skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Some high-end lawyers we've worked with have practically fallen over themselves to offer advice in anticipation of a professional relationship."

Offering advice is completely different than them drawing up a few sample usable contracts for you to use without restriction, all as a taste of more possible work to come.

Why is it that some programmers think design is so easy? Designers that think programming is easy bug the shit out of me so the reverse is no less arrogant. The percentage breakdown is taken completely out of thin air or maybe only applies to mid-level designers with cookie cutter work.

Having said all that, I'm a designer that's actually not against crowdsourcing designs (I like crowdspring more than 99designs) because it's not the same as spec work. Rather than a one-on-one type of relationship without any transparency, basically a closed door job audition, the crowdsourcing sites allow designers to compete openly and showcase their talent, even if their work isn't selected. They can also reuse work that isn't selected for future projects, for design layouts at least (not so much for logos), and eat the whole buffalo as it were.
All the cheap hosting places suck. Dealing with the customer and the non-responsive $5 / mo hosting place takes more time and effort than just hosting it yourself.

If they are truly low traffic, just host them yourself on a business class connection. You can pack a lot of low traffic websites on one machine. Graphics will load slowly unless you pay for more bandwidth, and you have to do your own backups, of course. Have your customers buy the domain themselves, but then have them log into godaddy or whoever they used and do the setup yourself.

Should the business relationship end, they control the domain and can just point it somewhere else, and you can mail their backup to them on a CD, and thus not be accused of holding anything hostage.
Rails Podcast with Ryan Tomayko
Look, if I'm working at Facebook, I'll be ticked off if my week's work is "make a terms of service page." And if I'm Zuckerberg, I'll be ticked off if I'm paying somebody to do that.
I fundamentally believe in this idea of "manager as servant." The problem is, that the people who get promoted, don't.
I think a freelancer isn't an entrepreneur because your business doesn't work without you billing for your time.

If you have some other people working for your web development business and you can go to the Bahamas for 3 months without your business going down the toilet, then you're an entrepreneur.

But I think most people on HN will think of an entrepreneur as someone who builds a product that has its own value, and you can sell the product to multiple people to earn money.
Or generate repeated advertising revenue.

So I think entrepreneurship is creating something (a product or a service) that leverages your time so that you don't have to work some part of an hour for every dollar you earn.
Jsvi: vi in your browser
There is a lot of advice here, but the part about hiring seems to me by far the most important. Firstly, it's actionable - it sets a very specific guideline to follow. Secondly, it's crucial for the other things to work. If you don't hire the right people - those that are interested in building whatever you're building, no management voodoo will save you.

I have never found the traditional methods of hiring — resumés, interviews, quizzes — to be helpful at all. Instead, I look at two things: what someone has done and whether I enjoy spending time with them. The first shows not just their talent but also their ability to execute. If they haven't made something interesting, whether as a side project or at a previous job, then they’re probably not worth hiring. It's not that hard to sit down and accomplish something; be wary of people who haven't.

Similarly, you need to keep in mind that you're not just hiring a robot — you're hiring a flesh-and-blood human who you're going to need to spend a lot of time with during the day. That means they need to be someone you not just get along with, but enjoy being around. A formal interview, with all its stress and structure and contrivance, is a pretty bad environment for seeing if you like someone. Instead, just go get coffee and chat.

And also:

there are few things more fun than working hard with a really nice, talented group of people.
UnixShell in JavaScript
"TwittyPic acquired"
"Pet Holdings hires TwittyPic Developer"

Which headline is more truthful?
Which is more interesting?

I doubt the latter would make it to the top of HN since it doesn't jive with the startup mythos. Congrats to bemmu, but I doubt he is swimming in vaults full of gold coins. This was simply an aqu-hire.

There is some really good stuff in this article though:
"five million page views per day, with Huh predicting that the sites will top two billion page views this year."
"I asked Huh about the irony of an Internet company turning to stuffed animals and printed books for revenue."
"It gives you a little bit of sense of how hard it is to make money online using advertising,"

We should be talking about that.
I wonder how they managed to get to half a terabyte. Delicious's was smaller even for millions of users.
IMHO, the thing to consider is that anyone worth bringing in as the technical lead for a startup that's in as early a phase as your seems to be would ALSO be someone who's quite capable of starting their own startup. You need to be able to explain to your candidate why they should bust their butt without pay on your startup, instead of working on their own startup. As many others on this thread have pointed out, offering a full founder/CTO position should do it.
Amid all of the bad economic news, Huh believes people just want something fun to read or view.

