skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Hiring away your best contact at a potential major customer?
I'm in a weird, but good spot. What would HN do?

I'm heading up an angel-funded B2B startup. We've got a landing page up and have gotten some press, but we're mostly in build mode and focused on working quietly with a few customers to tailor the system to their uses. So, it's very early stage.

There's a customer we'd love to land that would be a great fit and a big win for us. However, our contact there, one of their two decision makers on outside vendors, is also a longtime colleague of mine and has expressed interest in joining up, "going back into startup mode" (his first company was sold in a smallish but fairly quick exit a few years ago to the big customer in question), and heading up our sales and biz-dev.

Can I possibly land him AND his company's business? If so, how?

Context: I haven't worked together with him on anything, but he's been advising and encouraging me since news of my angel round broke. Shortly afterward he invited me over to his place to review candidates for our first engineering hire and to break down how our business model and pricing would work, based on his own experience in the industry. Those conversations were incredibly useful as he shared actual numbers and helped me understand some nuances in how this industry evaluates vendors that I hadn't seen before. These conversations were also when he asked if we might have an opening for him and talked about how he's had a good run at BigCo. and would like to join up a cool startup and do that again.

That was 3 months ago. Based on his advice, I scrapped all the candidates for the engineering position, started over, and found someone light years better than the previous candidates. We're building away and have a few early customers.

Meanwhile, we've met with him twice, but in a more professional capacity than I think he might have expected to show off the app and get his feedback on it.

And meanwhile, every week or so, he sense me clippings on news that we might want to keep track of, new entrants into our weird little field, new products launching.

It's been months since I talked to him one-on-one. Since then, I've brought in a co-founder and a few other people. The co-founder wants to bring him on board, but is very adamant that there's a particular way we have to play this and wants to regulate all future contact we have with the guy.

Meanwhile, he keeps sending me clippings. I'm not sure how to respond. I'd love to tell him flat out, "we want your business, but we want you even more. Is there a way we can get both?" But that seems like it could get people in trouble.

I feel like Steve Jobs would be able to pull this off. Get his guy, and get a fat contract with his company. Not sure how, though.

How would you play this?
Protect the Penguin - On Mac OS 10.7
Not really. Erlang is for reliable concurrent transactional computing while X10 is for parallel scientific computing. You might say that X10 aims to replace Fortan.
The Digg story just goes to show you that political metaphors don't always translate well into tech. Digg was never able to diversify content (read: expand, scale, grow) because it was never worth it for minority voices--and here I'm referring to non-liberal, non-young, non-male, non-athiest users--to attempt to carve out space and participate. The value proposition of helping diversify Digg's content wasn't worth the time to newcomers.

And so those users of other demographics simply went elsewhere to build their communities. The latest Digg was an attempt to push back against the niche that ruled Digg, but then that niche just found another community as well.

Real life democracies, in government, exist as a compromise simply because there isn't always the ability to pick up and move to a new nation state if you aren't happy with the local rules. On the web it's all too easy to move somewhere else, so typically all web communities are niches that push away newcomers who are different. On the web democracy does not give rise to real, long-tail diversity; it's just a quality filter.
Interesting. Noted!
I registered and verified, only to see this:

Rapleaf Encountered a Problem.

Whoops... we've encountered a small problem. Please try again soon!

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Why do I feel like I've just been taken?
So you're saying that the "language is a tool" metaphor breaks down because C is "complete" in a way that a hammer isn't. True, but that's taking the metaphor too far; it's original meaning is that the tool matters less than what you're building.
Is there a way of drawing tables?, It'd be great if I could do it.
Good to know. I'll up my recruiting there.
That's quite interesting. Don't forget to make sure you have the secure flag set on your cookies, that way you won't send the cookies over non-SSL connections.

You should also set the HttpOnly flag, which implements some XSS-limiting features, dependent on the browser.

While you're looking at securing session management, it's probably worth looking at Cross-Site Request Forgery:

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-Site_Request_Forgery_(C...

Some frameworks, such as Django have Cross-Site Request Forgery protection built in for free. The OWASP site linked earlier is an invaluable resource for all things web application security, and is definitely worth bookmarking.
That doesn't invalidate my point. Supporting SSL is certainly more costly when you're serving content on the scale of FB.

