skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yea completely agreed. but keep in mind they can wean them off it it since they have access to all the data, and they can instantly port it over. they could even let you use their client and your existing client in the interim, or just use each in different cases. obviously this poses new technical challenges, but not out of the realm of possibility.
That was a huge management error. A significant capital investment went into development. But it doesn't sound like any effort was put into consolidating the gains they made throughout the year she worked there.

Again: the project could have been broken into milestones, maybe with each demo-able. The founder wasn't technically capable of doing this, but could have had the dev write up a spec milestone-by-milestone, and then managed the project to that spec. At any point during the year, the dev could have left and the founder would have had something usable to work with.

Not only that, but by not managing the project well, the founder sent a message to the dev: "I don't really know what I'm doing, so I'm throwing money at you to make things work". There's nothing wrong with that when the person you're throwing money at is a full partner whose interests are aligned with yours. This person wasn't.

I'm making a lot of assumptions here, and I apologize if I'm off the mark.
i assume you made this comment because somebody downmodded you for no real reason? that seems to be happening a lot in the last few days. i'm seeing lots of comments at zero points that didn't deserve it, so i bump them back up to one.

i think we've got a silent karma troll.
There have always been comments like that. I think sometimes it's from not reading the article, sometimes from skimming and overlooking important parts.
Sorry, I just thought it was amusing. I don't really care. To make this thread slightly more productive, I will recommend one such consultancy: Blue Flavor.
Then write up a legal agreement that says she must be with the company for "x" years to earn the equity. Add in a little extra incentives for signing it ("Dual monitors!"). Once she signs it, fire her.

Regarding legal costs, I've used Pre-Paid Legal's Small Business Plan for a year. It costs $69/month and they do all sorts of stuff (and things like contract review are free). It isn't perfect but it has saved me the hassle of, "Should I sign this? Should I do it like this?" since I no longer have to worry about money when it comes to important legal decisions. URL: http://wserver0.prepaidlegal.com/legalzoom/SBpage2b.html
Listen to this person.
Sometimes I comment without reading when the title of an article suggests it's something that could (and thus probably should) be answered in a sentence or two.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180036
I raised the funding, performed the market research, liased with many different health organisations, classifed the information in the database, wrote all the copy for the app, and created the interface mockups working with a designer.
I am trying to figure this out as well.
The TopCoder algorithm competitions were entertaining, and I learned a lot. The marathon matches were grueling, and for the first while interesting, and I learned a fair amount.

The dev/design competitions were, for me, quite painful. It was an incredible chore to force my self into using their process, and as I was banking on it for some income, the discovery that solutions were rejected because I was missing absurd amounts of documentation/unit tests meant I don't see myself going back to it any time soon.

The design & dev competitions began to overwhelm the community as well. I haven't played there for a while.
I can counter that with a real world example. I've done a startup that succeeded and got a pretty neat product out (which btw. included FPGA programming, hardware, mobile technology, and web technology - not exactly easy stuff..) and we had contractors do everything. No hackers aboard. And it worked.

So it can be done.
A deeper reason why programmers aren't reading books
Doesn't speak well to her commitment to the company, but she probably was right about being owed more equity in the company, if only because her leaving really has taken out a good chunk of the value of the enterprise.
People just need to use the down arrow more. Good writing should say something worth saying about something worth saying something about. If you think there is a signal:noise problem then just start downvoting every comment that you're not a better person for having read. This goes more for root comments than for replies deep in a thread, which I don't think need to be held to quite the same standard for a variety of reasons.
Sorry, I didn't mean to characterise you wrongly, I only rephrased the actual quote because it fitted better with the deconstruction. I actually do think it's a reasonable representation of what you said (or, more pointedly, the concept in general).

Good reply, looks like I made a mistake about part of your opinion, but I can't agree with you about not being the value of these features being difficult to explain. I always just explain situations where closures/anonymous functions work well (while I'm not much of a web programmer, I can think of a couple of examples). I agree, there is something to the blub concept. There certainly is a spectrum of languages.
Upmodded--I think this was sincere advice (wasn't it?).
Is there access to click data in that dataset? I wouldn't suspect so, because it's kind of a privacy concern.
...as the payoff for learning to hack will be a few months.

It doesn't have to be that long. Do you have any programming experience? Do you have any friends that do? With a smart friend guiding you through, you can skip a lot of annoyances when you learn to program.

This is also a prudent point - what have you been doing the last 12 months? That would have been more than enough to get the hang of Django...
It doesn't sound particularly like she believed in the idea.

I think in retrospect it would have been better to offer 50% and the same salary as you.

Going forward though, I'd say definitely learn to hack. Also find people who might help not because of a salary, but because they think the idea is cool and want to be part of it.
If her work makes or breaks the company, and she's worth more than 80k on the open market, and she isn't "65% stake confident" in the founder, it's not a "sweetheart deal". It's a sucker's bet.

