skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everything I've heard says that 50/50 (or actually any allocation that gives away 100% up front) is a bad idea. Let "the company" keep some or most until you have something worth dividing up. Give your self 25, give him 25, and parcel the other 50% out over then next 6 months, year, or however long it takes to make those percentage points worth something.
The momentum here seems to be pretty heavily for Mercurial... maybe I should consider git to support the underdog ;)

All kidding aside, Hg might be what we need. I'm looking into it now. Is it easy to import p4 history into Hg?
Do you honestly have the entire class library for your language memorized? And all the member names of all your classes? And all the public interfaces of all the 3rd party libraries installed on your machine? And the entire Windows API?

Do you never deal with long member names that would benefit from a quick ctrl+space?

Are you really that quick at opening code files and scrolling down by hand to method definitions?

Do you genuinely prefer to use command-line tools to search your codebase? And replace? And if so, how do you safely rename variables, methods and member names?

I don't think that language choice has all that much to do with it. I'm currently working on a medium sized Python project, and spend maybe an hour a day cursing Eclipse for not knowing the contents of my own classes, let alone the Python and Django libraries. Honestly, I don't feel sped up!
What are the likely reasons that he did not get hired?

Seems like a brilliant programmer, but for whatever reason that wasn't enough.
Take him as a co-founder - no doubt about it. Give him a 50/50 stake with vesting. It is best if you also clear leadership issues and decide on a CEO.

The question that you should really be worried about is how to make it work (read manage conflict) between the two of you. Consider him your startups greatest opportunity as well as the biggest challenge.

Apart from the reasons others have already mentioned for having a co-founder - You need a co-founder not just to save your startup but more importantly and more frequently to save you from your startup.
Every time I see someone claiming the quality of HN has declined, I'm reminded of this blurb from The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33086
What's his story?

I tried Googling it, but it's hard to sift through all the fluff.
Don't take our advice like that! Try it first: You may hate the way that one VCS works compared to another. Technical merits have less to do with this choice than your own preferences.
Even just typing can be slower in an IDE as it looks for ways to complete the code for you. Compiling in the background and code analysis takes a toll too. I also find the little completion popups distracting at times. Same thing with code folding. I guess it's just a personal preference. I know all those things can be adjusted or turned off, but at that point I might as well use just use the best text editor available. When I'm using Java I consider an IDE almost necessary and I use IntelliJ, but for pretty much everything else I prefer Emacs or EditPadPro.

Developing with a text editor is definitely slower at first as you commit things to memory that an IDE may take care of, but in the long run I think it pays off since you're not bound to a particular tool. I've seen enough developers that can do next to nothing without an IDE. I don't want to be one of them.
The "billion" figure equals the total amount of CO2 produced, which is not the amount that would actually have to be planted and buried. I'm not sure why they quoted that figure, as the actual figure would be much less. It wouldn't involve arable land anyway, but more-or-less useless land in Siberia and Canada.

The primary difference here is that it isn't pre-emptive. If it turns out that global warming is an actual problem, then and only then, it can be countered by burying trees. If it turns out that global warming was all a ruse (probable enough) then nothing needs to be done.
#rubyonrails on freenode
Slightly unrelated, but the draconian regulations enforced on the logistics industry has crippled many small players. Its amazing what they put companies through to strengthen "National Security." My father, who owned and operated a same day, small package delivery company, says concerning DHS's regulatory requirements, "They're terrorizing us."
It's often said that developers need to understand the business, and bring forward a business-case, not a technical case.

So: how much money will lose by choosing the wrong SCM today because you're unwilling to change a process you even agree is sub-optimal?

Try to count the number of check-ins, branching, merging etc. the entire team does in a year, multiply by five, and then multiply by even a few seconds of lost time, annoyment and agony pr. event.

I would guess that in that perspective you can afford spending a few days seeing if you can change the build-artifact process to allow you a wider selection of SCMs.
I've seen this guys articles get posted on reddit/hacker news over the course of the past few years and he just seems like a tome of knowledge that keeps expanding at a rapid pace

Buddy, you have a lot of time on your hands and you're using it well, keep chugging along, looks like you're close to your dream job
Grats on the companies mentioned:

http://twitpay.me (OP's project) and http://skribit.com (my project)
It's not like Mercurial is all that unpopular. Sun has switched its open source projects to hg. Mozilla is using it as well. All the subversion committers I know prefer hg over git as well.
Cool story, but when I saw the picture (of the cat using the computer), all I could do was think of the LOLCat caption that got cropped out.

"I can haz brain?"

"I thinkz lik computr?"

"I'm in ur nural netz, thinkin ur thotz"

It got so bad I couldn't finish the article.
Sorry, but an article which gives no credit to the widespread adoption of personal computers and the internet cannot possibly be correct when talking about what made the 1990s prosperous.
submarine story?
Can you really Rent a Coder?

