skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've spent some time thinking about this in the past because my former long-term partner wanted to get out of being a management accountant into working in startups like me.

By the time a company is looking to employ a CFO or even a full-time accounts person, they're probably no longer "a startup".

From my experience financial service startups tend to either have founders with domain experience or actually rely on a third party platform for the financial service aspect. To give examples of that, BankSimple's two founders "previously consulted in the banking sector" (whatever that means) and Mint was really about lead-gen - the actual financial services bit was handled by a 3rd party platform.

I even know that one of the popular '2.0-style' online accounting sites doesn't even have anyone professionally qualified to do accounting on their staff. They just read books or ask accountants as needed for product advice.

If I was a VC I wouldn't invest any money in a financial services startup that was relying on an employee to provide the domain experience - it's got to be at the founders level (or like Mint, not actually about financial services at all).

The bottom line is that there are plenty of smart, professional people out there whose background, experience and qualification simply don't offer much to a startup.

The only real option I can see for your friend is to actually start a startup himself/herself and be the CEO. The financial services experience will help them with running the business (accounts, planning, etc) but their management consulting experience may be a hindrance when it comes to leading and managing a bunch of hackers.

I personally would never hire an MBA to work in a startup, in any position. Perhaps your friend doesn't have an MBA but hopefully you can see where I am coming from.
That's pretty much what I am waiting for before installing it on my limited space laptop.. Is this in the works?
This post sounds bogus. So you have a PhD and an MD and you cant figure out whether should go to a community college or spend even more time in school playing with robots (if you are really an MD, you probably just finished your residency a few years ago at 34). ....hmmmm...sorry, dont mean to be rude but I dont buy it. If you are legit then a PhD in biomaterials is already plenty and with tons of free time, that is the perfect setup to do a startup....just do it!
Thank you. That is a compelling argument.

I, too, am not a big fan of vague "smart authorities of an unspecified nature are on it, shut up" assertions, so if you heard a note of skepticism in my original post, yes, it was there. But specific "this specific experienced authority with years of experience in this field was concerned and directly replied that it was a problem" can be compelling. I am particularly impressed by the fact this person fed back directly, and not through a press release.
Gruber's an edge case, and he admits it:

"Now, the nature of my work writing Daring Fireball involves copying and pasting many snippets of text from web sites every day. So this Tynt stuff probably annoys me more (or at least more frequently) than most people."

I was actually pleasantly surprised the first time I pasted a passage from a Tynt-enabled website into an email and the URL showed up. I send these types of emails all the time and it saves me time.
At some point, after your developers have built your shiznit you have to find some customers. You have to take your widget and get it in front of a person who will pay for it. You have to get customers.

This is what my startup, eggzack.com, is trying to do for small businesses. Small businesses are similar to tech startups, run by hard-working entrepreneurs trying to fit a market need. However, most small business owners don't understand how to market themselves using it, which is where we come in.
I take it she had a lawyer review it before signing it, as is customary in such situations.
Thank you, I am reading up on git and subversion at the moment. I was thinking of hosting a copy on our own server for the time being just to test things.

What could I use instead of brainstorming? I have looked at microsoft project, but it's not really what I'm looking for.
Stephen fry: what i wish i'd know when i was 18
Not about this article in particular, but at a meta-level, I want to give an up-vote to the media criticism, both postings and dissections in the comments on HN; of which, this post and the comments is a good example. Some may say it clutters-up the news postings and is off topic (and they have a point). It might be good if postings could be divided into three categories, "pure" HN, media, and other general.
man, please don't think of life as being only code, .com's and retiring by 30s. I understand being passionate about your craft but you're too young to talk like this. I also understand what harm a chronic condition can do to your life, to your confidence, but please, don't give up.

Perhaps you need to re-invent yourself. If that means taking the bag, do it. Think of this as a new life. Shed that old layer, leave that guy behind. Think beyond code, beyond .com. Life is precious, really. There are women out there who do go beyond physical appearance.

You need some mental health therapy too. Your confidence needs a boost and that will surely help. Where is your family in all this? Bond more with some close friends, relatives, family.

