skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: on the lookout for co-founders (YC summer 2011)
I've applied before as a single founder. I want to build cool stuff, preferably stuff that hasn't been tried before.

I have a product idea, that revolves around an old new way to interact with multimedia resources on existing web applications with API's.

It's basically a web app and a lot of work with REST api's.

Independently of YC, i've always had interest in teaming with people who shared the same interests as me and, for most, that hasn't happened yet.

Hence, i decided to post on HN and poke the community for anyone looking for, preferably, a project and make their own way in their work life, with interest in applying for the next round of YC,
although that's not the ultimate goal, which is creating a useful and successful product.

Since teaming with co-founders is serious business, the trial by fire could be exploring the idea, filling the application form and, at best, developing a small working prototype, by the 20th.

The way i'm thinking about technology at the moment, it will probably run on Node.js, although i'm open to suggestions.
I hang around on irc.freenode.org #startups, same nick as HN.
Yeah, this is a fallacy many people hold. We are not here to "write programs". We are here to solve people's problems, a program is just a means to do that. That's what you're really measured on, how many and how difficult the problems you solve are. If you can solve a problem not with code but wth say updating the documentation, or running a training class, then as a programmer that's the right thing to do.
You're making the same mistake that he was by assuming that he was advocating actual socialism/communism instead of a "social democracy"-esque hybrid.
Nah, I still get carded all the time ;) I look like I'm 19 (or so they say). Although, it is true that the more expensive the place, the less they care. When I actually was 19 (and looked 17) I got offered a long island iced tea at a new place in the city that was ~$40-50 an entrée.
Me too. I don't know if that means I have a dirty mind, or if I try to guess missing vowels in alphabetical order.
Thanks!

I find that I save a ton of money buying and using items that are marketed for other purposes than I intend. Usually you get the same or better quality without the mark-up. This sounds like no exception.
Yes, you were right, and I wonder what influences have led you to question whether declining to work for a company for ethical reasons is "childish".

From what I understand about Goldman Sachs, what they do at its most basic level is figure out how to separate people from their money while producing as little actual value as possible, with no regard to the consequences, by pumping smart and productive people full of more money than you could ever spend in a lifetime, then encouraging a culture where all of your coworkers try to do it anyway and you are compelled to join them.

To me, part of maturity (the opposite of 'childishness') is learning to value things other than the immediate fulfillment of your most base desires.

This can be illustrated in simple ways, like when you realize that there are actually good reasons not to eat sugary cereal for every meal, or in your case, when you realize that money alone, even great piles of it, doesn't automatically make a job worthwhile.

In my opinion, the most childish people are the ones at Goldman Sachs, sniffing each other's asses and comparing watches and ties as a measurement of self-worth while they spend the prime of their lives trying to create paper out of thin air so more people can buy more watches and ties.

Good on you for not being one of them. If I were you, I would also contact the highest-up person you can reach and explain why you didn't want to work for them.
According to this comment [1], Qt has around 4000 licensees. A license is around $3,000, so that's roughly a 12 million dollar business, if we can trust those numbers.

Edit: actually, it's on the Qt press release itself. They state there [2] that:
> The Qt Commercial licensing business is growing and has around 3500 companies

[1] http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/16/nokia-cto-rich-green-spe...

[2] http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/07/nokia-and-digia-working-...
You could have an ie6 mode that you could make difficult to re-enable for those sysadmins. I don't know what to say about ie9 requiring vista, it's so obvious that ie8 will be the ie6 of 2013 when we are all trying to rely on HTML 5 features. That's just a bad decision.
Relatedly, 60% of NBA Stars are bankrupt within 5 years after retirement:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=3469271

Filing for bankruptcy is a long-standing tradition
for NBA players, 60% of whom, according to the Toronto
Star, are broke five years after they retire.

So it's not completely true that wealth is an advantage that cannot be squandered. And in the US there was a saying that used to be more popular -- "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/letter_from_america/11...

But many more smaller figures of the Robber Baron age
made immense fortunes, took no care of them, were not
of a generous or philanthropic nature, handed the money
on as a life belt to their sons who then squandered it,
so much so that their sons returned to the shirtsleeves
in which grandfather had landed in the United States.

To the extent that the unusual combination of traits required to create enormous wealth is at all heritable, it is certainly imperfectly heritable. This is augmented by the fact that when you have large families, the wealth is divided among all children. So insofar as we think of income mobility as a good thing, it's actually abetted in part by highly imperfect heritability and large family size.