I don't think this blog post even attempts to answer that question. Here is a post on the subject that links to some decent content:

http://calacanis.com/2005/09/07/rentacoder-com-and-elance-co...
I tried feedbackarmy - from a purely ROI perspective I think the usability methodology is flawed.

It seems that the folks who give the feedback are actually trying to be a bit too helpful - to the extent that they think about questions as a challenge and try their best to answer them.

For example - If I pose a question that "What does this site do?" in a usbility experiment, I am expecting to figure out if the audience immidiately grasp the utility of a site.

However in this case it seems that the audience takes that as a challenge modifying the question to mean "Can you figure out what this side does?" and try out very hard to find the utility of a site and in the process totally defeating the purpose of a usability review.

It might be an artifact of the way I posed the question, but then I was just following the sites examples. I think using the site in the way it is setup (messaging, mturk) the concept does not give a good ROI w.r.t usability.

However, one thing that I did like was that the turkers gave some suggestions to improve the site - some of which was really valuable. So maybe if you change your positioning to something like an active feedback/testing tool it might work better.
This is the same business model as the mafia: pay us and cede power to us, and we'll protect you. The danger being, of course, that you have no guarantee they won't turn on you.
For the few Startup Weekend projects that have been successful, how has equity been divided?
I wouldn't call it a step backwards. Perhaps a step to the side.
#cakephp and #python maybe...I prefer mailing lists.
Or maybe there isn't enough quality pieces on the internet to submit.
When the cry is "less regulation" at some point you end up with zero regulation. I think looking at eve-online is a great example of zero regulation at work. There are high returns on investment but high risk and the lack of trusted institutions slows the economy.
Web entrepreneur talk @ http://webetalk.com/chat.php

or

#webetalk on irc.webetalk.com
First computer hacker gives business advice
Citigroup is bailed out by the Government
How bad is it for startups seeking financing?
They ask common questions as a proxy for experience in those fields. If you work with something daily, you will end up memorizing certain facts even if you don't consciously try to. It follows, then, that if you don't have those facts memorized, you haven't been working with that technology daily.
Of course I don't memorize everything. I do memorize the things I use most often so that code completion is hardly necessary. This takes much longer to do when you have a crutch to lean on. I typically have my code on one monitor and documentation on another when dealing with something unfamiliar.

I definitely agree with you on the Eclipse issue, though. It's just a bad IDE and people just keep using it. It's sort of like the IE of IDEs.
#startups, #django, #clojure but to tell you the truth it changes all the time. for me it's not really a social thing - i'm just scanning for the occasional nugget of wisdom, or seeking help.
I think you make my point for me. :)
I really can't stand using an IDE, but I understand why others would. There is just too much going on and it just seems to get in my way. Give me a decent text editor and a couple terminals and I'm ready to go.
I guess whatever works for the person looking to make money works... but it's sad to think that people in the US have to compete on rates with people who will work for less than half of a living wage in the US. I mean, I'm sure http://www.odesk.com/companies/~~f2d09a6de7612bda has great skills, but so does someone who works for $35+. How do you compete in a market like that?
I fully understand this argument, but during the last quarterly all-hands meeting our CEO made it abundantly clear that we aren't doing anything unless it directly brings in more revenue or directly reduces overhead. One of the major reasons for switching from p4 is to reduce overhead, if we have to build a new system for it's replacement to work for us we aren't doing a very good job of reducing overhead.
Hm, I never had speed issues with Eclipse. I tried Netbeans recently because it supposedly has good Rails integration. For some reason I found it unusable - now that you mention it, I think Netbeans was indeed going a bit overboard with helpers, background compilation and stuff. But as I said, I never felt such pains with Eclipse. Working on a 1,2GhZ mobile CPU, so not the fastest computer, either.

So what you mention can indeed be an issue, but hardly a reason to dismiss IDEs in general.
Nokia 2610 No Network,2610 Signal Problem
2610, 2610 network ways, 2610 no network, 2610 signal problem, network, no network, Nokia, signal problem
Congrats twitpay!!
Don't forget the obligatory anecdotes.
I've tried Netbeans recently and couldn't stand it. Don't remember why, but another comment here makes me think that NetBeans was maybe really doing too much code completion, helper popups and what not.

Also I think it only did "menu entry for generator script", just like the Eclipse plugin. Maybe it was better at code completion, but I would really like some helper for the generator scripts, because I don't know the command line options by heart (and don't want to memorize them, either).
Drop.io file sharing service redesigns, gets more intuitive
Which have been successful?
#clojure, #scala
#startups, #lisp, #php, #dojo on freenode
#java, #c on efnet
Speaking of IRC, I realized this weekend I've implemented what I believe is the world's largest IRC network (the Justin.TV chat system).

