skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Michelle's methodology here is great, except for the fact that she applied it without a goal number; in other words, she took the offer number and tried to "reconcile" it to the model. The mechanic of running your offer through a model to justify a counteroffer is a great one that more nerds should adopt, but she's missing an input: what does she want the model to say? Your goal as a prospective employee is to maximize the number.

The offer side of this post makes my head hurt though.

70k with .5% equity or
60k with 1% equity or
50k with 1.5% equity or
40k with 2% equity

This offer says that 1% of the company is worth $20k. The company is worth $2MM. Late note: this analysis is silly, see comments below.

Later:

Inputs:
- Employee’s market salary
(I used my current salary, plus bonuses)
- Salary offered by the startup
(I used my offer, plus benefits like rent subsidy)
- Company’s valuation
(I used $5M, the cap for Keen’s seed note)

No, it's $2MM, the CEO just told you so, right?

Frankly, an offer with a .5%->2% spread between possible equity stakes is a red flag. Those are wildly different equity grants for the exact same role.

Also:

Our expected net worth after a few years in our existing management positions was, by any practical estimation, the most financially sound outcome – and a very good one, at that. Even if things went great at Keen, with a big Series A or early profitability, we’d probably make less.

What does "a big Series A" have to do with your long term financial outcome? The A-round money goes to the company, not to your family. How many companies with "institutional" VC rounds fail? Answer: most of them.
I think you're right, but one quick note: there is actually an element of time pressure on Threadless; they print a limited quantity of each design (though popular designs are brought back as reprints). Also, they regularly (quarterly, I think) have $10 sales. T-Shirts are a crowded market, with some very strong existing players. It is an interesting concept though, best of luck to the OP!
Hopefully, they've also calculated the on-call response time for the tape operator making the drive in to work(or to put the console game on pause and walk over DC). Unless they've come a long ways, robot/library drive mechanisms/belts often need adjustment. Besides, someone has to pick up the LTOs that slipped from the gripper.
I was just speaking generally. I know nothing about this company apart from their self promotional material and ego shouting.
Did you miss the rent subsidy part? It was listed at $12K, so $1K/month. But lets step back from that for a moment.

$70K gross income. Lets say you put $2K into an IRA (no 401k) so $68K after that. Estimated federal tax is $10,592 [1], Another 6.2% goes to Social security so $4,340 [2], estimated state income tax (CA) is about $3,922 so rolling that up, $68K - $18,854 in taxes thats not quite $50K left over ($49,146) so that is about $4095 a month.

So if you're living on $4095 a month you're looking at spending $2K on a studio apartment [4] minus the rental subsidy of $1k making it $1k on the Apartment. Call it $500/month on food, $250 / month on subscription services (cable / phone / internet) and maybe $75 /month on rental insurance so maybe half your monthly on recurring costs. Leaving you $2K/month for dynamic costs. If you don't own a car (and I wouldn't recommend it) then you're basically able to move what is left around for things like the occasional furniture or clothing purchase. Going out to eat occasionally and saving for a rainy day. It should be possible to put away $500/month of that into savings on typical month.

The bottom line is I don't see $70K/month as 'pretty tough' :-) but I can certainly see it not giving you a luxurious lifestyle.

[1] http://www.calcxml.com/calculators/federal-income-tax-estima...

[2] https://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/COLA/cbb.html#Series

[3] https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2012_California_Tax_Rates_and_E...

[4] http://www.mynewplace.com/city/san-francisco-apartments-for-...
Good idea! Some things to teach...

HTML
JavaScript programming,
Practical SQL/SQLite usage,
Project Management,
Visual Studio .NET
Some things not to teach:

Don't do:
Numerical analysis,
Compiler design,
OS programming,
Real time coding
Connectify connects a bunch 'net connections, one is a phone
Because they don't add any value to the discussion in the downvoters' opinion.

I remember your comment (Y Combinator's First Batch: Where Are They Now? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4341770) and IMO it wasn't really related to the subject discussed.
OP also mentions $12k worth of rent subsidy. Not bad, I think.

