skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Vesting options at a startup are really like second-order options. If they were granted to you immediately they would just be ordinary options: you have the option to buy the stock at the strike price. However, since they must vest over a period of time in which you are sacrificing a higher salary, you are also given the option of whether to continue vesting those options (by staying at the company) or not (leaving the company).

The second-order option is what makes them valuable. Most startups either grow aggressively during those 4 years or they die. If they fail early, you don't have to sacrifice much salary for the now worthless options. If they are doing well, the options are now worth much more yet you are still only sacrificing the same amount of salary for them.

The problem is that the value of this presents a direct conflict between the company and employee. When the value of the unvested options grow, the company can reduce the unvested amount (or fire them if they don't agree)[1] because it will be disproportionate to the value the employee is providing. Note that they don't actually have to go after the unvested shares to recapture this value. They can go after any other form of compensation they are providing since it will still be more than the employee can get elsewhere. Essentially, this means the employee's upside potential is severely limited. Since the value of a share in a startup is based almost entirely on a massively higher future value, this tremendously reduces the value of typical startup vesting options.

If I worked for a startup I'd want straight equity. Find the value of the common stock and pay 10-30% of my salary in common stock. The amount of shares will float as the value of the company does, but this is required in order to keep incentives aligned. I'll pay the tax out of my salary (at ordinary income rates). If the company succeeds, almost the entire value derived from the equity will still be taxed at capital gains rates.

[1] See Zynga, Skype, and probably many others we never hear about.
This looks great. Doing your taxes sucks.

One completely unrelated question (and I hate to be that person on HN): is the accelerated scroll on the website intentional? It's a really good looking site, but the scroll speed makes it very hard to read.
From Marc Andressen – A Master Class in Corporate Finance
Exactly. I thought it was pretty clear that I was talking about the kernel providing great crypto (read: random) by default for the things it already provides.

Similarly there's a need for great "APIs/frameworks/design patterns" for what the kernel doesn't provide. I predict over the next 5 years this will become a far bigger priority in how people develop software and thus use libraries.
> No one was caught off guard by Apple

Bull. I've seen numerous comments in articles that they were caught flat footed. The end of the Anandtech article notes that Samsungs has been shipping 64 bit chips for a few months now but their roadmap from right before Apple shipped didn't even mention 64 bit this year.

Samsung shouldn't need to chase specs, but that's what their customers want so that's what they do. They bump chip speeds, miscounted cores (sadly Apple did this too), add extra cores, etc. They need checkbox features so they make them. If they had 64 bit earlier they would have shipped it for the PR/spec value.

> Qualcomm has the ability to modify ARM designs. That doesn't mean they should do so [...]

If they don't modify the cores, then they're just a fab house. That makes them easier to replace. They need differentiation.

> I'm fairly certainly Google will have the 64-bits ready when the market needs them.

The benefit of what Apple did is that when the market needs 64 bit it will have been deployed for years. Transition issues are already sorted out.

Furthermore, Apple isn't going to start shipping new 32 bit devices. What they've got left is probably the last of them. That means developers can count on going 64 bit only sooner.

Given Android OEMs' histories of shipping ancient versions it wouldn't surprise me if brand new 32 bit Android phones were selling in the millions two years from now.
I think Tia's job title should read "Principal Tax Analyst", not "Principle".
Flexible PHP Development with PHPFarm
Maybe I missed the answer to this, but how are you doing this for free? Obviously your business needs to make money somehow.

As others have said you should definitely put a sign-up form on your site.
I suspect that at least two aptitudes are involved, and different programming languages/platforms place different demands on those two aptitudes.

One aptitude is essentially the math/engineering ability. The other is linguistic.
It's actually unclear to me why we particularly care about how long it takes to orbit the Sun. Axial rotation, sure, the length of a day is important. But outside of that... why do we need particular units like weeks, months, and years at all?
I can't be the only one that finds it pathetic that the president needs to prostitute himself in such a way to make a few thousand dollars for a political party.

