skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: The VC and the Geek.  Do VC's only care about 'management team'?
My understanding, based on nothing but some reading, is that as an engineer, I have zero credibility when it comes to VC's. They see me as something like a janitor or an electrician, or any other skilled craft. "You need them, but which exact one you get doesn't really matter."

My understanding is that VC's don't invest in technology, or in engineers, they invest in management teams. You need the resumes in your portfolio that have letters like 'MBA' on them, instead of letters like 'EE'. I assume if your letters were 'PhD EE', that might compete with 'MBA' ... barely.

I have used this knowledge as an excuse not to even try to get VC money for any of my projects that currently languish in notebooks due to lack of capital.

So, my question here is ... Am I wrong?
Nice cover story
You deal with it by using said 3rd party libraries 100x before you embark on your "current" project. Know your tools well, inside and out, and you're 10x more productive than someone just starting out :-)

Also, there is something that has to be said for compromise. Get libraries for the language you know best and you will more productive than if you used a high-performance library for a language you don't know. Start small, and worry about scaling or "going big" later.
A nice data point. Though, the critical thinker will immediately notice that the article discusses foreclosures, and not foreclosures on CRA loans. Indeed, a little research will confirm that most of the places you listed, do not qualify for CRA. For instance, Lehigh Acres (Ft. Meyers FL), often described as ground zero of the mortgage crisis would have in no way qualified for CRA loans. Contrast that with the North and South Carolinas. Both states have huge, impoverished, minority communities. Both states have communities that make liberal use of CRA. Odd, is it not, that these states should be so relatively void of foreclosures.

An interesting exercise I am trying to engage in is to determine, what percentage of CRA loans were defaulted on in comparison to Fannie and Freddie loans. It is difficult to determine as right now Fannie and Freddie seem almost desperate to keep that information opaque. Why?

What I can say is that here is a telling datapoint, Fannie and Freddy have collapsed, but Ginnie is still going strong. What problems Ginnie has, it got through foolhardy government attempts to save Fannie and Freddy. "What is Ginnie?", you ask. Ginnie Mae is the explicitly government backed entity that handles all of the FHA HUD housing stuff, indian (native American) housing, housing for military veterans etc. Incidentally, FHA HUD housing provides loans explicitly to those with low credit scores and low incomes. Strange, don't you think, that they are not having trouble right now? I mean given that these are exactly the people who are alleged to have caused the problem. Even more curious that Fannie and Freddy would collapse, considering Ginnie was the one on the hook for all of these low credit score mortgages.

Again, as always, I know there are a lot of people shooting off their mouths right now, so I invite you to look these things up. You may find it helpful to start here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_National_Mortgage_As.... Then there is an explication of exactly what CRA does here http://www.ffiec.gov/cra/. And finally, you may think wikipedia is biased, so I would encourage you to read more about Ginnie Mae here http://ginniemae.gov. Finally, take a look at the map on the link you sent out in your post http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2009-03-05-for... and compare the North and South Carolinas to say California.

Now you are probably asking why you've never heard of this stuff before? Because data, takes analysis and critical thought. It doesn't fit well in a soundbite. Seneca said that a lie could make it halfway around the world before a fact could get its shoes on. The great CRA debate is a textbook example of this phenomenon.
The 3D printers we have in the architecture school print starch and ABS models. They cost around $3-4 per cubic inch, and one method of reducing cost is to create hollow volumes instead of solid ones. But then they're reduced to visual study models, rather than any potentially functional ones.

I'm interested in seeing how the print materials will evolve. Current materials are great for prototyping and generating forms, but materials like starch are very brittle, and anything less than .125" thick will usually break. It would be great to print models that are not only functional and durable, but viable as end products.

A lot of attention is on 3D printing, but that's connected to a larger set of technologies that make up "digital fabrication," which includes laser-cutting and stereolithography, etc. Laser-cutting is as significant as 3D printing, I think, as you can design interesting 2D patterns as well as folded surfaces, that can be aesthetic or even structural.

For one of my projects this semester, I created a nice set of computer speakers for my macbook, out of foamcore(!). I lasercut the foam to create the housing for the speakers, and encase the circuit board that had the power and volume controls. The next step is to buy higher-end speakers and create the housing out of high-grade wood for better acoustics.

Anyway, the point is, you can make a lot of interesting things with digital fabrication.. I don't think it'll be as ubiquitous as inkjet printing, but more similar to the structure of Software Development Kits, where industrial designers will facilitate co-creating your customized products. I can imagine separate teams of designers making customized laptop chassis, medical equipment, cell phones, etc...
First of all, this is an idiotic comparison. Digg and Facebook target different audiences, and even though Digg does have some 'social' aspects, you don't need to be registered to make use of Digg content. Not so with Facebook.

