skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We won't be better in the end- All crude that can be extracted will still be extracted and burned in an engine. Furthermore, if China's economy goes downhill they'll never cut back on their coal burning.

Also, they aren't polluting themselves because of "government corruption" but because they have no other avenue to economic growth. A democracy in their position would act no different.

I'm not sure it helps anyone or anything if China "gets knocked back a couple of pegs."

This isn't a game of cribbage where the US "wins" because the other guy's peg got knocked back a couple of notches. If they lose, we lose. The reason we have our high standard of living is because we've been mooching off the Chinese population's cheap labor for our consumables all this time.

The only way the world will burn less oil is if there isn't enough left to burn- Not because the "nice guys" win and will chose to stop polluting... there are no "nice guys".
I gotta go right now. I got a ton of references, but I'm off to some my yoga class and a nice walk on a beautiful day. I'll post it tonight or tomorrow.
Google Protocol Buffers - Open Sourced
Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I would actually take it one step further and say it's closer to the process of turning a nice neighbourhood into slums.
You figured all that out about me from a single post? Amazing.

Your massive inellect and talent is wasted here at hn. Looking forward to seeing you on Dr. Phil.
I can tell you that I am pretty tired of Priuses jumping into the HOV lane in front of me and doing 45MPH in a 65 zone.

Congratulations on getting 100mpg or whatever, but the train of cars backed up behind you aren't exactly ready to throw you a party.
Before reading the comments I tried it too and found that it didn't work for me either.
Here is a MooTools version: http://digitarald.de/project/roar/

I like jQuery, but I think this is better than Jgrowl.
I tried it once, and decided I would rather have two larger monitors.

I use dual 24" on my mac and I love it.

(It seemed like I was forced to move my head a lot more with a quad monitor setup - either vertically (cube setup) or horizontally (4 in a row setup), and it wasn't very enjoyable to me.)

[Edit: I was using all 20" monitors for my test, and I actually liked 3 monitors more than 4 - there was a logical "main" monitor that way.]
Rik Van Riel - Why Computers Are Getting Slower (And What We Can Do About It) [PDF]
I HATE padded text. Length constraints kill the quality of many student, academic, and professional writings.

In the last 10 years of my education, I routinely submitted works less than 80% of the required length and still received A grades. Most instructors are reasonable enough to know that high quality work does not need to meet arbitrary constraints.

I wish educators would stop providing length constraints, even when students request them. Unnecessary verbosity should be punished, not rewarded. Succinct, precise, unambiguous, and accurate writing needs to be encouraged.
Thanks Daniel (I think).

he just questioned the morality of pot as an aide in student studies

No I didn't.

I challenged the appropriateness of a #1 hn post from a student who uses drugs to get by and then brags about it.

The reaction seems very mob-like.

I didn't know what to expect, but this was no surprise. Since "net" scores are the only thing that show, I'm curious how many up votes and down votes there were. Even though the net is negative, I wonder how many people agreed.
One way to go about democratising the "cloud". Some have cheekily aligned it with how current day linux came to form. A need for a free and hopefully standard platform. :-)
You have the whole rest of your life to sell out. You can afford to wait.
We have a branch of Rubinius that is compiling ruby to rubinius bytecodes and then transforming that into LLVM bitcode for native compilation. It is still in the early stages but it already giving big speed improvements.

http://github.com/evanphx/rubinius/commits/cpp
Understand YSlow: What Matters; What Doesn't
SpeakHQ: building a group micro-update webapp
Dallas meetup
There's a meetup tonight in Dallas. Word has it there will be some startup people there.

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/858058
Challenges of the startup entrepreneur and where is social software going
Do they really use all available data? Or does the "don't be evil" mantra prevents them from using specific datasets?

I suspect Google believes using more data is always "good", so it's impossible for "do no evil" to mean "don't use data we legally collected". Does not compute.
He tries so hard to look like an Apple user that I hardly believe he really is one.
A Different Climate Change Apocalypse Than the One You Were Envisioning
sorry hugh, I downvoted you accidentally, I ment to upvote your post. I have had the same question too.
It just seems like <code> or <pre> tags would be appropriate.
I would say they are for different things really. ExtJS is all about pre build widgets you can compose into other widgets, saving work, but sticking within how they work and look (skinnable). jQuery gives you much more control but at a lower level (widget wise).
Biological Clocks Tick for Men, Too
You're welcome : )

I voted you up just based on all the crowd-voting going on.

Sorry about misrepresenting your post. It had been a while since you posted it, and it's gone now.
Surviving an IT Budget Squeeze
Moving On: What I Learned From Shrimp Farmers
+1 for saying GCD instead of LCD.
The distinction between accidental complexity and essential complexity is very relevant here. Test-driven design is not a perfect solution ("The End of Bugs" is pretty sensationalized), but it's good at reigning in many kinds of bugs in dynamically typed languages, much like the static type systems in Haskell or OCaml.

