skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an existential dilemma I haven't quite solved yet. I don't want to die, but I can't help but feeling that immortality is a trap. What if I'm really a 12th dimensional being and death is the only way to exit this false reality? It would be terrible to spend an eternity trapped in a lesser universe. Though with infinite time and infinite wisdom maybe we can bust our way out.
+1, Gratuitous Musical Interlude
It's fairly typical, but I'm used to seeing at least a 401K with no match. Most startups I have worked for at this stage started exploring HR Benefits companies and generally the benefits improve slightly.

My advice is not to buy up the stock by taking less cash at that stage. .15% probably won't justify it.
| ...but maybe men generally have more aptitude for the subject.

Maybe, but there is also a lot of subtle social conditioning that tells girls and young women that there are gender-specific subjects and roles. (Likewise for guys, too.)

| "There are few female geniuses for the same reason there are few female serial killers."

You have to be careful about differentiating between innate or potential genius, and expressed genius. There could be a lot of very smart women out there that aren't getting noticed.

Creativity, scientific (or field) achievement, and corporate ladder-climbing has been correlated to testosterone in men. I wonder if there'd be a similar correlation among women?
Seeing Gaudy Night there suggests to me that I should read the others, of which I'm woefully ignorant.
Ugh I hate that. I got marked down a letter grade on a math test once for not showing enough intermediate steps even though my answers were correct.

I also once got an answer marked wrong because the teacher couldn't understand my intermediate steps, even though the answer (and steps) were actually correct. When I showed him, he refused to change my grade. That was at University.
I'm surprised he liked The Haj; the book is basically a Rand-style propaganda piece about Arab society where all the characters are either stereotypes or their 'lives' are an obvious attempt to demonstrate some point.
8 iPhone Devs Demo Their Apps Live
Isn't sqrt(-1) = i an axiom though, and not a theorem? In other words, if you just started with the integers and the basic rules of arithmetic, you will never run into the need for imaginary numbers. It's only after you posit their existence that a lot of cool results flow from it.

Am I wrong there?
Use the right tool for the job. "Functional" can have more than one meaning.
How do you define tons of equity?
40%? 30%?
The essential defining component of AI to me is an explicit attempt to model or study human cognition/neural processes.

A lot of the learning/search stuff being published is a mix of traditional engineering tools (like Kalman filters, used for decades for state estimation) with some kind of search/learning metaheuristic and does not give a flying hoot about being "intelligent".
Cornell has two sets of requirements. The requirements for your college within the university, and the requirements for your major. This course fulfilled the distribution requirements for the college I was in. However, it wouldn't necessarily count as one of the required science classes for your major. So, for example, if you were a physics student then it wouldn't count toward your major, so therefor it would make more sense to take another class that you could count toward both your major and your college distribution requirement. Sorry if this is unclear, it's kind of complicated.
Most "popular" books that are recognized as literary classics are good. A few may be crap, but I don't feel competent to judge them. A good rule is that any book that people are still reading several decades after it was published is worth your time. Please note that the inverse is not necessarily true.
Physicists discover new particle: the bottom-most "bottomonium"
Zacharye - Engineer here who might be interested. Send me your email address and we can talk. nick [dot] kleinschmidt [at] gmail.com
Experienced systems programmers will tell you that computer languages really are all the same, and that learning Python is trivial if you already know Blub.

No, I don't think we would tell you that...
Neat idea. I'd like to know more about the computers and software between camera and TV. It sounds like he's been able ot do better than I've done so far with linux boxes and Haupauge cards.
Thank you very much for your remarks. It looks like I am in a typical ballpark as far as the equity compensation goes, maybe slightly above average. And I am definitively planning to continue to work after this. :) But I also hope in "some" payday, otherwise I wouldn't be taking any stocks.

