skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the company raises money 900 work hours from now at $1 per share and they have 20 million shares then 1% of the company is worth $200,000 then. If he is granted the shares then he has to pay taxes on that (he can get away with a discount to that but he still has to pay taxes of some sort).

Right now the shares are probably worth zero. So if he's granted stock now there are no tax implications.
"questions climate change"

I know! All these pesky facts backed up with data get in the way.
Business Monkey Wants to Learn Programming:
I have been reading Hacker News for a few months and noticed the posters are primarily technical in nature.

I have limited experience with VB and I have decided to learn Ruby on Rails.

I have set out to make a web based application which allows the user to enter a single piece of data and hit submit which then puts the data in a secure database. (I figure this will be a challenge, but something attainable and a good solid start to my programming.)

Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to accomplish this? So far, I have installed Ruby on Rails.
There are numerous facts which disclosing would be considered a crime. For one thing, copyright infringement is a crime; all that is, in essence, is disclosing a fact. Disclosing trade secrets may be a crime. Disclosing personal health records can be a crime. Disclosing insider information to a third party can be a crime. There are plenty of facts which can be criminal to disclose.

Now, this particular case may or may not be criminal, but it is at least incredibly irresponsible.
Ever since I read a comment by patio11 a few months ago, I've converted completely to buying ready-made themes for WordPress whenever I want to put up a "sales" site.

Getting 3 themes at WooThemes will run you about $70. Those three themes each come in several color variations too. That means the next 3 times you decide to throw up a website, it should take almost no work (design-wise). WooThemes is really easy to use and customize, and they have good documentation.

This makes throwing up a sales site really easy. Effectively, any time I create an app, the first step is to put up a WordPress site with a WooThemes theme, build up the copy/etc, then copy the design for use in the actual application.

Note: I usually host my sales site on www.MyAppName.com, and have my "actual" application (a Django app) running from a subdomain like app.MyAppName.com. This way, I host my WordPress sales site completely separately from my app, which is easier for me to manage and to not screw up.
If I were rich, the only thing I would do differently is to tell people what I really think (when asked for an opinion) rather than tell them what I think they want to hear.
He's offering you an opportunity to be his cofounder. Given the high-risk nature of the opportunity (no funding, no salary, no customers, etc.)

Does 5% feel right now? My gut says no. Ask for 30%?

(On the other hand, 5% + a salary for first engineer is pretty generous)
Emotely: [Announcement/Beta stage]

http://emotely.com/
No I live in the Netherlands, Europe and my co-founder and I are in no option to leave school since we have a loan provided by the government. And by leaving school that means we have to pay it back. So sadly that rules out the question of applying to YC.

I'd rather spend the money on the company than putting it back into the gov. pool. I'll do that with my own money, when I earn it.
If nothing else this was a great tour of interesting pg essays. Thanks for writing.
A common theme seems to be that monetary safety comes at a price of psychological safety (ie rich people worry constantly about getting robbed, losing all their money, getting cancer etc...). I think we've evolved to never feel completely secure.
Ask HN: Using git commit hashes in legal documents?
I was just wondering: has anyone ever used VCS version numbers / hashes in legal documents for transfer of intellectual property?

This is the scenario I had in mind: I want to get some people to help me out with some code. Contributors work on code remotely, check in their final contribution & sign off on an intellectual property transfer sheet with the exact git commit hash? Seems like an elegant solution to me, but IANAL. What's the catch?
Did Britain try to assassinate Lenin?
betabeat.com--the valleywag without the funny--is owned by the observer of which Elizabeth Spiers is the Editor in Chief.
I understand SEO, but I don't understand what exactly you mean by "scalable content generation".

Also, I never imagined that SEO work would pay thrice (!!!!) technical skills. I should definitely look into this more. Are there any other non-technical skill that are in such demand? I am willing to learn anything, as long as it is interesting and there is scope for finding work.
Scala language: (host of) recent developments
thats right. the challenge is to find the right balance of health, money, work, that allows you to focus on the nuances of happiness (emotional health, spiritual health, simplicity, etc) and not constantly be driven with a desire for warning More.
I just read about these guys http://www.getmefast.com (from the blog of http://www.freshdesk.com/) -- they're in India but seems to have done a ton of work
I have worked in a few environments that offered products like yours. Visual design has never, ever been a concern of the customers.

Get something like this http://www.webgurus.biz/adminskin2/dashboard.html and focus on your UX and value proposition.

If you find it necessary to redesign do it v2.0 when you have paying customers and let them have a say in what the design should be.

I know there are a lot of template haters on this board and it baffles me because hiring a professional design team to get your initial product out goes against some of the core values this community is built on.
The OP isn't talking about slinging together some HTML. He's talking about hiring a graphic artist.
The problem is that a new product should iterate on its design fairly often, which requires a little bit of design-skills.

