skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His real name was on his Wikipedia entry for a brief period. At the time I confirmed with others that it was true, but then it was removed and hasn't been back since. I've not been able to find it with a casual browse (and I've forgotten it). This is all the more amusing since he wrote the foreword for my book :)
Clicky link: http://retailfans.com
Here's my initial concerns, reading your post and reading your posting on craigslist. You need avoid looking like a business guy with an idea (and without a clue) looking for a coder. I'd work very, very hard to avoid that because technical people will avoid you like the plague.

1. How many other team members are there? This is a website we are building, right? What are all these other people doing to earn their equity? Am I the only technical person? Be honest, how much would I -really- need your non-technical staff to build and run this site on my own?

2. Why am I not a founder? Why is this a "job"? Do I have a boss? Who is it? Why do I need one? Can I be fired?

3. If I am the only technical person, do I have full control of the technology? If I tell you that going with Ruby was an awful idea, are you going to listen? If you are, I really should be the CTO. If you aren't, then it sounds like I have a boss.

4. How much equity are we talking about? Do you think you can get a "coder" to build your website and add your features for a few % equity? Do you guys really understand how much you need a technical person? Or am I going to be viewed like an employee by a bunch of business guys with an "idea"? Are coders a commodity to you?

5. If I was taking an equity-only job, it would be for founder-level only. Anything else, in my mind, would be silly. If this is -not- the case, you need to make it extremely compelling and work very hard at avoiding all the pitfalls, because you are already fighting the most difficult uphill battle there is.

ETA: it took me awhile to write this, but even now, you'll see alot of posts by devs already "raging" against this concept as a bunch of "business guys" who appear to be severely underestimating and undervaluing technical contributes whilst simultaneously overvaluing their own contributions. If this is -not- the case, you have to work extremely hard because that's going to be the default position all technical people take.
Lets Go Deep - Is A. Rod A Monster That Was Created By Major League Baseball?
The requirements don't, however, say that growing and proving one's self will result in increased equity. In programming, usually you have a first job where you grow and prove yourself, and then go get a job for a significantly increased income.
Add ruby code to comments on my new blog
Not Comic Sans, but Zapfino.
I really loved the first half.

I'm working on my master's in Classics, with some Computer Science on the sly, and one of our requirements is a reading proficiency in French or German. When we're reading through paper journals in the library stacks, the thinking went, we'll need a knowledge of French or German to get through all the scholarship.

I can't see myself ever reading any journal articles far away from a computer with an internet connection to Google Translate, but academic requirements aren't changing as fast at the technology scene.

Fortunately, technology came to the rescue. There's a huge corpus of text segmented by domain, Wikipédia, so I just read various articles and refreshed my French.
I got a MacBookPro in part because it can power a 30 inch display. That configuration rocks: 30 inch + 17 inch laptop screen.

Rather than posting a how-to, I can summarize the instructions: plug in your monitor.
Thought someone here might find this interesting (if not, sorry!)

Disclosure: it is my blog, not trying to be spammy.
they have a lot more traffic than I expected
This guy obviously hasn't actually used xmpp in real life. eJabberd does really weird things to us when we throw 300-400k messages at it a day.

And this:
"XMPP servers, which are essentially make or break an XMPP application, are rapidly maturing beyond instant messaging."

Have he ever tried to actually debug ejabberd? Cause it's very painful and time consuming.

Now, I'm not bashing xmpp, it's pretty cool, but it's not exactly "the next big thing", IMO.

We're actually abandoning it for AMPQ.
Principles for Surviving Unemployment
You bring up a lot of topics worth debating, and I hope to answer a lot of them in detail at some point. Due to lack of time I'm just going to answer the direct OurDoings comment. We don't import from other sites. Hellotxt.com and ping.fm push to us, but that's what they're for. A lot of people upload using the Picasa desktop client; we don't import from Picasaweb.
This is exactly how I'm planning on getting my information taken down. It seems quite hypocritical of them to say in the same Statement (effectively): "All your Content are belong to us" and at the same time, further down the page, "We respect IP rights."

