skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, let me be "FIRST LAWYER POST" and tell you that you have to have counsel check this.

Second, it's actually likely that your friend cannot sell options in the company; typical boilerplate employee stock option agreements prevent this. Without that agreement, a competitor can buy options from a former employee and wind up with common stock.

Third, once your friend left the company, a clock probably started ticking on those options; they'll either expire or the company will automatically get the option to buy them back at their strike price (or some other nominal price). They may not be worth anything at all.

Fourth, it may not be lawful for the private company to have non-employee shareholders; private companies are typically only allowed to sell shares to SEC accredited investors, who (simplifying) have more than $1MM in the bank or $300k+/yr in salary.

Fifth, you want to seriously consider whether you even want to hold shares in a private company. Your friend was an employee, is probably last in line for liquidity, and probably has no meaningful voting rights. I have several friends who wound up paying for their employee options only to have them become worthless due to restructuring (companies can restructure, terribly dilute existing options, but issue new options to current employees to make up for them) or M&A terms.
Big fan of this: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/OpenSource/Conceptu...
Idea Lab: Who wrote the Koran?
I found this: http://www.programmableweb.com/api/reddit

But can't find anything about getting user info. Anyone here know?
The main issue here is: does the company allow the early employee to sell shares from an executed option when there is no public market for the shares. Most companies don't allow these shares to be sold (or have right of first refusal on a sale), so in this case the early employee would have to hold the shares.

If you are going to approach the CFO and let him know what you are thinking, this is the main issue to bring up. If the company will allow the early employee to sell the shares, than I would structure the $10,000 as a short term loan with tangible property as collateral (such as his car). The loan can either be paid back in 30 days or a set number of shares can be delivered at a set price. The $10,000 would be subtracted from YOUR_PRICE * SHARES_SOLD when the shares are delivered. You would write a check to the early employee for the difference. If no cash or shares are delivered you would get title to the car.

If a liquidity event is required to sell the shares to a third party, you could simply extend the loan period long enough for a liquidly event to emerge. This is more risky as the time frame is unknown, and would bring in concepts such as interest on the $10,000, etc.

The CFO should know the share price the board set at the last meeting. These prices tend to be low, but in general I think you should pay less than this amount for the shares. A discount of 50% is not unreasonable.

The other issue is taxes. The early employee will be incurring taxes at exercise on non-qualified options and at sale on incentive options, so in either case this needs to be factored in. The early employee will pay ( BOARD_SET_PRICE – EXERCISE_PRICE ) * NUMBER_OF_SHARES * MARGINAL_TAX_RATE for NQO at exercise and (YOUR_PRICE - EXERCISE_PRICE) * NUMBER_OF_SHARES * MARGINAL_TAX_RATE for ISO when he sells them to you. As long as the tax amount is greater than (YOUR_PRICE – EXERCISE_PRICE) * SHARES_SOLD he will be covered. His profit would be the shares he retains from the deal.

Good luck.
That makes total sense for your blog -- getting one tip a day in your RSS reader is way better for learning them than looking at them all at once.

However, I don't think it makes sense to post it on HN. If all the posts on the front page were little snippets, the conversation would quickly degenerate.
Understand that unless the C/C++ code being compiled is actually targeted for gcc optimization, you won't get more than ~2-5% speedup in code even with -O3 or higher. Infact, go high enough like -O9 and you may even get incorrect code. The only time that settings like -O6 help are in cases like XaoS which is targeted for gcc optimization.

Furthermore, MSVC is not the only compiler better than gcc. As of now, LLVM also produces significantly better code: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=286408
ASP.NET isn't so open source.

Also, at it's current state, it looks like any novice web dev could code up a similar app in a few weeks.
Wonder why DocSyncer didn't choose to put all their code on Github.
Given what's already known of the bee dance I suspect it's all about radial vectors:

Angle of the sun to the hive

Angle of the hive to the food

Distance to the food

Angle of horizon to food (height)

Angle of up (gravity)

Angle of magnetic north
Microsoft tries to grow its virtual reality platform beyond flight simulation
Security is important in this kind of services. However I don't see you emphasizing on it on the web site or even mention SSL. Or how you store data.
I didn't check it a lot so maybe I missed it.

The front-end looks modern.
LHC to restart in Summer 2009
Hi,

Thanks for looking into this and good guess on the username ;-). It's still showing '0' though, in case that helps.
It will be interesting to see how many startups succeed using this program. Since startups often employ tools for competitive advantage, this will be a good test between the microsoft and open source tool chains.

Also, as pg's essay points out, great hackers like to work with great tools / languages, so it will be interesting to see if they can recruit the right talent.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
Refresh--the JS is probably cached (set for a day). I see 210 in the DB.
how about 5 years?
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2003/10/17.html
First of all, I love the look. clean and professional.
The domain name is great as well.

