skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work with big organizations doing big software development (one of the reasons I hang out here is that not only am I a startup junkie, there's something really weird that happens when you scale software development past 6 or 7 guys)

As part of that, I try to keep part of my head in government software development, which is like a world unto itself. I have worked with a couple of agency CIOs, so I've heard of the larger CIO structure that they are part of. There is a lot of CIO-type stuff that was started, ironically, by the Bush administration when they came in. Stuff like balanced scorecards and a national Enterprise Architecture group. As you can imagine, there's a huge push for security, but there are also some really wild System-of-Systems stuff going on. Drop me an email and I can hook you up with more resources if you are interested.
Not too hard to google for such functionality, and find a free plugin that does the job: http://pixelnovel.com/flickrshop.html

But an image editor is really not the place for such tools, which belong in an organizer tool like Lightroom, iPhoto, or Bridge.
It must be taking a vacation from New Orleans.
IMO this misses the point of Time Machine.

1. Time Machine is easy to use.
2. Time Machine doesn't grind your disk as much as rsync because it uses FSEvents.
3. Time Machine backups are faster and use less space because HFS+ allows hardlinks to directories.
People are motivated by one of two things: pleasure or fear.

I enjoy learning random stuff, but I plow through difficult computer-related stuff for one reason: it's a fast-paced, cutthroat competitive world out there. I need every little bit of advantage I can scrape up. I like it like that, but I imagine most folks would find that belief to be very uncomfortable.

So I guess the enemy of self-directed learning is contentment?
How about paying people sort of like TopCoder with its prizes? Unlike TopCoder, you could reward most competitors.

This could turn this into something like a part-time job for high school students.

One can imagine that computer companies would be happy to donate money for these prizes to increase interest in CS.

Unlike TopCoder, you would have many targeted competitions (e.g., compiler design, AI, graphics, etc.).

So unlike university where you pay to learn, here you get paid to learn.
Because a Weebly website isn't, itself, a multi-website management interface; it's just static pages (as far as I know). Would you suggest Excel be coded in cellular formulae?
Funny in a "fresh eyed junior berating grizzled veterans insistence of rigour" sort of way. Until you read these ~ http://talkety.hacketyhack.net/thread/130/hackety-hack-for-l...
People that need to learn to be motivated won't be motivated enough to learn on their own. Low standards in school and a lack of clear guidance as to the point of it all makes people uninterested in learning. So start young, before they've become disinterested. Focus on the ability of learning/creating to make people truly happy and on the propensity to make people rich.
Ask YC: Equity/Salary Question
I know, I know, another one of these :), but I figured I'd get the best answers here since so many people have first hand experience and YC companies with funding (Xobni, Weebly, Justin.tv etc) are hiring as well.

A few details: the company has raised a seed round (few hundred thousand) and I'll be employee #4 (2 co-founders). There's an existing codebase as well. So in many ways it's similar to joining Xobni & co. at their maturity.

The offer: 1% equity and below market level salary (at best 70% of what I can get at a 'normal' job).

So my question is obviously: is this fair? I know the equity is fair, maybe even a bit generous, but what of the salary?

I'll be getting about the same as the co-founders. Should I hold out for a bit more? I'm not expecting them to rise to market-level since they're a startup and all, but figure something close would be reasonable.

P.S: I'm a developer.
thats eazy if they all go in they should be able to say ...that bulb thing wount help really whats if it blows how many thing will a light buld light b4 it blows
Assuming that you are qualified enough to get an above market salary with a later stage startup, I think you should hold out for more equity.
These days I don't really email much, but I guess email is the easiest place to start.
Just happened pon this board. I quickly looked through this thread and didn't see this idea mentioned.
I've worked ACIS who's kernal make AutoCAD what it is. When you want to use their code they provide the object files for you to link into your code. It preserves their secrets but allows you to make use of the functionality. You could try something like that...
I have an encryption scheme that could further hide functionality, even during execution. muxzero@inbox.com if I can help.
I think there is a good question at the root of this. Universities were once the best source of information, but now they're not. However, they provide many things that make it easier to learn (expert evaluators, like-minded peers, social expectations) that aren't easy to find elsewhere. How can you duplicate those benefits?

