skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure one person, after hearing your idea, ran home and immediately started working on a competitor.

Seriously though, the "startup guy" doesn't know much. Stealth mode rarely is useful — more useful is getting information and feedback from potential customers, suggestions from other (knowledgable) startup people, and getting the word out about your potential product to encourage critiques and even more feedback. Keep up the good work.
Sounds like you do a lot of emailing. Email is a tough way to communicate. Have you considered trying another medium? (chat, texting, phone calls....etc.)
And for every woman like you there are 10 more women who are stay-at-home mom's and/or just like Penelope's characterization. The exceptional cases do not invalidate the general rule.
Was this not the basic plot of the latest Bond flick?
> You really should be talking face-to-face as much as possible and I do not understand why you are sending e-mails in the first place. It sounds like you two live and work far away from each other and in that case I believe you are doomed anyhow.

This is the biggest red flag I saw. You guys should be talking voice or meeting face-to-face more often. You will not solve personality issues via email that neither of you have a lot of time to spare for.

If the OP doesn't make at least a serious attempt to re-connect with his founder then he's at least half of the problem here.

Make time to work with your cofounder vocally, in-person if possible. It's too easy to dismiss concerns via email.

He's counting on you and you both have to put up with a lot. If you can make it through this by stepping back and realizing that it takes two to communicate, then the business has a chance. You might have to try harder to communicate with him but can you honestly say you've tried your absolute best to make it work? Are you going to let communication breakdown without trying as hard as you can to fix it?

Things will get harder as you go on-- this kind of a problem isn't a great sign either way, but if you don't try your hardest the bad sign may very well be about you. Be absolutely convinced you did everything in your power to compensate for his weaknesses (and yours).

If your heart isn't in it enough to try your damnedest, then perhaps that's the problem and not the communication issue. I'd still try to address that because it doesn't sound like it can get much worse if you're considering leaving.
Trillions?

When was the last time you saw a climate science postdoc driving a Maybach?
Seems the article doesn't have problems only with software engineers, this is from one of the comments:

Whoever wrote this has no idea how judge positions are made and filled. In most jurisdictions, the number of judicial seats is fixed by statute or constitution. Growth in number of seats is always relatively slow. Judgeships are not a growth industry and never have been.
Secondly, no one is sitting around one day watching TV and says, "hmmm, I want to be a judge." Judges come exclusively from the world of experienced lawyers. In California, for example, to be a judge one needs at least 10 years of legal experience. For many attorneys (who are already in the private or public sectior), especially litigators, a judgeship is a natural step up in their career around the mid-40s. Turnover in judgeships occurs when older judges retire or leave the bench to go into the private arbitration world, which can be very lucrative.
The pollutants should choke on their own toxic waste.
"While computer software engineers, the guys who write the software, are projected to be among the fastest-growing jobs, rising 32 percent over the next 10 years, demand for computer programmers, the guys who write the instructions for a computer to use that software, is expected to shrink 3 percent in the next decade."

This doesn't make sense.
I'm in. Bring it on.
Well, yes.

Linus Pauling was a scientist, but not a biologist, thus his nutty Vitamin C theories.
We've had bacteria that can digest nylon production byproducts since 40 years after nylon was invented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria .

After 20 years of observing E. Coli in a medium that had lots of citrate, one (of twelve) population became able to digest citrate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_exp... .

There were only about 400 years between the Medieval Warm Period http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period and the Little Ice Age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age , but Europe still has a perfectly good ecosystem.

The finches on the Galapagos Islands have been observed closely over a long period, and seen to change from year to year in response to climate (and therefore food supply) variations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Rosemary_Grant .

I think you're seriously overestimating the time needed for ecosystems to adapt, and for lineages of organisms to change significantly.
Let's face it, what works is a teacher with a blackboard and a room of students at desks. Nothing else has ever produced better results. I see constant attempts to take the effort out of teaching and learning, and they all fail.

Learning is like exercise. If you want to get strong, there are no shortcuts, you have to work at it. The same with learning.
Read Ruby 1.9: Free Ebook About the Ruby Programming Language
Have you directly brought these issues to his attention? If you haven't...

I'd list the items that are bothering you most and how'd you like to have them resolved. Maybe run it by a trusted friend - someone who will be directly honest with you. Then, break the list into two categories - can live with it and can't live with it. For the former, make like a duck - let them roll off your back. Just shrug your shoulders, roll your eyes, and say 'Oh that <cofounder name> is silly'. For the later, I'd look to directly address your partner in a manner that is meaningful to him. If you come to some consensus, set ways to monitor it to see if things are improving.

After this, you will have accomplished 2 things. One, you took ownership of the situation in a mature and constructive manner. This helps, especially if things don't work out, since you know you gave it your best (read: less regrets). Two, you'll have a better idea of how likely things are to improve.

