skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a distribution channel problem if they'd "never see" it.

Gnumeric could just package up and sell via that channel. It would seem weird to them ("huh? you just download it"), but if you're right, it would make a huge difference. Then you've got brand-name issues and packaging and the whole business thing which they aren't interested in, not good at, and MS is brilliant at.
Hah, no problem. This is one of the few sites I assume by default people are trying to be positive.
Venture Capitalists Are Hearing Footsteps
This is a tough one. One thing I know though is that business is not worth friendship. You can succeed at business with or without this guy, but you can't succeed at being happy if you don't have any friends. For me in any case, people who think the same way I do and who I can be real friends with are far between, and though I have sometimes let business come between me and them, I've always regretted it later, because the money is no fun if you have noone to smoke cigars with.

I also understand what it feels like to be demotivated and to lose interest in a project, particular when it is not released.

What you have to see it as is a marriage. In the beginning, things are new and exciting, but with time, it gets boring. Some people like the boring life, but others don't. Your co-founder cannot take the grind. You need to spice things up a little bit.

Is there anything at all you can release? If there is, I'd suggest letting him release it and move him away from development into sales for a while. Just developing is boring boring work, but when people start copywriting and selling, they get motivated again.

To force his hand, tell him you will abandon the project. Use this as a bargaining chip to get him back into the project, and think of some tricks to get him interested again.

The best way I can think of is this - release the app! Yes, it sucks, it's buggy, but when any developer worth his salt sees a released app with his name on it and it's full of bugs, he'll start working on it pronto.
For the love of all things holy, please, please, PLEASE make sure to consult with a lawyer as part of this. You don't have to be a jerk about it; but if you become successful after you have parted ways, you're just asking for trouble.

Your friend has already shown you that he is worried about himself first. Don't sacrifice doing your due diligence just because you're dealing with a friend and not some random co-worker.
Marketing Your Mutual Purpose
if this is true, then we will see soon Chineese men behaving like conquering Vikings

:)

(ratio of men vs women is one of the highest in the world due to single child policy)
Now we just need someone to write a greasemonkey script which auto fills the answers for you so you can send emails right when you want...
I think that's a great plan, and what I tried in June, July, August, and September.

Perhaps I just suck at it, but that doesn't seem to be helping ;(
Then call it shareware and never actually ask for money. They'll think that they're getting expensive software for free. If someone tries to enter a fake activation key more than a few times (they'd all be fake, logically), actually make it shareware and charge $49 after thirty days.
In that case, my suspicion is that even the threat of a buyout isn't going to do any good in terms of motivating him. He really needs to go do something else, at least temporarily, to resolve whatever's going on in his life. Having him stay on helps neither of you, and as a friend and co-founder, he should recognize that.

When it comes to dealing with his share of the company, I can't claim to know how best to deal with these matters, but if he's made a significant contribution to the project overall, perhaps he could retain a reduced share in exchange for leaving the project early. (Someone tell me if this is a bad idea.)

As far as how to move forward, what will it take to complete the last 5%, and how tight is your current situation?
Yes. I'm not worried about the legal aspect- The agreement is written such that either of us can withdraw.

If I tell him that either a) I withdraw, and leave him the unfinished code and debt, or b) he withdraws, I'm confident that he will exit first.
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When you spoke to him on the phone, did you tell him all of your concerns like you have here?

From my experience when you spill your guts and explain to someone how the world looks from your perspective, people are normally sympathetic to your point of view provided you are being reasonable. I assume because he has been your friend for so long he's fairly reasonable too.

Did he refuse to be bought out? Does he understand your position?
You're no expert, but you slanged some Latin in there, so I'll give you credit for talking over my head :^)

I'm no expert either, and I appreciated that you clarified my views a bit. That's pretty much in line with my feelings about the effects this sort of action can have on an already suffering economy.
Hot Glue Gun and Glue Sticks
A specialist supplier of hot melt glue guns and adhesives with a wide range of products. Buy online.
Facebook Rolls Out Microsoft Live Search - Mashable
Well, that more or less explains a good bit of my startup motivation.
Google's moment of truth: Stock hits $350
Call me harsh, but he's not a "friend".

He is sitting there letting your project dwindle and letting YOU get deeper in debt. Maybe he WAS actually a friend at one point, but I don't think he is now.

From your post/comments, it appears that you are the de-facto CEO of this company, so act like one and get this guy out of your ranks as cleanly and cheaply as possible.

I would probably explore buying him out cheaply, or allowing him to maintain a very small fraction of ownership (1 or 2 %) in return for a clean break (ie, he just goes away and saves you both the legal costs and headaches).

