skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: are these warning signs in a cofounder, or am I paranoid?
I'm a fairly regular poster here but using an anonymous account because this feels too intimate (or maybe stupid?) to post under my own name...

I'm starting a new company to productize some code that I've been working on for a while. I've got a small seed investment negotiated but not yet in the bank, and I've also been talking with a potential cofounder.

This guy is someone I've known personally for a long time but we've never worked together. Initially I was happy that he'd be coming along for the ride, he's easy to get along with and understands the technical stuff, but now I'm getting second thoughts. Here's what irks me:

* He's hard to reach. He can go several days without returning my calls.

* He's still applying for another job. I get the impression that the startup is just his plan B because he's not ready to make the decision until he's got a 'yes' or 'no' from the potential job.

- He thinks we can get a better seed investment somewhere else and wants to turn down the offer I got. He doesn't have any experience in getting funding, though.

I once did a startup with three other founders that failed because it turned out that I was the only one doing technical work, the others were basically PowerPoint idea jockeys. I guess that's why I'm feeling particularly insecure about hooking up with a cofounder again...

My intuition about cofounders failed once, so am I walking into the same trap? Or am I just paranoid?
They were late to the internet party all around. But when they did decide to get on the ball they put a lot of the leaders out of business by finally putting the TCP/IP stack in the OS. Which really was a good idea in the early 90s.
"Available for Mac and PC". I'd say it doesn't sound very attractive.
That's awesome.

I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to short the stock of the drug company whose jurors I was sent to kill, but gave up and simply bought the rival's stock. (I think I made more money off that one transaction than any actual mission aside from the final one.)
The questions should be specific - how do you get more specific, and, also important, how do you get the timing right?
What's necessary for the prompt to fire when you can do something about it?
I use an IFFT action to get this listing (via RSS) in my inbox every day:

http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/
Incidentally, there are already a multitude of subreddits which have formed for the express purpose of manipulating the public markets. This is a really interesting interaction, though it's somewhat skewed by the fact that a player can simply revert to a saved game if the stock they've purchased tanks.
You can color me skeptical until we see actual HTML5/CSS spit out by this - regardless of who writes it, I'm always doubtful of the efficacy of any automated/wizard-driven code generation in the general sense.

I'll lump this in with Dreamweaver for now.
Think this is mostly an alternative for Flash in display ads (which still primarily use Flash for animation). Guess is based on it being announced through Doubleclick's twitter stream.

https://twitter.com/doubleclick_pub/status/38471531196005171...
Hey Baltcode, This is Elli, Co-Founder at HireArt. We actually only do jobs for non-technical hires (marketing, business development, sales, operations, etc)

Thx for checking it out!
No but with n binary dimensions (with value 0 or 1) you can encode 2^n unique identifiers.

So with 1000 continuous dimensions (typically values between -1 and 1 coded on 32 bit floats) you can encode quite a bunch of concepts and their nuances.

Note: the default dimensionality of word2vec is 100 instead of 1000. Apparently you can get better results with dim=300 and a very large training corpus. To leverage higher dimensions you need: more CPU time to reach convergence and a lot more data to leverage the added model capacity.
The author needs to login to PSN or XBOX live, and create a Rockstar Social account. That unlocks the BAWSAQ market which is based on other players trades.
I...bought...twenty shares of Augury Insurance (which sells auto insurance — a good bet, considering all the cars I've been wrecking)

I'd argue the opposite, no? The 100-year-storm of destruction that we, as Player 1, unleash upon the poor Liberty City automotive world would probably make any insurance company run screaming and crying in the opposite direction of profitability.

"We had HOW MANY claims yesterday afternoon??"

:)
Constructor, so is valid
A $200K Jet Pack That You Can Buy In Two Years
Maybe some sort of motivational person to talk to? Someone with whom you don't mind sharing your personal failings and who knows how to get you to do better.
It is not about what the government is allowed to do, it is about what is technically possible. If eavesdropping is technically possible, it is bound to happen, and constitutional protections will not be much help. The NSA revelations should tell you as much: the constitution is only tangentially relevant to the day-to-day decisions at the NSA about who to spy on or how to conduct surveillance.