"Money" sounds like a horrible answer. "Forced learning" discussions are missing the point (or at least discussing a different question than I am). The answer I would expect to hear here, "join a startup", is not very user-friendly.
The application clearly borrowed some questions from YC. It's really interesting how closely they're modeling you overall.
Yep that is true, and how do you get more self-esteem?

By being rich!!
I've noticed a much more obvious connection between poverty and materialism, but perhaps for these purposes low self esteem << poverty.
Creative Hiring: Solve the puzzle in this jobs page and get an interview
I probably click it about 50% of the time, and the other half is split about 50/50 between actually getting back to what I should be doing and finding another way to procrastinate. So it is about 25% effective, which is better than nothing.
How to recover from a start-up failure?
I'd love some suggestions. I'm still having dificulties to let it go, but all the signs are there.
Startup Casting Call: Google is watching!
Thanks. I thought that someone was suggesting that they were using let = ... syntax. Now, I understand that the idiom you showed is "let binding" in the Javascript world.
Not me.

I've been meaning to turn on that noprocast option, but never really got around to it. Seems like now my indecision is paying off! Lameness as virtue! (evil laugh)
This must be the first startup I have seen that is "passionate" about what they are trying to do!
Something about the colour in the images of the food was a bit off putting.

If you are going to do food, the images have to nail it first time. I don't know what it is but the colour needs correcting. A white background also helps. The difference between someone really noticing a recipe and ignoring it can be greatly improved by adding good quality images. For example compare these:

- http://flickr.com/photos/roboppy/sets/72157594175367381/

- http://blog.cookingwithpatty.com/

with these ~ http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/154/Biscotti

Another problem I see is the lack of tools to create a community as outlined by greenspun ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/community

"... Add the vanilla extract, almond extract, orange zest, and slivered almonds to the egg and sugar mixture. Using a spatula, stir once or twice to combine. ..."

As for the rest of the site it's actually pretty good. But I wish the recipes would suggest the best ingredients they can find. For instance real Vanilla beans instead of an extract. Read the "biscotti - starbucks quality" comments.
If we're posting food blogs....

http://offthebroiler.wordpress.com/ is my favorite one. The photography is incredible. You can skip the top two posts.
MS in Electrical Engineering. I completed all of the coursework, published part of my thesis research, just never turned in a thesis. I hope to finish some day.
That actually is pretty standard from what I know.
I remember seeing a survey and that was average for CTO. The difference is salary is not much, and if things start going well that could be bumped up shortly anyways. The 1% is really what I would focus on personally.

EDIT: Average for a non-founder CTO.
Uhmmm...check the source code.
Look out pg.

If AOL can make a strong comeback against the industry leaders, perhaps this can takeover from the current Incubator -ish folks.

/cheap shot
jsb got it right. Our goal is to organize your personal information centered around relationships and communication. Think of all the places where people communicate with you (web, IM, social networks); we want to organize that data.

Present day Xobni is already more than a plugin to Outlook. We keep our own store of all of Outlook's email data and our UI doesn't use the Outlook plugin architecture (it is very limited). What does this mean? .... it means you can point Xobni at any email data store and display it within any application. However, there are costs to moving to new platforms, so for the time being Outlook is the place to be - 300 million users and they have credit cards.
Cheap But Extremely Effective - Facebook Advertising
Much to my immediate amazement within in less than 5 minutes I had received over 100,000 impressions. The ad ran for approximately 10 minutes and racked up a whopping 326,088 impressions.
I use them. They've been good so far.
I disagree. if you haven't heard of him, and he exists, it's probably because he's doing a good job and hasn't broken anything big enough to make the nightly news.

