skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Worries about a cofounder
Hi Everyone--

I was hoping to seek council about a situation at a very, very early stage startup. This is, btw a throwaway account.

Long story, trying to be short:
I asked a friend about 6 months ago (another programmer) to work with me on a startup. We began meeting and tossed around some ideas that we were interested in. We came up with 3 ideas that we think could be a good place to start. At the same time another friend (a coworker of ours) and I had lunch and he said he wanted to get working on a side project. He is a good guy; pretty smart, nice and seemed, at the time, passionate. Definitely a businessman (project manager) and not a coder. I suggested he meet with me and my original friend. We began meeting weekly to discuss a startup venture. We settled on one of my original ideas, though the project manager guy focused it in on a specific niche inside of our market.

Fast forward 6 months -- the business guy is still interested, but after having another kid, missing a bunch of meetings and just waiting for us to actually build the product, I'm questioning his motives for joining. We met earlier this week and his focus was on getting us, inside a year, to a position where we could sell for a couple hundred thousand dollars. The other founder and I said we'd prefer to see about getting a couple thousand from very early round friends and family so that we can hook up with some big name partners in our field early on. We're in it for the long haul; we'd prefer to build something, run it for a while, and sell later. Not build and sell immediately.

So the question is, my gut is telling me to drop the project manager. I don't feel he is passionate about the project enough and is in it for the short term benefits as opposed to the long term. We haven't signed anything or spent any money; didn't even discuss titles, rights or what not. So we (my friend and I) could walk away safely, I think.

Is this a situation where I should trust my gut?
Flask 0.1 released
What’s great about those asteroid landings is that they are relatively easy and nevertheless exciting enough. Much more exciting than the ISS or anything happening in low earth orbit. I think that’s the most important purpose of manned spaceflight. Robots will be able to tell you pretty much everything about geology, water and the potential of life on Mars.
Disagree. I would rather the delay than the SEC going on a fishing expedition and being unable to make the charges stick and undermining its own credibility in the process.This is a very high-profile target and my [i]hope[/i] is that SEC investigators are taking a 'measure twice, cut once' approach.
How To Use Google Docs To Convert Your Doc To Pdf
It is amazing what people are willing to pay for.

(Don't focus on the circus stunt. Instead, pay attention to the business lesson :)
It really should have been billed as "Not a fun kids movie" IMHO. Still surprises me that people liked that movie.
Very nice article effectively. But accessibility is not only good for old people or ones with a visual disability.

I discussed with a 16 year old a couple of weeks ago and asked what she though about the iPhone and the Nokia (she had a Nokia in hands).

She did only one thing in front of me: Unlocked her phone, wrote an SMS, sent it, everything without even having a glance at the screen. Then she smiled, looked at me and said "Can you do it with an iPhone?".

Me: speechless and lesson learned.
I think it's cool
Peter Seibel looking for someone to take over Lispbox
It is kinda against the spirit of HN, technically. But I wrote this to scratch my own itch, because I personally know a number of users here, and I am a fan of quite a few others. I just want to make sure I see when they post.

But if you've ever met me you would know that I don't hesitate to disagree with anyone. So, I don't think this is a problem for me, I', quite prepared to downvote inanity when I see it, highlighted or not. Neither am I the type to just scroll down a page clicking upvote after upvote.

You mileage, of course, may vary.
They didn't directly generate more demand, but the existence of deals like this generated a market for the low quality bonds in deals, which made the hardest part of structuring those deals much easier.

So no, it didn't directly expand the bubble. But this kind of activity indirectly did so. (Though this particular deal came late enough that the bubble was about to collapse anyways.)
I haven't done any Firefox development, alas, so I can't compare.
Anybody here actually hack a pleo? I've never seen this before but it looks cool. Any reviews by HN users?
I have a home-grown web app I wrote for ideas from years back. It's not updated for html5/offline storage/caching, but I have an email-in loader: body and attachments are loaded as 'ideas' and the subject is parsed as a comma-delimited tag list.

So when I don't have a net connection to do direct entry I wind up using the plain notes app for text and just email things in.

For sketches and diagrams I've been using brushes mostly, though I'm trying out artstudio and it's pretty nice. (Ideas is nice, but no good for me, as it only exports in PDF)

At the moment, multiple apps and exporting is working for me; fits right into the old hacked-together custom workflow. I'd love a more appropriate and robust solution, I'm just enjoying such an improvement already that I decided to give the store a few months to mature before I start the app hunt.

