skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my own experience I've found the percentage your looking at, 0.166, to be about the industry average for a software engineer joining around the 10th person.
What percentage of users activate their accounts?
To those of you that work on websites that require users to click a link in an e-mail to validate their accounts: what percentage of users complete the activation process?
Startups 101: Make Sure Your Pitch Doesn't Suck
I'm guessing the philosophy you're describing here is the one you subscribe to. How has it worked for you? I'm generally curious. What are your personal accomplishments that would bolster your argument that this way is the best way to learn CS?
Here is something that I tell a lot of my friends that are looking to get into the "startup" world: You're going to get hosed on your first job.

The pay won't be what it should, you're likely to get a tiny percentage of stock that has a low probability of being worth much in the end. BUT, you'll be in the game, you'll learn a lot, and you'll meet smart people.

From this first experience you will enter into your second startup employment round better educated and in a better position to negotiate.

As long as you can live off the salary for a year or two, and they're covering your relocation, I'd say go for it and enjoy the ride. You can almost always move back to MO and be richer for the experience, if nothing else.
In your position, I would take the offer. You get to move from Missouri to one of the world's best cities. SF is one of two cities in America with 24/7 public transportation. Weed is legal, which reflects the extremely socially liberal feel of the city. SF has an actual music scene.

.16% of the company is low. You can try and get more, of course, but the offer as it stands is a great way for you to relocate to SF. If you don't fall in love with this company, you can always find a better job with a different company.

$60,000 is low for an uber-hacker in SF but it's plenty to live, especially when you're relatively young. Get a roommate if you want to live in a decent place in a safe part of town, otherwise, the less safe or more boring parts of town are cheaper. I'm trying to find a place on Craigslist now for an upcoming move to SF... right now I'm looking in the Castro, Mission, and Noe Valley areas. However, few places are available in advance on Craigslist. I think the way it actually works is the place is listed on Craigslist, you go to the open house the next day and beg the landlord to take your deposit, and maybe you can get the place. Things are not nearly as tight outside of SF proper, but there is a reason SF housing is in such high demand.

This is a good overview of SF neighborhoods. http://www.dreamworld.org/sfguide/Neighborhoods/index.html
That is probably a good thing. Rails is a great fit for what it does, a 2.0 danger was to do beyond its strengths. It seems to have evolved nicely. I look forward to using it.

As for the questions about the lack of "scalability" improvements, I don't really care. Its not needed for what I use it for anyway (and probably the same for most people).
Personally, what you're getting offered seems rather low, but I'm not sure. I know that living on 60k is going to be difficult in San Francisco, but you're young, and may not object to ramen noodles. Look on Craigslist.com to find out what rents are for a room in San Fran before you move out. I know that 60k might seem like a lot when you're 20, but it's really not that much out here in the Bay area.

If you really like the group of programmers, and you really want to move to the Bay, that's worth something, take that into consideration. And, there's always the "chase your dream" scenario that's worth something as well.

As to the stock options: If those are the ratio's, you're not going to be getting much if the company gets acquired. Think about it this way. If there are 3000 shares outstanding, and you get 4 shares, you own %0.13 of the company ( 4/3000). Now, whatever the company gets acquired for, you receive % 0.13 of that amount. So, if the company gets acquired for $10 million, you get $13,000. $100 million, and you get $130,000.

As an aside, there are precious few companies getting acquired for $100 million. There aren't that many acquiring companies that can afford it.

Another issue: There is a lot of competition in the Bay area as opposed to other parts of the country. There are a lot of incredibly smart people out here with several degrees and tons of experience. San Fran has some of the highest per capita Phd's in the nation. It can be a bit intimidating when your first arrive. You go from being one of the elite geeks in your small pond, to being just another techie in a huge ocean of nerds.

I've known a couple of people who came out here, and felt blown away by their own lack of education. It's easy to feel pretty inadequate. Paul Graham can write about the problems with the educational system, but Paul also has his PhD in Computer Science from Harvard. So, take that into consideration, too. He also recommends people finish their college degrees before starting their startups.

I've always been one to chase my dreams, however despite what anyone else said. If you really want it, you'll find a way to make it work.
"Rather than skintight latex or a chainmail bikini, she wears a plain orange jump suit that is eerily reminiscent of those worn by prisoners in Guantanamo Bay."

Way to read too much into the game. Half-life features a hero called Gordon Freeman who wears an orange armor body suit thing. She is trying to escape the lab, and Freeman was trying to escape the lab as well.

"The unobtrusive presentation of the female protagonist doesn't force a male gender perspective on the player as is the norm in FPS games."

What is the writer talking about?? In most other FPS games you can't tell if the character is a male or not either. All you can see is a gun and hands. How is that forcing the male gender perspective on the player?

