skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Employee as a partner
Hi,

I'm considering of making one of my employee at my startup as my partner. He's very talented and I would like to keep him in the company for as long as possible.

My startup is 1 week old and I had already considered in making this employee my partner at the beginning.

My question is how much of the company should I share with him? Considering that he is a paid employee who did not contribute any funding into the company, should I still pay him the wage I am paying him now (several dollars above min. wage at this point with 1% profit-sharing) while asking for some cash investment into the company? He is asking for 25% of the equity...

Thanks a bunch.
I like Rails and ActiveRecord just fine, so I don't meant to bag on it. But they do talk a lot about "magic" in the Rails community. Check it: http://www.google.com/search?q=rails+magic
swell, there are a number of silicon valley startup vets from the 70s retiring here. it beautiful and we think traffic means it takes 20 min to get to work, rather than 15min. i also think in milwaukee we have the best beer in the world. in madison, milwaukee, and chicago the startup communities are growing fast in web tech, but even faster in biotech. i know in the valley most of you don't see it, but here there are new hospitals going up all of the time. we have one of the first telerobotic heart surgery terminals in the world. in this area, we have GE, Abbott, and Baxter; its pretty much like having google, microsoft and yahoo in your bio-tech back door. when the baby-boomer are aging and using medical care that money will fall through this state at some point.

don't forget that we have 2 of the worlds largest financial processors, fiserv, and metavante. wisconsin is on a great path to take advantage of chicago's resources too. since 9/11 chicago has passed new york in trading value, and chicago is the 4th largest fiscal market in the world, with $460 billion in production value, where SF is 15th on that same list.

and don't forget our schools where UW Madison and UIUC take the 9th, and 6th position in CS school ranking. if only we had the risky VCs that the valley had, i suspect that many of the world largest computer companies would have stuck here in the midwest, near their alma mater.

also, do not discount our work ethic, one day we should eclipse the west coast in tech companies all together.

ps. who do you think will build the nanotech manufacturing economy too?
Poll: What should Yahoo have done?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180517
Accept the original $29/share offer
Accept the increased $33/share offer
Accept a $37/share offer
Threaten to make deals with Google and avoid a hostile bid (which is what happened)
VMWare does.
Well, they did nail the cookie-cutter suburbs and perv catching his neighbours on video.
I'd say if he wants 25% of the equity, he should be paid no more than 25% of what you are being paid. Less if you invested cash up front and he didn't.

What you don't want is to let people have it both ways, collecting a salary as if it were BigCo and getting massive chunks of equity as well.
If you slow down and think about it, this is really the same argument about the difficulties of telecommuting.

Sure, you can do all the hacking in your cocoon, but there's so much more to systems development that just the hacking part.

I want to see the look in users' eyes when they use the software. I want to see how they interact with each other. I want to see all the other things people do as they work with the software. I even want to see their paperwork and whatever else is on their desk/vehicle/work area.

Developing systems take more than just being Stallman/Turing/Woz. You need to be a little Columbo too.
I'm not being paid as of yet since there is no income. We are still working on demo products to show prospective clients.

Should he not be paid then?
I believe Microsoft just couldn't afford Yahoo because of Vista. If Vista sold well and there was mass adoption then MS would have had the free cash flow to aquire Yahoo without having to borrow. If Yahoo next year is at $20 a share, Microsoft may try again. (edited to cut out unimportant sections)
Man, I sure would love to control my thermostat from a web browser. That way, if my dog called me up at work and said it was a bit nippy, I could fix the problem without driving home.
Using PHP's magic_quotes_runtime as an example can support pretty much any argument you want to make about software design choices. How about this: Don't rely on DWIM-style features to actually do what thought you meant. Just write what you mean.

Or, shorter: "Garbage in, garbage out."
Round robin DNS is fine if you don't have any sticky session requirements.

