skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Leaving My Own Startup, Need Advice
The situation: I started a company last November that finally saw some traction in the past few months and is currently making ~$1,200/month but is not profitable yet. As the CTO and co-founder I owned almost half of the company and our lawyer made a mistake of using a clawback clause instead of a typical 4yr vesting schedule with a 1yr cliff. So upon leaving, I will still own a small amount of the company, roughly 10%. We initially raised around $25k and also purchased a laptop for me with some of the company funds.

I'll be leaving the company at the end of the month to become a co-founder in another company with much more traction. The new company has a similar business model (subscription based) but in a completely different market, hence no competition. So my code may possibly be similar in some ways, or not. Ultimately, I want to make sure that we don't get screwed in the future by my old-cofounder if the new company becomes successful and they say they still own the IP on something.

The dilemma: Old co-founder wants my shares back. They want to me to keep my laptop (worth ~$1500) in return for the shares, but I know the laptop is considered IP of the company (unless there is a way to say it isn't). I'm not sure I should even trade the shares for any amount since that company could possibly be worth something in the future and I built everything from design and dev. On the other hand, I don't want any legal issues in the future if I were to keep my shares. Any advice would be helpful, thanks!
If you made a HN that was much better, everyone would probably switch. Better design won't do that I'm afraid. I use stylebot on chrome to make it look really nice. Lots of HN folks have made css rules for HN. Just search for them.
Most of them are tests, unit tests or examples.. very few are actually being used.
So you cannot be passionate about software and at the same time be passionate about your family? That doesn't sound right at all.
I've thought about this too. I think it's more than just a US address and credit card. I think you also have to have a social security no and state ID.

The only thing I can think of is to bring someone on board to the project that meets this criteria. You'd have to trust them completely and it would probably be wise to have a contract drawn up too

I really wish there was a trustworthy company that filled this role.

Other sites like indieGoGo are fine but they just don't attract the same level of funding.
Yes, you certainly did get smarter between 6 and 25. Children's brains are still developing until late puberty. All sorts of cognitive tasks show development, including short term memory, working memory, etc... It's absolutely not just factual learning taht is happening.
>I'm doing this to save the lives of transgender people on the brink. Those at risk of suicide, homelessness, and starvation.

Those are all risks of joining a startup, not reasons to start one.
If he had never tried he would not be as happy with his current career. Knowing that he tried but it didn't work out is what makes him satisfied with his current job.

I mean can you imagine living life as an accountant and regretting all the kids you could have helped? Much better to try it out and then fall back on something else....
Well the solution is simple, you take her name :)
Founders' Exchange
Saving The Day With Scoped CSS
> Myth? MS built a very successful business on it.

It's also an unsustainable business. How long do you think MS will be able to maintain backward full compatibility? 100 years? 200 years?

> Customers don't care why your software just broke or whose fault it was, all they care about is it broke.

Customers aren't engineers; they don't know better. We do. In any, it's going to be cheaper to abandon the stubborn customers than it will be to maintain decades worth of backward compatibility, at some point.
In my limited anecdotal observations, I see the same as you. That does not mean that it isn't a "male domination thing" (at an ingrained-into-the-core-of-society level).

I simply wish we didn't feel like we have to excuse women keeping their own name, and hope that one day it will simply be the default.
By my standards, that's pretty remote. I used to live in Victoria and even that was cut off enough at times.
I didn't really understand how hard it is to run a VPS until I started doing it. It seems so easy when you look at it. Also, I run my own web stack on my dev machine anyway.

I went VPS because:

1. I'm more familiar with configuring my own web apps then trying to use someone else's admin console. (Low opinion of said consoles that I've seen in the past, but haven't tried Heroku or other new services.)

2. I need to run Node.js, PHP, and Ruby all on the same server. (Actually, just PHP and Node.js, which are in the same web app and so need access to a shared database. Ruby could be elsewhere at the moment.)

I'm still on VPS because:

1. Already paying for it, hasn't been a year yet

2. I still don't understand the new PaaS thing

3. PHP + Node.js PaaS host? Preferably with name recognition on par with Heroku, but at least lots of good reviews.

Complications of VPS are numerous, so I won't enumerate them. Lots of things to configure, update, and keep alive. Also it isn't the same OS as my dev machine plus I have to manage security for a public server but not for my desktop machine.

EDIT: just thought of one more reason I use VPS, I actually like ssh shell access. Ability to edit files and run arbitrary commands, many innumerable uses of this.
Just to be clear he worked in retail to pay his way through college a second time to get a masters in accounting which is his new job. So to say he was driven out of teaching into retail isn't quite true.
In the first scenario, the income of the man is 200K and the income of the woman is 25K. For a total income of 225K. It doesn't matter where the money comes from or is going. That's the income both will write on the federal returns or whatever you want, for the sake of the example.

