skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An idea as it is first conceived off, is not much good until it is tested. Not implemented, but tested. Let's say you lived in the age before airplanes and you had an idea for some type of engine that would make a plane take off. If you sat somewhere and built this engine for 2 years and then stuck it in a plane to test if it works, that plane won't fly.

Your initial idea is going to change as you realise and learn more things about the area you are trying to realise something in. The plane engine needs a lot of tweaking from whatever concept you came up with till it can fly.

Same with a business idea, but for a business idea, the right way to do so is to place it in front of lots of people and just keep trying till you get it right.
Oh, and with decent VPS hosting at 30 bucks a month the need to have a high performance CMF is diminished.
curl FTW
(Can't help it)

And start saving money for memory and large amount of servers...
Global bailout package nears USD 2 trillion
It is dangerous territory, tread carefully. I've seen situations where "exclusive partnership" means "this is threatening to us, we want to put this on a shelf and get it off the market." If the fact that you're asking here reflects a negative gut-reaction to the idea, you might want to listen to your gut. There was an interesting and relevant article posted to HN about two weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=309526
I'm sure that used to say Weymouth, Dorset?
Oh, man. I should've known it. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch is the y-combinator function in Arc.
See the article: http://tinyurl.com/244fl
Note: Wikipedia says the village is referred to as Llanfair PG. Enough said.
They are not swedish.
Some thoughts:

A partnership of equals can work but if the power in a relationship is too one sided then one of the "partners" is effectively the employee of the other.

You describe a potential customer for your software that can see that there is money to be made in exploiting your IP. They are offering their company as a test bed plus some money "up front" in exchange for 50% of the business.

From their viewpoint this could be a great deal They get a bespoke application (for be sure they will insist that your software meets their needs in particular) at a good discount. Plus if you manage to sell another copy or three they get their money back.

Beware the idea that a company is "well connected" when it comes to their trade rivals - they might be industry fashion setters but this may not translate into software choice - plus a package that is seen as being owned by a business rival has to be pretty good (or cheap) to overcome that stigma.

I have run into a great number of businesses over the years. Almost all of them think that their business processes are typical and a good model for the rest of their industry - in my experience they are all wrong when they think this. Each business has a whole lot of similar processes but they all emphasise different aspects, measures and controls. Writing packaged software based upon the model of a single customer is likely to produce software that will be difficult to sell to others in the same line of trade. A good package is based upon as wide a set of industry experiences as possible.

OK - I have raised a while bunch of issues but have no specific advice other than "Beware - proceed with extreme caution".
Try to rewrite something simple written in Python in C++ first and measure the differences in speed/dev time first.

Chances are you may end up with a story like this:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_threa...

Albeit micro-benchmarks may indicate that Python is
100-200 times slower than C++, they may not be applicable to the real world. Python can be very efficient. And when combined with libraries like NumPy, beating it's performance with hand-crafted C++ is difficult.

Emperor has no clothes.
Shakira lends support to Obama
Can anyone comment on the Slime support for Clojure? Is it as awesome as it is for CL? I'm deciding on a language for a robotics based project and the exploratory programming features of Slime are looking very tempting...
goddamn swedish thinking they're so superior with their stupid viking hats and their stupid longboats.
No I've not been paid for anything. My lawyer at one point mentioned that if I was they could use that to say "oh we've paid him, that's what we agreed to as compensation". So I believe you're correct in this aspect. I"ll ask my lawyer again.
The problem is if the idea is good and they take my code and sell it and make money then I've lost out. At this point I want what was promised to me.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I5BGsK5ZAU
They have filed a provisional patent and this is an interesting point. Again however I've not been paid ever for anything. Never at any point have I declared that I would relinquish ownership of the code. The recent one sided contract they gave me had these terms in there. I obviously didn't sign that.
No windows support?
I have threatened this several times to which the founder freaked out and begged me not to stop. It's at a critical point. I believe mostly they are just trying to intimidate me. It's now come to a point where I absolutely can't trust them and I'm going to stop providing code until I get what I want. I believe you're right, when I threaten to stop things will happen rather quickly in my favor.
I am actively engaged with a lawyer who knows about equity deals. He and I agree and our position is to find out what's in the stock agreement without signing anything first. I just keep getting the runaround which is "oh you have to sign this nda / contract first and then you get your stock agreement". As my lawyer says "I'm gonna call bullshit on that".
Don't just threaten, do. How long can it really take them to just give you the stock options? Especially when they realize they're screwed if they don't.
Actually the change in birthplace is the most recent edit to that page... click History to find out. It did, indeed, claim Weymouth.
Why Calories Taste Delicious: Eating and the Brain
He even brushing teeth regularly, what's the news about that?
On one hand, I can your point. On the other, I remember similar sentiments being expressed in 2001 and 2002.