There simply is no way to guarantee that a user will remain on one host for the duration of a session, if you use round-robin DNS (or even semi-deterministic DNS like F5 or GSS).

Your best efforts will be thwarted by load-balanced browsing proxies that 'optimise' the user experience by querying primary and secondary DNS, then distributing your HTTP requests across multiple servers.
HTH
Personally, if I was a Yahoo shareholder I would be calling up my lawyers to start suing the Yahoo board. Financially this deal is clearly good for shareholders coming at a 60% premium.

I can't personally see why Yahoo would be worth $38 a share. The job of the board is to do what's in the best interest of shareholders but ultimately it personally seems this deal was not rejected because of the numbers but because of the sentimental attachment to Yahoo independence.

Expect some litigation
I wonder if they are walking away from the deal so the stock tumbles, and they can come back in a quarter or two and try and nab Yahoo then. I think Oracle actually did this with Peoplesoft?
Extracting the structure of networks
Take that, license plate scanners!
One thing's for sure... this news is great for startups! Having MS and Y! combined would have reduced the number of exit points for startups. Also, it would have resulted in massive layoffs which would have further reduced the number of acquisitions that they would have made as a combined company. At least now you still have three major players to negotiate with.
"Agreed. Why is every future always depicted with us suddenly losing all fashion sense and running around in unitards with dorky boots?"

Is it that far off from everyone hanging out in jogging outfits or other "athletic" apparel, and overpriced sneakers, whether or not engaged in any actual athletic activity?
Perhaps he could have said "It's easier to get your students to upgrade to Word 2007 than to use LaTeX".

Which would be true. However, it's a much better idea to get them to use LaTeX.
That's true, but it's not at all what he said. He argued that language is a hard problem because it's linked with culture, and always changing. I think this is incorrect, because it doesn't stop humans from picking up second languages or from understanding older texts in their native languages. The hard part is whatever loop humans have that translates sentences into concepts -- not the loop that uses one sentence-concept chunk to link a new sentence to a new concept. That's in the library, not the interpreter.
Email From Steve Ballmer To All Microsoft Employees
"They can't pull out all of there investments right now, it would devastate the stock market."

Really? Their balance sheet doesn't show a huge amount of long-term investments. And yesterday, $1.9 billion worth of Microsoft stock alone changed hands -- it would be very hard for them to upset the market selling gradually. In addition, they're generating at least $4 billion in operating cash flow each quarter, which would support a lot of debt at a low rating.

Finally, they could issue stock. Free cash flow is not the issue.
Ruby on Rails routing demystified
Maybe. But the other way to look at it is, MSFT has an NIH culture and isn't a prolific acquirer; MSFT-YHOO combined could have produced more acquisitions than MSFT and YHOO apart.
Scott Adams recommended that loyal and productive staff be rewarded with additional holiday; that staff can purchase additional holiday and that everyone leaves work at 5PM. He called it the OA5 business process ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140712 ).
I might rather be a maid than a housewife. Tough to say. My wife codes for my startup.
I don't think Microsoft shareholders should be feeling all that comfortable, either.

This is a company with virtually unlimited resources (talent, cash, experience, partners) that wants to win every war, but can't seem to win even a single battle as the world passes by. Whats missing? Leadership. Time for vision to replace bullying. Stay tuned...
WSJ:Professor Randy Pausch (A Final Farewell - Encore)
Talking about stopbadware.org, he mentions this is what he's trying to do:

"It's stuff you download to your machine that reports back its vital signs and running code to the rest of the herd. Then I can ask the herd, before I run new software, how many other people in the herd are running it. We'll be able to figure out several things, like how many self-described experts are running it versus clueless people, when the herd first encountered it, and is it brand new. That will help users decide if they even want to run the code."

----

This is a pretty useful scenario. There's a fantastic startup idea, no doubt, in that as well-- to replace Windows's "Do you trust this program" UI with something that uses the knowledge of all the other people using the same software. Maybe someone here might want to run with it? A small group of talented hackers could probably put out a better product and really get it in the hands of users.

