skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
simple scenario: when you join your company gives you 1000 options valued at $1 per share (at the time of issuing), vesting in 4 years.

Assuming after 2 years, you decide you want to exercise the options that are vested, so you pay your company $500 to get your 500 shares.

Company start going down the tube, and folds out, or is selled at fire price. You end up with basically worthless paper on your hands. So, instead of earning money, you lost.
Imagine, that instead of $500 that was 5000, 50000. It is a lot of money.

There are also tax implication, depending what kind of taxing schedule you choose. You can find yourself actually paying taxes, for those shares at the time of excercising, yet when you want to sell, they are worthless.

Double ouch.
Also, one thing to consider is that when you exercise options, you have buy those shares. If your company is iliquid (not gone ipo), it might take a long time when (if) you are able to sale them (either it goes IPO, or the company is sold). So, you are tying a chunk of your money, in these shares.

So, as always, buyer beware. Do your own math when it comes in cases like this.
I'm using W3Counter (http://www.w3counter.com). It's like Google Analytics minus the 1-24 hour delay, and all the goodness that comes from realtime reporting. But I keep GA installed as well for some of the more detailed back-reporting it doesn't have.
I came across two things:

1)Depending on the size of your swf, initial loading might take some time.

2)Not everybody has the latest player on their browsers. If your users are not tech literate. This might be an obstacle.
We use Google Analytics, Webalizer, and AWStats, plus some custom Perl bits. Clicky looks pretty swish, but I haven't taken the time to try it.
You have the shittiest “convert to grayscale” I’ve ever seen: it doesn’t come close to preserving the value of the colors. Convert the image to Lab, and look at the L channel, and you will see that the “ugly” combinations have very little value contrast, while the “nice” ones have a great deal more.

To see who is “exactly wrong” more graphically: http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/7098/grayfxbetternp7.png

Notice that in the bottom row, where we take the value from ugly and nice combinations and reverse them, the combinations with the “nice” choices of hue are now looking ugly as sin, while those with the “ugly” choices of hue no longer look so bad.

Also, in your second image, the green stripe on the left is quite a bit brighter than red or blue stripes, which is the dominant reason that the combination on the left looks “better”, while the three stripes on the right side are of quite similar value.

Image showing this: http://img503.imageshack.us/img503/2456/vomitev5betteryu5.pn...

I didn’t really have the half hour to spend on this (paper due tomorrow; blargh), so hopefully someone finds it edifying.

(Edit: None of this is to say that there isn’t some real truth to the link’s author’s claims about commonly preferred color combinations based on hue. It’s just that the graphics he uses to demonstrate it [and also the one you made] are horribly misleading, and mostly reflect a completely unrelated effect)

----

Another edit to add: the hang-up may be that the “value” of the HSV model has almost nothing to do with the term “value” as used by artists or color scientists. So that may be the source of your confusion. HSL and HSV were designed for the 1970s and are nearly useless in an age of fast computers.
People make this claim all the time but I never hear anyone talk about actual examples where they were bitten by this.

People especially like to harp on the speed of ruby as a knock on ruby on rails. However I have not once run into a real life situation where the performance problem was directly related to the raw performance of Ruby. I have though run into plenty of performance problems:

* At Odeo (RoR circa 2005) we had plenty of problems with memory leaks in our FCGI (this was 2005!) processes and in feed_tools (well known to be slow)

* At my next company we quickly ran into situations where pages were slow to load due to the sheer number of database calls. When I started doing web apps I can remember never having more than three queries behind any given page. Some of our pages were doing 500 queries. This was easily fixed but Rails definitely tempts you to put up scaffolding which you then have to rework once it starts getting real use. In my experience this is a good thing. I'm twice as likely to throw away the scaffolding than I am to have to rewrite it.

* Twitter, which is the poster child for RoR scaling issues, actually actually has had almost all their problems on the backend, having to rapidly change their database and message queue architectures and deal with flaky service providers (AOL and phone companies). Again nothing to do with the architecture they launched with.

So, in the lab Ruby is a slow language, but in the real world how is this biting people?
http://wiki.w4py.org/python-vs-php.html
I use 'visitors' ( http://www.hping.org/visitors/ ), which was written by my friend, YC.news visitor antirez.

I tried Google Analytics too, but found it kind of annoying in that it's sort of a pain to get the information I want.
Too late :(
By my experience (I've gotten job offers from a few startups), most startups (especially after their series A) offer employees (at least engineers) a miniscule amount of equity (a small fraction of a percent). Even if these companies would have great exits (tens of millions), their engineers would hardly get enough for a down payment on a house in the Bay Area.

