skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to find a co-founder online?
I'm currently located in China + studying + traveling every few months, making it extremely hard to find potential co-founders offline. I have a few technical friends from university and previous jobs but for various reasons, I consider none of them to be co-founder material.

The approach that works for me right now is to explore ideas (including ambitious ones), launch quick-and-dirty MVPs, and see what sticks. I do this approximately full time, albeit not on a typical work schedule.

In the process, I'd like to meet and collaborate with potential co-founders. I believe that passed a certain threshold of competence, the relationship you have with a co-founder is a lot more important than the co-founder itself: might as well build some solid relationships now for when the big opportunity comes knocking. In fact, I just realized that the term "co-founder" might not be appropriate here. Just like you don't go out meeting women and telling them you are looking for a wife, the word I should be using is "people that want to build MVPs and have a strong interest in startups", but it would be a bit long to type.

That being said, here are some problems I have encountered with regards to online interactions:

1) It's hard to judge one's personality (emotional stability, honesty, trustworthiness, maturity, etc.) without the cues one would get from offline interactions (i.e. nonverbal cues).

2) It's hard to judge one's level of interest and commitment without the costs involved in real life interactions. A two hour face to face meeting is much more costly than a two hour online conversation.

3) I admit I'm susceptible to some kind of "dating site" bias. I can't help thinking to myself: "If this person is trying to meet a co-founder online, they must be desperate and most likely for the bad reasons." Yet, I am in this exact position and don't consider myself to be an undesirable co-founder (I'm probably biased here as well, hopefully not!).

So, back to the original question.

What are ways to find potential co-founders online? How to avoid the above pitfalls? What are the key questions to ask a potential co-founder? How to quickly gauge someone's level of interest/commitment?

Try to keep your advice as actionable as possible.
I don't think this is quite true. I see minecraft as a good stepping stone into more advanced things.

When I was his age, I was using the Lego Mindstorms heavily. At first I started with the built in GUI language, which was extremely limiting. After that I moved to progressively more advanced languages and IDEs until I was using Not-Quite-C, a version of C compiled for the Mindstorms.

These things tend to work as stepping stones. Had the kid started on something like CAD, he may have gotten stuck at an impasse that was too difficult for him, lost motivation and went back to playing Call of Duty.

Perhaps his next project will be in a "real" application, instead of Minecraft, because he has the motivation and knowledge to move forward.
Congrats Justin & Co. - Exec was a great experience for us at Mixpanel. It has that "just works" feel to it which is incredibly hard to create.
Raspberry Pi's Gertboard expansion kit gets revised
Launch Options for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8
For anybody interested in this topic, this SQLite doc page is excellent:

http://sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html

Check out in particular the sections "Hardware Assumptions" and "Things That Can Go Wrong"
The 10 VCs On Twitter Every Entrepreneur Should Follow
>I always found it absurd that some languages force you to write "Math.cos(...)".

I disagree. Namespaces are a good thing. The "Foo dot bar" syntax is just commonly associated with class member access. I think it's a lot better to have to explicitly refer to where a function comes from (as long as it doesn't devolve into retarded Java-style verbosity, ie "Foo.bar.baz.spam.eggs..."). Though it's nice to have a way to omit the namespace, ie C++'s "using namespace Foo" or Python's "from Foo import bar". I just think that the sane default is to use explicit namespaces.
That link does not have a valid public token with it.
Can a 'minecrafter' explain a little more please?

I know you get 1x1 blocks of wood/stone/etc. How do the pieces move? Are there simple on/off switches? Gunpowder + fire for wires?
Well, That’s One Way To Advertise Your Startup
$('#toc').removeClass('sticky');

I keed, I keed...

Sidenote: A bunch of the code samples I checked out are ripped bit for bit from "JavaScript Patterns" by Stefanov (O'Reilly/Yahoo! Press). I recommend that book to any JS dev along with the famous "Javascript: The Good Parts".
Did you just try and justify stealing bread from a shop is okay if you're hungry enough? I guess that's why some barbaric places still chop off your hand if they catch you since "abstract sense of morality" isn't enough deterrent. But anyway, while I haven't personally been unemployed long enough to be tempted into wage-slavery, I've known a few people who have been unemployed for at least a year who didn't compromise. (How long is "long period" for you?) They waited for a better opportunity even if it meant they grew a little thinner for a time.
A Simple Function for Formatting Currency
Obviously, one less botnet is a good thing, but does anyone else see a problem with Microsoft "raiding" companies and "seizing" equipment? What legal justification does a private corporation have to act like a law enforcement agency?

