skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even people who do "just see" things eventually have to learn to break things down into pieces and solve them bit by bit. As you get older and acquire more expertise, the complexity of problems you solve gets higher, until it reaches a point where nobody can hold it in their head.

When I was a kid, I used to piss off my teachers by just writing down the answers on all my tests & homework. They'd always say "Show your work!" and I'd say "What work? I just know what the answer is", and most of the time it'd be right. When I wrote computer programs, I'd pace around for a bit until I'd figured out everything, then sit down at the computer and type it in. When I solved physics problem, I'd memorize the problem statement, go take a shower, mull it over, and write down the solution when I came out.

This worked until my freshman year of college. And then it started to not work - half the time, it'd work great and I'd be done with my homework in no time, but half the time I just wouldn't be able to solve the problem at all. And then it started to not work at all, and I basically failed at solving anything.

So I had to learn the same skills of breaking things down and solving them piece by piece that everyone else already knew. Laboriously. At the age of 20, when most people had figured it out by 12. I'm certainly more effective now for having learned them though, as I tend to get stuck much less often.

It's still frustrating though, because I can't shake the feeling that I'm dumber now than I was at 13. I don't even know if I can still solve things just by looking at them anymore - so much of my work requires small, incremental changelists and clawing my way up the technology ladder. For someone who'd built so much of my identity on always knowing the answer (terrible idea BTW, never build your kid's ego up on their intelligence), this was a really bitter pill to swallow.
Great site. I don't know how difficult it would be to implement or whether it would hurt the performance, but it would be great if you overlaid the subway lines. See http://www.onnyturf.com/subway/ for an example.

Frankly, I don't know why google hasn't done this themselves, it's incredibly useful.
Comes from Dinosaur Comics for those who liked it.

http://www.qwantz.com

Took me a while to warm up to the comics, but there's some gold in there, eg:

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001426.html
http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001433.html

Also, while I'm spouting random and totally subjective opinions about Dinosaur Comic related things, I much prefer this shirt

http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_C...

to the time travel one, but maybe I'm just a big kid.
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.

No, the IQ test result purports to say something about the test-taker's "intelligence," that is about how the test-taker would perform doing other tasks on a different occasion. And that is why every IQ test result is best described as an estimate. The longer answer about why most mental test results are best not described as measurements has to do with the technical meaning of "measurement" as it has developed in sciences preceding psychology, and that answer is given very nuanced discussion in Joel Michell's book Measurement in Psychology

http://books.google.com/books?id=QXAAhBN8ZScC&dq=Joel+Mi...

P.S. IQ test scores typically do NOT describe in any straightforward way what the item-content score of the test-taker was, and it's possible, on the same form of the same brand of IQ test, to obtain identical IQ scores with other test-takers without having identical item-content performance.
They kind of do but this gives site owners a method to instruct Google on what they want stored about their sites. You can't figure that out with an algorithm.
Now if only MS and SONY would let the little guy develop for their consoles (the XNA platform doesn't count). They make it so hard for an individual to acquire an SDK (firstly, you have to be a real game company). Are they making the same mistake as the big mobile players? If only Apple would enter the console market and shake things up.
Great site :) I've seen people do Google Maps-integrated housing searches, but they always insist on using their own (very limited) data. It's about time someone did this with CL :)

I'm currently looking for housing too, so thanks a ton :)
"salary offered (deferred until funding)..."

I'm assuming you don't mean that you get paid back for salary you didn't get paid before funding. FWIW, investors are REALLY not keen to give $ to a startup and have a big slice of it go to to back-earnings.

Onto the question/situation, though. How long did they work on it before you? Do you all work the same amount?

Depending on the answer to those questions, I think you're entitled to a close to even share, assuming you all vest.

A way to get around the inevitable response is to vest. If you want to own 25% of the company, suggest that it vest over 3 years (you should ALL be vesting anyways). A good way to pitch it is this: "You guys have been working on this for 12 months. I've been working on it for 7. By the time I vest, the difference will be 41 months versus 36 months of time in. What do you think a reasonable percentage of my contribution will be at that point?" If time is the only facture, that's a fair point. If they poured cash in, have amazing connections, or had higher paying careers they set aside, they might be entitled to more.

