skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Vesting, equity, salaries, etc.
I'm preparing a startup and I'm hoping to learn how others have structured their equity sharing deals so I can consider my options intelligently. I can imagine one of the founders 'slacking off' once the business starts generating substantial income and I think it would be a mistake to give a person like this too much equity in the beginning, but ...

How do you decide how much equity and how much salary to give other founders, and when they should receive these benefits?

Does it make sense to share equity (in the beginning) based on the number of hours each has contributed to the project in advance?

Does it make sense to base the future equity sharing on hours worked after the company is started, so that if we end up with slackers they get no more than they earn -- and so those of us who do most of the work get nearly all the equity? Or is this more of a salary issue than an equity issue?

I'm particularly interested in how other companies have structured their equity and salary arrangements, especially when they work well and are appreciated by everyone involved:

- How is your equity sharing arrangement structured?
- Who gets what percentages and why?
- How much equity is reserved for future investors, etc?
- How much equity did you receive from the start?
- How much more do you get as the business grows?
- What determines the amount of stock you own?
- Do you receive more stock for more time on the job?
- How does vesting work in your company?

Someone once suggested that I keep most of the equity myself and only give out a small single-digit percentage to each of the other founders. This seems too greedy to me, but he also said my equity would be the portion that gets diluted in a round of future funding so I had better keep most of it myself. I have no idea if he knows what he's talking about.

In fact, I have no idea how long each founder should be required to work before they are 'vested', and perhaps even the issue of vesting should be approached as an incremental benefit rather than something that happens all at once.

Basically I'm looking for any insights or examples you can share that might give me some reasonable ideas for structuring our equity sharing arrangement. Thanks.
As someone who is utterly convinced of the worthlessness of religious studies, literature studies, philosophy, ect, let me attempt to answer your question.

CS is a topic where every question has an answer. We may not know it, but it either exists or is provably non existent. Furthermore, CS is a field which advances- and when CS advances, life often improves for millions of people. Lastly, taking CS and math classes means learning new things. I know things I did not know at the beginning of the semester about the nature of information.

In humanities, while the questions are interesting, they have no answers. Furthermore, the study of humanities does not advance, the fashions and trends simply change. It is also entirely possible to go to a humanities lecture and learn absolutely nothing new.

It is not the CS majors who are brutes. We are the scholars, the ones responsible for advancing human civilization. Studying CS requires constant intellectual growth and expansion as you enable your brain to understand more and more complex topics.

Taking humanities courses is a major distraction from this pursuit. I have never been exposed to an idea in a humanities class that I could not have understood as a 15 year old. I have never seen irrefutable proof of something I was previously convinced was false in a humanities class.

This is why I have a complete lack of interest in humanities.
(Australian) Lawyers to serve notices on Facebook
Deploy zoho creator apps on Appengine
I found the single most effective thing to do in UI is this: iterate. The average number of iterations I take for a single view is about 10 before I'm really happy.

You see #1, and it doesn't feel too bad. Then you do #2, and it makes #1 look bad. You get an idea, so you experiment and try to tweak it a little. Before you know it, you've created something that just feels good at heart. It looks good, it's appealing, it's usable, and attractive.

Some companies go extreme on this, I know Apple can go through hundreds of designs for a single product.

I have a few rules of thumb with this:

1) Never delete an iteration, including #1 which probably will look the absolute worst.

2) Just do #1, yes it will probably suck. Do it and get it over with. Then make #2 and subsequent iterations incremental improvements.