When they get married, the man's income stays the same. The woman's income evaporates. She's not getting paid anymore. So their combined income is now 200K.

But the situation is exactly the same! The same amount of work is being done.

GDP works exactly the same way. It's an account of money flows, not production or actual economic activity.
When you guys say that you're going to make servers not suck, can you share a bit more about what you mean? Are you referring to dedicated hosting?
My problem is that I see this used as way of forcing unpaid overtime on to workers by creating unreasonable release dates. In an agile environment where people are given lots of autonomy and can give accurate estimates I like your idea, but it seems for most it will be a disaster. We've recently had a client demand we deliver a month earlier on 6 month project in a 5 man shop with only two months left. If it wasn't for paid overtime I'd bail out of here.
Yes, but by then you have disrupted the market so thoroughly that asteroid mining becomes a matter-of-fact standard and, very soon afterwards, the only feasible source of certain substances. It'll be an inversion of the status quo and if they can pull this off, this could restart our space-faring technologies.

Going beyond our planet for resources constitutes a huge step in human development - a step we're currently opting out of, but one day a mining program such as this might get the ball rolling again.
I am 2300ELO in chess and about 4-5k in go (maybe a bit weaker now).
My impression is that chess is almost purely tactical/close fight game while go is much more strategic/feel game. Of course that could be because I am much stronger in chess and go overwhelms me a bit.
I like go more in general, it has aesthetic appeal which I like. The only drawback is that even blitz games are quite long while in chess you can fire up few 1 0 (1minute per game no increment) on internet in no-time :)
The problem is that to go from point A to point B, the white had to enslave the black to use them as scaffold. As far as I remember black slaves didn't just volunteer to come to America and do the hard work, did they?
They are actually much more efficient because they have type-specific implementations that operate directly on the underlying data structures, rather than constructing intermediate MapEntry objects and then mapping/reducing across those.
Shame so much talent is wasted creating so much shit all with the ultimate object of dumbing down the populous to a bunch of media consumers.
The materials are far more useful in space to build factories for building more things in space.
It's easy for your eyeballs to gloss over those sidebars on the homepage, at top-level it looks like some detailed auxiliary info and not where you'd find critical functionality.
Yes but you could compensate for that by buying appropriate futures contracts.
"Both the rules and strategy of Go feel more elegant in the mathematical sense of being a composition of simple ideas, which I like. Chess feels more like a set of arbitrary pieces of knowledge"

That is exactly the reason that I think go (1) may be solved before chess is solved.

For go, there are some results that give hope that an all encompassing theory exists. For chess, the best we have are results of exhaustive searches of relatively simple situations and a bunch of heuristics. It is true that, together, those have led to spectacular results, but I do not think they will lead to a proof about who wins chess.

(1) to be exact: Mathematical go, as defined in http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Go-Chilling-Gets-Point/dp.... ko rules can have variations, and there are variations in how to count points at the end of a game. Both may affect only a tiny fraction of games, but a alpha-beta search may need only one path that is a win under ruleset A and a loss under ruleset B to change the outcome of a game.
If you have your kill-date iterate rapidly enough, and advertise it well enough, people who build products on your API will keep up, or the competitors will and take their business.

Heck, if you want to be really hand-holdy about it, have an warnmesage attribute in your returns that mentions various issues, and start throwing deprication warnings some $time before the kill date as a reminder.

And the number of bugs and security holes coming directly out of backwards compatibility in MS products was a very big issue for a very long time. Lately they have been doing much less in terms of backwards compatibility (e.g. run in "compatibility mode"), probably as and outgrowth of this.
I'm using wget for a project, basically because it's the only crawler on the planet that given a single URL, can download that page + all images, style sheets and scripts embedded in it without hassle (just with a flag: -p or --page-requisites).

It sucks however, because you can't redirect its output to another program and have to write the output to the file system (more I/O).
Thatcher's anti-union stance & unwillingness to negotiate with the coal union when on strike eventually lead to the industry's demise. If your view was that domestic UK coal production was a waste of money, then you can thank the Thatcher run government for shutting it down. Government can do good & bad depending on where you stand.
At 500,000 users, The Fancy making more money than Pinterest's 20 million
NodeSocket founder here.

Indeed PaaS is an extremely tough market with tons of external competitive pressures. Right now there are two major strategies. The first is the notion of a 'polyglot' platform (Heroku, DotCloud, CloudFoundry) which is multiple languages/databases. The second, and our strategy, is focusing exclusively on a stack (node for us) and building tools and systems which work exclusively for the stack. Essentially, I believe it comes down to company resources which strategy to choose. When Heroku started they focused exclusively on Rails, and did it really well. Not until recently after growing the team and dominating the rails hosting market, did they make the huge shift to polyglot.

