skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My business cards: http://files.markbao.com/bcardsnew.png

Keeping it simple. (I'm the sole owner of Avecora, which is why it has my other info on it as well.)

Backside of the card is light grey, so you can write over it if needed. Font size is large enough, but not huge, as Kawasaki's is.

Thoughts?
"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'm not sure this is the case. It sounds like the "it's nearly done" is based on the developer's word, and there isn't actually anything demoable right now. If that's true, and given that it's taken her 12 months to finish a Django website, I think it's a good bet that all her existing code is unusable and will have to be thrown out. If you understand Django, it should not take you a year to finish a website; more likely, the dev doesn't understand Django and doesn't really have anything working.
Well yes, but the real question is: how do you make a good car for a reasonable price?

And the answer is in all those details of the manufacturing process as described in the article.
How is this immoral? They tell you how it works upfront, they pay you one-off for winning the competition, and they pay you royalties when companies buy the software. It would be immoral to judge the best entry as being not up to scratch, not pay out, and still sell it on, but that's not what happens. (the contest is re-run in that case)

Besides, it's what you call a (sustainable) business model.
If and only if the constraints map nicely. Otherwise you're out of luck.

DrScheme's language levels, where constrained languages help beginners avoid the strange error messages one gets by accidentally invoking an advanced language feature, are unique, as far as I know. Correct me if a learning tool for any non-Lisp language has succeeded in implementing the same sort of thing. Otherwise, I think it's obvious that if you have specific desired constraints for a limited language, some kind of Lisp is your best bet.
nostrademons

I paid the 35% equity 8 months ago, only to have her quit when the going got tough.
Will the next iPhone be subsidized?
I think that he may have figured out the ruse precisely because he was so wary of authority.
It's precisely because I'm unsure about this that I want to look at the data.

I apologize for the ambiguity -- I didn't mean to suggest removing the ability to subcomment, only that the data I want is the proportion of people commenting on an article before reading or rapidly after their first click -- and whether that proportion is changing substantially.
Apple's games strategy looks beyond consoles and the iMac
It was either that or "the developer that took a royal salary and equity, then extorted more equity, then quit leaving our hero high and dry, broke, with an incomplete alpha, after taking one year to not finish developing a proof of concept." I was trying to be nice.
> 1. Support a whole range of email clients and become the de facto email analytics plug-in across the board.

Yes, this is a good direction for Xobni to go in, and they're already making moves in this direction with the Yahoo! Mail "leak". There is great value in aggregating a user's contacts and relationships across accounts, and being a central platform for relationship management.

> 2. Produce an email client themselves when their value proposition gets good enough.

I doubt it. Their core competency is email analytics, and there's not really a reason for them to create their own email client. Why create Xobni webmail and get a 10% market share of power users, when you can create a Xobni plugin for Outlook, Yahoo, hotmail and Gmail and get over 50% of email power users. Eventually Xobni will expand beyond power users.

> 3. Don’t build a social network, just make email fun to use and make it easy for people to see what their email graph looks like.

Yes, it's fun, but that fun is hard to monetize. This could be a cool feature, but not the focus of Xobni's efforts.

> 4. Become the all-in-one contact threshold tool, and by that I mean users should be able to see their activity across all aspects of communication and set personal alerts for when their interaction level with somebody drops below or goes above a certain level.

Becoming the all-in-one contacts & relationships management tool? Yes. But, I think the idea of completely automating interactions with "Level 1" and "Level 2" contacts is taking it a bit too far. Being genuine is hard to fake, and Xobni shouldn't try to fake that.

> 5. Sell employee analytics to HR departments via the huge amount of mailbox data that they can parse and interpret.

Lots of potential here. The value is less in the data, and more in the interpretation -- HR departments aren't statistical consultants. One option would have to develop a consulting arm to maximize the value here. Another, more scalable, option would be to develop a killer product that does the analysis for the employer.

> 6. Attack other verticals on the local machine

Maybe. But there's more money in email analytics than in file system, IM or iTunes analytics. As for gathering data from other consumer activities, email is still a far from solved problem (and offers far more valuable data). Let Xobni focus on that!
nostrademons, please re-read the original post.

I never had 94%

I was eventually ok with giving up founder level share, but expected founder level commitment. This is where the gap lies.
Has anyone here ever been in a situation where they thought, "Wow, a unit test would have saved me" or "Man, thank god for our unit tests?"

I don't think I've personally encountered that. Plenty of bugs at compile time or during regressions, but nothing where I could even imagine a unit test saving me.

I think the true value of unit tests is documentation. Instead of writing documentation that says, "Hey, this function should do this", you're writing code to do that, which is usually a pretty good idea. Executable documentation is the way to go. It's a very lisp-y idea.

