skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good call, for an equity only position it is a huge upfront risk, and 4 years to vest is a long time for that risk to mature. If it where me, I would not take a pure equity stake without some ownership after a 30 day trial window. Maybe not the whole thing, but I would certainly want ownership of my entire stake within a 12 month window. The thing to remember in a pure equity arrangement is that you should be treated equally to the other founders after consideration has been made for the efforts put in up until you enter the company. If it is ground floor and no work has been done your equity and vesting should look like their equity and vesting, if it does not then you should consider that a red flag.

As for the consultant title, I don't think it is a big deal until salary is involved, they are probably not wanting to carry employees on the books as their are all kinds of legal situations that arise from doing so, standard (I am not a lawyer disclaimer applies). For example if you are not drawing a salary then how do you comply with minimum wage for a w2 position, that is just one of many, it can be done but it takes effort to dot all the i's, there is a lot less to deal with if everyone is a consultant, and responsible for themselves legally. I have been part of several efforts where we where all S-Corps and had a blanket LLC that each S-Corp or consultant held ownership in, while it is not totally the norm, it is not unheard of. What does the other founders structure look like? Are they employees or are they consultants as well?

The bigger question is does your equity place you on the board of directors for the company? If it does not then you may want to consider carefully your position in the direction of the company and you ability to direct that direction.
>tell me that you're gonna be a pain in the ass to work with. //

It does the reverse too surely. It tells a prospective employee that the employer is all about jumping through needless hoops - that they're going to be a pain in the ass and require things that are rather unrelated to actual productive work.

Personally I think I'd find it a turn off from either side. Is it a useful question? I can see how it could give a good indication about ability to think on the fly to provide a politic answer. If that's part of the job then it seems not completely unreasonable.
I have no problem with answering a question like this nor do I really understand why people are so upset over it. When I'm at an interview I try to be genuine and honest.. I'm not going to worry about fitting my answers to what you want them to be in an ideal employee.

I'm also not looking to debate/argue over whether or not it's a good question. But here would be my response:

1. The quality of the other employees

2. The quality AND purpose of the products being built

3. The quality of management

4. Required hours.. Do you want me to work 70 hours a week? If so, thanks but no thanks. I'm a team player and willing to pull extra hours when the occasion arises, but I have other hobbies that I like to indulge in.

5. Salary
Šta je danas?
Šta je danas? Koji je danas dan? Koji je danas datum? Pogledajte na http://danasdatum.com/
Inline Installation: New Way to Success in Chrome Web Store
I was rather looking forward to why Groupon was such an exception to the rule ("more on that later")

Sadly, "more on that later" turned out to be Pandospeak for "That doesn't fit my argument, so I'm going to gloss over it."
Huh? Did you just make this up? How can you possibly know the relative risk of those two things?
I didn't vote you down but it you want a critique, I'll oblige.

First, you start off with a promising statement about the correlation between slavery and dictatorship. Unfortunately, your following paragraphs have almost nothing to do with it. You quickly delve into a anti-religion rant which uses a poor metaphor involving Toyota.

I got your point in the end but I'm probably one of the few that made it that far. It's just easier to dismiss you by the third paragraph and down vote. Although I cannot down vote (not enough karma), I don't think I'd up vote you either.
Germany has a really awkward position for this key. You can only reach it by hitting 'Alt Gr' (the right Alt key) and a _right_ key in the row of digits. One-handed and similar (albeit mirrored) to the US layout's access to ~.

I .. switch all my keyboard to the US layout because I feel that I kill my fingers otherwise to reach {[]}| and \
The screenshots don't seem to have come through well in Slideshare so here's a PDF link on Dropbox: http://db.tt/TxxRxJql
Surprisingly Functional: The World's First Gesture-Based Calculator
The Minnesota winter is not as bad as it's made out to be. Yes, it's very cold, but you learn how to dress for it and you do stuff outside anyway-- such as an 8-mile hike I did in -10 F under 3 layers. Also, by this time of year it's 40-50 and you can do pretty much any three-season outdoor activity.

