skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is nifty enough, but Evernote has so many problems with its client UI design that I hate to see them spending front-end engineer development time on side diversions like this. I recently let my Evernote Premium subscription lapse and migrated my notes to another system because I was so frustrated with the painful user experience across their various clients, despite their core product idea being so awesome and their syncing/OCR/backend services working well.
Great illustration of one of the many reasons why developing for iOS is easier than Android...no need to deal with buggy hardware driver edge cases.
Ask HN: How much equity should I ask for?
Hello all. I'm a much more active HN-user using a throwaway account to ask an anonymous question.

I'm about to go start a venture with a partner and was wondering about equity.

Here's the backstory:

It's his idea and he has already programmed 70% of a working prototype. The idea was submitted and accepted at a YC-like (but not YC) accelerator...and will thus receive a good amount of funding.

Through mutual contacts, they reached out to me as he needed more tech talent and help. I'm an experienced developer and have created a few cool projects in the past. Obviously, it's a great idea in a very early stage and the more people we have working on it the better. Not to mention the whole focus on co-founders performing better.

We've met and talked about the idea and I'm likely going to come on board as a co-founder just a couple of weeks before the program begins, with the approval of both the original founder and the program directors.

It all sounds great but I wanted some expert opinions (maybe even people who have gone through YC or TechStars, etc) as to how equity is supposed to work out.

Right now, he wants me to take 10%. Most of the people I've talked to believe I should ask for more. But assuming that's correct, what's "more"? Is it 15, 20, 40, 50? Should I just accept this? What worries me is that the real work and development will occur during this program. Even with the prototype, it's unlikely that I'll only put in 10% of the total effort.

I honestly don't know what to do. Any tips?

[edit] - Not getting any compensation but equity. No salary.
Why Copyright Holders Love iTunes Match And Pirates Hate It
See, I knew the math was wrong... thanks for pointing that out.
out of curiosity, how were the founders able to raise at this level with no product? Did they have a pre-existing relationship with the financiers?
When Steve Jobs was 13, he called up Bob Hewlitt to ask for some spare parts for a frequency counter he was working on. He worked at HP, was a technician at Atari, and attended the Homebrew Computer Club. He does know about electronics, and it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to me that he might actually know a thing or two about programming as well.
I actually find this ruling fair.

FTA: "But [the judge] nonetheless concluded that the law does not require the bank to implement the “best” security measures available and that the bank is clear to customers when they sign up about the level of security it provides and the amount of liability it will assume if money is stolen from a customer account."
I think you're joking, but in some jurisdictions having large amounts of cash may be considered grounds for seizing it by the police. Sometimes this leads to abuse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenaha,_Texas#Police_seizures_s...
This probably depends on how arcane your research topic is. There are sources out there that have not been digitized, and this may require one to go hunting for some old, dusty tome. But this is all part of the evolution of how we get our information. More and more, I expect to see newer books go straight to digital formats, with dead-tree versions becoming a bit like vinyl records. Used book stores will sell things that are out of print, and things that were never converted into a digital format.

Edit: I forgot to mention that some libraries already offer borrowing of eBooks. So some of them have seen the direction of things, and instead of resisting, are adapting.
Bitcoin can cause brain damage
What you don't realize is that this happens with ALL businesses and ALL entrepreneurs. For example, in a college entrepreneurship class our teacher had to make a rule about not writing a business plan for opening up a chain restaurant. In fact, most of the ideas from the class were opening a bar, restaurant, pawnshop/payday loan, rental property website, computer repair service business, etc. I'm surprised starting a used car lot wasn't a common idea, but I digress.

It's not just software developers who tend to follow trends. It is almost anyone who has ever tried to open a business. Most people aren't that creative beyond "I'm going to open a widget factory but mine will be red instead of blue" without ever considering any idea that is outside their everyday life experience.
Knowing when to pull the plug on a product is a key part of growing a company aimed at developing multiple products. We'll go through all the lessons learned over the next few weeks and reasons why we shut it down - keep checking back, lots of valuable info.
> If their new batteries can get 40 miles on a "tank", and be refueled as easily as my car can now, that seems right on the threshold of being a very viable product.