Have you tried any alternative, less-intrusive, natural remedies? I can tell from personal experience they can be a ray of light, more often than you think.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting Tumblr use this service, or any other that refers to peoples work as "content". "Keep the corporations out of my clipboard!" is being a bit overreactive, as this is of dubious use to the market and obviously ineffective so it will probably go away of its own accord. I'm speaking for myself when I say it seems we should have better ways to bring writers into the dialog when we don't explicitly go through the steps of attributing their work, if a blogging engine like Tumblr doesn't already incorporate that to some extent.
I'd hate to be him right now. No matter what he does, people are going to find a way to make it negative.
He likened it to WireHog since both use peer to peer technology with some social networking aspects. WireHog was deemed illegal because it was designed specifically for file sharing. Diaspora is not designed specifically for file sharing and more for information sharing.
Thanks for the link, do you know of any alternatives? I would like to shop around a little. Assembla seems to have every feature, I wonder if Github does something similar? I am yet to make an account on their site.
I've use Django, Pylongs, TG, and repoze.bfg. It's quite different. A vastly oversimplified metaphor would be unix to OSX. Django is a monolithic all in one environment where everything 'just works' together but is not useful outside of Django, and no part really really excels at its own job, while being good enough for Django. Pylons expects you to write a lot more glue, and works better if you anticipate hitting the wall with a Django component ( ie Django's ORM is not even close to SQLAlchemy ). Pylons tends to attract people who will be writing a complex app that they will run with for a long time, or be extending in their own way. If you think there is a good chance you might need to rip out own component to replace it with a tweaked one, or different version, it's a lot easier with Pylons. Pylons is also written from the ground up around WSGI, so if building app stacks out of WSGI is your thing, that is still easier in Pylons ( though possible in Django. It still feels a bit bolted on though ).

That said, I personally prefer repoze.bfg over all of them now. Also minimal, built on wsgi, but also built on the Zope Component Architecture ( just the ZCA, does not depend on the ZODB or Zope server). For really being able to reuse and extend your code, that ZCA infrastructure is the killer feature.
Just because its illegal does not mean he did not think it was a cool project.
Calling “other” ImageMagick commands through Imagick?
To be fair, I should point out that it's much easier to get new developers going on Django, and that the monolithic approach gives people a much better out-of-box experience. Just not my thing, I like Vim better than Eclipse too. ;-)
I bet he was responding to a DM that came in via SMS on his iPhone. I've done this before:

You get a text notifying you of the DM. You immediately reply to the text thinking that it'll automagically send it back as a DM.
Just like how Apple's iAd initiative allowed Google to close the AdMob acquisition, Diaspora will inadvertently give an outlet for pundits looking for a privacy/open alternative to Facebook, giving them more flexibility to be aggressive in their growth strategy. Not to mention it makes him look generous.

It's a brilliant move.
Check out this framework: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/pdf/PragmaticMarketingFram...

When i first saw this it made hiring and sorting out non-tech jobs much clearer in my mind. Though i wish there was a version of this for consumer Internet type companies.
Not to me. He was explicitly asked what he thought about it. It's natural to say "I donated" if indeed he did.
Yea, I used to go to Halted and Triangle Machinery Co.. There's also the Electronics Flea Market hosted by amateur radio societies that has good deals too but you have to get there right when it opens (5am) to get the best stuff.
http://www.electronicsfleamarket.com/

San Jose State University keeps a good list of local surplus depots here:
http://www.engr.sjsu.edu/bjfurman/courses/ME106/componentinf...
That comparison doesn't really make any sense.
No majorly successful founder-CEO is "in it for the money." If he wanted to just buy Lamborghinis and penthouses, he would have sold the company for $1 billion several years ago.

Anyone like Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Ellison, etc. are in it for the power, megalomania, and manifest destiny -- not for the money.
30/30/30

Everyone is experienced and valuable AND is bringing something extra to the table (design mockups or an existing codebase). The only thing of remote value at this point is the prototype which was built by all 3 people (both coders using the design).

Just add a 4 year vesting with 1 year cliff, so if Mark wants to take a hike in 6 months, it goes back to 50/50 between Eddit and Fred (or whatever).
OR, it wasn't worth the risk for Facebook a quickly growing company at the time. However that type of risk my be worth it to a startup that is just starting and has many other more serious risks to worry about (like no one using their product).
Atif Aslam Releasing New Album &#8220;SHABNAM&#8221;
Pending Domain Name System Changes
Great Insurance Leads Are Here
Life insurance leads can be turned into profitable sales by offering clients a policy that suits their budget. It has dozens of options to get exclusive, individual & groups.
Similarly, the New York Times intrusively assumes I want to "define" anything I select, even it’s lines long, breaking my normal browser behavior.

Edit: I triple-click to select paragraphs (an OS X idiom); the define-word script prevents this, recognizing not a triple-click but rather a double-click (select word) followed by a single click (activate definition pop-up).
I've read that shanzai phone makers are willing to pirate WinMo, so Android is not necessarily cheaper. I suppose larger vendors have to be legitimate, though.
I think their problem is that they are to big an operation. They probably could be if they trimmed the company.
The Density of Smart People [+ data available for download]
It’s not neurosis; it’s not OCD. It helps establish a line for your eyes to follow when flicking back to the left side of text. It’s just like the ruler or piece of paper that speed-reading and sight-reading teachers instruct students to use.