"she comes to represent man's attempt to construct an idealized mother figure through the cold logic of science"

Ok, I'm done reading that clap-trap. Science always gets the shit end of the stick when lay-people discuss it. It's either evil and responsible for very bad things, or it's cold and it ignores people, or it's unnatural.
>Dr. Charette noted that more than 1,000 years elapsed before instruments of such complexity are known to have re-emerged

A mechanical device 1000 years ahead of its time. Cool.
As someone who is around the same age as you, who is also considering going into a computer graphics related field, and has around the same amount of experience, I would love to get an offer like that once I graduate. Sure, 60k might be a little low for the SF area, but who really cares that much? It takes care of the basics, and thats all you'll really need (I assume you're not looking to start a family any time soon). You'll be living in an awesome city (where a lot of people in the field dream of living), getting a load of new experience, and working with people who will probably teach you more than you could learn on your own in the same amount of time.
In the sense that many people on this forum are the uber-productive hackers described by PG in essay form, the industry average is low.
60K isn't going to make you rich, but unless you acquire a lot of bad habits, its more than enough for a single 19 year old to live off. If you're really worried, you can always find room mates on craigslist.

If this is the industry you want to be in, you're best bet is to make the move out here. The job is reasonable, and even if it doesn't work out there are a hell of a lot more opportunities.
After sampling a few serial numbers, the cheapest ones cost 1000 euros. Serial #2 is a mere 100,900 euros.
JSON. Its serializable and has cross-browser support for in-built parsing. Moreover JSON data packets are light-weight as compared to XML, which means you'll also save on bandwidth and the data interchange will be quicker.
> weed is legal

What makes you think so?
You are still extremely young. Now is the time to take risks and make moves, while it is still a high priority for you.

60k is enough to live on. A small percentage of the company is enough to make it extra lucrative.

What I would personally use the experience for was seeing how the industry works, meeting people with similar interests as you and people you would want to work again in the future.

Good luck!
I'm not sure, but there was a PDF from EngineYard recommending a layout right? using XEN a many different vps for dns, mysql, etc?
Thanks everybody for the great feedback! :)
Upto 35% Small-Business Owners Are Dyslexics
>I know that living on 60k is going to be difficult in San Francisco, but you're young, and may not object to ramen noodles.

$60,000 a year. Let's say it's $42,000 after tax. That gives our pal $3,500 a month. $1600 gets him a very nice studio apartment without roommates and covers utilities (no fiber internet available, unfortunately). He has $1900 a month to buy food, clothing, and entertainment... this would be enough to eat three solid meals a day in mid priced restaurants. Food isn't particularly expensive in San Francisco either, it's not like New York. Doesn't sound like a bad standard of living to me in the slightest, unless I'm missing something.
Email me and I would be happy to elaborate.
What's the alternative in MO? At 19 I would say the biggest question is if you are ready to go out and live on your own.

It seems like a good opportunity to jump into the scene.
well, as a user, i activate pretty much 100% of my accounts, even if i dont really use them afterwards.

this is probably because all of those sites require me to activate in order to use their service.

hope this helps.
I don't have an answer (since my site isn't active yet) but I have another question: what percentage of users that don't validate their accounts actually entered their personal email address?
Not if it's what the market bears.
Press for more stock.
Paul Buchheit: Is there more to life than money?
At 19, absolutely. At my age, no, because I've turned down better offers.
Agreed.

I'm not down on the humanities - I double majoried in CS and History. I love the humanities - art, literature, history: these things are important.

Women studies are not among the "real" humanities - this is a made up, politically correct, politically slanted body of "study" that, without justification, denies the importance of most of the useful arts and sciences, an simultaneously congratulates itself (and its practitioners) on being far more clever-than-though.

Witness the very first sentence of the review:

> Warning: The text you are about to read contains heady intellectual discourse and is not recommended for anyone made queasy by the discussion of feminist film theory or psychoanalytical signifiers.

Oh, yeah, that review was chock full of "heady" intellectual discourse all right!

In fact, it was filled with the four or five common tropes of feminist / culture studies "deconstruction". I could write this crap in my sleep. Throw around the word "symbol" and "signifier", the word "privelege" or "Other" (must be capitalized) or "hierarchy" (or better yet "hegemony"), and talk about how up "subverts" down, wet "subverts" dry, red "subverts" green, and drop in one or two entirely irrelevant political references to the conservative devil of the hour (in the 1980s, this meant Reagan, in the early 21st century, it meant Rumsfeld or Bush, now it means Cheney or Bush, etc.), mix in a half cup of cheap Freudianism, and away you go.

Utter, utter, lazy, useless garbage.
it depends on the countries that you want domains for.