In this process you are highly likely to lose either your "friendship" or your business. Best to decide which one is more valuable and/or replaceable and go from there.
I don't have any great advice for your particular case...but I can say that having a nice long vesting schedule is a good idea. You can renegotiate it during funding rounds and/or an acquisition...but when it's just the founders hashing out the details, you should think in terms of the long-haul. Because, while we'd all like to think we can build awesome value in a year, exit a millionaire, and be happy, the fact is that the average exit age for VC-backed startups in the valley is seven years.

YC started out not including vesting terms in the initial company paperwork--on the assumption that when the angel or series A funding round hit would be soon enough to make those kinds of decisions. But after a couple of instances where founders had a falling out, and ended up having to hash out those details during the "divorce", they began recommending vesting schedules from day one. I have to agree with them. I've never had any issues, personally, but it happens. Money is involved, hard work is involved, and peoples dreams and visions are involved. It'll get personal if there has to be a split, and vesting at least makes it more clear who is entitled to what, in terms of stock ownership, after the split.
Hey, Yudkowsky quoted from Batman!
You shouldn't need to motivate your co-founder. Co-founders are supposed to know what to do and want to do it without any intervention. Motivating other people takes a little bit of time and a LOT of energy. Uncertainty in even one person can drain the energy of a startup. One way or another, he needs to go.

In the future allow everybody's shares (including your own) cliff vest over 4 years. That way you don't need to buy people out.
(due to abandoning woman since they prefer men and get one child)
(ratio of men vs women is one of the highest in the world due to single child policy)

Single child policy can hardly be the reason for that.
Why would your code coverage metrics include Hibernate (to speak to the example in the post)?

Your code coverage metrics are only going to cover what you've written, not the included jar files. If you don't cover something in there then there's no way to know if it breaks until the bug crops up in production.
I figured a year would be enough. Next time, I know better. ;(
New Google tool reveals marine protected areas
First of all creating this clock was in all likelihood a major act of procrastination. Publicizing the clock: more procrastination. Me reading the article: more procrastination. You reading my post: more procrastination.

Where does it end?
"Anonymous" Facebook Dataset Is Identified as Harvard Students
A sad relic of muni wifi: Portland antennas now fancy bird shelters
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for broken symmetry research
"Only a wretch would aspire to surpass others"

If you are just trying to compete randomly then you end up lost, with no direction of your own, and easily manipulated.

But if you have a goal, getting there may require that you surpass others. If it is a large goal, it almost certainly will. You have to leave the village to get to the top of the mountain.
Mozilla Geode Released With Support From Pownce and Fire Eagle
What? Really? You people are crazy.
Maybe you need to hook up with this other founder disillusioned with his cofounder: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=325330
Maybe you need to hook up with this other founder disillusioned with his cofounder: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=325923
Chris Cole Leads Regulars to Win at etnies GvR : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Community
CollabFinder: Developers find Designers and vice versa
Please pardon my garbled post. It's been too late.
Perhaps using the clock ends procrastination. If you are lucky, that is.
Investor tired of Microsoft's Google envy, throws in the towel
No, it's not just a family thing. I'm not going to argue about abstract cultural values and philosophical systems. I'm just pointing out what actually happens.

I went to one of the IIT's. Unless you've been through the system, it's hard to imagine the level of parental and peer pressure the kids who train for the entrance exam face and the kind of work ethic it fosters in you. How many countries in the world do you think there are where it is common to go to boarding school for two years and forgo any kind of social life and a normal childhood just to have a shot at getting into a specific college? Pretty much just Japan, Korea and India.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of kids attempt the IIT. But that was just an example. In general, competition for resources is so scarce that it is common to make a Herculean effort to get things that are taken for granted in the developed world. Like a car.

I'm willing to admit that this might be an entirely urban phenomenon, and that rewards for hard work were much harder to come by in socialist India, until the early 90s. But we live in the new century, and a third of the country is now urban, where social stratification has largely broken down. That's more than the total population of the U.S.
No smiley needed; I've read serious predictions that China will invade neighboring countries for water and women within a few decades.
I use clojure-mode and http://github.com/jochu/swank-clojure/. They work for local or remote Clojure repl, compile files, look up code, auto-complete, display args and docs help, etc. It's not as complete as CL. It doesn't have debugging because clojure's debugging info is in the JVM, so something like Enclojure/Netbeans has full debug support.
Beware of the second worst programmer
2nd one in 2 days, I wonder if we will go 3 for 3 on HN with crappy co-founders.
Facebook launches web search using Microsoft Live
Either you're buying a gift for pg or you're really paranoid. Maybe both?
> How many countries in the world do you think there are where it is common to go to boarding school for two years and forgo any kind of social life and a normal childhood just to have a shot at getting into a specific college? Pretty much just Japan, Korea and India.

