skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Non-tech co-founders need to really understand their target segment on an intimate level. They may not be able to write all the code, but they should be the masters of the user domain and/or business domain that the product is going to serve. They should know what the right strategic goals of the business should be, given their target user. They should know exactly what problem they're trying to solve, for whom, and (roughly) how.

2) They should also have strong, well-informed opinions about UX. Take them to task on what makes a good UX or even a good UI. Press them for examples of good and bad UX design, or have them walk you through a mockup of something you've done in the past. You should be interviewing them just as much as they're interviewing you. They should have theories and opinions on how UX affects business strategy, and vice versa, and not just opinions on what looks pretty or simple. You want to get the impression that this person would have made (or was) a great product manager at a big company, had he or she not been a founder.

3) They should be great salesmen (or women), but not bullshit artists. There's often a fine line here, but the red flags are usually obvious. Look at his or her track record. Look at the realism of his or her vision. Look at his or her ability to model and properly account for risk, competitive threat, etc. If you can pinpoint a critical dependency or risk to the business that he or she can't, that's a bad sign.

4) They should be willing and able to bust their asses and constantly learn. They should not expect to kick back and let you build the product for them. Sort of hard to suss this out in conversation alone, but track record evaluation -- and careful probing about the vision -- should tease out some hints in this direction. A sense of entitlement, or of learned helplessness, usually outs itself under polite conversational fire.
It is useful when you're just knocking something quick together as an experiment and you have no intention of ever deploying it in any serious way. The full boilerplate is overkill and actually creates more work for you in that scenario.
I think Java as a whole, especially its use in enterprise development, is actively trying to prevent the developer from doing anything out of the ordinary, or even wanting to understand anything outside of the task at hand. This is preferable as it allows for effective division of labor, and protects each part from too much damage from any other part.

I think you may be over stereotyping a little bit, but there may also be something else going on which is that anyone seeking a job may want to appear as close as fitting a mold as anyone else, errr, such as not to seem dangerous or wild or uncontrollable ... especially in the enterprise.
Are the Self-Made Rich More Generous Than Heirs?
If anyone's interested, this[1] paper highlights why P2P, especially in gaming applications, isn't going away any time soon. Unfortunately, P2P authors really need better systems to keep inter-AS traffic to a minimal level, but the current Internet wasn't really designed with that in mind. There are a number of different research efforts and fielded methods out right now, but none seem to have taken a really strong hold.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/72879/donnybrook.pdf
Hi all, thank you very much for your so nice feedbacks!
I am really glad since it took quite some time to write, so it's nice to hear people find it useful.

@albedoa, I haven't paginated category pages yet since I don't have that many posts yet, but I think it is possible to do with a plugin that would generate those pages from a custom hash / data set, rather than what Jekyll makes available. I don't know if what I mean is clear but I will look into making an example.

@aw3c2, any web host will be good for Jekyll, since it's just static files that any web server can handle. As long as you are happy with the different workflow, you can switch without any problems. Actually, since your host has PHP you could use it for the contact form, as mentioned in the post.
... With $1M left over to embezzle! :)
People talked a lot about CueCat, too...for a while.
I think this has less to do with Java per se and rather the types of candidates you will see in 'safe' languages.

By safe, I mean, easily employable languages.
People working with haskell, clojure, scala, factor or whatever more obscure language probably aren't doing it because it makes them employable.

Plenty of people working with Java, PHP etc are doing it because it makes them employable. That doesn't mean that all PHP, Java etc developers are only interested in getting a paycheck but given the pool you are selecting from, you are more likely to select such a person at random then if you were selecting from a pool of developers working in a 'purely for the love of it' language.

I've started doing Java development for a day job again and between that and other projects, have met plenty of people who are java developers who are quite the opposite of what you have seen so they are out there. I've also met plenty of people who fit the stereotype you are talking about.
I think the acknowledgment is what he meant by a great response.
Initializr was integrated into H5BP and launched last week. :) See the Boilerplate Custom button on http://h5bp.com
Was Python your first language? After using other languages, I too found the significant whitespace to be frustrating at first, but I wonder if someone for whom Python was their first programming language would be similarly frustrated or not?
He's at the very least set himself apart from other potential non-tech founders and demonstrated that he's willing to be a janitor even though his degree didn't give him any training on how to mop the floor.
BTW, this isn't intended as a flame post, I just would like to know if this is typical or not. I keep recommending to my manager that we hold out for someone that has more breadth of experience, but at this point I'm not sure we are ever going to find that type of candidate.
This might have nothing to do with Java and everything with your company.

Maybe you are attracting boring people because the company presents itself as a place for such people.

