skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a concept in economics called "sunk costs"

In Poker its called "knowing when to fold"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betting_(poker)#Fold
Have you paid anything yet? Don't.

Drop him. Here are two good reasons to drop him:

1. You are wasting your time -- I don't think he'll give you anything, or you'll end up spending so much money that profits are unreasonable.

2. Even if he does, what guarantee is there that there is no "surprise" hidden in the code? I have seen freelancers do that when they're disappointed in the buyer.

Find another guy and learn from your mistakes:

a) Pay weekly, based on milestones.

b) Setup a Subversion repository and do a mandatory weekly commits. No commits, no money.

c) Ask for a very short but functional proof-of-concept first, once it works and you have received source -- pay money by this formula: $ = rate x hours.

There is no trust between you and freelancer and you should never work without at least a bit of trust and understanding of each other.
A reality check for you.

First, $2500 covers 50 hours of work. Do you think your app can be written in that timeframe ? Hardly. So this amount is not a compensation, it's more of a marginally attractive retainer.

Second, the 10% share is a joke. The reason being is that if there is a written app, then 10% commission gets you a simple e-com distribution (shopping cart, invoicing, payment processing). The 30% commission buys you a "fire and forget" kind of deal - you give the distributor an app, they brand it, promote, market and sell it and they also provide front-line support. THIRTY PERCENT.

You effectively offered a guy a 90% commission deal and now seem to be surprised he isn't happy. I wonder why.
> Requiring user testing for shades of blue and thicknesses of border is the height of silliness.

No it isn't, if a designers ideas cannot withstand a little objective scientific testing, they aren't worth using.

> Moreover, users often don't know they want something until a designer shows them they do. You can never get to those designs by testing blues and borders.

Which is the whole point of objective testing, do the design, throw it in front of real users and see how it performs next to the original design.

I think what's really going on is that more often than not, designers want what they like rather than what works best. Engineers want what works best, and Google has an engineering culture. Form does and rightfully should take a back seat to function.
"It currently authenticates the user on startup using a script on his server."
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Wow, ridiculous. This should definitely be changed before project completion. You need to get more stuff in writing from the sounds of it.
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I don't want to scare you, but from the sounds of this post, I don't see things working out in a positive way.
Ah yes, very good point. Only been overseas a couple times. Though some of the designs I've worked on have probably ended up in the very car you're driving. I've been in the industry for about 6 years total now (on and off, so really maybe 3.5 years solid).

I don't think you can ever bail on all the knowledge you've acquired, but it can easily be applied to other areas outside of engineering.

It sounds like you definitely know your stuff and continue to enjoy the passion for engineering that I lost a while back. I'd much rather depend on products designed by someone with your enthusiasm than those designed by the majority of people I know who are just going through the motions. Good luck in your career!
> And frankly I do not see the case where one person is worth 100 randomly picked persons in his field.

There's a rather famous list of 5000 German physicists who signed a petition stating that Einstein's theories were junk.

I don't know how many other physicists Germany had at the time but surely that tells us something about the odds of randomly picking 100 German physicists who were collectively "worth" one Einstein.
This is true, but it also represents a market shift - CD's are now really for listening in your car, or ripping to your PC.

LP's were for the days when you had a "hifi" and could be produced to actually have a soundstage.

The interesting thing is that's generally the target for SACD, DVD-A (i.e. someone with a high-end hifi). So they generally sound better irrespective of the technical qualities.

Video DVDs that are about musical performances (e.g. a classical concert) also tend to sound better for the same reasons. Although they generally tend to have compression, DTS, multi-channel, etc, etc, which I've never been a fan of.... All the same, the production is usually much better for a hifi scenario.
> There are probably several movies

There are movies where folks believe in Tinkerbelle and that keeps her alive or brings her back to life.
What I'd like to see is a way to enforce restrictions on the destinations you're willing to route as an exit node. I'm all for giving people living under restrictive regimes access to things like Wikipedia, but I don't particularly care to enable anonymous access to child pornography.
So whats your solution to getting the programmer to finish a 1-2 month project that's a year late?
Stack Overflow - More Voting Anomalies
Congratulations, now you understand who benefited when the media created the pedophilia scare.

I confess to being a total conspiracy theory nut on this topic, and go out of my way to defend "sex offenders" in any online discussion I come across. Sadly this is not enough. We're up against a monstrous evil machine made up of mostly good and well-intentioned humans and there's no apparent way to defeat it.

