skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I don't think, for the record, that our lack of success (to this point) is the CEO's fault, and it's definitely not mine: I'm just a developer"

If you really have the attitude "it's not my fault... I'm just a developer" then you should look for a job at a larger company where work processes are institutionalized. And if you get the temptation to do startup life again start your own thing on the side WITHOUT a co-founder so you don't have any temptation to fall into this mindset again.

Without assigning fault, it isn't good that you're abdicating the responsibility to define the business and get customers, and then balking when your partner makes demands. You've settled into a subordinate position and your post basically reads as if you want to switch to another alpha male since this one doesn't seem capable of driving growth.

I don't mean this to sound critical, but life doesn't work this way, or at least it never has for me and most of the people I know. When you start a business you have to do almost everything (if only because most other people can't). So - sure - work somewhere insulated from the market to support yourself and and force yourself to be more entrepreneurial by starting a side business.
I realize this is offtopic a bit but there are quite a few HN postings on this topic.
I think Marcin and his crew are doing fantastic work, and their simple, low-cost designs could make a real difference, especially in the case of places that are poorly served by current mass manufacturing.

One of my first kragen-tol posts http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1998-Novembe... predicted mass adoption of this kind of thing within ten years. So far it's taking longer than I expected, although it's happened in a few niches: http://www.cleggind.com/specialstructures/mobilepartsmachine...

One thing that some may not appreciate is that a local micro-factory doesn't have to run cheaper than, say, GM's body panel stamping machines in order to be economically beneficial.

To be concrete, consider the case where you need a certain screw. The screw that holds the left wheel of your push lawnmower on, which fell out in the grass somewhere. It needs to be a countersunk head to fit, and it has a much narrower thread pitch than most screws that size. None of the hardware stores in your area carry any screws in the right diameter and thread pitch, let alone a countersunk head. What do you do?

Well, at the time, I lived in Dayton, Ohio, one of the machining centers of the world. So I went across town to a company that manufactured screws and spent about US$5 to buy a pound of the right kind of screw (I think it was about half an inch diameter and half an inch long, with a humongous countersunk head). Here in Buenos Aires, I imagine I'd just be screwed.

Now, I don't know what kind of process you use to manufacture a big machine screw like that. Do you cold-roll the threads, or do you cut them with a die from a cold-forged blank cut from bar stock, or what? I'm sure that, whatever it is, it isn't cutting it out on a lathe, or they'd be sold by the screw, not by the pound.

But you can cut one on a lathe, except for the slot in the head, of course. If my local hardware store had had a fully automatic CNC lathe and the appropriate software, they could have punched in the numbers and cut me the correct screw in about five minutes. Maybe it would cost me US$10, but it would have saved me hours of shopping and driving.

(I probably could also have mail-ordered it from McMaster-Carr, although that still leaves me without a lawnmower for a few days.)

Custom automated manufacturing isn't competing economically just with mass production, even for clearly mass-producible goods like machine screws. It's competing with mass production, plus the costs of its supply-chain management and its wholesale and retail channels, plus the delays implicit in the same.
Looks really cool. Love the fluidity with the animations
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342559
Ask HN: Review my startup, Workables.com
A real-time marketplace for one-time jobs... http://workables.com
Wealth & Health of Nations Interactive Graph
What do you mean, the purpose of the new TLD is to segregate the Internet. It won't work, it's a bad idea and it will mainly open a lot of new adult domains but it been sold as a way to segregate the Internet exactly as people imagine.

And that's why a significant number of porn sites opposed the XXX domain as I recall (well, that and the devaluing of their existing domains).
The kids in Paraguay don't seem to think the OLPC is useless; although obviously the OLPC project has failed to achieve anything like its original goals, it's still producing things people want.
Is Bowline abandoned? - Issues - maccman/bowline - GitHub
And the name of a hundred other things, including technical drawings. I don't think that CSS framework has a monopoly.
Can you provide a link to your station's website? It would be nice to have an example to look at and compare other outlets.
To be clear, I didn't suggest a "complete disaster everywhere". That being said, you can tell a lot about the state of the nation by something rather simple and isolated as what they've experienced here. There are some rather simple best practices that probably should be employed that apparently are not, and even a cursory review probably would detected it.

I was, more than anything, responding to the parent's post regarding "they can just add security later" idea.

It's true that I tend to work on projects where security is a huge deal (online banking, government, global video game services including in-game payments, etc). As the architect of these systems, a key part of the design is security, and while other projects don't have to be quite as diligent, that doesn't mean they should just ignore it altogether.

I'd also like to hope that my attitude is not just for those of us in the security industry, but for everyone making web-based applications.

Personally, I think any online service does their current or potential clients a disservice if they don't take security into account early on.

