skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Early founder compensation
When a startup gets its initial round of funding, how do founders compensate themselves for the work they are doing and have already done?

If you've put 6 months of full time work into your startup, can you pay yourself a (moderate) chunk of money for previous work? Can you set yourself a base salary from this point forward?

What kind of rules govern these kinds of decisions, or is this all between the funders and the founder?
The later statically typed languages like Haskell make it relatively easy to create a type which is internally stored as some base type, like an Integer, but at the type system level is treated as a distinct type. Thus one can not accidentally multiply a Pixel by a Millimeter when trying to compute an area on the screen, while under the hood pixels and millimeters are still just Ints (or whatever). "Real" Hungarian is a good hack for languages lacking that.
Top uses for usb flash memory sticks
TOS and PP from US government sites should be public domain.
That combobox was baffling.
A Guide to UX Careers [Infographic]
Both examples actually re-enforce my argument because when they started they were all about delivering value to their end-users. Yes, twitter exposed an API really early on, but their focus was delivering on the end user promise of short messages.

Facebook did not add an API until much later and "being a platform" did not become a priority until recently.
The service is in private beta, we are simply not ready to welcome too many users, and I'm sorry for this. Nobody forces you to spam your social media network, you can simply wait :)
That JS on page crashes IE8.
We do a lot of ruby apps, avoiding rails as much as possible, but Redmine is one we use often. In all of our apps we use the Runit process supervisor to launch them, with svlogd logging each individual process. It has proven more than up to the task of keeping up with the busiest of our logging needs, and has many advanced features simply configured that other loggers lack. Worth checking out as an alternative, as you don't have to replace your syslogger to use it. See http://rubyists.github.com/2011/05/02/runit-for-ruby-and-eve... for more info
Ruby exploded really only after the web stuff happened. Python caught on before that.
Ask HN: Next Step to Expanding and Monetizing my Site?
The app: http://www.transitspy.com/mbta
Main page: http://www.transitspy.com/

TransitSpy was built using the NextBus API. There are lots of mobile apps that use the API, but no quality web apps. TransitSpy looks to fill that gap and serve as a tool that commuters can use when sitting in an office waiting to catch the bus or something stations/student centers can use as a display tool. I currently have a trial run going on for agencies in the Boston area (MBTA, MIT shuttle, Ezride).

I am trying to decide how to monetize it. The first idea is obviously ads - being flash based, there are a few hang-ups but nothing too serious. I could have the site up and running for 50+ different cities/universities by the end of the day (porting is simple), and think I could eventually get a pretty solid user base that way. This seems like the way to go, but I am hesitant to do so b/c of the other option…

Which is to charge other transit agencies if they want their own version. There are lots of small colleges and towns available through the API that aren’t likely to have developers who can build a bus tracking tool, while I can get them a version of TransitSpy up and running in a few hours. If I go this route, I have some tech sales people that are pretty skilled. Don't know if they'd sell it, but they'd do about as good a job as one can hope for.

A few caveats -

* Yeah, the site is flash based, which causes some compatibility problems. There might be better options, but I do believe there were lots of benefits to using Flex for the app. Switching over is possible, but I don’t yet believe that is necessary.

* The main page template was bought off of themeforest. I need to customize the front end a little more, as it looks nearly identical to other sites that use the template.

Your feedback is appreciated!
I've had my fair share of refactoring legacy code bases as well, and I agree that Rails code is a special kind of horrible. I think you will find that this primarily traces back to the following observation:

Rails developers read GoF and think "object composition is awesome!" Then they go and create a bunch of acts_as_foo and has_bar modules which they mix into their models and controllers, all the while thinking "object composition is awesome!" Meanwhile, it never occurs to them that modules are, in fact, closer to multiple inheritance than object composition, and all the wonderful benefits of object composition that GoF touts are nowhere to be found. Instead, what's left is a giant plate of spaghetti code...
Ehr technology
Our web based behavioral healthcare software, AWARDS, tracks data associated with many kinds of human services and behavioral healthcare agencies
Yes. Over time, if Perl is no longer significant either practically or historically, perhaps his wikipedia entry could be archived as "ancient history", but for the moment it is relevant.
What about the Red Hat model? People wondered how Linux would ever make money because it was open source. Then Red Hat was founded on providing support around open source software. If a service is useful to organizations, rather than just individuals, some kind of support contract might be profitable.
5 Reasons To Sell Your Startup
Ehr Technology
Foothold Technology provides agencies and service providers with software that tracks both mission-critical and administrative data.
Other than not minding so much about the JVM thing (even though Clojure.NET is coming along) I find my answer still holds up pretty well after all this time :)
The article dismisses setting an exception in the same line it's mentioned but it seems to me like a good option. As long as it's a python function then any incidental c calls will quickly return and let it abort, right? The difficulty of stopping a c function is a whole different ballgame.
I agree with wallawe. This sector really needs some new resources. The hotspots for debate online are on facebook notes and quora. Both platforms are not conducive for debating.

