skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I met one of the Blue Flavor crew at a recent event in Seattle and have only seen and heard good things about them.
Well, from what we have been told so far, this is a medical startup. Which means that there's a good deal of regulations and rules that someone has to learn how the company should handle. Since they took investment money, that means that there are investors to cope with. Also, there's that inconvenient issue of working with potential users to learn what they need. Again, because this is related to the medical field, user relations will be more involved than it would be for a twitter or a reddit. The unfortunate thing about this case is that drinko could have forgone hiring a developer and spent an additional 2+ years to learn how to program and build the site with the investment funding.
Platypus genetic code unravelled
Summary: One big surprise was the patchwork nature of the genome with avian, reptilian and mammalian features...
I don't think anyone is saying that she (the dev) didn't use her leverage to her advantage. We all recognize that it was the OP's fault to give her that leverage in the first place.

However in business, relationships and "karma" - for lack of a better term - are really what things are about. There are times when you should be looking at maximizing your position, and there are other times when you should be looking to cooperate in order to maximize a collective position.

Many of the people here (myself included) are simply stating that the dev displayed poor business acumen by being too aggressive in taking advantage of another's weaker position. The key being who that other person is - her supposed partner.

Partnerships need to have a level of loyalty beyond any particular transaction or they simply won't work.
Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?
Top 100 Telecom Industry Blogs
The telecom industry has changed dramatically over the past few decades, and blogs provide one way to keep up with with transitions from traditional technology to the latest connectivity. Here's the list of 100 telecom industry blogs.
Follow the Rainbow: 101 Color Resources for Web Designers
Here's the list of 101 color resources for Web designers. Visit them all and bookmark the ones that will help you become the most color-savvy Web designer around.
I used Zaplets in 2000 to help pick a name for my first startup. I remember using them and then seeing the Venturebeat 100M thing and thinking what the hell?
This seems like a dumb idea in the face of FIOS competition.
I know of a house of non-geek professionals in London who collectively download 10GB per day, excluding protocol overhead. That's easily 300MB per month. Collectively, they're saturating a 2Mb/s connection much of the time. That may be obscene to some but in parts of Asia, 100Mb/s connections are affordable. So, if a 250MB per month limit becomes established and accepted, it could very quickly become constraining and economically damaging.
I'm going to link you to your own thread ;) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183584
Cool story, would have been more interesting if he had refused to continue even without figuring out the ruse.
Browser, What Ails Thee?
I think 'shameless' would've included nothing about "promotion".. you have a little shame (and thats a good thing)
I think this example shows that the market has nothing to do with anything - it's people's perception that matters. It this particular case the dev won. I'll give you that most of the time it works the other way around.

Clearly, the poster underestimated her position and overestimated the dev's ability and that's what got her in trouble. With more knowledge, she could easily see that a django dev isn't worth 80K + 35%! In fact, I'm sure she'd get some bites (provided a solid idea) for the 35% alone from some very experienced people.

If the market did enforce the line, we wouldn't be having this discussion. :-)
Holy crap - you're paying her $83K, plus gave her equity, in TULSA?!?!? That's not exactly a high cost area. If you have $190K and you've paid close to $100K to her (14 months) just to get a proof of concept, I'd say you're in trouble. If she's drawing a handsome salary, won't put any of her own money in, and won't take a pay cut, she can't be that confident in the value of the equity. Sounds like you got milked.

I wish you luck but I think you've got some serious structural problems, both in your company and your relationship with this Django girl.
Sharing web links and thoughts should take less clicks
Damn. I feel for you then. If she's gone, she's gone. Fat chance she'll even document/transition the app. She's probably gambling on the fact you have no money to pay another developer so she figures she won't have to do it.

As others have said... learn to program. Consider it a character building exercise. I don't see too many other ways out of this situation.

That said, I don't think she was being malicious here. Most of these stories don't involve malicious folks. But when working with contractors you have to factor significant cost overruns as a reality. The work will be costlier and take longer than you expect.

EDIT: I also forgot to add. This is a litmus test. If she thought that her work would yield dividends, she might just bite the bullet and work for free until everything is finished. But she's not. She doesn't have confidence in the viability of your product/service. You might want to probe her and ask why. If you aren't going to get much out of her, you may as well at least try to get some feedback.
Want a VC deal? Go fly a kiteboard
I hate to say it, but the fact that she wanted market rates AND equity should have been a tip off that she didn't care about the idea. If I care about an idea, I'll work on it for free (and maybe a bit of equity). If all I care about is getting paid, I'll focus much more on the salary, and that seems like what she did here.