China as well, iirc.
Interesting videos. Anders talks about functional support on .net, concurrency, immutability. Guy Steele talks about Fortress on JVM. Too bad they are afraid of macros (access to AST), though Steele does say Fortress has some support.
Not by itself, but there's strong economic incentive for your one child to be a boy rather than a girl.
Find Other Designers and Developers and Collaborate on Awesome Projects
To say it bluntly: Sometimes girls are neglected until they die or killed outright.
You've invested a lot into this - I can tell you that your friendship will never quite be the same. Still, try to keep it, as 10 years is quite an investment.

Read up on his personality type. MBTI has helped me figure out why I can't get motivated on projects, and although it may not give you answers, it may open up some clues about why he's not interested. My thoughts? He's a dreamer (IP?)... loves to come up with ideas, but gets bored quickly with details and implementation. He also doesn't seem to have a lot experience programming - the barrier to him sitting down and writing code is much too high for someone who is proficient. It sounds like he needs a couple of years of work experience in a company or a real job before he's ready to tackle the entrepreneur world.

If you're going to let him go, don't corner him is my only advice I can give. Tell him that he's a smart person, but he's not yet ready for entrepreneurial life. I think he needs to hear that. Offer him a good writeup for his resume if he is going to look for a job. I wouldn't spend money to buy him out... to me it would build up financial resentment that wouldn't be good for the relationship. It sounds like you already have some frustration.

If he's a valuable friend, he'll understand and grow from this experience, and you guys can try again later when he's gone through a bit more of life. If he is unwilling to cooperate or touchy about money, don't hesitate to probe - ask him about his financial situation, his thoughts on his career, his current confidence level, etc... that will probably reveal a lot about him that you may not have known.

A lot of his type get attracted to entrepreneurship because of the freedom of life that it 'offers', but once they actually start something, it quickly becomes too fast and much too stressful. There's a vicious loop of thought that some people go through - the chance to strike it rich constantly fights with the too fast-pace/work intensive life that is a startup. It's not burnout - it leaves most of us paralyzed. That may be what he's going through.
Facebook Rolls Out Live Search
I Like Ask.com - But Somebody Needs to Put a Fork in It
The US doesn't use imperial units.
I am ambidextrous and I can lift my nose.
Ask HN: My host has me over a barrel.  I've placed myself in a pickle. How to handle?
I publish a social news site/blog network (URL in my profile). It's hosted on a "Gold" VPS with Midphase. Details here: http://midphase.com/hosting_vps.php. I'm using Drupal to power it.

While we had 5,000+ uniques per day last week, on average we've been getting around 1200-1500 per day.

This doesn't seem like a lot of traffic to me. However for the last 4 days, apache has been failing every 3-4 hours and restarting about 10 minutes later, meaning 10 minutes of downtime for each crash. My host is saying the site is hitting its memory limit all the time. Needless to say, this is a problem.

For the last three days I've been filing tickets with my support guys (I bought a 5-minute response support package for $60/month thinking it would free me up to do more writing/editing) every time there's an outage. I've now filed 34 tickets. Their responses say the same thing every time "We are making apache configuration changes and will monitor your performance." Last night we had about 5 hours without a crash. I thought things were fixed.

They just went down again.

I've spoken with a manager at Midphase. He said that he doesn't see any obvious problems with how their server is configured or how my site is configured. It's just using up too much memory. His suggestion (of course) is to move to a dedicated server with Midphase at $200/month.

Now, I'm more than willing to concede that my site could be better optimized. I'm working on that and have some Drupal pro's who've offered to give it a look sometime in the near future. I'm also aware that I should be planning for future growth with our server setup.

I just don't want to get ripped off.

It seems like I've got three options.

1. Ask my hosting guys the right questions and find out what's causing the problem and get it fixed.

2. Upgrade to a dedicated Midphase server, potentially encounter the same problems.

3. Go elsewhere, potentially encounter the same problems.

Are there some specific questions I should ask my hosting people to help me get a better picture of the situation?
Viking women:

http://deafjoke.tv/wp/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/women-2007-...
Great in theory, challenging to implement
I read in a book about Intel (Inside Intel), that AMD has a funny role in the market: To supply chips when Intel can't (for whatever reason). Everyone sees them as a CPU business competing with Intel, but in fact, they are in a way, partners.

I also came away from that book with Grove (or Moore?) 's "Only the paranoid survive".
Mexican shootout.