Sure, it won't prevent all bugs, but I wouldn't write off testing so quickly. Consider Proebsting's Law. (http://research.microsoft.com/~toddpro/papers/law.htm)

(I'm responding to anti-testing backlash in general; I'm not clear what position, if any, you're making by just dropping in the link. Also, akeefer makes some really good points here.)
11 Ways To Avoid Entrepreneurial Divorce Court
I guess making their own search system would be too hard, so they acquired another company's.

Logic FTW!
My Yahoo Rolls Out New Interface, Tries To Fend Off iGoogle
Seems to be an odd purchase. They already have access to all the data, how hard is it to write a simple search layer?
"trading some consistency for availability can lead to dramatic improvements in scalability"!???

Wow! That's just great! Why not go all the way: an 100% available system with no consistency whatsoever? Oh, wait, we already have that in Google App Engine!

Neither of these is reasonable. You can't yield consistency - it is more important than availability. What's the user in having information available at 100% when you don't know whether it will be consistent?
I don't know about everyone else but this is at least the 4th "I built some widget in X number of hours post" this week. It's getting old.
Learn How to Mine Data from Amazon.com & Harrah's Casinos
Twitter May Buy Summize
While the point about advertising is interesting, I think it's a bit of a red herring: Apple and Microsoft are trying to make money by having people use their OS, so naturally they have to convert people, or convince them to not switch to the competition. Linux on the other hand doesn't need to convert people.

Sure, the more users you get, the more potential developers there are, and the better the system will end up being. And of course there are commercial Linux distributions. But in general, Linux doesn't need advertising, because it doesn't need to "win." It just needs to stay alive for those of us who want to use it!
Learning to use the Emacs keyboard macro system effectively
I've never used more than two monitors, but I know most people who run three monitors use two (usually mismatched) cards. I don't know of any four-display video cards - I've never needed one - but if they're a lot more expensive than two off-the-shelf video cards, I don't see any reason not to go for the cheaper option.
"31 is not old age, and I hope when I get to 31 I have 20 year old girl friends"

I was thinking the same thing. If there's anything creepy about this guy's post, it's that he got married in the middle of college. I suppose that you would feel out-of-touch with 20-something life if you'd been married for over a decade by the time you were 31!
Amazon runs most of its stuff on eventually consistent systems. They do pretty well, as you can see, so your thesis of "A is clearly more importnat than B" is disproven.
Yes, of all of those guys, I think Microsoft are most likely next to act, as it would also be the perfect opportunity for them to offer any cloud-based Office products they may or may not be developing :)
Similar to Facebook Thrift (http://developers.facebook.com/thrift/)?
"No Silver Bullet" Revisited
Apparently as hard as it is for them to scale :).
Actually IBM has "Blue Cloud" (it even made Techcrunch ! see http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/15/ibms-blue-cloud-is-web-...)

But you're right it's a very high-end offering, so you're not gonna' see it mentioned much in the bootstrapped startup world.

btw, when are you coming back to Hursley ? ;-)
Touche. But since Summize is tapping their API, they are already paying for Summize to scale. Fun how that works.
As with most things: it depends.

How much risk have you taken out of your business? What is the market size and upside potential? What is employee #1's contribution expected to be? Is employee #1 your chief technologist, your CMO, or something different?

Have you closed angel or A-round funding, or are you paying them out of your pocket?

I am an East Coast startup person. Employee #1 at a post angel pre-A startup out here wants at least 1-2% with some hedging against dilution when the VCs enter.

Equity at the startups I've worked for is 4-year vesting with a 1-year cliff and monthly vesting at month 13. Most savvy negotiators will want a nut of options that vest immediately on acceptance.

If your product is not complete and you can't show that the market is itching to buy your product, a revenue-share-only package will be impossible to value.

But then again, same with the options.
Unsubstantiated?
That's certainly true. They're also useful for distributed caches, but that doesn't make B-trees any less useful when the situation calls for it.
I have 3 monitors hooked up to my mac pro(2x20" 1x30"). Could have up to 2x30" + 2x24" with my 2 video card setup.

My new setup will be a macbook pro (replacing a macbook) and a single 30" monitor when I'm at my desk. I found its better to cut down on how much you run so you can focus.

Look at changing the way you work... No email notifications, don't leave chat or IM running, use your pc when you are working and get away when you are not.
A Credit Card Missing One Digit
I was just about to vote you up then I saw the tobacco should be banned. As an ex-smoker (tobacco) I am against any smoking happening near me but banning it is not the answer.
"when you see period documents that talk about "hemp""

Good point I read some place that the reason people originally wanted to out law marijuana was in order to make it illegal to grow hemp which was competing with their cotton crop. So really this all just started out as a government enforced monopoly to please some corporate fat cats.
1. It depends (mostly on company financing stage and valuation).

