skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Experts Exchange is borderline spam, to put it mildly. They hide the answer at the very end of an enormous scroll (of course after they try to sell you via a pop-up). A reasonable user has no clue that the answer is on the page.

When I have made it all the way down, I have received a quality solution perhaps 5 out of 500 times.

Stack Overflow realized there was a quality problem with the existing tech Q&A services and ate their lunches. Ditto for Quora. Hopefully they can keep it up.
I think when deciding the go stealth or not you should decide what you have more confidence in: you or your idea. In general be positive and have confidence in yourself and your team. You know that your first idea won't be your best idea. If you find there's no competition and you are all alone your idea probably doesn't work and you will find something better eventually. If you meet competition, you just validated the market anyways and grew the whole pie. At that point its about believing that your team can out execute the competition.
Because requiring applications to use your in-app purchasing API and sacrifice 30% is "outrageous and hardly qualified as news" before it was confirmed. I'm not saying this is being rumored as happening, but it doesn't seem impossible to have a discussion about.
Erlang should certainly be a consideration in a distributed system, but there are usually many factors that go in to a technology choice. For instance, you may lose some raw speed in Erlang over C, so that could swing the decision back the other way depending on the application.
And you're assuming my ideas are amazing. ;)

Point taken. But, I like to give one thing my full attention, so that goes into the decision too.
Apple's in-app subscriptions could be better
And what if he is? Does that fact enhance or detract from his argument in any way?
Since this is almost a year old, some previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277000

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492984

(I still think the title should be tweaked -- 'gets'?)
2.) Someone else has the exact same idea.
Nonsense. Absolutely 100% total nonsense. I've published papers in the peer-reviewed research literature where the standard requirement is "new, correct, and significant". Note the "new". And I got a Ph.D. from a good research university, and there the main requirement was "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication". Note the "original".

We're talking about business ideas, not new research. Your new discoveries didn't grow up to be successful businesses. They're too young for that.
I don't trust this guy, especially given his connections to EMC's competitors.
Kingsgate Consolidated - Corporate Governance
Don't think you're irreplaceable. You can be replaced, and if he needs help you can do some consulting. Everyone justifies staying in a job by claiming that they are being a martyr - just watch Clerks.

I can't count the number of times I've heard an employee (sometimes myself) looking for a change of scene say "I'm doing this place a real favour, staying on".
They're clearly freaked out about by Stack Exchange. They attacked them for needing a "VC cookie jar," but couldn't actually saying anything bad about their sites.

This was also surreal: "Sites like Quora seem more like Tumblr or other blog-esque formats."

Wait. What?

Many here on HN have only ever seen EE when clicking on it accidentally because of their SEO-fu.

The rise of more modern Q&A sites combined with Google's renewed commitment to punishing automated/weak/content means this must be a challenging time to be EE.

I admit I'm not mad at that.
Rolf Rolles is more of a security researcher than Daniel Bernstein

I think we'll have to agree to disagree here. But given our different focuses in security, it's not all that surprising that we have different definitions of "security researcher".
The screaming, that is.
Might work out well for Apple as do most things they do - Amazon pulls out, garden-dwellers dwell on whatever iBooks offers, Rhapsody and Pandora pull out - there is only iTunes!

Apple is in a position where they can get very crafty and evil - just enough to get away with it all without being a monopoly - there is Google to help them there! Envious position for a company indeed!
20 Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know
Scoble Likes AisleFinder.com
Honestly, I'm just shocked to see that there's a real person behind the site.

I don't know why, but whenever I stumbled across an EE answer through Google, it's always seemed like a place full of crystallized ancient knowledge.
How Do I Know I've Found My Passion?
A place not to do this is with R/C helicopters. Best to buy them from Brookstone with the 1-year no-questions-asked warranty -- you WILL destroy them and you can go through your 3-6 choppers for the price of one.
Beware compulsive bookmarking
No, not Orcs. There are men who are allied with Mordor in the books. Specifically "Haradrim", who are described as black-skinned men from the south that rode elephants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southrons#Haradrim), and Easterlings, men who are described as swarthy, dark-haired, and dark-eyed from the east (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlings).

