skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Negotiating with an early startup
So I've been offered a position at a new startup with good funding, good plan and a mvp already. I'd be coming on as the first employee to create a more robust back-end and start expanding the product.

I already have the answers for:

Is a start-up for me?
Does this start-up look like it has a future?

And now I'm at, what do I ask for at the negotiating table?

I've been offered a salary about 12% less than my current, but better benefits, better working environment and room for growth.

I don't really know what protocol on asking for equity is or if I should. It wasn't brought up in the original offer so I'm not really sure on it.

Anyone have any more experience in this area?

Thanks!
Full disclosure: I was an editor on this report.
>top class negotiating skills exhibited by the sellers

Certainly a nice premium but not clear if this is a result of negotiating prowess or necessity given the large fractured institutional holdings. 30% is a pretty typical change of control premium for public companies and until the offer OPEN was under its 90 and 120-day moving averages.
This is not limited to the US, either. I have an Azure account hosted in the North Europe datacenter (in Dublin), and our IP addresses are associated with Brazil in the GeoIP databases.
It appears we are on the same page - apologies for the harshness of my reply. It was a legacy from another thread.

You know your fighting. :-)
I'm deaf and many many thanks for this. I will share with others.
MIT has 18.0.0.0/8, but according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AfriNIC Africa has 4 /8s.

China is under an Asia-Pacific registry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia-Pacific_Network_Informati... and from a link off of that, https://www.apnic.net/publications/research-and-insights/ip-... they have 44 /8s plus a /12 from their initial allocation, plus some "ranges from the IANA recovered pool"; according to the Wikipedia article they were the first Regional Internet Registry to run out of /8s.
> also there aren't a lot of Sumerian creationists around

Given Christianity has roots in Judaism and Judaism probably has some roots in Sumerian religion, I'm not sure if you could say that. Religions evolve from other religions, and in a geographic area, are likely to have common ancestors.
I am glad I found this post and will be checking it out. Thanks.
fluff. How to build a business on finding a gold nugget. How to build a startup after you bought Google IPO. etc etc
Cool. Yea, I really enjoyed the HBO show too (especially in the beginning, the writing tailed off a bit mid-season). The satire around "making the world a better place" was the first thing that jumped out at me and hooked me initially.
Earbits will be shutting down June 16th
It's so curious that in the UK there is no notion of time when brewing tea. In Germany you are supposed to remove the tea leaves after 3 minutes. Or if you keep them longer, the tea will change its nature from being wakening to being tiring. (Actually times vary a bit depending on the tea - green tea is usually shorter). Eventually the tea will get bitter if the leaves are left in the water.
Cool Kids Lose, Though It May Take A Few Years
The point is that if gold has inherent value so has the bitcoin-protocol and it's a useless distinction to try and claim that one has and another hasn't.

For instance for remittance Bitcoin has immense value compared to for instance gold.

Context defines value not the thing itself.
This doesn't detail "how" a teenage entrepreneur built a startup on BTC riches. It's not a very exciting story, either.

Here's what happened: in early 2012, he put all his money into Bitcoin. Then he cashed out when they peaked (probably around December 2013). Then he used the money to start yet another e-learning business/service.

I don't see what the point of this article is. He used money that was given to him to bet on speculate on a wildly fluctuating asset, and came out lucky. Now he's trying to invest his money sensibly. So what?

To me, the only interesting part of this article is that he pays most of his employees in Bitcoin. The rest is just fluff.
You should pick a name that is distinctive and also likely to draw legal action from three or more trademark holders.

How about "Open World Window"?
I have not ignored them, you are just upset at your illogical stance being dismantled.

Another poster also pointed out to you that the context of my comments was directly in response to your posting.

Next time, post better or post more accurately. Don't whine.
I use OVH and Ubiquity for dev'ing; with servers in Europe and the US. Both very cheap and cheerful; my aim is to sync/load balance. Just looked at Cloudatcost - sounds great, I'll have to get one of those too!

