skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Pay close attention — true motivations are revealed, not declared." ~ Naval Ravikant http://venturehacks.com/articles/pick-cofounder

tl;dr: either go with someone you know and launch something together. if strangers: brainstorm, hack something together in 48 hours and thoroughly go through their background. if they've done a startup before, ask them to walk you through PG's 18 mistakes and identify which they've made (and their plan for doing things differently).

it's actually a two-sided problem. how do technical and non-technical co-founders who are potentially strangers and often have wildly different skill sets evaluate each other?

i asked a few hacker-founder friends for their take. one (well-known) serial CTO said: "I don’t have negotiation skills and I’m afraid of talking to business people. They play this "wordsmithing" game and I can’t keep up. Before I know it, they talk me into accepting less than I deserve and I get screwed.”

turns out, being taken advantage of was a common theme among the technical founders i talked to. most have been burned. in some cases it turned them off forming partnerships altogether.

what about the other side? i was a non-technical founder when i launched my first startup, which failed partly due my inability to judge a good from a bad developer. i eventually realized that being non-technical put me in a foolishly helpless position so i did two things:
1. i taught myself to code (i started with Pygames, moved to Project Euler and wound up working on small Python projects and learning ObjectiveC);
2. i got lucky when i met a developer at a hackathon last year. we became friends and i asked for his help interviewing technical co-founders. he wound up being interested in the problem i was trying to solve and contributed to the project. when i wound down that startup and told him about my next one, he wanted to get involved.

but not before suggesting i quickly hack together an MVP, get some initial user feedback and even land a few potential customers first. :> i'm so glad i did and he was smart to ask for this. he now understands how i approach problems, saw my ability to hack something quick and dirty, and witnessed some serious hustle as i did all of that in 48 hours. the point is we have some shared history now and the net result is trust. we also understand each other's strengths and weaknesses and talk about them openly.

(note: i also did a post-mortem on my previous startup and identified which of PG's 18 mistakes i'd made. it was a great exercise and i recommend it to anyone who has had to wind down a startup before launching their next. do it for yourself but share it with prospective co-founders and team mates.)
"We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan." -- Armstrong

Whether or not it's absolutely unacceptable to him is debatable, but it is clearly acceptable to use the cost of preserving the lives of his employees' children as a scapegoat, when many other expenses (large engineering salaries, "digital prophets" [1]) could have been noted as examples of excessive expenditures. What ekidd is mad about, and I think reasonably so, is that the attitude of "oh, our employee's child almost died which was costly, so let's cut some benefits" as an acceptable mindset to Armstrong is very troubling. In so doing, he is passing on the price of expensive healthcare costs from AOL to his employees, in the form of a slashed 401k. Now that seems to be pretty close to ekidd's paraphrase -- Armstrong does consider it unacceptable for AOL to pay for his employee's child's healthcare, because he wants to pass on that cost to his employees vis-a-vis 401k cuts.

Now at least in my view, I'd hope my employer would place employees' wellbeing first, and consider cutting benefits as a last possible option, but maybe you have a different view.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/shingy-aol-digital-prophet-20...
>Did he say that?

Setting aside the fact that the post above is obviously not quote from Armstrong, we can't say for certainty what he said because all we have is a reported quote in the press with the sources cited as an unnamed AOL employee's transcript of the call.

The alleged quote from the transcript is:

>“Two things that happened in 2012,” he said, according to a transcript provided by an AOL employee. “We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan.”

If you believe the quote is accurate, Armstrong is clearly singling out these two babies as contributing to the reason why the 401k plan was changed.

But we lack all of the surrounding context, and the quote above wasn't even continuous. It does, however, fit the mold of televised arguments he gave on the subject. Obamacare and rising health care costs were cited and a decision to not completely absorb those and pass some of the increase to employees in the form of other benefit reductions was the argument he made in a few different places.

A poor comment to make considering the whole point of insurance and how it works, as well as the size of AOL's insurance risk pool IMHO, but then, I don't know if he even made that comment or qualified it with something like "But this is exactly the kind of worthy benefit and cost we believe should be prioritized above certain other existing benefits."