If you have done this and things are not working, then look at the options. Is it worth sticking it out? If not, list your options. Often times, the black and white options (quit cold turkey and stick it out) are not the best. Consider options like decreasing your role, decreasing his, bringing in a third party (e.g. a design guy), having distinct boundaries of responsibilities, or you taking over the design element.

If it is time to part ways, I'm sure you'll do it in a professional manner that doesn't burn bridges.

Best wishes.
Implementing the Gilbert–Johnson–Keerthi distance algorithm
Be careful-- We all know from experience that there's two sides to every story. The other guy's perspective could just as easily make it appear as if the OP has the personality issue.

The truth is that every founder is different and every one of them has issues. The successful team is going to be able to compensate for each other's weaknesses.

The key here is to really step up the communication-- if you do that and still nothing works out, I'd say only then start the plan to leave.

The day you believe in your heart of hearts that you did your best, but it wasn't enough to compensate, then you've fulfilled your obligation to the partner. I don't sense the OP has yet tried his true best-- or else he'd know there isn't more he could do to make it work.

Would you want him to bail/cut-out on you because he felt like you two couldn't communicate? At least without coming to you first to figure out a way to improve the communication issues?
It's not just going to be a simple rise in temperature, it's likely that other things will change, like rainfall patterns or air currents. If the jet stream shifts, the UK might get colder. Would Siberia really be more habitable if it's a mosquito-infested swamp all year long?
This will never take off because Google or carmakers can not assume more liability for accidents than hundreds of millions of drivers can. Technically, cool. From a practical legal perspective, a non-starter.
As I have written before, you can prove anything as long as you can leave out any disconfirming evidence.
Has anyone else read Daemon?
Excellent.

Is it just me, or does JS seem like its fast becoming the new object code?
apt-get alone doesn't do the necessary bootstrapping. The ubuntu upgrade manager should have a special upgrade option that appears, which does a bit more than a plain apt-get and does the trick.
Correlation, causation, everybody's heard that old saw. I certainly didn't say what you claim I said. What I said was: Few other fields do VC the way this one does. By which I mean, most fields don't do VC.

At all.

VC is almost purely a tech/bio/med thing. Most small businesses - which is what startups are, by the way - take loans. That's how it usually works.
I kind of agree, actually, I didn't need to throw that in. My point was not to whine about being marked down, but rather to comment that I'm surprised that a community of people as sharp as this one didn't agree that there seemed to be something major missing from the earlier article.
Astonished that this was voted down:

> what does he bring to the table?

is a very good question I didn't notice anyone else asking.

You talk about the negatives, and seem to imply there aren't many positives, but are there any?

Another thing I didn't notice anyone else saying, is maybe you could take a cooling out period. Back away for a little bit (tell him you're doing this of course) and see what happens and how you feel if you get a little "space" for a week or two. I bet you'll get some clarity about what you want to do, one way or the other.
Hi Marilyn. Awesome. But by "pre-traction" are you referring to List Central? Because, by my definition, that isn't a product. Bootstrapping to me means you have to charge.

It's not that hard to find women heading up traditional web 2.0 properties, like social networks and social media tools (that don't charge).
Sorry, I misunderstood your use case for the bug-fix branch. Yes, you likely wouldn't want a named branch for that.

I use local bookmarks for this. It lets you think of it as a branch locally (it's really a floating tag), but doesn't (automatically) get pushed out.
Another case of "Aging scientist turns into a crank". See also: Linus Pauling, Freeman Dyson, James Watson, etc.
Kid hacks news
Quite possibly the nerdiest Neodymium magnet site ever
I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like it could make some things easier. I look forward to using it.
This hasn't happened for other transportation methods so I don't see why cars should be different.

Early planes crashed more often than not and even today we get at least one huge crash per year, highly covered by media but no one suggests that we should ban planes even after they were used on 9/11 to destroy twin towers.

Busses crash, trains get derailed etc.

I think you're painting humanity with overly pessimistic brush as if reacting in the worst possible way is the only way can possibly react.

A vision for a safer, more efficient transportation is very compelling and something that many people and plenty of media will get behind and advocate.
I pictured a data center full of nothing but wall outlets.
You're jumping the gun here. Two prerequisites must be met before you consult a lawyer:

1. You've exhausted all other options; and

2. You decided that what you're fighting for has enough monetary value to justify the time and money you'll spend exploring and pursuing legal remedy.

Of course it's worth knowing your position. If you have no contract it's a mess. If you don't have founder vesting it's a mess. He can walk away with half but then again so can you.

