skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, the goal is independent wealth: a low risk passive income. The math for this is pretty simple.

Say you are a rock star making $100k/yr. After taxes, in CA, that's ~$60k/yr. If you are single and super-cheap (i.e. celibate), you can live acceptably on about 30k. Thus, you build 30k/yr in capital.

Say you need $3k/mo bare minimum, pre-tax, to retire, and refuse to draw down on capital. At a 5% return you will need $720k. It will take 20+ years to get there, assuming you survive as a corporate cog for that long, which is unlikely, given competition from emerging markets.

Of course, if you ever get married and have a family, this won't work at all. And if Wall St somehow takes 30% of your portfolio one year, you are in serious trouble.

Now, instead, say you quit working for The Man, and build a service priced at $10/mo. You have the tech background already, and work hard to learn the necessary ops, marketing, sales, and other skills. You automate everything. You work from home (saving 1 hr/day commute), have excellent margin, no employees, etc. With a web app, to hit $3k/mo, you probably only need to average 400-500 paying customers.

There are several billion people on the Internet. You just need 500.

Sure, a business producing $3k/mo after expenses is not exactly equal to having $720k in liquid investments. It's much less liquid, requires more of your time, faces competition, etc. But it also has some advantages, such as the potential for very rapid growth.

Most importantly, it scales: you can build more than 1 app. So even though you'll probably fail a lot before success, you're probably still better off.

I wish somebody told me this 10 years ago.
Ask HN: How much equity is reasonable for early employees?
How much equity is it reasonable to offer to employees(lets say, the first 10) who have joined you in early stage startup phase?
this is an amazing tool thank you. I would appreciate the presentation of the post date in the results page if possible. Thanks for your hard work.
It goes back to understanding your users. If you thoroughly understand what problem they're trying to solve and what they normally do when solving it, you can design completely around that and make them happy.
attractive to whom? know your audience. even among HN members, there's a huge range of what "attractive" means.

figure out who you want to target, very specifically, then figure out exactly what they want out of a job.

The following is my paraphrase of dotBen's comment, with "if statements" instead of "dont's":

if you want people who care about degrees, require a degree.

if you want people who care about the exact number of years they worked at some job or with a language, add it to your requirements.

if you want honest down to earth people, then be honest and down to earth.

if you want people who are cocky enough to label themselves as "rockstars" or "ninjas", then ask for it.

... list goes on

I personally think this is common sense, but as they say, common sense isn't common.

The most important thing? Hiring is a two-way street. You're shopping for employees, we're shopping for employers. Your job description is like an employers resume. If you want honest applications, then give us an honest description of what you want. It would seriously MAKE MY DAY, if there was a job listing that said straight up what you were going to do, i.e.:

"we need someone to work with us on a team of 5 to implement our new web API within 3 months and provide support afterwards. If you suck, we'll fire you. If you're good, we'll move you on to whatever new stuff we might need help on like a potential mobile platform..."

at which point it would be very easy for me to say "yeah that sounds awesome! i can do that for you!" or "fuck that i got better shit to do." either way, we'll both get exactly what we want, and I won't be trying to fake my way into a job I don't deserve, and you won't be questioning whether I'm actually good enough.
If you like programming in C#, the prospect of a microcontroller that can run C# is attractive. It'd be pretty spiffy to have a similarly priced/specced device for Java, especially if the API stack was based on a standard like J2ME's CLDC.
Merely that marginal cost does absolutely play a role and that people are really driving it down.
I work indirectly with Matt. Guy really knows his stuff. Looking forward to diving into this book.
I left a high paying job two weeks ago mid-project to start a start-up. I did it because each day in that cube I cared less and less about money and more and more about freedom. I spent the better part of the past two years making my company over 7.6 million in just six months, and actually much more over the full two years.

I needed to create and to be rewarded for my efforts fully. Everyone I know was against it, wife, family, and friends. Thought I was throwing away something they could only hope for. At the end of the day we live once I'd rather be poor and happy trying something I always wanted than stay in that cube always wondering.

What prompted my move so abruptly was interviewing a guy for a senior position. We asked him what his ideal job would be, and he gave an answer of doing his own business. He excused it as a dream because he has kids, and that's when I realized everyone I worked with had the same reason for not just doing it. That's when it snapped in me.

Week later I put in my notice. No jobs no nets to fall back onto. I actually worked on my own project last week and it was heaven. I have a meeting for a three month contract next week to feed my funds to continue this dream. Brother this has been the best two weeks of my life.
The sad thing about this post is why the idea of most fraternities is a complete turn off.

It's all about tricks and gaming people by being fake. I know they aren't all this way, I know they have benefits. I still see the same behaviors, too often.
"I've eaten an entire biological micro-ecosystem in one sitting."

FTFY!

