skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More successful (assuming a sales-metric): quite likely, given a guaranteed advertising budget. But less of it (%-wise) would go back to Notch.

Better: depends on your metric. Fewer customers = less feedback = more likely to get your idea implemented. More customers = more employees = more code backing the game (overall better), and likely more bugfixes and better-performing graphics. More control in the hands of one person = more personality-driven design decisions = ? (and I wish to point out that Apple works largely this way with Jobs - though again, "better" is still subjective)

But, at an absolute minimum, being part of Valve will put more pressure on sales than there currently is. Even if they explicitly say "do anything, we won't even look", there's an implicit push in that direction. He's now made enough money to do literally anything he wants with this game, with no pressure to make more sales. I count that a purely good thing, because there is no game for everyone, and without pressure to appeal to more people it's more likely (IMO, also still subjective) to become better in its niche.
If you're jacking up prices in an attempt to drive away business, I think you can afford to buy pretty good work. But if we go by your logic, no good IE6 compatibility work ever gets done, so expectations will be low anyway.
On one level it's quite cool to see human intelligence pipelined as a service, but on another I worry that this may represent a new form of slavery with the turkers being paid at such a low level that other social problems may arise as a consequence.
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Great explanations, you have put the gist of the issue here in the most succint way while covering almost the entire breadth of the problem.

I know I may get downvoted for posting just an agreement/appreciation. But sometimes, it just feels good to openly acknowledge good knowledge and logic. So be it.
R. V. Jones made a similar observation in Most Secret War (WWII) about collaboration between the operational and R&D branches. The Germans would build to spec without interaction with the requesting organization producing a fine piece of engineering whereas in the U.K. there would tend to be back and forth on the requirements and so on, with the U.K. device being less polished but more flexible and more likely to satisfy needs current and future. And I think often more quickly developed, since the R&D types would say "Well, can you relax this requirement?" and so on.

So this sounds like a long established engineering culture.
All right, I'll give you that.

But what if your "reward" was not $100 but a photo of an unknown subject. There's a small chance that photo is something you find valuable (newsworthy, embarrassing to the subject, etc.), but there's a far better chance it's a scene from a toddler's birthday party taken on a bad cell phone camera. That's closer to what Facebook is doing. I wouldn't rent a bloodhound for that.
I hate Java and I haven't done any game development since I was a kid, and I thought, "Hmm...I should check that out!"
Most of the pain of java comes from its library and developer culture. It tends to so much verbosity and unnecessary stupidity. Look at the nightmare of the Java Calendar/Date classes. If you got the right libraries and code base it isn't that horrible. The game industry standard is mostly C++/C with content scripting in lua/python.
Valve couldn't even offer him anything near 100k/day
The scariest thing about that video is how easily they refer to Soylent as 'it', as in 'it cuts down your text', 'it fixes grammar errors', even though when Soylent is in use it's clearly a 'they'.
Or perhaps that distinction is as nonsensical as referring to the bundle of neurons in your head as 'they'...
I'm just wondering; if they had said "we don't want to have to spend time and money backporting new APIs and we want to encourage you to upgrade Windows", how would we react? Frankly I would have far more respect for an honest answer like that.
His company (Mojang Specifications) is a sole proprietorship, so the tax situation is interesting (i.e. most of it is taxed as personal income, and Sweden has a progressive tax system, and he has to pay insurance contributions as well). I can understand why he's scrambling to establish a real company :)
Best news: You probably can make a pretty good living, even if you don't get rich.
That's not how currency exchange rates work...
Ask HN: How should we structure this company?
Ask HN: How should we structure this startup?

Cast of characters:
Person A has a significant consulting practice in an industry and wants to start building tools for clients that A thinks are resellable (a la 37signals). A's got a prototype that is functional but doesn't scale both technically and as a product (only integrates with one client) etc.

Person B: Not interested in contract work but interested in working for equity stake in the company. Smart technical guy who has worked with A in the past.

