skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>it's very tough to evaluate the credibility of
>a "business" co-founder until he's achieved success.

That's not at all true. It may be very tough for a technical person to evaluate a "business" co-founder, but it isn't any tougher than the reverse. I have both an MSEE and an MBA and I have both business and technical roles as a co-founder of a mid-sized, venture-funded firm, so I consider myself a decent judge of this. Whether business or technology, smart folks stand out like blinking red lights because they exhibit a sharp enthusiasm for their domain, have the ability to quickly get to the core issues and see possibility and solutions where others see or search-for complexity.

> Another viewpoint is that the valuation of
>businesspeople carries with it a much higher risk multiplier.

Then you've never worked with a mediocre tech team. The amount of damage that a not-good tech person can do can be remarkable. In particular, the damage is often invisible and can persist for years. A small sloppy commit at the start of a project can produce a bull-whip-effect 2 years later... "Business" people can do this, too, but it's been my experience that the damage they do is more quickly identified and contained. Anything a business person is doing that is large-ish will have lots of eyes on it and anything small is usually pretty minor to the business.
The title of this submission is confusing. The readme headline is better: "Byte-wise matching for Node.JS"
The key phrase here is "one of the best enterprise sales people in North America"...In addition, he understood the software enough to write the specs, AND raised money. Does not sound at all like the so-called business/ideas people in the original post.
How do you give business owners an incentive to pay more to the government than they already do?
This article is great and provides some awesome insight from someone who clearly has been down this road before. It couldn't have come at a better time for me. I was just about to implement my own manager today, but I'll take this much cleaner approach.

Thanks!
For us yankees that exist on the "coasts", anywhere outside of NYC, SF, and LA are foreign lands, and somewhere like NC may as well be the moon.

That is a bit unfair, but unsurprising. People choose to work where they want to live, and they'll work with the people they're most familiar with and understand, in the environment around them.
“For the 100 employees we have in France, we have 10
employee representatives, for whom we have to organize
weekly meetings even when there is nothing to discuss,”
Haan says. “Every time a social security contribution
changes, which is frequently, we have to update software
and send our HR people for training. We can’t fire anyone
without exorbitant costs.”

Instead of viewing the weekly meetings as a chance to touch base with his employees, learn about them, pick their brains for ways to improve the business, and the like ... he whines about the requirement to have the once-a-week meetings.

Then, he complains about having to tweak their payroll/withholding software and send the HR folks for training.

He must shed actual tears when regulatory agencies in the countries he sells his products into change the requirements that affect the design and source materials so that he has to have them tweaked or even redesigned from the ground up.

Sociopathy in management/leadership is a very real problem.
The article starts by saying

The problems of monopolies arising through network effects, and the negative effects of the lock-in that results, are familiar enough.

But then it goes on to talk about the problems of a monopoly that was created not by network effects, but because of governmental dictate.

The lesson here ought to be that government ought not to be so heavy-handed, because it can't change its own regulations quickly enough to address the naturally-changing business and technological environment.
LTE’s future: A scramble for spectrum, and creative data caps
> I've used the IEVMs project on github to install these VMs before

I don't know about that, downloaded them straight from Microsoft's website.

> Obviously the problem here is that IE9 represents 25% of the currently in-use IE browsers

Note that IE9 can be switched to IE8's engine (there are differences with the official IE8 but not that much, so most of the rough work can be done with IE9's devtools even using the IE8 engine).

> IE9 has a ways to go before it's new amazing developer tools are valued significantly.

I did not say IE9's devtools were "amazing", because they are not (unless your only comparison basis is IE6 devtools or pre-firebug Firefox devtools that is). But they are significantly better than IE8's (let alone 6/7)
Another metric for success is reach. For an artist, how many people actually saw your work and judged it is very important.
MugglesCheck out the amazon.com homepage 
Hogwarts express ticket on Jeff Bezos!
I had RSI to the point I could not longer work, happily I am now pretty much back to full health. What really helped for me was:

Take a week off, no computing (actually I had no choice)
Physiotherapy for a month (once per week)
3M ergonomic mouse (it looks like a joystick)
Being conscious of my body position, when working its easy to get in to a tense position to ease the pain.
Stretching, having break to walk about
Exercise
Not using Apple keyboard or mouse, the Microsoft Ergo split keyboard is great, if only they did a small form version.
Switching to Vim text editor (no mouse).
Setting my Mac clock to speak the time every hour (so I know when to take a rest).
The book, "Its not carpal tunnel syndrome", it talks about identifying the root causes not just addressing the symptoms.
A herman miller chain, pretty expensive.
Work less, 9-5, no evening or weekend work.