Not really. I go 300 miles between fillups and would like to go more. 10x as many visits to the "energy station" is a huge obstacle.

Not to mention that I often go on trips that are longer than 40 miles. Losing 5 minutes to fillups every 3-40 miles is unworkable. And, I often go places where the gas station density is low, so I'm going to have to fill up more often and there are places that I just can't go on a 3-40 mile tank.

As a commute-only vehicle, 30-40 miles can make sense, but few of us can afford significant money for such an "extra" car.
Startup Quote x Women 2.0: Caterina Fake, co-founder, Hunch/Flickr
Somehow this country, the richest country in history, is in the grips of an amazing can't do attitude. A big part of it is the rise of the conservative movement and its "government is evil" mantra. And part of it is just that democracy is messy since you have to get more people to agree and make compromises.
Considered aging the photos based on date-created, perhaps using vintage.js?
It’s about doing things that you haven’t done before, where you’re still kind of a beginner, and not resting on your laurels.

- Caterina Fake (@Caterina)

http://startupquote.com/post/6330360863
Nope, no one quit - the core team is now on other products in the company. Check back for parts 2 and beyond for updates, great lessons learned.
Not allow an unconscionable clause to be enforced in court. Happens all the time.
Yes, it was my opinion. Did it seem otherwise? If so, I'm sorry.
Our Startup’s Secret Weapon
I agree. Writing an 'uncool' app that makes lots of people happy and is very profitable is preferable to writing a 'cool' app that no-one uses and makes no money (e.g. yet another Twitter client).
Why GM Couldn't Be Apple
I'd actually consider obsession with acquisition and consumption part of the human state.
I do it similarly. And it's the way to go ...
Maybe because financial services don't make anything. They don't build anything.
I hear this from developers a lot, but here's the rub. Developing software that developers find interesting is no different than any other highly sought-after profession. Lots of young people want to be rockstars too, but there are only so many rockstars among us. The same applies for software. There is only room for so many "social networking X" companies.

I hate to be the killer of dreams, but I've talked more than a couple of devs in to tackling less-than-interesting problems, with the promise that I'll do the footwork of getting the client on board for doing interesting things within their problem domain.

For my part, I'm fortunate that I find business interesting. It doesn't matter much to me whether the business is publishing books or facilitating purchases. I enjoy the landscape view of every market. When you step back and look at these varied industries, many are just as subtle and interesting as the companies that occupy SV. You just have to look at them with the right set of eyes.
It was a combination of that as well as the potential of the product to fill a real need once we got customer feedback.
I'm not sure you can do that with gold because there's only one stable/naturally-occurring isotope, and the most stable other isotope has a short half-life of six months. Labeled gold's radioactivity may be a give-away.
I've pulled all-nighters for star parties. Takes a while to get back on schedule, but it's been worth it.

However, the thesis is that an all-nighter is bad for the project. Unfortunately, the author mixes up an occasional all-nighter ("just this once") with frequent all-nighters ("If you are at a point where you are working 24 hours a day"), and without making a distinction between the two.

The problem with this is that I personally can point to cases where an all-nighter worked - we added a couple of new features leading up to a demo at a supercomputing conference, and stayed up all night the night before leaving. They worked, and we scheduled in time to clean up the code.

The author calls out to "design" (by which I assume he means evolutionarily designed), but omits cases like the story of Cliff Young, and the influence on all-nighters for ultra-marathons. Clearly the best solution in that case is to not sleep, and I will argue there are evolutionary reasons why we can do that.
Considering Hastings is on Microsoft's board and influences Microsoft at least slightly, it's hard to believe that their companies are opposites.