Notice that you will hardly or never do this on narrow columns of text.
The 11 Companies That Tried To Buy Facebook

http://www.businessinsider.com/all-the-companies-that-ever-t...
Kraken Rising: How the Cephalopod Became Our Zeitgeist Mascot
Yeah, a better answer to the asked question would have been "Sorry, I'd really like to comment, but I can't without sounding cool."
It's not that crazy. Some companies thrive with competition. Microsoft enjoys having apple as competition and vice-versa. Microsoft bailed apple out a little over a decade ago for that exact reason.

Zuckerberg is very competitive. I'm sure he wants the competition to step up and give him a run for his money.
I do this as well, more of a "track where I am when I'm reading" when I get distracted by something else, I quickly return to the spot.

I dislike it when something like WSJ puts those 'learn more' links after you highlight something right under the cursor.
Doesn't sound like any boss I ever had. Mine have always been more like this:

1. My people have a flawed and incomplete understanding of how valuable I am to them.

2. My success depends largely getting obvious and mundane things done, in spite of my people's shortcomings.

3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to expect my people to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that maximize my own bonus.

4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being a jerk and appearing not to be.

5. My job is to serve as a human irritant, to bombard my people with external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe - and to avoid letting them think for themselves.

6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but to appear to be humble even though I am not. I aim to fight as if I am right, and appear to listen as if I am wrong, even though I never am. I protect my job by teaching my people nothing.

7. One of the best tests of my leadership is "how quickly do I reprimand someone when they make a mistake?"

8. Innovation is crucial in order for me to take credit.

9. So my job is to encourage my people to get off their lazy asses and do some work.

10. But it is also my job to fire them when they don't.

11. Good is stronger than bad. I am good. My people are bad. That's how I got to be the boss and they didn't.

12. How I do things is no one's business. I am the boss. Now stop reading this and get back to work.
I'm pretty sure he was just likening it to WireHog since both were P2P social networking apps. Parker's comments about WireHog were in reference to the fact it was designed as a file sharing app while Diaspora is not so Parker's comments have no bearing on Diaspora.
Yes, i do. I'm still not quite sure why most people choose Django over Pylons. Maybe it's the complexity (Might not be complex for the experienced Pythonista, but i feel that it's definitely more complex than Django) that steers potential users away from Pylons?
Or... block the .js in your browser.

Or use a text-based browser for browsing your text. I find that w3m actually works quite well. With a few extra programs it can even load images. Fancy that!
Before getting upset about this, make sure you read what the author says (in an update) near the end:

I specially carved out “young people” from my argument. Most young people are infinitely mobile. Also, I need to carve out mid-level developers. They tend to be fairly mobile. Finally, I should carve out international people. I talk about that in the comments.

So that leaves senior execs: Directors, VP, CEO types. This is the group I’m mostly talking about.

...in other words, this article is specifically targeted at well under 1% of the viewership of HN (I suspect we have many aspiring "CEO types" here, but mostly they are building up companies from scratch, not attempting to get inserted into them once they're up and running), and explicitly excludes the rest of us from this advice.
That's fairly common (I do it too). I remember reading one of MS Office PM's blogs (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/) and he mentioned they had to do work on the minibar in Office 2007 to not annoy people who select while reading.
Good points, all.

I'd like to add one more. My job as manager is to provide the support necessary so those working for me can do the best work possible. My job is to enable them, not to use them to support myself. At the end of the day, they're the ones doing most of the implementation; if I want the implementation to be successful, I've got to set the stage for it.
Psychopaths are great at hiding their agenda.
Yeah, well deceiving 400 million people will do that to a guy.
I love eastereggs, thanks for the library :)
I agree with you just at least at my school we didn't have it. I have a friend who works in the CS department now (and is one heckuva lecturer) that I'm going to mention it to.

I still don't know much about version control but perhaps a wrapper might be a good open source project or something.
I can't say it's my favorite, but I like it and respect it. I think I like it more knowing how it was done. It's hard to characterize it without sounding negative, but these guys were practically neophytes. The budget was tiny, and the actors are not conservatory trained or anything. It's shot very nicely, and it mostly feels quite natural. It was bootstrapped to success. In that way, it's a good spiritual match for the HN community.

Criticisms: it's twisted beyond comprehension, and it's jargony almost to a fault. I find it tough to get some people to sit through it.
So I don’t know, one thing that is personally a bit disheartening…. It bums me out that people immediately go to “You must be doing this to make money.” Because that’s just so different from the ethos of the company. It is so different from how we actually think about stuff that you feel so misunderstood.

It's pretty sad that people think that someone should or ever would run a huge operation without money being a major factor, and it's even more sad and also insidious that Mark is playing along with this fallacy himself.
Nice! This is more of what I'd like to see on HN.
He's probably one of the people who donated 2k for a box, pre-installed, just to study it.