I'm not saying the books are racists, but it's not a stretch to think of these people as indian and black respectively given the book's description.
Rohl, you mean like a miniature adsense setup for your company? Depending on the functionality required you would have at least a horz scaled set of servers replying to ad queries from javascript widgets on peoples websites, collecting metrics as well as serving the ad data back ti the client. I would recommend a CDN for the graphical ad assets like cloudfront for fast loading.

Then you would have a web front end for admin.

Additional features, like confirming the widget in use by member sites would be another set of spidering servers.

IMO this is a very fun technical problem to solve. Lots of moving parts and opportunities to optimize .
and the cost of supporting a given browser's rolling release schedule in-house at these companies is miniscule compared to the global cost to the web development industry

I hate to break this to you, but nobody cares about this amorphous global cost to the web dev industry. It's a cost that isn't accounted for and accrues in a uniform way that makes it inactionable.

If MS were to start telling the Fortune 500 companies that it was going to start screwing them over and not supporting old browsers -- IBM would immediately step in and start doing it. MS would lose most of their revenue (guess what, web devs don't generate much revenue for MS) and IBM would become the fastest growing company in the world.

It's just stupid to PO paying customers to help people who whine, but pay nothing.
Exactly.. how does Apple ban the Netflix app?
One of the big things that makes Experts Exchange unique is a patented system that requires askers to select their best answer. Most Q&A sites (StackExchange included) let the community vote for the best answer, when really the person whose opinion matters most is the one who asked the question.

StackOverflow allows for both community voting AND for the original asker to indicate which answer was the best answer. I suppose the only thing it doesn't do is require the asker to select a best answer like EE does apparently.

Also, how in the world did they get this process patented?
=====MILD SPOILERS FOR DAY 2 BELOW=====

(I posted this in another thread, but this one seems to have most of the action.)

I think it's become apparent that most of Watson's advantage is in signaling speed. Figure that a top human player like Jennings knows about 80% of the answers and Watson about 90%. Watson should be winning, but not by nearly that much.

Jeopardy signaling 101 for those that don't know: An offscreen operator presses a button to enable the buzzers when Alex is done speaking. If you buzz too early, there's a 300 ms lockout until you can buzz again. A light near the board lights up when the buzzers are open. Watson monitors that light (whether by electrical connection or optical sensor, they haven't said) and physically presses the signaling buzzer. Its reaction speed must be faster than the humans' and it will never miss and buzz too early.

Also, Watson's clue selection pattern shows that it definitely starts by searching for Daily Doubles. It picks the bottom 3 clues of each category before anything in the top 2 rows, where the DDs are statistically concentrated.
This makes me hate Experts Exchange even more.
The elephant in the room is Google Chrome.

Both IE9 and Firefox 4 (I think) lack Chrome's automatic updates. They simply cannot bring new features and bug fixes to users as quickly as Chrome can.

You can spend 1-2 years working on a major release, but if the competition is rolling out automatic updates every 6 weeks, you're at a major disadvantage.
Jees. Talk about sour grapes... If EE wants to know why they weren't picked for the Q&A site pow-wow while StackExchange and Quora were, they should look no further than themselves. Let's take a look at one of their current top answers:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Virus_and_Spyware/Anti-Virus...

30 day trial?! Subscribe now?! Who do they think they're kidding? Or really: who actually uses this thing? Before the other sites came along, it was merely a nuisance that showed up in your search results, mixed in with something that would actually help. (Interestingly, now the problem is StackExchange content-farms...)