If she was planning to ride it out long term, she would've definitely demanded more equity up front, and she would have offered to take a lower salary. It's not financially stupid to take as low a salary as possible in a startup. Lower salaries = more runway = more chance of eventual success = equity stake is worth something = rich.
All the statements about Hacker News quality going down hill I have seen have been anecdotal. I would like to see actual evidence, or at least a list of tens of stories that made the front page that people think are not worthy of being there.
It is hard to say without knowing more about your web app, but my first instinct was that 6 months of full time development seems like a really long time for a prototype, especially for a start-up. As one data point, clutterme.com took me about one week to prototype, and about 4 months to a public beta (and I did not consider myself an experienced developer at the time).

Unfortunately, it is more difficult for a developer to step into a project this late and be up to speed right away. For example, if your original developer had 1 month of work left to completion, it might take a new developer 2 months to learn the system and complete the remaining work. (this depends greatly on the complexity of the system and on the quality and clarity of the code you have at this point).

My advice would be to find a good developer you trust (not always easy, I know) and get them to look at what you have so far. Get them to look at your specs and requirements and design docs. Get them to look at your source code so far. Talk about what is left to do. This will take a few days, maybe a week. Pay them for their time. The goal is to get a professional opinion on the state of the current codebase (at this point I imagine there is little trust left in the original developer, so I would also treat any claims of progress they made as suspect), an estimate of how much work is left, and their opinion on how best to proceed (outsource, hire another developer, try it yourself).

It's hard to give more specific advice without diving into the details of your project, and you will be proceeding blindly otherwise. It sounds like you can't afford to make any more mistakes.
I get the feeling that there's an exception to almost every startup rule.

In my personal experience, I've never seen outsourcing work well, or really work at all. The first startup I worked at spent $300k to setup an office in China, paying their developers about $10-15k/year. It would've been a great deal, except that the China office produced nothing and sucked up the complete time of both the CTO and chief scientist so they couldn't get anything done stateside. They would've been far better off writing the code themselves.
Unfortunately it is well-established that the telecom industry has no shame.
I'm new here. I don't know anyone. I found HN purely by accident on a google search. I get a lot out of this site and am trying to contribute constructively.

I apologize if I'm pointing out the obvious but a major risk of making HN a gated community is blocking out new ideas and prospective startup hackers.
Most people don't have that option though, do they?
You are attacking a good problem - organizing events. However, right now I'm hung up on the name - I can't picture someone recomending 'gutmeet' to their friends. It makes me think of the inside of a butcher shop.
I just recently tried out smart draw for "Gantt Charts and what not." http://www.smartdraw.com/

Visio, PowerPoint (for presentations), MS Project (I'm a Windows person)
I think there is also consensus that this dev wasn't very good. Not sure I have seen a site so complicated that you couldn't at least roughly approximate it in 12 months with django.

Whole deal sounds to me like she didn't give a crap about long term future of the company, she just wanted to ride the funding into the ground through her paycheck. I'd bet she demanded more equity in a moment of faith, but by that point they were doomed.
I read books to understand concepts and technologies at a higher level (I particularly like the Head First series), but Google has largely replaced my day to day use of books as programming references.
There was a wonderful article in the July/Aug 07 Harvard Business Review magazine with Watanabe, president of Toyota. (I've actually got that edition here on my desk ;)

Their ability and commitment to measure nearly every aspect of production and processes is pretty amazing. This is very relevant in the space of tech companies and startups: Measure! Measure! Measure! (anything and everything from site analytics and bug reports to closing a sales cycle with clients)

The term 'Corporate Culture' gets thrown around a lot, but I think Toyota has done a great job of preserving & innovating their culture. Being as big as they are, that is a huge achievement.
I wish change management at my workplace followed a similar practice. We have dozens upon dozens of "good, revolutionary" ideas. Time, effort, and energy spent investigating these options and implementing them then goes to the next, leaving past solutions to rot.

Slow, steady change makes the stable foundation from which strong ideas arise.
I think we're agreed in principal and opposed semantically --- if drinko's position was better, a dev quitting wouldn't matter to her.

Strong disagree that a Django dev isn't worth 80k+35%. Sure, I wouldn't pay anything close to that, but I have a mature thriving company. But on day 1, without the capital to contract the project out, that could be a totally fair deal.

