skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Worth the risk to accept volunteer contributions to for profit business?
My partner and I just incorporated (yesterday!) our startup game studio. We each own 50%, no investors 100% bootstrapped. My partner knows someone who wants to contribute code (for free) for the learning experience.

My initial reaction is that accepting this is potentially a huge risk. It's an asymmetric risk.

On the other hand there is far too much work ahead of us for two people. If I say "no, no, no" every time my partner comes to me with people who want to help we would never hire any employees.

Is there a way to accept volunteer contributions to a for profit company that is fair to the volunteer while managing acceptable risk for us? I'm considering both the legal implications, and the moral implications. I think in this instance the contributor just genuinely want simple work experience because he is a CS student and we are in an area of the US where there are no existing game programming companies AFAIK. Though I don't think this instance is the case, I could also envision someone offering to do volunteer work with the hope that they'll join the team. The problem is what if someone contributes something but for some reason we don't want to hire them. We aren't trying to turn this into a large company or get a big payout at the end, we just want to make enough to support the founders doing something we love.

We're what I would call an "open source friendly" company; our game itself isn't open source but we use open source and plan to open source some portions of our libraries and some tools in return. So what I suggested to my partner was that perhaps we could open source the portion of the game engine that the volunteer works on; that way it'd be more fair since they'd be free to fork the project and reuse their own work if they disagree with us, and might be less risk for us because it would be separate from our game code and we could make our own fork if we disagree with them. (Am I right that it would be less legal risk?)

I'm sure many of you have been in similar situations. What are your thoughts?
Spot on!
Sometimes it is hard to pull yourself from work, study, etc. Just today I thought - I am working, while my son is happily playing with his trains; someday he will be all grown. So I dropped my work at the moment and joined him for a some father-son train time.
Forrst: Where Designers Who Code meet Developers Who Design
It's fascinating to watch 37signals adapt as it becomes a slightly larger company. I think the number of features accomplished is pretty impressive for it being their first attempt at this new way of working. Across multiple products, no less.

My first reaction to a lot of their learnings was "Duh", but of course I've only learned a number of those lessons after several years working with agile dev teams. Credit to them for sharing all of this.
when a group of subjects were given an identical serving of ice cream on different occasions, they released more hormones that made them feel full when they ate it in 30 minutes instead of 5

A half hour to eat one serving of ice cream? Madness...
What are Joel's contributions, exactly? Write your own programming language and quit your job if you don't have an Aeron chair in your own private office?
Correct. But the second is hugely better.

It's like someone is eating poison and you'd say: eat slower. Not a bad idea, but...
He presents himself as some sort of enlightened manager. Yet when he's on the spot with a chance to prove it, he slinks back into the traditional "neither confirm nor deny" stance of old-style corporations.

He was within his rights not to give a reason. Not saying otherwise. I'm just saying I'll never work with him or his company in the future. Although he'll probably never have any use of this "bridge", he gained nothing by burning it.
...is there a brief, cogent argument for why...

Software.
Is that what happened? The plug for State Farm at the end makes me think they did an end-run around the label and got somebody else to pay for the video, thus the record company doesn't own the video and they can embed it? (But then they'd still own the rights to the song, so maybe not)
Why the NYC Startup Scene is Hot (Hint: Not Fred Wilson)
Indie Fund is a brand new funding source for independent [game] developers
"Lastly, I resent the comparison of religion to insanity."

For what it's worth, he's not comparing religion to insanity by saying they're the same thing. He's saying all three people (or the fourth with the atheist) can't each be right.

Which is true.
Entrepreneurs’ Prior Lives, Episode 2: Michael Cann, Investment Banker
Indeed. In addition to writing extremely interesting posts, he was the one "celebrity blogger" that actually proved he had any programming ability (by releasing open-source software). So many bloggers write about programming techniques, but very few of them have ever written any code that the readers can take a look at.
"Sun Quentin is the informal nickname of the offices of Sun Microsystems. Close proximity to the San Francisco bay and the architecture of the buildings are reminiscent of San Quentin, a California state prison." [from urbandictionary.com -- and personal experience]
A rant about Ruby 1.9 String encoding
How many calories could you burn by jogging (or cycling, or swimming, or doing whatever exercise you prefer) for the extra 25 minutes, instead of eating the ice cream more slowly? If it's even close, jogging is a better idea, because exercise has so many added benefits.

Presumably, ice cream is one of the things that most favors the extended consumption time, because of its high calorie density. For more standard meals, exercise looks even better.
I think they only do it on summer
Because of the work I do in web development, I am an Ubuntu Linux user. I only use IE for testing sites so that I see what they look like in that browser. IE8 was a big step forward, but compatibility mode really put a kink in things such that on everything I'm having to add this tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

Even on new projects.