The video tour does a great job of overloading me with information on what I can do with OneHub.

The damaging part is that after viewing the video, I don't have any take-away on how I would use the tools you've described, and you go through them so quickly that it is very difficult to keep up, and it doesn't seem that the screencast is helping with the voice-over. I realize they are in sync, but everything is happening so quickly that it is just too much stuff.

My advice would be to pick the 3 or 4 features that you think are the most useful for your customer base, and just go through those. Don't describe the feature and how it works, that is for another video tutorial. Tell me how OneHub is going to help me interact. Just telling me it lets me interact isn't good enough. I interact already. How is your interactions better.

That is a huge marketing challenge, and it is very difficult to do. I did a video demo for one of my previous companies and it was many, many iterations before I was getting the messaging to the users right.

[EDIT] volida's post points to what I'm saying. if security is the most imporant thing, single that out. You're giving visitors too much information.
Maybe segmenting into a few videos would be best depending on your target audience.

Best of luck, keep up the good work.
Pete
I have used your beta for a little while and I think you guys are making a very very nice product. Super polished and I really really like how you guys do the "edit" mode where you can add tabs and pages and widgets. Very nicely done.

From a UX point of view, I think there's going to be a little bit of a learning curve for new users to figure out how to modify the default template, but once they get into edit mode, I think it's pretty clear.

I think a $20/yr plan that gave people 1 hub and 1 gig of storage would be a good idea. It may be a little bit of a loss leader, but it would be good to get people over that initial hump of getting their credit card out of their pocket.
There is a very strange bug with Firefox on Mac. Sometimes when the slide transitions, the explanation text appears to the right of the arrow, instead of overlayed on top of the image. This causes a horizontal scroll bar to appear. Sometimes I even see all of the explanation boxes.

This will probably be nasty to debug; I can't even figure out what the exact circumstances are that cause it. I thought it might have to do with restarting at the beginning of the animation, but I'm not sure.

For the design itself, perhaps reduce the font size of the navigation text on the right? It would offset it more from the body text, and then I could view all of the navigation without having to scroll.
tptacek's forth point is probably correct. You also may need to bring in someone with a series 7 license to close the sale. It's just the government looking after you for your own good.

tptacek's third point is moot as you will be getting shares in the company, not options, since the $1 per share is an exercise price.
Long discussion on using CAPTCHAs to get more followers on twitter.
“Mind you, that’s not great feedback...The perfect way to handle that moment would have been for the teacher to pause and pull out Venisha’s name card, point to the letter “V,” show her how different it is from “C,” and make the class sound out both letters."

Unless, of course, all the other kids start calling out their own names, then other words, and she does lose control of the class.

It's an excellent article. But the problem I've always had with the kind of analyses portrayed by the UVA team is that it's too easy to sit there and sound smart by making these kinds of criticisms. Similar criticisms could be made about the math teacher, whose style is more like mine was in the community college physics classes I taught, but I'll spare you, dear readers of this comment.

I think that it's better to think of teaching like trying to find the best-fit line through a cloud of scattered points. You can stand there and say, "the shortest distance to the next point is actually over here..." but completely miss the idea that if you are trying to maximize a long-term result, you may not want to draw your line in that particular direction.
Really?

Here is the profit(not revenue) filed under their latest annual report for their server and tools division, the exact software you are claiming they can't "give away"

Server and Tools: 4,261(2008) 3,593(2007) 2,980(2006)
Security is important, and I have found that they have their clients covered. It is at the bottom of the Features > Details tab.

"Onehub provides role based authentication which means you can grant different levels of access to users as you choose. Plus, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology protects your information with server authentication, ensuring that your data is safe, secure, and available. Onehub is hosted in a SAS 70 Type 1 compliant data center that uses firewalls and other advanced technology to prevent interference or access from outside intruders."

http://www.onehub.com/features/details#security
jruby startup is about <1 second on my box. They did a bunch of tweaks earlier this year to solve the issue.
Volida, I agree that security is super important for any site storing business information. We use S3 as our storage backend but do a lot of work in the application to enforce permissions. For any paid account (starting at $19/month), you can enable HTTPS. For free accounts, all login traffic and account signup is over HTTPS but other traffic is done over HTTP.
But software patents are so vague. You'd have to submit every line of code in Linux for this to work, right?

Didn't someone patent storing a wishlist in a database? So wouldn't this need to list storing X in a Y for all X and Y?
Thanks for the feedback. I agree our video overview needs some work. We will update this in the next few days.
Is signup really necessary for the free account? You many want to at least consider reducing the amount of information that the user requires? You could omit asking for first and last name, the company name and phone number. A/B testing should tell you pretty quickly the loss of signups due to asking for too much information.

