skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have already been once where you are today. My simple suggestion would be to leave on a good note and go pursue something better. There are many more guys who are looking to join a startup and I am sure your bosses will get hold of someone else. Given the fact that your company does not actually server any active customer, 1 month of No-Development would not be of much harm to the company owners.
> My guess is German police offers don't care if a person has a tree branch, butterknife, [...]

I'm pretty sure policy is if the guy is holding a knife, you warn them and draw your gun.
Then if the guy comes at you you've got the possibility to fire to avoid injury or death.

While use of guns by the police is extremely scrutinized (it's often big in the news when it happens). The guns are a last resort in the really messy situations when there's no other way out. (And you have to prove that later on)
I'd say go before it's too late. Being there, done that. After 3 years I realized that the founders wouldn't change their M.O. And that was after writing 3 products, developing the team, deploying the thing. There are plenty of good start-ups to work. Take that lesson as lesson learned and move on.
I doubt he's working for the IT department; I'd assume he's working R&D. I'm sure he also received a letter welcoming him from HR but that doesn't mean he will be working in HR.
If that CTO guy is actually as well connected as you say he is, they will not fail because of lack of technical person. They will be able to find one immediately. At least don't worry about this problem.
It does not tell you anything about their rules of engagement, so how can you say it is completely reckless? I've seen my fair share of shoot-outs from the US, and if that is not reckless, than what is?

Coming from Norway i find the very notion that police carry guns very strange. I also feel less safe when I'm around guns, be that of police or just regular citizen.
Funny enough, I had a similar thought when I applied to eBay. The idea of working for the parent company of PayPal turned me off (I hadn't used my PayPal account in years after getting burned!)

However, since joining, I've met some amazing people (including Bill - He's a wicked smart, cool guy!) and seen some of the projects in the pipeline. The stuff they're working on is top-notch!

It may not be a "sexy" start up and PayPal's business practices may turn people off (I know first hand!) but at the end of the day, you'll be doing some cool stuff working with some amazing people (who know other amazing people and so on and so on...)

Personally, I'm ecstatic Crockford has joined the company!
I've worn a sysadmin hat for many years. You're not supposed to gamble, or take risks of any kind. You are supposed to make sure. To make absolutely sure.

The successful companies we hear about did not gamble, in my view.

There are plenty of ways we ought to take risks in business, but basic IT practice is not one of them.
As a young, overly-optimistic, bright-eyed developer, I'll share a lesson that sounds obvious, but somehow sometimes isn't:

It is not my job to prop up someone else's failing business model.

It's one thing to take a lower salary in exchange for equity because you really believe there's a shot at making a return. And it's OK to take a lower salary to work on really interesting problems. But you aren't a co-founder, you're an employee. You have no professional obligations beyond your 2 weeks' notice. In this world, you've gotta fight for your wealth, health, and goals, because nobody else will do it for you.

Good luck!
AIUI X on FreeBSD depends on HAL, X support for which is now deprecated? I haven't had any trouble yet, but I'm worried.
The above is an invalid comparison. A better, more objective measure is linear population density.

Miles of roads in Texas: 152,054 miles
Miles of roads in Finland: 65,617 miles ()

Population of Texas: 25,674,681
Population of Finland: 5,375,276

Linear population density of Texas: ~169 persons per miles of road
Linear population density of Finland: ~82 persons per miles of road

Ergo, it is cheaper per head to provide wireline telecommunications services in Texas than in Finland, when building out to the whole population, as the linear population density is higher in Texas and most, if not all, permanent residences and business are accessible by road.

Sources:
http://www.aaroads.com/texas/
http://www.stat.fi/tup/suomi90/lokakuu_en.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas

() This road mileage does not include private roads in Finland. Including these roads would further lower the linear population density of Finland, but these roads were excluded from the calculation as the majority of the private roads are access roads to non-permanent recidency second homes and timer or agriculture roads.
Move on. Quick.

Three non-tech founders, after 1yr no funding, patenting in early stage ... you are wasting time.

Don't worry about the personal relationship. Just stay polite, try to reason your leave, why you have to move on and that you stay available for smaller Q&A. They will try to convince you to stay and to sell the big dream (that's their job) and maybe subtly pressure you by not liking you anymore. But that would be another reason to move on.

Or: talk to those of the three you really like and (if your want to keep on working with them) define new rules: find a new idea to pursue, demand equal equity and setup a new company/legal entity with the desired ones.
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Cut your losses and move on. You will only have so many opportunities to play the startup game in life... and probably many less than you anticipate.

They may be very likeable and connected but they are not performing at their job. They need to be driving growth by bringing in revenue, leads, funding, etc. as well as strengthening the business by reducing vulnerabilities (like having only 1 person that knows the technicalities of the product). If they are screwed after you leave that is more their fault than it is yours - that is a lack of management foresight.

