skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The moral question is: how should I live?

But anyway, use whatever words you want, I've told you what I meant: living better, more fruitful lives with more learning and thinking. And people who could do that, but don't, are guilty of living badly, living below their abilities.

This is not just a matter of opinion or taste. For example, we are only able to communicate here because of scientific achievement; that is objectively more important than pokemon. And, for example, no one is perfect, so people who correct more of their mistakes end up better than those who don't. People who think and learn more are more able and effective at correcting their mistakes to improve themselves.
I "smell" an opportunity...

..actually I don't.
I don't think he owes anything to society. I think he should do what's best for himself. If that's pokemon, so be it, but he'd be better off, and live a better life, if he cared more about thinking and learning and doing great things. Good ways of life reward the doer most of all.
I may be a CS nerd, but hey I can roll with the cool kids, too ... you know. I could do RoR and I am pretty good with Photoshop that I could too design websites with rounded corners.

But seriously, I am pretty interested with design and will definitely check out your recommended reading.
I will tell you all you need to know in three (run on) sentences:

PostgreSQL is historically a more complete and reliable SQL database, that was once slower than MySQL but is now slightly faster for most workloads.

Either database will probably work great for anything you will ever need from them--if you are running into scaling problems for a site that we've never heard of (I assume we've never heard of it) you're probably doing something pathological.

Google uses MySQL heavily, so despite its many historical problems, if you grow big enough to run into them, you will figure out a way to solve them and in some cases you will cause them to be solved for the general MySQL userbase, as Google has done.
Just wanted to say that I really liked the link that you have posted in your reply, about the correspondences between Feynman and Wolfram.
[I work in Bangalore, have worked in the United States, and have seen both sides of the outsourced projects]

"What about a competent lead developer who designs the application and writes the unit tests, but outsources the small implementation details and bug scourging/research to outside developers?"

This won't work. You can't really write unit tests separate from the implementation. The implementation and unit tests feed off each other.

"is there any way that outsourcing can be made to work, consistently?"

Here is what has worked, in my experience.

(1) Have a fixed bid AND milestone driven (where "milestone" is used loosely to indicate a "chunk" of business value and takes between a week to a month to code) project. Pay per milestone. At best you lose a couple of weeks worth of money.

(2) Hire a good developer in India/China/wherever. Work with him on the project with loose milestones. Talk for at least 20 minutes everyday (skype, etc). Once you gell, ask him to reccomend another, equally good developer. Build the team slowly.
Programming would be easier if the language were uniquely suited to solving the problem (e.g. more built in solutions). In general, it is harder than it seems it should be because to create a language that is actually useful to a wide variety of applications, it needs to operate at a sufficiently low level so that you have the greatest equilibrium between ease of writing and function.

Can it be made easier? As a pmb said, not if the problems we are trying to solve are becoming more and more complex. But that's ok since only a limited number of people are actually interested enough (and dare I say capable) of programming. That might be a good thing though since the result is higher quality code/solutions.
Crysis’ Crisis: Game Piracy
I would have to think that if under-population continues to be an economic problem in Japan, they will relax their strict immigration laws. This is what is happening in many other developed nations where the increase in population is attributable entirely to immigration.

Yes, there are strong cultural reason for those laws, but one would think that at some point the economic consequences would force a change.
Yeah, I can definitely agree with that dude. The doctor's life might be overall better if he finds a way to enjoy it.
It isn't accurate to say that "most" of these companies are small, private and owned by 3 people. Most of them are huge gigantic companies like IBM global services or Oracle or Microsoft Consulting. The ones that are small are always worried that a huge consulting firm is going to move into their market.
Hasta La Vista, Games for Windows
" teenagers mostly want to keep up with their friends and be social."

Or, as JWZ put it: "How will this software get my users laid?"

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
Dude, I am so old this site's name made me think of a Digital Underground album track:

http://www.amazon.com/Gutfest-89-Edit-LP-Version/dp/B001227I...
I see a couple of mistakes right off the bat.

Write the contract so that no ownership interest is achieved until a Series A funding event. For every hour that the technician works, they accrue the same hourly rate figure in an options account. This way when the startup is funded, the developer's percentage is determined by the value of their options account against the VC's valuation, not some arbitrary point like 6% It's much harder for someone to walk away from $100,000 in equity than it is a theoretical 6%

Should have included a clause whereby the equity would disappear if the developer quits.

35% is rather outrageous for any founder in a company that has raised significant amounts of funding, let alone a well paid one.

To echo other comments, 12 months to create a prototype in Django seems like a very long time. Either the developer sucked or was working on other projects on the side. It is also possible that the requirements kept changing mid-flight and this was a management problem.

