skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Should I offer equity to a potential business partner? 
A single, non-technical founder comes up with a startup idea and recruits an offshore development team to build version 1. The product is popular and 10,000 users sign up and feedback is promising. The founder has some new ideas to improve the product and a business model to earn revenue for the next version. At this point all expenses have been paid for by the founder.

The founder and dev team work together part-time over 3-4 months on a new version that includes new features and enhancements. The founder can no longer afford labor costs, so he decides to negotiate an equity deal with the development firm to create new features, and pay for the recent enhancements.

The offshore team is involved in other consulting projects and requires detailed functional/non-functional requirements, micromangement, and communication is infrequent and strained by time zone differences. The founder questions the firm's level of technical talent and their ability to scale/optimize in anticipation of rapid growth and an angel funding round.

The owner of the offshore team offers 2 dedicated, full time developers for a time period of 4-to-n months in exchange for ownership in the startup.

What would you do? How much stake should the original founder retain? Should the development team be treated as cofounders or investors? How much equity stake would you offer the offshore team? Would you re-recruit a new team of developers/founders onshore to rebuild the product?
Wait, how would karma transfers work? What would be the point?
WARNING: THIS IS MY PERSONAL OPINION

1. Uninformed.

2. By not consulting on "business decisions" which are actually mostly tech decisions.

3. Make sure you have AS MUCH COMPLETE as you POSSIBLY CAN - things like idea/strategy/wireframes/html mockups/product alpha/prototypes/customers who have intent to use product if it exists/realistic 1st year numbers/plan on who is getting merchant account/incorporating/vesting of stock/who is doing accounting/what is the bare minimum for v0.5 of product.

4. Be honest, open & encouraging. Mostly honest & open though.

5. None

6. Money & Recognition

7. Money & Recognition
This is correct in developer's terms, but not necessarily in sales terms. Unless you manage yourself, you may get fired for choosing the first option (overdue with no bugs). Another good reason for working for yourself, I guess.
My point is that it is theoretically possible to give karma more meaning than it has today.

... or less, if they were to implement a karma trading system.
A likely implementation seems a box where you type the username and points for the transfer recipient. I believe this was discussed a while ago, and someone mentioned that they would do programming work for karma.

I have the karma and it doesn't mean anything to me, but it means something to some people that don't have it. There are people out there that would trade real world goods and services for Hacker News karma.

The point would just be as an experiment. I'm not expecting anything good would happen immediately; we'd probably see more abuse than anything.
Thanks for this post. I'm new to doing bash scripting and this is very helpful.
Hackintoshed: Life With My “MacBook Nano”
If you are in Bombay, they will be broadcasting the NASA TV coverage live at the Nehru planetarium[1]. It's at 5PM IST.

[1] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Catch-lunar-e...
My bad. I currently know enough to be wary of even pharmaceutical patents (I think they should disappear, eventually), but still not enough to seriously back my claims. I know this is dangerous, I should have known better.

Anyway, I stumbled upon a better source than myself: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht... (a case against intellectual monopoly). Chapter 9 is particularly relevant here. If you have any counter-argument, I would be glad to hear them.
"Stop using IM. Period."

+100.

The average RescueTime IM user shifts to an IM window 77 times per day (6.5 hrs computer time).

Also, make commitments to focus (start with 20-30 minute bursts and 5-10 minute break times). Shut the door and/or hang a do not disturb sign somewhere. If distractions online are a problem, try LeechBlock or (our product) RescueTime, which allow you to selectively block the distracting bits for bursts of focus.
It may be helpful to remember that programmers look at things logically. That's why I'm no good at sales. I look for direct paths and solutions, and understand yes/no, not negotiations. I tell you this to show how/why I have respect for effective marketers. It's a bit like magic to me because my brain doesn't work that way (so you see how the tables can turn).

As for the questions, think about it in terms of any business relationship. Show that you can and will bring value to the table, and follow through on promises. Programmers do hard work; we would appreciate and respect a "business guy" walking back in the door with tie crooked, hair tousled and perspiring after a day working their marketing magic.
Hopefully this won't go to his head.
While Pro Git is a newish book, I believe Dive Into Python had that licensing long before my suggestions. There might be some history there though, as I think that book might have been developed online initially.
I think its great that these guys are trying something. They have an argument, and instead of theorizing they are going for it. I just think that its to far away from what JS is, JS has a long history behind it, and these 3 guys are trying to change that entire history with one broad stroke, I think that is nearly impossible to achieve.

