skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah- You've definitely convinced me that I need to take a closer look at coffeescript. But I'd only be really interested if it could take something approaching OWLlink Functional syntax and generate code in any popular language, with my main concern being the ease of controlling exactly what is generated. Not because I think OWL Functional is 'better' than JS; I just think flexibility is an important criteria for judging the quality of tools along these lines.

I suppose I do worry about a few detail-ish things: the future of the disco/ddfs project now that Nokia is on the ropes... how to more closely integrate CLIPS rules with redis... if it is ok to let webmachine sit between nginx and an osgi process, or if I need to back-burner erlang for a while...

Don't get me wrong, I've written plenty of JS and expect to write plenty more, with or without node. But I'm also curious if I could ship a native component for chrome that dynamically loads a Xen vm that contains a 'heavy' application, with the UI written in whatever, that renders through an HTML5 canvas (check out the gnome3 html5 demo). I don't worry about it happening though: that's going to take care of itself. I just hope there are no patents or licenses to buy that would prevent me from shipping apps that way.
In practice they go hand-in-hand
the real presentation (android developer camp stuttgart) was hilarious.

sadly no video capture available :(
Why don't console games use exceptions?
Do you really think every time Sony is penetrated, it's announced and everything is dumped like Lulzsec and other loud mouths do? The much more likely thing is that these vulnerabilities were known for quite awhile before.
People who use technical terms are generally specialists. When you're speaking to specialists in another field, or the general population you just have to use general language.
I know many totalitarian regimes that aren't communist.
Because all of the other white geeks on this site want to abandon their culture and move to Asia, so it appeals to them. They've been rejected by white women all their lives but have no problem with asian women. In addition, the civilized and high-tech society attracts them.
Good thing they didn't ask this when I was in school:

What I did today? -> Went to school.
What I want to do tomorrow? -> Stay home and play nintendo.

The second question is not quite honest, more accurately "What BS can I feed my teacher?" I view these questions as a way of attacking integrity, lie or face the consequences. One might argue this teaches a valuable skill. But I find it hard to stomach.
Don't play the game with people like these. That was the real problem. Once their nature and character became evident, which it must have quite early, there was no way to win. Leave and find a better game.
My guess is that even if Maryland doesn't have casinos, New Jersey does, and they know where their money comes from.
I worked with a guy about 7-8 years ago who went onto to manage an Indian outsourced team for the SonyStyle web store. He was terribly frustrated with the situation and the quality of the engineering staff. Stopped having lunch with him as every time it seemed to devolve into a rant session. Note that he was Indian born/educated himself. It was sad as we collaborated closely on a project for over a year and he was one of the sharpest, happiest, most positive engineers I ever worked with.
I think you are right that this is a hugely widespread problem. Does anyone know what security solutions are out there now?

Big companies better start seeking out people like tptacek and quick. More than just consulting, I think a Heroku-like product with a heavy emphasis on security (in addition to ease) could be a great product/SaaS.
Is quite amazing how repeated failure impacts the stock by only about $4/share or roughly 13%. I guess as long as consumers keep buying...
You simply can't do it in the U.S. There are very, very strict regulations against it. Many have tried different angles but it's amazingly airtight.

Malta isn't appealing, I'm sure, to those outside of the EU. But the way I mentioned makes at least possible what otherwise is impossible.
> It's hard to imagine a web application where one HTTP request comes in and a dozen threads (or processes, whatever) are spawned.

Really? I think that's a failure of the author's imagination. Nearly every web application that I've worked on since 2003 has had a significant amount of concurrency involved in handling each request.
Same difference. In a map-reduce framework, you don't need the workers to have multicores; they could all be single core machines. So in retrospect, it is addressing the same issue.
[PloobsEngine, Opensource XNA Game Engine] Tutorial Lights and Camera Released
Change from search terms to websites, and Google trends tells a different story: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=okcupid.com%2C+plentyoff...

My guess is googling for "okcupid" all as one word is relatively more frequent than "plentyoffish" as one word, and here's confirmation using Google Insights for Search, which allows OR queries:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=%28okcupid%20%2B%20...

As much as the PoF guy's pontificating gets old to me, and agree with your Facebook-MySpace analogy, he's still killing OKCupid traffic-wise.
Your office is in Model Colony, Pune!?!?!

I'm not looking for a job, but I will get in touch when I'm next in my hometown (5-16 December). Would love to meet you!
Ask HN: My Startup is Going to Die Because I Messed Up
I'm 24. I started a company 7 months ago, planning to bootstrap it with $5,000 borrowed from family.

We started working hard at creating our brand. Logos, webdesign, website copy, flyers, and SEO. We divided our time equally between these tasks and selling the product. We were headed to profitability in short order.