IMO most Northern European winters are worse than Minnesota's-- not nearly as cold, but longer (in Europe, it starts getting cold in October), darker, and much cloudier.
How does this compare to SoundManager2 ( http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/ )? SM2 seems more actively developed, and looks to play nice in JQuery pages as well. Any reason to prefer one over the other?
The OpenGL ES port of FreeGLUT is progressing
I haven't owned a car for 29 years and have lived in Vancouver off and on for 24 of those. Having said that - our transit system is really quite disgusting and I am seriously thinking that 2012 will be the year of the car for me.
Humble Bundle Pack #2 For Android
Leanpub.com does allow you to make a free sample PDF with as much or as little of the content as you like, it’s very easy.

So, you can implement the feature you suggest right now!
Geostationary satellites are stationary over a point on the equator. You can have an inclined GEO orbit, at which point the bird describes a figure-8 ground track that's centered on the equator.

Unless there's been some extremely unusual geographical developments recently that I haven't heard of, there's no way for a GEO satellite to orbit over Russia.
1. The quality of the other employees

2. The quality AND purpose of the products being built

3. The quality of management

4. Required hours.. Do you want me to work 70 hours a week? If so, thanks but no thanks. I'm a team player and willing to pull extra hours when the occasion arises, but I have other hobbies that I like to indulge in.

5. Salary
COPACOBANA cost ~$10 000 and apparently is as fast as 2500 PCs for the DES cracking it's optimized for, so ~$4/PC-work-unit plus insignificant power costs. You'd need to find someone with experience with implementing crypto in hardware, though. On the other hand, botnets risk detection.

(If you're buying in bulk, ASICs are cheaper, but few will be willing to pay for that much cracking power.)
Their reliability was questionable because if one of the 17.000 tubes was broken, you never knew which one. You had to test all 17.000 ..
Ok, so the point is subtle and perhaps not easily communicated. This example is good though.

"The whole point of GCC is to have a complete compiler toolchain where all the enhancements are being made available to _all_ end users." ... "the last thing I want to see is a situation where developers keep their enhancements proprietary."

I believe you have correctly expressed a consensus opinion of why it would be 'bad' to allow proprietary plugins. And your claim posits a reason:

"(likely due to the wishes of their companies who see no gain in releasing those enhancements and instead wants to keep those enhancements as a competitive edge)."

Which is also a common reason given.

However what if there was a different reason? What if there is some capability that could be created with a plug-in that is pretty specialized, further that plug-in would require specialized domain knowledge and would only be of use to a small number of GCC users.

Traditionally the way the market has created such things is that a person invests their time to create the capability, and they charge a fraction of what it cost them to others to use the capability. The compute the fraction to offset the cost of developing it, and the community benefits by getting access to this capability for a fraction of what it would cost to develop in house, and the developer benefits by having the cost of their efforts covered by the community.

In a GPL world where the work would be considered derivative, you remove the opportunity for people to charge for their work, and thus you remove the economic motivation for getting something built. This damages the community as a whole with a somewhat 'invisible' "didn't go there" sort of damage (you only miss something if you had it and then you don't, not if you never had it). It is an unfortunate byproduct of GPL like licenses that they poison[1] the market for those specialized tools.

I completely understand the motivation behind the FSF and GCC communities for wanting to keep GCC available for all.

But you have to also note that people who sell software make very much the same arguments in defense of copy protection. They (the software producers) argue that they want everyone to have the same experience and they can't control that experience if people are out there making bootleg copies and changes they don't know about. So they deny something their customers want "software unburdened by loathsome copy protection" to preserve their stated goal of giving everyone the same experience with their software.

So if the FSF and GCC communities are denying something their customers want "modularized GCC tools for easy customization through plug-ins" in order to preserve their stated goal of giving everyone the same experience with their software, well it strikes me as ironic.