Glad I don't like fig newtons. :)
Good for you :)
Being an introvert is fine. It didn't stop Isaac Newton or Emily Dickinson from doing great things.

Forget about the frat. Go hack on a project that interests you. Both you and the world will be better off for it.
I think test taking becomes a culture after a while, defines the education. Do you really expect to have no/less tests later in life, e.g. for colleges, once it's firmly instantiated early in life? Why is university entrance exams is deemed to be stupid and not similar tests for five year olds?
It is slowly my searches down. a-jax is neat, but it still takes time to load. When I query something that is more than five words it just gets annoying. They do let you disable it, and that is better than nothing.
Adobe Announces HTML5/CSS3/SVG Pack for Illustrator
Let us please not go by deadlines. The Mobile Number Portability in India, was supposed to launch last October. 3G services were supposed to be rolled out on full scale now.
hundreds??

no i think it took way longer than that. maybe even tens!
I'm interested in practical cases for this too. Also, check this link by pg http://paulgraham.com/equity.html

I quote from the article:

> For example, suppose you're just two founders and you want to hire an additional hacker who's so good you feel he'll increase the average outcome of the whole company by 20%. n = (1.2 - 1)/1.2 = .167. So you'll break even if you trade 16.7% of the company for him.

> That doesn't mean 16.7% is the right amount of stock to give him. Stock is not the only cost of hiring someone: there's usually salary and overhead as well. And if the company merely breaks even on the deal, there's no reason to do it.

> I think to translate salary and overhead into stock you should multiply the annual rate by about 1.5. Most startups grow fast or die; if you die you don't have to pay the guy, and if you grow fast you'll be paying next year's salary out of next year's valuation, which should be 3x this year's. If your valuation grows 3x a year, the total cost in stock of a new hire's salary and overhead is 1.5 years' cost at the present valuation.
A new place to YELL and SCREAM
A unique site that fuels quality debates and discussion on ANY topic. Fucking awesome.
"Isaac Newton or Emily Dickinson" funny you should have mentioned both of these folks, they both died virgins. The world might have been better, but they never got to experience an important part of being human.
I was talking to a friend about this and we started talking on the lack of small change in most european countries. They can avoid small change because everything is priced at a rounding point. A hamburger costs 2 euros, not 1.99 + tax. Tax is already included in the price. But we came across the reason why it wouldn't work here. A company can't have a set price across the board because each country has a different sales tax rate. The only way for this to work would be for the companies to bear the whole burden of the tax and charge the same for a Big-Mac in LA (9.75% sales tax) and Salt Lake City (6% sales tax). I don't see this happening in the near future.
Ask HN: please review my html5 web game
Yes, because once things hit your exchange account they can leak all over the phone. Attachments stored on it's flash storage/SD card and the like.
with android you can erase the O.S. from the device and re install
a clean version, and still all applications will work

Rooting is a complicated process, and it's by no means a certainty that it will continue to be possible. The carriers and the manufacturers are getting better at patching the holes used to get root access and are coming out with technologies like e-fuse that are designed to prevent unauthorized firmwares from being installed.

Can you do that with iOS.

Yes, much more so than Android. At any time I can run a restore on my iPhone and install a clean version of iOS. With most Android phones it's impossible to run a stock version of the OS unless it came with it or the phone is rooted.
A couple of weeks ago I showed you guys a web game I wrote for the 10k contest.

I wrote that in about 7 hours and hadn't intended to submit anything until the last minute which is why it was so rough.

It's been 18 days since then, and this is where I'm at so far.

It uses the html5 canvas and browser database (SQLite not indexedDB) so will only run in Safari, and Chrome, and I've been specifcally targeting the iPhone.

The url goes to my posterous for an overview of the game and links to it and the source.

Being my first game, I would greatly appreciate any comments you have on it.

To go directly to the game:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/165110/lastmanstanding/index.html

Or see the original 10k Apart entry:

http://10k.aneventapart.com/Uploads/358/

Edited for spelling and 18 "days"
You're right, the PC, "every child is special" approach in the US (esp. in colleges) is not doing the students any good and some level of rigorous reinforcement of knowledge is beneficial. However, tests let the kids focus only on the "answer" for a narrowly specified question. This may be good for school but is a horrible way to approach real-life problems which are broad and do nor have clear answers.
Acting in a way that's unfamiliar and uncomfortable will always feel fake initially. If the OP wants to get out of his shell he'll have to be awkward and fake for a while.

Happily this will fade with time as he becomes more accustomed to acting that way.
I joined a fraternity because I was an introverted engineering major, and wanted to get some social skills.

It worked. In addition to social skills, I took leadership positions, managed teams of people, managed a budget, learned invaluable presentation skills, and probably most importantly, gained a great deal of self-confidence.

I wouldn't be a startup founder without all those skills, nor would I be a startup founder without my hacker skills.