3) Don't stop until you're absolutely proud of the iteration. Be honest, don't let fatigue be your reason for stopping or moving on. True UI design is difficult and requires endurance, just like anything else that's difficult (sports, programming, writing a novel, etc).
Actually, millions will not thank you, because they would not have had to deal with that pesky dialog box in the first place!
Your "How to install" blurb needs a couple s/surround/repeat ;)

Thanks for another useful plugin I was completely unaware of!
I'd pay $.05 to get the them to up vote my site for certain search terms on Google's new "Search Wiki". See what happens.
Colorado Short -Term Housing | Colorado Temporary Housing | Denver Furnished Apartments
Short-term housing, furnished apartments and quarters are offered by Colorado based ExecNet Properties. Our temporary housing arrangement is a great alternative to a hotel for extended and short term stays.
Do you guys have a website about what you do etc?
Yeah, really the only part of your comment I was replying to was "why would anyone want web-based Photoshop?"

Sorry if I flamed you.
How is this a robot any more than any other missile? Not to say they aren't cool... but if I could mod this down I would for being misleading.
Wow. Just in time. I think the Greek Government needs a couple dozen of these things and it needs them right now.
Discussed three days ago:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+W...
Dude and I am being serious, do you have a blog?
Those are decent (yet obvious) ideas for a startup that appeals to the sort of people who read TechCrunch. Most people have never heard of Twitter (or at least never been there) or killerstartups or squidoo. We've found out the hard way that marketing toward Joe the Plumber takes a much different set of tricks.
Have a look at http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive for past coverage on this topic.
Wow! Where do you get ideas from?
Ranking in Google will bring customers, but and this is very ironic, people visit sites that already have.... people, if you can fake or achieve that the ball will just keep getting bigger.
A syntactic dilemma & an intro to Gazelle’s ambiguity resolution
lol I love the cookie sentence.
Agreed. After watching the video I also find the "killer robot" title misleading.

Also, why not link to the original? The linked blog post adds little value. http://www.thirdeyeconcept.com/news/index.php?page=336
My experience consists of one sample point. WebNotes just launched an invite-only beta with decent success. Alex, our marketing guy wrote a great blog entry detailing the entire experience from preparation to payoff. http://blog.webnotes.net/post/2008/12/15/How-to-Launch-a-Sta.... Our biggest breaks came from having mashable and readwriteweb simultaneous write great reviews of our product. From there, we surfed traffic onto the front page of delicious and were picked up by several other personal blogs and websites. Good luck with implementing your launch!
Web Design Company India
Syrup Technologies, a professional website design company based in New Delhi India. It provides website design service India, website design firm India, web site designers India, dreamweaver website design, web designing companies, website designers India, India web design company, website design company India, internet web site design, website design India, web site design firm India and web design services India all over the globe.
Isn't the point of the book that it isn't challenging? That it is fun and you want to complete it and get a wide range of lessons and then go off exploring on your own?
Microsoft, Oracle, Motorola in top h1b sponsor list
I would hate to be stuck knowing/doing only one thing for the rest of my life. As much as i love computers and the internet and the like, I couldn't imagine not being able to pick up a notebook and write a short story or draw something. Not to be able to compose (or hell, even just identify and listen to) good music, discussing politics in depth with lots of details with people and so on.

Not being able to do anything but math/code? That honestly sounds horrible to me.
Duty:
* Make sure that if I do nothing else, and barring a collapse of society, I don't have to work for anyone else again.
* Make sure my wife can stop working for others, too.
* Make sure my daughter can afford to go anywhere for higher-education. If she doesn't want to go to school, provide her the ability to try startup ideas.
* Make sure my parents and parents-in-law are looked after.
* Keep my relatives provisioned with computers, and buy my Dad copies of Mathematica and Matlab.
* If I have sufficient funds, make sure my relatives can study anything/anywhere they want, as long as their marks are sufficient.
* Prepare to leave some money to various causes.

Fun:
* Actually spend the summer playing tennis, instead of in crunch mode.
* Take my parents to Wimbledon, the French Open, the US Open, and the Australian Open.
* Re-activate my Scuba licence, and spend some time diving.
* Go sky-diving
* Go on a "shooting range tour" where I fire all those guns you only see in games and movies, and to some kind of CQB training.
* Learn to fly a plane
* Learn to fly a helicopter
* Re-learn how to ski and spend more time doing that.
* Spend more time playing piano. Maybe learn the cello, the violin, or guitar.
* Spend some time in extremely remote locations, like the high-seas, in mountains, or underground.