Let's see if they respect my IP rights.
Who's responsible for that moving part?
You should have some sort of contest to get more ppl to sign up and create content.
For example, the user with the most votes of the day wins X.
After Death Can You Return? - Will Magnolia Pull A Phoneix?
Can a webservice come back from the dead?
"The International Contact " - A Vehicle for Successful Business Transactions 
Is your company negotiating with an overseas customer or partner? Do you want a contract that protects your interests and intent without scuttling the deal?
Isn't that the whole problem with XML
For example, Windows can just one day destroy all your data without any consequences. Is it enough?
I can't afford it, but there's probably people out there who want to run 2 30" monitors with their MBP. And perhaps not all of them want a Mac Pro.
The Real Price of Flowers
"Kerr and Lincoln built algorithms that recognize likely foreign names on U.S. patent applications."

This doesn't seem very definitive to me.
Such lazy "arguments".
Apple already charges sales tax/VAT world-wide so there is no difference here.

The operator deal is very different, yes. Hopefully EU operators are not as stubborn as US operators and Nokia should have bigger influence on them, too.
If the guy is going to be your technology lead, and he's a founder, then he's clearly your cofounder CTO.

You might want to read this article I wrote on the subject of technology recruitment in early start-ups.

http://inter-sections.net/2008/09/03/technology-recruitment-...

If you don't have anyone on your current founder team capable of building the product, you don't have a start-up yet. This guy, if/when you find him, will change that. I suggest equal equity with you.
You click on the word "settings" on your homepage.
You're misreading my comment. "them" means those that support no-spec campaigns, not designers in general.

Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Keep in mind that Facebook's original V.C. Investments came from the C.I.A.'s "Advanced Technology Research and Development Venture Capitial" Arm.

Citation, please?
3. If I am the only technical person, do I have full control of the technology? If I tell you that going with Ruby was an awful idea, are you going to listen? If you are, I really should be the CTO. If you aren't, then it sounds like I have a boss.

And that boss is the CTO. If they're not qualified to be a CTO, then I would run.
The consensus of 1% of the scientists, when directly opposed to the consensus of the other 99%, is not very convincing, nor is their ability to convince laymen.
I worked with one startup on an equity only basis, and it didn't even finish getting started.

Here are some of my thoughts on what you're asking:

1. You are a startup that isn't even started yet. No matter how many pieces are in place, there are many opportunities for it to go wrong. Remember this when you expect someone else to invest into your vision. The risk/reward should be there.

2. Consider starting someone out working in a low commitment/low risk way. i.e. take someone with potential and pay them to do some stuff. This will make it easier to recruit this someone and give them a chance to find out how they like working with you and if they buy into your vision.

The startup I did some consulting for consisted of people I already knew and I felt they had a pretty solid model. Overall though it hasn't "started up" yet because they got in their own way.

3. Consider giving away equity for a very well scoped deliverable. With the startup I worked with, I took a small slice of equity in exchange for working with them to create a product functional specification and to deliver on that spec as-is. I liked this arrangement because it limited my commitment to them and they liked it because it tied my slice to a deliverable.

Overall it comes down to this: let them date you before deciding they want to marry you. Don't go on a first date expecting it to turn into marriage.

P.S. for your job ad, this analogy carries over there as well. Emphasize what you bring to the relationship and less about the expectations you have from them.

Good luck!
Original launch link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388226

A low key launch ! (Also looks like it was 72 days ago rather than 47)
Memory bandwidth, memory size, fill rate, slot type, SLI/non-SLI, DirectX support, HDR support. Certainly not a range from slow to fast.
Sorry, it's a holiday, so I'm geeking out on message boards bigtime to avoid actual work.
You realize, this is just going to increase the number of apps built upon Twitter... That may not be a bad thing.
In the US, downloading music , etc. is not a crime- it is a civil infringement. I think (not absolutely certain) that accessory laws in the US generally only apply to criminal acts, not civil infringements.
Uhh, dude, have a browse around the Corbis website. Then have a look around Facebook. The idea that Facebook has any value as a library of stock photos is frankly laughable.
I like the concept, and the price is on point so far as I can estimate, it's pricey enough to make good profit for you all, but low enough that some individual bootstrapping his campaign can afford it.

