skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have become sick and tired of the carping and flaming you see from some folks whenever Joel publishes a rant, accusing him of douchebaggery and all sorts of sin. The usual behaviour is that he has one great insight, a bunch of entertaining ranting, and one egocentric point. And on the basis of this, the whole thing is junk and he is a has-been windbag.

I don't go along with that sort of vilification. If a post has one great insight, something I can learn from, I'm a happy man. I can chuckle at Joel complaining about competing for interns with Google as long as I'mn entertained by his prose and intrigued by his central thesis.

I would have loved this post on that basis.

Except.

WTF is with the dig at playing Ultimate? Joel, you have totally lost it this time. Ultimate is the ultimate nerd sport, and interns who play Ultimate are your best hires ever.

Ultimate involves complex plays involving team co-ordination. A skill that just might come in handy working on a software development team. The flight of the disc is the kind of thing the mathematical mind drools over--gyroscopic procession, ballistics, aerodynamics, everything comes in to play.

Ultimate players are healthy and I'll wager can crank code for long hours compared to those who eschew aerobic sports in favour of foosball.

And for those who are still single... Ultimate is a great place to meet people of every gender and orientation. Which leads to cohabitation, the purchase of homes, large mortgages, and a slavish devotion to working your ass off to earn a fat bonus.

Joel, I wanted to like this post, I really did. But you have got to stop making insanely wrong pronouncements about things that matter most.

Like which games interns ought to play ;-)
New Relic: Rails performance metrics service
Not at all. Unless you went to a top school, where you went to school becomes irrelevant after a few years. Where you worked and what you did become much more important.
The thing you're looking for is called "git-svn". It's built into git, and it lets you use git with your office's svn repository.

You do have to accept some constraints in order to use it successfully -- basically, git-svn doesn't seem to understand merging back-and-forth between different branches very well, so it encourages a much more linear, one-branch workflow than git does -- but it is still a huge improvement over stock svn, and it lets you inch your way into git, and gives you a platform from which you can lure your fellow employees into git one at a time.
I can't imagine that in any real company, employee shares would be "protected from dilution at all stages". It is, for what it's worth, largely not up to the founders; if they want a VC round, they're going to alter the structure of the company to suit the VC.

4% of a company that has been operating for 18 months is a huge stake.
In the Tulsa area there is a high demand for CS types. I probably get a call once every two weeks wanting an interview. My company routinely has a need for Java devs. I know of 2 companies hiring Rails jobs right now. I think you need to look a bit harder. Oh, btw I have no degree, work in CS, and make 70K a year in Tulsa, OK.
>documenting in some 6-figure modeling tool how I order paperclips

are you suggesting that the execs should go and read the code that some intern wrote in order to figure out how their customers buy paperclips?
The poll, as of right now. (heh heh, 1337)

$20 Million?

* Hell, yes! Are they crazy?
1600
* No, they will be worth a lot more a year from now.
1337

Total Votes: 2937
You're not an employee, and they're a private company. It's a catch-22 situation. They'd probably tell you if you were an employee and option holder. Such information might be held as company proprietary information, and as a non-employee, you're not entitled to know. I know how this sounds, but they apparently have a tight disclosure policy.
"how do we reconcile our innate capacity to continuously expand with a finite world?"

Condoms.

Seriously, in keeping with the spirit of the OP, many people in the developing world can't even imagine a concept like "family planning" so they don't bother to do it. They just assume you keep having babies until you can't.

Maybe we should be less concerned with "One Laptop Per Child" and focus more on "Condoms for Couples". Then the laptop problem would solve itself.
If price is not an issue then we already have RAM the size of hard drives...
i wish i could work for him on some of the projects
Stop bringing up non-web products. If they are not at all different then you wouldn't have to keep doing that.

People would not pay for toasters if you could download them for free. This is getting idiotic.
Successful Offshoring & Outsourcing (for games dev)
| my stake will be protected from dilution at all stages.

So you are being given preferred stock? That's the only stock that I can think of that would prevent dilution during later stages. I find it difficult to believe that a smart startup company that would give out preferred stock to employees. I also can't imagine VCs/angels who would invest in a company that had just given preferred stock to a "Legal and compliance director" (no offense but that title isn't necessarily thought of in terms of bringing revenue in as highly as a developer or salesperson).

A 2% stake could easily get chopped down to 1% or .5% on liquidation due to various means. Assuming a five year growth-to-liquidation, does 1% of a $100m sale ($1m) justify taking no salary for 2-3 years and then a below-marketing salary for the remaining time? Balance that with the risk that the startup may fail, not raise as much money as they thought, etc...

