skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Knowing when to dissolve a "previous business" is really hard. And it's even harder if you don't have formal or semi-formal arrangements in place from the start. You get to what is effectively (to you) a new business, and the early founders, now no longer involved, can start saying - "But part of that is ours."

You asked:

" ... why on earth is there a stringent corporate structure
and equity doled out years before there is even a concrete
idea or tangible business?"

... and I answered. You have it to avoid the problems of not knowing what everyone else believes. Formally dissolving the previous business would have been the right thing to do, but even then, having the formal structure definitely helps.
Hmm, I should send him pictures of the guts of my ASR-33 a "real" teletype, aka tty. :-)

And for the record it is much safer to pronounce it 't-t-y' rather than 'titty' as one professor at school was fond of doing. I was in the unfortunate situation of being in a meeting to analyze image data where he said "Ok, everyone grab a titty and lets get to work." Sigh.

According to Gordon Bell, one of Digital Equipment's top engineers, originally the consoles that computer companies first built used typewriters from the typewriter companies. Unfortunately the typewriters were found to be unreliable as they were not designed for continual typing. So they took a "cheap" teletype from Teletype corporation (which had made Teletype machines that ran 24/7/365) the model 33 and used that. Even though it was the 'cheap, lightweight' version of a Teletype it was 100x more reliable than the typewriters it replaced. Only IBM stuck with their Selectric typewriters as consoles (but they were the manufacturer of the Selectric so they could beef them up accordingly, and they could change the font with a type ball).
You are certainly entitled to give up whatever equity you like, and perhaps you are a better man than me for not feeling you deserve such a minor stake. If you feel you did the right thing and fully comprehend the situation, it is not my place to challenge your decision. I'm only expressing my thoughts, and my feeling that this is not the way to handle pivots with former co-founders anymore than it is a way to handle pivots with investors.

I don't know how long and hard you worked, how related your work was to the ultimate direction, whether you participated in early fundraising, advised the continuing founders, etc. All of those could impact my thoughts on this. Going on the assumption that you worked long and hard - you contributed to the ultimate direction and team and you earned something.

"Pivots" are all the rage in startups these days. Why is it any more acceptable to ask for vested founder shares to be returned than to ask for shares to be returned from early cash investors or advisors? Does YC return shares to founders who pivot after leaving YC?

I think it can be fair to renegotiate stakes according to impact, as it appears you did to get down to 0.5%, but eliminating clearly earned stakes entirely seems rarely justified. Re-incorporation makes sense in many cases, but in others will open the new company to accusations of fiduciary violations largely for the same reasons.
That's true, although most of those businesses' founders also don't have much of a choice: they aren't turning down a 6-figure pizza-delivery job or eschewing pizzeria-angel funding to open their own pizzeria. They just don't have much of a choice but to open it on their own and try to scrape by, sometimes borrowing from relatives, living with parents, getting "free" healthcare in the ER, etc.

I think it'd be a much less attractive choice if you were in an area like tech where you do have the option of a well-paying job or funding, though. Lifestyle businesses are still attractive in tech, but only if you're somewhat better off, either coming from a better-off family, having already had one minor success on a previous business, or spending some time in a lucrative job / consulting career that let you save up a cash reserve. That appears to have been Steve Blank's route as well; he became a self-funding entrepreneur only after first having a few successful exits from funded companies.
That was my point. Everyday the first page my mother reads in her local paper are the obituaries. Next stop is the community pages to see who filed for marriage certificates and divorces, followed by the high school sports and maybe the front news section if she has time.

I get phone calls from her because so and so that was in my high school class had a baby or was picked up by the cops. It's never to discus the latest city council meeting.
Windows does this already for games that enable it. Turns off desktop effects when it goes full screen, then reloads it when the game exits.
he got booby-trapped
His comment is a famous paraphrase meaning the technical challenge alone and the fame it brings may be enough motivation for some.