The reality is that laws can change, and that when we create systems that are technically easy to abuse, there will be people who push for the law to change so that the system is legally easy to abuse. The police are always look for more power, and if you have something like Lavabit, the police will want to have on-demand access to it -- and they will want to reduce the barriers to getting a warrant, or even remove the requirement to get a warrant in the first place (like, say, if the emails are older than 180 days). By having a back door inherent in its design, and by positioning itself as the gatekeeper for that backdoor, Lavabit invites abuse and its users were lucky that the founder is a man of principles.
In Germany it is quite common to have a phrase like this in job postings: Women preferred when equally qualified. ("Frauen werden bei gleicher Qualifikation bevorzugt")
The same goes for severely disabled person. ("Schwerbehinderte werden bei gleicher Qualifikation bevorzugt")
I'd be interested to know about how much they have in the way of custom software. If they're just using Office, I agree, this should be fairly easy. The tough thing is when you have custom development that happened on Windows.

For example, the US deploys a large number of custom applications on Windows. One of the biggest is the VA's electronic medical records application, CPRS. CPRS is a massive application. Wine might do the trick, though I'm not sure how it works with AD and other Windows services the VA depends on.
Brilliant. I feel it, man. In fact, as of two weeks ago I am building this right now (in a small slice of spare time of course).

Thanks for the inspiration for a new aspect of it.
Let's start with, I won't sell your email or share it with other people without your permission?!

What else would you be concerned about?
I had to laugh for about a solid minute at,

>I am an escapologist, I am thinking outside the box here.
Dreamweaver generates a lot of nested tables and I don't think google will do that sort of thing. (do like bootstrap though)
I view them like the ratings agencies. They exist because someone has to fill a void. For the ratings agencies, there is a void where people who don't have a lot of financial knowledge are placed on top of large sums of money. One could argue they shouldn't, but they're there, so they need someone to give them guidance on investments. Gartner exists similarly because there is a void in organizations and their knowledge of technology. In the absence of Gartner, the un-tech-savvy CIOs just buy from whoever they play golf with. We could argue that all CIOs should be hands on current in all the relevant technology, but that's not the world we live in.

An interesting question would be, "What's the return on investment in getting into the right quadrant?" It truly is a marketing decision that should be compared alongside advertising, conference attendance and direct mail.
so why did they make this? flipping thru the help docs, seems to be for creating responsive ads (not a surprise I know) -- so they want to kill off flash but maintain the animations and flash ad style things out there for youtube and what not?
Yes context matters as does experience from the journalist who crapped out the article.
I said "properly" to avoid confusion, but it probably only increased it. Java is not a strictly compiled language, since it still uses JVM. Most modern dynamic languages aren't purely interpretive and they use various techniques (like JIT) which make them closer to compiled, but they are still not "properly" compiled in a sense. That's what I meant above.
It looks like the site itself was generated with it. You can do a view/source to get an idea of what it might spit out.
Interesting that this is being released as a native app, rather than a web app.

It uses Chromium Embedded and a fairly custom UI, so it looks like it's all HTML anyway. Maybe they packed it up as an app to get better FS permissions (amoungst other things).
Nah, Coq, Agda, Idris and any dependently typed language have Haskell beat -- their type systems are designed to be just as expressive as their value language.

That may be true, but it comes at a big cost: inference and decidability. Haskell's type system is designed to very carefully butt up against the limits of these features. Once you go full-spectrum dependent types, you lose all that.
Makes sense to me.

