skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
0% for interns. You wouldn't give ownership to some offshore worker or a contractor. Treat them as such.

I've done a couple coding internships (gosh, it was 10 years ago this year!) and they paid me $10/hr. I shudder to think about the crap I wrote too.
Are you offering equity in lieu of cash?
0, or something really small. If you are paying 80% market value, the difference should be made up in the excitement of working on your exciting startup. Say you end up selling for $20M and they end up with 1% at acquisition. You would be rewarding them with $200K for a few months work when you already paid them salary.
I really liked this one:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/on-being-decohe.html

Of course, I have a Ph.D. in semiconductor lasers, so I've been trying to think about such stuff off and on for years... which means I'm a terrible test case for articles like this. ;)
Yeah. It is that way when you first start out, but when you get used to it, not so much. At this point, I don't really make any mistakes and am not pressing that hard. And it is really quiet.
The Challenge of Investing in People
Congrats! You really did win, and good luck on your future projects.
If no one else is doing what you are doing, then there is a 99% chance that it is _not a good idea_.

Competition is not something to be avoided, but rather something to be appreciated. It:-

Proves your market exists.

Proves that there is enough business to sustain companies.

Shows you how much people are willing to pay.

Shows you what works and what doesn't.

Gives you the chance to figure out exactly what you need to do better to steal users from the incumbent players.
You may actually save money by doing this. Depends on currency rates vs the country.

fourhourworkweek.com -> pretty good resources, if you haven't heard of the book already
"Market value" for an intern isn't very high. Pay the extra three bucks an hour so it is market value and forget this whole giving equity to interns idea.

The ones who are willing to take internships are folks who don't have a lot of real world experience yet, and won't produce fantastic code (and that's OK--you're paying them pennies on the dollar and experience is part of the equation). You'll want to recognize that there are wide-ranging levels of coders at all ages.

I've never hired "interns", but I've hired college kids who kicked ass, but I paid them whatever they wanted me to pay them--regular consulting rates, if on the low end of the scale $25-50/hour usually. But I could tell they kicked ass because I'd seen their code in Open Source projects--I'd be hesitant to hire someone who has no projects I can look at. But those generally aren't the folks you're going to get through internship programs (usually, though one of the smartest developers I've ever met interned at both Google and Microsoft while in school...I doubt either of those companies really took advantage of the opportunity they had in this kid and he went to work for neither after school).

Anyway, interns and contractors don't get equity. If you want another partner, bring on another partner. Maybe even a cheap one (e.g. 1-5% stake), if it's a kid that is working part time while going to school (if we knew where to find just the right person, we'd be willing to do this, even though we can afford to pay market rates for the work we need done--the right person is always worth equity). And maybe you even pay him something. But "intern" means "here and gone before he/she becomes really valuable to the organization". Scaling the learning curve in a codebase of reasonable size will take an inexperienced developer a month or more.
Not sure it's so hard, first you introduce some randomness and inefficiencies in the gathering process so that it's more credible that it's a fallible human that's doing it.

And as a second crucial step, you hook groups of bots into a "monitoring computer", at which an actual human sits and responds "No, I'm not a bot lol." when the supposedly fatal question arrives from an admin. You can even outsource this to the third world.
Humans have spontaneous thoughts, allowing us to build something in our mind first, and then trying to build it concretely.

(So we can think to build computers, but computers can't think to build humans...)

Neither animals nor computers will ever be able of that.

Although, I find his responses quite superficial sometimes.
I second that. Another great feature is how close and tight the plastic keys are to the metal base: very few things can slip underneath them, and the keyboard stays exceptionally clean.
In the 20-plus years I've been coding, I never really gave a crap about what keyboard I worked on.

Currently mostly happen to use the new Apple keyboard that came with the iMac. Expected to want to replace it when I first saw it, but it's surprisingly pleasant.
Google: Unicode conquers ASCII on the Web
> I doubt anyone would pay even a nominal fee to make bids for buying items

You've clearly not seen TeleBid:

http://www.telebid.com/

There are plenty of fools out there just gagging to throw their cash away. Note that the "current price" beside each item goes up 7 pence per bid, so it is easy to work out how many bids have been made on each item. For example, at the moment, there is a Play Station 3 up for auction, and it is currently at £38.08. Divide that by £0.07, and we see that there have been 544 bids made on this item. The nominal fee is 50 pence per bid. So the auction site has brought in £272 pounds so far, and the item is yet to be sold. In the time it has taken me to write this, there have been 35 more bids. The auction is likely to last for several more hours, bringing in at least £2 a minute, probably more like £5 a minute. There are many auctions on the site.

Basically, the site is a scam, as people pay to bid on items they will never win. But, it does prove that you can make people pay per bid, they just need to think they are about to get a great deal.

