skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When should someone be considered a co-founder?
I'm in a bit of an argument about what my title should in a start-up I am involved in (that's why I had to ask this question anonymously). Here's the situation:
A biz dev guy with pretty good experience and an excellent graphics/UI designer came to me with an idea to develop something. I didn't love the idea but I liked the space and the team so we talked for a while about what we would actually build. What we are building is significantly different from the idea they came to me with and they had no previous development, just a great flash demo. They have spent some money on lawyer fees, branding, and a couple contractors but it probably only totals ~$10k and some of it is friends/family money as convertible debt. I do significant work on the actual product strategy and UX, not just development, as well as a good bit of market research. Basically anything that a founding member of a company would do just because he is passionate about the idea and wants the company to be super successful. When I first joined, they wanted to consider me a product consultant and I was cool with that because I have never worked with them. Now we're about a month away from launching our first version of the app and I'm looking back on how significant and co-founder like things I have done. I asked them to consider me a co-founder and they declined with this email:
"we agreed that we really want to stick to a literal definition of a co-founder, which we would define as being one of the people who conceived of the initial idea for the business, made the initial investments of time and money, and recruited the team to execute the idea." Of course there was a follow up conversation and more to come but that was the initial email I received. On top of that they mentioned they didn't know me well enough but we have been working together for about 8 months. While we don't know each other extremely well because we are all remote, they are taking a risk on me just like I am taking a risk on them by working for only equity, so that point seems invalid.

My question to YC is - Does it sound like I am a co-founder? If so, how much should I care about getting this title?

In general titles don't matter too much to me but it really bothers me that it's such a big deal to them to give me this title when I feel I have clearly earned it. I have spoke with successful entrepreneurs and they agree that I should be co-founder, but they are also my friends so I want a less biased opinion.
Love your "social security death detection" feature. Hope it doesn't have any false positives
"There was no hack involved"
...
"There was a URL exploit"

I suppose that if your system is vulnerable to a "URL exploit" that's not _technically_ a hack in the strictest sense of the word, but the barn door was still wide open for the possibility of their system being hacked, so I don't see how there is any meaningful difference.
You are correct, but the event you're taking about (the "everyone who can afford one has a computer" event) happened years ago. We're already there. Destiny is history.

That said, things never really decline, because prices are going down, the need for computing is going up, and so the market is always expanding and sales just steadily grow now and forever.

You only ever see these kinds of false "declines" where people are really just shifting to a different kind of computer.
Robots Successfully Invent Their Own Language
We wanted to be different from those other sites and focus on a niche, which is golfers. Also, we have some cool features planned that are directly related to golf.
I think the article is referring to Nokia outside of their handset business. My understanding is that Nokia, Ericsson and Cisco are the big players in the infrastructure supplied to the carriers, not just the handsets.

It could be in this space that Microsoft may benefit from deeper partership with Nokia.

The handsets will be nice, but not a game changer for the industry.
> It's hard to find a buyer for an expensive laptop.

Not to mention selling stuff is a pain in the ass. I'm a programmer, not a professional craigslist haggler. Buying things "because I can sell them later" has always burned me in the end.
Hope they won't actually enforce this patent unless they start going out of business.

This is going beyond ridiculous now, trivial ideas with trivial tech behind them have no value and should not be protectable with a patent - it's not like there is a face recognition technology involved, or anything an intern can't "invent" and code within an hour.
See If Credit Card Debt Forgiveness is Possible at ConsolidateBillsToday.com
In debt settlement, an amount which is lower than the current balance is presented to the creditor as a means of paying off the account in full with one lump sum payment. Consumers can attempt to negotiate debt settlement with their creditors on their own behalf, although most lack the knowledge they need to be successful. There is now another option available through an agency called Consolidate Bills Today.
You need to segment the audience a bit more - I am on the technical marketing and business development side of a large corporation and linkedin is an essential tool for keeping track of people as they move from company to company as well as within a company.

There is additional value in seeing who knows who and how I can get introduced to key decision makers at other companies.
An ipod shuffle is $50 - with shipping and tax about $65? That expense shouldn't be that much.
Why not to get your CxO on board with Social Media
How To Communicate Your Bootstrapped Startup: Consulting or Product Business?
Free Online Dating App Using GPS Coming Soon
Sounds like accentudate is going to release an android app using GPS to help users find local dates!
Without the disclaimer, in some jurisdictions the post could be interpreted as unauthorized or inappropriate practice of law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANAL
Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds
Tech distractions for workers add up
And if the structure is going to be permanent, then using sea water due to a temporary shortage of potable water is going to result in a permanently weak building. I understand that this is supposed to provide a solid shelter during quick relief, but it's going to be much harder/costlier to take down than a tent if it becomes unnecessary at any point in the future.
Yeah it feels counter-intuitive.

