skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That depends on your class of equity! Your terms might be different to the founders - in the UK you can read the memorandum and articles to understand the current equity structure and dilution rules for a company.

(Changing the mem and arts usually requires a shareholder meeting, and can be contested in court if the interests of minority stock holders are not taken sufficiently into consideration.)

In addition even if you do hold stock of the same class as the founders that won't always prevent you getting screwed over. The board might sign up to a sucky deal through innocence, incompetence or collusion and condemn you as a side effect.
Depends on the tools... it's usually done in C or C++ with low-level locking primitives and that can be pretty tricky to make efficient. You can easily write code that's correct and slow, or fast and error-prone.

IMO there's a lot of room for improvement on the tools side. I don't think a new architecture is needed/warranted given the improvement we could get just from better programming models and tools.
WordPress Stays Hip with the Times, Adds Gears and Looks to OAuth
I think that one of the major factors in the iMac selling well is that there is no cheaper box-only OS X offering* to canabalise it's sales.

*Excluding the mini, which is too far below to really be a direct iMac competitor.
A lot of these books are really, really dated. It doesn't mean that they shouldn't be on your must-read sci-fi list.
I've been using Google's calendar to send out invitations. How are these sites different? I.e. what's the point?
It seems to be a list of "classics" more than necessarily a list of good books or good scifi books.

I'd put Andromeda Strain on there before Timeline or Down and Out.

It's funny that Down and Out is one of the few modern books on there - it's more notable for the buzz around its distribution than being any good.
And you'd pay out the ear for it!
The entire Timeline plot is a bit pathetic, your company builds a time machine and what does it do with it? Go back to the 1960s and buy Berkshire Hathaway stock? Of course not where is the money in that...

They go and study the 14th century using the time machine so they can build an accurate historical theme park.

Fail
You will lose your negotiating leverage. Good faith and five bucks will buy you a sandwich. You really have no idea what they "think is fair." That said, if you want the job, the equity will be a pleasant bonus, and most employee equity grants are easily diluted, anyhow. I think you're left with nothing but trust and their own incentive not to dilute at the end when you're not a cofounder.
Francis Bates became one of the first Silicon Valley entrepreneurs

More like he was an entrepreneur who, much earlier, happened to live in the region that became Silicon Valley.
Users don't care about it being "tough" or "rare", they just want it to work.

And decoupling interface thinking from code is a mistake.

Schneiderman talks about this in some of his papers: design the interface, then write code.
I had an 'anxiety disorder' in my early high school years (mid 90's). I don't just mean around girls either. I would actually get butterflies whenever the monotonous redialing of my modem would be broken by that glorious screeching and scratching sound that meant I was finally connecting to the coolest local bbs. You know... the one where I was on track to make sysop one day; where I was clearly gaining the upper hand in a few threads of great import; where the girl I (and everyone else) liked might have accepted my marriage proposal in LORD.

The family doctor gave me some pills to take as needed, said they'd calm me down. And they did. Before long I forgot all about the pills and didn't seem to need them anymore, online or off. I got some contacts, my acne went away, I got a skater/hacker identity and a girlfriend. About a year later I found out they had been sugar pills. A total placebo.

So I got tricked out of my shyness.
The work is good. The interface isn't very polished, but it sounds like you haven't really worked on it yet, so I assume you'll polish it up later.

On the copyright side, there have been issues in the past (http://news.cnet.com/Lyrics-site-negotiates-copyright-issues...). I'm not sure how they were worked out, or if a defense of "everyone else is doing it" justifies reliance. You should look into any updates in the area, and also be aware that one day someone might disagree with you on if its ok (and by disagree I mean sue).
I can't believe CakePHP is so slow. Probably they have used unstable version. I used cake in few projects and had no problems with speed.
I have heard this story many times, typically it takes longer than what's actually promised to issue stock. Find out why it's taking so long, also speak to current employees there to figure out what was promised to them and when stock would be issued?

Even if they issue stock at a later date, I don't think they can start your vesting date from they day you join (check on this). Also the price would change every month and you will probably get it at higher price than right now (in the cents not $).

All that said, if you like the people, the market for which they are building a product, your role in the company go for it with ONE condition: Typically companies have a 1 year cliff, in this case, if the company takes X months to issue stock, you can ask the company to reduce the cliff by 12-X, which is fair. If they take longer than 12 months, count this as experience and move on.

good luck!
With all due respect, and it's a great novel, Animal Farm is not a science fiction.
An Ender's Game movie is in pre-production now actually. Apparently it finally happened because Orson Scott Card got a deal which included the level of creative control he required.

A lot of films never make it past pre-production so whether this film is actually finished is yet to be seen.
That would not have been better, because it implies that seniority implies competence.

