skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I completely agree. After working for a startup for over year, I have witnessed behaviors, actions and decisions that create progress as well as the ones that hold it back. You begin to see all of the mantras and advice trickled throughout the web actually applied (or at least attempted).

You see what works for you and what doesn't. You identify your strengths and whether you can handle stress or not. Consider it getting paid to learn about the things that interest you (startups, hacking, marketing, etc).

Other Tips:
To get a basic overview of funding strategies, read http://www.venturehacks.com. Attend events like http://sf2.startupweekend.com and be in a room full of people you can ask questions to (let me know if you would like a discount code for this).
This is beautiful --- using home-made waterproof microphones and computer software to detect migrating songbirds.

Here's a direct link to the microphone construction details: http://www.oldbird.org/mike_home.htm

The directions are delightful, and include helpful hints such as which model number of Kmart flower pots work best for the purpose.
To answer your question, Java is very easy to reverse engineer. Google for a decompiler. Several years ago I would get an almost perfect copy of the original source, with the proper variable names, etc. The only thing missing were comments :)

The legality of you reverse engineering the software is a different matter. But if you have paid the $2500 in question, then you own it.
I have to ask you if you even know what the CRA is, because your description of its effects appear to be based on not knowing. It is a requirement that banks load to people who couldn't afford a mortgage on their own merits because of the politically-oriented belief that the reason why these people couldn't get mortgages was not that they couldn't repay them, but because the bankers are racist.

It is impossible for the CRA to have had any involvement in the creation of an area for "retirees, empty-nesters, and a crapload of yuppies and speculators", because those people would not have qualified under the CRA, what with being relatively rich and all. (Excepting the last one; one of the saddest outcomes in my opinion of this whole mess are those who use the CRA to speculate. Oops.)

The CRA's entire, explicit purpose was the creation of a large number of toxic mortgages, a function it continues to perform. (It is of course impossible that a law so noble, so totally full of those glorious good intentions could be a bad idea, and the idea that it should be repealed is of course racist.) So, as my parenthetical sarcastically points out, that's not how the politicians see it, but it is an accurate description of the act in terms of what it actually does in practice. You can argue about the extent of responsibility it bears, but it is inarguable that it created toxic mortgages to some extent; for the CRA, that is working as designed.
As a follower of Emacs (I'm having a golden GNU built as an idol for the office), I have to say a good part of the problem is knowing where to go for docs. There's still a good bit of oral history to these editors, even if a lot of that is available online.

The last emacs book was published quite some time ago, and no matter how much of it is still valid, it's just not up to par with providing people with the same level of familiarity and desired features as one of the new ones. At work, we're all using gvim or emacs, but most are aching for eclipse or visual studio.

I try to mention ctags to them and they just stare at me blankly. I suspect the field has started to move rather quickly in the UI and lingual diversity fronts, and it's time editors need to diversify as well.

Still, lisp (or the bastard stepchild, emacs lisp) is a very good language for an editor. It's a shame it's the only place I use it.
Genetic Algorithms on Nokia N73
Nonsense. Once the developer accepts a $2500 offer he is obliged to do his part of the deal. Not to mention that $2500 can be a lot of money for a lot of people.

The 10% share of profits is a sign of good will on behalf of OP. It was not part of the original agreement and in that question is ridiculous to complain that it is too small. The developer is not a cofounder, he is a freelancer.

I'm sorry but contractual obligations will always come before what seems fair or not.
The original article about the 41 shades of blue says that Google decided to test the 41 shades because another team pushed a slightly different shade and it performed better.

So, it looks like the designer didn't know.

I'd contend that's because most designers don't optimize for performance, they optimize for aesthetic. When those two are in conflict which should win?

It sounds like Bowman thinks the latter, while Google thinks the former. As a stockholder I'm thankful that's the company's attitude.
I think that's right, but a little overgenerous to engineers. We have our hangups, too.

Say, which do you think is better, emacs or vim?

Even in a data-driven environment oftentimes the argument gets pushed back from "what to do" to "what to measure."
Project Voldemort: Scaling Simple Storage at LinkedIn
$2500 for 50 hours of work works out to $50 p/hour. I don't know what the fair market rate is for freelance client side app dev, but that sounds a bit low. Most web designers I know bill higher than that. For $50 an hour I'd either expect the developer to be really junior, or experienced but totally unaware of their own value.

Also, I agree that providing a percentage of the possible profits is not a very good motivator. Unless you're some master marketer with proven businesses experience behind you, it's a bad gamble for the programmer.
Matt Tiabbi does write with a certain muckraker-type style, and because it's only an article, it can only go so deep in the story. Having said that, as far as I can tell what he says is pretty much spot on and very much factually correct.