I could get market rate salary with less stock, but I think I am going with a below-market salary and more stocks. About that, I am still trying to decide the right balance...
Subtlety is an artistic choice, not a necessity. People that complain about the lack of realism in certain authors' works are probably the same people that hated the movie "300" because the characters weren't wearing proper period clothing.
Discovery is the New Cocaine: Going Beyond Engagement
IBM isn't "getting the milk for free" from AMD. IBM and AMD are sharing a lot of R&D costs, along with most of the major semiconductor manufacturer's out there (like Samsung, TSMC, UMC, Chartered Semi, etc). IBM and AMD are also trading technologies; IBM provided AMD with low-K semiconductor technology, and AMD provided IBM with automation technology for IBM's fabs.

And don't forget that IBM WAS in the desktop chip market. They even had an x86 license that allowed IBM to design x86 processors, as well as manufacture them.

They tried to get back into that market with the G5, and both AMD and Intel pretty much steamrolled it -- because IBM launched the G5 while AMD and Intel were hot on each others' heels (AMD lead performance at the time, Intel lead price).

IBM didn't make Apple happy because IBM couldn't afford to. Back then, IBM's semiconductor division was losing (each quarter) approximately AMD's annual operating budget. IBM wasn't willing to invest in a fresh design for the G5, so they went with a cut-down implementation of POWER4, which doesn't work so well without the massive caches and buses that POWER systems get.

IBM is good at makeing cost-no-object systems like POWER (which only make money because the systems and services for IBM's servers are so lucrative), and custom jobs like Gekko, Cell, and Xenon. MS and Sony have 2nd sources for Xenon and Cell (Chartered or UMC, I forget which, and Toshiba respectively), because IBM's not so good at making high-volume chips at reasonable cost.

Would it be worth for IBM? It's hard to say, particularly since IBM is also one of Intel's biggest OEM's, and IBM no longer sells PC's.
Walked up to the San Diego Apple store, saw a three hour line, walked away. Hoping for better luck tomorrow.
Here's an article describing some of the differences between C-Corp, S-Corp and LLC.
http://www.mynewcompany.com/entity.htm

I'm not an expert either and am approaching this decision with my business partner shortly. Here's what I understand so far.

If you're accepting funding, go with C-Corp since VC's will insist upon it. If you're not accepting funding or angel funding (friends/family) etc. then LLC will be the cheapest and least red tape. VC's prefer C-Corp because it requires you to maintain more paperwork, reports, filings, etc. (though I'm not sure exactly what that entails).

Regarding Delaware, Here's an interesting article on Nevada vs. Delaware. It advocates Nevada for "tax reasons."
http://www.val-u-corp.com/whynev.html

Anyhow, I hope that helps. (and that people more knowledgeable in this area respond).
Yes it can. Think of Newton, Galileo, Einstein, etc. ;-)
Unfortunately, a lot of those "let's talk about improving the company" retreats do end up being historic wastes of time -- but not necessarily because the meeting itself happened, but because nothing happened afterward. Or more specifically, the people with the power to make changes based on what they are being told rarely take any followup action. For them, the conversation at the retreat is the action.
There's a planned salary increase up to market rate in 8 months from now (if things go well of course). That's also why I am considering more stocks now. If I start with a market rate salary now, I won't be getting any pay increase later.
"Greene's ouster may have stemmed from a dispute over business strategy, rather than her gender"

How charitable of the author to decide that the company may have been motivated by business concerns rather than pure misogyny.
MSF's actual advantage is that it's fronted by Sarah Beeny (Americans: she is probably as well-known in England as Martha Stewart is in the US), a national TV personality - even if it were "conventional" it would still have achieved critical mass.
I don't really know how to interpret your sentence. Complex numbers are a field in which you do 'basic rules of arithmetic'. You can't do the 'basic rules of arithmetic' on integers.

i is defined as sqrt(-1), if that answers your question.
Modest Web Site Is Behind a Bevy of Memes
I'm not convinced that's true. E.g. you go to the newsagents and there is a rack full of wedding magazines - how many people buy a subscription?
If Google didn't come up with new things once in a while, the article we'd be reading would be called "Google is boring me" and the thesis would be "why doesn't google come up with anything new? they must be dying."
jr, what image and ui are you running? it's almost impossible to make calls on a 1973 (or FR) from what I've tried so far.