I like this move regardless. it's showing his personality, great PR story too.
Monster. Good pick.
Bitter much? Jeez. I've had some good bosses and some bad bosses, but nothing like what you've written here!
I'd have thought there was a bright line between people like my parents who use the ubiquitous "share this link" site features, and people like me who send messages with links and excerpts tailored to the recipient. If I'm right, you're an edgier edge case than Mr. Gruber.
Money can be a major concern to a huge operation without being its primary focus. Money is a big deal for the Red Cross, but the Red Cross doesn't exist to make money.
Dude, it's marketing. It's meant to paint a strong picture and create an association between Chrome and speed, which I think it accomplishes well -- since Chrome <i>is</i> in fact faster it seems like an honest ad. Do you disagree? Or is your beef just that the ad is unscientific? An ad featuring a double-blind study could probably be made to be interesting, kind of like the blind Coke vs. Pepsi taste-tests... but that's not what they made.
Microsoft enjoys having apple as competition and vice-versa. Microsoft bailed apple out a little over a decade ago for that exact reason.

No, Microsoft "invested" in Apple to settle the potential multi-billion dollar lawsuit Apple was threatening to file: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company
Granted, it can be a crap shoot, as the author of this article pointed out on his site. But I suppose this need has diminished a bit recently, with so much information - both work and non-work related - about people and companies available out there now. As soon as my current employers showed interest in me, I went through the Internet to grab any piece of information about the company I could find. I wasn't going to move 2500+ miles away without getting a good idea what I was getting myself into. The company had been recently well-funded, seemed stable and was heading in a good direction that interested me. Three months in, it seems I was correct.

I asked one of the higher-ups this same question after being hired, and they said that they scouted my blog, Twitter and Github accounts, among others, and with what they heard over the phone, they felt I was a really good fit in their company. Had I not taken the time to build my online persona, I doubt I would've had been hired. This doesn't just apply to job-hunting in remote locations, but nowadays it should be a big part of it.
Robotic quadcopter acrobatics like nothing we’ve seen
Just for the record; I have a couple of friends in New York who also went to the club after I showed them the thread (of their own volition).

Their report is pretty similar to this guys; except to conclude it is very much a place to pick up girls for sex as well. One of them is of slavic origin, can speak Russian and was at one point offered a girl (he believes because he passed as Russian - the others were not offered at any point).

Once it was clear they were American and were not there after girls they were treated like it was a normal club.

They point out it wasn't particularly seedy; it was upmarket but definitely "gang" owned/affiliated (these are guys I know through work; one of them works on trafficking and prostitution in his professional capacity, so it's a reasonably expert opinion).

Their conclusion: that the girls were on the edge of one of the lighter "trafficking" scams, where girls voluntarily go over for short spell with the promise of work (and often the "nudge wink" suggestion that they could skip immigration and stay longer if they stay below the radar). What usually happens is they either get the job promised them, or it "falls through" (like in this case) and they get given a waitress job for the visa period at a club like this. All above board.

Then when the visa is almost up it is suggested very strongly that if they wanted to stay they probably could, but not in a normal (legal) job...

(note: this is all second hand information. I trust my friends experience but as with anything over the internet.. treat it as unconfirmed :))
Free for all Friday at Inventables - Crazy or Obvious?
Dude I was a missionary for a few years. But that's not the point. And your personal experiences (and mine) are irrelevant when it comes to looking for the unbiased data about whether there is waste in the world of charity. Do you agree?
Or if they come up with something innovative, he can quickly copy it into FB.
doesn't seem that crazy when you see someone doing this kind of stuff without computer assistance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zzhriAN9Bc
Just buy these two books. You won't use everything in both, but they will give you enough ideas and perspective to make them both very worth reading:

"Making Things Happen" - OReilly
"The Art of Agile Development"
What's the difference between file sharing and information sharing?
Most "mad scientists" are actually just mad engineers
Thankfully select + middle mouse button in X isn't affected by this.
I agree completely with the need for shareholder agreements.

As for SpaceX, they almost certainly have a milestone payment after the Falcon 9 test flight in the next few weeks. That and they'd make a good investment for anyone who would like to use their services in the future, both satellite and manned space flights.

Edit: They are due $5m in payments after the Falcon 9 flight.
Unless there are viruses that can run on Android/Sugar and/or Windows Mobile, it's a ludicrous jab.

It's a given it won't run desktop Windows.

OTOH, if the ARM in it is fast enough, it could emulate a Pentium II or III at native speed. That should be able to run a couple viruses.
I think you're a feature. A perhaps sorely missed feature, but still a feature. I agree trying to drive traffic is hopeless. You need to find partners that want to embed your functionality. You shouldn't be a destination, you should be a service for destinations.