Besides, you don't always have to be working on the "next big thing" in order to be successful. I know lots of successful, and wealthy, people who innovate in fields that are hundreds of years old.
When, exactly, are you dead?
Why do we splurge on games of chance and rack up credit bills? A neuroeconomist explains.
Wordpress 2.7 is the Real Deal
Ask HN: iPhone app for reading YC Hacker News?
I apologize if this has been asked before but is there an iPhone app for reading Hacker News?

I understand that I can subscribe to the RSS feed of the article titles but the value for me is in the comments.

In fact, I always start by reading the comments and often don't visit the article itself.
Tell them that you want a handwritten promise of what you agreed upon verbally. No specific details, just a simple hand written promise at this moment, with a specific 3 or 4 week deadline to make this formal. If they say no, you tell them that they are acting in bad faith, and that you are going to stop work immediately.

An agreement is an agreement - if you have emails or chat messages or so on, that's already a contract.

They have a choice - give you something handwritten now or they lose their developer at the point where they are about to close a deal, which is a really bad time. They will tell you that this is the wrong time to apply pressure, but for you, this is exactly the right time. This is when they are most vulnerable because the deal could fall through, so this is your best chance to get this through.

When they have investment, how useful do you think you will be? They will just get rid of you and hire someone new.
I can painfully relate. One of my computers was called the Crapple (dual inherited from cripple and crap).

I've owned four Apple computers (ibook G3, ibook G4, imac G5, macbook), and despite skipping first revisions and treating my computers very well, every single one of them has had several minor defects and all my notebooks have broken completely within a 3 year time frame.

In my personal experience, Apple is a hardware bimbo - pretty but useless. I only come back for OS X, which is the nicest desktop 'nix. I wish apple were still apple computers, not apple media.

I'm waiting for the next mb/mbp's, but if anyone has tips for alternatives, I'd love to hear them.
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You should really talk to a lawyer about this. Oral agreements can be binding and enforceable. If this project is big enough that the founders would actually fight you, then you definitely should not assume that no written agreement equals no deal. Unfortunately, the short answer is that it's complicated.
Not so clear cut. You would need to be very careful if you tried to pull this. Look at the facts he explained. The investors are just coming in now, and the founders are saying that the stock agreement depends on the investors' lawyers. That's actually pretty reasonable in a situation where you have a bunch of inexperienced founders getting money from experienced investors. The investors might force the founders to agree to different terms in their own stock agreements as well. It's not at all clear that the founders have breached anything yet. If he was to take the code elsewhere, that act could actually be considered the breach.
Potenzmittel
Männer mit Potenzproblemen werden im Potenzmittel Blog geholfen, hier gibt es Tipps und Beratung + Infos zu Viagra, Cialis und Co. Nie wieder Potenzstörungen.
I think it would weaken his position significantly if he were paid...
http://www.ieeeusa.org/members/IPandtheengineer.pdf
Check out page 5. If you are an employee of the company the company clearly owns your work. If you aren't getting paid though and there are no other agreements covering your relationship... ...You could argue you were never employed and your work still belongs to you.

The other big question would be whether or not you used employer resources in a significant way.
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I think you might be over-reacting to these provisions. It's entirely normal that you sign over ownership of the code to the company in exchange for your equity. That's in every form stock agreement. Are you using an experienced startup lawyer? It sounds like maybe you are not. You don't need a big fancy law firm, but you do need a lawyer who is very familiar with startups and standard terms. You should confirm that your lawyer has worked with many clients who have negotiated with startups.
bloglines is entirely C++. I remember seeing some interview where the guy said it was critical to beating their competitors. They were all busy trying to scale while bloglines already worked.
Call to atention about using hash functions as content indexers
> Because we have repro­ductive independence, and we get maximum Darwinian fitness by looking after our own survival and having our own offspring.

i.e. we are selfish and greedy.

If everyone recognized and accepted this we'd be able to move past fantasies like the free-market and "our leaders have our best interests in mind"
Boston Legal - Episode 5.03 - Dances With Wolves
The ep starts out with a bang—literally—when Denny and Jerry are mugged in the parking lot at night. They’re in the middle of a discussion where Jerry is asking Denny to support him for partner this year and Denny is explaining to Jerry that being partner isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. (So I guess Jerry was given a clean slate when he was rehired
The Big Bang Theory: The Barbarian Sublimation
Clich here for more information
all my lawyer did back in the day was structure equity for Internet companies. He worked for one of the top firms. Trust me this guy is an ace in the hole. He like me is worried these guys have lied before and are doing it once again.