The comments bewildered me, too. Digg is hardly techie-biased anymore. Look at the front page of digg.com right now; I don't see much that is related to computing. The 'cool pics/videos' fad has taken it over like half of Reddit.
Ask HN: If we woke up tomorrow and...
If we woke up tomorrow and all technology had gone, assuming we could still make a fire, how long would it take to get back to where we are now?
This is a horribly uninformed opinion piece with no substantial data to back up any claims. MVC is a huge step forward for MS. 10 releases prior to 1.0. The source is available (yes, they don't take contributions). It has 94% code coverage. It's brand new and it's true the docs need some improvements. .NET has three ORMs built in (L2S, EF and typed Datasets, which are crap, but they're there) that you can use for the model. Validation and scaffolding are there (not sure how they missed that) and there's excellent 3rd party validation tools (like xVal). C# 3.0 is awesome (LINQ rules and it's more than just LINQ to SQL) and hardly verbose.

I hope people don't read this blog post and dismiss ASP.NET MVC because of it, because the post is just plain wrong.

EDIT: Here's an example of how the docs are already being worked on: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-n... Completely free and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives.
We built a video transcoding platform in Rails - http://zencoder.tv and http://flixcloud.com. Of course, it would be stupid for us to try to actually do the encoding in Rails. That's what C is for. But Rails makes a nice lightweight queueing/management platform that can work alongside of other tools.

Each of your examples is a place where Rails isn't appropriate. But each example should be a multi-tier architecture, and Rails can happily cover one or more tier in each case.
I've noticed the whole "posting-links-for-links'-sake" happening too; lately, the front page has, at most times, at least one link to Seth Godin's blog, and many times multiple links to techcrunch.

My "solution"? Skim the front page, and spend more time on /newest instead. There you have a wider range of topics, but they're also easier to filter: The usual gaggle of amateurish SEO attempts with rolex/viagra/holiday-home/tourist sites, some repeats from the front page, but for the most part, fresh & interesting stuff that barely makes the front page any more. Works for me.
Some of his complaints seem to be about C#, which is not required. Also, the exclusion of an ORM is probably a good thing, so you can choose whatever you want, similar to the view engine.
This is baseless speculation. MVC is now one of the core parts of the ASP.NET stack (Webforms, MVC, Dynamic Data) and it isn't going anywhere. I was at MIX this past week and met most of the MVC team. They get it. MS has stated a commitment to developing both Webforms and MVC going forward.
great many enterprise systems - oh please give me a break. Subversion has nothing to do with enterprise blah. Many of us simply use svn because it is a fine tool and gets the job done. For all kinds of projects, from open source to 'enterprise'.

Seriously .. don't put the enterprisey stigma on it. It does not deserve that.
Selling Software Like a Pro
You're right, the exclusion of a default ORM is a good thing. They do ship ORMs with the .NET framework though so if you need one, it's right there to use. And you can plug in any 3rd party one you want like NHibernate or SubSonic (which was inspired by ActiveRecord) or whatever.

StackOverflow (the biggest public ASP.NET MVC site that I know of) uses LINQ to SQL for instance, which is built in to the framework.

MS gets grief when they include something people don't want by default so they decided with MVC to avoid an ORM war and give people the option to use whatever they want (or are already using) and they get grief anyway.
It's a decent comparison, but now that MVC has a full release, the documentation has gotten significantly better. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd394709.aspx

I will disagree about ORM- there are already plenty of ORM and ORM-like frameworks out there for .NET, and I don't think the MVC team wanted to add another one.

Not sure about the routing being verbose. I'm (hopefully) close to finishing up a fairly complicated app with the framework, and routing hasn't been a problem for me.

I will definitely agree with point 12 though, but that's because the WebForms model causes brain damage if you use it for too long.
Its Humma Kavula http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3066140928/tt0371724
How the Kindle will change the world.
Long enough that most of humanity would die very quickly. Without tools to grow food to satisfy our current population, we couldn't make enough. Couple that with lack of heating for cold regions, general lack of knowledge of survival skills, and the realization that we must first get metal before we can even create decent tools... I'd say we'd be goners.
We still have the knowledge, so assuming that knowledge is utilized i guess you could answer that question by simply reverse engineering the amount of time it took to obtain the knowledge of achieving a significant process and then determine from that point how long did it take to implement the solution. Since you would be implementing the solution only you would then need to know how many key solutions are you re building and you could figure this question out quite easily.
It can be. Depends what you make of it.
The concept of 'karma' doesn't seem to have anything to do with the thing we call 'karma' on the internet.

I want 'tech support karma'. If I only submit a tech support request once per month, and I never ask for a telephone call-back, that should be worth something, like, very high priority in my request. Similarly, if I am pinging tech support every hour, that should lower my priority, perhaps.