Technology should be seamless and transparent.
I cant find any indication of how much funding they intend to provide, or how much equity they intend to take. Anyone know?
Is Aaron Swartz the Paris Hilton of Web 2.0?
Is he "famous" for no reason? He speaks at web 2.0 conferences, there are stories about him on news.yc all the time... (Yes, I'm using the word "famous" liberally.) Why? What has he done exactly?

Here's what I've got. Feel free to add more. He:

a) worked on rss 1.0 when he was 13. woopty-doo

b) there was the Infogami - Reddit merger, which made the AOL - Time Warner merger look like a genius move for Time Warner in comparison. it is often said that aaron added no value after the merger, while taking a huge chunk of reddit's stock in the process. There's a lot more to this story, but I won't go into the details.

c) started a half-dozen half-baked startups. (I'm using the word "startup" liberally here).

d) has a blog

What am I missing? Can we stop up-voting every story that even mentions the guy now?
An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything (not a joke)
that's pretty pathetic. At least bury the 'puzzle' in a css or js file so that it's not the first thing you see.
You will also save your self 22 years in solitary confinement if your wrong.
So win win.
Ask YC: Where to find legal help for a tech startup
Ok, I'm doing a SaaS startup, and I need to know what I would need to do to get bullet-proof legal advice, I'm in middle america, I assume that I'll need a TOS, a sales agreement and a service agreement, but I'll also need to setup 'business structure' (currently a boot-strapped sole proprietorship, but what it would take to change it when I want a partner) and talk about LLC vs Inc, etc. What is a typical budget for legal expenses in this type of arrangement.
keep in mind that if the company is successful and is one of the lucky few to get a series A VC round you will likely get diluted to 0.5% - 0.6%.
Thanks for posting this. I, for one, like the community sharing interesting ways to develop, design, etc. Much better for us.
I'm kind of confused about what the three of you are talking about. Yes, the clue to the puzzle is in the source code; I think that's where they were going with "embedded". "an hour" might be an extreme upper bound, but it's not like getting from the page source to the answer was instantly obvious or trivial. "pathetic" is definitely way over the top.
"No more ramen", says the philistine who hasn't ever had real ramen. :(

(Real ramen comes piping hot from ramen shops (restaurants), not from 10-cent packets...)
That is definitely true. According to the Battelle book "Search" (good book by the way) and others, they tried to pitch themselves as a tech provider to Yahoo and others. That plan failed since no one was interested, and they went their own way.
Entrepreneur 2.0
Slides here:

http://relativity.phys.lsu.edu/ilqgs/lisi111307.pdf

Audio here:

http://relativity.phys.lsu.edu/ilqgs/lisi111307.mp3
> I myself have often cried out for help to colleagues who have generously made house calls, in order to unwedge my highly customized Linux system.

Wow. Talk about bragging rights.
Gmail's support for IMAP is even sketchier. It's terrible.

Perhaps it's because Gmail uses labels rather than folders, it doesn't map well. Also, when I delete a message from the inbox, it doesn't actually delete the freakin message, it just removes it from the inbox. Arggggg.
Somewhere an irony detector explodes from massive overload.
New Firefox3 Theme for MacOS X (wow)
I disagree.

"Education and religion are two things not regulated by supply and demand. The less of either the people have, the less they want." -- Charlotte Observer, 1897

There is very much a reason that it is the law that children must go to school until 16: we want to enforce a certain amount of education on them, otherwise they'll think they never need it.

The difference between me and my sister is a nice anecdote. I love to learn; I read books out the wazoo, etc. My sister, on the other hand, hates it. For the longest time, my parents had to watch her do her homework, or she wouldn't do it.

The thing that eventually got my sister to do her homework by herself? Getting it through her teenage head that if she reliably does her homework, my parents won't be on her case every 5 seconds. She's now learning, not because of intrinsic love of it, but because of extrinsic reward: independence from my parents.
isn't that a picture of safari?
But pg got famous after eating breakfast!
School is unpleasant. This turns people off learning. Then schools say: see? kids don't like learning. we have to force them.