As for the Sketch; I'm debating that one myself. How are you liking it? I wasn't sure what to make of the business-end of it from the pics (the drawing nub itself). Does it give the stylus more the mechanical feel of a pen or a brush?
I think for many it's actually: "Thank God I can sleep in tomorrow."
Sounds like you have already made your decision.
I was going through a Section 508-derived set of standards today for a government project, and it was surprising just how many of the implementation requirements were really just best practices for semantic markup. Isn't that the way forward for accessibility everywhere? When data, interaction, and presentation are properly modular, it's much easier to replace parts of the system for those unable to use them.
I spent some time playing with the styles, and I didn't really bother to match the orange. In a future version I plan to make the colors configurable.

In the mean time, there is a CSS stylesheet you can edit!
A robot cannot stand on the tallest volcano of the solar system and tell you how it felt.

Robots can tell a lot, but not everything. Exploring is not only knowing what's there, but actually experiencing it in human terms. The richness of the reports from astronauts on the Moon cannot be approached by what a robot can tell you. Also, a robot can only answer the questions it was designed to answer and, thus, it embodies, in its own construction, a series of assumptions about its target environment that may be completely off.

Humans are an extremely valuable resource.
Fair point; I forgot the precise bit they were suing over. :)
If you buy something you don't understand (when all the info is clearly available to you) its your own damn fault. The organizations buying this stuff were required to have ISDA contracts (not easy to get). Their money is managed by professionals.

If you want a place to put blame the most apt place would be Fitch, Moody's and Standard and Poors. The ratings agencies were far more complicit in perpetuating false understanding than GS was.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
That's always been the dream, hasn't it? Eventually technology will become good enough that we won't have to worry about being responsible.

One thing I've become annoyed with lately is how little planning anyone does. Who needs to make solid plans when you can can just call someone via cell phones and make the plans as you go? It makes coordinating more than a few people very hard.
This was kinda a weekend project (in the middle of the week, for #Chirp), so, I don't really have grand plans for it. A server-side component might be cool, to let me synchronize user lists, but at the moment I don't have any plans to do that.
This is a nice paradigm when it works, however for programs that are often piped to other programs, I believe this can run into issues with the flush on stdout blocking. Am I wrong here?
No. I'm kind of ambivalent about it at this point though. I've tried to listen to the interviews, but a lot of it seems like voyeurism. Not that that's bad. It's just more entertaining than it is useful in my opinion. I await your downvotes.
Dow, Nasdaq and SP50 are sliding down. I wonder how much this will affect the economy.
What about thinking about what to write?
Tech Companies Hiring Like Gangbusters
Welcome to the poker table!

Take this social proof and run around to other VC's. Having other people interested is the only way you can improve terms and push anyone to close.

The best option is to say you dont need their money and would rather boot strap operations (even if that is a bluff).

As a rule of thumb, always turn down your first offer. Always.
I'm glad you asked, since apparently I wasn't clear in my previous post.

Firstly, only apps that download AND run code were not allowed, now apps that download OR run code are not allowed

That's inconsistent over time, not necessarily a bad thing, though it was a change made quietly which is a bit of a poor show.

On top of that there are still lots of apps, games mainly, running interpreters. That's also inconsistent, on a completely different axis.

So yes they are meeting the letter of the (current) law in the banning of this particular case, but "consistent" is not a word I would leap to using in this case. The simple fact that they're kicking out an app that was already in, rather than blocking entry in the first place, makes it a strange word choice.
No, I'm saying that some companies (ie. Disney) don't advertise on websites and platforms with mature content. And most of those companies happen to be the ones with the biggest advertisement budgets.
This is why I'm getting 'sourcerer' printed up on all of my business cards.
You confuse jQuery's .each() with its jQuery.each() function. The first is a method on a jQuery DOM collection, and indeed you could use .filter() or .any() on a colleciton of DOM elements.

jQuery.each() operates on an arbitrary array, .filter() cannot be applied to it. I could have written my own, of course, but doing so would have simply meant wrapping a for loop in a function.

This is a crucial point. The example is NOT bad even if there was a jQuery.select() or jQuery.filter() analogue for arbitrary arrays. The point is that a for loop is a syntactic construct with certain properties, and that you cannot make a direct analogue out of functions. Assuming there was a jQuery.any() function, I could write:

if jQuery.any(collection, function (...) {...}) return 'close';

But I am still moving the return statement out of the block of code. Ruby blocks allow me to leave it where it is.

The use case for blocks is when you want to leave the return statement where it is just like in a for loop. The answer of 'use a functional programming construct that works with pure functions' is equivalent to the old Unix answer to any question: 'How do you do X? Don't do X, do Y.'

It is informative and useful to point out that there are elegant ways of not needing a return statement inside a loop. Thanks! But I don't think it invalidates the point that this is where blocks replicate a built-in feature of keywords like 'for' and functions do not.
Still the same in parts of asia (China, India).

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/skinwhitening-a...
Its the job of Goldman's investment bank to broker product not take one side or the other. It didn't matter to Goldman if they were "doomed" or not (in fact when Goldman structured them Goldman may have even thought Paulson & Co were the fools) they were trying to find pairs of parties willing to take bets against each other and make a commission.
> That, and recorded conf calls show that GS analysts as trying to convince rating agencies to inflate the ratings of the underlying assets in the CDO.

