skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bootstrapping --length, effort 
Startup gurus,

I am one of those very resilient (call me obsessed and passionate (sometimes insane would also do)) first time startup fellow trying to make world more secure on cyber space.

Situation: No external funding, 2 patents issued, one website launched, some letters of intents from some institutions, but no major progress as we are going thru a long sales cycle, core product finished but needs feature enhancements.

Got a "psuedo certificate" from a big-player CTO that we are a disruptive solution, but might take longer to get traction as it involves user behavior change.

Not much of marketing, as we should do. But due to severely capital-crunch we are slowly but steadily dragging on with whatever we could.

Personally have been on without major pay for a few years, and now I am feeling the pinch of bootstrapping and planning to take up a full-time and continue to bootstrap, as we now have IP.

We offered to license our tech, but a few major corporations are on the wait and watch list.

So we had this website launched (out of frustration from conservativeness of a particular industry we had been trying to market) to make users aware and at the same time acting as a showcase for our core product.

My qs:
a) What is a typical bootstrapping time for a startup, that is in a lucrative but overcrowded market?

b) What are some of the best ways to market on a shoe-string budget? Planning to go to youtube, any thoughts on this?

c) Any crowd source fund/site for hi-tech startups?
Makes me wonder, imagine Minecraft with Lego IP.
How to print Number Triangle using Java...
Really great Idea! But where can people find the site which you have mentioned on the video?
http://www.bufferbox.com/
"I see your point - this guy wrote some nice code that didn't consider "the future". I'd suggest that in a well-rounded team, there should've been a number of people who he either paired with (if you believe in that sort of thing) or code-reviewed his work that should've caught that, right? You implied that would've fixed it but never happened... That's interesting."

But but but.... YAGNI. There's a constant struggle between building something that might (or perhaps even 'probably will') be needed in the future vs getting something out on deadline now. And had the guy in question built stuff to be configurable and extendable for future work, but constantly missed deadlines, he'd probably have been regarded much differently. Even when those configurability issues are found to be of much use later on, I've found that it's often not valued enough at the time it's built that way.
Thanks. I didn't know about them and must check them out.

But now that I think about it again, I think I was a little harsh. There are plenty of good news sites about Open Source software and community.
ECN Forex Trading Platforms
You probably know you should do this, but how many of you don't do this?
Too bad it doesn't work the same for lotteries
The eero programming language - a dialect of Objective-C
Nginx design details
I'm sure our handy friends in Africa will find a way to pry even Retina MacBooks apart with their bare hands.
There are also other problems such as nesting functions inside other functions inside other functions which is IMO much harder to maintain than a clean flat list of functions defined in the prototype. Don't even get me started on using "self", "that" or "me" instead of the built-in keyword "this".

It could be just me but I cannot understand how that was/is/has been acceptable at all in the first place. Doesn't functions nested 11 levels deep (true story) ring any alarm bells for people?
Aside from e-waste, "Apple is knowingly letting children be exposed to toxic materials" was established with the iPhone screen cleaning story, where hexyl hydride, which evaporates faster than alcohol but is extremely toxic, had to be used to shave mere seconds off the assembly line speed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/07/chinese-workers-...

The Apple factories are notorious for hiring underage workers.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-20032074-247.html

These findings have been covered in Apple's shareholder report, so it's not like they can be contested.

http://education-for-solidarity.blogspot.com/2012/01/apple-r...

> Apple found more than 91 children working at its suppliers last year, nine times as many as the previous year, according to its annual report on its manufacturers.

> The US company has also acknowledged for the first time that 137 workers were poisoned at a Chinese firm making its products and said less than a third of the facilities it audited were complying with its code on working hours.
There is a reason many people still use Firefox 3.x and it not's just for legacy or development reasons.

I cannot stress smacktoward's astute post enough.
Could Louis C.K. Make His TV Show Using The Direct-To-Fan Model?
Unconsidered: The things we never think about.
Is there a PC maker that gives you such a guarantee?
Nokia Asha 306 Features And Price
Same way you deploy large distributed systems - replace tiny sections, test, and progressively move across like a virus, slowly assimilating the previous version (your neurons). Once you get 100% replacement - you are uploaded, and you are technically separate from your body.

To be clear - this is merely theoretical - which is a fancy way of stating that all this singularity stuff is still pure fiction (at least for the time being).
I'm leaning towards thinking firms probably should have offices, and that most people should be in the office at least part of the time. But I would take a pretty laissez-faire approach towards it, I think. Provide offices, but give people fairly unlimited freedom to work remotely or come into the office as they see fit.

That sounds like a good idea.

I'd maybe consider running some experiments too. See what happens when you have everybody work in the office for a month. See what happens if you have everybody working remotely for a month. I've had clients try things like that and be surprised by the results.
Sadly, there is a substantial market for helping companies pretend to acquire fashionable trait X without making any of the substantial changes that would require.