Easier to make websites --> More websites --> More ads --> More money for Google.
Yes, and that some embedded 32-bit systems deployed today will be in service come 2038. And quite probably some 16-bit, 8-bit ones too.
Most users are as you describe, but I made it my mission to educate them on what they were asking for when requesting a software change, and why one change might take two or three days, while another takes a month or more. I'm not didactic about it, just providing good explanations in terms they can understand. This makes them better understand that I'm neither a wizard nor a plumber, but someone who uses the ability to break complex problems down into a collection of small, simple, eminently-solvable pieces, and builds the complex solution out of those simpler solutions, sometimes using a bit of insight, creativity, and mental brilliance to achieve economies of scale.

The bonus, for me, is that occasionally there will be a colleague who gets it, someone who doesn't get that glazed look on his or her face as my words pass in one ear and out the other, and who can become a true partner in the quest to maintain, improve, and extend the software's capabilities. When you find someone like that, it makes the effort seem worth it.
The author uses the word 'thwarting' in two consecutive paragraphs... Wired UK's writing is usually better than this.
Cue the sensational headlines heralding web developers becoming obsolete. These tools keep getting better. Instead of rendering web developers obsolete, they just force everyone to be better.
Dunno, I think it's part of the culture fit. A company saying they're playing starcraft on lunch time will clearly have my interest.
> upsell the power version to the power users

The problem is you then have to have two versions in the App Store, Acme and Acme Pro. Each version will have to go through the torture that is the App Review process. What if one gets rejected, and the other doesn't? It's a pain to have to start over again and lose another week, not to mention coordinating marketing, etc.*

If you decide to sell the Pro features as an in-app purchase, i.e. pay $9.99 for "Pro", what happens next year? "Pro 2014", "Pro 2015" ... ? Also this assumes that your app is built such that Pro features can be isolated from the rest of the app.

*EDIT: Also, if you have a free app and a Pro app, and the user finally decides to purchase the Pro app, with sandboxing, you now have a problem of how to best migrate user data to the Pro app.
Might be useful to let marketing department guys crank out ad banners without bothering any devs. I'm still waiting for http://macaw.co/ for responsive site & application prototyping.
Here's my logic - when customers have very limited information, and side-by-side pricing, they'll always minimise risk by getting the cheapest app. The cheapest app is free. And eyeballing statistics on sales, $1 apps don't do any better than $2 ones (depending on the platform and app - iPhone buyers can be very elastic). Many customers aren't so stingy they'll balk at paying an extra dollar, they simply flock to free apps because you can't beat free. Especially for an app which has lots of substitutes (todos, games).

If customers have good information (they are already using the app), and only one price (your IAP), or pricing you control (your IAP, with dummy prices - feature by feature unlocks, and maybe a premium feature or two), they'll spend be more likely to spend money.

The big money is in exploitive IAP. Skinner box games which use psychological tricks to goad big-spending "whales" (addicts) into spending more. But the small money is probably in IAP too - unlocking the demo.

There's no money (IMO) in $1 apps - they are too expensive (compared to free apps), and they sell themselves short.
It doesn't take much time at all to look for a job if you spread the tasks over a year. Sounds like an excuse to me.
Thanks for sharing but that one doesn't interest me.
Yahoo agrees to pay damages to Singapore Press Holdings
Is Dreamweaver heavily used anymore? I don't honestly know, I haven't worked with anyone that used it in at least 7 years or so.
I cheated YouTube for 5 months and finally got caught
Main discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6470426
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6470426
The point here is not that the tests execution time should dictate the design. On the contrary, the idea of this post was to stress the importance of good design, and that fast tests are just a side effect of it. Now, you might disagree with me on what constitutes good design but that's a different issue.
I've been through immigration (Washington State <-> Canada) multiple times (like more than 50 times) and I have NEVER had any issues with American immigration/border patrol. I was born in South-America (brown complexion and with an accent), but am an american citizen. Even when I was a permanent resident never had issues with them. Sure, I was detained various times (only a few times for more than 1/2 hour), but didn't feel it was an excessive amount of time. Early on, I learned that if you keep your cool, you amplify your chances of not getting flagged.