A least two key factors you need to think about are (1) what you expect the company to get acquired for, and (2) when you expect to be acquired. A $10m sale in year 1 means you get $50k-$100k (being optimistic) for one year of work. A $10m sale in year 3 means you get $50-$100k for three years.
That $5-10k delta could be made up within a year or two for a good developer coming from a non-namebrand CS school who puts his/her nose to the grindstone.
the tones aren't hard. reading and writing Chinese characters (even simplified) are hard
Todd is right. After a couple of years, your school is much less important than what you've done with it during that time.
That is a consulting company, not a software product.
Thanks, this is useful and gives me a better perspective.
Nice article (I like your style)... it would be better if people referred to semantic web technologies as technologies and facilitators of other applications, not as the abstract, "future" concepts. I address many of these on my blog -- you may find some of my MI topics interesting/applicable.
Yeah, legacy COBOL probably equals "huge corporation." I assume, then, that there's an employment agreement covering this scenario.

It's an ethical dilemma, but in my opinion the fundamental right to earn a living (basic economic freedom) trumps the letter of an overly-restrictive contract, _if_ the employee's outside activities don't impact the employer in a material way. That's not law, that's just my opinion, and I realize it could be a bit of a slippery slope. However I just don't see how a company can own an employee's time away from work (again unless the employee is competing in the employer's direct line of business). See the work of Brandeis.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (Hanlon's Razor)
some keywords are harder than others (based on competition) and pretty much based on their value, so yeah you have to charge more
The News is Improving
Classic essay: "Why Chinese is so Damn Hard" http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

"Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility."
Extra Cost to Buy Yahoo: Retention Pay
I would assume that most people who do SEO also do all the other aspects related to site design and optimization. SEO would just be one aspect of one's time. Just guessing though.
Ask PG: please make me a sandwich.

Edit: In all seriousness, you can probably find answers to most of these in his existing essays.
Kinda demanding, especially since you are saying the purpose of the information is to help YC competitors.
sudo Ask PG: please make me a sandwich.
So if we take into account cost-of-living adjustments (ignoring quality of life +/- adjustments), the average starting salary is around $50K
Xobni != Outlook search. At all. And Google Desktop Search is not the only really viable way to search Outlook.

???? Do you even use Windows?
I wonder if this will change Apple's mind about Flash running on the Iphone (at least for future versions)
I'm with you - I tried it and didn't find it useful at all.
Keyboards 'dirtier than a toilet'
With what basis do you have to say $20m is a weak offer? I'm not clear on what numbers you are using to base your view on. I'm not privvy to the internals at Xobni so I couldn't even guess whether $1m is weak let alone $20m.
Don't Be Afraid To Delegate
Thanks for this.

We're still in early discussions. No it wouldn't be preferred stock, just ordinary. They seem to be proposing that a shareholders agreement will contract for my stake to be protected, but, as you know, a VC will restructure all the shareholders if it wants to, so that doesn't work.

My calculations are based around a sale value of around £50million to £90million in about 5 years which at 2% would make my stake worth £1million in 5 years time (if £50mill sale price) but that assumes I don't get diluted below 2% etc and that is why I think it is a too low % stake for me to accept since it would only give me double the salary I could otherwise earn over the same period.
We may want to hire you. Email my yahoo address please.
But if you initially got the 30k before they raised money, and now raise the 6 million, you probably get diluted to the same situation.

Or is this not the common scenario?

Also: do most people's options vest immediately and never expire or have conditions on them?
As for the DRM things I'm talking about, google PT_DENY_ATTACH and the dtrace equivalent. Basically, if iTunes is running, you can't use dtrace. And the kernel prevents you from attaching debuggers to certain processes. Great.

Finally, using a Mac to play a DVD is incredibly annoying. If I use VLC, the video just starts playing. If I use Apple's program, I get "Prohibited" if I try to stop or skip at certain points. Prohibited!?? Fuck you, Apple. I make the rules on my computer, not you. (The annoying part is that this program auto-starts whenever I insert a DVD, and I can't quit because that's also "Prohibited". After that happened a few times, Apple's DVD player ended up in the trash can.)

I'd spend a lot of time dealing with idiotic things like hardware issues, compatibility, linux updates etc etc. That's not a good use of my time.

But OS X is just as bad. Every three days the machine wants to restart to install iTunes updates. And, there is no sane way to install UNIX-like software. Fink, macports, etc. are all junk compared to real Debian. The annoyances continue; emacs doesn't really work right, Apple breaks their Perl by applying non-approved patches, etc. Their window manager is utter junk. Not only do I have to manually arrange windows, I have to click to focus them, and "maximize" isn't an operation that exists. Arranging windows is a huge waste of time; the computer should do it for me. (So I use xmonad on Linux.) All in all, I really don't see how anyone can get any work done on a Mac. It's nice for Safari and VLC... but not for work.