As a side note, this site benefits from having no social aspects, but is a nice example of a site that could not be built without AJAX. (If the people bidding could talk to each other, they would probably be able to work out just how badly they are being ripped off.)

PS: Also, the timeout for posting replies is annoying. Stateless servers do give you less chances to mess about with closures though, so I understand why it is this way...
Paul, I've been reading your stuff for six years, and that's the first one that made me cry.

It's the last step on a good path, and I was worried you would never take it. I'd been quite enamored of YC for a while, but I had my doubts about its ability to do good things.

It's also something I never thought of. I just always mentally separated "good, charitable" and "successful company" in much the same way as people generally separate "work" and "what you love".
Part of what can be annoying about the "rock star" label -- other than that it's a buzzword -- is that it's now a buzzword without a standard definition. At one point it clearly meant "you, o techie, are a recognizable name and thus a brand unto yourself." But in the last few years it's come to mean "miracle worker."

I got so worked up about this, some weeks ago, that I even blogged about it: http://advice.cio.com/esther_schindler/rockstar
Microsoft's Brilliant PR Strategy for XBox 360
"Centralized CORE services--engineering, IP, analytics" -- centralized engineering?

I wonder how they achieve deep domain knowledge and focus if 'engineering' is shared among projects.

I thought the whole point of micro-invested startups was uncompromising focus for the key players. If the engineers aren't considered key players, well, good luck.
I think that a model of when students will talk with profs is the following :

"comfort level being outgoing" * "likelihood of doing research for fun" + "comfort level being outgoing" * "confusion over the days lecture"

this plus a little bit of reflection on the distribution of socialization styles amongst smart folks is a fairly complete model.
Fixed. It took 1.045 seconds.
Owning Kraken Zombies, a Detailed Dissection
You've never played WoW, have you? "Randomness" is a dead giveaway of a bot. Other players will grief you, report you, and you will be banned quickly.

Just the computer vision aspect of it alone would be amazingly hard.

Efficient goldfarming (e.g., with a frost mage that can take on 15-30 monsters at once) involves carefully coordinating a complicated series of actions where timing is critical and reacting quickly and intelligently when things go wrong is the difference between living and dying. It involves making complicated judgments about relative positioning, reasoning about surroundings, cause and effect, and other things that require human-level intelligence.

If you can make a bot that can seek out and kill monsters in a non-trivial manner without dying all the time there's no reason you couldn't program a robot to replace a wide variety of menial real-world jobs. The consequences would be tremendous and using it to make $20/day off the Internet would be retarded because you could license the technology for billions.
The "new crappy ones" are the ones that I'm referring to in the OP - I got myself a 50 dollar MS keyboard, and my mistake ratio went up like crazy as a result of un-even tactile feedback that resulted in letters appearing out of order far too often. Stay away from them :)
Actually, you can get paid through Tipjoy.

You can get an Amazon gift card, and we'll expand to other kinds of gifts cards. We'll move on to actual cash once we're licensing as a money transfer agent. This will happen soon because we're in the process of raising a round of funding.
He goes on to suggest that MySpace are the ones capitalizing on something like "demand creation", by realizing that people go there to waste time and therefore MySpace is doing a lot in terms of entertainment properties. Matt doesn't use the same terminology you're using, but I think he's getting at a similar idea.
True. Saying as eBay owns PayPal, they could probably turn it into one though, if only for use on eBay itself. And you've probably already given PayPal your credit card number too.
Dumb crooks fail to anticipate the consequences of their actions? No way!

Every "got my lappy back" story involves not formatting the hard drive.
Patterns in Interaction Design
I love the Kinesis Advantage keyboard. It's incredibly comfortable and the in hardware customizations (key remap and macros) are awesome.

It takes a couple of days to get used to it (the keys are not diagonal like in a standard keyboard, and it takes a little while for your muscle memory to adjust). By the way this will really improve your touch typing if you don't have proper form (since the keys are contoured to the shape of the hand there really is no way to type but the right way).
Maybe "boring" is not the best word. Maybe we are really talking about "more fun" vs. "less fun".

Naturally, some things are more fun that others, but I am never bored in my startup.

Frustrated sometimes, yes. This week I lost a whole day because I had overlooked something simple one day last week. Had to retool the whole stupid thing when I really wanted to build the next level up. So the exciting part had to wait a day. No big deal. It happens. But was I ever "bored"? Hardly.

A little background. I sat in class bored to tears for 17 years. Then, I did work in 86 other companies (none of them mine) before I started this one. I have a clear vision of what I want and a fairly clear idea of how things should work. I love both the technical details and the people part. Usually, I can't wait to get to the next thing.

The only thing I really don't like is when a client calls for me to fix something on their crappy system. Shifting gears sucks.

