skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe it should be "Ignite Your Innovative Internet Business Idea, Unless of Course Your Customers Are Still Paying"
"That $375k would then be subject to 63% taxes, netting me $138,750, or a 20% down-payment on my piece of the american dream. The other company does the right thing, so I only see a 15% capital gains tax"

A bit of an aside but could someone elaborate on this? Is the OP referring to an 83(b) election? If so, isn't that his responsibility (of course, the company should advise him to do this). Or is this referring to something else?

At any rate, my impression is that there would be California taxes as well on that income, bringing the taxes well above 15%.
> Startups aren't for financial security. They are for the frontiermen who are hoping to strike it rich in the gold rush. Most don't but some do.

I think you mean "Founding a startup is for the frontiermen..." Being an employee is not. Being an employee is a losing proposition far more often than the 95% you cited.
>doing meaningful work and working with great people

overall this is true, but its as rare as a finding an employee like the one in the article to accept accept below market rates and less than stellar benefits.
It isn't even life-changing money. It's most of a house here in Seattle, or a quarter of a house in the valley. That's nice, but not life-changing.
lol, but I totally agree with you!
I am not sure where to start: I was diagnosed 3 yrs ago with multiple congenital cervical spine disorders. Inoperable & impacting 6 of my cervical discs & compressing multiple nerve roots. Also herniated L5/S1 with nerve root compression. Add to that severe depression, numerous neuropathic issues resulted in being prescribed multiple heavy duty opiods & neuropathic pain fixer-upperers :-)!! Then developed more medical conditions with more severe disabling pain in back & legs followed by osteomyelitis. Needless to say I know what severe excruciating chronic pain is & more to the point, it's impact on my life. The latest issue resulted in losing 95% of use & feeling in my right hand & fingers. Am on various antidepressants but recently reduced the doses as I had had enough of the various other side effects. So, how do I exist - I have retained & enhanced my sense of humour & I immerse myself in education regarding my favourite subjects which are IT Security & IT Knowledge in general. I read voraciously, and find that if I can immerse myself in learning new things every day I can push aside the pain so it sits in the background.. it is always there but when I am immersed I can function ( sort of :-) )... sleep suffers; tend to sleep more at my keyboard than in bed!! Cant walk without a walking stick anymore & occassionally lose the plot and get very teary but am now able to side track both the depression & the constant pain on demand... its not easy but it is do-able... it is possible to live with chronic excruciating pain and I believe that it is very much an individual thing but everyone can find a way to do it if they try hard enough & are stubborn enough. Honestly, fighting it is way better than letting it beat you!!
Good Luck to you all.
I've never understood why startups position themselves this way? If you have 10M in the bank pay your employees what they fucking deserve! In an internet startup your engineers are all you actually have. Ideas are worth nothing.

Living in San Francisco is expensive as fuck. You should do everything to make your employees lives easier so they can concentrate more time to work.
I am curious about this too. Please elaborate if you know anything about this.
While that may be a passive aggressive comment, sinatra is bloody brilliant all the same. You can basically pretend you're writing rails code, but with a tiny fraction of the dependencies, and actual fast response times.

Sinatra, sequel and postgresql is a dream combo. I wouldn't use rails for a new project these days, I got bored of the un-navigable code a while ago. These patches and regressions are the icing on the cake.
not yet, but we're working on it: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/3119
Rob, are you guys looking to do SIP Reggie soon? I imagine it's gotta be coming at some point (I don't know why you guys don't do it now except for the obvious pain point of network overhead from all that registration traffic).
This entire thesis is a red herring. I doubt we've ever had a conversation with a startup about what sort of benefits they should offer. Since the startups in a position to hire lots of people will presumably have raised money from later stage investors, if anyone is giving them advice about this, it would probably be them.

FWIW, if anyone did ask my advice about what benefits to offer, I'd tell them to err on the side of generosity. I certainly tell them to err on that side with equity grants.
A similar issue (removed from search results, but remained in index) happened to my site due to a DNS issue last year, and I had to perform some magic steps+ in webmaster tools and we re-appeared in search within a day or so.

+ no magic, I just don't remember what exactly I had to do.
>If you are not willing to fix/adapt/improve the framework you are using, you better not be using ASP.NET also (try a google search on asp.net issues), of any framework at all. In fact, developing larger more complex software might not even be possible without adapting frameworks for your specific problems.

Huh what? Stack Overflow with it's extreme load works quite well with ASP.NET.

>try a google search on asp.net issues

Okay, I did, what I am supposed to be looking at?
So many "they killed reader how can I ever trust Google again" comments. As if everything ever has been permanent and Evernote will outlast humanity.

