skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems that there's some kind of happy medium to be struck here. If you want to learn how to code, great, and it's something good to know if you want to work on a startup regardless.

Yet it's unlikely you're going to master a given language within a few months, so there may still be room to seek out someone who has had experience with it for a long time.

tl;dr Learn how to code, but there's still a time to work with longstanding hackers.
Just sticking together. They don't have to have the same mindset. E.g. Jobs and Wozniak.
Another aspect we have to consider is title inflation. It's no problem nowadays to buy a BA, MA or even doctoral degrees - it dont know how and if those fake degrees have been counted in the statistics.
Apple didn't stop piracy, but they did something almost as amazing: get the average person to spend money on software. Just look at the anemic PC software sections in any Best Buy. The average person hardly buys any PC software. Maybe a virus scanner and this year's edition of QuickTax. The App Store changed that and opened the market to any developer with $99 to spare. Thanks to the App Store and it's clones, one guy in his basement can now reach millions of customers without negotiating with manufacturers, retailers, or mobile network operators.

This is a matter of preference, but I'm glad that the App Store reinvigorated client apps. I don't see web apps as an inherent good. The best web app interfaces today barely approximate the usability of the desktop software I had on my PC 15 years ago. I'm not thrilled about the ads, either. I'll happily pay for client apps, and I'm thankful the app stores make that possible.
If you learned to program in "some weeks" you are a genius.

Just a couple of hints: don't store your users passwords, don't trust inputs from your users and enjoy yourself.
It also heavily depends on what kind of state you're maintaining, whether any of it needs to be persisted or shared across connections, and how much CPU load the processing outside of pure connection handling will produce. Having a suitable scalability mechanism may be worth more than reduction of per-connection-event CPU cycles. (scaling beyond more than one core, scaling beyond more than one server)
Fact is Eclipse is an industry standard: Adobe Flex Builder, Aptana, Zend Studio, all Google tools (gwt, android, app engine), Pydev, CDT, Bioclipse.

It even has a marketplace: http://marketplace.eclipse.org/

Netbeans is just a desperate attempt to not lose control, still slow, still unbearable L&F on both Linux and OS X. And have you noticed Oracle has a competing product? Versus Eclipse that's backed by a non-profit with lots of third party contribs?

I guess they'll get sued sooner or later.
Lesson 1:

Get a big stack of paper, pencils, pens, tracing paper, markers, erasers. Start drawing. Print out stuff you like. Put tracing paper on top and redraw it. Draw every day.
90p ~~ $180... For a single box?! I can get them cheaper at Staples, though not in bulk. Who's your supplier?
According to an email I received from an Amazon representative the Free Trial applies to accounts created from 10/21 or later.

"I’ve researched your account and have confirmed your account is eligible for the AWS Free Usage Tier. Though the promotion does not actually start until November 1st accounts created from 10.21.2010 or later are eligible."
FogBugz has a Startup plan that is free for 2 users. And like other users said, why not pay for good software? If it saves each employee $30 of time, or makes each of our team $30 more productive, than it's worth it.
I'm nuts about user experience. I wanted to create software from a UX perspective but I didn't have a job where I could bully people around to make things for me. I also didn't have any friends who were programmers. Basically, no one was going to do it for me and I didn't have cash to hire anyone.

So, about five years ago, I learned how to program.

And the really fun thing I discovered is that I enjoy programming about as much as I enjoy creating user experience. The passions become entwined in way that's meaningful and fun.

No matter how far you take it, understanding programming is going to pay off if you want work in the software business, startup or not. You'll often be able to participate in the problem solving process alongside your technical colleagues, understand when you're being bullshitted, and maybe even prototype things to prove your arguments.

And maybe you'll think it's fun. As long as you're comfortable taking a few years to get there, this is great advice.
memcached doesn't do replication as far as I know. It will just have to do some requests second time. It still beats re-calculation on each request.
I've been using Solr for some pretty heavy lifting, and it's incredibly impressive. Rock solid, extremely advanced analysis and search capabilities, and the performance is amazing if it's on suitable gear. Time invested in learning it pays off big.

I'm familiar with the enterprise black boxes you're talking about - I probably know the specific one you're tormented by. I've seen the licensing fees alone lead large companies to drop rows from their front-end stores to avoid going into a new pricing tier (takes balls of steel to charge by the record, I must say), and I've seen competitors fold at least in part due to the expense of paying for the thing.

A lot of startup folks getting excited about NoSQL seem to have passed over Lucene/Solr completely, and I think it's worthy of much more consideration than it gets. It's mature, it's fast, and the people working on it live and breathe the problem space.