FSO (http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/FSO) is the only thing that reliably lets me make calls but that's ALL it does.

What're you using?
Financially, you're almost always better off taking more cash and less stock. In the average startup, things do not go well, so a raise in 8 months may not really be in the cards (and if things are going well, your equity will be worth much more than your salary anyway).

But there are intangible benefits to taking more equity and less salary. You work harder, which means that you get to work on more interesting things, which opens up more doors in the future. If I were to take a job now (and I'm looking :-)), I'd probably go for more equity and a lower salary as long as it's adequate to cover basic living costs, if only because there're only so many material comforts that one needs...
The sorry decline of General Motors has proved Reuther right: the government is the better provider of social insurance. Let industry worry about selling products.

Huh? Seems to me that this just proved that the market is a better provider of "social insurance" in the form of products people want (i.e., medical care at market prices) than anything collective offered by either the unions or the government. Hasn't this guy ever heard of Social Security and it's looming insolvency? Why don't the same arguments apply? Just think...how much easier it would be for the government to prop up the financial sector temporarily (not that I'm for that...just following the argument here) if it didn't have 3 limbs tied behind it's back by SS/Medicare/Medicaid?
Ah. In that case, buy them up. I've seen planned increases to market rate go awry, but if you're comfortable that it'll be delivered, it can't hurt to forgo 8 months for another .15%.
I should have said "Real Numbers" instead of "Integers", sorry.

My point is that sqrt(-1) = i is an extra assumption that you don't need to make in order to derive the math you do in school. If you don't make that assumption, you can still derive a lot of math. If you do make that assumption, then you can also derive the theorems of complex analysis.

I think that's true, anyway. I could be wrong.

It just seems strange to me that someone would be bothered by the lack of negative square roots, since their existence is never derived, only assumed. But then again, people's minds work very differently, especially in Mathematics.

I was the opposite in Math class. I fought accepting "i" when they tried to teach it to us since it seemed so arbitrary and contrived to me. This was before I discovered that all Math is arbitrary and that there is no "real math", anyway.
I'm in the same boat. I am in Product Management and fairly technically oriented, but I wouldn't call myself a real programmer.

Since I have not found people of like mind I have tried to learn enough to try to do something on my own. But not having built a web service in the past, it's not that easy. I would be happy finding a mentor who could point me in the right direction while I learn.
Or as Steve Jobs put it. "Death is life's greatest invention"
John Reese REVEALS The #1 Overlooked Traffic Method
Hi, Cory here with a quick update before the weekend. What’s the update about? Well here it is in a nutshell... John Reese just released a NEW video that reveals a ‘big traffic’ secret that many of the world’s top sites don’t want others to know about, and he shows how YOU can quickly and easily start using this ’secret’ for your own sites.
Yes. Totally amazing hack. The stuff I like to see here. (A few more tech details would be righteous but I'm sure the hackers here have ideas on how they could do the same thing.)
My problem is recognising tallent outside of your core compentencies.

If you can recognise tallent, it's easy enough to pick up people who are on the rebound from bad jobs, or who haven't gotten much paid experience yet. I regularly hire friends of friends, but then I hang out with very technical people who have very technical friends. I've picked up a lot of really good technical people with little experience and paid 'em $15/hr to work for me... most of them leave for better pay after a year or so, but if I was compitent at business, I'd be able to pay them more by then.

My big problem is that if you are incompetent at something, you can't reconise compitence. I am an incompitent business person, so I can't recognise a good sales/businessperson. Even with a good solid technical team, you need business compitency to succeed, and there isn't much of that in my social circle, and even if there was, I wouldn't be able to tell the good from the pretenders.

