skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lost in the process of building a start-up in the UK: What shall I do?
I came up with a business idea few years ago. Since my background was not programming, I decided to hire a developer to build a prototype to test the market while adding more functions to finish the site.

So I hired a freelancer (who seemed the most suitable considering my limited budget), built a prototype and gone live a year ago. By the time the site gone live, it exceeded the initial budget and took 3x longer time than anticipated (there were some technical challenges).

As soon as we started working on the second phase of the development , I realised that the developer was running out of skills, and he hinted me about this.

Now I have a quarter baked site with vital functions yet to be implemented. On the top of that, I am frustrated with the fact that, with the state of the site, I can't market the site despite having a marketing background. As I believe, there is no point of having visitors if I can't retain them.

I guess I have only three options at the moment

1. Go back to work and save enough money to be able to hire someone else/agency (My concern is the amount of time it will take and also I am quite paranoid that someone else may start something similar by the time the site is finished)

2. Look for a technical co-founder ( I tried this already. Went to few meet-ups and networking sessions where it seemed everyone had a great idea and more interested to talk about Techcrunch rather than building a product. After reading some blogs/forum, it seems it is a typical start-up scene in London)

3. Try to raise money from angels/VCs (This is the last thing I always wanted to do, as I know how hard it can be without proven success previously, let alone being on your own)

Now my question is, is there any other options open for me? If not, what is the best option from the above?

Your valuable opinion would be appreciated.
I need to find skilled Unity game engine coders. It would be awesome to have Unity icons at the bottom like the ones for their other credentials.
We use an autodidactic approach for our kids' home education. Working out really well so far with one at high school age on down to our 4th that is kindergarten aged.
You should lead with that and put something similar at the top of your website.

Edit: Nice, just noticed changes on your site. You guys are fast.
I think I understand what you're explaining, but I'm not sure. Can you give an example how someone would use this website if they're a freelancer and how someone would use this site if they're looking for a freelancer? All I see is an input box for a github username and nothing else to click; not sure if I'm missing something or the site is just a list for now?
I am not opposed at all to children learning to program.

Just that there are much better choices than Java/Android SDK.
I think its an ok analogy because its talking about federal government services and when talking about services like national security and currency protection they are all getting the same meal.
Howdy lxpk, I might know some programmers who are a good fit. We'll be sure to throw you some free credits when the marketplace officially opens. Keep in touch and email me if you have any questions - michael.karpeles@gmail.com
When I read utter crap like this I want to sell my computer and move to Tibet.
Not a lot of people know this, but the "B" in Benoit B. Mandelbrot's name stands for "Benoit B. Mandelbrot".
Why is the photo hosted at imgur ? http://i.imgur.com/tyvjN.png
Couple of concerns here, although I went ahead and applied just in case. First, I tend to keep my programming "persona" separate from my "regular" persona. That avoids issues with places I've worked or may be working. Second is that my GitHub is rather sparse because most of my clients don't want their code shared. I don't think that's unique to the mobile space (Android/Java and HTML 5 primarily) as when I used to do PL/SQL work I don't recall seeing a lot of code out there other than Oracle samples.

So just curious how you are planning to make this marriage work?
I wasn't visiting his site to benefit from his content. I am not one of his customers, or readers, or viewers. I loaded up his site for the sole purpose of being able to point to things on it and say, "these are great and you have done a good job". Publicly.

Instead the site threw a barrier up in front of me and forbid me from proceeding at all until I gave it an email address. It went a step beyond all of the goddamnproliferatingeverywherenow lightboxes that more and more sites seem to be using lately: there was no close box, no "cancel", no "no thanks not this time". Just, "give me your email address or go away."

The day that that particular tactic is no longer considered rude and inconsiderate and Bad will be the day that I'll be done with the internet.

Believe me when I say that I was way more polite in my comment about it than my initial visceral response to it.

...Or am I not allowed to call him out on a bad move just because he's Andrew Frickin' Warner and "has put an incredible amount of effort into" Mixergy?
It’s also foolish (no pun intended) to think that the Universe was meant to have life. We tend to believe that life is what gives meaning to all that vastness but Cosmos doesn’t need a reason for its existence, it’s just there.

Furthermore it’s not about just life but intelligent life. Life in form of microbes could be all around the Universe. But intelligent life could be extremely rare or it could be just too early and we could be the first of many species to come. It’s not egoistic to think so, it doesn’t make us feel unique and special, more likely it makes us feel depressed thinking that we are the only ones or the first of many to come.

