skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The OP hasn't asked the right questions, IMO. For most startups, the thing that causes success isn't just great hacking talent. Heck, a lot of startups really aren't solving a software problem so much as they are solving a market problem.

But even if it is a really hard coding problem that you need a star for... The big question is whether he's an entrepreneur or not.

Questions to ask him (and yourself):

1. How much traction would it take for you to quit your day job?
2. Which evenings and weekend days are you willing to set aside for this project moving forward (at a minimum).
3. How many months can you go without a paycheck (related to #1)?
4. Do you like non-coding problems? UX? Copywriting? marketing? SEO? (i.e. are you willing to evolve as a founder? I have a long post about this here: http://www.tonywright.com/2008/startup-founder-evolution/ )

In terms of parting with equity, the equation should come down to risk/value. If you're both committing to spending 10h per week on this, then he deserve a largely equal slice. If you're quitting your day job and going 40h per week (or have 300h already sunk into it), then you're risking more and deserve a bigger slice.

Be careful about overvaluing what you've done so far. A startup is a multi-year commitment. A few months of weekend and evening time is a tiny percentage of value creation compared to what's been contributed at the end.
(An exception is Sarbanes-Oxley, which has been much criticized, but I have not heard anyone blame it for the current financial crisis.)

You've never heard anyone point out that Sarbox raised the cost of being a public company, which increased the number of LBOs, which leveraged the economy and fed the CDO market, which led to the collapse?
The other day I thought it would be nice if desktop browser easily did what iPhone's browser did.

Zooming into to parts of a page with a double-click would be really nice on those late nights where everything is getting blurry. (Yes, I know you can zoom in; it's not the same.)
As much as I dislike talking to my clients on the phone (which means I'm not 'working') they really do like talking to me, and it usually means they buy more services and pay up for services they've already bought.
I would say there is a higher concentration of tech companies in the orange county area and cities like Irvine as opposed to the immediate LA area. In general, a lot less web startups and more biotech and videogame/entertainment companies.
How does he become a futurist by basing his manifesto on the old, decrepit, failed movement of futurism?

This movement's so old the Catholic church made it one of the seven deadly sins, called "pride of life."
I prefer funny jokes.
I love it. Mega long article with tiny text and no pagination. My kind of website.
While I'm pretty sure this doesn't offer the intellectual discourse you're looking for, http://cherrypeel.com utilizes a very reddit-style voting system to promote underground, independent music. I've discovered some fantastic new artists from this site.
Why all the love for Git, but nobody every talks about Bazaar, Mercurial, Darcs, etc? Sure Git is faster, but unless you've got a enormous code base (like the linux kernel), it seems like Bazaar or Mercurial would be a better choice than Git.
Off-line word of mouth, i.e. magic

One paying beta client recommended us to another company who helped us setup another couple of meetings and so on. We now have just under 20 clients and are debating whether we need to hire a sales guy ;)
I spend nearly everyday in a cafe doing part of my work. I really enjoy the time sucking down a coffee and people watching when I'm not hacking.

It has stayed busy here, I couldn't even find a table when I came in for lunch the other day. I don't know what this means about the local economy, but I would be sad if this place disappeared.
Thank you! My intuition was correct about the '{}', but the rest was educational.
Is Google Really Laying Off 10,000??
Interview with Neil Mix of Pandora - iPhone Development Podcast [mp3]
LinkedIn Launches Streamlined People Search
overall I like the article and I think it's useful... but an idea having the same weight as committment and risk (or even responsibilities) - that's a joke

"Genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration"
or we could ban you, just for advocating banning someone who submitted an article you were offended by
We'll find out later if they were wise. If it can't be monetized they will get $0. That could very well be the same for Facebook though, it will be interesting to see how it works out.
Mathematica on Amazon EC2
Fair enough. I also got another answer from someone far more knowledgeable from me: At least in the current plans, the government is getting preferred stock in return for their investment.
Oh, that would make a lot more sense. I live in LA proper and don't really venture out to meetups outside of the city. There's plenty of game companies here (the significant other works at one), but I suppose I meant more along the lines of Hollywood when I say entertainment.
Usually it's a cumulative effect.