I believe there's an implicit "keep up with the Jones" factor here. Surely there are plenty of non-programmers living with less than $70k in San Francisco.

In Japanese companies, you need to get to senior level (implying at least team lead but more likely project manager) to earn $70k a year. And it's not like Tokyo is a cheap place to live. I told a Japanese coworker that in the US new grads get U$70k right out of the school and he thought that was crazy.
ChromeOS releases a new apps list
Kornelius Tonyoi's status on the extraplay social network
5 reasons to Run Windows 8 on a Mac is via VMware Fusion 4 Boot Camp
Even so, she is getting rent subsidy which rounds out to be $1,000 per month ($12,000 for the year).

With that in mind, it's not hard to find a shared apartment for less than $2000 in SF/Oakland/Peninsula. Now if she wants her own 2BR or 1BR, sure she'll have to shell out more.
What are common database development mistakes made by application developers?

It is a question, an open question intended to provoke debate and teach about a subject, in effect it's a request for an FAQ. Now perhaps SO is not intended to be for that sort of question, and that is of course for SO to decide.

I suppose the reason many people come to SO to read questions is that they'd like to learn about a subject area, and the reason many people come is write answers is that they'd like to teach a little about a subject, and this sort of open-ended questions offer the opportunity for someone to answer questions the asker didn't even know they had - like should I add an index to my db, if so when? Should I use natural keys? etc. To in effect tell them to unask all those questions they would otherwise have asked in groping their way to familiarity with the subject. It functions as an FAQ for that particular subject, to prevent beginners from making the same mistakes/asking the same questions over and over.

So that sort of question can be very useful for someone starting out, for the kind of person your site targets. Maybe that sort of question belongs on some other site though, a sort of training site rather than a question/answer site, or maybe SO should just expand to encompass that sort of FAQ function?

I'm not so convinced that for this category of question there is a clear line between 'db x breaks when I do y, what should I do?', 'Do I need to use db transactions in db x?', and 'What are the common db mistakes?', and that one sort of question/answer is rational, and another narrative - is the division really that clear? Are there not many many borderline questions which solicit opinion (of someone who knows more about the subject), and yet are useful for others too? Are not many of these smaller 'science-in-the-small' questions actually answerable in many different ways, each of which may be somewhat valid and none of which is actually 'right' in some categorical way?

For example this question, which is equally open-ended, remains open (rightly so I think as it could be a useful discussion :)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327199/what-will-we-do-af...
$150,000+ Epic Flash Game Contest
My very first criminal act of hacking as a teenager was gaining access to a printer somewhere in Spain, by which I had limited access to the rest of the network but I was too dumb to understand what to do.

So yeah, printers at least were a big gaping hole in the late 90s and early 00s.
Why green energy startups are now 'toxic'
According to cpubenchmark.net the Nehalem Core i7-920 in (from November 2008) mentioned in the article has about half the performance of the Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K released in April. In 2004 the best we had was Pentium 4's which were around 8x slower than the i7-920 that came 4 years later.
Marine cloud brightening
Practice is indeed something to be encouraged. Practicing to the test is no better than teaching to the test though. It's fine if there are no outside consequences like job offers, certificates with a score behind them etc. It is cheating though.
I thought she mentioned it was a 4 year vesting for that equity, which means 1% = $80k. But then that values the company at $8M, which also doesn't match the asserted $5M.
Good point, our wiki is a backed by a mercurial repo, which is mirrored on bitbucket, and most people also have it checked out locally, so that if there was an outage that prevented us from viewing the wiki, we have other ways.
Social Patterns: The Communication Loop
Really like this analogy. I'm coming around to the metaphor that engineering is the fire and marketing is the gasoline.