Surely there's some economy to be created to fulfill that desire? Are microsubscription models really doomed?
I wish we could do opt-in non-anonymous polls as well. For example, this poll could be a tree structure and we could explode out the "Designer" node so I could see who my fellow design peeps were, let the subgroups flock together. The only equivalent right now would be to hold a different poll altogether - "who here is a designer?", "raise your hand if you're a designer?" - and those get pretty annoying quickly.
I don't like Icanhaz. They're almost as bad as Ebaumsworld. A lot of their content on their network of blogs--the ones not captioned with their tools, or even some of those captioned--are outright stolen. That happycat that they're now making plushies out of is also not their IP.
duplicate:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=483466
duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=483551
Adobe Connect is what we use
"I Would Like My Applications To Go..."
A salary. Lulz.
I'm uncertain as to how your comment is upmodded so much with statements like this:

'Students graduate in to a world where connections, wealth, accident of birth and not talent determine your success in life.'

This is clearly true everywhere in the world, and if you meant to say that this is MORE true in China, then you better rethink because there is far more opportunity there right now compared to most places in the world. Might I suggest a few reasons why you cannot higher the 'best' cs graduates:

The best will go where the money is, are you offering enough money? A lot will go overseas. Another good reason is CS is not where the money is at in China. You must also remember that IT is a new field in China, and not long ago a computer and the internet was a luxury, ditto for the education of CS.

I am a Chinese who moved to the Australia when I was 9, the education system here seemed to me like kindergarten at the start, it was just play all day and do nothing. This moved to Chinese primary school year 4 level at the start of high school.

Anyway, although I attended one of the top public schools (my year was very strong), it provides no where near the same rigor nor depth of education, and most importantly the majority of students here did not actually want to learn, which was probably the one thing I hated most about this system, nobody cared, what a waste of youth and talent.

Chinese students at the end of high school are amongst the most well educated in the world, not to mention the vast differences in education and life culture, which a lot of westerners are ignorant about.

The big fallacy of the Chinese education system is that its hard to get IN to a university, and once you're there you're pretty much assured graduation (or the mentality is there), this is perhaps the reverse of western society and needs to be fixed.
Yeah indeed... .5TB is huge for bookmarks (title, url, tags, description). I have never had the chance to build anything this big but if you imagine the amount of text you could fit in 500GB, it makes you wonder.

I gave a look at your comments and found this one which replies to my question perfectly (I didn't follow that thread, discovered it right now): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459000 -- thank you for sharing your experience!
Ask HN: how do you read code?
As a computer programmer, I've realized that one of the best way to improve myself is to read the code written by the masters of the art and try to emulate them. This is helped by the enormous amount of opensource code out there.

However, along the way, the very act of reading code has become a stumbling block in my journey.

I'm posting this because I want to get a perspective of how other programmers approach this problem. When faced with a huge chunk of code, how do you guys read it? do you read it line by line? do you guys put it into an IDE, look at the outline and simply jump into functions you are interested in?

Do you read through the "main" function first and then branch out to the utility functions or do the reverse where you read the utility functions and subroutines first and then figure out how they are put together?

please share with me some of the tips and tricks of code reading that you have discovered.
well why should another person get to keep your information when you are no longer using the site? Its just an excuse for FB to keep the data, because not having the missing comments etc won't be noticed anyways.
U.S. Food Policy: Evidence on declining fruit and vegetable nutrient composition
Working for a startup is a sucker's game. Even assuming it succeeds, with the amount of equity a typical employee holds and the size of an average buyout, the best-case scenario is that you'll emerge with a pittance after years of very long workdays. More likely you'll end up with nothing, and little professional respect for having spent years at a company few people have ever heard of. The odds are really only in your favor if you're a founder, not an employee.
That could be cool. Thanks
I fundamentally believe in this idea of "manager as servant."

I agree that "manager as a servant" is a good ideal, but not realistic, but for a different reason. It seems pretty obvious: "manager as a servant" clashes quite a bit with "manager decides who gets [fired|a bonus]", with "manager is usually older/more experienced", and also with "manager gets paid more".

The problem is, that the people who get promoted, don't.

Not in my experience. The place I work, the CTO (a non-coder for quite some time) gets it when it comes to being unassertive, taking all the blame, and none of the credit.
Magenta exists. But article is not useless. It is talking about perception of electromagnetic cocktail.

Check out this experiment: http://www.greatreality.com/Color2Color.htm

[related HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459970]
What would you consider a fair action on MS's part? In this scenario I'll consider it a given that you have traced the loss of all of your data to a bug that Microsoft agrees exists and did in fact destroy all of your data.
There's some potent irony in the fact that the no-spec site looks as horrendous as it does.
The experience you gain at a startup
can be pretty worthwhile, payout or no.
From the article:

Many of the discussions of the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question - ªYes, but how will we ever keep track of such a large project?º

What amazes me is that the LHC is older than the WWW. Wikipedia says construction was approved in 1995. I assume they'd been designing it much earlier than that.

