skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got a better idea - figure out the goal of your startup before you do anything.

Do you want the freedom of owning/running your own business?
Do you want to make lots of money?
Do you want to experiment with new technology?
Do you want the satisfaction of building something from start to finish, making all the decision?

I think that is my biggest regret in building my startup - I did not have a clearly defined outcome. Sure I want to make tons of money, add new skills, learn ruby on rails, build something from scratch, add something to my resume, learn how to start a business. But I think more than anything I wanted to build something and see it to the end.

I did make some compromises along the way but building something and showing it off as my own has been the biggest rewards.

If money was the most important thing I should have done things a lot different, i.e. talk to customers early. Do you want to build something you believe in even if people tell you it's not a good idea (I did) or do you want to fill a need in the marketplace? Figure out what your highest priority BEFORE you start building your startup. That is the best advice I can give you, considering that I've been flailing away at my idea for 2.5 years, on and off.
It would be helpful if there was a way to show the reasoning behind deleted submissions. Like a quick note on [dead] pages that explains why it was killed, just like you did here. That way, people won't keep resubmitting the same story over and over, which makes it easier on everyone.
Is this really written in Cappuccino? I get some crazy graphical glitches when I click any of the buttons or dropdowns on that page. I hope this isn't the quality they were talking about, but I will admit that looks like it belongs in a Desktop app.
I loved the research you did, a little apocalyptic at the end, but nonetheless a great read.
>Chrome is ahead in some areas, but behind in others.

Correct, but as a whole, it's significantly more ahead than Firefox, and it's way, way, way ahead than even the latest version of IE. What you said doesn't contradict that point.
The success of the web makes horrifyingly apparent how important ubiquity and ease of deployment are. In they quest for users, they trump almost everything else.
While I'm against what Adria Richards did, I would normally be sad by these news, because it's a pity for anyone to lose his job over something that he did outside of it.

But -- I've read her blog post on the incident, and it comes off as so unapologetic, self-entitled and arrogant, while never saying that she is at least sorry for getting the guy fired, that I think that in this case she got what she deserved.

This is what I'm against:
-- She eavesdropped on a private conversation ("it was loud enough" is no excuse: two people talking are TWO people talking).
-- She took a picture and exposed said private conversation on Twitter.
-- She got a guy fired and publicly shamed two people for making a joke in private.
-- She never asked the guys to stop (if they were talking loudly), or complained to the conference organizers.
-- She presented a joke as a "thought crime" to be shamed off.
-- After the guy was fired, she never showed any sympathy or empathy. A guy that SHE got fired, and that hasn't done ANYTHING to her personally.
-- She took advantage of the whole incident to promote herself and her job.

Still, I wouldn't want anyone to lose his job over something like this. Asked to offer a public apology would be enough.
Hear your point, and agree generally, but parts of this are definitely critical. For example, you have a hard stop window of 30 days to file your 83(b) election. If you miss it once, it is gone. That can create millions in additional tax liability if you have a successful company on your hands. If you don't have someone watching for stuff like this, it can mess you up pretty bad down the line, regardless of if you roll into a new company. Fixing problems that could have easily been avoided often ends up being costly.
Pretty awesome post and right to the point.
Couldn't agree more to points 2 - 4.
Regarding 5: Stripes == NCOs - right? Sorry, I'm in a different army

I would personally add:
1b) No matter how bad the situation, chances are that you and your comrades will crack jokes about it within 3 months. (Probably doesn't always apply, but certainly in regards to bootcamp/exercise)
Are you suggesting that every non-flagged article on Hacker News contains actionable advice one could use to improve their business? Because I think we all know that is not true.

Articles of all kinds are popular on HN- some tech, some business, some lifestyle, some that have absolutely nothing to do with tech. But mysteriously, gender seems to be about the only topic not permitted.
Absolutely they archive this information. The of the monetizable web depends upon it!
It seems like if you didn't want to discuss it on HN the easiest way would be to just let one story sit on the page where others who do want to discuss it can do so and ignore that one story. If people are flagging these because they don't want to see it discussed on HN they're just making the problem worse and ensuring that it's an even bigger story since it adds another layer of controversy.
South Korea Cyber Attack, Wiper malware and Chinese IP Address
The assumption that this is fake is reasonable in my opinion, especially that the site is being DDOSed and inaccessible.
As one of the people who worked on GWT, and have used other more structured frameworks (Dart, Closure), I have a strong affinity for systems with good tooling support, a consistent package management and module system, etc

However, I think what's missing is a recognition that there are different kinds of web apps. There are "application" oriented apps, primarily single page, large, and not content driven (gmail, docs, games, etc), and then there are page-oriented apps, like forums, content management systems, blogs, database backed forms/reports, etc.

