skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like you need a "boss mode" for your screen and also for your approach to the job.

Frankly sometimes it's important to look busy. Or in other words, to better communicate the value you're producing.

Maybe you should try to have some sort of deliverable every few days or every week. Or, make him make the tough decisions about delaying the quoting system b/c you have to create a local copy of the db vs paying extra money for a solution designed for local hosting.

If he's saving your anual salary in the 4 weeks you take to do it, then he'll view himself as very wise for having made that decision, and greatly enjoy the savings.

If he's a jerk, then quit, but if he's not then try some of the above and maybe it will make your job more fun.
Yeah, here is the kicker, when I drew up the architectural diagrams, I showed the CEO and the Technical Director (who at the time was more the server admin type, that why I was brought in) and the CEO asked the Director "All of the other teams told us this could not be done, do you think this will work", to which the director replied "All of the other teams failed, so why should we believe a word they said". Then the CEO said to me, if you are so sure of it, why don't you forgo your salary and bonus for the year and I will just pay you a cut per booking. I was really new at the company and did not know their volume, so I declined, with the offer of if it does not work you can fire me and keep the pay for the time I spent on it. That is one of the biggest regrets of my carrer. I got my pay day though when we exited, so I can't complain.
The Magic of having a Team
Half a day would be enough to interview at the nearby place that paid the equivalent of £102K/year for you. Ask for £80K/year, they'll think they're getting a bargain. If you save half of it, you'll still be much better off, and you'll be building up a reserve so that, later on, you can quit and spend time interviewing in a city where there are good jobs.
For those of you that are just interested in the topic:

http://www.inc.com/guides/marketing/24018.html - An article about Market Research

http://www.euromonitor.com/USA - Expensive Market Research reports :-/

http://www.marketresearch.com/browse.asp?categoryid=52&S... - A bit less expensive Market Research reports
So did I. 2007 I believe. When did you?
> Taxes are the money that we pay to make our society civilised.

I would say that trade and enforcement of contracts are what make our society civilized. I think it makes sense to have the government help in the enforcement of contracts to some degree, through modest fees and/or taxes.

> provide the services necessary to allow those of talent to rise up above the crowd

I'm sure John C wouldn't advocate throwing orphans and disadvantaged children into a "dog eat dog" world. In a longer essay he would agree with you that children need to be cared for by society and that this requires tax money to some degree. His argument is focused towards how competent adults should be treated. Once a person reaches a certain level of adulthood, giving him/her additional resources through government programs (in the millions of different ways the government distributes money, directly or indirectly) is a very inefficient proposition.

> There are exactly zero examples of meritocracies without taxes in history

At one point there was no state in history in which women could vote. At one point there was no state in history in which slavery was abolished. Sometime you need to buck history to progress.

That said, I don't think it's clear who to cast a vote for to accomplish John C's goals- It's hard to know who the candidates are who "vector in that direction." Even though I agree with the thesis that "less government is usually better" I still end up voting mostly for Democrats, since the Republicans in recent history seem anti-rationalist to me. Rationality is a necessary ingredient.

Just because the Tea Party folks say "let's decrease government programs" doesn't mean casting a vote for them is actually a step towards accomplishing that goal. I'm sure if they got power they would think _their_ government programs would be a fine way to spend money.
As the father of a four-year-old and the founder of two post-child startups, I can say that it's still possible to work on a startup and have a kid.

The biggest change you'll find is that there's basically zero time left for your personal coding and hacking interests: setting up that home Samba server or writing an open-source project that isn't startup-related just never seem to have time to happen.

I highly recommend finding a way to work from home as much as possible for the early years. The hours you lose on your commute are valuable time. Both startups (dotspots.com and gri.pe) are both zero-office affairs which meshed reasonably well with my family life. It also helps to be a Canadian: the expenses to cover food, utilities and mortgage aren't that hard to meet.
"I've found I'm much more efficient than I was pre-baby" this is exactly what happend with me too http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537811
You are doing it wrong.

The way to do it is to let them come to you. I've never initiated any conversation on OKCupid and I've been on dates with about 50 women from that site. They have always contacted me first. In mid september of this year I had 15 different women contact me in one week, resulting in 10 dates, which was the record. The key is to just have a few decent photos and be funny. It's very surprising how most people can't even be bothered to get a decent photo of themselves, or figure out anything clever to say in their profile.

Also, NYC has proven to be 5 times better than SF in terms of both quantity and quality. More dates and cool women with interesting jobs, etc. SF women are generally easier and put out on the first date, but are also much crazier. If at all possible, don't let them know your phone number. Make sure you can easily get a prescription for antibiotics.
I haven't worked with webcams. I imagine the AS3 docs, and the included examples, should cover your use case:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/

For sending the photo, you probably want to look at URLRequest:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/fl...

