skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
20-25% for the management team? Perhaps MBA's aren't as "useless" as some folks preach they are. Just being qualified to be one part of this team puts you on an equal footing with founders in a startup after 4 rounds. Damn...

Who are these people? I am assuming that CEO/CTO are the founders, then you recruit COO, a VP of marketing, perhaps VP of business development... who else? Do these 3 new folks grab 20% of the company in addition to being paid salaries?
since they say its a late stage play, my guess the founders are pretty much kicked to the curb by this point. So CEO is most likely in play.
There's no print version (yet!) but maybe one day I'll look at some print-on-demand services like lulu.
Look at shovebox. It's too simple for me to use exclusively -- it lacks many of the archive/organization/retrieval features that my app of choice, EagleFiler, boasts - but it's got the quickest input I know.
Two thoughts come to mind:

1) the VC system needs to be reformed. If founders are being screwed like this (and I think it's reasonable to say this is a screw), they're going to find other ways to raise capital. (And they are!) VCs should be in the business of cultivating founders, of encouraging and then rewarding them.

2) This is all the more reason to sell your company; it's more realistic (post-dot-com-bust) anyway, and obviously, it's the way to profit the most. Plenty of companies are buying these days. You just have to find a way to make something worth buying (and that's the rub, isn't it?).
I've read tons on the pros and cons of OO, done quite a lot of both OO and non-OO programming, and witnessed many other people try. My conclusion after all of this is that the debate on OO is almost entirely obscured by noise, because only 10-20% of developers are capable of using it even remotely correctly in practice. Many of the people yelling about how horrible it is are not in that 10-20%, either, and nor are many of the people singing (or, at least, "repeating") its praises.

It may be sold as a technique that the masses can use, but this is demonstrably not true, if you examine the code the masses are producing.
And remember, there are usually 2-4 founders.
Before Etherpad, I solved the problems it solves by various expedients like publishing drafts on my private web server, putting stuff on wikis, and exchanging drafts by email.

Etherpad is a bigger deal than people realize yet. It's one of those things you don't understand till you try it. I myself didn't. I put off trying their first beta for weeks, and then within about 2 minutes of trying it I got it.
The only thing I worry about with git is getting really raw developers who have never, ever used version control up and running in a semblance of a reasonable manner of operation.

I mean, I know people who were resistant to using subversion because they didn't understand how it was supposed to work. I sort of shudder to think about the mental reaction to being dropped into git. Because of this I originally supported Darcs. I still would if they could clean up some of the patch resolution problems that they have and the Darcs GitHub-like got halfway decent (maybe with Camp).

Source Control is one of the fundamental tenets of development and getting newbs trained on it is so incredibly important. We, collectively, can't afford for it to be a tough thing to get a handle on. Even if it takes time to really understand, it needs to be easy to get going and using the tool in a good semblance of the proper manner.
Ubuntu 9.10 is named Karmic Koala, promises to bring boot time under 25sec
"it's so expensive, it's GOT to work"

Exactly.

“Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.”
There's a fine line between clever promo and desperate.
You mean they work on Free Software and are a major contributor to the Free Software world.

I say that since we're discussing the GPL above.
In the near future, I doubt the accidental deaths from military robots will exceed the accidental deaths from other pieces of military hardware.

Helicopter, plane, and jeep malfunctions kill people all the time. Not to mention human error! We already have control devices installed in aircraft (pilots) that accidentally bomb civilian weddings.

War is a messy business.
I was wondering when celebrities would start doing this. It seemed inevitable that celebrities eventually cash in on their immense social capitol.
HoodiePeople.com: More than just a fashion trend
Al Qaeda and the Internet
I'm not sure how founders are being screwed here. They are asking for (in most cases) millions of dollars to develop a likely unproven idea. Also, VC's are not in the business of coddling founders. They are making an investment that they hope will return a profit and that is what is expected by their investors. Places like YC try to cultivate and encourage the founders, but they only give you ~$10000. If you want a couple million then you have to be willing to play the game.

You are right in the fact that new startups should be looking at new and innovative ways to fund themselves and I hope that people take that point away from reading articles like this.
So you'd rather have 49% of a dangerously under funded company than 4.9% of a well funded company?

If you sell equity for investment in to the business the total value of your shareholding has not reduced, but the company is more able to proceed.

Too many shareholders blindly cling to equity for the sake of keeping a high percentage - when the business would benefit from further investment.
Just pushed email features last night. Supports file attachments too.
$600/hour to make phone calls to people who'll tell you how great you are? $75k to work a 24-hour work week for a month? I'll take that kind of desperation any day.
App Store Grows, but Apps Are Seldom Used
Facebook: You Own All Your Data. Period. (But See You at the Next Privacy Uproar.)
I agree that the GPL is vital for getting contributions from commercial entities. In my company, management reacts very strongly to the possibility of giving another company an advantage and getting nothing in return. If I release code for a BSD-licensed project, my company might be subsidizing competitors, other companies that use our code but don't release theirs. The GPL provides a legal guarantee that our competitors have to play fair.