Still not sure if it applies universally, but generally acknowledge it can be the catalyst for a great product to get widespread adoption.
Based on the ZDNet article linked elsewhere on the comments, this system does not use any tape at all. It is all commodity hardware and hard drives, pretty much in line with the design of the rest of the services from AWS.
If you're receiving a W-2 salary that's in the ballpark for your field, absent some other contribution (marketability of your name, unique and non-substitutable skills or rolodex) you're not a cofounder.
As someone else mentioned there was a $12k housing subsidy. Since she disclosed that she's engaged to the co-founder, and assuming they are living together, and assuming that he's getting a similar subsidy, they would have $2k a month which is doable for a 1 bedroom apartment. She's also got some expenses (food, internet, gym) taken care of so it is very possible.
Rent subsidy makes no sense to me. It's a fully taxable fringe benefit (at least in the US, if it's not for the benefit of the employer like at a mine), and basically the same as salary, but people don't include it in the salary calculation. It's just stupid for the employer to offer it instead of the same amount of extra income.
I'm not following how you're drawing a 4x valuation from vesting, but I'll admit that my head is in an SSL3 negotiation bug I'm grappling with while posting, so maybe I'm crazy.
The Telit module is fully on the internet just like your PC. The module can do GET's and POST's directly to any server - no extra host needed anywhere.
Not totally true, you have to pay for retrieval for 1GB and upwards per month: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/#pricing as well as 5cent per upload/retrieval request.
That's a heck of a cool idea, nice job! I visit a lot of t-shirt sites and my first thought was "Very clever!" which doesn't happen that often. :)

My only problem is that I already have enough of a t-shirt buying habit that spending $25 per shirt isn't going to happen very often, especially when I don't know the quality of the shirts. You might add more detail on the actual shirt quality and fit.

The email collection line on the homepage doesn't make it clear what kinds of emails you'll be sending. If it's a weekly (bi-weekly, whatever) showing of the new shirts I'd say something like 'Sign up for our weekly new shirt email' so it's more specific.
Thanks yo! I just wore my UHack shirt the other day at the Red Sox game and a couple Hurricane alumni gave me a high five.

Had a great time.
I'm a writer and editor. I've done marketing and financial writing, and the job I'm starting in two weeks will require me to do technical writing. I've also started learning to code, because I'm interested in it and because it's an important part of how important systems in the world work.

There are common attitude problems on both sides of the the technical/non-technical fence. From the non-technical side, there's a sense of unfairness, that people with the interest to pursue technical subjects are guaranteed 80k/year jobs right out of college, that they are stuck-up and dismiss the ideas and opinions of people with fewer credentials, etc. Like most stereotypes almost none of that is true. My coder friends are some of the most generous, respectful people I've ever met. It's much harder even for someone trained in CS to get a job than it looks from outside. HN is largely technical--you know that there are reasons for how technical people behave even when it might seem strange to outsiders.

The most common mistake I see technical people make about non-technical people is in the area of algorithms and specifications. To but it simply: in a lot of disciplines, there aren't any. The common misunderstanding is that there are formulas you can use, or rules you can follow, to get the result you want in non-technical disciplines. There are huge numbers of artifacts in the world that aren't empirically measurable. Take a pair of jeans and say, "Is this OPTIMAL?" The question is as nearly meaningless as makes no difference. Look at a wedding bouquet, or a corporate event, or a logo. The people who make these things are constantly making choices informed by their education, experience and perception, but those choices aren't based on data that's easily quantified. At best, you start to notice patterns that work and patterns that don't work, which is something that I think can also be said about software development.
Thank you for giving a little bit of reputation for our trade of skills around here :)
I think most of the time "new computer" means new motherboard. Which, if you change the motherboard for any reason then it'll likely end up in a call to Microsoft. The last time I had to do that it was a fairly painless procedure other than having to write down numbers and letters from a recorded voice.
Twitter Bootstrap Tutorial and Code Samples
I thought about this, too. Git would be useful for a lot of different industries - not just programming.

Instead of rewriting git, why not give it a user friendly wrapper? Its performance is already incredible and you should be able to use that.
Let me state that for the record, I believe JSON is a fantastic data interchange format, especially when compared with the current state of XML.