That said, I'm not fond of the author's implication that unit testing will save you from cascading failures and make you a better programmer. He even says it's not a silver bullet, only to turn around and say it's the most magical thing to happen to software productivity since the invention of the keyboard.

It seems to me that the productivity gains are from forcing your developers to actually understand the code they're writing and interfacing with, but personally, I don't think I'd trust or hire someone who wasn't proud enough of their work to do that on their own.
Have you considered dissolving the company (with her signature), transferring the IP to a new company and then starting fresh with a 50/50 co-founder?

If you can sell another hacker on your idea, they may take it to the next stage (prototype finished) for no up front cost beyond the equity.
Distributed Version Control Systems: A Not-So-Quick Guide Through
The point is they say "unlimited" along with a price per month, which implies a flat rate.
For people that do try to outsource, the crucial question to ask yourself is "What do I bring to the table that a hacker might need?" I chose to partner with a non-technical friend (who ended up quitting, but at least he gave me full ownership of the startup), because this friend was adept at dealing with people and had connections to several possible angel investors. These are aspects of the startup experience that terrify me, and so I was more than happy to let him deal with them.

For your experience, persistence and not taking no are both really important to startups and very difficult for many technical people. So you added some value that a hacker couldn't get by just going off and doing the same thing on his own.

In the startup I mentioned above, the founders were all technical people and didn't really add anything of business value besides that. They were outsourcing because it was cheap and out of a misguided assumption that they needed a big team (and probably because they were spending Other People's Money). They would've been far better off writing the product themselves.

I don't know enough about drinko to know what s/he brings to the table, but unless it's a lot of sales connections to potential customers, it'll be hard for a good programmer to justify spending time on her project vs. all the other projects out there.
I didn't think that Kevin Rose was a nurse in Tulsa. ;-)
Actually, I believe group theory emerged very gradually from many simultaneous developments. Other sources: permutations, symmetries of crystals and linear transformations, quaternions and matrices (though theory of equations was indeed the main driver). I believe it wasn't until after a bunch of these had reached a high level of development (around 1880) that the abstract group concept began attracting attention as a field of research, because then people could see its use for unifying all those others. Abel's proof for 5th-degree polynomials came out in 1824, and Galois' general proof was published in 1846, so this was slow going, even by nineteenth-century standards.

BTW, I thought I read that Gödel worked pretty much as a lone wolf on his stuff, as most mathematicians weren't into it. And the trend has continued: foundations of mathematics has gotten research attention from surprisingly few people. I'm not 100% sure of this, though.

But anyway, yeah, proving that something can't be done is definitely a big deal. Interesting observation. I will percolate on that.
Twitter is like sex - http://michaelmartine.com/2008/04/11/twitter-is-like-sex/
Am I really so old? The black back/front just does not work for me. I know I don't write on cards folks give me as much as I used to, but I still do at times and being able to is a big plus. Not being able to make a quick note because I forgot my white paint marker is just plain less smart then something I can write on with just about any pen/pencil/bloody finger/greasy stick I can find.
Sitepoint, is a burial ground most things sold on there consist of snake oil or clones. It doesn't even deserve the name of 'exit'. More of a liquidity place to re-coop bad investments..
I would love to read what such a think tank comes up with. Right now my brain is fried for coming up with business ideas, but groovin' on doing implementation work. If I knew of a small web-site idea that had a really good shot at making money by subscription, I would blast it out immediately. Then my rent would be paid for when I go to grad school this Fall. :)
The Facebook Effect (why Facebook application are subject to adverse selection) + why facebook is evil
Respect for you -- who posted as a noncoder here last year and now a coder!
Beginner's Guide to SEO
Think of it as similar to a spreadsheet. The calculations are mostly linear algebra and are represented visually in 2d arrays.

What language is it currently written in

Common Lisp (at least, the calculation part). It's a great language for developing the product, but we don't want to greenspun our own vector-based calculation engine if we don't have to.
Take this one.
If the backup service goes down, you can't get your backups. I have no intention of the backup service ever going down; and the data which I have stored on S3 is enough that I can bring a new server instance up even if I lose everything else.

As long as S3 doesn't lose any data, your backups are safe.
Ok, start here: do you know the developer's age?
The really frustrating bit is sorting out how much of society relies on these fundamentally anti-intellectual structures. That's hard to answer. I really believe that over a certain size, widespread free-thinking is almost an impossibility.

A really interesting exploration of those sorts of ideas is reading Huxley's Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited and Island as a trilogy. I've read Gato's book that this essay is taken from, and he does a good job of stating the problem, but doesn't step far enough into it to look at how you restructure society to live in a freer way. Brave New World sets up a completely systemized dystopia, Island a communal utopia and BNW Revisited (collection of essays) puts down in more explicit terms much of what he thinks is the core of modern societies.
I think that the project was doomed with this particular developer from the start, because it sounds like she doesn't really know how to program. 12 months for a Django website with nothing to show for it is insane.