My main feedback is that all of the information looks equally relevant on the page. I would suggest minimization of suggestions of other debates and focus the UI on debating the current issue you are looking at. It seems that you want people to debate rather than just vote. As of right now, I get lost in the three column layout.

Another shift to consider is having the evidence before the voting. If your goal is to educate and to encourage discuss over voting, the information on positions should be more readily available.

No doubt this vertical is hard to design for, ha ha
I'm in Japan right now, and I've found the early warning service random at best. I'd say 50% of the time I get alerts, I actually feel the quake, and 50% of the quakes I get have no alert.

There are quakes [that you can feel] about every other day (here in Tokyo, they're still more frequent up in Sendai).
Yes, as has my brother-in-law - 2 different phones, networks, vendors. I have a Nexus one, he has a Droid of some sort.
Yes, I agree. If we can develop a drug, I'm all in favor of it and this certainly gets us closer to that goal. I'm simply arguing that the search for a wonder drug/magic bullet always seems to overshadow so called root causes.

Noticeably absent from the tribune article (have not yet read the Nature article) is any discussion of environmental triggers such as diet or lifestyle.

We often jump from disease to drug without considering the causal factors.
Ruby has a public/private divide which can easily be circumvented. But the circumvention is a bit ugly, which is a good thing - it makes the circumvention obvious in the code.

Personally, I think Ruby hits a sweet spot here: the privacy curtain is strong enough that Ruby WILL let you know when you've stepped off the path of using methods which are part of the stable API. But you can then tell Ruby "yes, I understand, and I know what I'm doing".
I would have thought that Windows is an example of a platform created as a platform. It was seeded by ability to also run MS-DOS apps, and it had some starter apps, but the effort to fire up the platform-developers-apps-users-hardware-... cycle was pretty clear. In many ways MS/PC-DOS was similar (with Basic as an important developer tool) with the attraction of IBM's imprimatur for applications (many of which were seeded/transposed from CP/M).

But that's history. These days, with the Internet for infrastructure, creating user-facing platforms and use of social-software provisions blurs everything, with an increase in user-facing provisions (and users for addition of value), the process is short-circuited, sometimes massively. But today's attention to ecosystems and the effort to establish Windows Phone as one platform of an ecosystem is further example.

Also, I think there are other reasons for apps to be modularized in a way that supports plug-in extension and customization in larger integrations. Attention to extensibility and customization can be valuable in the development progression of the app itself. That might make it a mini-platform without growing to a platform as we think of them in todays distributed ecosystems. It is useful to have an eye on such matters so that early releases can grow there from initial rudimentary (essentially-private) provisions.
> On (2), length, I don't recall any of my meta editing tasks involving "100 keystrokes and a mouse movement." Customizable shortcuts can trim down the outliers.

As a simple example of that, using a dumb text editor like notepad as the baseline, changing the same 10 characters on 10 consecutive lines will take at least 200 keystrokes (100 DELs, 100 times typing the same characters back in, plus the movement keys - about 9 to move down to the next row.

With a bit of thought, in notepad, you can reduce this a bit. use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to reduce the amount of typing - but you'll still need to either DEL or select the words to replace, in the same location on each line.

With a more modern text editor, you can select a rectangular area and replace the text within it. In vi, replacing those 10 strings on 10 consecutive lines will take (starting at the first character to replace, like Notepad, and assuming it's a single word inside separators):

Ctrl-V e 1 0 j c A_NEW_WORD

That's 16 keystroke instead of over 200, with no mouse movements.

This is something I do frequently enough that I didn't need to even think for a millisecond to bring to mind the keystrokes needed to do it.

Now, I'm not arguing your editing style isn't different - maybe you've never needed to do this - but I would argue that this is a fairly common programming text editing task.
Thanks, that looks very interesting! I wish I would have used this years ago, but (un)fortunately I switched over to Python (and some C for extensions).
I was initially going to stop development and wait, but after hundreds of thousands of potential customers emerged over the weekend, it's full steam ahead.

I know it's the same for some other devs, as well. A good number of us are sticking around, at least supporting and fixing bugs on our apps, and creating new ones.

The ecosystem is definitely not dead yet, but we can only run on fumes for so long. If they get a hardware parter and new hardware that people lust for (imagine webOS on the likes of a Nexus S or Galaxy S II), we might be OK.