- Kris (teamcoding.com)
It is possible for C programs to update themselves with zero downtime. See nginx[1], "Upgrading Executable on the Fly". The trick is that fork()'ed processes (can) inherit open sockets from their parent, even after exec()'ing a new binary. This seems a bit delicate and involves some communication during the hand-off from the old to the new, but it does work. It's also possible to kill the "new" if there were any problems and instruct the "old" to take over again.

This is not to take anything away from Erlang, which is a very interesting system.

[1] http://www.nginx.org/en/docs/control.html
How to make your customers feel safe
Man, I was expecting something crap (that's usually what happens when someone asks for "please critique $x")

It's very well done. There's a bit of an issue with the aliasing on the top of the checkmark, and I would make the left stroke of the V slightly larger (it looks slightly smaller than the other side of the V, which is jarring), but other than that it's simple, recognizable, portable into different media, and will age well.
Exceptions are indeed not the silver bullet to error handling. Handling errors upstream can be useful as catch-all, but when the entire stack has been unwound, it can be hard to recover the error usefully. Also it is hard to make a sensible inheritance hierarchy, and every library chooses its own, generating a forest of different-but-equivalent exceptions to handle.

A fully-fledged condition system (like Smalltalk, CL) would allow for a lot of scenarios where exceptions currently give trouble. They would allow recovering the problem where it happens, retrying operations, and so on. Too bad so few languages have that.

However I don't think the right solution is to use an even more primitive language. C seems simple, but you end up doing everything yourself that would otherwise be done by the compiler, which is a lot more work, bug-prone, makes the code verbose, and generally inconsistent (unless you're very disciplined; forget about it in a team).
I agree, this is just a rant on C++.

Coming from Java world, I can tell that it is nice being able to raise exceptions from the constructor.

However, switching from C++ to C is absurd. C++ is (mostly) a super set of C. Whatever you want to do in C, in C++ is also possible.

If there are some C++ features (exceptions, classes, contructors, etc.) that are making his coding task more complicated, he should simply stop using those features and refactor his code.
> I'll put in the time to boot into a Windows partition and double-check IE9, but when it comes to OS X/Safari, I've got little recourse but to crossing my fingers and bank on Safari's Webkit rendering being the same as (or close enough to) Chrome in Windows and Chromium in Linux.

Might want to try the Windows version of Safari then. The JS engines in Chrome and Safari have some quirks between them and can behave differently in some scenarios, mostly things that JSLint would catch though.
I'd argue that in the short term, everyone is replaceable when the company is profitable. Most companies that are bought have their founders leave even if the product keeps going.

Though of course in the long term without the innovators the company loses relevance (Flickr, Delicious, MySpace etc.).
I'd lease it. 50% split until the 480k is paid off, or the site dies.
Using a laptop is what started my RSI off in the first place. I would suggest at least plugging a proper ego keyboard in to it.
We basically have 2 approaches to this problem.

When people have existing data with some structure, they can easily convert this into a semantic Silk site. This can be done using various importer tools (such as our CSV importer) and via the read/write API.

When people are creating new content, we're trying to make it as easy as possible to add semantics/tags. It's as easy as making your text bold and we try to provide instant value to users who tag their content, thereby encouraging them to keep doing so. Some things we do are:
- converting currencies
- showing how long ago a date was
- displaying a map for locations
- showing how data relates to other data (tagging the age of a person, will show a list of how old other people in the site are)

So, if you have unstructured data and are looking for one quick answer, Silk may not be the right tool to use. When the data has some structure already, you can easily convert it into a Silk site and then enjoy some Silk magic. But ideally, you use Silk to make some specific content available in a structured manner, so you can use it for a longer period of time.
There is a naivete here that thinks geographic distance means the economies of disparate locales are disconnected. As the center of the startup scene, that few square miles in California will set the pace for the nation as a whole.
I really don't understand the over fixation on Silicon Valley. I lived there for awhile. Its got high population density is full of a lot of fake people (people who are happy to "help" your startup for just a taste of the equity), fake investors, and an extraordinary amount of noise. I'm sure there are many people who love it for the same reasons that high pressure finance types love new york city.

But this seems anathema to building a good startup- where you need some isolation some time to focus and to keep a broad and rational perspective, not to be high on each others fumes.

Plus, the bay area is very expensive, it attracts engineers who are more likely to jump to the next hot startup, its hard to find good office space, etc.

It isn't like you can't get broadband everywhere.

And I think people really misunderestimate the importance of good engineers who stick around. Turnover means critical knowledge is walking out the door.

This makes bumfuck Ohio[1] a better place if retaining talent is important. The idea that only Stanford educated engineers are good enough to work at startups is silly. (my experience- finding the best engineers is not correlated with ivy league degrees.)