You should mockup the user experience before you go to a designer or buy a template. I use Balsamiq for this but there are others.

If you're buying a template you'll know what to look for.
If you're working with a designer it will communicate your requirements better than words can.

As themeforest.net is already mentioned, this guy shops pages for 19 bucks: http://albertomoura.com/designfor19bucks/
Linode customer here. It really depends on your architecture, but I'd say it's just as easy to scale at Linode as it is with AWS. You can simply upgrade your linode, but that involves some downtime (depending on how much disk space you used). The other alternative is to setup a separate one then once you have everything switched over shutdown the old one.
High Rise Free Desktop Window 7 Wallpapers,
Except that it's not PC.

My beef is not with it being PC or nPC.

It is about questioning the theorie(s) in a scientific manner with rigorously formulated and educated questions. Otherwise, it is merely politics/BS/political-BS.
Apple Will Fight For the Low-End
I can see 20-40 hours per work for a specific page, but not <b>per</b> page. Landing page? Sure, your conversions may hang on it. Store view? No problem, most stores are ugly and hard to use, so it pays to put some extra effort in. $10,000 for a static Contact/Map page just because it's a separate link? No way.
Speaking as a designer, it's simply a case of you get what you pay for. The designers on dribbble are very very high quality, best of the best, well-known names in the industry, so there is a reason why they charge that much. If you can't pay their rate, you aren't their type of client. Besides, I wouldn't start there if you are just looking to get something up. Themeforest or WooThemes is a good option, you can get someone (or yourself) to do minor modifications the psd files to suit you.

My own rate is $80/hr and depending on the job one page usually takes me around 8-10 hours. Don't underestimate the power of UI design...you are looking for conversions, after all. It helps, too, if you do a little research on why and how good design works in your favor. Having that knowledge will give you leverage and prevent you from being overcharged for sub-par work. Best of luck.

http://forrst.me/zhanna/posts
>And take a look at four of the new “horsemen” of the consumer web—Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Twitter. This may surprise you, the majority of all four properties’ users are female. Make that “horsewomen”.

May be that implicit targeting of women explains why i'm not on any of the sites. I honestly even tried once to register on Twitter, yet just couldn't make myself to do it on that page with a birdie and swirls.
Don't worry about the hours, it's the 5% you should be thinking about, specifically dilution. Watch the movie "The Social Network" and what (allegedly) happens to Eduardo. He had 30% and then ultimately had 0.03% ... unfortunately you have to watch the whole movie to see how that works.

Here's Fred Wilson: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/10/employee-equity-dilution.htm...
Could not agree more. If you have to take burden and responsibilities for being a cofunder, 5% is very low. If you are the first employee it's good, with a decent salary.
> It adds value because it weeds out the people who talk the talk but don't walk the walk.

Isn't the market already effectively doing this? If they try and fail, or don't try at all, or don't ship by the promised date, they haven't succeeded and they've been "weeded". I don't think that calling them out on their lack of success is going to dissuade others from making big claims.

> If many people adopt this hobby...

I think if many people adopted the hobby of building stuff and shipping it, that would do a better job of cutting down on the level of bullshit.
The papers actually quite weak, as there a strong distinction between IT and software development (and CS (G4xx) and IT degree), which the paper doesn't really pick up on. They make the mistake of using HESA data which classifies all IT degrees as computing.

Non-development IT roles in the UK have been dropping dramatically over the last decade due to outsourcing and automation while developer roles have been increasing (roughly 10,000/year).

Salary data in general has a relatively small impact of choice of subject. Most 16-18 years old have a very limited understanding of salaries by degree subject and are often under many false misapprehensions (for example thinking most law students will become lawyers). Choices are far more driven by cultural trends.
Try new Opera Barracuda, Available for download.
Just before finding this post I filed a feature request to allow the mac client to support full screen. Using this with Chrome totally satisfies my request. Thanks for predicting my needs and making such great software! Cheers!
It should be easy enough to throttle bandwidth on the instances.
ROFLOL -- but only because I don't really get it either and I'm female. (More proof I'm weird, I guess.) I have a facebook account. I almost never log in to it. (I log in so rarely that sometimes when I try, I can't remember the password.) I just don't get it. I have never registered for twitter. I really have no idea what zynga is.
What's the start state? Is there one? I'd think to start at the top, but that has an incoming arrow...
To start getting used to the ruby language I recommend using http://tryruby.com.

For rails there are quite a few tutorial sites. Here are a few good ones.
http://railsforzombies.org/
http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book

If you go through some of these they will talk you through creating a form and submitting the data to a database. Your application is suite similar to the typical blog application many tutorials take you through building.

