skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Allow me to elaborate:

A lot of companies have a policy of not hiring people that are significantly overqualified for a position. The reason for this is that those people are almost guaranteed to be unhappy and perform poorly. That means that if your company just needs some code monkeys to crank out code to spec then you need to hire people that are perfectly happy doing that because it matches their skill level and ambitions.

Someone with enough initiative to start their own company is not likely to do well in that kind of an environment, and the fact that they look at it solely as crap they need to tolerate in exchange for a paycheck doesn't help.
if you're not good at these conversations, they can just be really fucking exhausting. so staying out of them, and therefore not being exhausted by them, is a success.
I've recruited in the UK grad developer market, and I can tell you there aren't anywhere enough barely competent programmers on the market to make a failed startup background a problem. Most people applying for graduate developer jobs struggle to even write basic code and lack any real fundamental understanding of the languages they use.
12.04.1961 - First human in outer space.
The actual data being shown is very clearly explained. They aren't drawing any conclusions so I don't see what your problem is. There is a 'Normalized Comparison' graph but the weights are right there for anyone to adjust. The authors are very honest about what this data is and what it means. It's just interesting, nothing more. They don't claim or even imply any of the things you say they do.
Thanks, I feel much better! I ranked highish on an IQ test book, 130-150 (however reliable that is).

I love your hypothesis of what IQ measures, though unfortunately I don't think it's true. But do I think the "skill of breaking down problems" is one thing that actual accomplishment measures. It also seems to me that even a 230 IQ person is limited to what they can grasp instantly, if they lack this skill. Perhaps if their high IQ removes their motivation for acquiring this skill, it might explain why the accomplishments of some high IQ folk aren't commensurate with their IQ.

230 IQ sounds awesome, but just what can such a person grasp at once?

Is it like someone with very long legs, so a step for them is a giant leap for anyone else...? If so, it isn't much good if they can't string steps together. If they can't combine their steps, a crawling baby will effortlessly outdistance them.
Whatever it is, you agreed to the original offer and technically the other founders do not have to re-negotiate the offer with you.

Since you accepted the offer with salary although deferred. I think it is fair, assuming the other founders did not get salary, in lieu of the low equity you are receiving.
Phew, we're back to a net-zero effect from HN!
Very sad, Google did not change the logo, like they do for even less honorable dates.
It's not just for shortening urls it's also for deciding where your search engine scores go. So to take an example from a googler at a recent conference say you have an online store that has a bunch of categories. Someone wants to buy a red bag and they go through bags then to red and pick item 5.
/bags/red/5

Someone else goes to red things then bags than item 5
/red/bags/5

You end up with duplicate content issues and the possibility of having your search engine score split between the two pages.

With canonical you can say on both pages that /items/5 is the real url and thats the one that will get the search score + be indexed most likely.
FFX: Right click -> View Background Image
1. Your site design looks really good.

2. The isk8 app is really interesting to me. Would you please email me: zackster[@]gmail[.]com when it goes live?

Thanks!
>> Thanks HN. You lied to me about the true cost of a failed startup.

You are kidding right?
Another hiring manager at the same company will tell you "an entrepreneurial attitude is exactly what we need around here!" Rejection doesn't contain any signal at all. It's only noise. Blaming other people for your own failure is a mistake, but perceiving rejection as failure at all is a bigger mistake. You're doing so many things wrong here, it's hard to even imagine what you could be thinking. If you're going to a company, rather than having companies come to you, then you're already doing it wrong. You shouldn't even have a resume, let alone be taking it seriously when a hiring manager tells you some specific thing on the resume is what got between you and the job, let ALONE be blaming anonymous people about their failure to correctly guide you. This post is so riddled with personality problems, bad strategy, and self-indulgent lapses of reasoning that it boggles the mind.
<<Consider these things:

How much did the original founders spend both in time and in money before you came along.

* How much have /you/ spent in relation to that?

* How affected was the outcome of the business by your presence, did you accelerate the growth, did you take it the extra step, can they survive without you etc.>>

I've done this math, valuing time at the market rate. I come out as about a 10% contributor, but they obviously can't give me 10%, since there need to be points for the option pool.

I was offered 2%, which seemed really low, but I was told that this was because the CEO wanted to conserve points for future hiring. I was also told the low number was because I wasn't relevant to getting the first round of funding (which appeared to be imminent). However, funding came later, at a time when I am relevant, and with 7 months on the line, I don't think this is enough, unless a large number of programmers much better than I am are hired (and they mentor me).
I've become a fan of Merlin's writing since he posted this last December.