I look forward to reading his book, but I hope he takes time to really delve into the issue of how openness is at odds with great user experience. At the end of the day, great products can only be achieved through razor-sharp attention to detail. This usually means from within one organization, and there must be hard but fair rules for 3rd parties.

Look at what Apple has been assuring by semi-closing their iPhone through a rigorous app approval process -- they're trying to assure that apps sold are solid and not buggy. You won't miss calls because of some errant game you download.

In an era of increasing device and software complexity, that type of peace of mind just might be worth a walled garden.
Public transport is simply not viable at the densities common in American suburbia. Can't be done. So it's not quite chicken and egg.

More likely that a whole lot of suburbia is going to become ghetto cheap and people will crowd into existing, older areas.

> The only way it's going to happen is a massive federal/state cooperative infrastructure program like the Interstate Highway System built under Eisenhower.

Totally unnecessary. The whole problem is from government in the first place. Sell the highways off to the states and privatize AMTRAK. Within three years the highways will be crumbling potholed messes and private investment will be pouring into rail. The amount of money the government dumps into the highway system is massive. It is hugely inefficient compared to rail. That's why highways were fairly limited before the feds misallocated resources to them.
I got frustrated with it and just use TextMate. It has a latex-typeset command. It was command-B, but its command-E now I think. It integrates really well with BibTex with autocompletion of sources. I setup some nice macros to auto do certain mundane typing tasks and all-in-all I really like it.
That's true, but it's not at all what he said

What he implied from culture, I took to mean a polymorphic mapping of "sentences" or "units of communication" in a given understood context that can be learned only through experience.

it doesn't stop humans from picking up second languages or from understanding older texts in their native languages

It doesn't stop them, but it is far from trivial to learn a new language or to even resolve syntactic,lexical, or sematic ambiguity without context, even in a native speakers language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity. The ill-posed nature of this mapping is not static, and for people not speaking their native language or young children this becomes the basis for some forms of comedy.

As far as I know we have no generic grammar that can generate the rules for all languages; there is no universal "interpreter", and it is not certain that "concept" can be decoupled from "phrase" or "sentence" without context, so I don't think your separation of "library" and "interpreter" holds.
Quick version:

We Vista'ed Yahoo.
Microsoft abandons Yahoo bid, rebuffing higher sale price
Microsoft now has $50 billion burning a hole in its pocket
The gas tax bothers me less than any other tax. The roads are inevitably paid through taxes--I doubt a libertarian scheme exists that could actually privatize them. In addition, there's a non-trivial chance that the natural price of gas will be very, very high in the future. Taxing it now heads off any serious disruptions caused by that.
That would be my bet. Wasn't it BEA that Oracle did that to? Perhaps they did it more than once.
Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise
It was based on a userbase of 80 million for MySpace (from the article) and 20 million for FaceBook (which I'd heard as of about spring '07). However, apparently FaceBook has now grown past at least 30 million (http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/07/10/facebook-rockets-pa...), and may be more now. So it's probably more like a factor of 2 or 3 now. My information was out of date, sorry.

Edit: actually, the MySpace numbers are out of date too, so if they've grown at the same rate, MySpace should still be 4x bigger.

And I agree that the future of social networking is probably something that hasn't been invented yet. The market is maybe 5 years old, which is about the same age as search when Google started kicking ass. My startup is actually in the running, so I've got a vested interest in FaceBook failing, but we've got so far to go that I don't even dare to hope...
Why use software? I have a hardware load balancer at Softlayer and for $99 bucks a month it's totally worth it.
Ask YC:  Prediction market to determine how likely HN contributors are likely to succeed?
Even if a startup is in stealth mode, people might guess the likelihood of success based on the contributions made here.

This is useful feedback to founders and may influence the way they present themselves in the future.