It's a minimal todo list for godsakes.
Putting aside snarky sentiments about its inevitable shutdown: pretty neat, although as others have stated, it seems a little too minimal. I imagine if your life is already on Drive that this could be pretty useful. I especially like the Android lock screen widget that lets you add stuff directly from the phone (mentioned on their blog)

Regardless of the product you use, searchable cloud-synced notes that you can quickly access are a life changer, even if they're just text files. It's like direct memory augmentation; I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to have it. "The weakest ink is better than the strongest memory" and all that. The trick is to make a workflow for yourself that allows for writing stuff down now and finding/organizing it later. I find OneNote + SkyDrive works pretty well - it ties you to the proprietary OneNote format, but the features you get from it are powerful, and as long as you have the client software and a place to put the files (preferably on the web), no one can "shut the service down". Perhaps I'll give this one a try though.
Smaller Norwegian companies which offer shares to employees often have a "if you quit within 5 years, the company is allowed to buy all your shares back at the price they were when you received them" clause, or something similar. Obviously you'll only get sub-par or naïve people with such a policy.
Technical person here, and I will use Facebook or Twitter login 10 times out of 10. I do not want to create a new account for your service unless you absolutely force me to.
The Sony is actually a better buy in many cases - and twice cheaper.

The only thing GP does really better, IMO, is that it records at a true 1080p60fps. The sony can record in slowmo, ie capturing at 1080p60 and recording at 1080p30, slowed down.

(Then again maybe that's because I've no use of the features such as the wifi remote)
There was an alternative called Mention[1] that made the front page[2] of HN a few days ago, I have no idea how it compares in terms of features/quality/etc though:

[1]https://en.mention.net/

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5376180
I take it back. You clearly would not fit in over at /r/mensrights... which says only good things about you. :)

I can't judge what happened at this convention--wasn't there, don't know what all was overheard, or what people may have said during an interview with managers that might have led to a firing... nor do I know if the firing was indeed some kind of appeasement gesture that really was massively unjust to the guys. So I'll leave it to those more familiar with the events and people to determine whether or not this was a justified firing.

As an aside, and possibly an irrelevant one...in my experience, which I know doesn't count as evidence towards anything, people get away with making crude jokes at the expense of others most of the time. It's rare to see people held accountable for their poor judgment. You've got to be pretty confident of your own untouchability to make off-color jokes in a professional environment when you're surrounded by people you don't know. Maybe these guys didn't do anything like that, and, if so, what happened to them is quite bad. Even if it was just a misunderstanding (they didn't think they were making crude remarks; if they'd had the chance to talk it over with the person who reported them, she'd have seen that she had misheard them and would agree they were blameless), it'd be quite sad that one of the guys got fired because of it. On the other hand, I'd like to live in a world where people don't feel smugly confident that they can do or say whatever they want and the rest of us will hunch our shoulders and take it.
I don't understand what this has to do with Y Combinator.
Haven't had a chance to fully test it out, but I love the interface. Never change.
... until you start relying on it. Then Google will shut it down. No way I'm using any more Google products except the one I pay for (mail).
I think the first bit isn't strictly true. You can claim copyright over images of your product to the extent that the product image is copyrightable. You can't publish photographic prints of copyrighted artwork, for example. And I think there's case law about photographs of publicly-visible architecture as well, but someone will have to confirm that.

I'd tend to agree that this doesn't extend to straightforward images used to identify the product in a consumer review, but I'm not so sure it's as cut an dry a case as you think.
> working for an established company will give you a far better expected financial outcome at lower risk.

Tiny, tiny nit: that final phrase is redundant. Calculating an expected financial outcome includes the risk.

Agree with everything you're saying.
"Anyone can post a photo and get you fired."

No, the photo did not get you fired, your employer's questionable policies got you fired. If indeed a phallus joke between two persons in a private conversation is not objectionable, why was this person fired?

As I see it here, the more and more "transparent" our private lives become with cell phone cameras and always-on video glasses, the more protection employees need from bone-headed employers dismissing them for reasons wholly unrelated to their competencies performing the job they were hired to do.
The additional advantage of this age group being that they generally have no experience with salary negotiations or normal work-life balance. In fact, if they're coming out of a top CS program, they are probably used to bonkers work-life balance, which is exactly what a startup will demand of them.
The irony is that all the places I've found where you do meaningful work ALSO pay well. Some of them do just pay high cash comp with minimal benefits, though, and some startups do large equity (1-5%) with less cash comp for a year or so (80k/yr vs. 120-150k).

(The exception was government contracting, where it was >$250k/yr but the most meaningless work, 3 year old broken Dell laptops, and generally horrible.)
Parsing Nginx Configuration with Python
Two different definitions of "underpaid" are in operation here.

