skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The other problem with large equity grants to employees is that employees discount them irrationally, why by "irrationally" I mean things like "by trying to value them without doing the math or research". Employees are usually at a sharp disadvantage when it comes to valuing equity, which means that when you allocate it to employees, you're paying a premium to do that.

My sense of it is, it's good to give generous equity to keep the team's skin in the game, so that the ups and downs of the business are meaningful to everyone. And, key team members that really want equity and are willing to do the work to value it, also good. But pro-forma "competitive" equity grants? Pay cash instead.

Incidentally, the odds that the "best" engineers getting 10% of startups at signup are actually the best developers is, I don't know, something like 𝛆.
I don't watch a lot of films/TV series, so I would totally pay to watch a single TV episode/film. But I'm on Linux, and I don't know how to do that with iTunes, or if it's even possible. Hulu and Netflix require a subscription, which gets way too expensive because I don't watch a lot of stuff, and when trying to purchase an episode on Amazon I'm greeted with the following:

> We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.

I simply can't find any site that lets me pay to download a movie/TV show episode, so I usually turn to Pirate Bay.
> Saying that popcorn-time isn't napster for movies because people don't watch movies on their computer, they watch them on their tv isn't really different from saying that napster isn't napster for music because people don't listen to music on their computer, they listen to music on their stereo.

This was my entire point. People didn't just listen to their Napster-downloaded music on their computer, they listened to them in the car, they brought burnt discs to friends house, etc.

Timing is important. The things you mentioned like Apple TV and HDMI-out are not yet refined. It's not easy, and most importantly, it's not ubiquitous. By the time Napster came out every tower computer came with a CDRW drive.
An IDE for ideas. Intellisense for thoughts.

For those of you who develop using powerful IDEs (such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, ...), it's hard to imagine going back to a basic notepad.

Most people, most of the time, don't write software. They exchange ideas, express wishes, share their feelings. And to do that, they use tools that are not more powerful than a basic notepad.

This forces them to be explicit, to explain what they mean, to repeat ideas, to think linearly.

I believe it's time for the average person to have access to tools that are just as expressive (if not more) than the ones developers have been using for years. It's time to break the speech metaphor and develop a completely new way to communicate. It's time for a UI-driven, computer-assisted, general-purpose language.

What I suggest we build is an IDE for ideas. Intellisense for thoughts.
This is disruptive. This is the first time in a long time I can say that without imitating a vc/wantrepreneur etc., but be serious.

Obviously there is a lot of data missing here, but the fact that it is even approximated is amazing. Imagine the possibilities for people w/o insurance, veterans, inhabitants of poor countries.

Imagine if one day amputees etc. have a standardized interface to their nervous system that controls their hands. Then all 3d-printed hands need to do is adhere to that spec and people can put their health/abilities in their own "hands".

Very cool and the more geeky/creative amputees could actually build tools into themselves to use for fun sometimes. Granted I'm speaking for people when I have no idea of their struggles. But as Kramer said once, I'd like to have "shoehorn hands".
>There are no exceptions.

Wow, well I guess the issue is closed. I wish they had contacted you from the start, otherwise this multinational, multi-billion dollar corporation could've avoided the entire market. /s

I mean are you intentionally being dense? It has been a LONG time coming to supplant the multiple devices I have to keep around my TV just to use cable, streaming services, etc. Now I don't need to fire up the Wii if I want to watch Hulu or Netflix, movies off a media drive or USB. If only I could integrate the cable box into the TV, then it would really be a game changer.

I don't know about you, but I consider myself an above-average tech consumer and I value simplicity and if companies can manage to keep my TV functional for the next 5-7 years with all of my services, then it is money well spent.
> Why can't we accept that a lot less women are interested in entrepreneurship and technology than men?

For the same reason that 50 years ago nobody should have believed that women were less interested in going to college, becoming a doctor, or becoming a lawyer.

All of those are at parity now, but 50 years ago people were spouting opinions just like yours. They were wrong.
hm, this could have some legal / human rights issues potentially.
There is no way in hell I could be accidentally misquoted and misunderstood, three out of three 'arguments' in single post. Yeah, let's pretend that I have no idea what I am talking about -- much easier than acknowledging any kind of flaw in actual foundation of the architecture.

I can't be any more clear than what I already said. If you decide to take an easy road and kill the messenger, no problem with that. I don't have any intention to continue with this discussion indefinitely, especially if it turns out to ad hominem. History teaches that killing the messenger does not make problem go away. You see it or not, decide to ignore it or not... fine by me.
systems architecture is how you assemble components to make a system This is just systems engineering- how to build a system.
>today, one can imagine NO journalist engaging in as _confrontational_ an interview with ANY politician or person in political power.