The legal guarantee is actually all we need. I'm not sure why that carries any weight with the bunch of ruthless mother...s I work for, but there you have it.
HN: Looking for a Student Design Co-Founder
Myself and a couple other developers are starting a company, which is going to create web applications geared towards students. We have three ideas now that have the backend prototyped, but we need to bring it to reality. Therefore, we are looking for a student web designer to join the team who has experience or is willing to learn how to design user interfaces.

You will have an EQUAL share as the rest of us and will be a co founder and equal in every way. We would love to describe our ideas to you. We already have the design done for our home page (outsourced design) but we need to design our other applications.

Basically we are looking for someone striving to be a part of something and is preferably currently a student. Please email me at the following address: rah5051 AT gmail DOT com

Thanks!
No, ambition and sloth did this to us: Ambition in the scope of the systems we build, sloth in our willingness to give in to whatever gets the job done.

As Alan Kay said, "The revolution hasn't happened yet." He knows that OOP isn't the final answer (although I think we're all thankful for its existence). He is one of a small group, made up of mainly self-funded geniuses and eccentrics, who are working in this space. Everyone else gave up. We had PARC in the 70's and really nothing else since; we're still coasting on what they accomplished there.

Now that we know how important this is, why can't we fund a PARC again? Why can't we build a place where we throw it all out and start over? I know of a few places doing this now, including Viewpoint Research, but we need more.
Talent is the principal, practice is the interest rate.
If google doesn't pay a dividend, profits accumulate as cash which increases the value of the company (and hence the value of stock shares). In an efficient market, by keeping the cash, the value of the shares should increase by approximately the same amount as the dividend would have been. However, since the gains are the stock price they get taxed as long-term capital gains instead of income, and they only pay tax when they sell - letting exponential growth kick in. This means that the investor pays less in taxes.

Personally as an investor, I don't usually like companies that pay big dividends because it increases my tax liability. I'd rather invest in a company that has no dividend.
Yeah, but as Tim Lister once said (about something else): if everybody gets it wrong, there's something wrong with it.
thing is, you should put the value of money in a more important position. If you are looking for fund, that means your "business" here need more money to start or level up otherwise you can self-fund. Under that circumstance, without the money, you can achieve nothing. To find VC for funding is a fair game in the end (despite somehow the connection plays an important role here). It is a open market, you need money, and they take shares. A business is a business not an idea because someone has to do it and someone actually fund it.
This is like an equation where the earlier you go outside for capital the bigger the chance that you will end up with a very small slice of your company and a possible lack of control.

If you're halfway smart - and you'd better be if you plan to play the game well - then you should stretch your own means as far as you can. If you're dirt broke and you want to start a new company it better be something that is profitable within 30 days.

If that is not in your future then consider doing two things, one with a short ttm to fund the other. That way you can develop your 'big idea' to the point where you've proven its merits by having your first batch of users on board or whatever metric you use to measure your success.

The worst way to start a new company is to just have an idea and to start looking for funding. By the time it is a running business you'll have nothing left.

No point in blaming the VC's for that, an idea is just that, an idea. I have a notebook here that contains a bunch of ideas. Each and every one of those is potentially a company worth some money if you put in a couple of years of sweat and brain power. Without that they're just ideas and I personally value them at exactly $0.

edit:

Another really good reason to go the 'spend your own $ first' route is that you show with your own money that you really believe in your idea, that will go a long way towards convincing people that you are serious.
The various flavors of Enterprise Linux are products. Since Red Hat provides paid support for Enterprise Linux, they have every incentive to make sure core Linux functionality is as stable and efficient to manage as possible.

You might say they don't want to streamline themselves out of a job, but there will always be demand for supported versions of Linux, no matter how easy it is to administer.
Shuttleworth on Ubuntu and Free Software
See also here, for the identity of the site among other insightful commentary:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434510
It's not just that Git is faster at branching. The concept of a branch in Git is conceptually different to a branch in Subversion. In Subversion, a branch is analogous to a directory, and creating a branch is essentially a cheap and efficient directory copy. In Git, a branch is more akin to a reference or pointer to a particular piece of historical data.

