skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's my most important lesson:

Treat equity carefully: it can be as much of a help as it can a hindrance to a firm's success.

Granting equity to staff is often needed when firms do not have the reserves to pay staff cash for remuneration. While enabling a startup as such, this can curb its success later as will be explained. Moreover, a well funded startup should not by default grant stock options to all its employees, and instead be highly discretionary by being both shrewd and frugal.

Equity is sometimes but not always a great motivator to perform, and even can lead to worse performance. From being in a couple of startups already with multiple equity holders, I have found that equity holders can become complacent of their positions within a company, taking for granted of their long-term status within it and relating to others as outsiders or tools, and also not fearing being fired or reprimanded. This opposes conventional wisdom that equity promotes the striving for excellence. In this case, the provision of equity changes nothing in terms of performance, maybe making it worse.

Additionally, any equity holder essentially becomes reasonably non-replaceable for their position, which is detrimental when a more fitting external candidate can take their place, or when it removes promotion opportunities internally for non-equity holders regarding that position.

In terms of motivation, for many startups the provision of equity should be unnecessary with staff already motivated enough by the vision, challenge, work practices, team and environment of their startup.

Equity is better seen as a source of retention by way of giving a sense of ownership. This is especially important in a firm's difficult times when the desire to leave a firm can increase, and also in bubbles when better offers may be easily acccessible elsewhere. It is also important for attracting the most valuable candidates who see themselves as highly contributory to a firm's success and demand a stake in it. Retention through equity also lowers the risk of the most valuable employees leaving to a competitor: however this can be mitigated through a restructuring of power or better information management, not through just equity provision. However, providing equity to the most strategically important employees could act as a hindrance if such a position can become commoditized or systemetized later.

When absolutely necessary, granting equity should be to staff who are a combination of the following:

- highly strategic, sought-after and niche

- clearly promotable or able to work in multiple areas that sometimes don't always offer the most satisfaction

- loyal: unwilling to be transitory, and instead show a long term capacity

- can value organizational needs above their own

It seems like granting equity is a norm in startup practices, but this is not always justified. Care should be used so that staff are treated fairly but not overly compensated: and not only for the company's success, but ultimately their own. People say they've seen bad hiring destroy a company: minimizing equity distribution makes firing easier.
I remember when MySpace first started getting really spammy. If the consumers have moved to Facebook, eventually the spammers will figure out a way to follow. Check out this BBC piece on the ease of creating a phishing application: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/7375772.s...
Isn't that essentially what the newer navigation systems are supposed to be doing?
Reading this, I wondered what kind of idiot could convince the New York Times to publish such stuffy, cliche drivel. Then I got to the bottom:

"Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist."

Ah, it all makes sense now.
Honestly, this is one of the most well-written and well-researched articles I've seen on TechCrunch in a long time - excellent read, very interesting stuff there!
Software developer in a large company.
There was a poll recently on this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=223846

I'm, well, we run a startup. :-)
>His key insight is that buildings should be designed around what makes humans feel more alive in them. Applying that to software, you'd end up thinking more about projects and teams than about iterators or singletons.

No - I think you would end up thinking more about the end users of your applications.
Choosing Materials for Building Quality Gazebo Structures - Associated Content
Freelance coding, currently python web stuff.
I'm a web R&D manager for a bank.
My experience with Java is that the bosses of MegaCorp Inc. see banks & insurances using it, so it must be good.

The result is cost on the project being multiplied by, oh, a factor of 10, and the release date pushed back to sometime next leap year.
just look at this discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283639

Python lacks some features from Ruby, which does in turn not have some features which Python has.

Java lacks both.
Its featureset is designed for OOP and does not faciliate different programming styles.
The folks around these parts tend to be from the dynamic languages camp. Folks who work in Lisp, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk, tend to look at Java and see nothing more than unnecessarily chatty, and annoyingly prim, code. Most people here accept that Java has a place, but they'd usually prefer that place to be far away from their own projects.

You might like to read the pg article that summarizes much of (and may even be partially responsible for some of) the Java-hate you'll see around here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Pond Care - How to Prepare Your Pond for Freezing Cold Winters - Associated Content
And while we're on the topic, Perl has pretty much everything both Python and Ruby have (and better Unicode support, to boot), though it's wrapped in syntax and idioms that most Pythonistas and some Rubyists find distressing.
I have plenty of experience. But I'm work in academia so my experience differ.

As I thought Java disliked not because design. It's human factor. Use ruby for number crashing and you will hate it.

Thanks for comment.

p.s. My primary tools are python and matlab. And I have to say sometimes static typing is must.
Startup.