Really like what you're doing, can't wait to replace my dodgy little hack job!
The numbers don't add up...

PC sales are about 85-90M per quarter. iPad was selling at 4.7M that quarter. If every person who was going to buy a PC bought an iPad it would be a 5.5% reduction. Consumers are about half the market, so maybe you say 11% of the consumer market. And that again is assuming EVERY iPad sale is a lost consumer PC sale. HP dropping 20%+ is bigger than the iPad.
The "value added" bits will continue to be so as the VM projects are merged; the point is that you can now deploy JRockit for internal production applications gratis (which was not possible before AFAIK).
I accessed the person(s) amazon account to find contact information. They are now fully aware that I accessed the account as I left a voicemail. I offered full access to the GMAIL account and gave the password on the Amazon account so it could be shut it down and alert amazon who could also further do a full audit of what I accessed.

There does not seem to be any alarming distress in the situation. It has been over 2 months since the incident, I made sure that the person(s) involved was fully aware and of the blog post. No issue was raised about me writing it up and posting it. I also waited for a period of time to hear back from the Google Security Team. I believe I have taken the correct response here.
ARM Powered Windows 8 Is Not Compatible With The Legacy Application
I like it (caveat: I'm not the target market)

It's simple and doesn't require much interaction from the user. Ideally, I would set the notifications at 1month and 1week as some clients may have purchase orders to be written etc (or for small businesses, on holiday for example over Christmas)

Only other thought: this doesn't have to be a webapp. It could function just as well as a cross-platform desktop app or browser extension. Sure, that's a one-off payment model but I would worry that a user wouldn't be signing into Flaregun that often so the likelihood of maintaining a monthly subscription would be low. I would just worry that if that aren't logging in often, the perceived value goes down.

Best of luck!
the fact that I completely fail to become excited by that headline should tell Oracle something about how badly their brand has been damaged from their inept approach to the entire Java ecosystem.
My budget which keeps my working on my startup is roughly $10/day. Explain to me why I, using nail clippers once a month, would spend $7 more dollars (my entire food budget for a day) on better nail clippers.

Small stuff adds up dude.
HTC Bresson Is Equal 7.5-WP To And 16 Megapixel Camera
edit: However, it must be fully backwards compatible with the full unix toolchain to be useful to me.

happy?
Interesting idea, hiring a team like this could have its drawbacks. For instance, what happens when they want to leave? You have a segment of your work force leaving with domain knowledge all at once.

It seems really good for teams, you get to pick your co-workers (at least some of them) and you can negotiate larger compensation packages as a group.
Wow, great idea, this provides great value. I hope it is enough of a differentiator to other similiar sites.

No patent? ;-)
Gist creation in 5 lines with Java v3 API [GitHub]
A year ago I would have voted Yes, however I was recently recruited[1] via LinkedIn (while employed) so I voted No.

[1]: http://www.thepursuitofquality.com/post/51/how-online-profil...
tldr; A recruiter found me via StackOverflow, followed the SO profile to my blog, and then contacted me via LinkedIn.
Yet another developer hostile move by Twitter. Developers get two weeks to switch to OAuth (with app review), and to top it all off, Twitter's official apps don't have to abide by the new permissions model. Ridiculous.

I can't wait for all the 1 star reviews third party apps get when users have to login again.
I imagine Apple is furious. They paid Lodsys in good faith for a license. Hopefully now they are rewriting the API to get around the patent. Then they can tell Lodsys to go fuck themselves.
A lot of households still use personal computers to do their taxes and manage other financial/important docs, create things for school which is often in MS apps, or archive photos and video, etc. A lot of these functions would just be far too cumbersome on a tablet and I really can't see any of them being replaced in the reasonable future.
The hardcore randomly change all the urls in testing to make sure nothing is hardcoded. A hateos api should still work.
The issue is with Safari. I will get this fixed. Thanks!
Mike - very transparent and noble of you to post this survey! Thanks.
According to several studies in cognitive psychology, introverts and heavy multitaskers perform less well in the presence of music (especially ‘pop music’) than extraverts. Music seems to be especially distracting for introverts involved in reading comprehension activities. Coding tasks are slightly less affected.
Thanks. We hope so too. End of life validation is a tricky problem we think we've become good at solving by combining several validations. http://www.blog.lifeensured.com/end-of-life-validation-on-li...
Yes I understand these techniques, in fact they are heavily in use in Colm, just not for maintaining the global state that is used for the parsing feedback loop.