Non-Commercial Research:
* Read even more. Make sure I've read the classics.
* Spend a few years really learning Physics, at least up to EM with relativistic effects, QM, and GR.
* Learn cell and molecular biology fundamentals.
* Research Superconductivity.
* Research computer vision, motion control, learning, and memory.
* Research and implement a lifestyle that maximizes my own cognitive abilities, even if it's eccentric.
* Re-learn French and German. Learn Mandarin and Japanese.
* Research and implement programming languages.
* Research meta-programming.

Make:
* Build a legged tele-operated or autonomous robot.
* Build a submarine
* Start or contribute to open-source projects in games, simulation, and education.
* Start a game studio.
* Become a competent illustrator
* Make an animated short.
* Make a smart sci-fi film
* Build a virtual CAVE.

... you get the idea ...
... learn how to format HN posts ...
Please let me know if this post is useful or if you have any questions. I know that a lot of these points are of the "duh" variety, but if you have any questions specific to your startup, I'm happy to help.
Google AdSense Steps to Success
If it's so important to you personally, what is stopping you from going after it now?
Martin Sheen Height/Biography
Very true - if you have any elaborations we'd love to hear..
A good interface is intuitive, in the sense of both easily learnable and easily usable. I don't think you can really decouple the two. It sounds like you're mostly just displaying giant blocks of text, so I'd recommend this excellent slideshow on web typography:

http://www.slideshare.net/jeff_croft/elegant-web-typography-...

It's a bit long, but very thorough and very helpful for content-heavy design -- and it gives you exactly the CSS you need. To summarize it very briefly: a little bit of white space goes a long way.

It's also worth putting a little bit of thought into styling the forms, especially since unstyled web forms can be really hideous. Here's a quick walk-through of styling a web form: http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/css...

Obviously a contrived example, and you wouldn't want so many fancy colors in a professional setting. But the key point there is to align everything nicely, and go to the trouble of grouping related fields using fieldsets and legends.
A great technique is to modify the UI based on context and allowed actions. As I started using Basecamp (37signals) on a daily basis I realized that there are hardly any error messages in the application. If you aren't allowed to do something they hide any UI elements associated with the invalid action. This results in a simpler interface that is more intuitive.
The Babson Book
The Babson book was written by two Babson students so that no student will ever choose Babson again with out knowing what we know now. With 70 + pages, this book covers all of the things you will only find out after attending Babson for two or three years.
I've written to them for a couple projects I made, but never heard a peep back. What does it take to get their attention? Any tips?
beats per minute, length, tone, and a whole bunch of other semi-tangible quantities

Not once have I ever gone through my collection looking for a song fitting any of the above particular qualities. Maybe some have, but when Pink floyd, the Clash, and Beethoven can occasionally aggree on BPM, it becomes a distinctly useless metric.
Images derived from Brain Scans
Mobile Version of Wikipedia Finally Launches
You're right, these are pretty obvious and appealing to a mass audience is much harder than just marketing to the tech crowd. I'd suggest checking out Andrew Chen's blog: http://andrewchenblog.com/
This guy is THE guy to read when it comes to user acquisition.
They a tool kit called HAWHAW http://www.hawhaw.de/
Anyone have any experience with this? I am looking to create a mobile friendly web app but more gear towards the hi-tech / next gen phone. (iphone, android, storm)
Nice ideas and all, but most developers still benefit from being able to charge on the app store, plus the marketing Apple is doing for you (less and less, but it's still better than a web app no one goes to, and google ignores for 6 months.)