Am I totally wrong about how much Django devs make relative to PHP or Rails devs? Because my experience is they make more than 80k if they're good and have any business aptitude. They certainly get billed out higher than that.
this might be a good post to ask my related question.

i'm teaching myself ruby on rails. i'm learning ruby by reimplementing some of my c++ classes, and i'm learning rails by ... erm, haven't figured that one out yet.

does anybody know of a project that i could apply myself to? i'm no good at doing tutorials, they bore me to tears. i learn by having a goal to accomplish. but i don't have any really strong ideas about sites i'd like to implement. so i'm willing to work on somebody else's site, for free, just for the experience. who knows what projects would have me?

i just quit my job, i have a lot of money saved up, and i am serious as a heart attack about putting a lot of time and effort into this.
You're much better off paying that 35% equity along with a full salary than giving her 6% (or worse, 1%). Think about it this way: she is building your product. She can either put in high effort or low effort. If you give her 35%, there's a good chance she'll put in high effort, you'll both succeed, and your 65% is actually worth something. If you give her 6%, there's a good chance she'll put in low effort, you'll fail, and she'll soak you for your $6900/m sunk cost. If you give her 1%, it's almost certain she'll blow you off and you get the privilege of paying her $6900/month for nothing.

As happened here, apparently.

There's a whole chapter on this problem in most introductory game theory textbooks. The basic problem is that you cannot directly control how hard someone works, you can only give them incentives to work hard and then measure the output. Much as you'd like to say "She's a professional, you're paying her, she ought to do a good job," the real world doesn't work that way. She'll do a good job if it's worth her while to do a good job.

The economy is not fair. You can try to pretend it is and watch all your ventures get driven into the ground, or assume that you're going to get a raw deal sometimes and only take those raw deals when it leads to a sweeter deal later on.
Sorry for your difficult situation.

1. Outsourcing may not be a good option particularly for work that can be done by 1-2 developers. Approach a local developer, try and negotiate a contract where you give equity but not salary.

2. The runaway developer has 35% equity still? That might be very problematic in the future.

3. I do not about Django particularly but learning Python is not tough. Python is a very easy language to pickup and you should devote some time to learning the language so that you can at least understand what your fellow dev is doing.
No, I think an 80K mark is good for a salary. What I disagree with is that a brand new startup should be hiring an 80K dev right out of the blocks like that.

This startup needs a technical partner, not an employee, imo. So, you'd be looking at upwards of a 50% share with nowhere near that salary requirement.

BTW - Billing rates rarely translate into salaries in any normal fashion. Two different markets, and the billing rate one tends to be much more inflationary.
I know I'll probably be reviewing this book for Ruby Inside anyway, but.. tip for the future: Use better headlines for posts on HN ;-)
Just in case you're asking this to get a wider picture / lots of data points, I wrote "Beginning Ruby" published by Apress and was approached by the publisher, we came up with the idea together, and then got started. There was no real proposal at any point. It is now one of the best selling Ruby books (almost 6000 copies to date - but this is an incredibly tiny niche).
"This Django girl"?
Microsoft May Build a Copyright Cop Into Every Zune
both before and after.
More fuel for the "Media Cartel Hates Apple's Strategy" fire.
Your project sides interesting and in the same space as mine. Send me an email at mbedwards@gmail.com
Absolutely -- that was a huge red flag for me. That much salary plus equity is a lot of money.
http://projects.zoho.com/jsp/home.jsp --- pls write a review here if u use it.
How I built an effective blog comment spam blocker
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183499
It's not part of the solution here. It's just a good investment if you are running a tech start-up.

For example, if there was another partner here that knew how to hack, but wasn't a nurse, I'd say: Learn as much as possible about health care - it's your industry.
Customer service via Twitter works for unpopular people too
I think everything is just fine. I take away a lot of good stuff from this board everyday, and get good intelligent responses from other users. And this is probably the only place I have ever encountered where people willingly admit their mistakes and change their views if they are intelligently countered. This is a very good thing.
They're called people from techcrunch.

:)
I agree, there are others as well. One of my goal is to have no log in for anyone. Personally I think that logging in to use something is a big turn off to me.

Is there anything you'd like to see in such services? such as "um... ok now. I need to do this next, and it is not here" or "after organzing something, this is what I move forward with it." etc

I tried to add something easy, but everytime I try to attack one particular problem, it makes the whole thing complex, which is not what I intend to do.
Saving the Internet with Hate: Zed's Presentation on UTU
High-speed academic networks and the future of the Internet
which begs the question of why it seems that even in pretty technical domains, theres still an aversion to aggressive use of theory tools?
I believe everyone over 25 karma can downvote - I would guess that'd be most people.
Twitter Starts Blacklisting Spammers
Like the idea, but agree about the black
I'm not sure if comments that plainly ignore the main points of the article are totally, or even mostly, from people before they've even read it. They may be from people who just don't get it, whether from skimming or not paying close enough attention.

And I don't see how filtering out replies to subcomments solves anything. Often those are the most interesting conversations. I suppose one could have +/- to expand subcomments easily.
''We'd be more excited about a WiMax-enabled iPod touch (with a bigger screen perhaps)''

We already have the n810-wimax.
Granted, DSLs are easily expressible in Lisp, but pretty much anything is expressible in Lisp. If you want some sort of guarantee that your DSL is limited in some way, you would need to write additional Lisp code to enforce those constraints. But if the constraints map nicely to the constraints in a more limited language, you get the constraints effectively for free by choosing the limited language, while trading off the power of Lisp.

