skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
well, the negotiation will take some finesse, and might not have a happy ending.

if both sides were happy with the prior terms and had the same expectations -- i.e. you didn't really understand or investigate your compensation compared to market value, and/or they deliberately lowballed you -- they're probably not going to be thrilled about revising things right now if they're also stressed out with the crunch and also not too excited about paying more for the same labor (or having other stressed out employees grumble for more comp, or wondering if you'll threaten to leave again in the future, etc.)

so even though you may be justified in asking for more, it might be tough to get it given the constraints on their end. if, though, both sides expected at the outset you'd be working a normal 40 hr week and you're working 2x that, then the negotiation would probably be easier.

the good news is you'd have no problem snatching up another (probably cooler) gig -- just look at the yc job postings :)
You already know the answer, or you wouldn't be asking.

You're just being exploited.
A fantastic startup offers Digg-like presentation and voting for your community.
Digg Gets a Real Threaded Comment System
Need a cap table? Here you go. (With screencast)
Thanks for the details. If you ever want to post more about it, I'd be interested.
Having the exact domain name to the company or product name is actually not necessary.

Example: 37signal's Basecamp is basecamphq.com. This creates more possibilities.
Which startups started out on credit cards?
Did Google, Yahoo or eBay? Others?
http://www.uie.com/articles/prototyping_tips/

Perhaps your team can introduce you to the basic architecture and syntax of the web framework they've chosen, as well as the everyday version control and deployment steps.
That first line is classic!! Ha!
Mobicious.com - ultimately mobile startup
A lot of the generated names are "funky" to say the least. Here's one I generated a minute ago...

mone
mordengdom
forcer
sperichad
whor
prined
Allas
allonexpet
yough
hichery
Applescript hack: move screenshots from Desktop to iPhoto
Couldn't post it on the thread b/c of formatting issues. Play with it.
Free Idea of the Week: A Web Stats Dashboard Widget
Webware Winners I Hadn't Heard Of
WWDC 2007: The Aftermath
Is Yahoo! Too Dysfunctional to Survive Much Longer?
Runner+: Running Social Network
Mark Bowden On The Future Of Journalism Online
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Henry Ford

-- Take these three along with Yang, and then compare them with Semel. There is a key difference.
Is Yang right to run Yahoo?
Is It OK that Google Owns Us?
How long have you been married?

Is your wife employed and does she have a stable career?

Do you have kids?

Do you have a modest lifestyle that can sustain long periods of no income?

Does your family have health insurance?

Has your wife had any exposure to the entrepreneurial culture -- i.e. have her brother/sister/father/mother been a company founder?
Looking for life in virtual worlds (MIT & IBM)
Sometimes the problem has nothing to do with lack of domain knowledge. For example, before I went to MIT I saw a NYT article about students protesting the proposed removal of the pass/no credit system for the following freshman year. The article slanted it as if the students were selfishly interested in not getting grades. It doesn't take a domain expert to realize that if you're an MIT student now, you won't be a freshman next year, and could not be affected by the removal of pass/no credit. Students were objecting because they felt it would have a detrimental effect on others.
[Note: I hope I'm not pissing people off by adding these links, but I (along with a few friends) read the books and summarized them for you, for free, so I don't think you're getting a bad deal out of it - and as business books, they are pretty relevant, or at least I think so, which is why I read them in the first place.]

Jim Collins, in Good to Great ( http://tinyurl.com/ypwu8a ) comes out against rock star CEO's, saying that those who turned the companies he studied around were decidedly not rock stars. He has a term for these people, "level 5 leaders", which to me sounds like some kind of weird cult mumbo jumbo, but his point is well taken.

