skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How much is sweat equity worth?
I've been working on my start up by myself for nearly 2 years and there's been some interest from a handful of potential advertisers to finally start bringing me some revenue. I'm at the point where I can't do it all myself and need to bring on some partners. I've got well over 4,000 hours into this and over $25,000 personally invested but I still own 100% of nothing at this point. Can I even put a valuation on the company yet? How do I determine how much % to give to new partners?

My question is, if I bring on some partners how do I measure the amount of work required by them and for how long? Say I give a programmer 5% in return for 25 hours a week minimum to start with. How many weeks does he have to work to earn that 5%? And what happens when that time is up? He owns 5% but doesn't have to do anything more? I'm assuming if someone is invested in a business that much, they will work beyond the minimum...is that common? Perhaps a sliding scale would work in this case.

I plan on bringing in a couple people to take this to the next level and just want to know what I'm in for. I know this subject can go on for ages, but I'm hoping to get some insight from seasoned people.

Thanks!
InboxQ (YC W10) brings its Twitter Q&A service to Firefox
6 up-votes, so I take even your VP of sales now got the HN account :)

(edit) The page itself - I am trying to like it, but something about it rubs me the wrong way. It might be that it is too personal and overly playful, and people look somewhat unnatural, almost as if they were forced to look having fun. This coupled with sudden image swaps creates the impression of a twitchy teenager trying to look cool rather than a smug bunch of sociable geeks. Also your CEO needs a shave, looks kind of unkempt, and Jeff's photo is of a different scale, so he looks like a person with a small head.

Oh, and the dance mode doesn't appear to be working in FF3 on Windows. Typing "dance" does not do anything.
I wasn't sure if you were just obstinately dismissing my arguments, so I decided to do a benchmark and prove this to you.

http://paste.lisp.org/display/120386

Here is the benchmark.
I did two versions in clojure 1.2,
the first one uses a transient vector... the second a list. (which it reverses at the end).

As you can see, on my machine, the timings for these benchmarks puts the recursive list version approximately 2x faster than your version.

edit: annotated paste with more generous timings of composition version.

http://paste.lisp.org/display/120386#2

Are you convinced that yours is doing more work now?

edit2: I will note, however that neither of mine are fully lazy. I am not a Clojure expert, so I'm not intimately familiar with the laziness abstractions, how would I make these functions use the laziness abstractions? is it even possible?
Zappos API Developer Contest
I think one of Google's "secret" weapons is their incredibly fast innovation and time-to-market. Their rivals spend years building a product in secret (e.g., Windows) and then release a giant binary blob to the world whether the world wants it or not. Google's fast-paced changes to their core product are a huge part of what keeps them on top.
I love this analogy. I was scratching my head at refusing $10k/per day (I can understand it logically, but can't quite grok it), but once you said that I got it totally :-)
Do it. The rest of us are writing about it, you know you want to too!

;)
Regardless of how insanely irritating their site is, I've found my answer there.. about once or twice. But I wouldn't block them entirely..
Just tried it out with the manual block page at < http://www.google.com/reviews/t >

I notice that when I block a subdomain (eg, http://answers.yahoo.com/ ) the page actually shows the entire domain (yahoo.com) as blocked.

Is this just an error in the display, or does it actually only block based on domain? If the second, this significantly limits the usability, since I can't block < http://someobviouslinkspam.blogspot.com > without also blocking every blogspot.com site.
Even in a completely self-serving frame of mind you may want to "prop up" a business model.

The idea is that either you look at some ads, or you pay directly for content. Moral or issues of principles aside, that's simply the way it will go. Personally, I choose to look at ads instead of paying for content, but that's a personal preference.

If you don't like paywalls it would benefit you in the long term to turn off adblockers for sites that "behave".
Riak Python Client Needs Testers
This deserves more discussion. I won't be able to do it justice today, but hope to restart the discussion later, maybe with a comment on your blog.
For the same reason a real estate agent wants to get a deal done.

After a while negotiating for an extra few thousand gets the recrutor an extra few hundred. If it takes 2 days to get this much more then the recruiter has lost money.

However to the employee, this takes none of his/her time and compounds onto top of each additional raise so it's in their interest to get the most they can no matter how much time, with in reason, it takes the recruiter to get the deal done.
What is Linked Data? ...featuring Yuri the unicorn
Where did the Jay-Z/Modern English track come from?
You probably are wrong, and you imply you've never used okc. Match percentages matter to me highly since they certainly indicate users I'd get along with, based on my interactions with other users. Their data also show that messages response rates correlate strongly with match percentages.
Dependency graphs are really nice things to know explicitly.
"Engineers suck at negotiating, so don't negotiate, be fair." From http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-cr...
> if you only listen to winners, you're only getting part of the story