Given his response, it gives me the impression that he made a comment to this effect, and that it was a poor one to make, but that's just an impression. And it's even harder to say where his heart is on the matter. At the very least he has mentioned in interviews that they actively prioritized their benefits package in light of costs, and clearly healthcare was a higher priority than the 401k benefits that were cut. So for the poster to conclude that Armstrong deems covering the costs of these sick babies "unacceptable", I don't see it. The opposite, if anything. Whether or not he used the sick babies to rhetorically deflect from the fact that AOL is choosing not to absorb all of the rising costs and is passing them on to employees...well that is another story in my mind.
The daytime population of San Francisco is much higher than the actual number of residents, so no, this isn't the problem. If the daytime population was lower then you'd be on to something.

Google has repeatedly tried to stimulate residential construction in Mountain View but the city of Mountain View just doesn't want it. We're all waiting for windshield perspective baby boomers to just hurry up and die so we can have proper urban forms on the peninsula. And I'm not talking about high rise, I'm talking about 3-5 stories over street level retail. Mountain View currently has lots of single-story and surface parking lots, even in their "downtown" which I reckon to be at Castro and Villa.
And EU officials are unhappy about it. I guess if it was one of the EU countries, people would get to vote until a pre-approved decision in a referendum is reached.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_European_Constitution_re...
My point still stands. You don't run into Euclidean division when you're running back home. You don't see vectors when you're waiting for the school bus to take you home. You never see Binary trees, when you're out playing. But you do see buildings and some being constructed. Not to mention the legos game.
Aka, the abstractions to concreteness is harder in CS than in Civil Engineering. It still might be a good strategy to teach some subset of all students, but as general policy for the majority it'll be horribly ineffective (I think).
They should have gotten secondary catastrophic insurance. I.e. only for claims over some dollar amount, which are very rare and very cheap to insure for.
> Someone else on this thread pointed out that Von Neumann was an exceptionally stylish guy, but he's far from the only example.

So your solution is to suggest everyone be as smart as John von Neumann so they can master subjects while still being a snappy dresser? Does this seem like something people can do?

The proverbial 10k hours of practice have to come from somewhere. Time is limited, activities are zero-sum.
Except most references are complete BS anyway. Normally good references are agreed upon before leave, regardless to if they were good employees or not.

Bad references are normally given because of political reasons(as good references are almost always given) not performance. I.E Employee exposed bad practices or made boss look bad, and a bad reference is used as retaliation.

I think there was some academic research that said references are the worst predictors for performance.
Right, i disagree with you wholeheartedly. The probably is the how do we get from here to there. We have transportation infrastructure. It's roads, the roads are mostly designed for car and light truck traffic primarily. Now my question to you is, how do you justify, politically, the proposal to add a bunch of extremely expensive, and unpleasant to build (2nd ave subway made 2nd ave horrifically ugly for a couple years) infrastructure.

Without a billionaire (thus fairly incorruptible) mayor in his last term, i really don't think it's going to happen.

People have invested in the car infrastucture, they have bought certain houses, in certain neighborhoods because of it, they have planned their lives around it. You can't just say, "okay, we're all going to take light rail now, so we need to remove all the street parking on your street, sorry, 1/4 of this town is going to have to deal with dramatic changes in infrastructure.

No, the way to do it is sin taxes. Why? Firstly, because the pain is felt by everyone. This prevents NIMBY's from getting their ammunition. Everyone feels the pain, everyone must adjust. Secondly, it provides a gradual path to a low-car environment. Slow is good, fast is politically untenable for most cities. As traffic decreases, you can add BRT lines with little objection. You can switch current infrastructure from private vehicles to public. You don't have to dig a bunch of holes in the ground, you just have to re-purpose. Thirdly, you've just funded your public transit projects.

If we want to make public transit in america. I honestly thing the best way to do it is build a better bus. A bus that feels like a subway car. A bus that i would want to ride, even when it's packed.
>Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do

The draw of programming for me was that I do could do interesting work and create something all by myself, by the force of my own mind. I loved it largely because I could do it independently, without mommy and daddy steering. I would have lost interest quickly had it been supervised.

There aren't many other creative activities like that - hardware hacking requires 1) driving to stores to 2) buy parts 3) with money or 4) owning a credit card to order things online. Music requires 1) paying 2) an adult teacher and 3) driving you to lessons. Sports, again, requires money, equipment, and driving. As long as there's a computer and an internet connection, you can teach yourself to program all you want.

(As an aside, Cory Doctorow has a part in Little Brother where he talks about why programming is so amazing - there's really nowhere else where you can make living, acting things with just your thoughts.)