For example, you might get a write up in a blog that then gets you a lot of karma on social bookmarking sites (Digg, del.icio.us, etc.) and then that gives you the immense traffic that makes you succeed. Do you mark that as being based on the blog write up, on being based on social bookmarking? (which isn't even on your list)
I would disagree with the statement ..."to young to jump to the conclusion that it is counter-cyclical."

As a quick backgrounder, my former boss who owned and operated a videogame publisher/developer mentioned to me on several occasions that the gaming industry is 'recession proof'. He was an astute businessman who started and sold a couple of companies related to materials engineering and then jumped into the gaming industry.

In addition to his remarks and feelings, the current and historical numbers (going back to about 1998, when I entered the industry) show that in tough economic times, the gaming industry in rather insulated. People always need some form of entertainment and that particular medium is shifting more and more towards videogames, be it casual or 'standard' platform or PC games. This is evident from the fact that for several years now, the gaming market has been generating far more revenue than the movie industry.

(The NPD group has some good reports which back up the numbers)
Software Business Idea: Make a Software Distribution Platform like the iPhone App Store
Just FYI, if you didnt already know, this is in Atlanta GA.
Was using sphinx + ultrasphinx, but was talking to Evan Weaver the other day and he mentioned thinking_sphinx is the one to use now since Pat Allan is really intensely working on it, so we switched over to that in this release.

Note: For larger production websites served off multiple app servers, thinking_sphinx doesn't work well since it tries to do reindexing of changed items directly within the rails process. However, there is a great fork of the latest plugin that can use updated_at, so you can index your deltas on a cronjob, offline. Check it out if you're going to use thinking sphinx: http://blog.edhickey.com/2008/09/15/thinkingsphinx-rails-plu...
Well, I'm pretty sure the article is about the death of cafes in France. But in any case, the much-predicted death of the NYT isn't something I'm looking forward too, either.
I know what you mean. I use Ctrl-+ (Control-Plus) and Ctrl-- (Control-Minus) to enlarge and shrink text on the page. Firefox is nice because that also enlarges and shrinks images; Chromium doesn't do that.
I would call social bookmarking part of on-line word of mouth.

And in the situation you describe, I would ascribe the major cause to the blog write-up because you can trace it back to that. There are certainly many situations where you can't trace it, i.e. it is a murky combination of many things. In those cases, I think the correct choice would be more than one above.
Ask HN: How do you create an admin part to your site in Rails
Django has a nice admin setup that comes with it, while Rails leaves it up to you. I was wondering what strategies were used to create an admin part to your web app.
We used to do prefix and infix search, but the amount of value provided was not huge. It also really blows out your indexes / indexing time. I'd like to add this back at some point, but we're not there yet.

As for supporting equimatch using quotes -- its actually not too hard to do this. Just wanted to ship early and iterate rather than expend too much effort getting it perfect.

A plan violently executed today is always better than a perfect plan executed weeks in the future. But thanks for the feedback -- these are important search items that need to be addressed.
I roll my own each time. That is not to say I don't reuse common parts like user management, but I have found that my scenarios are diverse enough to warrant this.
Given that the list includes water, I'd have to agree!
Music is such a polarizing topic, if there is a place that has managed to put together a community of reasonable people and consistently interesting/civil discussion I will be surprised and impressed.
Scaling Rails: Write-Through Cacheing
What about investors? Getting tech people to meetup and collaborate seems much easier than convincing people that are unaccustomed to purchase certain asset categories to do so.
That's why I don't play the stock markets (that and a lack of cash).
Seeking: freelance web designer in DFW
We need a local, reasonably talented, decently experienced designer in the Dallas area for freelance work. Prima Donnas, know-it-alls, "rock stars", Sven, and "I only work with the cool stuff" need not apply. We're in business to make money and I'm the only Prima Donna, know-it-all, rock star, "cool toys" guy around here :D