The initial jailbreaking is just the door opening that enables useful applications to emerge.
What cryptographic flaw was exploited by Flame to get it signed by Microsoft?
Flame Malware Spread Via Rogue Microsoft Security Certificates | The Hacker News
Eh, I just think the service read it later type apps provide has been commoditized. I have used pretty much every one of this kind of app. They all do the same, relatively unimportant thing with about the same level of polish. In the words of Jobs, it is a feature (of future browsers), not a product.
I believe Steve Song's wonderful Village Telco project is about doing just that -- creating a low-cost wifi mesh to share connections. It certainly deserves a mention here!

http://villagetelco.org/
Have to agree with this. Fun socks for $11/month is cool, but only if there's an option to get socks that fit my 14EEEE feet.
Yes, you can call it a computer but you could also call it a heap of atoms - both statements are true, but they are pretty much both just as useless to describe what an android device really is.

I disagree -- knowing something is a computer is knowing that it can be virtually infinitely repurposed. "Computer" is an entirely different kind of thing from anything else, regardless of the form it takes.

[quoted from another post] You guys are completely missing my point.

Don't mistake disagreement for obtuseness.

Also, this thread is too long already, but I wanted to mention the philosophies that seem to be driving our respective arguments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology
On a completely different note, I think this looks fantastic. There are so many javascript frameworks out there but none of them have really approached the cleanliness and simplicity of rails so I've been reluctant to pick them up - this is definitely the closest I have seen. I will give it a shot for sure - props to the authors on good work!
> will run most of the apps that I run on OS X

Good for you.

> I'd be fascinated to hear your argument as to how Windows is less general purpose than OS X

For me, at least, it's a pain to develop software on Windows. If I did Java development, it'd be relatively painless, but having to rely on Cygwin to have an environment that approximates the servers that will actually run my code is very suboptimal.

Don't think I'm a slave to OSX - I'm not, but I'd have a very hard time being productive in an environment that's completely alien to the software I write. Actually, for work, I prefer Linux, but a Mac is fine. And I can play with Xcode and iOS development on it.
This is (almost) exactly what Goatfish[1] does, except it uses SQLite, and can create SQL indexes on any arbitrary field. I needed a schemaless, embeddable store, so I decided to go with that, since Postgres already has the hstore. It's still very simple and preliminary, but it works, and it's very useful for prototyping.

I'd like to develop it some more, if people found it useful and started using it.

[1] https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/goatfish
Conduct Browser-Size Analysis Within Google Analytics
Show HN: Color Code Your Twitter Feed - Chrome Extension
I concur. It's much easier to plug in functionality and DB objects into a finished UI/UX than the other way around. Also, it allows the hacker to just work on the core functionalities instead of worrying about how their code is supposed to output to fit into an unpainted canvas.

Obviously if you're working on an API, this doesn't apply - but you'd be surprised at how fast the hacking sprint can get when you know exactly where to plug your code into.
It depends on what you intend to run. If you want to run either Visual Studio or Xcode, they are completely different machines. Both machines will run Office and a browser if that's your thing.
Coreboot is a good thing, but it's going to be hard to succeed without hardware vendor support, and that will be hard to build unless people actually want the product.

I work for a VAR. Our preferred vendor was one of the first to market with motherboards that expressly supported Coreboot. We're supporters of OSS, and so are our customers, so we figured that they'd be popular.

We sold only a handful over about two years. Our competitors didn't seem to have much more success, as our vendor didn't continue the experiment into the following motherboard generations.
I don't know what their definition of "soon" is but if they are talking about Brackets then they better get crackin'. Brackets has a long way to go.
I'm talking about markets on the whole, not any particular business.

Let's say you have 5 players selling car tires. There are 1000 cars in the area, and only one brand of tire to buy. For the most part, these 5 players compete on something other than price, since the market is mature. They have 20% of the market each.