If you enjoyed this, go read Real Advice Hurts http://www.43folders.com/2008/12/03/real-advice-hurts which speaks to some of the same issues, and struck a chord with me. I've re-read it at least half a dozen times.
Well, remember that a.) wrapping up a failed startup and b.) getting turned down for jobs afterwards is a very stressful and emotionally demanding experience. I went through it less than a year ago; I can certainly empathize.

Zubar's attitude certainly isn't productive: he'd get a more positive response by acknowledging that ok, the startup is dead, what can I learn from this? But it's understandable. It's often not easy to be rational in the face of multiple rejections.
The best way to promote the truth is to always tell the truth yourself.
These things are never simple but a fair distribution should take into account the risk each person took and the value of their contribution. For example if they worked twice as long as you and they took twice the risk you did then it would be difficult for you to justify more than a 1/9 stake.

If they were stuck before you got there and you played an important part in getting a 3-person company to some measure of profitability then you probably deserve closer to a double-digit percentage.

A board seat is probably out of the question at this point but I'd recommend you negotiate for the same class of shares and vesting/acceleration options that your co-founders get.
Good for knowing what is more marketable.
Odd that you would even get that kind of feedback. If they really have that sort of rule, wouldn't they just toss your resume on the pile? Most large companies avoid giving specific reasons for rejecting you, as that information could contribute to legal risk. (e.g., "too much experience" = ageism)
The other founders have deferred salary as well.

Obviously, no one has to renegotiate anything, but I'm asking what's fair. I can't evaluate my own number because I don't know what's happening at the bigger picture. If 30 programmers more skilled than I am are hired tomorrow, I'm probably getting a fair share. If some post-money marketing VP gets, say, 8%, I'm going to ask for a raise to at least that level or quit.
Interesting. I wouldn't have thought so. I could be misinformed.
My software can break your hardware.
http://langpop.com/timeline.html
Can someone elaborate on what the following paragraph is trying to say? I can't seem to follow.

Through looking at the code behind Twitter, Mikeyy was able to produce a similar site to Twitter with some additional features. “I used my past knowledge to gain an insight on how Twitter worked and outputted to a user. Although both of the sites are coded in different languages I was able to give my site the same features as Twitter, while coding some of my own.”
I recently discovered that you can pay freelancers for 2 hours work on a small problem [an edge case], and save yourself 10 hours. You don't even have to pay stock, as people are pleased to be paid $80 for an hour's work.

EDIT: However, knowing what to ask for (what you need doing) is important!
Perl is older than Java.
Actually, I feel that at some point in the past the market for PHP books was saturated. Until perhaps PHP 6 comes along, there is little need for new books. Additionally, the way many PHP programmers usually start is with online tuts and docs.
You don't think social interaction is worth something?
You could shade the truth, yes. For instance, you might say you were an employee, rather than stakeholder. An employer looking for conformism isn't going to care about that sort of lie, because it's a lie told in order to conform.

As to the truism that lying on your C.V. is a very bad idea, well, it is, but so is trying to recruit excessively conformist employees. You've put yourself in a position where you can't both conform and be truthful, so decide!
as an entrepreneur you are obviously a free spirit, not the kind of person that settles well in a normal job

Thus does the domesticated assail the free.
I figured the deal was fair because I thought salaries would be coming in imminently, and that I'd only be putting a few grand on the line. That turned out not to be the case.

In truth, I don't know what fair is, because I don't see the whole picture: who else will get equity in the future, what does the option pool look like, etc.?
Mentorship and non-financial support? I don't know the full scope of what YC does for its startups, but you may get to ramen profitability on your own, but growth may be extremely difficult.
The problem with that assumption is the same problem people make with consumers; you're expecting them to be rational. This guy was launching a Twitter-clone and blatantly attacked the Twitter service. If it wasn't for the fear of repercussions in regard to JAIL TIME, I doubt he would have ever come clean.

“I am the person who coded the XSS which then acted as a worm when it auto updated a users profile and status, which then infected other users who viewed their profile. I did this out of boredom, to be honest. I usually like to find vulnerabilities within websites and try not to cause too much damage, but start a worm or something to give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website.”

OH RLY?! Promoting yourself and your website by writing code that, despite his ridiculously naive belief, reflects what MILLIONS OF CONSUMERS COMPLETELY DESPISE in the form of disruptive viri, malware, spam, etc. Absolutely everything a consumer hates, he decided to be a marketing gimmick to attract people to his web site. In case he didn't get the memo, honest twitter-app developers have a difficult enough time convincing users to give them their l/p for value-added services that have no intention of creating disorder. Thanks for making that job easier.

Jesus h...
Thanks, I've been trying to recall the source, but all I remember is he didn't support his hypothesis very well. I'll post if I find it.
I wasn't at all implying it's the only option but rather that it's an option. I don't think you can entirely avoid discussions in that format especially if you are discussing non-professional topics like politics, how you should raise children or other highly opinionated things.