The site does a great job of telling me what you do, but not a great way of how you do it. Give me a breakdown of costs between some firm I might hire and using you guys. Etc.

I'm not sure I agree with your concept of a targeted web development app, since it's what I do for a living, but I wish you guys all the best.
Djbdns cache poisoning
if that is the case, then it should be clear in the job posting whether you are the CTO, software architect, lead developer or just an unfortunate code monkey at the bottom of the heap.
two have cratered, two are in the process of "working-out" and look promising if slow. one happens to be my own pet-project of many years, so i am the equity. never been screwed. you?
There are people around now who can legitimately claim 15 years professional web experience. This isn't the 1990s - the bar to claim to be "experienced" is as high as it ever was in the pre-web development world.
I've done it once, as a favor. It went nowhere.
A Look at the New Windows Mobile
I wonder if he expends too much energy on being Quirky.

He goes by a Quirky name, writes Quirky & Poignant guides, and responds to questions in a Quirky way. Overall, he's really quite Quirky.

He's unique and intelligent, we get it.

But for once, it would be nice to see him talk about something like a normal person.
"What IQ is good for" (not for avoiding most biases, it turns out)
The page history says that his last name might be Malsky.
Facebook's response: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130
What's killing the video-game business?
I think (from having tried it) that doing it as "a favor" isn't going to make the cut. One of the reasons my first two fail is that our team simply didn't have the dedication and wasn't able to find the sheer hour count to sink into the project.

I think one thing a lot of people on the thread are expressing is that if you want to join an equity project, you want to give it your all, because otherwise its not going to work out for you. And if you "all" is being rewarded with piddly equity (not founder status, not CTO), then ... well, you just aren't interested or aren't really going to give anywhere as near as much as you could.

The other crater was for other reasons.
IANAL, but a bank being taken into administration by the central bank is what should happen, rather than a huge injection of taxpayer's money. Having said that, if the taxpayer is going to do that and isn't getting equity (and wiping out existing shareholders, they knew the risks, yadda yadda) then something has gone badly wrong.

The perfect bailout (assuming one was to happen anyway) would have been to refund everyone a year's income tax. The money would have gone into the banks via people's current accounts, and the rightful owners of that money, the taxpayer, would have maintained control of what's theirs.
Ask HN: What do you use for web-based product demos?
What do you use for live, collaborative, web-based product demos? I like the features of Adobe Connect and Web Ex, but not the price tag. freeconferencecall.com offers voice-only conference calls, but I'd like the ability to visually and collaboratively step someone through my product. Any suggestions?
So there's no way you could just use Cocoa? Maybe it's not tinkery/Free enough? :)
If you skip the middle bit, do please at least read from But what do violent video games have to do with educational software? to the end, where you will find a very worthwhile discussion of what makes good vs. bad educational software.
The U.S. like any country, needs to look for ways of attracting talent. Sadly, migrating to the U.S. is very hard and it can take many years. I know people who have been waiting for more than 10 years. You cannot make any life plans with that type of waiting.
He might as well be a group of people - sorta like Aristoteles or Homer (the greek one, not the Simpson)!
:-/ Insults aren't appreciated when I'm posting a question about how to make sure we're offering value to people. Unless this became digg when I wasn't looking, and insults are cool as long as they're funny?
Pirate Bay founders offer defense in Swedish trial
My constructive advice on how to offer value to someone you bring on as a key developer is, pay them.