Before this one, I had another one for seven years (at some point it stopped being a startup and became a very modestly successful lifestyle business, which wasn't really what I was aiming for, so I shut it down). And when I get bored with this one, I'll start another.

I've frequently done contract work, on the side, to make ends meet. Even some quite long projects with great small companies--including another startup. But I've always known I would own my own business...since I was a kid. And I've always planned and acted accordingly.
You could make a pretty strong argument that IT guys in a solicitors office means something is broken.

This article is just saying that taxi companies don't need as many on board mechanics.
thank god for recess! And school wasn't so bad. I mostly have happy memories (I guess I have forgot the bad ones).

Still I remember being so envious of the dog. I was forced to walk a mile through the snow/rain at 7 am and the dog just got to curl up next to the radiator. It's amazing that I was able to get up so early for so long.
Then WHY is geodjango in Django! Why is there no useful explanation as to why so many things in Django are "Design Decision Needed", but GeoDjango got accepted with no questions.
Very nice use of graph theory, and well implemented.

Will you have anything to show soon on other (non-Wikipedia) datasets?
It might be more valuable to avoid basing your business on artificial scarcity to begin with.
We've got a couple of pilot customers (one a social network for culture and entertainment, the other a music site) that we're just starting to work with.

I've also got a non-Wikipedia demo that I'm banging on as time permits that should be another fun application.
Folding Paper in Half Twelve Times
Client Support Administrator for the United States Air Force
Excellent. Keep us apprised of the results-- it's cool stuff.
Design and storytelling..
I was a Suit, used to do technical sales :-). Now working on my startup.
Ask YC: Whats the future in mobile and digital coupons?
Does anyone know what are the biggest hurdles for mobile and digital coupon adoption? Is it the devices or user preference or POS integration?
Web Development Consultant but working on my first startup.
Anyone who cares about this subject should read Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society".

http://ournature.org/~novembre/illich/1970_deschooling.html

He was ahead of his time and died in 2002, but his time is now. His ideas on "Learning Webs" and "Conviviality" are a goldmine for any startup not wanting to get rich but to actually help the world.
Running Vhosts Under Separate UIDs/GIDs With Apache2 mpm-peruser On Debian Etch
Freelancer, python web stuff, with my own project on the side.
"Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question."
Myspace Scrape, social networking
I need to know if there is some avdanced MSS or spider that can show me a hidden online now icon as easily as possible.
MSS is fooled by it I think, and bringing up the page is KATE only shows LoggedIn=False
Help appreciated, im new to the hacking community :)
If there is a site or extension FF compatable, Debium linux, plz post.
The themes/messages are timeless, not the works themselves. Here is my point: Would you rather read Plato, Aristotle, and the like, or the writings of a more "modern" philosopher who had conceivably based his opinions on all three?

And yes, using word timeless twice in my original post does make the argument appear circular. Works are not timeless because they are timeless (circular indeed!) but because their themes are timeless AND they were the first to thoroughly explore those themes.
Yes, but it was a lot better than the alternatives when mandatory schooling was instituted in most countries.
That is a liability? As is the name "GoDaddy", right? You are quite ignorant about branding if you think that the name Yahoo is a liability. So what is your suggestion: best-search-engine-and-portal-online.com?
AmEx gives their retirees less work and more time to pass along their expertise
Market Research Analyst by the day and Hacker by the night and weekends ;)

Does having a completely different kind of job help your hacking enthusiasm? I am still figuring that out.
The American Wanderer, in All His Stripes
But the point he actually wanted to convey was:

* Christopher Alexanders design patterns are a valuable concept which might benefit computer programming.

* But GoF patterns sucks and has nothing to do with Alexanders patterns

Too bad he doesn't provide any kind of example of how Alexander-type patterns could be applied to programming. Otherwise it might have been a quite interesting presentation.
I couldn't see what the news here was until I actually clicked the link. For a second I feared the obvious, ancient "look at what this tool can do!!!" links which digg and reddit are notorious for was hitting Hacker news.

Cool stuff. None the less, I think the submitter should have made the headline say "vertical split screen", since split screen really isn't news at all.
Stopping blog spam or Why I started to block Internet Explorer 6
How Can I Teach My Kids to Enjoy Work?
Buying Quality vs. Buying Crap
developer @ http://huddle.net
"... Isn't that essentially what the newer navigation systems are supposed to be doing? ..."

Yes but using open data instead of closed services.
Perhaps they should have a well-defined mapping. Why should one-to-one be helpful?
Explore: An Optimisation Algorithm
Web designer & front-end developer at a startup.
I read Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird years after I finished school. I'm by no means a literary snob and read all sorts of fiction (except I haven't gotten around to Harry Potter yet), but there's a reason why these books are taught in school over say Dan Brown... they're damn good. Especially without the burden of school assessment.