The costs must be weighed against the benefits. Calling FB out as a "fail" is failing to understand all of the issues.
There's an opening if ever there was one:

What are the skill sets that YC companies are requiring? Are these people not to be found? In Vancouver it seems a lot tougher to find new members (unless very, very well funded so as to be able to compete with the very secured and well employed). What is the biggest challenge for your companies in hiring?
That should be doable. Thanks --
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_15950113
Yes, you can do it. Hiring insiders is tried-and-true way to get business.

Like so many other things in life, it's all in the execution. Can this guy leave his current company and keep his reputation there intact? Can he also get you business other places?
reddit has ~5 people and they _still_ have problems paying for themselves. i can't imagine who paid for digg's 80.
So I don't need to write it. Thanks :-).
christians, jews, muslims: http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=Why+ar...
We (I'm a senior at Oregon State University) use C in classes more than any other language and I, for one, love it. I know a lot of students don't, but most of them at least have some idea whats going on.

Also the ECE ("Electrical and Computer Engineering") students here (and probably elsewhere) use a lot of C, so that might be something else to look into, although they're mostly familiar with embedded environments.

Maybe this goes without saying, but no one here (to my knowledge) gets very in-depth into a lot of stuff you might take for granted, for example I haven't met a single student (or many professors) who is familiar with mmap(). There are a lot of really smart students who could probably work out great with a few months of real-world experience and mentoring, but students who could sit down and work on production C code right out of graduation are probably less than 1 in 100.
A more agnostic way of doing this is to serve all your non-security required static content from a subdomain over HTTP, set the secure flag on your cookies, and scope the cookie to the fully qualified domain name (e.g. www.myapp.com rather than myapp.com).
you can also get them for free at startssl.com (yes - they are recognized by major browsers, but you need to know how to configure a "chained" certificate in your server).
GOP: No Compromise If We Retake the House
Very true and totally agree. Just because you want clicks doesn't mean you are running a scam. For the most part the option we come up in the end is better explained.
Protip: timewaste comes not from the companies themselves, rather sneaky recruiters, who will, at some point in the conversation, offhandedly ask 1, to provide references (previous managers you've worked with), and 2, who's interested in you currently (usually dressed up as "how do you find the marketplace?" -type of questions).

Do not, under any circumstances, give out these datapoints early in the game (personally, I don't give them out at all, but I imagine some large corps to require at final stages). Recruiters will use this as lead-generation for potentials to sell candidates of their own. This will not only lower your chances in potential new places, but destroys your reputation with your existing clients.

For more information, see the book "Dirty rotten recruiter tricks" :)
Recruiting.com finds a buyer
Brainstorm ideas, not fully baked:

Ads. Yeah, they will be closing the browser as soon as their phone rings, but you will still have them for a bit before then.

Make them watch an ad before they can input their number and make the call.

Charge them to call the phone. Maybe the first time is free, $0.25 thereafter. Or possibily make it so you can call the phone once by manually typing in the number, but if you want to do it again, it requires the number again and a captcha. But for a fee the system will call the phone, wait 1 minute and redial the number automatically--maybe 10 times or until the phone is answered. (I suggest this because I know I have hit "send" on my computer to send my missing phone a text message then sprinted into the living room to hear if it beeps there, send another and sprint into the kitchen and listen, etc...)

Become an affiliate for similar services which charge a monthly fee.

Ads for new phones, contact backup services, etc. (Make the ads easy to find again once they have realized they cannot find their phone and come back to your site.)

Make them agree that you can sell their number to telemarketers. Or to a cell phone company who will cold call them about needing a new phone. Charge $0.50 to opt out.
Yea, I agree. I need to add some more space between user's image and number if votes.

Regarding Branding, they have it on the header. I was just playing with it on Firebug and took screenshot so that part got clipped.
Check out the FAQ:

Don't you know that X10 is the name of industry-standard communications protocol?

Oops. C'est la vie. Next question, please.
omg, it gets worse than that. From their (incomplete!) online tutorial, which downloads an HTML file instead of displaying it:

>Xiom: The global/non-global distinction in X10 is intended to make you powerful, not miserable. This will not be obvious while you are getting used to X10.

(a (lame) play on "Axiom")

The tutorial documentation goes downhill even further after that. I'm having trouble deciding if this is real or an extraordinarily elaborate April Fool's day joke.
I've worked as a banker and both my parents were bankers as well, so I guess if we want to compare anecdotes about rich people we can do that all day. At the end of that day you'd be suprised how many rich people will keep a large portion of their money in FDIC backed accounts, such as time deposits (CDs), or money markets. Many rich people are older and more concerned about asset protection vs. asset appreciation.

