skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, it's very unlikely that he's really almost done. Haven't you heard that the first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time?

And doing business with jerks is bad business.
There more severe problems, in many places I have done contract work for the HR database has only the pw encrypted and all other info (SSN, DOB, Address, Bank Account #, Routing #, etc) stored in plain text. Each time I come upon such a data store, I die a little more inside and then make sure my info is not inside.
At first i would be concerned with not freezing to death and finding food, I'll leave technological advancement for the better days.

You see, we started to develop technologies only after we had people who could afford not to have to kill their own food, so they had some free time to make now tools or have new ideas. cave men weren't stupid, they just didn't have any spare time to waste.
citation please? While this is sweet kool-aid, and I like the taste a lot, this is in direct opposition to almost all VC websites that I have read.

I expected this answer, posting here. I WANT this answer. But I need more. I need convincing that the VC sites are wrong.

Here's links from a one minute google.
http://www.smallbusinessnotes.com/financing/venturecapitalde...
http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2008/08/hi-mark-big...
http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:HQ8zeI6-mXUJ:www.va-int...

... and so on. I have a bookmark folder filled with these somewhere, but for now, you get the idea.
$2500 will barely cover about 100hrs of effort (2.5 weeks). So a $2500 is a really simple app. If he has put that effort already consider that you have had your moneys worth.

Likely, he was thinking of a one bedroom house. You were thinking swimming pool, gourmet kitchen, etc, etc. Professional software developers know how to deal with it. The lesson is easily worth $2500.
Wow. This is one of the worst pieces of advice I've ever heard.

Don't hire him in the first place, maybe. But once he's there, if you don't have a replacement already lined up and combat-tested, firing him can easily shut down your company.
Right on the money.

I use 3rd party libraries until I hit a tipping point where either the effort to implement is looking to be greater than the effort to simply write the baseline functionality I need from it. The basic idea is to get it to fill in the functionality you need to prove your point and then rewrite it as your needs increase, or if you're like me, are OCD about a consistent code base.

Instead of writing from scratch, I tend to copy and paste whatever I can salvage and build from there, typically refactoring the original code into something new entirely.
This has always been inherent in "the process." It's just that child pornography is particularly easy to vilify, as it likely should be. But in the past, there have been similar scares using witches, communists, homosexuals. Now there are Nazis and child pornographers. (Heck, I've even seen people trying to vilify Nazi child pornographers!)

I think more attention should be placed on the broader issue of Human Trafficking. We know this is real, and child pornography constitutes some fraction of it. It's just a lot easier for the police to get ahold of an IP and break down somebody's door.
I assume every artifact made by man disappears instantly? No books, no canned food, no clothes. Everyone i know would die in a week. My grandma grew up very poor in the dustbowl. She would have a chance, but it's cold at night.

So, you're left with people who can recreate their tools in a few days, and don't really need what they have. the !Kung in africa? There's probably 20,000 people in the world like that. Expansion around the globe would likely happen as fast as the first time. 100k years?

I think teching back up would take a lot longer. The easy to get natural resources are gone. 100k years aren't really enough for plants to turn back into oil. Maybe really big earthquakes would bring metals to the surface. Once upon a time there were black puddles of oil on the ground. Now, we have to pump saltwater into deep reserves to get the oil out. I suppose there's plenty of easy to reach coal. I don't know much about copper mines, they always look very deep to me. perhaps there is a lot of easy to get surface copper, just not in high enough concentrations to make it worthwhile to mine.
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I have been taught the U.S. Constitution mandates ALL spending must be initiated through Congress. If this is correct, then the above cited Act is not constitutional.

There are many that argue the Fed has long been exercising powers it does not have. We shall see how much longer this behavior continues.
Using a logarithmic scale for the axes would probably make for a more instructive chart...
For me, this quote is the hard-earned kernel of wisdom that affirms what I've been saying about transactional memory for the last three years: "Why make the code XTN-friendly when they can make it lock-friendly as well, and have it run fine on all gear (and not just HTM-enabled gear)? Also locks have well understood performance characteristics, unlike TM's which generally rely on a complex and not-well-understood runtime portion (and indeed all the STMs out there have wildly varying "sweet spots" such that code which performs well on one STM might be really unusably slow on another STM)."

Transactional memory sounds appealing to programmers who've worked hard on making lock-based systems scale because the grass is always greener. Locks sound easy, too, until you try to build a huge system with them. It sounds like Azul has built the first industrial scale TM implementation, and done it with some of the best and brightest, but has not found the going significantly easier or faster than with traditional methods.
I believe you are wrong.
It isn't about degrees as far as I understand, but it is about the ability to sell the idea, manage it through production and growth.

