skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Open-source a startup?
I've been building my startup for the better part of this year, but have come to a point where I no longer can afford to pay designers or programmers. However, I'm entirely focused on getting the site built, as I feel it is the perfect time for such a product and it will greatly benefit our world, especially in these tough economic times.

I've been considering ways I could finish it while not currently having the funds. One is getting a loan, but I'm quite adverse to the thought of putting myself in such debt, especially with other responsibilities like having a roof over my head coming in first priority.

Another is crowdsourcing, but the problem with that is that I'm worried if enough people hear about my idea, someone with bigger pockets and more connections than me may steal my idea and launch it before me. The third option I've though of is turning my startup into an open-source project, with only qualified people being allowed to work on it.

Has anybody ever thought of this? What are some pros and cons that I may not have thought of? Also, how would I make it open-source without giving up full control of the direction it goes in?
Nicely said. I am a developer and a designer, and I used to tell people it wasn't worth learning HTML or CSS since it's taken care of in many CMSes and plugins. But now I've come to realize that people who have little working knowledge of HTML/CSS are unable to even conceive of using the Web to its full potential.
Betaspring Startup Accelerator
Can you guys hook it up with some student discounts?
Mobile Carrier To Sell Service for $19/mo; Android Handsets For $99 Until Nov 27
Amazon Kindle Fire vs. B&N Nook Tablet vs. Nook Color
"Why? This is the result of a designer under-valuing the importance of what his/her work can bring to the table in a startup. IMO, a rockstar designer should take more stake in a company than a rockstar developer. Look at Apple, I’m not so sure if their designer(s) took much credit for what they did in turning around that company (Unless Jobs designed the ipods/iphones/macbooks himself, which I doubt)."

With Jobs's recent passing, the last sentence is a statement that has plenty of evidence and testimony to argue either way. It doesn't bode well for your overall argument for you to say "Did Apple designers get enough credit? Who knows? Who can be sure?" and leave it at that.
This is taking embeddable polls to the next level. I like the ability to scroll through it and gather additional information like gender and age.

I saw that it's an iframe inside the JS. Is it possible to pass in styles to skin it for my site?
What problem does this solve?

I've never been walking around thinking, "Man, you know what would be cool? If a merchant could incentivize me right now. I wish my digital loyalty card also had an e-coupon so I could checkin somewhere".

Change the pitch to: "Scan this for X free Airmiles" or "Download Social Passport for X free airmiles."

Is it possible to design a QR code that looks like a plane taking off or something?

Who the fuck even knows what a Digital Loyalty card is?
I wrote the email handling code for a relatively small PHP project for a client which involved handling relatively large email attachments that needed to be processed. Needless to say MIME parsing was a pain, and Gmail's IMAP does strange things sometimes...
Cloud-based services top 10 technologies for 2012
David Dietrich
Very common in the digital arts communities. Basically, it's a signifier of "framework that gets you to pretty/shiny/beepy/pokey the quickest". So, you usually have a VERY stripped down interface of setup/update/render functions that allow you to do an interactive task quickly.

If that seems limiting, that's because it is. The thing to realize is that you're /supposed/ to be limited in the outcome of your program. Usually in creative coding frameworks, you're just trying to make a program that does a single thing, but needs graphics/sound/interactivity. Limiting the interface down to what you need means you can program with the end interactive situation in mind.

This tends to mean creative frameworks eschew quite a bit of software engineering practices in deference to ease/speed, which can cause software developers coming into these frameworks to think they're, well, crap. But, the single use practicality does make it nice versus trying to implement this stuff in something like a full on game engine.
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Jobs, we learn, was a bully. "He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe". Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 pm ... the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is "disgusting". Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme, Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery. ...when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes...

...Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for other's ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, "He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one.' And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea."

----------------------------------------

Was Jobs really such an asshole? If so, I think he was really lucky to have Steve Woz as his co-founder. I know a lot about Woz and hardly anything about Jobs, and I do know that Woz in addition to being a first rate engineer is also a very good guy. Maybe if Woz was even half the asshole that Jobs seems to be, he might have kicked him out before Apple went public and Jobs would have been just another tantrum throwing hippie hanging around some starbucks in Berkeley or wherever angry hippies like to hang around.
Design can be split-tested by someone with average skills and end up with above average results. The same is not true of development. Throwing together a bunch of things and trying them in production leads to unmaintainable code and many hard to track down bugs. One requires time and persistence, the other requires knowledge, planning and problem solving.
We'll be launching a student plan in about a month
Thanks jjacobson,

