skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been thinking of putting together something simple to analyze employee option paperwork and add some plain English annotations to help employees understand exactly what they're signing. Based on my experience, there's something like 5 or so templates that cover 90% of the startups in the valley, so shouldn't be too hard. Is there any interest in something like this?
Let me try to spell this out in a bit more detail. I think you know everything I'm about to say, but I want to make sure I understand it:

You'd be crazy to pay more than a few cents more than the market price for 1 share of AAPL, because that price represents the value the most marginal AAPL investor places on the stock: Offer him a penny more and he'll sell it to you. But there are investors standing behind him who think AAPL is worth more than the current price. As you need to buy out less marginal investors, the price to get them to hand over their AAPL shares will rise. Thus 1,000,000 shares will cost you more on average than one regardless of the value of control.

The same works in reverse with AirBNB: If they sell one share, it will go to the most enthusiastic investor who thinks they're a future $1T company. If they try to sell 1,000,000, they have to work their way down into those investors who believe AirBNB is a more marginal opportunity, and the average price will decline.
The problem with ev calculations is variance (as Michael O, et al, will no doubt forcibly assert.) Employees in the bay area housing market are probably better off taking a lower ev with a corresponding much much lower variance.
Are you being consistent here?

I've known no atheist who actually believes the nonsense that "right and wrong are agreements between people." They don't actually live their life that way when talking about girls not being able to go to school in Afghanistan or whether it was okay for the Marquis de Sade to torture women for pleasure. How does the atheist impose his moral code on another with consistency when they say with their mouths that "there's no such thing as absolute right and wrong?"

In other words, what would the atheist argue to punish Hitler? After all, German society had redefined humanity to exclude Jews. Hitler was acting consistently within his society's moral code. My worldview (Christian Theistic Worldview, btw) absolutely has no problem saying Hitler was wrong. Right and wrong make sense given the Christian's set of axioms. Not so with the atheist who relies on links to Wikipedia sites: "But Mr. Judge, Hitler wasn't wrong per se, I just disagree with his reasoning as per secular humanism which is TEH AWESOME!!!!111"

How would you characterize your beliefs on the existence of non-material things? Do you believe in a ghost or spirit? Are there non-material objects that exist given your view of the world? For example, is there such a thing as a "law" that governs our thoughts or the natural world?

PS: Why the need for insults? I think we can both learn from each other, but your mocking tone is a bit much.
there you go - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/354/maximus/

FTFY
Yeah OP was silly, agreed. There are humans that opt out of technology, and not because they're dumb.
63 Companies Bent On Transforming Healthcare
Avian (alternative JVM)
Thomas Friedman's column, automatically generated
>how disproportional the effect is of downvotes on an item's ranking

I think you mean flagging as there is no down voting of submissions as far a I am aware.
When I was a child, I asked my dad if his work was fun. He said, "If it was fun, they wouldn't pay you." I remember that from time to time, because it's true. Something that is fun (relative though "fun" is) doesn't warrant payment.

When my mom asks about my current job, I sometimes repeat that phrase, and she gets all huffy and annoyed that I don't view my current job as enjoyable. Sure, my job is satisfying in small ways, but ultimately I'd rather be doing something else.

I just mention it because my mom and dad show two sides of the generation mentality discussed in the article: the "buckle down and get a job" type, and the "you should do what you love" type.
I was completely sold on the Nest - going to buy it ASAP until I saw the following review and the related discussion:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1KD7Q92LDK4KK/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pe...

Gave me pause. Until Google bought them out, now in the wait and watch mode. Which direction will Google take this?
Cassandra is not a service discovery cluster...

I think you're missing the point here. I don't know what else can be explained better.
Ask to forward exercise when joining. From what I understand, there isn't a negative impact on the employer, you are just being granted RSU's that they have an option to buy back for $0 before your cliff, and then convert to ISO's at your cliff. You can file that 83b election immediately, which will substantially drop your tax burden.
The original submission had something like that, but it's been changed by the mods to be less informative.

<fx:shrug />
Showtime Turns to Parse to Power Next Gen TV Experiences
FWIW, I don't actually have any beef with your distaste over the "emerging adults" label - I agree it's not a useful category, in so much that it seems equally loaded with notions about what adult looks like. Both positions seemed like extreme forms of ageism that aren't anywhere near universally applicable, essentially.
I had no difficulty in seeing what the value was. Maybe you need to work on your presentation and articulate the use cases as clearly as they did.
Regarding the question of knowing what percentage of total equity your stock grant represents, most companies that are not incredibly early stage will simply not tell you.

Pushing the subject further will make you look like you're nosing around where you shouldn't, often leading to the offer being dropped (this has happened to me).