A solution might look like this:

1) Set up your server to accept HTTP POST requests which include a photo, in whatever data format you plan to transmit them

2) Obtain the image data from your webcam (I have no particular insight into this)

3) Create a URLRequest

4) Assign the URLRequest's 'url' property as appropriate

5) Assign the URLRequest's 'data' property to to the image data

6) Set the URLRequest's 'method' property to URLRequestMethod.POST

7) Set other URLRequest properties, like '
requestHeaders', as appropriate

8) Add event handlers to the URLRequest as appropriate

9) Call the URLRequest's load()
NASA Trapped Mars Rover Finds Evidence of Subsurface Water
In university I once eliminated weeks of work by automating data entry for a small university department. They had to hire way less students (to simply ensure that the data is correct). I wish I got the salaries of the jobs I eliminated added to my $13/hr at the time.
This is very ambitious! Home page video seems a little long. Seemed more like a tutorial.

You have a ton of content on the home page and how it works page. You might consider dividing and rewriting this content into more manageable chunks. Give each one its own page and you can use these pages to drive people to your site.

Same thing with the videos, convert some of these into an article and post on the site.

On pricing page, its easy to overlook your free option as its not in the same format as the other paid options. Free 30 day trial should be more prominent. Also, highlight what you consider to be the preferred plan. Take a look at the BaseCamp page for an example. http://basecamphq.com/signup

For the UI, because your app is so complex, I'm only able to go over a few things based on your screenshots. You definitely want to be a/b testing and if you dont have one, bring on someone who can do some in depth testing of your UI.

With that said, the dashboard looks too busy. A dashboard should be more about communicating important info quickly and easily. I wonder if so much stuff on it is overwhleming to your users.

One idea is to make more use of the lightbox. I like this feature and perhaps you can take stuff off the dashboard and include in the lightbox.

On the item estimation page, the dice are cute as a visual display of the credits but really not intuitive. A 2 is 200 credits but then a 3 is 400 credits. Is the image or text something that can be clicked? Maybe just get rid of the image and make the text look more like a link so I know I can click it.

On the motion page, I can foresee that some users might want motions to have anonymous voting. Is this an option?

Is the discussion forum something you created internally or are you using a 3rd party product. If the answer is internal, you may want to consider going with an outside company for this part. Basic reason being that you're probably not going to create something better than whats already out there, so why waste your dev resources? Better to focus on the core parts of your application. Obviously, this could be wrong if your discussion forum is deeply tied into your other functionality, but its something to consider. You could probably post on HN to get some good companies, but I've used getsatisfaction.com and been very happy with their features.

Same goes for the wiki, doc storage, data security and backup. Decide whether these are core parts of your app and outsource if they're not. There are a number of companies building cool apps in these markets.
Wow. You seem angry, or frustrated. Did I say something that offended you?

I only participated in Ning's interviews as an interviewee. I worked for Ning for six weeks before the layoffs.

The only thing I'd notice when I blur my eyes a little bit is that Ning employees were better engineers than most I'd previously worked with. The same applies at my current employer, also known for its rigorous interviews. The similarities ended there.

You complain here about the things the author expects to see in an answer. He's looking to see what they think of that scale of problem and how their thoughts comport with their resume. He's looking to see what questions they ask to get more detail. He's looking to see that the solution is in reasonable bounds for hardware--that the candidate understands the limitations of the silicon we have to work with. He's looking to see whether they would reinvent the wheel or use proven technologies. He's looking to see what languages and technologies a candidate would choose to use. He's looking to see how well the candidate understands those tools. He's looking to see how cognizant candidates are of the failure modes of the system they're designing.

Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see any issue with the list of things the author expects to see expects to see. Can you be more specific, perhaps?

Likewise I don't understand the problem with the way the question is presented. He describes the data you have and the load you need to support. Is there something wrong with that presentation?

The crossed-out "interrogation" is obviously a joke. I'm certainly not known for my intuitive perceptiveness and I still saw that (and no, I never met brianm while working at Ning, to my knowledge).

How is asking about failure modes a "gotcha"? Every good engineer needs to consider how his designs and systems can fail. What in that question do you expect trips up good engineers?

The only "specific type of candidate" this question seems oriented toward finding is "good engineers." He's not asking for particular technologies. He's not even looking for a particular solution. He's just asking people an open-ended question about how they would design a system. All the best engineers I know would be able to answer that question in 30 minutes.