Also, the delay on supporting CSS3 stuff like border-radius and text and box shadow has been disappointing. As of the release of Opera 10.50 today, even Opera has finally caught up to support the most popular CSS3 stuff. Now only IE8 drags its feet.

I wish Microsoft would release point releases sooner, rather than hold up and release major releases. This makes it easier to accommodate the subtle changes in the browser as things go.

One of the great things about the open source browsers is that the bug teams on those browsers listen for the most part, and get bug and security fixes out there sooner, while Microsoft simply drags their feet.

I don't like the way the buttons are arranged in the IE browser. With Firefox I can move things around to how I like things and can even change the look of those buttons.

I really, really like Firebug and use it in my work. IE needs something like that. Especially the ability to move my mouse around, click something, and immediately know what it's called, see the CSS, and can even try changes on the CSS. This was how I was able to retheme ProjectPier (ProjectPier.org) with a custom theme, while it is not easy to do in IE.

Often in web development, I need to clear web history, caching, cookies, etc. Ever try and do that on IE8? You wait forever over something that should be performed instantly like other browsers.

The Advanced tab is goofy. It has a window I cannot stretch and so I have to use the horizontal scroller. It has so many items in there, and everyone usually needs to get into that if they're a developer, that you can't help but wonder why it wasn't implemented in a series of tabs.

Many of the other IE8 problems are discussed here:

http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=IE8

And specifically:

http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html

Last, I don't think Microsoft is pushing hard enough to get people off of IE6. I keep bumping into clients who still run it and I bruise my head on the table.
sorry pg but I have to disagree with you.

Apple have patents, and they want to protect them. There is nothing "evil" with that.

These are all legitimate patents that Apple worked long and hard on and spent millions to develop.

If you're the CEO of a major public corporation and you owned those patents you'd do the same thing.
He's right on just about every account. For most web-based businesses, there are better ways to get users than blogging. (I say this as someone who built a pretty solid one off of a blog in the past as well.)

There's too much competition. It takes too much effort to write high-quality content frequently enough to attract lots of attention. The conversion rate is low, and the price is high.

Sure it works for some people. It worked for Joel and 37 Signals. It worked for me once upon a time. All of us started before the word "blog" had entered the popular lexicon, but it could probably work now with the right niche and enough effort.

But if you're a small startup, you'd be better off programming some viral hooks, maybe doing some basic SEO, testing out Ad Words, a/b testing landing pages and every other point in your sales funnel, etc. Blogs, Facebook Pages, and Twitter just won't give you the ROI those will when developer hours are a big factor.
I don't get how they can change the Internet and get the rest of the world to build on this "new" infrastructure (and they really need the rest of the world to follow suit in order for it to work) ... unless it means separating the US from the rest of us.

On one hand, the US has the largest market for web applications. On the other hand, Europe, Japan and China at least are fast growing markets that may surpass the US in the future ... so I'm pretty sure many US entrepreneurs will move their businesses overseas.

So don't worry about it, it will be just like the Copenhagen negotiations, if not worse :) Not to mention that I don't think they have the technical skills to pull it of (the Internet itself was spawned by some of the brightest minds of the 20th century).
It's 34 pages, but very interesting, remarkable readable.

You upvoted two other articles about this to the front page, so I thought you might find the original interesting as well

The other two you've linked to are:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.ht...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=depressions...

BTW, there's something going on where <p> tags are leaking into introductory comments
Twitter, social networks, and website used in large bridal show scam
Haha, my technique is also blocking websites. Here it goes, might be useful for someone: http://pastebin.com/AhY3mgU4
I would add, remove wheat and most other grains -- but especitally wheat -- from your diet. Personal results include a loss of 25 pounds, effortlessly. No hunger, more energy.

Here's some background on the theory behind that:

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/name-that-food.htm...
Yeah, I don't think Joel is saying you shouldn't blog about yourself. You should, for just that reason. He's just saying it's not an ideal lead generation tool for most people, and I think he's correct.
Books are actually usually written by humans. In fact they often serve as a device for condensing, organizing, and transmitting one human's collected insights on a topic to many thousands of other humans. It's pretty efficient and effective.

dislodges tongue from cheek
I fully agree with the value implicit in having that library book deadline to push you to finish something that you wouldn't have finished otherwise (100 Years of Solitude was that book for me). At the same time, you can avail yourself of the cost-free access to try something that you can't find in bookstores in case you won't like it. I got to surprise myself with enjoying Asterios Polyp and hating Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan.