To secure the data stored in the database just think of the data as a password and store it encrypted using a salt.

Good Luck.
tl;dr: use the builder pattern instead.

My answer to the headline: "heck yeah, that would be prime concentration time!"
Can you give a good defense of why you're not for insider trading?
On improving Finland’s (or any country's) startup ecosystem
I love it, Gabe. I've been running Hackers and Founders Silicon Valley for several years, and this flow chart pretty much nails it.

I would suggest at the "Have a Hacker Founder?" level, to add a "learn how to code" box. I run in to a lot of BizDev people at our events, and the business people that have had the most success are the ones that...

1. Learn how to code. It proves to hacker founders that you are serious, and every level of technical knowledge that a business person brings to the table makes them exponentially more valuable to the technical founder.

I'm not blithely saying this. My day job is as a nurse, and I went back to school for software engineering because I wanted to do the startup thing. It took me years, but I decided early on that I was going to have to build 10 startups before one succeeded. So, I learned what I had to, to be able to build 10 startups without breaking the bank. And, they key factor there was learning how to code.

2. Leave their idea behind. Instead help hackers take their too technical ideas and turn them into proper businesses.

3. Learn how the open source model works and give away their ideas and advice freely to hacker founders. Eventually, if the've helped enough hacker founders, they gain enough street cred, karma and friendships that hacker founders will ask you to join their startup.

-----------

When I tell business people to "learn how to code" the most common response I hear is that "it takes too long". To which I say, It's going to take you at least 6 to 12 months to find a technical co founder, even in Silicon Valley, if you're lucky. You might as well start learning how to code while you're looking.
How are VCs doing in their latest bets?
The piece of insight that I think was missing from the post is this: If you can get to $10 million and still not feel secure, there's something very wrong with the way you are living your life. $10 million, with a 1% annual return on investment will give you an income of $100,000. There are people earning far, far less than that who are doing just fine in terms of security / contentedness. At a certain point, you have to cut back on your idea of how much money your should have. Your income will always be limited by the world you live in, but your idea of how much you should have isn't so firmly held back by reality. If you always feel like you should have more, then you will always feel like you should have more, no matter how many billions you acquire.

He almost gets there, but he closes by saying he didn't appreciate money enough. That wasn't the problem. I wonder what stops him from connecting the dots.
as karl pilkington would put it, we all have a problem hole. gotta put something in it, and whatever you put in will expand to the same size.
WordPress themes are not just for sales sites. The "Admin Templates" on Theme Forest [1] offer some great options for B2B applications.

[1] http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templat...
The internal display is Thunderbolt bus connected.
For the first person who brought up this climate change thread I have a few questions I hope you can answer honestly:

A) did it have to do with the article in question?

B) Did you see the reference to climate change on wikipedia or you have actually read the chapter on it in my book where I feel I present a very balanced view.
Seems to me the fundamental economic difference is that record labels control distribution, so they have much more leverage than VCs.

edit, found a source: "This pattern is mirrored in many other industries, such as the music industry, where record labels control radio / media distribution and are much more powerful than the actual artists, or the clothing industry, where small designers are beholden to retail outlets and have to take terrible terms to get distribution. The takeaway? Being the distribution platform is a lot better than being a producer."

[1] http://areallybadidea.com/what-i-learned-from-watching-six-h...
Can anyone who has some hardware knowledge give us a rundown on what is currently being used to decode H.264 in hardware and this offering? We clearly can't know that much before we test actual drives, but is there anything concrete one can gather from this announcement?
"Are you serious" is the start. It's a loop to weed out people who aren't truly committed.
О нерешительности и шопоголизме
This really drives home the need to launch as soon as you can. Most of the actual work of building a startup actually happens after that. Great visual reminder!
Ralphlauren.com has a cool Polo Shirt to support Japan.

Twitter, Groupon

http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2011/03/20/bullock-eastwo...
This assumes that you must get funding and investment.

Neat concept though.

Need a similar thing for 37signals style advice. Anyone?
Hotlink detects index virus - منتديات قروب الساهر
I would reevaluate that friendship.
What exactly stops you from doing that now?
No it doesn't. If you're not raising money you answer No to "Raising money?" at which point I suggest you seek advice (if needed). I personally haven't yet raised angel/VC money for my startups and often advise people against it until if and when they really need/want to.
BOE scenarios. For simplicity, I assume you earn $100/hour. So the deal offered is #100000 for 5% of the company. That suggests a $2,000,000 valuation of the venture at the present time. Is that reasonable? Would you invest $100000 of your own money in the venture? If you were to put your own money into the venture, what kind of return would you expect in a year? five years? ten years?

