skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd start by exploring what his expectations are-- you might find that he doesn't see much of a role for himself. I believe it is better to be a single founder when you are at the idea generation and prototyping stage, particularly when you are working on a small business. Working alone helps you stay focused and ship without any distractions from co-founder drama. Once you have something that feels promising, then go look for a co-founder.

If your acquaintance is OK taking a back seat for the first iteration, then I think your problem is solved. If not, then you should have a frank discussion about what each of you will bring to the table. Even small businesses are a ton of work. At a minimum, you could offload the less technical work so that you can stay focused. Perhaps he focuses on connecting with the customer while you build the prototype? Most founders underestimate the value of connecting with the customer in the early days and in turn don't allocate enough of their time/energy to this task.
The entire QK[1] kernel, including all library code, is less that two thousand lines of C (and most of the library code isn't even used by the kernel itself, which is just 234 LOC). QK is a single-processor kernel (although still pre-emptive) and very well written and tested (in, literally, hundreds of millions of devices).

It was not difficult at all to run QK and it's supporting code through KLEE and exhaustively verify the properties of each function, thanks to a super-simple design and the many included assertions, preconditions, and postconditions, which KLEE helpfully proves are satisfied automatically. If I wanted a certified optimizing C compiler, I'd use CompCert[2] to compile QK, which would give me a certified kernel all the way to machine code. (I actually use Clang.)

I am familiar with the verified L4 kernel, and it is far more complex than the QK kernel I have verified. That people have already verified a kernel far more complex should be sufficient proof that a much simpler kernel can also have its correctness verified.

Stepping back, it's 2012: people should no longer be surprised when a small-but-meaningful codebase is certified correct. It's common enough now that you don't get published in a journal just because you did it.

[1] http://www.state-machine.com/qp/index.php

[2] http://compcert.inria.fr/
Wikipedia's most unusual articles
In a nutshell, everything besides coding. Business formation, business development, arranging legal and financial matters, etc.

>How can I vet him without just coming out and saying "what good are you?"

Try rewording: "What would be your role in this?"

>CPA/forensic accountant by trade

Fwiw, that's a pretty interesting field to me. The term refers to accountants who specialize in digging up financial/white collar fraud, but some were also among the few who saw the financial crisis coming in 2005-2006 and sounded warnings about it (ignored for the most part). They live to dig through SEC filings and bank balance sheets to construct a picture of what is both there and not there.

That's an interesting skill set, question is do you think he can reapply those skills outside his domain, say to negotiations with investors, vetting investment proposals, etc?
SolarCity Seeks $151 Million in IPO, Shares at $13 to $15
Node.js Hardware Hack 2012
Products as Performances
The only complaint I've heard about Leanpub is that they don't give the author access to end user email addresses. I don't use email as a marketing tool much (almost never) but I would guess this could be a show-stopper for many eBook authors who are considering their solution.
for example:

Wallace Silversmiths
Five-Piece "Grande Baroque" Flatware Place Setting
Original:$1,240.00
NOW:$992.00

- http://www.neimanmarcus.com/p/Wallace-Silversmiths-Grande-Ba...

I agree, if the best Jacket, piece of flatware, flash light, etc is more expensive, that doesn't correlate: the overly expensive products are the "best". Which I think the writer is suggesting. Sometimes the cheaper product is the "best".

If Dustin wants to buy reliable and highly usable stuff, I don't see what the problem is. That said if it leads him to become attached to his items in an unhealthy way, that could be a problem.
The manual:

http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html#...

edit:

oh, this is the first time I've seen this: there is a vi mode for bash
http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html#...
Or simply "I'm feeling better". Not everyone has experienced highness. Contact-high is also possible.
Chocolate invader: handmade from bean to invader
Elon Musk's 80,000-person Mars colony: Daring dream or crazy talk?
HP Has ‘Extensive Evidence’ Of Misconduct At Autonomy
Web performance strong on Cyber Monday, busiest online shopping day of 2012
If you include the time he spent researching flatware in the bill it would be probably hard to find anything more expensive south of diamond-encrusted things for oligarchs without taste.
XSL! Oh no! I'll have to steer clear of that :)
Each of my forks cost 25c. Each of my knives and spoons too. They work great.

Buy the cheapest. Use it and learn your use case. If you ever need another, you'll know which quality of tool is the right one.
> 9 women can't make a baby in a month, and a billion dollars can't make a Google maps clone in a year.

I suspect this is exactly the point Cue made when he fired him. They are looking for someone who can put in place the plan and team to deliver a Maps app that is superior to Google Maps over the long term, not this time next year.
The Slowdown of Tech
Wondering if others are also feeling the slowdown - would love to hear your thoughts - especially from people in other parts of the country...
Welll . . . it's hard to say. I mean, it's definitely possible that this is the case. But on the other hand, if the manager was pushing for release and won senior management over on incomplete or misrepresented data, then it would make sense to take out the trash.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/221/
"in browser"

why!?
Silicon Valley's dirty secret: Age bias
This is a great idea and I wish I could upvote it more.

