skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: High tech prototype, 150K spent, 3 people, what would you do?
Hello, I am hereby anonymously asking the help of community in steering.

Some data:

* We have a confusingly high-tech product prototype, similar ones built by teams of champion engineers.

* We are 3 people.

* Spent total of 150K in 18 months. Raised from Friends & Family.

* There is a valid market. There are interested customers in multiple ways. Competitors are huge (and spent many Ms to build theirs) but no market leader.

* Prototype crashes occasionally, is not sexy and needs one last coding/debug marathon to a compelling demo to show. I feel it must look polished for a customer to buy.

* Time is running out.

My current decision:

1. Go to silicon valley, stay for several weeks, meet customers/angel investors and as many people as possible. The other two engineers continue fixing issues.

2. Give prototype to outside contractors who might help for equity or possibility to join if we get a customer.

I feel we have something very valuable, but we are too weak with 3 people to communicate what is at hand.

I am in this position first time in my life so don't know what steps would work best. What would you do?

Thanks in advance.
I guess that not repainting everything can be an advantage of SVG. Can you think of a way to time repaints better?
Clickable: http://www.hackonday.com/
Just to be pedantic: CAPTCHAs are a test for being human so human-ness has to be the consequence of some condition. Your premise is therefore an incorrect framing of the CAPTCHA test.
The search for the perfect startup
Love the realtime valuation by bus graph. Break that $200 barrier!
What the Eibach and Mock studies show is that if someone criticizes something you have a lot invested in, like having kids, you will get defensive and exaggerate the upsides. That doesn't say anything about whether having kids is foolish - maybe the upsides really DO outweigh the downsides.
Been there done that.

The key is he wants all this detail before committing. This guy is never going to pay you anything, why should he, he is getting you to do everything for free. I have been there hundreds of times and not once has it lead to anything. For all you know, he is another freelancer who is having you do the design work for HIS client by asking these questions. That has happened to me before.

Detailed work requires a retainer paid in advance. Treat this as a lawyer or any other such professional would. Clients get a 30 minute free consultation wher eyou come to understand their problem and if you can help them. Then they make a decision to to hire you or not. If they want you, based on the interview and your reputation, they start by writing you a $5,000 check and you start billing off it. If there is money left over or they change their mind they get a full refund of the amount not spent.
Am I reading this right that there is absolutely no HTML escaping for app descriptions on the Android Market? Seriously Google, like none?
Woz, you around?

That gave me a good laugh! If it is of any interest, in the following video which was posted a while back on HN, Steve Wozniak tells how he co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, and amongst other things, how he hackishly brought color computing to the Apple 2:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/400/

(You'll have to forgive me since I don't have time to search exactly where in the video he talks about adding color.)
Out of curiosity, did you catch any flak from former colleagues? I can imagine many people would still be quite angry, even if you fulfilled your legal obligation.
Is this even legal? Doesn't it fall into the same category as "unpaid internships"?
It seems to work in IE6 too.
Aza Raskin (and about half of Humanized who had come with him) was working on getting this into Firefox. He worked on some other stuff and then left for another company, but you can get the idea from here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tut... and a very impressive video: http://vimeo.com/1561578

The architecture was pretty far along, completely extensible with new verbs and parsers in JS. They'd got rid of the ugly hyphens from that demo video with a better parser. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/0.2_Design:_UI_and_Se... They'd even solved most of the localization problems, like verb-subject-object or subject-verb-object, and pronouns, and stuff. I really would like to see this revisited sometime.
Today's children, yes. Which is why we need to get started ASAP. I fear for the future of civilization...
Was. It's fixed now, apparently ;)
Entirely tech-savvy people use the navigation bar as sort of a launch bar for their whole browsing experience also. Chrome enables this fantastically.
We recently just had a baby and your words are much more important than many people think. The number one hardest thing has been keeping time for our relationship. The baby get all the attention and time and there isn't much left for us. Try and find time for your wife.
And it really does all go so very fast. It seems like just the other day she couldn't hold her head up and now she can almost walk! Every day is something new.
Very interesting. Do you think it will make a difference on mobile devices?
I can guarantee you that for the vast majority of my classes it would have been better if I'd gone off and studied on my own, which I do. I also hardly ever learn anything from my classmates, except one or two friends.
Just remember, baby comes first, mom comes second, and you are third. Unless you have a dog, then you come fourth.