I was involved in "Agile" before the term had been coined, and there was a ton of meat there. But year by year the substance was leached away, until most of the consulting money was in, as you say, adopting symptoms. In talking with manufacturing people, the same thing happened with Lean Manufacturing. And I see it starting to happen with the Lean Startup thing. It kills me.

I originally thought this was driven by cynical assholes. Which I could have solved as soon as I figured out how to dispose of the bodies. But the problem is worse: it's all well-meaning people who just aren't paying enough attention to what's really going on.
thanks for the pointer to alot. as a vi guy i could not really get used to notmuch (too much emacs :D) so nice that you pointed me to them.
Test flight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgHSaNtAMjs

Cool folding prop (but scary - if it doesn't unfold properly, it could make quite a mess).

FWIIW, it is really a flying motorcycle, not a flying car. Three wheeled vehicles (in the USA) are licensed as motorcycles and have hugely lower regulatory (especially safety) requirements.
But Google Apps has been around since 2006. They only added 24/7 phone support last year.

Google has no credibility regarding customer service, both online and by phone.
I think you are right about this. In fact I would say it is likely a major issue in LL not getting a much larger user base.

There are a couple big problems with LL's clients.

The first one is that while they are LGPL the range of supported hardware, particularly on Linux, is vanishingly small. This means for most systems, it might work or it might not. If you ask for help you get a reply like "your video card is not supported. Sorry."

Again, it might work and on Windows it often does. On Linux it is another story. Often it works until such a point as there is a minor update and then framerates drop to maybe 0.5 to 2. Again, unless you have an nVidia or an ATI card, you are on your own.

The other, third party clients (many of which are open soruce) are often better in this regard. I have never found that sort of problem to occur with a third party client though some of them have stability issues on some platforms.

I think LL more or less figures that since there are enough other open source clients for their network they really only have to do enough to get people started, but often this doesn't work. So I think that the poor initial user experience may be a big factor here, where it is a factor.
I agree. Reading through the comments I see that many people say that every develop should be an architect. Although I agree that developers should be able to think in terms of the larger picture, in my experience, certain developers either have more experience or are more capable of seeing how things fit together.

Some developers are better at the micro, others at the macro, and ideally you'll have one or two that can do both well. Personally I think it is good to have somebody who can work across teams and software areas to keep track of the bigger picture.
SL has always been a exceedingly poor technology implementation of an ill defined objective. It's pretty much a failure and an oddity.

Korean MMO's do it better. You can have your x-rated chat with digital paper doll avatars that will look as sexy as your credit card can muster in the cash shop.

The fact that huge swaths of SL is outright advertising spam is another reason to avoid it.
What do you think of my startup's newly redesigned landing page?
Yes: those makers whose PCs are EPEAT-certified. EPEAT certification is designed to make the products economic to recycle.
Why do we see failure in a sustainable business that makes money.
There is something symbolic about something impractical and expensive becoming a symbol for practicality and frugality.

There was a recent post on HN about a startup in Seattle spending loads of time to build door desks, an apparent attempt to emulate Amazon. Perhaps purchasing ergonomic desks for a reasonable price and no time sink would be a better strategy than these clunkers.
Very interesting and true. At the end of the day everyone is human and fundamentals of human psychology will always shine through. Personally I think the important thing is to always know what your own requirements for happiness/contentment are - if you base your own happiness on other peoples position/status you will never be happy as there are always people doing better or working less or more lucky etc!
But then you didn't move, you copied.

So there would be 2 of you now?
With an emulator running on a Virtual Brain simulator hardware layer.
For those that are interested, there is something similar for Zurb's Foundation framework:

http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-tour-p...
Chineses Constroem de Raiz Cidade Periférica a Luanda
It looks great! and I can't restart tour once more. Keep watching the project :)
Homepage: http://sup.rubyforge.org/

Note: No built-in IMAP (use fetchmail). Uses Xapian for searching. Handles multiple SMTP servers well (unlike TBird)
In my situation POP3 works best. I only check email on 1 device, my desktop. Not my phone, not on other computers. I have 4 gmail accounts and 4 email inboxes from my .com domains. I NEVER use my web host's webmail interface. NOR do I want old email backed up into it. So I use POP3 to pull ALL of my emails out of those accounts. I don't like leaving my email with gmail either. I pull it out and it becomes mine. I own my email. I have my entire Thunderbird portable folder with ALL of my emails backed up constantly.