Outsourcing to India may work or it may not. Regardless, at this point you need to pay based on results instead of time.

Good luck.
Start networking. Talk to your parents, your friends, your friends' parents, your parents' friends, and anyone else who you can sit down with for 30 minutes. That should be plenty of time to listen to someone complain about their problems, and from that you should be able to make a list of possible business ideas. Then all you have to do is research them and figure out which one, if any, are viable.
This story gives great insight into the nature of the human spirit.
Did you see the application working (partially) or did the developer say that there's nothing to see yet (because the application isn't finished)?
It's the only title I could think of that didn't start with
"So, Mr. Angry Overreaction Man, your photo is now on the internet. Call your lawyer."
Does technology drive history?
The Aggregation Dilemma
Using the Internet to Physically Harm
This is the most disturbing hacking incident I think I've ever heard of, and I hope it makes people take the importance of good security measures to heart.
Learn to hack. Giving any employee a hazy equity offer with promises to "scale it up" is a bad idea. The better your prospects get the more she is likely to feel screwed. And the worse they get, the less motivating the prospect of continuing seems.

Any scaling equity package should be linked to dates and performance goals. You basically said you didn't want her to own the company unless it succeeded, when success was contingent on her.

Sounds like she trusted you. Then stopped trusting you. Then left a few months later. You screwed up. Go apologize.
> I get the feeling that there's an exception to almost every startup rule.

Well, it would be a lot easier if it were just a collection of rules to follow;-)

I'd be interested to hear what mixmax did, in what field, in order to succeed without technical people, although it's mainly academic interest, as I'm definitely "technical people" myself.
Data points work best in groups. Here's more.

We outsourced initial development of a prototype, it cost us little money but much time, and the quality of the output was appalling (from both a user and a technical perspective). It was functional on a very pedantic level, but mostly useless.

Daniel
I wouldn't use the word "useful" per se. Social Networking does fill a need and is useful to a bunch of people. What I'd like to see is more incentive and recognition to those who push boundaries, whether it's in what the application does or how it was built. Like someone said earlier, many of those apps exist, but they get buried in the hype that social networks, etc get these days.
btw, it takes a lot of guts to admit …

Almost everyone feels like this at least some of the time.
Find a job you enjoy doing and you'll never work again.
She wasn't initially hired as an employee - it was more of a contract agreement to develop the beta, with the option to come on as a full partner if we were working well together.

It wasn't a hazy equity offer.
when I spent some time with the Maasai, I learned that even a Lion learns to fear the bright red cloth, because it often means death ...
Is Tiny Seesmic Going to Take Over the World?
Ask YC: Which is the best book for Data Structures and Algorithms?
No matter how hard I try, I lose myself while studying Data Structures and Algorithms. Can you people suggest me a really nice book along with a decent study plan? Thank you.
Creating a successful new online product - 13 tips
yeah, its interesting how now when you use amazon, the loading urls have ec2 and s3 in them.
I don't see a contradiction between social and useful. Social networks are not per se useful. But social networking features may boost the usefulness of an application. See Flickr or Delicious as very prominent examples.
100% of people who succeeded tried.
100% of people who did not try failed.
Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?
Chinese firms bargain hunting in U.S.
It's definitely good marketing for them to eat their own dog food.
One behavior I think is good, is to disclose that you actually didn't read the article at the beginning of the comment.

I think this behavior should be generally accepted if you actually read the other comments as to not duplicate something that was already said.
The kind of chaining shown in slide 97 feels dirty. Is end() faster than calling $('div.entry') again?
I was in the same position.

And eventually, partially because of the mirror-every-morning trick he talked about, I did quit.
Simple viral marketing with Twitter
At the recent Barcamp Leipzig I heard about a simple approach for marketing with Twitter. Instead of the classic "recommend this site to friends" email form, use a link to twitter with a prefilled status message. That way it is much easier for people to spam their friends about your web site, and they don't have to give you their friend's email addresses.

Self-Plugging Example: http://twitter.com/home?status=Just+read+Bjoern%27s+Blog+http%3A%2F%2Fblog.blinker.net+%23bjoernsblog (at least it won't be made into a real link).
"How well does the back...print"

It looks really good printed actually, which I was a little surprised by.

"something about the text in the top-right corner on the white side seems off"

You're right, and the colors are poor choices. The correct colors looked pretty bad too though, so it was trying to find a balance.
Ask YC: Morph Exchange / heroku for PHP?
So far, both do only Ruby on Rails. And Google App Engine does Python.
http://www.morphexchange.com
http://heroku.com/
I tried to go to barcamp3 and 4 in London but never get registered in time. tickets get booked within 5mins of going live and they advertise going live time of 11am but systems opened at ~10am and sometimes even earlier/later.