Were not asking for anything outrageous, we just want to know what is In the stock agreement. When you're told sign here and well tell you by those that have lied multiple times, that is the problem
C++ will drown you in complexity.

There are many ways to look at complexity as an abstract concept. You could look at code length. Or you can count how many 'degrees of freedom' your code allows you to have, and be sure that you need to control each of those. C++ affords too much freedom for developer.

The trend meanwhile is towards reducing complexity at system/core level and focusing on application unique added value. Today, in large web applications, complex behavior is build using simple components. Those components are normally done in C, and then wrapped by some scripting language. C is not too flexible. The components are rock-solid as a result, they lack unexpected behaviour. Their code's 'degrees of freedom' are easier to control.

On top of that, there is trend towards frameworks in scripting languages which reduces 'degrees of freedom' at core/foundation level even further. Finally, there is this REST thing that wants to standardize API of a typical web app, offering us even larger blocks to code to work with. Again, all these trends have one objective - allowing to focus on unique application functionality, on interaction with other systems etc and hiding underlying complexity from the developer.

By using C++ you are likely to get complex behaviour in your code very early, at a very fundamental level. As you add functionality, the complexity/behaviour quirks will grow exponentially and you will fail.

I am convinced that Microsoft failure with Vista is mostly due to them using C++. They were simply defeated by mounting complexity, not by lack of engineering talent. Meanwhile, Unix success (Apple OS X included) is determined by relative 'dumbness' of underlying C language, Unix tradition of small single-purpose tools etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden#International_rankings

vs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian#International_rankings
sorta like these... http://www.digi.com/technology/wireless/products.jsp
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?c=111

Google made a wireless epaper meeting schedule display with these...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyHaImmmkGs
ya except moving past something like free-markets is a fantasy in itself; power begets greed. imho, given the 2% that control 1/2 the worlds wealth it is that 98% moral objective to destroy that 2% and redistribute the wealth accordingly via the battleground known as the free-market.
No thanks, I'll take stability over new features.

WP 2.6 has been a disaster for me with media and backend issues.
I do everything in C. I have 3 e-commerce customers and their sites are written completely in C. I have no issues whatsoever. One reason I started doing it this way is because I was concerned with speed. Having done so in C, they are blazingly fast.
Customer question: How do I make my 7 year old computer run faster?

Apple 'Genius': Buy a new Mac.
Geek Squad: Uninstall bloated apps, remove startup programs, buy (cheap) memory upgrade, run optimization utilities etc.

Which answer takes more 'genius'?
Selfish, greedy, unrelated, and fertile.

E.O. Wilson's point was that since each worker ant is closely related to the rest of the colony, and they can't reproduce themselves, it's in the best interest of their genes to look out for the colony. We could get a similar effect by sterilizing humans (perhaps this is why monarchies have used eunuchs as their closest advisors and attendants), but I don't think it'd go over well.

Ants are selfish and greedy too, when it comes to warfare between colonies.
Sure, a new shiny version with a lot of bells and whistles will make it more writer friendly while adding to the bloat, but it's sad to see lot of people out there spending more time upgrading and spending more time meddling with the back cms system rather than the spending time writing actual quality posts.

Wordpress is nice, I've used it since 1.5 something, but recently dropped it completely and wrote my own just because the bloat was unbearable and there are too many features that I won't ever use. And if I skip out on updating, then comes the script kiddies using all the holes to exploit the site and others to plug ads and spam. And when I get around to updating, all the customization hacks done to the wordpress installation either completely goes fubar or everything comes to a screeching halt.

/rant

Spend a day, write your own cms and save a ridiculous amount of time in the long run while having total control over your features.
They have filed a provisional patent and this is an interesting point.

I agree. That is an interesting point.

http://www.google.com/search?q=patent+fraud+%22must+be+the+i...

The person requesting the patent must be the inventor
That was a remarkably well-reasoned and plainspoken summary of some cool facts and trends in "sociobiology." I remember seeing a talk about evolutionary psychology early in my college career and dismissing it as imprecise, speculatory nonsense, but perhaps I judged too quickly. It seems more interesting and credible when the person talking about it doesn't seem like a crackpot. I'll take another look when I get the chance.

Also, on "A scientist would rather use another scien­tist's toothbrush than his termino­logy," I think that goes double for mathematicians. For instance, in complex analysis, "analytic," "holomorphic," "regular," "differentiable," and "complex differentiable" all mean the same thing in the context of functions/maps, with various subfields of mathematics adopting one or the other at various times.
Motorola seeks to hire up to 300 Google Android developers
Hear, hear.