Maybe the company has a reputation or a vibe that simply does not attract the kind of people you are looking for.

Maybe job openings are worded in such a way that they attract these kind of people.
"... consulting position ... large ... company ..."

This may be part of your problem. I've been doing software startups in Java since Java 1.0.0 days, and I've had no problem finding extremely talented developers with broad backgrounds and deep expertise. I've certainly seen my share of developers who have done freshman-level projects all dressed up in EJB, but they don't get hired.

I suspect that given an interesting job at an interesting company will attract more interesting candidates. And as has been often noted on HN, the best candidates aren't going to appear via headhunters, they'll appear via connections.
This is something I'm actually trying to do. It looks alright so far, but I'm working on the backend stuff mostly so far.
As far as the final question of better communication tools. At our company (even though we aren't all remote) we use OpenFire[1] as our communication platform. By tieing it in with LDAP we can automatically add new employees to everyones Roster quickly. It's worked out great over the course of the last 2 years. We do have gateways enabled to allow employees to use it as their all-in-one IM system, and we were going to experiment with the video-chat features but never got around to it. It's worth looking in to IMHO.

[1] OpenFire - GPL Real Time Collaboration Server: http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/
FULL Recap: New iPad 2 Event - منتديات قروب الساهر
There is also a longer paper (mentioned in the presentation) dealing with this issue from a specific point of view:

http://files.cloudprivacy.net/ssl-mitm.pdf

Certifi ed Lies: Detecting and Defeating Government
Interception Attacks Against SSL (Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm)

It makes it very clear how every trusted CA in the world currently has the power to circumvent the security of any https-protected website; by themselves or compelled by someone else.
AT&T’s takeover of T-Mobile USA would damage mobile-phone choice.
Shi Chuan, an excellent frontend dev from Singapore joined our development team last fall and spearheaded the Mobile Boilerplate. I'm just very happy we have a smart avenue to distribute best practices-- mobile is a really hairy area.
Doesn't matter if it's Java, .NET, ColdFusion, PHP or whatever. The majority of programmers out there are 9-to-5ers and couldn't care less about your company's vision. They're just looking to get hired, be told what to program, write code, turn it in and go home.

I think the problem is that most of the passionate, big picture developers already have jobs or have started their own companies.
I am willing to bet good money the problem NYT faces is the same problem that www.expertsexchange.com faces (opse forgot a dash), google won't index them if you get a paywal when you are a user vs a bot. So probably the reason for the CSS hack. It was probably research and stuff. Basically you'd have a paywall but nobody will be able to get to it because the news won't come up on google news, google search etc.

However why the price tag was not a maximum of $1,000,000 beats me. Possibly massive user and seo testing. Maybe a chunk was bribes?
Traditional C based BerkeleyDB is not log structured. BerkeleyDB JE is log structured, but is in Java. I don't see cperciva coding Java and the drawback of Java's IO subsystem is that interaction with page cache can be unpredictable if you're doing something beyond key/value lookups.

BerkeleyDB JE is also designed for low latency operation: the recommended way to run is to keep a checkpoint interval, which is then periodically flushed to disk. The flip side of that is that the larger the checkpoint interval, the longer it takes to recover from a crash (longer segment of the log to validate). It is possible to run it in an "fsync after every txn" mode, however. There are also modes available that allow different levels of transaction isolation and serializability. Looks like Colin wants to support one.

While I'm generally happy with BerkeleyDB JE, I can see Colin's decision especially in the greater context of what he's doing.
I can't afford even the 99designs rates, so I created the logo for my startup -- http://stellient.com -- myself. I searched through http://www.istockphoto.com and found a nice clipart which I tweaked in Inkscape, combining it with a nice free font from FontSquirrel; and I couldn't design my way out of a wet paper bag.

That being said, great logo design needn't really be expensive: http://misipile.com has one of the best portfolios I've ever seen, and their rates are not much higher than the 99designs ones.
Steve worked on-site at Pixar one day a week (Friday) until the Disney acquisition. Day-to-day management went through the executive team, primarily Ed Catmull for technical and operations, and John Lasseter for creative direction.
PDF Transcript is here:
http://www.hardtofindseminars.com/Transcripts/Fruite_Guy.pdf
When you say Java I immediately think of all the crappy programmers in my CS program who would choose Java as their favorite language even when it would be the worst possible choice. Hackers don't program in Java unless Java is the only solution. If you want better programmers offer more money. If you're tired of interviewing make them take an online coding test before they get a face to face interview. I wouldn't event interview someone if they can't pass the code test.
Tell HN: I can't find a fix. If you build it, I will be a paying customer.
I want a better way to manage lists of contacts within gmail.