2. 4 years, 1 year cliff.

3. It's an uncommon structure that won't align the company's interests with your employee's. Revenue up front and value building don't always go hand in hand.
1. Zero

2. Infinity

3. It fails to maximize your expected utility while minimizing everyone else's.
Myron Scholes worked for them...
SOA Elitism
The yellow background on that site makes my eyes burn.
John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2.0 - You Gotta Watch These Amazing Videos
Hi, Cory here. Its the beginning of a new week and there’s no better way to start it off with but with a great educational video. This video you’ve just gotta see, NO QUESTIONS asked!!!
Dropbox Gadget Adds Your Synced Files to iGoogle
It's great to see Google has a brain about this. XML is sooo hyped up, and there are so many fan boys that it's generally not worth getting into a discussion about its merits lest you start a religious war. It's cool that Google looks beyond the Dilbert-like mission statement of XML and recognizes its failures as well as its strengths, not to mention the suitability to purpose for their needs.
OK if we are talking about anecdotal evidence then how about a colleague of mine who smoked pot every day while doing his PHD. He spent several years doing very little work and then ended up having a major psychotic episode. Without people to support you this sort of thing could entirely derail your life. Fortunately he managed to complete the PHD only after getting off the pot.

Having known a number of people who have smoked daily for periods in their lives and suffered from mental health issues, I have no doubts that heavy pot use contributes to mental health problems.
Atomic Monday: Why Atompub is a big deal
Monitor Access to Your Gmail Account
I'm sure I'm not the only one that wishes they had this yesterday. Being able to read from slaves would be a _huge_ help.
Five trends driving the mobile web
"[Adding very different business models to a business is] one of the big advantages that small, agile companies have."

Which is true, but if you don't do it carefully it's a good way to make your company no longer so small or agile.

What would be really interesting is an article that discusses not just that it is possible add very different products to your business, but how to identify which of these types of new add-on products would work well with your core business, even if the business models behind each look very different.
How tech is changing US classrooms
Son's Death In Iraq Drives Father To Build Life-Saving Robot
Yes, I could see that focus might be an issue. But as it is, we use remote desktop quite a bit, so I've always got a couple of other desktops up that I'm working on. And most of the time, I'm doing comparisons between databases or configurations, etc, so I think that the 4 monitors will help with that process.
Guide To Cloud Computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradeoff
China is a little too 1984 for my tastes. It's not as bad as North Korea, a literal 1984 society, but it's pretty awful.
Thrift was inspired by ProtocolBuffers. Ex-googlers who went to Facebook reimplemented PB. In fact Facebook was hiring people explicitly with experience with PBs.
16-layer disc with 400 GB capacity
It also depends on the quality of the employee, and the amount of incentive you want to offer her to stay with your company over the long term.

I think that founders (due to their enthusiasm/optimism) tend to forget two important truths about option grants:

1) Options aren't salary. They don't "make up" for below-market wages.

2) Options are time-delayed bonuses that provide incentives for your early employees to stick around.

If you try to economize by offering piddling option grants that vest over a long period of time, you're just defeating their purpose as an incentive. Moreover, a rational employee isn't going to accept or reject your offer based on the option grant alone; they'll decide if they like the rest of the offer/company/work first, then treat the options grant as a hypothetical bonus for taking the risk of working for an tiny company that will probably fail very quickly anyway.

My advice is to offer your first engineer enough to give them a reasonable shot of becoming a millionaire in the event of a $50M exit (so, at least 2%).
Yes, but the only refutation I think he has is this little footnote saying that underneath the layer of paint is a super-precise line drawing. I would be incredulous to hear that super-precise line drawing was not a refinement of a blurrier one that just set out the basic idea.
I think the key is "eventually" consistent. As long as you can determine when the data are consistent, I think it bears some consideration.

I don't generally care about today's sales in real time. But tomorrow, I want all the data to be consistent, and I want to know it is consistent when I get my reports.

I don't think that BASE is at odds with that concept.
Feynman in action: http://youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8
Don't worry, this was a collection of items. They all point to the original source.
The CPA in my industry is on the order of $300+ and the lifetime value of a customer in wireless isn't much more than 2-3 times that.

Lawyers are getting off cheap for these qualified leads. (But then, their business scales with how many hours they can work.)
I'm probably going to use 19" monitors to start with since I have a couple of them laying around. That might make the display a little more "compact". I guess if I don't like the cube setup, I could always drop back to three in a row like you suggest.
Digging His Way to Web Success (on scaling Digg)
Not much. Approx 5 million businesses. Employees expected contribution is to finish development of system. Yes (Chief Technologist).