I suppose physics isn't for the impatient.
I agree. One of our big financial clients has an automated tool to scrub such data, but then they have social security numbers as well as lots of other juicy financial data. So they're worried about all sorts of stuff that most of us never ponder as a business risk.

One of the santizing steps is to replace all passwords with a set value, such as six/seven of a letter (like "A") or a number (eg, "111111"). Another sanitizing step is to scramble names and addresses. Usually the first letter gets preserved, and the rest gets replaced with a hash (say, MD5 it, and then base64 it and truncate it to length, that way it preserves max lengths and typical size of words).

example:
John Doe, 1313 Mockingbird Lane might get munged into
Jiqw Dyh, 1313 Masdfasdfas Lfds

We just have username/password/address/phone, so all we do is set all passwords to a default value (all emails, if any, get set to mine), and munge up telephone numbers. Later this year I'll cobble up a better sanitizer. Our parent company has to worry about GLBA compliance, but our little apps don't "collect" enough information to worry about GLBA at this time.
I Would Like My Applications To Go Please And Thank You
Bring on the mobile!
Ironic, because the very low bar for qualified applicants to be your "lead developer" screams that you're looking for a code monkey to take advantage of, which most people on here probably find insulting.
It's funny, because WSGR (probably the most famous of the Bay Area law firms) did exactly that with YC, drafting a series of term sheet contracts for free.

I don't think design work is easy, and I'm not saying I advocate spec work as a sound business choice, but I don't see the ethical problem. Design firms sound a lot like realtors when they talk about boycotting things like 99designs.

And again, it is also the case that for 80% of the market, "competant" is the hurdle, not "groundbreaking" or even "distinctive". People who need "competant" design are ill-served by projects padded with weeklong branding sessions, or even multiple rough comps to choose from.
Hopefully, since this is just the start of it, it will differentiate itself from upcoming, and any other sites out there. I think it was Matt Mullenwag who said something to the like of "If you're competing against a giant company, well, you're set." Yahoo! owns Upcoming, does it get the treatment, feature updates and dedication that it had when it was a startup? Or does it fall by the wayside as the founders are working on other things for Yahoo!?

EditConf might not be anything different now, but I bet they have some innovative ideas. Plus, it's tech focused, so that's different.
Prove themselves to who? Without either another technical person play off of or a cofounder/business-guy/whathaveyou that is able to recognize contribution and not treat technical resources as replaceable cogs.

Recognition by someone skilled or experienced or has background in the art is much more valuable than recognition by someone who is or has not. In my experience, I've proven myself to non-technical people who were peers with me at the time (we worked under the same blowhard), and that afforded a certain kind of respect that wouldn't come from having to prove yourself to a superordinate.
There are two types of people who would attempt to work full time for six months without a salary:

1) A well established developer (read: savings and connections) who would likely request a "founder" level of equity, perhaps even a plurality of shares.

2) A junior developer (read: recent graduate) who may not have the technical acumen to "understand the big-picture, make strategic recommendations for technology decisions, and guide other developers." Further, he may not have the resources to live for six months without a salary.

I don't think these are necessarily bad situations, just that your goals seem unrealistically high.

To answer your question, I would work for equity if I had an expectation of a market rate salary within a year and a large payout (5-10x yearly salary) within three years. The idea would have to be stellar with a dream team of co-workers. In particular I'd look for access to capital and marketing prowess.
Funny thing is that you can then turn around and hire this top grad for 7000 rmb a month after college. Top grades are not a guarantee for high paying jobs. 7 million university grads per year.
The Real Budget Startup - Profitability Or Death
Micro Startups are the future?
At some point, isn't it in the best interest of the VC firms to pioneer innovative methods for screening, analyzing and funding large amounts of quality smaller deals?

1) In addition to building relationships, funding a significant portion of smaller businesses would increase the number of available quality deals at later stages.
2) Lowering the transaction cost of attracting, analyzing and screening deals to the point where smaller deals could be profitably funded, would likely have efficiency impacts throughout the funding process of any VC firm. In fact, you could make the argument that if a VC firm really masters this process, it could obsolete the need for the 'bulge bracket' model entirely.