This could be used on HN as well. If somebody submits often, there should be some penalty associated with that. A pop-up window that says, "You're over your daily post threshold. Submitting this link will cost you 5 karma points"
It's a bad working relationship, you have to end it. The only question is how to salvage something.

If you've paid for work so far, and your contract gave you rights to the source code, demand the source code. You could hand that to another developer and it might be of some use.

If he won't provide it, and especially if he's local, sue in small claims court for your money back.

If you have a running version without source, you could rebid this elsewhere and use both your previous correspondences and the working version itself as a new spec to accelerate the new work.

If it's truly $2K worth of work by an ornery contractor, it can likely be reproduced for about the same cost. But it's also possible that he was way undercharging you and that's why he's become ornery.

If you have a working code delivery but not source, Java code can be decompiled to recover somewhat useful source code. However, unless there's some fancy custom algorithms/graphics/etc. in your app, a basic 'Swing desktop app' might be easier for a new contractor to build from scratch in their style than try to reuse something from an unreliable coder. Only go the decompilation route if you are confident of your rights to the work (because it was clearly a work-for-hire with you receiving the rights under your written contract, and you haven't orally modified that contract in your pleadings with the developer).

Rentacoder and other sites really help prevent a lot of these problems by nudging people -- especially those new to software development -- into doing things the right way... having a clear contract, planning for likely delays, staging things, getting multiple bids for comparison, etc.
I'm sorry but this is bad advice. Coding isn't a special skill that can't/shouldn't be hired.

He hired a guy to write code. That guy seems to be jerking him around. The way forward should be to dump the guy and get someone else. There are a lot of software engineers out there. Reneging on a deal isn't ok just because you know Java and your client doesn't.
You're assuming several things:

1. That he has money to pay.
2. That he will pay the money he's ordered to pay.
3. That he will pay that money in a timely fashion.

Bottom-line, this person is not going to give you a product that you're happy with and definitely not on the timeframe you need. Go ahead and file a small-claims case against the person but count the money gone.

There's lots of good advice on here about what to do, raise the cash again, hire a good programmer using the advice given above and below this and move on. Don't waste any more time pleading, threatening, or talking to this guy. Sue him and put it in the past, count the money gone. If you ever get any of it back, apply it to something different, server costs, etc.

Honestly? $2,500 is a very, very cheap price to pay for everything you've learned here. Learn from it and how to avoid this situation in the future (plan out all contingencies ON PAPER with the person ahead of time.)
The 10x coder doesn't really have a magical trick for dealing with those kind of things. He simply maintains his focus, and makes steady progress until the problem has been solved.

However, the 1x coder ignores the problem, or declares it unsolvable. Inevitably, he waits for the 10x coder to fix it. The 10x rule holds.

10x coding is as much about willpower as it is about technical competence and experience.
Yes. It is. The connections you get out of an elite college worth more than that.
http://watchdog.net/

http://fixcnbc.com/ta
Are you sure these are examples of 10x programmers and not 100x programmers?
i think you should clarify more. for example:

do we still have the knowledge but have no material technological items? do we still have the stuff but no knowledge? are we being impeded by some sort of magical force? are there dragons?
Interesting and creative, but seems much slower than the qwerty keyboard.
The faster JS is attractive if you use a lot of JS heavy sites,. I do not - in fact I mostly browse with JS off. Start up time is a once a day issue, it is not significant given all the other apps usually in my session, and will be even less so once I solve an issue with suspending to RAM.

I would like process per tab, but I like my Firefox extensions more (Scrapbook, Clear fields, No Script, Its All Text, Errorzilla, Download Helper, Add to Search Bar, Web Developer, No Squint, Search Status).
VCs invest in founders, not management teams. Some of the good ones have a strong preference for those founders to be engineers.

Most of the most successful VC investments have been backing very smart engineers. This pattern is not lost on them.
Before launching a freelance writing career in January 2000, Kalpana was a software developer at IBM for ten years. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Chennai (India), a Diplome Superieur in French from the Alliance Francaise and an M. S. in Computer Science from San Jose State University.

I found this on her homepage, kinda interesting that she developed software at IBM for 10 years before she found her calling in writing.
Again, CRA is centered around the concept of NEIGHBORHOOD investment. Not investment in minorities. When you say:

<<"The problem is that if you don't lend enough money to minorities (who disproportionately can't afford it), the federal bank regulators can block you from acquiring/being acquired by other banks.">>

I'm confused as to which part of the act you are speaking about. Perhaps you could post the link to the relevant statute, and we can discuss this based on the data.

Regarding the links you provided, again, what is the relative default rate? This is the key piece of data we need. Even better, would be the absolute amounts of money that were defaulted on. That said, I would observe that it is interesting, wouldn't you say, that default rates on FHA HUD loans should be so public, and default rates on the Fannie and Freddy backed stuff so closed. Even more interesting that, as I said in response to your other post, Ginnie Mae should still be solvent considering Fannie and Freddy are basket cases.