If you take the Drake equation for example and tweak a couple of pessimistic numbers you realize it doesn’t take long before you come to the conclusion that life is extremely rare. A very good implementation you can find here:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120821-how-many-alien-worl...

I would also like to point to the Fermi paradox. Given the aforementioned Drake equation many scientists have made estimations about the number of civilization in our galaxy. Estimations vary from a few dozen to the thousands. But if there were even one advanced civilization in the galaxy they should already have made contact somehow. That is the basis of the Fermi paradox, you can find more at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Second, you should use this as your leading title. Makes it much easier to understand.
What do you use for mail?

I've tried many mail apps for my Android tablet, and none comes close to the mail app for iOS. The one exception is the Gmail app -- but I don't use gmail (ironically, for lock-in reasons).
Ummm... that's kind of a broad statement. Are you looking for folks who can use Unity to create desktop games? Mobile? Looking for stuff compatible with the web player? Unless you were just using that as an example and don't have a current pressing need.
Put a description on your site... it's basic user experience stuff.

Also limiting the slots has no point at all.

The whole thing seems like a totally incomplete concept that was created in half an hour.

And "a selective network of great freelance engineers"; seriously? It's a single static page with images and a couple of links per person...
Nicely done guys! Once you made that spinner, the rest was inevitable :p
I immediately thought of: http://geekli.st/

Just curious how this is differentiated? That it's restricted to users on HN?
We have so many apps and requests every single day we have to prioritize what people are willing to pay for first. Wappwolf does have better permissions here (which we'd also like to support) but they don't have 117 apps to support alongside it. Startups are not asking for this stuff maliciously -- there are only so many hours in the day and we have to prioritize.
In my scholastic chess days I used to play a lot of suicide chess between rounds. What continually amazed me is how very few players could grasp the basics of how to play suicide. The nature of suicide chess strategy was too conter-intuitive I guess. I'd be capturing be after piece after piece and they'd get their hopes up only to have them crushed near the end when my superior force proved decisive. To lose at chess, one must first win.
Though the headline above cleverly omits the 6, the linked to article is "6 ways to improve click-through-rate on your banner ads without being spammy", sure sign of link-bait and mostly vacuous content. In fact only 2 out of the 6 (#1 & #5) are ways that could help.

next
Indium is only used for the clear ITO electrode, though. So if scarcity of Indium were the only concern, then only the "front" carbon electrode would be relevant--the rest of the photovoltaic structure could be anything you wanted (including Si).
The framework is written in less. The css is just the rendered version of the less framework. You can configure variables to choose colors, curvatures, font base heights etc. the math performed in less scales elements and padding to the base height. There are a lot if edge cases and browser issues that are noticed and fixed by the larger community. You can also break the framework apart easily and only include certain parts by includes in the master style sheet. I'm personally using the sass fork And I have the js and CSS pared down to reduce the overall size, customize navbars etc.

It's definitely a framework.
You know, I don't have a good answer... I was going to host it on another page on codeplex, but my teammate insisted on something w a direct link & no misc. stuff around it. I'll use your comment & tell him "Seeee!" :).
> Because the cause of the problem is Skype's (and iTunes) poor development, not Windows.

Which is the key factor here. It's not Windows' fault specifically, but it's a problem that occurs when using (very common software on) Windows. To the end user, what's the difference?
Someone noticed the spinner! Every time someone manually clicks "spin", we log it (we do not log the automated first spin):

http://i.imgur.com/LCFu6.png
That's a lot of questions. I will do my best to answer them but note I am not trying to sell a language here. I'm just a student and wanted to show an interesting project I'd been playing with.

The performance implications are much like vtable lookup in C++. Generic functions are essentially overloaded and their function pointer looked up at runtime. The main tradeoff over C++ is that rich types don't play well when allocated on the stack as destructors cannot be automatically called on frame exit.

The added semantics are not optional, but you can still program in standard C while avoiding the defined keywords and functions and the interaction should not be troublesome at all. There is no price for linking the library.

It is not type-safe and employs runtime type checking where inserted by the user - but also this allows for duck typing and more generic code so perhaps it is not a bad thing all round.

I hope that helps. Any more questions feel free to drop me an e-mail.
A new metric for cloud architectures
This article ignores the fact that many wealthy individuals, via investments and other rentier activities, are able to obtain lower effective tax rates than people who work for a living.
http://blog.golang.org/2010/07/gos-declaration-syntax.html
As someone who's hired several freelancers before (and is continually hiring), the process has often been very time consuming and frustrating.

I welcome new solutions.

For me, the main problems are centered around communication and trust.

In my experience, freelancers are difficult to work with because they're hard to communicate with as they may have several projects going on at once, enjoy living a rather unstructured lifestyle, don't like to email, amongst other things.