(Not driving at any particular point here, just some interesting links of relevance to thinking on income mobility).
What is SMART and why SMART?
Gay Sex Is A Criminal Offence In Singapore
Use the padlock icon on your status to set which list of people can see it.
Those are stunning renders. Mind you, Lego plastic is slap in the sweet spot of what a ray tracer ought to be good at, so I guess it's not surprising.
(I'm a Chrome dev)

about:flags is useful for testing but, in general, you shouldn't switch on random features. If you're doing web page development and want to see how hardware accel affects things, then sure. But if the feature was ready for general use, it would be enabled by default. It's not worth crashing your browser for a few extra frames per second.

(And pre-rendering is something completely different, not related to hardware accel at all!)
I think it's best to 100% open so that you attract the right people at the stage that you're at. You should read "You’re a little company, now act like one": http://blog.asmartbear.com/youre-a-little-company-now-act-li...

Do you really want to attract the kind of people who expect a big support team, when you don't have a big support team? Probably not, unless you want to disappoint them!
It can actually hurt if you're really good at or really like programming because it can sometimes lead to unnecessary programming. A common example of this is writing a small script to automate something that would have actually taken less time to just perform manually the one or two times you have to do it.
I agree. I think that immigration itself is a risky undertaking. One has to abandon everything familiar, which is by no means easy, regardless the difficult circumstances. Besides, all the rich kids in the US today we are discussing and capitalists are the descendants of immigrants.
I would not say that immigrants are risk-averse, but I think that obtaining a visa or green card mainly keep them from entrepreneurial ventures. Or maybe language barriers.
It's also likely that the prior for any given customer being underage is much lower at a more expensive establishment - 16 year-olds don't generally have the cash to splash out.
> First, think back to news stories from 2007. Everybody's house is going to keep going up in value forever. Wall Street is an obvious place to go if you're smart and ambitious and want an easy way to make a lot of money.

Maybe I'm old, but I remember none of these stories. I understand your point here (and there are a group of successful traders whose main "technical indicator" is headlines from a certain set of periodicals; they trade against whatever the consensus is), but I'm sensing the gathering of reeds for the strawman construction just a wee bit... =)
For those using Qt for multiplatform desktop applications: better than being tied to a disinterested mobile phone company.
A/B test it, which ever leads to more sales, use that.
Louis Vuitton Luggage Replica
For anyone else who was wondering what pre-rendering actually is, here is the design document: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/desig...

Prerendering is an experimental feature being added to Chrome to potentially improve user-visible page load times. Prerendering is triggered by <link rel=prefetch> elements in referring pages. An invisible RenderView is created for the prerendered page, which will do full loading of all dependent resources, as well as execution of Javascript. If the user navigates to the page, the invisible RenderView will become visible.
Nokia c3 themes Ubuntu Dream Clock
You reminded me of http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_wit...
I did not make three grammatical mistakes in three sentences.
Agreed, except you need the wisdom to know when you truly will never ever have to do that task again (nor anyone else) vs when you think you only need to do it once. There's value in having something scripted that you end up needing to come back to months later. I also know I would have preferred setup steps to be scripted on projects I've taken over, vs apparently just hand-entering SQL.
SurfSens brings surfing into the computer age
VezTek USA’s Impossible eBook App
Just wanted to share some insights I have come up with...working virtually with a team which can be managed systematically to scale any business up and yep, free your time :)
Point-of-Sale Systems are Easy Target for Hackers
You could build the skeleton in Erlang and then call out to Lua. This one works well...

https://github.com/Eonblast/Erlualib
Part 1 of a tutorial on monads
The ampersand (&) is an 'E' and a 't' fused together. A fact more readily apparent in some designs[0] more than others.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trebuchet_MS_ampersand.svg
It'll soon be illegal in Europe to differentiate insurance risk by gender...
I actually had the opposite experience: I never got carded until after I was old enough to drink.
Previous Discussion of IdeaPaint:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=699602

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=701255
In terms of material wealth Western commerce structures have produced more. However, much suffering has occurred a result. High levels of pollution, propping up of corrupt regimes in exchange for access to resources for cheap cost, environmental damage done to poor countries, etc.

The costs of this material wealth have not been measured fully. Typically fields like economics only look at financial matters to determine that we are better off. The 'we' part changes depending on context. Are people in the Nigerian deltas better off? Every two years or so they experience a Gulf of Mexico BP level oil spill. Acidity levels in the ocean are increasing and then there is global warming.

In some countries life is good (generally speaking) but this good life does come, at least partially, at the expense of others. From my perspective there is a serious problem with capitalism and Western commerce structures. The problems seem to be getting worse.
I like the paradox in the press release:

Through the proposed acquisition, around 3500 desktop and embedded customer companies from various industries are targeted to be transferred to Digia.

and

Nokia will continue to invest in future development of Qt for the benefit of all users, both Commercial and LGPL.

Why do they sell it in the first place? If Nokia will continue to invest in future development, it will be a direct benefit of Digia not really Nokia...
Blogspot banned in Turkey
Second this. It's the same as the rejection therapy thing that started catching on. You need to be conscious of failure and unexpected outcomes but don't turn it into yet another friggin' cult movement or goal.

