skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a few key points (some added):

# a foundation is fully legal person
# the foundation has no members
# therefore nobody can decide to change the foundations mission afterwards (f.e. no shifting of mission values or other priorities possible)
# the 50.000 € is a recommendation, yes. part of the reason: only dividends and interest must be used to finance the foundations activities. the 50.000 must stay untouched forever. 50.000 € * 0,03 (average interest rate) = 1.500 € per year available for expenses
# again: the foundation is a cemented full legal entity which can hold copyright owner rights
Stallman's insistence on unlimited and unrestricted redistribution at a price not exceeding cost is the critical flaw with the free software movement. While I agree that this is good and should be encouraged where possible, if there were a license or some support for persons that allowed access to and modification of the code and redistribution of the code only to persons who were appropriately licensed by the copyright owner, then I think we'd have a much better ecosystem here.

Everyone would weld the hoods of their cars shut if leaving it open meant they had to give the car away for free. Since it doesn't, most people are free to access the internals of their vehicles and do whatever they like. The same principle should apply to software -- if we make it reasonably easy for people to leave the hood open but still make some money, there'd be more freedom to go around for everyone.
I'm not a "founder" in the startup sense, but I did start my own indie development and consulting shop, and I think the startup founders can relate to my experience. For example, 16, 18, even 20 hour days are common. Keeping the business going becomes the major focus in your life. You think about it all day and dream about it if you manage to get some sleep at night. You hope and you dream and scratch and claw and fight and work your butt off every single day with no end in sight. It's your idea, your vision, your baby.

For an employee, it's a job. They do the work, they get paid. They may care, and they may care a lot, but they'll never have the kind of commitment you have as a founder. Someone recently asked me if when I hire my first employee, if I'll be able to double my productivity. I wish it were true, but I would never ask an employee to work the kind of hours I do.

So are founders always worth 1000x more than the employees? Maybe not always, but I can sure see the argument being made.
I find Le Conte's reasoning interesting. It's almost seductive even now. He's absolutely right that we don't have systems which approach the efficiency of the "animal machine".

But that efficiency is due to our remarkable performances on nothing but a few grams of low-grade fuel. It doesn't say anything about what would happen if you had some really high-grade fuel.

Sugar has about 18.8 joules per gram. Kerosene, which was pretty well known in 1888, has almost 46 000 joules per gram.

Perhaps we can extract some general principles about prediction from that, like: given a complex enough system, if one factor changes by two or more orders of magnitude, previously observed behavior is useless as a guide to the future. I'm fudging on 'complex enough', though. Trigonometry works just fine with triangles the size of pencils or skyscrapers, but predicting the scope of inventions doesn't seem to work well when one factor changes radically.
And to make it more concrete: those who take the risk are rewarded because investors need people who take risks, otherwise they'd have nothing to invest in.
GoToMeeting is the most stable/best in my experience.

Skype's new group video conferencing is super buggy, but I have gotten it to work. Normally it takes 10-15 minutes of screwing around and making sure everyone has the latest version. The UI sucks on the new version, but after a while you can get used to it.

For one-on-one sharing Skype is fine.

A free conference call system + Google Doc with an agenda is also a nice option.

finally, Adobe Connect seems to be getting a popular. I've had an OK experience with it one-on-one. I think it's free.

Basically if you're doing this professionally and more than once a month I think GoToMeeting is worth it.
Great post. Now we just need a rebuttal from Steve Souders.

I wish some of these authors would start collaborating together though. The number of script loaders is getting ridiculous: LABjs, ControlJS, Head JS, and $script.js.

Am I missing any?
Great links. I'm a regular no-show for SkullSpace and Secret Handshake, but the other two are new to me.
In the Free Software model, there's no such thing as an end-user. Everyone gets to be a developer (for themselves or their friends). That's why it's so developer-friendly.
I was wondering about that... do people just show up unannounced?
I am curious if any of the communication show discussion about the ethical repercussions of this kind of work? I would like to believe a company like Palantir (in those 1000 emails) at least mention some kind of concern on the part of their engineers. Any thoughts?
He already seized vb.ly because it was used to serve porn. There's no way in hell that bit.ly isn't doing this as well.
Can you please point me to songs/albums by Ministry without vocals? Can't think of anything (not that I know a lot of their songs).
Hacker News and submission-driven news sites in general are a way of bringing a constant stream of exceptional things to your attention. They are not a good cross-section of what's going on the world because almost everything that's going on isn't exceptional. Millions of Americans felt love yesterday. That's not Hacker News.