You also often don't get quite the right story, since not everything a successful person says about their own success is accurate. Sometimes there's a bit of self-mythologizing, but even without active attempts to mislead, sometimes people just aren't that good at analyzing the causes of even their own success. They're usually interesting to listen to, but people who are good observers can also be interesting to listen to.
The iPad 2 Online Sales Start At 1 AM Tomorrow
I don't see this button on google.com.br

I hope it's propagated to international Google pages soon.
That's the exact reason I don't use an ad blocker at all. I use the internet with such frequency that I know what is an ad and what is not, and as a result I am pretty much ad-blind with or without an ad blocker. It's been years since I've clicked on an adsense ad for example, but I don't use any adblockers because they provide essentially zero benefit to me but I know they take away a lot of benefit from other people (the people that make money off the ads and use that revenue model to provide free content).
Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard the winner of the 2010 Turing Award
We actually documented the process as we were creating it and we're hoping to put up a blog post in the future showing off the behind the scenes creation of it, because we know a lot of people would be interested. So, yeah, look out for it.
Dance mode made my day. Well played.
This kind of stuff is just blowing my mind this week. Also I love how the whiteboard shows traces of not-quite-erased stuff.
I've used okc for years and have never noticed this.
PS3s seized in Sony-LG patent dispute
I completely agree. I was raised in a family where the expectation was you went to work right out of(and even during) high school and then you worked hard, and 20-30 years later you retired. I tried this but I found no matter how much I applied myself, I wasn't ever satisfied. I always questioned my bosses logic and knew with every fiber of my soul I could run the business better than he could. It wasn't until my first small business that I understood that the reason I couldn't be happy as an employee is because I am not an employee. I'm an entrepreneur. Frankly, I'd rather earn minimum wage working for myself, than make a 6 figure income achieving someone else's dream.
Is It Time To Rebuild & Retool Public Libraries And Make “TechShops”?
Buy low, get high.
If the manager or owner are concerned about this possibility, then they can respond to your request for a raise by making a counteroffer like this: “We’ll give you a 2% raise now, and if you stay on through the end of the year, we’ll give you a bonus equal to 3% of your base salary.”

At any rate, the conversation will not be “fresh in mind” after two years. Six months, maybe... one year, just barely possibly... but not two years.
As a programmer I don't get involved unless there's money to pay me. I like the idea of getting paid up front for my work and keeping the 5% share and the "owner" of the project recouping my up front pay when the money starts rolling in. There's not a project you could show me that would convince me to work for equity only. Just my opinion
They can be scared all they want, but between the iPad and Kindle, they are all I am buying now. I'm done with big, heavy, space-eating print media, just as I grew tired of collecting music on little silver discs.

A decade ago when I left home for college, my new apartment was filled with books, racks of CDs, and a big bulky computer. Now, all of that stuff fits in my Timbuk2 bag.
I bought an iPad 1 for $499. It would be hard to sell for more than the $350 that Apple is selling refurbs for, and I can buy a new one for $499. So that means $150 to use it for 11 months which seems rather excessive.

OTOH, I could have sold it last month for at least $400, which would be a much better deal but would mean I would have no iPad for one month.

OTOOH, if I keep the iPad 1 another year, it will probably still be sellable for $250, and that is $250 for 2 years of use which is not bad.
First look at Google Chrome 10
Boosted JavaScript performance, Adobe Flash sandboxing, password encryption and an overhauled settings interface are among the new features in Google Chrome 10. JavaScript pages should now load 12% faster than in previous versions, and Chrome 10 beats IE9 by at least 50% in a JavaScript benchmark.
Would you care to elaborate, or link to some page that does? It sounds like this could be important.
Joel Spolsky recently said[1] that if your whole attitude is "this thing can make me rich" as opposed to "this thing needs to exist", then maybe you don't have the passion required to run a startup.

Is that something you select for (or against)?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2298470
LinearML:a programming language designed to write efficient parallel programs.
Binary plugs removed from OpenJDK
All this internal politics between different UI teams seems like evidence of a clear lack of technological vision at the top.
First thing I did!
Its not that it didnt work, People use to love Nokia it worked like charm. Nokia was the biggest mobile phone manufacturers until it stopped innovating and iterating their products. It wasn't new for them that Apple and Google are coming up with their phones and how they would be changing the mobile industry. Had Nokia took that up and changed their product to be up with the tech innovations they would have not lost the market share. Right said if you don't innovate or iterate you are going to Die.
They are not asking to avoid Android altogether, just the market.
I would, except I can't. :p

It was a slow process, and not really something you can accurately monitor yourself. A lot of the changes happen without me realizing until pointed out by friends.