The one you're using has to do with how much you deserve as a person. You see yourself as no different from your friends. You pursued something that interested you and it led you to a job. They are probably doing the same thing. Yet here you are making more than all of them. What have you done to deserve that? Most likely, nothing at all. You were lucky to enjoy something which led you to this end. You never sought out money; you just ended up getting what seems like more than your fair share of it.

The other definition, the one that almost everybody here on HN will use, is one devoid of human connections. It's just about what the market rate is in comparison to how much value, dollar-wise, you produce for the corporation you work for.
The point is, SO almost certainly aren't using vanilla ASP.net. Nobody can succeed for too long without maintaining and cultivating their stack.
"If you're a YC founder, you're in the club. You were picked. It's great if you succeed; if you fail, you have a network. If you're a YC employee, you're just an employee of a small startup. YC founders seem, at least from this, to be blind to the fact that their employees aren't able to cash in on the prestige of being YC and will therefore expect hard currency."

Well said.

It's actually infuriating when one joins a pre-YC company and contribute to the company, yet don't get to attend any of the events. It's like as a non-founder you are not worthy of ever setting foot in their room or gaining knowledge, despite the fact that so many non-founders have contributed significantly to a company's trajectory. Though I think the Silicon Valley community has an especially strong fixation on founders.
Yeah, just saw your reply to our "pal" from /r/mensrights. I was wrong about you--wrong to imply you might harbor misogynist impulses. I apologize for the remark and accept that you, sir, are awesomesauce.
This. I think the rapid release cycle of Rails is a good thing, rather than a bad thing. The past few months, some serious vulnerabilities were found in Rails, and I guess this made the Rails core team a little anxious.

One might argue that these performance regressions are unacceptable, and they are. I agree. Still, Rails is relatively young framework and these things happen. I expect any framework that is widely used will see some serious vulnerabilities in the next few months/years.

By the way, a good explanation of what these past Rails security issues mean is explained on patio11's blog (http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/01/31/what-the-rails-security-...).

OT: I'm also writing a book on upgrading your Rails 3 app to Rails 4. With these rapid releases, a lot of things change and it's not always clear what has changed or what is new. Feel free to check it out at http://upgradetorails4.com/.
Referring to something as minimal doesn't seem like a knock on the product. It's not just startups that follow lean methodologies. Google can create a minimal viable product too. In fact, this is exactly what they should do. Feature bloated products are terrible ways to launch.
Looking at the definition of controllers here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93cont... how are backbone.js 'views' not controllers?

Or does this logic belong in the Route.js file? I am clearly confused.

FYI.. rails didn't invent mvc; it was invented in the 70's for smalltalk.
The takeaway is that YC companies need to offer more equity, if they hope to attract people like the OP. At the end of the day, most YC companies don't have money to fund the salary and benefits packages the OP wants. This is expected for startups, the idea is that you get paid in equity instead of cash/benefits. Given more equity, the OP could sacrifice some savings to pay for the benefits he wants (clipper card, health insurance for his daughter, health club membership, etc.), with the idea that the expected value of his stock would pay for these benefits in the long run.

It seems pretty clear that he feels YC companies are not offering enough equity to make this tradeoff worthwhile. Thus, the only practical solution for YC companies to attract talent like the author is to provide more equity.
> I think the first bit isn't strictly true. You can claim copyright over images of your product to the extent that the product image is copyrightable. You can't publish photographic prints of copyrighted artwork, for example. And I think there's case law about photographs of publicly-visible architecture as well, but someone will have to confirm that.

Right, if the photograph amounts to a reproduction of something that is itself copyrightable then it is copying and could be infringement. But a camera isn't copyrightable.
You're an developer evangelist for Sendgrid. I can't believe you have not been fired for tweeting those pictures and getting those developers fired without even talking to them.

Since Sendgrid continues to employee you, I'd encourage any developers using Sendgrid to switch to an alternative like Postmark or Mailgun. Let Sendgrid know why you are switching.

For the record, I agree with you that those jokes were inappropriate, but what you did was orders of magnitude more inappropriate and unprofessional.
Planck Microwave Background Results at 10:00 CET, 3/21/2013
Ah, okay that makes sense, considering that both client side and server side events will be used. Thanks for the reply!
it would be great if you could help out more in irc. the noobs are asking pretty fundamental questions and not getting much help. i think it would help shape your guidelines as well to know about some of the problems on the front lines.
William Binney, and other reports about Trailblazer.

I've also talked to a lot of NSA IT employees. They obviously can't divulge anything classified or even sensitive, but are always happy to get back to the commercial world.
So 80% of the comments here mention the Reader and yet you surmise that most people don't care about it?