There are undoubtedly devs out there badly needing powerful analysis and search to execute on their vision, but who will end up suffering with half-baked solutions for lack of even hearing about Solr, much less giving it a try.
Keeping it in Perspective
So. Fix it.

Not sure what your personality mismatch was, but I would tend to believe it's something you could alter/improve/change if you consciously wanted to.

Of course, if you REALLY can't get over the "sting" of a simple rejection, then you might find that the never-ending stream of "no"'s and doubts you run across in trying to get something off the ground would be more than you were able to deal with.
Stop worrying about the press - watch the airbnb startup school video and listen t othe advice he was given: go to your customers, build the base from them.

http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383
"gateways, processors, and PCI compliance"

These are not that complex and should be well-understood by any would-be entrepreneur. We are writing our own recurring billing system right now for our startup www.wellhubstudios.com, using Auth.net CIM. Auth.net even offers recurring billing themselves.
Another obvious issue with the services you mention such as Chargify et al is that they charge a higher rate for each transaction than most other Merchant Account providers, sometimes 1-2% more per transaction which, if your trying to
run a viable business based on margins it is something to greatly consider. The Transaction fee we got was ridiculously low compared to what these "recurring billing" apps (which surely will reduce your headache) are offering.
Off to make some money.....
I am sort of confused. If you ask them to improve performance do they just ignore you?

I know with the current project I am on, we have a very specific cpu and memory usage requirement. This specific requirement is silly in what the customer demanded, but it is a requirement and it is our job to make it happen. There is no option to ignore it.

Don't give your developers an option. Set specific goals based on your target environment. The product is not ready to ship until it meets those goals. At the same time you have to be reasonable. Your goals must be based on what the applications are actually doing. If they are very graphics heavy, you may need faster hardware than if its just a standard office style app. Giving them slower hardware will never make impossible things possible.
>> It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.

The money in your hand only has the value it has because we collectively instill a value in it. This is true, isn't it? I mean it really is just numbers and ink on pieces of paper and electrons over a bunch of wires. But if it were just the ink and and numbers and electrons then I could write a few zeros on a piece of fancy paper and become rich overnight.

But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created. So "your money" (see? I can do quotes too) is really society's money. Moreover we collectively agree that the government allocates a portion of all of our earnings and recognize that this happens nowadays in a mainly un-coerced fashion. Sorry it inconveniences you. Maybe we can argue about waste without bringing your pet ideology into it.
I'd probably go with node.js for this task - more manageable. Twisted has a huge learning curve.
Yes, because in most startups there's a point where things seem hopeless. At that point the startup itself has no power to hold you together, because its expected value is (or appears to be) zero. You need a strong friendship to keep you together. E.g. I know for sure there were lots of times when Rtm thought Viaweb was never going to amount to anything, and only worked on it because I asked him to.
Eventmachine can juggle connections fairly well, but the common MRI problems kick in once you start actually doing something with these connections. Namely heap fragmentation followed by unbounded heap growth which results in stop&go operation during gc runs - until the host eventually swaps to death.

Other ruby impls (REE, JRuby or rubinius) might be better in those regards. But I wouldn't trust MRI with a long running process that might get under anything but the lightest pressure.
I might go up to 100,000,000 families and ask them to pay one penny so that 100 waiters can clearly explain what's on the menu...
It really does make sense to move non Apple stuff out of the system updater, and into the app store updater. Flash and Java being the two main items.

OTOH, it would make even more sense to wait until the app store exists.
It's not something that sticks out like a Flash video, so it's easy to miss. I use ClickToFlash so it sticks out for me.

I agree that those new font solutions are nice, but they're also just that, new.
I'd say the main thing is control.

Me and a friend, both non-technical, started a service oriented company 6 years ago.

Now we're switching our focus to SaaS and even have some $$ to pay contractors / employees...

But how do we evaluate talent?

How do we delegate?

How do we understand (much less give input) on technical decisions?

What happens when (not if) they leave and move on?

Being vulnerable to and leaving that much decision-making responsibility to 'employees' who aren't invested like you are is a recipe for failure - entrepreneurs make things happen and get things done, but how much of that can you do if you don't understand the core of what your business does - software?
I don't think I'd call it FUD so much as a non-visible use of Flash.

HTML5 and jQuery audio players are another example that often discretely relies on Flash as a fallback.
What are your thoughts the two founders being identical twin brothers?
The platform provider should always be responsible for installation/upkeep whenever possible. In retrospect it seems a bit odd that OSX ever included Flash in the first place. Adding that extra distribution layer may give the user the illusion that Apple is responsible for keeping Flash updated. No one wants that responsibility. Not even Adobe. As far as I can tell the only way to keep Flash updated is to check Adobe's website every so often. I didn't hear a peep from Apple or Adobe about 10.1 being released. No automatic update here.
Personally I'd go with simple Python WSGI app or node.js app. Actually even PHP can handle 150 reqs/sec (your load at 150 users with 1 req/s) if used as nginx+php-fpm+eaccelerator. By my measures it can actually do about 1000 reqs/sec.
By Building something? That's what I'm trying right now, I'm building an early prototype that I can then show. I hope it will work. My friend like my ideas but they are a cautious bunch, they need what I mean first.
I had a CS background but didn't do any coding for about 17years so the basics were already here...