YC did something innovative - they figured out how to invest <$20k in early stage companies in order to help those companies get to the level where they can bring a product to market. If the VC community really brought their perspective and resources to targeting this opportunity, it seems they would only stand to benefit in the long-term.
long term i am sure you are right. but right now if you want to watch a youtube video or listen to streaming audio in a flash player on your iphone browswer you can't. sure you can download an app, but that seems like a backwards approach. should every experience on the iphone require an app?
Your question is somewhat vague and muddled. Could you clarify what exactly you are asking for? How are you using the term "gateway"?
(OK... I'll be the token girl who suggests you change your request to "+ friends" instead of "+ girlfriends" :D)

So... I checked out your site. Some early thoughts: the graphic assets and design could probably be improved a bit. There are a million aesthetics that could go here (urban sophisticate, funked up, modern Japanese a la MUJI), so I won't suggest any single one, but right now it's just a little too much like a YouTuber's personal channel.
I think the YouTube channel look can work IF it's matched by a really personal editorial voice, but this site is kind of "crowdsourced," so the design should probably be adjusted for that.

Idea: Stackoverflow, but for retail.

As others have pointed out, you need to entice people to join in, and I will make a radical suggestion here that will kind of disrupt your entire model:

Make it problem-centric, rather than product-centric.

As many other other sites have proven, when the "social object" is a question, it invites participation.

People asking what they should wear to a party, how to get rid of acne... all the same items at play, but just a different paradigm. Kind of like Stackoverflow.com, but for retail stuff. (Yes, I went there.)

Going back to YouTube, there is an incredible YouTube community around retail reviews, reviewing what sucks, what's a rip-off, who's having a sale. Sometimes it's 14 year old girls, sometimes it's adult make-up artist guys. But they are REALLY enthusiastic and doing it "for free."
(Proving people like this exist on the Internet.)

You might tap into that.

Example: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=xsparkage&view=video...

Also, as for the question-centric model, I think Yahoo! Answers also has a lot of questions about this stuff (and yeah, admittedly of varying quality.) You could mine that, too.

Back to design: here's a "digg but for shopping" site you might check out: http://www.stylehive.com/
Can you elaborate on what "a little stock" is ? I.e. is it 50K, 250K, 500K, etc in cash equivalent ?

Just curious. Thanks.
Grants for college students
Want some free grant secrets? One place you will want to visit when you are looking for an Education grant is the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. This also known as CFDA and it is the biggest free grant secret that you can learn.
Some people end up directly on event pages. For those people, it would be really useful if you could add links to other local confs and an address box to get driving directions so you can quickly see how long it would take to get there.
Symbian is effectively open-source now (if a handset manufacturer wants it, they can get it), and it will be officially open-source soon.
Brilliant :) On another note I miss the BBS, and Major Mud.
"I would like my applications to go please.."
Ask HN: FairSoftware--Good way to find a cofounder?
I've recently came across a startup at fairsoftware.net. This site markets itself as an easy way for people to start and grow their online business. You can create a "project" and track its revenue, and then list jobs available for other users to contribute. I can see this as a decent way for say, a hacker, to get in touch with a businessman and make things happen. What do you think?
Nice article. I would have liked to see more discussion of motivation. Nothing is more important as far as I'm concerned.
That's misleading. There are web-startups that aren't tech centered and there are medium and big companies that solve hard technical problems that startups don't (or can't) encounter. Obviously there are also tech-centered start-ups and "business" centered big-cos.

A better dichotomy isn't start-up/big-co: it is is whether you're looking to do fairly simple, business-oriented programming or CS-focused programming. Or whether you'd prefer to work in an environment that's demanding in terms of output but flexible in terms of work-style or one that's strict 9-5 (no overtime, but no flexibility either).

The stereotype is that big-companies are "9-5, business centered" and start-ups are "demanding but flexible, tech centered". Yet there are other combinations available ("9-5, tech centered" -- think Intel -- "flexible, business centered" etc...) -- in both start-ups and big companies.

Better advice is to work on something you're passionate about in an environment that gives you the chance to gain skills/experience you won't otherwise: once you find such a place, it shouldn't matter whether it's a start-up or not. You'll always have time to make gobs of money later (whether from options at a start-up or bonuses/salary/stock at a big-co).

Essentially: don't work at a start-up for the sake of working at a start-up. Starting your own is a different option -- and isn't the same as joining an existing one; joining a start-up will give you exposure to the "whole picture", but it may also not give you a chance to learn technologies you could put to use at your own start-up.
Thanks for the feedback - really helpful. I've been thinking about adding a poll feature (e.g. "Which of these dresses should I wear for a party tonight?"). Making that the main focus of the site is an interesting idea.
Is Andy Brice on HN? I just sent a link to Perfect Table Plan to my brother who is planning his wedding currently, and thinks it's awesome.
Given their particular niche; I have to say that I think that a pay strategy will probably work for them.

They are the Nordstrom's personal shopper to flickr's Target. Yes it costs more, but you get better quality and a more personal service.

Not everyone wants to use a site that just anyone can join.