I think back to the books that I did read at school, like Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald's Gatsby, and I can instantly see the quality in those works. Same goes for "classics" I've read in recent years, like Marquez, Camus, Frank Herbert, Huxley, etc.

That said, there have been some classics I've found tiresome. I've never been able to finish a Dostoyevsky book, and Kafka was hard going without being very fulfilling. But in general, the classics are really fucking good.
She is only folding lengh-wise and that it's not too difficult with a long enough paper. Also the myth was busted properly in mythbusters season 5, "seven folds":

"They decided to make their open big 170' x 220' piece using 17 rolls of paper joined together with double-sided tape. An experiment this large required that they go to Moffett Field and setup in one of the blimp hangers there.

Using the traditional technique of alternating folds length and width-wise, they were able to get eleven folds."

http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2007/01/episode_72_underwater_car...
Space Needle, of course, and over by the Space Needle is Paul Allen's "Experience Music Project" that is really cool.
Building Architect
There are a lot of factoids in that article that sound impressive, but all the junk obscures the simple reason Yahoo Japan is such a massive success.

The Japanese internet is very small, compared to the english language internet, so when Google stepped in with just pagerank and no human-powered indexes, Yahoo's colloquial indexing was able to provide a better experience. Even today, any time I search in Japanese, google seems to provide much less useful results.
OK, define "timeless" that way. It still doesn't follow that these things are worth reading. Being first doesn't make you best. Figuring out what's best is a very hard problem, of course, but it's a problem worth trying to solve, rather than giving up and going for the next best thing, which is prestige. Plato and Aristotle are good examples, because reading them is a waste of time (but very prestigious). See http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html.
Perhaps adolescents these days are smart enough to read BOTH The Catcher in the Rye and a contemporary equivalent, and compare how the specifics have changed, but the feelings and emotional driving forces are still very similar. It's not the What or the How, it's the Why that makes TCitR such an amazing book. Just because typewriters are obsolete now doesn't mean books that were written on them are...
Because it was on the http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/VersionOneFeatures "maybe" list (as in it will go in to 1.0 if someone does the work to get it ready), and someone did the work to get it ready.

As to how things got on that list, that's why Django has BDFLs. Someone has to make these decisions. If you wanted to influence those discussions, the time would have been several months ago on the django-developers list. If you want to influence future decisions, join that list and start arguing for them.
This ties in nicely with the lecture series recently on Death.

The Onion in good form, blending humor and a question that more and more of us are asking: really, what is the point of school?

A question which has been asked a lot on HN recently, and I hope to see more answers in the near future that are not "eh, school is necessary".

I am so grateful that I started taking part time jobs as early as the 6th grade, after school at INTERESTING places. A patent law office, SETI (really, I was amazingly lucky), SLAC, several software companies. Without those experiences, I am not sure I would have ever realized that work and fun can be synonymous. School certainly didn't teach that idea.
Taleb on the Subprime Crisis
looks like they used Britney's method to fold. Also, the favicon on that mythbusters site is very close YC's.
I haven't used screen for about a year or two. I can't stand the GNU/EMACS keybinding. Naturally I chose dwm+mrxvt

The only thing I miss is attach/detach ... Does anyone know any alternative to Screen?

Thx!
I do financial due diligence for M&A. Mostly on the buy-side. (with a webapp side project)
"Learning" Catcher in the Rye? What about just reading it because it is a damn fine piece of literature? Maybe this person didn't get the book because she "learned" it, rather than appreciated it for what it is. How do you learn a piece of fiction, anyway?
> It explicitly mentions that human activities are "nowhere near the whole story"

I read this as being relating to artists (specifically graphical) rather than the entire class of human activities.

> even primitive organisms can be considered creative

Must admit I missed this as the sentence was in what I thought was a plug for a book.

> "creating something new or being original is an essential part of creativity"

This didn't really mean anything to me.

Most the article was explained using specific examples which were human specific activities and for me that was the main thrust. Perhaps it wasn't the authors intention but that is the impression it left on me even re-reading it.
Corn and Software
No they didn't, they alternated folds length and width-wise on a rectangular paper while Britney folded a long piece of toilet paper lenght-wise.
Well, you obviously know nothing about that particular business. Let's say an average medical machine like a heart rate monitor - this machine cannot be bought accross most of subsaharan Africa. Even for doctors who have the money, it still cannot be bought, because it's not being sold.