What differentiates a programmer from a developer in the author's parlance isn't merely experience. A lot of newcomers to the field today build prototypes and put them into production, and believe that they got it right because their software is in production. That it's a maintenance nightmare doesn't enter into their minds, and as a result, their next project also turns into a maintenance nightmare.

That's a big problem where I work; we have a lot of software clear written by people without even a vague clue about web development (e.g. they don't use the HTTP session for anything, instead using lots of Java code to maintain session data), and instead of learning to write better software, they learn to repeat the same mistakes.
Crude Keeps the Heat on Stocks
What is the best alternative to google analytics then?
Dirty Dozen: Bankruptcy Myths Debunked
Startup Advice from George Costanza: Do The Opposite
I agree! Clicky [http://getclicky.com] FTW. Live traffic trumps delayed data anyday!
They don't scale because they're services businesses, and services businesses are harder to scale to large number of clients, since you're selling hours rather than bytes, and hours can't be duplicated for free infinitely like bytes can.
A proof of the Riemann hypothesis
Antitrust probe opened over Google, Yahoo deal
Actually, leave or sue. If they make a deal and you have evidence of it, they have to stick to it and courts will enforce it.
Viget is pretty large, in my eyes.

http://www.viget.com/about/team/
Similarly, have y'all seen mobaganda.com? It is doing the simple == better thing, as well. I notice you guys seem (I haven't actually used either site yet) to have a few more features. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
Neither is Atlas Shrugged.

anyway, who wants to add 32 books to their reading list all at once? it's more useful to know which are the best 3.
Google sees an online world of over a trillion images, wants to organize them all
"Attack Shyness"? Shyness seems unlikely to respond well to being attacked. I'd rather say something like "address shyness".

The point may seem minor, but wording affects how you frame a problem, which in turn has a big effect on the solution. In my experience, when working with parts of oneself, it's better not to frame things oppositionally.
Ask HN: What do you think of my first start-up?
A start-up about my start-ups. Do entrepreneurs want to know what choices are made and what the results are?
Nice! I'd like to diversify the providers of the various web services I use as to not place all my eggs in one basket so to speak. I'll give this analytics solution a try.
I think that's the second step in the original link.
50 Fun Things You Can Do With Google Gears
Google Gears application allows users to store Web-based information on their own system, making it possible to access and edit it even when you’re not online. Here are 50 fun and productive ways to use the program.
Big 4 accounting? H&R Block? I see your point, but there are companies who have made it work. And even for product-based businesses, only an extremely small percentage sell goods that can be duplicated for free infinitely. Amazon is doing okay.
"Think Google will not do it? The last time I read their terms and conditions, there is nowhere that it says they cant do this. They will make oral statements saying things like “If we did that we would lose the trust of our advertisers and go out of business”, but they have refused to put that in writing in any way, shape or form. In other words, they can do it."

Except that they won't, because what they say is actually true. For Google the money is in large numbers of advertisers, not in small numbers of affiliate clicks. This post makes no sense at all.
Natural Language Processing Techniques in Prolog
Nokia 6600 Slide (Unlocked)
This Black colored mobile handset is embedded a camera of 3.15 MP with an autofocus, video, and flash to enable you to capture the affectionate moments of your life which would be shared with your closed ones. Moreover, these pictures can be stored in its internal memory of 18 MB.
In other words: 32 science fiction books by someone who has read most of the bestsellers in the last few years, and a few classics. Or is there some other reason that Accelerando and Spook Country are on the same list as PKD?
This really depends on your specific group of friends.

For example, most of my friends do not use Facebook.

But all of my friends use email.
"We eventually had many competitors, on the order of twenty to thirty of them, but none of their software could compete with ours. We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the server and yet felt like a desktop application. Our competitors had cgi scripts. And we were always far ahead of them in features. Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce features that we didn't have. But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too."

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
One of my biggest problems is with #18. I don't know any social places that are 'comfortable' to me (heck, I get nervous when I go to new IRC chat rooms...), so I don't really have a place to practice any of the other things they talk about.
One reason could be the revenue model, its hard to expand without recurring revenue streams. Many places, like Robert-Half, don't have coders on staff, so there's no capital expenditures when the market is slow. A large firm would still have to pay people. Now, an example would be IBM, they're a huge development shop if you think about it, but they have many contacts and work on long projects that consistently bring in revenue. Its hard to get to that level, especially when your clients are diverse and hire you for one-off projects.

In your example about law firms, I think its inaccurate to say there are no large nationwide firms. Its more accurate to say there are few large nationwide plaintiff's firms (although lawyers have other restrictions we won't get into). Plaintiff firm's clients don't usually come back for a second round, which makes it hard to employ many people who might just sit around doing nothing. Business law firms, on the other hand, do have large nationwide presences, because their work is often on retainer or consistent.