Again, it seems like you're talking as if there were "rules" about equity participation. You would have to have an absolutely awesome idea to make, for instance, a security researcher participate in a startup for no salary. Even if you pay one $50k, and that $50k cripples the startup and maxes out hardship for everyone else in the company, it's still a sucker deal for the researcher.

I'm using a familiar example to illustrate a point. It's a marketplace, not a secret society.
Study: Developer activity on Facebook's platform is slowing
Comcast wants to put bandwidth hogs on a diet; Considering 250-gig monthly cap
I agree wholeheartedly about your #3 (lack of standard implementation). For me, the most insightful line in the OP was:

> "I believe that the lisp boom won't come before there is a
canonic open source implementation and a canonic repository for
libraries."

I wouldn't argue there should be One Right Way, but it'd be nice if there was a Fairly Standard Way. Even Ruby, which has an official implementation, has several other implementations that exist in parallel, so it's not like picking CLisp or SBCL to be the flagship would doom the others. Power users are still going to appreciate choice, but it'd be nice to have a default that does everything for us noobs.
Unlike you, I do not want to do my work, which involves writing proposals today. =)
this is a very tough position, and I certainly applaud your openness - it takes guts to get on here and tell your story.

I cannot imagine having paid this person so much money, $6900 is a lot of money, x12 is like a well paying job. To have her leave without finishing is horrible.

As your pretty far into it, all I can say is you must get to market fast. My #1 suggestion is hitting your network, find
a good developer to consult with, have help you put together a road map for completion then consider your options.

Don't loose faith and don't spend another dime until you have a clear path to launch planned out. Good luck boss!
agreed, an effective method, tried, tested and true. We at JAJAH have grown virally with this "leech method" -- through our API and custom integrations (managed services). Outside our 10 million direct customers we "leech" into a number of social networks, communications providers and more. Latest client: Yahoo! instant messenger. Overnight we have millions of indirect customers, growing our reach and presence globally.
Going invite-only is a retreat. I'd rather just make/keep the main site good.

It doesn't seem to me the stories are any worse now than they were at first. The quality went down a bit a few weeks ago when we were mentioned on Techcrunch and got a lot of new users, but it seems back up now. I suppose I should write something to display the top stories from the past to make sure this is true.
Test: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?
More data points: I've had experiences with only two startups which outsourced their initial code - and both regretted it deeply (ended up in complete rewrites).
Four possibilities spring to mind:

* Maybe you really did do a majority stake's worth of work, and she was just inexperienced.

* Maybe you didn't really do a majority stake's worth of work, and she felt like she had gotten shafted. You did start her at 6%.

* Maybe she was just a bad employee and a crap dev and wanted the paycheck. You weren't experienced enough to notice and fire her.

* Maybe through no fault of her own the project became untenable (for instance, maybe the spec changed a bunch of times, or you couldn't hammer out a reasonable set of features to launch on --- this has happened to us lots). You ran out of money, and she couldn't stay, good faith or not.

What are you going to do different next time?
Why is "learning to hack" the answer here? Doesn't that leave this person with a startup with no team?
Comcast Considering 250GB Cap, Overage Fees
Still a shame people have to do this to implement blindingly obvious ideas.
i play runescape.I need cash for my account
I wouldn't sign on to a startup with no employees, no code, no long-term funding, and no revenue for a 6% (or 35%) vested stake.
It is a marketplace. A marketplace where I know that good people exist that will not draw a standard salary and demand equity at the same time. (at least not in the levels we're using here)

And I don't care what you're doing, if it takes 12 months to get a prototype in django, you aren't worth 80K.
Columbus Ranked One of the Highest Paying Cities for IT Professionals (higher than san fran)
I don't have any programming experience beyond BASIC as a 5th grader.

Market research, ethnographic study, trying to raise more funding,(too early for VCs here, and there are not many risk taking angels here), running the ongoing alpha, liaising with patient groups, and health organisations, writing copy and designing interfaces. Learning about tech startups is a phase transition from the perspective of a nurse.
Planet Startup - Community Aggregator for Startup Blogs
In the spirit of various "planets" in the Open Source world, some of us in the #startups Freenode IRC channel and others have gotten are now syndicating on "Planet Startup". I finally got around to cleaning the CSS up some last night, so I figured this was as good a time as any to bring it to a wider audience.

http://planetstartup.directededge.com/

Other Planets:

http://www.planetkde.org/ | http://planet.gnome.org/ | http://planet.ubuntu.com/

And so on. If we hit a critical mass I'll move it over to its own domain. Got a startup related blog? Let me know.