The former lend them selves really well to the structured approach. You trade off simplicity and iteration speed for more of a "on rails" experience, but it helps for larger teams to collaborate on larger projects to have some restrictions on freedom and some mutually agreed upon consistent behaviors.

However, the latter page-oriented apps fit in a lot better with these microframeworks. And page oriented apps fit in with the original vision of the Web, they are documents, they have URL addressable, RESTful, hopefully, durable content, indexable by search engines, and linkable by anyone.

I think there is room for both and a sweet spot for different approaches. I often use several languages for specially suited purposes, like sed/awk/Perl for text processing, JS for small page oriented stuff or mocks, GWT for larger apps. I would not advocate GWT for people for building progressively enhanced page-oriented apps, even though I'm the author of GwtQuery and AngularGWT.

Using the right tool for the job often depends on context and personal preference. A lone hacker or small team can get by with doing a large app in hand coded JS with hand rolled build tools and module systems, but frustrate other people coming onto the project.

There is too much, IMHO, "one above all" thinking when it comes to development, and often, the original goals -- what the app is supposed to do for the end user, get lost in the zeal to build a cool framework or infrastructure for it.
You have a weird definition of "exactly".
Looks like she got the boot.
http://www.facebook.com/SendGrid
But what if I'm an old customer with 6 people on the team? Now I see that they are giving away what I have been paying for. Not a very strategically sound decision.
This is a sensible decision.

I work with Ruby daily, so using RubyGems to install a package is easy for me. On the other hand, when I find the installation instructions for a tool written in Python, I'm often confused: there will be a couple of options for installation, and I don't even know whether I've got pip or easy-install, let alone which of them I should choose!

There are downsides, however: the author now has to take on responsibility for building packages for multiple platforms and architectures.
The reason this is important, to me as a business owner who is looking to hire our first few developers, is I have to learn how to deal with these situations. You may call it drama, but I consider it a lesson in how I should behave when forced to deal with these sorts of difficult decisions.

Is there a right or wrong answer? Probably not. To borrow the title of an absurdly sexual book referenced a thousand times in this argument, it's fifty shades of gray.

I'd like to at least see what the community thinks on these topics, so I can make better informed decisions later on. Not to mention understanding even how to communicate those decisions to the public.
Because the threads are, in the parlance of our times, embarrassing shitshows. It was clear to me that they needed to be torched off the site as soon as we got to the comment about the hetero guy in the gay bar.

That is what the flag button is for. To scorch the shit off the site. More people need to use it. These threads are horrible and they need to go.
see you later
It's a complex and multi-faceted ethical question. Involving issues of empathy, unintended consequences, power asymmetry, confirmation bias, and lynch-mob justice.

No. I don't think we're ready to have a discussion about that yet.
This is exactly what I was wondering the other day if it was possible, you nailed it on the head, major props. Basically nobody in high school is on match.com or other dating sites because it's not legal and kids just don't seem to do it. So this is a fantastic algorithmic way to optimize who you should be talking to. A huge factor in finding a good person to date is familiarity and their closeness to you. If they see you all the time and you send out trustworthy, non-socially awkward signals, they are likely to trust you more.
I think you're underestimating the complexity of native apps. To duplicate functionality of a web app, you're still going to need to know your networking layer, whatever it is, and you still need to write a server and persistence layer; the only difference is on the client, where instead of HTML/CSS/JS you're building in one language... plus probably a GUI framework (which are not exactly known for their simplicity or ease of use). And there are security issues related to distributing native binaries too. When you say there are tons of extra 'hoops' to jump through, what do you mean?
Being someone who's made a big mistake in the past and very nearly lost my job, I think the best thing is for an employer to care about an employee and try to help them work through what are often temporary problems.

That being said, I don't know what happened behind the doors of SendGrid. I'm not happy to hear anyone lose their job over this and I hope, for the sake of morale at SendGrid, it wasn't the company being scared of the internet.
Without a shred of reasoning, it's a poor comment.
That point seems pedantic to me. The author is talking about the logo as central element on the flow of the page. His point was to put communicating with your potential customers above shoving a brand down their throat.

EDIT: Although on second thoughts, there is an argument in there for a revision of the actual literal advice to align with the point.
Really rooting for Dart personally, but I'm going to watch for the sidelines and stick with Rails, Ruby and Coffeescript for a while longer.
Great idea. I signed up. Please keep developing the product!
There is no solution to this problem. It is simply the nature of being social. If I like talking about X, and another person doesn't, then I'm simply not going to talk with them, because they don't like talking about the things I do. Yes, X can be sexual innuendo jokes. But X can also be computers, or board games, or gardening. This is simply how being a social entity with differing world views works.
That's not your google reader logo. You made a high-res version of the google reader logo, which was only ever officially available in low-res sizes. People who wanted a high-res version of the reader logo used your high-res version, because it existed.
> While I very much applaud your interest in data analysis, this is very much an overreach. Even assuming that facebook has as much information about you as you think, there has been no service which is better at predicting what you like than you yourself.