=== Security Wise ===

If anyone somehow breaks into ANY of my email accounts I still have access to all of my emails, they can't delete any emails, and they can't read any of my emails. With IMAP they can just look through old confirmation emails and see your username, go to that site, try to log in as you, click "I forgot my password", and have it sent through email, log in with the new reset password and change all your credentials to a new username, new password, & new email so you can never log back in. Effectively creating a massive mess for you to clean up. Email is the greatest failure point of your digital existence.

I've reached a point in my digital life when I realize how insecure I feel to have so much information all over the place with ANYONE in the world able to access it all just by knowing a password. With everyone claiming a stake to own my digital property I feel the best way to truly be in control of my own words is to pull my emails out completely and keep them locally. I want to own my words, I want to completely control where they are and on what hard drive they exist. It makes me happy.
I just built something very similar on top of bootstrap for my company two weeks ago. Even some of the methods and naming are the same! Oh well, we needed something slightly more customized and it only took a day or so to write.
Huh, how is that a guarantee? They probably still just throw it into a landfill.
Normally I use code like this to avoid polluting the global namespace -- you might as well throw your functions in there and they will be "private":

(function(){

})();
Agree 100%. In fact in 2010 I wrote a post titled:Cargo Cult startups on exactly this: http://blog.thinkst.com/2010/04/cargo-cult-startups.html
Point taken, if you have a plan B, why not.
Memory is seldom a constraint on the sorts of computers which run JS. The real WTF about that approach later on is just going to be that person.hasOwnProperty('Save') === true. As long as you can guarantee that you will never want to iterate over a person with a for/in loop, you should be pretty much fine.
Any. If the e-mail client is good enough, I'll run the required OS in a VM.
Unfortunately it doesn't look very good on my laptop - mbp retina, chrome. Suggest you try some cross browser test tools - take a look at http://browsershots.org/
Base Hits over Homeruns
The other replies address the nuance of your relationship with the person you handed you the ninja, but I think there's something more fundamental.

If you're happy at work and then you're generally having a good time and more inclined to do goofy stuff like this. If work sucks and you're stressed out then there's nothing more irritating than someone trying to paper over real problems with a hollow gesture like this.
Future scientific predictions have an extremely high rate of over-estimating based on treands of the time, and then missing the real big things that actually will matter in the future.

I won't spoil my mind assuming immortality is even a distant possibility.
That's a big question we don't have an answer for yet.
I use POP3 as a way of storing a local backup of my gmail emails.
Sounds penny-wise and pound-foolish. Works as lore, though.
That's what I got told when I visited my clairvoyant last week! What amazing predictive powers they have.
If VMware are going to run me, I'd probably end up dying due to the license fees...
I agree this stuff is far-fetched, but how do you benefit by telling yourself this is categorically impossible?
Hey. I became a Vice President. Still I am out of money.
too much amateurist
I'd rather die. That's a big thing to say but without motivation to do things before you die, humanity will descend into chaos.
While I do not disagree with you, implicit in your post is an assumption that humans can solve these NP-hard problems. More likely, most examples are either not NP-hard, the average case is easy, easily approximated or we simply don't do well in handling legal cases at all.

I would offer Strong AI-complete as a counter suggestion.
Yep and the RIAA will sue for the royalties on any songs your new copy might remember.
Kaggle is doing ML wrong. It has the opportunity to teach some people about these perils, this blog post being the beginning of such a realization, but I feel terrible for anyone with a hard problem who invests in a funded Kaggle competition.

Black box machine learning is unlikely to improve a meaningful metric beyond a stock SVM or random forest. It's possible to tune an algorithm to achieve arbitrarily good training set performance, of which you can include the small "test set" evaluation, but this does not make a generalizable, practical tool.

Opportunities might exist if you have the opportunity to feature engineer with domain expertise in order to keep improving your Bayes error. Kaggle is designed not to allow for this, though.
I think it's a bit premature to prognosticate consciousness transfer when we don't even have a good understanding (or even a definition) of what consciousness is.
What is the main difference between this and the original GPL ?

I'm not a lawyer so I ask here, why I would use GPL.next instead of GPL ?
All things considered, who really cares about the glass. Glass is not toxic. Throw it in a landfill. The batteries are what you want to get, that's where the nasty stuff is. And what kind of glue are we talking about? Something so strong that you can't pry it apart? Seems kind of unlikely, but I don't know. I'd imagine something more like a semi-flexible rubber cement.
Indeed: https://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Part2#Survey_of_co...
According to this [1] article, it is the best client after Thunderbird.

[1]: http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/best-lin...
Thanks sbuk, hadn't heard of Postbox before - I'll give it a go :)
"I don’t think a reasonable evidence-backed case can be made for your implication that Mac laptops are designed to be obsolete more quickly than, e.g., HP, Dell, or Toshiba laptops."