Right now we're doing an iFrame because we wanted to get something out the door. The way we've built them is so that we can constantly update and polish the widget as issues arise. There is a possibility of it moving over to pure javascript at one point -- but not for the foreseeable future.
The World Famous Florida Avenue Grill
Cool - many times I have wanted exactly this kind of tool - also, thanks for introducing me to Seinfeld's productivity method, cool.
I think eropple's point was that ARC is not a very high-level sort of approach to GC, i.e., not Lisp-style exact GC.
That's true if you actually read and interpret the URL (I'd guess that most users don't.) But regardless, I was commenting on the earlier complaint that the URLs aren't "search engine friendly", not that they're not "user friendly." That's all I was trying to address.
10 tips for dealing with armchair IT experts
Both plans allow you to download the videos
I think the theory is that WL was a competing news organization with the potential to replace NYT, but NYT hasn't rolled over and died, therefore blocking WL from taking its seat on the throne.
Great concept, looks nice. My only complaint is that, I know I worked out for two hours yesterday and one earlier today, how do I enter in that data? It would be nice if I could keep track of that without starting and stopping the timer in real time.
Personally the first one would be a red flag for me and i'd be suspicious of autogenerated content. I'd be more likely to go with the second. But from a google results page, the summary is the part i pay the most attention to.
Ben - That is pretty nifty.

How configurable is the size and what elements are included?

For instance could you eliminate referring source from the embed statistics?

Also, any opportunity to remove GPG branding from this as a white label?
The design changes are nice, but we're also waiting to see how Experts Exchange reconfigures itself to deal with the new Panda rules.
Ty for the feedback. nice catch on the artwork being off center.
Olympus E450 Digital SLR Camera
Reviews about HD Camcorders, Travel Photography, Visual Effects, Post Production and Movie Making.
Experts Rebuild Babbage's difference engine #2 -- Congrats JGC
When someone asks for help, you either give it, or you don't. Your aid ought not be contingent on what you get out of it.
Anyone else, except for people behind the same caching web proxy...
Ah, I read it more as 'It's 2011, where's my flying car/why aren't just about all apps running in managed environments'. Sort of like one says, 'It's 2011, why did syslogd just brick my server'. And it's not a completely lisp-machiny, neckbeardy sentiment, 10 odd years ago everyone was telling us the flying car was just around the corner - Apple was busily trying to bridge Java into Rhapsody, Microsoft was working on .NET/CLR. And yet, and yet...
My Cassandra benchmarks were performed a couple of months ago.

Turns out MongoDB doesn't scale well with number of connections due to software issues (eg. one thread per connection instead of async io). At about 500 connections Mongo starts to break on the platform we tested.
>Design can be split-tested by someone with average skills and end up with above average results.

I do think split testing is not the answer in every case. Firstly you have to know what to split test. A product like Dropbox cannot be designed just by split testing for example. See MS Windows file copy as an example, i still think it's broken.

With dropbox, somebody noticed a problem and wanted the product to be so easy to use, even to the extent of being invisible. I would imagine split testing would lead to dozen tabs of configuration of file sync rules.
Sure! It's a really simple party game - one player plays a black card to the group which poses a question, every other player answers the question with the funniest white card in their hand. There's more information at http://www.CardsAgainstHumanity.com.
Is 2.0 rock solid?

Some say not yet: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202028
We're going to be launching a student plan in the very near future
Level 3 suffering a global failure
What Kevin Rose's latest project: Oink could potentially become
Are you serious?

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot to hate about HTML and CSS. But unless you're working on a 5-page website, separating those two is a blessing. Do you not remember the nightmare of FONT tags?
Not as far as I am aware, no. In any case, that would be an even greater indication of people expressing their loyalty towards a huge brand.
Here's why many "rock star" designers don't like (generally) working for a single company or brand like a startup. First you have to understand not all designers are created equal. You tend to have "Rock Stars" (or in the agency speak a Creative Director) and a spectrum down to "production" designers. "Creative Directors" tend to be good at a lot of the different design disciplines, they understand business objectives, they can help with product and feature vision, they understand usability and they can make things pretty. Its the entire package.

If they go to work for a brand new startup they start with a blank slate, all the needs and challenges are large and the designer is fully engaged because they have to draw on all their different skill sets to solve problems.

But as time progresses the needs of a startup tends to shift from where there is less need to do full UX the product is now defined and its about making small incremental changes. This is where they go from being a "Creative Director" to a production designer. As a CD they get to design the web site with a brand new look and feel, as a production designer they're doing a new module on the home page which matches the existing design standards.

