skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not how wealth perception works. Wealth is a relative substance. We compare ourselves to our peers to construct an image of our own success.

When I just moved to US I made less than 30K in my first year and I did not feel poor. In fact I made more that year that both of my parents combined. I also remember seeing a happy family at a parking lot near Lincoln Park in Chicago. They did not speak any English and they were all posing in front of a brand-new, shining red Toyota Corolla, laughing and taking pictures. It was probably their first brand-new car, very possibly an unthinkable achievement among their friends and relatives left in whatever country they were from. I am sure they felt richer at that moment than Paul does now.

I would like to re-phrase Paul's though, assuming I got it right. To westerners, who are already born rich by most standards, money most likely mean the freedom of doing whatever they feel like doing. PG mentioned it in his essays as the only driving factor behind programmers trying to make money - to set themselves free to work on problems they enjoy.

Thing is, you don't have to be rich to work on something that makes your life exciting. Joining a startup that fits your needs is another way of not wasting 2/3rds of your life while @work.

My personal pet theory is that most people, given appropriate education and development, are pre-programmed to work on something they love. This is precisely why so many Hollywood style millionaires like rock and movie stars end up dependent on drugs facing alcohol problems, etc. They never had any creative nuclei in them and had been working simply to put food on the table. And when they end up with more food that they can swallow, they literally go nuts: wealth can be dangerous, even life-threatening to unprepared.
According to salary.com, $60k in San Francisco gives you the same standard of living as $28k in St.Louis, MO. How does that compare to what you're earning right now? I'm guessing that it's considerably less.

Now, how much do you think the company will end up being worth? $10M? $50M? $100M? Divide that number by 2000 and that's what your annual stock grant could be worth -- in the above cases, $5k/year, $25k/year, or $50k/year -- but remember that you won't get that money until the company has a "liquidity event".

Is what you've calculated your potential stock windfall to be worth enough to balance out the fact that your salary will provide for a lower standard of living over the next few years than you're used to? There's your answer.
don't worry about making $60k. i'm 26, i've lived in SF for a few years, and i started bootstrapping my own startup earlier this year on a (post-tax) budget of ~$2400/mo, including a studio apartment and health insurance. i'm sure you can do better than me. :)
Thanks for the link, that's the best "demo" for i game I've ever heard/seen.
On the other hand, it allows you to write retrospective articles like this, in which you speculate about how your life may have turned out if you hadn't focused quite so much on grades.

Too bad these types of hypotheticals are wholly unrealistic. I think your standard straight A student (especially a straight A college student) would have a hard time not making straight A's. And it's really that quality (or personality flaw) that makes the grades completely irrelevant. How many C students were running a radio station and participating in the student government simultaneously?
Kratom does get you 'high'. It is a stimulant at low doses, but its effects strongly resemble codeine when in slightly larger doses. Kratom extracts are available everywhere from ma and pa merchants to ebay. These extracts can easily be made into a tea that feels a lot like poppy tea - a feeling I would definitely call 'high'.
I am not advocating anything here, just providing a little insight into how Kratom relates to 'high'.
If you really want to start "thinking with portal", search for the challenge maps

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MHC7Ld1oXaU
Money doesn't just give you freedom.

This whole question could be answered by answering: what are the basic desires of people? I can think of:

1. power

2. love

3. reproduction

4. glory

5. health

6. just wanting to feel good.

Not surprisingly, you can more or less buy any of those with enough money. Or at least make it 100x harder to fail.

However, I suppose that prestige or glory would be much harder things to buy.
from your previous posts I'm assuming you want to do audio capture.

I looked at this problem before and here is what I found:

Java

Pros: Free, hosting is not a problem, plenty of java programmers and resources in the world
Cons: Java Sound is still fairly primitive and obtuse imo, u must sign your applet to get permissions to record sound, users think java applets are so 90s

Flash

Pros: Seems easy and straightforward, good interface, users like it better than java
Cons: Expensive. Flash comm server which you need is thousands of dollars, hosting for it is also very expensive,
Sure. I guess all I am saying is that members of this forum and YC applicants are much more likely to be uber-hackers than your average corporate developer. It's not an overly meaningful statement, but I'm pretty sure it is true because of strong outliers like yourself.