That isn't a valid argument. If pleasant, voluntary, interest-based learning was offered, you don't know how children would react.

The same thing with your sister. the offer usually made is something like: obey me, and do your schoolwork. it won't be fun, but when you grow up you'll thank me later. if you don't obey, i'll hurt you.

That provides no information about how your sister, or any other child, would have behaved if offered some better options.
I think he's funny.
Yahoo! Next blog launch
Yahoo! just launched Yahoo! Next, a blog focused on technology trends, innovations and the people who builds them.
You ought to be able to do better. At that stage I'd consider 1% and a competitive salary, or a larger stake and living expenses, but that offer wouldn't cut it.
< 15 minutes to solve. (I think. I come up with an answer string, but don't see anywhere that it would conceivably go?)

Firebug rocks.
Are you not an admin? PG mentioned early on that the admins included YC founders, so I've sort of assumed that all YC founders are admins though on reflection I don't really have good reason to believe that.

Either way "mark this such that brett loses clout once pg pushes the new ranking sw" is still probably far less satisfying than "get this crap off the front page now" would be.
web.py -- is good. I am using it, even thou i am replacing it's parts bit by bit with my own implementation, it is a good start for a very basic python framework (then you can grown your own out if it).

That it is still pretty good for a young guy. He probably has work/startup ADD. Starting lots of things, but never finishing anything up. Maybe lack of discpline, b/c of lack of work ethics guidance when he was a kid?

Other than that boh... Now qweartyy, why so jelous of him?
Self-learning has its own problems, some that have caught me out on more occasions than I care to admit.

I graduated with an EE degree six years ago, but over the years found myself more and more interested in economics. I read textbooks, papers and articles, and over time I thought I knew something about it. It was only when I went back to uni this year to formally study for an economics degree that I realised I knew jack. All the fundamentals and boring little details that I used to gloss over had more signficance than I'd ever thought. I also had access to the university resources, good instruction and a fairly rigorous course structure. Granted I was motivated and keen to learn (sadly unlike the bulk of the 19 year old kids there), but I gained a much more solid basis for understanding econs than I would have had I not gone back to uni.

I'm certainly no apologist for universities and schools, but wanted to point out that there are some issues with self-learning, namely 1) focussing only on the interesting topics and neglecting the fundamentals, 2) unstructured learning can be ill-directed and 3) good instruction is more efficient than finding your own way.
you failed the puzzle
Is this supposed to be an all Javascript puzzle? I am passing the current time, and the damn thing still complains about the wrong token.
Perhaps bootstrapping and bootlegging go hand in hand. That is, go it alone for as long as you can get away with it.
I'd recommend talking to WSGR and other firms in SF/The Valley. They'll often work on deferred payment. I'm not sure if you can just walk in the door or if a bit of an intro is required for that (we obviously got the latter).

It's nice to not have to budget for that in the early stages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_method
Assignments and exams are much less important than being around your intellectual peers every day. If instead of going to a university, you moved into a big house with 50 other smart, ambitious guys and a big room full of textbooks on every topic, after 4 years you'd know at least as much as if you had gone to a university, and probably more. You might be a little sexually frustrated, though (edit: and socially retarded, as well).
Google's Mayer to judge VC pitching contest
Very low cost exams or other verifications that results in a certificate with publicly known high standards.

Any high schooler should be able to afford the test, but people should be immensely impressed if they pass it.

Once they are known and respected, they become resume fodder and that leads to money.
passing the time worked for me
I recently wrote up my own experience on how to recover from a startup failure.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/riding-a-bike.html

Hope it helps. If there is any other way I can help, please comment. Good luck.

--Denny--

Denny K Miu
Seconded. I went to a nice Ramen shop in Tokyo--basically amazing.
I also think that parents can encourage a curious attitude in their children, but it has to happen early. It won't work on every child, but can't hurt to try.
leave the guy alone!
What I would like to see is more of the Socrates style teaching. I think that's a lot like the kind of pleasant, interesting learning that you're talking about.