For a decent price (certainly not the cheapest to my knowledge) I was able to register domains for Taiwan, mainland China, Japan, and the EU at godaddy.com (I was more interested in a domain registar I can somewhat trust than price).

To my knowledge right now (someone can correct me), most governments are too inefficient to able able to enforce special rules with certain domains (such as having a company setup in country x)
total accounts: 45800

confirmed emails: 28800

total unique people as determined by cookies/ip addresses: 28900

System lets people use the site for 10 minutes after they sign in before they are forced to confirm their email if they have not done so already.
The offer sounds fair. If you're excited about the people and the company, then you should take the job.
quantify different and I'm sure they can find it
only a matter of time before you can just CAD your own.
Hi, thanks for the advises. I wish I could code and help my partner. That would be great but I doubt I can become a good coder in a few months. I'm more of a design guy.

@Sean Murphy. Thanks for all the links. It helps a lot.

@jmtame I've sent you a message through GoBigNetwork.

@rakuten How do you contact another member here? Can't find your email on your profile page.

My email is

sayaww@gmail.com

and our project page is

http://bookvair.com
Amazing. I'm checking it now.
Great, what exactly does this have to do with getting high? If kratom really is "a rare stimulant that makes you more productive" as rms and imagenium claim (as opposed to a drug that binds to the same receptors as codeine and morphine, and can cause analgesia, sedation, reduced blood pressure, itching, nausea, euphoria, decreased respiration, miosis, and decreased bowel motility often leading to constipation.)
Then it really has nothing to do with this conversation does it?

What does a stimulant have to do with coding while high?

It would be like you mentioning a coffee business in this this thread. "Oh, weed doesn't help me code, but triple tall vanilla soy latte's from --insert name of your silicon valley coffee shop here-- do."
finish high school and then college (and a startup on the side if you like). if this offer doesn't work out, a degree is a nice thing to fall back on and is required for larger careers down the line. and with a degree you can expect and ask for a higher salary. just my thoughts.
"I'm not trying to push a drug here, I'm trying to tell the truth."

I'm not buying that, nobody challenged you and here you are hijacking this thread and posting 1/2 a page of info nobody asked for. Its off topic, and annoying.

(Also the study you cited came to the conclusion that kratom is tolerance building and has withdrawl symptoms What a great thing to be peddling to the masses.)
I gave all the information necessary so people can make their own conclusions. I reserve the right to jack future threads on drugs, perhaps with a link to the previous post.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/
Sure -- I am saying that the industry average is low for an uber-hacker, because he or she is worth more... this gets us to the Grahamian theory of business, where the only way to get paid what you are worth is to start a company.
60k would be doable but lean for someone with a lot of expenses. Student loans, car payment, auto insurance, gas, and medical expenses often take big chunks of income.

For a 19 yr old kid with minimal needs and few fixed expenses, 60k is fine I think. I still might recommend roommates, though you'll want to be picky. In addition to saving a ton on rent, it's nice to have people around especially when you move to a new area.
China Link Suspected in Lab Hacking
I'd say take the offer. $60k isn't a huge amount in the Bay Area (the cost of living is crazy here), but it's definitely enough to live on if you're 19. ~0.1% equity is also a bit on the low side.

BUT, I think the most important factor is the experience. If the guys you're going to be working with are top-class and if you think you'll learn a lot (sounds like it), then take the job and don't worry about the compensation too much. Working with intelligent colleagues is the best way to become a better hacker, not to mention making great networking contacts and positioning yourself for a higher-paying job down the line. When you're just starting your career, 60k vs. 75k doesn't make nearly as much of a difference as working with "B" coworkers vs. working with "A+" superstars.

As far as living in SF, there's a big difference between living in San Francisco itself and living in the SF Bay Area. SF will be somewhat more expensive, but it's a blast when you're young, and I'm guessing a big upgrade from Missouri. The Bay Area is a lot more suburban; there's less culture, and you typically need to go to San Francisco or San Jose if you want to go out.
Is there more to life than money?

Yes

Is money still a really awesome thing?

Yes
"You should mostly ignore your competitors"

Bad advice.
averaging 85%. seems low.
Nokia is not calling Ogg proprietary
Amen to that. Money means freedom.
Another closely related post is Math Every Day: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/math-every-day

Since most here are of a programing bent Project Euler (projecteuler.net) may be of help in that quest.
Top 10 Worst Computer Worms of All Time
The Internet is an Internet lover's paradise, a gamer's haven, a business's lifeline, and a hacker's playground. Over the past two decades, hundreds of worms have devastated the infrastructure of millions of computers around the world, causing billions of dollars of damage-and the life of the worm is far from over. Let's take a look at the last 20 years to see which of these worms have stood out from among the rest.
How quickly have you been able to move through Concrete Mathematics? It looks like the sort of thing you might be able to do 1-2 problems a day.
Even if it was true that it is outright legal in SF (which it's not) you're ignoring the fact that the feds can bust someone without regard to local laws. This is off topic, but if someone moving to SF took your words at face value they could get into trouble.
>if someone moving to SF took your words at face value