If I had to pick 10 applicants for a software company and I knew nothing about them except whether or not they had accounts here, I would take 9 news.yc'ers and one other, just in case.
hey dude,

I'm a 20 year old guy in almost the same shoes as you, except I dropped out freshman year of college. $60k sounds cool, definitely a good net ~15000$ more than the $40k I am getting, but I have no idea what SF living costs are
( i live in a suburb of a small metro with 4 roomies for $300/mo ).

Do you plan on getting rich with them when you say "I'd simply like to find an interesting project and then really throw myself at it", or do you plan on starting your own thing? I've worked at 2 jobs (both enterprise; one was crazy hours and high pay when I was 19 (yup, red bulls all day), and the one I have now is very smooth at 9-5), and I can honestly say that I haven't found any truly interesting projects at either of them. If the answer is yes, and you think they have a good shot at getting rich within 4 years, the $60k should be a small factor in your decision.
Great advice. Being reactive instead of innovative is death in a startup.
IME, stimulants (xanthines, amphetamines, etc) in doses for which their effects are mild, tend to make me more productive while all other drugs (depressants, disassociatives, opiates and psychedelics) make me much less productive.
hmmm... $1900 a month.

Utilities:
Cell phone: $40-50 a month easy
Internet access: $60 a month
Other utilities? Electricity? Water? Garbage? $50-75
Food: $15 a day x 30 days a month= $450 (This is the low end. Have you been to Safeway lately?)
going out to eat twice a week for one month? $20 bucks a plate = 160
Cable? $30-60 a month. or $110 a month Comcast cable/high speed bundle.

So, the total for those utilities you're looking at 700-900 a month, unless you can get some of those bundled with your place.

Transportation: Car? $100 a month in insurance on the low end.
Car payment?: 300 a month (low end more for a new car)
Gas? $100-150
Parking???
To have a car, you're talking a total of 500-700 a month in expenses. It'll be cheaper if you take the Muni, of course, but then you have to factor in occasional cab rides and car rentals if you want to go out of the city.

So, just in expenses, you're talking $1100 - 1800 a month. That doesn't include clothes, any bills that you have to pay like credit cards, or school loans. You will probably have to fly home once or twice a year to visit mom and go to the required family reunion. If you're like me, when you're living on your own in a large city by yourself, you go out a lot more often, and eat out a lot more than twice a week. That also doesn't include emergency expenses like parking tickets, car repairs, a new laptop once a year, World of Warcraft subscription, new IPod, etc...

You could probably manage on 60k a year, but it's going to be really tight. And, if you don't watch out, those credit card bills will start creeping up in a hurry. That's all I'm saying.
Representative vignette of music industry history
As far as Flash goes there are a few open-source or free media servers out there. Red 5 is probably the most popular. A couple of the startups that went through Y Combinator have some experience with it. Justin.TV just went ahead and wrote their own...
The Turtles were one of the more successful 60s pop bands. But like countless other musicians, they got financially screwed. Admittedly they were responsible for their own bad decisions and the miscreants here were managers rather than labels, but I still think this story is representative of what the music industry has been and why it's a good thing that it's being crushed.
In San Francisco, it's legal to possess, but illegal to purchase.
I'm not. But I do my best and learn more every day.
"Love your work" is often just a way for startups and other small companies to extract unreasonable hours from you, with little payback.

I've done the startup thing. I've worked 9-5 er I mean 9-6, oh, wait it was more like 10-7:30. In the end, any job will require you to put up with things you don't like. Obviously, some jobs are a better fit than others.

