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zngtk4on Show HN: I wrote a co-founder equity calculator over the weekend

I found this a pretty interesting and useful way to look at this.

One additional factor I would love to see: situations where one person is coming on a "late" cofounder (e.g. a basic product has already been made, e.g. with outsourced Eastern European developers, and there is some minor traction).

zngtk4on Khoi Vinh - Why I left my job at The New York Times

I'm not sure whether or not your wife is working, but how do you manage your time with her and that relationship? Is it just shared time that you spend with your daughter in the evening (since you usually go back to work after your daughter goes to bed)?

zngtk4on Not-so-safe Sex

What about this point?

>Second, condom-only regulation would also encourage a black market in adult film production. So movies featuring no-condom sex would not only still exist, but those actors and actresses would no longer be required to participate in the industry's HIV testing program, increasing the risk of an HIV outbreak in the industry and the population at large. One need only look at prostitution to see what happens when an industry operates underground.

zngtk4on Is depression really an evolutionary adaptation? A second opinion.

Part 2 can be found here:

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/is-depres...

zngtk4on AWS Multi-Factor Authentication

If you allow OpenID, users can choose an openid provider that has a hardware authentication option, like Verisign.

Most won't, but it at least is an easy way to provide this option.

zngtk4on AWS Multi-Factor Authentication

Nice, but why not allow integration with common authentication devices available, such as SecurID? I don't want to end up with 5 or 6 of different authentication devices.

zngtk4on Traffic Hacks: How One Driver Can Vastly Improve Traffic

That (in addition to the fact that everyone lives in the suburbs) perhaps provides some of the explanation for why Atlanta rush hour traffic seems to be some of the worst in the country, despite having more lanes and a smaller population than cities that have better traffic.

zngtk4on Traffic Hacks: How One Driver Can Vastly Improve Traffic

To an extent I think you're right and some people will do it regardless. On the other hand, smoothly flowing traffic creates an incentive to not zoom ahead in the merge lane. There's less of a feeling of a need to cut ahead and people don't seem to do it as much when there isn't already a jam. (That is, the jam provides an incentive to cut in front of everyone)

And if people were to implement this strategy, the provided space gives an incentive for those zooming ahead to merge a little sooner rather than risk waiting half a minute for someone to let them in right at the exit. It's been my experience that most of the "cheaters" will merge a little sooner if there's space rather than zoom up right to the end. They'll still be passing you, which is IMO aggravating, but at least things will move a little sooner.

zngtk4on Traffic Hacks: How One Driver Can Vastly Improve Traffic

Interesting, my instinct has always been to try to "punish" the cheaters by preventing them from merging in, thinking that this would discourage this behavior. But I can't really stop this, and the article provides a good explanation for why you might as well just let people merge in front of you.

zngtk4on Google faces $15 million lawsuit for releasing blogger information in model row

You can actually be sued for anything. Whether or not you can win is another matter, and it's difficult to recover legal costs for a frivolous lawsuit. The lawyer is probably just hoping for a settlement.

zngtk4on Why Can't Gmail Search?

It would at least make sense to deal with plurals. I can't tell you the number of times I've searched for something using an s (or not) at the end, and failed to find what I was looking for, only to remember later that I should try to add or remove an s from my search term.

zngtk4on Never Criticize Your Competitors

At what point does a casual conversation become illegal collusion?

Unfortunately, the law provides no clear definition, just as there's no clear point at which competitive behavior become "anti-competitive."

I'm not sure I'd agree with the statement that it's "VERY hard to make an anti-trust case stick" -- the antitrust laws are used a lot more than you hear about in the regular news (and the government doesn't have to be the one who brings them since you can be sued under the laws). For instance, in 2003 Nestle and Dreyer's Ice Cream were blocked from merging on antitrust grounds because the government defined the market they would gain a large share in as "The Market for Superpremium Ice Cream" (not the market for desserts or the market for ice cream). Many other deals aren't even attempted for fear of antitrust.

Not only that, but you can be found guilty of price fixing even if you didn't have a conversation about prices.

But if you're big enough for this to be a concern, you're already thinking about hiring Washington lobbyists to protect yourself and not reading Hacker News.

zngtk4on What’s Really Going On With Apple, Google, AT&T And The FCC

Here's something that seems to be left out of this discussion: there was an existing Google Voice application on the App Store called GV Mobile. At the time that Google's own app was either "rejected" or "held for further review", Apple also pulled GV Mobile from it's App Store. That at least, is rejection.

zngtk4on There's No Rulebook for Sex Verification

How do you determine "verifiably female?"