Even The Economist has had a number of editorials lately saying that pay should better respect performance. For instance:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9257618

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9257830
Scripting via programmable keyboards doesn't make WoW more fun except for a small minority of people. Most of the repetitive parts are not necessary to advance, and certainly not necessary to have fun.
"Let" generally gets used both ways in marriage. It doesn't usually imply disparity.
Webware 100 winners announced
I had my heart set on another domain, whose owner wanted to rent it to me. That sounded like a really bad arrangement to me, so I finally found a domain that wasn't taken, ourdoings.com.
I meant this relating to time. It takes a long time and a couple of revisions to write a good polished essay (or blog post) I think for creating a podcast you write down what you want to talk about in point form and then you talk and elaborate on these ideas.
25 Web Sites to Watch - Yahoo! News
dude, if you cant convince the one who decided to spend the rest of her life with you, how are you going to convince people who dont know you to invest in your company?
I think this is actually a ploy by PG to ensure quick initial adoption of Arc. When he finally does release a version of Arc, lots of frustrated hackers will learn Arc so that they can contribute patches to news.yc. ;-)
Reading the list I think there are frequent misuses of the term "invented". I think terms such as implemented, developed, or even created are more accurate. To say someone "invented" Rails is peculiar: there wasn't much about Rails' concept that was revolutionary, what was (perhaps) revolutionary was its implementation. I am perhaps focusing a bit too much on the trees rather than the forest. :)

As jey's comment points out, selecting the programmers is going to be an arbitrary process. For example its clearly in the vogue to dislike Aaron Swartz, but I can't see why we'd want to focus on Robert Morris if you are going to suggest that the Internet Worm was his great accomplishment (its notoriety is largely the result of a mistake in the implementation causing it to propagate too quickly, or at least so the story goes).
I doubt any CEO's salary comes near the theoretical market value of the job.

"Tournament theory" in economics explains why that's true: "Why Your Boss Is Overpaid" http://www.forbes.com/2006/05/20/executive-compensation-tournament_cx_th_06work_0523pay.html

The same dynamic drives people at startups, too.
The NY Yankees GM certainly knows all about that concept!
I'm glad he said something about sales; too many of the silicon valley blogs gloss over it or ignore it completely.

It's certainly the toughest thing to do (especially if, like me, you come from a technical background), but it can be tremendously important to your company, if there's no exit on the immediate horizon.
10 reasons why you should never get a job / be a sheep
I question how productive someone working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for multiple weeks, can actually be. NASA's software engineers come in and work hard writing truly mission-critical software for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Then they stop. NASA found that going over 40 hours a week resulted in more bugs and errors, which meant that ultimately it took longer to produce the desired software at the desired level of quality.
Social Networking Goes Offline
Sell Your Business, Stay in Control
In vogue or not, web.py is not that interesting. Useful perhaps, but not interesting.

I think people would rather hear about the "dude in a basement hacking for pure excitement" story of the Internet Worm than other more recent stuff Morris has done. It's just more suitable for this book than modular routers or distributed hash tables.
Search Engine Optimization Is Not About Useless Rankings
Google Press Day 2007
12-14 hours 7-day a week shouldn't be normal anywhere. Even ignoring work/life balance debates, people get fatigued and those extra hours have negative incremental contributions. Working people that long delays your release in the short term and engenders resentment among employees in the long term. Sounds like inexperienced management to me.
I read from Founders@Work that Evan Willams had to dip into his Visa (or MC/AMEX) stash to keep Blogger alive.
0.2%?! Don't know how many shares and employees there are but ask for at the very least 5% of the company or a full salary and less hours. You're practically a slave right now.
The Value of a Media Mention vs. a Blog Post
It's funny how the article uses parenthesis and brackets as examples of unneccessary 'cruft' that muddles your program's readability, yet to explain a common 'Rails-ism' the author re-introduces both of them into the sample code to make it more readable.
Well, the situation is this:

I was the first employee, and I came on board when the first round of angel investing was made. There are currently 2 other employees, and 2 co-founders. One is business-oriented, one technical. I work probably a few hours less than the co-founder (per week).

The tech co-founder seems to be somewhat slow to pushing updates, as he gets sidetracked micro-managing the 3 team members (who are all graduates, except myself). E-mails that come from investors are usually ignored, for the fear that they will "distract the dev team." I'm not sure if that's normal either.