This upset a lot of people in London wanting to go.
"In retrospect, I believe that my upbringing in a socialist-oriented family steeped in a class struggle view of society taught me that authorities would often have a different view of right and wrong than mine."

Well, it didn't make my father-in-law independent. He was a leader in the fight against the Japanese, was shot and left for dead, but recovered thanks to a brilliant doctor. As a reward, after the war he was appointed photography editor of the PLA's offical newspaper. During the Cultural Revoultion, they threw him into a reeducation camp for supposedly making a joke about Mao. I wonder if the people who fed him his one egg a week cooked in used motor oil had any trouble obeying orders? After all, most of them were raised in "socialist-oriented families". What about the secret policemen in Cuba? What about Mussolini, whose father was a member of the Communist Internationale and whose famous son was first elected to parliment as a member fo the Socialist Party? Was that enough of a "socialist-oriented family"? Or the Hilter Youth of the National Socialist German Workers Party? The hangmen of the Ayatollah Khomeini's "Islamic Socialism", stringing up a fresh batch of gays? Mugabe's goons murdering political opponents in Zimbabwe? What about Danny Ortega's goons murdering Moskito Indians in Nicarauga -- any trouble following orders there? Saddam Hussain's Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party? Soviet soldiers starving 20 million Kulaks to death by withholding their grain and movement privileges (hello Wlater Duranty and the New York Times!)? The Cambodian language teacher turned Khmer Rouge prison director who meticulously corrected the confession of an inmate while the guards in the next room poured gasoline into her vagina and ignited it? Obiedient socialists all.

Speaking of social experiments, you don't often get a chance to control for nearly all variables when comparing outcomes among large groups of people. Compare East Germany to West, North Korea to South, Taiwan and Hong Kong versus China on the amount of "obiedience to authority". Same culture, language, history, geography, weather, genetics.

"This is not to say that membership in the Communist Party made me or anyone else totally independent."

Oh, he's quite wrong there. One last bit of history that you've never heard cuz it's just too darned trivial. A bit of background: Human feces is valuable to Chinese peasents, as they often use it as fertilizer. During the Great Leap Forward, my wife's cousin was found by the side of the road, several leaves in his hand wrapped around something. Puzzled, they opened it up to see what was inside. It was all he had left in the world. He was quite independent from that point on, as he and 77 million other Chinese never needed anything from anyone ever again.

Stalin once said that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. But then, he and all the people who obeyed him would know, wouldn't they?
I would be interested to hear about this too.
you're absolutely right, I apologise.

Point remains that asking for equity does not fit with expectation of failure.
"Creating a new, successful product is like writing a book, creating a movie, or raising a child. It’s a fiendishly complicated task that requires great adaptability creativity. Rules can only get you so far. No amount of advice can guarantee you success. Sometimes, the rules fail, and you need to adapt to those situations and do what needs to be done, even if it flies in the face of accepted wisdom. For every rule of product development, there is a dozen examples of teams which did it differently and still succeeded."
Yeah, the input needs autocomplete="off" adding to it, otherwise you can't quite see what you're doing
I'd start with CLRS ("An Introduction to Algorithms") and follow the MIT 6.046 course through online video (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...)

That way you get book, study plan, lectures, lecture notes, problem sets and exam questions.
Startup crisis. Dorm room style. 
This is a joke compared to drinko's story, but I've really gotten myself into a bit of a bind lately. I'm hoping you guys might help me. I'll start with the background story...

One of my roommates is a film student, and he is taking a class in the film school on Internet media this semester. The class is brand new and has never been offered before. They basically spent the entire semester going over web 2.0 buzzwords (blog, wiki, mash-ups, news feed, beta, social bookmarking, social network, RSS, etc). They were also assigned to come up with a "cool idea for a website" for their final grade, and they are actually expected to develop this site.

My roommate's group quickly found they had no idea where to start. He came to me with some questions, and at first I was glad to help him. I started by walking him through the steps involved in purchasing the domain name and hosting plan. Then he started asking more questions, and I eventually had to tell him that I didn't have time to help him all the time and that the class was just ridiculous.

A week later he tells me that he wants to pay me to work on his project. All I would have to do was make a working prototype. At the time it didn’t sound like a bad idea, and it sounded like fun. I thought I could make some money and help a friend out, and I would be able to copy and paste code from other things I have worked on to cover the majority of the project. So I told him I would charge $20/hr, and I agreed to a cap of $400 since it was coming out of his pocket.