I don't know about storage.
Most of the restaurants around here just link to OpenTable on their reservations page, if you get there via Google. I think they actually pay a smaller percentage for those kind of bookings, rather than ones that were generated within the OpenTable app.

That thing he mentions about restaurants not putting up their prime time reservations is a bigger threat to OpenTable, since they know they will be sold and don't want to pay the fees, but I don't know how widespread that is outside of chic city restaurants. I know that I would just book elsewhere if I saw that a place "seemed" book solid in OpenTable.
You can get strong, flavorful tea, just not in bags. If you steep your own loose leaf tea, you can make it as strong as coffee with nearly as much caffeine. Unfortunately loose leaf is more expensive.

And I agree, both coffee and tea are better without additives.
How to Rescue a Non-Booting GRUB 2 on Linux
It sounded like you...wanted to read the book which would require iBooks. I'm guessing you were just interested in an English translation of the summary?
If you're looking for an actual metaphor, it would be selling armed guard services to you and also to gangs. Its not even clear, in this metaphor, that said armed guard vendor can even tell the difference between law-abiding citizens and gangs - and they can't just shut down services to anyone accused of being a gang, because then the gangs get you by telling ARMED GUARDS, INC that you're a gang and then robbing you while you're not protected.

This metaphor got long and stupid, but at least its accurate. Stop fear-mongering just because you don't like CloudFlare.
This somewhat reminds me of when Microsoft announced the Zune. One of the selling points was (in true nerd form) you could send a song to a cute girl nearby. To which Steve Jobs replied, "Or you could just go up and talk to her."

A bunch of mathematicians came up with a formula for finding a wife. @smoyer effectively just went up and talked to her.

Kudos to you sir... and your wife! :)
> even in the very last sentence of the article,

I am not a psychologist, but isn't part of the definition of priming that it happens before? How would saying something afterwards harm your ability to previously understand something? Well, I guess I could see how that'd be possible, but I'm not sure that's priming anymore.
Which comment(s) of mine specifically should be downvoted.

I count one (now possibly two). The rest are all valid intellectual points.
Private Methods and Properties in Swift
KnockoutJS needs to be on there.

IMO it's close to a data-binding library, rather than a full-fledged framework, it works well, is simple, and relatively performant.
I just know that people come into IRC, and there was some discussion about bitfields to help support embedded stuff. Not sure there's a lot written about it yet.
This looks great: it's a well-designed site and solves a lot of the problems in TA. The idea that people will rate hotels higher based on "marginal experiences" is very well put, and probably true. Will definitely use in the future.
In this story, it's regulation that has put some companies at the merci of competitors. Small Startup Y has to hope that Big Corp X wants to license a patent for a fair $ amount. Startup Y has no way to negotiate a large fee down to an acceptable level, pay the expensive licenses or fight in court if they ignore the patent.

Considering two companies with patents, you get the Nash equilibrium where both companies go to court for patent infringement (assuming the plaintiff always wins). The payoff matrix could look like this, where the numbers are the changes in profits in %.

| court | not court
---------------------------------
court | -5 \ -5 | -15 \ 10
----------|----------------------
not court | 10 \ -15 | 1 \ 1
---------------------------------

Assume the profit of the previous year is 14%.

- If no company goes to court, both profits grow slightly with 1% to 15%.
- If one company goes to court, and the other doesn't, the plaintiff's profit increases with 10% to 24% and the defendant's drops with 15% to -1% (placing it a loss).
- If both companies go to court, the profits of both companies drop with 5% to 9%.

If you want a real-life example of this situation, just look at the lawsuits between Samsung & Apple. Probably the only case where they'll evolve to the pareto optimal solution, is when patents no longer exist at all.