You'd think they have more important things to do - given they're running a nation and all..

Anecdote: Joe Biden visited our town recently. I'd bet the amount of money spent on flying him out here far exceeds the amount he raised at the dinner. There is a huge security apparatus that travels with them. Not just the presidential/VP jets, but a few days before he arrived a plane carrying the armored car(s), a whole ton of people in charge of security and god knows what else.
It's like Pivotal Tracker except you get gold rather than points and you track your life rather than just projects. ;)

Ads are super annoying. Probably the wrong way to monetize something like this. Maybe even make a micro payment as part of the system. Lose X - lose real money. Want to cheat to get your prize? Pay real money.

You could setup Trello to do something like this. Maybe tap into the API to create a report or something. More flexibility, less cuteness.
This is not Obama's doing. A US President essentially travels with a 30-mile-radius 18,000 foot TFR wherever they go.
Cool. Just curious, will "FreeStyle" ever become something that Cocoa (non iOS) apps will be able to use? :D
He's there to raise money. If he wanted to talk to Sam Altman he'd just buy him a ticket to DC
Value per share goes up, but presumably the employee had a significant role in making it go up, so that part seems fair. The 5th year discontinuity is an unresolved problem, though. It seems that, for the most part, people don't expect their employees to stick around that long. In the blog post, it mentions that some people are moving to 5 or 6 year vesting.
I don't think you pay several thousand dollars to stand in a backyard... Though I could be wrong.
Hopefully in the middle of the massive sucking up somebody will remind him that he is massive disappointment.

Would be nice to see somebody in silicon valley stand up for principles instead of just money and a popularity contest to meet "important people".
This sounds like very bad advice for tax consequences. Is an IOU tax deductible? Does one declare IOUs in an 83b election?

Beyond tax implications and VCs, the IOU system strikes me as particularly terrible advice. In what realm is it reasonable to simply ignore hard interpersonal problems until they go away? If some group of people can't quickly come to an equitable arrangement for the division of equity, they shouldn't form a business. After all, founder breakups are a leading cause of failure.
That happens for every president. It's a military aircraft carrying the leader of the country, probably high ranking officials and diplomats, and a lot of sensitive information. It would be ludicrous and irresponsible not to control the airspace around him.
Ca$h Out – She Twerkin (COVER BY 13 y/o – WTF?)
I grew up in Christchurch, NZ.

90% of my friends immediately left the country after university. This is mostly due to low income employment and lack of potential career development.

Like most kiwis I moved to Australia (two and a half years ago now), my income increased by 50% just by making the move. People in Australia (Melbourne) also seem a lot happier and successful (by their own measures, whatever they might be).

For my friends and I, other than the beautiful landscape there wasn't much holding us to New Zealand and quality of life is better in Australia.
The comments in here are snarky hilarious. Love HN!
It's hidden in plain sight... but that's all I'll say.
Believe it or not, world elites were once on the brink of adopting the International Fixed Calendar, which was basically the same as Comte's.

Then judaist religious backlash kicked in, and here we are.
Would it be feasable to show what an example profile/job-description looks like before signing up?
Make sure to not schedule any meetings in mountain view on that day.
I know. I just think it is wrong
All: to judge by the first dozen comments or so, this thread seems headed to a dismayingly low-quality place. When you post, please ensure that whatever opinion your comment expresses, it points in a thoughtful, non-reflexive direction. This leaves lots of room for whatever position you want to articulate—it just requires conscious care.

(Just in case anyone's wondering, I'm saying this purely from the HN side. I learned about this event by seeing it at #1 on the front page five minutes ago and haven't discussed it with anyone at YC.)