When a VC says they fund a team, they don't mean they fund degrees. Funding a team will often mean funding people with experience, or some other factor that lets the VC know that this is the right horse to back.

Lots of engineers get funded, but they don't get funded for 'projects that languish in notebooks due to lack of capital'.

So that's the problem first. You need to be able to sell your idea, and likely you should probably be on the road to building it or have something built before looking for funding.

Pick up Curtis Carlson's book "Innovation: the Five Disciples to Creating What Customers Want".
It will help you put together the proper positioning for your idea and get it ready to be heard.

----- EDITED -----
I REALLY liked Sama's response (which wasn't there when I wrote my original response above).

My response is probably focused on steps. You can't go right from idea to VC (unless you have some serious connections and likely some very serious successes in your past as well).

An idea is just an idea. It is a management team (which might need a good engineer) which brings the whole thing together.

Rarely (though it does happen) is an engineer the best person to lead a business. Think Apple - Woz was the engineer, Jobs the manager/marketer.
You might need to find your Jobs if you're Woz (okay, that's not the way the history works, but you get the jist).

By the way, I'm in your boat (kinda) I'm the engineer of my start-up and also trying to be the management guy. It's tough going it alone, once you're in it, you'll likely understand why VC's focus on the team aspect.
Why would he? It's not like he did anything illegal, and if you tried to say what he was doing should be illegal, or at the very least regulated and in the open, then you would have been called a loser socialist who's jealous of financial innovation.

Let's not forget what the prevailing attitude was just a few years ago, and you can still see lots of it left over today.
I'd say there is very real significance in creating an elegant personal transport powered by a pair of 18W drill motors, but from the article:

"We had to do a kinematics project with Dr. Chambers the semester before, and I made a walking device out of chicken bones. When I started working on my senior project, I wanted do something that carried weight. It just kinda grew from there."
You're moving the goal post. No one's talking about desktop apps, you said web apps. Web apps are a different space and sound is just not appropriate there, and it likely won't ever be.
Better yet, a botnet of 3G smartphones. This might be useful enough that some criminal organization might actually buy smartphones in bulk to do this, instead of trying to hack them. (Maybe even manufacture them? These things wouldn't even need input devices and displays.) Pay truckers or bus drivers to carry them around in cities, and program the nodes to periodically shut themselves off. Combine this with a mechanism like TOR, and I'm not sure how you're going to prosecute. (Are judges going to issue warrants based on MAC address?)
"pertinent information needs to travel both ways"

I agree with your statement to a certain extent. It's the "travel" part that I think is not necessarily true.

Everyone (pertinent) must know everything (pertinent). And once information is ubiquitous, it will no longer need to travel.

As far as translating from one person's lingo into another (whether it's CEO<->Programmer or otherwise), then you can't argue with that. On the other hand, if the CEO and the worker's were able to understand each other directly, then you would have a much more efficient organization.

I would say that the latter example has an advantage over the former.
Ask HN: how do you process payments?
I'm starting to research payment processing systems for my startup, and was hoping to get some feedback from some HN readers who have had some experience with some online merchant service providers.

Which payment processing provider do you use? And how would you describe the quality of your service?

Google, Yahoo, and PayPal all provide this service, and they all charge similar fees. How do they stack up against each other?

Also, the ability to charge for recurring payments (subscriptions) is important to me.

Thanks!
How to Give a VC a Hard-On [video]
Absolutely. Keep the job, 9 to 5, and work on something on the side, waiting for the vesting.
Like what? The thing is, if he was a real paedophile they would have needed to act fast before other harm was done and before he would destroy any evidence. The part that sucks the most in this story is the period of time for which his computer was seized. It was absurd to seize his computer for 4 months.
You can't measure emacs vs vim like you can the effect of color or layout on conversion of an app. When measuring is trivial to do and results are easily seen to directly impact revenue, there's just no excuse to not do it.
Firefox may already be
Yeah, I had the same experience. Strikes me that in the end, googles 'purity' has paid off!
What Google should learn from Apple
Personally I think they're the same creature, it's just that 100x programmers happened to work on problems that are more visible to other programmers.

I've noticed quite a few programmers inside Google that are easily the caliber of Resig or Zawinski, but I'd never heard of them outside of Google because they work on closed-source software and don't go around taking credit for their work.
Hate to tell you, but virtually no one does use Lisp. It's not ad hominem, it's just the facts; I'm not saying it's right or that's how things should be judged, just that they are.
I presume you (or your company) owns the IP. If so, fire him, take the code and find someone else (in this economy, that is not as challenging as it seems) to look at it. You will lose several months, but you will gain clarity and peace of mind (assuming you learn from this lesson and hire a better personality).