As additional evidence that you are right, open facebook and look at the ads they are displaying, they are way, way, way off. (currently I am seeing a thermacare ad, I'm not sick, and a car insurance ad, I don't own a car.

Amazon on the other hand pretty much got me to buy a Romba by continuously posting photos of it on all kinds of websites until I just couldn't stand sweeping anymore.
Case Studies Are a No-Brainer for Startups
Ember is 50kb gzipped
Archipel Beta 6 is out
How realistic is it really that Sendgrid's official Facebook, Twitter, blog, and status site were all compromised simultaneously?
Yes, the relationship between page load speed and bounce rate is well proven: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/?wide=1
It's one thing to delete posts on a certain topic. But deleting posts asking WHY these posts are getting deleted? How can that possibly end well?
I'm sure that's a big part of it. Things like due process and jury trials are slow, but they're the best things we've got.
This is great news. If you want to see why HipChat makes sense: take a look at our integration with HipChat

https://www.blossom.io/blog/2013/03/12/take-a-look-at-our-ne...

If you have a product that creates more value for your customers if you integrate with HipChat this is now a no-brainer :)

Revenue wise integrating was definitely worth it for us.
Thanks for the reply. I was hoping you'd weigh in.
I can't have a discussion with you, if you actually believe people have a right to get offended and act on those emotions above other peoples emotions.

No person has a right to get offended. Period.

I don't know what caused you to call me stupid here, but I can understand you felt a need to call me out on something.
It's my passionate belief that you have a right to express yourself freely. I am not going to argue with you there.

If Mr.Bean can't explain it to you. Then there is nothing I can do, and I will carry on. And I won't be offended, because I can leave it behind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gciegyiLYtY
Did the Google version definitely come first? Looking through Google Reader blog, all I'm seeing is the textual "Google Reader Labs" logo with the chemistry beaker, until the 3D one appears in a desktop widget in May 2009. The OP's Flicker page is date June 2008. Anyone have earlier examples of the Google version?

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-reader-on-yo...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/indiekid/2551308352/
You don't have to be an owner to have an employment contract. Most union employees aren't at-will for one.
Before this, all of the articles I'd seen about MOOC's were vehemently (and baselessly) critical. It's nice to see them publish something informative.
The #1 Mistake Entrepreneurs Make
DevOps in the Hell of a Thousand Different Platforms [video]
I agree. Here are two (old) essays that really sum up this argument for me:

How Microsoft lost the API war: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

and

The Location Field Is the New Command Line: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/location_field

Note that both of these articles kvetch about user experience and how the web simply can't compare to native apps, but emphasize that the ease of deployment matters more.

Also, note that the app store model obviates some of the deployment difficulties of native apps and makes it almost as easy to install native apps on the phone as it is to visit a web page.
Why I Shut Down My Startup After 3 Months
He's talking about fosap...
If you compromise the Gmail account of the person that controls all of them- quite realistic.
> The person is going through a very hard time right now

Hey, at least she doesn't have three kids to take care of.

Seriously though, what about everyone else at SendGrid who is suffering through this ordeal because of this one bad employee? They're going through a hard time, too, and they really do need a good PR person. Badly.
I was on the Internet regularly 25 years ago. "Simple network games" did not exist, they had incredibly complex protocols and failure conditions (remember setting up Netrek?).

Chat services also incredibly difficult to run correctly over the Internet that there was no proliferation, there was... IRC. Which had its own major messes (recalling EFnet netsplits almost hourly in the early 90s).

Or let's talk about BBS'. So, you could do ANSI art fairly easily, but let's recall the hassle of handling multiple users on the software of the day. You usually didn't. BBS games (Tradewars, Legend of the Red Dragon, etc.) were turn based - someone dialed in, played their turn for the day, and waited for everyone else to dial in and play their turn. Email and Fidonet EchoGroups came in daily, or maybe twice a day, when you dialed into your upstream provider. The only way you could run a multitasking BBS with multiple phone lines was mostly DESQview, OS/2, or the BBS software itself had its own multi-threading.

The Internet didn't replace IRC and BBS'... the Web did. Not that they're gone completely, just no where near as important as they once were.

Network games are OTOH are still as complex as Netrek because they don't fit a Hypermedia architecture.

But ultimately I think you have nostalgia for a better world that never existed. Which is fine if you want inspiration for new ideas but... it is important to understand why the Web won: for many cases, it was better than what we had.
On the homepage right now, I see 27 tech-related articles, and 3 pieces related to this drama, all of which have been flagged by several people.