Backdrop:

Person A and B get along well, have worked together successfully in the past and during the development of the project. B has now completed a rewrite of the software to support multi-tenants, scale to some reasonable estimate and the product is ready to go. A is now working with his consulting client base to begin generating revenue for the product. It looks like the product will make revenue, but relatively meager in the first few years (maybe enough to pay these guys a mid-5 figure salary if all the clients sign up).

Questions:

How should this company be structured so that it can function as a lifestyle business for both A and B? What should A and B do to protect themselves from the other no longer participating in the business? What if A and B want to take investment in the future? If the percentage ownership is different for A and B, what's to protect the lesser owner?

Possible endings:

- Give A and B profit rights in an LLC

- A and B get equity that vests over time

- A and B get full equity immediately with some buyout provision

Thanks for reading this far and of course, we are also consulting a lawyer but would like to get founders' opinions as well.
They may not have had revenue in 1999 but they were by far the best search engine. Prior to discovering them I was using altavista, lycos, and when really frustrated, a random 3rd search engine. I quickly switched to exclusive google use within a very short time of finding the service. This was a company to be excited about because they were miles ahead of the entrenched competition.

If excite didn't see value in them it's because they were too busy pushing their portal garbage (along with everyone else).
I recently had out a RFP for some construction work. One guy called me and told me to call him back when I've got some offers, he'd knock 10% off the lowest one.

Needless to say, I said thanks, hung up, laughed and crossed his name off the list of candidates.
I'm also looking to move to NYC in about a month. Have you spent much time exploring the neighborhoods? I'm heading out there in about two weeks to do so, but I've been looking at a lot of places on Craigslist and asking people for their opinions on different areas to get an idea of what I'm getting into. Happen to be looking at any specific area?
The additional datastore call and also the CPU time spent in the script (even though it might be minimal) are totally unnecessary. Just upload the files yourself and serve them statically. Even though it's not a true CDN (as discussed in many places many times), it works good enough.
And why do call it Google Application Engine? Google itself calls it just App Engine.
Transportation costs more by what metric? I think the population density would do a lot to offset the naive euros/mile comparison. I suspect there's a similar effect with housing, that cultural norms in the US create unnecessarily large housing expenses, for example large manicured lawns. Though I'm reaching a bit here, I still think this isn't as cut and dry 'cheaper.' Question is more what's culturally expected? Daily hot showers are pretty pricey for example.
Holy smokes, how did I never see this one before?

As it is I never had high regards for MSFT, but this takes things to a whole different level.
The rationale behind your 'upside' is that it potentially improves the voter's social status.

If you perceive that the intent of upvotes and downvotes is something other than improving the quality of posts (for example similar to Facebook's "Like"), and if you are able to discount reciprocity then I can see where your coming from.
Just advanced searches though?
Which is entirely unsustainable, so not much of an argument against working for another company. If they can offer, say, a million per year, what will the ultimate amount he gets be at 20 years from now? 40 years? Reliability has its uses.
Those ten airports serve, just guessing here, 1/3 of the US population.
With your arms?
This is a tremendously bad idea, but rather than clarify why, just read:

http://www.listware.net/201009/linux-kernel/48874-rfc-patch-...
On the other hand, both awk and sed quickly spiral out of control if you need to do anything nontrivial that spans newlines.

If the unit of input in this kind of stream processing system doesn't match the problem domain exactly, things get very difficult very quickly.
My guess is that they were a bit stressed out that they weren't really hitting jackpot at the time, especially as they are today. It was early 1999, they didn't really have that many good income sources at that moment(if I'm not mistaken, they didn't even have Adsense launched back then).