My initial instinct was something like "Naw man, everyone should use vim or emacs and a CLI debugger," but I recall being almost magically more productive upon learning to use the debugger in MSVC and having a really difficult time learning to use vim and gdb.
I just shot you an invite to the PenFM beta, because you hit it on the head. www.pen.fm is taking on that end-to-end publishing challenge, and then some. Having worked in epublishing for a few years now, I think I've finally come up with a way to automate the hell out of epublishing--and the results show up. At any point in writing in PenFM, you can click download and get your work formatted perfectly in epub, mobi, or pdf. Formatting improvements are coming rapidly, and mostly present already for mobi.

The biggest problem I've recognized with epublishing is that you have to get the formatting down perfectly, and usually that requires a lot of work by hand making sure your input HTML file is exactly as it should be. When you control how content is inputted to a platform, it's much easier to automate perfect-formatted rendering of that input HTML file, including TOC by inference.
Looks interesting. May I ask what you are using to convert to PDF and what formats does it accept?
The numbers are monthly and its based on twitter
Thank you. That article about "The Best" bothered me in a way I couldn't completely verbalize. Beyond a certain threshold, the quality of objects just simply doesn't matter.

The example of flatware was particularly annoying, because, really, in what way does a fork ever actually "fail"? Have you ever had food halfway to your mouth when the fork just suddenly collapses or something? As a tool, flatware is completely superfluous. Just ask the billion some odd people who eat with their hands.

Anyway, maybe some people enjoy the process of endlessly researching and hunting around for "the best" of something. If you do, more power to you. Personally, I think when you look back at the end of your life you're going to remember the meals you ate and the people you ate them with more than the utensils you used.
Why We’re Pivoting from Mobile-first to Web-first
It can't seem to create or open JavaScript files. How does one use it with Django?
"If Big Pharma wanted to push dangerous or ineffective drugs on the public, there are far easier and cheaper ways to go about it than coming up with elaborate double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled testing protocols."

That's demonstrably false. There are dozens of books on the topic, many of which I link to here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4807436

"Until the results of larger studies come in, there's still room for doubt here."

No question there's room for doubt. My issue isn't with the fact that the author doubts that MDMA will be effective, which it may well not be, but rather that she is being intellectually dishonest in her arguments.
The UX is slightly confusing. The Viewpoints toggles are easy to miss.
Deriving the Y Combinator in Ruby (keynote presentation from RubyConf)
> I've spent a few years working with the most incompetent people who were cooks, business graduates, poured concrete 2 months prior (you name it) and then decided to become programmers because they coded a formula in a spreadsheet.

If we make CS education accessible earlier, you could imagine that more people would actually be more prepared to enter the field.

> Don't get me wrong, i think programming IS essential and I DO believe it should be taught, but i just don't see how this benefits anyone at this point in time.

A few immediate benefits: Giving job opportunities to students who would have never had them before. Allowing students to complement their other subjects with knowledge of programming. Demystifying the use of computers. Creating their own projects.

Those seem like benefits to lots of people at this time.
Google has vector based map data available, it just wasn't being used on the iphone's Google Maps. If I understand correctly, maps on Android use vector based data. They are working on a way for PC browsers to support vector based maps as well (called MapsGL[1]).

So Apple didn't do anything amazing with their vector based maps, it was just new for their platform.

[1] http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
Malicious code added to open-source Piwik following website compromise
Code your bot (in any language) for Conway's game of life
After years of having cheap, shitty can openers that made it a pain to do the task, I spent 20 minutes looking it up and bought the best that I could find on Amazon. While I may never figure out how to service it if something happens to it (the thought!), it has worked pretty well so far. Cans are opened with little to no effort. It stays out of the way, it does exactly the task it was designed for, and it does it well.
Did you even read this article?
The basics of selling your service or product
Your last statement is incorrect. Blizzard proposed to try it when they rolled out their new version of battle.net in 2010, but they reneged long before release when some people kicked up a gargantuan fuss. The people who opposed it -speculated- that it would result in bullying, harassment, gender-discrimination and other general problems.
I actually stand on the opposite side of this debate. Not using an IDE forces you to remember and think about your language and development environment. You learn the methods and APIs that you call much better when you have to research them rather than when you scroll down an auto-completing list of method names. "Oh, this name looks close enough, lets try it!" versus going and looking up in the javadocs or python docs or [your language of choice] docs. When you have docs that are a good read (like javadocs and python docs, and maybe boost C++'s docs too), you can read the description, the examples, and sometimes even some recommendations on how to use that code.