It's a great time, enjoy it. Congratulations.
Someone at Google probably got in trouble over this.
I'm not sure this implicates cloud in particular.

I see it as a company that doesn't understand the difference between securing an operating system and securing a website. Which is especially bad considering the train wreck that is web security. Jon was apologetic that his bug was so 'lame' since, unlike operating systems, the web was generally not designed to be secure.

"Web security" in general depends on the secure behavior of the web browser, which in turn depends on the security of the operating system, hardware, and so on. If you reverse the arrows in the architecture, as Android appears to have done with Marketplace, then the whole thing becomes much less stable.
For C programmers that hate C++
http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2300423
Last Chance for Google I/O tickets
which I think you need an old gizmo5 account to do?

Not anymore. You can do VOIP calls through a browser, and I do them with my iPhone using the Talkatone app (free). (Ironic that this is through GV but Google's GV app doesn't support VOIP calls; someone else had to implement that.)
Provisioning and configuration management are converging, but aren't the same thing. I agree that you can use puppet to help a lot with provisioning servers, but that's not its reason for being.

Provisioning is the process of taking a baremetal server and making it usable. Configuration management is about organizing ongoing changes to the infrastructure.

Red Hat Kickstart and Solaris Jumpstart are examples of provisioning tools that don't help much with configuration management. Cobbler is provisioning tool built on Kickstart. Systemimager is a cloning-style provisioning tool.

These tools all help you get an OS up and running on a machine. Optionally, most of them can be used to do a great deal of software installation and system configuration beyond the basic OS install. But most of them aren't, for example, especially interested in helping with issues like adding a new apache virtualhost to httpd.conf, or a new DNS zone to named.conf, or a new root cron entry to run on all application servers, or reconfigure iptables on every system. Tools like puppet and cfengine are very interested in these scenarios.

The line is fuzzy, but when standing on one side or the other its obviously there somewhere.
40 Tutorials for Outstanding Text Effects in Illustrator
Fuzzy, sketchy, bubbly, viscous, sleek, shiny, retro, futuristic: you can do it all in Adobe Illustrator. In this showcase, we have collected 40 tutorials that show you how to create awesome typographic effects in Illustrator, step by step. Some of these tutorials require the use of Photoshop for finer details.
I prefer coffeescript for the reduced line noise, particularly around lambdas, loops/comprehensions, and object literals. I find the shorter lines and reduced line count* allows me to notice api flaws more easily, so I tend to do my api design in cs. I generally don't use the class construct unless the library I'm working with uses the same pattern (e.g. yui3). It's pretty much just syntactic sugar that simplifies the code at the expense of complicating the toolchain. I think it's worth it but I've met plenty of people who don't.

* In js->cs rewrites I usually wind up cutting the line count in half, but most of that is eliminating all the stray closing brackets on their own lines and collapsing if statements into single lines.
Entrepreneurial Matchmaking Site Hacks Venture Capital Investment Models
Papers2 has been released
Our field is founded on the idea that mechanical computation is preferred to human computation.
The brother of a friend of mine from Oz went to the States and somehow ended up joining the circus as a carnie where he worked illegally for a couple of years. He was caught when the circus went in to Canada for a while and they checked everyones papers when trying to reenter the US. He was denied entry, got banned from the US for 10 years and the rest of the circus waved goodbye and left him at the border.