Regarding board seats, those get re-assigned if you get funding oftentimes. Board meetings aren't particularly fun-- I'd avoid it unless you think your board will do something screwy. Only thing I'd offer is that you want founders to have control of the board-- if not, the board can fire the founders. If you are the odd-man-out, the board can fire you whether you are on it or not. So being on it offers little protection unless you have unanimity clauses written in. You can always ask to have regular optional attendance for the board meetings.
Webbynode. Competitive plans, Ready Stacks and Community Stacks will be a killer feature.

http://www.webbynode.com
Bark Command : Aiding You Get Some Peace and Unpretentious
The first thing I tried to do was click on the center image. Several screenshots of Qimo in use would improve the site tremendously.
The correct answer is "as soon as you figure out what's going on, you ask to speak to your lawyer":

http://boingboing.net/2008/07/28/law-prof-and-cop-agr.html

I expect that your lawyer will then explain the situation to the cops, point to your car in the parking lot, point to your lack of criminal record, motive, or experience in fencing stolen cars, offer a stirring and heartfelt apology on your behalf, and then stand by to argue.

(But I can't be sure of that, because I am not a lawyer myself.)
Pretty bad cheat sheet, since it doesn't mention any military applications. Throw in a few tips on how to make rifles and should be good to go
Welcome To TechCrunch, MG Siegler
No it's not premature to figure out what your fair share is. The proper time to negotiate is immediately, it only gets harder the longer you wait. You should negotiate your share relative to the current other members of the startup, and then everyone should dilute at the same rate when you add an option pool.

Unfortunately, you have already made the mistake of waiting seven months. As soon as they reneged on paying you the "imminent" cash salary, you should have demanded a much higher equity stake than low single digits.

At this point, you have the right to ask for whatever you can get. It's just a matter of what your alternative is, and how valuable you are to them.
The topic is very interesting, but whoever designed this needs to go spend some time with a Tufte book ...
Amazing site. I'm moving to Montreal and have been sorting through TONS of listings (not used to it all, coming from a much smaller city!) and it's been pretty tiresome

This site is seriously a godsend and will instantly reduce our stress in finding a place.
Out of interests sake: how does one validate an IQ test?

Thanks for asking the important follow-up question that is so rarely asked. To validate an IQ test (a test that purports to estimate "general intelligence"), one must first reach a consensus among test designers about some sign of intelligence that is detectable outside the testing room. Over the years, psychologists have proposed various behavioral characteristics of human beings as signs that those human beings are "intelligent," with entering challenging, high-income occupations that require a lot of higher schooling being one criterion proposed for adult IQ tests, and being precocious in school and having good grades and good teacher ratings being one criterion that is proposed for child IQ tests.

One finds a sample of persons to take a new brand of test in its norming administration, and rates those persons by external criteria of "intelligence," weighting those criteria by consensus, and then checks the rank-order correlation between the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the IQ test and the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the validation criteria. There will NEVER be a perfect ("1.0") correlation between the test and the validation criterion, just as there is never a perfect correlation between IQ scores on one occasion and IQ scores on another occasion on the same brand of IQ test by the same group of test-takers.

There is enough play in the joints in both IQ test scoring (whatever the brand of test) and ranking people by other validation criteria (whatever they are), that strictly speaking one can't say that there is any all-time, universally significant ranking of human beings by intelligence. But a close-enough-for-government-work validation study would show an IQ test having correlations above .80, and perhaps even above .90, in comparison with previous brands of IQ tests, or in comparison with subsets of its own item content, or in comparison with some well regarded external validation criterion.

For reasons mentioned in another comment in this thread (above?), there is especially little reliability, and hence especially little validity, for IQ scores far above the population mean, and thus it's very hard to devise a validation criterion that would sort, say, members of Mensa

http://www.mensa.org/

or members of the Study of Exceptional Talent

http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html

or members of the Davidson Young Scholars program

http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/

into their "true" rank order by IQ, not to mention that IQ scores for the same individual can and do change over the course of life.
Some of India’s Urban Elite to Plunge Into Politics
Thanks HN. You lied to me about the true cost of a failed startup.

This is either:

a. Bait. You got me.

b. A poor joke. Next time you may want to try <sarcasm> and </sarcasm>.

or

c. Your true feelings. You have a attitude problem. The large software company noticed too. Fix your stinkin' thinkin' and stop blaming others for your failure. I wonder if "lack of money" was the only cause of your startup's failure.
The problem with push: can small developers afford it?
"No, the IQ test result purports to say something about the test-taker's "intelligence," that is about how the test-taker would perform doing other tasks on a different occasion."

Do the makers of the various IQ tests each publish a document that says how well people with various IQs will perform at other tasks?

edit: Thanks for the link to the book, this is great stuff. I've been looking for a book like this for a few years, because it's been bothering me for a while now that there doesn't seem to be any philosophy of what can be measured vs. what can't. I'm glad I'm not the only person to notice this problem.
Should Online Scofflaws Be Denied Web Access?
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.