They went to these guys wanting to cash out and probably lay low for a year or two ... after which I'm sure they'd be back on their feet with something new.
Sean Parker as Jim Clark 2.0, and the return of the dotcom boom (2006)
more discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635385

has been around here lately quite a lot ...
I wonder if it might be a requirement (or nearly) for run-away successes though, while obviously not sufficient for it.
Ongo gets $12 million in financing
Hi,

I think hugepages etc., serve to solve the symptom of the problem (making mysqld itself unswappable) rather than the actual problem (the system needs memory on a certain node and there is none to be had). Making mysqld's memory unswappable will just mean that something else gets swapped, or in the worst case something gets OOM-killed or the allocation just fails. Those situations could be worse.

Regards,

Jeremy
You can't win unless you play the game!
nice example of how luck is a factor in business success
I'm not sure if "middle ground" is quite right; PEGs and CFGs can express a different set of languages, and each has their own advantages. Probably the most important tradeoff is that with PEGs you gain infinite lookahead and negation, but you lose left recursion and the ability to express ambiguity.
I'm most intrigued by the fact that he states he does not use any .NET libraries. I understand the argument, but is this taking it too far? Do any other sites do this?
Strings?

Not familiar with your specific needs, but generally prefer DSLs fine tuned to the task. Strings sound like they'll allow more flexibility for you, less hassle for developers to type and read. Objects and classes sounds like boilerplate galore.

Hard to say though, depends on API or string DSL design. Do you have example code?
> "Brands are a signal of self-worth," said Gavan Fitzsimons, professor of marketing and psychology at Duke. "We're signaling to others that we care about ourselves and that we feel good about ourselves and that we matter in this world. It's more than 'I'm hip or cool'...I'm a worthwhile person, and I matter, and you should respect me and think that I'm a good person, because I've got the D&G on my glasses."

How is this not satire? It is one of the most depressing things I've ever read.
I hear its not always that far north of 50k.
What is $xxxx in practice, for IE6? [or as a percentage]
Public health care doesn't mean that nobody pays for it. Since he's not employed by anyone else, it's part of the ~15% in mandatory fees that he'll end up paying in addition to the ordinary income tax.
I like the comment about halfway down:

A $25M – $40MM sale, doesn’t this make techcrunch a “dip shit company”?
I think you're missing something here...

The entire reason Minecraft is so successful is because there IS NO HUGE INCREDIBLE STAFF. The game spawned from the thoughts, dreams, and abilities of just a single mind. Add more minds and the game becomes something it was never intended to be.
Free happiness included!
AT&T Wireless vet creates group text messaging service Ivycorp
Why would you compared Berlin (one of Germany's poorer mega-cities) to pretty much the best paying area for tech workers in the states?

It's true that you'd still see a huge salary disparity even if you compare SV to Hamburg, Munich or Frankfurt, but comparing to Berlin is still a bit disingenuous.

Also, I believe SV (especially for tech workers) is the outlier here - there is no other place in the world where developers are so highly payed, and the highest average wage earners among professionals in Germany are not people in the software industry like in SV (they are probably the people working in finance & banking in Frankfurt).
Ten Things I Will Never Have to Do Again (micropreneurship)
Florida’s Foreclosures Nightmare
Rumpetroll - a new Websockets/HTML5/CSS3/JS experiment
Not just coincidence. I've bought quite a lot of indie games the last few years but Minecraft is one of the few I recommend, no, urge my friends to buy.

It's genuine fun, different and has QWAN.
I wrote this paper in 2006. I don't really write anything publicly anymore, and I even took this one offline after noticing a bunch of annoying blogger-journalists passing off bits of it as their own insights; that being said, I felt that this paper needed to be brought back to the surface.

I'm very interested to read what the HN community thinks of this paper, as most of you probably never saw it when it was published.
Thank goodness they didn't sell. Their rejection narrowly avoided them becoming another "dipshit" company and forced them to build something great.
Seems alive for me.