EDIT: Also, I should mention, many devs received loads of downloads over the weekend, myself included. http://www.webosroundup.com/2011/08/devs-see-boost-to-app-do...
And they're both older than Java, but you're more likely to see greenfield projects in Ruby or Python than Java because Java gained acceptance much more quickly. The year that the first compiler for a language was written is kind of irrelevant — it's time at certain popularity thresholds that really determines a language's maturity.
Abstracting away from the traditional arguments regarding modality and keybindings, emacs serves the same purpose.

I selected emacs in large part because I was tired of learning different editors, one for each platform.
Social capital ... has not disappeared. It is alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens. They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person, donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life. Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.

Struggling politically for more government action (and by extension, taxation) toward the same goals isn't altruistic?
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Apple (famously or infamously) has no problem adding features that formerly only third party apps had.

Apple sells devices first and is middleman for developers second. Apple makes their money with devices.

If Apple doesn’t integrate a feature they would like to, the reason is much more likely that they don’t want to scare off developers, not (the small) lost revenue and (the even smaller) lost profit. (Considering the massive amounts of people writing software for iOS, that’s something Apple currently doesn’t have to worry about all that much.)

Apple will always want to make their devices more attractive for consumers. I don’t think that developers have priority for them (at least compared to consumers).
I had someone else report an IE7 crash recently. I wish I could narrow down WHICH JS is the problem. It's just stock WordPress+various widgets.
But "I am nothing" is so much more poetic! :)
Please don't editorialize in your title.

"BBC has live coverage of the events unfolding in Tripoli"

is preferable to

"BBC's amazing live coverage of events unfolding in Tripoli".

If you want to comment on the quality of their coverage, do it in the HN comments.
Is Y Combinator growing too quickly?
Isn't this exactly what console manufacturers did? Microsoft took a huge loss on the original xbox (and the 360?) and made a shitload of money on the xbox live + a few in house games. In short, they created a platform/ecosystem and took a loss up front.

It's riskier, and can only be done by companies that have significant runway. But it's likely the only way to compete with someone like Apple, who has an enormous domination in the current market.
It's an (albeit extremely large and diverse) e-commerce website, not a platform. What software do you build that runs on top of Amazon?

Ignoring AWS, there are lots of complex systems you can build on top of Amazon. One example is Fulfillment by Amazon. You can integrate this service with your ecommerce website, and Amazon can warehouse your inventory in its facilities nationwide, charging you based on the volume of your inventory. They will automatically select a warehouse closest to your clients that has your item in stock and pack and ship it, and even order more inventory from your supplier when a certain warehouse inventory level falls below a certain threshold. It is basically S3 backed CloudFront for physical goods.
Apple doesn't care one whiff about any single app's livelihood. If integrating something improves the user experience, then it gets integrated.

iOS 5 is already taking aim at Instapaper (Reading List), the entire ToDo category (Reminders), non-SMS messaging apps (iMessage), Zinio (Newsstand), half the camera apps out there, and a swath of Twitter apps [1]. You can almost bet if there is a swell of applications with similar features that Apple will wipe them all out in the next major version of iOS.

What's one more weather app? Apple is already taking aim at them by adding hourly forecasts to the built in weather app for iOS 5.

[1] http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html
Totally agree. Most companies that have platforms start out building an end user focused app, gain success, and then open up some level of their internals to become a platform. For example, Facebook. It was just an app, and then, after it had success, launched a platform. Even the iPhone initially did not have apps. Amazon is another example. It started as an app and expanded to be a platform that other partners could plug into and take advantage of Amazon's services, particularly logistical ones.

Further, most startups that try to build a platform from the beginning fail, because to have a platform you need a vibrant set of partners who make money off your platform, and it's very rare for a startup to be something that others will build a business on.

Perhaps those that build a marketplace could be viewed as both an app and a platform, like an Ebay. Of course it's necessary to get scale as the marketplace for it to really be successful and provide value to both sides of the transaction (buyers and sellers).

Note that the Amazon example shows how Amazon transformed from an app to a platform by adding the marketplace.
Agree to disagree about what is UGLY.
I think people imagine it's like safety razors - sell the razor cheap, make money on the blades. The same strategy has worked for printers, where the real money is in ink or toner cartridges, and with phones, where the profit is in selling connection time/bandwidth over a 2 year contract. After all, Apple takes a cut of all sales through the app store and iTunes store, so some tech writers assume that that will work for anyone (even though it's taken Apple the best part of a decade to build the required infrastructure and the company had positioned its products at the top of the market almost since inception).
Archos is selling their 10" tablet for $270. The 7" is $240. I've used one of the 10" models and found it fine for web browsing. Sadly, their new models coming out in September are said to cost $300 and $370.

https://store.archos.com/archos-internet-tablet-p-5005.html
> >The main developer is very responsive and helpful.

> Well, here I must concede a point. I have no idea how responsive the developers of Racket are, for I never had cause to contact them.