I think you're right that the market is against the structure of a large firm. Its just much more economically useful to be small or be part of another company that also does other things, because the revenue stream is inconsistent and project based.
All of those things are already with us. The problem with those things are in the algorithm performance, not compute cycles.
Plus, they're offering industry competitive salary, which also means they're probably not a true startup.
Keep going, but take time to imagine a world where flash-search is commonplace. What will the world need then? What will Google need then?

If nothing else, the work you've done puts you in a better place to answer that question than almost anyone.
Intellectual laziness.

Study disputes Long Tail theory.
IBM, Logica CMG and Accenture would be examples of big dev shops. Not solely web.

I see your point though. Maybe the niche is too small and generally too cyclical.
Sorry, Your Inbox is Still Exploding
Don't forget that companies like US Web / CKS, Razorfish, and Organic grew quite large during the dot-com boom, when there was plenty of Web dev and design work to go around. (Sure, these companies had major downfalls, but I'd argue that that wasn't due to a failure to scale up, but rather management problems and a sudden dearth of clients due to the bust.)

Likewise, if you consider that outsourcing firms like Infosys and Satyam are likely doing some Web development work in addition to more traditional "IT" work, those firms have scaled quite well. Infosys has over a billion dollars in revenue each year.

Maybe the moral is that shops that only focus on Web applications will have a harder time finding new and larger clients than firms that can provide services that go deeper than the Web interface -- into CRM, ERP, and so on. If you don't like to do that sort of work, then you stay small and run a boutique shop.
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur
Outcast Commits Suicide In “Second Life”
Downmodded, but i have to explain. First, it's specifically mentioned in the guidelines that just funny news are strongly discouraged. Second, this is not reddit and i like it. I read both, but for very different reasons.
What disappoints me the most is that the RoR maintainers made almost exactly the same mistake a couple of years ago, trying to keep a security flaw under wraps rather than being forthright about it.
In virtual worlds, child avatars need protecting -- from each other
Yeah, I haven't read Spook Country but I did read Pattern Recognition...I don't like the direction Gibson's going in. Idoru and the Bridge series or whatever it was called was cool.
The Fail Whale Fan Club
I had a great time with Salsa dancing. In the right place, you dance with lots of different girls all evening long. Since you can take classes, you can get reasonably good at it so as to make a good impression. Lots of girls will dance, some won't, but because each song only lasts so long, you can meet lots of people. Furthermore, it's fun in its own right, nice music, doesn't cost much, and you can learn a surprising amount about someone from 2 or 3 minutes of dancing with them.
You will lose one type of negotiating leverage and gain another.

Once you have been there a while your true value will be obvious (especially when you produce, in a _nice way_, comprehensive documentation at your first performance review).

Please be clear that I am not advocating salary blackmail (pay rise or I quit) tactics. However reasonable and friendly negotiations periodically is not an unreasonable thing to request.

For most of us the company at hiring time is seeing a choice beteen you (an unknown risk) and someone else (also an unknown risk) and while they obviously have a preference it may not be that strong. However after twelve months they will be evaluating you (a known, and hopefully respected, certainty) and someone new (an unkown risk) which is a whole different game.
"persistent, stinging loneliness"

I vividly remember that phase of my life. I would not want to live it again. It was a combination of shyness, geekiness, being a foreigner in a new land and persistent rejection arising out of the first 3. In hindsight, the big mistake I made was to try to fish in over-fished waters (typical engineering graduate school, where every female has numerous suitors). There exist overstocked ponds, demographically speaking, where you will have much better luck. School teachers, nurses and the like come to mind, but there are many other demographics. The school teacher demographic is a good one: they tend to be bright and idealistic (and many of them are pretty too!).

The good news: I eventually came out of that phase, got on with life, found a wonderful woman (my wife now), and even made decent money ... so there is light at the end of the tunnel. If I can do it, you can do it too.
I think that currently you have a blog, not a startup business. :)

That's not to say that a blog can't be a business, but it seems like you have a lot of work yet to do to form some sort of product offering (which could be content) and a business model.
How to Handle a Bear Market
statcounter is really pretty good. Not as flashy or feature-rich as getclicky. But, free and no ads and live updates are nice.

I agree that google analytics is not the best choice.
Speed can be easily benchmarked. Security can't.
It depends on how good you are at what you do: If you are a really great developer and you become an vital part of the infrastructure after a few months, that will significantly increase your leverage. In order for this to work, you have to be able to walk out on the job for real if the negotiations don't go as planned. That just involves keeping feelers out for replacement jobs (always a good idea regardless when joining a startup since there's no guarantee the company will survive for long) and having enough money saved up to be out of work for a few months, and knowing how to apply for unemployment benefits if you need to.