Just be straightforward but nice with them - you won't be burning any bridges.
Gangs. American gangs are fueled by uneducated population. Ignorance is so celebrated here, mixed with the attitude of entitlement, you get a lot of frustrated uneducated people when they realize that all the stories about getting rich and famous only apply to 0.0001% of the population.

This mentality is the major factor.
You learn best when you get 7.5+ hours of sleep.

I don't find that surprising at all.
Me neither. Over the years I have grown to passionately hate them. I wonder if they ever be able to turn around themselves.

Just recently this week they reminded me again of their incompentence.It seems they no longer allow Mass Payments for small businesses. Why is it so difficult to let users upload CSV with list of payments to be made? I guess they want their customers to suffer as much as possible, by doing payments one by one.
Thunderbolt on Windows gets hands-on, lacks Mac's hot-swapping
Chinese Researchers Quantum Teleport Photons Over 60 Miles
Start cultivating offers now. If your current pay checks are still clearing you don't have to move in great haste. If you get an attractive offer: be as professional as you can but move on; offer to work hourly, if you can muster it, and on board new employees / contractors. Give as much notice as you think is prudent considering your new employers. If you were still enthused my advice would be different; I've spent enough time in start-ups without direction to know how frustrating and exhausting it can be. Don't languish for the sake of a broken organisation, find a healthy one and move on. I sympathise with caring about the welfare of your current employers but you can't do their job and yours at the same time.
I have a different theory, having lived in both places. Police in America seem to be willing to escalate a confrontation or "chase" to almost any level in order to prevent a bad guy from getting away. Where I lived (near DC) a police officer stood in front of a car to prevent an unarmed teenager from leaving an IHOP without paying the bill, when the kids wouldn't stop, he shot up the car, killing a passenger(1).

Sometimes, when the offense is minor its OK to let the bad guy get away. Firing repeatedly at a moving vehicle in a crowded parking lot is never ok, even if someone might get away with murder.

Polizei seemed much more calmly methodical and much less cowboyish. I can't imagine this situation occurring in Germany.

(1)http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02...
I work in mining so I'm greatful to have found this and read it.

It baffles me, however, how could this ever make it on hacker news?
As far as recklessness go, 49 warning shots in one year is still a bit better than e.g "...another 90 shot at one fleeing unarmed man in Los Angeles."
The CTO is non-technical? How does that work?
During meetings, I always feel like a killjoy by attempting to be realistic ... about the brand new idea they come up with every other week and that I need to get started on right when the meeting ends.

I tire from that very thing, very quickly. I've worked with too many "idea" guys that always want to see 10 ideas started, vs. 1 completed and executed really well. Maybe they're trying to find that 1 great idea by trying out many, but a lot of times I see startups start one thing without finishing another. In the end, after XYZ time frame, the company really doesn't have 1 solid feature to show for it, only multiple half ass ones.

What's worse, at least from what I've experienced, is that a lot of those ideas or features are secondary, or tertiary, with regard to what the core product should really support.
Unreal.

It's especially brutal that people involved in tech believe they're changing ("improving") the world yet decide gender determines skill.

What really matters: the people without prejudice - who will hire/work with talented engineers regardless of gender or race - will have an advantage via a larger talent pool.
Google translate says "emergency decrees" for "Notverordnungen", which I would agree with. "Emergency law" is an ok but (to me) slightly confusing translation. I think a more common American English phrasing would be "abuse of emergency powers". ("Emergency powers" appears to be "Notverordnungsrecht".)
Judging by the details of the post I'd say it does not.
PYTHONNNNNNNN SUCKSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS, FUCK IT
I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't edit my post, if that's what you mean by "added."

I took the reference to Republican advocacy for "more self-reliance" as synonomous with Republican advocacy for less welfare. welfare == dole.

Although in actuality, almost all Republicans are RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), because almost all of them are altruists that advocate expanding the government/nanny state, just at a less rapid rate than Democrats. So "Republican" in this discussion may be a misnomer.

</rant>
Creativity isn’t a gift possessed by a lucky few, Jonah Lehrer says
As someone who tends to release on more-permissive licenses, I just want to clarify the causal model here.

It's not "doing something extra" to release with BSD; the "doing something extra" comes when you want to properly release with GNU.

After a long random walk over the licensing attitudes graph, I have found myself for the last several years stably located at one node. This node is, "licensing is about lawsuits." People often release with the GNU GPL because licensing, for them, is not about lawsuits but has some other import and use -- perhaps moral. But for me, a license is strictly about defining what sorts of lawsuits are possible.

Copyleft is a threat to sue. More precisely, it is the threat "I may sue you if you don't threaten to sue others." And that just sounds crazy. Why would you do that? Well, the stated goal of copyleft is to eliminate all fears of lawsuits by using legal threats.