What happened to winking, nods and understanding looks on golf courses?
For starters, they don't do the same thing right? You're returning the matching something_or_other and he's returning the string 'close' if something_or_other matches.
Have you found Firefox 3.6.3 stable on the Mac?
Doesn't anyone else think this is a just a short-term measure to appease public opinion? It was obvious something like this had to happen, there is still a lot of blame to be attributed. Alas, it's the easy way out. Of course, some of the things that happened have to be brought to court, as there definitely was at least misrepresentation, if not fraud, involved.

That doesn't change the fact that there are much larger things amiss.

1. Regulators who are ill-suited and ill-willing to enforce existing standards, not to mention any kind of additional authority that gets bestowed on them soon. There are numerous cases of whistles rightly being blown where regulators didn't do anything. Selective enforcement is worse than no enforcement at all.

2. Too much governmental interference in markets and backstopping of market actors to let markets function properly - but blame it all on the markets afterwards and cover up all kinds of fraud at Fannie/Freddie. This encourages fraud in markets which the government kindly looks down upon (it's housing, after all)

3. No consistent policy regarding bail-outs. If you bail-out market actors, you have to split up 'too big to fail'-institutions; otherwise it's just a game of waiting for the next tax-payer-sponsored bail-out.
EFF Backs Yahoo to Protect User from Warrantless Email Search
sociological images recently wrote about this. here's their article, which provides some interesting information omitted by the parent link: http://contexts.org/socimages/2010/02/08/the-last-sideshow-f...

the most interesting omitted point is this: the last Fat Man actually retired as late as 2003
I just compiled it on my NetBSD laptop from pkgsrc (http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html), (http://pkgsrc.se/sysutils/htop), and it works no problems... no Linux emulation/support required.

Pkgsrc is a cross-platform package management system, originating w/ NetBSD project... I've used it on NetBSD and MacOS successfully. Should work with pretty much any *nix-like system.

[edit: though it doesn't appear "fully-integrated". Example: pressing 's' to run strace(1) doesn't work in NetBSD, which uses ktrace(1). Maybe configurable; I haven't got that far...
I tend to get a little touchy about this type of "word" stuff.... Your right, mobs are often ignorant, but some of the key moments in our history of civil rights were described by one side as mobs.

I am not sure technical understanding is really the necessary item. I think it comes down to understanding the implications on your daily life. I know I get caught up in explaining the technical workings of things, but the best explanations to a general audience are almost always the little stories about what this will do in real life (tech example: technical specifications vs an Apple product introduction).

I guess I am in "the technical understanding makes it much easier to see all the implications, but I think understanding just the implications is good enough" camp. I am not sure this is a good thing, but with all the stuff in life, it might have to do.

Taking an example, I think the whole school webcam spying story is ripe for this type of thing. Really, I think the technical understanding is well above the heads of most people (including some tech writers I see). But, the implications won't be lost on any father of a teenage daughter. I expect that with our current media's prejudice towards the juicy, if the student who was suspended at the start of this was female and not male, well...
Right: how GM foods affect health is an entirely separate question from how processing affects health, yet the two are conflated all the time. I'm sure it doesn't help that the most common wrong reasons for opposing processing (e.g. "getting back to nature") also oppose genetic engineering.

(But processed foot is actually quite delicious.)
Translation:

It saddens me that this is necessary. It wasn't long ago that Latin was part of the standard curriculum in grammar schools.

The people

For clarity: This is my answer, not the answer given by Plato (who argues that the guardians should guard themselves) or answer from Juvenal (who implicitly takes the position that this is an impossible problem).
Varnish: It’s Not Just For Wood Anymore
The importance of communication...
This isn't an accurate depiction of what happened. The banks that failed did so because they were the ones holding on to the doomed products. In fact, the banks that shorted the products in volume were the ones that survived and didn't need bailouts (GS being one of them).
Why are functional programming trainwrecks good and oo ones bad?
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1148157
I watch some of the interviews. I would say what is best about Mixergy is that Andrew Warner works hard on the site and does an excellent job at having a steady stream of high quality guests. On the other hand, I don't particularly enjoy his interview style because I find the questions to be too high-level and "fluffy" most of the time. I'd enjoy the interviews a lot more if the questions were more about specific operational issues that startups deal with. But, that's just my opinion and the interview style is really a matter of personal taste.
These APIs are just the beginning. We have plans to make our Erlang-based REST backend mostly public, so eventually people will be able to write bots and all kinds of other applications on top of our data.
with a complicated enough legal system, everyone is a criminal
not to sound negative, but Google doesn't update the public PR information in real time...they do it once every ~4-5 months. So your "PR jumped to 1" "PR jumped to 2" etc doesn't hold much water. I'm guessing you just saw that PR jumped to 4, so you extrapolated your efforts backwards.
Here are the tools I find indispensible as a sys admin:

- screen for accessing servers

- lshw for seeing Linux server hardware config

- cfengine for automating my system administration
The Idea Behind My Latest Invention
Pivoting the Business Model
What about performance? I think performance can explain this.