Bumfuck Ohio may not have the cool meet ups that SV has, but it doesn't have the two orders of magnitude more distractions that SV has as well. Nor does it have the jealousy driven culture where every 4th person has an overpriced show off car, etc.

The reason everyone focuses on the Valley? People are focused on venture capital, not building profitable businesses. Venture capital lives in the valley because for a lot of these VC firms a 90 minute flight to Seattle for a board meeting is just too much effort.

That's it.

[1] Nothing against Ohio, never been there, just picking it for an example.
I think you really misunderstand this.

I did work as a junior mechanical engineer in both French and Eastern European manufacturing plants, small and large. In my experience, labor is equally or even better skilled in Eastern European countries than in France. Since we're talking about trained workers, not qualified professionals, productivity is much rather a function of the skills of the management than the skills of the workers. Generally, small ateliers is France can be more productive than the large factories of companies such as PSA Peugeot Citroën. I have noticed no such correlation in Eastern European factories.
CitiBank Shells Out $41M to Sponsor NYC’s Bike Share Program
Computers are physical machines that obey the laws of physics. Flipping bits at a lower microcontroller level can be observed as literally directing electrons to travel to specific chip pins.

With unit tests and behavioral tests, we can assume basic assurances on individual components working as a whole.

Engineering also has good design principles. One does not make gear teeth perfectly angular (take a look at the Antikythera Mechanism) because it can lead to premature wear and will have poor performance. In fact, there are hundreds if not thousands of kinds of gear teeth, and interchanging them within the same application can have all kinds of long lasting effects. Take a look into any vehicle recall in the past 2 decades and see that nearly every one of them is an edge case bug that slipped by Q&A.

Not accounting for the string null being valid is a bad design principle within the domain of software. Just as using Frozen water as a bearing surface in high speed rotational machines (Hey! It's hard and slippery! It's perfect!) is a stupid mistake, not accounting for valid "Bob Null"s will also lead to premature failure if not for the database but for the business.

We've only been at software engineering for less than a hundred years. We've been at mechanical engineering for a good 2000 (see the aforementioned Antikythera). We might need a few more years to iron out best practices as an industry.
Yeah, noticed that. Personally hate having to download to get the content, and even though I've tried several times I couldnt get it to work on my ipad or iphone.

Love the agressive user acq strategy, just wondering if its working
Yeah, just don't use virtual methods or constructors on classes and his second complaint pretty much goes away. And you get a syntax and amenities that are still way nicer than C.
I actually spent fifteen minutes or so going back and forth on that. My old cell phone had one, perhaps for style, yet my new phone doesn't. And I was thinking a lot about that bizarre V-shaped TV antenna, too. ^_^
This Inflatable Boot Camp Would Make the Draft Obsolete [Inflatable]
Cheers Paul, nice of you to say :)

I remember reading somewhere on HN once that if you can get a business co-founder who enables you to spend almost all of your time focusing on development, that's extremely rare. As you pointed out, there is a metric ton of non-coding work that goes into establishing any kind of viable business.

Back to the article, what really ruffled my feathers about the article was how it applied a set of awful behaviours and mindsets uniformly to all business co-founders.

Whats most concerning, is if you adapt those mindsets in talking with potential partners/co-founders, you will simply confuse the naive ones, and drive away all the good ones - including the person that would have made a perfect partner for you.
Anything, from liquid water to the human body, is now a potential touch screen
Cabs already stream ads once the meter starts in many cities, so that's not new, nor is fare sharing - New York has had it for decades.

I'm sure any driverless cab would have the ability to ask to get out, but technically one might argue you're kidnapping someone as soon as you take them off the route they requested for any reason, if if there's an "opt-out"... at the level of an individual cab ride and human driver it's moot, but if you're operating a fleet of thousands of cabs, doing that over millions of rides, it could easily turn into a class-action suit.
Your blinders are industrial grade.

Developing for Windows is in fact a pleasure. MS have more love for their development community than you realise, and this is reflected in the tools and technology they provide. .Net is incredible. Really.

> IE 9 is only supported IN WINDOWS 7

Supporting WebKit in iOS requires me to BUY AN IPAD just to test properly! Supporting WebKit on Android requires me to buy an Android phone just to test properly! Your argument is invalid.

> Now... ITS 20-fucking-12 and windows still has the biggest piece of absolute shit terminal tool possible

The actual console window annoys me, I'll grant you that, but only in terms of fixed width and columns. PowerShell, the current standard shell for modern Windows version is really powerful. Get with the times.