BTW, I'm going to be disappointed if I don't see the $5000/week people keep mentioning once I get up to speed on iPhone programming :-~
But for a DJ looking to beat match songs, it's a pretty important thing.
Now if they'd just provide javascript hooks for the location, acceleratometer, sounds, etc. (Yes, I've seen PhoneGap)
Should employers discriminate against World of Warcraft players?
If your site is Stumble worthy, check out their advertising service @ http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/. I've been using it for my flash games site with decent success so far and their rates seem pretty fair to me.

Also, take a look at the following two posts in which petercooper makes some great suggestions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341138

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351709
It's something you write codes in.

(a pet peeve of mine is when people refer to code as "codes")
I haven't tried out Git yet, but I think this feature may be the most impressive example of what Linus Torvalds said awhile back about Git: that perhaps its most significant advantage would be the tools that people will be able to build on top of it.

This seems like an excellent example, especially since it's not something that I could see being feasibly grafted onto Subversion. I've got a personal codebase that I'm planning on making into an open source project, and this feature alone makes me inclined to try out GitHub.
"Fork queue?"

Same to you, buddy!
Share the wealth! (cough)
Wow thanks for posting this I was looking for a good lecture to watch. Not only does this talk have interesting ideas, it is also good to learn from Mr Soros on the pursuit of knowledge and how to live as a human being.
Five Strangest Programming Languages
spell check time

"In a lot of startups—probaby most startups funded by Y Combinator"

you mean "probably" i assume. no big deal
B2C in the first wave, ad based also initially, we are attempting to make money of course
US auto woes mean trouble for Japanese makers, too
Prying open my 3rd eye
Seeing as it's past my bedtime, can you give a synopsis?
Obey the first law, please!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
If you had followed Derek's link you would have found out he sold CD Baby for $22 million :)
Analysis: Is Apple about to have an enterprise moment?
From the thesis:

MusicBox is written in Java 6, and uses Processingfor drawing the visuals. Its dependencies are
written in Python (for creating the cached soundsieve thumbnails) and Perl (for uploading and
retrieving analysis result ﬁles from The Echo Nest). Audio analysis depends on The Echo Nest
Analyze API [56] and Rhythm Histogram Matlab code from the Vienna University of
Technology . Jonathan Hilliker created the icons used for the playlist playback buttons.

The Echo Nest (the.echonest.com) seems to be the classification engine that makes it possible.
Well, I think you completely missed my point, since I didn't anywhere say that PHP can't scale in the sense you are talking about.
Doing the legwork to get back to school and lining your life up with the admissions schedule can take a year or more of planning before it's safe to quit your day job. It helps if other people you know are doing the same thing at the same time. But one thing it doesn't require is getting rich beforehand.
Un.. durr.. lin?
I'll just assume he built it out of mashed potatoes.
We targeted much smaller blogs for several weeks before developing the credibility necessary to approach the larger ones. Also, when approaching the larger blogs, we approached as a company launching a product. Perhaps you should try maturing your projects a bit more before asking some of the larger blogs to cover your work. Do you have any specific projects in mind that you're trying to launch?
I'm with you here as well. It's essentially a glorified version of the missiles that we currently use to shoot enemy missiles out of the sky. This is where all of the government Military contractors are headed, autonomous packs of weapons that hunt together and act as one mind to destroy something. My dad worked at Lockheed for 20 years and has since moved on to Northrop where they have some pretty crazy pack-hunting autonomous helicopters that look pretty fearsome. That's the kind of stuff I might worry about, but something up in outer space shooting down an enemy rocket doesn't really concern me as potentially dangerous... at least not any more dangerous than shit the Military already has :)
Thank you for the input.
Web design
Speed Limit Studios is a professional full-service web design company. We specialize in web design and development, but we also place a lot of focus on marketing web sites and businesses. That's because we know that having a great web site isn't enough. You have to be able to market that web site so that Internet users can find you. That's why we don't just create a good-looking web site and then wash our hands of it.
It really depends how critical the team are and how much they are giving up to join you. In my case, I agreed with my co-founder (engineering leader) to just do it as up front equity rather than vesting and we agreed 20% plus a nominal salary (before dilution in funding rounds). IMO Don't be too greedy and try to retain too much yourself, your founders will be key to your success or failure.