Boring? No, I just don't see it.
Has anyone used a DiNovo Edge? I hear it has great tactile feedback, but haven't had the chance to try it out yet.
I was able to get to it through the San Francisco Public library website using my library card. Best use of my library card in about 3 years!
Facebook’s options not like they used to be
A few years ago, I wrote a program that would screen-scrape to read all cards showing and then do a Monte Carlo simulation to randomly complete the hand and compute what % of times my cards would win (along with pot odds). It took a second or so to do the simulation, so I could use it to make decisions in real time. It was a fun project, but I soon stopped using it. Your odds against random cards are not at all your actual odds, because most players fold weaker cards. What matters most is who you're playing against.

Anyway, the article, although it describes well the techniques for programmatically interacting with a poker client, is majorly misleading because this is not the hard part of making a bot. The hard part is figuring out whether, and how much, to bet. He alludes to this as "the million dollar question", but then omits to even mention it under "What skills will I need to write a bot?" Perhaps he'll address this in later articles?

If you look at the last screen shot, it's clear that he built a UI for an end-user to specify the actual logic for poker play. ("Call if it has not been raised, I'm later than 7th", etc.) His "bot" doesn't actually make decisions. It collects rules from an end-user, calls those to decide what to do, and passes the result on to the poker client. In other words, the hard part of the job - writing a program to play poker - has been passed to somebody else. Maybe that somebody else is the author, creating the algorithm through his UI... but then why not just code it?

There are serious researchers who have made credible bots (he links to them), bots which would (and, for all we know, do) make money on poker sites. But when I looked at it, the literature was not nearly detailed enough to code up their algorithms. (Also, they were working with simplified versions of poker, since full no-limit holdem is a hard nut to crack). What they didn't use were the "extensible rules-based systems" which this author claims "are a lot more powerful than you think". Count me skeptical. Good players eat such systems for snacks. Maybe they make money in low-stakes games against bad players, but I'd like to see evidence.

In short: never mind the dll injection, show us your bankroll over 100,000 hands!
I noticed I don't usually use the Emacs key bindings for navigation (C-f,b,n,p) when using my Kinesis keyboard. I use the arrow keys most of the time since they are located in such a convenient place. I really wish someone would make a laptop with a similar keyboard layout (even if it's not contoured, at least keep the split and put the useful keys within thumb reach).
Google + Yahoo = GooHoo
Where can I find flash developers?
My company is looking to find a php / flash developer that has experience creating a custom flash players, hopefully with experience with pdf2swf. Where should we post the gig?
In o(n) time, no less.
You are taking this a bit too seriously, I think.

Although I do agree that with that technology you are better off licensing it.
Not quite. Points per character. "No" is 50% more efficient that "lol".
The post briefly flirts with a refutable hypothesis, and then degenerates into a tautology. They start with conditionals - often, they don't contribute well, and "they may become fixated on trivial tasks. This leaves open the possibility that some workaholics are, in fact, focused on the right tasks and contributing well, (though perhaps at the expense of their own health and sanity).

The rest of the post essentially turns often into always, and may into will, and at this point, yeah, it becomes a tautology.

That said, I think PG wrote that a startup is a way of compressing a lifetime of pain into a few years. It probably isn't sustainable for a lifetime, or even a decade.
Free sandwiches should do the trick.
> "No" is ... more efficient that "lol"

Not if we count unique chars.
I think you might want to add a little more analysis there.
Ahh, I didn't notice that. That would affect things. The timestamps and counts are: ('04/15', 630), ('04/16', 1993), ('04/17', 1994), ('04/18', 491), ('04/20', 270), ('04/21', 1049), ('04/22', 59), ('04/24', 33), ('04/25', 342), ('04/26', 29), ('05/03', 165), ('05/06', 86), ('05/07', 23). So most of the members have older join dates than I figured.
My definition of spammer might be a bit broad. I'm just really tired of the crap pages in a lot of Google search result so I don't have any sympathy for the people complaining when their site with nothing other than ads and SEO tricks got booted from Google Search.
Sorry. "No" is 50% more efficient than "wtf".
I don't think I agree with you on no-limit vs. limit. There's a pretty simple strategy you can use to be a marginal winner at low stakes no-limit (or especially no-limit sit and goes). It' called short stacking, and essentially involves buying in for the minimum and playing mainly all-in or fold (with some preflop calling).

You have to leave the table as soon as you get past 1.5x the minimum buy-in though. It was mainly done on Party Poker, which was the only site dumb enough to let you cash out and then return to the table for the min again. Any other site either made you bring back what you left with or wait an hour.

On a site with enough tables in action, though, even that would not be a limitation. A bot could do fairly well at it.

Also I can tell you from first hand experience that breaking even at low stakes NL sit and goes can be done with an AI consisting of nothing but if/then statments. I did this with WinHoldem back in the days before it was banned from everywhere. I wasn't able to replicate that success with limit. The main problem with WinHoldem was that it didn't join or leave tables on its own (also, it would often bug out when the tournament got heads up), which meant that the time spent managing it made it less profitable than just playing myself.