If you suck well there's no guarantee that they will keep you anyways.

Main thing would be -- would you enjoy relocating to the west coast? If you never get any benefits other than the salary, would that be enough? Have you considered whether the place you are moving to might have higher/lower costs of living?
For some reason, I started thinking about the barber shop/salon type model. Where you pay X to rent a booth to do you work in, but has shared resources. This idea quickly starts to look like a tech incubator, but different.

Would it be a independant Hacker Incubator? Supplying physical space, mail boxes, phone lines, shared secretary pool, printers, and hopefully some amount of mentorship; but, centered around the independent spirit of the developers.

(Sorry, I think I rambled away from the topic.)
CakePHP is slow, sorry.

Speaking from experience here, having rewritten WordPress from scratch and tried a number of frameworks before just biting the bullet and writing my own.

PerformancePress: http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/wordpress-performancepress-and...

However, speed in web-scripting languages isn't the kind of thing you notice until it starts to give you trouble. Projects get started and finished, tested and deployed, and only after the real traffic starts coming in that the dismaying results turn up.... so while CakePHP may not feel slow, that doesn't mean it isn't so.
they do scale.

but in order to scale, the dev shop has to be willing to take on different sized projects. and in doing this, they evolve from a dev shop to a consulting firm. this is because, to be able to ensure everyone has work, turning down small-scale one-person types of jobs becomes more and more difficult.

for example, the shop would be much more willing to send the java guy in on contract to fix issues or do some short-term work on an existing system if the alternative is just having him sit on his hands. if he sits on his hands for weeks while he waits for work, he's either not getting paid, or the company isn't getting paid for having him work for them, which is a net loss. and he's also probably surfing dice while he waits.
Citrix CTO Simon Crosby on Xen, Microsoft & VMware - GigaOM
Well, we've got 32 employees right now, but I wouldn't call us "large," really. Large to me is ThoughtWorks, or Sapient.
Brainfuck interpreter written in LOLcode
you are comfortable on these forums. Or at least comfortable enough to post comments.
HN Req: Change Tabbing Order on 'Edit' Page
When editing a post, pressing <tab> from within the text-input box changes the focus to the "Help" link instead of the "Submit" button. Can this please be changed, because it's slightly disconcerting and not <strike>user</strike> hacker-friendly?
Chatting with Luis Lavena (Ruby on Windows)
Anyone know enough math to be able to tell if this is a serious contender?
[Quotable] Andrew Stanton, Stefan Sagmeister, Joel Spolsky, Philip Johnson, etc.
Stranger still is the "usa" substring.... I had to read it twice to get the actual text :)
We offer competitive salaries, and we're definitely a startup. Founders expect poor compensation from startups, at least in the first years. Everything else is a matter of negotiation.
I agree, but: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Abrupt ultimatums may be bad form, but if you take a job and later realize your comp is unfair, you are under absolutely no obligation to accept that situation.
Snow Crash is awesome. I finished it and "The Diamond Age" last week and I can vouch for them as a worthy read.
I don't know if they can artificially backdate the vesting schedule, but they can certainly make the vesting schedule shorter.
Please note the use of the word "harder", rather than "impossible".

It's possible to build a company the size of Accenture or Infosys... but it's damn hard and requires a LOT of skill, talent and luck for a very long period.
The content will definitely be the product. In this case, the content relies on a second (and third and fourth) start-up, so you're right, the work I need to do involves starting another business, which will provide content for the first. Ironically, I have yet to formulate an exact business model for the first start-up, rather my thoughts have been on future projects. In a weird way, its likely some projects will outshine and be bigger (at least economically) than the original start-up.
+1 for Kohana. Their ORM is superb, and overall the speed of the framework is better than CodeIgniter. Also is developed by a community (as opposed to Ellislab)
If you liked Down and Out, you should try John Varley's short stories, especially The Phantom of Kansas.
I think this is an unfair blanket statement. I think that every APPLICATION, forget framework-dependent or not, will have its bottlenecks.

I see so many size comparisons about which framework is faster than the other... People need to realize that a framework is nothing more than an application library. A smart developper will know how to use it to his/her advantage and will know how to identify bottlenecks and optimize them.

The point is to get your ideas into the wild fast. All you need for that is a development environment YOU'RE comfortable in, be it RoR, CakePHP, Code Igniter, Zend, whatever..

Once your idea is in the wild and generating traffic that breaks all your best optimization tricks, I'd hope that you have enough revenue or interest generated to then start rethinking the framework that it was built upon.

I think if you're rewriting frameworks and tools like wordpress from the get-go, you're missing the point.