Suggestions for the pricing page:

1. I think free account should be a little more prominent in the table of options. I went straight to the pricing page and didn't see the free option at first.

2. List from most expensive on the left to least expensive on the right (see http://www.backpackit.com/signup). The less expensive items will seem comparatively cheaper.
The computer mouse turns 40
Also, information hiding is rumored to be important in real software. Ruby gives you the ability to nominally "hide" data, but it's trivially easy for any later programmer to violate the encapsulation. It's DHINO programming -- Data Hiding In Name Only.

Not only isn't this considered a bad idea in the Ruby world, but it's actually a common technique. Use a third-party library, and you may well be re-writing core parts of the language. Sound good? You can't prevent it.

I like parts of Ruby; it's a fun language. But the author is right -- it's not a language for large projects, or projects with more than a few programmers. My alternative to Ruby would allow the fast-and-loose stuff that makes Ruby fun, but also give you a way to make classes immutable and guarantee data-hiding and encapsulation when you need to do real software engineering.
Woops! Sorry. My bad. Should have looked harder before commenting. My apologies.
The point for me is that the failure, inefficiency, whatever you want to call it of our public schools is a deeper threat to the economy in the long term than the failure of GM in the short term.

But we are managing our way from headline to headline and crisis to crisis. We can't fund and improve public schools over the long haul the way we fund GM in the short term, just because we lack attention spans (and because the public schools lack a lobbying arm proportionate to their reach).
A Winning Web Formula
excerpt: "Recent research from HP Labs in Palo Alto, CA, shows that it's possible to predict, with reasonable accuracy, how popular an online video clip or news story will become simply by looking at how well it does within the first few hours of being posted."
I'm so sick of people marketing a collection of user-level application being implemented as web applications as an "Operating System". It's absurd. Even in this article the author betrays this absurdity by claiming "you can switch over to Windows or whatever OS may be running". So this machine is actually running two operating systems? What?!

Also, this isn't even a Cloud OS! This appears to be a user-level program (a browser) that is just provides linkage to other user-level programs (Google Docs, etc.). A Cloud OS is (as far as I understand it) some OS that is specialized to provide support the cloud from the server perspective.

Maybe I'm wrong, I can barely keep up with the buzz words.
I think useful content is useful regardless of length.

Also, TONS of crap gets submitted to HN. You're seeing this because it was voted to the front page. I don't think I'm affecting the quality of conversation negatively.
The top 20 most bloodsucking Hollywood vampires of all time
And yet the bastards in the prosecutor's office still ruined her life.

This isn't justice. This isn't even a miscarriage of justice. This is holding justice down, raping her, giving her two black eyes and a bloody nose, and then saying in court that the bitch was asking for it.
Alright I'm not a hardware engineer I don't even like assembly.

Can somebody explain how mainframe DMA is different from the DMA in your home PC?

I know mainframes have more then 16 CPUs.
The memory problem we're talking about here does not apply to them, right?
Gartner Recommended WHAT Over ColdFusion? (WHAT == Perl)
It seems obvious now, but when reading the code, it might help to note that "writeTVar" and "readTVar" probably mean "write transactional variable" and "read transactional variable."
I think his criticism that GM is poorly from top to bottom is spot on. However, his solution of installing school superintendents as managers at GM is completely illogical. Doesn't that make it satire?
yep, it's working. Nice tool.
I thought the flippancy of the article was funny and being able to laugh a little at sad things makes them bearable. I've wondered quite often over the last few years if laughing at our problems is a good thing or not. Most of the people I know enjoy things like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. On the occasions when I watch them, I find them funny. I think to myself that even if I can't change it, I can laugh about it and I have too much to do already. Maybe I would find it intolerable and do something about it if I couldn't joke about buyouts or our decaying education system, but I don't have to deal with it yet because I can still laugh at it.
This article was brilliantly written and right on the money. Superstar teachers are VASTLY underpaid, and it bothers me that dreadful teachers who $*&% the dog are paid the same as highly talented teachers who dedicate their life and talents to their profession.

The CEO of the investment advising company states that he is willing to interview thousands of people to get a handful of potential advisors. He noted that 70 out of the top 125 elite investment advisors are from his firm. Perhaps individuals interested in starting a company could apply similarly stringent techniques in evaluating potential co-founders.
Very good first impression. Very attractive site design - simple and elegant - and I like your tasty use of sIFR. You've clearly lavished care and attention on it and it shows.

The weary exasperation of the password strength checker is a nice touch too :)
Its not that the fraud rates are high but rather that if an airline or supplier in the chain fails then the credit card company are liable for the refund to the customer. The Risk lies with them.