You both come to the table with sealed envelopes, each containting a number that the respective founder would be willing to pay for the entire company. Highest number has to buy out the 50% stake of the other.
I would miss Mono.
They are probably talking about each other.
women are usually the motivation for almost all the accomplishments a man has ever achieved
Quite possibly. At any rate, it's an "Eastern" thing :-)
1) You need to understand this stuff yourself. You need to learn about Apache and Drupal and the other technical bits - maybe not to the point of becoming an expert, but enough to work with them a bit.

2) Go elsewhere. Slicehost (or linode) has better VPS deals, and Layered Tech used to have some pretty good deals on 'real' servers.
linode.com asap
Yes, it would be a meaningful indication. I'll grant the lack of randomness in the sample, but the math is correct.
> He is sitting there letting your project dwindle and letting YOU get deeper in debt. Maybe he WAS actually a friend at one point, but I don't think he is now.

Not how I look at this kind of thing at all. My friendship is not conditional on never making mistakes that cause me problems or never wronging me. There's limits of course, but I consider disowning a friend to be pretty severe. This kind of thing might make me end our partnership and not work with this friend again, but not end a friendship.
384 MB of RAM is really low for a site (apache + db i assume). I host my Drupal site ( http://esciencenews.com ) at ServInt on a 90$/month package with 784 MB of RAM. Dont know how I would do it with 384, looks impossible to me. Higher traffic daily than your spike.
It's more like

Apple: over-hyped
Microsoft: under-appreciated

Not about bad or good. Both companies are both.
Govt. Report: Data mining doesn't work. Elementary Bayesian statistics.
Hey there! I forgot you hang out here (confession: I read your esciencenews Drupal showcase writeup about once a week for inspiration).

Ok. So 384 looks low. That's helpful, objective advice. Thanks.
How Webdevs View Webpages
Well, you can argue about whether or not my sample was sufficiently random, but if it were, a failure of 3/4 indicates a VERY high probability that the overall sample has a higher failure rate than 10%.

Again, that might be a failure rate for one production run. They were bought in different states, but all around the same time, so they may have all been made on the same day in the same place for all I know. And either way, it clearly doesn't speak to every product Apple makes.

The whole point of the article wasn't to bash Apple, the Macbook Brick thread here just happened to be what started the thought. It was to point out that, mathematically speaking, a lot of times a small sample can tell you something with a very high degree of certainty.
I think Ning may be falling into a common trap. Just like many websites obsess over their visitor numbers, Ning obsesses over the number of networks created. This affects the site design: right on the front page, there's a huge "Create" widget that doesn't even check if something with the same name already exists. Try doing a search for say, "entrepreneurs." You'll get dozens of little networks, many of which have identical goals.

This duplication clearly hurts Ning: because of the network effect, merging two networks doesn't make it twice as useful -- it makes it four times as useful. I'm sure Ning knows this, but they aren't able to do anything about it because if they change the design, and the pace of network creation slows down, their investors might look at the chart and panic.

Ning is unique in their space, so right now they don't have much to worry about. But they have to be really careful about the fragmentation or else at some point they will have more networks than users and the useful activity will get drowned out in a sea of noise.
Their plans seem a bit expensive. Depending on how much bandwidth you use, slicehost.com might be a better option - you get 1GB of RAM for the same price.
/me smells a good idea for a network-enabled coffee maker, with web-based configuration of scheduled brewing, plus REST API for controlling the coffee maker via other applications....

grin
Learning the Programmer's Craft
Well the first you can do, is to configure apache to restart an httpd process after serving some number of clients. Under Apache 2.x this is called MaxRequestsPerChild and the default is 10000 requests. Since you are not bumping into CPU problems, try reducing this number to say 500 requests. After a child process has served 500 requests it will exit, and another process will be started.
Well, the whole thing began here. I made a joke about the title of a post "Macbook Brick" which admittedly is much likelier for someone who has observed a lot of failures to do, and then we devolved into a discussion about sample sizes.

I was more intending to point out that small sample sizes can prove things with a high degree of certainty sometimes. It's true though that how they are collected matters much.
If you're willing to handle the stuff yourself, and it isn't that bad, SliceHost is a charm. I've hosted my django based blog (600-1000 uniques per day, ~6000 some peak days) on a 512 megabyte vps (Apache2 with mod_python, nginx for static files and proxying other requests to the Apache2, memcached instances with maybe 32 megs (not a lot of content to cache), and postgres) for the past 8 or 9 months and it's been great. On a 256 meg vps it used to crash, but 512 has been golden with my traffic levels.

Oh, and its $38/month for 516 meg slice. Can't say enough kind words about 'em (if you're willing to fire up SSH yourself:).
Seconded. You could probably host this site quite easily on their $40/mo package - if not lower.