Edit: For the curious, the post is being weighed down entirely by user flags.
If we were talking about a million dollars, I wouldn't see things differently from you. Of course, if your founder role at a startup exists at the pleasure of someone paying your salary, rent, and expenses, you're not really a founder, are you? You're an employee. Whatever control you have on paper, the funding founder trumps with their bank account.
The scroll kind of stinks. Honestly I didn't spend much time putting it up and that's one thing that's annoyed me as well. It'll get better over time. The real focus is on the application that makes filing free right now which is going to blow people away.
Who is he fundraising for? The Democratic Party in general?
> I feel like I remember PG telling me that large founding teams (more than 3) were highly correlated with failure.

They usually are, but the median is not the message. If it's a group of college friends coming together to start a company for the first time, 2-3 people is way better than 4-5. But if you've worked with a few people before, know them well, and know how to set up expectations on day one, you can successfully have a larger group of cofounders without worrying about conflict. (This is something I've discovered for myself, it doesn't mean it would work for everyone)
Java Real or Not?
It's a reasonable precaution to take. Inconvenient for everyone else yes, but people do try to kill the American president from time to time, and those people are usually Americans.
Xkcd is wrong about "free speech"
No, one doesn't declare IOUs on an 83b election, because the 83b is about up-front valuation of equity, not about loans.

Different loans have different tax implications. If the "IOU" you're taking is a deferred salary arrangement, and you are eventually paid a year's salary as a lump sum, that will obviously be taxed as income. If you're paid back a loan you made to fund operational expenses, and the loan carried no interest, the tax implications are likely to be minimal.

In any case, if your equity is worth anything, you're working with an accountant. Actually: if there's money changing hands in any direction, you're working with an accountant.

An IOU doesn't "ignore hard interpersonal problems". It's one of several resolutions to those problems. Your last sentence can be true without IOUs being unreasonable.
Why be interesting when you can be acerbic
I hope he does not hit the same way he hits Yemen... :)
We don't see that on the _desktop_ market.
Bull. I've seen numerous comments in articles that they were caught flat footed.

Oh, I'm sure you've seen lurid tales of mysterious, unnamed sources who will regale about how flat-footed Qualcomm -- one of the largest ARM processor makers in the world, closely intertwined with ARM's 64-bit efforts -- was with Apple's introduction. Might you also be in the market for a bridge?

If Qualcomm is "responding" to anyone it is other chip vendors (such as MediaTek), because those are who Qualcomm competes with. Qualcomm does not compete with Apple. Again, Apple could have come out with a new, improved A6 and they would have gotten as many iPhone 5s sales, and they would have taken exactly the same number of deign wins from Qualcomm (0).

If they don't modify the cores, then they're just a fab house.

So they should change things just because? The A57 is a fantastic design, and is poised to offer incredible power to power consumption (and, if preliminary analysis is correct, Apple will have gone down the wrong path jumping the gun on ARMv8, having effectively put themselves a lap behind). Qualcomm will likely offer their own take on things later, but right now they might just go with what gets them a great design with little risk.

Given Android OEMs' histories of shipping ancient versions it wouldn't surprise me if brand new 32 bit Android phones were selling in the millions two years from now.

I would not be surprised at all. And it doesn't matter at all. Why should it matter? That is a complete non-problem.
Google: the unelected superpower
Unity's "Javascript" is, AFAIK, more aptly named "UnityScript".[0]

[0]: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=UnityScript_versus_J...
Which is exactly what Perl did, but to alleviate the clumsiness of single statement if conditionals they added a post-conditional if statement of the form STATEMENT if CONDITION; (which has the benefit of being how some people express simple conditionals in real life. "Go left if you see the blue house.")
Because this is looking for a co-founder, it's ok. Job posts aren't allowed, except via /jobs (it is one of two areas where YC companies are allowed an edge on HN).

I'll change the title to make the cofounder bit explicit.
The war hammer looks a lot like this tool: http://www.stihlusa.com/products/chain-saws/accessories/fore...

That's probably why it's in the related section.