> Developing on windows means piece of garbage hardware, shitty laptops till maybe a few months ago, who still cant fucking get touchpads right

Ummm... blame the manufacturers? Microsoft doesn't own Asus, Acer, HP, or any of these other companies.

The topic is whether or not to support a particular major browser, not whether you prefer Windows as a development environment or working with budget hardware. I would suggest you step back from your frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of Microsoft and determine how up-to-date, relevant and accurate your information actually is.
Countries have military forces that can ensure the settlement of international disputes.
"I'm amazed that we're on the same wavelength - we've had to build very similar infrastructure for ourselves"

Right, we hear that quite a bit. A few comments:

- Here's our Backbone sync adapter:
https://github.com/Simperium/simperium/blob/master/javascrip...

- Dealing with subsets is a priority for us

- OT and versioning are generally helpful for managing changes/deltas

- We're using MongoDB for storage
Gijit just messed with every calendar event of mine, and spammed itself to my colleagues. :(
So I first tried this on mobile and that's where this interface because horrific. As my thumb slides over the number toward the top of the circle, I can't see what I've selected.
Always great to see examples of more complicated iOS apps.

Did you ever have a desktop side implementation, maybe a chrome extension? I'm a longtime 1Password user, and would have to say the ability to use the same password manager on my iPhone and Mac, sync'd via Dropbox, is a big reason for that.
So I first tried this on mobile and that's where this interface becomes horrific. As my thumb slides over the number toward the top of the circle, I can't see what I've selected.
>> So now why would I support IE?

Because you're not developing for yourself. You're developing for users.

Also, just because you're developing on browsers that exist on both platforms doesn't mean you're supporting all operating systems. If you tested on any WinOS you'd understand that.
Wait, what's wrong with:

class Todo(models.Model):
content = models.CharField(max_length=100)
# other fields go here..

@classmethod
def incomplete(cls):
return cls.objects.filter(is_done=False)

@classmethod
def high_priority(cls):
return cls.objects.filter(priority=1)
Please don't post 3 separate root comments replying to the same story, making it look like there's a lot of people agreeing with you when there are not.

Instead, edit your comment to add updates.
Don't confuse "best" with "traditionally used". I've always found OS X to have much better support for internationalization than Windows ever has, but it's non-traditional.
There are better ways to establish a social safety net than forcing companies to employ workers they don't want or need.

Look at the results of the law--not the intentions. The article says France has 2.4 times as many companies with 49 employees than with 50. This labor code is preventing companies from expanding, and encouraging companies to create new jobs in other countries rather than in France.
The effect it is having is to protect existing jobs at the expense of new ones, and is an overall net drain on the economy.

If they, as a society, have decided they want a social safety net, why not work on something like a guaranteed minimum income or a negative income tax system instead? Give them the money directly so the costs are transparent instead of this roundabout regulatory nonsense.
> I prefer Chrome myself, but supporting IE9 really isn't that hard, and suggesting otherwise is FUD.

This.
From that story he sounds the total opposite of the OP's complaints.

The pitch would have been, Hi I am a successful Sales exec with millions of dollars of yearly sales under my belt, I've hired 6 guys and am looking for a 7th to develop this new software I have an idea for, I have got x million in VC already and by the way once you are settled and running through the VC cash, I'm going to Cancun to recharge my batteries before coming back and selling the heck out of what you guys build.

Hell, I would be very happy to get on the ground floor of that one.
https://www.hpcloud.com Click on Products, then on compute or CDN, etc. and then on pricing ...
The emotional story of Reddit's start & sale
To me, it seems like a decent structure, and I wish that the US had something similar. As the article says, there's nothing stopping the business owner from starting multiple 49-person companies. Therefore, the system isn't technically holding anyone back. It's just slowing down their greed and consolidation of resources, which is a good thing.

There's also nothing stopping the companies from outsourcing non-core work to other 49-person companies. Seems like there's a lot of market opportunities that entrepreneurs aren't taking.
There are two problems with vegas: (1) it starves when competing with traditionally-aggressive TCP; and (2) earlier vegas flows can be outcompeted by later vegas flows, so it isn't fair when competing against itself. The problem is that the earlier flows can cause a queueing delay which is detected by the later flow as a larger base RTT; the earlier flows have self-tuned to back off above a smaller RTT, so they behave less aggressively than the later flows.
The hot trend for visionary types to do today is wax on about how kids these days only text and use Facebook between Netflix show. Everything else is just too difficult, supposedly.
You do realize that these things cost real money, right? Costing money for meaningless, valueless endeavors makes a business's overhead go up. When the overhead goes up, it has to be cut in other ways, usually by cutting employees. Unfortunately, that's difficult in France, which is why he is complaining. It's not sociopathy, it's business.