So for example XL Airways going bust earlier this year had a massive impact on the merchant service provider as where products werent sufficiently bonded the liability lay with them.

In such a high value turnover industry I can understand the risk element to the credit card company, but you would assume that becoming a member of 3 required bodies with bonding in place would be adequate! Clearly not in 99% of the cases!
I wish The New Yorker used a similar interface for their online offering. The current one is unusable.
Maybe link to links like: http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?http://news.ycombinator.com...

If that doesn't work for you I'd love to hear why.
Except you can press [esc, .] multiple times.
if you open 1 lot in your life and sell it and outperform the market, yes that's random. If you open more lots and your success rate is higher than 50% then you can't really call it random. Playing random in forex kills you.

You can treat it as gambling yes, but it's not.
Shhh.. if there's one thing that I realized about this kind of MS criticism is that they will usually answer with something like "yeah, but in ZXY years, the business is doomed!", or "when Google releases its Office suit"...

And you know, for more than a decade I've been reading stuff like this. Now, I prefer Linux development over Windows, but MS is the most sucessfull tech company. Ever. And year after year it has managed to improve its profits. (cue monopoly comments in 1, 2..)
Facebook users hit by virus
The way I see it we're talking about two different things; you're talking about the quantitative difference between say 90-92% of people have access if they want it. Whereas I'm talking about the qualitative difference between even a large percentage of the population having some degree of access and 100% of competent adults having at least a minimal level of access.

Obama is not the only politician pushing for universal access, if local governments could act with confidence that moving basic tasks like title transactions, judicial proceedings, public records, etc. to a completely electronic format would not create a vast set of support issues coming from the 8% or so of people who have no access; they could streamline operations and save taxpayer money. The point I'm trying to get at is that Universal Broadband may be one of those rare government initiatives that does pay for itself. And as an infrastructure investment, it makes for a better environment for any company reliant on the internet.
No worries, they're a bit hard to find.
Somehow I don't accept consistent bias as an acceptable aspect of a review, or any journalism piece for that matter.
Amazon Now Helping Software Developers Sell Software and Services Online
See other advice above, ie: it's very unlikely that you can actually execute this arrangement.

Supposing that you can, however, I would recommend that you either purchase shares outright, or now. Stock is not really a good thing to have joint ownership of (excepting cases of spouses, etc.).

I would never "purchase" (I'm using the term loosely here) stock that I didn't have ultimate control over. If the ex-employee wants to make some money, you could agree to purchase his options at a price between their current value and his strike price.

If you don't follow the above, you'd need a fairly rigid contract outlining how and when either party could force the sale of the stock (price, criteria, RFR, etc.).
This meme is wearing a bit thin. Yes, deliberate practice matters. So do environment and heredity.
Great job on the site, I bookmarked it for future reference.
I'm a bit confused. How do you just get to your to-do list from the gmail homepage view?
its now been one year since we officially closed up shop at my first startup, and I've now been working at a big co for a year as well. I felt a deep sense of loss after we closed down, while the financial pinch was very real, what burns me to this day is the fact that we did not launch, because it leaves a gaping "what if" void.

I feel fortunate to be working on my next startup in my off hours, and not having any looming moonlighting conflicts (lesson learned) this time around.

A lot of the frustration I felt around the first failure motivated me to get back in there with a new startup. Big or small, rich or poor there is nothing like working on something that is truly yours. The sirens call to entrepreneurship was more than I could resist.

thanks for sharing your experience here and go kill it at google for a while until the siren calls you back.
DA's may have incentives to not drop cases. Take the case of Paulette Cooper, where the Church of Scientology was later found (in Operation Snow White) to have done things like falsified evidence, etc. against people.

Despite this, the DA didn't back down.
Meanwhile, in actual school-related news:

"American fourth and eighth grade students made solid achievement gains in math in recent years and in two states showed spectacular progress, according to an international survey of student achievement, released Tuesday."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/education/10math.html?hp
At most, it's not Free Software (you have to pay for the ASP.NET/Windows licenses) but if you release the source, it's open source.
That's not something you want to optimize.

When working on a production box, I've trained myself to type the command without sudo, then actually take my hands off the keyboard and sit on my hands while I ponder what might go wrong with the command. Then I hit ^A sudo space return.
Run it on Mono.

There you go. The entire stack is open. (and free)
The downside of strong auth is that you might be able to start a war with a DoS or revocation attack. See Vinge, Rainbows End.
No it isn't. I am seeing an even lower number: 0.24 sec on my box, right after reboot.

That's called the filesystem cache and pre-fetch daemon (present on Vista/OSX).
jonathan -- thanks for the writeups & best of luck at google. you'll find some good future cofounder material there. swing by dropbox HQ sometime :)