What's the range of equity you were thinking of offering this person?
_why is an ARTIST!
I wish the interviewer asked what he thinks about calling software engineering - and the classic 'building bridges' comparison... :-)
There should definitely be a way of re-submitting articles... the fact that only one person upvoted this story before it came off the "new" page isn't right.
For one consulting project I outsourced logo design to 99designs.com with a $300 "contest" and was absolutely blown away by the quantity and quality of submissions. I got probably a dozen out of 80+ submissions that would've been perfectly suitable.
Don't we have too many normal people out there already, saying the same stuff in their lookalike blogs...?
(or maybe _why IS one of those guys as well, uh?)
Cool site, interface, and idea, but their rate is surprisingly high for what they are offering.
GoToMeeting trumps WebEx, I haven't tried Adobe Connect. The best thing about GoToMeeting is that it's only $49.99 a month for unlimited meetings per month. It can also record all users in the sessions, both VOIP and Phone. It can display multiple monitors (I have 5). It also has screen drawing, user manipulation, and much more. I personally find it to be a lifesaver and allows me to communicate and collaborate with our clients, and users in a whole new way. They also offer a free trial.

Note: I'm not affiliated with GoToMeeting in any way, just a very satisfied customer.
This is basically an anthology of three Paul Graham essays. If you're here, you've probably read the essays, and if you've read the essays ...
Viacom to shut off MTV music video API
I agree in that I don't think the interview contributed very much, other than to propagate his quirky reputation

But reading your comment makes it sound like that's all there is to him - it isn't. I found his book brilliant - the quirkiness in no way made it any less informative or useful, and only made it more enjoyable. I encourage anybody who hasn't read it, or who want's to learn Ruby, to take a look at http://poignantguide.net/ruby/

Since he's able to contribute/create/do as much as he does, I say let him do it in any way he wants. Apparently he finds it fun to create and preform a character.
A simple tip for those that run any kind of database:
Be sure to replicate them in master-slave (or master-master). And base your backups on taking a slave down for backups.

Hot backups only work for very small databases - even those that are based on LVM snapshots, tarsnap, innodb hotbackups etc. With big databases, you will be most likely IO bound and a backup will take your site down.

If you have lots of load and lots of data then re-creating a slave will require lots of downtime. For Plurk.com we have had a 4 hour downtime due to re-creating a slave, so be sure to run a master-slave setup and have fresh slaves replicated at all times (we have learned this the hard way :)).
His argument seemed straightforward.

He says that the government taking control of the banks isn't socialism. Instead it is a fundamental aspect of capitalism that when equity holders can't repay creditors, the creditors become the owners of the company. Due to the unusual structure of banks, the government becomes the owner. Even though the government ends up owning the bank it is not socialism because of the mechanism through which that occurred.
Zuck's Official Comment: On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information
I'm a hacker, designer and sysadmin who happens to be an entrepreneur because I'm unemployable at conventional companies. Having to go to an office at the same time every day is enough to pretty much drive me to kill.
assuming they get revenues/funding in the future.
Top Tips for Evaluating a Job
Do we know of any company that has successfully used hyper-local market idea to grow exponentially?
Did Deep Fritz use Shakespeare to heckle the World Champion?
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/nationalization-or-pr...
"Nationalization, or Pre-privatization?"

More discussion on the same theme.

'Bankruptcy could become, in effect, a massive bank recapitalization. Essentially, the equity holders are told, "Go away, you have been zeroed out." The debt holders are told, "Congratulations, you are the new equity holders." Suddenly, these financial organizations have a lot more equity capital and not a shred of debt! And all done without a penny of taxpayer money!'

That last sentence is a bit over-optimistic...
I'm convinced the budgets aren't necessary. The way major games are developed at the moment is just appallingly inefficient, and I see little indication that anyone is trying to do something about it.
Assuming your dataset or shards are reasonably small (<100GB):

1. Set up a replication slave on another server.
2. Periodically lock the slave while you back it up.
3. Copy files to 2 different secure locations.