They are very responsive and helpful and the mailing list is active.
HP's fire sale will actually aid all Android tablets in the long run (assuming an android port does follow for the touchpads). Cheap tablets for hackers/developers will result in better software for the entire Android ecosystem.
<public_display_of_affection>

Dear sir,

I'm jumping on my bed right now out of ecstasy, for my unworthy comment has garnered a reception, from a noble soul like yours.

You just made by day. In fact, you do it through the means of coffeescript everyday. Thank you for coffeescript, kind sir.

Hats off.

A broke, insecure, forever alone developer.

</public_display_of_affection>
My first thought was: what about duplicate names?
Ditto, with the exceptions of class names, projects not my own where I have to follow certain conventions, and in a Lisp-like languages. Dash beats underscore and I love question marks at the end of functions that return bools. I've also sucked long on the teat of dynamic type languages, so I've found that I care more about being able to decipher code's intent from reading it than what specific types are. For me, Python code is still more readable than C++ code no matter how many stylistic conventions on your C++ variables you make up.
Looks pretty awesome so far. I'm not a big fan of all the different fonts and formatting. Like aginn mentioned, I don't know if Related Issues should have the same size as the currently focused issue. Love the landing page though.
HP single-handedly destroys non-iPad tablet market
Court refuses trial by combat
Singularity University About To Graduate Its Third Year of Summer Students
Especially since if I had to write that JavaScript by hand, I wouldn't.
As an app developer, I have to say I agree with Apple on this decision. The UDID is harmless to share, but in the days before TestFlight when I would send out Ad Hoc builds to test apps before publishing, many people would get nervous about sharing their UDID with me. I'd often be asked "is this safe? Can you hack into my phone with this?"

Of course, classic Ad Hoc builds will probably still require handing over a UDID, but I would think it would be comforting for the average iOS user to see stories like this, because it gives the illusion of a little extra security and certainly helps regarding privacy.

The only thing I'm worried about is how this will affect TestFlight. Without programmatic access to the UDID, the on-boarding process for a tester in TestFlight is going to become much more complicated.
Lawrence Livermore creates fast DNA copy machine
Strictly speaking ruby, private only forbids calling the method in question with an explicit receiver.

object_instance.private_method is obviously prohibited, but so is self.private_method when called from another class method. The latter one is fine when private_method is called, without the self. To circumvent privateness in the other case ("calling an underscored method") you would have to say object_instance.send(:private_method).
Smart Development vs. Clever Development
Just described the stack that I use to a "T".

The only things I would add are "solr" for search, and "redis" for miscellaneous speed improvements, such as statistics tracking and counting.
maybe it's because I started coding in the 80's but I've been doing this "autocomplete" and "full syntactical parsing in the background as you type" thing in my brain. Along with my ability to refactor "bareback" it may be why I prefer tools like vim over IDE's.
"Just like JavaScript but nicer to type." was a decent pitch to make CoffeeScript sound safe. But it's become so much more. And you get past the simplicity of that pitch quickly if you use CoffeeScript earnestly.

Going through the Table of Contents on http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ I've picked out the features of CoffeeScript that make it a different beast than just a JavaScript without warts.

* Lexical Scoping and Variable Safety
* Conditional Assignment
* Splats
* Comprehensions
* Everything is an Expression (&implicit return)
* The Existential Operator
* Classes, Inheritance, and Super
* Destructuring Assignment
* Function binding
* Chained Comparisons
* Extended Regular Expressions

This is beyond a simple sweetener for your JavaScript code. Yes, you could write your JavaScript like you write your CoffeeScript, but you wouldn't.

Try this little jewel in Try CoffeeScript and you'll see what I mean:

[open, contents..., end] = "<impossible>".split ""
alert contents.join ""
I'm sceptical about what he's doing:

a) He's immunising people to stop suffering yet increasing population due to this causes more resource issues. They magically forget that side issue... [1]

b) He's shifting Monsanto GM crops to Africa[2] - not a good thing. That's vendor lock in for food which is incredibly dangerous.

Philanthropy my arse. The guy has spent years making questionable decisions and causing absolute HAVOC around the world, yet the collective ignorance springs into action when people see him "giving money away" which he's not doing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters...
Thing is, Apple has a lot of money now but MS can run deficits in the tablet business essentially forever. So can Google.

Half of Apples income is tablets. They can run for some time, but not forever.
If someone likes x over y, it means they must like the most extreme thing possible that is different from y in the way x is!!

Why make that point? It has absolutely no intellectual content.
I honestly don't think that Amazon or Barnes and Noble consider their devices to be iPad competitors, though. They're selling them as eReaders that just happen to be able to play Angry Birds, not as full-featured tablets.