Well, technically alive.
Obie offers expert yes/no opinion on your web idea for $5
Be sure to read the second comment.
Behind nearly every "overnight success" story is a reality of years of practice and persistence.
Anyone who hasn't tried a general purpose language with pattern-based dispatch (usually referred to in practice as "pattern matching") should really do themselves a favor and try one; it's one of the most useful language features around. Now that I've become used to it, it's a bit unpleasant for me to use languages that don't have it. It's a very convenient way to structure code.

The parent post mentions Prolog, which is a good example, but there are several others worth trying that frequently come up on HN; Scala, Haskell, F#, and Ocaml spring to mind.
their willingness to sell for $750k makes me wonder if they were the visionaries then that they appear to be now.

Or perhaps they had more than one idea, and selling a preliminary collection of search algorithms to reduce personal financial pressure made sense to them given the high-risk nature of the market they were playing in.
"Do you focus on rich, internet savy countries like Holland or Belgium? Or, do you focus on the next two largest languages online: Mandarin and Spanish?
" - Good question

In biz speak (or probably in non-linear programming too), i guess it would be where the different curves meet, the converging point of per capita potential revenues, the volumes (current and future), resources required to tap the market.

Practically this is how the decision tree may look like:

if one has less resources, then it may be wise to tap the market that has the highest per capita of potential revenues(while having reasonably enough volumes)

If one has medium level of resources, then still tap the high per capita market first with the least amount of resouces spent, then once the biz model is validated, deploy the resources for the future biggie market (high vol, low curret potential per capita revenues)

If one has billions to throw like Google, then of course, throw the money in tapping the future biggie and buy off any of the small amart start ups in the developed markets.
He's also really awesome at coding. I had a similar idea several years ago after seeing how horrible all the MMORPG crafting engines were. In fact I may have even posted something to that effect on HN. I would have loved playing it, and even started sketching some designs. But I gave up pretty quickly, distracted by other things, and even if I had stuck with it, it probably wouldn't have ever been much more than a proof of concept to anyone but me.
GNOME 2.32 Released
This just in, huge concave structure lined with reflective materials causes unexpected strange heating effect from the sun, says engineers. News at 11.
While I agree that this should be downvoted, just be aware that there is some truth to this: Minecraft makes my current generation (well, technically last, but the 13" model barely changed) MacBook Pro run hot enough that I cannot leave it on my lap. The only other thing that makes it do this is encoding video; I'm not really sure why, exactly. There is a decent amount of background processing going on, but it's limited to a 300x300x128 (I think? in Z? 300x300 XY for sure) block area, so...

You wouldn't be able to guess this from the graphics style.

EDIT: Upvotes for both responses. My love of command line is showing; I know next to nothing about graphics and what it takes to make them perform well.
The cost of pulling over cars in city traffic is incredibly high. In downtown Seattle the police ignore automobile moving violations as a matter of policy. I've seen a guy with a car full of rowdy passengers turn the wrong way down a 4 lane one-way throughfare almost hitting a cop car head on, and all the cop cared about was getting him going the right way.

On the other hand, they will apply the full motor vehicle code to bicyclists, and they actively ticket pedestrians for jaywalking.
Housing appears to cost about as much as a major US metro area.

Where did you get your information? Have you tried comparing the rent of a reasonably central apartment in Frankfurt & Munich (Germany's wealthiest and most expensive cities) with their New York and San Fransisco equivalents?

Housing in major cities in Germany is drastically cheaper than in the US.
I think Billmonk is dead as well
Mock Craig's List Freelance Job Post
http://startupquote.com/post/1164724792
Are you seriously suggesting that Manhattan and San Francisco are representative of the housing markets of the entire US?

The average cost of a newly built detached house in Germany in 2008 was $320,540USD. The average cost of same in the United States in 2008 was $292,600[1].

Yes, I did compare, but not aggressively. What's your source?

[1] Bulwien Gesa via "Global Property Guide", and the US Government, respectively.
Movies, especially Hollywood movies, are about conflict. The Facebook movie looks like it will focus on egos gone amuck, with Zuckerberg as antihero.