That said, going to a-whole-nother environment just to complile can be a bit of a chore. There are some text editors that come with hotkeys for compiling and running. When I was in highschool, we used TextPad. Ctrl + 1 to compile java and Ctrl + 2 or 3 for running programs (depending on if they were applets or applications).

In college, I used nano/pico and eventually emacs. I'm still slower in some modern IDEs when trying to manipulate text as fast as I did in emacs -- though autocomplete and jump-to-definition makes my coding faster, in general.

At the end of the day, though, we're two people with anecdotal evidence that strongly supports our side of the argument, in our minds.

Addendum: regarding debugging. I generally find, for the kinds of problems that new programmers run in to, println debugging is generally sufficient, so for debugging, I would just recommend that.
I don't know where you shop, but the "traditional flatware" of my people is whatever was cheap enough at the department store. Our rich native customs dictate that we spend $15 on a set, and then use it until there are not enough non-bent spoons, and then to spend another $15.
Ah you're right. That is one of the main things I'm worried about as the Viewpoint toggle are pretty much the most important UI control on that page. I'll work on making it more clear.
To be fair, I had a backup by doing a simple export, it was about a month old so I didn't lose anything important (and reason I did it this way) but the fact it worked that way did annoy me. I just like the way the Google products are much more synced with my life. I was a "work" email which syncs with work related stuff, and personal email with syncs with regular stuff.

I still use both for cross browser testing, and at the moment I still use FF & Firebug but I am weaning myself off it. My day to day browser for everything is Chrome, in much the same way we all ditched IE but still had to occasionally use it for those sites "optimized" for IE.
I've been paying for Google Drive for several months because I really, really want it to work, but it's actually kinda useless as it causes constant instability and 120%+ CPU load on my 2012 Macbook Pro. This means that I frequently close the application down, so it's not actually covering me and if I lost my computer, the most recent files probably wouldn't be covered. There's been an open issue about this in the support forums for months and there's no news on when they're going to fix it...
Hiring Your First Product Manager
And the users get really mad at Exchange and Outlook, and they complain to their administrators, and they switch to Google Apps.
You have an odd definition of police state, then. People control and unchecked intelligence gathering on citizens are essential to a repressive power apparatus.

The point of cobrausn is that NYC takes this too far while other large cities do not. I'd argue the safest cities in the same class as NYC are probably as much police states. At least in regards to violent crime. Petty crime rates are difficult to compare uniformly across cultures.
It's unfortunate that there isn't, and really cannot be, an accreditation for SEO -- the industry move too fast, and the techniques are in flux, it's just the nature of things.

But I look at it the way the way I look at mechanics: There are a lot of great ones out there, and a lot of slimy ones out there. The slimy ones make a bad name for all their peers, despite the many people doing hard, important, quality work.

There are many wonderful SEOs (and Mechanics) out there, but if you're ever in doubt, just ask to speak to some of their clients. You'll know the good SEOs because their clients will be ambiguous in praise, with clear definable results they can discuss.
A fascinating example of higher-order function refactoring in Ruby leading to the derivation of the Y Combinator.

I was really impressed at how smoothly the live coding portion of the presentation proceeded despite the complexity of the material being presented.
My first reaction was "At least give the guy credit for the Flyover feature". But I just found that the feature came with the acquisition of C3 Technologies (2011). Looking at other aspects of the Maps app, I have hard time convincing others there are innovative components that originated from the team.
This is a great guide. Especially awesome for me was:
26. Change input mode to vi

$ set -o vi
This command changes the key bindings to vi's. If vi's your favorite editor, you'll love this. I'll cover the vi mode in more details in the next part of the article.

I'd love to find a cheat sheet for vi bash usage (and also an indicator for which editing mode I'm in).
Stephen--

It would be great to hear your thoughts on CodeHS.

>but with lab/office hours -- where people can work at their own pace but in the same space as others at their same level, and people with more advanced skills, who can give advice and mentor

This is literally a description of what we are trying to build at CodeHS.

>With Codecademy, it's easy to get discouraged because of the lack of people around -- you can go onto the forums, but there are no humans in proximity to commiserate or discuss hard problems.

Yup. And every beginner gets stuck. If you like our approach, contact us at team@codehs.com!
Monetizing Mobile Means Ditching Advertising as We Know It
Oh sure. However, it also puts a lot of load / strain on servers that Google doesn't want to run (SMTP, IMAP, etc). The way the post is written makes it sound like Google has figured out how to tame some natural force to allow us to have big e-mail attachments, while all along the limit was set by Google itself. I really don't think that Google cares about Outlook users (why should they).

