skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: If technical cofounder, when is business cofounder needed
I am technical founder right now of my own software startup.

Right now, I'm developing the software and am seeking a business cofounder.

I lack domain expertise in the various parts of the business side of a startup.

However,I am willing to learn it, but I cannot do everything (as I've recently had to learn myself).

I am talking to one particular business cofounder (business/marketing end), but he basically doesn't want to join yet because there is no product yet (I'm pounding my fingers working on it). Is this guy likely not the right business cofounder for my startup? He doesn't want to consider being a cofounder until after the software is in MVP

Ideally - while I'm busting my butt to develop, he could be busting his butt to realize our first clients, including beta testers, proper marketing/sales etc. There is no question the product in MVP form will be ready by May/June of this year.

Is this a realistic view of a business cofounder at this stage (pre-product) or is he right in not joining until a product is developed that he can sell?
We're experimenting with something like this now. I'm currently acting as the "consulting" dev here. Our first experiment is on a quarterly basis. We'll reconsider after the quarter.

We're actually struggling with finding the right amount of time for this. A week didn't feel long enough for us because that person would also handle tier "3" support for the week. Any thoughts on finding the right amount of time for something like this?
Don’t Get Stuck While Working, Get Quick Answers with AssistWindow
Apple's Watershed Year
'Privacy visor blocks facial recognition software'
That's weird. It should definitely switch to the new article if you click the picture/play icon or the title. As a workaround, could you try "up/down" arrows? It's possible the HTML5 audio player in FF19 is buggy.
Why not define a type alias?

type AppForm a = Html -> MForm Blog Blog (FormResult a, Widget)

And then you get:

newPostForm :: AppForm (Text, Text, Text)
True, but I think it illustrates his point further: given enough zeroes, it's close enough to infinity that it doesn't matter :)
Not all copy right holders have the financial means to sue for copyright infringement.

That might be a good reason for funding state-provided attorneys. It's a terrible reason for making it a crime.
If this were the case there would be a large number of corporate executives behind bars tonight. The biggest problem as I see it is that there is one rule for well heeled, connected, corporate types and another for poor, zany, out there types. What happened to all created equal and justice for all?
I've spent the last 15 minutes looking through his site. I think he's being ironic.
MBA programs attract borderline personalities? That's a new one.

In reality, the MBA provides managers with a framework to conduct business in a methodical manner. It gives them a process to use, so that their personalities don't have to be such a large factor.

I've never done an MBA but I know many who have; it's mostly case studies and common sense. If you ONLY have an MBA and no other particular expertise, then yes, you are just another talking head. But if you are an ME or EE or SWE with an MBA then you have a formidable set of skills to draw on.
Yes. Sounds great. Just email me at dan.p.gailey@gmail.com or DM me on twitter @dpg
We have the same in Sweden, and the tax is on all storage media (HDDs, DVDs, USB-sticks etc)
Your focusing on Internet Explorer is just odd. It's borderline libelous since the headline is not true. The truth is that, if you have an Xbox Live Gold account, you can access the internet because one of its benefits [1] is "Explore the web on your TV with Internet Explorer for Xbox." The benefit of purchasing a Gold account is that you can access the internet with your Xbox; Internet Explorer just happens to be the browser. For you to say "Microsoft charges to use Internet Explorer" then is clearly a mis-characterization of the service. I think it's fair to say that this is just you making a scandalous, link-baity headline to get attention.

What if the benefits said "Explore the web on your TV with Xbox" (thus removing Internet Explorer)? Does that change anything? No. To me, the point is that Microsoft charges you to browse the web via the Xbox; not which browser is used. That's silly and that sort of silliness is the type of thing that keeps from buying products.

[1] http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/join
The Constitution specifically gives congress the power to regulate copyright. It makes sense for it be that way, as allowing States to meddle with copyright would create chaos and barriers to commerce. Kidnapping is a Federal offense when there is a reasonable expectation that the criminal will cross state lines. Bank robbery is a Federal matter because the robber is defrauding the FDIC, who insures the deposits.