Let's introduce 3 new players into this market. They bring nothing new to the market per se, but by default they get some sales (maybe they are closer to the car owner's homes, maybe they have a hot chick at the front desk). Nothing major, let's say they share 10% of the market overall, and the 5 incumbents lose 2.5% of their sales each.

The incumbents panic and look to counter this threat, and one of them happens upon the fact that if you change the formula for the tire a little, you can get a 50% increase in performance and a 20% increase in lifespan with only an extra 5% in manufacturing costs.

Now everyone scrambles: Some into R&D, some into improving customer service, some into death. The overall value of this market increases, because of the 5% increase and corresponding price increase... inflation, if you will.

This innovation happened completely and only because of the dreaded saturation of the market you are complaining about. The quality of the noobies is irrelevant, since the incumbent did the innovation. Point is the innovation happened, and wouldn't have happened without the new entrants creating pressure through competition.
"Think: the ticking agent asking you if you are bringing bombs onto the plane in your luggage."

Actually average people would probably know enough to think "someone could just lie when asked - that doesn't provide protection".

To me "security theater" is doing things that seem to appear to lock something down in the eyes of an average uninformed person. Average is not Bruce Schneier or an 8 year old. It's a typical traveler who believes they are secure because they see checkpoints, have to take their shoes off, and have to have their laptop scanned.
> Work with people you like and trust, and focus on
> building a product, not on what your "stake" is.

Sounds great, until there's money involved, and people have different opinions about what their holding should be. Shares and equity is the proper way of keeping up front and above board everyone's understanding of who owns what.

> We have laws in this country to prevent people
> from getting screwed.

Take it to court and only the lawyers win.

> It was only through the honesty of these other
> co-founders that they were able to steer away from
> real trouble.

No, it was working with people they like and trust, as you advocate, and having formal agreements about who owned what, that enabled them to understand the position and negotiate openly and cleanly.

> Those co-founders could have given up nothing
> had they so chosen.

Correct. Imagine, then, how much messier it would have been had those co-founders claimed that they owned 30% each.
If X is the number of different characters your password can contain then the total number of possible passwords exactly 8 characters long is X^8.

The number of passwords that are less than 8 characters long is X + X^2 + ... + X^7 which is significantly less than X^8 for large X.

So your point is even more valid.
Are your dashes masquerading as underscores?
Most advanced visual programming systems I'm familiar with can't be properly read or manupulated by anyone except even tinier minority of people who specialize on working with the particular system.
Sure, I understand the idealized theory; it just doesn't match what actually happens in most complex systems (take fluid flow, for example, where increasing pressure increases flow rates... until a critical threshold at which flow becomes turbulent). I don't think markets are well-understood enough to apply this idealized theory without empirical evidence that assumptions aren't violated. It's not a priori clear to me that there don't exist situations where increasing market participation leads to decreased market efficiency as friction effects or internal market dynamics start dominating.
Very good advise.

Also, keep a text file open and document each step with notes, urls and all the terminal commands you've used.
A family of three can get reasonable health insurance for $500 / month depending on how comprehensive you want it and how low you want your deductible.

I see middle class Americans blowing their money on $30,000 vehicles they don't need, and running their credit cards bills to the moon at 10%+ interest rates.

People have forgotten that health insurance was never designed to cover sore throats. It was designed for catastrophic coverage. Not to be used when you sprain your ankle, but when you get cancer.

When I was 25 years old I was able to get a very good HSA for close to $100 / month. It had a $2,000 deductible, and was not to be used for a stubbed toe, it was for a severe health scenario (thus the "insurance" part, just like car insurance, designed for serious accidents, not a rock chipping your paint). The HSA paid into a tax free account that could cover things like a stubbed toe (tax free so long as it was properly used for health related items).

A smart phone contract for three people will put you at $175 to $250 depending. DirecTV is commonly $100 / month if you want much on the setup. Look up how much your typical family can save by not eating out.