Real life is usually less about open conflict and more about slow grinding progress to mutual benefit. So, every meeting that isn't about hurling epithets like "I WILL DESTROY YOU" just won't make the cut.

I am always disappointed because movies are so bad at showing the twists and turns of working out a successful design -- to me this is the most truly "dramatic" part of our job. That said, from the trailers, it looks like the entire movie has a subtheme of where ideas come from and who deserves credit. So I'm at least somewhat optimistic.
I wonder what the potential market size is for this game, and if he will reach a large part of that while the game is in alpha and on special.

Something tells me he is selling it for too cheap, especially with all the buzz it is getting. The license is also a lifetime license, so he has ongoing server costs for the next 5+ years that need to be covered with what he is bringing in atm (minus the huge tax bill he will be hit with).

He is selling what is a recurring service at a flat one-off rate, a subscription at $20 year may have sold just as well.
What evidence do you have for that?
If anyone wants to hack on this together, shoot me an email (email in my profile) I'm thinking of some...interesting uses for the data.
You realize that iOS is just a stripped down OS X right?
Controlling Complexity
Renting an apartment in Berlin is WAY cheaper than in NYC, and the cheap apartments are actually nice.

That's not really answering your question, but for a gigantor metropolis berlin is a lot cheaper than manhattan...
Create Your Own Custom and Address Labels Online
In order to create your own labels, you will have to immediately make use of simple graphic design techniques so as to get the job done perfectly. That is why label printing company offers you discounted label printing.
Kevin Rose: Digg Turned Down $80 Million Acquisition Offer
Awk isn't so bad if you're clever about RS, but sed sucks. A tragic gap in the Plan 9 legacy has been structural regular expressions, which deal with these situations adroitly.
Thing-O-Matic videos
it is satirical but that's materialism.
I choose to interpret your parent as a joke.
the name killed it for me.
Yeah, that sounded more derogatory than I meant. I just mean they weren't as invested in the vision of Google as they appear to be now, which I think is part of their value.
Just realized this only covers company search, although the same issue is there for people search:

http://www.crunchbase.com/search/advanced/people/1250638

Interestingly it looks like people search gets hit much more often than company search which is the opposite of what I would have guessed.

I wonder how long it's going to take for someone to make a high-score table of the most searched founders and startups ;-)
My source is living in Austria, which has a very similar housing market to Germany & having friends in California & New York who pay $2000 a month for an apartment nobody here would pay even half (maybe not even a third or a quarter) of that for.

And there are also much cheaper cities in Germany, I was comparing the most expensive in both countries since you talked about major US metro areas.

Pretty sure that even if you go down the ladder and compare Seattle/Miami/San Diego to Hamburg/Berlin/Cologne or whatever their German counterparts are German housing is still cheaper.

EDIT: I see you changed your comment while I was replying. You're right that if you compare suburban housing (detached houses) the US is cheaper. But if we are talking about metropolitan housing it's a different story. Also, relatively few people live in detached houses in Germany - these do not represent the average household like they do in the US.

I don't think we are at a disagreement, because I don't think we are comparing the same thing. I am talking about metropolitan life (apartment, central location in a big city) while you are talking about housing in general (which in the US mostly comprises houses in suburbs).
I've been out of school for a while (msee 97). Back when I was going it was pretty smooth sailing (state school).

Now it's harder than creating a startup? No wonder Mark Zuckerburg opted for the easy out. Maybe even Bill Gates too.

I kid I kid!
Another cost saving measure that Southwest appears to use is to access the "worst" terminals via the "worst" gates. What I mean by that is their flights consistently service older terminals, gates that are further away from the security checkpoint or are otherwise less desirable. I presume that this means they save considerably on their airport access fees. I personally don't mind walking a bit further to the gate, so this kind of cost savings doesn't bother me a bit. I do wonder what the distribution of AirTran's gates looks like, though.
This is exactly what I do and it works!