Thanks for your tips.
I could see this kind of interface being extremely useful for folks who do any sort of 3D art. Being able to rotate and manipulate without arcane keystrokes would be a boon for quickly sculpting 3D objects.
I've used VideoJS (which I discovered here a few weeks ago) for HTML5 <video> with Flash fallback. Works like a charm.

http://videojs.com
Anything by Ian Piumarta is worth reading, and this is no exception. http://piumarta.com/

Also, for those interested in minimalism, VPRI has a project to recreate the entire computing world with 20k lines of source (logic, os, compilers, gui, etc.) They're doing a very interesting and very swell job so far.
This appears to be related to that project.
Think you need to use the scroll wheel on your mouse.
not a separate process, but it will continue to try each customer. any customers not billed on that day will be retried the next day if not manually before then.
I'm aware of what they are (and in fact have one myself), but my point was that they're distinct from Ph.D.'s (so the title is misleading), and they can span across a broad spectrum of fields.
Im also pretty sure that it is possible to pirate steam games. In fact, I recall seeing a torrent that advertised itself as being a steam install, and had instructions to install the game directly into steam, so in a way it was actually leveraging that platform for piracy. I'm at work so I can't really provide evidence of this at the moment.

That said, I do think that platforms like this reduce piracy in general. Gabe Newell, in reference to steam, said something like "People didn't buy games because piracy was beating us at a service level" (not a direct quote). Having an app store like this reduces the headache of having to go to the store in some ways.
So far siblings seem to work well.
Fun with the Y Combinator in Ruby
I don't have anything measurable, but I do work on a slow, glitchy VM with a bloated application on an old machine in some of my projects.. It takes in the several minutes for me to test any changes to the codebase.

It's possible that under the right conditions this might work (though I doubt it..), but in my situation the code has been steadily degrading due to refactoring being too painful of a wait, and having the time for a coffee break between any code change shakes any semblance of concentration on what you're working on straight out of you.

You might be better off deploying to a slower test machine and have it run some time-tests there.
Secretary of Energy Chu: We Have Taken Our Technological Leadership For Granted
You only imply Eclipse is better because it's more modular and more popular.

For web or mobile development in Java, I prefer NetBeans and regard it as a well rounded up overall solution. I hear from Ruby programmers I respect it's really good for Rails work. For Python/GAE development, I prefer Eclipse because of Pydev. For Django and Clojure, I'll stay with Emacs.

For Java web development, I feel Eclipse is overly complex. Kind of flying a VTOL fighter to the supermarket.
Facebook Goes Down; Second Major Outage in a Month
I have an API that addresses some of these issues in alpha right now: http://houdinihq.com. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like - my email's in my profile.
1. It's about PCI compliancy
2. It's about running a cronjob/sending invoice mails
3. It's about fancy features (up/downgrade/trials/coupons/variable fees)

1. You will not be able to collect raw credit card data without having a PCI certification. This is easy to get by filling out a questionaire if you have only a few thousand transactions per year (below 200k iirc) and it's about a ~1500$ fee (iirc).

PCI compliancy limits your choices of payment gateways and inhouse software solutions:

a) you can use a payment gateway that supports recurring payments: they save your customer's raw data and provide you a token where you can bill future charges. This is the simplest way, does not require a PCI certification of you but has a huge vendor lock-in. If ActiveMerchant (e.g.) supports your gateway of choice AND recurring functionality WITHOUT dealing with raw credit card data: Go for it, it's the easiest way.

b) you can chose between more payment gateways by using the various 3rd party services that are PCI compliant (recurly.com, spreedly.com, chargify.com). Of course this is another vendor lock in and costs money.

2+3) This is about dealing with subscriptions and is primarily not credit card dependent. Of course you want to deal with chargebacks (you don't want to but this will happen) but usually the hardest parts are: up/downgrading within a paid period. Everything else is easily done, imho no special "kits" are needed UNLESS you're busy or lazy which is sometimes ok.