Finally, recently, there is a new emerging strategy which I am really excited about, which is even more focused. Real-time javascript frameworks, with hosting bundled into the platform. Examples of this are Meteor and FireBase. Certainly there is some preliminary evidence, that these may be the future.
Yes, because Gold is not rare everywhere, just in the Earth's crust because of gravity differentiation (Gold sinks--there's probably quite a bit of it in the mantle/core).

There are individual asteroids out there with more platinum-group elements than has been extracted from the Earth in all of human history.
Maybe OP was searching for style guides. This almost looks unintentionally public. It's all a bit bland for a brand like Starbucks.
I trust that the billions of women world 'round who practice this know in their heart-of-hearts that they are not being dominated by adopting their husband's last name. Yours is something of an extreme point of view, IMO.
UK Enterprise Fund Wants to Invest in Technology
And where would you get the parachutes, ablative capsule and guidance system?
why is it absurd? it's comparing the plight of the transgendered to the plight of racial minorities; the whole point of affirmative action is to provide a helping hand to groups that face ubiquitous and often invisible-to-the-majority difficulties, to level their personal playing fields a bit.

as for the comic, the point of it is that inheriting a situation where, thanks to historical swings, things are easy for your demographic, and then complaining that more disadvantaged groups are asking for a hand when you made it on your own, is both wrongheaded and sadly common.
No web site, nothing on google, I'd start by creating a marketing department

Seriously, I'd buy some shares even if its a very high risk venture, if I knew how too.
Making the data available to you probably would be interesting but using it to 'improve' your experience probably drives more engagement.

Also, having you paying money would probably be less beneficial to Facebook, as I'm sure they can make more money from advertising.

I'm not trying to defend FB here but it is worth remembering that they've reached 800million people so they've obviously got something right. The question people should consider is at what cost to themselves.
The more this goes on, the more I'm flabbergasted at the incompetency of the Oracle legal team. I'm sure there are 99 ways to nail Google using Sun/Oracle IP, but the one they picked clearly ain't one.

If things keep going like this, it might actually be the first time in quite a few years that Ellison ends up losing a court case.
Barobo launches the Mobot – a low cost modular robot
Stripe can already store CC details. You can create users for each of your customers through the API and then build out your own "easy payments" system without having your users ever leave your site.
You think he doesn't have much to lose because at the end of the day he's still a billionaire. I doubt he feels like that. He's got an opportunity to succeed in ways most humans never do. You could argue that he's got more to lose than most, not less.
While we're on the topic of ad hoc design tools, I made a site called Iconomus (http://iconom.us) to do something similar for icons.
If I were them, I wouldn't be worried one bit.
I still work at NASA and the GP is referencing a myth. There are plenty of reports out there detailing how much Shuttle cost by many different accounting metrics.
This article also illustrates how important it is as a researcher to publicize yourself well. Mogo really only had a very small part in the breakthroughs that were made. Yet it is heralded in every such article as the bot that made it all happen.

For those that are curious what happened, there are some seminal references:

Monte Carlo Go. Bernd Brügmann - This introduced the basic idea.

Monte-Carlo Go Developments. Bruno Bouzy - Bouzy is the guy that kept hammering at the original Brügmann idea while everyone else thought it was a dead end.

Efficient Selectivity and Backup Operators in Monte-Carlo Tree Search. Remi Coulom - This was really the breakthrough paper, that showed how to combine Monte Carlo simulations with a tree search. Was also the first MC bot to win the gold medals.

Mogo replaced the ad-hock operators in the last paper with an algorithm with more mathematical grounding (UCT). Even though the name is now very well known, most top Go programs, including the last research published about Mogo, actually already dropped the idea and went back to more ad-hock formulas again.

The article also makes the common mistake that the position is evaluated using random games. Calling them random is quite misleading. It seems to be necessary to include some knowledge in them, but too much knowledge hurts the strength again - regardless of any speed impact. It's an open problem to fundamentally understand exactly what kind of knowledge helps the program to actually play stronger.

What happened in Go is also a nice illustration that if you want to make a computer good at an AI task, the key is finding an algorithm that approximately-linearly improves with the computing power you throw at it. If you do this, you crack the wall. Algorithmic and hardware improvements will do the rest in the years to come.
How crowded the market place is depends on the itch that you're trying to scratch!
The Lonesome Tale Of An Unsung Computer Genius
I posted this on reddit a little while ago, but not many people really saw it, so I figured this community could perhaps appreciate it a little more.

As a tech geek, you come to respect a number of the greats in computing history.

Perhaps it's Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates or a personal favorite of mine, Edsger Dijkstra. There is one genius of the history of computing that doesn't have much fame or notoriety, and I couldn't even find his name on a reddit search. This man created the concepts behind the idea of our modern computers. Running a graphical operating system on a limited, simplifed, chipset and mostly just the CPU, rather than having to use specialized hardware. Now he, apparently, lives a sad and lonely life in California, occasionally making his only human contact on the way to Whole Foods to pick up some groceries.

