skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"How would you explain to someone why a web company needs a good technical lead (preferably co-founder) and can't just go "hire someone to write the site" ? "

Why bother (explaining to them)? If they think they can get by without a tech co founder, let them try. They may even be right (for their company) who knows? Wish them well and get on with life. Such things can't be "explained" to people who are convinced they are right. Let them run their company and one of you will learn something depending on how it turns out.
I had a former life as a web contractor, and almost half of the projects I did were from individual or small groups of founders. They were usually non-technical or had no knowledge of the web technologies they required. Even though we were able to create some really strong initial products, the businesses themselves never took off.

I think this was often because as a contractor, I finished version 1.0, and then I went off on the next project. I was available for small fixes and enhancements, but I didn't feel it was my job or my specialty to help them iterate or pivot. Without a technical person fully invested in their work, there was no real evolution to their products or their business.

Eventually I came to the point where I no longer took those kinds of contracts, because I either didn't believe in the model, or else I felt that it would only be worthwhile to contribute as a partner as opposed to a worker for hire.

So I think that technical founders are necessary, whether that involves bringing on someone with the knowledge, or having one or more non-technical founders learn enough to become a technical founder.
It's nice that you have an employer who will let you leave for two months. Most people don't.
Beginning with Windows 98, it has been more trouble than it's worth to try putting your files where you want them in the filesystem, instead of letting the application find a place for them. After I realized this, I tried putting My Documents on drive D - that didn't go so smoothly either.

I recently helped my aunt install a new scanner. She asked me how to send a document to someone. After exploring the driver software for a while, I adviced her to start the scanner wizard/pamphlet printer/photo editor/document manager, click "scan", click "email", and let Outlook take it from there.
That power can be delegated to an employee.
I must say I didnt quite understand how explanation differs from description (other than that the former encompasses the latter, but not vice-versa). What should be added to a description to make it an explanation?
Eventlet stopped being performant at around 60k iirc. (I work for UA)
Another alternative hypothesis for you to consider: there is already so much beauty, novelty, and interesting diversity in the US that it takes a slightly bigger push to get past this local maxima. No offense, but if you chopped out and stitched together all of the interesting bits of Canada you would have a land mass that was about the size of California and with a similar population; in the US we have 49 other states to tool around in as well that present a much greater diversity in terms of environment and inhabitants. We get all that without needing to use a passport, exchange currency, or try to learn to speak like a tourist in another language. It is not the same thing as real international travel, but it is a close-enough approximation for some people that it serves as a reasonable substitute.
Richest planetary system discovered
agree I think they serve two completely different purposes. Apply to YC for the exposure or mentoring or network. Apply to AngelList for funding.
That's no good! I'd like to figure out what's going on. Can you email me at aaron@structlab.com? We'll get it sorted. In the short term, once we fix your crash I can cut you an ad hoc build with an eye to getting a fix into the app store in a week.
I think the two are pretty complimentary. I am aware of several YC companies that have used Angel List to help fill out the round that they raise following YC.

We were in the winter 2010 batch and I can't say enough good things about the people (both the YC team and the YC alumni network) and the program in general.
Hosting Maven Repos on Github
I think having a good technical co-founder alleviates the need for getting as much seed money. If they have access to a lot of seed money, then they can afford to hire a designer/developer and give them a smaller chunk of the company. It's a valid way to do it. But, more and more, due to technical and social reasons, developers are realizing that they don't need access to massive amounts of money to do it themselves. The people becoming unnecessary in this equation are the co-founders you mentioned above.

So, basically there are two ways to doing a startup.

1) The "traditional" way they described above.
2) The Y-combinator method of by passing the people mentioned above and getting the hackers to found companies directly.
I often wonder why web-startups need business co-founders.

At least in HN circles, that doesn't seem to be a widespread view. The general opinion seems to be that if you're motivated and reasonably intelligent, you can work out the business stuff as you go along, as long as you can build a viable product.

That's not to say they're useless. If you need to or would like to raise money, or developing a prototype is extremely expensive and you need to get sales early, having a person dedicated to that aspect is probably a good thing.
I agree with you, but I am also hesitant to say that we are in the majority of people. When someone does something more efficiently I am all ears just like you. I don't think that the majority of people distinguish hard worker and more efficient worker though so the two get lumped into the category of "makes me look bad."
Look at the successful IT startups - they almost always have a technical founder - Gates, Wozniak, Zuckerberg, Page & Brin. They may have business co-founders such as Balmer or Jobs, but the technical side is always there.

Business founders may know the market, but they lack the vision that comes from a deep understanding of the technology. You can pay an employee to build a site, but you can't pay for the vision.