I find the startup smugness naive.
Thanks for illuminating that -- I will make kratom's dual effects more clear when I revise my kratom description.
This was confusing as written, kratom is a rare drug in that it is a productivity enhancing stimulant that also happens to be an opiate. It has different alkaloids that do both, though the stimulating alkaloids haven't been studied very well.
I think he meant you shouldn't spend a lot of time thinking "Oh, I hope my competitor is not doing or thinking about doing <insert something you think would give them a big advantage over you here>".

I think some people use a strategy like: "Be good enough to eventually win over your competitors, but not good enough that they'll see you coming and decide to get serious at competing with you". I could see that happening at a startup trying to take control of a "secret niche".

I think that's an horrible strategy, it's like a glass ceiling artifically limiting your growth and progress.
>you have to be either drugged or insane to hack GCC's internals

I think that it is really funny that this is a logical conclusion you made.
60K seems like good money for an entry-level game programming job. I wouldn't count on any profit sharing or equity to be worth anything. If it is, great, but don't count on it.

The game industry is organized kind of like the music industry. Small studios are the bands to the publisher's record companies. Small studios (typically under-funded and over-ambitious) beg the big guys for money to work on projects. They often get screwed. Fight to get your name in the credits of any game you release. OTOH, many many games never get released.

Hm. Re-reading your post, it occurs to me that the startup may not be a game company.
https://www.gandi.net/domain/buy/search/ is a serious French company selling some generic and european domains.
You sound like someone who hasn't programmed much in a real-life scenario. Programming is far from being black and white as mathematics can be. From my own experience, programming is a mash of creative arts and psychology with a mathematics flavor . Most of the time, a programmer is just calling other people's API (which is unfortunate, in my humble opinion). So, what is the usual skill usage of a programmer?

50% Knowing the programming language you use and its libraries.
20% Communication.
10% Debugging efficiently.
10% Creativity and taste.
10% Algorithms and mathematics.

Of course, these percentages depends on what you're doing -- e.g., a programmer working on a numerical-analysis application will need mathematics much more often than the average web-developer.
There is a psuedo-empircal monetary value to enjoying life. Consider a thought experiment where you plot "free time" or "enjoyable time" versus "salary." Now consider a job where your enjoyable time is ~ 0, coal miner 100 hours/week, for example. How much would you need to be paid? Now maximize the other dimension, how much salary do you need to live, but have a rewarding and stimulating job?

For me, the numbers are like, $1M a year and $50K a year. This means that if I manage to maximize my enjoyment axis, I'm an enjoyment millionare. My personal goal in life is to be on the manifold that connects those two points.
It's clearly a very forced analysis, and, like you said, just drips with cliched, volumeless argument. That being said, I'm pretty sure it was posted with some degree of self-referential humor.

The idea of analyzing Valve games critically is pretty good, though. They're one of the few studios which makes games worth analyzing! I'd like to see articles like those.
Is being a niche language developer good for your career?
Right, and (speaking as a 26 year old with a doctorate in CS) what you've done is quite impressive for a 19 year old. But you have to compare this job offer to the other jobs available to you -- not compare it to the jobs available to other YCers (which is, in effect, what you're doing by asking what other YCers would do in this situation).
It says a lot about the state of open RTMP media servers that JustinTV's choice to write their own was absolutely justified.
We are using Flex for www.rocksolidarcade.com. It's the Adobe comand line compiler that outputs Flash files. Actionscript 3.0 is basically Javascript 2.0. You code it very much like a traditional application (or Java plugin), with any IDE and a command line compiler. The Flex SDK is free, but they've got an IDE based on Eclipse that is just too cool not to use, at least when 3.0 comes out of beta. That's about $500 I think, but the profiler is probably worth that alone (if you have funding). Alternatively, FlashDevelop is very good.

And frankly, even if Flex was $1000, the Adobe Flex IDE didn't exist, and the Flash IDE was free, I'd be using Flex. The Flash IDE for any kind of serious development is just horrible.