Idea skills:
- web design (duh)
- flash
- css
- html
- dhtml/javascript (nothing heavy)

It would be swell if you knew php, but it's a huge plus, not a requirement.

if you are NOT PHYSICALLY located in the Dallas area, please do not bother wasting my time
Google Layoffs in the Thousands with More to Come This Week
I was going to flag this, as it seemed a bit sensational, however I now understand what they are talking about. Google (and Microsoft) are huge fans of temp workers; I could totally see them shedding large numbers of these to please Wall Street.

The same thing is happening in Dubai, with far more dire consequences for those laid off. I'm sure someone will be writing an article on that very soon.
Just because someone is a cofounder, doesnt mean they need to own an equal share... Try an 80/20 split or something. Dont expect him to pony up more than 20% of the expenses though either.
I originally thought (f-1)6/4+1 = (f-1)3/2+1, but it's an integer... hmmm

gonna have to think about that some more
There is also http://pandora.com/

It doesn't have voting, but for finding music it can be alright.
Please note, I was reading on Slicehost's forums/blog the other day, and you can install a 32 bit OS.

Here is a link that should help:

http://wiki.slicehost.com/doku.php?id=installing_an_arbitrar...

So its not completely out of the question.

Hope this helps steer some people back to SH side.
Facebook ads seem to work best for me.
I came here to suggest hypem.com, but you just mentioned it. Maybe follow some blog posts listed there?
Not necessarily. Social isolation is caused largely by the privatization of social objects. E.g., when everyone can afford their own barbecue they no longer need to go to the country club or town park to make dinner. If people have less money then theoretically there should be more demand for social objects to be socialized. In practice though even if a society shifts from being more gesellschaft to being more gemeinschaft, there are a few different forms this can take, not all of which would ameliorate the problem.
The concept of bubbling up conversation to the top level of one's own published blog is fascinating. I didn't quite understand reblogging before reading your explanation, and I think that's the main downside to the scheme, but there is certainly value in making the act of commenting ALSO an act of publishing on one's own blog.
What are you advertising? Did you tweak it a lot before it started to work, or did it work right away?
Really? By extension if you created a popular startup would you support people "demanding" that you do things a certain way to appease their needs, even if it was counter to your business model?
Developer Rebuilds Twitter in a Week
We found this article and we trying to see if it were true, it just seems like a lot of people
Now I remember why we computer scientists always looked up to the Math majors...
How U.S. Gold Reserves Were Stolen.
This is not about the economic crisis in any way. The magazine just put that in to get a bit of the feeling of this being something related to now.

This is about a culture of young people that is changing. I spent a lot of time in Paris during the summers, and the young french people are no longer really Cafe people. When you think Cafe, you think of sitting down to relax and socialize and talk, but nowadays, who does that anymore?

The cafes are run by unfirable waiters who are no fun. The french cafe business seems the same as it always has been, but times them are changing. The business needs to adapt to the changes, and it's not really doing so.

The Cafes in Berlin are WAY more comfortable to chill out at than the french Cafes, because they offer a bit more than just a wooden table and a cup of coffee.

And of course, the internet means that you don't need to meet people to catch-up anymore, you can just send them a message.

Cafes are not entertainment for young people anymore. They need to bring back the entertainment factor.
I think people can be convinced of this by explaining this is a signal to noise ratio problem. If we have a lot of sources of information but if a lot of them have a lot of noise, it's useless.
YouTube's Live Event As Overhyped As The Company
This may indeed be the crisis that we can't spend out way out of.