You can take the lack of such formalities as pretext: say to your cofounder you meed some structure. Say you need founder vesting and clear division of responsibilities. Make yourself CEO and then you can decide who designs the website. If necessary you can fire him then (without cause he'll still end up with a piece but that can be better than half).

Or simply talk to him about your grievances and concerns.

If those conversations fail just wAlk away.
This is one of the coolest things I've seen on HN recently. Thank you for sharing :)
so what?

I think the feeling you get from a design means a lot for the average consumer.

do you know for certain that it results in increased profit? Have you tested it?

No, we haven't A/B tested it. However, we know scientifically and from customer feedback that the dark background with light text works well in low-light environments, which is what most operation centers are like. If you don't know what an operation center is, here are some good example pics from Google Image search: http://www.google.com/images?q=operations+center&oe=utf-...
>The consensus of scientists for many decades was that the earth was flat. as we well know, the earth is not flat

This is such an annoying canard to keep hearing repeated.

The earliest Greek philosophers realized the Earth was round. It was pretty much a done deal in the western world after that.

To be honest, it's pretty obvious. Look at ships going off into the distance slowly dip under the horizon line. Look at the phases of the moon.
IMO the simplest way is:

$ /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /bin/chmod +x /bin/chmod

ELF files run by manually launching the dynamic loader don't require the executable bit.
Agreed, but once a company is already making lots of money I tend to drop the "bootstrapping" adjective to refer to their present state of operation. :)
There are a few women in the NYC startup scene who are "bootstrapping" their companies for months (or longer) until they have revenue or are ready to raise funds.

Your speaker list looks great. And if you are only looking for women coders, who have built successful product companies, that have never taken VC then I agree they are hard to find! But keep in mind that there are not many startup teams that raise VC where there is a founding female coder either.
I get the need for a local server if you need low latency/high bandwidth and/or lots of storage. However, for what percentage of those use cases would the user not be happier spending a bit more for something beefier? Why is the form factor so appealing? Even those in a NYC studio could find somewhere to stash a larger server. If the device is being used to serve media, it will have a bunch of external drives dangling from it anyway.

The managed vs. unmanaged question seems important but mostly orthogonal to locality and form factor. And, Dropbox has proven that the local/remote Hybrid is valuable (along with management). Although the form factor is novel, I don't think it's significant for those who only care about the benefits of a piece of technology.

Maybe the world needs more managed services for the individual/household? I posted a "Tell HN" a few months ago about my desire for a managed router, so I guess I've already made this claim:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160585
There is also http://github.com/cloudhead/http-console which is based on node.js.
earlier discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667951
And the houses. And the farms. Are you suggesting we should replace those, too?

Change for the sake of change is -not- good.

I get that this article is asking for ways to update education, but the reason behind the question is wrong.
This is exactly how I feel, and I think it plays right into the "Advanced Cruise Control" perspective. A mode that one might use on highways (whether on a long trip or stuck in stop-and-go traffic), where there are much lower risks of unexpected pedestrians/bicyclists/blind driveways/etc (and thus lower liability risks).

Also, I have to add that this is the kind of research that I love that Google is doing. I might not love everything they do, but I don't think there are more than a handful of corporations actually pushing things forward with far-out, jump-into-the-deep-end projects the way they are.
I'm apparently the oddball that didn't mind the one thing per rapid slide for reading style.

It reminds me quite a bit of things like the speed reading firefox plugin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuszcoVL3lA#t=2m10s
The people don't care.

However, that's just the way I like it. Why? Because it doesn't target the businessmen, but the consumers.

Angry consumers mean Switching. Switching mean market share. Market share mean money.

I am like the small new publishing house in the 19th century. These publishing house make their living from legal piracy of British literature. You know what? It was a boon for the American public. The American people can learn how to read cheaply. The price are mere cents in America as opposed to dollars back in Britain. It was excellent public policy.

You know who don't like it? American writers. You see, British literature dominated the literacy market. So they get out-competed instead.

Well, of course, I don't sell pirated software on the side. The analogy ain't perfect.

Sure, the media giants are enemies of liberty. However it doesn't mean that they are smartest cabal in the world. Far from it.
In the USA this is true but European countries have already given the green light to a somewhat watered-down version of self-driving cars on public roads. The USA will eventually follow I would think.
Why not ask for feedback on HN?
"What would you do?"

First I would get on his case, tell him the website needs to be updated because the service will not grow into a real business in its current 1990s design. Show him websites that I feel are a good standard and what I expect our site to be like. If he can't do that then it is the wrong partnership for me.

I would stop working on the project(in relation to his ideas/feedback/requests), tell him I need the website updated a few decades or I'm on my way.

and then plan do the whole thing on my own while keeping an eye out for another co-founder with some technical ability aswell as business interests.