What if you have a "female" with high levels of androgens? Do you just say if you are 2 standard deviations within the mean of females you are verifiably female? Which is the cutoff?

zngtk4on How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash

I completely agree with you.

I would easily spend 5 or 10 cents to read an interesting article, multiple times per day, especially a well written article from the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

zngtk4on Lower Pricing for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

The one thing that all of these GB comparisons never take into account is actual performance (which is admittedly harder to measure).

I've experimented with about 4 different dedicated virtual server type hosts (none of which was EC2), and found differences in page rendering time from 30ms to 180ms, due to things like how much load their servers were dealing with, speed of hard drives, and CPUs used.

Some tests I've seen elsewhere suggest that Mosso has better Write IO than Linode and EC2, while Linode has better read performance than Mosso and EC2.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to use a virtual server and performance (rather than just the ability to handle a large number of users) is important, you have to consider more than just the RAM and bandwidth.

zngtk4on ATT dumps Kevin Mitnick

An 8 digit, all numerals password? Really, Mitnick?

It's not super secure, but it really should be secure enough if a website cares about security -- they should be limiting login attempts, and shouldn't be storing them in plain text.

zngtk4on Visual Map of Your Name's Online Presence

I repeated this three times with my name. It gave me completely different results each time...

zngtk4on Ask HN: Case studies of equity splits between cofounders

This is an interesting idea. The obvious question is how do you measure activity -- this is one of the things that often causes disagreements (e.g. different cofounders all thinking that they contributed the most).

zngtk4on Forget Starbucks, work at the library instead

I agree. Working at home also gives you the opportunity to use a full size keyboard, use multiple (or large) monitors, and more. And you save tons on the price of coffee (and can often have even better coffee once you learn how).

This works best if you can have a separate room as your office, however.

zngtk4on G.M. Puts Volt’s Mileage in City in Triple Digits

That electricity cost is based on a single location. My electricity is 12.5cents per KWH, regardless of time of day. That turns into about 3 cents per mile, rather than 1 cent per mile quoted in this article.

zngtk4on Source: Apple And Google Agreed Not To Poach Workers

Technically, it probably would be, which highlights the inanity of these laws.

zngtk4on How Much Will the Post Office Put Up With?

According to wikipedia, zip+4 does not uniquely identify single individuals unless they are high volume recipients.

zngtk4on Twitter, Facebook attack targeted one user

No, actually, the livejournal account is literally "cyxymu". The word is best written as Sukhumi (the Georgian city), but the cnet article refers to the "account name" and so is completely accurate.

zngtk4on Google Maps accused of unfair competition in France(for being free)

This seems wrong, but Google kind of deserves it -- Google has been involved in antitrust and other actions against Microsoft (e.g. they have been actively involved in the recent case against Microsoft in Europe regarding the "browser ballot"). So they don't really have any right to complain when someone uses the same types of laws against them.

zngtk4on How to avoid Gmail's Sponsored Links

Especially considering that having the link advertisements is essentially my payment for the gmail service. If you don't think it is a good deal to receive the gmail service in exchange for having to have the advertisements of the page (which you don't have to look at), you don't have to use gmail.

zngtk4on Student sues Amazon after Kindle eats his homework

>what if one of his class mate had thrown away his homework notebook. Would he be still be able to sue the other kid? Courts aren't setup to deal with this kind of issues.

He actually would still be able to sue the other kid. However, his damages would likely be rather small, and thus he would go to small claims court, which is setup to deal with this kind of issue. Probably he could also make a criminal complaint against the other kid if he really wanted.

zngtk4on Gmail: Send mail from another address without "on behalf of"

What if you have multiple domains?

zngtk4on Gmail: Send mail from another address without "on behalf of"

While I agree that it would be best to not have to give your private key to Google, I think it would be a good start to get all email transmitted using the PGP protocol. Once the emails are being sent like that, those who don't want to trust Google, could more easily do it on the client side since it would be much more in use.

You would probably have to not use Google, since if they are unable to read your email, that kind of destroys their business model.

zngtk4on Food allergies get curiouser and curiouser

For the record, not all scientists accept the research regarding birth control and mate preference as sound science. There's not even good evidence that humans can detect (even unconsciously) the MHC genotypes of another person (most of the papers don't show a statistically significant effect), which the referenced paper takes as one if its premises.

In addition, in the paper referred to in the article, there isn't a lot of difference between those on the pill and off (the error bars tended to overlap):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18700206?ordinalpos=1&...

It was also not a random or blind trial: "allocation to the pill/control group was entirely the decision of the volunteers, not the experiments."