Then a few days later, he comes into my room with a stack of papers. It turns out to be a 17-page contract that his dad, who happens to be a lawyer, wrote up. The contract would give my roommate full ownership of the code, ip, license, etc, and all for only $20/hr with a cap of $400. It also states that I would not be a partner or have any equity. I scan it over and quickly decide that there is no way I am going to sign it (and I still haven’t). Not to mention that I was just scared of a 17-page contract and feeling a little outgunned when his dad is a lawyer.

So a week later, he doesn’t seem to care that I didn’t sign his dad’s contract, and he pays me for the first couple of things he needed to meet in-class deadlines.

Now, the project is looking really good, and I’m starting to think that their idea combined with my awesomeness might actually have potential. What should I do?

I feel like I am too easy to take advantage of, and I wish I knew the rules on the legal side of things much better.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=55372

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62052
Buff, that's bad luck. You are in a difficult situation but I really envy your bravery. Definitely you are commited with your project, and I hope that will be the key for your success.

Developing the app yourself it's not an option, unless you have a decent background in programming, with obviously it's not the case. Some knowledge of how things work may be worthwhile, though.

You need to find a good developer: if he or she is in the US, India or Europe is irrelevant. The problem is you can't know if someone is good developer or not, as you are not one yourself. A safe bet would be an entrepeneur with experience who could show you his past work but it will be expensive so definitely you need to raise more money.

It's easier to find an undergraduate willing to do the job but that will be like playing the russian roulette, may be it will work but may be it won't.

Something I don't understand is: what are you have been doing in the last year? If you don't code, and you don't have customers yet, Why did you quit your job?
MySQL v PostgreSQL: Which have you used and why?
MySQL v PostgreSQL: Which have you used and why?
"The Django Gal." Nice. I see a country music spinoff in YouTube any day now: "A rough and tough tale of battling Pythonistas in Tulsa."
Didn't you just basically ask the same question 6 hours ago?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184099

Also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41133

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4861
Being in startup is hard enough but now having to learn coding and fix someone else's code is not the path you should go down. I think outsourcing to get it to releasable state is very good option. Your focus should be managing the product expectations and seeking your next round of funding, not coding. In addition, think about the fact that your Django developer still owns 35% equity even after leaving you high and dry. I recommend taking a corporate attorney's advice on how you can get her to give you back that stake or start another company.
Not so fast - there are laws on the books like HIPAA that govern patient confidentiality and protectected health information. If she's selling to 'covered entities' under HIPAA they have to subscribe to a certain level of security or anonymity in their systems.

Why do you think MSFT and GOOG are so slow to enter this space? Because of all the hidden rules, regulations and pitfalls of the medical industry. Our poster probably has a good handle on this, or has been working hard to get a handle on this in the last 12 months.
I believe that human beings have a fundamental right to waste their lives on completely meaningless pursuits. It's what separates us from the animals.

Your post made a very aggressive move by defining "contributes little back to humanity" as immoral. It's not a bad definition, but it's very different from the common definition.
Well, when you've just got a couple people ...

I'm development, marketing, sales, investor relations, quality assurance, public relations, human resources, customer service and janitor. I suspect most people are in the same boat. ;-)
From the newspaper London Lite on Tue 6 May 2008: "All you have to do is say yes or no to things. It's easy." -- Singer, Joss Stone, 21, has a simple trick when it comes to managing her own career.
An Introduction to PLT Scheme with Pictures
Wow, this could get really complicated if you end up building something people want. Before it gets any further, you need to have a talk with your partner and his group members and talk about what they want to do with the site after the class is over and if they're willing to give you significant equity. If they don't give you equity, and you cease development after 20 hours, make sure that you are allowed to launch your own competing startup. You'll have to recode it, but make sure you're allowed to compete.

If they do give you equity, make sure they're not only doing it because otherwise you won't do the project, which is the situation the last crisis poster had. If every member of the group is not really happy with the arrangement, you will have problems.
Find a partner
I have been a co-founder of a few company (some even very successful) as the tech partner. My issue here is that in the last two companies, although the other partner/s seems nice, in the end he has issues. (Not reliable, liar or just passive-aggressive personality which I didn't want to deal with).
I had a few proposal to partner up. However, I become really skeptical about partners, and I try to find out about people who work with them. I know that usually friends are the best people to partner up with, but my friends are from other fields. What do you think is the best way to partner up with some or to know him (I guess time is the only way to know a person, but it also something you don't have in a startup)?
Absolutely. I live in Eastern Europe, working as a software developer in a big company, and my salary is around $2000. I would be more than happy to work for $6,900 with 0% equity as long as the founder would pay me. ;-)
Thank god population is decreasing somewhere on the planet. They should be rejoicing.