Just a guess, but are you saying this from an US POV? As an USian, I can't imagine seeing journalists confront or challenge a politician except by accident. Even when those accidents happen, the journalists and civility become the center of a follow-up media frenzy, rather than the subjects (the lives and deaths of millions.)

By contrast, I see confrontation in a lot of (less consolidated, less war-profiteering) non-US media constantly. Paxman would be hounded out of the industry within days here.
I woke up with the realization that my problem is probably GC pressure. The system is currently written in idiomatic Clojure so doing everything generates garbage. What's more, the garbage is created in one tick, then released in a subsequent tick, so I'm losing the benefit of generational GC.

I think I can make my subgrids algorithm work, but it will have to be using mutable data structures.
We're going to look back and laugh at "Smart" TVs like we currently laugh at TVs with built-in VHS players.
> It's not the Internet, just the CA system.

Ok, so it is just the portion of the internet that involves purchasing things with credit cards and requiring passwords to access sites. The rest of the internet is just fine.

Great. I thought for a moment that the commercial basis of the internet might be in danger. Now to determine what percentage of the internet is not dependent on the CA system.....
Network before you need it: Heather Carson and Renee Warren, Founders of Onboardly
This is an interesting idea. However, it's not always the case that timeless messages are more important than messages that are important during a specific timeframe.

In addition, most people nowadays expect things to have instant feedback. How would you address that concern?
But dont a lot of emploee share options get diluted away in later rounds.
Most people pass their code to a CI system after it's been pushed. Run your unit tests locally, push your code, run it through your CI system (integration and unit tests, anything else), then push goldbits to production.
Authored by:

By Mario Sousa
Member of the
Communist Party Marxist-Leninist Revolutionaries
Sweden
I remember an experiment where the result of a chemical reaction between two substances had a lower volume than the sum of the original substances. The weight of the resulting compound is the same, but the new bonds keep the particles closer together.
As a part of my venture into user interface and user experience design (http://www.caseyash.com), I created a few concepts. It would be excellent if I could implement them, however technical individuals are rare in Tennessee.

Below are the concepts:

Pack - A travel planning tool that integrates weather information to stay alert on what to pack.

RQRES - A real estate search that uses a collaborative algorithm to quickly find a home. The application pulls 10 homes; user rates them and then are shown results that are highly relevant.

Pattern - A more difficult game of Simon. Instead of four tiles, there are nine. The game also features ways to manipulate the game board.

Wonder - Hyper-local network.
Saddam was also Man of the Year. It's not a popularity contest.
Those things are not refined. The primary innovation of Popcorn Time is that it lets you watch torrented movies without knowing the details of how it works. Having a movie being streamed from your computer (eating up battery) and then pushing it to a set top box (all of which are niche products at the moment) or hooking it up through HDMI cables and then having to find your laptop's power supply so you can plug it in right next to the tv.... all of that clunkiness ruins Popcorn Time's primary selling point.

If someone were to build Popcorn Time as an iPhone or Android app that streams to Chromecast / AppleTV, that would be the next logical step, and then we might be able to talk about it being the new Napster.
It doesn't reduce the amount available to investors. It just factors into the valuation. And then dilution happens across the board (generally). So after taking a few rounds the founders have less of the company than if they had given less to the employee. Likewise, the founder will have less of the company if they give more to the VC.

The question for Fred is if an employee is $1m and your cash is worth $1m -- should they both get the same valuation with respect to equity?
Bingo. Except material cost for $42,000 one probably is likely much much higher than $50.

If you read Robohand's FAQ, to build a proper medical grade hand will cost $2,000.

http://www.robohand.net/faq/

"To print the fingers with the knuckle block and hinges for a Robohand costs around US$5.00. To make a proper Robohand, which includes medical Orthoplastic, stainless steel hardware, tools, Velcro, plus the time it takes, costs US$2000.00."
Browsing samsung.com on ones TV's close to a 0% use case, not a 95% use case for users. Therefore checking to make sure samsung.com is up helps about 0% of their users.
I am a bit disappointed no one actually addressed* an issue that every founder has to deal with when raising series A: the option pool (it's true most start with a small option pool long before series A but the friction start during series A fundraising).

Most (if not all) VCs require the option pool to be formed before the series A transaction is completed and usually push for a very high option pool to avoid granting more options and dilute themselves in case the option pool is not big enough.

This conflict of interest lead founders to fight the VC to form the smallest option pool possible while VCs want the biggest one. And the non-sense is that most of that option pool will be granted to employees that will be hired after series A.

*Sam Altman actually wrote a short note but didn't expand on it and I think it's a shame.
Agree. Very much.