The law was originally written with printed material in mind. In those days, it's obvious that someone going to the trouble of setting up a printing press to duplicate a book or pamphlet was infringing copyright on a "commercial scale" -- which is where you cross the line from civil to criminal liability.

Digital media has been a grey area. RIAA/MPAA sits on one extreme, and the "information wants to be free" crowd is on the other. Today, I think that there is a consensus that a private citizen downloading a copy of a copyrighted work isn't a crime in most cases.

The grey area is around distribution. Is somebody seeding a torrent committing a crime? Most people would think no, if they think yes, not to the extent that it is worth prosecuting. Is someone sourcing and distributing unlicensed material at a reasonably high scale, branding it with a distintive mark (IMAGINE) committing a crime? The Feds think so.
To echo other sentiments on this page, how does this work with a one page, ajax application?

The other issue, is that it is all to often that user events trigger the adding, subtracting or refactoring selectors.

How does this handle these scenarios?
I seem to have developed an aversion beyond words can convey, about people who shamelessly rip-off the svbtle layout. This is simply wrong on so many levels.

And you've just made it look uglier with those noob-ish buttons.
Aren't that always the case with class action suits? I would also like special criminal laws to be added each time a company do something that result in a class action suit. It would make things so much easier.
Atari U.S. files for bankruptcy
You don’t want to be typical
Blackberry Z10 The First Blackberry 10 Handset
MS is about a quarter the size of IBM in terms of employees.
> Not everyone is like me, and not everyone is like you. There's no right or wrong, just preference.

I never said there was. The poster I was responding to said that he disliked the closed environment iOS provides. Perhaps my wording was a bit more confrontational that I meant, but my comment still stands:

Apple's products are not marketed to or designed for power users.

That's really all I meant by it. I never said that everyone is like everyone else; they're not. Many people who enjoy tinkering use Apple's phones. These people are, as is apparent to me now (hence my buying an Android next), better off using an open platform like Android.

As an aside, it's just as easy to classify servers and caches as tools that should "just work". It's about perspective, and preference.
Faking waves: how the NRA and pro-gun Americans abuse Australian crime stats
I'm not talking to the general public. I'm talking to people who want more than something that "just works" at the cost of user control.
Who the fuck respects Steve Ballmer? What has he ever done that was the least bit respectable in his life?
Why not fork the OS one? And sometimes 3rd time's a charm...
>When did you use Haskell?

Roughly two years ago.

>I think the silliness about PhD's is very very silly.

Of course it is. I just wanted to make a point that the "average programmer" has probably never seen a single line of ML-syntax before.

>About profiling -- I have never profiled a Scala/Java application, but how much easier is it compared with: "cabal configure --enable executable-profiling", and then running the program with "+RTS -p"? It may not be point-and-click, but it really is not hard at all.

I don't remember exactly what we tried, what worked and what didn't; we had no experts on the team, and just came to the conclusion that hooking up jconsole/yourkit/<insert jvm profiler here> to a running jvm process and see what's happening in real time on an app server was so much more comfortable.
What is a war file?
Very nice concept. I hadn't heard of SoundGecko. I'll need to check it out.

Shameless plug of an old, but related, blog post:
http://mindtrove.info/my-ipad-is-my-copilot/
This. It was a new idea to me when I started at my current place, now I can't imagine living without it. We've also been through a merger with another similar sized company (with a very different culture, in a substantially different timezone) during my tenure, and evangelising the IRC network was a big thing. The difference in communication efficiency between teams who were quickly convinced that group chat was a positive vs those that weren't was pretty noticeable.

The etiquette thing is important, and varies team by team. Our team has several channels to ourselves with varying levels of formality, and company wide channels similarly (#techteam, title line: "No banter" vs. #companyname, title line: <insert latest in-joke>)

Not only does the group element allow anyone who's taking a quick break to offer some help, it often draws in advice from across the organisation, including people you'd never have thought of asking, who just happen to be dipping in to the channel at the time.