Besides if they feel they have something JS developers want why not take it through the standards bodies.
Most of those aren't specific to bash.
It's not about performance; it's about not having logging statements in the code and/or having to add them when something goes awry.
For music:

http://trancearoundtheworld.com
(2 hour + streamed sets)

http://pandora.com (paid so theres no commercial distractions)

http://thesixtyone.com
(streamed songs you don't know about)

http://mugasha.com
(good quality well-known streamed sets for free)

Love the streamed sets because they don't interrupt your workflow. It's like being at a coding dance party; for hours.
thesixtyone has a CC section with a very good collection. Here is their CC electronic section: http://www.thesixtyone.com/cc/electronic/ There are some other relevant genres too.
Your choice of the word "cog" to represent a programmer and "gear" to represent a team indicates you might be internally (to your mind) objectifying the people involved with your potential projects. I could see such an internal objectification causing various problems with your interactions with the "cogs/gear" in various ways during a project. You can quickly lose someone's respect if he learns that you think of him as a replaceable part of a soulless machine.

A problem for "business types" is that they are trained to think of people as "human resources." This is probably a bad idea on any scale of team/organization. But it's an absolutely horrible idea w.r.t. the small-scale teams of which startup companies are made.
What percentage of HN readers use windows?

I'm assuming : 70% mac, 25% linux, 4% BSD derivative ...
I think they've found a very complicated solution. Wouldn't it be much much easier to:

1. give the content behind the ajax call a static url, which can be accessed by non-js clients too

2. add something like <link rel="alternate" media="ajax" type="text/html" href="http://example.com/doc.html#state /> to the head of that static version, which the search engines can then use as a pointer to back the js version
I'll never understand why big companies buy out an open source project when the chances are it'll just stall and loose all credibility. Who gained from that transaction, aside from the team who got their cash windfall and ran.
Ask HN: Please Review My Webapp
Ignoring for a moment how impractical this currently is, just because you have a ton of data doesn't mean you can search it effectively. In fact, the more data, the harder it will be to find the relevant bits.
For point #5, listening to music, I'd like to emphasize sticking away from vocals. It's weird, but my brain can listen and code just fine to non-lyrical music, or music which has repetitive samples (they meld into the background like another instrument). Once you start adding in someone singing though, it all changes for the worse.

Psychedelic trance, like Infected Mushroom or Psycraft, is my favorite stuff to code to at the moment. In fact most electronic music lacks lyrics and is favorable to coding IMHO (if you haven't heard of it, check out "Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music" to find some electronic songs/genre's you might like - http://bit.ly/10ZP9). Beastie Boys is ultimate death, unfortunately. Too much damn lyrical style.

Small hack: I've found that you can listen to vocal music without distraction, but only if it's sung in a language you don't understand. But for the life of me, I can't find any songs about Assembler... ;)
The only one I didn't know about is the problem with:

echo "hello world!"

I'm surprised history expansion could reach inside the quotes.
Etherpad: realtime-collab, playback and embeddable.
Can Techcrunch be a trusted and reputable news source once they start creating their own products?
The article outlines only one major reason for karma-based systems.

People can get addicted to their rating, creating "karma whores" and the like. This is nothing that probably hasn't been discussed here and on other communities.

Its a balance between the web-site operators wanting people to come back (what is my karma now after that awesome comment?), and pissing people off due to the problems karma systems introduce along with a general decline in community quality (Reddit anyone?).

Is it too much to ask for people to just have online conversations for the sake of getting involved? The only real CLEAN motivation is intrinsic, but that says a lot more about human nature than online rating systems.
This a side project I was working on for fun. If the site takes off I plan to aggregate the highest commented/liked tweets and celebrities. Beyond that I don't have any plans.

Design is by a friend of mine: http://sandosh.info/v2/pages/home/

Thanks in advance for spending your time on reviewing the site. :)
Peter Cooper's unusually successful Ruby book

BTW, I don't know if that's true. I'm not aware of the sales figures of any other Ruby books, but O'Reilly's The Ruby Programming Language has consistently had a sales rank (on Amazon) higher than my book. So has Pragmatic Bookshelf's Programming Ruby.
I think you are getting knocked down because you don't want to recognize that some people may disagree with you.