I can't think offhand of a single successful tech startup that did not have at least one tech co-founder. I know a lot of MBA morons who thought they could buy their way into a successful tech startup and floundered helplessly.
We Had No Idea (the first digital camera)
Fact check: malware did not bring down a passenger jet
You might want to try Listening-Reading method. Requires a book in both languages and audio in the target learning language. Google "Listening-Reading method"
Sure, he wasn't truly homeless. But he slept under a bridge and in a homeless shelter together with truly homeless people. How many people go to that length to try to learn something?

So even if his approach might have been flawed, I think his attempt should be applauded. Personally, I never even talk to homeless people, even if I pack all sorts of non-homeless gear.
why don't you get a hepatitis vaccine?
For a few years now, I've seen creationists suggesting that radioactive decay used to be orders of magnitude faster.
Psychological studies of this type tend only to promote superficial analysis.

A co-worker who has a gracious, giving spirit (and, hence, is unselfish) is infinitely to be preferred to one embodies the opposite traits. That is the person who will be there when times get tough and sacrifice is required. It is the person who will not dart out the door, or dodge responsibility, when something has gone wrong and people have to step up to take responsibility. It is the person who will respect you as a co-worker, who will take a personal interest in knowing that you are well, who will sympathize when you share a problem, who will support you through your trials - I am not talking here about one who is a close friend but rather of the traits exemplified by one who has a loving, kind spirit that is ever alert to show concern for the welfare of others and who is willing to sacrifice for the good of larger aims besides immediate self-interest.

That is what I think of when I think of working with "unselfish colleagues." A genuinely unselfish person is an admirable person by any measure and will usually be humble to boot, not focusing on outward show and phony braggadocio that tends to the sort of self-advancement that is the exact opposite of unselfish.

Such people are known to all of us and are universally admired, or pretty nearly so. And the character traits that underlie the core of such a person cannot be identified or isolated in a superficial study of a few college students playing an artificial game or two.

Common sense will always trump "science" in our understanding of areas such as this and will allow us to sense intuitively what we really don't need people in white lab coats to tell us.
The Four Types of VCs
> suddenly I become very interested in learning from this co-worker.

Which doesn't mean you like them, or don't resent them.

(Not you personally, but the average employee.)
Right, I mean building architects. (Some of whom get rather upset that computer tech companies use the term.)

I'm not a building architect myself, I have a computer science background. But I have several architect friends (in and around Boston, MA) and very few have had work since August, 2008.
"So, what do you do?"
The paper does mention this:

As an example, radon concentrations are known to ﬂuctuate seasonally, as has been noted in Ref. [10], and it was suggested that the decay of 222 Rn could lead to a seasonally dependent charge distribution on the experimental apparatus. However, this eﬀect is extremely small given the low counting rates that typically arise from radon background [11], and in any case, the PTB data shown in Fig. 3 were corrected for background.
Witness what happened when google results for "facebook login"[1] returned an article on readwriteweb, which confused thousands of visitors who thought that facebook had redesigned. So this is not an isolated phenomenon.

1: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_google_failed_inter...
Apologies for not publishing the EC2 Small number in the original post. It was 120,000 for the pure Java NIO implementation, but I'd like to explain a bit more on that one.

We hit 120k clients at the time the process was killed by the kernel, but had about 500mb free memory left when the OOM kill occurred. Here's why (and please correct me if I'm mistaken - I'm not a kernel expert, but have done a lot of reading in this area over the past couple months):

Small EC2 instances are restricted to running a 32-bit kernel. The 32-bit Linux kernel (2.6 series) allocates memory into three zones, with the first and smallest slot reserved for DMA (~16mb), the next portion reserved for kernel functions ("low memory", ~896mb), and the rest allocated as "high memory" for userspace. There are very limited options to configure this allocation, aside from recompiling and maintaining a custom kernel for our purposes, which we do not want to do. The Hugemem kernel allocates low memory differently, but is no longer being actively recommended (that I can see), and only makes sense for servers with > 4GB anyway.

Because TCP sockets are allocated in low memory, and its size is relatively fixed, 120k sockets will exhaust low memory despite about 500mb of high memory being free and unallocated. At this point, the kernel has no memory left allocated to itself to do work, so the OOM killer steps in and shoots the process.

The 64-bit kernel makes no distinction between "low" and "high" memory, and does not suffer this problem. We switched to an EC2 Large instance in order to avoid this limitation and properly test the service. In the end, if Amazon were to offer a 64-bit Small instance, it would be ideal for our application and would push our cost per client even lower, though it's currently at a very acceptable spot.