It doesn't matter though, because inflation takes a bite out of ALL investments.

Even if a person is at 0 debt they lose little compared the person that is losing thousands due to inflation.

Perhaps it would be better if we argued the converse. In a deflationary scenario money is consistently worth more and more. People that have a lot just get inherently richer even if it's sitting under their mattress. Credit of any kind is harder to obtain, and costs more. What does the "generically poor" person gain in this scenario?
I have to second this - almost every smart up and coming network/programming/security guy in the area I live in, that I know, is either: 1) married/has family in the area and that is why he stays

2) has gone on to better things in Baltimore/WashDC corridor, Delaware, or other places.

One of the guys I know went to Cambridge on full scholarship and ended up working at 2 well-known startups, one after the other. He hasn't been back to PA in years :-)
I know it's done. I've just never had to think about it before. On the one hand, it sounds unethical for him to lead us into a contract, then leave and come work for us. On the other, our product is awesome and will solve a key business problem for them. It's a no-brainer for him to midwife a deal between us and his company.

I feel kind of weird even bringing it up to him. Maybe I just need to sack up.
I find it very odd that CS graduates don't know C.
I don't find it odd that people don't enjoy programming in C.

At my univ the introductory programming course is taught using Scheme but there are plenty of course that use C, such as Algorithms and Data Structures and Operating Systems. Hell we even have a course that uses assembly (Computer Architecture).
This is all on the undergrad degree.
As much as I liked that list, I stopped from installing all of them, because they scare me. Call me stupid and paranoid, but I dont understand why a friggin "color-picker"-extension would require full access to my browsing history. If anyboy can explain, I d be glad to be informed on why that is.
You only get to write this rant if you built your computer yourself, smelting the metal and crafting the circuits by hand, without recourse to off-the-shelf parts, and then wrote every bit of code for it on your own, from the lowest-level drivers to the highest-level interfaces.

And for bonus points, you have to use it by toggling ones and zeroes manually, since all those wrappers hide things and get in your way.
Excellent. It's about time that something did.

Well really, C++ is rapidly replacing Fortran for scientific computing, but it ain't all that much better for it. I'm excited about the idea that this replaces MPI.
People need to stop repeating this same old false argument. Read http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/google-switch-ssl-cost.html

"all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that."
How to manipulate people
Just for the record 'useless platitude' is a pleonasm.
IDA Pro seems to make the bomb lab considerably easier (e.g., by showing the basic block structure of the assembly); I imagine that the Hex-Rays decompiler would be even more so. Students willing to torrent that software would probably have a much easier time with the lab...
Paul Graham on the cover of Forbes
Ezra Klein - Why it gets better
try hiring electrical/computer engineering students. C is a high level language for us :P
Clojure 1.3 Alpha 2
He's already approached you, it's not like you've gone out hunting him. It also sounds like he might have a better idea of how to handle the situation than you do. Talk to him about it?
Except that C is not like wood, in the sense that it's a substrate out of which programs are constructed. It's more of a notation for describing the program, which the compiler then translates into another description, which the hardware then "runs" without the program ever being brought into existence as such. Therefore, C is more like a specific type of blueprint: it's good for building sheds, but it's not good for building motors or skyscrapers.

It's not like a blueprint, either, because you can just go ahead and build a birdhouse with no blueprint, but you can't just go ahead and build a program with no language.

We can pick holes in one metaphor after another, and fundamentally get nowhere. The point is simply to not over-specialize on any one environment, unless either you strongly believe it's the best one for every job or you're pretty sure you'll only ever want to do that job. I would contend that most people know neither of those things with any real certainty.
IPad "Orientation Lock" becomes "Mute On/Off" in software update
How annoying. I use that all the time when I read in bed or on the couch.
They claim the slowness is due to Mutter. They say the are moving (back?) to Compiz, and that it improves performance a lot. http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/10/25/ubuntu-11-04-to-ship-uni...
Just be aware, HTC stock browser on android (obscure I know), doesn't have StartSSL as a root certificate authority so it will give you a warning.
Then it's doomed IMO, since there's Fortress (http://projectfortress.sun.com/) out threre developed at the Sun Labs and which seems to be a better candidate to replace Fortran.
> This moreover confirms to me that Ubuntu is turning the distro into something that everyone's mom/dad can use. While that's fine for popularizing linux, that isn't the OS I signed up for years ago.