Regardless of what your personal relationship to the Reader issue is, you might consider the possibility that THIS product is axed after a few years when you are used to it.
I'm not sure how an open monoculture is square one. If it becomes less than ideal to anyone, they can just fork it. Plus, you can't really shut down an open "One True Product" if someone can just use the open materials to start it up again.

The risk seems to be more in the camp of the company. If it's open, someone could undercut them more easily than if it was closed. So the onus is placed more on the ability of the company to continually add value through services or the kind of innovation that led to the product in the first place, rather than just protecting their IP.
This is diassapointing. I've been a fan of GoPro for awhile, but between this and their poor customer service I'll definitely consider other options next time.
Petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/374/323/889/give-alex-reid-hi...
Pretty sure he said $25 and not $250..
can you really 'come and go as you please' if you are a contractor, or even if you are working on your own thing?
YOLO: spend less time deploying, more time for development
Just wanted to say Thank You. I wish more people/stores would do this.
While I agree with some of the points made, I don't think that posting them anonymously on pastebin and then submitting them on HN using the pseudonym "afraidofadria" is of any help if you're actually interested in a balanced discussion.
When this service will be retired?
For that matter, why did anyone buy computers when waiting just a little longer brought cheaper, faster, and better computers?

Well, for one thing, if nobody bought computers, they wouldn't have gotten any faster, since no one would have built them. And if nobody launched space probes, they wouldn't have gotten faster, because no one would have made them.
Initially, divide equally between co-founders and worry about it a little bit further down the road.
So why couldn't you turn around and shh them? Move away from the "offending conversation?"

To me this appears that you intentionally set out to get them kicked out of the conference. You: 1. Tweeted about it 2. Took your phone to take a picture of them [they are "in a public space" or in a private space that allows photography (I'm assuming) but it's still a bit creepy] 3. Tweeted the "offending" rule to the staff.

Don't take this as an attack against you [or even in this situation] However, how would you feel if you were asked to leave a conference from a non-PC comment in a semi-private conversation that you had with someone? How would you feel if that ended your revenue source and/or tarnished your professional reputation?

[My 2c, get off your high horse and be an adult for once: People are going to say things you don't like, get over it. About the photo pit, I find this action extremely uncomfortable.. The same "right" you exercised could be turned around for you.. Someone could start photographing you and make you feel uncomfortable. ]

EDIT: Empowerment has nothing to do about interacting with other individuals. Theres no such thing as a lack of "empowerment" that prevents women from handling the situation with a "ssh" or moving away from the conversation. Could you have even mentioned to the people directly that you're offended, granted you'd look silly as that this is a very minor situation.
Scala IDE 3.0.0 final has been released
Absolutely crazy ! That was a harmless joke gone wrong. Sorry mate.
i'm a yahoo pipes user. why should i switch?
I think the most interesting question raised by this article is, "Why are the smart people graduating from college willing to get shafted by startups?"

Why are schools failing to teach engineers about caring for their own careers? I do not think most business majors would put up with kind of crap. They are all taught to negotiate for salary and to get high earnings early as a basis for later demands. They also understand how stock options work and that 0.5% over a four-year vesting cycle with no protection in the event of acquisition is an atrociously bad deal.
In parts of the US we say herb too
I'm very surprised that they rolled this out without the "sharing" features baked into Google Drive already. You can publish the contents of a spreadsheet, but you can't get at these notes. I know the announcement says a feature like this is coming in a few weeks, but why didn't they just withhold the launch until it's more mature? I mean, who is going to early adopt something so crippled? There seems to be such a lack of focus from Google lately, and I'm not trying to hop on the bandwagon. But they could have rolled this out with the share features already found in Google Drive.
If you are destroying a part of the world to fix another, you are not good. You may be evil even. Because you are selfishly choosing the part to fix, in expense of the part you destroy. If you are good, you should do no evil, or at least strive to.
Wow, you're either one of those incredibly rare ruby devs who actually run windows, or you're going to switch your entire environment in order to switch frameworks. Something doesn't smell right
My pointing out Garriott's fallacy doesn't advance the conversation but your repeating it does?

One last time: Garriott's statement is uselessly vague. If we ask people "do most designers suck" we will be lumping together the affirmative answers of those who think (e.g.) Halo's designers suck alongside those who think they do not.

So both groups agreeing to the over-broad phrasing "most designers suck" gives us only the illusion of consensus.

So as long as Garriott avoids defining "what sucks" and "what does not suck", he is not saying anything true or worthwhile.
Here's David in EA's iconic "We See Farther" poster, from the company's golden age (the Trip Hawkins era):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/grouchodis/7918145932/in/photos...

I had this poster on my wall in high school; these guys were the original "rockstar" coders.