This gives you consistent backups that do not interrupt production, as well as a hot copy in case of some catastrophe.
I wish people would say this more about other eccentric people. Some people aren't this tolerant with RMS for example...
Cocotron -- http://cocotron.org -- is a project that goes a fair way in that direction, although through source compatibility rather than binary compability. It's two things:

1) An MIT-licensed reimplementation of Cocoa (Foundation + AppKit + some CoreFoundation plain-C APIs)

2) A cross-compiler GCC toolchain that produces native Win32 binaries and installs into Xcode. (There is also some degree of Linux support.)

The benefit of this combination is that you can basically add a Windows target to an existing Cocoa project in Xcode and have it produce an .exe file... At least if all the methods used by your application happen to be implemented in Cocotron.

There's still quite a bit of the Cocoa API missing, but the amount of work already done is impressive -- and one of the really great things about Cocotron is that it feels so easy to contribute to the base frameworks. The Foundation and AppKit projects are clean of cruft, neatly laid out, and they are built as Xcode projects so there's no toolchain learning curve: if your favorite esoteric NSString method is missing, you can simply open Foundation.xcodeproj and implement it.

For me, Cocotron is cross-platform Objective-C that "just works". YMMV.
Do we only need virtual friends?
There is a world wide craze about social networking sites. There are as many variations as there are people with any kind of IT skills.

The question i want to ask is this:

1. Do we only need virtual friends? Are we going to give up on our real friends?

2. Ad revenue from social networks so far is not enough to provide organic growth. What is the future of these social networks as business if their ad revenues are not high enough to cover costs?
If you photograph someone, they don't have copyright in the photograph. [1] But if some copyrighted thing appears in the photograph, the holder of that copyright might have legal rights.

Moreover, the subjects of photos can sue you for invasion of privacy -- or, depending on how you use the image, slander. Property owners can sue you for trespassing. And, in some parts of some countries, there is a "right of publicity":

http://www.publaw.com/rightpriv.html

... which prevents you from (e.g.) taking a photo of a well-known person, Photoshopping your product into their hands, and using the result for commercial purposes.

The end result is that professional photographers, videographers, and filmmakers try to get signed release forms from every recognizable person who appears in a shot that is to be used for a commercial purpose. [2] The documented existence of those release forms is a major reason why stock photos cost more than your brother's photographs of random pedestrians on the street.

---

[1] Have I mentioned in this thread that I'm not a lawyer? I'm not a lawyer.

[2] http://www.videomaker.com/article/809/
Why This Recession Seems Worse Than '70s and '80s
It is hardly surprising that design agencies with huge hourly fees don't like sites like 99designs.com. But I won't be shedding a tear for them.

I am a bit more concerned about the fact that the vast majority of work on 99designs.com (much of it excellent) doesn't make a penny for the designer. I guess the designers know what they are doing though.
Red Hat and Microsoft Expand Server Virtualization Interoperability
What I was saying is not that law is common sense. What I was saying is that in many cases, law tries to reach the same conclusions as common sense by other means. IE try to mimic common sense.
Your editorial efforts are appreciated. ;)
How is this different from Upcoming?
Amazon charges pretty much the same rate too
Was there something specific you'd like? The entire palette for the site or for specific parts? We'd love to hear more about what you think would improve it. Thanks for the feedback.
What Do Sirius and Blu-ray Have In Common? (Hint: Nothing Good).
I think it'd be really interesting seeing the ethical implications of having such a clear example that the difference between humans and animals is only a matter of degree. Which is a neanderthal? What would their rights be?
Aha! Gotcha. Sorry, I misinterpreted some of the stuff I saw on signup.
Except they process CC payments at no additional cost, have a more streamlined interface, and give you access to millions of potential buyers.
Microsoft Goes Retail
Hack Your School (Work) Computer And Get Administrative Privileges
If you use computer at the work or at the school , you probably have a problems with administrative privileges. Most admins stop MS-DOS prompt from working, because it´s the best way to get administrative privileges. For beginning you must enable MS-DOS prompt.