Not to say it wasn't a not-so-great company to start with, but a dropped offer is a dropped offer.
I'm not sure what was happening, but I used to have many gedit processes running in the background. Geany is much, much lighter for me.

Same with Nautilus.
Fantastic! Thanks for sharing
Instarecs – instant recommendations using pairwise comparisons
If that's the standard, mine must be empty.
The back-weighted scheme is also problematic because sets up a perverse incentive to consider letting people go at the end of their second year unless they are all-stars, since the company ends up keeping 70% of that equity and gets 2 years of hard work out of the person. With an even weighted scheme there is no time-dependent tradeoff like this to be made, the employee continually earns shares at a fixed rate and as long as they are contributing managers never have a hard "decision point" to make with regards to their shares.
The Gaming Garbage Channel is great. I didn't realize the barrier for making 3d games was so low. What are they using to make these abominations?
That's probably all true. My only point was I don't think Sam was saying to make the compensation package that equals what you'd get at Google based on the most optimistic outcomes, but on a true, expected outcome using some broader averages (which leaves room for upside).
Parodying an elected official is protected by the first amendment. It seems quite unlikely that anybody will be charged with anything. Pretty much all this accomplishes is making the mayor look ridiculous + creating a bunch of new parody twitter accounts.
Very interesting. I like this train of thought. I have a lot of developer friends that would rather (and are) pursuing their own entrepreneurial ideas than join an existing company. While I wholeheartedly support that, the flip side is fewer startup-savvy developers available to join other startups.

There are a lot of reasons why they are pursuing their own ventures. A common one is: "It's not worth it to be an employee of a startup. You need to be a founder. (Or maybe employee #1-5.)" You may disagree with that belief, but it's certainly a belief many hold. Sam's suggestions may take this reason off the table.
overreliance on /dev/urandom in the presence of little entropy is a well known performance problem on servers. that's why http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generato... exist
It's something deep in American culture I guess. Thomas Jefferson was worried 200 years ago about all the buildings we were making in wood. He predicted the nation would have no architectural heritage, a tabula rasa after 100 years when the wooden structures have to be replaced. Many of the buildings Jefferson designed and built back then then are still going strong, but I guess that sentiment never caught on here.
Depends on the level of abstraction at which you view them :)

They are all getting into legal troubles by trying to replace the status quo with a more efficient process that happens via the internet.
The problem with back weighted grants (and amazon is famous for this) is that the companies that do it are the ones who ride developers raw and are doing it to attempt to stanch horrific employee turnover. Well, I guess I'm generalizing from the example of amazon, but really, is that the company you want to keep?

My take on it as a startup employee is (1) no, (2) hell no, and (3) your company sucks and you are doing this to attempt to lock me in. Also, hell no.
Selective vs. Elitest
The reasons given in this article are fairly nonsensical. He states that if he upgraded all of the windows desktops now, he'd have to do the same thing again in 4 years, yet if he had upgraded all of the desktops 4 years ago, why don't they have Windows 7 on them? It was released in 2009. Also noted is the switch from a desktop to a laptop making people more mobile - really?
Sorry, yes, flags. I mis-spoke myself - there is indeed no down-voting of submissions, and I was referring to the disproportional effect of flags on a submission's ranking.
my recipe for leaner is more about CPU and RAM and less about diskstorage.

One of the first things I recommend is aptitude over apt-get and that manages your stale packages much better. (for e.g. aptitude will offer to remove unused packages each time you remove an installed package, whereas apt-get will only do that if explicitly asked to with apt-get autoremove.)
Tidal Wave: Depression in the West – Calling for a new way of thinking
This would be fantastically useful. Please, do this. I looked, hard, for this in the last month. If you need it, I'll talk to my employer about creating a template with dummy information based on my package.
What kind of filter will be in place to be assured that these are full stack jobs?

For example, for the Bradford and Galt Consulting Python/Django job... "some Javascript". This does not scream "full stack" job to me, "some Javascript". What do they use for DevOps? Will I get to write C or Go? Unless they use the SomeJavascriptMVC.js framework, I'm guessing their JS is... mostly trivial. To say nothing of DevSales or project management responsibilities.
The problem with the 10%/20%/30%/40% thing is that if the company shoots way up in value, an employee could theoretically be fired after two years and not capture much of the value they helped to create. It also doesn't necessarily need to be malicious [1], sometimes companies change and a person's skills aren't as valuable anymore.

If I were a prospective employee I would never take a deal like this, because it is really difficult to have that much trust in a company and founders that you likely don't know that much about. I can't say the standard 4-year vest with a 1-year cliff is the most optimal situation, but from an employee perspective it is way better than 10/20/30/40.