Think about it: who should we blame for the persecution and near ostracism of the article's author? The journalist who honestly warns the public about pedophiles? The media executives? The lawmakers? The police? The whole chain is structured to remove accountability, letting both idea creators and executives sleep peacefully with a clear conscience. The end result is the poor person facing a giant senseless Machine, thankful to be alive after narrowly avoiding its grinding gears. It doesn't have to be this way, people.
Ask HN: Is $5k really worth 5%?
A good software developer contractor can gross 10k in a month. Is something like ycombinator worthwhile to give up 5% for $5,000 per founder?
Assuming the designer is correct, when you have that much traffic and easy access to real data you don't need to make assumptions.
Technology convenience trumps fidelity every time
> I've found sound to be critical in software usability

Very little is worse than web pages that use sound. It's no accident that most sites don't use sound, your tastes are just way outside the mainstream on this.

> Interjecting them in the design process too soon and giving their opinion overriding power is a mistake.

The success of Google clearly shows it's not a mistake, numbers don't lie, but designers are full of bullshit they can't justify.
It's ok to have client state in cookies, just not application state.

For instance if you have a shopping cart you can have "items in cart" in a cookie because that's pure client state. You can think of the client as a resource and, say, a "view cart" page as a representation of that resource.

If the cookie in any way tells the application how to behave, then you have sinned against the gods of REST. The most common example is probably the login redirection cookie.
Well, apart from the fact that you got your math wrong (its $5k + $5k per founder) I'll give you a few other reasons why YC is worthwhile.

1) Introductions to prominent VC's/Angels if you want to obtain further funding

2) As a result of the process of getting into YC, it can somewhat validate your idea

3) Having to pull it off in 3 months can really light fires under people's asses

4) PG seems like a genuine bloke who really wants to help people. The mentoring aspect would be worthwhile.

5) Constant feedback. You'd be surrounded by a lot of other YC alums who are very switched on people... Good things to be learned all round

I'm sure there are other reasons I failed to mention, but I think I covered the basics.

EDIT - also, read PG's essay on the subject.

http://paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html
I believe its more about the experience and opportunities that are opened up to you than the money. You can earn $5k pretty easily but where does that get you?
This has been answered before. YC isn't about the money; it's about the advice and connections. If those things increase the probability of your company's success by more than 5%, YC is a good deal. If you can do better on your own, do it.
Read, network events, and start building something that you care about. "Founders at Work", like anuraggoel suggested, is a good place to start. "The Art of the Start" is another good place.

Focus less on the legal side of things at this stage and more about the entrepreneurial mindset.

Good luck!
SVN is basically developing the graph structure that other DVCSs have had ever since their inception (because a DVCS is toast without one and svn can manage).
Yep - seconded. I did that and have regretted it for 20 years now.
Not really. There have been several attempts since 2005 to create Super Auto-Scaffolding (streamlined, ActiveScaffold, and several other generic names that I don't remember, like "Ajax Scaffolding"). These aren't identical to Django's admin, but they could serve a similar purpose.

For all of its innovation, I'm a little surprised that the Rails community hasn't put together a quality solution for this problem yet. I assume the ORM differences are a part of this - Django's ORM (I think?) defines the schema in the application, while ActiveRecord gets this from the database directly. But does that really make a Django-style admin impossible with ActiveRecord?
If you want to make money selling desktop apps, the advice you'll likely get from this crowd is "learn how to do it yourself." Otherwise, give your coder at least a 50 percent interest in all of the proceeds from this app.

I don't know about that. Personally, I'd take $2500 over a 50% interest in most apps-for-hire I've seen. The OP may, in fact make a lot of money off of what he's trying to sell, but asking a programmer he doesn't already know to take that bet seems like a way to get a programmer who can't find other work (probably for a good reason).

To the OP: even if you're right, morally and legally, and you manage to get someone to disable the authentication, and you don't get sued, what you're asking for is still a bad idea. You won't have the source code. You won't be able to make any worthwhile changes. You won't get very far selling an application that you can't modify.

Your best bet is to either start over (someone here might be willing to do the work, for example - I'd consider it), or work things out with your programmer. Note that working things out might involve you getting a lawyer, though he might well have some legitimate claim to more money, if, for example he did work beyond the original spec for your project.
Paul Grahams essays are pretty excellent.
I appreciate that coding software is an iterative process.

But this software was planned out very clearly, there were some minor changes, but nothing big.

Im not sure why 10 percent doesn't seem like a good deal for him, he quoted me 2500 dollars, which is all he should get. Out of desperation and a desire to get the project moving and actually get some results, I offered him 10 percent when it was several months late.
"I disagree, for some the thought with 3D printers is simply to download a model and hit print, but many others see it as a path to "democratized" innovation."

How are those opposing forces?