Not everyone has a huge body of work they can put out there in the world of FOSS for a vast variety of reasons. Of the two best programmers I know, one is active and publishes, the other is a guy you would kill to have on any team, but whose work is all in pursuit of his closed source job.
I think the inhalation risk is overstated here. This stuff is 12% alcohol by volume according to the label. You've got about 5 liters of blood. If all the alcohol goes straight to the bloodstream, to get a BAC of .4% (.004) you're going to need to snort (5000 * .004 / .12) = 166 milliliters of this stuff.
Those prices look suspicious indeed. Most of my experience is from Glasgow around 2010.

I just entered a journey I made often (home in north-west Glasgow to the central station) and that website came up with £13.50. I clearly remember paying £5 with tip for that journey from a local taxi company.

Even with the dominant black cab company, I don't remember going home from the city centre late night for as much as that.

In Paisley, which is a bit smaller, I took taxis to the airport for £3 or £4.
The original url [1] was blogspam—that is, it was a knock-off of some other, more original source. In such cases HN strongly prefers the original source.

All: when you know of a better, more substantive version of a story, please alert us to it in the comments. There's too much material for moderators to check, so community effort makes a big difference. Let's optimize for quality.

1. http://3dprint.com/2438/50-prosthetic-3d-printed-hand/
Speaking as someone who spends a big chunk of his working life auditing others code, having a consistent style makes it a lot easier to spot problems.
As someone who does contribute a bunch to open source, it does make me a bit wary - I've met some excellent developers who do very little open source development and who I have learned a lot from while working with them.

Personally, I contribute to open source because I want to see things fixed and generally want to move fast since that's how I operate. Sometimes this has meant figuring out fixes myself and opening up a pull request. I see this as a way of helping projects I like move forward since they can focus less on bugs and more on feature development.
Already done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

It's just a memory of its former self, but still in use today.
Fair enough, but I wasn't arguing any such thing.

Just giving my opinion that I find taxis far more expensive in Germany than I did when living in the UK.
Because at the margin, of the three parties we're discussing, the investors have the least market pressure. For all the talk of valuation bubbles, top-tier VC firms still fund one company for every ten-twenty-thirty? companies they meet with.
None of those things are intractable, I have had scripts handle them all.
On top of that, writing scripts educates you on how such systems work. It really isn't challenging.
It is odd that sound plays very little part in actual gameplay other than rhythm style games.

There was "Enemy Zero" for Sega Saturn. I remember being amazed by the pre-rendered scenes, and mostly enjoying the game. But it wasn't great and even in that game sound wasn't super important part of gameplay.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Zero

Having said all that my ideas for games that use sound as a key part of play are a bit, uhm, not good.

== Cat Detective ==

You play the part of a cat who is also a detective. You are investigating crimes. You use analogue sticks to generate meows and purrs - this is a cat language that you use to question suspects and witnesses. How well you ask the question governs what kind of i formation you get back.
That's about where founders land now, isn't it?
Three years ago, over 70 comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2134720

The lead thread on that is an interesting read. Very interesting. It serves to confirm my opinions of both cperciva and jaltucher.

Other submissions of this story include these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126660

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321018

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5173533

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379855

There may be more ...
What would be the point? You couldn't view them within Popcorn Time. Popcorn Time is not IMDB, it is for streaming movies to watch in the app.
Sell anything in a snap.

1. Find something you want to sell

2. Snap a picture (or a short video)

3. Tap "list for sale"

4. Let mechanical turk + computer vision identify the object

5. Let the system pick a value (based on sales history, location, demand)

6. Contact the seller when a serious buyer made a deposit

7. Proceed to demo + sale

I shouldn't have to write down any spec when selling something as ubiquitous as an Xbox 360. I shouldn't have to go through 100 different ways to describe an iPhone 4S when looking to buy one.

Delegating item identification to a third party is how you reduce the friction of listing items for sale and improve semantics.

And to think that this system only applies to selling items is naive. The possibilities are endless.
H-1B loophole may help California utility offshore IT jobs
Completely agree. Some language constructs that are "almost symbols" such as fn certainly works well to abbreviate, but for function names and types it feels outdated and hard to read. If a common function name is too long to spell out like iterate() then that is a candidate for sugaring out completely, not cutting in half.

Even in good C codebases that run static analysis, there are errors due to mixing up "memcpy()" and "memcmp()". UT4 is one example where this happened.
> Plex/XBMC need to double down on their "Mom" useability..

I happen to disagree. Post installation Plex is literally a pleasure to use if you use your smartphone/tablet as a remote and just beam content to your TV.