I guess my question is this: if you say you're only going to teach voluntary, interest-based things, how do you make things interesting? How do you make math interesting to a kid who doesn't care if he knows how to add? How do you make history interesting to a kid who thinks it's awful?

There's a lot of value to a well-rounded education. If you don't "force" kids to explore a variety of areas, they'll have a tendency to become focused and centered on the one thing that really gets them off. That's great, unless they start blowing off other subjects and whatnot. It's the reason most universities require a variety of general education classes for all freshman.

So I think we have to "force" everyone to study different topics, not just the ones that intrinsically interest them. The key here is "forcing" the kids to like the material. How do we do this?

Well, I don't have a great answer to that. The only thing I can point to is that one great teacher we've all had (or I hope you've had). That one teacher who was able to just turn you on completely. But it was the teacher that was special, not the material, not the procedure, not the tests, not the class.

My favorite example is Mrs. Sams, my calculus teacher. When we got to the fundamental theorem of integral calculus, we held a mock wedding between the derivative and the integral.
Why would they need help? Our current president is an expert on The Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90DKubFKwVo
WTF?

function solvePuzzle() {
var t = new Date()

var time = t.getTime();

var params ="";
params += 'pos=solvepuzzle';
params += "&";
params += 'auth=' + time.toString();

new Ajax.Request('/weebly/publicBackend.php', {parameters:params, onSuccess:handlerSolvePuzzle, onFailure:function() { alert('Transmition error. Please try again.'); }});

}

solvePuzzle();
> I went to a nice Ramen shop in Tokyo--basically amazing.

There are probably some pretty good ramen shops closer to you. Check yelp or google maps...
At least he continually puts himself out there to be judged. He's managed to get noticed and people actually care what he's up to. That's a heck of a lot more than most people. I think it's totally fair to critique his public work, but there's no reason to get mean about it. Let he who is without personal faults cast the first stone.
hey this is pretty brilliant! "Recipes 2.0"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_timestamp
getTime() gives you milliseconds. you want seconds.
Provide role models and mentors. Let them find a subject on their own that they can love and be the best at amongst their social circle.
Ask news.YC: Is your startup making the world a better place?
Do you spend any time evaluating the possible effect your startup could have on society if you succeed? Have you ever adjusted your plans in order to have a more positive impact on the world?

It's easy to argue that any time you make a free-market profit, you've made the world a better place, but I'm not sure I'd ever be content to make a fortune in something like domain squatting. What do you think? Are you attempting to create value, or to acquire wealth?
Have you read the book he is writing? It's much better than most of the crap I read on blogs these days (most of which constitute things like your comparison here: is X like Y? here's why blah blah)

Most of the books he recommends are really good (I just bought "Punished by rewards" after finding it through his site. It's a great book.)

So he doesn't finish his projects and does some drama. So what? His projects are almost always decent (I enjoyed reddit, have played around with web.py, have used books.theinfo.org several times and liked the first few chapters of his novel), sometimes noble (the site giving advice to school kids) and quite often useful.

Get a life and lay off him. The real reason you are doing this is because he got rich of Reddit while still a teenager and you think he didn't deserve it. So what? That's life for you and he's still an o.k. guy.
Isn't that what I am doing by using getTime() ?
Danke sehr...

But still not enough.
Do you realize that all of what you said applies to Paris Hilton, too?
I don't know where qwertyy's bitterness is coming from. Criticising his body of work is fair enough but to tear him down personally like this, in a forum like this, is uncalled for.
I can't see anything at all in konq (not that that matters very much).
please do a video about Aaron Swartz in the style of "leave Britney alone!!!!".
"You Be the VC, is where old-school a venture capital meets pop-culture phemonenon, American Idol -- mixed with dash of Malcolm Gladwell's, The Wisdom of the Crowds."

Wow, after reading that line, I'm not sure whether I'm reading a troll, a thirteen-year-old, or one of those splogs where they mutilate the text of a real blog entry.
Sounds to me like sour grapes at another's success on the web?