The Git idea of a branch is somewhat more flexible than the Subversion idea of a branch. For instance, say I'm hacking away at a new feature, but I haven't thought ahead and created a new branch for my commits. A user then comes along and asks me to fix a bug. In Git, this is no problem, because branches are just references. I first assign a branch to my current work:

git branch new_feature

Then I rewind my master branch back to before I started working on the new feature, 4 commits ago.

git reset --hard HEAD~4

I then commit and push the bug fix:

git commit -am "Bug fix"
git push

Now the user is happy and I can continue working on my feature. But now I'd like the bug-fix to be included in the history of my branch, since I've pushed the bug-fix but not my new feature. So I change the 'base' of my branch using rebase:

git checkout new_feature
git rebase master

Now I can continue working on my branch as if nothing had happened.

Using Git is a bit like having a time machine you can use to alter history so you didn't forget your wallet this morning.
Fiction can be fun, but I find the reference section much more enlightening.

Apache License: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

Perl's license: http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_1_0

Python's license: http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0.1/license/

PostgreSQL's license: http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence

Rails' license: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/License

More of the open source world does just fine without the GPL than you'd care to admit. The various BSD projects are also doing just fine without constant hype and Slashdot announcements.
You have to wonder what their primary goal was. Perhaps they pursued their primary goal (a modern Unix with elegant internals) very intelligently and diligently and hoped that their secondary goals (users, developers, and influence) would materialize as a result. Or perhaps their primary goal was to win acceptance for their idea that Unix internals are crufty and deserve rethinking -- and perhaps they achieved that goal.

If winning users and developers was their primary goal and not just a secondary hope, then they got spanked and sent home, but I don't get that impression from the interview.
He probably means management team + other employees. Isn't the total employee option pool about 20%?
One change I would like to see is the demise of spreading a 1,500 word article over 5 "pages".
Not sure if folks here saw that video/read the transcript -- many interesting comments, including Andrew Chen starting something viral.
Why do you group two points into (c)?

The difference between (b) and the second half of (c) seems unclear: what's the difference between

(b) (the decider) declining to invest marginal resources

and

(c.ii) deciding that the sides-in-question are not importantly different (presumably "not importantly different to the decider"; if not, please clarify) and not worth judging between (again, presumably, "not worth judging between to the decider"; if not, please clarify)

?

What's a scenario which is (b) but not (c.ii) and vice-versa?
Where'd you get that second quote? It seems familiar.
I'm curious what the alternative is, if any?
I have a couple of enterpreneur friends that say that you should always aim for an even number of founders (3 in the best scenario, never 1, hardly ever 5). Having an even number helps when 'voting' things, so the tendency is to keep things moving...
having been an enterpreneur myself (with 3 other people), I must agree with them
while its not Time, Newsweek, or Business Week, we are super stoked to get a little media coverage. As PG says, when people know about you it makes it harder to die, or something like that.
how about NOT showing a full screen ad of the Kindle every time I go to amazon.com?
Specially given the fact I'm not even accessing from US...
No. The long answer is that Java did it to us. Like jacquesm below, I have inherited a large Java enterprise project, 400,000 lines of Java, XML, JavaScript, HTML, and Flex. And no comments, JavaDoc, or design documentation. All of this seems to have been written by one person with smaller contributions by a couple of others. There seems to be lots of copy and paste and IDE generated code. The system was designed to be modular with plugin components.

The first culprit is Java itself. The language is missing critical builtin data structures, ArrayList and Hashmap with corresponding literals. If they had been part of the language and not just libraries, Java might have taken a completely different direction. Throw in lack of overloadable operators, first class functions, and descent introspection and you get a language that in not very expressive.

Lack of key fundamental data structures, leads to the OOP bandwagon. Interfaces and inheritance are good tools but they should be used in moderation. In my project there is the pattern of BaseInterface, BaseClass, MoreCompleteInterface, MoreCompleteClass, ModuleLevelInterface, and ModuleLevelClass all to implement a DAO with nothingg but getters and setters. In one case this adds up to more than 2000 lines of code that does nothing that could not have bee done with a hash. Just to make sure that the code is completely non-understandable most serious classes have something like this

BaseInterface dataSource;

along with a setter that is filled in by Spring at runtime. I cant even explore the class structure. Contrast this with Python, where it would be a handful of lines of code, maybe 100 or 200 times fewer.

To get around the problems inherent in the language, Sun came up with beans and the Java community went charging off into complexity. And throw in XML configuration just to create an impedance barrier. Since this was all new territory, the result was an explosion of frameworks.

So now I have a stack that includes JBoss, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL, 200k of JS libraries (some of which I never heard of before), Flex, Granite, and more open source Java libraries than I can shake a stick at. I suspect there are many cases of a library being added for a single feature. Java OK, JS not so OK because of download bloat. Maybe Java is not OK either because I have to deal with what broke when I upgrades to a new version.

