Apple vs. Adobe, etc. Some of it is interesting. A lot of it is boring and repetitive. But it will pass. No site can ever completely escape a bit of TMZ, so there will always be some of it hitting the front page.
it's here. (beta)

https://www.google.com/
Bad move by google, really. Start on a button click is one thing but auto-starting something that makes a bunch of noise on a page that has always been totally silent is really dumb.
>It's all pretty depressing, and makes one despair somewhat of democracy.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville
You don't have to be a strong Singulatarian to recognize that projecting out, say, 100 years into the future with the hidden assumption that technology won't advance is a waste of time. You don't know what will be necessary for human life then, with a much stronger nanotech base and who knows what else.
"Nor will they accept that German industry was able to thrive over the past decade because of a common currency and a common monetary policy that, over time, rendered industry in some neighboring countries uncompetitive while generating huge real estate bubbles in others."

I don't really buy it. Germany was strong even before the Euro was invented, and other Eurocountries were already struggling before that. And we see big companies moving out of Germany into cheaper Eurocountries on a regular basis.

I am also not sure I entirely buy that there is a right or wrong way to handle a strong export industry. I think ultimately what causes problems is just wasting money (ie on bureaucracy and "bribes" a ka subventions for shoddy businesses).
That's darned good advice. Right now it feels like our biggest problem is avoiding starvation, but I can see how distraction would be a bigger risk long-term.
I think there's a lot wrong with what you just wrote. But just two things: consumption of resources and economic consumption are two different concepts; and the paradox of thrift.
I think it likely that aging has evolved, that is, nature wants us to die (or some organisms at least). It certainly doesn't care how long we live.

That doesn't mean that we can't come up with out own motivations and schemes.

There is also (afaik) at least one organism that can live forever, a jellyfish.
The problem is that we seem to go from one soap opera (App Store 3.3.1) to the next soap opera (Faceboook privacy settings) with barely any break for sanity in between.
I'm talking more about (roughly) employees #6 -> #30. At that point you have a product vision, but no concrete product.

I don't think this is true, at least not for consumer internet startups. If you can't build a concrete product in this space with 5 people, you probably can't build one at all.
Serious question, any specific reason you went with O'Reilly and not Microsoft Press? Seeing as you do work on the Azure team and this would be a perfect match for MS Press.
Frankly [my dear], I too have been finding the stories and the discussion here pretty dull lately. On-the-plus, I've been hitting f5 less frequently :).

Perhaps old-timers with good karma should have a higher weight to their story upvotes.

That, and we should start submitting more "appropriate" stuff that the old-timers would like and upvote, and their upvotes being heavier, these stories would propagate the frontpage.
They now reduce it by 10$ per month, but still if you compare the discount to the total they still keep 95$ if you break it a month early. (325 - 10 * 23 = 95$)
Ask HN: How to tell whether a query is a subset of another
Subject
Please write an algorithm to determine if a query expression is a subset of another.

a little bit more explaining:

Take the SQL statement, for example, if the query A is
age> 21
Query B is
age> 20

We know that the result of A is a subset of that of B. Those who meet the condition A will also satisfy B. I need an algorithm that given any two expressions will tell this relationship.

code example:
if ($ queryA-> isSubSet ($ queryB)) (echo ("A is subset of B");)

For simplicity, consider only simple AND, OR logical operations, greater than, equal to, less than comparisons.

This is one situation our less than 10 people technical team typically encountered . For example: to cope with more searches querying huge data that distributed in multiple cities on multiple servers. System administrators can use the data frequency and other patterns to set up several different databases (MySQL's, and Solr's). Thus, when a new item arrived, we can decide, which db to put it.

Then when a given query is a subset of another corresponding to a previously configured db, we can just check that one. This allows us to easily configure dozens of data sets, without changing a single line of code.
"It also will support Flash, something Apple refuses to do, mostly out of spite."

Oh, so we're being honest about it now?
Clang++ now has a finished implementation of C++'03
Floss.
Bccthis Unlocks Subtext in Email (And Some Cash Too)
I am from China, my advise for western Chinese learners is:don't learn it based on Pinyin which seems helpful at the beginning but leads you to nowhere at all. If you just want to be able to read CHinese books or novels you simply don't have to know how to speak it. Most of the European Chinese experts in the last century were like that. And if you just want to speak it fluently, find a Chinese gf/bf,in two years you can flirt with others in Chinese.
Well, its a comparison of android to Iphone, with, even, possible partnership with an iPad (though the partnership was pointed out primarily as a joke at APPL's expense).

When fed 'iphone android comparison' Google Returns this:
http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1DVCB_enUS356US332&so...

If you think the google search might be biassed...Here's Yahoo's:
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AnkgfRvCvrkOfUBCGO7pLneb...

I would of course love to see some defenses of Apple move through HN, because we're sitting squarely in the Google camp, and there has to be another side of this. Something about seeing both sides, if only to make sure that one side really is a shriveled beggar.
translated to English by Google with some revision

Subject:
Please write an algorithm to determine if a query expression is a subset of another.

a little bit more explaining:

Take the SQL statement, for example, if the query A is
age> 21 &
Query B is
age> 20

We know that, the result of A is a subset of that of B. Those who meet the condition A will also satisfy B. I need an algorithm that given any two expressions will tell this relationship.

code example:
if ($ queryA-> isSubSet ($ queryB)) (echo ("A is subset of B");)

For simplicity, consider only simple AND, OR logical operations, greater than, equal to, less than comparisons.

This is one situation our less than 10 people technical team typically encountered . For example: to cope with more search querying on huge data that distributed on dozens of servers in multiple cities. System administrators can use the data frequency and other patterns to set up several different databases (MySQL's, and Solr's). Thus, when a new item arrived, we can decide, which db to put it.

And when a given query is a subset of another corresponding to a previously configured db, we can just check that one. This allows us to easily configure dozens of data sets, without changing a single line of code.
No, that simply brings me back to wanting to see longer-term outcomes. However, so far, so good!
Don't feel the need to apologize. You wrote a book! A whole book! How many people can claim that? Most people can't even read a whole book, much less write one.
A lot of these were probably the result of the Google IO conference, which is now over (I think)? When the iPad was announced there was also too much iPad stuff for a while, but by now it seems to have settled a bit.

So just relax, things will be fine again.