skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The endgame for any "platform" software technology is an open, freely available, ubiquitous spec. Flash is, within its current domain, ubiquitous and free-as-in-beer. Only the open part is missing...

And that means that it could be dethroned on mobile devices: unique Flash builds everywhere will increase the cost of the platform over time, become a support nightmare, and eventually make users switch to a more open alternative. As it stands platforms other than Windows and Mac are second-class citizens, either having buggy/lowered performance(Linux), or supporting only older versions of SWF. (Wii Opera, mobiles) This is not a good track record.

So Adobe should be applauded for this move. They aren't stupid, and they still will have some control over the spec into the near future, since they possess the premier dev tools. (I love MTASC/haXe/SWFMill, but must admit that they have shortcomings.)
I just graduated with a business degree, but I was hired at a startup in Boston as a Rails coder making $65K. I turned down an offer of $100k at a big corporation for obvious reasons.

I figured it's enough for me to live comfortably and continue to work on my side projects :)
Telco 2.0 platform, Jajah,Ribbit and Broadsoft fighting hard
For Europe's middle class, stagnant wages stunt lifestyle
I'm getting more and more convinced that having to take VC is a competitive disadvantage. Granted, some types of startups have to have some kind of VC funding, but I'm planning to avoid it if at all possible.
very interesting analysis.

When I came to the part about google, funnily enough, it reminded me of Paul Graham's "What the Bubble got right", specifically about Yahoo in Para's 2 & 3.

http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html
But 'sustainable' population isn't necessarily zero population growth. On a macro scale, even the population explosion of the last 40 years has so far been sustainable due to huge advances in agriculture, health care, and energy. As long as our ability to provide those things grows at the same or better rate as our population, it is sustainable.

(I'll note I am using the literal definition of 'sustainable' here... able to be sustained. As an nerd, I'd really like our future ability to provide those things to be environmentally and socially sound, but that wasn't what I was talking about.)

Exponential population growth becomes a problem when we give up innovating.
The original paper by Chua: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2753819/MemristorThe-Missing-Circu...
Don't tell anybody this, but I always take a 15 minute nap in our break room after lunch everyday at work. It really helps me get back to focus for the rest of the day when I'm coding.
Tom DeMarco's books are awesome. Slack really opened my mind, instead of optimizing every waking hour, I used a "structured procrastination" approach in getting things done.
this is great. let's hope some mobile browsers integrates flash directly in the browser now. I can't wait
I guess its time to leave, the moment you start calling them "Sir" :-)
I pay around $1300 for a 1 bedroom apartment. This is a bit on the high side, but I like living in the city center, in summer it's almost European.
On this note, I have a question that I (as a new grad) don't know anything about. What are raises like? How often do they happen? How much? What does it take?
Howto: Install Metasploit 3.1 svn in Ubuntu Hardy Heron
This is a tool that I pentest my lan with and can be used to hack remote computers/networks or whatever, I will show you how to get this setup and installed in Ubuntu Hardy very easily:
Howto: Awesome Opensource MilkDrop Winamp Music Visualizations for Ubuntu Linux! (475 visuals!)
Tired of lame GOOM! visualizations in Ubuntu and want something pretty tight? Check out projectM!
Ubuntu Unleashed: Easily Upgrade to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS
C/C++ if you want to do what's best for future career.
most modern operating systems, device drivers, desktop games, console games, etc. are written using them. The other languages you cited may give you edge if you want to stay in a special niche but they won't give you as much flexibility to work in a variety of other industries.
Ubuntu Unleashed: Tweak and optimize Ubuntu Linux Boot and Application Startup times dramatically
Raises? It's called changing jobs.
Goog Analytics question
I have a site with many user generated pages. Should I embed the analytics code in every page on the site, or just select few?
I wish you guys would include me in the beta! I've been tooling around with JungleDisk which hasn't been working (which sucks!). I'm a grad student so I have a lot of back and forth between school and my computer and I'm always syncing files back and forth through email (which is such a pain!). File syncing is a big deal for me. The fact that you guys do version control sorta by default is awesome. I've been thinking about how you guys do that, and I think I know how, but I'll keep it to myself as you probably wouldn't comment or confirm it anyway. (so nobody steals your thunder).
Clearly CS PhDs are different from CS DPhils. :-)
I'm not sure what you're getting at -- should I change jobs when I feel like I'm due a better salary? Even if the job is awesome?
This is pretty spot on.
For the lazy, Craigslist says that they can dilute ebay's share because ebay launched Kijijijijijiji, which is a direct competitor for craigslist.

I just went and checked out the Kijiji site Ebay launched. Its totally lame compared to CL. Its weird how I now prefer the non-newness of CL's look. CL is so clean and fast, that Kijiji just looks awful and cluttered. Not to mention it uses Flash, which immediately gets minus points.