That's why we tried to build a bot ourselves. Maybe I'll blog about that some time.
on jobs here?
Oh, no.

People need to know that these things happen, that there are people out there like this. It's inspiring.

Who gives a fuck if the dude is arrogant or feeding his ego (assuming that is even true)?

He's feeding 300 homeless people as well.
Greg Linden: "I should have focused on angels."
Go find out who you're talking about.
Ask YC: CMS? opinions?
we are developing web software, although we decided that our company might want to make more than one thing so our first product is going to be seen as that and not the company itself.

We aren't interested in building a company site from scratch since there are good cms' available.

what do people recommend? or would it really be better to build one from scratch since we are supposed to be a web software company.

EDIT: I've been thinking about using Joomla but really haven't decided.

EDIT: on another thought does anyone know of any that are postgres friendly? that's the db we are using for our first product.
Update: Mass Effect for PC drops dial-a-DRM!
I used the challenge deadline as a motivator to get me to learn the Android SDK quickly. Downloaded the SDK on the last day and had to submit by midnight. I built a simple twitter clone but instead of seeing what your friends write, you see what people within 10 miles around you write. Needless to say, I didn't win.
This just in: EA dropping dial-a-DRM.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/09/update-mass-effect-for-...
If they were normal early stage employees I expect they'd get about a 3% stake vesting over four years.

3 / 48 * .03 = 0.001875.

So, a 0.1875% stake in the company would be reasonable over three months. If you make a ten million dollar exit, that's a respectable $18,750.
I think this is actually a little more general than that.
Removing all 1's and 2's improves the relationship somewhat (moreso with log(k)) but still not a whole lot.
It depends on the effort to build from scratch, and a marketable product.
Agreed. If I had data for the quality of contributions I could have done that.
One disadvantage Unicode has over ASCII, though, is that it takes at least twice as much memory to store a Roman alphabet character because Unicode uses more bytes to enumerate its vastly larger range of alphabetic symbols.

LIES. A decent (though brief) article about increasing Unicode use on the web, and then they write this in their last paragraph. They even mention UTF-8!

Here's the original source of the data:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/moving-to-unicode-51....
On the Mac its possible to put a password on to stop the machine being reformatted. Cant remember how (wow, I'm a great help eh?) but it is possible as I did it on mine
Clarification on parent: One of the best parts about UTF-8 is that ASCII text is also valid UTF-8-encoded text.
That said, I'd hire one good intern and pay him 120% of market value. One person who feels valuable and respected will do twice the work of a team who think they should be paid more.
That's wrong because it isn't the tiny banner ad that is the billboard, it's the website you get to when you click it. Budweiser doesn't sell beer on their home page, they advertise it.
FREE BEER
I'm not sure what amount of time a cms would save you.

If it's a smaller site, I'd just use wordpress for easy blogging capability. All the stuff that a CMS would help you with (like dumbing down markup and such) wouldn't be worth my time, to be honest.

Depends on what you're doing though, really.
Wordpress. Really.

Don't build one from scratch - it's a waste of your time, unless you're planning on turning it into a product later on.
Generally true, but if a steady income is a requirement due to family obligations, it's often easier to raise funding and pay yourself a salary than it is to build and monetize a site in the short term.
Ask YC: Mother's Day gifts?
Yes, I know this isn't hacker related, but many of us have probably waited until the last minute to buy gifts for the mothers in our families. What are you getting?
It's generally unwise to a build a platform on top of something controlled by third party. Any little change that third party makes is likely to break your platform.
Sorry, I kind of assumed that the HN crowd would know this. (judging by the comments - maybe the silent, lurking masses don't, I don't know) I've read a few too many articles with glaring mistakes today.

If you're reading this, are even vaguely technically inclined and don't know what we're talking about, please read

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
I'm just in this position, I've my laptop on a small side table and I'm using a standard keyboard and a trackball. It's pretty comfortable.
A YC startup created an account only 3 hours ago??

user:	madscientist
created:	3 hours ago

C'mon what are ya trying to hide by creating a new screen name?
If you like Rails, Mephisto is a pretty flexible way to get a lot of functionality for less work.
What if the child is the son of the adult that is failing with his/her responsibility?

- Should we take the child away of the adult?

- Should we let the adult have an incentive for having more kids, knowing that the children will always have someone that will be willing or obliged to help and provide?

You don't have a solution. Me neither. Because there is none.

You can't stop irresponsible adults of having kids. You can't multiply wealth infinitely and guarantee that everyone will always have a baseline of resources to live by. Heck, even if you wanted to provide a better life for a child that is a "victim of circumstance", you'll have to get the parent's (or legal guardian's) consent.
Microsofts All Acquisitions