skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the real issue isn't whether or not founders are "worth" 10x or 100x or 1000x the 10th employee (arguable, no real answer) but whether the extreme variance that exists in early startup employee equity is fair.

I once surveyed several friends who joined tech startups (at similar funding rounds, # of employees) out of school as very similar software engineers. They received between 0.05% and 0.3% of those startups. That's a 6x range.

That certainly wasn't a result of a transparent and perfectly fair market; equity compensation numbers are opaque to many startup employees, plus the comparative data just isn't widely available. (Ackwire is the best I've seen, and it's new and rudimentary.)

And it's not really in the startup's interest to make them more aware-- who wants their employees to have the thought "my boss will make 100x more than me when we exit" in their head? (Not everyone is as hyperrational or founder-aspirational as the HN crowd...)
The fudge point in his reasoning: "The animal machine is far more effective than any we can hope to make."

Exactly what does effective mean?

We still can't make ornithopters that approach the performance of birds. That is what his analysis actually shows. Our successful aircraft still don't have performance that resembles that of birds. Then again, no birds cruise at an altitude of 30,000 feet at nearly Mach 1. Our aircraft don't have to be bird-like to be economically useful, and this is indeed effective to us.

So to go back to my other comment that predictions should involve economic analysis: our professor should have considered flight performance envelopes that would be commercially useful, not flight performance envelopes that resemble those of birds. (For example, he could have extrapolated something like the performance envelope of a balloon, but with twice the speed and better directional control.) If he had considered a few examples of those, he'd have quickly realized that using birds as a model wasn't a good idea for an analysis of human flight technology.
Edited to provide context:

am I missing any (other script loading libs)?

Require js... and it is really nice!
In A/B testing there is no such thing as a free lunch
Video: Impossible Escher waterfall
> At some point your startup put a fair market value on its stock.

Assuming that his company went public, or took outside money. If it is, and will remain, a private company (with no outside investors), why worry about stock at all? Stock is unnecessary overhead, perceived value is unnecessary overhead.
I have to seal myself from any disturbance with an exception for Vivaldi's four season music.
Actually some German states now also take tuition fees, but they are quite low (1000 Euro per year) compared to other countries.
And they aren't. The nic.ly page says about 10k have been registered, meaning they make about $750k/year. The country's GDP is five orders of magnitude larger.
Hey Michael!

Sounds great. München is an awesome city. Much better than Lafayette (sorry Purdue fans). She'll learn German too!

Question: As an American citizen how is it possible to take advantage of this?
Already seen:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2233584

Much discussion there.
When IE6 stagnated, it had a market share of over 95%. So if a web developer wanted to take advantage of new HTML/CSS features, only 5% of their users would notice, and so it wasn't really worth the cost. This meant that all websites had to work in IE6, so there was less incentive to switch browsers.

Now IE market share is closer to 40%, so whilst they're still the market leader, they no longer have a majority. Even if Microsoft ceased development on IE9 now, web developers could still use new HTML/CSS features and reach 60% of their audience. This would mean more websites using new features, which would result in a faster switch from IE.

If you have a monopoly, you can afford to sit back and allow technology to stagnate. If you don't, and your competitors are constantly developing new features, you'll lose market share rapidly unless you keep up.
I think a Go backend was added a while ago, but since there hasn't been a release in 2009, it isn't part of the official release yet.
Ask HN: An idea for a dispersed Library of Alexandria
From Wikipedia: The Royal Library of Alexandria seems to have been the largest and most significant great library of the ancient world.

Today:
I live in an area surrounded by many universities and students. I have a ton of books at home and I am sure so do the others around me. But I don't know what books they have and they don't know what I have. It is hard to share books and it would be great to be able to share them and get to know people who have the same reading interests as you...

Solution:
People can upload the titles of their books and create an account with a zip-code. With the zip-code when people search for a book they can see who closest to them has the book that they need. They can request to borrow it etc.

Tweak 1:
Getting people to upload a list of their books can be tricky. One solution would be for them to take a high-res photo of their bookshelves and using OCR to identify the books. I did a mock trial on my bookshelf and it worked ok

Tweak 2:
Search results could be anonymous. You could request it and the person you requested the book from you could see who you were and decide if they wanted to share with you.

Would love to hear if people think that something like this would work? If people would want this? Have you wished that sharing books was easier?
There is a read more, he has read them over the course of 35 years.

I quote: "A few readers have Emailed me asking how I manage the time to read. But it should be noted that the books I have reviewed I have read over the span of about 35 years. The reviews are posted at my leisure, and it should not be concluded that a book review that is posted 3 days after a prior one implies that the book was read in three days. Most of the books I have reviewed I read long before Amazon was even conceived. The books were therefore not read in the sequential order in which their reviews are posted.