One example: He spends a few sentences explaining how banks created CDOs: take some good loans, take some bad loans, put them together and using some math convince regulators and investors that these things are AAA rated. Wired wrote an article (itself not that detailed) explaining the formula that allowed them to do this: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant

I don't think there can be an article that explains this stuff. Some years from now, someone who is both smart and an excellent writer will be able to look back and write a book that explains everything, but until then this stuff will be about as good as it gets.

Details on "how to prevent" are even harder, and you'll probably have to look at the upcoming G20 summit in April where the Europeans will try to at least start talking about some kind of regulatory framework, while the Americans will just want everyone to throw more money at the same people that fucked things up.
> I'm thinking the best way would be to get someone to reverse engineer the software

You don't have the source code? He just gives you a crippled binary to demonstrate his progress which only works after authenticating with his server?

I'm not sure why people here are telling you that there is either some ethical or legal problem with taking control of the work you already paid for.
Doh! I know rsync... perfect. Thanks for the pointer.
Give up and start over with someone else.

$2500 for 2 months of work comes out to 8 dollars an hour.
This isn't a good wage for a programmer anywhere and should have been your first hint that this wasn't going to work out.
That's true. Design is not about shades of color and pixel widths. But it also sounds like he resists having his designs put through the ringer of empirical analysis.
There is a legal problem. Unless the contract specifically states that the IP for the project belongs to the buyer, the software belongs to the programmer, even after it has been paid for. Threatening him with legal action is a waste of time.
That it was a crappy gift is at least as irritating.
complete side note - but your favicon has a lot of aliasing when it's on a dark background (i.e. as it is when you have ddg in an inactive chrome tab). the circle looks nice on white, but you may want to adjust it so it reads a little better against other mattes.

aside from that tiny-minor issue, ddg seems cool & the overview of the architecture is very clear. i'm going to give it a try as my default chrome search engine & figure out just how behaviorally indoctrinated google has me and how your architecture holds up as more people use the service.
That's a terrible idea. Think of the user experience for somebody who actually uses IE and likes it. Your website will essentially be telling people that they are stupid.

There are sites that do this to anybody not using Firefox and all they do is piss me off and force me to make a note never to come back.

If you run a website for a living, you need to support web browsers. That's your job. It doesn't matter if they've only got a few % market share, that's just the way it works. If you can't support IE6, that's your problem not mine. Fix your site instead of complaining to your customers.
It's not that Apple is subjective. Design isn't and shouldn't be objective.

I see it like this: design-thinking tends to be top-down and borrows from fields like psychology and anthropology, while data-driven-thinking borrows from the harder empirical sciences and is based on continuous measurement.

Neither is "correct" and both can be executed to produce a great company. Apple, as you say, is on one end of the spectrum. Companies like Amazon and Google are on the other end.

It's important to understand how you're making decisions and why you've chosen that process as opposed to some other one.

It sounds like neither Google nor Doug have done that.
I can comment on this, since I did my PhD work with Landauer and Kintsch and was the webmaster of lsa.colorado.edu for a while.

The current scene of statistical semantics is very active right now. I'm not sure that the SVD is easier to implement than the probabilistic versions (LDA, topics model). The svd code LSA uses required sparse matrices, and the code runs using the Lanczos algorithm; it also needs to place the entire matrix in memory at some point. This limits the scale of the corpus you can deal with. The probabilistic versions are iterative, and while they may take more CPU and time, they are not memory bounded.
HN lost my super eloquent comment that would have really helped the orig poster
Can we please implement:

- a way to preserve the typing of a comment even if the session expires

- caching of the submit page and/or comment form so back button preserves input in text area etc

Basic Usability: don't lose stuff that people spend time typing

hope this helps...

-a
How is it not less UI, if he reduced multiple screens and buttons to one text box? He literally reduced the quantity of interfaces a user interacts with.

I'm not convinced that we can treat "less UI = better app" as an axiom but I don't see your point.
I know you just heard about...
Birmingham, Ala., Today; Atlanta, Ga. Next Weekend - Feel The Energy Now!
*www.boostyourenergylevels.com
>And the out there thought for the day? We’re doing this to ourselves. We don’t encourage people to act aggressively all day to everyone they meet. We reward certain behaviours more than other behaviours. My unprovable conjecture? Humanity is selecting itself for certain behaviours, and the traits we think of as fundamentally human (loss of hair, retention of juvenile characteristics relative to primates) are a side effect of this self-selection.