It sounds like I need to get together with someone like you, but who? I mean, I alrealdy said, I can't tell if someone is a compitent businessperson, and having the wrong CEO is much worse, imo, than having no CEO at all.
Yes, Compaq Federal LLC, HP Hood LLC, Capri Capital Partners LLC, MacroMarkets LLC, Bain Capital Partners LLC, etc. are all small outfits. Some of these have been in multi-million deals, others in billion-dollar deals.

Talk to a lawyer. Seriously. The incorporation decision and details and protections are based on state laws and do vary, and the decision depends on where your are going with your startup. A good lawyer makes this process far easier.
you don't meet Justin Timberlake or Jessica Alba being CEO of Flickr
I read Life A Users Manual by Georges Perec thanks to his recommendation (I read this page about two years ago, I guess). It was a real eye opener. I never actually finished it, but instead read a 600 page biography of Georges Perec.. a crazy but amazing man.
I would have loved to see that presentation. Do you know when and where it was given?
Django: Sprinting to the finish
Why does Apple need to be independent? How would be in Apple's best interests to take on the massive overhead of being a CPU manufacturer?

I'm not even convinced that it would be in Apple's best interests to be in the graphics hardware business either, but at least that doesn't entail owning a fab. Neither nVidia nor ATI fabricated their own chips, they contracted that work out to foundries like Chartered and UMC. Owning a fabless graphics hardware developer might work out for Apple, but I'm a bit skeptical about that. I'm also not convinced that it was a wise purchase for AMD though.
> In the average startup, things do not go well

At one point, I had something like 10K Linuxcare options, when VA Linux and Redhat had recently had huge IPO's and were trading well north of $100. Sigh...

It's not something I think about much though. I was paid well and got a lot of other things out of the experience. However...yeah, it's pretty easy for things to turn sour in a hurry.
If you feel like not dying, I would suggest signing up for cryonics with Alcor or another reputable provider.

Otherwise, frankly, quit whining. It's not like there are no alternatives to death.
The long term answer is to build a hacker network. That's going to be hard.

There is no good short-term answer but here's the only way: asking in the right places (like here) and getting very lucky. Being specific will help:

Do you have actual ideas? Do you bring domain knowledge to the table? Are your ideas niche to that domain? Do you know what type of business you'd want to run (bootstrapped/VC)? How are you going to get funding?

As a programmer, I know several hackers who are looking to start a business in the next year or so. If you had good answers to the above questions, I'd consider putting you in touch with them. Regardless, though, you are going to want to be specific as possible when asking. It's the only way of even having a chance.

Bonus tip: Put your email address in your profile before asking questions like this. You never know who might email you out of the blue.
You should really ask an attorney about the cost/benefit of different options, but here are a few as I understand them, and why VCs generally demand a C corp structure. Standard disclaimer--I don't know what I am talking about and you are an idiot to believe anything I say.

Tax is a big one, and the reason I think that VCs don't like LLCs. LLCs are "passthrough" entities for tax purposes, like partnerships. They don't pay taxes....the members (shareholders) of the LLC pay taxes on their portion of the LLCs earnings or losses. For VCs and other institutional investors, this creates a nightmare from an accounting point of view.

C Corps are technically "persons" for tax purposes, and pay their own taxes. Much simpler....VCs are not in business for tax credits, they want capital gains when the successful investment is sold.

Governance--C corps have existed for a long time and there is a considerable body of law around them. Delaware is preferred because its laws are considered optimal (not sure of the details why), and its fees are low.

LLCs are very flexible...many of the governance elements are crafted into the Operating Agreement that controls the LLC, which is why LLC docs are much longer than the incorporation docs. I have always found that LLCs are more expensive to set up because of this.

So.....if you are going to take outside institutional investment, save time and start with a C corp...might as well do Delaware since every lawyer speaks Delaware law.