I use the term "copy" in the general sense to make discussion easier. Conceptually, persistent data structures are a copy, even if they are optimized heavily to incur very little cost.
Ditto to that. I admit predisposition to liking Termkit because I also had a similar idea in the past and I had neither the time nor talent to go anywhere with it. Kudos to this guy for producing something that looks like a very large step in the direction of improved usability and a potential step towards improved performance if programs can be made to pass each other common structures without needing to serialize and reparse the data until it needs to be seen by a user.

In addition to the frontend and pipe changes, I also imagined changing the way files are accessed. Some subsystem could put indexes and attributes on certain data files so you could run something like:

$ query --tsv login, uid, name[last='Smith'] < /etc/passwd > mysmiths.tsv

or:

$ cat /etc/passwd[@uid=0]@login

and you would get the desired set of information without needing to write potentially buggy regex scripts. If there was a new type of file that you wanted to get data from in a few different ways, you could write only one buggy regex script to use as a filter and then query the file with the shell's normal query methods to pull down any information you might need. In the example of pulling users from a file, the shell could know from the attribute metadata that you are looking at a list of users and it could show the results as widgets that you could right-click to get the user's properties.

This all implies rewriting every utility in the system to accept recordsets instead of text, adding custom code for every different targeted data file, and making sure it all works with existing tools that have not been converted yet. That could be difficult, or at least time-consuming.
The 'sf' combination is very rare in the English language (look up the dictionary), so difficult for people to remember how to spell it and therefore how to find it.

Change it.
Anatomy of a QR Code
You're using the API wrong.

Sent from my iPhone
San Francisco supervisors approve 6-year break on stock-option taxes
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Review: Take Off Your Ti
Brings into question the utility of bothering to do business with IV, doesn't it?
Its interesting to see how many employers use LinkedIn as the only way to apply.
How Green is the iPhone?
Wait, was the 'URL Exploit' the fact that there was a URL at all? Because otherwise, the 'exploit' was that they asked only for information that had recently been stolen.
Are you saying it happens a lot, or that it doesn't happen that often?

I have never seen that, myself.
From a quick scan it seems they patented the ability to send notifications on tags, not tags themselves.
[edit] it seems they have tagging oo. I wonder what does flickr have to say about this?
It sounds like Google have changed their policies on this. Just a few months ago I was caught on the other side of this issue. Basically I bought a domain and wasn't able to get Google Apps set up because someone else had used it in the past. Here's the full story: http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/11/12/issues_with_google_ap...
Prior art: anyone who's ever written names on the back of a physical photograph.

Oh, wait. "On a computer." What magical words!
Could it be as simple as denoting a Facebook next-of-kin?
Yottabyte
IOS vs. Android from the Trenches
I kinda like it - picture this simple scenario; you need to fix your car's brakes/rotate tires/change oil/fix taillights/buy gas?/ instead of going to 4-5 garages to get an optimal price/quote you broadcast your interest in the local neighborhood in the hopes that the interest will be fulfilled by a "service provider"..
You can add Hacker News to the list of (welcome) distractions...
Can “Max Action” Help You Grow? — Read time: 3 minutes
Curious about the plans for a revenue model. Are they going to charge teams to list? Or charge companies to find them?

The big challenge with any outsourcing platform is to retain recurring revenue from existing customers - because the problem is that once two parties connect with each other and do a successful project, they can just as easily contact each other direct thereafter; without any need for the middle-man.
This is one of the ideas that make you kick yourself saying: "Why did I not think of it first?"
LibraOffice doesn't show up in Bing search
Does anyone else get a "Not Found" when using MS Bing to search for LibraOffice? On Google, it was the first link as it normally should?

Just curious.
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The "subliminal message" remark was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Calling the inscription a Freudian slip might have been more accurate...
It's the End of Computers as We Know It
Gauge Your Twitter Influence & Everyone Else's
Frickin' Awesome: CloudFlare Automatically Learns How to Stop DDoS Attacks
Indeed I did not follow what you meant. I missed the "persistent" and saw ... "don't incur the cost of copying." I took that to mean that you were referring to not maintaining any history and using a single, mutable global state. It is with that understanding that I made the previous comment.