The articles I've seen use language like "accompanied by" or "escorted by" US Marshals. Shouldn't this be the FBI or Secret Service doing the raiding and seizing, maybe with Microsoft providing technical consulting?
I would kill for $10k per month.
Jruby: meet embedded Tomcat 7 and JWt
I am really afraid that although this 16-year old (I don't like the patronizing kid word) has made something of immense creativity and of intrinsic value, he'll face such a drastic world that limits a lot of creative potential by the idiosyncrasies of mature reality.

I really hope talented people like this guy be given full-throttle. They are the real capital, not the tools.
Japan and CS
I've had a short conversation with a friend about Japan's position in CS recently. Japan has always been known to be on the bleeding edge of technology, after doing a little reading it's clear that they basically just focus on electronics, AI, aeronautics, among others.

Japan has the fastest super computer right now as far as I know, that says SOMETHING about their intentions for CS but I don't see much else coming from them. My prediction is that they're just not focused on improving it as much as other technologies. Any thoughts?

EDIT: relevant links...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Japan

http://www.economist.com/node/18958643
Remote Procedure Call is a design paradigm for synchronous call-and-response network communication. The Sun RPC protocol is an actual technology defined in RFC1057: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1057.txt

It's not insane, though not terribly relevant in the modern world. The only common technology still using it is NFS.
Vook wants to let anyone become an e-book publisher
Money and the App Store: a few figures that might help an indie developer
Make it a template (parameterized with coefficient and solution type) and you'll get very generic and efficient solution across all mentioned 'dialects' of c(++). It has the added bonus that this routine can be converted to vector form almost without breaking the interface: just make a, b, c pointers and specify length. And you can specialize templates when you'll want to rewrite float32_t-version in assembly.

Numeric code is really inappropriate for demonstration of new C++ features, as good (fast!) numeric code is most often C with templates.
I don't know about iPad but when I bought my first Android tablet recently (I don't own any smart phone yet) my first instinct was that Android and this Tablet craze is nothing but more of the same consumerism. These are not productivity devices like computers and you can't really do or produce anything on it other than to consume and receive. The only thing that exist on these gadgets (be that smart phone or tablet) is the Market and these markets are there to sell you something.

I am since then convinced that Desktop or Laptops are not going anywhere.
Python is a lot easier to learn than Ruby, therefore there are more people know Python than know Ruby. The poll just shows the demographics.
I think thats what we define as a monopoly. Time to redefine what can be targeted by anti-trust lawsuits.
Not really; I've never done any cryptography so I wouldn't know if I liked it. I thought I'd see if I liked it by learning about it for a WW2 class. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
There are a variety of switches and buttons, wire, NOR gates, and a small handful of mechanical devices, the most important of which are pistons that allow you to move blocks around.
What does this do? I bet you that like me, most users won't sign up for something that accesses their Facebook without a good idea of what this does. Bonus points for screenshots.
Talk about tenacity! And there's such a huge amount of disruption to be had anywhere in the insurance industries - looking forward to them earning the 'hipmunk for insurance' title.
Tricking people? They promised and delivered faster downloads.
6 ways Google hacks its cafeterias so its employees eat healthier
The primary revenue/profit driver of MU was illegal content. You can spin it however you want. They knew it, I know it, and you know it.

> Otherwise, we should start suing knife makers for not including a label that says "Not to stab people",

Not that I'm going to take your bait, but if the primary function/use of the knife was to stab someone, then sure, we should. But instead we use it in mostly in other ways.
Theater, of course.
In the game there is a resource known as redstone. It can be acquired underground when mining in the game or made available in the game's creative mode. With it you can build various kinds of circuits. The game also includes various input and output blocks, such as buttons, switches, lights, and pistons. Put together, the player can do anything from as simple as a button opening a door to as complex as the article describes.
Sent Jason Chaffetz (my representative) the following email:

Disgusted With The TSA

I was looking forward to seeing the TSA respond to Bruce Schneier's criticisms in the Oversight Committee meeting today. He is one of the world's experts on security. The news that he was dismissed from the committee makes me think the TSA is much less interested in actual security than in their own appearance, which fits the definition of security theatre very well. Please hold the TSA accountable for their gross misuse of power. Please make them answer to actual security experts on their policies. Thank you very much.
Seconded completely. I had an account for about a month, I think actually in mid 2011 (funny that). Very few people who were accomplished seemed to have time for it. Felt like nearly all of the posts were of a please-review-my-first-project nature. Also, despite the attempted parity, designers outnumbered the developers so substantially there were only three or four developers on there participating consistently.