You always get to choose the people you are having a discussion with and some people have a hard time taking someone disagreeing with them. Even if the discussion might feel unpleasant in the heat of the moment I find that days or weeks after the fact, I can still have the conversation in my head and feel I've gained some insight into other peoples minds and maybe even agree with them.

So all I was implying was that they aren't entirely pointless, however frustrating they may be. I can see your point of wanting to avoid the frustration, even if I personally have quite a thick skin and don't mind it all that much.

I could mention that I'm from Sweden, but I doubt that helps at all. :) I do like to stress that I don't try start those types of discussions and I do think people who start shouting are silly, but I do argue against someone however loud their voices are. :)

EDIT: I could probably also say that I tend to stay in heated group arguments mainly because of the audience rather than whoever might be disagreeing with me. As people who tend too shout don't tend to change their mind but letting them have the only word might make the audience think that they are right.
You're in the UK? Well, that's the problem I'm afraid. People in the UK are not generally very accepting of startup failure, and will often count it against you.

I moved from the UK to San Francisco a few years ago, and everything is very different. An attempted startup, whether successful or not, is almost always seen as a good thing here.
Nice. Thanks for posting that.
I guess I'm not the only one who daydreams of going back in time and (re)inventing all the good stuff.
What's a recommended way to get started with Ruby (on Rails)?
Thats not a company you want to work for - they are looking for people who don't think.
Writing about what performance may or may not look like in 3 years time after changes that may or may not happen seems like a waste of time.
First, read pg's essay on the subject, if you haven't already: http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html.

Although it's tough to revisit this question after you've already established a deal (it would easy be perceived as opportunistic), it can't hurt to ask.

At worst, the other founders should be able to justify the allocation you've been given and their reasons for not upping your share; at best, they might revisit their decision given how much value you've delivered over the past 7 months.

Just make sure raising the question doesn't come across as blackmail.
For example if they worked twice as long as you and they took twice the risk you did then it would be difficult for you to justify more than a 1/9 stake.

That seems about right. I figure I'm worth about 9-10% of the work up to now, considering time spent and what we'd command on the market. That number needs to be docked according to the pool reserved for future employees, and raised if we go longer without salaries. There are enough variables that I'm not aware of, so I don't know what fair is although I have a general sense of the range.

A board seat is probably out of the question at this point but I'd recommend you negotiate for the same class of shares and vesting/acceleration options that your co-founders get.

Why is a board seat out of the question? Should I want one? I'm really naive about this question, and don't even know if I necessarily want one. What are the benefits and drawbacks?
Goods Arrival
Glad To See You R. Hear Now :)
A quick calculation shows that all of Twitter's tweets come to about 260GB uncompressed (including 40 bytes of metadata for each tweet). The social graph would be about another 200GB. Given that the entire Twitter could fit on a high end laptop's drive, it's weird that they wouldn't have enough replication to avoid data loss. Even if you assume the data is doubled because of denormalization, it still seems fairly manageable.
A 2008 Sun article sees Flash as having the following position in the server storage hierarchy: cache, DRAM, Flash, disk, tape:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/not_a_flash_in_the

Which is what the present article is talking about in this line:

The benefits of SSDs as an intermediate caching tier are also limited, and the cost of provisioning such a tier was justified for fewer than 10% of the examined workloads
He built a Twitter clone (StalkDaily.com) which completely copies Twitter's HTML.
Any talk of IQ should include "the point", i.e. why you're paying attention. If measuring IQ corresponds with a wide reaching genetic study to find precursors for intelligence - awesome. If we're looking for reason to label a racial subset "lesser", than it's a waste.

I remember a really awkward moment in 6th grade, where my teacher took me aside and told me that my tested IQ was top of the class, higher than hers, and only equal to her son's (also in the class). What in god's name could I say to that?
The guy cloned Twitter. He wrote this worm to advertise his clone.
You can also add the HTTP header to the response for these pages so you don't even have to touch the markup, just a configuration file on the Web server.
It's hard to tell if this is a credible news source.
Preoccupation n. extreme or excessive concern with something http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/preoccupation
Courtesy of a friend, can't take credit for it, but indeed, good find
Yeah.

"For everyone wondering, I did NOT promote and/or was involved with the spamming ON Twitter. All bad things you are hearing about this site is not true. Please reconsider as I am not the person who did this…StalkDaily is a website that follows the same functions as Twitter, except more advanced How? Well, instead of just adding an “update status”, people can add pictures and videos. Then you can stalk them, so when they upload a video or picture, or comment someone, you’ll know!"

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/11/twitter-hit-by-stalkdai...