Look, I don't care if you use Linux or not. But you should realize that OS X and Linux are both unproductive in their own unique ways. (Same for Windows.)
What do you mean by "operating"? You could well be right but there is no hackin or anything going on here, its more the founders going round looking for customers and creating relationships with strategic partners etc. There are no contracts signed yet, no shareholders invested yet. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to discount in anyway what they have done, I am just trying to get to a situation where I can understand the best way to "value" what I am being offered a stake in, so I can compare what they are offering me against their stake.
Another benefit of being a woman in tech? People always underestimate me. This, in my opinion, is one of the best things about being a woman in business. Nothing is more fun than watching someone change their opinion about you right in front of your eyes. This happens to me all the time.
Wow, way to make me feel bad for being a postdoc! :(

(Computational physics, not CS, but still...)
the obsessive "apple fanboys" i know don't know much about technology. so i'd say it's half good products, and half marketing. apple's the only company that creates a personification of their product as a marketing tool. it's a great trick because anyone who identifies with the persona burns apple into their souls, but it's uncommon because you can turn a lot of people off that way. most companies don't do this at all, or pick something inoffensive or only remotely human (geico uses a lizard). obviously nobody identifies with generic friendly people or lizards. but some people do identify with justin long, god help them, so apple gets a small but devoted clan who loves it because it "just gets who they are." that said, apple's probably betting that rates of justin-long-ness are trending upwards.

on a side note, bud select is great.
I don't care that much about how the computer looks, just don't make it ridiculously bulky and keep the lines clean. Although even with such basic concepts, most competitors attempts at duplicating Apple style end up looking ridiculous. There is elegance in simplicity that most people don't understand, yet in many industries the design leader is the one that keeps things simple and clean.

However, I use Macs because of the O/S. I would definitely buy non-Apple hardware if it would run OSX without hacks but you can't.

Microsoft pretty much summed up where they are in innovation and design with the Zune. They are a giant but unless they can turn things around and actually start making devices that people WANT instead of making cheap products with a recognizable name, then they're going to end up more like Ford than Toyota.

They also have a real jackass of a CEO.
I think "svn ci" sometimes being a little slow is a total non-issue, at least in my experience.

Well, if you haven't used git, you don't know what you're missing. "svn ci" seems fast. But try git and you will be amazed.

SVN supports branching just fine

No, it supports cheap copies. It has no idea what a branch is. As far as svn is concerned it's a directory. (You can even "svn copy" a single file. People do this, and it makes the nightmare called merging even more of a nightmare. Araaggghhh!)
Salaries for grads outside of Moscow are probably half that - I think PHP coders in Kharkov, Ukraine for example would be pretty happy with 12-15K. QA positions could be as low as 8-10K.

And $1300 for a 1-bedroom in Moscow center...what can I say you got off light. All my friends had to go through realtors for $2K places (2-3 rooms through) near Kitai-Gorod.
probably too self serving for PG, along with all the other reasons
German Firms Patent Scented Text Messaging
Structured procrastination?

Is that where you give yourself x minutes to surf the web or whatever, but when the timer goes off, you go back to work, or is it something else?
Free CSS Admin Template For Your Web Apps
Erlang: It’s About Reliability
YC competitors will fail if they don't have honest soul to help others to grow. Also YC model looks easy from outside but if you try to know the nity-gritty of their business model then you will realize that its a hard work and the passion behind it has to be genuine otherwise there would have been hundreds of clones all over world. I see YC as a social entrepreneurship than just a money making machine and hence if Pg can share something that can help other entrepreneurs and countries then it would be like an adding jewel to his legacy crown.
Arrington Finally Makes It Onto The Cover of Time (If You Squint Real Hard You’ll See Him)
Are you kidding me? Time considers Arrington one of the 100 most influential people in the WORLD????
We hackers like to underestimate the amount of work involved in finding customers and creating relationships.

18 months of their efforts within their expertise is 18 months regardless of whether it is hacking :)
Capital gains tax would take that much?
I've heard of offers as low as $48K for assistant professors in biological sciences. That's at a real PhD-granting research university, though admittedly not a particularly good one. Even lower for fields like English and History. Higher for hard sciences, and even higher for CS.
The CRA Taulbee Survey (http://www.cra.org/statistics/) has detailed info on CS faculty salaries in the US and Canada. 2005-2006 9-month salaries for a new PhD in CS with a tenure track position ranged from $70k to $99k with $82k median. Of course, you have to get one of those positions first. PhD production has been at record levels in North America for a few years now. It seems lots of people decided to go to grad school after the bubble burst. The survey has incredible detail including, for instance, how many positions opened up as a result of people dying!
I don't believe that you and Microsoft are suggesting the same thing at all.