Just because we reward people doesn't mean we are selecting for them. Modern society selects for people who have lots of children. Those people are also more likely to be religious.
I assume the programmer is not working on this project full-time.
Google's Designer quit due to a clash of cultures
It's more like a scooter meets a spider. No dynamics or sensing in the thing whatsoever, from what I can tell.
Ask HN: How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches?
I find that I spend at least 50% of my hacking time not writing code but figuring out how to get the desired results from 3rd party software. Things like configuring web servers, using frameworks, using web APIs, etc. In this realm, things often don't work as you'd expect them to, and documentation is often lacking. There is a lot of trial and error, and I absolutely hate endless trial and error (especially with many unknown factors). It always feels like banging your head against a wall.

If the legend of the mythical coder who is 10 times faster than average were true, this person would have to overcome the same set of challenges. But how can a one do this 10 times faster than his colleagues?

How does one deal with the headaches resulting from using 3rd party software? For me this is by far the biggest obstacle to being happy as a coder.
This seems like a pretty basic thing for the contract to specify. What else would the buyer be paying for?
Even so, $2500 is less than a week's worth of work for anyone good.
You were cheap and you've been had. Learn two lessons and move on.
It's unintuitive, but most software contracts do not explicitly give the buyer the IP. It doesn't sound like either of the parties involved know what they are doing, so it's unlikely the contract gives the buyer any power over the IP.
I think unsecured WIFI AP in Burma or China is a very precious commodity, if it even exists.
Quietube : YouTube without the distractions
.NET MVC vs Ruby on Rails. Ding
Thanks! I will look into the favicon issue. Please send me an email after you try it for a while with your thoughts.
Where did the process screw up here? Regardless whether he was running a Tor server or not, you don't think that the link between his IP address and child pornography was enough to warrant a search?
These designers who went to work for google strike me as incredibly naive.

Google was founded by two computer scientists, helmed by a former electrical engineer, and stacked to the rafters with mathematicians and statisticians. Their original investors were exactly the same types.

Can anyone think of another type of firm that fits this general description? That's right people - hedge funds!

Can you imagine a visual designer walking into a hedge fund and expecting free creative reign? It's absolutely naive. They were working for a bunch of quants and numbers people that are turning the online advertisement industry into a derivatives trading market.

Read that last sentence again.

Google is Wall St. West without suits or ties, I don't know why more people don't understand this better. They're blinded by bright colors I guess.
I've been in similar situations. As others here have pointed out your time is the most valuable thing on the line here and there's a big danger of wasting a lot of it if you sue. Here's one way you can handle it:

1. The quality of the work is probably middling to poor...

2. ... so figure out how much of your time $2k and the code is worth to you.

3. Hopefully you're friendly with an attorney. Print out all of your documentation for this deal, sort it chronologically, and run it by them to see where they think you stand.

4. Provided #3 turned out okay have your friend send a letter asking for the deliverables or a refund.

5. Be prepared to either walk away or negotiate an agreement both of you are equally dissatisfied with.

6. If you walk away be careful about using the binaries you've got, this guy may have rights to the profits even with everything else that's happened.
Since we do not have access to IE6 and know our latest version is messed up in it we are forwarding IE6 users to our old version( /ie6Index). The site is functional but asks them to upgrade.
Related bit of humor: http://blog.hugsformonsters.com/post/87657240/overly-judgeme...
Reputation On Stackoverflow (Graph)
We all 'know' that most of the work on a user-generated site is done by a small number of users but it is rare to get a clear picture of it. Stackoverflow has a great reputational system and easy to parse user profile user pages so I knocked up a simple scatter plot of reputation versus ranking. Any more data on user participation in community sites?
Smart Grid Vulnerable to Hackers
I would definitely blame journalists and the government. They did NOT report the dangers of paedophiles honestly. They grossly exaggerated the level of risk and mislead people about the sources of risk ("stranger danger").
I cancelled cable TV a couple of days ago. I was expecting the advisor to launch into a script designed to persuade me otherwise - probably offer me free TV for a month during which time I would reconsider. No, they seemed accustomed to my request and I was disconnected 5 minutes later. Moral of the story: easy way to save money right now.
turning the online advertisement market into the new derivatives trading industry.
It's basically Wall Street West.

That is a good way to put it. But, I doubt most people think of Google in that way, including engineers.
A contract is only valid if something is exchanged in both directions. This is a legal principle called consideration, and in the absence of consideration a contract has no legal legitimacy.

Without some transfer of IP rights either by copyright assignment or by bare license I don't see what consideration would be for a contract to produce custom software.