My comments are mostly intended for bystander-readers who're thinking of doing the same thing - paying a technical developer a full salary + 1-5% equity to develop a product from scratch. There're a lot of people that still suggest that, and it really doesn't work, as you've found out the hard way.

I dunno what advice I'd give to you personally - it's a hard situation, as many others have pointed out. Probably cut your losses, chalk it up to an expensive learning experience, and move on, then try again some other time. As I mentioned in another comment, I think it's fairly unlikely that this developer left you usable code that someone else could pick up, so it'd be difficult to get a contract developer to push it to finish line. You could learn to hack yourself - Python and Django are not difficult - but it'd set you back at least a couple months, and then you'd still have to implement everything.

[Edit: last paragraph was on the assumption that her work was not even demoable, but rereading your post, it sounds like you've gotten to alpha but just need to incorporate the feedback in. If that's the case, a contractor might work, but be aware that it's harder to read code than to write code, and if the code quality is bad enough any contractor would just have to throw everything out and start from scratch.]

If you can find a technical cofounder, someone that you trust that you know is a good developer, I'd do that (and give the decent equity from the start!), and then they can probably write the whole site from scratch in a couple months. But it has to be someone you know well, someone whose skills you're sure about, because otherwise you run the same risk with them.
Toyota can use their expensive workers to do the same work in 50% of the time with 80% higher quality. That is where the real savings are.
you maybe right, every time someone left on one of our projects, we forfeited the code. ...and we are developers, it was always easier for us to take what we learned from the previous code, and then to design something simpler and more elegant. one of our guys has really turned me on to the track of design for use, and not for maintenance. Which tends to get stuff out of the door.

You know another option is for drinko to start a new company, and license the tech from this company to the new one, to avoid all of the bullshit.

Drinko, in all likelyhood, you are starting over at this point. I have seen 3 projects fail this way. Your BEST BET is to learn to code.
Do you believe that buying insurance prevents accidents?
drinko, have you thought about putting this on Google App Engine? it would cut your server costs out, and if you are using dJango, that probably means that you are using python, which Google Apps Runs on.

Google claims that an app engine account is worth about 5 million page hits a month, which should support 100k users.
Oil price 'likely to reach $200'
Apple iPhone: More Powerful Than 1998 iMac, WAY More Powerful Than 1984 Macintosh
Ask YC: living in Bay Area dorms?
I was wondering if anyone at YC has or knows about being able to get some cheep rent in some unused summer dorms at one of the colleges in the bay area?
How important are Keywords, alt tags, etc?
Unfortunately, another, connected problem that seems fairly frequent is that of misleading titles which bear no resemblance to the title or content of the linked article. Particularly when it's reprased as a question the article doesn't ask (or attempt to answer). I'm never sure what to do in that case - upvote it because the article was good, or not, because it was misrepresented on n.YC.
Hell, I also would be willing to help you at least deploy or something to get rolling. Regardless of circumstances, you are in an unfortunate situation. Best of luck. (email in profile)
Absolutely agree - hop on the irc channel too, people are extremely helpful there.
That is a real number. Look at GM's annual report.

Sweetheart deals by unions in the 70's prior to Japan coming into the picture are a part of what is causing GM to falter.

That doesn't explain their ugly ass cars though.
Python : XML parsing using ElementTree Module
Ask YC: When did we stop wanting useful software?
Why is it that all webapps have to be 'fun' or 'social' applications these days? I wrote some software (as a webapp) that I think is pretty useful, but has only the barest and most rudimentary social networking features. I showed it to a co-worker whose first response was "cool". His second response, a few days later was, "I'm going to build a copy of your program, only I'm going to make it focus on the social and sharing aspect. I hope you don't mind."

Now, on one hand, I'm not really offended, since my app is just a clone of an existing (but unavailable to me) app. On the other hand, I'm pretty offended that to this guy, software isn't good unless you can socialize through it. I'll admit that there is a natural social aspect that comes out of the idea, but whatever happened to solitary software that just helps you be productive and organized? Why the heck isn't there a simple web-based address book out there? That said, I applaud mint.com and their decidedly non-social approach to webapps.
Not a lot of people are talking about the very serious problem of your developer now owning 35% stake in your business. Even if you manage to pull all of this stuff together by yourself, you're still screwed. You cannot raise more money as long as there's a "ghost" shareholder...if you do it without telling the investors about it you're liable to get sued, and if you tell them about it, they'll do the math and figure that your business has to be nearly twice as successful for them to make any money on the deal. It's like she's bought the whole series A round.