I do agree that the article/idea makes little sense though.
"I think it's fantastic, but in the end there were few people to communicate with, no decent reading material"

These only really matter if communicating with others and consuming content were your primary goals. If so, obviously a more mainstream language would be preferable.

But there are other things that you could do, such as create Lojban content yourself (ie. write articles, books, poems, etc..), or help others to learn Lojban (increasing the number of people to communicate with), or figure out ways to use Lojban to communicate with computers, or help improve and shape the language.
If anything, I think Netflix should buy Redbox parent Coinstar, dump the coin machines, and corner the content market, on and off-line. It certainly makes sense, and it'll reunite Reed Hastings and his co-founder Mitch Lowe under one roof again.
Clojure on Heroku Demo: Twitter followers in common
It's more than DRM though - there are no open ways of exporting annotations or bookmarks, on any of the major e-reading platforms. The Open Bookmarks project is an attempt to kick start this conversation, before it gets left behind.

http://www.openbookmarks.org/
He seems so tired. Get well Steve. Beautiful building!
Not only that, but it's literally the cutting edge and folks with most disposable income... ie, a great market even if it the covers aren't a large % of iPad2 owners.
Meet our documentation and get some tips on writing yours
JSHC: a haskell compiler/interpreter written entirely in javascript
Should you trust a root CA that couldn't keep track of it's own keys?
Rudin's far from being a dry, terse, and impentrable tome. But maybe my standards are different.
"Our tax dollars are paying for WHAT?!" would, IMO, slowly (or even quickly) erode the list of "approved" topics and authors. And of course gaming the system would be worth a significant amount of money.

Also: tax dollars are a per-country thing, whereas popularity is often global. It would make sense for countries to try and free-ride and get other countries' books for free and pay their authors nothing. For instance Australia could happily pay nothing to authors and let the US and UK pay them.
Building the prototype is the easy part. If you're going to do 40% of the work, ask for 40% of the equity. This is assuming he has no revenue, no customers, and no other partners. Being accepted into an accelerator program doesn't make this a guaranteed success and even that 40% could end up being worth $0.
For me, I would say > 20% would be a "co-founder" status. Anything less and it sounds like you are more an employee than anything else.

It may be his idea, he may have even created the prototype, but a prototype is not a final product. If you have to trash the prototype and work from scratch, you'll be putting a lot of work into something that is barely yours.

I wouldn't, however, ask for >30%. If he's gotten into an accelerator and programmed a prototype, he's probably been working on the project for quite some time (a year or more). To ask for almost half of the equity would probably be too much.
I think the important message isn't that a job is from 9am to 5pm, but that you have a job that pays a regular paycheck based on hours worked. mattman is not in a situation to not be making any money.
10% Signing Bonuses Becoming Routine for Startups
Does the calculation of efficiency take into account the efficiency of conversion? I know that the actual potential-to-kinetic energy conversion rate of gas-powered cars is about 20% ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#Gasoline_.28p... ). Wikipedia claims an electric car is 3x more efficient than that ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle#Energy_efficie... ).

So theoretically, energy density of a battery tech only needs to hit one-third the efficiency of gasoline to match mileage. So the goal is 14Mj/kg, and a 10x increase would be 2.5Mj/kg -- so still lower, but getting much closer.
There was once a lack of other people who spoke Esperanto. Yet it flourished.

There was once a lack of other people who spoke Klingon, and yet it flourished.

There was (at around the turn of the 20th century) a lack of people who spoke Hebrew, and yet it too flourished and now there's a whole nation of people who speak it.

Lack of people who speak the language is always a problem for any artificial language... at first. Some manage to overcome this problem. Others don't. The interesting question is why this is the case, and what can be done about it.
To quote our IT manager "So its an actual walled garden?"
I imagine this is what Wil Wheaton hears in his head when he's reading EULAs.