According to searchirc.com QuakeNet peaks at about 170k users, whereas Justin.TV chat has gone up to 188k concurrent users so far.

I should write something about how JTV Chat was implemented - there's some interesting stories.
Wouldn't it be nice to have "Automator" for iPhone?
An application similar to "Automator" for OSX could be very useful on the iPhone. E.g.: I can create a script that sends an SMS to my wife every day I leave work, so she might let me know if I need to pick up milk from the store. Of course this script would need to be location-based. Maybe in the end this would be useful to implement something like RescueTime. This could also be useful to track progress of field workers. Do you know if something like this already exists?
My small advice to Posterous team on search:

1- Work more on equimatch before doing the partial match. e.g.: if I type ‘ruby on rails’ you should worry about returning post with ‘ruby on rails’ first before partial matches. In your case the second and third results do not even have occurrences of ‘ruby on rails’.

2- Your match text algorithm, the one responsible of coloring match text on result in green should focus more on full match for now until you find a way to do partial match effectively. One hint, use a regular expression algorithm, that’s all the help I can give you for now.

Overall you guys are doing a great job.

edit- One more thing here, if I search for 'iness' you return 'business'. This tells me that your going the wrong way on search. You should do more research on the subject of search.
The Human Flesh Search Engine
I'm right now doing a one person startup (more like an micro ISV). The best part is you have complete freedom. If you know you are right, then you dont have anyone to convince or talk others through it. The downside is, being absolutely sure that one is right is tough. Having someone whom you can bounce your ideas with is really nice. But yeah, you dont have anyone to share the highs and the lows with.
#ai is good.
#python for help in python
#c++ to help ;)
#ai is good.

#python for help in python

#c++ to help ;)
Don't get me wrong- this isn't a blanket dismissal of IDEs. I was just responding to someone who was amazed that there are still people that write code in text editors. I believe in using the right tool for the job and there are cases that call for a text editor as well as cases that call for an IDE.

I actually happen to use an IDE on a Java project every day at work. I think Java can be a difficult language to work with otherwise. It's verbose so you end up with an enormous amount of code and there's a very slow feedback cycle. These are areas where an IDE can really help.

I rarely find myself wanting an IDE when I'm coding in Perl, Python, Javascript or pretty much everything else I use. Then again, maybe it's because I haven't seen an IDE with much to offer other than code completion when working with these languages. I have almost zero need or want for code completion. For me, some of the best an IDE has to offer is the ability to find things quickly and refactoring. Many of them don't do a particularly good job at this with languages other than Java.
Facebook is a social applications host, Google is a webservices suite, Microsoft makes OS and software... Twitter is a great service because it's independent. It's a community that loves the only service provided : it's Facebook's "is" and nothing more.

This status can be updated with anything, broadcasted on everything, read by everything... It's a service that doesn't need a ton of other services to work. Without last saturday night pictures, without suggested friends, without planned events, Twitter is still Twitter, while Facebook's "is" would be just Twitter. Buying Twitter, Facebook would create a conflict between the two status services and would merge them, Twitter's "@" messages would disappear...

For a independent Twitter, put your hand up in the air o/
Enough with the exclamation points. People at Google already sound so absurdly fake on a daily basis that it's nauseating. btw: They gave a BS reason for rejection -- they're in a hiring freeze now. Just look at the stock chart.
A company called Atlanta Startup Weekend LLC owns 50% of Skribit at the moment. The LLC is comprised of all the people that contributed at Atlanta Startup Weekend last year. I am the President of the board of managers of the LLC and vote on behalf of the LLC when the need to do so arises. The rest of Skribit is owned by the active cofounders. This method of distribution is in the public domain.

Twitpay's equity distribution is not in the public domain. I will say that the cofounders who worked on the project over the weekend each received a small share.
"Nevertheless, the Clinton-GOP governance, despite the constant bickering and backbiting, ironically left a shining legacy of prosperity, which bipartisan deregulation was so much a part of."

I think an honest appraisal would say that Clinton-GOP governance gave us both the prosperity of the 90s and today's crisis. Or that Clinton-GOP governance was largely irrelevant to both.

I honestly don't know enough to demonstrate this empirically, but am suspicious of attempts to assign all credit for good things to policies you like but none of the blame for bad things. As the article says, the Clinton-GOP 90s policies are pretty much still the same policies we have in place to day. (An exception is Sarbanes-Oxley, which has been much criticized, but I have not heard anyone blame it for the current financial crisis.)