A world without patents would allow companies to win customers based on pure attractiveness and features, not by getting competition banned. Note that this isn't the same as giving your key designs away for free. It means I could reverse engineer an iphone touchscreen and create a compatible version, without being sued by anyone. Apple would still have the early mover advantage with existing customers; the consumer would have more/better/cheaper choices and i would have a more attractive product. (Note that this might not be the case for other sectors, like pharma, where it costs a lot to develop a new drug from scratch, rather than the cheaper additive innovations in the tech sector).
I'm not a rubyist, neither I am a professional programmer, but I'm sad that Apple didn't/couldn't choose Ruby as their main language. Nowadays I'm deciding what programming language to learn as a hobby. Reality (market) tells me that should be JavaScript or right now Swift (looks like javascript for me). It makes me sad, I wish it could be Ruby. So clean and clear. Everything makes sense, I don't need to memorize almost nothing.

Edit/Disclaimer: My first contact with programming (besides BASIC) was Autolisp (Autocad scripting) and my professional field is design.
NASA scientist designs faster-than-light spacecraft
Data is the Colonial State of Tech
There is very little justification for human involvement in space combat. We are very fragile, and space is a harsh mistress. Not only is aviation headed towards automation, every extra-terran spacecraft that has been built has also been automated. Even if the life support systems were entirely costless, having to keep acceleration under certain limits (i.e. below the point where people turn into paste) seems like it would be disadvantageous.

To me the question of propulsion is most interesting, and specifically I wonder how feasible it would be to solve the problem of engine design by using two different engines. Nuclear propulsion looks good on paper, but a ready supply of fissile material is likely to be difficult to obtain.

Lastly we might consider whether or not space combat will happen at all. Spacecraft are very expensive, and the conditions which give rise to warfare on Earth seem unlikely. When your political entities are light-years away from each other, it's hard to have resource conflicts. Or, in a universe with FTL, it's probably hard to have conflicts when you don't have causality.
The answer to 'question headlines' is usually, no.
All of OpenTable's features are core competencies of a restaurant. A restaurant must do CRM, it must maintain analytics about its own performance, it must be able to manage tables and keep track of payments, and unless you're a no-reservations place, it must have a system in place to handle reservations.

If you don't cover all of the above bases as a competitor, you're leaving your customers to cobble these pieces together themselves. Maximum freedom? Sure, but how many takers do you think you'll have?

"Hey Mr. Restaurant Owner, I understand you have a substandard but perfectly functional system that runs every major concern of your restaurant. Your employees kind of hate it, but they're extremely proficient at using it since it's the industry standard. Boy do I have a great idea for you! You should throw this system away so you can assemble multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors together to do the same thing, in a field where interoperability isn't even in the vocabulary! How your payments system talks to your CRM system? Fuck knows. But you should do this!"

OpenTable isn't completely immune from competition, but they're pretty much as close as any software company can get. There's a reason why every potential competitor to OpenTable has taken the "full restaurant management system" angle.

OpenTable is vulnerable if someone can execute on the kitchen-sink restaurant management system better and more cheaply. I don't think it's vulnerable to piecemeal replacement.
As a wannabe-rubyist who thinks reading Obj-C is somewhere between having a migraine and using H2SO4 eye drops, so far I'm in love with the language. I'm doing lots of tripping over the Cocoa APIs, though, in no small part due to Xcode.

The error messages you get when you've done something wrong are unintuitive at best and downright misleading at worst.

Example: I've got a field I want to render an image in. It's represented as an object of type NSImageCell.

I've got my image file defined as an object of type NSImage. So far, so good.

I type the . after the image cell, and I'm presented with a number of autocomplete suggestions. One of which is a method called "setValue" which accepts an object as an argument.

Okay cool.

myCell.setValue(NSImage(named: "myImage"))

Compile and.. instacrash with "Unrecognized selector"

What?

Some research turns up that this error means you've tried to send a message to (call a method on) something that doesn't accept that type of message.

Turns out that the method I needed is called setObjectValue. And it also accepts an object as an argument.

So, Xcode. Why did you give me setValue as an autocomplete when it isn't valid on that object? Why are these method names nearly identical? facepalm

And that's before I get into the almost completely worthless inline error messages. "Cannot convert to $T1". What?