[1] Sorry for inflammatory way that sounds, my thesaurus is coming up blank on terms that mean 'something which kills an existing organism and keeps it dead'. Using 'nuke' seemed worse.
Ah, I missed that you included that.
You are very wrong (at least about MSP)..
An extremely interesting idea, but consider me a sceptic until proven wrong. I strongly suspect this is something that might see a few "Show HN: I made..." type posts (not neccesarily on HN), which receive feedback that can be summarised as "nice POC, nice code, not suitable for real use because x, y and z".
What's the point of educating the populace if we aren't doing things like going to Mars?

If we abandon grand visions, I honestly don't care if people are educated or not.
PayPal to Tap Local Online Payments Market in China, India
This Google Doc's spreadsheet seems to be the most up to date: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=t_toYuVyy6fci0MAiIaZ...

You can also look at: http://ycpages.info/companies as well
Works now after the new version was published. Thanks!
Why Yahoo’s Lawsuit Is BS
It's funny you know, under ordinary circumstances I'd find that an offensive commentary, but I'm so accustomed to ranting tirades about how being a woman in tech is an open invitation to constant unremitting sexual harassment I perceived just the absence of this as a positive.

In retrospect though, yes, it still wasn't actually worth a commendation.
The AVC/H.264 patent pool contains over a thousand "essential" patents. So, at a guess, at least hundreds.
Unfortunately the defaults are suited to large numbers of collaborators. For example tags are not pushed by default. With a small number of collaborators that is highly annoying - of course you all want to see and use the same tags, and not remember magic flags. With a thousand collaborators you don't want the master repositories littered with tags from all and sundry unless they really meant it - ie you must remember magic flags.

I really wish the guis were better. They can look at number of collaborators, project size, merges, branches etc and behave appropriately eg noticing that tags aren't pushed. I did try a bunch (Linux desktop) and they are uniformly ugly and somewhat hostile. The least worst one I found was gitg.

My experience on other projects (using Hg) has been that perpetual intermediates that use command line tools only make the most DVCS mistakes while TortoiseHg resulted in the fewest mistakes. Git's command line definitely isn't aimed at perpetual intermediates hence the "usability" complaints.
A Season of Renewal and Rescue
How Much Is Your Data Worth? Mmm, Somewhere Between Half a Cent and $1,200
Video game demos.

On Xbox Live Arcade, AFAIK, all games have mandatory demos that can be upgraded in to the full version at the end.
But none of those companies are "twitter-like". They all have fairly low-risk and clear business models. The lede of the article is essentially why aren't there more businesses like Twitter starting in the Midwest. If a number of high-risk twitter-style startups descended on Madison tomorrow do you think it could absorb all the out of work employees when/if they got laid off?
JOBS bill may increase cost of capital, not reduce it
Probably. Lots of programmers (me included) like raging on their code while hopped up on energy drinks, and RB is one of the originals.
Yes.

Health care research is cute and all, but we don't really have a system that lets it benefit the vast majority of people, yeah? We are doing our damnedest to wall off the research that comes off of it, yeah? We are setting ourselves up for unrealistic expectations and a fantasy world where our loved ones never die, yeah? That's not worth spending money on.

Education cost is not the point--other replies covered that better than I can.

Solving world hunger? You mean, feeding people who can't feed themselves while we force our own poor into shitty lifestyles from eating junk food, yeah? Giving food to dictatorships in hopes that they, oh lawdy, don't develop nukes? Giving GM crops and their associated IP to fuckwads like Monsanto so that they can get a stranglehold on the food supply, yeah?

Space is the least harmful of places we've tried to make policy.
Might want to refer to this:

>> Hack ones and zeros and earn our respect. But hack us and earn our contempt.

By you asking the question you have already earned the interviewee's contempt - now it is only a matter of how that is expressed. Some people express it openly, others are more diplomatic. The result is the same though -- a person who is not going to take your offer.