Finally, I am uncertain as to how the links you provided support the assertion that CRA precludes banks who don't lend to minorities from acquiring or being acquired. If you would elaborate on the connection I could determine better whether or not I agree with you.
Dear HN: Rails didn't win. Nor did COBOL lose. Let's stick to substance instead of linkbait.
Can we keep the Tech vs. Tech linkbait off of HN? Rails didn't win, and COBOL didn't lose. Django isn't better than Rails, and Rails isn't better than Django. These thread just bring out the trolls, and get reflexively upmodded by people who didn't read the article.

Let's talk about specifics, not generalities. "Rails does X well - you should learn to use it." "PHP suffers for the lack of Y." That has substance.

Rails vs. Django lacks substance. Rails won or lost lacks substance. And PLEASE quit with the "Community X is full of douchebags - here is a bad experience I once had". As petercooper said in a related thread, "Hi pot, meet kettle."
What about the ability to spread out a particular request to many exit nodes? This would probably require the establishment of new formats and protocols. How about image formats with the same sort of information as Bittorrent? (Can someone be prosecuted for downloading a fraction of something?) As mentioned in the Rivest article posted recently, there are also "packaging transforms" that allow one to divide information up into n parts, such that all n parts must be provided to retrieve it.

I am surprised that such protocols haven't been devised yet. Yes, this would enable those engaged in child pornography. But those so engaged will just concoct yet another mish-mash of obscurity in any case. (Like using encrypted Windows Remote Desktop connections to virtual servers with encrypted archives on them.)

Just because Bittorrent is used by so-called "pirates," doesn't invalidate it or its use to distribute ISOs of Linux distributions. Likewise, such protocols would patch TOR's weakness at its exit nodes.
Ask HN: Are you getting screwed?
Say someone joined a company at a very early stage, just when it secured its seed funding and there were only 6 employees. Today out of those 6 first employees there is only 1 more that has stuck around, meanwhile the company has grown to over 100 employees and has raised enormous amounts of funding and are planning to be very profitable.

Now say you have generated the company millions upon millions, have been an integral process in making this company the success it is today and you are not recognized nor promoted for your work, hired over and feed the left overs of those hired from the outside

Is it worth sticking around for 2 more years to let your options vest when you know the most you will ever make is half a million to a million?

What would you do if you were this person? Is having a job alone good enough in this economy?
I agree that your "solution" fits the culture of hacker news. Rather than write legislation to beat down or prohibit bad behavior, the community here works, by and large, to exert self control and cooperation. Wow, did I just write that? Let me write it again, "Self control." That felt good. There seems to be a distinct lack of self control in our society, but that is an entirely different rant and off topic.

So I think that restraint will work for the news.yc "natives" after we talk about it a ton, I'm not so convinced that the "visitors" will have such inclination. Well, I'm receptive to hear what everyone has to say.
Can a few new metrics be introduced in the leader board such as:
- average karma per post (subject to min number of posts and possibly decay factor)
- average karma per submission (subject to min number of submissions and possibly with a decay factor)
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?

I am a 10x coder, although I prefer when people just refer to me as someone who gets stuff done.

The answer to your question is simple: Yes, we are faster because we overcome these challenges, because we are as much sysadmins as we are developers.

The secret sauce is to realize that the world does not end at the borders of your VM.

If you refuse to acknowledge that your webapp needs an operating system, a webserver, a cache and a database to operate and if you push the lowly "grunt-work" of setting these up to someone else then you'll never be a 10x developer. Because in that case you're depriving yourself of acquiring the magic systems knowledge that leads to all the little "ah, this could be easier"-moments.
He's not a really good coder, really good programmers don't work for peanuts. Good programmers in America make anywhere from 6k to 10k a month, what exactly do you think you're going to get for 2k?

For the price you're offering, you won't find any good programmers that'll work for you, you'll only find hacks who think they can and are more than willing to take your money while learning.

If you think you can spend 2k to have some monkey write some code for you that you're going to sell and make a ton of money with, you're sadly mistaken. If you think your idea is with 90% and he'll do all the work for 10% and 2k, you're also sadly mistaken and very like to be taken, as you clearly have.

If you think you have an idea that's worth anything, you need to find a good programmer and bring him on as a full partner, he'll be the one doing most of the work and offering anything less will be insulting and unlikely to work out for you. He needs to be as vested in the success of the endeavor as you or it'll likely fail.

If you just want your idea implemented by a contractor and you keep all ownership and a reasonable estimate is that it's two months of work, then you're looking at 10k to 15k to get it done right by a competent programmer, not 2k. You'll get what you pay for.