Basically the challenges keep getting smaller, and the designer is less engaged. There's a similar arc in development, however while at first you need to do "Big Things" (get the site up) and some of the changes become smaller, at least those small things can be as challenging (or more so) then the "Big Things" (optimize the load time).

Finally as a designer you live and die by your portfolio, and having a one site portfolio gets you nowhere. Unless you're looking for a big exit you're much better off getting more work, and more projects it both grows your portfolio and expands your experience and abilities.
I agree with you, but the main reason to do this is to keep it it DRY(Don't Repeat Yourself).

Templating systems help with this a lot, but they don't completely get you around being able to add the class 'round' to everything you want to have rounded corners. That's really why you keep things separate, so you can minting a single point of change.
This is incorrect.

Lisp is not slower at everything.

When properly tweaked it can be pretty close to java in speed.
When I test this, the page is getting cached - and thus my one time secret is viewable multiple times. Interesting little quirk...
Don't skim the last paragraph, which was very much the point of the whole article, and the take wasn't so technical.
This is where password management gets ridiculous, because you'll find a lot of registration forms limit the length of your password input to, say, 12 or 16 characters.

Why? Is it not being hashed? I have a (possibly very wrong) inkling that a longer phrase might increase the chance of collision but even so, so many places enforce a strong password but force you to keep it short.
Our preference was to get you immediately in to the product, instead of trying to sell you the product.
I find that personas are nearly useless for this kind of design discussion. Personas are an attempt to homogenize some group of people into a single pseudo-person that has specific attributes. When the lines between personas are hard to draw or there are so many lines that you wind up with lots of personas, you can find yourself spending lots of time managing personas without a ton of direction or solving anyone's problems.

For a heterogenous audience like "web makers" of various types, an activity centered approach can be really helpful. Don Norman explains this idea better than I ever could:

http://jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered_design_considered_harmf...

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/hcd_harmful_a_clarification.html
This is just a temp fix until we can create the Badge Map in HTML/CSS/JS
PostgreSQL does this right by supporting adaptive Blowfish hashing in their pg_crypto extension[1]. I checked to make sure since we do use pg_crypto.

1. http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/pgcrypto.html
I would like to see the "why" expanded on a bit more. Lay out the use case clearly and sell me on the benefits. Especially if I have to install two other pieces of software to get this to work.
This looks pretty slick. I have a small, fun project at:
http://wheelspotting.com/

and used MailGun to handle incoming email attachments (mainly a temporary stop-gap until I build an iOS app). Couldn't have been easier.
No problem! I've added that to the todo list.
"In fact, if the last generation is any guide, your child growing up in the top two-fifths today will have a 60 percent chance of being in the top two fifths as an adult. That's the impact of picking the right parents -- increasing the chances of ending up middle- to upper-middle class by a factor of three or four."

Let me get this straight. A kid starting in a bracket that includes 40% of the population has a 60% chance of remaining in that bracket as opposed to the 40% if it was totally random. I would actually have expected a higher %.
You can add new songs to play to iTunes DJ, if you queue up songs there you can add and remove songs as you please.

The other thing, so far Enqueue does not support syncing back to iTunes, so I won't have my star ratings and all that stuff...
I've been using these APIs for a little while now and they're awesome. So nice to not have to build this yourself.
It shouldn't be. But it is. People want to get "paid" in information.
The root of the problem (or at least the fixable part of the problem) is probably schools. Rich people arrange for their kids to go to good schools, and poor kids end up stuck in bad schools. So maybe the best way to narrow the gap is to make the worst schools better. That would be a good thing to do regardless.

Startups may be able to help: http://imaginek12.com
I'm having trouble putting it in words. Maybe thats a bad sign. Its kind of like the iTunes DJ but not really. I can tell you that nothing in there is unrelated. Imagine the main library is a completely separate entity from the 'player'. The music player plays from the sidebar. You fill the sidebar with songs from the library.

And yeah I probably should add a menu item for hiding the browser.
> Do you not remember the nightmare of FONT tags?

Yes, but that's simply a failure from having no ability to define abstractions.

Separating form/design/layout from content is one possible abstraction boundary, but it's just one arbitrary one, so it's kind of strange that they tried to bake it into the platform instead of making it easier to define whatever abstractions are meaningful for you.
Post your Google+ brand page here
Add me and I'll do the same: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113580549882650540449/posts
Indeed. The question from there is, does it get you the job you want? If you only have the skill to pass a test, how valuable will the work you get be to you? Just a means to an end maybe?
Thanks!