No you can't switch, but you can definitely shift your personality slowly. If you think grass is greener on the other side, start walking this way now. :)
It's the last track on Girl Talk's All Day: http://www.illegal-art.net/allday/
this is gorgeous.

my coworkers are turning this into a stickie-moving-war game.
Why JavaScript Doesn't Have Operators Yet?
Yeah, I agree he has some interesting pragmatic tweaks on it. I suppose he was proposing "[naive Bayesian] filtering" but not necessarily "naive [Bayesian filtering]".
The benefits of being a big company ;)
-Really- want to see a recording of this one. Shareable always has interesting things to say.
They're fast at building stuff when it isn't social.
> That's what rubs me the wrong way: that kind of phrase is a throwaway. You're pro-winning. Great. Until I read your blog, I was a firm believer in losing? Maybe it was because I was striving to be as mediocre as possible, rather than... "excellent"?

Actually, maybe not you, but I think a lot of the modern world is fundamentally anti-excellence. Maybe America less than most places, but a lot of the world Tall Poppy Syndrome going on -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

A Swedish friend of mine is a talented mathematician, professional poker player, and was a highly competitive athlete before a shoulder injury derailed him. He said he got all kinds of negativity and abuse and people really hating him for what he did, despite the fact that he's like the nicest, kindest, friendliest person I know. He says they have this phrase for it in Sweden -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law

So yeah. I think a lot of the world is actually anti-winning, anti-excellence. Look how rich are always portrayed in movies. They're always the bad guys. Look at how the star players get booed. Look at how people cheer against the New York Yankees just because it's a successful and extremely well-run organization that wins.

> I'm not trying to be a wiseass (well, maybe a little), but do you see what I'm getting at?

I understand. Most people don't realize that things are like this because it's so normal. But if you seriously break the mold and go counter-mainstream/counter-culture, you're going to get serious abuse from people. Almost everyone that breaks the mold does. I think that's garbage, that ambition should be celebrated, that achievement should be celebrated, etc.

I also spend a lot of time working on various time tracking and habits and reading lots of science and things like that, but that more pedestrian stuff never really gets spread around the internet - so if you only see my site on an occasional one that climbs HN or Twitter retweet, you're probably seeing the more controversial/aggressive stuff. I'm a believer in hard work and putting the time in too, I'm not a fan of rah-rah-go-go.

But to answer your question, yeah, I think a lot of the world is fundamentally anti-excellence, anti-standing-out. And I think that's bad.
I'm not affiliated with YC and these are just my thoughts:

Ideas are worth less than a dime a dozen. Being successful comes down to execution. In my experience, if an idea is really good, a number of people will come up with it at around the same time.
A Deep Dive to Retrieve and Fortify Memories
I just observed that for blogs like http://somespam.blogspot.com, it allows you to block somesmap.blogspot.com alone, not the whole blogspot domain. It is the same for wordpress also.
Ok cancel
Having the same answers.yahoo.com issue here. Very weird.

Edit: Clicking on "show details" it says that answers.yahoo.com is blocked, so maybe they're only showing the base domain here. Still weird.
Do you really need to write the map and reduce functions as a Javascript and supply them as strings? That certainly seems un-pythonic to me.
Have you considered letting a hacker news style moderation system pick the applications for you? It seems to work well ;)
Not entirely. Ideally, a disk image would be used to redeploy another computer in the case of an critical OS failure. You would restore it in the case of Norton Ghost by inserting the disk, Ghost will then activate from that disk and allow you to restore that image.

Now if you create the image, storing it on a high capacity network drive would be a good option since it allows you to retrieve multiple images from one location to perform a remote restoration.

The benefits of this method allow you to back up multiple drive images, and deploy functioning computers much quicker than reformatting a hard drive, downloading and installing each hardware driver.

At one company I worked for, we serviced 10 different desktop models. In addition to having a lot of DVDs, we also had each image stored on the network. So if Windows shit the bed, we'd say a short prayer that they were saving to their home folder on the DC like they're supposed to and send a signal to perform a network boot and restore the latest image for their model computer.
Love that Shareable.net.
Oh don't get me wrong, it does I guess what it promises, but lets take for example scrolling. The built in Safari has great physics reactions and overall nice and speedy. The UIWebView is very flakey on scrolling (this was I guess version 3 something when I was messing with it). In general, the rendering I found to be rather different at subtle CSS settings. The same page in Safari would act one way, whereas UIWebView would render it differently. Now lets talk same origin policy. Android and iPhone both honor this as they should, but at the time I was developing, iPhone even enacted this for XML calls. If you did an XML call on the Obj-C side, from a remote server, it would not let you mix that data with your local served web page resources. Now the biggest thing is this point some of dev friends are making that there's a new performant javascript interpreter, but it is hands off to the developer. Another avenue I tried was to access iframes, from a foreign server, with javascript, ala greasemonkey ... no go there. The origin policy is enforced because the page running your javascript is locally hosted. I love the origin policy for general web use, but if I'm designing a browser more or less, it shouldn't apply. I would also think this is safe because UIWebView seems to support having its own history, cookies, etc, so it isn't like I'm trying to sniff what else the user might be doing elsewhere. So far in my android dev experience this all just works, and I'm even given a WebKit class to work with.
I actually don't think that's accurate, since it naively adds up the resident set size for each Chromium thread. The problem is that there is probably a lot of shared pages among those threads - the Chromium runtime and such. I think - but I'm not sure - that the resident set size includes pages that are shared with other threads/processes.
Apple's OS X is First OS to be Hacked at This Year's Pwn2Own
Are you 100% focused on tech startups, or will you look at a good idea even if it's not in the software/tech realm?
GraphEffect: A Killer Facebook Advertising App? You Decide
To quote a graffito I first ran into back in the '70s in the loo at Change of Hobbit (a late lamented LA SF bookstore):