I'm new to joining startups, and don't understand investment and equity as well. Obviously, I need to starting learning more ;) That's one disadvantage of being as young as I am and joining a startup (I'm not old enough to buy a drink, let's put it that way). I'm glad I got some feedback on this though..
RiceU scholar gives up everything; moves to Philippines to become a nomad
Mobile communication + internet + t-shirts + startup= Reactee
Tell her:

If I fail, we lose the house. If I succeed, I'll get rich and "trade up", if ya know what I mean.
Sounds like management has serious problems.

You never want key members of the team to have questions about whether their effort is going to be rewarded in the event of a nice liquidity event. 0.2% would be great if you're working for the next Google--but even Google gave away more then 0.2% to their first employee. If it's not the next Google, think long and hard about how you're spending your time. The only reason anyone, other than the founders, works for a startup is for the liquidity event (or a solid future of profit sharing if no such event is planned). When we hire our first full-time employee we expect to offer them 1-5%, depending on their other compensation requirements and what they bring to the team.

Also, 12-14 hour days and seven day weeks are not productive over a sustained period, and they're a sign that the founders don't have a lot of real world experience. It can work out, if everyone is just that passionate and feels like founding members of a great company, but I don't think 0.2% (vested over four years) would make me feel like a founding member.

I'd say get out...Not just because the carrot (0.2%) is much smaller than the stick (12-14 hour days), but because I'd lay good odds on this company failing fast. From the small bits of data we have, I believe your companies management is incompetent.
Never Give Your Horse/Business More Attention Than You Give Your Wife
If you really want to do it, all you should need to do is make sure she knows that you can't be happy without pursuing your dreams. Your spouse should want that for you, and should be on board, no matter what the sacrifice.

It helps, though, to give something back for her dreams. Marriages are partnerships, after all.
Tim Peters, probably the most respected Python developer over Guido himself.
I felt that way at the first dinner, but things are under control now.
I think the prospect of financial security for their (possibly future) kids is the biggest selling point.
A startup founder with a successful startup is already a rare exception.
MS PhotoSynth
And the winner is..!!

..Bebo? Wow.
Blocked China Web users rage against Great Firewall
That would be the equivalent of writing down a few notes for your essay beforehand and then posting the first draft. The revisions are needed for a reason, which doesn't go away if you're talking instead of typing.
I wonder how many potentials will be discouraged from doing a startup by this advice. Those potentials are probably not founder material anyway.
Do you like helping a startup and winning a chipotle giftcard simultaneously?
..Whaaat? Hehe. Sorry but that ratio is way out of whack. There's almost certainly a way to do things the "rails way".
I'm trying to train an advertising algorithm.

The link takes you to a page to create a sample advertisement - these go into the system and are used in testing. And by entering an ad, you're signed up to win a giftcard to Chipotle, which is the unofficial currency of Yeah Systems.

Pretty fair deal, no?
You really don't understand marriage. You don't just do things - You work together.
Query Languages
New Site "Jumps" Into The Application Creation Space
I'm the author :)

Yeah, Ruby certainly has some quirks, especially coming from a C/Java background. I think it's similar to seeing i++ for the first time... you need to separate it into "i = i + 1" when explaining it to newcomers.
This is why it used to annoy us when the Digg guys tried to spin reddit as a "Digg clone." Half the functionality of a news aggregator is the comments, and reddit had good threaded comments almost 2 years ago.
0.2% seems really low for a first employee. I have no equity with my current employer (employee #10 or so), but my boss also doesn't expect more than 8 hours and pays a competitive salary. My other offer was about 0.01% as employee #22. In a previous startup, I had about 0.1% as employee #13, but that was straight out of high school (the two recent ones have been as a graduate of a top college). I've heard that 2.5% or so is typical for the first employee, and it decreases exponentially from there.