Bottom line: the question is manipulative, and everyone with a bit of self-awareness will figure that out. Nobody wants to work for a manipulative person.
Either way, Team Kaspersky didn't exactly cover themselves in glory. Probably the 2nd most used compiler on the planet, in the most obvious language. God help them if someone really did confront them with an exotic language.
I did not say that Tesla participated in TARP. I said Tesla was bailed out with government loans. The phrase "bail out" has generally understood meaning in the English language that is not limited to TARP.
Not backwards, I think you got it. I lived through the flame wars in the 90s and really resonate with the message "Give us the damn source so we can change it to do what we want!"

The irony is that if folks are trying to check in changes into the GCC tree that allow for plug-in modules because that is what they want, and the community is denying those commits because they fear having a plug-in architecture would enable other people to do bad things. Well that is ironic that such changes would be denied based on a potential transgression for some of the users.

When I read the argument it sounded like what folks had been arguing on the other side back in the 90's, hence the irony.
MT uses a lot of memory. IIRC, it's multiple KiB where 64 bits ought to do fine.

A modern CSPRNG like the SHA-3 candidate Skein can produce random data at a steady rate of only a few cycles per byte. I wonder if at some point something like that will dethrone MT for non-crypto PRNGs.
I disagree. The only people that would pull this trick (answering the question with a question) have a lack of judgement and social skills.

Having said that, I'm against gimmicks in interviews.
Congrats on the launch. This space is definitely seeing a lot of interesting activity. Rofo's in SF, and we just launched in Portland ( http://www.officespace.com/Portland-OR ).

Best of luck. You guys definitely have a nice interface.
Not just make their own?
My humble attempt at explaining GIT
Thank you for your compelling and insightful argument.
On Instagram, "picture talking" is very common since the service is completely geared towards pictures but people still want to use words from time to time.

So to express a thought or thank friends, Instagram users have to find a way to put words onto a picture. The most common is to write a note in Notes, take a screenshot and upload that. But on the stylish communication medium that Instagram is, it can look a little gauche. So people will often upload pictures of handwritten notes, etc. which have some class but not everyone wants to go to that much effort.

The easiest thing is to offer a 612x612 template and the ability to show a PNG that users could then save to their Camera Roll and then upload to Instagram. If you can connect with the user's Instagram account and let them upload from Instagram like Chute does, even better!

Disclaimer: been totally cranking on my own words-on-pictures app for the last few weeks — congrats!
I submitted an eerily similar application to YC in Summer 11' though it was focused on storage as well as office space. Best of luck, its a market thats ripe for some disruption. If you want my domains let me know, I won't be using them.
VLC have no money, so there's little incentive for H.264 patent holders to pursue them. Given that fact, the game theory suggests it is in the H.264 patent holders ultimate interests to allow VLC to be distributed far and wide. That provides an avenue for further penetration of H.264, which may create additional opportunities where royalties can be sought.
Google blocked third-party scripts on Blogger, in Germany?
Ding!

It's so hard for companies to find good talent, it's silly to dick around with mind games and petty power plays.

Find good folks. Realize that on average you're going to have them around for maybe three years, five if you are super lucky, ten if you win the lottery, one if you rub them the wrong way. Treat them with respect, ask yourself how the HELL you can bend over backwards to try to make their experience working at your company good enough to keep them around for a while. Don't talk down to them. Don't imagine that they are beholden to you for anything.

If you are unlucky enough to end up in a situation where you as an employer are holding all of the cards in a hiring situation then I have some bad news for you. You aren't hiring the best candidate possible, you're hiring a mediocre candidate.
> He was not attempting to be intellectually honest.

That's incorrect. He lied in his story; then he lied to people who were trying to fact-check his story.

He said "This is true" about things that were not true.
8 Biggest Mistakes in Affiliate Marketing that Will Crush Your Business
As somebody who has lived on the West Coast my whole life but has married into a very large family in St. Louis I've spent a lot of time there over the past five years. Anecdotal evidence disclaimer.