If you're actually getting depressed by this (and you wouldn't be the first) then you need to stop and take stock of the real world through your real senses and think about how much of your life you want to burn up on things that don't actually involve you or that you can't or won't do anything about. You have to ask yourself how many of those things you actually care about personally vs. how many are just sensory input you're just reacting to because it's been put in front of you. If you care, you can do something. If you don't, you can turn off the input.
> You've taken that quote out of context, as the next sentence dispels your fear of having to help your mother debug her cell phone.

If the next sentence dispels that fear, then the quoted sentence is wrong, and should have been left out altogether. And so it is.

This is perhaps the biggest fail of the Free Software movement: co-opting a word, phrase or sentence to fill people with idealistic notions that do not represent what GNU and the FSF are really about. This begins with "Free" which translates into rules and restrictions. If you want truly free, there's public domain or BSD-style licenses. GNU/FSF have goals other than true freedom, and they believe strongly in those goals. Many agree with them. I think everyone would be better served saying what they really stand for, starting with changing the name of the FSF.
My Winnipeg comes to mind: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1093842/
A corollary is that schools have packaged loans as financial aid. Financial aid representatives sell loans to students as if they reduce cost. They mask the true cost which preserves demand and therefore price.
Google searches will reflect more of what your friends know.
I see the 1000x as a reflection of the risk they undertake.

Employees, for 100% probability of receiving a specific amount of money exchange their time and effort while founders for a 10% probability of receiving a unspecified amount of money exchange their time and effort.

Essentially, for a lower chance of success they make it possible to receive unlimited rewards or go broke(losing years of work and to be despised by all and suitably fit for ridicule and to be made into a parable.).

Life is indeed fair, hence you can't have your cake and eat it. You can't have security and unbounded success, something has to give.

Fortune favors the bold - Virgil
You're more than welcome to stop by and hang out at the Hacker House. Shoot me an email: dru@druwynings.com
The "strict" refers to the fact it's not lazily evaluated.
MSI GT680 WORLD fastest notebook Review and Price | TECHGADGETSITE
Investing in infrastructure isn't silly if it is a large project that only government could afford, addresses a current or near future problem, and has favorable return on investment.

Widening highways and filling potholes has been more about giving states a short-term bailout under the name of stimulating the economy.
Dr. Lee D Carlson, a man that reads everything
Over the past few years, whenever I have needed a graduate mathematics textbook, I often found it reviewed on Amazon by the same person, again and again--and these were usually the only helpful (and incredibly detailed!) reviews. The reviews showed he had clearly comprehended the material within.

What is more amazing is that when I prodded outside of my field to physics and neuroscience, he was still the lead commenter on the references! Consider this.

http://www.amazon.com/Theoretical-Neuroscience-Computational-Mathematical-Modeling/dp/0262041995

http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Fields-Strings-Course-Mathematicians/dp/0821820125/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298141669&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Enumerative-Geometry-String-Theory-Sheldon/dp/0821836870/ref=pd_sim_b_3

What's even more phenomenal is that he has reviewed over a thousand books like this, a large number of them technical! These normally take months to read. Who is this guy? And how many people like that are there?

Here is his Amazon profile:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3EQQP0LD4Z375/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp
MSI WindPad 100W Tablet Review,Features and Price | TECHGADGETSITE
College costs a lot for the same reason that houses do: you can either be rich and buy in cash, or leverage up and amortize a huge payment into relatively small monthly payments, making it seem affordable.

Once purchasers start leveraging to purchase a good or service, price elasticity goes way up. Not to mention both are part of the classical 'American dream'.
How Swiss Import CloudSigma Plans to Compete in US IaaS
News in the US will always be somewhat sensationalist and only expose the problems, but this is a good thing--there are a lot of regimes out there where things look bright and shiny on the surface, but only because the problems are hidden and media is suppressed.

I'm not saying that everything on that list isn't a problem, but at least they're getting attention and people are looking at them. We still have a free (if somewhat immature) media, and we shouldn't forget that there's a huge selection bias in what makes it to the news.
I think this is just a free market equilibrium.

If employees were unwilling to work for anything less than 10% of the company than employees would have more stock.

If founders were able to get away with keeping 100% of the company, then they deserve to have it.

There is no fairness here. It's just the free market. If employees want founder economics, then start a company. It's that simple. Welcome to America.
> And I prefer my software to remain open no matter who works on it or distributes it. So, I use GPL.

BSD license accomplishes that just fine. BSD licensed code has been taken, extended, modified and used in proprietary products for decades, and yet the original contribution remains open.

I think that what you object to is that someone can take your code and make money using it in a closed source project, perhaps modifying it in the process. If that makes you unhappy then GPL will serve your desires better.