Weather you were aware of it or not, that is exactly the distro you signed up for. Being end-user friendly has always been a primary goal of Ubuntu.
An excellent example of why competition is good. Unless you think this wasn't motivated by <canvas> and WebGL getting more attention.

That said: why not just expose an OpenGL(ES) implementation? Then your application logic is portable too, instead of whatever new setup you've got to learn for theirs, and you can fall-forward to a native implementation if you ever want / need to. So again, we have Flash doing something better than a generic language can do (JS)... but at a cost to code portability and skill re-use.
How GetGlue Aims to Become the Foursquare of Entertainment
List of TEDTalks (Google Spreadsheet)
Oh, sorry ... you're the guy behind iconfinder :)

In that case, great job! I thought you were just posting a good resource.

Looks like a very useful site ... bookmarked it along with my other icon finding sites.
Why Reputation Matters
"Why is my (dog|cat|girlfriend) so..."
http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn/#start=Why+is...
DARPA funded X10 and Fortress at the same time to provide options for a future "high-productivity" HPC programming language; it's not clear that either one has gotten any traction yet.
I'd consider paying for the ability to use some icons for commercial purposes. Perhaps you could get some sort of affiliate program going? Then you could add another rights type - 'Allowed for commercial use (purchase)' or something like that. Then you could start allowing designers to offer their icons directly. A centralized place for purchased icons would be much nicer than what you have to do now - search all over the web and trudge through lots of designer's websites to try and find what you're looking for.
Miro and the eMusic Downloader should count, too.
At least RapLeaf is open enough to show this chart. You can edit your data, and opt out. Far from a perfect system, but let's be practical: nearly every other advertising system is doing exactly the same thing, just without telling you what they have. Some sort of an open advertising cookie seems like a good idea to me. Something that people can customise so that they'll see advertisements somewhat interesting to them.
Google Finally Updates FeedBurner To Focus On Real Time Stats And Twitter
Gaining followers might not be the right metric to follow. A stable framework might not gain followers at the same rate as a hyped up shiny-new-thing.

Since you say you are "bored", why not try both out for a day or two and see what's more "fun" to you?
Physicists at my school/uni (in France) use Python with appropriate libs, but I don't know if it's the general case here, since I know physicists from near university use C++ (badly from what I saw, but that's an other story).
expect problems collecting, people not wanting to pay, people wanting a discount, people paying late... etc. usually big companies are easier to collect than small companies. it's a soft skill because you have to be firm to get your money, but you don't won't to be a jerk and not get any more business.
At least you have a date on your article. Half the articles I find have no date, and so then you're left wondering, 'exactly how out-of-date is the information I just found?'
I think your argument is extremely literal. Metaphors don't sugest that X is Y or that X is like Y in every way, just that from a certain perspective, X has a lot in common with Y. So there will always be holes to pick in every metaphor.

Your argument reminds me of another Perlisism:

There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages can only be said poorly.

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
both are carrying what seems to be cigarette packs. They have smoking rooms now. What happened to the conveniency of smoking right in from of the computer? Did computers riot against second-hand smoking?
Thanks for the response.

I think a good portion of designers who use Photoshop use more shortcuts than standard user. M for marquee. U for shape. Command + Click on Object and move to duplicate the object. Space for hand tool. In other words, every tool has a shortcut so that it's easier to access and in fact, I barely use tool menus except to edit values. It's just so much more efficient to use keyboard commands than to click on every single element.

Docking the property inspector to the left or right or allowing the user to customize it would be a great option.

I still think layers provide a lot of power that's really useful (layer styles, easy to switch which object appears over what, easy to create multiple states) but I'll defer to you since this is your vision for the project.
there are a lot of Os in those.

I'm guessing it stands for Otvet
Joinwire video
Pretty funny. I wonder what problem they are trying to solve.
It's also got to be one of the hardest language names to type. Shift+bottom row ring-finger, number-row far left, number-row far right.

(love the comment, btw. In part because I first thought the standard was going to try to make a comeback, from the title alone. Upon seeing it was a language, that was my exact reaction.)
It is not generally possible to serve more than one https domain from a server, because browsers won't accept more than one certificate.

However just because you serve one site doesn't mean that you use one IP more, nor do you contribute to the exhausting of ipv4 addresses -- you already use your ip to connect to your server.