I don't disagree because I was part of the process, I disagree because I can't understand your objections. I hate to sink to personal attacks like you have, but have you considered that your opinion on questions like this may have been formed by your abilities? It seems a more likely possibility than that questions like this are fundamentally flawed in some way that you've as yet been unable to describe. Both companies I've worked with that have had rigorous interview questions of this sort have hired the highest quality talent I've ever had the pleasure of working with.
Reports of the death of wired Ethernet are greatly exaggerated.
Now let's get all phone manufacturers to adopt the same version of WebKit.
Vague title of the month award?
When it comes to online dating, a majority of females maintain profiles for ego boosting purposes. The same girls that are approachable on the street will not give you attention online as they have a large range of choice and are looking for something specific, usually something that doesn't exist (only in their heads).

For best results, exploit superficiality: put up interesting pictures.
What about an option for people who are a member but did not meet the person they are with through the site.
Although you may pop in one day, carrying the bread, to find no one at home, and the closets emptied.
I do agree. I migrated my personal server after the RAM increase at Linode and all of my company's servers as well.

I can't think of any other new features SliceHost has rolled out in the last 6 months.
Think of it as business: improve your marketing. There are many women who ignore anyone who messages them because they want to be in control of the situation. Therefore they troll the male listings and respond to the ones they like.

I used to take both approaches, but met more women when they came to me rather than the other way around. Make sure you have a great profile and a nice picture. SMILE!! LOOK HAPPY!!!
If you're looking for "easy to get out", Silicon Valley stays much warmer than SF, as we have the Santa Cruz mountains to guard us from the Pacific fog.
Wireless HDMI Finally Comes of Age: Asus and brite-View WHDI Kits Tested
Ask HN: Easier to Find Hackers in the Valley?
Hi, everyone. Long time listener, first time caller. I'm hoping to get a bit of insight from the HN community.

I'm from a community that is not very entrepreneurial focused and is also not really a tech/hacker hotbed. With that said myself and my business partner founded a company and began to build the infrastructure and put together the resources we'd need to start building.

This is probably going to kill this thread before it gets anywhere (But I hope not) as I've seen the reaction to non-technical founders (We're all just people, though) - my partner and I are not developers. I have done some coding in the past (Java/JSP) and can now make my way through a Rails project and modify code that is in front of me - I'm much stronger on the front end with HTML, HAML, Javascript (We use lots of jQuery) and CSS but there are people who are much better at all of these things than I am. We are generalists with skills across many disciplines and experts in a few key areas.

We've been successful in raising a small round of investment (low six figs), hiring one Rails developer, and are about to release our first product.

With all that said it has been next to impossible to find passionate developers who want to get involved with a startup and are team players in our community. By that I mean we've actively and passively looked for good developers that will mesh with the team for two years. Are other startups encountering the same issue? If not then
there's something wrong with what we're doing or our location stinks - That seems like the easy answer, I'd rather find out how others have been successful.

If you've been successful in finding a couple good people to bring into your startup, how did you go about doing that?

As a side note, have any startups had success with remote developers?
http://cineight.com

App is working fine. Need help in making it look good
It seems to me that the problem could actually be solved by using a 64GB SSD. Given that the storage is 1TB and each of the keys and values are 128Bytes (and hence the disk is full to capacity), and assuming the keys are unique, which it would need to be to have all the keys unique, then we can safely say that every possible value in the 2^32 space is used. Therefore, we could read the data from the 1TB disk, and for each key we find, use the value of the key as the address of a memory location on the 64GB SSD. Net effect is we essentially remove all the key info from the hard disk and compress the storage into 16GB. ie, no need for the hard disk, just a 64GB SSD.
You could just make min(len(secret_username)) = 1 + min(len(username)) + min(len(password))... if that's what you wanted.

Not all systems need to have the same level of security though, nor do they all need to assume their users are ignorant.
Why just Obj-C for iPhone (or more accurately iOS) dev? What about Objective-C for Mac development?
It is kind of difficult to add JS into this poll in my opinion. I think everyone will have to check js and something else, unless you are talking about using js for the backend as well as front-end. I can't imagine a startup/app that doesn't use js (at least one that is web based)
How strange that people seems to accept an author writing a book for 10 years, or a screenwriter writing a movie for 5 years, yet when a web developer tries to make a simple web app people go "NO! you have to be in a team! It's TOO HARD!"
Zepto.js actually goes in and fixes certain things cross-webkits; but yes, it would be good if the vendors start to make things more compatible.
I don't think that considering your child the most important thing in the world is good for anybody (including your child):

1) Your wife is probably more important, than your child: in 20 years your child would be gone (to have separate life), but you would stay with your wife longer than that.