With that out of the way, would it be possible to represent EULAs in a simpler manner while still satisfying a company's legal department?
Cupertino did have a downtown along Stevens Creek and De Anza, but the area changed significantly in the 1950s and 60s when streets were widened and DeAnza College was built. Cupertino certainly doesn't have much of a downtown now.
Mechanical Engineering Marketplace GrabCAD Raises $1.1M
and NOkia stated that business will decline by 35% in 2011 alone
Ask HN: Tracking fund raising efforts in angel round
There was a recent presentation/image that showed each call, meeting, email that a company did in order to raise their angel round. I'm trying to find it. The image was red lines that either in ended in success or failure at some point with the value of each investment tracked. Can you point me to the right direction?
I completely disagree. Libraries, in the UK at least, are a fantastic resource for the poor and marginalised. To see our current government's attempts to shut them down is saddening.
What role would you play? Most seed raises are in the $500k-$1m range these days in which case the first handful of employees are expected to work for about half salary, so that's not surprising. Except that you say they raised upwards of $4m in which case salaries should be closer to market (but still lower). If yours is a key role, .6% is too low. 1% or more might be right. But it depends a lot on the importance of your role (engineer vs non-engineer, role player vs manager/director). Is neither founder technical? Watch out.
Why Apple is like a Zamboni: Startups react to iOS 5
Safari Reading Lists: Glorified Bookmarks - Not Instapaper Killers
tptacek is referring to that I work for PhoneFactor and we sell a multi-factor auth product to secure against these types of things. You're probably right, and thanks for the input.

It's hard to know when to worry about not disclosing affiliations and when to worry about sounding like a product name-pusher. I felt like I was on such basic facts in this comment that it wasn't so relevant, but I did mention it in a later comment in this thread.
Sure, maybe he lives in a remote location with crappy internet service. with Blockbuster going down it's a perfect time to offer friendly customer service and enlightened selection.

Or, like I said, buy a vending machine.
The Joy of Concatenative Languages (Part 2)
These kinds of questions are easy to answer if you put yourself in the other persons shoes.

I came up with the idea, I coded it, and I got in to an accelerator. Now a good engineer wants half? No way. I climbed part of the hill without him, I could just keep going.

I can hire him 6 months from now after the series A, and get him for 1% as a lead developer. I'll offer him 10% to come on board now, because accelerators are intense and I could use the help.

--

If you're not going to be happy with 10%, ask for 20% and call it done. Start-ups are (mostly) bimodal, you'll make a shit ton of money or you won't make a dime. Worrying about a few % points just isn't worth it. Just get enough to feel good and get ready to work.
Yikes, that picture of that massive cubicle farm gave me the creeps. What is the idea with these trading floors always having open plans? It's not like anyone's going to be shouting across that room.
Yes, one of our engineers contributed a his work on a native port of mod_pagespeed two days ago. We have made a number of other contributions along the way as well, most of which aren't nearly as sexy as the one you pointed out. And we'll continue to do so.
Seriously. What keeps OP from working anywhere with an internet connection? I would see this as a massive opportunity to learn various skillsets.
link for hot dog stand http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=1049
SWAT Team Raids Home To Recover Student Loan
If 70% of the project is complete, and they have been accepted to an accelerator - then 10% is very fair, maybe even a little bit too fair.

Your cofounder has created an immense amount of value already - seems to me you're getting a pretty good deal - grab it with both hands.
Anatomy of Seed?

http://www.slideshare.net/brendanbaker/anatomy-of-seed-77538...

http://brendanbaker.co/anatomy.pdf
I'd argue that his workflow is broken.

If he is sitting all day staring at his inbox rather than shock switching windows between his task tracker or work or whatever, and his e-mail interface, then that doesn't make every email client broken.
> "Jesus was probably the first to emphasize how much the humans are social beings, that they need one another, and that there's actually a lot to enjoy and to win by being nice towards each others."