I am surprised to read so many comments and see nobody articulate what I thought the 3D-printing idea was, which is that it will bring open source to the physical world. No more, no less.

You don't need a degree in mechanical design to use an open-source-powered 3D printer anymore than you need to be a programmer to use open source, with roughly the same capabilities and tradeoffs. Most of the rest of the problems cited in this discussion are supposed to be solved by automation; for instance, I can easily imagine how to help people stock up on raw plastic stock with arbitrary degrees of customization, that's not even remotely a challenge.

"Even if you just wanted to hit print, you can currently only print plastics."

Considering that 3D printers only barely exist today, basing your skepticism of the concept around only the progress that will be made in the next 5 to 10 years is an odd position to take. (And I feel I'm being generous when you explicitly say "today".) There is nothing fundamentally challenging about integrating electronics into a sophisticated 3D printer; it's only engineering of the type open source does every day. We could make a pretty decent pass at a generic electronic loadout today and it will only get easier over time. Already we see full Linux machines barely larger than the plug they attach to.

In fact, it's not even that 3D printers will be "like" open source, the hope is that it will be open source. 3D printers are just another hardware peripheral, hardly different in principle from 2D printers or graphics cards or audio cards or any of the other myriad bits of complicated technology already attached to computing power. Trying to separate the "3D open source community" from the greater open source community would be as futile as trying to separate the "3D graphics open source community" from the greater open source community; oh, there will be specializations and such but there's no way you could produce a criterion that cleanly separates each and every project into either "3D" or "not 3D", the way you can separate "open source" and "not open source" (for a suitably well-defined definition).
Lxml released
Revolutions: Physicists, models, and the credit crisis, ctd.
Earn Your High School Diploma In Less Than A Week
That is the business run by the article's author (http://www.shapeways.com). Check it out.
On a Mac you are allowed to change regions 5 times, total, over the lifetime of the computer. So the prime minister could have watched all 25 classic movies, if he didn't alternate with other films in between :-)
I paid him more than 2000 dollars of the fee already unfortunately. I've learnt a lot from this, specifically that even really good coders (or any professional) can be very good at what they do but still be completely unreasonable and willing to screw you.
GED Test: Free Online GED Testing Practice
That's true. It's also true that a single person can destroy the productivity of 10 other people no matter how talented and motivated those other 10 are. I think that is the point the article is trying to make.
Scrabble and other games have overvalued points
Anyone know how this compares to the instructions at dnstunnel.de, which uses ozymandns perl scripts? I've been using this method, and though it works, it is horrendously slow (takes a minute or more to load gmail...)
In most cases you're well served by making sure:

a) You have a reasonably-sized developer team

b) They document and test their code

c) No single developer 'owns' any part of the code

That should ensure that your developer team's "bus number" is reasonably high.

Finally:

d) You treat them at least well enough that you're not in danger of the entire team quitting at once.

That said, it can still be useful for many reasons if they base their work on F/OSS code (languages, libraries, tools, frameworks, etc.) that has a reasonably-sized community around it. But if the developers you hire are good that is very likely to happen naturally.

There are always circumstances where writing your own may make sense in the short-term, but unless it has something to do with your business' core-competencies, or otherwise leads to a sustainable business advantage, you're usually well advised not to bother.
Top Pitfalls in Growing Your Business [slides]
Desktop apps are used by more people on a more regular basis than any web app to date. Web apps are getting there, but there not there yet. Sound, when used appropriately, is a very critical component to user experience and more importantly, usability — hence why most operating systems use sound feedback. Apple's new Nano uses sound to extend its usability tremendously, and other examples are endless. (By no means do I assume sound should be forced, always a user-defined option).

Agree or Disagree: Twitter clients are an example of sound feedback hooking users attention (among other things), where the web was failing to do so.

Success of Google and 'design sensibilities' is not really an argument worth correlating; there are companies like Apple that master both engineering and design... tremendously successful. Furthermore, one could argue that Google Calendar is a near exact rip off of iCal, no credit to Google except putting it on the cloud and syncing it with their own software suite. I think influence is great, but goog engineers are not necessarily to credit for design and usability in this and other products.
If anyone hasn't seen it already...

(Brasseye: Paedogeddon)

Part1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7jVnrfoZD8&feature=relat...

Part2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcnQDYnGtS8&feature=relat...

Part3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA07Tw4iEFw&feature=relat...
Yes, many of us have felt this way. Be smart, draw a line under this and start again with a new coder. In a years time you'll look back and be glad you did. In an alternate universe you won't and it will make you miserable.
Even if they don't think it is malware they're going to bounce and bounce hard. If they're on my website they're on their way to conversion, period -- why the heck would I want to say "Excuse me, I don't want you clicking that checkout button just yet. First, go to microsoft.com. Then, click a download and go through three prompts. Then, do a twenty minute install. Then, restart your computer. Then, find this site again and I will accept your money."