I went through the EXACT same situation with a Java developer last year. The developer extorted us, refused to hand over code, always demanded more money, was rude and insisted that he was doing us a favor. We finally let him go. Coincidentally, it was around August 2008!

Fire him and move on.
I agree completely with the quote. I may have been reading too much techdirt lately, but I believe that's pretty obviously the case with the RIAA and the rest of the entertainment industry trying to clamp down on file-sharing.

Taken to it's logical extreme, there are some other pretty radical examples of "middlemen":

* universities (another PG example, http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html)
* banks
* financial regulators (see: xbrl)
* lawmaking bodies
* large corporations
* etc.

Are we ready for this kind of disruption? I have no idea.
It would also work well to separate out karma for posts, and use comment/AskHN karma as the main number.
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?

No, you probably won't make any money at all. Early stage employees get screwed the hardest. You either want to be a founder or a "key hire" after the company gets series A.

What would you do if you were this person?

I left, twice. Was it the right decision both times? Yes.

Is having a job alone good enough in this economy?

Well, that's a different story. Probably. It truly is a shitty job scene out there right now. I can't tell if you hate your job or you're just bummed about how the politics and finances have played out. It's probably worth locking in something else before you quit.
Yeah, it's pretty disheartening that a guy who really was trying to do something good for folks who have restricted legal access to the Internet, is hammered by the cops because of some douche-rocket that needed his pedophilia fix.

In his case, maybe white-listing would have been a good idea. I don't know what a Tor directory looks like, but perhaps there could be a list of Tor nodes that give access to specific sets of sites.
Cassano was not committing fraud in the narrow context that our politicians had been bought off to ease regulations to allow him to do what he did. Additionally, our executive branch pulled the age-old political trick of "speak loudly but underfund". That is, there was noone providing oversight in the OTS. According to the article, there was only 1 OTS employee that had a background and position to oversee the entire industry.

Incidentally, a similar thing happened with Pentagon spending: for much of the Bush years, there was reportedly only 1 person to review ALL expense reports from all contractors. The result was everything was approved; zero oversight.

This is what I term "engineered incompetence".
Ask HN: Is there online service like Delicious that saves series of URLs for later viewing?
More specifically, I am often logged-on to public computers and start browsing the Internet. Before long, I have more than 15 tabs open on a common topic. Instead of saving each URL individually (i.e. Delicious), is there a service that can save a "browsing session" for later access?
> Deep technical competency is overrated

..

> ability to make excellent decisions

Ability to make excellent decisions comes from deep technical competency. Firing the guy who knows something about stuff leaves behind a bunch of guys who are not very likely to make the excellent decisions you are looking forward to.
But there are people who _pretend_ to have deep technical competence.
http://www.instapaper.com/ -- works via web and has a nice iphone client.
I get that if you don't try, you won't succeed, hence my questioning here, as a way to jump start myself, perhaps.

It does sound a little silly, doesn't it. Here's some guy claiming to have all these ideas in a notebook, but he's obviously not trying to do anything with them, or they wouldn't just be in a notebook.

I have developed mass market consumer electronics for many years, for large companies. I simply want to continue to do that, for myself. I know, from actually doing it for many years, that $100K is very cheap, and $300K is normal, by the time you get plastics designed, molds tooled, PCB's and components purchased, etc. As your complexity goes up from there, so do your costs. Then it's time to actually go buy components, arrange shipping, and have the thing manufactured. Some things do not bootstrap. You either write the check or you don't, period.

These products will not change the world. They're not revolutionary, and frankly, the world will get by just fine without them. But there is money to be made from them, as people will buy them.

So, here I am, with experience and ideas, but a strong feeling that I can't close the deal, based on a lot of reading that I've done.
How do the police even stumble on the fact that this guy was involved?

Did they take down a pedophilia source and then rip through the web server logs? (That seems legit.)

Or were they monitoring IP traffic on a larger scale, knew of a pedophilia source, let it continue running and simply harvested IP addresses that were connecting with it? (Sounds like a privacy issue.)

Regardless -- how does a good guy help without putting himself in legal hot water?
This is the type of article that should be passed out to everyone running an open Wifi network.
No user serviceable parts inside
Remember how we used to laugh about stories that in the USSR all typewriters had to be registered with the police.
-Papers please citizen
> Like what? The thing is, if he was a real paedophile they would have needed to act fast before other harm was done and before he would destroy any evidence.

Why would police suspicion of an IP address trigger any knowlege by a miscreant who uses said IP address? (While miscreants who know that they're being watched may do something, surely police can know a potential suspect's IP address and gather additional evidence without tipping him off.)
Overvalued points introduce a lot of fun and drama to the game. Sort of like the exponential escalation in Risk.
It'd be more interesting to see an article comparing Chrome to Firefox 3.1b3, which recently came out. See https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/03/12/f.... You'll notice that one of the improvements in b3 is performance increase in the javascript engine.