Now, about Canadian border patron...

Even though they might ask you "What brings you to Canada?", the way they really ask it, while they're condescendingly looking at you is "WTF are YOU doing in my country?"

I have been harassed so many times by them. All with no smiles, no niceness, nothing. I stumbled on an oddly worded question once... this flagged me right away. They made me feel like I was lying, and even had the audacity to tell me: "If you're lying to us; NO CANADA FOR YOU!".

IMO, American border patrol wants to get you on your way as soon as possible after they do their own checks (whatever those are). Canadian border patrol want to harass, intimidate and annoy you to the point where you just want to say "F* YOU, I'm going back to my country!"
It certainly looks that way. The name seems like a bit of an overreach though - "Designing the web" = creating animated ad banners?
I don't get why you'd want a debugger in Vim when you could just use tmux to get what you want in a cleaner way.
Correct. In the "Create New File" dialog, all of the default options are for Google ad units: http://cl.ly/image/2V0n2W1i041v
If Google decides to couple this up with their cloud services, I wonder what does this announcement mean for Weebly?
You're correct. You can't dilute it by adding anything to the pool. However if you also increase the amount of entropy that the system thinks is in the pool this can cause issues. The system keeps a log of the amount of entropy that it thinks the pool has. This is reduced when in some cases for example when urandom is used. When the entropy remaining runs out urandom will have to wait for more. You can specifically tell the system "I've added lots of entropy" and then urandom will not stall but may make some not-very-random random numbers. So adding to the pool is a good thing but don't tell the system it has more entropy and don't expect to get random numbers faster.
If one of the factors underlying the OPs sentiment is that they don't feel like their work is particularly useful or meaningful (which I DO struggle with), these points address that head-on.

Sometimes political or budgetary constraints can prevent projects like these from finding legs, but good points.
Pitch Deck For Startups
World's Smallest Autopilot To Heighten UAV Disaster Response
In my experience, that will also unfortunately encourage them to crank them out without any designers ;)
That sounds too complicated and fragile for me to use.

Really, I was just getting at that you should probably label the field as "Do not type anything in this box" so users with assistive devices don't get trapped. I'd also provide a useful, non-cryptic error message for if the captcha fails.
1. Books and Computers.
2. Between 7th and 8th grade. Learned assembly in 9th.
3. 18. Published article, which is what gave me legitimacy.

My first book was on BASIC, and I had no computer so I wrote out what the computer program and what it'd do in a notebook.

It's been 26 years since, and I'm still going strong.
Sounds good to me. It doesn't say it anywhere on the site, so I was just asking. Also, it would be nice to be assured that I'll get only emails that I'm signing up for. Just an idea for your site to put some people at ease. I'm signing up though.
The most important feature of this (to Google(?)) is the built-in ad editor.

It's the last point on the feature list page, but it's very telling that it's the first thing on the "Create New" screen.

https://support.google.com/webdesigner/answer/3261498?hl=en&...
Possibly reasonable considering you even admit that you repost the same stale post every time the company is mentioned.
Fantastic. I've been waiting for this to happen, and not the least bit surprised it's coming from Google.

I've been super excited for the HTML5/Canvas/JavaScript takeover of web interactivity from the grips of Flash, but the one thing I kept seeing in almost every single tutorial is that it's mostly - still - hand-coded stuff. That's cool for programmers, but the reality is that the "mass" market (among designers) isn't going to really adopt HTML5 until there are well-established visual tools.

Procedural graphic design is a fun exercise, intellectually interesting, and can have some amazing results, but the market for that type of design work is really limited.