If you want to go down a long, long rabbit hole of amazing videos, I recommend starting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvJ8Q1vAdGA

Which is an example of how to use this tool.
Might have a hard time using "Hummingbird" as a name:

http://connectivity.opentext.com/
Hacker News Nation: https://www.youtube.com/user/hackernewsnation
> I don't think you pay several thousand dollars to stand in a backyard... Though I could be wrong.

I've been to a number of high-class fundraisers/events held in back yards. It's pretty standard (obviously everything is spruced up nicely) to hold nice events in the yards of mansions.
The Unity asset store has libraries as well as graphical assets. I haven't looked in a while, but I imagine someone may have written a simple game engine to do what you want that you could buy if it isn't too costly.

I just looked, and this is the third thing I saw: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/11067
This enormous gas tank is now a wondrous, isolating work of art [video]
This post set off the voting ring detector, but I'm restoring it because we want to see original work on HN.

A voting ring is when people get friends to upvote their post. This is against the rules. We want stories to be on HN because they're good, not because they were promoted.

All: Please don't do this; just take your chances with HN's randomness. If a post is solid and hasn't gotten any attention yet, a couple of reposts is ok. Questions are welcome at hn@ycombinator.com.
>The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough.

Exactly like a broken but popular API. It's still fundamentally bad.

>Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days.

I think we'd all be relieved to have a separate classification space for leap days (29 February is an abomination) and other adjustments we might have to add here and there. We could dedicate these days to generic "spiritual and religious celebrations" to make traditionalists happy, call it "Holy Month" or something. It's a very subjective judgement anyway, one way or the other.

>You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.

Still much more elegant that the current mess.
I think it really depends on your agreement with your employees, more than the risk. Do they feel like they are being treated fairly?

For me personally, I want my employees to feel vested in the company. They are helping to build it, they are helping to mold it and shape it into something that will hopefully be very great. I want them to have equity because it gives them responsibility. (We don't have any employees at the moment, so it's easy for me to say this now).

Most importantly, I want the employee to feel like they are in an arrangement that they are comfortable with. If they are doing it as just a job, working exactly 40 hours per week, then a salary without equity makes sense.
Ripple: a tiny foundation for building reactive views
Why is this news? Self promotion?
It's never too late to start biking to work if you live close enough!
Thoughts about the Keystone Pipeline? I know it's an election year, but really, can't we have a bit of rational decision-making for once? Punting till after the election just seems so very lame.
Finished. If I missed a link you posted, please add it!
This is bottom-up:

http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/

http://www.nand2tetris.org/

I've only read a little bit of the 2nd book (IIRC I stopped reading and lost interest when I found a very obvious and repeated error), but all of the 1st one. The 1st one is highly recommended.

IMHO the trend of teaching things in CS top-down doesn't encourage understanding of how computers actually work, which turns out to be quite important in many situations, especially debugging and knowing the limitations of what computers can and cannot do. I believe that a lot of the problems with software today (bugs, inefficiency, overcomplexity) can be eliminated or at least reduced greatly via a deeper understanding of these basic concepts, since the majority of programmers seem to have only a very vague idea of e.g. memory, number representation, CPU operation, etc.

I think CS should start at the lowest level above EE, with binary representation of data and basic digital circuits (without e.g. going into the physics of how transistors work.) Have students build basic CPUs and write/enter programs for them and run them manually to see computation happening at this level. Then proceed up to Asm, C, and higher-level languages to write more complex programs, maybe even a simple operating system, accompanied by some of the more theoretical material (e.g. algorithmic complexity), continuing to keep the theme that there is a practical use for learning these things.
Lol, I appreciate well-thought out disagreement. You may be right about VR ... possibly it's too early. But it's day will come, undeniably. I also think full legalization of marijuana is undeniable, even if there are some roadblocks.