Somewhat unrelated, I think that Google is beginning to try and pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP. I've long used Mail.app, mutt, or Thunderbird to use mail hosted by Google, almost entirely because the GMail client doesn't support any kind of message encryption or authentication. Recently, I have been receiving a lot of "quota exceeded" messages during routine interactions with the IMAP servers. I suspect that Google is in the process of gradually lowering the allowed quotas for IMAP usage in an attempt to get people to use the web UI, Android, or cros ...
would love to hear pg weigh in on this...
I am already extremely satisfied with PyCharm. I'll keep an eye on this though. Being able to write plugins in Python is promising.
How to Launch Your App – #appdevchat November 29th at 10am PST
Thanks for sharing. I recently launched into writing an ebook (educational, kids). Even though I use Word for tons of stuff I became concerned that it would insert all sorts of unwanted junk into the file. I looked around and decided to start the process on Sigil. My reasoning was that I could easily move the text into just about any other platform if I wanted to.

My first impulse was to simply write it all in a plain text editor and deal with formatting and producing all the various file types later on. One file per chapter, etc. However, with Sigil I can deal with images and TOC from the very start, which might be an advantage.

It's interesting to read about how other's have approached this. It sounds like the toughest part of the job might very well be getting the various formats to look the way they should.
Perhaps because not everyone is doing development on KDE?

The Ninja-IDE supports linux, windows, and osx so it has broader appeal.
Could somebody explain why those news publishers don't just deny the Googlebot access to their content? Why create another vague law, as if we don't already have enough of those in Germany.
Growth Marketers? Sure. Growth Hackers? Very rarely.

I love your posts John, but "Hacker" implies a level of coding in my opinion, and I think most here on HN would agree.

As someone who talks to a few dozen SEOs a week, 99% of them cannot code in a fashion needed to be a "Growth Hacker". It's not that they can't contribute to growth, it's just that the traditional methods SEOs use (content, technical fixes, social) would not be considered hacks, but just solid online marketing.
Scott Forstall (the guy in senior management directly responsible for maps) was also fired, so this doesn’t seem like a pawn sacrifice at all – unless when you say senior management you actually mean Tim Cook and only Tim Cook.
Thank you! People seem to think that just because it is illegal that there was no reason the drug was invented. It used to be a legal drug used in psychotherapy before they decided to label it a schedule 1 "narcotic."
Right, most aren't, but his story shows how far a solo founder can go.
The biggest take away I saw in your article was, do your research about the journalists you are going to pitch(or in your case get lucky by knowing someone). Making sure you are the story they want to write about is sure to increase your chances.

Glad it worked for you!
Kickstarter meta edition - a kickstarter to fund another kickstarter
Revenue is abysmal. No decent networks will advertise on Twicsy due to the adult content. Up until about 2 months ago I couldn't even cover server costs with the ad money.

As for the story:

I launched it back in 2009 as a last ditch effort to save my company (Searchles) and was featured on TechCrunch a few times that first week. But, since then, the coverage has been almost nonexistent. I have relied on organic growth, SEO, and old fashioned, bullheaded persistence since then. It has grown about 5x each of the past 3 years.

I have been running it in my spare time since March of 2010, and I am not the world's greatest web developer, so almost all improvements have been on the back end just trying to scale the site.

If you are interested in the tech:
I run MySQL on a 2TB SSD RAID 5 array, but then I use data caching servers I developed myself to speed up serving the site (some data in memory, most on SSD). The near real time search was also developed by me. Only 4 total servers are used to run the site.
I think what you are doing is great, and it does look like the way you are trying to achieve it would make it fun to learn programming.

Maybe I'm looking at it from a different perspective as I don't know much about the US school system. Here we have a few core subjects which are required and then we get to pick from a list of others (with various 'rules' e.g. you have to do at least basic science). I have no objections to making programming an option, I just don't think it is a core subject whereas many programmers think it is.

Basic IT skills should be taught to everyone and your product seems like a good way to introduce programming to those students so that the ones who might enjoy it could take on the full programming class option.
Seven Months at Github
I've seen regional versions of online communities, notably Barrapunto ( http://barrapunto.com/ ) as a Spanish-language version of Slashdot.

I think that there's value in creating regional communities of like-minded people.

I'd definitely like a Latin American startup-centric Hacker News equivalent.

There are several problems that are region-specific - for example I don't have to worry about VCs or IPOs or American tax rules, but I do have to worry about my country's restrictive employment policies, and other stuff that means the best answers for people in the USA are not necessarily applicable here.
This article stinks of some kind of manipulation. The diagram was leaked by officials from a country critical of Iran’s atomic program, but just didn't want to be mentioned. Hmmm... I wonder who that might be?

This also strikes me as someone in the US defense establishment planting a "causus belli", like the "WMD" of the Iraq War, or the testimony about Iraqi Army soldiers dumping Kuwaiti baby incubators for the Gulf War. An Iran War would guarantee profitability for defense contractors for 25 years.
I hope Moxie starts posting more frequently, especially if they're these these HN-popular posts, though I'd be interested in his security stuff too.
As pointed out by arrrg, senior management (forstall) was also fired