If I have a good spec sheet that details exactly what I need done, when I need it, at a fair price, will you deliver?

I find that question to be very hard to answer when reviewing people. Though, I believe a major reason for that is because I'm not technical (my background is in interface design and not backend stuff).

I'm aware that part of the problem stems from me. As freelancers are worried about new features being added on later, changes being made, new problems arising, lack of payment, etc.

With that said, I've have some good experiences. The best being when the spec I've written is in fact good and not making any changes to it until it is delivered as written, on time. Payment being promptly made. And then discussing changes.
True. A lot of people felt the same about Win95. It's a good thing the tech world has short memories. :)
This is a tad off-topic, but I'd love something that's more like django's admin UI for mongo-using projects. Not the same tool, I know. What's a good word for something like that?
Thank you for posting this. It boggles my mind how people - let me rephrase 'wantrepreneurs' - lambast people who want to actually make a profit.

If you don't care to exchange something valuable (an email address) for something worth 10x (the content on a site) - simply hit the back button.

Those same people who complain about "sales tactics" will spend the next 5 years reading about other entrepreneurs on this site, with the excuse "well I don't want to sell 'that' way, that's why no one is buying my product and I am still working a day job on the slow lane"
BSC Open Hackathon 1: Saturday, Nov 17 to Sunday, Nov 18
It's MM-MBA-RPG time
So how do you propose storing a JSON object with .attr()? Do you JSON.stringify(), store as string, get as string, JSON.parse()?

Seems like a no-brainer to abstract it away into a helper function, but then you're just duplicating .data() functionality, surely?
Actually most Oromo people can speak, and many can read/write in Amharic as it's the dominant national language.
The world of chess engines is the world of search algorithms. I've read that exploring a search tree is inherently serial, and while there have been large performance increases over the years (Houdini and other top engines are 3000+ ELO), it seems they have not substantially outstripped the single-threaded performance of modern CPUs.

There is a chess programming wiki[0] (which was possibly referred to in the article) which gives some examples of parallel search algorithms. There is also a chess engine written in openCL which is not terribly strong as yet. Those of you with greater knowledge of algorithms may find these problems interesting; if I had a dedicated GPU to hand I'd probably be hacking on it.

[0]http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Parallel+Search
[1]http://zeta-chess.blogspot.com/
Airbnb waives fees for Hurricane Sandy affected area
I'm not sure if this is by the same photographer, but the image used in the Sky Survey app is pretty incredible as well. http://skysurvey.org

I'm really looking forward to being able to combine detailed visuals like these with the rift 3d headset or like.

boom!
Most Entertaining Aircraft Safety Video
The whole thing is actually a life form living in some other world. Haven't you seen MIB? :)
Interesting thought. Try invoking the Blub paradox here[0]. Who knows who the best hackers are? In some sense, only the best hackers do. On the scale of hacking ability, you can only look down and truly understand what is beneath you. When you look up at people beyond your ability, you have no idea whether or not they are crackpots or 1337 haxors. So, for this website to be effective at all, the people judging and deciding the hackers need to be at the top of the hacking scale to offer any sort of guarantee as to the quality of the hackers listed.

Dipping into personal experience and anecdotes, I don't recognize the names of any of the people organizing the site. To me, this means that the site probably doesn't have the very best hackers running it and so cannot guarantee that they have some of the very best hackers on there. But, I suffer from the paradox/curse of Blub as well, so I have no idea if the people running this are skilled in their hacking abilities or whether it is just a few grad students who put something together last weekend.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

N.B. This comment falls into the same pitfall that the original essay does in that it only considers the field in question to have one dimension. Hackers come in all shapes and colors just as programming languages do.
Near infrared is effectively just light, and there's not a whole lot of it. It's not infrared from heat, like you are assuming.

Near IR is generally up to 1400nm wavelength, where the infrared from heat isn't really a factor til you hit 4000nm.

The intensities of NIR are too low to be worthwhile.

The scientists made something that could see your remote control's LED, not your body heat.
Cool! Pardon my ignorance, but can this be used as a decent Python IDE? Or does it have a more specific/narrow use case?
ZTE Grand X LTE another Chinese Nexus 4 competitor arrives - Gizchina.com
It's cool to see him acting like everyone else when they first tried it. Sticking his tongue out and making silly faces. I don't know about others but I often get caught up in Steve Jobs: The Legend rather than the man.
Trying a Dead-Simple Blogging Experiment
I'm trying an experiment to post on my blog (about technology) mainly through email subscription, so if you're interested in this topic, feel free to sign up -- but no pressure, who needs another email, right? My goal is to, over time, make the content good enough to be in your inbox: blog.semilshah.com
Howdy brandall, great question.