This is exactly the kind of thing that inspired StackOverflow (a fact this post even references!) and it's a key factor in its massive growth and adoption on the part of fed up programmers and sysadmins.
A mobile first strategy still needs distribution
I wonder if the author is even aware of the ill will people have towards EE? There are not many sites people clamor to remove from Google listings. You're probably doing something wrong if they are.
90% of the phones sold this year in the US were dumbphones. For the people who bought those phones, Android and iPhone are not very strong brands yet, iPhone perhaps on par with "Windows" (what they use at work and at home).

Windows is still a very familiar brand to everyone, even though it doesn't have any cachet.
EE is the only site I would block in my google preferences, a really annoying one...
Perhaps you'd be happy with a Palm Pre: hotspot..check (and free with Verizon)...possibly world's finest notification system...check.

I had an iPhone for a year and now have used a Palm Pre for a year. I just bought my son an iPod Touch and yuck!! The celebrated UI of iOS is quite a turn off compared to webOS in my opinion.
With 2MM/yr, why not consider taking outside investors? The market seems pretty bubbly right now, and you have a proven track record and don't "need" the money. Ironically, the thing I find most loathesome about venture capital might actually be a win here: you get a board of directors which can fire the CEO.

If that's too drastic, why not add another stakeholder? Two more options:

First: you can make a strategic hire, like VP/Sales, or a "rock star" VP/Eng. This doesn't change the ownership structure but, with buyin from your partner, does put pressure on the company to manage itself properly. If your partner likes the new VP/Sales, he'll listen when the VP/Sales says marketing sucks and the networking conferences aren't bringing in leads.

Or, you could go whole hog and bring a third partner in. The dynamics of 3-person teams are very different from two-person teams, because you can vote bad ideas off the island. With a business putting 1.2MM or so away every year, you probably have a pretty compelling pitch; all you need to do is find a gap between you and your partner that deserves a board-level answer. It doesn't need to be 33/33/33 for you to win; 45/45/10 still breaks the tie you're in right now.
::SOB SOB:: looks like someone felt left out. Whoa! no VCs? I would just love to see what would happen if they found out I didn't pick them for my kickball team. Looks like Fortune magazine in the end all for what's right in this universe.

Pretending like you took part in the interview. I can only describe it to my self as...Desperation.

Maybe this is whine your-self some more recognition tactic? I've been out of the game since I was 6 years old, I can't be sure.
If Kindle and Netflix app gets removed, it will touch a nerve with lot of Apple customers. Hope Apple understands that.
You're missing the point (I hate to break it to you). The F500 and Microsoft can do as they please, but stop expecting the web dev community to take seriously this claim that they need to standardise on version X of a browser. We don't care anymore.
Not necessary. Just scroll to the bottom.
I highlighted it because of Bing Cashback, which is exactly the sort of money-losing stunt that dot-com businesses pulled at the height of the boom to gain market share.

Microsoft, at least, has the cash that they can afford to blow a few hundred million for nothing, and the smarts to discontinue the program when it's obvious it doesn't work.
Startup America - IBM GEP SmartCamp New Cities & Entrepreneur Roundabout Part 1
In reality these are beauty contests. We should pay attention only when Hong Kong creates startups that makes use of the 1Gps.

On the other hand, I enjoy the meta discussion about monopolies and barriers to entries that exist in America. If anything, it is a pointer to a more general malady that befalls every aspect of doing business in the U.S.
How does it make sense to do a $10 million IPO when they are going to spend 20 percent of the proceeds to implement SOX?

There needs to be some change in the security laws to allow small companies to opt out of Sarbanes-Oxley.
Orion: Eclipse for the Web
> I first discovered Vanilla Coke in a winding 7-11 in Hong Kong - I remember this beverage to be almost overwhelmingly sweet

It is overwhelmingly sweet no doubt about it. I could not drink two sips of it and I am a Coca-Cola drinker.
Interesting.

As an alien to English culture, I always wondered why LOTR is so popular amongst all sorts of non-conformists and bohemians. I had an impression that the essence of the book is racism and classism: how good a person is, is pretty much determined by his birthplace and pedigree.