For a technical book, I usually spend a few months (calendar time) studying it. I do not monitor how much real time it takes me to read the book as this is not of interest to me. For a non-technical book, a few days or possibly a few weeks calendar time."

Blame your short attention span ;-)
"On the other hand, MSDN is far more informative than source code comments, a half-hearted Wiki and a snide support forum for the non-professional programmer which populates your ideal world."

This is directly at odds with my own experience. Whenever I've had to work on Microsoft platforms, I've been constantly bumping into walls where I simply couldn't get the information I needed to solve my problems. MSDN, or no, I've generally been much more satisfied with the process of developing free software and for free software platforms.

Do you find it difficult to find quality documentation for Python, or Perl, or Ruby? How about GCC or LLVM? I haven't. I've found them to be extremely well-documented. And, when in doubt, I can go to the source (or someone else can go to the source to help me). That's not a privilege one has with non-Open Source software.

But, as I mentioned in another comment, the biggest difference in our perspective may be that you think I mean "all users must be developers", when in fact, my intention is, "all users may be developers".

We are talking about freedom here after all, and not forcing anyone to do anything. I simply want a culture in which anyone who desires to learn how their tools work can do so.
The businesses that "add little value" are envied in China because they have access to demand, and he who owns demand is key. The Chinese are making it a priority to advance their marketing, design, etc. abilities to compete in the West's consumer culture. While you may not like marketing, it brings in the money - and in our consumerist economy that's our GDP...

I'd like to see Foxconn try to replace Apple - hell even Dell. Lenovo had to buy their business from IBM to get the marketing / brand support to be successful beyond their manufacturing capabilities.

It's hard to market from a culture from the outside. VW made their German designers live with US families - which is when they figured out why we want cup holders so badly ;-)
If I thought there was any chance of them creating a decent competitor to Office, I'd consider donating. Can anyone persuade me this is the case?

The "free as in beer" argument doesn't work when you're asking for money, and while I think "free as in freedom" is nice, if I'm going to donate money there are other causes that come first for me.
I argue that those first employees are taking more risk. If the company runs into trouble in 3-6 months time, it's going to be the employees who get turfed, not the founders.

And I'm sure the founder of Friendster has no trouble finding a job. Starting a company and failing has enourmous cachet in the States. And Friendster did quite well, relatively speaking, compared to most failed startups.
The founder of Friendster is very likely to be capable of being hired for a job, so the risk he took to his reputation was the risk of lower probability of becoming something other than an employee. Therefore, in comparison to an employee, the founder of Friendster remains on equivalent ground. He lost little if anything compared to an employee (a group of which he now belongs), so the risk was little and of low value in regards to personal reputation.

In regards to money, that depends on the process. Did the startup function using the founders cash for a period of time that required a significant financial investment? If so, then there's significant risk on the part of the founder. If the startup functioned for a limited period of time on the founder's cash before receiving an investment that paid the founder as well as employees, then clearly there is little risk. Granted, the former scenario is the more likely.
Yes, that is correct. Obviously, with rising numbers of University graduates the situation is beginning to change -- albeit at a much slower rate than in the US. There are plenty professions that do not require a BA.[2]

I agree with the sentiment, by the way. University access in this sense[1] isn't intrinsically desirable. Quite the opposite. For a large chunk of professions, higher education is in fact a waste of money and incurs significant opportunity/real costs for the student. (Data entry with 150,000$ debt in addition to losing out on a similar amount of salary?) It's nice that a degree mill like the University of Phoenix has more students than half of Germany, but I don't understand why that's necessarily a strength. A significant proportion (> 60%?) will regret that degree.

[1] There are two interpretations of the notion. First, you want everybody's chances to be equal. That is, no racial or social discrimination when it comes to HE access. Second, you want everybody to go to university. That seems highly, highly inefficient. (Not all people require HE, even if you consider education an intrinsic good. Non-broken high school education help.)
[2] It's important to acknowledge the cultural differences here: BAs (i.e., limited primary college degrees) were introduced very recently. Up until 2004-2005, you'd always graduate with Diplom or Magister which go a lot further than US BAs.
Simple things:
1. Price match in stores
2. Better customer service
3. Enhance the experiences (signings, poetry, etc)
4. Become a community nexus, much the way the library once was.

In south Florida we have an independent chain called books n books which is overpriced(compared to amazon) but they do well because of the last 3 in my list.
Great collection! And the Lock Haven url made me smile.
Adobe.com has a pretty solid interface and lots of functionality, and there's a free version for individuals.

Slideshare just launched PowerPoint sharing with video with their Zipcast features.

Salescrunch is about to have some really cool tools for more sales oriented presentations
>"For the lenders, higher tuition means more loans returning 5% or more for which the government assumes all the risk."