Totally worth it just for having such an adventure for a couple of years.
You don't need the HTML5 history API for that either.

location.replace("#...");
On my current platform (STM32L micro) we'll have 256K flash, 48K RAM, no hard drive. It's very reasonable to use C++ on such a processor but exception handling might not be something you want to pay for.
Another poster [1] in this thread made better argument than mine: it's not that non-hierachical file organization is bad. It's good (especially for small, homogenous data sets, I guess).

For other data sets it can be improved, and it will be: by adding support for somewhat hierarchical structure. They did it a few decades ago and it will happen again and again.

The example of music is very, very specific [2] -- all files come with diligently filled-in metadata, and all files have same metadata fields. Each song can be uniquely addressed by (artist, title, version) and mostly uniquely by some other tuples.

But that won't work very well for average Excel and Word files, at least not in the way they are created right now; they largely miss metadata or it differs from file to file.

MS Word? Creeping featurism, bullet-point engineering, yea. They painted themselves into a corner. They broke out of it with Ribbon UI. I like it :D

--

raganwald, I'm terribly sorry for being irritating in the above posts; I'll try to social up :-)

--

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301548

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301942
Because copyright limits free expression, and so would violate the first amendment.
There's a bum somewhere with the "Will code HTML for food" sign who's just your match. http://farm1.static.flickr.com/79/265918244_f16ba8182a.jpg
Posted under "Things that went well":

We charged money for a good or service

I know this one is controversial, but there are enormous benefits and you can immediately reinvest a whole bunch of it in your project sips daiquiri. Your customers will appreciate that you have a long-term plan that doesn't involve repackaging them as a product.

If Pinboard were not a paid service, we could not have stayed up on December 16, and I would have been forced to either seek outside funding or close signups. Instead, I was immediately able to hire contractors, add hardware, and put money in the bank against further development.
For anyone who hasn't used them yet, it's the one-stop-shop and their API that really sets them apart from the competition. You submit one set of paperwork and they take care of all the accounts: merchant, gateway and api. No need to chase down different accounts and get them all working together.

The fantastic API literally saved hundreds of hours of integration and build time, as the recurring billing, discounts and everything is completely programmatic and just works.

I just signed up within the last few weeks and throughout the whole process I could tell they built it up with developers in mind, not as an afterthought.
Where do you think the money is coming from?! Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.
Her friends don't hate Google Voice, they hate that she doesn't use it enough.

Google Voice is the exact solution to her problem, but since she only SOMETIMES uses it for outgoing calls and texts, it completely loses its purpose. This she blames on the tediousness of using the GV app. Sorry but at the moment that's the price you have to pay if you want to test 10 smartphones and be able to be reached on one number (for free!).
Why does it take so long for Google Voice messages to come to your phone? I've waited all the way from 30 minutes to 4 hours to receive one message.
I'm curious, why do you need to make a distinction? Is there some other feature of CS that depends on it? Certainly 'for key, value of array' could be implemented with numerical keys. If using just 'for value of dict' is allowed that would also work fine.
Oh, how I miss _why.
Agreed. In precedent based systems broad-ranging principles often arise after-the-fact based on earlier, narrower-held opinions.
Memolane Transforms Social Data Into Visual Timelines
7 Amazing Facebook Infographics Compiled - The Copy Paste Blog
Apply to Y Combinator.
Apply to Angel List.
Apply to 500 Startups.

Look around your local area for incubators.

Depending on what you're doing, Silicon Valley might not be the right place to go. More appropriate investors and mentors might be located elsewhere.
Jesse Robins "Amazon master of disaster" on DevOps Culture Hacks
That's a precondition check. While useful (essential), it doesn't cover all "forgot to check an error code" cases.
Get Amazing Canvas Banner Printing
Idsketch.com provides you artistically designed canvas banner with quality of stuff. We serve you worldwide. We offer well designed canvas banners to our valued customers that are suitable for promotions and campaigns.
while I don't necessarily agree with the article, it does point out (and other research has shown) that it's not just about money, it's about _happiness_. Despite what most parents will tell you the studies have shown that they are generally happier both before and after the children are in the house, and would probably be happier if they didn't have children.