I'd give some thought to what you want to get out of a startup. If you're just looking for experience (as I am, mostly), the equity isn't too important, and the real criteria should be whether you're learning stuff and are involved in decisions. If you want to get rich, be aware that 0.2% of a typical $40M exit is only $80K - not chump change, but you can't look at it as any more than a nice bonus. It will take a $500M exit to make you a million dollars, which basically means you either need a really hot product (Facebook/MySpace/YouTube) or you need to be able to go public. Salary also factors in - if you're being underpaid by $20K relative to market rates, your stock payout would get eaten up in 4 years.

If you're in it for money, I would suggest trying to renegotiate. Losing the first employee would be a tragedy for most startups, so they'd probably be willing to go up to 1-2% equity if they're smart. They may not like it, but part of being a successful entrepreneur is doing stuff you don't like for the good of your company.

If they aren't smart or their ego gets in the way, you want to leave now anyways, because they aren't going anywhere. Also, try to have another job offer in hand when you renegotiate - it helps your bargaining power significantly.

The micro-managing is a bit of a red-flag. It happens a lot with technical cofounders. My current boss has a bad case of it. I had a bad case with it the first time I managed a software project (at a volunteer nonprofit), and letting go and actually trusting the other developers to do things right was one of the hardest things I had to do on that project. The usual result is that the business stagnates and doesn't go anywhere, then folds when the employees all leave because the business isn't going anywhere.
"You don't just do things - You work together."

this is correct.
Not necessarily - 12-14 hours is what the startup mythology says, but there's a wide variance depending upon lines of business, business models, growth strategies, capital structures, etc. Working 12-14 hours/day for sustained periods of time is more likely to indicate that management sucks than that you're actually getting stuff done.

A few data points:

Before college, I worked at a VC-backed startup selling remote-access software to large corporations (well...planning to sell...they never launched). The core engineers typically worked 12-14 hours/day to put out a very buggy product.

Same startup, I knew an engineer who was employee #35 and later VP of Engineering at Stratus Computers. She said that yeah, if you have to hit a deadline, 10-12 hour days may be normal, but if you're doing it regularly you're doing something wrong. You should not have to work more than 8 hours/day to put out a decent product.

I'm currently working at a bootstrapped financial software startup, selling direct to hedge funds. The founder works about 10 hours/day; the rest of us work about 8 hours/day. The company is profitable.

My other job offer was for a VC-funded financial software startup, selling to smaller brokerages. Founders typically worked 12ish hour days, most of the rest of the employees worked 9-10 hour days. The company was not profitable at the time I applied, though they've been growing well since and may be by now.

According to Founders at Work, del.icio.us and Bloglines were both founded by single founders who kept their day jobs, and Steve Wozniak spent the first year of Apple Computer's lifetime employed by Hewlett-Packard. I'm assuming that means 3-4 hours/day on weekdays, plus full weekends.

I'm in a similar position: 3-4 hours/day of work, keeping my day job, about to launch after 5 months or so (including a month hiatus when we worked on a side project).
If I had a dozen votes I'd probably use them all on Jamie Zawinski.

His wicked blend of humor, cynicism, realism and practicality make for some fascinating stories and actually useful advice.

He's worked with tons of interesting stuff - obviously XEmacs, Netscape and Mozilla, but he also wrote a bunch of code for the legendary Lisp Machines early in his career.

Peter Norvig called him "One of the best programmers I ever hired" - http://norvig.com/21-days.html

You might have to be very persuasive to get an interview though. I think he pretty much hates (1) being famous and (2) the software industry these days!
Paul Graham's upvoted articles
Note: To see them you must first log in as pg.
Help: need fsevents wrapper (Java or Obj-C) for Tiger
Bram Cohen, creator of Bittorrent, on cutlery
Btw oknotizie ( http://oknotizie.alice.it ), a reddit alike system my startup developed for the Italian market, already has the ability for users called "power users" (having enough total rank and enough rank accumulated in the last month) to replace the URL with one better suited (for example not linkjacked).
I lose perspective on what generally passes as interesting sometimes, so good point. Number one on my recent interest list has been writing web analytics software, so you might suggest my opinion is a bit away from the norm. ;)
Search Engine Roulette: Fewer than 1% of first-page results are shared by Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and Ask
Personally, I like to podcast by sound waves. It's totally cool, I use this flap of skin to move air around and I can podcast to people around me at the same time. It has limited range though....
I took one of my favorite Rush songs and put 'soft' after it. Bravadosoft. I think this gives the company instant credibility with the right kind of folks. :)
Nice link, thanks, I like Tim Harford's articles a lot.
Xackup is not the best name from a pronounciation point of view :(
On developing Facebook applications
"Let"? As in .. you have to ask?