I quickly learned my cofounder was over his head in personal debt, and could no longer work full time. Some of our borrowed money went to him to try to keep him around for a couple of extra months ($1,200). It didn't work and he had to get a job.

We've been floundering back and forth, spent the majority of our money, I invested another $1,000 to help us make one more sales surge to allow us to dedicate more time. We planned to see if this startup would work, setting a sales and spending goal in under 60 days. Success and we continue, failure and we cut our losses.

We planned to make it happen starting next week.

Friday afternoon I got a call from a business owner in another state, telling me that our business name infringes on his trademark for his business name. Our name would be mycompanyname to his companyname. We had only checked and seen that companyname.com didn't exist, we did not check the trademark database.

At this point, discouraged, unable to afford new marketing materials and a complete redo of everything we've done so far, we're left with little money and a threat of a lawsuit if we don't change everything.

Here are the mistakes that I made, and will learn from:

1) Learn about the financial position of any cofounder. A cofounder's personal situation will hugely impact his/her ability to grow the business.

2) Investigate any trademarks or copyrights on any of your branding or naming. Wasting time in a bootstrapped business will ruin you.

3) Have a plan. Not just a mental plan, but an actual written plan. Decide what is required of the cofounders, decide where money will go, decide your failure point.

4) Be prepared to drop the project, or go it alone. Putting all of your eggs in a basket carried by your cofounder can lead to disaster if you aren't prepared to run with the project yourself.

What other lessons can I learn from this? Where can I improve so that my next project doesn't fail in similar fashion?

tldr: My business failed because I made mistakes in timing, my cofounder, and business branding. What else can I learn from my experience?

EDIT: After a few comments, and an e-mail, I should clarify that this is not necessarily a web-startup or app. It's a business targeting seniors (hence the flyers, which were placed in senior centers and used at senior health conferences). My cofounder came into the picture as the one with more experience working with the senior market. We had suppliers for our product, so our main focus was to sell, sell, sell. So, to add another lesson:

5) Cash in a small bootstrapped company should be spent on client acquisition. Not on whiteboards, office refrigerators, business cards, or flyers.
Not just kind of - more like "absolutely" mapping and reducing are directly from the functional paradigm.
Local concurrency and shared memory can be used to improve performance of operations that may be distributed; assuming proper implementations, a shared memory mailbox will always be cheaper than forcing multiple data copies of network/pipe based messaging, even if the API for both transports is identical.
US citizens can own shares in a foreign public company. That company can sell shares. There's nothing the SEC can really get mad about here.
Im surprised there is no discussion about the images/message of the hacked homepage.
Not really. You must have a substantial, pre-existing relationship with the investor and you may only have a few investors. Even then, because these are non-accredited investors, you may have trouble raising financing in later rounds.

The idea of OpenStarts is that you can be funded by thousands of people you've never met and there's no penalty later.
Anthony Bourdain has done a few episodes on Vietnam, it's his favorite place on Earth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAbOmZFoJYE
It's the somewhat the same in Finland and many other countries. Here you can choose between 6 months of service in the military, 12 months of alternative service or go to prison for 6 months. While there are many up sides in conscription I still feel it's against human rights.
Scrappy broke startups are uncomfortable, not so much by choice, but necessity.
Silicon Valley startups, investors target $100 billion lighting industry
It might be the perception thing. OWA looks more 'professional' than GMail for example, although the latter probably has more capabilities and obviously isn't tied to Exchange.

I'm guessing this version of Office will be extremely flashy, and Google Docs will look like a 90s edition of WordPerfect by comparison.
Are you arguing that you can only fit in to one place in your life? Fitting in is only a feeling after all.
calm, obedient, slightly docile nature of asian women

I don't think you know enough Asian women.
Free desktop publishing software – SpringPublisher
Yeah, I use the Spreadsheet app the most. It's quicker to download all the Javascript required to run it than it is to boot Excel off my hard drive, and I just use it for groceries and things.
Existential types? The author alludes to this, and then proceeds in ignorance of what he'd just said for the rest of the post.

In Java, all you have for these is interfaces, so it's no wonder people think that types are problematic.

Types aren't the problem. Crappy types are the problem. Not making the types lightweight enough that people can dish them out at their pleasure, that's the problem. When the math don't work well enough, make better maths.
Security products are a hard sell. And, there's a lot of snake oil and voodoo that gets passed off as useful. One of our competitors had (maybe still has) a slew of security issues, existing for years, and yet people kept buying and deploying the product at an alarming rate (it was extremely cheap, and had a tremendously long feature list)...it took a disaster at the company to change things to where we no longer view that product as a real threat in the marketplace. But, I never could figure out how people could overlook the abysmal security record.