Problem: I have different groups of friends (as do you) based on what they do, how we're related, where we've met, etc. I enjoy sending articles to these people based on their interest. I reach out to them to get advice relative to their domain expertise. I get in contact with them when traveling to their city to get to together. Lists of these people may look like this:

Atlanta natives,
Georgia Tech alums,
Consulting folks,
Entrepreneurs,
Budding Entrepreneurs,
BD Guys/Gals,
CTO/VP of Engr,
SXSW (Meet at SXSW),
VCs/Angels,
Customers,
etc..

Managing this through Gmail Contacts is a pain and I have given up. Generally I remember some of these lists of people (note: they don't usually include that many - maybe 10-15 each). But a lot of times I end up going through a chunk of my list to jolt my memory on whom I need to ping about something.

Solution: I want a simple chrome/gmail extension that allows me to enter an individuals email address and quickly tag them into a couple lists. Then as a MVP, let me quickly bring up the tag, see the people in it and copy their email addresses into the To/CC/BCC box.

Want to look at an app that did a kick ass job of bringing in a simple solution to Gmail: Taskforceapp.com. Something like that would make me happy.

Bonus: reminding me to ping people every x months. Etacts did this and I loved it...but that's gone.

How much would I pay? Definitely $20/month to start.
As I recall, driver binary compatibility is a goal. Last time I looked into it, they had you drop in the generic VGA driver from an NT install while they were stabilizing their VGA driver.
This is all part of a plan that was laid down some time ago.

Jack is a product guy. Tremendously good (evidence being he created both Twitter and Square). Jack is not an operator of a quickly scaling company, or at least, that's what Ev has said on the record more than once.

Jack recognizes his strengths and weaknesses. At Twitter his weaknesses were "recognized" for him and he was pushed out as CEO. It was painful and left some damaged bridges. He's been maturing and growing since then and looking back, probably agrees it was the right move even if it was handled the wrong way.

Then he founded Square. He got the product launched and hired Keith Rabois, a well-known operator. A hardcore, real operator and business guy.

Jack will run product at both companies. Keith will run day to day operations at Square, probably even as CEO. DickC will continue to run day to day operations at Twitter. Jack will play to his strengths and let someone else keep the cash balances in check.

With Twitter, Jack was pushed out. With Square, he probably couldn't have hired Keith if there wasn't a plan or timeline in place for Keith to become CEO.

* This is all my speculation.
In my opinion, the hand waving happens when people associate the "flash crash" with HFT in particular. Algorithms may have behaved as designed, but a lot of humans panicked. Yes, this panic led to some people losing money, so obviously any smart algorithm designer would build in some common sense controls. There is no reason to believe that it was only HFT algorithms that dealt poorly with the panic scenario.
When your company (Square) is under competitive threats from multiple directions, you don't decide to start dating another company, even part time.
Like I said, 10 programmers that do actual work. Even if you double that to 20 and add sysadmins, project lead, QA engineer and UX/designer, you still won't have more than 30 people, which is bigger than many startups' dev teams that build entire products rather than a single feature as in this case.

The rest goes to corporate managerial overhead, which was my point. Even if I underrated the size of the team, the difference is still merely 35M vs 38M. 35M is enough to take a startup company from nothing to a world-level player with the right team.
I'm leery of HFT, but not out of concern of a level playing field. Consider a market for some commodity. Start with the simplest market--people who produce the commodity sell directly to those who use it. Let's also assume external factors that affect the supply and demand for the commodity are stable over a long period of time.

After a number of transactions have been done, and the information about these has spread among the buyers and sellers, the market should converge on some price for that commodity, which will then be stable.

When some real world event happens that affects supply (a late snow wipes out newly planted crops, for instance) or demand (Justin Bieber turns vegetarian causing millions of teen girls to give up meat), the market will adjust to a new price.

A key thing to note here is that the price depends on real world events and the knowledge the actual produces and consumers of the good have of those events.

Now introduce intermediaries who trade in the commodity, but do not product it or consume it. They speed up the rate of transactions, and help the flow of price information, and so arguable help the market settle on the correct and stable price--basically the price you'd have in the direct market adjusted to take into account the increased transaction cost of having an intermediary.

Since the correct price economically ultimately depends on the factors that affect supply and demand (the weather, Justin Bieber, and so on), my concern is that if trading by intermediaries becomes too fast you can get to a point where the price is not being driven by the real world factors, but rather by traders reacting to other traders.

In other words, could HFT make the feedback loops that allows a market to set prices too strong? Feedback as a control mechanism in general is a good and useful thing, but too much feedback and it can become self sustaining, and the output of the system depends less on external inputs than it should (or even not at all).