While the metrics in this post focus on connections per node, our ultimate goal involves both maximizing the number of connections per instance, in addition to minimizing the number of instances required (essentially, we want to [safely] maximize density across the board). The sentence you quote refers to this cumulative goal rather than the particular comparison of implementations and instance types. I should've been more clear.

Anyhow, pardon this omission from the original post. At some point, I might write a bit more about the TCP/kernel-level issues we ran into if anyone's interested.
The pro move for non-technical founders who have financing before a technical co-founder is to hire an employee as a 'technical founder' - but with a comp package that has more (greater than 0) salary and less equity than a pre-financing co-founder.
Direct link to my answer on Quora (the above links to a note on my blog about Quora): http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-the-Django-web-f...
I wouldn't mind if they were in zones 4 or 5, but it still doesn't add much choice. Tesco Extra stores aren't exactly small, but they still don't have much choice in the grocery side.

If a different store had the range, I'd go there instead. But each store targeting a slice of the demographic pie has very much the same limited range with a tiny bit of diversity outside of store brands.
I think this is a variation of the "should the project manager of a software project understand software" question, which I have thought quite a lot about over the years.

The answer is yes because:

1. As mentioned above, it enables them to hire well

2. They can independently assess effort estimates

3. They can act as a more effective shield between the team and the users/customers/management

4. They can effectively referee technical arguments within the team

5. Problems are best solved not by throwing resources at the problem, but by intelligently rescoping, recasting, or refactoring. You need to understand software to do that. I think this is the most important item on the list.

6. Even sane well-managed projects have "all hands on deck" crunchtimes. The manager of a software project should be able to make themselves useful - if not code, they can debug, beta-test, document, manage releases, etc.

7. People give you their best work when they respect you. Technical people respect people who understand them,.
Only if the employee is very good and sufficiently dedicated to stand up against decisions by the founder(s) which are bad for technical reasons. It's hard enough for us techies to hire people like that; for non-techies it's basically a lottery. And that's if they don't actively select for the wrong traits. It's likely they'll focus on people who talk the talk, do as they're told, or have a business background but have dabbled with some techy stuff, etc.
If you can't build your own idea, don't expect others to do it just how you envision it. Another issue is one many programmers will find familiar. How many times as you're working through a project do you find the original specs don't work? If you can't build it, how would you know your idea is flawed.
I have the Schwab FIA card and the HSBC Orchard card which are 2% on every purchase. Amex is 3% on gas/travel/restaurant. Discover is 5% on gas/other-stuffs sometime.

Sometime there are promotion on Amex gift cards with 2% to 4% rebates. I would buy those with my Schwab card, getting effective 4% to 6% rebates. Edit: Funny story, I used this $3000 Amex gift card in Starbucks and the cashier said someone was really nice to you to give you that. I smiled. Yeah, I'm nice to myself.
Note the hundreds of ships parked off the coast of Singapore. That's the US economy anchored out there.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1212013/Reve...
The author wants to know why toddlers who are surrounded by a language and can never speak to anyone about anything as long as they live unless they learn it outperform high school students who don't need it to communicate with their friends and spend one class period learning about it (and that instruction not necessarily even given in the target language)? Well, I have a theory on that.

Also, the previous post the author links to claims that it is remarkable that children learn language at a rate of 1 word every two hours? Seriously? I just learned a word of Greek in under two minutes. Kalimera!

Really, Khatzumoto of All Japanese All The Time says it best:

"It is a poisonous combination of ignorance, arrogance and innumeracy to expect to have even passable Japanese WITH AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LESS EFFORT than even a typical Japanese toddler has put in."

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/cute-girls-mathema...
Web scam hits iTunes and Paypal users
there is already so much beauty, novelty, and interesting diversity in the US that it takes a slightly bigger push to get past this local maxima

That statement though is illustrative of my point, though. Canadians and/or Australians will either view their country as boring or too large, and so they head overseas. Americans don't.

I don't think this speaks so much to the actual fact than it does to the way one looks at the situation.
They don't as long as the start-up isn't tech driven, if you're building something that's fairly standard and doesn't require any complex tech behind it then you can go to a webdev company and they'll build it for you.

However if tech is a core component of your offering (which it is for most YC companies) then product development needs to be guided by technological complexity as well as user demand. Which means you need someone who grasps both the tech and business side of things. And if someone fits into that category why would they work for someone-else's startup for a relatively small wage rather than working for a more profitable company (higher pay; more security) or starting their own company ? - essentially offering significant equity is the only way to hire these people. Hence they need to be co-founders.
There's a standing feature request about this that could use more attention: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017933
This is quite the definition of "unselfish". When I think unselfish, I think of the guy who steps in to help you out with something and doesn't ask for any credit or imply a quid pro quo. I don't think of glory hogs who go out of their way to make a spectacle of their work ethic.
Interesting, but I wonder why they didn't take a look at Erlang - I mean this is pretty much what it was meant to do.
"Going back to take another look at the decay data from the Brookhaven lab, the researchers found a recurring pattern of 33 days. It was a bit of a surprise, given that most solar observations show a pattern of about 28 days – the rotation rate of the surface of the sun.