Edit: The office wide "banter" channel's primary purpose most days (so like, not Friday afternoon) is the distribution of fresh coffee, prepared in 5 mug cafetieres, announced and claimed here. So many people have IRC bings on the word "coffee" that it's best discussed in some form of leet substitution if you're not offering to make some.
I agree, and would bet that the person in the photo is not an engineer. Engineers in Google have either two 24'' monitors, or a single 30'' monitor :-)
This wasn't the first time Ahmed (not hamed, ahmed) reported the problem. When they ignored it, left the software running, and notified none of the students, he used some free white-hat web security scanner to generate a report to make it more clear for the business people what was wrong.

The business people have decided that the security scanner is "a hacking tool" and that Ahmed needed permission from the school to see if the software that was imposed on him which was leaving his private data exposed after the staff knew was still broken.

The way Richard Filion, who runs the school, tries to make excuses around this is appalling.

http://www.cbc.ca/homerun/2013/01/21/dawson/

The software vendor gave the poor kid a scholarship and asked the school to change its mind.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2013/01/21/mont...

The RCMP declined to be involved.

The running excuse they're giving is "it was against our code of conduct." And, I mean, most schools don't even kick binge drinkers who got in an accident and nearly killed people out for code of conduct.

So clearly this isn't an excuse.

The people responsible for the decision are the head of the Computer Science department, Ken Fogel, and Dianne Gauvin, one of the deans. Predictably, they do not respond when contacted.

This is a computer science department where a panel of 14 out of 15 "professors" actually chose to stand behind this - though nobody will release their reasoning or names. So don't expect Ken Fogel to get it on grounds that you imagine he's one of us.

The school ombudsman, whose job it is to stand up for Ahmed, has been whitewashing its Facebook page of all criticism. The main school Facebook page is just ignoring the criticism instead; they post inbetween literally hundreds of people (including students and alums) to chat with people on posts from before this started getting public.

And, a reminder? They did this in November. They've been sitting on this for months. They aren't going to change their minds without a very good reason.

Not shockingly, other students have been posting reams of existing security holes on their various servers, and evidence of compromises that are claimed to be years old.

Staff is doing just as nothing about those as they did about this the first time Ahmed reported it.
Oracle is not into Java on Mobile
My own approach to learning FP has been "Hello Haskell", "Hello Scala", "Hello ML", "Hello Clojure", "Hello Rust",...

I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello.
Specs of Next-Generation Xbox Possibly Leaked
This article is a piece of uninteresting, content-free, gossipy garbage and I'm not sure why it was voted to the front page. This guy doesn't like Ballmer and he writes a book about it and that's news?
Porting TF2 was a nice touch (and I have it installed on my Linux partition for a quick lunchtime game whilst working) but I need quite a few other games to be ported before I could consider using it more often.

Give it a few years though; I think there'll be a slow trickle of games for a while, but it'll start to ramp up as some of the bigger studios realise there's a market there.
I run GitLab on my development VPS and use it for all my projects (and everything to do with them, including client interaction via the wall and issues). It's quite brilliant.

I nearly decided to hack in a Public Mode myself last year, I'm glad it's finally implemented!

This has prompted me into getting back to work on my KanBan SPA, that hooks into GitLabs issues api. I do wish they gave the api a bit more love in this release, but I can't really complain: My $20/m VPS gives me self-hosted Github, Dropbox, and Gmail/Gcal/Contacts "clones". Not bad!
They got so embarrassed that they challenged the school to change its mind, and offered the kid a full scholarship to wherever he goes next.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2013/01/21/mont...

In the meantime, their student body is furious that the staff have been knowingly leaving their private information public for months.

So I'd say "a lot."
I like the thought of a Forever Company. Often we start businesses to sell it, and then to start on something else.