First they will try to borrow all that money, when that doesn't work they will start printing money, that still won't work but it will have the added "benefit" of destroying savings thanks to hyper inflation.
or we could ban you, for not getting the (admittedly not very funny) joke I was making :-)
I'm surprised by this article. I live in Toulouse, France and quite the opposite appears to be happening. Almost all of the run down cafés in the centre of Toulouse have undergone extensive refits in the last year and are now packed.

The article does make me wonder to what extent these bar owners are failing to update their run down bars and hence they are losing their clientele. My experience of the French is that they do love to complain about things not being like they used to be, perhaps these people should look to Toulouse as an example.
I don't wish to criticize you or your friends, but this is similar to the problem of having multiple TVs in a house. The only solution to this problem is to put the computers away and talk to each other.

In my house we have computers in an office, we have a TV in one room, but we have strict hours for the TV for the kids, we all eat meals together with no books, TV or computers allowed.

BTW I think it would be more healthy if the four of you sat in front of one TV and watched a program together (especially if you laughed at it, talked about it).
Yeah. It's tough to understand, and sometimes I feel that it detracts from the blog entirely (extended back-and-forth conversations start to look amateur), but it's a very neat system that gives you a lot of freedom in how you choose to handle interaction.
int rand17()
{
int t = rand15();

if(t > 3)
return t;
else
return 2 + rand15();

}

I dunno? will that work?
"The goal is to be monetization masters who are focused on consumers and build viral, capital efficient products, and to leave behind the full of shit, spam artists who are snobby about not making money."

In other words, do everything right.
Especially since neither the Fed, nor the Treasury actually have $7.76T.

What people keep forgetting is that the problem isn't what we're seeing now. The problem is NOT that consumers aren't spending 'enough' money, or that banks aren't making 'enough' loans, or that people aren't buying 'enough' houses.

The problem was that (induced by a loose monetary policy) consumers were spending too much relative to their incomes, banks were making loans to wealth-destroying ventures, and developers were building condos that no one needed.

The symptoms we are observing now are part of the correction. The government is attempting to move us back into the situation that caused the problem in the first place.
fluff piece
Seems like the engineer in the comments section summed it up the best. You were probably really close to getting the job, but a few to many mistakes tipped it against you.
Not much discourse, but the guy at http://www.audioindie.com is really up on the indie music scene.
Positive online reviews on specialized websites. This is simlar to getting dugg or slashdotted, but the effect is far more lasting. It also helps with getting to the first page in Google & Co.
We? You've submitted a lot of articles and this is your only comment.. Who/What are you?
I don't think it is exactly like TV. You aren't talking to the TV. You are actually 'talking' when online, just not with your mouth.

My son often asks to 'do letters' on http://starfall.com

I was fixing a bug the other day, and when I said we couldn't do letters, he assertively said "close computer!"

Pretty insightful for a 21 month old.
> must be accessible at all times

Nope, just when they're on call. I was snowboarding in Montana for a week last winter with my google SRE buddy, so I'm pretty sure about this :)
Google Online Sales/Operations (OSO) is notorious for hiring smart, super ambitious 20-somethings from top schools and giving them temp jobs in customer service with the carrot of the possibility of a full time position maybe. Not sure how much of that 10,000 is OSO, but I have to believe it's quite a bit.

Google is an engineer-first culture, so it would surprise and amaze me if there were that many software engineer contractors.
As a vimmer who has used Visual Studio in the past:

- Auto-complete can done in emacs and vim, too. There's an older vi-style completion which just completes from existing tokens in the current file (Ctrl-P) and a newer "omni-complete" (Ctrl-X-O) which is a bit smarter. For better poking around, keep an IPython session running.

- Don't scroll by hand in vim. There are keybindings for all kinds of jumping around and finding the declaration or definition you need.

- Search and replace: I'm surprised you would doubt this. Vim itself is a search/replace/insert filter; there's no dialog you bring up; full regular-expression navigation and substitution is always active. That's why a couple of keystrokes is usually faster than reaching for the mouse, for vim and emacs users.