It's not far off at all to say that a family of three can save $750 to $1,000 / month by driving cheaper vehicles, living in small homes, dropping the crazy cell phone plans, dropping the hyper expensive DirecTV plans, and not eating out. Oh but of course that's unreasonable, that people not live beyond their means.

The average white middle class male in America earns $60,000 per year. That person and his wife can EASILY slash enough out of their budget to pay for health insurance. EASILY.

The whole point is: Americans have been extraordinarily irresponsible over the last 30 years. Instead of saving, they've spent themselves into oblivion. Affording health insurance is trivially easy for the middle class, but they've chosen not to be responsible. Previous generations didn't make the same stupid fiscal decisions. They bought cheap vehicles and homes half as big, and didn't use credit card debt to live.

The only legitimate argument for socialized medicine is for poor people and scenarios where someone has a pre-existing condition.
Github is not a rich web app for me. See Google Spreadsheets to figure out what a client-side framework should be helpful for.
> We have laws in this country to prevent people from getting screwed. Work with people you like and trust, and focus on building a product, not on what your "stake" is.

The most important reason to negotiate equity early is not to avoid people getting screwed, but to avoid fundamental equity disagreements from screwing everyone.

Even if you like and trust someone, this does not mean you have compatible beliefs on equity or vesting.

If founder B joins founder A, and they move forward with founder A's idea, it's quite possible that years later, when they decide to raise money, founder A will insist that he deserves 90% of the equity, while founder B will want 40%. You'd also be surprised how much people's attitudes and allegiances can change when heavy hitters enter the picture and large amounts of money are at stake.

Laws will not prevent you from getting screwed if you don't have any contractually established rights. If you sign an assignment of IP for your work to a company, you can't later sue for equity to avoid getting "screwed."
A similar stunt is attempted with the "job hopping" accustation in the NYTimes post the OP was replying to.
Created this simple Chrome Extension to color code tweets on twitter.com. Feedback is very encouraged!

Use: Hover over a tweet and press a number 1-9. Each number has a color assigned to it, and all tweets from that user will be highlighted with the number's color. Press 0 or click the icon in the address bar to toggle highlighting on or off.

I personally use it as a sort of replacement for Twitter's horrible list functionality. I color friends one color and news another, and when I'm bogged down with unread tweets I can skip the less important ones.
I am not sure where you think the community has "nobody is up in arms about it at all".
Most of the biggest complaints about Apple is their locked down approach to hardware/software integration. Yes, you are right, nobody is complaining specifically about apple not allowing android on iOs devices, mostly because the desire is not there based on the expense of the apple hardware compared to android based phones.

The desire from an MS perspective is that the hardware can be acquired significantly cheaper than other devices.

As a whole, you will find that the community is opposed to locks in general, whether defining it as OS level or application level (ios jailbreak). Overall the consumer prefers open platforms over closed.
Joosy seems to be missing real 2-way data binding of Angularjs/Knockout.js/Serenade.js/Batman.js, even if it can automatically re-render views.
Looks like it still keeps the boilerplate to a minimum though and a great option for Rails devs though.
That's really weird. AFAIK, hardware support for Linux is excellent on Atom chipsets. What brand was it? Mine uses the N270 and tops at 1.5 GB of RAM and won't deal with dual screens side by side (two of the reasons to switch to the i3)
I liked using Picplz too, and it was free.
Warren Buffett Taking on Facebook
Within the constraints of a hackathon-type scenario, in general I would hypothesize about the expected user interactive results (the experience) model my data, establish the basic CRUD and wrap the UI around that, tailoring the experience to what the actual user outcome will be. If you do it in the order listed in the post you'll end up spending too much time with a UI and later having to model the data around it. That's backwards.

tl;dr: hypothetical use case, data model, CRUD, UI, test for results.
I use GitHub and http://www.digitalocean.com (cloud hosting) to deploy my RAILs applications. Super fast and simple. :)
NBC is your DNS Ready for the Olympics?
I still have WebObjects 4.5.3 on my home machine installed (Windows XP). It's basically OpenStep for NT (YellowBox?) - it kind of works, but I haven't done much in it.