If she were actually "all in" on the business, 35% for a developer would be perfectly acceptable, even if she wasn't taking on as much risk. But, you need a vesting schedule in these kinds of agreements. At least then, you know you get four years of labor from the person--or they lose (some or all of) their stake.

I'd suggest going back to the drawing board (and back to a real job, while you gather your wits and save up some money). If you can buy out your former partner (hopefully for a pittance, though it sounds like your former partner is far more dangerous at the negotiating table than you are), you can outsource the remainder of the work--with better contracts. Or, learn to code on nights and weekends and finish it yourself.

But, if you can't buy out her stake, you can't build a business. It's hard enough to build a profitable business when everybody is working full-time on it. It's going to be damned near impossible when 35% of your company is doing nothing for the bottom line. Raising money will be impossible. Making it profitable will be difficult (while stock holders don't have any particular right to be paid dividends, at 35% she's got voting rights that have to be dealt with...depending on where you're incorporated, you might find 35% is a dangerously high ownership stake). And any exit, unlikely as that is, will be bitter sweet.
A chef with cancer fights to save his tongue
Now GPS Can Tell You Where the Cops Are
If I was the xobni guys...

I would make email a platform; as in, make it easy to develop apps for e-mail.

Like To-do lists, contact lists, crm's, etc...
Yahoo News. #1 Online News Site.
>ended up in complete rewrites

I don't think you can blame outsourcing for that exclusively. Most startups rewrite their code multiple times, to track design changes. OTOH, if it was a rewrite motivated by code quality issues, I can see what you mean.
Python & Django might not be too hard to learn, but learning Python, Django, HTML, CSS and probably Javascript will slow you down a lot.
I wouldn't read too much into the updated iMac. As far as I can tell, the MacBook Pro has been a somewhat better gaming rig than the iMacs for the last months, which isn't what you'd expect. Really, they're just correcting that oddity in their product lineup.

The article may well be spot on in its analysis on the mobile devices. I suspect it will very much come down to how they treat developers. The iPhone in its current incarnation isn't anywhere near the DS or PSP in terms of price point. (DS: €150, PSP: €170, iPhone: €1000) The audience for the games is therefore very different (and presumably smaller) as well. In terms of hardware, the iPhone is (apparently) roughly equivalent to the PSP but with better connectivity.

The way to go is to figure out what kinds of games typical iPhone owners play on their other devices, and develop games to that need.
Does this mean that all future Spring devices will use Google for search or just Sprint devices on the ClearWire network?
Age doesn't have much to do with gender. If she was male I would have called her "The Django Guy". There's not a great corresponding female version of guy - chick sounds chauvinist, lady sounds to formal (think of how "The Django Gentleman" would sound). "The Django Woman" doesn't work either. What would you have said?

More choices from Encarta Thesaurus: lass, miss, young woman, mademoiselle, daughter, lassie, mademoiselle, maiden, damsel, maid, young lady.
Hey.. uhh.. Do you work on the same project as me, or is this just a common setup?
"Girl" doesn't imply age any more than "dude" does, but it does imply a bit of disrespect over, say, "this Django coder", in exactly the same way that "this Django dude" would.
Just to let you know, if you're wondering who is downvoting you, it's me. This comment and the one before were both stupid and unnecessary.

If you really gave half a shit about the original poster and the situation she's in, you wouldn't be going through picking on every damn comment and responding with idiocy, and starting branches of discussion that aren't relevant to the subject at hand and do nothing more than make finding useful information here more cumbersome.
we didn't.

the issue is that "we" has been moving, fairly quickly, from the techies or business workers that used to primarily use the internet to, basically, everyone from soccer moms to preteens/teens to grandmas.

grandma doesn't need your totally sweet amazon ec3 backup tool, she wants to keep in touch with the family and look at their pictures and such. teenagers mostly want to keep up with their friends and be social.

there's still tons of people out there that need useful software, and useful software is a great cash cow. now that population, that niche that needs your software, while still probably sizable, no longer makes up a measurable segment of the internet.

i'm building an app that will be marketed to a group of maybe 50k-100k people. thats a negligible percentage of the internet-users at-large, but its still way more than enough to (hopefully someday) make me a nice income stream.

edited to add: social aspects of apps are how applications have been moving to monetize themselves while maintaining free-to-use cost. people need to return and view ads frequently for bills to be paid, if the users aren't dishing out the money themselves.
Just cuz you're hung like a horse, doesn't mean you have to be in porn
Viddler Tries To Hit Digg Frontpage By Hosting Revision3 Shows
Agreed. My first thought was "is this a meetup site for 30+ year old looking to extend their already robust beer gut?"
In the great tradition of Dear Abbey, I reserve the right to show a tiny bit of disrespect when told a tale of exploitation like the one the OP shared.
Amazon S3 Copy API Ready for Testing