You can't argue "I'm happy because I have children" because you don't know how happy you would have been without them (and with all the money and freedom they cost.) I want kids myself but it's not an easy question to answer if they actually make parents happier. It obviously makes parents _think_ they're happier but that's not the same thing.
Could you explain why? I'm also curious why Facebook, arguably the definition of a modern startup success, chose to remain powered by PHP after they obtained more than enough capital to switch to say Ruby on Rails.
Space is time.

From the Gentoo wiki: -Os is very useful for large applications, like Firefox, as it will reduce load time, memory usage, cache misses, disk usage etc. Code compiled with -Os can be faster than -O2 or -O3 because of this. It's also recommended for older computers with a low amount of RAM, disk space or cache on the CPU. But beware that -Os is not as well tested as -O2 and might trigger compiler bugs.

I believe Apple compiles (a lot or all?) of their stuff with -Os.

Anyway C++ exceptions are awful. ;)
The problem here seems to be that you're working against git, not with it. Committing and branching should be things that you do casually in git, by making a big deal out of them you're limiting yourself and crippling git.

If you try to use a screwdriver like you use a hammer, you're always going to be disappointed.
Sadly, they removed some power user menu options, like "Open Frame in New Tab".
The issue is Ruby/Python/Java's semantics don't map perfectly to JavaScript. As it says in the documentation, the golden rule of CoffeeScript is "It's just JavaScript".

For people who know JavaScript, it's not a new language-- just some syntactic sugar and a few bonus features.
I travel around ND,SD, and MN - T-Mobile is the worst here. It has no coverage once you leave a city and sometimes not even in them. AT&T and Verizon were amazing compared to T-Mobile. Sprint does ok in parts, but has some big dead spots.
Thanks for all the advice! I'm already in awe and completely in love, and he's not even outside the womb yet. I can hardly imagine what it'll be like when he is.

Good points on getting into routines/patterns, we'll definitely work on that. What led you to choose cosleeping? How long have you done that for? My impression is that it's something that's somewhat controversial (some people think it's great, others think it's terrible), but it also seems like a lot of parenting is that way.

Congratulations on your third!
Fix it by hand. If it's ten accounts, that's pretty easy. If it's ten thousand, more of a problem.

When you read irreversible, think "very difficult to reverse and not worth the cost of writing and validating code we don't ever expect to run."
coverage area is one reason for me
How To Run Android Applications on Your Computer
I think i've heard that speech at four different conferences. Woz needs a new story.
Because of whitespace and line break sensitivity you can't dynamically generate serialized CoffeeScript (unless delicately handled) because it won't compile.
Well, we do have a dog, so... :D

Thanks.
reminds of how "protection" services were being sold in Russia 15-20+ years ago : once "A" branch of the protecting organization visits you today, tomorrow - you're are a happy paying customer of the "B" branch. Bad cop, good cop.
Argh, you're right. I should've used private browsing for this. Fortunately on FF there's a "Clear Recent History" feature.
> Is pretty syntax better than common-use syntax?

What do you mean?
I would agree with all of this. I'm still amazed that I can get from my house outside of Laurel to downtown Baltimore in 15-20 minutes even during the morning commute. There's also such easy and cheap access to DC, Philly, NYC and Boston via Amtrak.

We have a crop of good schools around here too. There's Hopkins and UMBC in the city plus UMD College Park has a top notch CS program.
I've used GV with my iPhone 4, HTC EVO 4G and HTC Hero. Also with SkypeIn/Out numbers.

Mirrors my experience, especially on iPhone: freezes often, messages can be delayed, unreliable voice service, voicemail transcription is rarely accurate. As soon as there is a problem and I have to switch to my carrier number, and confusion exists again.

I also run into the problem stcredzero describes; showing up as "Unknown", forcing me to move back to carrier number.