Some may expect a correlation between prediction market performance and karma, but that's not obvious to me.
oh, thought you were just another me too blog.

good on you then. :)
Worse, pluralization in Rails is a feature that fixes something that isn't even a problem. For a framework based on 1 to 1 table mapping, there's absolutely no reason the tables names shouldn't directly map to the class names with no translation at all. Customer class equals Customer table. Pluralizing them is pointless, and creates minor problems that didn't exist prior.

This article however, is extremely bad and its arguments simply don't make sense. Magic isn't bad, leaky abstractions + developers who don't understand it are bad. If he think ORM's don't solve a problem then he hasn't written enough SQL to tire of the insanity of doing it manually when CRUD should clearly be automated because it's so god damn repetitive. Repetition + boredom should always be a signal to automate.
Right - I don't know how VirtualBox compares with VMWare, except that the former is open source.
I think Ken Kutaragi even in hindsight deserved to be in the list. He's since left Sony and made many major missteps which are likely causes to the PS3 not being the dominant market leader.
People would have said the same thing in 2003-2004 if someone offered $16 a share for AAPL...now they'd look stupid.
I do run them on the same machine for userscripts.org - although I have used them on seperate machines on other projects - nothing public though :)

I use Nginx for things like serving from memcached (someone else commented on that), rewrite rules, redirects, logging, ...

Also Nginx is good because I have 5 different virtual hosts on the box, so I can proxy to different app servers based on hostname/location.

Here is my commented nginx config for userscripts.org:

http://pastie.textmate.org/private/rmp4b9xpwevxnckumxmq0a

Here is my haproxy config for userscripts.org:

http://pastie.textmate.org/private/rbxzpeu7e0gjkkc6r04ta

Nginx does have weighting options, but I was unable to get the affect of having only 1 request hitting an app server at any time (it could be possible, but switching to HAProxy was easy, and in a month I've not had a second of down-time, and I restart all the app servers every hour via log rotate) Not having request queue at the app server level helped, combined with HAProxy pinging for health between requests has lead to faster requests, as queueing at the app server level leads to delays if you get behind a slow request.
But the same move that caused the PS3 to not win the console war caused Blu-Ray to win the format war. Which one was more important?
I used mechanical turk to get keyword suggestion tips for an AdWords campaign. It was a quick (seriously cheap) way to see what search terms people would use if they were looking for a company like mine via Google.

I paid $5 for more than 450 responses out of 15 people. Posted about my experiences at http://www.brianlash.com/2007/11/how-to-get-450.html.
Nothing personal, but that's the kind of shareholder that ruins good businesses. The language of Ballmer's letter is clearly intended to cause precisely that kind of action from Yahoo! shareholders.

The shareholders sue the management, the management spends its time defending itself from lawsuits rather than leading innovation and increasing stockholder value, department projects go awry and more employees leave, and the stock drops. Microsoft makes the same kind of offer a few years later, but at an even lower price. The new management, seeing what happened to their predecessors, will take the offer, and Microsoft gets all of Yahoo!'s assets at a bargain price.

It's absolute short-sightedness on the part of stockholders. Surely the mere fact that Microsoft was willing to buy the company at a 70% premium indicates that the stock was undervalued to begin with, and that people with the tech & business knowledge to see the big picture (not just the Microsoft execs, the Yahoo! execs too) knew the value of the company could be increased.