That's silly. There's no such thing as persevering points. If you create an option pool later on, everyone dilutes together.
heres a redemption code: donttasemebro you get 10 tasers. add me - 185-446-714
REDEMPTION CODE: donttasemebro
add me: 185-446-714
These people are using the website with no warranty

I think you will find that a jury will have no trouble telling the difference in value between something that has no warranty, something that has no warranty and is broken thanks to an error by its vendor, and something that is broken because some third party broke it. Warranty law is about the first two cases. It has nothing to do with the third case. If you break a company's product, you are going to be liable, whether the product is under warranty or not.

Incidentally, we have reached the point where it's important to point out that I am not a lawyer.

I'd argue that somebody was just getting creative with their profile!

If you get creative with your own profile, and it brings down your browser, you have found a bug. Indeed, if you get creative with your own profile, and it brings down Twitter, you have merely found a bug. (Though one that could obviously be used to perform a DOS attack on Twitter. If you exploit the bug to bring down Twitter over and over for your own amusement, you're getting into shakier legal ground. The responsible thing to do is report the bug.)

If you "get creative with your profile" to create a XSS attack that deliberately defaces other profiles? Hire a lawyer, pronto.

how responsible do the website owners have to be?

The truthful answer is "not very". You can be convicted for breaking into an account that has little or no actual security on it. You can be convicted for searching for an exploit on your employer's computer, even if you don't exploit it. (Ask Randal Schwartz. You should probably Google up his case. Sounds like you need some legal briefings.)

Don't impersonate other people on computer systems. Even if the system owners are begging for it. (Especially if the system owners are begging for it.) And don't "test" people's security without specifically getting their permission in advance.
I don't know. My data plumbing gets parents home to their kids an hour faster. Spore's considerable technical chops were in the service of a game which was not fun to play.

I don't wake up in a cold sweat at night going "Aww shoot, two years of work on this project and it is useless!"
Another perspective: http://www.google.com/trends?q=c%2B%2B%2C+paris+hilton&c...
Direct link from TFA: http://beta.w3.org/

The search button text foreground color is very close to my system's button background color and I think they should specify a background of their own that goes good with it.

Other than that, it looks much better than their current design.

Also, you can give them feedback at http://www.w3.org/QA/2009/03/betaw3org.html
I didn't say it was a good marketing ploy or anything but was going off the thought that he didn't do much damage, if he did end up deleting data or something along those lines it would be a bad thing. I was just hoping he was honest in saying he did it to point out an exploit which is what twitter needs since it is growing so quickly.

Developing twitter apps should be an unsure market as it is new to the masses and extensive security testing should be done. I don't condone people breaking into websites or messing around with exploits but it happens and the less harm people do the better.
I find this article to be incredibly insightful, even at 70 years old. It also contains many choice quotes.

"If we wanted to give our convenient inquiring friend, the Man from Mars, an idea of the best in human culture, we would hardly hand him a set of school texts and syllabi. Why should we do it with Johnnie and Susie?"
If you talk about how cool it was, and how you plan to do it again, they won't want to hire you, thinking you are just there for a few months until you go back to doing startups

I don't think so. I did just that and I still got 3 offers out of 3 interviews. 2 of them were small companies (one of which I'm working at now), but the last was a corporate behemoth with the initials FX. It really depends on what the employer wants out of filling the position, I think.
Note to poster, this is an example of rude and/or lazy linking behavior magnified:

1. joshwprinceton linked to the gizmodo story, it's actually just a cheap "via" link from buzzfeed (http://www.buzzfeed.com/reddit/lets-say-youve-gone-back-in-t...)

2. Buzzfeed linked to the image graphic directly, instead of the actual story providing context at Topato (http://topatoco.com/hey/?p=33)

This laziness fails to give Topato the actual traffic they deserve for this image. It's a case of giving the money to the least productive members in the information supply chain.

I have no affiliation with any of the sites or people involved.
Thanks.

Should I try to line up a job before negotiating?
You can do that, but even in exactly the same market, two different companies (or contract firms, in my case) may want diametrically opposite changes to your resume (or CV, in your case). Here in the DC area, I was told to play down my business ownership and that the amount of money I was asking was "unrealistic" (and did I want to maybe talk about something 20-30K lower?) within a coupla weeks of being hired at more than the "unrealistic" salary by someplace I'd sent the older version of my resume. It's incredibly variable.
Ask HN: How to share equity and talk to a potential partner ?
Hello folks,

I have been working on a application for a Social Networking Platform. I did a version 1 (designed DB, implemented backend, and the front end ) and released it to test it out. Now, I am adding another feature to it for which I need someone with a good front end experience as it's too time consuming and distracting for me. I found someone to help me with the front end(Flash, as he is good at it). We both will continue the development along with our existing full time jobs, so basically weekends/evenings. The idea is based on my understanding of the user base and other demographics. I am treating it like a fun side project with revenue if any being tied to advertising/virtual currency.