- Command line: Yes! Search, replace, sort, find a declaration, pull up the documentation for a function, run a documentation generator, interact with the version control system -- most of it's build into the editor, and for what isn't built in, the editor gives easy access to the system shell. It's perfectly reasonable to build and edit your code with vim in one window, perhaps split into a few buffers, while playing with the resulting program in a terminal window next to it. For an interpreted language like Python, you don't even need to restart the interpreter, just reload the modules after they change. Thanks to this design, all of this works just as well over an ssh or telnet session.

Vim/vi is built for Unix; on Windows, without Cygwin, it's fairly crippled compared to a system that's fully integrated with the operating system. Unix was made to be programmable, and the shell gives significant help for inspecting the system and connecting different programs together. So a text editor that gives direct access to all of these capabilities and builds on top of them is very powerful -- assuming you already know how to use the shell effectively. For VS, it's the other way: VS makes Windows programming reasonable, while doing the same things without the IDE's substantial help (perhaps the way it is in Eclipse) is brutal.
No offense, but I'm inclined to be skeptical about a comment on a social news site by some random person who is (ostensibly) reposting a comment from another social news site by another random person that purports to be explaining research of a complicated biological process, all without citing any references or linking to any sources.
Specalized websites examples? Are these like blogs or more like HN?
1998 is not that long ago. Even 1988 isn't that long ago. Games are typically first played by youth. The youth of 1988 and 1998 are getting older and have more disposable income. The industry is growing as a whole so it is really hard to tell whether the gaming industry is insulated from recessions or if it is just continuing to grow. Your remark about movie vs. video game revenue further illustrates this point.

Also, video games != casual games. The point of this article was that casual games might be counter-cyclical due two their revenue model which differs from traditional video games.
"Your job is most certainly to maintain a working and current toolchain."

Subversion works. It's well-documented, simple, and there are many tools that work with it. Tell me why it's an inappropriate choice for a "working and current toolchain".

"There are minimum standards for software engineers who want to develop software professionally, and using version control and understanding why we use version control is pretty high up on the list. If a basketball player isn't ready for the NBA, it isn't Ad Hominem to tell him his game needs more work, even though he may feel very insulted by the concept."

Not wanting to learn the version-control flavor of the week is a very different thing than not knowing how to use version control -- and it's suggestive that you've so confused the two concepts. To extend your basketball metaphor, version control software isn't part of the game, but rather, a piece of the equipment. If you suggested that an NBA player should spend even a day "learning" how to dribble with a new type of ball, he'd laugh you out of the room -- unless that ball added a significant advantage to his game.

Being a professional is more about judicious decision making than it is about raw knowledge of technology. The transition of a pre-existing project from Subversion to Git adds huge complexity, in exchange for very little, as far as I'm concerned. When the situation changes, and Git adds more value than fad, I will re-evaluate.
That's interesting, because I consider "word of mouth" to mean verbal communication (such as telling people on Twitter, IMing, e-mailing friends, etc) rather than voting up a link on Digg or del.icio.us, say.
Looks like this:
http://www.bincsearch.com/

"The core of our business is to identify and assess exceptional professionals, and recruit them into outstanding organizations, anywhere in the US. Our goal is to find the ideal individual who fits an organization’s specific requirements and then present them with a highly desirable job opportunity."

All of bincsearch's submissions are from their site.
Perhaps I should have separated them, then (assuming other people think like you do). I guess I consider them the same because people are similarly taking the initiative to share the link on-line with a community, be it their friends or a more general community.
Last night I posted a "which SCM" question and there was much love for Mercurial, and some love for Bazaar.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=374390
I do wish someone would counter sue over the top - and burry a couple of these patent trolls; for the good of the industry.
We advertise a gaming related site to Facebook users with interests like Halo, Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, etc. If I recall correctly, for $5 a day we get an average 3-5 new sign ups out of 50 or so hits.