As soon as you take money from someone, I consider that to be a responsibility that has been accepted to not only provide the functionality you offer, but to do it in an appropriately secure manner.

It's the classic techie vs. sales guy argument; we don't want it perfect, we want it on Wednesday.

The problem is that if even simple and effective security is overlooked or not dealt with early on, you'll almost always be forced to accept a compromise rather than take the required time to implement it properly.

As to the job, I'm already quite busy, thanks. Between implementing Oracle clusters and my new startup that's just closing on our financing, I've got my plate full.

Besides, I hate PHP. ;)
Why Sports Statisticians Should Be More Involved in Games
dump it on github - someone will come around and clean it up for you

what is it written in?
How about: test on your staging environment before deploying to production?
Yeah, I mean Groupon seems like a sham (3 years to $25 bil. valuation?!) but rumor has it they're going to pull in $1bn+ in rev which would only be 12-25x, a seemingly logical multiple.
We're not that stuck. We can be out of Amazon in a month if necessary. We very specifically don't use any of their "lock-in" services to make easier on our open source users, which has the side effect of not locking us in either.
Is there anything bugging you that won't let you focus and concentrate?
I wonder why anybody from HN here read that article and decided to submit it and not the original source
It seems you are in a situation where I was a long time ago. I also was frustrated, because the CEO had the same attitude, the start-up never started making money, low pay, no savings.

I was thinking about quitting for a long time, but didn't do so. I felt loyalty, I was green, I was the developer guy, I didn't really know how businesses are created, yadda, yadda. At the same time I felt that things were not right, we were not going to the right direction.

After some years I decided to quit. Being broke was the last straw. I was also becoming toxic, a hostage, I had to quit to save myself and the start-up.

It was a bit hard to find a corporate job, because I didn't develop any good connections to the industry during my start-up time. Eventually I landed a job in a big company. It wasn't the best of jobs, but got me started in my current career. After two years I got a call from a manager that quit from that company. That's how I got my next corporate job. Then after three years, the same manager called me again and I got my current corporate job. And now I called that manager and some other ex-colleagues to offer job opportunities. You get the picture.

In hindsight quitting was the best decision I ever made. Two years after I left the start-up lost funding and went bust. Steady income improved my life significantly, I paid off debts, started saving, travelled, had real vacations. Almost all the stress and pain in my life was gone.

The only thing I regret is that I didn't quit earlier. I didn't believe in the start-up, but I kept hanging around, I was wasting my time. Since this experience I have made the decision to trust my gut feelings. If I feel something is wrong, I'll trust myself. So far this has served me well. I keep large savings. The idea is that if I ever need to make a jump to the void, then I'm able to do it.

My advice based on my own experiences:

- If you are finished, get out, because you are wasting your time and potentially other people's time.

- To maximize your chances to get a job in a big company look for a good match. When I quit I applied to all sorts of interesting jobs, but never got a reply. I did graphics programming, and unsurprisingly I was eventually hired by a company that desperately needed a graphics programmer.
Side note but: I've always thought that this kind of technology rather than rockets/spacecraft is the limiting factor preventing us from being able to realistically colonize another planet.

When you got to Mars, the Moon, etc., you'd have to be able to unpack and set up a reliable self-sustaining industrial infrastructure.
In Soviet Russia, duckface does you!
Once upon a time there was a Blit terminal [1], which allowed processes to display content in independent windows. One process managed the windows, others could draw only in own windows; the terminal took care of that.

In an ideal future, GPU could be extended to support concurrent access from several processes, each with own context. The GPU would enforce separation; each process would draw to own window. Without going through syscalls...

----

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)
Which provider? Can you email me? jedberg@reddit.com.
It may just be me, but I don't see this "war for talent". I live in San Francisco and have worked for 3 companies since moving here. I am a damned good frontend engineer, like learning and playing with new tech, very opinionated and dedicated to good product design, and sure I would be an asset to any company that wanted to hire me. I've also had experience with trying my own startup (failed) and even been part of a team that got a YC interview.

Despite all of this, any time I have interviewed with some of these companies that claim to be in a war for talent, that's not the impression I get. I always end up meeting and talking to people that are looking for CS students who happen to know HTML.

Some random Facebook engineer wasted a half an hour of my time trying to get me to write a function to calculate a square root approximation method. Another interview asks me how to figure out which one of 100 bottles of wine has poison in it using 10 mice. Seriously, WTF?

At no point have these people who say they desperately want a frontend engineer actually asked anything remotely touching the job skills I possess. Want super efficient pages? Well constructed js? An innovative solution to a hard frontend problem? A high performance html5 app that looks native on a phone? Apparently not. These guys just want more CS engineers like themselves and not people that have acquired the best knowledge by years of working in the field.