2) You can have several children. Would you name one of them as "the most important"?

3) If you consider you child the most important -- it may spoil the child.

That said -- children are definitely important part of your life.
Similar story -

Kevin, one of the founders of Wufoo, does a great job of explaining how he grew the product by word of mouth. He built it from the trust of his users, most of which was from http://particletree.com/. It's fascinating how much emphasis he puts on interacting personally with the paid users and how they scaled that. Definitely a lot of hard work, but it paid off when they had some server trouble when Wufoo first launched - their old users trusted them and backed them up when some of the initial comments were negative.

Long story short, he didn't do any search advertising either.

Interview here: http://mixergy.com/wufoo-kevin-hale/
Another vote for Scala (plus Ruby, R and Javascript).
> It will slowly become the new cobol.

Which means that it may become lucrative to transition yourself into being a Java developer now rather than later.
> nobody on the business team I report to notices any difference whatsoever, except that feature X took a week longer than it probably would have otherwise

This. And also Refactoring is almost a dirty word so we try to keep it to ourselves and sneak in bits of refactoring when implementing bigger features
see campfire - http://campfirenow.com/
Well we were talking about expectations here, were we not? I certainly expect my IM, email, VoIP and other forms of communication to be no less private than phone or post. So does, I believe, nearly everyone else. Just because one stumbles (stumble is not the right word though for what article described - the malicious intent was clear) into an unsecured segment does not make it right to eavesdrop.
What I find more amazing is that they'd lived with a booking process that just didn't convert well for years and no one had ever questioned it.

A good UX developer are worth their weight in gold, it is just hard to get people to recognize the difference between an HTML designer and a UX professional that works with metrics, focus groups and A/B testing. They see 40hr for a designer and 200hr for a UX developer and they go with the designer. When in reality they are separate and complimentary disciplines.
An organization I used to work for wanted to be able to analyze search keywords entered on the website's search form. But the search was a homegrown system.

So several business departments and the IT department entered into a series of long debates about whether to spend time adding extra functionality to the homegrown search or to just upgrade to something like Google Custom Search / Google Search Appliance -- both options that would have taken a long time, given the bureaucracy at the organization.

Meanwhile, in looking at the site's logfile analyses, I noticed that the analysis software they were using was really good at letting you see stats on GET queries in URLs. A quick look at the HTML for the site's search form revealed that the form was using POST.

I suggested to the IT dept that they simply change the search form to use GET instead of POST and call it a day. Done.
One that doesn't auto-upgrade itself (in case they send a broken upgrade, then I'll have no browser.)
You should check out Boo.
http://www.facebook.com/Boo
metalab rocks :)
the whole nerdscene in vienna rocks :)

if anybody follows this post and comes to vienna - hit me up as well!
Had to go to match.com to meet the girl four blocks down 88th street. Married for 3 years, together for 5 so far.

Only in NYC
The problem with his thesis is most rational disagreements in government revolve around things that are either impossible or can only be done by the government. So inefficiency isn’t really the issue.

Take health care as a perfect example. Having studied the issue I personally think it’s impossible to have quality universal health care. Others disagree. But what we can both agree on is that only Government could do it if it is possible.

So the question isn’t inefficiency because both sides concede government is inefficient. But if government is the only power that can do it than inefficiency isn’t the issue. The conflict lies in what can be accomplished not in whether government could do it efficiently.

(People like me would argue the question is whether the private sector could provide better quality health care to more people but as long as the other side believes universal health care is possible the point is moot to them)
What kind of project failed?
I can help you either restart them with funding or offer advice on how to turn them around.

Like wise, if technology is good, I might be interested in buying some assets

Let me know

Have an awesome and very bright day!!
jimmy@inodesoft.com
I consider myself reasonably fortunate, in that most of my side projects were made to scratch my own itch, and they all served me well.

In that sense, none of them failed, since their primary purpose was to statisfy one of my own needs, and so they did.

However, most of them never gained momentum, I stopped maintaining most of them after about a year, and hardly anyone missed them.

There's one or two where I still get a few questions, whether it's still in development, or "what happened to it?", even after years of stopping work on them - one can either view that as a failure, since the projects were shut down; or as success, since some still remember them fondly.

Being an optimist most of the time, I treat them as success.
Sooner embarrassed by the fact that I've programmed for for over a decade and haven't released anything of significance :)

I think I'm finally on the right path to finding ways of motivating myself to finish/release stuff, but that's another topic.
You are right - that's why I stopped adding any more languages after the first 30 mins since this could skew the newer languages lower.