Set your target, go hard towards it, if you fail or come off the rails, accept it, assess it, suck it up and keep going.

All I see this doing is encouraging people to be wreckless, and not in a constructive way. Go hard, but hard enough that it's of benefit to you and your project, have some regard for the outcome that you actually want.
This has to be one of the most ridiculous rulings I've ever heard. Statistically, male drivers are more dangerous, so why should women now subsidise this behaviour? It's pure ideological lawmaking, designed to show how egalitarian the EU is by in fact foisting a law upon its citizens which is completely disconnected from reality.

In their attempt to achieve "equality" and "fairness," they've actually achieved neither - the two concepts are mutually exclusive in the insurance world. The whole concept of insurance, like life itself is predicated on inequality in the boolean algebraic sense of the word. It just proves how meddlesome the Eurocracy is becoming.

Besides, where does it end ? It's likely now that male pension annuities, up till now cheaper than female ones, due to the earlier death of the average male will increase too.
That's not "fair," is it?
This is pretty much why people with out jobs can't find them and the only hiring going on is for people with jobs. The most important thing in any situation is to act like you should be doing that.
How can anyone claim there's a scam happening just because a list hasn't been updated in 15 minutes? Whoever said the list is updated in real-time? It could be hourly. And even if every fifteen minutes, why should there be any change?
Yes, in my personal opinion, this is exactly what's going on: the next step in Nokia's new love affair with Windows Phone, and Qt the rejected mistress.
Excellent, thank you! Since I use AWS now for other stuff, this approach makes the most sense.
BFM Fitting Solves “Weighty” Powder Problem
A most interesting exchange, on reflection I find Dyson's reaction intellectually honest and quite consistent. There's lots to read between the lines here.
It's absolutely true that socialism is an overloaded term that can refer to anything from the European-style welfare state (hardly a hellhole) to far less pleasant dictatorships like Cuba to out-and-out mass murder like in Cambodia, China, and the USSR.

However, the post said "I believe my generation will overthrow the arbitrary and brutal authority of corporate capitalism and bigoted conservatism in favor of rationalistic, libertarian socialism driven by a scientific approach and a concern for universal social justice".

That sounds more like Pol Pot and Lenin than your standard EU bureaucrat. The latter usually pays at least lip service to capitalism and markets even if they often have a conflicted relationship with them.

Also, the thing is that we tend to take people at face value in most other areas. If someone calls for takeover by Hamas or Islamic Jihad or the KKK or the American Nazi Party or what have you, we usually do not go into detail to try to figure out exactly what splinter faction they belong to, or whether they represent "true Islamism" or "true Nazism", because we know that ideologies coming from that direction are a dead end and have killed millions of people.

Similarly, if someone calls for the overthrow of capitalism, it's incumbent upon them to explain that they don't really mean "overthrow" for real, but something more like Sweden [complete with multinational corporations like Ikea].

Postscript: For what it's worth, 90% of Indians and 93% of Chinese believe that trade and business ties are good for the country. These are still large, poor countries -- yet they are actually considerably more favorably inclined towards capitalism than wealthy countries like the US (now at only 66% favorable!)

http://pewglobal.org/2010/06/17/obama-more-popular-abroad-th...

http://pewglobal.org/files/2010/06/269-03-11.png
I don't know if the people upvoting looked through the syllabus, course notes, and assignments, but I'm going to go so far as to say this is completely useless, and might even be damaging for a new entrepreneur to read.

The course is divided into 4 sections

* Valuations
* VC Deal Structure
* VC Types & Strategies
* Exit

The assignments are of the form: 1) read a case study 2) write your thoughts. You will answer inane questions like "What should the pre-money valuation be" and "Would you invest" with arbitrary answers like "$10M" and "Yes", spread over a 2 page memo.

Since it's from 2002, it is missing relevant information on angels, super angels, accelerators, and incubators. The VC market has also significantly changed. It doesn't address bootstrapping.

More importantly, it doesn't touch on how to actually run or think about companies. Spending the time on this will help you understand a few more items on your terms heets and deal packet, but you can also just as easily ask your lawyer or a founder friend when the time comes.
People from wealthier families also have an advantage in fields that use unpaid internships when starting.
while you might be right, i wouldnt be so fast to write off ggl. Google after Yahoo, Gmail after hotmail, android after ios, fb itself after myspace should i continue? Google (and some other big COs) have quite successful track of following/copying/buying/redefining/spin-offs.

I know many ffb users are already feeling frustrated with latest FB initiatives as they simply need place to stay in touch with friends and some of them would be happy to switch to something like "Facebook classic".