I've yet to see any semi-open system as powerful, functional, yet user friendly.
That's pretty disappointing; a big formatting change like that means that it'll increase friction of pulling fixes and changes between the two versions.
This sounds very much like the directory system I want to build on top of Telehash.

The problem I still see is creating a global directory of Kerberos realms. There still needs to be a sneakernet component for private key distribution. (Maybe that would be a better use of the armored cars I see making regular stops at the banks around town.)
But isn't what's happening here a change to the coding style to match the style used by BSD? That might be fun for BSD coders, but is that actually helping improve the OpenSSL code?
No. You're not following me. You think I'm describing agl's point. I'm not. I'm saying that beyond CRLsets, certificate pins also allow Google to detect misbehaving CAs. CAs have power only to the extent that Google allows them to have power by keeping them in Chrome's root CA key store. Google can pick among most of the current CA's and put them out of business on a whim.
There's a lot of parallel conversations on Reddit / HN / etc. for various articles.

Would about pulling high rated, top-level conversations from multiple sources for a quick digest? Sort of like Google News for commentary.
so if you want to know how much someone makes, schedule a one on one meeting.
Yes, but it seems like with much less say than they would have if they were a partner, as opposed to just 15% shareholders.
How I learned assertiveness from being a consultant
Sounds like the "No True Napster" argument. Cd players had to be plugged into stereos and speakers, too. Do you recall how unfriendly CD burning software was in the 1990s?
I would like to see more evidence of employees getting too much equity. What I see more often is the VCs getting the large option pool and then the founders try to issue as few options as possible to protect themselves from the dilution the large option pool created for them.
I really hope this doesn't become a thing. We don't need a bunch of perverse incentives pushing people to write open source like academics are forced to churn out papers.
> Would turning down all equity be a red flag to a start-up?

Possibly. The idea of equity (in the form of options) is the company avoids paying as much up front as they might otherwise, in exchange for a stake in the company's future. If you turn down the future stake, you may signal that you don't think the company has a reliable future, or you may be taken as a pragmatist -- it depends on the individual to whom you speak.

Obviously the extreme would be a company that only offers options, no salary -- there's a cut-off point where no one will take them up on their offer. And remember to look at this from the opposite perspective -- the company wants to attract intelligent, creative people, the kind that might understand options too well to want them. They need to understand candidates' likely responses and the reasoning.
Contacts and cochlear implants.
Linking to a search might do!

https://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/sort_by_date/0/%22ask%20hn%2...
I got one of those electric kettle you linked. It is made of plastic - the boiled water smells, tastes like plastic. This is not just the first time, even after a dozen times it tastes the same, and it is horrible.

I don't know anything about aeropress, but it is not a good idea to buy a plastic electric kettle. stainless steel ones are better.
They still haven't done the most critical thing: add tests. This is for two reasons: the code has no tests now, and when you refactor, tests are important to make sure you're not subtly introducing errors.
For anyone on HN who hasn't had the opportunity to use a 3D printer I really recommend that you find a way to use one for a few hours. The experience of willing something into physical existence with a few clicks in Solidworks is amazing. If you remember the feeling of the first time you made the computer say "Hello World" or the first time you set up your own website, you'll get a similar rush from 3D printing. I've been lucky enough to have access to one for my final project at school and it's made me so much more ambitious with how I can design and has made my iteration speed at least 10x as fast.
This.

What I find help with it is give them as much information as possible and be there to answer any question they may have.

If you're giving away generous stock option grants you want to make sure they are as educated as possible about their value as opposed to some companies where they'll be secretive about the actual outstanding shares issued and other preferences that could hurt employees grants when a liquidation happens.

Additionally for people who may not value option stocks like you do (as a founder or early team member), we usually offer generous equity grant but also allow employees to swap some of them for a higher pay.

I think employees are grateful when given the ability to pick more pay or more options.

It allows them to put a price tag on these stock options which make these more valuable and tangible.
Cochlear implants – with no exterior hardware
Your claims are a lot more controversial than you're making them appear. It's intellectually dishonest to present them as settled fact.
They wouldn't even have to use it themselves. If I understand rightly, "contributory copyright infringement"[1] is the stick they would get beaten with here.

My hazy understanding is that if the Popcorn Time folks had wanted to get away with this, they shouldn't have said anything about Hollywood movies. They should have promoted it as a tool for watching all the great publicly-licensed documentaries and fan-made films out there on the torrent network. That would give them "substantial non-infringing use" [2]. And if somebody else published instructions on how to change the configs so you'd also get Hollywood's finest, well, that wouldn't be their fault. Oopsie!

[1] http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/question.cgi?Question...

[2] http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Substantial_noninfringing_use
How much did the young jeweller charge you the first time?