Let me hasten to add that this is a very pretty idea. If you know the religions of India, this idea is called tantra -- that sometimes the most precise tool for removing a thorn is other thorns, or sometimes the best way to remove dirt from your clothes is with an abrasive substance -- like other (cleaner) dirt. The reason that Stallman is sometimes described as religious may come back to the attendant mysticism that tantric approaches usually bring with them.

My point is, this sort of thinking is an active choice and requires you to enforce the threat, at least in principle. The BSD license is much simpler: it says "I won't sue you, and you're not allowed to sue me." It is a Buddhist-nonviolence approach to eliminating lawsuits: "I have stopped causing suffering in this world, Angulimala -- now why don't you stop?"

It is nothing extra to release this way: you simply promise to not sue anyone, and you only give permission conditional on the fact that they will not sue you, you write it once and then it is done. It's clean and elegant. If you want to actually be a productive GPL licenser, you have to either hope that the threat in the docs is enough, or else find everybody who is "conveying" your software, and slap them with a lawsuit so that they learn how much lawsuits suck.
Since we're all echoing the same sentiments, I'll offer some concrete, smaller points:

>I wouldn't want them to tarnish my reputation as a young engineer completely new to the valley/startup world

You can join a more established "startup", with say, 100 or so employees, and build a track record there.

As for a "reason for leaving", you can simply tell them that you just can't make ends meet anymore. Money is almost always a credible motive, and is actually more amicable than say, "your product sucks and this ship is sinking, so I'm heading to a sexier pasture".

By the way, is it just me, or is the description of the CTO seem more appropriate for a BizDev Officer rather than a Technology Officer? I'd be deeply skeptical of a founding CTO who isn't involved in the product at all at such an early stage.
Not all mining is the same.

Copper / Gold mines tend to be extraction of a concentrated deposit by either open pit or tunnel, while there are exceptions they tend to be limited in surface area affected.

Mineral sands mining for rare earths is often akin to strip mining for large broad area coal seams - very large areas are turned over just to access a thin layer - where mineral sands occur beneath old growth forest it's often the case that the entire forest would have to be removed, as opposed to a gold mine that might simply tunnel beneath.

Other techniques of note include uranium leach mines where a well head pumps fluid underground and other well heads extract dissolved salts, this leads to relatively small amounts of surface disturbance, and (for the hell of it) marine based alluvial diamond dredging - performed by barges across deposits from current or ancient river mouths. Again, not a lot of surface disruption.

The extraction of a billion dollar lead/zinc deposit two thirds of the way up a mountain in Greenland will be very different to any usual rare earth extraction.

Greenland Deposit :: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvUol1aS8UA
First of all, German police statistics underestimate weapon use a bit (though not horribly much, so we're not talking about order-of-magnitude errors here). The gist of the article is correct, as far as I know, in that German police officers use guns far less than American ones (though still more than the UK police, where -- with few exceptions -- the police does not carry guns at all).

As far as I know, it's primarily a matter of policy. Gun use is the ultima ratio, only to be used when other means are insufficient. Constitutionally, this is a reflection of the principle of proportionality [1] in conjunction with article 1 and 2 of the German constitution. This means that police officers are required by law to use the least intrusive means available to stop a crime and not use disproportionate means (obviously, with due regard to the difficulty involved when making split-second decisions or judgements based on incomplete and insufficient information).

On a practical level, this is ensured by two mechanisms. Firstly, these principles are part of the firearms training for police officers. Secondly, each gun use by a police officer in the course of his or her duty automatically triggers a criminal investigation (even if it is obvious self-defense). This adds a high inconvenience factor even for justified uses that discourages casual shooting. (In 1993, allegations that a GSG-9 member had executed the terrorist Wolfgang Grams [2] nearly led to the dissolution of the GSG-9 and, along with the botched execution of the raid, caused the resignation of the Minister of the Interior.)

[1] http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/3907/1/1458-1702-1-SM.pdf

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Grams
I also think that criminals have a different attitude towards warning shots knowing that the police (almost) never fire shots.
Open Source Semiconductor Core Licensing → GPL hardware?
Technology.

China currently has a massive grip on rare earth production, ergo a massive influence on the future of iPods & mobile widgets. Without alternative mines the bulk of technology production in the world that's centred about rare earth usage will migrate to China for the costs breaks ...
An explanation for geeks: why Google hasn't won anything against the Java APIs
you probably didn't want the "& FG" part, as it would go to the screen and run "in the foreground", e.g., make you wait. but anyway, as other people have said, it aims at providing an object oriented replacement for shell scripts, etc.
If the US police isn't allowed to do reckless things, where are all those car chases I can see on TV filmed?