Yay for CL. I have gotten so many awesome things through it.
Am I going to be screwed over because I go to Arizona State?
Do you seriously have 135 un-saved text files going? Because if you do, you are my new idol.
yea, people that do that annoy me
Hi,
http://www.percona.com/presentations.html

There you have around 20 presentations on pdf related to MySQL, indexing, improving performance, query optimization, techniques for scaling, etc.

Have fun with those!
Short answer: If you want metrics to include those pages - yeah.

Long answer: By user generated pages, do you mean pages over which the user has ownership e.g. blog posts? If so, it might be more polite to analyze server logs. Otherwise, yeah.
You can't evaluate the offer without the number of outstanding shares.

The last offer I received I was told that it wasn't their usual practice to tell. I talked to their HR director and she told me right away — in other words, you might have talked to the wrong person.
But don't let on. Work on your startup with the new extra time.
Exactly, or, to put it another way: right now synchronization is yet another way to share files either with someone else or with yourself, and there's already hundreds of methods for doing that, and once everyone starts using web applications exclusively, it'll be a non issue.
You and, well, maybe everyone here and, uhm, maybe everybody at reddit and slashdot and then, well, nobody else.
Start telling people; maybe things will change.
I only have two unsaved files open right now -- Untitled 82 and Untitled 135. It's just that I've had TextMate running continuously since sometime in March.
Market Research: Detailed stats about international and US blogging, social media in 2008 (scribd)
The New Novice Programming: Google Apps Hacks
Max! You don't have your email in your profile...Shoot us an email.
Isn't this known as the "Social Engineering" form of hacking?
This will be great for gnash. I'd love to see desktop Linux distributions shipping with a solid, open source flash player.

Firefox has hung one too many times when trying to play flash content over the last year or two, so much so that I use flashblock by default and only enable what I really need.
Wow, does that take me back. I had the original Diamond Rio back in the day (though the second, 64mb generation) which I bought from Best Buy for $300. I remember how freaking happy I was with it too. What was that, 1998? 99?

I soooooooo wish I hadn't sold that on eBay.
I think "svn ci" sometimes being a little slow is a total non-issue, at least in my experience. Admittedly, the project I use SVN for is only ~750KLOC, but I think that probably includes the vast majority of people using VCSs for source code.

Subversion, despite its marketing hype, has no support for branching and merging

That is overstating the case (SVN supports branching just fine), but I think that is SVN's only real problem is how terrible merging is (that and the whole centralized model in general, but there are plenty of circumstances in which a centralized VCS is perfectly acceptable). Hopefully merge tracking in 1.5 will improve things.
"how do we reconcile our innate capacity to continuously expand with a finite world?"

How about colonizing space? Seriously. Do you think it will never happen?
For the lazy, Craigslist says that they can dilute ebay's share because ebay launched Kijijijijijiji, which is a direct competitor for craigslist.

Sorta. Though Kijiji seems the motivating factor, the actual legal maneuverings are a lot more subtle, even tricky.

In fact, there's a curious provision apparently adopted in 2004 when EBay first got their stake. It said that the other shareholders had a right-of-first-refusal (ROFR) to acquire EBay's shares, but that if EBay started competing, that ROFR in EBay's share would expire. That's odd because the ROFR is not for EBay's benefit, but the company/others... so letting EBay unilaterally increase their freedom to sell their shares by competing with Craigslist seems backwards. (Instead, I would have thought the competing party would lose their ROFR to the others' shares.)

But I guess someone was thinking a few moves ahead, because it looks like Craig+Jim used the expiration of the first ROFR (in 2007 because of Kijiji) as rationalization for the creation of a new mutual ROFR. For agreeing to this new ROFR, the agreeing shareholders (Craig+Jim) would get bonus shares.... such bonus shares being just enough to dilute Ebay below a 25% ownership share, unless they also agree to the same new ROFR. 25% turns out to be a crucial threshold for electing a board member or preventing other operational changes.

Did Craig+Jim agree to the 2004 ROFR-expiration clause, knowing it would provide a rationale for a later new-ROFR-justified dilution? Or was the 2004 agreement just broken, and now they're trying to recover from something which gave Ebay too much freedom to both compete and sell their shares to anyone? I hope Craigslist's filing(s) clarify things.
That's a bad sign. Did they specifically refuse to tell you? Did they offer any explanation?

It's important to be able trust the people you are working with.

At FriendFeed, we'll share just about any number with the people we've made offers to.
I did a CE degree (Computer Systems Engineering) at Stanford. To be honest, I should have listened to my CS advisor, who said CE really doesn't give you enough depth in either CS or EE. Four years pass fast, and invariably a CE degree is the "no theory" or "less theory" degree. This will hurt you in the long run if you end up choosing CS or EE as your eventual interest. Lacking a strong algorithms / theory background, it can hurt both when interviewing (most great programming shops place a heavy emphasis on running times and algorithms) and when actually developing code. On the EE side, you pretty much need a PhD or at least a MS to get one of the more interesting R&D positions. And for applying to grad school, you'll be up to your more solidly EE brethren who have that much more coverage of the material and connection with EE faculty.