I think there isn't so much a fear of failure as much as a fear of risk. I think people doing the startups aren't afraid of failure. It is their friends, families, and community that might not view taking a risk as an intelligent move. When I was discussing the side company that I was trying to start I was immediately dismissed by a few people. I think their mindset might still be in the brick and mortar style of business. Some people might take that negatively while others embrace it as a challenge. I'll show them!

One other thing that I've noticed is that there is a certain energy in some cities that I haven't found in St. Louis. There is electricity in San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, New York, and London that isn't there. One that feels to me that maybe the person sitting at the table next to you in the coffee shop might be a great connection. That you're always one chance meeting away from a great opportunity.

I'm not sure if Chicago is like this but many people in St. Louis (well into their 30s) still form opinions based on what high school you went to. In fact it often the first question out of their mouths after introductions. With my background I find that custom weird if not unhealthy.

Also, it does seem to me that people as a whole do get married earlier there than on the West Coast. At least among the people that I have met. Having a family and doing a startup is tough (particularly if it is on the side of a 9-5 job) but people make it work.
Buy at the market peak. Genius.
Who Makes All The Money on Wall Street?
Kirill Makharinsky on Startup Research
A play on Indian IT offshoring & how it works (rather doesn't)
Yes, it's a common opinion (I quoted Schneier on it downthread).
Transcoding is still expensive for video, but not for audio. There's certainly some cost to transcoding all the world's MP3s, but given that a single modern CPU can encode and decode audio at 100-500x realtime, it's fairly small.
> For example, why not buy a few suppliers?

Antitrust regs.
> they're not going to sue me if I get them elsewhere.

But that's a potential sale lost. You're stealing that potential revenue from your local grocer and deserve to be punished!
>the lack of censorship in the android marketplace was always the biggest reason I supported Android //

So you support Android only as far as they allow the undesired exposure of users to hardcore porn or shock imagery? That seems a very strange line to take.
If you are a job hunter, you should know the answer to this because you've already thought about it.

I usually start a job hunt with a spreadsheet so I can track progress and also scoring along my key metrics. When I get asked questions similar to this, I reveal that I have thought about this deeply and discuss my criteria and how I operationalize things like "good coworkers". So far, the reaction to this revelation has been quite telling about the person on the other side of the table; I have gotten everything from disbelief to disgust to admiration. The marginal cost of being organized (and combatting things like recency bias or charisma) is minuscule compared to the marginal gain.
Yeah, that's a good point. But even a billion dollars wouldn't put it out of their price range. I'd also imagine they could drum up serious public support by offering to give everyone free cell service, and maybe squeak out a legislative discount.

But I guess it's all a pipe dream anyway.
I think it seems overly pedantic or something. I could also be imagining things.
Wow. It shows current date. And a couple of ads. Bravo.
I really don't think that is true at all.
I've used JPlayer for some personal projects (e.g. https://github.com/pfarrell/pshare3). It's very easy to setup and use. I haven't gone as far as creating my own skins, but since it's all jquery and css, modifying existing ones is a no-brainer.
My favorite interviewing question is: When was the last time you used your skills/ability outside of a work context to make your life easier?

I feel like it's important to have people who think practically about the kinds of problems they feel like solving and whether they actually make an attempt to solve them. There's nothing wrong with leaving work at the office but we tend to look people who are extremely passionate about technology in general, not just people who use it as a paycheck.
Totally Tumblr, wait til that crowd get their keyboards on this!
Conversely, is Google Images porn? I suspect Google would respond along the lines of 'no, though it can be used to find a variety of material including adult material'. Much like the Reddit app.
> They show people blowing their head off with a gun in the afternoon news while children are watching, but omg, a boob or even worse a nipple they go crazy!

http://i.imgur.com/SRa6U.png