Hosting is a bit of a moot point - yes, you can get a Flash comm server from Adobe, but that's just an option, and an option you don't have with Java (though I know very little about the Flash comm server, you can do raw TCP in flash, so writing your own is definitely possible).
Dear author,

The Cake is a Lie.

Portal is revolutionary but not for it's gender roles. It's revolutionary for turning FPS into a puzzle game on crack. Go back and play with the developer commentary.

Look at me still talking when there's science to do...

:)
I disagree.

Having millions is different than living on a 30k income vs a 60k income.

Someone like him is in a position to do whatever he wants for a few years without worrying about rent, food, or any basic needs.
And if you change your example only slightly, you can break again most-people's mental-model of pointers:

#include <stdio.h>

void fn(char *s) {
printf("[%s]\n", s);
}

int main() {
char *s;
s = "hello world";

fn(s);

return 0;
}

And yet again:

#include <stdio.h>

void fn(int s) {
printf("[%s]\n", (char *)s);
}

int main() {
char *s;
s = "hello world";

fn((int)s);

return 0;
}

And back to a single char:

#include <stdio.h>

void fn(char *c) {
printf("[%c]\n", *c);
}

int main() {
char c = 'a';

fn(&c);

return 0;
}

The ugly and evil way:

#include <stdio.h>

void fn(char *c) {
printf("[%c]\n", c);
}

int main() {
int c = 'a';

fn((char *)c);

return 0;
}

And the obvious way:

#include <stdio.h>

void fn(char c) {
printf("[%c]\n", c);
}

int main() {
char c = 'a';

fn(c);

return 0;
}

It is not difficult to see why most people find pointers in C confusing.
The smarter students become aware pretty soon that grades are meaningless, and only care about them if they have a good reason to (scholarships, etc).

There's a middle ground of fellows like him, who are smart enough to get good grades if they work really hard, but think it matters.
I'm pretty sure that this has already been posted, recently.
LinkedIn API and New Homepage Drawing Near
Nobel Laureate Says The Internet Makes Us Dumb
You would think that the developers at apple would've come up with a simpler blockmove function first anyway. I guess they discovered the same thing you did, and got rid of the bottleneck in a clever fashion in the next step.

Way to reinvent the wheel!
Thanks. I think i can start with Red5.
"from your previous posts I'm assuming you want to do audio capture"
Yep. Capture then push to the phone.
I have used flash with red5 with no issues (so far). I use the flex compiler.
"I majored in English Literature and minored in Communication Theory."
"If I could do it all over again, I would spend less time in the library and more time at parties"

Man, same regret here.
It gets high reviews from Slashdot also:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/03/0353231
Mob Rules (The Law of Fives)
Her speech is not anti-internet; it is pro-literature. The one egregious line Techcrunch quotes was supposed to be funny.

This paragraph is the real point she makes about the internet.

>What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"
When tech goes wrong
Money is nice, that is true, but freedom comes from the inside. Many rich people are still slaves.

Also, more money doesn't always mean more freedom. Most people simply dig in deeper when they get a little more money. They buy a bigger house with a bigger mortgage, fancy cars, and other expensive junk. Then they're really hooked.
Money is nice to have -- did I say otherwise? Or are you arguing that there ISN'T more to life than money?
San Francisco is awesome compared to Missouri. Unless you're a real down-home homebody type - then it may be your worst nightmare. ;-)

$60K is great for 19. As usual there are a bunch of people talking about how it "isn't much for the bay area." But - ignore them. Most people outside of the tech industry in SF don't make $60K, and they get by. Most 19 year olds are making $7/hr, part time.

How to live large on $60K in SF:

- Don't rent your own place at first. It is better to live with roommates. You can rent a room for $600-$1000, depending on how nice of a place you want and what neighborhood you're in.

- If you are working in the city, don't bring a car.