"Reality is a crutch for those who can't handle science fiction".
No offense intended to anyone here but one of the Appsumo deals I signed up for was, absolutely, a scam.

My advice would be to only sign up for these offers if you won't be upset if some of the vendors refuse to honor the text of their offer, just assume that some will pull a bait-and-switch and you won't be too disappointed.

Do not think that you'll be able to persuade them to honor the offer as described, I made that mistake and simply wasted a lot of time; they know that, ultimately, no-one is going to bother taking legal action, so, they'll just stonewall you until you go away.

Also, pay extremely close attention to the expiration dates.
Very amused they have a pull quote from Mel Gibson. (If you click through to the airbnb page for the island.)
The Maemo platform (what was shipped in N900, and later joined with Intel's Moblin into MeeGo) was based on GTK+ and related technologies since the days of Nokia 770 tablet (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nokia_770).

From that POV, you could say Nokia abandoned a lot of man-years of Maemo toolkit work becaues they wanted to use Qt so they could say it targets all Nokia devices.

Now with no plans to put Qt on WP7, it's kind of ironic :-)
Ask HN: how to build a centralized system for people to annotate websites?
Hi all - Not a tech guy here and I'd like if you could point me in the right direction.

I'm thinking of a system where people could - with a single click on a bookmarklet, probably, categorize a website into A, B or C categories.

Other "users" of that system - i.e. ppl with the bookmarklet ?- when reaching that particular website would see the A, B or C letter with the number of times it's been categorized as such.

I have absolutely no idea
- if people would need to log in to perform this action
- about the technical difficulty of building such a "virtual" layer.

I'm guessing that for ppl to use the system, they'll need to install the bookmarklet/extension.

What are your opinion on building such a system ?
- bookmarklet or extension ?
- login mandatory ?
- would it be easy to code ?

And last, having answered those questions, what kind of technical abilities/experience should I look for when looking for someone to build that system for me ?

thanks for the help!
Every employer wants to pay as little as possible obviously to keep costs down

Well, partially. They also want to raise a barrier to entry to competitors and one way to do that is to make it hard to match salaries.
Africa now serving more mobile ad impressions than Western Europe
What happens if you block Google?
I think employers are missing an opportunity by not doing this. In a high-tech business, an employee with several years' experience with the company's products can be worth several times as much as one who has been around only a few months to a year, even if the latter is qualified and talented -- some of these products are just so complex it takes years to learn their ins and outs. It only stands to reason that retention bonuses for the long-time employees would be money well spent. And I mean substantial retention bonuses, on the order of 100% of salary. I don't mean for every employee, but for the stars.
When did the FSF say not to browse the web? Yes there is the "non-free" JS stuff, which IMO does have a point. It can be split into the issue of obfuscated and license-free JS.
I am not trying to speak for pg, so only take this as an advice of an entrepreneur:

Incubators like ycombinator have seen thousands of start-up ideas over the years. Most likely some of them overlapped, and there has probably been a good amount of duplication (deal of the day site--only for food!). If there was an NDA for every single one of these, any successful company that might have duplicated an idea unintentionally (ie, they came to the same idea themselves) might get in trouble later down the road when another entrepreneur says "hey, that was my idea, they must have stolen it!"

EDIT: seems like me and iqster had the same basic comment :)
Spotlight for your web apps - Redwood
Giant spider eating a bird caught on camera
Another thing. If you're the technical guy then you should only hire sales people. Make money then hire programmers. I doubt the project has grown so large you can't maintain it. If you haven't made any money then your 4000 hour/25000 dollar project is just code. No one cares until it makes money.
The slug of this article is telling:

android-market-has-drm-too

Assuming that's an early working title, I wonder why it didn't last? The implied comparison is interesting.
Check the block list on http://www.google.com/reviews/t . If it lists the pages you blocked through the extension, you'll be good to go. Otherwise you can always add them manually.
Also, if you need help at some stage, it's much easier to find someone with some knowledge on a framework (say, Symphony, since he built in PHP) than having to train that person into your framework and then the thoughts behind your application/idea.