So yes, that's what I'm suggesting. It's also what the guidelines state explicitly.
What should they have said? "Today we fired an employee. Please go about your business."?
I am refering to this table here: http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html

http://i.imgur.com/arqYfh6.png
If a man had posted that tweet, likely nobody would have paid him any attention aside from maybe an eye roll from how easily offended he was, how he lacked a sense of humor (even if the joke wasn't very funny), and how he resorted to extreme passive aggressive tactics instead of simply saying STFU to the guy making the joke.

And if the tweet had still somehow garnered a lot of attention and gotten someone fired, he would have been condemned much more strongly for lacking the basic human decency not to out someone publicly, lacking the empathy to express regret over a man with a wife and three kids losing their job, and not manning up to admit they didn't handle the situation appropriately.

In other words, if a man had posted that tweet, he would have received much worse treatment, because this has everything to do with the tweet being an inappropriate reaction to a silly joke, and nothing to do with discrimination against women.
Shouldn't you advise them to use POP over SSL?
I assume Sendgrid management tried to unweave whole issue by asking their employee to publicly apologize and ask for PlayHaven to rehire their employee. This would have been the best situation for everyone. Could have resulted with no one losing their jobs and everything blowing over after a couple weeks. I think someone's ego got in the way which resulted in the termination of the employee. Really saddens me that how a small incident can spiral out control. People need to be aware of other people's sensitivity in public areas and on the opposite side, people need to have a little bit thicker skin and shrug minor things off. Failure on both sides combined with knee jerk reactions from companies.
I think the blog post, twitter post, facebook post, all out push to get this "news" out leans towards the firing being fake. This isn't the sort of thing you'd really want to spam over all your official channels. The people who have a horse in this race are aware of the issue and will know what the outcome is and the rest of their customers don't care.
Restless leg syndrome has some correlation with caffeine as well.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001810/
FYI, when you link to Quora if you add ?share=1 then people won't be prompted to create an account.

http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-taxonomy-of-names-of-videoga...
Sure, sometimes their usernames are their primary keys. Even if the actual primary key is arbitrary, the primary identity is still exposed to the user, in that they know what their user account is, and which email addresses are linked to it.
"misconstrue" becomes "made up" when you announce it to a crowd at large. At some point, confirmation was the polite thing to do, but we have gotten over that as a society.
>Funny how it's only topics that require self-examination of the industry's perception of gender that aren't relevant.

I don't see any "self-examinination" happening on the other side: that this is taken too far, that women maybe don't chose CompSci careers for other reasons besides "sexism" (the least of which are bloody crazy expectations of overtime and having to do rather mundane programming chores 90% of the time), and that not every field has to have a 50-50 men/women representation (nobody fights for more women coal miners. Why is that?).

Looks like "rampant sexism in tech" is the gospel, and only everybody disagreeing must "self-examine his perception".
Carma at its finest... http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/21/breaking-adria-richards-fi...
Please release the self-hosted version, and we will start using it.
Meanwhile the NSA is spying on the entire world's Internet communications, including those of all US citizens, without warrant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind_(code_name)
Thanks, interest is what will motivate me enough to work on this. I saw your email, I'll email you soon to ask you some things, if that's okay!
Quick update about ads on reddit
Ok, thanks - out of interest would my FilePicker API key be subject to the same vector of attack as a Zencoder key ?

It seems to me that most of the FilePicker documentation talks about using it in client side applications ?
It seems like the author has been out of the workforce for several years, came back and realized this wasn't how things were when he left and now he's pissed.

The rate at which technology moves, you can't have any kind of framework that requires huge overhead, no matter how good it is. If people can't pick up and start building stuff with it right away, it's not going to gain traction. Add in decision makers don't allow you to just take a week to learn a framework you think will be awesome for a project you might be working on soon. Time is still money and nobody has the time or patience to learn something which has a high overhead. While I agree this sucks, it's just the way the industry works these days.

I do believe there will be a cost to this somewhere down the road, and the collective pendulum will swing back to how the author prefers it.
State of journalism in 2013.
Looks nice to me! You've got my email now. :)
IMHO, anyone who has been around a company since the last major pivot (significantly different product, market or business model) should deserve the founder title.

I am employee #1 at the startup I'm at and I've been here since we were a completely different company, targeting a different market with a different product. Being present before these major pivots, means you are very likely to make major contributions to the new direction of the company. This in a way makes you a founder. You may not be the founder of the legal entity, but you are a founder of the company insofar as product, market and business model are concerned, since all were conceived with your involvement. It's very frustrating to be on the other side of the founder-employee divide.