But saying a BSD license won't keep your code open is not true. It may seem like a nit, but it's one that matters.
come to launch as my guest.... jason@launch.is :-)
Fixed-Schedule Productivity: Doing lots of work in a small number of hours
Laying an Innovation Egg
Don't misunderstand me, copyleft is a good approach in certain contexts. 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 seems a weak argument, it's only applicable once you've actually got a reputation to protect. The vast majority of founders aren't celebrities.

Given that many entrepreneurs just keep failing and then trying again and again and again it doesn't make much sense to me at all. There is no risk. Maybe it will be embarrassing if Malhalo fails, but I'm sure that won't stop you trying again.

Personally I think there's no good reason, founders aren't actually worth much more than the employees, it's just the way capitalism works. To the victor goes the spoils. Hence the occasional Marx being thrown into the mix to try and keep the worst excesses in check (overall I think capitalism's been a greater good for humanity). I think we're due a Marx soon if the earnings divide keeps growing as it is.

Don't try and rationalize it, it's just natural greed. But it has benefits too, all those jobs that wouldn't have existed.
I really question this idea that (YC-style) startup founders are taking on more risk than employees. Few founders have a significant amount of personal capital invested in the business. If the startup fails, they're not out of much more than a job. In fact, early employees are in a far more precarious situation, since they're much more likely to lose their job than the founders. And if the company does go down, the founders have a much better entry on their resume than someone who took a job at a small company that no one has ever heard of.

At least in America, there is so little stigma associated with a failed startup that I don't see the reputation aspect of your argument. Short of flat-out malfeasance, a failed entrepreneur is far more fundable than someone who has never started a company.
You're a founder in the startup sense - just because you started a service business doesn't make it any less of a business. You have customers, employees, revenues, profits, losses, capital equipment purchases, travel expenses, etc. You probably make more money than most 'product' startups.

IBM, KPMG, PwC, etc. are all service businesses that are massive and successful. There's a thousand other firms with middling market caps you've never heard of that also make billions.
I tend to agree.

The schools are also making a money grab due to the availability of money. The university I am enrolled in said they will have to raise tuition "drastically" because the state will only give them $125mil vs. $150mil due to cuts. I checked average salary of administration positions, 130k in 2006 and 230k in 2010. Also, they have built two buildings last year and have two more going up this year. Obviously, nothing can be done but hiking tuition.
> Channeling people into vocations at 18 [US system]
> or 10-13 [German system]

Don't exaggerate. Yes, it's true that there's some segregation going on at that point (Gymnasium versus Hauptschule versus Realschule), but the boundaries are permeable.

Even if one assumes that students stick to their "path," that doesn't mean that they don't have a choice over their vocations later on. You're free to do whatever you want. Most students start their first degree when they're 21/22. 30-35% (IIRC) change "major."

I wouldn't say that HE flexibility is a specifically American strength.
That reflects on their future prospects of being a startup founder, though. I think the founder of a company like Friendster could still get a job working at Twitter or Zynga or whatever as an engineer, and the notoriety in their past would actually be a benefit.
"If the next sentence dispels that fear, then the quoted sentence is wrong, and should have been left out altogether. And so it is."

Sometimes, a thought or concept requires more than one sentence to express.
Value that can be extracted will be. As a founder, you have a large, if not the final say on compensation. Founders therefore pay themselves as much as they can while keeping the business healthy.

I think this is a greater factor in the relatively high compensation than "value added" or "risk taken".
how about this: create a HN group on last.fm, use it while working, and everyone can all refer to that instead of these threads popping up every 3-6 months.
As far as I understand it, the problem with public domain is it's not a license, but a meaning, and this meaning varies between countries. A completely permissive license (if well written) could be more permissive than PD in some parts of the world, since it's specific.
I agree, though I dislike public domain simply because in some countries it isn't recognized and becomes completely unusable. For that reason, I prefer an unresitrictive license like BSD/MIT, or better yet, something like the WTFPL[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
A common theme of failed predictions is the "X are interesting toys, but not suitable for Y" statement. Let's unpack that statement.

A toy is something which fascinates the mind in some way. An "interesting toy" suggests something that has a scope of operation within some small realm. I'll posit that Legos are an "interesting toy" whereas a toy car is "just a toy".

Substituted, this is now "X are things which have great possibilities within a smaller realm of operation, but are not suitable for Y".

The problem should now be obvious. The next question is to ask what it would take to scale the X's realm up. If it's economically feasible, it will happen.

The use of "toy" is the rhetorical trick here, because it implies the thing in question has permanently limited scope, and it might not be. (There's also the implied put-down, that those who find them worthwhile are childish.)