I realize that it is written in the Norse epic style, and Norse mythology is naturally pretty racist, but it still escapes me why an academic linguistic experiment got such a wide audience.

Another motif, about a small guy doing things greater than himself, is nice though.
I always considered it spam. I wish Google allowed me to globally exclude the domain from my searches. Moreover, given what I could read it didn't look anymore promising or valuable that the various sites that come up, discuss a problem to a dead-end with no resolution (usually posted by a clueless Microsoft "MVP"). No thanks.
Rhapsody won't bow to Apple's subscription policy
Because it goes against the spirit of the competition. Nobody would be impressed if IBM built a machine that could simply buzz in faster than Jennings and Rutter.
Of course Rhapsody can't sell their stuff for a 30% margin. It's not their own stuff!

They're trying to be the last link in a chain of 90/10 (or more) splits. They repackage record labels' repackaging of artists' content. Do you think the artists would find 30% economically untenable?

The App Store is 70/30 because Apple can take things straight from content producer to customer. When the Apple takes the place of publishing, distribution, inventory, sales, payments and shipping, there's real value for that 30%.

When all someone wants out of Apple is merely to process the payment and send things down the pipe, gee, who do they think they are? But that's not what Apple is actually holding themselves out as. Apple doesn't want to be in that kind of commodity market anyway. Seems reasonable to me.
The type of business makes a big difference. They couldn't have charged much more. Beyond a fairly low price, it makes more sense to just bring your own printer.

It's much different from something like contract IT where nobody knows how to bring the network back up and they can't do any work while it's down.
Rhapsody doesn't have "another" 30% to give. Their margins are probably something like 5%. Crapple is demanding 30% of the sale price, which leaves Rhapsody with a 25% loss.

Since that is economically infeasible, Apple is effectively mandating that they are the only ones who can sell content on their platform.
"Nathan Cohen made this discovery..."

Surprisingly he does not have a wikipedia article. You'd think someone who made such an important discovery would have a rather long one.
Is there anything else from "The Social Network" that isn't true? Just kidding, but the parent comment was a Zuck quote -- I think in real life in an IM that someone saved.
Being a 50% partner means you can fire the designer. If the partner with the personal relationship isn't willing to, tell him you will do the honors.

I think a restructuring is in order. You can either leave (dealing with your half of the company in whatever way is necessary), or restructure the company so that you (as the person who seems to understand and run the business) have all of the decision power. Of course your partner will need something in return for this, be it cash, or the threat of leaving. Another option is to mutually agree on a 3rd board member for dispute resolution. Make sure this person can remain objective and make decisions that are best for the company.

Unfortunately I can't give you any advice on how to deal with your personal friendship with this person. You probably know best the way to amicably approach the situation with him.
I think they'll move to capture new slices of more pies, rather than a larger slice of the pie they already have.

If people are bothered by the 30% subscription take, wait until iPhone users start buying gas and groceries using near-field communication on iPhone 5+ (with a cut going to Apple)...
Horse Racing Tips | FREE Horse Racing Betting Tips | Horse Ratings
It looks like CSS transitions just showed up in 2009 (http://www.webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/)

And even then it was just a proprietary vendor extension. It's not like it was part of the draft standard at that tmie.

If MS adds a new feature to IE, does that start the clock on when everyone else needs to implement it?
> the cost of supporting a given browser's rolling release schedule in-house at these companies is miniscule compared to the global cost to the web development industry and user productivity of having to support three (possibly four) different versions of IE at any one time.

That's a mighty bold claim to make without any supporting data, given that the maths is so heavily stacked against you.

Suppose a 5,000 person company standardised on Chrome tomorrow and built their key in-house IT systems to support it, as many have with IE over the years. Now suppose that in about five weeks, Google push a breaking change in the new release of Chrome, that takes out some of the organisation's key intranet functionality. What would that company do?