That said, the fraternity I joined annually won awards as a top fraternity at it's campus and nationally. I know many others who joined fraternities and had very different experiences.
As has been said elsewhere in the comments, it overreaches because once that data hits your phone it can leak in to other applications, the phone can store attachments on it's flash storage or the SD card, etc.
List of Foods to Be Consumed by Diabetic Patients
What I mean by grading on a curve is that, rather than give as many 1-star reviews as 5-star reviews, nice people almost always give between 3 and 5 stars. Even if they find an app to be useless to them, they often give the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it will improve in a future version, or be more useful to someone else.
It also allows them to serve more ad impressions at a much faster clip.
It really depends on the state of your company, your product, and what you're bringing to the table vs. your employees.

If you've got two non-technical founders and you're going to need an engineering team of 40 to bring your product to market, then excluding the dilution of investment, you probably want %50-%70 of the company in your pool.

Of course, if you're looking for a rule of thumb, it is usually %15-%20, and it doesn't matter what the state of things is, you offer senior engineers a fraction of a percent and no anti-dilution clauses....

Oh, and you split the stock enough such that this fraction of a percent sounds like a large number of shares.
I'm not sure if you're just naive, but "rock star" programmers make a lot more than $100k/yr, try tripling that.
The book’s author, Matt Aimonetti, explained his reasoning for writing an open-licensed book back in May:

http://merbist.com/2010/05/09/writing-an-open-licensed-book/
Keep in mind that however much people talk about startups as a shared mission or a calling, it's also about the money. Try asking for a meaningful chunk of equity if you want proof. The goal of every startup is to reach an exit, which is an acquisition 99% of the time. Once the retention agreements expire a year or two later, the newly-enriched founders will be gone while the employees will watch the acquirer systematically dismantle the company. Or they'll be laid off.

This is a business; don't get too romantic about it.
My advice is to go for it. At worst, you'll have a story to tell a few years later. Or you can make a few friends. Either way, it'll likely have some sort of positive outcome.

Personally, I didn't join a frat. Not for me. But, I know a few people who did -- and they've had good things to say. Maybe not about the rush, but about everything else afterwards.
40 hour work week.
Great idea and I while I would love to head to NYC (from Australia) I would probably want to get a more permanent gig there instead of just a few days.

Also what is it with websites and having text as images? I thought we got past that design phase a few years ago.
I was in a fraternity in college and definitely one of the geekier members. I felt it really helped my interpersonal skills a lot, and I made a lot of really great friends in the process. The best advice I can give is not to worry about catching up socially or feeling comfortable with large groups right off the bat--these things won't necessarily come quickly or naturally. I would suggest figuring out who in the fraternity you get along with and work on forming friendships with those individuals. Just try to make friends with the people you like and the rest should follow naturally. That said, if there is no one in the fraternity you would like to be friends with, then you probably should consider other social options.
Password Reuse
I switched to Bing.
I did several small Erlang projects and now working on two relatively large.

Erlang is a good fit for:

* Irregular concurrency: Task-level, Fine-grained parallelism

* Network servers

* Distributed systems

* Middleware: Parallel databases, Message Queue servers

* Soft Realtime / Embedded applications

* Monitoring, control and testing tools

Not so good fit for:

* Concurrency more appropriate to synchronized parallel execution: Data Parallelism

* Floating-point intensive code (HPC)

* Text Processing / Unicode (Unicode support now much better)

* Traditional GUI (some improvement with wx now)

* Hard Realtime applications

* Extensive interop with other languages/VMs (some improvement here with NIFs and Erjang - Erlang on JVM)

* No Windows 64-bit VM

I using Erlang for the things listed under "not so fit", because it's advantages out-weight some incomvinience.
I wish you the best of luck in refuting the beast from your side of the pond. Do you find that approaching MPs with a "Don't let America control our laws" type of approach works?

I'm not real keen on America controlling my laws (as an American), it would drive me nuts to have the US trying to legislate via treaty in other countries (for example, our sick drug laws).
Why I Think Google Fiber Should Come To Ann Arbor
Wow. The website is basically just images.

There is no text int he source. Every word is part of an image. Each option in the menu at the top is an image of text. The whole "Dear Hackers" pretty thing is an image. Then the "Get Started!" button is another image. Then the "Ambassadors From" section is one big image that includes both the heading and the logos. Then the "Success Stories" section is also one image, including the heading and all of that text.
A) From what most of what my friends have said, pledging isn't that bad, but it depends on the frat

B) Attend something outside of your normal circle of friends. Join a student organization or club sports team if you like sports. I graduated with a EE degree and I did cheerleading (At a big ten university :) my sophomore and junior year of college. It was a great experience to meet people outside of other engineers.