You said that outlook is better then gmail. While you might be able to make an argument when you compare it side by side one one machine. You would be mistaken in making that comparison. Gmail kicks ass for me not just because I feel it can replace outlook, but I can have my gmail, on my iphone, I can access it from any computer that has a web browser, I can access it from the linux command line using lynx, or links. Can outlook do that.

You need to realize that when they say desktop apps aren't as good as web apps, I think what they are saying is that desktop apps aren't mayby the best way for most people to use apps.
Would a now-published author with an established Web presence have a better platform for successful self-publishing? ;)
It makes me simultaneously feel like an old fogey
shaking his cane at progress

You're not, you're perceptive. The stuff that has happened to UI will make people of the future react like we do when we hear that this car was considered to be the pinacle of style: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ford.anglia.105e.moors.arp...

Was the world mad?

OSX has somehow pushed everyone (including competing systems) into a state of madness where gaudiness is prized. But phones will encourage sensible interface developments because normal people find them less intimidating and have increased expectations of a clean, powerful, responsive interface.
How is OS X optimized for one window/program? Switching between windows is fast. I'm not sure what you mean.
Ask HN: Questions for a Bank Analyst?
I'll be interviewing an analyst that specializes in banks and other financial firms for a large buy-side firm. In light of the recent financial crisis, I thought this opportunity may prove to be particularly insightful.

If any of you have any questions, I would be happy to pass them on to him during the interview. I'll post back with answers.
Details, details. All middle-management cares about is whether or not the task is done. And the associated costs of your shitty code are, at least partially, shifted on to your co-workers. This gives you an even better comparative velocity! Bonus season will be good this year.
- How do they come to respect or disrespect someone in this role?

Earn respect by investing not only in your product, but in your programmers. If you're a carpenter, you'd think your boss was crazy for asking you to drive nails without hammers or a nail-gun; and yet, this is how programming environments sometimes operate, causing consternation.

Earn disrespect by treating programmers like cogs. Do not ever assume that you can simply replace one programmer with another; there is an absolute chasm between the skills of the best and the worst. One way to judge your programmers is in adaptability; do they at least seem willing to tackle anything you throw at them, or do they not really have a clue how to start most of your ideas?

- How can I best approach a software engineer with an idea?

Do not make any assumptions about how simple the implementation could be. There are hard things that sound easy, and vice-versa. At the same time, be prepared to deconstruct your idea to say "well what if we only did X and Y"; you may be surprised how different the answer is.

- What can a business type do to build trust with a programmer?

Be detailed; communicate without filters. There's nothing worse than being asked to drop everything to provide one or two tidbits of information "immediately", only to find out later that the wrong question was being asked and that the priority wasn't really accurate. Heck, if you have to tell the programmer your 3-year plan for the product, do it; that may affect how the implementation proceeds.

Be flexible. Programmers will be productive at the weirdest times. If you see someone who comes in late and works for 12 hours straight, then takes a day off, they could still be the most productive software developer you've ever seen. Even if we aren't actively working on an idea in front of a computer, we are often putting it together in our heads. Perception is not reality in most cases. Having said that, do demand evidence (simple documentation, occasional updates, and definitely prototypes).

- What motivates programmers? Success? Personal fulfillment? Money?

I want to feel like my projects are useful. I want to have the freedom to design, and not feel "stuck" with any bad decisions.

Money is only important enough for me to live comfortably (I don't need a mansion or a yacht). On the other hand, if it became clear that someone who contributed very little was going to be showered with millions from my ideas, I'd definitely want my cut.

- How do software engineers perceive business types?

As a necessary evil. :) Software is relatively easy to distribute, so there isn't much to prevent people from acquiring your product. On the other hand, there is a lot to prevent them from finding products, so marketing is quite important. Not being sued is important. :)
Man, UofT (where I go) would be way the hell up there if the people that went here actually liked going here. I'm a Math Specialist and Computer Science major and I love it.
I'd wager much higher than that. At the very least, I'm using Win7. Statistics on browser/OS usage from pg would be interesting though.
It's almost a perfect storm of inconvenient equations. Magnetic field strength drops off as the cube of the distance, so you want to increase the current in the coil, but power loss (and thus heating) in the coil goes up as the square of the current, while field strength is only linear.
I 'created' one of these for my partner. I find the keyboard too cramped, but she loves it. She's not technical, so some of the rough edges (audio output for one) annoy her a bit. It's fast enough for all her uses. I did drop in a replacement HD with a higher spec, though.
I am experiencing exactly the same thing.