As for our President Elect, I think his relationship with the Clintons is a very complex one. At times he was hyperbolic in his praise. But earlier he more or less got Bill to throw a temper tantrum by suggesting that Reagan was a more transformational President than he had been. At other times he made the implication that alternating Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton would leave us pretty much in the same place we have been. After Obama secured the nomination and all the Democrats closed ranks is when Obama got all gushy about the Clintons and hyperbolic in his praise.

So I would not put too much stock in remarks about the Clintons to determine Obama's true leanings on specific policy issues.
#debian, #linode, #lighttpd, #drupal-support, #wordpress, #amateur_radio, and a private channel. On freenode, oftc, and efnet. Colloquy is nice. ;)
Some IDEs are great. Some text editors are also great.

Maybe vim can be made to do it (ctags or whatever they are called?),

Don't use ctags. Use cscope. And stop being such a pansy about configuring your tools. If you consider yourself a professional, it is worth learning.

Basically, there's no right answer to the question, but there are wrong reasons to choose. If you want to go with IDEs because you don't want to think too hard about your tools, I would say that's a bad reason. Your IDE skills are going to suck if you go in with that attitude. A better reason might be: you want to work with your code at a higher level than mere bytes in a buffer. I know guys who can make Eclipse or IntelliJ do insanely perverted things to their Java code, automatically. Good for them!

I prefer vim because I generally work in scripting languages where a refactoring IDE doesn't help much. I like the fact that my editing session can live in a screen, which can be resumed from anywhere in the world. vim+screen is the most rock-solid dev environment you can get. And since vim is so ensconced in the unix way of small tools combined, there are few features of IDEs that I can't at least emulate.

Meanwhile, my TextMate-using colleague accidentally searched for the letter 'v' in our entire codebase, and his laptop locked up for 10 minutes. The best part is that he did it AGAIN by accident a few minutes later.
I can only speak for Twitpay, and have no knowledge of what other companies have done. We decided to set aside 10% of the company for ASW2 participants. We had 9 team members, plus some people who helped ahead of time, and so we divided it up so everyone on the team got 1%, plus another 1% to split up among those others.

The remaining 90% we structured in a typical startup fashion, after people had a chance to decide if they wanted to continue, and what they brought to the new company. Many of the original team decided to continue, which is pretty cool.
For the purpose of this conversation, let's define it as one or more of the following:

Recurring profits/issue dividends/get acquired

Unless someone has better metrics; success is hard to define.
An idea is not worth much without execution, but the actual code-writing is a little part of the execution. If one has a bit of an ability to code and some money, then one can 'manage' the development using cheap freelancers.

Giving up 50% to a guy who just will do the coding at the start is too much. But if he is good at marketing, analysis, idea bringing and all the other stuff that take a company over the first year, then one can give him 50.
What I would really like to read is "My Job Interview at X"

X - any startups like Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, Kashless. etc
True popularity is different from hype. After all, Perl has always been more popular than Ruby.
If those are the metrics the answer is zero Startup Weekend companies are successful. I would say it is too soon to tell for many. Somewhat like a YC company at the end of a session.
Over the past year, it has been quite an experience to see the entrepreneurial community in Atlanta band together and do great things like ASW2, Startup Riot, Startup Gauntlet and ATL Show and Tell just to name a few.

ATL is no Bay Area but it isn't "hosed" either, pg's opinions not withstanding :) [See Atlanta can compete: http://blog.weatherby.net/2007/10/atlanta-can-com.html]

In addition to the 100+ people who participated in ASW2, a lot of credit goes to the guys who helped organize it, sponsored it and worked to make sure it got attention in the media. Lance Weatherby (news.yc user lanceweatherby) and Georgia Tech / ATDC where it was hosted deserve a special mention.
AFAIK the iPhone only allows pseudo background processes (http://www.iphonebuzz.com/new-iphone-sdk-allows-pseudo-backg...), so the app would have to be running when you leave work. Apple could make this kind of thing happen if they developed the app themselves, or you could make this app for the Android. See Locale: (http://www.localeandroid.com/).
Arggh...rooms? Rooms is AOL-speak. :)

You mean channels.
Browser Page Load Performance
I was referencing the OP's comment noting the few Startup Weekend projects that have been successful. Which projects are among these few?

In general, though, I would go with a lower bar than fallentimes's suggestion. How about any company that is now incorporated and could be seen on a path to being something that someone would want to acquire, i.e. has any of these properties: is actively hiring, has raised money, is generating profits, and/or has a significant (>20K?) and growing user base?
Citation needed.

(Seriously, two totally contradictory opinions on this, wondering if there is any actual evidence either way.)
I don't know enough to make an informed opinion about what works, but intellectually, the model I would like is a completely deregulated field for very small companies, and as the companies grow, they get more and more regulated to control their influence.
It's not clear whether they actually hired anyone for the position (there are contradictory opinions in this thread as to whether or not Google is hiring at all right now).