5% is a typical origination fee for an educational loan. The lender takes it off the top. Interest on educational loans - since loans to parents and relatives are a big part of the business - can run quite high for non-government backed loans (9%-11% was not uncommon for loans written in the 1990's).

Focusing on traditional educational loans (Stafford, Plus, etc) misses the other big form of educational borrowing - credit cards. Perhaps this has declined with the recent downturn, but from the late 1980's credit card companies increasing targeted students, and it was not uncommon for people to graduate with $3000-$12,000 in credit card debt in addition to student loans. [and it has also become a more difficult debt to discharge through bankruptcy]
I was employee #1 at a company. I once clocked 210 hours in a 2 week period, and become super emotionally invested in the company. I spent time on the assembly line when we had orders that needed to go out. If it's just a job for your first employees, you hired the wrong employees.

Because it's super hard not to become that involved -- you're working so closely with the founders who are that involved. It's pretty hard to 9-5 it when nobody else is.
I'm a PHP Developer
I wish my parents had doen this. I definitely fell into the mindset where "oh, I'm smart, so I don't need to try". Needless to say, I'm now playing catch up.

Another consequence of this upbringing is that learning became a grind for me - pursuing intelligence rather than interest.

I burnt out at the age of 12, and the past 8 years have been trying to find direction and motivation for my academic life.
Internet 'kill switch' bill gets a makeover
Yeah, that seems to just be a subjective judgment, based on information that he did in fact have. I suspect many people here think Roman-era technology (transparent windows, tubes for diffusing warmth, aqueducts, etc.) is at least as interesting as Rome's contribution to philosophy and literature. Seneca disagreed. But neither view has a lot to do with predictions. It's not as if he was arguing that technological inventions could never have a big impact, and then history proved him wrong. He saw many inventions in his own day that did have a big impact; he was just arguing that philosophy is nonetheless a higher calling. If that's wrong, it's for reasons other than being a misprediction.
National Security Jobs To Rival Silicon Valley Over the Next 10 Years?
Well, yes and no on the relevance of Keynesian / neo-K policy. It's true that the current pot-hole filling projects are just ways for congressmen to get money for their district while claiming they're stimulating the economy.

However, there are certainly projects out there with high multiplier affects. For instance, in PA the "Ben Franklin Partnership", who invest in early stage startups, claims a 5x multiplier of economic value over its funding. This is the type of infrastructure spending I could get behind.

Certainly, a lot of our human capital needs investment as well. Anyone who claims this isn't a partially structural recession is living in a fantasy land or is blatantly supporting the status quo. School reform as a long-term plan and some type of incentive for retraining the existing workforce would seem to have a high multiplier affect as well.

FWIW
Open source (as in BSD, MIT, WTFPL) are more liberating than "Free Software" (GPL). They greatly enlarge your opportunities in how you use the software.
The number of subscribers is not the metric we used. We use a metric we call "activity". The behavior described in that blog post simply pointed out a bug in the activity metric.

Also, to be pedantic, it is not possible for reddit to censor anyone. Governments censor things, private entities do not.
This can work in cases where gaining a critical mass of information/content/links is necessary for a critical mass of users, but what about gaining a critical mass for a product or service? It has to be something real that people buy, so faking it wouldn't work.
Many founders invest their savings into the business at inception. They certainly invest a massive cut in salary (usually all the way down to $0). The opportunity cost for founders is much more than a "25% haircut".

Imho, for most, the financial risk and opportunity cost is why they deserve those shares, if you're going to do calculations.

But, even more fundamentally, the founders deserve the shares because if they didn't start the business the business wouldn't exist. Without the founders, the discussion is moot.
Didn't Google sponsor someone for gSummer of Code to work on Hackety?
Solve a big problem for a few folks or a small problem for lots of folks
If you were the inventor of Facebook, then you would have invented Facebook.
This question is more about positioning, less about risk per se. Founders are usually in a position of strength to negotiate higher valuations than subsequent employees. Likewise, future needs (funding rounds, key hires, etc) may also devalue their position of strength. Although unlikely, it is possible that founders have little risk.
Just discovered these guys. Nice interface actually. Investigating a bit more but so far so good.
There is a reason Latex doesn't let you put images where you want them, namely that it means it has to skip ahead and leave a blank area on the paper.
> In an ideal world, the user and the developer are one in
> the same.

What a horrible horrible horrible world. Luckily, that ship has sailed. In the ideal world everyone has tools which just happen to work for whatever particular task user has, be it a composer or doctor without the need to wast the time for fixing them.

This precise sentence I quoted explains why stallmans are more and more out of touch with the reality and the real needs of computer users.
Computers are just tools for the majority of they users, just a means to get task done.
Yes, but not this time. If that sentence were dropped, the remaining text would be more clear and accurate. That sentence is not true.