Security is sort of an amorphous concept that most people just can't really wrap their head around. What does secure software look like? How do you know it's secure? Non-technical users have no way of knowing; expensive software is just as likely (if not more likely) to have security issues as Open Source software. Software that claims to be secure can be just as insecure as software that makes no such claims.

Security is a process not a product. You can't buy security. Things like proxies, mod_security, firewalls, IDS, etc. are all bandaids that you put over problems, and they're usually "preventing" ancient exploits that have already been fixed in the underlying software (assuming you're running the latest version). They might prevent some attacks, but if you're running insecure versions of your software underneath, a determined attacker will find a way in.

In short: Security is hard. The new hotness is easy and is an easier sell.
You can't possible make that judgement from outside. If their security team consisted of two people, the surface area was just too large. In that situation, id be worried about protecting trade secrets and intellectual property and to hell with the web sites.

If it consisted of 20 people, I would agree with you: they would still be hackable, but the embarrassing simplicity of the hacks should have been covered.

Without knowing details of the team, it is just an unsubstantiated guess and/or heaping crap on Sony (who, as a company, i can't stand).
I've noticed that the points on this post go up during "european awake hours" and down during "American awake hours". I think there is definitely a work ethic divide there.

(I am in the UK for reference).
You sound like you have a good idea of what went wrong. But surely you got a lot of things right too. What were they?

It would sound like your mistakes point to a lack of research. It sounds like your co-founder isn't a friend, so you didn't know enough about him to get started with.

Finally, this isn't legal advice, but don't give up on the trademark situation yet. Especially if you haven't launched. I'm not so sure the other party would be willing to pay lawyers for a lawsuit, especially onsidering there isn't much to get out of small bootstrapped startup. Also, if you haven't launched, then you dont have very much to lose. You haven't established a brand yet, so perhaps this might be the best time to tweak with this. And of course, you'd want to improve on your branding research this time.
How have you failed if you haven't even launched?

If nobody knows your brand, why can't you re-brand? Did you buy a bunch of useless merchandise, or can you personally tweak some logos in Photoshop to a new name.

What is your partner's role? Sounds like he must be the coder / designer.

More than a plan, it sounds like you need a great mentor.

(I assumed this was a web startup, but you made flyers, so now I'm not so sure.)
If g returns an x and f takes an x, I can do f(g()) without knowing anything else about type x. Even type inference will choose an x that makes g compatible with f, or complain if there isn't any. So the system is still modular at the source level, which is important because it keeps the project comprehensible. What you don't have is binary-level modularity, but that's just an efficiency hack that dates back to when computers were almost too slow to run compilers. Now it should only matter to people who obfuscate by refusing to ship source (or source-equivalent intermediate files, which at least one Ada and one C++ implementation used to handle separate compilation of polymorphic code) and living with the lack of whole-program optimization.
It's not just non-work time you get to share when you work at home! My 8yo has a small work table in my office; he comes home from school, opens up the backpack, and we work together (my job, his homework) for a while. He usually checks up on what I'm working on -- I was lucky enough to have a mini-hacker who not only comes to tech conferences with me, but spoke at his first one at age 7. He has a play room just off my office, too, so even when we are doing our own things, we're together-ish.

I find it decidedly suboptimal that our society insulates young people from work until their late teens or early 20's, then expects them to suddenly and magically become good workers. Raising my kid around my work is a huge plus, in terms of his preparation for life, his understanding why mommy works even though it takes time away from him, and increasing the time we get to spend together.
Copy-pasting a comment on the original article here, since I have the same comment/question:

Brian said...

Dynamic typing doesn't restore the modularity- it simply delays checking for violations. Say module X depends upon module Y having function foo- this is a statement which is independent of static vr.s dynamic checking. This means that that modularity is lost- you can't have a module Y which doesn't have a function foo. If module Y doesn't have a function foo, the program is going to fail, the only questions are when and how.

What I don't get is why detecting the error early is a disadvantage. It's well known that the earlier a bug is detected, the cheaper it is to fix. And yet, all the arguments in favor of dynamic typing are about delaying the detection of bugs- implicitly increasing their cost.

6/05/2011 6:49 AM
We originally wanted to do something similar to what you are proposing. Since crowd-sourced investment was out in the US, we decided to just set up the site pitchups.com to allow people to get feedback/comments on their startup idea and connect with others, and just develop it as a community. There may be some value and synergies in combining what we are doing at pitchups with your site - maybe it can serve as a funnel for great ideas to get to the crowd-sourced funding stage. Let me know if this is something that would be of interest to you, by emailing admin@pitchups.com
I guess this serves as a proof that some large corporations don't take security seriously enough. And we're supposed to trust them with our data. I think we should have a "Hall of Shame" for all this companies that fail from a security perspective.
"3 hour project" - I wonder what the author's intent is to point out that it took him 3 hours to implement? (I've equally been curious about the ones where people share their weekend projects and remark it explicitly)
Don't Quit Your Job. Spinoff - with Phill Simon
I was expecting your question to be: what can I do to make my company survive? From what you describe it sounds like you're giving up, the situation itself doesn't necessarily sound terminal. Other startups have survived worse situations and succeeded in the long run.