I work at a big name media company now. When they interviewed me a couple years ago, they got it. They knew what they were looking for and what they actually needed. I work with some awesome people. Sometimes we butt heads because I care a lot about what I build and sometimes big corporate decisions are bullshit, but that's ok. The team I work with is smart and capable and we get shit done.

And guess what? We aren't all CS graduates. We taught ourselves and built careers for ourselves. We learned everything we know the hard way, by actually doing it.
I tend to agree. SEO is a disease that makes Google lots of money, but is destroying the ability to find anything. Keywords simply do not work anymore. I have a feeling that there are probably 5-10 startups out there working on this and at least a few are going to come up with some seriously compelling alternatives. The search+ads sector is absolutely RIPE for disruption.
I find the alert box is a bit much as well. Maybe change the status icon somewhat to signify if it's in sync or not?

I also got a 404 error when I started it the first time. I'm assuming since it didn't find the NeatList directory that it then created. It may confuse / annoy new users into thinking the app doesn't work right, may want to make that a silent check & fix.
thank god our (Russian) leaders of that times didnt think the same :)
Looking over IRCCloud's subscription plans, why would I want to pay for features that have been offered free forever? Is the idea that since I can't run an IRC client on my iPhone that I'd pay for this? I don't get it.
One big macro-scale drawback to home ownership is that it impedes labor mobility: It anchors homeowners to a particular city and makes it harder for them to consider moving elsewhere to find employment. A few months ago I heard economists on Marketplace saying this was a significant national policy problem.
You are absolutely right, the alert box will go :)

Charging for this app: maybe a future, pro version.
WebOS now officially supports Node.JS background services
Anonymous vs. Anonymous: Enough Hubris To Go Around
Hi, sorry for the secrecy. Without going into too much detail, i'd be taking larger payments from businesses and paying chunks of multiple of those payments each to individuals. Similar perhaps to adsense. Ie a single individual wouldn't just get say 10% of a single payment but of several.
>If nobody bought a house, who would we rent from?

James is saying: don't buy a home and make it your primary residence. He is fine with buying real estate (homes, condos, apartment buildings, REITs, etc) as investment properties.

An added interpretation of mine: he assumes that you would have a property management company take care of the landlord duties for you. In the case of REITs, it's really hands off.

Sources:

By the way, this is going to sound like a contradiction: but I think housing is a great investment right now. I think housing prices have gone down far enough and I can list the reasons why housing as an abstract investment concept is going to go higher from here.

- from the linked article

Rather than spend $100-200k+ on a down payment for a house (which is like throwing money away since it is completely illiquid as long as you own the house) you can put that money in a portfolio of diversified REITS (REZ is an ETF of residential REITs, for instance) if you truly believe in housing. You can do it with some leverage as well if you believe in the idea (like 90% of Americans do) that you should leverage up 200% the single largest investment in your portfolio (your house).

- from http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/02/never-own-a-home-again/
Thats why I divided the post between "financial" and "personal". The personal stuff is my own reasons, the "financial" stuff is why I think financially buying a home is a big mistake.
In the US, the interest is tax deductible, so if you have earnings to match against that, the effective interest rate to the buyer is only 2/3rds of the nominal rate on the mortgage.
Thanks, i'll look into that
uh.

You realize that facebook supports xmpp for chat, so you can use any IM client for facebook chat.
nm, it's back up right now, with a good chat going.
Mostly Python. Some C. Some R to play around with datasets and prototype algorithms.
I've noticed this on KPCC in Orange County, CA - sound bytes from a mayor's speech that's being covered, or a quick interview with someone at HBGary after the whole Annonymous attack. On one level these sound bytes are superfluous, they don't add anything beyond what the reporter is already telling us. But in addition to adding new voices to the newscast, it also assures the listener that the reporter was at the mayor's speech, has talked to people affected at HBGary, that we're not just getting regurgitated news stories as are so common (as pointed out by this article). Even the news story about Guitar Hero being cancelled had sound clips from "music experts" about the effect the game had on popular culture (essentially, his kid likes classic rock and roll now when he never liked it before) - that had limited news value, but real exclusive added value for the radio station.

So KPCC is one example of a news organization doing things above board.
Dump it on a hub and provide a link, or just provide a link to gz or zip version...
Right. The big issue is people think they are wasting money on rent. But if you factor in mortgaeg, taxes, maintenance, etc it still comes to rent or more, EVEN when the house is paid off and there is no mortgage (but taxes keep going up)
Kleinmatic is 90% correct -- reporters are used to banging out copy, passing it to an editor, re-writing it, passing it to a copyeditor, re-writing that, back through the ringer, and passed onto someone they've probably never met who fits it on a page. They've never had to really worry about the presentation on the paper besides the number of inches and maybe worrying about a sidebar or illustration to go with it.