TL;DR

If you think that your MVP and core functionality needs more love than a fancy payment system, go with one of the services (recurly, chargify … or even paypal). If you business works, you've the time and money to upgrade to a better/your own solution/pci compliancy. It usually does not pay off to write your own billing system unless you already have paying customers :)
Yes, it would handle it and we could have kept scaling the server up to handle more and more of it. With the C app all those problems went away. It has almost no footprint and uses almost no processor power.
The Hofstadterian mood, or, how creativity works
China Starts ‘Map World’ Service, Challenging Google, Sohu.com
IPanties - the perfect iPhone accessory
Prosecutors Seek to Block Xbox Hacking Pioneer From Mod-Chip Trial
Where I work, we've run into a great deal of pain scripting ssh. For a one off job, I'd agree, but if you want something stable over time, well....

I'm not dissing ssh, I just don't think automatically running jobs on remote machines is its sweet spot.
That link won't take you to the talk itself (the linked pages within say "this video is hidden" at Blip tv). This link, which I found from a Facebook link, might work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odbul86485w

but it wanted me to sign in, and I wouldn't. (I don't have a youtube account and didn't want to use my goog)
I'm surprised the article wasn't talking about the Microsoft Kinect interface. Kinect is hitting the mass market in a month and the UI is completely navigable just by waving your arms. It doesn't have enough precision to do something like move files around, but it's still really cool.
Stop with the ponies
I'd be fine with people going to college to be happy if it wasn't based on tax dollars forcibly collected from me. It's time to end public funding for higher education and let people pay their own way.

I am sure someone will comment and say, "But you benefit from people going to college." And of course I do just as each of us benefit from all kinds of network effects. Volitional trade is the way to settle those scores, not stealing someone's money because you claim to have helped them.
Even if not required by law, I'm sure you'll be subject to more scrutiny by any taxation agency if you don't serialize your invoice numbers.

As far as they're concerned, you're throwing away invoices to pocket additional income.
Changing the email to a loan company owned email would prevent this.
My team has been using FogBugz for over a year now. Huge improvement over the various systems I've used in the past. I never tried Redmine, but you couldn't get me to switch away from it now. FB8+Kiln is an amazing combo. Plus the upgrade from FB7 to 8 was painless.
Karnickel: Macros for Python
In this context I'd like to quote Peter Norvig talking directly here on HN just a few days ago (in this case about Lisp vs Python):

In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815
Replication is the wrong word for it. Key distribution is what you want. If a given memcache server goes down then the keys it was storing should get reloaded to a different one in your pool by your cold cache loading code.
Economics doesn't assume everyone wants to maximize money. It assumes everyone wants to maximize utility, and then uses money as a (poor) proxy for utility. It's a subtle, important difference.
The form of the money is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is that resources are being allocated to one sector of the economy that does less to raise the standard of living than other sectors would likely be able to do with those same resources. Therefore the government, in this instance, is preventing the standard of living from increasing as much as it would have otherwise, which happens to hurt real people.

Ensuring that the resources they take from the private sector are used better than they otherwise would have been should be one of the primary concerns any government has when it decides to meddle in an economy because the consequences can negatively impact a lot of people.
'Systems' is a very broad term.
Every group of people that consistently does something has a system for it.
while in programming a system is denoted by strict rules, in human interaction it's based on incentives (including social incentives).
So, you can get somebody to do something if it strokes with his incentive or you can try to subvert the incentives.

It's not by definition an immoral thing to do.
e.g. a real-estate broker wants to sell a house as quickly as possible, so they tend to sell houses slightly below market-value and then convince you it's the best you'll get.
you can rig this incentive in your favor by telling the broker you've contacted two brokers and will accept the highest bid.

I actually applied this one recently as my sister was looking for a renter and had contacted only 1 broker. I convinced her to get a second opinion and she got a way better offer.
For anyone who would like to take Solr for a spin, I invite you to check out nzadrozny's and my startup: http://websolr.com/

We are a bootstrapped startup providing managed Solr hosting in the cloud (currently EC2). We're all about making the operational side of high performance Solr hosting as one-click easy as possible, so developers can focus their time on doing cool stuff with it.

We love HN and are frequent commenters/lurkers around here, so we made a "HN10" coupon which you can use on signup to get a month of our Silver plan for free.
thank you for this - I have annoying beach ballyness on occasion, it's nice to know there is a way to diagnose the problem.
This is pretty hard... I found a co-founder at http://www.techcofounder.com/ and things seem to be going pretty well for us. We met in Pittsburgh. What
Many cities other than the valley have a great infrastructure and meetups that should allow you to find others.
A quick search for LA tech meetup found this - I'm sure you can find many others
http://www.meetup.com/newtech-25/
If it is not too much to ask, what are your real constraints and requirements and what existing systems did you investigate?

Based on the tidbits you've supplied I would guess what you're really doing writing is a file system capable of handling small files well (i.e. something along the lines of ReiserFS).
sorry, catster beat you to it!