Until there's solid analysis showing that HFT can't lead to the bad kind of feedback, I'd rather see it approached cautiously.
Maybe change the candidate requirements to ask for Python or Ruby knowledge, even if it's not required for the actual job. You might get more people with enjoy programming rather than those for whom it is just a job.

However, be upfront with anyone who contacts you and asks about Python/Ruby usage, e.g. "The environment is basically all Java, but we want a candidate who has broader knowledge of development outside the Java ecosystem".

My two cents.
Kid 606? Don't know them...

Are you a North Carolinian as well? If so, shoot me an email; maybe we can meet up sometime.
"This is not just speculation: from our position (Hirelite connects developers with companies looking to hire them via speed interviewing over video chat), startups value a developer about 50% more than a non-technical person with a similar level of experience/skill/etc"

They have some basis that developers are more valuable based on market forces alone, which means that you need to set your expectations accordingly.
My 'The question is' is:
Will Lion demand 1GB, 1.5GB or 2GB or RAM?!
I mean absolute minimal install requrements, not ideal ones.
Nike Basketball Shoes, Air Jordan Shoes, Nike Lebron and Kobe Shoes, Nike Dunks.
I know the concept of price ending, but my point is that 1. WWDC sells out anyway, and 2. It's mainly companies paying their developers to go here.
The Future of Manufacturing is Local
Well, no central, national government. They still have police, etc.
Suppose someone claimed that residential broadband speeds should be capped at 14.4 kilobits per second b/c some teenagers download songs songs with inappropriate lyrics. The reader is supposed to believe that lowering the speed is a good thing just because the reader is assumed to believe that inappropriate lyrics are a bad thing.

Prices are not "good" or "bad". Most of the people who oppose HFT are very much in the habit of attributing aesthetic descriptions to prices and to trading patterns.

In my opinion, this is a naive view of markets and complex systems that leads to the false expectation of stability, etc.
Meanwhile Facebook is out talent-scouting at the White House:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/facebook-may-hire-rob...
Skype chat is definitely the weakest link the chain for our remote team as well; it's basically unusable beyond a handful of groups. We've been migrating over to IRC for as much as we can. We also briefly toyed with using Mumble (http://mumble.sourceforge.net/) for voip, and while it was pretty compelling in terms of cross-platform stability it never really took off in our organization.

The article mentions only moving off Skype if it's sufficiently advanced beyond Skype. IRC by itself is not, but we've got our own IRC server that adds some important features like indexing and catchup: http://writequit.org/blog/?p=444
As an example, I got one done for my (NOT YC) company (I ended up changing the name so I didn't end up using it). My experience was fantastic - the key is providing a ton of feedback.

The company was "Super Bomb Labs" the logo can be seen here:

http://www.superbomblabs.com/images/Topper.png

Hit the nail on the head for me with the combination of the bomb/vial and for $225 the price was dead on.

You can see the whole contest results here:
http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-labs-7824

I know where the complaints come from but I have a hard time justifying paying 5-20x that price to get someone local to do it.
The federal judiciary in California is sometimes better at handling complex intellectual property and technology rights cases because they have seen more go through. Because of this they also have some precedents which can be cited and which the ninth circuit is supportive of. I don't doubt if it were a complex financial scam that they would be happy to move it to New Jersey (where they have seen a number of securities cases go through)
That is another person used as an example in the post that he isn't the only one making such money on android.
Haha, I love that line. Thanks for the references.
Retail Innovative Companie
If they have that much revenue why do they need a paywall?
Ask HN: Please review my demo video for group photosharing (the anti-COLOR.com)
JavaScript Creator And Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich To Advise Ajax.org
A line of thought such that everything happens deserves to happen?
This is a tangent, but the giant fixed black header on that site is awful. It covers the text, and the giant navigation links extend beyond the header even, distracting even more from the content.

What bothers me most about it is that it consists of navigation links and a search box-- elements that are meant to take me away from what I'm currently trying to read. If you're going to go the effort of writing things you want me to read, why would you then shove something in my face that distracts me and tries to pull me away from it.

/rant--sorry.
I work at home at my current job about 95% of the time. I don't mind it, and it does have some serious advantages. But I still feel having your team in one building is the better way to go. It can also get a little lonely, and spending so much time in your own home does get old.

The trend of the "virtual company" where everyone works remotely will only increase, and I think it might even become the norm. So I'm getting used to it and looking to ways to make it truly ideal for me. Recently I've been contacted by companies about potentially working with them and when I tell them I really can't move, every one of them has said working remotely would be fine. Even just a year ago that wouldn't have been the case.