Why should a user be a developer in an ideal world? Why should one be required to be a developer to utilize software? It's not even a world that anyone really wants to move toward. The whole idea is very developer-centric, and doesn't represent an enlightened user perspective.
No, one comment suggests that's the reason. In fact, the actual reason is that it's hosting open x malware.
1. "We will bury you" -- widely taken as a statement that communism would out-compete capitalism. North Korea and the USSR differ because the former doesn't have an ideology like communism that can be shown to be rationally hollow. Instead, it's based on nationalist feeling, which is entirely irrational.

2. I don't think the North Korean regime preaches that the West is decaying and will fall in X years. That's another way the USSR got egg on it's face that the North Korean regime does now.

3. Not disputing this. The "heroic struggle" stance takes care of this. The thing is that it only works if it resonates with the people. It got to the point where no one in the USSR believed it. I think huge numbers of North Koreans do believe it.

4. The USSR failed to maintain a believable alternate reality for enough of their people and they lost the emotional support of virtually all of their populace. From what I've seen of North Korea, I think they do have a viable "reality distortion field" in place and large numbers of people are emotionally involved in it.
If someone "borrows" your thumb drive they could extract the secrets and return it without you knowing, but AFAIK secrets cannot be extracted from a real token such as a Yubikey.
Ahhh. No. Google said "Summer of Code will not have any Ruby projects," so the Ruby community put a bunch of money together and did Ruby Summer of Code. Same thing, no Google.
That's right. That patch is waiting to go out. Unfortunately I didn't get a release out in 2010. By spring I'm hoping to have one. It got stalled because I was trying to include a revamp of conditions and I got hung up wrestling with the complexity of that problem. I now know what I'm dealing with and my plan is to push out a 6.7 with all the submitted patches, then later on do 7.0 with the new condition stuff. It's gonna be awesome :)

I've also been distracted by another project, which is also going to be awesome :)
If you use programming as a means to an end, dont't forget that you can hire/outsource/partner with those who have the skills you need. I mean, if you want to build a business rather than be an employee, you don't necessarily need the skills yourself.
"The fact is, our economy is a lot more complicated than it used to be."

Or, our economy is actually just not the top of the heap anymore, and probably never will be unless Asia suddenly slides off and sinks into the Pacific. If it weren't for anomalously successful companies like Apple or Wal-Mart, multi-nationals will eventual write-down the US market as dying and move everything overseas. If KFC can make more money in China than here, we're not really going to recover and be their #1 market again, unless we just open the immigration floodgates (even then, that adds 100 million TOTAL Mexicans, which is a drop in the bucket in comparison). GM sells more cars in China than in the US. You think that's ever going to "pivot" back to us, no matter if we build infrastructure or let it crumble?

It's simpler than you think. Multi-nationals will continue to benefit from the stable political structure and docile and manipulable populace, executives from said companies will continue to live here with its favorable individual tax and seasonal climate (not everyone can stomach the heat in Singapore no matter how tax advantageous it may be) and liquid assets can be increasingly secreted away in wherever pleases them (Caymans, Switzerland, etc.). The only thing that actually changed is that their money makes the world flat.

This is the end of the empire, whether by brute force (Chinese market and labor force) or by increasing political and military irrelevance. We used to own all the money and guns. Now everyone's got guns and everyone's getting money. Now we're just 300 million people pointing fingers at each other.

It's not complicated; there just isn't going to be any solution that we want to hear.
That's much better. May be a developer. May engage the services of a developer. May benefit from unknown developers somewhere halfway across the world.
A pretty awesome read. Though peppered with references to Indian culture. For ex, Marwaris - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marwaris If you are curious about some other things, I can probably chime in !
My vision for Mendicant University
Atomo isn't a Haskell dialect - it's another language. The first implementation is written in Haskell, but other than that there's no relation.
Look on the bright side: if it is American companies who are making these huge profits overseas, then there is some chance of the jobs being created in America, whether forced to by government or voluntarily. Foreign companies making huge profits outside of America are not going to spend money or hire people in the U.S.
At Apple, the ratio of Foxconn employees at work on Apple products to U.S.-based Apple employees is 10-to-1: 250,000 Foxconn workers to 25,000 Apple workers. The same ratio exists at Dell.

Huh, bullsh*t. I don't know what the average Apple worker gets paid but I'm assuming that most of them are developers (or related), so it's in the $100K/year. What about their Chinese counter part? I don't have any data but based on my country which has better wages in average it should be in the $10K/year ballpark if not less.

And it's quite a lot different, the USA developer buys a nice car in his first year, while the poor Chinese worker may never figure out how to get an old one.
The meaning of the sentence hinges on the word 'describe'. I took it to mean a complete description.

You're right though, it could mean a description of any complexity, something Mathematics is well capable of.