My question is how should the potential revenue be divided once he jumps into the project as a Front End Dev ?

[
i. I already did some work already(how to quantify that),
ii. I am also paying for hosting,
iii. I had the idea (even though it's not rocket science)
]
Python is older than Java as well.
It's a lovely UI, but golly is it slow.
Apple went into the Mobile Market business only because they knew that its standing still.

The gaming market is soldiering proudly!!!
The author seems to confuse push with polling:

> Consider an application with just 10,000 users. It might service a million uses per day, assuming update checks every 15 minutes. More time-critical uses might demand checks every few minutes or even several times a minute. As the computational burden builds, so do the hosting costs. While cloud computing provides an excellent match to these kinds of needs, that kind of solution comes with a real price in development, maintenance, and day-to-day operations.

With push, small developers are saved from the hassle of handling lots of polling connections. They just push according to what their application needs -- it's more scalable, and that's the point.
Their site runs in ASP on Windows? That's a bit messed up for a linux distribution.
People said that about AltaVista before Google came along. I think what blekko is trying to do is fundamentally change the way you interact with a search engine. If they can do that, and do it in a way that truly improves the experience, then the users will follow.
That sounds like bad news waiting to happen.

The other 2 people have no idea you are upset with the current arrangement. Waiting to see what happens with other hires and then getting angry just seems spiteful and jealous.

If you are unhappy with the current situation, you need to figure out if it is enough to force you to quit. If so, give them the option to re-negotiate to a favorable arrangement for both, or quit.

If you aren't willing to quit over it, ignore that factor completely and learn from the experience.
This is the college lab experiment that I remember the best. Because my lab partner and I did the measurement and determined that G was 15% smaller [1] than the value in the textbooks.

We asked the professor what might have gone wrong. Whereupon he exhibited the key trait of a great science teacher: He refused to tell us.

So we worked. Oh, did we work. We armed ourselves with the backs of many envelopes and brainstormed. We tried to think of every possible source of systematic error. We tried to calculate the likely magnitude of each of those sources. ("How much electric charge imbalance would be needed for static electricity to cause the error?" "What if an elephant were pacing around outside the lab in phase with our experiment?") We redid the experiment several times, changing the orientation of the apparatus, moving ground wires, et cetera.

Nothing helped. In the end, we wrote up a really long lab report detailing all the theories and the calculations and the systematic errors that we had tried to correct for. Then we plotted up our results and stated that our measurement was X, plus or minus something like 5%. We noted that every other physicist for the last few hundred years had converged on a value 15% higher than X, which suggested that we'd probably missed something, but that there was nothing we could do about that because we didn't have any more time to experiment.

As I recall, we got an A. I will never know how we managed to screw up the experiment. After we turned in the report, the professor confessed that he had no idea either. If he knew otherwise, he was an excellent actor. They plotted all the class's results on the wall, as a time series, and ours was a big, big outlier -- that damned apparatus worked for the groups before us, and it worked for the groups after us. We got a lot of good-natured ribbing.

I'm not sure I could design a better two-week tour of the scientific experience than that.

---

[1] Or maybe it was larger. As if it really matters. Anyway, it was way off.
Here:

http://www.quinncoincorporated.org/screenshots.php

I had to do a little snooping first, only because their "donate" link figures so prominently on their site that it triggered off my scam detector. They're a legit non-profit founded by a couple.
This has been discussed multiple times before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=413473

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=374998
Great! . Have you thought about offering this as a Google apps solution. So that authentication can be restricted to people from my company and app could be accessed at gitbug.mycompany.com
That's usually not necessary, but I don't know enough about your situation to comment.
I suspected there were a lot of us INTPs here. Namaste, architects.
Ask HN: What Linux distro for a Rails app that needs to scale?
Title says it all. My startup has collected so many users that it's getting to be just ridiculous. So, we bought a brand new server with really nice specs, and I'm debating what OS to use.

While I love OpenBSD, I'm more concerned with scalability than security, at this point.

As of right now, I'm going to use nginx over Apache, and probably use a 64-bit Ubuntu server.

What would you use?
It depends. Consider the prototypical iPhone app, the Twitter client. AFAIK, the Twitter API only supports polling, but the iPhone only supports push for background notifications. Thus the app developer is left to build (and pay for) a polling/pushing adaptor.

Somebody like Gnip could make good money here.
To flush out this point, consider that hiring someone is not free. There can be significant costs of hiring someone who performs poorly (opportunity cost, training overhead, lost work).