If you try and like it, please donate to your local public library! Just think of how much you're not spending on books and how much you'd spend for Netflix discs

As a side tip, I've usually got notions towards more books than I actually want to check out at a time, so creating an Amazon wish list is a really easy way to track interests.
"we often forget that the consequence of unnecessary duplication is far less than the consequence of unnecessary consolidation."

I don't know that I agree with this. Unnecessary consolidation is bad, but I find that it's more of an effect of that consolidation being poorly thought out.
It's still a religious debate. I just talked about it with a professor in the field and he refuses to have a conversation about OS with other similar folks due to the lack of rationality in the debate.
My .emacs is based on the emacs-starter-kit as well, its really helpful to hit the ground running if you do not have a configured emacs yet.
Verity Credit Union changes all member passwords to birthday + last four of SSN
someone should measure the difference between:

a. eating the icecream during 30minutes
b. eating in 5 minutes + working out lightly (take a walk) the other 25
A Disturbance In The (Burger) Force
If I may, I would like to point out the following related discussion at Infinite Injury and Less Wrong on the virtues of reading original sources in the sciences:

(original) http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2010/02/25/reading-origin...

(response) http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ul/for_progress_to_be_by_accumulati...

(I agree mostly with the arguments made in the Less Wrong post, viz. "If one wants to know the Standard Model, sure, study it directly, but if you want to actually understand how to do the sorts of things that Newton did, you would be advised to read him, Feynman and yes, Plato too, as Plato also did things which contributed greatly to the development of thought.")
I like the quote about Warren Buffet. I sometimes wonder about how useful my current skill set would be in a world war. But I think zombie apocalypse (or, more realistically, the possibility of a startup) are reasons the to stay curious and have hobbies.
>>>I have a product for bookstores.

Ouch. Drop it. They're all on their way to being gone in 3-5 years. Seriously. See: Tower Records/Blockbuster.

Very, very few things just "catch on." The invisible hand of marketing and PR helps that along.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but is it possible that they thought so negatively of you that they didn't want to violate the old "if you have nothing good to say, then say nothing" rule?

I'm not asking for anyone to say anything "good" or "bad". There is no good or bad. There's the truth, and I'm asking for the basic courtesy of telling it straight. And yes, you can say "you came off as arrogant in your phone interview". I'm an adult; I can handle it.
I think it's far more calculated than that: Google's shipping Android builds avoid a lot of basic UI features that Apple did first. HTC then adds most of them through their "TouchSense" modifications, just like they did with WM6 before.

They're trying to keep Google in its place, and prevent HTC from extending it. They're happy with Android being out there for the dorkwads and ideologues (it lets them shed their 'worst customers') but they don't want the public to see a sea of direct clones of their style of multitouch.
From the comments:

"I don’t watch TV, I have no social life"
Indie Fund: A brand new funding source for Independent Game Developers
Clicking 'try a live demo' just opens the same page in a new tab for me.

Windows XP, FF 3.5.8
being a workaholic is having an addiction. It just happens that the thing you're addicted to can have a positive outcome, but it is an addiction nonetheless
Starting at 2:30 the music is timed perfectly with the banners. Certainly the machine's timing was not that precise. How they were able to keep it synced up? It's impressive that a machine that looks so rickety still works.
You may be right. I've been searching for some evidence of either case, but haven't found any yet. I had figured that the video being embeddable had meant that the label had listened to Damian's previous post.
use case arguments aside, I have discovered a XSS vulnerability for you http://redo.heroku.com/72
Reddit clone in 4 lines of perl: http://gist.github.com/299579
Yes, Sun's inability to execute in consumer markets appears in the failure of applets against flash. And it would also prevent them from creating something like an iPhone.

It seems that just about all current success stories in computing are in consumer markets: search, social websites, smartphones.

It's true that Oracle is doing well and they aren't in consumer markets - but their market is not showing rapid growth; on the contrary, they are actively consolidating it.
This is an experiment in scientific methodology
> I’ve read a hundred books a year for the past couple years.

I read about 30 books a year. I read about 15 books for the first time, and then I reread a few of my favorites over and over.

I find some books are worth 1000x more than others. So when you've identified these great books, it would be a shame to not reread them frequently.
They may have missed the joke, but the problem is that adolescent obsessive compulsion to prove oneself does actually accumulate to certain kinds of advantages in the long term. Cantrill really was underestimating what he was up against.
I don't know, I think that there's still a lot to be said for a physical book. Not everyone is going to be carrying around a Kindle.

Blockbuster is obsoleted because there is a better mode of delivery for the same thing, and because Blockbuster was unwilling to adjust its policies or respond early enough to remain competitive.

There is still a big market for physical books, I think, and there are a lot of independent bookstores that carry things besides the next Harry Potter installment or other mainstream things like that. Rare and used bookstores contain a lot of information that isn't even going to be digitized for a long, long time if ever, even if we assume that all of the book's potential perusers would rather have a digital edition.