Memcached is damn useful, and Perlbal saved me from server meltdown and banning many a time when it was still my favorite language to write the hackish, duct-taped monstrosities I called "web applications."

LiveJournal hasn't been the same since bradfitz stopped working on it, but it was a milestone as far as interactivity on the Internet is concerned.
The advice on capitalizing Crisis of Meaning stage is helpful. But may be it is time to quit for the better. How does one arrive at this decision.

I would like to quote seth godin "[Strategic] Quitting is not same as failing"

It the hardest time with poor morale, lost confidence, stress & burn - mentally, physically and financially. You probably have even stopped believing yourself, in your business and doubt your rationality. And this super critical decision.

Here in India at least we have serious lack of people who can help you make that judgement call - Quit or Stick.

Any structured way to arrive at this quit/stick decision at such stressful times?
The free market is modelled around the fact that we are greedy. Communism assumes that we are (or can be made) purely altruistic ("From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" collapses if there is just a single selfish, greedy actor present).

That's why free markets work remarkably better than communism.
I would find out who is really pulling the strings. Could the founder's lawyers or maybe the investor be asking that all parties involved sign an NDA? Are the founders merely advising themselves? You may want to think about having a meeting with everyone(founders, lawyers, investors) and find out where the contingencies are. The people in control may not even know your situation.
Except the Ruby version won't run away and cry if you try to do anything even slightly more complex in it. Also you can still type "lambda" if you really want to.
I have threatened this several times

Maybe this points to the root of the communication problem between you and them. By threatening, instead of doing what an assertive person might do (which might be to simply walk away with the code that you own and wait for them to contact you with a sweet offer in writing), you might be sending them a message that is poisoning the negotiations. It is possible to be passively abusive to people. It might be your own greed and anxiety that is preventing you from being a stand-up person, doing the stand-up thing, and making money off of this situation.
A SWOT Analysis On America
That's interesting about the relative recycling value of chips vs. blocks. Is it possible to keep the chips covered in coolant to prevent oxidation if it is known that the aluminum is going to be remelted?
ok, how about this one:

((lambda (f) (f 3))(lambda (x) (+ x 2)))
Memcached was created by Danga Interactive, the company which ran LiveJournal, to improve LJ's performance. See http://www.danga.com/memcached/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memcached .
YouTube - The Break Up
In Disciplined Minds (a book certainly worth reading, but take with a heavy grain of salt), Jeff Schmidt made an observation about highly educated people and their political tendencies that made me stop and rethink my own personal views.

He believes that while highly educated people are usually considered to be liberal, they are, in practice, a lot more conservative than they seem. Most are usually only liberal when it comes to personal viewpoints on social issues, viewpoints which have little social impact. Many professions which are usually seen as left-leaning, like university professors, are in fact very conservative when it comes to beliefs and values that they act upon in the workplace.
I pretty much agree with your core idea here; "not having a 401k forces you to take care of your own retirement savings".

However, it seems like you think that saving for retirement is completely stupid. I don't mean to insult, but it sounds like when you feel like you can't make money anymore, you're going to down a bottle of whiskey and blow your brains out. Financially, that's actually probably the better idea, since you don't have to worry about having money for a zero-productivity endgame. The downside is you miss out on a lot of non-money advantages of retirement (grandkids, if you go that route, and various other things retired folks say they enjoy).

Just think of retirement funds this way; people are making sure they don't have to eat cat food bought with social security checks during the waning portion of their "brief window of autonomy", and they don't want to go for the aforementioned whiskey-and-suicide route because most people don't actually want to kill themselves.
This most noticeable change will be the navigation bar being moved to the left-hand side of the page.
I'm reminded of the scene in Cryptonomicon where Doug Shaftoe lectures the guys about bullshit landing on their heads. Translated into your current situation:

"My goodness, this guy is attempting to screw you!"

You seem to think that getting a stock agreement means that you have "won". I don't think so. It just means that the guy has to start looking for a different way to screw you.

You are dealing with a bad person. If you try to interact with him on good faith, you are likely to lose one way or another. All the time you're writing code, he'll be thinking about ways to screw you over. Maybe that will be a clever loophole in the contract, or maybe it will be easiest to frame you for embezzlement and send you to prison.

My opinion, your first priority should be getting out. If you can do this and get paid also, great. You have leverage because of the investor, maybe you can sell out all your interest for cash today (with the help of your lawyer). If you can't get paid, get out anyway.

Good luck.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. So do you think I should avoid C++ altogether and stick to C? What about Google? Google uses C++ a lot and they seem pretty fine/stable to me? Maybe C++ can be good web architectural stuff (not as complex as an operating system)?