IE6 users gave me about 5,000 reasons to be tolerant last year.
This is only a temporary concern due to the cost of current 3D manufacturing. A big, expensive machine is needed to provide the mechanical stiffness needed to produce something of a satisfactory resolution at a reasonable rate of production in a useful sized work envelope. These are the same factors which drive the cost of lathes and mills. So if you're willing to accept very low resolution outputs produced slowly, you can get that today.

Once molecular manufacturing is viable, this conversation is over so there's not much point in getting too agitated about precisely when the size, cost, resolution and work envelope of 3D printers makes it more appealing to have one in your house or to have Shapeways print it and mail it to you.
The google chart is intl data vs hitwise entry which is US only data.
This explains the facebook anamoly (recent intl growth vs myspace and craigslist which have remained primarily us sites)

edit:
this is the us only chart, which more or less matches hitwise data:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace,+craigslist,+facebook...
On sale: Adorable Pomeranian Spitz puppy
REST doesn't tell you what to do with the information after it's created or updated. Everything you might want to do through a web interface can pass to the server through the narrow funnel of CRUD.

It might seem that an exception to that would be to initiate some action off the server: send a fax, send some emails... but you can also look at these instances as changing the state on the server such that such action is requested. It's then up to another process on the server to respond to the changes and update the state on the server to show the results of that action.
Just as a point of interest, this is a model of the Flying Spaghetti Monster which I designed using Rhino and had printed at Shapeways.

http://www.shapeways.com/model/13639/fsm.html
Sounds to me like we're all getting crappy fucking DNS gateway software installed on our upstream connections. Thanks!
It can push you from 'thinking about starting the company' to 'starting a company.' If you're a 'thinking about starting a company' person, then it is worth it just to force you to switch modes.

Also, the adage "it's better to have half of something than all of nothing" has never let me down. I've always been very generous with stock and it has always paid off -- for me anyway.
I think many companies are just laying off because they now have a good excuse: "it's the economy". So no one will question the decision.
Fun exercise!

1) The old school UNIX admin solution to this is to make each of your fileservers NFS servers as well and cross-mount them all with each other.

Pros: it's there, easy, and pretty simple to understand

Cons: NFS clients (the whole OS) can get cranky when a NFS server disappears silently and the client attempts to access a file on it.

2) You can set up a machine with small, fast disk, and a reverse-proxy caching solution. Then you can point that cache server at a single server with acres of cheap disk.

Pros: This can be more economical than scaling machines if you're careful: buying SATA ports and connecting more disks can be cheaper than buying whole computers (and rack space, and power, and switch ports) for their SATA ports.

Cons: This technically doesn't solve the problem that you're eventually bounded by a single system's capacity. Also for certain pathologically bad workloads the cache server can thrash and performance will fall off.
It's pretty straightforward; WinXP just remembers and rebroadcasts ad-hoc SSIDs, so once you connect to "Free Public Wi-Fi", you're "infected". It is indeed pretty hilarious.
Ad Block Plus. Once Chrome has it, I'm switching full time. I realize there's other ways to block ads with chrome, but they don't seem as efficient as ABP
No. I mean buku, not beaucoup.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=buku
Exactly. The fun is in dealing with reality, not stereotypes. Life would be so much simpler (and boring) if everyone fit nicely in a little box.

At least in startup mode, where you obsess daily, hourly and minutely (?) about everything: should I fire John? Is John the best producer I ever had? But John just did something amazing yesterday, he saved the day. John is being a pain today. Had lunch with John, what a great guy.

You have to constantly look at the trees, look at the forest, and make choices. Tactical and strategic.

It's the same as parenting by the way. It's easy to read a book and see that by age 2, you should treat you kid in such and such fashion. Great, high-level advice. Except you interact with your kid constantly. When you're in a good mood and when you are not. We are back to tactical and strategy.

Bottom line: hire engineers who have great kids :-)
The point of the blue-bar incident was that the designer was not correct, and a different shade of blue (which most people inside the Googleplex thought was inferior) generated measurably more revenue - more than the designer's salary, and certainly more than the time spent experimenting with different shades of blue.

The best thing about a data-driven approach is that it gives room to be wrong. And we're proven wrong all the time: basically every meeting, there's some measured data where we go "that can't be right" - and then we either discuss ways in which we might've misinterpreted it or say "Okay, assuming this is right, then what do we do?" It sounds idiotic, but really we're (humanity in general) the idiots.