So in that sense, asking them to link -- a presentation function! -- is very new in and of itself.

But also, a lot of the content management systems make linking prohibitive. The version our reporters and editors see makes you paste it into the story as a plain, unadorned URL, bumping against the words you want to link. But hope there's no comma after it -- it's comin' with it. And if you need to edit those words, you might screw the URL with it.
thanks for the list !
I rent, I live in a suburb, I have kids. So what else can I say? I wrote the article.
Poor Twitter is getting all the blame from TechCrunch these days.
Yeah, go buy a REIT or a housing-related stock. Then you haev all the investment benefits of owning a house EXCEPT
- you don't have to pay extra taxes
- no maintenance
- you can sell any second you want.
So go figure.
Well, I moved to a nice little suburb about 65 miles north of NYC.
While I can fully appreciate your sense of loss about leaving your company, you have to do what's good for you. If you've been in development limbo this long, odds are the CEO doesn't have the vision and or the leadership required to get over the finish line. Just remember that if need be, the company would get rid of you without a second thought.
you don't ask to be treated differently, you demonstrate that you're worth being treated differently. an attitude like "its not my fault, i'm just a developer" isn't helping.
s/Allowed/Required/
Great site. I can't tell you how many times I have been on skype with a group of friends passing time codes back and forth in the chat room. Here are some things I like:

- its not build on flash like some of your competitors products
- public rooms are advertised on the front page
- group modifiable playlist
- UI is clean and functional
- youtube search box on the same page
- music mode
- option not to be in sync with the group

Improvements

- more integration with twitter/facebook
- more discovery tools for public videos
- the settings button seems misplaced
I am working on a project (more of a public service than a startup) that needs this. I've looked through all of the resources linked in the articles above and nothing works as well as I need it to. The best performer is readability, so I will probably be going with the python port of that.

If your code works well I also think you should put it up on github. You can see what I intend to use this technology for by reading this text snippet: https://github.com/sbuss/revisionews/blob/develop/web/index....
Coding for the Mobile Web
I don't see how my comment was mean. At its meanest, I think my comment is dispassionate and pessimistic on a topic that you feel rightly passionate about, similar to how a a YC applicant feels if they don't win an invitation to join.

I think it looks mean to you because you have a high estimation of AirBnB and you think I am belittling them.

I have a lower estimation of AirBnB (compared to my estimation of VRBO), and so I thought your pitch to Fred Wilson was overselling the potential ("eBay") and Fred was right to not buy into the overselling.

Now, there is are significant gaps between

1. AirBnB completely fails as a business and wastes everyone's money, but at least the founders had a learning experience.

2. AirBnB team and pg and the investors and customers make more money and worthwhile experience from AirBnB than any other use of their time and energy and capital.

3. AirBnB gets bigger than VRBO.

4. AirBnB gets as big as eBay.

I'd guess (but I wouldn't bet, because I absolutely to not have the infromation and insight that you and the team and the investors have)
that AirBnB is at least "1.5" now and will peak at "2.5" and need a major lucky streak to hit "3". It's successful, but in my estimation (worthy of no more than a forum post) it is not up to the "eBay" comparison.

Fred guesses now (after he refused to bet, which frankly makes his blog post less interesting than what he wrote when he did have his hand on his wallet) that AirBnB is "3" to "4".

I'll note that my best business venture is a small "1", (capital investment and costs under $1000, weekend labor, revenues smaller than that).
Here is one: http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781449398583/
and this is how the book will look like once it's out: http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/03/nodejs-book.php
Since node.js is still under development, you'll find very few text on it. Still try to look for code/examples on official site and videos are available too if you do a google search.
Perhaps the author of DuckDuckGo[1] did not know about those limitations...

As far as I know, this search engine uses both own crawlers and some external sources of data. One person team did it.

----

[1] http://duckduckgo.com/
WordPress display post views within admin post columns
Who cares that the desk costs $100 if it does an excellent job as a workspace/computer desk? I'm a huge fan of the Ikea Galant desks to the point where I bought myself one for home to go along with the $700 chair I have (similar situation to what is shown in the Tasty Labs picture).

I didn't buy it because it cost $100, I bought it because they are JUST ENOUGH desk to make an excellent workspace and they are height adjustable. I will never use a non-height adjustable desk again, full stop, and there aren't many other options for height adjustable desks that are anywhere near reasonable in price (and that is coming from someone who didn't blink when buying a $700 chair).
Seems like a phase every company has to go through.

First they love you, then they hate you, then you win? Time will tell.