I give the users of this site a lot more credit than that.
Excellent observations, however I think it's particularly cumbersome to attempt to explain its novelty in terms of masculine and feminine. It confuses both the game itself and the meanings of the term "masculine" and "feminine."
Far be it from me to argue against higher ed -- I spent thirteen of the best years of my life in college, if you count the postdoctoral fellowship -- but if I were you I would take the job now and go to college later. There's plenty of time, and it's not like they stop letting you in to college because you're too old.

The thing about getting some work experience before you go to school is that it may make you a better student. You'll have a better idea of what you want to learn and why. You'll be better equipped to recruit future colleagues from among your fellow students, and you'll have better war stories to tell them when you're sitting at the bar.

The idea that "a degree is a nice thing to fall back on" is true, but the reverse is even more true: If your career falters, you can always go to college. (If you have the money, of course... but if you won't have the money then, you probably don't have the money now either!)
Its a lot easier to ask that question when you have millions in Google stock.
einstein never slept, he only took naps several times a day.
The problem with freedom is that most people aren't very good at optimizing their own happiness. At least when you're stuck in an institution there is some base level of engineered happiness as a by-product of that institution's need to fulfill its stated goals. Otherwise, freedom may start with travel and book-writing, but it has this habit of quickly devolving into sitting around reading Reddit and Slashdot. In other words, in their state of nature people have this tendency of doing just enough to make themselves minimally happy, even if greater happiness is ultimately attainable. Look how many people sit around all day playing World of Warcraft.

I guess what I'm saying is that even if you need freedom to achieve maximum happiness, complete freedom also leaves you with a much greater chance of getting stuck in some minimal existence. Which basically describes about a quarter the population of Japan.
This article is hilarious.

For those who don't plan on playing Portal:

First let me say that you should reconsider. The game will break your brain.

Second, you should listen to the final song. It's so rewarding.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI

Sung by a passive aggressive AI who you kill in the end. The AI and a weighted companion (an inanimate cube) are the only other characters in the game.
I never particularly liked the modern methods of "deconstruction" in the humanities. It gets geeky very fast, yet there's nothing solid underneath. Unlike code, you're only talking about symbols -- whose power lie solely in their ability to push emotional buttons in people.

Most of the less obvious and academic-y stuff is contained in the later parts of the article. Shooting portals that opens up to another part of the map is pretty obvious for anyone familiar with Freud. Less obvious is the broken AI that has a pseudo-maternal personality, the robots that speak in voices of little boys that can easily kill you, and the gigantic cube that you carry around. You only use that to flip switches, and you are encouraged by the AI to form an emotional attachment to it.

Seen in that way and having read the article all the way through, I agree with the author that most FPS force a male gender perspective on the player ... though I find that idea rather unsettling.
Go to eurodns.com They're with asiadns.com and will get you just about all the country specific domains.
The level of freedom I would like requires me to own a federal reserve bank or a popularly traded currency backed by oil or delivered joules or water, so I don't plan on getting bored anytime soon. Then I can start playing World of Warcraft. :)

You're right, states of minimal happiness are depressingly common. It scares me how appealing alternate worlds like World of Warcraft are to society at large.
Campaign appearances by candidates - very nice interactive graphics
Based on your suggestion, here is a page with some really useful inter-wiki links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain
I am saying that the industry average is low for an uber-hacker...

I don't have any direct knowledge of palish's qualifications, and I certainly mean him no disrespect -- but his self-description (19 years old, programming for 7 years, high school drop-out) doesn't exactly scream "uber-hacker" to me.
Survey of 100k myspace profile pages to see which are the top interests
i remember reading this from "of human bondage" (slightly paraphrased) "money is like a 6th sense, without which you cannot make use of the other 5"
Ask the questions listed in this post (it was linked to YC some time ago): http://www.genuinevc.com/archives/2005/10/seven_questions.ht....

I agree with rms though. Just remember that you should choose the next step based on whether you're going to learn something new. If you are, take it.
Anyone can code.

Anyone.

It is a question of motivation and effort, not intelligence.
We don't do that. It just another barrier to entry. Hopefully you do it because it's necessary for the product and not because you want to have a validated e-mail.
I don't know man. I'm just circling a huge fusion reaction 93 million miles away at 66,000 miles per hour like everybody else I know.
I don't think the article is supposed to be taken too seriously.
Java applet vs Flash for browser plugin?
Which would you recommend?