Not saying that you should or should not give up, that's your call. Only that it sounds like a challenge that's no different from the one many other startups faced.
Can a £15 computer solve the programming gap?
he's married and not in his 20's. why would he care about nightlife?
Communist countries tend to be totalitarian, the reverse isn't true.
I hear you talk a lot about the branding, marketing and your cofounder, but what about the idea? Is it original or still worth marketing? A name change and a cofounder might not be the best reasons to call it quits.
Except you can't unpack existential types, right? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2300275/how-to-unpack-a-h...
My biggest complaint with Google Docs is related to consistent formatting. I am anxious to see how MS handles this. I do agree that for pure collaboration, Google Docs is currently unmatched.
Well he's already making money from taking down the gov and Sony websites.
Look on the positive side - $5,000 isn't a ton of money and people are failing at business every single day, usually losing a lot more too. If I were you I'd get a job to pay back the money borrowed from family and then bootstrap another startup again, building on the lessons you learned from this experience.
Do you have your product built? You're already giving up, the worst that can happen is failure which is the same as giving up. Scrap marketing, find a new name and launch. If it fails because of no marketing, oh well that's a shame, if it succeeds then woo! If you give up you're just skipping the launch part and going straight to guaranteed failure.
Depends, most high powered rounds travel supersonic, you don't hear them until after they've already hit you.
Have you talked to someone about the trademark? Do you know if you are actually likely to be infringing?

There are tests that are applied. Also, simply having a similar domain name may not be a problem unless you're directly competing with the guy or you're passing off. There are many limitations to trademark.
Why Doesn’t Microcredit Create Entrepreneurs?
Hopefully they will be rewriting in Go ;)

Interestingly many rubyists seem to be joining the Go community lately.
I have personal experience shipping a web app to a bunch of large companies and educational institutions, and it's a mixed bag.

Most businesses seem to get by with as little as possible in the way of security resources. Often they don't have anyone dedicated on security (warning signal #1), and they'll let you remote into their network without many restrictions (warning signal #2). The other businesses are usually to the other extreme on security. They want documentation that you have a secure development policy, they'll do an independent security audit, they won't allow remote access under any circumstances, and some won't even allow any direct access at all (you have to prepare documentation that their people can follow for any modification that must be made to the system). So, basically, there's a minority that really gets it, and a majority that doesn't know and doesn't care.

The fallout of this is simple: there won't be any. It hasn't gotten worse enough yet. Sony's case is seen as an isolated incident of a company that got unlucky. Most business leaders won't even see it as having bad policy, just bad luck. Programmers will know better, but wisdom from the tech crowd generally doesn't percolate to the C-levels. However, hackers everywhere are realizing that all these big businesses are information goldmines, and the coming years we're going to see an onslaught of hacks that will eventually force a standardization of security policies.
The official website is http://raspberrypi.org/.
also see http://www.quora.com/Machine-Learning/What-are-some-introduc...
Rebooting the cosmos?
I think you only go under when you stop refusing to die.

Our company went completely under (Chapter 11 stuff), we lost all staff and had legal threats from all sides.

After a few weeks of misery we decided that we don't feel like dying. We went all-in and turned it around on a shoe-string budget in a matter of months.

Keep refusing to die, and you'll be fine - it just won't be easy!
Discussion about this overview at the Haskell Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/hs0e9/three_haskell...
For future reference: very little of what you spent money on is in the critical path for B2B sales, which I assume is what you are doing. One might decide to sell the software to at least one person, then write copy and design flyers. After you have one sale, $1k is presumably not a lot of money. (I am hearing high touch sales so presumably you priced at least in mid four figures, right?)
I don't think you should be quite ready to throw in the towel.

Have u launched yet? You said you were headed to profitability. What about the original idea as others have mentioned here?

Here's another one:

Plan to dedicate more than 7 months to said startup.
I think there will be increased demand for such a thing, but the security features a secure PaaS could provide (network and application firewalls) are never going to be a 100% solution. There is no substitute for building your product securely and no PaaS will do that for you.
Woah! Did you just copy/paste my mind or what? I am exactly in the same situation and feel exactly the same way as you! Every word and sentence you wrote describe me perfectly. I also sold a few startups, I'm both business and technical, can't get excited again, love Square, etc. We should hang out ;-)

I showed your post to my wife and she really thought I wrote it.

Please reach out to me and we'll talk. You can find my email on my about page. Cheers!
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