That first bit is a rather bold claim in the face of Confucius.
It's hard to answer questions like this without knowing more of the back story and the other terms, but presumably you're not in a position to disclose those without compromising your anonymity.

That said, it sounds like he's got the idea, most of a working prototype, and started to secure outside funding. That means joining the venture is significantly less risky for you than it would be if you were coming in before the technology was proven and when you had to put up significant amounts of your own cash to co-fund the early days.

I think that means the two big questions are whether you have something unique/personal to offer that it would be hard to find elsewhere, and how much you're getting compensated aside from the equity.

If you could be replaced by someone else with a similar skill set and you're being paid a decent salary on top of the equity, then you're really more like employee #1 than a co-founder, and I'd say you were probably doing well to get 10%. (10% of what, by the way, if outside investment is already involved in some form?)

On the other hand, if you have particularly relevant skills or insights that would be hard to replace and you're being asked to work primarily for equity in the early days, then you're more like a co-founder even if you're not co-funding at this stage. Now it's down to the proportion of the work to make the business a success that will be down to you, and if you think that's more than 10%, you should probably look for more than 10% in equity as well.

Just MHO, and based more on second-hand anecdotes than personal experience since none of my companies have been in a directly comparable position, so take with liberal salt sprinklings...
I agree with you that people can get pretty worked up about the topic of free software, but I think you need to be a bit braver in the face of downvoting and disagreement. I can't ever recall seeing a respectful, well-thought post getting downvoted below 0 on hacker news.

One tactic for this situation is to post your truth then never look at the thread again. It might be rude to people who want to engage in honest discussion on your point, but if your post was a good one it will still benefit the hn community more than not posting at all, and you won't have to stress about troll replies.

Just be respectful. Assume the people reading your post are as smart as you and your post won't get hammered.
You're right: green teas are pretty easy to destroy as well - but I'm not a fan of green teas, so I don't have a very developed palette for those.

Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the tea I'm drinking. It's at my desk at work, but I bought it from a tea shop, so it's not pre-packaged. I have the name written somewhere at home, though. When you steep some Oolongs incorrectly, the taste you get isn't as much bitter, as a (chinese word) sow taste. I don't know if that's a very good explanation, but I'm more accustom to drinking than explaining! This particular Oolong steeps for 24 seconds on a first steep (after wen ren shuan), and 22-23 on the second at calmed boiling.

I'm excited about this tea discussion.
As long as you have an internet connection in the "middle of nowhere", you're not in the middle of nowhere. Get to work!
It seems like he didn't really quit either but was let go gracefully. As head of iPod division it seemed as though he was more protective of the iPod's role as Apple's superstar product then of the big picture Jobs wanted to push. Rumor was he wanted to use the iPod OS for the phone and then he gave an interview about how converged devices were lame and 3 weeks later they announced his "reduced role" as a consultant and shortly after that he was out.

Granted that's mostly based on rumors but it gives an interesting contrast to Microsoft's failure in tablets because of things like the Office division's execs refusing to make it touch friendly.
iCloud stores non-DRM copies of music on your devices, right? And iTunes Match songs get all the same privileges as stuff you buy from iTunes, right? So, how can Apple "control your music"? Can they delete files you store locally? Or prevent you from sharing them on The Pirate Bay?
Side note: I've managed to duplicate the flavor of regular lipton by brewing Bai Hao for about an hour and then reheating it in a microwave. (I didn't brew it that long on purpose.)

The white tea? Wow.

Anyway, yes. A more fragile tea is probably a 5+ year aged raw puh-er, as a good example! I still can't brew mine properly. =(
Does anyone know of a central repository for all of these little landing page optimization tweaks? I know each site is different and just to test to know for certain but there should be some general decisions vetted that would make a good boilerplate.
That's why I said probably. It was to the best of my knowledge.

I'll refine it as "Jesus was probably, in western philosophy history, the first to emphasize...". But I may still be wrong...

I know nothing about Confucius. I guess it's Wikipedia time :-)