You're right, though, when you say that it isn't just about the javascript engine's speed. So maybe we should wait until Chrome becomes a full-featured browser before we start touting its unbelievable performance. Remember when Firefox went 2.0 and one of the biggest complaints (that I remember) was how it had become bloated and wasn't as fast? Guaranteed the same will eventually happen to Chrome.
Most falling-block 2D puzzle games in existence copied Tetris anyway.. I suppose they're only bothering to go after the easy targets or the lucrative ones.
I must have missed something - what technologies are behind the actual search? Lucene/Nutch/Xapian??
thx,
Dave
I'm in the same boat, here's a little bit of research regarding subscriptions:

1. PayPal subscriptions are an under-documented mess. I was hoping to get a trial going with their subscription quickie form builder but couldn't figure out how to get return data. I'm sure this is possible, but it all seemed more like it was setup for magazine subscriptions than for online subscriptions.

2. Zuora is a company that keeps getting mentioned on TechCrunch and had given me the impression it was subscriptions done right, where right is simple API and simple setup. On investigation, they're only open for private beta and they seem more like a "solution" provider where you're going to have to talk to a salesperson to get anywhere.

3. If you mention Zuora on twitter you will be contacted by a company called Aria Systems. In order to see their API they will say they "need a signed NDA as our API's are mature proven and we guard them like the family jewels."

4. Spreedly seems a little bare bones but is the only company out of that bunch that seems to share my sensibilities.

I would love to hear an authoritative answer. If you were building a subscription based service like Basecamp, what would you use to start?
Big foolishness on the part of your cable provider.

They (and others) are going to look back at this period and wonder why they sat around watching that part of their business dissolve instead of pouring money into keeping subscribers and figuring out how to reach more folks. (Such as more diverse programming plans at a lower rate.)
Is this some kind of joke? The Google Code page is broken for me on Safari 3.
http://i40.tinypic.com/2zfrgwl.png
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theo jansen

strandbeest

his talk at TED:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talk/theo_jansen_creates_new_cr...

see the animal under this invention about 3:30 into the clip
Again, this is an argument for allowing downvotes. (Flagging is not appropriate in these cases, since it may not be spam.)

Since there is only one button, an upvote, there is no way for folks who would prefer to not have an article to appear to push it down.

So only upvotes occur (the herd mentality at play) and as stories float higher, it simple becomes part of a feedback cycle where more people vote on it and the higher it goes.

PG: I love the community, but what worked in the beginning may need to be juggled a bit since this place has grown so much lately. You are running a very real risk at this point for many of your core passionate readers to shuttle off to a new site where the topics are more relevant to hackers. Remember ole' Slashdot?

(For instance, it's way to easy to game the system currently to make front page, which "spammers" love since Google is constantly indexing it.)
> Once upon a time there were black puddles of oil on the ground. Now, we have to pump saltwater into deep reserves to get the oil out.

Hmm. I know where to find some of said black puddles.

While there are reasons why they're not being exploited today, I guess that makes me pretty valuable when all the tech goes away, at least until someone figures out that we need metal to deal with said "puddles".
Sure a lot of humanity would be wiped out. But the strong will survive. The resourceful ones would be left standing in the end. People in cold regions would work there way to warmer ones or stay warm with fire and making clothing. I'm not sure the scope of the original question. Whether we are starting from pre-language times or we wake up tomorrow as is with no technology. But assuming we aren't starting from scratch and still have basic communication and enough skills to irrigate and hunt we could survive.
If we have the knowledge, ten years.

If we don't, a thousand.

If there is magic, until the magician decides.

If there are dragons, never.
>> Chuck Moore wrote everything himself, down to the hardware, which he designed with CAD software he wrote himself in Forth, a language he wrote himself.

Whoa, I read a bit too fast there and thought for a second that it was true -- Chuck Norris could do anything!
mu.

The right question is something like "Is ycombinator worth the equity it will cost my company?"

While other people have talked about what ycombinator is worth, the right answer to that question also depends on the meaning of "my company".
Can't learn what its like having to deal with DRM if you never have to. Maybe this will set the wheels in motion.
If every piece of human technology disappeared, I would probably die in a few seconds, since I sleep on the 7th hour.
Agreed. None of these religious discussions help entrepreneurs make their ideas into businesses.
If the server supports HTTP Range headers you can easily download portions of files. I'm not sure what percentage of servers do, though.
Now that we have all witnessed the greatness that is online porn, probably not that long.
Amazon payments for cost efficiency. We thought considered using pay pal but it was more expensive. The other nice thing about Amazon is they let payers use their amazon payment accounts.