Summary: don't expect the equity you get from working at a startup (unless you're a VP or an executive) to be worth much. Google-like events where many employees got rich are few and far between. If you do work for an existing company, I suggest looking at salary more than equity as a means of making money. The difference between making 120k vs 80k over 4 years is 160k -- more than you're likely to get from options, and less risky.
Are you going through the web page to create your identifier first or just setting it in the app.yaml and attempting to upload? I had no problem setting mine up through the site first and then using the appcfg deal to up it.
Yahoo Reveals Details of Its New Ad Sales System
Vinod Dham Interview: On Pentium, K6 and Startups
I add lots of java server-side reference code within and inbtween my static html/javascript. so unless the client code is not too dependent on any back-end code, or aleast not more then say passing a few paramerter or xml request/response, then I wouldn't go with any other ui. the main test for me is, is this, say flash client going to end up being a fat client? if it is then it's not the right choice
I feel old. My high school AP computer class used Pascal running on Apple IIe computers (I worked in C, E, assembly, and Rexx on my Amiga at home, though).
I think that the real teller on Ruby is it's own website. not the main page, but most of the surrounding infrastructure linked community is really slow. That is, it is painful to browse. I don't use Ruby or Python very much, but when I do I usually go through the main site for language to find reference and documentation and Ruby is definitely more difficult on that count because of this. I can only assume that it is because they build their websites in Ruby.

On the other hand, Ruby is Japanese. I suppose that the websites may be hosted on on Japanese servers all that way across the and that may account for the lag. It's still annoying though.
Not quite ;)

I just mean that really if you look at PHP's function list, it really is just a wrapper around C libraries. Many functions map 1-1 from the C lib to the PHP function. That's where it gets its string function names, many of the original database libraries were exactly that (which is why there was no built-in abstraction layer for so long), and you can look at GD or any other extension for more examples.

When you take that into consideration, you can see what the language designers were thinking in the decisions they made for PHP. They aren't necessarily the ideal choices, but the rationale does make sense.
The operational costs of a web startup are approaching the cost of connectivity. But, the people to wire it together will still want money.

And as a number of people are gleefully pointing out, Appengine comes with a strategic cost that is not trivial.

After playing with the .zip file they provide, I think fears of lockin are overblown. It should be relatively trivial to port existing apps to GAE, and apps developed for GAE should be easy to port to a WSGI enabled server.

Google will be a good place to run the free version of your web app that serves as an ad for the premium version that does the same thing with crypto, or with C extensions that add value to the transaction, you'll be able to use the same core code in relatively similar application containers.
Google App Engine

Python: +2
The future of mobile broadband has arrived -- in Korea
"... Thanks for signing up to try Google App Engine! Your account has been activated, so you can begin building applications! ..."

I'm in.
Open Source Decade: John Ousterhout
It doesn't save power in absolute terms (which is why the lower power Atom chips disable it), but it increases performance per watt (and performance per transistor). Basically, on modern chips the leakage power is a huge proportion of the total power used, so you're paying for blocks of logic whether you're using them or not. You can shut off blocks (most modern processors do this), but only at a very granular level.

Hyperthreading runs two threads simultaneously, and when one thread stalls, the other thread takes over, so you get a much higher % utilization of the chips resources. Switching power used goes up, leakage stays the same, and performance increases.

Hyperthreading speeds up simple, in order chips like the Atom particularly well (because a single thread is stalling so much!). So don't expect equivilant performance gains from Nehalem hyperthreading.
PHP doesn't have first class functions (and all of the stuff that sort of naturally flows from closures and all of the other nice bits that make dynamic languages so very nice to work with). It is a pretty dramatic difference between PHP and Python, Ruby, and Perl. Idiomatic usage of the latter three are, on the whole, similar to one another, but idiomatic usage of PHP is dramatically different. I think if you don't see "paradigm shift" differences, then you're writing PHP code in Perl and Ruby. In other words: You're doing it wrong.

PHP isn't really even in the same branch of languages as the three popular dynamic languages. It's like a fork off from C in the same way that chimps and humans shared a common ancestor 8 million years ago. So, one could say, "chimps are to PHP as humans are to Perl", if one wanted to be inflammatory...and in this case, one does. Both are pretty flawed as creatures go, but one flings poop and the other drives cars and builds roller coasters.
I see what you're getting at, but I think it's better said like you did in the comment above. The standard library wraps a lot of C libraries. I however suspect that more came by way of Perl, which PHP was somewhat based on.

As a language, aside from the fact that they're from the same syntactic family, one is a compiled, low-level iterative language, the other is an (semi-) object oriented, dynamic, garbage collected, interpreted language. In terms of language features, it's a lot closer to the Python, Ruby, Perl clan than C.
When I was using flex I would run across strange bugs (such as invisible artifacts on the scrolling data grid which would make it so you couldn't trigger click/hover etc. events in random areas) which you are just "stuck with" as you can't exactly delve into the source and fix it yourself! I hate waiting for vendor updates! With extjs/yui etc. when I have come up against an oddity I have been able to get into the guts and figure it out (and usually figure out what I was doing wrong). Another factor would be accessibility. I know Extjs has this on their roadmap, what about flash/flex?
Atom is very impressive. Intel demonstrated it running Unreal Tournament 2k3 + Vista on Atom + its chipset (integrated graphics), without so much as a heatsink on either.