This is an opt-in only thing in an attempt to build a community, not an aggregation of Scott's Favorite Blogs. Among other things, this consolidates some of the news.YC folks' blogs into one feed.
I will recommend one such consultancy: Blue Flavor.

Since you're plugging them, could you disclose your relationship?
It starts off with a 250GB cap...

1. What happens when they institute plans based on a cap?

2. What happens when we become more media rich and everyone is downloading HD content?
No one is saying learn to hack is the solution to the issue. Regardless of doing it alone, or finding a team, it'll be an invaluable tool. It'll help him play a more significant role if a team was formed.

Stop refuting everyone's opinion.
Either learn to hack, or find others who are passionate about the idea who can hack. Rather than people who are passionate about a salary. But doing both is a good idea IMHO.
It just seems like the only option.
The bottom line is so-so, but the top line's great for a company like Take Two. EA can afford to spend money to get hits, they just need more of them.
Not to be argumentative, but just to talk straight: you can "draw lines" between employer and employee all you want, but if both parties are rational, it's the market that enforces the line, not you.

In other words, if you bring very little to the table, and your "employee" brings a lot to the table, you're setting yourself up to fail by being "clear" about an untenable arrangement.
drinko -- maybe you could give me a shout, pcc5757 AT gmail.com (just a temp addr, will pass you the real one once we start talking); can't promise anything, but might be able to help.
I'm a security researcher, not a web dev, so I'll just say there's no possible conflict.
It doesn't matter if a legal contract was signed. As long as you undertook this venture with the agreement (verbal) that each person owns a part of the business, than it's the same as forming a legal partnership. Though, it wouldn't be useful to sue her unless you guys specifically agreed that she would finish the work, etc...
It doesn't matter what the nurse was doing OR how much the developer was getting paid. The developer agreed to the terms upfront (and I'm hoping there was some kind of contract involved). Renegotiating or asking for a raise is one thing, but this sounds a bit too much like blackmail to me.

Of course, there are two sides to every story.
Now is the time to be honest with yourself. You need to find out why she left. People usually complain about money/equity issues when they think the situation is so crappy that only money/equity can keep them in the situation. Was there a lot of scope creep?

Let me pose this hypothetical situation. You contract with this developer to create your web app before you have fully spec'd it out. But that's okay because you're using more of an agile approach. The developer gets on with her job of creating a basic prototype and you tackle issues as they arise. Things begin to change and you see want a few minor changes to the web app. The developer not being very assertive, says okay to most change requests. But 6 months in things have changed so much that the developer realizes that this project will be in perpetual beta. You are frustrated because the developer hasn't finished when she said she would. She's frustrated because she realizes just how extensive the web app is and that she underestimated the amount of work that would be involved (and with the feature creep there is even more work now to boot). Both of you are so far away from the original terms of the agreement that the whole thing leaves a sour taste in your mouth. She can walk. But you're left with the tab.

If this sounds like your situation, I know it won't make you feel any better, but it's a common story. I think what you need to do is offer the developer a way to save face while helping get you out of your current rut. Chances are she's not very proud of having bailed on the project, nor does she want bad word of mouth to spread. She was probably frustrated. Can you identify her frustrations and address them? If so, can you talk her into re-joining the team and giving her the 35% equity? Right now, you have 94% of a whole lot of nothing. If she doesn't want to re-join fully, ask her if she will help document the project and transition it to another developer for you. If she does this, you will give her the existing 6% equity in the company. If she flat out refuses to talk to you, keep your composure and be polite but let her know that under the circumstances you feel her monthly payments were more than acceptable compensation and she has no equity. If this happens, your money is gone and isn't worth pursuing. But I would contact a lawyer in order to sort out this non-documented partnership. You will want her to sign something because right now there are a whole bunch of ugly intellectual property ownership issues that you are at risk of down the road.
"Commitment to DrinkoCorp" is not actually a virtue, just so we're clear.
Project Management
What software are people using for project management, to make Gantt Charts and what not. Are there any good open source ones.
Does anyone else think that a salary of $6,900 is too much? I even think that $3,000 is too much... Of course my situation in South Africa might be a lot cheaper. I got away with $1,250 per month, and even then I was able to live pretty comfortably.
Blackmail?! She didn't take the company hostage. She quit it. You can always quit. I can always fire you.

If you make a mistake when you negotiate a position, you are not ethically required to "ride it out" to some foreordained date.
This has been done for several months. I finally got off my ass and closed the deal when Vinod woke me up at 7am with a phone call saying "buy those patents, they will do big things for Xobni."
Would definitely help them manage developers in the future. The best manager I ever had couldn't write a line though.
I disagree, at least in the general case. I believe everyone has a basic responsibility for the well-being of others (insofar as you can reasonably help), and so even if the negotiated agreement is bad I think it's more virtuous to end on good terms. Threatening to quit just because you have a ton of leverage isn't illegal or immoral, but I'd look down on somebody who did it as prizing money over relationships, which to me is definitely a vice.
Ok, so this is what happens to startups, step two survive.