My suggestion: try some of both, and make a decision, and go deep.

If your college really is a 'java school' -- consider doing well your freshman year and transferring to a school known for solid CS instruction. It'll probably make a difference.

Good luck!
Well, it's fairly rare a VC invests in a company that early stage and thinks it's peaked a year later. I agree with you, but that doesn't happen.
Here in the UK the starting salary for coders outside London is around $45k (+$5k for a masters).

However that is for a 37 hour working week. Most people can add 50% over basic in overtime (for 40% extra hours, due to premium rates).

Northern Mexico is about $30k which, compared to basic cost of living, equates to about $120k in California :)
You're wrong. They don't need majority control of the board to veto a merger or acquisition. Most funding rounds give the investors preferred shares. An acquisition would have to be approved by the majority of preferred stock and the overall majority.

I'm of course not privy to Xobni's investment terms, but I'm sure it includes that. They get that sort of veto power in >99% of funding rounds.
I submitted it because I thought it was mostly true. Much of the backing evidence/arguments are linked too in the article. But mostly I think it's of worth for some perspective.

You're right that there are a lot of lists of generalized assertions around -- some of these bloggers sound a bit like the next generation of self-help authors. But sometimes the perspective unique, and valuable, and I think this is one of those cases.
Well it has advantages and disadvantages. You can get $5m from a VC round while only giving up the same amount of equity you would to take $0.5m from angels. At the same time, you drastically reduce your potential exits by limiting yourself to much higher dollar amounts.

You have to weigh the pros and cons and decide what's right for your situation.
They have balls. I know them well enough to say they had long term aspirations long before Microsft came a knockin. They're in no worse shape now than they were before that. In fact, it's much better.
In Oklahoma it seems to be more like $40K. :( When I went to make some job applications, I realized none of my professors gave any of the new CS graduates any advice on what salary to ask for. It's a moot point because I'm not convinced there are any CS jobs out here. I'm graduating top in my class, have 3 years experience working at a (folded) software development startup, and I've even done a NASA intership - and even with a resume like that I haven't even so much as gotten an interview yet: the job market out here is just so low-tech...
I suppose a VC would not pass on 2x if they knew they were peaking there. At the same point, if a VC funds a company, and nothing catastrophic happens in one year, they're not selling at 2x. To do so would invalidate their original judgment.

I'm sure it occurred to Vinod Khosla and the guys at Xobni that Microsoft might one day implement their functionality. It's too obvious not to have.
No startup I've ever worked for has told me the number of outstanding shares. They generally gave me dirty looks whenever I asked. I figure it didn't matter...the 30,000 options were take it or leave it and I've never been in a position to haggle.

Thinking about it, it might be a matter of public record. Maybe you can look up their articles of incorporation filed with whatever state they are in.

btw, 30,0000 shares sounds pretty standard in line with what I've been offered at previous jobs.
My money's on us seeing the hostile takeover, too.
I think it depends on the job. If it doesn't take advantage of your research abilities, then a freshly-minted PhD (without other work experience) probably won't be paid too much more than a M. Sc. (less than an undergrad is plainly nonsense, though). But if you're taking a job at a place like MSR or IBM Research, not only is a PhD essentially a job requirement, but the starting salary is typically around $130k.
Ask HN: How do you work?
I came across this old article about how successful people work - http://snurl.com/26lrf. But I did start wondering if there was some gap between how these guys worked and how you work?

My question to you is: How do you guys work?

p.s: I am pretty sure there are a whole bunch of HNers who will consider themselves fairly successful to answer this question.
I came across this old article about how successful people work just recently. And I started wondering if there was some gap between how these guys work and how you guys work your time?

My question is to you HNers: How do you guys work?

Thanks!

p.s: I am pretty a whole bunch of HNers will consider themselves fairly successful to answer this question.
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As a new PhD grad, I got a raise after 6 months, and another (larger one) 6 months after that. Just ask for a performance review.
It depends. If you're a rock star candidate, then no. If you're average to good, then probably yes.
A friend of mine couldn't sell to a great offer a few years ago because it was blocked by the VC and the company died a slow death.

I guess anything in life is a gamble and this is no different.
IIRC, Linuxcare turned down a few offers when it was still 'hot'. I don't think they were very good offers, but it still turned out to be a mistake.
RMS: Can we rescue OLPC from Windows?
yes. raises tend tp ne 2-3%, You can get 10-15% or more for changing jobs
He's also at MSR -- the folks at MSR are doing lots of very interesting work.
I am sure they will for the 1bn+ Chinese speakers.