This should help drive a real, solid, mass-designer-market adoption of the new standards. Cool.
It's necessary, but not sufficient. Look at Microsoft Blend for Visual Studio (formerly Microsoft Expression Blend), for example.
As an ADHDer, that's what it's like for me; it's not a lack of focus, it's a lack of executive control over focus. I can go head down for sixteen hours on a really interesting problem, but if I'm not feeling it, it just doesn't happen.
this is truly a shameless advertisement in the form of a news article. throwing in a discount code at the end to put the cherry on top.
There are some good suggestions here already (starting with 'talk to a financial advisor'), so I'll just throw a few different ones out:

* Pay down all debts, especially high-APR ones

* Give X% to charity

* Put $XX,000 in savings as an emergency fund

* Travel a bit

* Save it for starting/supporting a family

* Help out a friend or two in need
The BAWSAQ is by far the most interesting market. The BAWSAQ is an online market driven by the buy and sell orders of all 15M+ players.

Early on, before people started to realize how the market worked, I did some pump-and-dump schemes and made >$400M. That's a lot of money, even in GTA. Now that I have that much money I can drive stocks up or down and milk the market for all I want. GTA isn't just for blue color crime anymore.

I know that a few other players did equally well, I suspect they are doing similar market manipulating schemes.
Hmm. I just tried and was unable to reproduce it as well. Maybe I copy/pasted something in that it didn't like? Sorry for the false report, I'll mess around a bit and see if I can get it to work again.
I don't have a Rockstar Social account and I've managed to use the BAWSAQ market, it opens during some of Franklin's assassination side missions given by Lester. It's not under maintenance throughout the entire game.
Wait what?

A high end Aprilia costs around 20k (this is an expensive superbike, see one from the Japanese manufactures for something half the price)

http://www.apriliausa.com/en-US/Model/101340/RSV4+Factory+AP...

This electric bike starting at 30k is very expensive relatively speaking.
The app in question is a "to do list" app. There are thousands of to do lists on the App store. Lamenting why they can't get someone to pay for an app that is usually free and should come with the phone is fruitless. Big whoop if you can do everything with just 'gestures'. Tapping an onscreen button is usually easier to remember and reliably do than a gesture.

In other words, you are exactly right. They aren't providing value. I could write their app in one week, tops.
A good point. When you look at the top richest people of the world, some of them are (were) programmers. None of them are sports or movie stars.
I think that makes sense -- a lot of Google's (paying) clients have been using Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash to make ads for years; if Google wants them to adopt HTML5 technology they need to make tools that are as easy to use as Flash was.
I got very surprised when I saw the download-button. Will the Chromebooks be able to run this?
Where I work, we just had a long internal debate about the usefulness of monolithic frameworks such as Rails and Symfony. I argued against the frameworks, but much of the team is committed to using them. The convenience of having everything in one place apparently is important to a lot of people, despite all the problems that are caused by that. I posted the debate here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/an-architecture-of-sm...
Many crypto algorithms depend on good random numbers. Even if generating a key using a poor RNG is not a problem, some protocols create nonces which must be randomly selected or the security of the algorithm is greatly compromised.

I'm not totally sure as to which algorithms fit this definition but some suggestions might be DSA/ECDSA, Diffie-Hellman, SRP, etc.
Interesting that think.com is owned by Oracle instead of IBM
i was surprised by this as well since google has moved away from desktop apps to web apps with a few exceptions.
The issue is that users have come to expect free updates for the life of the product. I've had five-star apps get 1 star reviews because 'it hadn't been updated in months' – in one case, with an app that already saw nearly three years of continually free updates that each brought a ton of (painstakingly) added technological complexity. Most of our users love the product. We've gotten an award, and have been featured by Apple.

Those 1 star reviews, as you know, are very detrimental. I've had one or two in the past because they _thought_ we were going to charge for an update that we announced.

Anyway, point being that while I feel your pain -- this stuff is never easy to build -- many users do not.
no Linux support, I'm assuming - GNU/Linux is my preferred workspace environment.
That's what reinsurance is for :)
This is exactly my feeling. If it's cranking out noisy code, then I don't want anything to do with it.
Doubtlessly he's bemoaning the lack of support for linux.

I would also like linux support, but it still looks like an impressive suite regardless.