However, the point you've touched on is exactly my gripe with JSON. I just might not know enough, which is completely adequate, but afaik all the JSON schemas are either extremely complicated (I'm looking at you json-schema) or way too simple (jschema).

When working with service oriented architectures and if you're following the principles of RESTful architecture, discoverability and HATEOAS become central to your service. That means that the API needs to be self-documenting.

How does one do this with JSON? Essentially, if you boil the problem down, what someone would try to accomplish is "marking up" their JSON responses/requests. The irony is hilarious because this is exactly the job that XML was designed for.

It's obvious that the XML ecosystem grew way of control exogenously, but the core concept was very simple and was designed to solve this exact problem which I think the JSON ecosystem currently lacks.
been a while since I was in college, but nothing was better for studying than just taking practice tests,

if nothing else, MIT's OCW, and all these online classes create a vast library of practice tests, if I was in college now I would try and sign up for as many parallel classes as I could, just so I had practice tests to work through prior to my test for college
Wow, yes, please do! I've never used Arq, and at the S3 prices it doesn't make sense on top of my Dropbox. But with Glacier, I'd love to be able to back up my entire HDD off-site for $5/month, and Arq looks like a good way to do that.
kala ta pes dike mou.
the desktop PC market which was always -- I contend -- driven largely by gaming.

For the leading edge of the desktop PC market, definitely (advanced graphics cards, fastest possible processor, fastest possible RAM).

On the other hand, the broad center of the bell curve of the desktop PC market has been driven by office applications. These have never needed the high performance that the gamers demanded - users simply wanted something "good enough for Word, Excel PowerPoint, and email".
Y Combinator S12 Demo Day Batch 1
Sometimes even more. I know of recent graduate engineers at some of the bigger giants (like Facebook, Google) who get large stock options, signing bonuses, and a six digit salary... right off the bat.
For those who don't game or edit videos, this has been true for about 8 years. I retired my 2004 1GB RAM Dell desktop in 2012 and still keep it as a backup. The ever increasing speed of browsers and the shift of my work from the desktop to the cloud kept my system operating at the same speed it did 8 years ago - not blazing fast, but good enough.

I expect my Sandy Bridge replacement system to go another 7-10 years before I replace it.
This is really thoughtful. Thank you.
So, this is a really embarrassing question: is there a reliable guide for how to use these? I've been googling, (and DDGing and Ecosia-ing), but everything seems to be out of date. I don't have, for instance, a .Xresources file. At least not one that 'locate' can find.

Or do these commands go in .bashrc? or .vimrc? Thanks.
Official or not, most (and me included) would consider VN, Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I guess my contention is that currently, the US is not at war with any particular country, however, it is involved in conflicts in some and has military presence in others (tho not in active fighting). So I guess my main point is that calling it war is a stretch but I acknowledge that they'd go out of business pretty soon, if they just went by general convention of what "war" is.

Maybe an alternative ideas would be "conflict" food, that would enable them to serve food from ethiopia, india, tibet, afghanistan, sudan, colombia, mexico, phiipinnes, etc. and not let their fate rest on the possibility of peace.
If these are the type of students I'm thinking of, they really don't want to become computer scientists, or software engineers, even. They want to learn how to code so they can build stuff, namely web apps. I'm assuming that since they don't want/can't handle a theoretical program, yet still think they want to learn Comp Sci, they fit this description.

So I'd teach towards that:

1) an understanding of the technology stack for a web app
2) Javascript
3) Ruby or Python w/ Rails or Django
Your startup is not a startup, it’s just a website.
This doesn't directly have to do with this post, but I'm going to ask it anyways:

Can I use Freshbooks as a business accounting solution for my subscription SaaS?

If no, what is the current leading solution for accounting when it comes to recurring income? My accounting right now consists of csv file exports and excel sheets. Automating this somehow would be the bee's knees.
I've spent several hours reading about this and talking with colleagues, reading the (really great) HN threads on the topic and doing a bunch of math - and I've come to the conclusion that rsync.net/backblaze/tarsnap/crashplan probably don't have too much to worry about for _most_ use cases.