Culture tends to spread based on economic supremacy. It has done in the past, do you have a reason to think it won't here beyond the language barrier?
Certainly, but I don't think this is what Umair was exhorting people to do. OTOH, I'm not sure exactly what it is that he wants everyone to go do, either.
In London, CS grads at banks get around $80k. IT consultants get $60k. You can't really survive on much less than that in London :)
Sounds like it's time to move?
Wow, highly original thought: China is going to be an economic superpower.

Except I have read that about a zillion times before...

Just gives me a thought: maybe it would make sense to create two fake identities, one who predicts China becomes a superpower, and one who predicts that it is doomed. Then, whichever turns out to be true, you can officially assume that identity and be hailed as a prophet.
yeah everything circles around usa and the white west.

or not soon...
Firefox 3, del.icio.us, and you
because they dont WANT to believe it they choose not to believe it.

obv the white western world is not gonna reign over the whole world forever.

lets jsut ope they treat us better than weve treated them.

any hope for democracy in China in the near future?

will it happen as they grow wealthier?

i mean it can ahrdly be called communism anymore, more like fascism now(not that thats any better).
The (s|S)emantic (w|W)eb
Who the Hell Are You? Path to Building Your Brand
You really should consider your options. I could probably find you a job that pays a million dollars per month - Zimbabwe dollars, that is...
Ask YC: Help in negotiating my stake in a start-up
I have been asked to join a start-up recently and will be the 5th member. The original founders go back about 18 months and have up to now been the driving force behind the business. I have been offered a 2% stake with share options to 4%. This is the same as was offered to the 4th member. The 3 original founders each have 31% each. The remaining 3% is to go to certain other smaller investors.

This is a banking services/technology start-up and I am to be the legal and compliance director,I am a banking lawyer by profession.

My gut feeling is that I am not being offered enough equity here and that there is too much disparity between my % and the original founder's 30.1%. I had expected to receive nearer to 8%.

We will shortly be approaching angels/vcs for round 1 funding and the 3 founders proposals is that they will dilute their shareholdings for the VC etc and my stake will be protected from dilution at all stages.

Does this seem fair and equitable to you guys or am I being ripped off here? I have thought about it so much I can't think clearly about it at the moment. I am taking no salary and working for "free" in return for this stake, though I will get some salary though much below market rate probably year 2 or 3.
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Collection of online barbie dress up games. Site offers flash games for girls where kids select the barbie doll they love and dress her up in many of the available outfits.
kijijiij had something of a lead in non-US sites, where CL is now starting to gain back some ground (thanks to the efforts of a YC.news reader who works there:-)
I should be sleeping now
Several factors to consider: Are the other founders taking salary? How will they protect you from dilution? Why won't they pay you at all even if they raise money now?

But generally, 8% is pretty high for someone joining 18 months after founding.
which is why they have a small percentage of the market?
Lessons about age discrimination learned from a mother
he may not have to write one himself:

http://www.jazillian.com/howCOBOL.html

disclaimer: i don't know cobol and have never tried this.
but haters usually in regards to their fair trade coffee (or lack there of). Starbucks junkies are fanboys as well -- and I find often coincide with Apple fanboys
Academia, of course, gives you entirely different salaries. For an Assistant Prof. job at a good university you are looking at ~65,000 +/- 10k depending on location. This of course is supposed to be for 9 months, but good luck telling your tenure review committee you didn't do any work during the summers. Word is lucrative part-time consulting gigs can be had if you are enterprising. It looks as if you are at about 1/2 of what an industrial lab will pay. But then if you are in the academy, supposedly you care more about freedom than money.
But wasn't Ebay always competing with CL even before Kijiji. The use cases are not very different, CL just does it through free listings and Ebay has auctions
If funding comes in, we will all have some salary, albeit well below market rate, which I suppose is fine, its a start-up. Why is 8% high for a late joiner?
I haven't yet seen an unique usefull idea from xobni so far, except that they group attachements by author....
Ok, but he's not pointed out a solution. I guess MSFT has lost the battle and solution is to admit it and they should work on their strengths. There is a whole lot of potential in there. I mean look at Vista & IE 7 ;(
Even though .NET powers some heavy-traffic websites but the framework is still catching up. LINQ is somewhat cool but they're giving out MVC in (ahem) 2000 and 8.
>1. Sleep deprivation makes you act drunk.

It just causes similar impairment on driving tests.
You don't need to actually change jobs. If you get a better offer, you can tell your company that you feel you're being undervalued, and ask for a raise.

It's just money, so don't be shy.
They added Gmail-style conversational threading to Outlook. That's one of the best features of Gmail and something Outlook was really missing. It's not a unique feature, but it's definitely useful. There aren't many companies out there that are trying to improve the basic functionality of email; I'm actually surprised that Xobni has seen so little competition.