In short the biggest benefit I get from GV is actually the Chrome extension where I can send SMS messages very quickly and play voicemails (the transcription is usually useless) - really wish Apple would acknowledge that tying your phone to a browser is really powerful.

I've switched to giving out my GV number professionally and using my carrier number for close friends and family.

That vanity number is just not worth it.

Disclaimer: I am not an idiot and I understand how GV works.
Noted. We both work at home most of the time (and my wife only works part time, and will be able to take plenty of time off), so I'm hoping she'll be able to sleep when she needs to, since I'll be around to take care of our son. I expect to consume lots of coffee in the coming months. :)
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-difftool...

Personally, I use vimdiff.
Take the prototype to as many customers as possible. Gather feedback; see if interested in alpha program. Close whatever deals possible. Get the relationship started and have them committed to you.

This probably gives you leverage should you approach investors shortly after.
What reason could there possibly be to downvote the parent? Dogmatic Git fans, you are turning me off to Git more and more.
I think it's quite a stretch to equate a version control system with a general purpose language.
I've actually found Last.fm's APIs and its ubiquity to be a plus. I've implemented Like.fm's tracking APIs to be identical to that of Last.fm's. So new player implementations usually only require minor, or no, modifications by me to have it working with Like.fm.
Ask HN: Need help w/ external image preview like FB then image capture
Hi,

Non-technical founder doing some research to try and help point my developer in the right direction.

Seeking resources or guidance to help generate an image preview from a link, similar to the one used in Facebook's UI, and then subsequently also allow a user to display / grab the full size image of the preview as well. Not looking to necessarily create a bookmarklet a la svpply.com or the like, but interested in figuring out a way whereby a user can enter a link, select the image they want on the page they've linked to, and then have that image added to a post or submission to a web page.

Also, given that I'm working on a product in the fashion/style space I'm wondering what this solution might be if applied to pages with flash or other platform that might not host images in a traditional way.

Any help, guidance, or anything would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!
Visualizing a VOIP security attack
A Schemer's View of Monads
This was possible without the advent of HTML5. One could always change the hash frag to your hearts content or use hidden iframes
So in a nutshell, a want ad for serfs?
The question is: would Google be a good consumer infrastructure company? Their first foray into that arena was their Google Fiber experiment which has been delayed. I know that Google always seems like they're on our side over infrastructure things - but that might simply be because they aren't building that infrastructure.

It's possible that Google would bring excellence to consumer infrastructure as well. However, they haven't run an ISP, cable company, wireless company, home broadband, or other regulated consumer infrastructure project. That doesn't mean they wouldn't be up to the challenge, it's more a question of why you believe they'd do better? They talk a nice game of unlimited, high-speed broadband, but that's easy when you're not the one paying to provide it.

Google also had the option to purchase the open-access 700MHz spectrum and once the reserve price was met, decided that they didn't want to be in the consumer-facing communications infrastructure game. If they didn't want to become a wireless company a couple years ago, what would have changed to make them want to become one now?

Google has a strong staff and it would, at the very least, be interesting to see how they would fare as a company. Would they decide to forgo the profits one receives for pushing things like Blockbuster Mobile onto their smartphones? Would they push faster technology faster? Would they decide that limits were wrong to put on users? Would they decide to forgo subsidised phones and offer much lower priced plans?
Polish Your Online Presence In 6 Easy Steps
We need to make a distinction because we want to have arrays be iterated over with:

for (var i = 0, l = list.length; i < l; i++) { ... }

And objects iterated over with:

for (var key in object) { ... }

Using a "for-in" loop over a JS array isn't acceptable, for performance and semantics reasons, and neither is sniffing at runtime to determine whether the object passed is an array, or an object.

Ideally, JavaScript would have supported a single iteration protocol for both arrays and objects from the get-go, but alas...
LivingSocial's Daily Deal: $10,000 Penthouse Suite
Thanks for the tips. Is there anything specific to having a newborn that you've found can help your wife feel appreciated and cared for?