Pretty lame, if you ask me.
The kid admitted to it on http://www.stalkdaily.com/
"From the purely statistical standpoint, many studies repeatedly showed that verbal intelligence, including the sheer size of one's vocabulary, has one of the highest correlations of any type of test item with overall intelligence as measured by tests containing a wide variety of test items."

I call bullshit. Hart & Risley found that by far the biggest predictor of verbal ability was the volume of language used by the parents. IQ had only a nominal correlation.
"Umm, okay"?

I think my response when I found out what my IQ was was, "That's nice."
Worked fine, stayed in production use for years - might still be there for all I know. And no, it wasn't appreciated of course....

"Safety margin"! What's that? ;)
wyvern - I agree.

I have to say, as someone who is massively new to this - this is no right or wrong. There's no harm in asking the question, if you raise your concerns and walk away with any additional % - excellent. But the thing you don't want to do is alienate the others, so be sure of your approach before you voice concerns.

Nobody here will ever be able to understand the effort/risk you have all put in comparably apart from yourself, so the only advice I'd give is go for what you can get, nicely.
Qimo: A desktop OS designed for children
I remember doing this experiment as a physics undergrad. We had to set up the torsion balance and leave it for 24 hours to let any vibrations damp out. The problem was that anytime someone would close a door in the lab more vibrations would start up. I don't remember how close our numbers came to Newton's constant, unfortunately.

It is a nice application of lasers to measure measure fundamental forces. Sort of the poor man's LIGO (minus the gravitaional waves): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO
IMHO, the word measure seems more appropriate. Your IQ is just a number that measures how many questions you got right on an IQ test with the number of questions the median person got right. It's an exact number, not an estimate.

As for what this means, it's neither a measure or an estimate. It just is. It might correlate with some stuff, but it doesn't seem appropriate to use either 'measure' or 'estimate' to describe any such relationships.
My plan is to wait until we're ready to formally incorporate before I raise the issue, because I'll have a better sense of what the numbers mean. I'm sure there were external people given equity (legal counsel, etc.) so it's premature to judge what's a fair share.
Does anyone know how many programmers are programming per language? I'm most interested in Ruby, Python, C#, Java, but any other language would do too. Very rough figures? Are there 10^4 C# programmers, 10^6?
Then again, you probably wouldn't be looking for a job if your startup was a success. I agree with you though -- I think it's just a case of them not wanting someone with a high level of ambition and drive, and instead needing someone who would fill that position for the long term.
Slicehost or Linode
Hello, I would like to hear experiences from people who have either used slicehost or linode. and which would you recommend?
>he decided to be a marketing gimmick to attract people to his web site.

(1) At least it was only a marketing gimmick. Do you not know how much more damage a worm such as this could do if the author chose to?

(2) You make it sound like it was some well thought out scheme for him to become a millionaire. No, it was something he seems to have launched and it just caught fire and spread like crazy.

For a 17-year old, I would say this is pretty expected behavior.

Edit: Just read that the worm apparently deleted buncha tweets. If that is the case, that is pretty bad and crossing the "funny" line.
Myspace was targeted by something similar a few years ago. The worm creator was hit with a lawsuit and "three years probation, 90 days community service and an undisclosed amount of restitution."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(XSS)
While an interesting snippet, I don't see how it relates to the comment you responded to.
Great job! We'll be using padmapper on our house hunt from now on.

How do you handle CL entries without street location information?
(3) If you're going to quote anybody, at least quote the source.

Mikeyy explained to BNO News that he created Stalk Daily from “boredom” and because he “needed a way to make money.”

Sounds to me like premeditated criminal intent.
The Defeat of the Schools (1939)
I work at (and and found my current apartment using) HotPads - http://hotpads.com We list about 300k rental houses and apartments all over the US
It leads me to wonder, if google is as smart as most people see them as, why don't they make an attempt at working this out, or at least defining a way to deal with it themselves?
After your business has gone so far into the red that you've decided to fold it and just get a job, you, too, might just want a paycheck. It's not necessarily a permanent condition, but surely no company hires thinking that the employee is going to be hanging around their company longer than 2-3 years anyway?
I appreciate your preference and wish I knew more people like you. On the other hand, I wish I could appreciate conversations the same way I appreciate playing sports, as an enjoyable activity that allows me to exercise some of my natural human capabilities.

Unfortunately, I can't do it. I get bored if important things aren't discussed, and if important things are discussed, I get stressed out about the quality of the discussion. For some reason I feel like raucus, uninhibited arguments are incompatible with intelligence and a critical approach to life, even though I know that's wrong; I know that plenty of intelligent writers and thinkers have been known for their wit and their ability to hold their own in rowdy discussions. I think I've been programmed to believe in a false dichotomy between intelligent discussion and noisy manipulation.