-----------

You should take the positives out of this project in its current state. You have the technical side down and you know you can get customers to pay for the service.
Yeah, I checked out the known issues and found nothing that would impact me. I did do-update-release earlier today and it took about an hour while I did other things.

So far I've had no problems, but also haven't noticed many improvements.
Personally I love driving. I hate being a passenger. I can see this being useful for some people, but not useful for me.
Except in this case, the transport protocol's job is to prevent packet loss rather than correct for it.
"The problem is that it wasn't really air tight....."

So the problem was that you did not use enough duct tape.
hacker news isn't a reflective sample of the real world? neither is standing on the street corner but it at least might get you out of the tech/startup community.
I think this all depends... I don't know that there is much that can compete with face to face interaction with a targeted "end user." Not sure he got much of that in this case but I think I personally would prefer that "real" interaction with a targeted client in an early stage.
Totally get your definition of bootstrapping. But it is also in common usage in a much looser sense -- at least i hear it used that way quite a lot!

Good luck Marilyn!
This is such good news -- probably some of the best tech news so far this year -- that I keep looking for problems. It's too good.

So, although I'm hugely supportive of this, and I think it's possible to have fully autonomous vehicles within a decade, I want to see it. In production. Then I'll believe. Up until that point it's like one of those science stories where it works in the lab but nobody has any idea whether or not it will work with humans. There is a long, long way to go from the mechanics of AI and auto-driving and the real thing happening. It's not just the technology. There are about 17 large groups of people and organizations that need to be re-aligned before this would ever fly, even if it were perfect. This could easily end up like pot legalization, where it's obvious for years that the current laws are idiotic but it takes an entire lifetime to get the politicians on the same page as the public.

I'd love to go all blue-sky on this, going on and on about the massive changes true auto-drive would entail. But instead I'm opting to be very cautious about separating press releases from real products and benefits.

(Still, it's awesomely cool)
And wouldn't they get pulled over, just as they would if they broke the speed limit in a normal car?
Non binding, sure, but hardly meaningless. Currently ACTA is in the negotiations stage. Mexico's congress has the power to reject treaties, so this resolution means that no matter what is negotiated it will not be accepted by Mexico.
I disagree.

Throughout japanese media and culture there's also the thought that "if I just try hard enough, I'll succeed" despite lack of training. This is demonstrably false, and similar to giving gold stars for effort.
Congratulations on getting covered on RWW: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/friendshuffle_stumbleup...
I forgot to inform you at least that I know Charles Dicken do want copyright.

However, some British authors are making a killing off the American publishers, sometime even more money than they were paid in royalty rate for years.
mkrecny, how would you rate this method of getting feedback?
“Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.” — Howard Aiken
The .NET version of Isolator is nearly as expensive and sells very well. $1200 is equal to employing a C++ developer for 2 or 3 days in US/Western Europe.
Joose is an open source "object system" built with JavaScript on top of JS which allows one to employ classes, modules, roles (like mixins) and a number of other programming concepts found in Ruby, Smalltalk and other popular OO languages. It was inspired Perl's Moose system.

Check it out!

http://joose.it/

current release of ver 3: http://openjsan.org/doc/s/sa/samuraijack/Joose/3.012/lib/Joo...

There's a nice side-by-side comparison of what it looks like to build some classes with and without Joose here:

http://openjsan.org/doc/s/sa/samuraijack/Joose/3.012/lib/Joo...

I'm quite frequently plugging Joose in my comments here on HN, but I don't want to give the impression I'm just reflexively "advertising" for it anytime someone mentions JavaScript. As JS continues to rise in popularity and importance for both client-side (mobile, browser, etc.) and server-side apps, adoption of "power tools" like Joose can help one to avoid "re-inventing the wheel" over and over again.

Something similar is Coglan's JS.Class, which is modeled very closely on Ruby:

http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/
"If you don’t understand a single word i just wrote, please remember, we are geeks."

Hum. An SEO discovers HTTP pipelining and gets all excited about it. yawns
Not sure how Poll Everywhere could be considered a spam operation...
No mention of Jakob Nielson?

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
This is great! If you are looking for a business idea, I'd be willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for a private version of this. As a developer, I'd use it for reporting bugs in web apps that I develop (and I'd encourage biz and product people within the organization to do the same).
Naw, great idea and approach - gotta make sure you do it properly though (I did market research as a student) otherwise results are useless, so if you haven't done that before just check out a few samples and copy their structure (you'll get a bazillion times better results).

And yeh, if your idea is any good then:

a. You're doubtless not the first person to have had it
b. As soon as you publicly execute a heap of people will copy you

So it doesn't matter if everyone knows it, the main thing is whether you can do it better than anyone else... see Zynga :)
500GB bandwidth included.