If you are not taking professional money, then you may prefer the tax efficiency of the LLC. You get tax benefits while you are losing money, and you eliminate one layer of income taxes when you are making money. This is assuming you distribute the excess cash--if you don't, then you have to pay taxes anyway, but you don't have the cash to help. For this reason, most LLCs make what is called a tax distribution to help members cover their tax liability.

There are other structures (sole proprietorship, S corp, partnership) that have pros and cons depending on exactly what your aspirations are for the business, but C corps and LLCs dominate.
To all the editors I’ve loved before…
Just FYI, I have an MS in EE and I work at a pattern-rec startup. So, no PhD not really required to get a job in that field. That being said, having a PhD helps alot if you want to take on the 'scientist' role right off the bat (for example, my job duties have included things like optimizing the algorithm both computationally and algorithmically).

Your stats look fine for applying to CS PhD. Top 5 is probably a long shot (but it always is). But, they love math backgrounds. The only problem is no publications. Top tier CS schools virtually require a strong research background.

1. It's probably going to hurt more than help, to be honest. Even though EE and CS and the like -do- have industrial applications, the people who are reading your application chose to stay in academia. That means they don't necessarily look kindly on people diminishing that. My suggestion say "financial obligations" and leave it at that. The key is to seem really really really really excited about CS and that's why you are applying.

2. This is a serious longshot.

3. AI research groups will care alot more about your research than the school. And yes, top tier schools will tend to have smarter people and therefore better co-founders. Any "decent" school though will have plenty of smart people.

4. The money is there at any CS school so you'll more then likely go to school for free and work on funded research projects. The career possibilities are as good as they get with any PhD.
recognizing talent is one thing that humans are amazingly bad at, as recent HN stories about malcom's new book and the nytimes article about competent vs nice coworkers have suggested.

i dont know if an iterative model can work in staffing.

this is why experience is so valued by companies -- if you've done stuff, then you are able to do stuff (though, maybe you're a big faker who got lucky.)
As long as you live you always have something to worry about.

A possible interpretation along the line: "Only the Paranoid Survive" by Andrew S. Grove
"Being a retired professor is a lot like being an ordinary professor, except that you don't have to write research proposals, administer grants, or sit in committee meetings. Also, you don't get paid."

New one for my list of favourite quotes. Great! ;)
I'm going to give it a try once I get the new iphone - I think it'd be nice to have in a big city.

At least he didn't double pop the collars.
How to compensate sweat equity?
I had several would-be technical co-founders. They ended up quitting after putting in only a month - 3 months of work in exchange for equity. In most cases, they delivered some but not all that they promised. The agreements were done on a handshake.

I worked on the project for 10 months full time and am bringing the product to the finishing line. And, I invested in all of the business expenses, including hiring contractors overseas to complete the work.

So, my question: how do I give equity compensation to the tech folks who worked for sweat equity that is fair?

I don't think they are any longer founders so out of what pool of stock would I compensate them when I incorporate?

Any rules of thumb would be appreciated. I'm also looking into equity consultants so any referrals would be great. Thanks.
You can have Lisp "portability" without the JVM, depending on your choice of implementation. What I like about SBCL is it compiles fast native code... haven't tried other platforms than Linux yet but I will---and then, I simply have a dislike for everything Java, including its class libraries.
But shouldn't we judge a work of political philosophy by how long it continues to inspire debate?

Probably not. If well reasoned people are debating, wouldn't we judge the philosophy by its ability to end the debate?

People who are poorly reasoned will be able to debate even rubbish endlessly.
The most important revenue number you present in a business plan
I'm not picking on these guys in particular, because it's a widely used phrase, but does the English language really deserve "liquidity event" instead of, say, "selling the company"?
Another approach is to hire contractors overseas to build exactly what you'd like. Rentacoder, elance and odesk are great resources.
Great stuff. When a committee's job is to make sure that each individual in the room does what is necessary to keep their employeement with the company, the life is ready to be sucked out of out of the company.