Imagine you are working (let say coding some code) and you have other things that are playing in your mind (like taking the kids or your Credit Card debt) so you'll be focused on two things, but you don't achieve the same performance.
> I think he should have resubmitted immediately, and hoped for a different reviewer.

Isn't that a symptom of a broken system though?
That's just plain stupid. If you're buying, don't count on the seller having your interests at heart.

That's part of Goldman's job. They want the transaction to happen; if they can get a good rating, they should. The entity that's responsible for making the rating agencies rate things well is... the rating agency.
"In fact, the banks that shorted the products in volume were the ones that survived and didn't need bailouts (GS being one of them)."

So you're saying

1.) GS never needed bailed out

2.) GS was a bank before and after the crisis.

Goldman Sachs takes $12B Bailout, Hands out $14B Bonuses
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1081624/Go...
Won't it just get buffered into the other program's input buffer?

I believe pipes are block-buffered and basically look just like redirecting to a file.
That's subscribers. I was talking about app sales. The two aren't necessarily corelated all that strongly - which is kind of my point. I remember one study recently that estimated Apple was responsible for more than 99% of all mobile app sales: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-...
This misses the point. Skinning - in the Winamp model of 'same functionality but different look' - is not the same as effective visual storytelling and usage of animation.

I'm not talking about just how Movie OS looks, but how it behaves as a whole. I agree that sticking a Star Trek skin on Windows 98 reduces usability.
Setting aside the question of whether they needed a bailout, which I'm not qualified to answer, Goldman Sachs did receive federal assistance. The best link I can find is a reference to them paying it back:

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmV...
People of Walmart. http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/?p=12413
Is it time for a new approach to finding extraterrestrials?
The counterparties had access to all the same info Paulson & Co. did, they just didn't analyze it correctly or in as much detail.

You have to separate issues here. Paulson & Co. were counterparties on a credit default swap with Goldman Sachs. That is fine. Goldman Sachs failed to disclose information to investors about Paulson & Co's role, and lied about their position. That is what the SEC is upset about.

You are right that the credit default swap was a zero sum bet between equally informed counterparties. It so happens that one side analyzed the deal better. (Actually that is questionable. The bankers on the Goldman Sachs side knew that they would get large personal bonuses no matter what happened to Goldman Sachs. So they may have analyzed it correctly and done what was in their best interest. But let's not get into perverse incentives.)

The issue that the SEC has with the scenario is that not only did Goldman Sachs fail to disclose Paulson & Co's involvement (instead saying that ACA had selected all of the bonds), they told investors that Paulson & Co had $200 million in equity in the deal, without disclosing the credit default swap position that meant Paulson & Co were actually significantly net short. This was a lie, and that is why Goldman Sachs is in trouble here.

Edit I had the parties wrong. Fixed.
3a. If fail, have taxpayer pay for it

That's the most disturbing part of all this: profits are kept private, but losses are socialized.

It's the equivalent of "heads, I win; tails, you lose".
Code for Flexibility: A Manifesto (yield thought)
if we can manipulate neurological details like gender, why not lock ourselves into a happy-loop and be done with history?
How do we know that these shoppers did not, in fact, knowingly submit their souls to this company? Like, hey, why not? No biggie.

In all honesty, this just illustrates a very common UI practice that opt-outs are more effective than opt-ins.
"If you buy something you don't understand (when all the info is clearly available to you) its your own damn fault."

Suppose I sell you a word processing program. Inside the program, I include a snippet of code that will cause the program to stop working in thirty days, without telling you anything about it. By your logic, you would not be within your rights to demand a refund, since it is "your own damn fault" that you didn't understand the ten megabytes of assembly code that I sold you.
In the process of structuring and pairing willing parties they just forgot to mention one party had privileged information about what the product actually was. That is not what a supposedly neutral broker does.
I don't think that makes much sense. Consider a music analogy: samplers and sequencers didn't kill demand for new music. If anything, they spawned a whole new sub-industry dedicated to simply finding and selling new interesting snippets of sound.
I think the market for keyword based .com, .net, .org, and .us is still healthy and growing.

One data point:
I was lucky and was able to purchase a .us domain with 135k exact match searches a month for $200, when the .com, .net, and .org were all asking 30k+ and not budging.

What domains are you sitting on and what do you expect to get for them?
Thanks for these kind words, I appreciate that! (I'm a US citizen.)