The first thing you need to do is get her to either sign a non-compete, sign away the company, or make you an offer to buy out her shares. Something legal might be necessary. If she is willing to sign a non-compete, and finish the project that is what you want, else, options 2 and 3 are on the table.

Next you need to finish your project. http://uservoice.com/ provides an outsourced software feedback engine for a website. If your feedback engine is more specific to your business process then you need still need to hire a developer.

At this point in the process, if you need to find a technical co-founder, i would skip it and go right for a freelance developer. You have developed most of the idea, and now you just need to round the corners, this is a perfect job for someone that just wants a pay check. I suggest 2 options to finding a developer.

Option 1, go your local colleges TODAY! and talk to career services. You might be able to find a programmer that can pick up fairly quickly what your previous developer did. You might be able to get away with $10-$20 an hour.

Option 2, i have heard of good things from http://programmermeetdesigner.com/, or another place to pay someone for a project.

Ok, so the final thing you need to do is to raise more money. Either sell the app now on a trial basis or something. You might be able to get some cash in the door to help with legal fees, and to pay your new designer. You might find it easier to see if you can get another $50k right now from an Angel, Prosper.com, or from a potential customer that might loan you the money.

I hope that helps. If your product is medical related, I know some people who might be able to help you in Wisconsin.
"They have already started doing this with Pine and I am sure others are to come"

I thought that whole pine thang was an April Fool's joke... Was I fooled, or were you?
If relationships are paramount, everyone should have the same equity stake. What's the formula that gets you from 50% to 6% for $6000/mo? Just a thought.
Are you any good? Are you still looking? I'll beat that number.
Xobni has been an excellent utility, and these patents could both enhance that strategy, or allow them to bridge into a medium strategy.

As a utility, Xobni works for any user, and with all of their stored e-mails, regardless of whether any of their contacts also use it. They could use FireDrop’s tech to add better visualizations for information contained within the e-mail, which has been their core focus so far.

If they instead start offering functionality that only works between contacts who both have Xobni, then we’re seeing a big shift in their business strategy; it suddenly provides an incentive (other than, “hey, this is awesome”) for users to encourage their coworkers and friends to add Xobni. The best thing they could do to enhance that strategy is streamline the installation process even further.

That strategy may also provide hope for Xobni compatibility for Thunderbird, as their business goal becomes adoption, rather than having strategic value for a specific platform.
You're totally right about that. Sounds like there's a consensus that this project needed milestones.
You could argue that it's still unlimited; you could transfer terabytes if you want and you'll just get a bill for it. It's certainly not flat rate, though.
of course it was. per your post i added the (joke acknowledged) in case people took that to heart. :)
Y Combinator Dataset Of Users Version 1.1
A 0.7MB archive of Y Combinator user profiles is available by accessing http://www.rushy.com/ycombinator-news-profile20080507.tar.gz

More to follow in the next day or so.
Microsoft sends out feelers to Facebook
That's such an obvious neutrality violation that the ISPs would be shamed into changing their policies.

Of course, it gets trickier when the same company provides capped Internet access and uncapped non-IP-based services.
Microsoft still shopping; Approached Facebook
She left because we ran out of money.

Scope creep was limited.

The company owns the IP - we did sign paperwork on that.

In case it isn't clear, at the time I did agree to giving her the 35% in equity. I currently own 45%.

She has agreed to documenting and transitioning the app.
Your angels might have connections with hackers that would be willing to sign on to your project, presuming that your previous cofounder relinquished her equity stake when she left.
Take a look at http://www.coordinatr.com - they have something similar.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183436 for a more active discussion on this topic.
One thing I heard here is that drinko may be epsilon away from a credible demo --- the pieces are there, it's just not presentable.

A next step may not be "outsource to India", but rather to hire someone for a few days to document and report what's there and what's working and estimate how many hours it will take to get it to a demo.

That's a small project ($2k-$3k at the going daily rate for indie Python devs) and at the end of it drinko gets enough info to make a sane decision.

Drinko may be screwed --- her dev's demands aren't crazy, but as run4yourlife points out, her accomplishments over 12 months (!) probably don't justify them. This may be a case where someone should have been fired after weeks, not years. In that case, she may be starting from scratch.

But if both parties were acting in good faith, Drinko may be a short contract away --- maybe even a pure "skinning" HTML+CSS UI project away --- from a demo that will generate customer interest, help her get more funding, and attract a better quality of developer.
You seem to be advocating DSL's, which is incidentally one of the strong points of Lisp.
I would have sell, MS can just get someone to work on those widgets.