Big chains may start to suffer somewhat, but they're not the target anyway.

And, even if bookstores do eventually disappear from under us, the product can be abstracted into another general retail niche pretty easily. It's not too specific -- it's actually rather general and common, but there is an untapped market there, I think.
"Devops is on the rise primarily due to realization that there is a big gap between developing end-user systems and bare-bones systems administration"

That's the key take away here! I've held such a role in ~10,000+ node environment. I've since moved on to development, but I've been trying to drive this point to start-ups for years, but apparently most still think that:

1) Operations means installing an OS on a machine, doing backups (and may be occasionally checking how many threads are running in the application server)

2) As we no longer have to admin bare iron, start-ups do not need operations.

The hiring is done accordingly: the idea is to contract-out/outsource/reluctantly hire one or two "IT-type" admins whose goal is merely to (in a reactive fashion) respond to outages as they happen and (manually) provision servers and networking gear.

Nothing could be more wrong. With the move to commodity and virtualized commodity hardware, running operating systems that are geared (originally) towards developers rather than sys admins (e.g., Linux vs. Solaris or FreeBSD -- this isn't a stab at the latter two, it's rather a comment to how much more admin-friendly theses OSes are) the assumption should be that unless there's "lights out"-style automation in place, outages are going to be the norm rather than exception.
I look at HN voting in the same way. If you upvote what you agree with and downvote what you don't, you end up with Reddit, where "lolz your mom" gets +12 and reasoned disagreement ends up -30.

I actually end up upvoting a lot of <1 point comments, even ones I disagree with. If the comment is reasonably coherent and not trolling, it usually shouldn't be below 1.
decently clean, and super easy to understand.
I think it would be REALLY nice to have categories, as browsing all deals can get a bit much.

Really nice start Kris.

I assume you'll be adding a way for people to sign-up/sign-in and vote up the deals? I don't see that on the site right now.

This may be a good place to implement facebook connect, as you'll get a nice viral push as well.
I can confidently say reading company blogs has never factored into my purchase decisions. I also don't read company press releases, most company copy, or most ads before buying. What's the point? That time is better spent reading independent reviews and such.
Really? I liked:
"Of course Microsoft's customers are already familiar with deep layerings and complex hierarchies."
We're doing 4-day weeks in the summer. They work better there since a good portion of the company lives in cold-weather climates. The extra day was often used for working, and when it wasn't it made the week feel like 3.5 day weeks. So we're starting to think of it as summer vacation every work week.

That's the current idea. We're ever-chaging so we'll see how it all shakes out.
Yeah they certainly have their place, but I would never put them above human contact. I'd go insane.
I live in Utah right now, but I'm not too hopeful about the locals.

I actually worked at a company run by one of the area's biggest angel investors. My experience with him and his partner has contributed greatly to my discouragement; they didn't care at all about anyone who wasn't a VP and literally held a meeting telling everyone never to talk to them, only talk to your relevant VP. This company had about 40 employees. My experience with that guy is not good at all, and I don't think he likes me very much anymore, and that will probably affect my chances with local investors negatively since he is quite well-connected.
I know. Try clicking the image instead. I fixed this locally but heroku won't accept my push. I'll try again later.
"Taking measured risk is not that close to crazy."

Depends on how carefully measured the risk is, what the possible payouts are, what the fallback plan is... and it depends on whose perspective is being taken.

Where do you draw the line between "taking a good risk", "taking a bad risk", and "taking a crazy stupid risk"? What happens when you think a risk is good and everyone around you think it's stupid and you're crazy for taking it?

I'd never buy a lottery ticket, but I have long-term disability insurance. Both have a negative expected value and a rare but high possible payout. The only thing that makes insurance "smart" and the lottery "crazy" is that with insurance the payoff happens exactly in the circumstance you need it to. Sometimes the line between smart and crazy is really, really thin.
I figure the podcast can stay alive at least short term. Riffing off of Jeff's podcast agenda by phone for two hours a month isn't nearly as much work as blogging a full two out of every five work days.
And if down-voting should have a purpose ... then it should definitely be for filtering out people not in HN's demographic.

That might be true for people who want to use HN to talk about politics or religion, but Jason is definitely in our demographic. He's a web startup founder, whether or not his startup sucks.
The earthquake in Chile has shortened each day by 1.26 microseconds
Has anyone here read Surfing and Health by Dorian Paskowitz? Great book that. Everyone seems to eventually arrive to his conclusions (including that TED talk about living past 100).
The latest in a series of internet retirements and disappearances. Private forums are on the uptick.