To address what you meant ... it's more a matter of what's practical. For example, to parse C++ one needs to do quite a bit of semantic analysis during parsing. A full implementation of the type system is necessary. Then the data structures change with every statement/clause parsed. Achieving this with persistent data structures is far too costly.
Any thoughts on how Google could prevent this? Seems important they provide a way to reclaim domains.
I would be inclined to think there's less risk of the team leaving than of individual contractors leaving. They've found a gig, are working with their friends (or at least people they've chosen to work with) and are committed to each other as well as the project to stay on.
A terminal emulator running on an object-oriented system like Termkit could run vt100-friendly filters to convert everything to text before it is sent down the line to the user. Users who did not know they were connecting to such a system might not notice the difference.
Entrepreneurs see walls and smash right through them
I'm not saying there aren't work tasks that require a proper workstation. I'm saying that even for work, there are some contexts where a full-on computer isn't needed. The people I referred to spend a lot of their time meeting people, doing sales, networking, responding to emails, sending presentations around, etc.

If there are work contexts where the iPad is sufficient, it's not a big leap to imagine that there are even more non-work contexts where that is also the case.
It's interesting that face recognition is not covered, the tag must be done by a person
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This guy should be a hero to everyone who has taught themselves programming, computers, business...anything. Though he was already a mathematical powerhouse as a teenager, he still dropped out of college and endured very hard times while he wrote these notebooks. Ramanujan was well below "ramen profitable," and very much a "solo founder."

Possibly an object lesson for VCs as well.
Homeowner builds moat to protect his home from flood
Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain emulation by 2024
Why Learning From Mistakes is Hard
I think that the GPS-based aspect of it is what makes it a bit more interesting. I expect that some unemployed folks with a car or bike might be able to make a pretty decent living by becoming a for-hire courier.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/technology/18talent.html?h... has a report on how some companies are hiring teams.

They acquire a startup for its employees :)

An excerpt "It was widely reported that FriendFeed was bought for about $47 million, or about $4 million for each employee, though some money went to its outside investors."
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Hey, thanks for the detailed comment on how you handle this situation. It is so helpful to get such thoughtful feedback and has really got me thinking critically about this product.

Out of interest do you develop websites on behalf on your clients or is it just web/email hosting?

I am trying to figure out the core market for Flaregun. I think it is really targeted at web design agencies which handle a clients complete web presence.

The last company I worked at, a small web agency, was a reseller (Enom) and like you would buy domains on behalf of clients. However a lot of our clients wanted to buy the domains themselves so they had full ownership. So we had a situation where we owned and renewed 70 odd domains and then the rest (100+) were owned by 40 odd clients (some legacy) across as many registrars. Tracking all these domains was just not possible. Some were bound to slip.

"i tell them they're responsible for renewing them (which i use as a selling point for why they should transfer them to me)" - this is a completely reasonable policy which completely covers you. However perhaps this "I told you so" attitude wouldn't work in all situations. I guess it depends on the relationship with the client. If it is just hosting then yeah you can take that stance. However clients paid my old company to handle their web presence, sometimes on high traffic websites were downtime was not acceptable. In this instance their expectation was a little higher, and preventing potential problems like this was assumed to be a responsibility of the web agency.

Your thoughts on the free vs paid for plans are interesting. A few of my thoughts:

1. Perhaps it would make sense to get rid of the corporate plan (as you say anyone with this many domains would already have a well sorted billing / renewal system in place)

2. Make the agency plan unlimited (chances are they wouldn't have more than 500 est domains).

3. I see the professional account as a freelancer. Maybe 30 domains is too high in this case.

4. The free account could be removed and a 30 day free trial added to the paid accounts. I guess you either want this or not. The free account doesn't really serve as a sales device like it would on other apps. Also your use of Flaregun doesn't expand over time (like it does with a app like Basecamp). You start with x number of domains to manage, so you jump in at a price point (plan) which allows that number of domains.

I have been thinking about building billing (domain and hosting) into the product, but I guess most people already have an invoicing system setup and wouldn't want another systems. Integration with existing systems would be great but is time consuming and makes the web app a lot more complex.

Cheers,
I think that's because you should be searching for libreoffice - it's the first link on bing.
I can't remember specific employers, (and if I did, I'm not inclinded to "out" them) but I know job recruitment site TopProspect requires LinkedIn.

As a side-note I recently moved to San Francisco and I'm looking for work as a UI Designer. At a couple interviews there have been printouts of my application, resume, and -- sure enough -- my LinkedIn profile.

Even if you don't think it counts, it shows up when employers Google you. Well, it does it you have an offbeat name like Critz.
Hilarious take on Start-ups: comedy skit
As a student of Classics do you think the patronage model that companies like Kickstarter enable will become dominant or at least mainstream?

It seems like a key to understanding the future of copyright heavy industries will be to understand how people like Vivaldi (or any artist up until the 1950s) made art that persists to this day without the benefit of recorded media.
Google should remind you that your domain is expiring and offer to switch to a regular account or clear your data.