Besides that FB is doing great in exploring "what is SOCIAL"(how it works/how to make money out of it etc), but someone yet has to tell me what would REALLY stop other followers to copy all the best results once they approach their maximum(both in terms of product and growth challenges for company). I heard a lot of "Google just dont get it", "why GGL cant build X/Y", "social must be in your DNA" noise but someone has to explain why they absolutely cant do something IF they really need/want it. And I am not taking Wave as a proof, as it just shows me that GGL still has balls for serious decisions(and i count both starting and stopping something BIG as a major achievement)

Something tells me that this is just the beginning...
There's so many articles these days about failing. What if you fail to fail?
I'll always hire a middle class guy with something to prove over an ivy leaguer. The fire in the belly is what resonates with me the most. They work harder and don't take success for granted.
Doesn't seem to be that big a deal from a business perspective. Digia (DIG) is +0,46%, compared to +0,75% for OMXH as a whole.

We will have to see how good a home Digia will be for Qt. They did come out with a profit warning just a couple of days ago, due to problems in the Mobile Solutions segment.
> The reddit guys came by our Cloudkick office late last year and flat denied there are any bots they know of that downvote when I asked them

I guess they forgot to explain that while it's not bots that do it, there's a feature in reddit code itself makes it look to many people that such bots exist: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/eaqnf/pardon_me_but_500...

I've linked that so many times in threads about tragic events or sensitive questions where people even a single downvote personally (ie. it can happen with very small scores but high activity)
It really depends on where the immigrants come from and what their values are. I've read that Chinese immigrants out-earn their US-born counterparts. Second generation Chinese do even better. It wouldn't surprise me if this were also true of Indians, Koreans and a slew of other nationalities, too.
Also, this use of 'open-source' for of font characters is confusing. Why use an embedded font for a single image? I was under the impression that it's legal to embed images of characters from fonts (i.e. I could scan and use a '&' set in Garamond from some print), it's just not legal to embed the 'program code' of the font.
Installing Nagios On Debian Lenny And Monitoring A Debian Lenny Server
We used Ideapaint at our office and it still works and looks great two years later. I would highly recommend it.
Why interactive prototyping and Balsamiq Mockups can live together in peace
But then you run a risk of not automating things you should have automated, which is already much more common.
I think that this would be an awesome game-like approach for teaching the basics of programming to a small kid.
Integrity is more important than a small edge from pretending that you're more than one person.

Use "I" or the company name.
Personally I use "we" in scientific writing mostly because its a convenient neutral way of addressing your reader. Referring to the reader directly with "you" can be jarring or to informal.
That was the assumption I went with.
The drug addict richkids are the exception to the rule. You have to be very focused and sometimes oblivious to feedback from your social cycle make a quantum leap in careers if you come from a working class background (rich kids get it for free).

I wholeheartedly agree with your last comment. University student == immature anxiety. Being careless does not equal fun, creativity, reward and, most of all, challenge. It's a popular culture stereotype i 've come to hate vehemently.
Look at the pricing of the fingerprint app. There's your scam.
In the long run, I will get cheaper insurance so wont argue too much about it.
AdGrok (YC S10) emerges from beta, simplifying Google Adwords
TL;DR: if you use jQuery and PHP, you are noob, everyone who disagrees is a noob. Rails ohhh yeah it's the best, fuck yeah. If you don't use Dojo, you are a fuckin' noob.

For some reason I can't take this post seriously, it's like a typical troll post, it claims a lot of things but doesn't even try to back them up properly.
I've actually used a "PB&J" exercise like this to teach HS kids from my hometown that took a computer engineering lab.

The class would start. I'd have a whole loaf of wonder bread, a pack of plasticware, pb, jelly, and paper plate.

"OK, who wants to tell me how to make PB&J"

The first kid will inevitably say something like "Put the PB on the bread." So I place the jar of PB on the closed loaf of bread. They laugh. Then they start to get it. But even then, it takes time before they break it down into "atomic" steps that I can actually interpret.
How do you figure? It's unlikely insurance companies will reduce their premiums for male drivers, they'll just increase the premiums for female customers.
It does sound a little bit like the sale of UNIX rights by Novell to SCO, which may account for the tingling feeling.
That is why a lot of programmer jobs, especially for small firms where design and development will never be completely distinct teams of people, are listed as "developer / analyst" (or "analyst / developer").

Translating what the user wants into a practical design that is useful to them can be more important than actual programming skill.

Even further removed from programming: inside industry knowledge/experience can be vital too, particularly in regulated industries, so that you can translate what the user says they want into what they actually need (I have before had to quietly ask "have you run that past your compliance department?" when presented with a requirement that I saw would cause problems with the auditors - spotting these things in design stages rather then the UAT stage saves a lot of hassle).
Didatic approaches to teach versioning with Git