As a side not, when I was a freshman I thought about joining a frat, but the reason why I didn't join was because people tend to label you based on what frat you belong to. This is especially true if you meet a sorority girl, they will instantly know the reputation of your frat. So just know the reputation of the frat you want to join first before joining.
I felt seriously underchallenged at my day job, even though I was making six figs. It was quite a difficult decision, given the fact that you hear horror stories about people not able to find jobs in the current economy. However, what it came down to, for me, was I was just wasting my time at my day job, and after awhile I realized that time and my sanity was my most precious commodity.

You say there are a lot of risks associated with a startup. As part of my decision process, I realized I had to consider the long-term risk of being unfulfilled at your job, not developing your skills and talents the way you expect. This is a bigger risk IMO.
I agree with all of this. I hope I didn't make it sound like he shouldn't take a job. All I've got to say here is, don't play games with your IP.
Drinking and partying and dancing a lot will make you get better at drinking and partying and dancing.

People worry a lot about [achieve task X] optimally, when really its probably fine to just [achieve task X] somehow/eventually.

For example, people read mountains of research to fine tune their workouts. Guys who work on farms do fine without. "Lift heavy things. Repeat." will make you strong enough that you shouldn't have to overthink the method you choose. Don't overthink the social skills thing either. Have fun. Repeat. Drink and party and dance and you'll get better at it.
This is the sort of thing that I currently search certain sites for. Like if I'm looking for book recommendations on a certain programming language, I search HN (eg. site:ycombinator.com rails programming books)

I could see this type of thing being really useful. Maybe you could partner with some of the online-learning sites to have the students and teachers rate books that are used for teaching/learning subjects... Good luck with the project!
Yes, and the high-paying job I left was at a big company that acquired my previous startup.

Post-acquisition, the salary was good, the bonuses amazing, but the company was dumb as a bag of hammers, and the job became soul-crushing. Dilbert bosses, communication by powerpoint, pointless projects. It got to a point where I just had to get back to a startup. All but one of the really early employees left for similar reasons, and also to join startups again.

That said, I'm not sure I'd make quite the same decision if I couldn't get in very early to a startup that I thought had a really good chance of succeeding.
Not a fan of it either. It feels like fool's gold to me. Partial searches don't get me the results I need but the screen updates seem to trigger me to read the results anyway. I know searching for "Barack Obama" isn't going to help me find the text of a speech he gave 5 months ago on HCR but I'm profoundly optimistic somehow it will. I recognize this isn't Google's problem but we all want to believe in magic sometimes. The parallel that jumped out to me was tab completion in command lines or CLI history. Sometimes you spend more time mucking around with this than it would have taken to just type the command manually.
I would say go for it. To catch up socially, just go to a lot of parties and talk to people, but don't try too hard, its OK to be less talkative in your first few parties, but don't avoid interaction either.

In a frat some guys will like to bust your balls and you will have to come up with quick responses. Don't worry about responding eloquently, you will get better over time. But make sure you don't laugh it off, agree, or self-deprecate...bust their balls back. It is all in good fun. This is how your social skills will improve.
Should he tell them in the interview? Who cares? But once he gets the job, he doesn't get to play games anymore. His mention of "discomfort" and "side projects at home" will do absolutely nothing to help him when his (ex-?)employer decides to sue him.

Is he going to get sued? No, unless his startup actually comes to something.
I just classified everything outside of a lecture or tutorial as homework. I studied in Germany, and we usually got a sheet of exercises to work through (mostly finding proofs) each week for each subject. We presented our solutions in the tutorials (Übungen). At the end of the term there were oral exams.

Germany has a history of very self-directed university study.

Of course you were free to do library study and the like. It was often a good idea to work on the homework in teams.

I found it quite easy to get through the exams with just attending lectures, tutorial and doing the assigned homework. But most people studied a lot more. (I got decent but not perfect grades.)
Huh. Blind hackers need not apply?
They got bought by obopay.com in 2007, so you could try contacting Billmonk through them. Both their blog and twitter (@BillmonkFriends) are long dead.
Let's not overanalyze or criticize. What is there to lose in visiting NYC in the first place, not to mention the opportunity to socialize with similar-minded tech people?
Man, that game is so much fun!! It gets really hectic at points! What are the guys the spit junk at you called? Are they like bosses?
FCC may release new wireless spectrum, unused television channels
I built a real-time news widget that streams (hyper)local news and public records (marriage licenses, liquor permits, etc). Media companies partner with us http://nozzlmedia.com we've doubled the time visitors spend on their Web pages.

Erlang was a good fit for us, mostly because of the tools available around it, such as Nitrogen http://nitrogenproject.com a powerful JavaScript/Erlang framework. Erlang apps seem robust and lean.
They built the site in a day. Cut the dudes some slack.
Actually, a company-wide Starcraft 2 tournament is more likely. Oh wait, we just finished one of those last week. And then had HDStarcraft come and cast the finals.
Live Matrix Launches a TV Guide for the Scheduled Web