Think quickly, because for every hour that key system is down and all the staff are stopped from working, the company could have hired an extra web developer for an entire year.
Are there similar "challenges" in the closed source world? Say, C#? And are there similar, say, Scheme or Haskell challenges?
Seems pretty cool! I laughed though at "intuitive one button interface" where the guy pushes it a few times, then he holds it in to do another function.
Don't buy DRM controlled books (or DRM controlled anything). By doing so you are at the mercy of the content provider/deliverer.

That should be the lesson learned.
I think this is the best advice on this thread. If your partner has control over hiring/firing/finances, etc. and will not respect your interests as co-owner then you have a major problem. But it sounds as if your biggest issue is non-performance of a single staff member in a 7-person company.

Lack of growth is not really the fault of a single person. And your partner has emotional reasons not to want to fire this guy. Either view the designer as a temporary cost of supporting your partner, or figure out a way to train the guy into greater competence in his role. At a minimum, it sounds like you'll have to be the bearer of bad news if you let him go. Do you have a way to do this and save your partner face?

Tip: deal with all conflict with your partner face-to-face instead of over email. That will avoid people reading passive aggressiveness and latent hostility into communications -- both you and him.
One example: The universal truth of "DRM Doesn't Work" actually simply means "DRM isn't strong enough to for big companies to stand up to the ravenous appetites of everyone on the entire internet."

This is why big companies with content everyone craves have such a hard time with DRM -- there's just too much firepower arrayed against them. If you look closer, you find that "DRM Doesn't Work" isn't quite true. It's just not as strong as Phillips or Sony would like it to be.
Skype 5.0 Easter Egg: Super Simple Way To Launch Conference Calls
There's a deaded comment by nostromo here that I thought was good and don't see why it was killed. The interpretation of LotR as a book about the domination of non-white peoples is really not that much of a stretch.

--

No, not Orcs. There are men who are allied with Mordor in the books. Specifically "Haradrim", men who are described as black-skinned (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southrons#Haradrim), and Easterlings, men who are described as swarthy, dark-haired, and dark-eyed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlings).

I'm not saying the books are racists, but it's not a stretch to think of these people as indian and black respectively given the book's description.
Long-term good is often very short-term scary. Our economic models will not be adjusted to this new reality very quickly.
Then you won't be getting many contracts from large organisations, and people who work at large organisations won't be using anything public that you develop on their lunch break. If that doesn't matter to you, that's OK, to each his own. But it does matter to a very large group of people in the web development community who make their living building professional sites for professional clients.
What's going to get really interesting is seeing where Apple draw the line with "subscription apps".

The Rhapsody and Magazine apps of this world seem fairly clear cut. Kindle is somewhat less so (since books aren't a subscription service - something most blogs seem to miss). But what about these "Go to my PC", Salesforce.com, or other SaaS sites that basically provide free iOS apps for expensive subscription plans? Are these companies now all going to start adding in-app sign-up options and paying Apple a cut?
If the reason the designer wasn't fired was because he was a close friend of the founder, then we have some small tremors here that may be indicative of a larger problem.
It's not always this way. Think about, say, a Pandora subscription - thin margins, but provides a real value added service that is well above and beyond that of a mere distributor.

Can they afford to give Apple a 30% cut of all revenue?

It's completely misguided to characterize all payment through a mobile app as cutting out the middleman. In a great number of cases (i.e. subscriptions) Apple role is nothing more than a payments gateway + lead generation. Does that make them deserving of 30% of your entire revenue stream?
I somehow manage to lose more faith in the patent system every day. I thought it was at zero, but somehow it's lower.

Perhaps I should patent my faith system that allows for negative numbers. Seems reasonable...
Neither seems very intuitive for "back" and "forward".
I am stoked for this. I have met David a couple times and know he's got the right mind and attitude to do a good job.

NYC is not an easy place to navigate quickly. This newsletter will especially help hackers new to the NYC scene.