1: Though it could be, I know there was a story about something happened at Zygna like this
right right, but I have to (1) come up with $50k in cash (in my example), and (2) if the job isn't working out, I want the fraction of my initial payment back upon leaving and it isn't clear this happens...
I can't say when they started, but we've been using it for our marketplace for a little over 6 months and it has been capped the whole time.
Are there alternatives to livestream.com for the livestream?

It works only intermittently from northern Europe. It only plays back for a few seconds and then stops for buffering...
Anyone chromecasting this successfully?
It's a great idea, and Adam is classy for a number of reasons, but having just left Quora, I only have 90 days to exercise my options, so it's not something Quora is doing right now, which is what the article seems to imply.
World's most famous Australian, Natalie Tran.
https://www.youtube.com/user/communitychannel

As I type this, the leading video is an unboxing :)
Don't forget new YC Alum http://www.booksuperhost.com/
It's quite difficult to compete with Google and their revenue/cash hordes when it comes to salary / total comp. Especially if you price the options at the last round's price and discount them some more.

Imagine a well to do company of 2 founders (in SF/Bay Area) and a team of 3-4 others that raised a seed at 10m cap. They want to grow their team headcount to 15 and are busy hiring, running servers, etc. They can offer a 100k salary (more than enough to live on) to a sort of senior engineer or PM and want to compete with Google on total comp. Let's say they need to make up the other 100k difference in comp & salary with options. Over 4 years, you're looking at a 4% equity chunk to one employee, the 6th person joining the company.

Not that I think numbers in line with this aren't realistic (I do agree with Sam that more generous equity grants are better), but for most companies that make a 15% option chunk for employees it's difficult to rationalize a number like that.

Edit: Also, that puts the equity comp of that 6th employee (or 10th, because in most cases you will have a similar equity bracket for those people) at about 1/8th of the founders, not the 1/200th that Sam mentioned. I wonder how many people have made offers to employees with a similar comp plan.
do downvoters have anything to add? I think it's a valid comment given the timing of these acquisitions.
There's nothing saying a full-stack developer can't focus on one area when needed? It's not as if you've specialized in generality -- you're just interested in everything.
Nice straw man. Profit margins have nothing to do with the fact that the money is being spent to develop tools to kill humans instead of helping them. Not all engineering jobs are equal.
From a company's point of view, wouldn't that really suck, having all of these outstanding shares in limbo? I'd imagine at least part of the 90-day thing is just so that the company knows the status of those shares. For an employee, the company is holding those out as a carrot for you: someday those shares might pay off, if you work hard. For a former employee, he/she gets 90 days to decide whether to pony up the cash for the company (who gets money in exchange for the shares), or they get the stock back to give to other employees.

Having to keep track of "large" (unsure of how to quantify that) percentages of the company that might be purchased at a later date seems like a liability that the company wouldn't want to have to track, especially as a startup with other things to focus on. They're useless to the company, the only upside is for the employee.
Yeah, honestly, I'd prefer our smart pointer class over that nonsense any day.

You end up exposing the SDL functionality as a normal class object, and everything's much more straightforward.
I have tried to figure this out: is there any point to doing forward exercise and 83(b) election with ISO options, which is what most employees get?
There is a CSS/HTML rendering engine for print, PrinceXML http://www.princexml.com/ - it is extremely good quality. It is not open source, but does fill a niche gap. If you need to produce quality pdf output from a single source it could be worth looking at.

(its also interesting in that it is written in a functional logic programming language..., and that it is a small Australian startup)
Sounds like there could be a conflict of interest though. The power company makes more money if people use more electricity in general.
How Do You Even Do Anything Without Using EBS?
I totally dig these ideas - is there any consensus docs floating around we can use for our employees? and/or is anybody implementing these ideas today? ( perhaps we can borrow their docs ). Thx
Thats's why lawyers will be the last market to be disrupted.
unique_ptr is not really a good solution to this problem. Something like Boost.ScopeExit for short lived resources, or shared_ptr (which stores the deleter using type erasure, meaning you don't need to allow evidence of the deleter to to permeate through your codebase) is a lot easier on the eyes...

template <typename... Args> inline
std::shared_ptr<SDL_Window> CreateWindow (Args&&... args) {
return std::shared_ptr<SDL_Window> {SDL_CreateWindow(std::forward<Args>(args...)),
&SDL_DestroyWindow};
}

auto window = CreateWindow ("App Name", SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED,
SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED, 640, 480, 0);

You know, or someone should write a good quality wrapper like you would just expect for any other language (Python, Ruby, whatever). Many here seem to be blasting C++ when nobody is doing any better without a similar level amount of work elsewhere.
A hardware RNG isn't going to do anything to address the scalability problems inherent in having a single shared lock around /dev/urandom.
Given that such "hustle" tactics are endorsed by YC, I would assume almost all successful startups have used them at some point.
Only the anti-gaming system is not OSS, for obvious reasons.
I've yet to see anyone make the claim that Borges originated any of the important philosophical ideas in his stories.