A fogey shaking his cane at progress? No, I like progress. I like the new start menu design. I don't like the fact that I have a Core i7 with 6GB of RAM and the start menu still takes as much time to start populating results as it takes to open a TCP socket to somewhere tens of miles away over half a dozen intermediate systems, submit a search query, Google to run it through ~700 servers and return the results.

Or that it doesn't match substrings, so 'irefox' has no results. Irefox? IREFOX? Are you an idiot, there's no program called irefox!

Or that it sorts in useless order - so a search for 'i' shows "IBM National Support BBS.ht', a Hyperterminal shortcut I've never used, above 'Internet Explorer'.

But even with that, the start menu is good. It's progress. I like it.

I don't like the changes to Sharing and Security and Ownership on files and folders going from XP Pro/2003 Server to Vista Pro/2008 Server. That's not progress, that's just adding extra button clicks and extra popups for no benefit to me.

I don't like the magic directory tree either, where 'my computer' is inside 'desktop' and the tree structure is hidden by default so folders like "work - october" float around in a detached and ethereal fashion, instead of making it clear that they are located somewhere. I don't see how non-technical people don't find that immensly confusing and unhelpful, because I do.

Progress is good, but I'm not feeling progress, I'm feeling 'paper over the complex stuff we don't want to change so it wont look so scary, even if that means what you see has little relevance to what's going on thus making it more difficult to understand'.
s/loose/lose

Why do so many people make this mistake? It drives me crazy!
Invite HN - Boston meetup: Harvest Party October 25th
Get Out of My Building
Yes, provided that the author is sufficiently good at editing, organizing thoughts, typesetting, copyediting, and marketing.
Upvoted to show support for the article and its point. I've once wondered into Google's Usenet jungle, it's a terrible mess.
Wufoo introduces integrated payments
Generating Clojure from an Ontology
Well I was going to call you a "media mogul." [I'm a regular Ruby Inside reader.]

I forgot to mention that I too was a technical reviewer for one book prior to getting the first writing gig. So that's another "in."

It's been a while but I think you could get an agent if you wanted one. Due to the technical nature of the material I think it's always difficult for publishers to find authors who are both willing _and_ able to do the work. Because of that technical authors still have opportunities authors in other markets can only wish for.
It's easy to imagine how it could work, though. "I have programmers ready and waiting to work on your idea..."
Well, I didn't set the X-No-Archive header. And now there's no chance that I'll ever get elected to be President of the United States.
I Wouldn't Hire a Programmer With No Interest in Programming Outside of Work
Nvidia Halting Chipset Development
I love how "make the product" is step one. That's the easy part, right?

I also think the complete premise is off target. This guy is talking about selling a newsletter for $25/month.

Most high-quality magazines go for $25/year, or even less. And most of those magazines have large staffs generating quality (usually) content so that the customer is willing to part with that $25/year.

If this guy wants to sell me a weekly newsletter for $25/month, that better be one hell of a newsletter.

Unless the whole point of this article was describing how to fool people into buying a low-quality product. In which case, why not just go all the way and start pushing fake Viagra? You'll get a lot more than 300 "contacts" a day if you're spamming!

What the hell happened to "Make a quality product, promote that product, sell the product, improve the product, repeat"?
> The problem is that "democratic" is not the opposite of "authoritarian".

Sorry bad choice of word I guess. What I meant is that China's government is authoritarian but it is also closed, whereas the US government, although it has authority, it is responsible to the people, even though indirectly.

> is not too far off from describing the strategy of the ruling class in most modern democracies.

The ruling class in modern democracy is composed of those naturally fit to rule. There is nothing wrong with that in my opinion. So basically what I'm saying in that when a society advances and more people are educated, there are enough people to fill in that ruling class naturally.

> In practice, a democracy always grants power to a select few; democracy is inherently unequal in this sense.

Democracy's advantage is not in equality, but in allowing those fit to have more, have more, and those fit to rule, to rule. Those fit to rule would,on average, rule better than constantly selecting random small group of people to rule.

As for your education point, China has restrictions on information, and it has a similar style of education as the US, but with an even more mechanistic approach.

So while the education system in US is not ideal, the one in China is less ideal, but in the US you at least have freedom of information, which permits and promotes anyone to self educate if he or she wants to.