Now, one can buy two pieces, put it in your luggage and fly down there. Not as a humanitarian, but as a business man. You can thene easily sell it for twice what you paid, meaning that a doctor now has this machine, and he is saving lives.

What YOU don't seem to realise is that this doctor can afford to pay that amount for the machine because he is MAKING A LOT OF MONEY. The reason he buys it from you instead of just flying to the US is that you are OFFERING IT CHEAPER when his flight, transportation and accomodation is factored in.

You get it? It's a win-win situation for everyone, it's not exploitation. Exploitation is what you medical companies do when they set the price for medicine at a very high level, even though there is no expense or effort involved in those medicines anymore.

So, what's your preference - a city in the 3rd world where there is no heart rate monitor, or a city in the 3rd world where the richest doctor has a heart rate monitor that he paid twice the value for?

Because if you were to tell me that I should buy a heart rate monitor and go sell it for $100 profit, I'd say no. It's not worth my time. The same as you apparently, otherwise you'd be out in Africa right now helping out. But you're not.

So please don't be a hypocrite.

Now, to business. Let's say I want to make money online using the same system as I did above, but with $300 capital.

Step 1: I'd find out the most in-demand software products out there

Step 2: I'd reduce this software to the simplest possible functionality. I'd pay a software developer to make me this software for $200 (cheap outsourced guys)

Step 3: I'd buy a domain and host, and start selling this software. I expect to have about 10 sales a month bringing me $100 extra a month. So after 1 month, I've got $350.

Step 4: After a couple of months, I'd repeat the same thing, leading to a second $100 revenue stream. In the meantime, I have improved the reach and features of the first software, such that it is bringing me $200 a month.

Step 5: After about 5 months, I should have a steady $600 - $700 revenue stream. I'd save up till I have $2000.

Step 6: I'd take the $2000 and clone a popular piece of software, and make it specific to a particular industry for $1500. I'd put $500 in marketing

Step 7: The new software should be bringing me a more reasonable income, like $800 a month.

Further Steps: I'd just keep repeating, upping the stakes each time. Bigger and bigger.

The point is not what you do, the point is that your path has to keep changing and getting bigger and bigger.
The article doesn't suggest any books to replace Catcher in the Rye

Scroll down, that's the third one on the list - but yes, I missed them at first glance too, looked like an ad block. I suppose in a way it is and ad block...
previously - electrical design engineer

current - full time phd student
It's wrong when you do it in a weaselly way.

The thing that most pissed me off was their "Firefox vs. Safari" comparison chart, where Firefox got points in things like "encourages developing standards" and a ton of things that AREN'T web browsing. Their marketing has NOTHING to do with how good the browser is, EVERYTHING to do with pure glam. Same with setting a world record. That did nothing to prove anything, nothing to counter the criticism that Firefox was getting for things.

And, not to get all fanboyish, but Firefox is an inferior product. Opera is slimmer and faster, and yet can do far more out-of-the-box. On the Mac, as alluded to before, Safari is a godsend. Firefox looks wrong, it's too cluttered, it doesn't support two-finger scrolling well or three-finger navigation at all. And the team almost certainly knows this. Yet they've ignored constantly the fact that they're making an inferior product and continue to market their product as the best there is. Which, at least on OS X, it's not.

I think the thing that I like most about Steve Jobs is when, in a marketing interview, he said, "Apple TV might not work. Other people have tried and failed. There's every chance this will fail too. In which case we'll improve again." Apple is famous for marketing, but it's famous for marketing in a more honest way: they don't lie about their product. Firefox and its developers do. That's what's wrong with their marketing.
How does it compare with SquirrelFish?

Edit:

Ah, Resig briefly suggests an answer here: http://ejohn.org/blog/tracemonkey/#comment-319458

> Well, considering that Squirrelfish was "only" 46% faster than Firefox 3 at the SunSpider test - and the current TraceMonkey code is already 83% faster than Firefox 3 - it's pretty safe to say that TraceMonkey does to Squirrelfish what Squirrelfish did to Spidermonkey. It's a game of leap frog and we're seeing tremendous results.
I needed to hear this today: Make a little progress every day - Try stuff - Ignore schmexperts
I was forced to walk a mile through the snow/rain at 7 am

So was I. We're showing our age.

Does anyone do that anymore?
In my experience, 95% of the time something appears unused or irrelevant, it is.

It's the other 5% that bites you in the ass.

I'm finding more and more that a total rewrite makes the most sense. This used to be taboo, but now, it often takes less resources than untying the Gordian knot of horribly evolved software.

And besides, someone should actually know what it does every 20 years or so.
I'm using FF 3 and can't see this page. So much for user-agent sniffing.