Be "the man." Take "the risk." She will follow you. (Otherwise, dump her.)

Also, read "The Way of the Superior Man" (and/or other books) by David Deida. It will be one of the better investments you will make in your life.

PS. There's a reason San Francisco's dead-last in (_heterosexual_) sex, young children and babies per capita:
(Hint: can be elucidated from the following article)
http://digg.com/offbeat_news/No_Sex_Tonight_2
Uh, no. Discounted cash flow analysis is pretty much standard throughout the investment world. It's used to value just about everything, from startups to blue-chips to bonds to real estate.

You and PG are basically saying the same thing: NPV is the expected value of all future profits, discounted back to the present by the risk-free rate of return (normally taken to be the interest rate on T-bills). You're assuming that profits will remain constant, though. In most cases, this is not a valid assumption. Even big companies like Coca Cola have some earnings growth factored into their stock prices.

There is, of course, risk in trying to predict future profits. But there's also risk in assuming profits will remain constant (as I rudely found out when I invested in a stock with a P/E of 9, only to see it lose money the next quarter). That's why financial analysts get paid big bucks.

The only company that's worth zero is a bankrupt one. Sometimes not even then - many bankrupt companies still have a residual market cap because investors expect them to emerge from bankrupty and continue operating.
The things you should tell them?

I took it as a list of things you should be doing as the leader of the company.
Wow, nice response. Really appreciate it (as well as many other people who've followed up on this).

I'm extremely experienced, so that's not really what I'm here to get. I pick languages up fairly quickly, and I've been doing sole proprietor/freelance work for years on end now. I've been told many times (by clients, professors, and employers) that considering my age, my skill set is remarkably impressive.

I'm very young though, so I have had very little startup experience (and very little "corporate" experience). I don't want to get too far into details, simply because this is the internet, but I've taken everything mentioned here into account and will plan to do something.
Slides from FOOA are now online
You must have been in the passenger seat of that car they dug up from 1957. There is no doubt Microsoft has helped progress the industry (albeit sometimes monopolistically and heavy handedly - but hey they are trying to maximize ROI for shareholders). Often they also wait for others to progress the industry and come late to the game. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that a company of that size and influence can adapt to such changes and drive further improvements and direction. I don't see them becoming a non-factor. They are far from dead. Time for you to get back into that car and get lowered back into the old drive-in movie you must have been watching.
Actually I understand only too well. I know the OP's situation is no good because your partner should be supporting your dreams/goals/aspirations and vice-versa. You should never have to ask permission, or convince someone to "let" you pursue your dreams. Nobody who truly cares about you would ever try to stand in the way of it.

"Because I really want to" is reason enough for anyone you're that close to. Bringing in a bunch of unknown people on the 'net to help you plead your case is a defacto admission of a lack of closeness/belief/trust.
Which Y Combinator company (now/then) has a founder based outside of the US?
It always implies disparity.
Sorry if this was mentioned before.
To paraphrase, everybody is moving off of Windows to Macs and Linux... only grandmas are using Windows? What have you been sniffing? Do they only hire 12 year olds at Y Combinator or just people with the mental capacity of a 12 year old (no offense intended to those readers who are actually 12 years old out there... just making a point about Paul Graham's immaturity of thought).
Do Macs get viruses?  Not according to an Apple Store employee
"They may not like it, but part of being a successful entrepreneur is doing stuff you don't like for the good of your company."

Very well said!