I really, really like the language, but Xcode is trying its damndest to turn me away. I've got a stack of bugs/feature requests that need to be entered into Apple's reporting tool - hopefully some of these are just warts that'll get fixed as Xcode 6 comes out of beta.
Asking arrogant rhetorical questions on HN that have literal answers, you should not be surprised when you get literal answers.
The only way to win this game is not to play
Yesterday when I brought up ESPN's streaming feed they had an option to stream a video with closed captioning. Is this your source?
Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency
Patent discussion aside, I just want to point out that battery powered cars are NOT the solution to global warming, at least not at the current state of technology. Aside from all the environmental damage involved in producing the lithium cells them selves, you have to also consider that to charge those cells we are still burning cola and then transmitting that power over an incredibly inefficient, almost 100 year old power grid (in US).

In fact, given the environmental damage from production of a new car combined with environmental damage from production of lithium batteries, combined with CO2 emissions from the cola burning power plants and nuclear waste from the nuclear power plants, I would argue that the earth is better off if you were to drive an older F150 pickup truck for another 300k miles, rather than buy a new Tesla. If you have an option though, you should choose something more efficient.

But overall, I just wanted to point out to anyone who is honestly concerned about global warming. Driving your current car for longer (assuming it's reasonably economical), and investing the money into fixing it up and getting more miles out of it is way better environmentally than buying a new car. Remamber, repair > reuse > recycle > replace.
> Whoever wants to replace OpenTable needs to replace all of this at once. Not only that, they need to convince a restaurant to ditch practically their entire IT stack, retrain all of their employees in the new system, and do so without service or quality interruption.

Yelp acquired SeatMe[0] (front of house management) last year to expand into this market, and Yelp Reservations[1] was launched last month. These two products combined function as an OpenTable replacement.

Disclaimer: I work at Yelp.

[0] https://www.seatme.yelp.com/

[1] http://officialblog.yelp.com/2014/05/yelp-reservations-new-f...
Not necessarily. It was given to him by his grandmother. Perhaps she's divesting herself of some of her retirement funds for whatever reason (e.g. maybe is actually not all that well off but she wants her grandkids to "have something" but is anticipating losing all she owns in end-of-life care).

That said, there is little to this story that seems impressive to me. Regardless of whether his family is rich or not, being given $1000 for easter is a big deal when one is 14, and therefore most of the rest of this kid's story is better attributed to good luck than talent. What's impressive is that he didn't spend all the bitcoin-windfall on video games, apps, and trying to impress his friends.
Most cloud customers are fine with RFC1918-IPv4-space VMs and one IPv4 address on the outside of their load balancer.
Probably a dumb question, but I seem to have trouble understanding the post: Are the bitcoins being sold in one discreet chunk (you buy the entire wallet or nothing) or are they being parceled out (it mentions auctioning off blocks)?

Also, is it possible to use these bitcoins in a transaction, or would you simply be paying for the still-encrypted wallet?
But to view the game on any UK provider, (I think games are shared between SKY and ITV), you need a subscription right? I mean you have to have a UK address with a TV or no?!
The idea is that battery powered cars will become more prevalent and effectively cleaner as the electrical energy used to power them is drawn from more renewable sources, rather than from fossil fuels.
The Well-Followed on Social Media Cash In on Their Influence
The parent to your post could be rephrased as:

> That presumes 'serial dating,' but you can actually know several people at once, and get more serious with one once you've evaluated the pool.
yeah, looks like it. Oh well, it gave me brief hope of having an awesome domain.
It doesn't completely miss those points, it covers them actually.

"The fighter is probably nothing more than a glorified chemical-fueled missile anyway, no more sophisticated in principle than the missiles you already expend by the dozen. You can at least double its effective range by replacing the pilot with a computer and turning it into a disposable missile bus (I say at least because the computer will probably mass a lot less than the pilot and the life support systems necessary to sustain him). It may be able to accelerate faster too, since it’s now freed from the restriction of having to not kill the pilot with bone-crushing sustained G forces."