Geeklist is a great idea for building community and sharing. This just isn't a problem we're trying to solve.

Hackerlist provide a premium network to match skilled engineering freelancers with companies. It seems like a lot of people currently rely on hackernews freelance posts to accomplish such. Current competitors like oDesk tend to underpay, lack the same quality standards, and don't specialize exclusively in skilled engineering jobs.

I think toptal.com does something similar but it is focused on recruiting freelancers rather than providing a useful odesk-like interface.
Your example,

void foo() {
auto items = {1,2,3,4};
return;
}

is the case of poorly designed syntax, in a truly Hindley-Milner system there is
no expression which doesn't have a type. Now, we could add some syntax that
screws that up, say:

let v = I-HAVE-AN-AMBIGUOUS-TYPE in 0

But that's rather silly, isn't it? If a value isn't used then I would,
personally, like my language to optimize it away. So why not ditch such silly
syntax?

This is part of why I said that the foundations of C++ are too far-gone.

And this syntax isn't necessary to save on typing. In a language that supported
syntactic macros (such as Scheme or Racket) we could write something like:

auto items = my-vector-syntax(1,2,3,4);

which expands to something like:

auto items;
items.push_back(1);
items.push_back(2);
items.push_back(3);
items.push_back(4);

If you're interested in true syntactic macros for non-sexp languages (though I
do suggest getting over the parentheses, my color settings make them nearly
indistinguishable from the background) look at Rust [1].

Actually, Rust also has type inference [2].

Hell, stop programming in C++ and start using Rust! [3]

[1] http://dl.rust-lang.org/doc/tutorial-macros.html
[2] http://dl.rust-lang.org/doc/0.4/rust.html#type-system
[3] http://www.rust-lang.org/
It's the plurality national language (there's no single language with a greater adoption in Ethiopia) but it's not the majority language -- fewer than 50% of Ethiopians are able to use Amharic. So, "most people" in Ethiopia use a local language instead of Amharic.
What about "C&"? C and

Short and easily searchable.
If you have the data, it would be cool to see this colorized by genre and length. My guess is that dramas have a higher quality to rewatchability ratio than comedies, and that a similar relationship exists between long movies and short ones.

Very cool visualization!
It's easy. Here's what I did (after 20 months off)

1. Visited Russian owned Wineries in Mexican wine country (yep they have them - they are amazing)
2. Learned how to Horseback ride
3. Volunteered at an orphanage in Latin America (changed my view on business for ever)
4. Moved to Budapest for a while (amazing opera, kick ass clubs, amazing white wine, great caviar)
5. Went clubbing in Stockholm (Midsommar ftw)
6. Went clubbing in Marbella, visited amazing parts of Southern spain, loved it so much settled there (check out a kick ass co-working spot here: http://www.nidomalaga.com)
7. Went clubbing in London - was supposed to go to falconry school but blacked out - LOL just kidding....
noticed a trend here?

Read a gazillion books, caught up on TV, started writing a book, etc. Actually now I'm back on my 3rd start up 'cause I want to get into movie production - self financed. It costs at least $50 million to produce a good movie and another $50 million to market it so I need a to get to work ;)

I thought about posting some screenshots but meh, too much work.

People discounting the whole 4HWW lifestyle - it's real. But who has time to convince other people of something you know to be true...
I don't think there's one magical solution. The more we work with you guys, the better we will become at reducing friction and eliminating wasted time in the process. It shouldn't take 5 days for companies to vet potential contractors, like is often the case with oDesk.

You mention a lot of important issues like trust. I'm hoping by being extremely selective (and limiting the number of accepted hackers initially), we'll be able to keep quality and trust high (or make necessary adjustments).
I haven't had that usecase. I just store 'keys' in the attributes and do lookups in objects (which have been created from JSON) to get the 'values'.

For example, if I'm displaying a bunch of objects as rows in a table, I do something like this: tr.attr('data-key', key) as I'm looping over my objects. Then, if there is say an 'Edit' button as a column in that row, all I need to do is button.on 'click', (e) -> $(e.currentTarget).parents('tr').attr('data-key') to figure out which row was clicked on.
That's our dataset of user ratings at Goodfilms.
This story reminds me of the efforts one guy in New Orleans went through to keep his data center running after Katrina. There were some tales of diesel hauling in that blog as well.

http://interdictor.livejournal.com/57475.html
http://interdictor.livejournal.com/40720.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdictor_%28blog%29