Thanks for the advice.
Science is what we know. Technology is what we can do.

What's on the other side of our ignorance? What novel things can be created out of matter? How can we ensure that new discoveries and inventions are safely brought into society? How can we do this to change things for the better?

This is why I'm a programmer.

I can't wait to see where these new technologies, the computer and the net, will take humans. I excited to be alive today.

Don't forget the fundamentals.
How to think about identi.ca
Lets remove the word fair, and I'll submit the following:

1. Options: 1% - 5% since this is a "non-founder" early employee and you already have another developer.

2. 4 years vesting with 1 year cliff seems to be "market" (i.e. the most common). After the cliff, vesting is usually pro-rata on a monthly basis.

3. The big downside of a revenue-only structure is that it does not attract the best candidates. The risk is skewed too much (the person you're trying to recruit is taking too much risk).

My two cents. Situations vary widely (on #1), so the standard deviation is pretty high.
Did you read the whole article? The author sounds pretty sick of that stuff, too. For example:

"The book's ultimate doomsday scenario -- of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs -- seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season's youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday's news (haven't we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?)."
Yes, class of 2005. Most people in Palo Alto are pretty gung-ho about sending their babies off to a Top 20 college, so being smart got you respect. The only people I could think of who I would consider ostracized in school were those who were incredibly annoying or awkward to be around, i.e. it was a matter of social skills, not being smart. I do realize I went to an atypical high school, but if you're socially incompetent, you may not recognize that your social problems arise from your social incompetence. That's why I'm a little suspicious of pg when he claims that he's seen both sides of the popularity scale and that he now knows the magic formulas to apply if he had to travel back in time.
I had a very smart, very nerdy friend in high school who wasn't cool. Whenever the French teacher handed out an assignment he thought was stupid, he simply refused to do it. No popular kid would have ever done that.
I'm always a little surprised at comments like this regarding a software/technology acquisition. This sort of thing is rarely about whether or not they "can" reproduce the technology, but how much value it would be for them to have versus the opportunity costs of working on it.

Right now, Twitter is flush with cash from their recent funding. They need to continue their growth and their best engineers are obviously working to keep the site alive rather than designing new features.

As such, it makes lots of sense to add features through acquisition given their circumstances. This particular feature has been tried and tested to work with their existing infrastructure. Because it builds on their API, they also don't have to worry about the design breaking during their internal scalability refactoring.

This deal makes lots of sense to me and I would expect to see more of this from them as they fight to keep aloft.
Weird, their link to the Gmail blog takes you to techmeme.com.

Anyways, here is the correct link to the Google announcement:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/remote-sign-out-and-in...
Without knowing much about your particular business, I'd say you should expect to yield 2 percent of the equity and hold out for a proven rock star.

I'd avoid any instant-vesting grants if it comes up unless that employee is bringing you customer #1 or #2, or a significant partnership out of the gate.
Never trust an IDL whose performance is benchmarked against XML.
OLEDs are the future of screens and always will be.
Sleeping Baby - Good Code
Yes, this is a game called "Click Fraud".
and for anyone with a chemistry background reading the above, be warned that ordering olivetol is a quick way to get a DEA agent to show up at your door
The fact that Google said this is much faster than XML does not mean that the IDL might be slower than other IDLs. In fact, the way it is implemented, I see no reason why it should be slow. If you want to find a drawback, it's the fact that the IDL is actually less expressive. Whether that matters or not in real life is another matter completely.
Mesothelioma has been the top-valued search term for quite awhile. Aggressive bidding is obviously behind it, but that doesn't mean it's irrational: mesothelioma acquired from exposure to asbestos is very often actionable. It's not just Adwords; asbestos attorneys advertise disproportionately on TV. They are apparently easy and lucrative cases to win.
From #3, are you asking what equity someone would want to work for free? Because if you are you'll never find anyone who'll want to do that.
I routinely submitted works less than 80% of the required length and still received A grades. Most instructors are reasonable enough to know that high quality work does not need to meet arbitrary constraints.

That works great in cases where the instructors are allowed to think for themselves, not so well otherwise. In Florida we had this law called the Gordon Rule which states that all students are required to write 24,000 words worth of essay text over the course of their college education. They don't literally track how many words students write on an individual basis, but rather designate certain courses as 2,000, 4,000, or 6,000 word courses. Professors are then held strictly accountable for truth-in-advertising. They're required to check every student's word-count, and to flunk any student who goes one word under the quota.
As an aside, http://venturehacks.com is a great site for questions like this.
its search not rocket science. Unless the acquisition is in the low 5 digit figures, it's probably a waste of money. Acquisitions are usually about getting the seller's user base or some unique piece of technology/patent, which is not the case here.