Unfortunately, the chipset is still etched on 130nm and is substantially bigger than Atom itself - you won't find the combination in an iPhone any time soon.
Make Your Ruby/Rails App Fast: Performance And Memory Profiling
Same here so probably not luck
So, it seems that EC2 is still the way to go for that kind of problem.
Interesting side note: it appears they've reserved all Gmail names for application identifiers.

It wouldn't let me pick my Gmail name (which is fairly obscure) but appending "1" to the end worked...
Once Google App Engine is fully released, you will be able to acquire additional computing resources at market prices, and set your own automatic resource limits.

Market prices? What exactly does that mean, will it be determined by supply and demand, via an auction like AdWords perhaps?
There is a new channel #appengine on freenode
Excerpts from Ricardo Semler's book "Maverick"
Twitter accelerates communication between the extended edge(s) of one's extended network and brings them virtually closer:

For example, I was fascinated to follow the successful launch of Quotably.com on News.YC from the creator, Ben Tucker ((http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144253). manvsmachine read the same post and twittered about quotably.com and brought a very positive response in <30 minutes from Robert Scoble, creating a real-time snowball effect, culminating? in a techcrunch news blip and a twitter blog entry in <24-48 hours (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/23/quotably-the-perfect-tw...
, http://blog.twitter.com/2008/03/quotably-helps-you-follow-co...
). manvsmachine had been a twitter publisher only about a week prior to his quotably.com twitter.

http://quotably.com/manvsmachine/statuses/776053962

manvsmachine: the most useful twitter app I've seen so far... it even makes sense out of @Scoble 's feed http://quotably.com/ 15 days ago

Scobleizer: @manvsmachine http://quotably.com rocks. Thank YOU! See, there is signal in the noise.

I agree that it is an always-on network and it also allows mob computing, on-demand emergent and/or just-in-time networks (SxSw)
This is a neat trick, but not very flexible or scalable.

Basically each user is given a presigned authorization token that lets them upload certain files to their bucket. Other users only have read access to the index. The clever trick is that the key is used to store the publicly available data like the latitude and longitude.

It works out well in his case, but it's not very useful generally.
Blizzard's Success Story
Pash - open source version of Windows Powershell
Google account sign-in: let your users sign in to your application using a Google account and password

This worries me. It sounds like Google is trying to become the new single sign-on, completely blowing off OpenID, a perfectly good open solution. Microsoft Passport all over again...
Spydentify: http://spydentify.com/
People love looking a pictures and trying to figure out what’s in them.

And it's not photo hosting (in fact, it's specifically configured to disallow photo hosting).
Does it even make a difference? The whole world is using gmail as if it weren't in beta, with expectations to match.
Great anecdote of Twitter in action. I was around to watch that whole thing unfold for Quotably. It was neat to see a conversation which began here gain so much traction so fast.

How exciting for those guys...
Thanks for the feedback Tim. I replied on the blog (and posted an update for those who don't read the comments), but here's my take for the YC community:

I think you're right... by virtue of the interface/function issue, Twitter isn't an example of ubiquitous computing per se. But I do think it's an important milestone on the path there.

As I said, you're more "expert" than me. Thanks for adding your opinion.
I search domains all the time through DirectNIC and I've never experienced any sniping firsthand.
I second a search feature, which would be particularly helpful for some of the interesting "Ask YC" posts.
A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity
Purdue's 156-Step Burger Maker Wins Rube Goldberg Contest
Thanks for the link, would upvote if I could.

More work by the artist discussed in the article and linked at the very end:

http://members.shaw.ca/adms/
http://memory.ucsf.edu/Art/gallery.htm
The point is that because of the lower funding they have a lot more exit options than an average VC backed company and can exit in a lower valuation where an IPO doesn't make sense.

Of course some of your companies have awesome potential ( I wouldn't have applied if I didn't believe in the model) but they have a lower incentive to wait for an IPO than a VC backed company.
I love typography - Choosing typefaces (a few guidelines)
The original article contains a few more arguments: http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/02/28/communications-wh...