And then for the others who joined after we did it as share options, up to 4%. A way to calculate is to use sweat equity.. what would they/you normally get working for a large company for that time against the valuation of the company you work out.
I've raised the subject of Xserves at my company and been told we can get better compute density from Sun and Dell.
Please link to a single "conservative" investment with an 8% yield.
Malbolge reminds me of APL :-)
This should be a poll.
Free PSP Games
Your largest repository of free psp games for download on the internet
All the thrusters are in a circular plane around the KV. How does it balance itself front to back when its thrusters are all in a 2D plane?
Right now you can get 6% in the UK on a no-frills deposit account at Tesco (hmm, thought they were a supermarket) but that'll be taxed so it's more like 4% real. Which is barely keeping pace with (real, not official) inflation.
Ask HN: Do you use Twine?
I was wondering how many people on here use Twine. I signed up some time ago, poked around, subscribed to some twines, but have not posted. I find much of the content to be Semantic Web-oriented (understandable), but I also can't quite figure out what makes it different from a link-sharing site (i.e. HN).

In my attempt to investigate I came across an interesting interview with Nova Spivack, the founder of Radar Networks / Twine, here:

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kermit-pattison/fast-talk/twine-binds-qa-nova-spivack

It definitely helped to clarify the [stated] purpose of Twine. Yet, in spite of all of Twine's special semweb abilities I learned about, going back to the site I can't quite seem to understand,what makes it more than a link-sharing site.

Can you please enlighten me? Am I missing something major? I'm really curious, because the interview (and the idea of the semantic web) are really interesting, but I can't quite seem to connect the ideas to the actual site. Thanks!
Members of my own family died in the nazi death camps

Which camps? Were they in Germany or Poland?
Well, yes and no. Mathematicians for example are notorious for burning out young.
You can. XServe is essentially a vanity purchase, and no company in their right mind would buy them. They're about twice as expensive as the same box from Dell.
For an overview, check out www.shirlawscoaching.com

Some articles, blogs etc, are at www.shirlawsonline.com

Nothing sales specific is accessible online, but I'd be happy to discuss our processes if you want. jaldridge at shirlawscoaching dot com
> writing a good compiler is somewhat more difficult

Also depends on how you define what's good.

You might want a compiler to give good CPU performance, memory, code size, debugging information, robustness, start-up speed, etc.

Some of these can be difficult - any combination is even more difficult again.
Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design
Yellow and purple in particular.
WoW is a very social game. You may have to deal with people, be a leader, and handle unexpected problems. I've "met" people in WoW who are exceedingly good at these things, the kind of people I'd want to hire.

Not everyone is the same. Like with any discrimination, a company would be crazy to assume too much about what it means to be a WoW player.
Palm jumps on the app store bandwagon
Those are not decided by arbitrary conventions. They're usually chosen by some sort of criteria like performance, simplicity for teaching, portability, etc. There's definitely flexibility in choosing the specifics, with a lot of trade-offs to consider, but they do have specific design criteria and are not just conventions. They are conventions in the same sense that TCP/IP is a convention -- since if everyone did something completely different, there would be no interoperability.

Calling conventions (argument passing protocols) are designed to be efficient for a particular CPU architecture. Scheduling algorithms try to make the best use of all resources while still meeting other performance criteria (e.g. firing events at roughly the right time). Register allocators are usually trying to produce the fastest code possible. And there are arguments both for and against big and little endianness, but I don't remember what they are. :-)
"... Lawrence Lessig, an Internet law professor at Stanford University and an influential proponent of network neutrality, recently shifted gears by saying at a conference that content providers should be able to pay for faster service ..."

wsj also did a job on Lessig who replied with "The made-up dramas of the Wall Street Journal" ~ http://lessig.org/blog/2008/12/the_madeup_dramas_of_the_wall...