The wonky pricing on retrieval makes this inordinately complex to price out for the average consumer who will be doing restores of large amounts of data.

The lack of easy consumer flexibility for restores also is problematic for the use case of "Help, I've lost my 150 GB Aperture Library / 1 TB Hard Drive"

The 4 Hour retrieval time makes it a non starter for those of us who frequently recover files (sometime from a different machine) off the website.

The cost is too much for >50 Terabyte Archives - Those users will be likely be doing multi-site Iron Mountain backups on LTO-5 Tapes. After 100 Terabytes, the cost of the drives is quickly amortized and ROI on the tapes is measured in about a month.

The new business model that Amazon may have created overnight though, and beats everyone on price convenience, is "Off-Site Archiving of low-volume low value Documents" - Think Family Pictures. Your average shutterbug probably has on the order of 50 GBytes of photos (give or take) - is it worth $6/year for them to keep a safe offline archive of them? Every single one of those people should be signing up for the first software package that gives them a nice consumer-friendly GUI to backup their picasa/iPhoto/Aperture/Lightroom photo library.

Let's all learn a lesson from [Edit Mat, one t] Honan.
$15M won't be enough.
Cool idea, agree with the comment about regrettable purchases so I think you need to figure something out for that.

I think there's a lot of space to apply game theory / gamification in e-commerce. Still need to get a clear understanding on the regulatory framework for this.

Also, which fulfillment service are you using?

Good luck!
From a big data perspective, I'm pretty sure people were making do with CSV files before JSON came along. I think most practitioners would not subject themselves to stupid, stupid XML unless they really had to.
"employable computing skills "

I think this is a very broad statement even though not trying to undermine your question. The problem however with this statement is that it varies. Some people have mentioned HTML/JS etc. which are surely good but not all tech. related jobs need that.

Some things that I strongly feel should be part of every CS curriculum especially in the context of your question i.e. employability are following:

- Understanding real world projects and the lifecycle. This should include practical experience delivering software and manging the entire phase. Some universities already have a "software engineering" class for this.

- Related to #1, teach them the value of teamwork. No real world project can be done alone and the bigger the employer, more likely you will deal with cross matrixed teams (yea teach them what cross matrixed means :)

- Teach them about distributed computing and how software is deployed/managed in a large scale environment.

- Teach them that no one cares if you build cool stuff. People care about what problem it solves. It could mean anything from keeping your company/manager happy to solving real world client problems.

- lastly, tell them that whatever you learn now, you will learn a heck of a lot more when you are actually out in the real world and that will make you realize that you did not know anything. This does not however mean that the learning is useless but it is just the tip of an iceberg.
Primed caches? Faster access for their clients who use the cdn?
Huh? Nobody offers .5% equity to an "office manager" or "QA". She says in the post her role is "Director".

Michelle is an enterprise software consultant with an engineering background.
Neither of Apple's non-modular systems you mention are artificial. Upgradeable storage would require substantial additional room in a device that has no room. The Retina MBP's screen is glued together because it makes for a substantial thickness and weight savings.

Agreed. This is not some evil conspiracy of hardware integrators (led by AAPL) to make non-modular devices. This is a design tradeoff in a leading edge machine [1] in which upgradeability was deemed to be less of a concern than making maximum use of space and weight.

[1] You can't get a Retina MBP for less than $2200, making it a premium product for the laptop category.
Win2000 as well, that was my favorite for a long time. I eventually upgraded, kicking and screaming, because the Supreme Commander beta wouldn't run on Win2000 and required WinXP.

Fun silly fact, Win8 appears to be WinNT 6.2, go figure.
At this stage, I don't think it matters if Bob cheated because Udacity can't even verify Bob is actually Bob. It does seem strange that the post doesn't talk about the logical next step, physical testing centers that can verify identity, especially since Udacity already announced their first partnership (http://udacity.blogspot.com/2012/06/udacity-in-partnership-w...).