I'm grateful Forrst explored the curated social network space, but unless it were done better I don't think I'll have time for it again. I think you could create and sustain a designer/developer site like that, but probably not with unchecked positive growth. I would like to see more curated communities, but the curation on Forrst doesn't seem to go far enough. You can either release a site to the world or keep it private to your friends; the space between those two extremes is troublesome.
I guess if anybody is to confirm that it's in fact a circus, it'll be the TSA themselves. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
It was just a "rising emphasis" sort of thing. I hate all technology about equally.
Shedding light on qualia. (aka subjective conscious experience)
Why most startups have no followers on AngelList
Yes, soon. We want to know for a fact that we understand how to consistently provide excellent service before expanding anywhere.
Round 2 of the Most Influential SEM Tournament Opens
This. This is what people who critique the kid fail to understand. He built a processor, from scratch, with a solid understanding of binary math, at age 16.

I'd knock him too.. if I were intimidated as opposed to impressed.
I find the 'randomly soak with liquid' methodology frightening but the quest for a better superconductor seems to be gaining some interesting footholds.
Good point. I'll put up a screenshot there.

For now, it is just a way to browse your wall.
Eventually it will be a web based FaceBook client.
There’s a redstone resource, which you can lay down as wires. These behave like electronic circuits. There are some special blocks like redstone torches and repeaters.

Some other blocks can be powered or triggered by redstone, for example pistons that push blocks, doors and item dispensers.
Accidental SEO: Learnings from Watchlater App
It definitely happens; here's a case from last year that the ACLU was looking at: http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/want-job-pas...

The insidious thing about this is not if it happens for people looking for tech jobs (they're generally clued in enough to refuse, or go somewhere else, or make a fake Facebook account filled with stuff like "I love working so much!" and "I saved a man's life with a quick appendectomy at my volunteer gig"). People looking for lower-tier jobs are in less of a position to be able to refuse.
Will the JOBS Bill Help Your Startup Raise Money?
Screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/hfjCO.jpg
AirPlay Takes the Boardroom by Storm
Most of this is relatively straightforward and unsurprising. But the one part that grabbed me is about "jittering". They insert random delays into timed events (the example given is cache expiration) to prevent a thundering herd problem when all the parts of the distributed system see the event at the same time (and for popular content, presumably repopulate the cache from the backend simulteously).

This is simple enough when described, but is not a technique I've seen applied much in practice or discussed in the community. I'm wondering if it's something that gets reinvented for all the projects that need it or if it's secret sauce known only in youtube. Regardless, I thought it was pretty insightful.
You can try this http://www.techcofounder.com/

However, I don't this it would be easy to find someone online and build a startup as co-founders.
I don't really think that's something to be worried about. Millions of insurance agents are reliant on insurance companies for their revenue - I don't see how this is any different.

As far as just being an affiliate site, you seem to overlook the fact that there is currently no way for consumers to price-compare different insurance companies without going through an agent. This is huge and I'm willing to bet they're hard at work on expanding into the even more lucrative homeowners insurance space as well.
ONLINE MOVIES: Dark Tide (2012)
Why do people make pages highlighting colorizing things, and then make the subtitle of the page (and other text) be blue on black? This does not inspire confidence.
And Here's One Secret Reason Apple Is Crushing Google...San Jose State!
Be careful. I'd see this as a blindly obvious technical need, but not so much a market need. Do business decision makers know they want to pay for it?

I love Steve Blank's "hierarchy of needs" concept when evaluating business value for a new product. Look for the diagram in http://steveblank.com/2010/03/04/perfection-by-subtraction-t... .
The university I attended did something similar.

To graduate you had to apply online. However, they never actually integrated the graduate application process with their auth process. So when you applied to graduate you had to "sign" your application with your password. This app, password and all, would then be emailed out to everyone in the Records and Registration office. I presume they then manually logged into my account, and if that succeed I had verified my identity. If this password wasn't tied to, say, the ability to take out a student loan then maybe it wouldn't be a big deal.

I tried explaining to the person who answered the records office phone that this process was broken and I needed another way to identify myself (I'm an out of state student). They didn't care and didn't understand the issue. No one took me seriously until enough people tweeted about it that a PR person contacted me and had IT fix the problem.

So: Mr(s). Non-technical also tend to have very different ideas about passwords than, for example, HN readers.
There used to be an old, old joke on slashdot. Whatever the topic, somebody would say "I, for one welcome our new X overlords"

I, for one, welcome our new security overlords.

For some reason, it doesn't sound as funny anymore.

There was a story recently about how all sorts of various agencies now want their own drones to watch the citizenry as we go about our normal lives. I'll never forget an interview the reporter had with a Congressman. His basic stance was something along the lines of "Boys will be boys. This is just all sorts of other agencies wanting to get in on the UAV bandwagon."

My point is this: I don't think our elected representatives take any of this very seriously at all, no matter what they might say during an election or on TV. I don't think it bothers them for one second that the TSA gets to pick it's own witnesses for each day, or that gradually we're turning into a security state. I just don't think it really registers on their radar.
Travel Guide: Exploring Lisbon, Garden by the Sea Shore
To be clear: I was just pointing out the hypocrisy in pulling out my (admittedly) mildly ad hominem slur comparing the OP author with an IT robot and calling it "crap". You can't reasonably demand civil discourse if you aren't willing to practice it.