Also this:

"This means that, unlike in many pop SF depictions, warship crews will probably be quite small. Human beings require a lot of supporting mass in supplies, life support, and crew quarters, so spacecraft in general will probably be heavily automated. A warship will probably basically be a can full of weaponry on top of a big fuel tank, with the crew controlling the thing from a small habitat module. The crew will effectively be command crew; there to tell the machines what to do, not to micromanage the operations of the ship. You’ll probably have a small core crew to fly the ship, a few damage control technicians, and maybe a medic or two. Serving on one will be more like serving on a WWII U-boat than anything else."

Makes me think you actually didn't read it.
$1000 is not that much money. Grandmothers might figure that it's better to gift money while they are still alive, to save on inheritance tax (among other reasons).
aside from that most people can't afford to go that far for work... by a long way. it takes money to make money.
I use to use greplin for something similar. Where did I hear about this band? Search for it, see it was a tweet from my friend a year ago. Cool project.
Also good: http://musicforprogramming.net
This is really the way to go. Customize the UI to the platform make the app as polished as possible, but don't give up cross-platform business logic/unified deployment.
I'm happy that developers are excited enough about Swift that they can't stop writing about it.

But... this is basically reiterating Apple's keynote and WWDC sessions. We already know about those strengths of Swift.

And people already felt Swift is better than Objective C the very second (literally) it was announced.

Usually when you ask "why" in your blog title, it's not supposed to be a question whose answer we already know, like "Why is water wet".

EDIT: Scratch that, "why is water wet" would make an interesting article.
How to solve your business problems with this problem solving steps
I see quite a lot of elderly people on buses here in the UK. Not really surprising given that free bus travel comes with the pension.

Quite a few rely on the bus as it's easier and safer than driving. Quite a few of them make an issue of it at local council elections.

I've also noticed here in Edinburgh that parents are relaxed about letting even fairly young children (under 10) travel the bus by themselves.
Who would have thought... I've read about this boy a few days ago on Reddit (subforum Entrepreneur). Someone suggested that he should get his story in the media, because it's rather interesting (especially his age, and Bitcoin is still hot nowadays). A month later, here he is!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/25u81a/im_15_a...
I'm in CZ and have no TV. I paid to watch the NBA finals and Euroleague games. I'd gladly pay to see WC games too and F1 but since they are not available anywhere, I'm stuck with illegal streaming. Best I could find was: http://www.vipboxeu.co/
UK guy gave his bitcoins to the Silk Road, but no one is claiming ownership of the Silk Road wallet.
Native Client is Widely Misunderstood (2011)
Have you asked this question at: http://www.growthhackers.com ?
Is there no better way to upgrade Node and its plugins?
I think the author is wrong on visibility. Put simply: things in space are very far away and hence visually small. You have to be looking in exactly the right place. Finding things when you know where they are is easy. Poking around randomly for things you might have missed is hard. Compare: the effort to find earth-crossing asteroids - objects that like a hostile ship are dark, drifting, and small.
I was really impressed by The Lost Fleet's detailed exploration of space combat - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Fleet
Imagine you hand your local crack dealer a wad of cash to hold for you temporarily. The crack dealer adds it to his bigger wad of cash and promptly gets busted. The drugs and money he's holding are seized. That's what happened here. Would you expect the government to return your wad of cash?
The title is link bait and inaccurate. It's not about "how to marry the right girl". It's about "how to marry the right girl, given an unrealistic set of constraints".
Not that this isn’t good news – it is – but it’s taken 4 years to get to this point: http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2010/03/portland_ci...

Still no fiber in the ground. This sort of negotiation is such a huge barrier to entry that only very big (or incumbent) companies have a fighting chance.

Obviously, Google entering the market is a big deal and good news – two competitors is better than one. But only a company of the size and regulatory savvy of Google would even try.