I would think those would endanger bystanders much more than shots fired into the air (which might only kill you if you are really, really, unlucky, as in 'having a weak skull and watching up, getting the bullet in an eye socket' or so.
Well, Dell is getting plenty of PR out of this, so congrats to the people who hired the Danish version of Andrew 'Dice' Clay.

Little miss muffet, sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider, who sat down beside her, and said, "What are all these bitches doing in Information Technology!" Eyyyyy!
Well, Dell is getting plenty of PR out of this, so congrats to the people who hired the Danish version of Andrew 'Dice' Clay.

Little miss muffet, sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider, who sat down beside her, and said, "What are all these bitches doing in Information Technology! Eyyyyy!"
&FG and &BG are just shell-ish shortcuts. you can always use .popen() or .run()
Dustin Moskovitz: “I Couldn’t Imagine Moving to Optimize for Taxes”
New Nokia Developer Music Video Proves Brogramming Is Alive and Well
Well, one of the reasons why I wrote the REPL was to learn CoffeeScript. However, I soon realized my JavaScript knowledge was lacking, so I decided to write the REPL in JavaScript to learn/practice.

Porting the REPL to CoffeeScript will be Phase 2.
Warning shots are part of the procedure.

If a german officer wants to use his firearm, he has to warn the other party either verbally or ideally with a warning shot, if time permits and if no immediate threat exists to the officer himself or other persons.
Find a new place. And either move on, or try renegotiating your position at your current company. This post might help: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2949323
It's appreciable that you have this loyalty towards the founders. However your first loyalty is to yourself and to your interests.

Communicate with them, tell them why you think things aren't working, and propose ways the startup can make improvements.

If you encounter too much inertia and you know things aren't going to get better, find yourself something better to do.
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Yahoo may be losing users on some of their have-been web services, but to say that the developer culture is one of the worst is the funniest thing I ever heard. Yahoo is doing more for developers than almost any company out there. Ever heard of YUI or Mojito? How about YQL, Hadoop, or YSlow? With so much open source effort on their part, and the enormous success of some of those mentioned, I don't really see how Yahoo is a "cultural" step down from PayPal, especially when talking Javascript.
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From what I'm reading, this poster is the 'real' CTO so to speak.
Cold calling versus Google Adwords
Most US police agencies these days do not engage in high speed pursuits for non-felony suspects. Chasing a murder suspect may be dangerous but so is letting one escape.

Warnings shots fired in public are virtually always reckless.

And no where did I claim or imply that US police never engage in reckless behavior.
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In the long term we can hope for this. But simple logistics say it'll be decades at least before we on Earth will possible see benefit. Potentially only when the upper crust's resources start to draw thin will it really kick in, based on what I reckon about the prices of returning materials in bulk.
Thanks, all good points. I guess it's just hard to remember that it doesn't really matter in the long run.
Perhaps your decision to leave will be easier if you realize that if they needed to let you go, for whatever reason, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Not out of malice, and perhaps not without regret, but as a rational business decision.
Because there's no safe way to fire a warning shot in a public space. Firing a weapon without a proper backstop is always extremely dangerous and should be a last resort.

Also, I seriously doubt you would feel less safe in an FBI office than a ghetto in London. One is full of guns, the other is full of danger.
The problem is that there's simply no way to safely fire a gun in a confined public area. If you look at what it takes to make a gun range safe you'll see why. You need a large non-ricocheting backstop to be safe.
Wow - I thought I'd heard about this deal from every angle over the last few weeks since the deal, but for some reason I hadn't heard or considered your point about the AH connection.

Really interesting point.
The IT Department welcome's you to eBay, Inc.;
Nasa trains astronauts for asteroid mission
You may like them, and they may be the nicest people on earth but that will not make you happy at work, make you successful or provide for your children.

You may want to try to bring some common sense in as a last try, but a year and no users or revenue is a major warning.

Out of 4 people only one can code...not a good thing, at all.
Did you also develop this in Node?
As far as I'm aware though, disarming someone with a knife is relatively easy if you're highly trained and armoured, and they are literally "coming at you," ie. you have plenty of notice.

It all comes down to the value of human life: how much personal effort and risk are you willing to go to in order to protect a murderous criminal? Should you chance a little light judo to make him drop the blade? Or should you just put a cap through his eye socket and go to lunch?

I know which category I'm more willing to be policed by.
Do you mean "can't go without"?

Except for your second sentence you are praising StackOverflow.
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Did you write some blog post about how you build this? Looks quite interesting and speedy!
I think you're right. It's a common trope in German crime shows on TV to see the police chase a dangerous criminal on foot with their gun drawn and then watch in frustration as they get away - but not shoot at them.

> Sometimes, when the offense is minor its OK to let the bad guy get away.

Especially since, with a bit of methodical work, you usually have a good chance of catching them later.
Totally agree. That was the point I was trying to make.