What is the vesting schedule? What is the actual cost to you of the stock, that is, what is the current value? What is the cash-out strategy? Are you OK with all your compensation being in stock for which there is no market? Has the company been funded? What about dilution of your share by future investors? What happens to you after the six months is up? Are you critical to the success of the venture? Who owns whatever intellectual property you generate in the course of your work with the venture? How do you participate in the upside if the company is a huge success? What happens it the venture fails? what if it just ends up as the living dead, surviving but not prospering?
I'd rather you answer the first one, how a person can move forward in time while staying in visual contact of the person staying behind. If you can answer that and prove it, then you will have made an amazing contribution to the understanding of the universe.

Two kids are on a merry go round, one in the center, one on the edge, the edge is traveling at .99 speed of light, when they communicate via cellphone, one voice sounds very deep and low, the other sounds fast like a chipmunk. Yet if you were to sample the sound relative to each point, you would hear a normal voice, because of some bizarre principle.
Breaking the Rules
you can get safety by just setting aside an emergency fund for 6 months of expenses. it works.
The uphill climb will be getting 3rd party vendors to actually put this in their chips.

Seeing as WebM/VP8 is only supported on Android really, and won't be supported on other platforms that use these chips (WP7, chinese linux phones), it's a gamble to get them into the mainstream chips. Space on a die is extremely valuable - for example, nVidia left the NEON FPU off their implementation of the ARM A9 in the Tegra2, to the detriment of quite a few workloads, for the main reason of shrinking the chip to maintain high volume and lower cost.

I'm going to guess at least a year or two before we see phones with this hardware encoder. The big issue is network effect - this is designed for videoconferencing, and thus both ends have to have the HW encoder for it to not drain battery life.

I'm thinking this will be a very slow, very long uptake, especially when there have been H.264 implementations in the wild for years now. Ideally, someone will come along with a combined dual codec VP8/H.264 encoding block (as the formats share a lot of internal functionality) that uses less die space than having two separate blocks, and software vendors will just get to choose which format to support.
How To Optimize Your Blog for SEO - Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs
I don't think there are any "H.264" patents, per se, rather there are a number of processes associated with H.264 that have patents associated with them. This is a subtle difference, but, as an example, US Patent 7,577,304, "Method and device for condensed image recording and reproduction", has some relevance to Predictive reference picture selection. This is useful in H.264, as well as VP8.

I've never really understood why something as complex a picture encoding/decoding was not thought to be covered by the patents listed at MPEG LA for the H.264/AVC Licensors [1].

It will be interesting to see how this plays out - Either Google goes to war with the patent licensors, and tries to invalidate a lot of the patents that apply to both H.264 as well as VP8, pays them a bucket of money to license their patents, or some other outcome that I can't envision (The patent holders just don't bother going after the distributors of VP8 products?)

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcCrossRe...
Those designers are for the artist socialite crowd who are willing to pay their fees. You can get it done much, much cheaper and get 80-90% of the quality of a top shelf designer.

True story: At a startup a couple years back, we asked for two quotes for 4 pages. One was $15,000, one was $1,500. Sure, the expensive guy was better, but not that much better.
I had similar experience long long time ago -- told the recruiter that I would not interview with Philip Morris and got back a blank stare. Nothing dramatic really came out of it, but it sure made me feel good.

PS. Oh, and Sony was not offering this gent a job, it was a simple "feeler". Google sends out these in droves, it does not mean they are sure job offers.
Yup. Single man hobby project turned profitable product. Niche SaaS, took about 10 months to clear the 50k hurdle, but I've done almost no marketing for it either.
If you're still looking for a reasonably priced designer lets chat :) http://kreativehq.com is my portfolio. Use the contact form and I'll send some more current work as well.
£28k will get you a reasonable graduate. I don't understand how they're offering a salary range that starts with that for a "senior" position.
Exactly; downclock the graphics.
VCs like packaged shit ideas as much as labels like packaged shit music. Is Zynga really helping the world or just great at turnng shit to gold? That's Kleiner's "best peforming" company! (as of when Doerr was interviewed)

All the VC "Innovation" speak is just part of an abstraction of how more money is generated from less money. Most VCs are as faddish as any label trying to find the "new sound" - and are about as good knowing what "innovation" is...
Actually, the difference between the two is enormous.
Not sure this is a lesson about appreciating money or not knowing how to.

A bigger contributor might have been that he didn't understand why he made the money, resulting in his inability to know why he lost it.
Yea, so the only differences are cause by a less fluid market in the music industry than the venture finance community... Right now - as infomation asymmetries are being solved - labels are losing relevance. I guess the same can be said for VCs too...
So, you're saying...what? I want to guess that you posted an ad at NYU.