The idea of text as a finite construct struck me as original when I first encountered it in The Library of Babel. Are there any earlier sources that I should be aware of?

As someone who's interested in interactive fiction, I found a lot of prescient thinking in Borges. His work becomes more relevant over time, even as it posits its own eventual redundancy. I'm not sure anyone can say that about García Márquez. But like others are saying, there is no need to take away respect from one of these authors to pay it to the other.

Edit: Just to back this up a little more, here is a quote from the man himself: "But I wonder if they are my ideas. Because really I am not a thinker. I have used the philosophers’ ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don’t think that I’m a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps."

In other news, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome is a thing.
The thing is, you're going to be wrapping in a class anyways, so why not move all the nonsense into a normal destructor and then use normal smart pointers?

I suggest that this is somewhat solving the wrong problem.
I don't think the 4/1 aspect of vesting is a particularly big problem. If you are enjoying your job at 4 years, the job has probably changed substantially, and you can renegotiate for a refresher grant.

I don't see any problem with restricted stock pre series A, when equity is the biggest consideration for employees. As long as financing is notes, the common hasn't yet been priced, so you can just use a very low value.

Willingness to issue refresher grants is easy for CEO and board to change.

I don't think you need to be as open as buffer, but being open with percentage ownership and financials seems obvious.

RSUs with a performance modifier already cover most of this for larger companies. Something like that for startups probably wouldn't work since so much of the risk is company-wide vs. individual.
If I understand that problem correctly, it has nothing to do with the amount of entropy available but is a simple synchronisation/locking issue. Were reads from, say, /dev/zero ‘protected’ by spinlocks in the same way, the same issue would arise. Conversely, I don’t see how adding a hardware RNG to the system could alleviate the locking issue.
Uber: small capital loss with short disentanglement arc for hosts (cars+drivers)
Tesla: orange
Airbnb: large capital loss with longer disentanglement arc for hosts (property owners)

The places most likely to reinforce the established industry are exactly the places airbnb needs to be most prevalent. I'm not saying there isn't a path through the thicket, just that I'd love to see how they are saying they can get there. .5B only buys so many politicians in so many markets. Guerilla resistance by entrenched interests with force applied by upset neighbors could easily swamp cash reserves.

Tesla only has to fight each state due to sales channels and they have a product which doesn't offend people driving in the car next to them.

Airbnb might be fighting city to city and their service providers would really annoy plenty of neighbors. With the small surge in speculative buyers who never owner-occupy, their success would come in a zero-sum game with neighbors. Your condo is worth less if there is a stream of tourists stumbling through the commons all the time.
I'm amazed you're getting downvoted for an obvious and sensible set of statements. But I guess it's easier to downvote than articulate a counterargument.

Internet of things systems have terrible security at the moment, and what many such systems presently amount to is people selling a portion of their privacy and exposing themselves to security risks to save a few bucks or have some small marginal household convenience.
How I became a BitShares believer in 917 words
This is Bitcoin 2.0 most promising development
Thanks! I looked through their blog archives but didn't see anything.
I worked on Adobe Flash's Android video support, so I feel your pain. :) Flash sits in the uncomfortable position between an internet's worth of poorly-encoded MP4 files and all the crappy Android devices' hardware decoders.

Google's Stagefright developers told me they did not want to provide an API to query the hardware decoder's profile and level support because some hardware supports H.264 capabilities beyond their state profile or level. Their recommendation was to "just try decoding the video" to see if it works (as if that is something that can be easily determined programmatically), ignoring the fact that playing an unsupported or corrupt file will trigger Stagefright's fatal CHECK() aborts. In Flash, we had to duplicate a lot of Stagefright's MP4 parsing code so Flash could fall back to its H.264 software decoder instead of hitting Stagefright's CHECK() "landmines".

We also had to write almost 10 different color conversion functions for all the random color formats used by long-tail Android devices.
Well shit, if Adzerk can handle the traffic loads from 4chan (out of curiosity, how many users use adblock?) then it would be perfect for some of the projects I'm working on :)
Hi its not a problem! I have big pending list to import, need more time to analize and download releated content to every link. Please be patient. When it done you will be emailed!
Konami code chrome extension
Trigger the konami code on every page you visit with this chrome extension.Install and forget it and you might have a surprise when surfing on the web. Happy easter.
Gamification of boring daily activities is the future in my opinion.

Check this out (ignore the ending and story, it's kind of dark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJKwHAvR4uI
As a left-handed person: great, another lethal tool optimised for right-handed people and therefore more unwieldy and dangerous for us.
Need more time! :) Many many bookmarks uploaded to import today!