The prevalence of DSLs in Lisp code poses an interesting counterpoint to Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated Lisp program contains an ad-hoc, informally specified subset of a declarative language. :)
The Other Startup Exit: SitePoint Marketplace
I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing that when she took the job, she thought "Sure, this'll be a cinch. I get a full salary, and if it works out, a nice bonus." Then it turned out the job was much harder than she expected, she saw the founder with 94% doing basically nothing, and said "Dude, if I'm going to slave away with this code for months, I should get founder-level shares. Otherwise, I could just do what you're doing and take the 94% you're getting" and tried to renegotiate for a stake that'd make the development pain worthwhile. The OP refused, so she walked.

Chalk it up to first-time founder mistakes on both sides. Almost everybody drastically underestimates the amount of effort required to get a startup off the ground. So what seems acceptable at first ("yeah, this won't be hard for me, I can whip it off for you") starts to feel like you're getting massively ripped off later.

And I totally agree with the comments on other subthreads that she's probably not a very good Django dev. I wouldn't be surprised if this is her first Django project. I remember that I expected my first PHP project to take 3 months; it ended up taking 3 years (I didn't charge for it; it was a volunteer project in college).
Agreed, and looks like the competition between bigger groups of replaceable people vs. smaller groups of brighter people will keep going in this industry for decades, until something changes from the roots, if at all.
Another pro-(2 yeLISP-ars old)rant
what are people opinions about ptyhon vs LISP anyway?

edit: what happened to the headline?
is this pownce?
I might be able to help you salvage something (at least a working prototype) pro-bono if you'd like to contact me (my username @gmail.com).
I see your point, and I think that I'm probably one of the few people that have seen it from both sides - allow me to explain:

The startup I talked about above was some years ago, and I had no idea how to program anything. It worked out because we were extremely persistent, and simply didn't take no for an answer. A year ago I thought that it might be a good idea to actually learn to hack, and so I set about learning it. Now I'm doing a web-based startup and I have to admit that programming it yourself, and knowing what the heck you're talking about gives a number of advantages:

1) your dependance on external partners is minimised

2) you can see what features are trivial to do, which are hard, and which are just impossible.

3) your product becomes better because it is what you want, not someone elses interpretation of what you want.

4) you don't need a lot of capital, just a lot of time.
Agreed. I'd call myself a fairly capable programmer, althouth not an expert in their main technologies (.NET and Java) and from the few times I attempted to compete in component development, the amount of work involved just seemed a bit much. (especially the amount of unit tests) I'm not sure where the article's author got the "1-2 components per week, part time" figure from. It seemed to take me almost a week full time to complete one $500 component. (which, inevitably, didn't win)

I'm not complaining I didn't win: the judges clearly thought the other competitors did a better job, and they were probably right. But it's anything but easy money.

TopCoder seems to be overrun with developers from developing (largely Asian, as far as I can tell) countries where salaries (and cost of living) is much, MUCH lower, which is also keeping the prize money low. $500 (before tax) for a week's worth of work is just not attractive to me, I can make (and have made) 3-5x that doing normal consulting. (where the probability of being paid in the first place is a lot higher)

There is, of course, nothing actually wrong with this. This may well be the best way to outsource development to cheap labour: if it's not good enough, don't pay them anything!

There's probably a certain amount of practice to this, over time you figure out what the judges want, and what not to spend time on, but to make a competitive amount of money, you'd still have to have a very high success rate. The article is somewhat misleading in this respect.

That said, if you're in it for the fun, it's great!
I believe that the winning entries for the design & dev are sold by topcoder to various companies. Personally, I think it is very immoral.
i think you should contact PrototypeInvest (http://www.prototypeinvest.com/default.aspx) - they are like VC but instead of giving you money they will develop your application (against equity) - now because you have source code it should not take much of a time for them to develop a prototype for a reasonable amount of equity. This option will save you time, money and energy. If you decide to try them then write a review about them over here as more people like you can use them (if they are good). - GOOD LUCK.
If so, why haven't they? There is a common misperception about how well large companies can respond to threats to their cash cow products (and thus many people opt not to enter markets where they will be competing with those theoretical products from the large company).

That said, I definitely believe the single biggest threat to the growth and success of Xobni is their absolute dependence on Outlook in the current iteration. But, by the time MS releases a tool that does some of what Xobni does, Xobni will (I would hope) have a multi-platform version with a dozen additional features. Xobni obviously doesn't plan to stand still waiting for MS to catch up to them.