Rust, as far as I know, is the only language trying to pursue compile-time memory safety while still giving the developer control over memory allocation and cleanup. That's absolutely a game-changer, and no other language (that I know of) is even trying to tackle it.

There's a lot I don't love about Rust, but that one feature trumps everything. There are sexy languages I get excited about (Nimrod, Lisp, Haskell), but the feature the world needs most is memory-safety with low-level control.

I think once that feature is delivered with a full release, the world will flip from "ho hum" to "holy crap, we have to have this."
What can be done that's uniquely YC to welcome him as he does fundraising? Maybe speak about the JOBS act?
It does, but the hover is at sea level... ;-)
It's disappointing that demand for tickets to have dinner with him would be so great in Silicon Valley. He really screwed the Valley with this NSA stuff, among other things, and has forever damaged the trust that the world once had in US technology companies. He has directly taken money away from any Valley business whose customers are sensitive to such issues.

I realize that the Valley leans markedly to the left, but at some point you have to take a stand against people that are messing up, even if you agree with their political ideologies.
Aw, come on. I'm sure I'm not the only person who went "holy shit" when I saw this after 7 years on HN.
I was looking for a todo app last week and stumbled on this one too.

Tried it for 2 days and the first problem I had was that using this at work kind of makes you feel stupid and since that is the main feature of the app I dropped it for which is my top contender for the moment Trello. (tried 2Do, Any.do, Asana, RTM, Wunderlist, Todoist, Toodledo, Todoist, Astrid and some others)

I am still not sure if Trello is what I am looking for but it's working OK so far with some added integration with Pipethru(they work good with Jira) and Zapier(Trello integration), tried IFTTT but they don't seen to like trello.
GoLang....Ruby....become very very very good at css, javascript and 'mockup to code'
A strange rant. I saw nothing in it to back up the title. Indeed, it seemed to completely contradict itself when it quoted the text of the first amendment.
The presidency is by FAR the most dangerous job in America. Out of 44 presidents, eight (18%) have died in office, four by assassination. The next-most dangerous job in America is logging, with a death rate of 128 per 100,000 workers per year, while the presidential assassination rate is 1,777 per 100,000 workers per year.

Given the frequency of presidential assassinations, and the extreme disruption to all Americans' lives when they do occur, it's worth spending lots of effort, money, and inconvenience to do our best to prevent them from happening.
Ask HN: Karma unlockable easter eggs in HN?
Can someone tell me some about some of the karma unlockable easter eggs, like getting PG's phone number once you have more karma than him?
Past and bread are grain that has been processed before you eat it. Your body doesn't have to work as hard to turn it into glucose -- zoom. The more your body has to work at processing its carbs the better (but don't eat mulch).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index#Disease_prevent...
This is a factual, neutral question. It doesn't deserve downvoting.
Sorry only just saw this, it was the front / landing page. It seemed to be very sluggish, especially if you are already using cloudflare, unfortunately Australia's internet is atrociously slow compared to NZ's (oh how I miss it!) so it's very noticeable if a page is even slower than usual. Perhaps make a free NewRelic account and have a look to see what you can easily target as low hanging fruit (long db queries etc...)
HTTPRequest isn't technically built in to PHP.

I agree that they aren't using the correct technology for their use case though.
"Last night I tweeted a line of code from the OpenSSL source code that demonstrates a hilariously funny bug. I was attacked for my speech from OpenSSL defenders who want me to quietly submit bug patches rather than making OpenSSL look bad on Twitter."

How was the author attacked? Verbally? So he is complaining that his free speech is "restricted" by an unleashing of free speech by others and wishes they would be prevented from doing that by... whom?
Yeah! I speak English and Spanish fluently. I often listen to music in Spanish while working, because I can easily tune out the words, and it's not distracting. ...as long as I'm working in English. If I get an email in Spanish, I have to turn off the music, because it interferes too much.
TL;DR: An open source, cross platform Skala Preview/ Sketch Mirror that also works with HTML