Right now we're targeted the size to fit the majority of most common blog platforms. We'll probably roll something out soon to pass in a param to get your own sizes. The problem is resizing the analytics gets tough.

We will probably have the ability to turn on/off certain reports pretty easily if its really requested.

We also plan to implement branding VERY soon. And we're going to give it away for free. Feel free to follow @GoPollGo on Twitter for relevant updates.
And if he had spent time obsessing over internal code details would the project rot less?

Things change fast in software. It's one thing if you're building the backend system behind a billion dollar bank. Obviously that's not what the author is talking about.

If you're trying to make the next Angry Birds, or Facebook, or Google, you need to get something out there now, the MVP, and iterate.
Simple testing for your algorithmic Javascript
I would expect a reverse package manager to be something that somehow screws up, disorganizes, or otherwise injects entropy into my packages.
A Message To My Generation
Shopping For Great Christmas Gifts? Don't Get Scrooged,
New Startup To Help Other Startups
But the problems sskates mentions would not be helped by better schema compliance; they start and end with the fact that CSS is a miserably poor layout engine that is not powerful enough to effectively separate content from presentation.

HTML itself has its warts, sure, but the fact that we end up constantly resorting to HTML and/or Javascript edits to do things that should be happening in CSS alone is, to me, a much worse problem.
totally sucks, whatever man, like that's something fucking awesome, like who's gonna spend shitty 7 grands or whatever $$ you say on that
I got that in a second reading, and I edited my comment accordingly, here is the relevant bit:

> As someone who rarely uses sub-lists and typically just flips around the main library, copying the entire existing library to the sidebar isn't a great idea. I get it for playlists and other subsections, not so much for the entire unfiltered library.

I guess it's not so simple if the app is built around that concept. I always use my main library and rarely have an urge to structure a queue, so maybe it's just not the app for me.
Crowdsourced Professional Databases An Investment Theme
Also, props on the new drop down create poll layover. That is nice.
I would argue the contrary, that the very reason why HTML took off so fast was that any fool was able to craft a site, and it would work even if it had a few bugs in it. Failure tolerance is a great feature. Especially if you consider it in the context of document authoring - for which HTML was originally designed for - it's better to read a document that has one unclosed <b> tag in it, than to be completely unable to read it because there's a syntax error in markup.
"WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity and deserves our protection"

No, it's not. It lost that moral ground when it released unredacted information.

It also lost that status when wikileaks became about Assange himself.

I supported the original wikileaks: Anyone could leak anything and wikileaks would publish it, and sometimes the broader media would pick it up.

This new wikileaks is all about damaging entities Assange doesn't like. No thank you. Wikileaks should not get to choose what to leak. Either leak everything you are given (after redaction of course), or nothing, do not selectively choose who to leak against.

Once you do that you become a political organization.
As promised, here's more info on how Dark Sky works:

http://blog.jackadam.net/2011/how-dark-sky-works/
Heh. I'm guessing "normal" alternatives wouldn't clearly illustrate that it was a liquid that was being consumed.
I didn't mean in reference to their site, but how the end-user transmits the link to a recipient.
All this banter reminds me of...
.../missy.html

glad she's safe
A Photo Tour To The Soviet Past
A lot of my covers don't show up. I think it's the ones I downloaded through iTunes automatically.

You could consider adding a feature I think iTunes has been missing for years, a "cue up" button that will set a song to play after the current one is over.

When there's nothing playing, I feel like the blank album cover is pointless.

EDIT*

When the albums for an artist show up in the sidebar, clicking on once should expand it, not just highlight it. I'd rather not click on the arrow if it's already taking up all that screen space, because highlighting it doesn't really do anything.
POLL: Is the brain the most complex thing in the Universe?
FYI, Fraunhofer IPA is known for their robotic arms, e.g.:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdVzrSgt_Hc
One group that has always been chasing the "holy grail" of separation of content and presentation are big publishers. They want one content source that is controlled by "editors" and then the content can be rendered differently for the different avenues of publication. Maybe a transform of the content is sent to online databases like lexis/nexis or westlaw, or sent to printing press for a book, or sent to the web, or abstracts sent to a bibliography service, etc.

This is why SGML was big in the publishing industry before the web.

It's mostly achievable but there are clearly problem areas such as tables where sometimes the presentation is an integral part of the content.
Compiling to reduce the impact of soft errors on program output