The comments at slashdot point out the underlying economic trade-off: cost of reliability vs. cost of downtime.
http://code.google.com/p/recordstream/
Facebook Reportedly Near Accord Over Origin
Always know who you are hiring. Always verify by documenting.
I like bbclone a lot, it's not like the usual stats but gives me very uniquely useful information and much better than many of the others as its so direct,
Not really, offering you a number of shares but refusing to tell you the number of shares outstanding is like offering to pay you 100,000 a year but not being willing to tell in which currency the 100,000 are. Might be in GBP (about 200k USD) might be in Yens (about 1000 USD)
interesting concept
It was a long time ago that the "IT" cost of web startups was anything at all worth thinking about. About as relevant as the cost of a water cooler (less so, probably)
That is crazy...!
Seriously, I had an idea for a social network back in '98 and the people I pitched it to said it was stupid! Being a 15 year old dumb kid, I didn't pursue it any further :( ...
Fun is that PHP still lets you pretend it works functionally.

http://php.net/array_map

http://php.net/array_reduce

http://php.net/array_filter

http://php.net/array_walk

http://php.net/call_user_func_array (apply)

http://php.net/create_function (lambda)

PHP is a language that encompasses all useful things in all other languages. Which, I guess, makes it inferior.
I figured this was obvious-- if the company fails, you lose the money invested. That's the nature of equity and stocks in general.

I wouldn't consider losing 5k after exercising options (and knowing the obvious risks) as being "fucked," though. Just a bad outcome. And exercising 50k worth of options on a company that has a chance of failing is just stupid.
Eliminating bad options is a good thing. (Also, 90% is way off)
Google AppEngine - A First Look
+1 for the design
PHP is sloppy and messy, and say what you will, but the first time I tried writing something like the below code I definitely had one of those "Woah. That is cool." moments like first-time experience with lambdas:

$a = 'var';
$b = 'iable';
$variable = 'var';
echo ${$a.$b};

Useful? Sure it is:

$filter = array("name", "email");
foreach($filter as $v) $$v = $_POST[$v];
I share your love of typography. At some point, we might even see more aural typography (sound fonts) in screen readers. Imagine the difference between a text read out loud by Christopher Walken vs. Audrey Hepburn...
double post, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157705
You know that you have to supply the function by _name_ as a string?
- * * dictionary arguments

P.S. No two stars next two each other allowed on news.yc?
Navigenics Launches Whole-Genome Scan (competing with 23andme and deCODEme)
Debatewise - http://www.debatewise.com. Created because I wanted to find out what both sides of an issue thought and I found searching various blogs time-consuming and error-prone.

We allow debate creators to collaborate on their argument, wiki-style and present the points they make alongside the points of their opponents, so people can quickly compare the two.
Blah Bah Blah Bah Blah Blah.

Too much time is wasted on this planet due to people trying to convince themselves they are "doing the right thing".

I don't know (or care) what the results are for others.
For me, Ruby on Rails saves me tremendous time when developing projects and makes me enjoy coding web apps again. So I use it.

If you get that same feeling, use it too. If you don't, try something else.

Anyone who sees anything more to this needs a vacation.
No, I'm not concerned, there's nothing against it here:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Does it happen a lot? No, I don't think so.
Unattended Fedora 8 Installation With NFS And Kickstart
Debatewise needs your love - http://www.debatewise.com/. Plus if you start a debate between now and 14th May you could win a MacBook Air. More info on the Competition link from the home page.
A Sequoia backed startup versus a Google backed startup versus a large Icelandic publicly traded unprofitable research institution.

It will be interesting how this one plays out.
Good overview
Capitalism versus Nepotism versus Socialism

Also, John Doerr is on Navigenics board: http://www.navigenics.com/about/bio/JDoerrBio/nav/BoardDirec...
I find this comparison biased towards python.
Totally. Latin for Latin Americans.
Please don't call "create_function" a "lambda". That's a parody of anonymous function. You have to escape (\") your source code, function is registered in the global scope, and the only reference you get on it is... a string with generated, unique function name.
Thanks David, note that in most debian-based distributions all you need is apt-get install visitors.

Edit:
Also if you could like to play with real-time analysis to get detailed information about how your users are interacting with your web site please feel free to write me at antirez -at- gmail ~dot~ com for a free invitation for http://lloogg.com
One site I am maintaining is getting like 65k a month but compete is saying ~37k a month. Totally bogus.
I found PHP to be easier to deploy. It might (because I'm not sure how much memory Python apps with mod_python or mod_wsgi really take) also be a better choice if you're making multiple sites and don't have a lot of memory on your server (e.g., 256MB VPS) since it doesn't take up too much memory.
you spelt MERP wrong.
Wikimedia Gets $500K From Neeru Khosla, Wife Of Vinod Khosla
Yes, it is a known problem, and I have also found myself editing my own profanity:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/02/why-ruby-is-not-acceptab...
Help me understand: what are the good reasons for the parameters of a block overwriting variables in an enclosing scope?

That is, we are talking about:

i = 100
x = 0
[1,2,3].each { |i| x += i }

I understand why it is incredibly helpful for x to refer to a variable in the enclosing scope (even if we could accomplish this same effect with a fold). What are the use cases for the parameter i referring to a variable in the enclosing scope?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Duck_Syndrome