Even if the management at Yahoo! can defend itself from these lawsuits, they'll have been put on the defensive, on every front. No major initiatives, no bold new plans, no big mergers or acquisitions that could actually help the company; if they rock the boat a second time so soon again, they won't avoid being tossed out. So while they stay the course set by the backseat drivers who don't even have a full view of the road, Microsoft is free to out-compete.
Yahoo’s Tough Week Ahead
what is ultramonkey like? i saw that a while back, but it looked like the project was no longer being updated.
EngineYard uses nginx at the slice level and LVS at the site level (to balance between your slices) - this is for my startup (not userscripts.org which is at serverbeach)
Its worth mentioning that Twisted is basically a hack to allow normal python to do what would otherwise be easy if the language had coroutines and continuations. (eg what webframeworks in scheme and smalltalk do)
and haskell too
Never mind, Zenbe beat them to it: http://www.zenbe.com/.
if yahoo! has a steve-jobs in the closet somewhere, it's about time he showed up...
Funny posts hardly ever get upmodded here. This is a serious site full of serious people.
Good book for economics
what would be a good book that would serve as a nice introduction to economics ? i currently am planning to go through "economics, by samuelson and nordhaus". is there something better ?
Yahoo! Issues Statement in Response to Microsoft
Ah, but you make the mistake of assuming that automated SQL generation == ORM. That's not the case, at least for us.

I touch a bit on the framework we use at Expat here:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/03/examplecode-pr...

Basically, you can think of it as an early-bound Rails. We use CodeSmith to generate a bunch of classes, stored procedures and unit tests based on the existing database schema whenever we make a change to it. Those classes, along with generated wrappers for all our hand-built stored procedures get compiled into the project. This saves us from ever having to guess what SQL we'll get for a given operation, and allows us to pause at any point and be looking at readable code that does real, undestandable work and that can be debugged through.

That may seem like a minor distinction, but then I bet you've tried debugging thru ActiveRecord once or twice and I doubt it was any fun. This way, we keep the same fast development pace that a traditional ORM might give us, without sacrificing the debugability and maintainability side (or relying on Magic happening behind the scenes.)
Those most likely to succeed are probably not doing much posting here. By the time people are posting here to promote their startup, you could judge success by the startup itself.
Yes, KVM can run any OS as a guest.
This is extreamly unfortunate to yahoo shareholders. At the current state I don't see how yahoo can create value in the company. I wonder how bad the stock will fall starting monday
Then perhaps we will see some more antitrust lawsuits?
Yahoo Responds.
Ask PG: What are your thoughts on The Underground Myth?
>Surely the mere fact that Microsoft was willing to buy the company at a 70% premium indicates that the stock was undervalued to begin with

That does not follow. MSFT might see more value in yahoo as a part of msft than yahoo run independently.
the best selling book is currently Mankiw's Principle of Economics (Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/6euszg). i highly recommend his blog too (http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/)
Part of me thinks "Ugh, no, we don't need a popularity contest" and another part of me thinks "But it might be cool if done in a just-for-fun manner."

Regardless, I don't think this would be useful feedback, if only because the only people whose opinions matter are your customers. It could encourage some people who are all talk and no action (like me ;-)) to keep talking, and discourage some folks that otherwise have good ideas.

The one thing I would kinda like to see would be graphs of prediction-market prices over time, with feature announcements and other events overlaid on top of them. I've changed my opinion of several YC startups fairly dramatically over time, and it'd be neat to see if I just suck at making predictions (i.e. everybody else got it right at the beginning) or if specific things they did made lots of people change their minds about the success of their startup. And it may be useful data, both for them and for the rest of us, to see what the impact of a particular event is on the futures price.

(Curiously, this is a large part of what my last employer did, except they were dealing with the real financial markets.)
I'd play...
I wish I could help you. I majored in economics and math, and can't recommend a single one of my economics texts. I kept a good number of my math books, but sold all my econ texts when I graduated.

That being said, you will probably get better results if you specify what you mean by "economics." There are several disciplines within economics: microeconomics, macroeconomics, econometrics, financial economics/mathematical finance, game theory, etc. The material in each of these disciplines will vary considerably depending on how theoretical the textbook is. For example, a graduate-level theoretical macro text might talk about general equilibrium models, but a more practical macro text would cover topics like the implementation of monetary policy, economic history, the relationship between the government and the economy, costs and benefits of international trade, etc.

If anyone knows of a good comprehensive overview of the field, I would be interested in hearing about it.