My guess is you want to give everybody what programmers have been able to do for years with distributed VCS, publicly addressable computers and rsync. And presumably want to do it well enough that even programmers who could get it for free wouldn't be able to fool themselves that paying wasn't worth the convenience.

Now what Microsoft is doing is probably connected with there life-logging stuff. MSR has been going on for a while about how we'll never delete anything and every document and every phone call we make etc will be recorded and searchable. The mesh is presumably the infrastructure that all these Windows Mobile devices would use to make this seamless.

However this is insane, there are already more mobiles in Europe than people, and Microsoft can't even keep XBox Live running. Just have the devices query/talk to each other without getting some central server involved.
Sure. I agree about idiotic DVD restrictions. Great that you can just install mplayer, vlc, mythtv or a hundred other solutions. I don't think windows media player is that much better to be honest.

As for iTunes, I've only ever used it to play music and rip CDs, and even then make sure it encodes as mp3s. Does sound like a pain if you have to use dtrace a lot.

Every 3 days to install iTunes updates???? That is just absolutely false. Don't make completely untrue statements like that, it doesn't help your argument. I have rebooted my macbook maybe 3 times this year so far, each time to install an update.
Macports works ok, or just install from source.

I agree every O/S has its issues. For me personally, OS X is the most productive and least hassle. Please try to understand and respect that. Don't just dismiss it and assume that I must have an ulterior motive, or must have been brainwashed.

There are 2 things I do really hate about my MacBook:

1. The DVD drive is region coded, and has been region changed the max times, so I can only play half of my DVD collection in it.
2. I can't buy things from the iTunes US store unless I have a US credit card. Hello??? This is the internet!!!
I went to the website for the California Department of Corporations (http://134.186.208.228/caleasi/pub/exsearch.htm) and found out that they issued 3,000,000 in shares after their seed funding ($1 million) last year. I can't find the latest filing because it was so recent.

Would it be reasonable to assume that the number of shares is now 6x that (6 x 3 million = 18 million) since they have around $6 million in funding now?

Of course, now that I know that the information is in the public records, I am going to run away if they tell me I can't have that information after I talk to them again today.

Thanks for all the helpful comments.
I managed to get it to work, and after messing around with it for a little while I've come to the conclusion that I really suck at this game.
Embedded Video is Broken
4% is pretty high coming into a startup over a year after its founding.

You're coming in at a point where there will be significantly less risk.
In Chicago, 55-60k.
Thanks, this helps a lot, I'm leaning towards CS.
Does anybody else have any advice?
You Name It, and Exercise Helps It
I think you're talking about integration not synchronization.
Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills
Mozilla warns of Flash and Silverlight 'agenda'
Reading the essays will answer the meaningful questions here.
Having worked as a programmer and spending time at B-school, I'm about to tell you the secret that explains all the conflicts between managers and programmers.

Many is the programmer who's said "I get more done after midnight than most people do the rest of the day."

But at B-school the saying goes "I get more done before 8 AM than most people do the rest of the day."

And therein lies the problem. ;-)
(Working) Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower
Startupindex.ca - Free our data, free the community
It buys them relevance in the face of Microsoft. Flash may be on nearly every browser, but Silverlight is only one Windows Update away from similar numbers. Adobe watched the .NET CLR rapidly eat Java's pie, and now the same technology is targeting Flash.

To be competitive with .NET, Flash needs at least as good a developer community, which means it needs to be at least as open as the CLR (which is an open standard, various patents notwithstanding). The sad thing is that a third-party developer community has tried to grow up around Flash for a decade now, but until recently Adobe has done little to encourage it, simply to protect Flash sales and outrageous Flex server licensing fees.
"Viral marketing has quickly achieved recognition because of a handful of high-profile examples: Marketers demonstrated that on shoestring budgets they could motivate millions. They did so by leveraging customer-to-customer communication to increase sales, brand awareness, and market coverage.

To date, however, marketers have had difficulty reproducing the success of a handful of viral campaigns, such as 'The Blair Witch Project,' HotMail, and the 'Dancing Baby.'"

Viral marketing requires things achieve popularity through word-of-mouth replication, not big-budget marketing. So if my solitaire gets 20 good reviews that get 20 downloads each, and spawns 20 more good reviews, &c., it is virally successful. You might not like that that's how the term is used, but you're about 7 years too late.

( http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=837321 )
I started my company 1 year ago. I haven't found any clients and haven't built a product, but I've traveled around the country talking to potenatial customers. Want to come work for me with no salary for the next 2 years in exchange for a 4% stake?
VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool
Migrating to ext4
New Media vs. Old Media - Why Old Media is SO WRONG
McDonalds is doing the same thing - All the Ronald McDonald and kids stuff is not just for the families: It's a long-term strategy.
I think they make a good amount of money from all the specialized ads they have. Like the meebo skins, and all those little icons for various bands and products.