So what things today are "interesting toys" but not suitable for "real work"? Mobile devices? Social networks?
With the way copyright has been mangled in the last 35 years, public domain may not be safe - I have seen several people commenting that there is no way, since the copyright changes in the late 1970s, to affirmatively put your work in the public domain. Because of that risk, the WTFPL - Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License, http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ , or an equivalent, is safer for potential users. Note that on the page I linked, it is pointed out that some non-Anglosphere countries didn't have a public domain in the first place.
"Clean" no-non-sense IaaS is as easy to use equally by high-school teenagers and large enterprise architects. Many seek alternatives to Amazon Web Services.
I call bullshit. For financial risk, this doesn't apply if the founder doesn't have much to lose, or has a stable family they can rely on, or is just starting their career, or doesn't care about money. For reputation risk, that's hardly an issue, because making mistakes in considered a legitimate (even honorable) form of learning in startup culture; it certainly does not ruin someone's reputation.

The real answer is way more simple: the founders hold most of the cards, and the engineers don't.

Edit: and if the engineers don't like this, they are free to try to start their own startups.
You could try some musicians earplugs, they have the effect of reducing the noise around you without muffling. http://www.amazon.com/Etymotic-Research-ETYPlug-Protection-E...
There is a huge risk in opportunity cost to join a startup.

Some founders such as serial entrepreneurs who have proven their value, I could see 100-1000x. However, first-time and inexperienced founders should not get more than 10x their employees given that they providing a lower expectation.

Also priced into it should be the difficulty for you to do it yourself. If the company truly does amplify your value by 1000x, then by all means it is a fantastic deal.
I realized that they get to keep the money, or at least most of it. Just it seems like an recommendation/requirement that shouldn't exist. Despite this, I think it makes a great excuse to get 50,000€ in the bank, which can help in other ways.
For me it has been - who picks up the hat when something painful needs to get done? (getting tax info together, sales cold calling, doing a complex data migration, etc.) It is usually the founder, in order to shield employees from potentially morale destroying work. For this (and other reasons mentioned here) their value is more then that of their employees..

Obviously this is not the case all the time.. just my experience...
Your question strikes me a flame bait. Nothing in the article says nosql is the only solution, and in fact Wordnik also uses MySQL.

But I'll bite. The number of requests/day might not be as important as what's going on around in and around the requests. Since Mongo lets Wordnik avoid complex joins and supports high volumes of reads and writes at the same time, it works for them.

And personally, I know many developers prefer MongoDB's query syntax, and use it instead of MySQL just for that reason, even on small projects or when performance is irrelevant.
but I think what you say is unfair

Sorry, but I'll stick to my point. We should stop making excuses for software that was great in its time but is simply not adequate anymore by today's standards.

Almost nothing is straightforward in LaTex, and images aren't either. Placing an image exactly where you want it can become a serious issue - even more so in documents that change and get reflowed all the time.

Yes, LaTex often makes good decisions that require little tweaking. But the moment you disagree with one of its decisions you find yourself in a world of pain.
a) The GI bill was an exception to the rule. I sincerely doubt that people earning BAs in their 40s are as common nowadays as you claim they are. At least not more than common than in Germany. (Yes, it happens.)

b) Changing majors four times would indeed be frowned upon. But that doesn't mean it's impossible or even actively discouraged. Moreover, I don't believe that such radical and seemingly aimless changes are perfectly acceptable (in a social sense) in the US.
It's the difference between "may" and "must". You think I'm saying "must", but I intended to express "may".
Many of the songs on Land of Rape and Honey, for instance, either have no vocals, or the vocals are repetitive bits that seem (to me) more part of the music than typical lyrical vocals.

* The Missing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gzXpzDwwbI vocals don't bother me.

* Hizbollah http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JRxVov_0a0 has vocals I can't understand ;-)
I recommend the following (mostly instrumental) styles - all of them works really well for me:

* Neoclassical (Arcana, Ophelia's Dream)

* Post-Rock (God Is an Astronaut, Explosions in the Sky, Mono)

* Shoegaze / Dream Pop (Beach House, Cocteau Twins)

* Nu-Jazz (Parov Stelar, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Essamble)

* Dark Ambient (Lustmord, Desiderii Marginis, Sephiroth)
Agree with this article. AWS et al are serving a sub-set of the potential market. There are loads of developers such as myself that are crying out to have more control and flexibility in the cloud without a lot of the artificial vendor constraints imposed currently.
They have them (something comparable at least ) at Walgreens, $5 or so, blue with yellow/green string connecting the plugs
http://oil.ly is already taken, btw, but seems unresponsive. http://oi.ly is also taken. Alas.
> yes taxes are high, insanely high by american standards - but in the end it more than evens out. plus life is less stressful.

The US tax revenue per person is about the same as the tax revenue per person in Western European countries. (The US collects more taxes per person than Canada.)

That means that the US govt has the money to provide europe-class services. It doesn't, but that's not due to a lack of money.

Note that US GDP per person is significantly higher than much of Western Europe.