I particularly dislike the addition of Hibernate because it separates the programmer from the understanding of the database. In my case the database itself was generated from the the .hbm.xml files. The database was created from a Java-centric point of view as a network of classes. As a consequence Hibernate created hundreds of tables. One query to fill in a simple list in the browser created an SQL query with 10 joins. I'm surprised the db didn't roll over dead.

At least I'm being paid well.
As the author you quoted and reviewed, I'll say this:

1. Thank you for the input.

2. I think you're imagining a greater amount of blame being heaped on OOP than I actually intended. That may be the fault of unclear presentation on my part, though.

3. The second half of your comment is most excellent, and quite worth the read. Thanks for making these points so well.
Sometime today I'll try to reproduce the conditions. It was definitely event fixing (or something in jQuery) that did it, because even if I cleared out the mousemove function, it would still be laggy. But if I didn't bind it, the lag would go away.

You're right, the event namespacing was exactly what I was looking for.

BTW, is there a list of "reserved" words in jQuery? For example, jQuery has to store this information somewhere... possibly it gets attached to the DOM element itself. Where does ".data()" live? I often directly access the DOM elements, and want to be sure I don't interfere with jQuery.
Transgenes found in wild corn
You have to account for the fact that there has been numerous IFF errors, including the US military firing on British troops. IIRC at the beginning of the Afghanistan invasion a British plane was shot down by the US because the IFF incorrectly identified the plane as hostile.

I don't see how when there's so many accidental deaths of soldiers and civilians, how any accidental firing of a robot would exceed this. I mean there's been ~95,000 civilian deaths and ~4500 military deaths in Iraq alone. Most of those civilian deaths wouldn't be reduced as they're the result of suicide attacks, however those 4500 coalition soldiers would all have survived if they'd have been replaced with robots, in fact the military presence in Iraq could be ten-fold what it is with no protests of soldiers dying.
This question of talent can be rephrased in another way: are humans the product of genetic selfish replicators alone? The answer seems to be no, that memetic replication has a role as well. If only genes were the factors in what makes a person "talented", then indeed, people could consider "talent" as the predictive factor in somebody's success. But we are not only gene replicators, we are also meme replicators, and therefore, our innate "talent" is not a sole predictor of our success. I could be for example genetically pre-disposed towards intelligence, but then if my mind becomes hijacked by one of the various religious memes out there, instead of using my innate, genetic intelligence for the benefit of man, I could for example use that intelligence towards constructing a dirty bomb, in slavish servitude to the meme of religious fanaticism which has infected me. So is "talent" bullshit? Yes and no. To the extent that we are determined by genes, no, talent is very real. To the extent that memes play a role however, talent can either be increased, decreased, or misdirected towards destructive ends.
. . . or at least with its choice of target audience.
I was at the meetup and there were few bits about how Facebook uses R, Hadoop, and python for different levels of data analysis. The guys sitting behind me were talking during the whole presentation which was really annoying... please don't do that.
An odd number you mean?
Use OOP correctly.

Don't turn OOP into the point of your programming style on any project.

Don't use it at all when it's not appropriate.

When you don't use OOP, make sure you're using the right thing for the problem domain at hand.

When you use something programming paradigm other than OOP, make sure you use that correctly, too.
In my opinion, a main reason for the situation described by the author is lack of architectural governance in large projects.
The most senior programmer often is assigned the role of "the architect", even if he is more of a type that likes to obsess over details rather than the big picture. Such types are prone to dismiss the importance of conceptual integrity throughout a complex project which ultimately leads to the pile of unsustainable mess that many enterprise-class applications have become.
Brooks laid out the importance of conceptual integrity pretty well in in the mythical man month. It is often not taken serious enough today.
Those Big Fancy Professional XML Libraries are complicated (internally) because they can parse DTD and XSD specified XML and do transforms with XSLT. Something the author's naïve implementation is far from.
As I alluded to in a rant just posted, I think deficiencies in Java as a language created a community of complexity where OOP was taken to the extreme, where interfaces, inheritance, and beans are used with abandon. Contrast this with Python and its community, where there is a less extreme approach to OOP, because the language itself is more expressive.
you trust statistics from a .gov site on the efficacy of government programs?
According to the article, 25 seconds is the target for Jaunty (the 9.04 release) which is pretty nice right there.

Beyond that, Karmic is supposed to being a new UI look (brown no longer). Since this is often the most prominent complaint I get about Ubuntu (ridiculous or not), it will be a welcome change. According to Shuttleworth, "The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it." That's really welcome and I hope they do as wonderful a job as they've done with the rest of the system.
It's supposed to be funny.
I like xPad. It's simple and free:

http://getxpad.com/
Meh. Most companies are "dangerously underfunded" until they're cash flow positive.
Great iPhone preso on AppStore retention curves, pricing strategies, etc.