WebObjects 5 moved fully to Java.
The Yellow Box lives on in a way; Safari for Windows is very much based on a Cocoa runtime for Win32.

Safari even ships with some obviously named DLLs which can be used to link basic (non-UI, mostly) demo CoreFoundation-based apps out-of-the-box with the headers from OSX dropped into mingw.

I was trying to reverse-engineer the Safari DLLs enough to make GUI apps work a few years ago, but a combination of shifting priorities and a cease-and-desist letter from Apple led me to pursue other things instead.
Please educate me.

From a 1980s perspective, what is the difference between having a smartphone and being a cyborg? With some consumer electronics I can do most stuff Steve Mann could when he was at MIT.

(One difference is that the cyborg would have even bigger problems with battery time. Also, I ignore medical implants and military level stuff. I'm happy as long as I don't need either.)

Edit: The big difference is better controls with direct nerve connections? Hardly worth going under the knife for, imho.

Edit 2: Better vision is a good argument, but I just can't risk my work tools with a laser/knife/anything. :-(
Ever received a letter to the editor? Legal threat from a story you published? Had someone get fired over a piece you wrote and had to deal with the guy's family having to sell their house. These are extreme examples, but newspapers have support costs, too.
Oracle WTF: The Girl With The ANSI Tattoo
Our New Privacy Policy - You Own Your Data, and We Don't Sell It
I think it comes back to the idea of "jack of all trades, master of none." No matter what PhoneGap does, it will never do everything superbly, and sometimes (often, even, I'd say) the trade-off isn't worth it.

There's also probably an ego play, too. I see the "Objective-C isn't that hard. Learn it." argument a lot, but it does have a steep learning curve. For one, it's syntax is confusing if you don't recognize the brackets and messaging. Second, it's a lot closer to C than something like Ruby or Python, so you have to learn about types and memory management.
Why not use a hosted VCS, so you don't have to install it? Most free VCS hosts offer public-only repositories for free. However, a few, such as BitBucket, provide free private repositories. There are likely others too. I think this would solve your problem.
"Joosy interface was designed to get best out of CoffeeScript."

I think you accidentally a word.
I googled "latex track changes", knowing that for documents, people are more likely to call it "track changes" than "version control", and got this:

http://trackchanges.sourceforge.net/

http://www.peteryu.ca/tutorials/publishing/latexdiff

http://narnia.cs.ttu.edu/drupal/node/130

Seems like there are a few solutions.
The service is NOT provided for ARM devices.

edit: I'm sorry to see the child comment downvoted. I am under the impression that user key enrollment is disallowed, but I'm actually not seeing an mechanism by which Microsoft can prevent the signature of ARM based bootloaders.

That having been said, I don't completely understand ARM devices to know if it's plausible to sign an ARM bootloader with the MS key.

edit2: The person y'all downvoted is the guy who wrote the blogpost outlining the Fedora way of handling this issue: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12368.html
I wouldn't be too surprised to see Facebook stock head down the same path. If Facebook was trading at the same P/E ratio as Google, the stock would be worth $8 a share.
IE for XBox 360 and Kinect arrives this Fall
Half Cat, Half Machine
Well, we were talking about cyborgs. Hard to be cybernetic without also being electrical.
All the JavaScript and templating code should be reusable by other platforms with no effort. It's required for testing, optimization and being able to move from one technology to other easily. This is the challenge programmers should solve. There has been already dozens of very good client-side frameworks that let us create very cool UIs with no effort but none of them is still good enough since the core idea is bad.
Mayhem in the lab is productive
Can you share a specific example?
People go under the knife for improved vision. Better, faster controls may be worth it - a day in surgery and a couple of days for recovery in exchange for minutes, hours, days, weeks, years saved over the longrun.