In a way the forever company is you, 'Me Inc' as it were. Hopefully forever building and growing.
What if Money Wasn't a problem for You?
Мake all of my steam backlog work on linux and I switch. And not a moment before that.
I'm in a similar rut; I just don't feel like doing anything most of the time. When I do...it seems like there are so many barriers. Upon reflection, I know these setbacks are day-to-day things that everyone deals with, but they seem much more substantial to me at the time.

What seems to be working for me: Ramit Sethi's material. He always seemed scammy to me in the past, but when patio11 started mentioning him I had to take a look. He's quite motivational -- I haven't really made a lot of progress out of "meh" and into the zone yet, but I at least feel like I can.

(unaffiliated; throwaway account so people don't know about the rut :))
Once they get their own games running on Linux (especially Dota2 & CS:GO), I'm set.
I believe that in former times the number of uneducated people with few skills were much higher than today. Unlike today there were plenty of jobs for those who had no education nor skills. Only the difficulty with finding gainful employment for those people - and the need for founders, makers etc. - draws our attention to them in the first place (a microtrend of glorification of those people through shows like the one you've mentioned nonwithstanding).

Regarding the upper class who does not work that maybe the trust fund kids?
I'll address it, but I don't think cost is your true rejection[1]. If I was talking about a highly-experimental cancer treatment, I doubt you'd nitpick the price. Doubly-so if you had cancer. In fact, I bet you'd do your best to estimate its effectiveness.

I didn't quote the cheapest price. I quoted what I pay. I have no idea how much older people pay for life insurance. If you looked at their website, you'd see that Alcor dues are $800/year. Neuropreservation is $80k and whole-body is $200k (http://alcor.org/BecomeMember/scheduleA.html). This may sound like a lot, but the standard way to pay is to buy life insurance. When you die, the policy pays Alcor. You can see the cost break-down in my GP comment.

Alcor is expensive. Cryonics Institute is the budget option. CI dues are $120/year and whole-body preservation costs $35k. CI members usually pay with life insurance as well. CI can charge less because they have less staff. Their research budget is practically zero. Most importantly, they won't camp at your deathbed. IIRC, Eliezer is signed up with CI and pays around $300/year. That's the cheapest price possible.

It's often said that getting cryopreserved is the second-worst thing that can happen to you. Cryonics gives you a small chance of living a much longer life. I'll be the first to admit that it's highly unlikely to work. But for myself and many others, the expected value calculation heavily favors signing up. After all, consider the alternative: You die slightly wealthier.

1. http://lesswrong.com/lw/wj/is_that_your_true_rejection/
jdrake, you're hellbanned, so I can't answer you directly.

> Why not fork the OS one? And sometimes 3rd time's a charm...

It's not about the technology. I think mine works better and they made some choices that I wouldn't want to inherit. I think their technology and protocol choices are part of what holds them back. I believe I can do it better, and for a time there I did.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is finding out if I'm crazy to attempt this again or not. Sometimes you really can't tell whether you're Linux or Losethos.
Where did you find claims on the school's part?

The only one I've found so far is an audio interview with Mr. Filion; everything else has had the school refusing to comment.

Please provide links.
Apple awarded patent for iOS 'loupe' on-screen content magnification
You could also move to Thief River Falls :)

I laughed at that, even with the smiley. I live about 6 hours from Thief River Falls (home of DigiKey) and it's about -12F here right now at 7:30AM. Just checked the Thief River Falls weather and it's a balmy -24F there right now.

I don't think we'll be seeing a flood of Bay Area HN'ers moving here any time soon :-)
No, universities internationally are furious and disgusted.

This is a trade school, not a college. It's like being angry at DeVry or University of Phoenix. The stupid things that places like that do have nothing to do with real universities.
An interesting and accurate allusion, and one I'm quite fond of, technical managers herd nerds.
I had a look at his LinkedIn profile, and this is what I found:

1. A finance guy

2. A name dropper of numerous corporations... Mind you, this is LinkedIn... But I seem to see that in a lot of places...

3. A director on 4 boards

4. A snappy dresser: http://about.me/markmacleod

Ok, I'm being harsh here. I'm sure he's fine, but if you followed his own advise, you'd have to rule him out!
The fraudster who fooled a whole nation
All I was "offering" by the way was 'free updates'

What? I don't get it. What is a 'free update'? Sorry - your whole post is just weird and I don't get it.
Stop trolling, please.