If the contract is determined to be invalid the buyer can then make claims to the IP under the doctrine of promissory or reliance-based estoppel since they have built a business on the expectation that the software would be delivered with appropriate rights to distribute and modify it.
> But, I doubt most people think of Google in that way, including engineers

You can bet the people calling the shots at Google are thinking of it that way.
I feel for you, sorry. If I could be so bold as to offer advice to anyone doing something in the future I would say:

Have a lawyer draw up a contract. Make it clear that you own the copyright to every line of code that goes into the revision control system that you own, and if possible, manage. Make sure the contract ensures you see the code often, making it a vital part of signing off any milestone. Always, always have a contract, even if you're out on this adventure with a pal. Money can't buy you friends but it most certainly can lose you some.
IKanServe - "the skeleton" of an Ioke web framework
Investment Bankers vs. Consultants
Why would the NHL want to offer an incentive for longer games? Maybe people buy more beer and food?
If Google supports this, why don't they use it on Google.com?
One of the best reads. So well written and so many good anecdotes. Few good ones:

One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens.

Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for.

Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage.

A famous French writer said "There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives."

Don't be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that "Life is the art of drawing without an eraser." And above all don't imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.

You don't need to run down like an unwound clock. And if your clock is unwound, you can wind it up again. You can stay alive in every sense of the word until you fail physically.

The more I see of human lives, the more I believe the business of growing up is much longer drawn out than we pretend.

You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.

You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves.

You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.

You finally grasp what S. N. Behrman meant when he said "At the end of every road you meet yourself."

'Did you collaborate in your own de
feat?" A lot of people do. Learn not to.

You never get the impression that a cow is about to have a nervous breakdown. Or is puzzling about the meaning of life.

There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are.

Life is tumultuous -- an endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous struggle, never an assured victory.

Someone said "It's all right to be a late bloomer if you don't miss the flower show."
Who owns the source code according the agreement? How were the milestones defined?

You can technically reverse engineer the code (it will not look exactly like the original). Depending on the agreement though, if the coder owns the source, you're probably better off not doing that.

Next time specify who owns the source in the agreement, and make sure that you're getting the source as you release the funds.
I think the comment above is the best path you have now. Get another coder, the development costs so far have been lost. And now pay him every time he/she delivers on a repository (always have the source code with you).

Having a one year project and having no source code for what you paid for is unreasonable for a key asset of your company.
This depends on many factors, pretty much all of which can only be answered by you. If you think that the YC route may be worthwhile, then you'd do well to apply, and if not, bootstrap or go off on your own.
Twins commit perfect crime
In a salary or for freelance? I think salary hours are typically 0.5 * freelance hours, is that right?

So inside a company, $1250 is less than a week's worth of work for anyone good?
I think what's appealing in this is that we all know that the tablet form factor is a valid one. There are hundreds of thousands of purposes for a lightweight, page sized tablet device that people could do basic computing from.

But at this point no one has managed to "do it right".

Apple is a company that tends to do things right when they actually move into a new market place so the "giant ipod touch" seems like the light at the end of the tunnel. That's why I think people who hear the rumor (myself included) tend to like the idea.
I love security. An Apple II and two feet of floppies with an old game cracker's tools were my introduction to home computing. When I was younger I had a few adventures. So I hear where you're coming from.

But this juvenile attitude of "they haven't figured out how to stop me so it must be ok" drives me nuts. Have a little integrity. Maybe it's a small thing but that doesn't make it nothing.
Many will point out the fact the introductions and the opportunity to work with other startups are worth more than the money. I want to say the money is worth it too.

We are self-financed and so we do contract to pay our living expenses. It is working great for us, but often we will get sucked in client projects. Those distractions have been costing a lot in term of growth. 5% for the intros and money to just focus on your idea for 12 weeks is certainly worth it.
Fiat currency is the cause of the problem, but it also provides the solution. I agree that our financial system should be running MacOS, not windows. I agree that running Windows is why we get so many bugs and viruses. But as long as we are running Windows we should still apply the patches that Microsoft sends us. Or in this case Bagehot. And declaring that we should just let the virus wipe out our computers, so then we can all buy Macs, is neither an effective strategy for making friends and influencing people, nor is it in your interest.

If you're going to run a fiat currency, try and keep it as close to gold-like as possible. Do not inflate, do not deflate. If bug in the banking system wipes out half the currency in the world, simply run a patch to add the money back. If you find some alchemist created gold in a laboratory and pushed it into the market, you should shut down the alchemists lab, but allow the gold that has already entered circulation to continue circulating.