Just more obsolete than all the laptops that can be serviced and upgraded without the same restrictions.
I wouldn't go lumping all of the models from all of those makers and settling for a blanket statement like that because that reads false just by picking one model that passes the conditionals, just one per any given maker.

In the end it is a choice and some will try to sugar coat that choice with whatever makes them feel better about it.

But if you have to imagine a given brand tops the lot because you "don't think a reasonable evidence-backed case can be made", when it clearly can, that speaks lots about brand engadgement from your part as a customer and not much else to the merit of that brand, and stand for the ethics behind it.
Or you're a phone.
Why even look at these scoreboards?
I work for a small company (not a software/tech one) as a sysadmin and programmer and sometimes I feel almost ashamed of scripts or pieces of software because I know that they could be implemented much better or cleaner or this or that. I have some delusion that programmers working at other companies make better design decisions, better code, better tests, etc.

I love to read other programmer's battle stories! (I am currently reading "Coders at Work" and really enjoying it).

Thanks for sharing!
Ok I might have misunderstood you ;)
Well I'm not saying comments are generally bad. But I think a lot of comments can be replaced by better code :)
Solid examples I can't really show you atm (I'm not yet there where I'd say from myself that I write the cleanest code ever) ;)
I don't see any connection between punching game and being woman. Seriously. And I saw thousands of such games before. Except most of them were about punching males.

Well, not all of them featured bruises and injuries though, but it's just a question of quality.

I think it's much easier to make a punching game with these features now than several years ago.

And here are some examples:
http://www.arcadecabin.com/play/punch_the_president.html
http://www.urban75.com/Punch/gates.html
World Population Day 2012 Pictures, Images & Pics
Well, for me, I love developing for iOS. The development tools are just awesome. They've made real effort to make it simple and fun (compare that with other Environments).

Regarding making money, I do make some money from the apps (not enough to replace my day job), but that's the case for any other thing you pick up. There will be competition everywhere.
Its cool if the manager means it when he says - take this ninja and take pictures and do fun things and MEANS it

Its NOT cool if the manager gives you this stuffed toy because someone else told him it would be a good idea and its the new corporate direction

In short, the gesture is meaningless irrespective of who it comes from unless the person means it and its in keeping with his/ her character. i.e. not FAKED or FORCED

The line between cool and douche is driven largely by intentions (being in character v/s being manipulative)

Hope this helps
What deters someone from lying and saying the call was a waste of time (thus collecting the bond) when it really wasn't?
The day-to-day performance of Mail.app is orders of magnitude slower than Gmail. Loading a thread with 100 replies in Mail will take several seconds. The same thread in Gmail will load in milliseconds.
Editor in chief, The Next Web, France shares xkcd without attribution
Crowdfunding : http://www.indiegogo.com/yearofopensource
Article : http://yearofopensource.net/2012/07/04/year-of-open-source-p...
The thing is that it is not the barrier to entry of the bar that is creating the expense. It is instead the nature of the law itself. Perhaps the ethical issue here is not the fees that lawyers charge or the licensing process, but the fact that you need them at all in so many situations. The ethical issue is that there are too many laws.
You haven't answered the question, though: Why does the market continue to bear what you see as exorbitant rates? Consider that we have an oversupply of bar-certified lawyers, there is no conspiracy or collusion going on. What is preventing those unemployed graduates from entering your $250/hr market, charging $150/hr, and eating the other guys' lunches?
https://github.com/richardfontana/GPL.next/issues/13
Isn't an opportunity to grow in the mobile space? I don't like to use Second Life in "desktop mode" but when I am on "mobile chill out mode" it sounds perfect!
One relevant fact that's not mentioned in the story is how deeply SL can affect people. There's a significant portion that becomes obsessed with it to the point it takes precedence over their "real life"'s responsibilities.

I've read many a story of both "addicted" gamers and family members of gamers and some of them can be quite devastating.

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=second...
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal... unless, of course, we get hit by a solar flare, asteroid or some local disaster :-).

But seriously, we should create some redundancy or protection for our technological foundation before connecting to the Matrix...
Doesn't look very good on chrome. Even if you fixed the cross browser issues, it would look amateurish. I'm not trying to be rude, my websites tend to look amateurish at first go too. You might want to hire a designer for a redesign though.
I would be very surprised if the part of the brain responsible for motivation was so directly tied in with the part of the brain which is consciously aware that it will die.
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Great idea, but you need to spend some more time on the implementation. Especially the box was at least in my browser kind of a mess. You need clearer call to actions for your next.

Also I found it hard to orientate myself because of the stacatto moves between the steps. Perhaps some sort of animation with some easing would make it easier to follow.
Maybe. If you had bits of your brain replaced with identically functioning machinery, would you still be you?

What if you had your whole brain replaced piecemeal like that?

What about if you had a prosthetic thalamus or visual cortex?