Marc Emery sold illegal goods internationally. The two situations have nothing to do with one another.
50% taxes in Germany? Example: you get 42.000 Euro/year, you pay ~20% taxes. If you earn 100.000 Euro/year, you pay 30%.
Start Your Day in 33 Different Ways
Loved it,though its still paining to work it flawless on my Dolphin browser. I'd be more happy if we had RSS feed for this station. I'd love to import that RSS directly in to my Pulse reader and consume all podcast right in to pulse without leaving.

EDIT: And, How to get this the hacker-news as my Soundgecko channel?
It's short for (Web Application ARchive), it's a jar file used for deploying web applications written to work on the JVM.
One of the things I like about Haskell is that there's never scarcity of new concepts to learn: Functors, Applicatives, Monoids, Monads, Monad transformers, Comonads, Arrows, Lenses, Foldables, Iteratees... And every one of these has a world in itself!
Could you elaborate what 'real-world' means to you in this context? Millions of users, hundreds of servers, a personal blog? 'Real-world' is often a very broad term with a huge likelihood of misunderstandings.
I doubt it's his site.
I'm going to guess that your forever project is a distributed social network. I think a lot of people (me included) are in a similar position. The challenges are really big, and most of us (me included) get disheartened at some point. I think at some point Facebook will drop the ball and something else will get to pick up the pieces. I guess that will be whoever had the stamina and resources to keep iterating.
I'm not sure I particularly consider Walmart to be a particularly positive influence in the U.S. economy...
Yeah, doesn't work on FF19 even with the arrow keys. But it did work on Chrome Canary - must be a bug on FF.

edit: It looks like FF19 is complaining about the content-type: "audio/mpeg" when changing articles. Not sure what one it is using, but it does manage to play the first article only.
> MBA programs attract borderline personalities?

> In reality, the MBA provides managers with a framework to conduct business in a methodical manner

Those two things are not mutually exclusive, of course...
Comparing a statically typed language to a dynamically typed language is silly when talking about type signatures. Of course you don't have type annotations in Ruby, it's a dynamic language. But it also means you don't get compile-time guarantees.

Ask yourself what would be the type signature of a similar function in another statically typed language. You have a parametrized type with three parameters, which would give you something like:

MForm<Blog, Blog, SomeFormResultWithWidget>

And SomeFormResultWithWidget would have to be defined elsewhere. I'm not convinced it's clearer than the Haskell version. And you could easily remove the verbosity of the Haskell version with a type alias.
> Exposing a security flaw doesn't get you expelled.

Unless you're at a minor Canadian trade school which wants to bury that they knew about the security flaw for months and did nothing about it.

.

> He had to have taken it one or more steps too far.

First he told them about it.

Then he waited a couple months, and tested to see if it was still there, with some free online security scanner; it was.

So he reported it again, and this time contacted the vendor.

The school freaked out, decided that he was hacking them without permission, and expelled him over "code of conduct."

They absolutely refuse to explain, though they keep pretending that there was a law broken. The student went to the RCMP; the RCMP disagrees. So does the original vendor, who has challenged the school, and given the kid a scholarship.

http://www.cbc.ca/homerun/2013/01/21/dawson/

This is just a terrible administrator doing new damage trying to bury his own failure.
Regarding the mention of GTD: I don't think it's incompatible at all. I think DA would say that it belongs on your Someday Maybe list, and you're welcome to bring it back up for review anytime you like. Just keep it in the system so it doesn't take over your life right now. GTD is exactly for this.
At real universities, this doesn't happen.

I've seen scholarships handed out over this. But you never hear about those, because nobody's angry.

Hiding responsible disclosure just means you aren't responsible.