I am talking about Burrell Smith, the Apple engineer who designed the motherboard for the first Macintosh and found ways to shoe-horn upgrades into older computers in ways no one ever thought possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrell_Smith

You can find some amazing stories about his genius and unique personality here:
http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?characters=Burrell%20Smith

What has become of him today?
http://tradertim.blogspot.com/2007/07/lonesome-tale-of-burrell-smith.html

According to Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs there is a chance Burrell suffered from schizophrenia during the 1990s... I don't know. I just feel sad reading about what has become of him and wish we could tell him somehow that there are geeks out there that appreciate the work that he has done and his unparalleled creativity in the field of hardware engineering.
I think sophacles is onto something here.

In my post I tried to make it clear that backwards compatibility is a challenge for successful APIs.

However, I guess if you don't want to make your APIs successful you can do all kinds of things that make them harder to use, like putting in draconian kill-dates, warnmessages, etc... Make sure your documentation is extra-long and wordy too while you're at it.

Because, sophacles, is right: if you don't have a successful API you don't have to worry about pissing customers off.
Wow, and that post from Elon is over a year OLD! Wonder where things lie currently?
Well, if it helps any, I've found the CUDA API to be somewhat lacking in features, but more or less robust, and pretty logical to deal with as a developer. Keep up the good work.
https://www.dotcloud.com/ does all three (Node, PHP and Ruby) along with many others. You can set up different instances, have them access the same database as well.

When I was in their beta program when they first started out they also gave you shell access to the machine so you could see what was being deployed, and run arbitrary commands (perfect for having an Python app that required running paste for upgrading the DB to the latest version).

In my experience with them I had absolutely no issues, it was fast to configure and set up and their command line tools were fantastic. It used git if you wanted it to, or could use any arbitrary directory and upload the contents.

Not only that but you could modify the nginx config file to change redirects and set static directories that shouldn't be handled by WSGI so that you could take a load off the Python app from serving up requests for static content.

I haven't used dotCloud in over 8+ months now, if not longer, their pricing just didn't make sense for me, and I found it cheaper with all the sites I host to just go with a single dedicated server rather than use their services so maybe a lot has changed, but they sound like what you need.
Largely agree. What saddens me is that the extracted semantics are not apparently being shared or exchanged automatically, which is holding us back. On the upside, I remember the view that mass internet usage couldn't take off because open protocols didn't provide sufficient economic incentives for private actors, but that turned out OK.

would be quite interested in hearing more about your startup if you want to post to HN or correspond via gmail.
I could code comfortably in Haskell many months before learning HM as well.

This is a better argument for you than for Haskell. I wasn't disputing that there's a set of people who can intuitively command an incredibly recondite black box they don't (yet) understand - or that that set includes you. What I will argue is that that set is small, making it very hard to produce a critical mass of Haskell users despite the tremendous academic subsidies Haskell has received.

Imagine you're a helicopter pilot. That it's easy for you to fly a helicopter doesn't mean it's easy to fly helicopters. If we compare the set of people cognitively able to use PHP, to the set cognitively able to use Haskell, I don't think we're far from comparing car drivers to helicopter pilots.

Of course that's false -- but once a Haskell program is typed and compiled, there are much larger chances that it will work first time compared to, say, Java.

Indeed. (I'm not just agreeing for rhetorical purposes - this really is true.) Inasmuch as the programmer isn't perfect, however, he spends his time chasing not runtime errors - but static type errors.
You're right about the SSN, which makes things a lot more difficult.

I came across indieGoGo and thought about it, but it just doesn't seem like I would get the same kind of exposure as Kickstarter would give me. I'm contemplating just posting our launch page on HN and hoping for a decent amount of votes, but that doesn't solve the funds issue.
Starbucks Bootstrap, anyone?
Berners-Lee: Don't let record labels upset web openness
It's only a matter of time before Facebook colonizes the moon :P
How A Reddit User’s Post Made Him A Hollywood Screenwriter
I read the link and thought exactly the same thing. I'm patiently waiting. Although my father does have a green card, maybe I can get a bank account under his name. :)
dotCloud (not affiliated) might fit your needs. You can run various mixed stacks on one platform and as far as I remember from testing it they leave you more freedom than e.g. Heroku. Only drawback is the pricing which in your case would be at least 99 USD pm.
And by the way, we happen to be a python shop and encourage all ep.io refugees to give dotCloud a try!
My first take on this, more to come.

http://flexibilityenvelope.com/barobo-launches-the-mobot-a-l...
Off topic question, but you seem like a long time Kindle user, did you ever have screen problems with it? Mine is just two months old, and its screen half-froze and I can only read half of the documents. I googled this around and it looks like its a frequent hardware problem people face.