- If your job is in the city, don't live outside the city. Commuting costs aren't too bad, but if you live somewhere far out, like Berkeley or down on the Peninsula, and have to work late, you will get stuck covering a huge Taxi bill from time to time.

- Learn to love cheap food. Burritos, Pho, Bahn mi, pizza slices, etc.

- Being 19, you're too young to go to bars, so you will automatically save a lot of money on the weekends...

- Craig's list, Chinatown and IKEA for all your house stuff

- Costo, Trader Joe's for groceries and sundry items

It should be pretty fun.

I moved to Manhattan when I was 19. Manhattan was and is still way more expensive than SF. I only made $55K, and I managed to save about $10K my first year there, and I went out and did random stuff all the time.
I can make a forced analysis of System Shock 2. Starting also with the broken pseudo-maternal AI that guide you through the first half of the game before spoilerspoilerspoiler.

Within my limited experience with talking to artists and poets, I don't think artists deliberately set out to include specific symbols inside a work. Too much left-brained stuff. Which I find funny as a deconstruction essay requires you to spell out exactly what it is you are talking about. Kills the mood.

Yet most artists that are any good at their craft easily tap into something that hits you in the gut. I think Portals is one of those games. I have not played it, but I bet it does mess around in your head in ways beyond just messing with your sense of space-time. I wasn't too hot on playing it, however, after reading the article, I want get a copy now.
As a computer science major, I've learned more of the material for my coursework on the internet than from the actual class. Maybe that says something about the course, maybe that says something about the nature of the major, but either way, I'm not disconnecting.
I disagree. Don't you need to validate their email address so you know you're reaching only people who wanted to sign up?
Shawn,

Two thing to consider about stock options: dilution and additional options grant.

You can be diluted at any time. That is the company can award additional shares and options that will make your 4 shares a smaller part of the pie.

In theory, this should only happen if the person getting the extra shares puts more money into the company, so you will have a smaller share of a bigger pie.

In practice, it doesn't have to be. You can just get a smaller share of the same pie...

On the other hand, should you prove you worth to the company, it is customary that you will get additional options granted later on, as the company will want to keep you interested and motivated.

For an early stage startup, both have an even chance of happening.

I've had both happen to me (with the same startup). By the time the startup was bought I had a bigger option grant then I started with - but it was worth much less due to dilution.

Bottom line: the amount or portion of stocks you are granted when you start working is meaningless or close to meaningless.

But I'd take the job anyway. San Fran is cool.

Good luck!
gby
"The fact that the chat is automated has nothing to do with it, of course it is still entrapment, just like you can't shoot somebody and claim the gun did it."

I don't follow your gun analogy.

IANAL, but my understanding of the case law surrounding entrapment (in the US at least) is that the entrapped party has to have been actively induced to commit a crime. And so agreeing to sell crack when approached is not entrapment (no one was explicitly encouraged to do so), whereas repeatedly soliciting crack is.

I'm not sure where SlutBot would fall along this continuum, but it seems that there's at least a case that its use would be legally viable.
How to Get a News Website To Pick Up Your Press Release
How about scaling each shape to the unit volume, and then rotating to maximize the overlap. What's not overlapping is the shape delta.
There's something to be said for the Buddhist take on happiness: life is suffering, but suffering is ultimately the result of craving and desire.

(Of course, that blows a bit of a hole in the "be an entrepreneur to get rich" mindset, but I still think there's something to it.)
I am certainly not a millionaire, but I have a few friends who are and judging from the way they are, I can guarantee you that anyone who says " there is more to life than money" is telling you 95% bullshit. That is unless you live somewhere Capitalism is not KING.
Self righteousness can only get you so far.
I'm not so sure...is Facebook really likely to be around in 10-20 years? If it was me, I'd have cashed out a while back.

Although, I'm sure that if Zuckerberg had his way Facebook would become FacebookOS, with Word/Excel/Open Office running as Facebook Apps next to your wall. Now THERE'S a business idea!