But to be honest: I don't think my quip was really that bad. Did I hit too close to home? Do you do soap automation?
For a high-valued production data, if you think your data is safe after it's (finally) written to disk, then you're doing it wrong. Your data is not safe until a) it left the physical database machine, b) it left the physical datacenter to be stored into multiple datacenters around the world (e.g. S3).

Thus ideally, the (horribly slow) disk doesn't even come into play, especially for in-memory DBs. You buffer the data in memory before they are sent out of the machine/datacenter, but you make sure to mirror this buffer at multiple separate physical machines (which your database cluster should support), in case one goes down or over. Once the data are committed into a replicated store, you can clear that buffer. Fast and reliable.

This is not to say that there are zillion cases where harddrive is still the ideal persistence device. After all, it's very hard to destroy a harddrive in a way to make the data unrecoverable (of course, I'm talking about cases where RAID failed or wasn't present). However in reality, data from broken harddrives are seldom attempted to be recovered, mainly I guess due to the price and relatively long service waiting times.
Microsoft tries to entice developers to choose Windows Phone 7
>I can build a Hello World app on Android in under 2 seconds.

Doesn't it take Eclipse at least 20 times that long to even start up? ;)
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on Askolo
I had never heard of the "Ring-fencing" concept. Makes total sense but interesting nonetheless to see MSFT set aside $10m to push the tactic.
Heh, mount this "tower" on slip rings and an alternator and you can have both a solar array and a windmill in one.
That's where mods like Redpower comes in.

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/365357-123-eloraams-mods...

The mods are really what set Minecraft apart.
Gezonde darmen: verstopping of constipatie voorkomen
Ask a scientist: Can you see black hole lens effect in this?
لودفيغ ميس فان دير روه - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
We (hope we) did learn.

First of all, pay closer attention to the usage patterns. We saw increased activity for a few days before the beta signup, but never investigated in depth. We only learned that something's up when the heavy traffic started and monitoring alarms went off.

Second, get the scaling-up procedure more automated, we had everything planned, but it took too much time to get the extra infrastructure ready. Pressure and precise operation don't work well together.

Third, we uncovered a previously unknown memory leak in one of the components, which got evident during the Guild Wars 2 event and forced us to restart a subsystem a few times.

All in all it was a nice (if a bit stressful) experience, hope you guys enjoyed it a bit yourselves too :)
What? People get confused. I get confused. You get confused (as evidenced by this post). Everybody gets confused, just like everybody poops.
It's not enough to support a startup though, it's barely enough for one full-time developer.
Comcast: Xbox 360 On Demand streams won't count against data caps
true story. when I was 16 ( way back in the early 90s), my parents enrolled me in niit.com (presently a billion USD company that was at the time a tiny 3-room outfit ). niit taught cobol. I hated everything about cobol. I thought it was a shit language and the people who taught me cobol were shit. We were supposed to build an inventory control module in cobol. I didn't know what an inventory was, so they gave me an econ book about manufacturing & inventory. I thought it was absolutely dumb to keep track of nuts & bolts & accounting & money & suchlike. So I wrote a cobol program to calculate the fourier coefficients of complex exponentials, since that's what I was studying at school. So my cobol program would painstakingly calculate the first five fourier coefficients of sawtooth waves & square waves & then using the partial sum, it would reconstruct the expansion by printing out the series on a dot matrix printer. All of this was running on some processor called intel 80286 xt and it would take 10 full minutes to just compile the code. One day I was standing by the dot matrix when the instructor walked in. He thought I was some precocious kid who had coded up a whizbang inventory module for acme corportation, so he expected nice tables with rows & columns of data on optimal number of nuts & bolts. But when he saw the printer slowly rolling out sawtooth waves and square waves of various frequencies, he completely lost it & yelled at me for wasting the precious resources of the dot matrix printer to do frivolous nonsense. I got a F on cobol.
How Basketball is playing Moneyball
Cool, but I don't think this will give developers any clue about where they are in the queue. There's probably hundreds if not ~thousands of apps submitted daily? If you're a new developer you're probably really excited about getting on the app store, but after the first couple submissions, you'll be like "meh, I have work to do".
He's not actually insulting him. The first sentence is ironic, because vgnet isn't actually confused, he just has reasonable expectations. It actually serves to further insult the TSA, and is a fairly common phrasing in these sort of comments (at least in physical conversation, perhaps it's less advisable through the medium of the web).
Ha, ha. Very funny. But the beauty of this is that AIDE isn't eclipse, and it takes < 1 second to start up!