The explanation? The core of the sun – where nuclear reactions produce neutrinos – apparently spins more slowly than the surface we see."

This sounds a lot like they are trying to fit an explanation to their data. Surely they would need some sort of secondary evidence for this kind of conclusion -- especially considering the topic at hand is brand new and unexplored.
Eclipse has autocomplete and documentation built in as well, right?
And right now 4 of the top 5 are positive! It'd be interesting what the proportion is in a bigger sample size over time, though.
Still, creating a throwaway account does present a certain barrier. In any case, this has been discussed to death previously.
dying? no. growing? no, not really, either. or, at least, nowhere near the pace that it had to get to where it is now.
Say what? Atomic clocks are based on hyperfine transitions--electrons jumping between energy levels. That's an entirely different process than beta decay, which does involve neutrinos.
"I co-run a company. We break into banks."

I agree; the words "startup", "entrepreneur", and "small business" are all freighted. Just say "company".
"what can a co-founder do that an employee cant ?"

Communicate with employees and foster trust in a leadership role.
Linkedin. Hoffman had a background in tech firms but only in project management rather than doing any development himself.
Basic on MSX

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
r.i.p. yahoo search (2004-2010)
It's not so simple as 'developed world' vs 'developing world'. There's an awesome Hans Rosling ted talk [1] about that. Here's an quote from it:

"I find my experience from 20 years of Africa is that the seemingly impossible is possible. Africa has not done bad. In 50 years they've gone from a pre-Medieval situation to a very decent 100-year-ago Europe, with a functioning nation and state. I would say that sub-Saharan Africa has done best in the world during the last 50 years. Because we don't consider where they came from. It's this stupid concept of developing countries which puts us, Argentina and Mozambique together 50 years ago, and says that Mozambique did worse. We have to know a little more about the world. I have a neighbor who knows 200 types of wine. He knows everything. He knows the name of the grape, the temperature and everything. I only know two types of wine -- red and white. (Laughter) But my neighbor only knows two types of countries -- industrialized and developing. And I know 200, I know about the small data. But you can do that."

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_o...
> Theory of CS is same as Mathematics of Computation

And Mathematics is the same as Logic, and Logic is a branch of Philosophy, which is ultimately concerned with English (and other natural languages), so the only things you can study are literature and stamp collecting.
When you learn how to ride a bicycle, it is really hard. You fall, the entire thing seems almost impossible, it requires a lot of concentration and perhaps even leads to frustration. Once you learn how to ride the bicycle however, you sort of work on automatism.

If you have a routine in the morning, you do not need to stop and think what you are going to do. You get up, have a shower, brush your teeth, you know what you are going to do with your day, so you can keep the focus and attention for other new things which inevitably occur within the structure.

For example, reading hacker news is a distinctive activity, and it is the same activity any time you do it, but what you read is often new things.

I doubt I have explained myself well, but basically people get used to things because that is the most efficient way of operating. Learning how to write for example is a very hard thing, once you do learn however, it happens almost automatically. So too with such complex things as you mentioned. Finding a job is relatively hard, once you find the job however and settle in, you operate more efficiently.

I have been thinking very hard about how this can be broken. It happens all the time, we change habits all the time. As to why some are easy to break and some others are not I am not sure. I think there is this ingredient which I call conviction. It is not knowing that something is bad, nor understanding or realising, but an absolute conviction, that is absolute certainty that something is bad and damaging to yourself which seems to make breaking certain habits easier, even very easy to break.

When however you would like to do it, but know that it is bad, although you are absolutely certain that it is bad, it still is hard because although you might think you are absolutely certain, there is doubt, because you like doing the thing, and doubt makes breaking a habit very hard. In such instances, the only way I know to break the habit is by pure strength of will.
Client Fragmentation: Apps making software more expensive
In the billions of years since life began, evolution never took a life form, put it on the moon, and brought it back. I doubt mankind can do it "before this decade is out".

Practical nanotech will inevitably harness the forces of life that already exist; why wouldn't it? Saying it's not real Drexlerian nanotech may be true, but it will also be a very uninteresting thing to say. Who cares? What's happening and what's real is what matters, and what's really happening has definitely started and isn't stopping anytime soon.