>violent videos

So what? Anyone who's slightly informed about the news sees violence all the time. It's part of living in this world. I watched Saddam Hussein hang on CNN.com and I'm not any different because of it.

>social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around

You might be shady for all I know, but it doesn't matter unless we meet in person. Where your child is going and who he's letting into the house are perfectly legitimate things to supervise and even I wanted to walk into the arms of a predator, it would have been pretty difficult.

As far as Facebook, the shady characters are exactly the same shady characters at school.

>Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.

These were the dominant media for a while, but your CLI program in 2014 isn't very interesting to anyone else. Web and iOS applications are, and the web is pretty important if you're going to target these media.
I can't tell if your tone is part humorous or if its actually dead serious all the way through, I laughed my ass of anyway. Now here's some pictures of old tough men wearing fannypacks to drive your point home :
http://www.strengthfighter.com/2013/02/old-tough-men-wearing...
Looking around here in the winter, we could make some major changes to how roads are laid out as well. For example, most of the freeways are just one lane during and right after a heavy snowfall. The cars are also traveling tens of miles an hour under the speed limit. I've even seen two-lane roads become one-lane roads, because people only want to drive where everyone else has proven it's safe to drive.

Driving in the snow is much more dangerous than driving in perfect weather. It's only natural that people are going to change their driving habits. This article has a good premise, but poor execution.
What's the difference between me grabbing a package from backports and me doing a build-dep/dpkg-buildpackage from a testing/unstable dsc?
I often feel the same way. I did suggest 3 'better' metrics in the article. The problem is we're brought up on generalized metrics and when in reality we need most likely need to create our own to really understand how our business is working, imo. Although the created metrics can/should be derivatives of the most often used metrics.
Imho it is not a good choice at all.
As the EU commission said, if the Switzerland want to put some immigration block they have to drop also all other rights of the treaty EU-Sw [1].
Considering how much Swiss companies depend on the EU to make profit, I think this can be a large catastrophe on the mid-long term.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Un...
In the case where your application and database are running on the same server, you can eliminate the database password entirely by running the application in a separate user account [1] and running your database on a UNIX socket [2] with peer authentication [3].

[1] You should really be running your web application in its own user account regardless of how you interface to your database.

[2] Running daemons on a UNIX socket is better security-wise than running on localhost, because you can protect the UNIX socket with filesystem permissions.

[3] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/auth-methods.html#...
This is pretty obviously preferable to the situation we have in health care today in the U.S., where you're (more or less) forced to get employment and health insurance from the same company.
Actually, the EU should be grateful - that decision will result in fewer engineers, doctors, professors, and other highly qualified talents migrating to Switzerland.
I don't think there is a market for cars without micro electronics. Especially not with the rise of electric cars.

FPGA's are several orders of magnitude more expensive than mass-produced electronics.

Modern cars contain more than just controller electronics. What about image sensors, for instance, for automated parking systems? You can't 3D-print an image sensor. Not without a clean room at least.
As a driver I see the areas being sectioned off as stress inducing. I haven't lived in a city very long but I see a lot of short sighted ideas in this post. Parking is a concern, a place without parking is inaccessible to people from other areas. Plenty of the examples make turning impossible even for small sedans, let alone full sized vehicles. A fun concept that hits a bit too close to home for me right now. City planning like this has kept me from exploring my own downtown area.
Seriously? So the best way to get more people in a sports stadium would be to get rid of the parking lot, or walmart's sales would go up if they got rid of their parking lots? Or on a small scale, I'd be more likely to go to a restaurant or small retailer if I knew for certain I couldn't get there on foot and if I drove there, I wouldn't be able to park?

Now I do see your point for a stereotypical neighborhood local bar where they shouldn't be driving drunk anyway, or even a small local pharmacy or convenience store/gas station.

I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots?
At this point, the only thing that still keeps C close to the hardware is that they need to keep the hardware close to C model because of all the legacy code in the world. Most recent hardware innovations, like pipelining, speculative code execution, SIMD, etc are not easily expressed in C. Additionally, C was written in a time where accessing the memory was cheap and had a uniform cost - nowadays memory access times vary immensely depending on if its cached or not.
Girls don't get barbies thrown at them, they beg for them. The are expensive, too.
Third party insurance doesn't necessarily save you when this happens. I worked for a company with third party insurance, and when one of my coworkers had a kidney transplant we lost money that quarter as a result of extra charges.
Less dark: we used to measure budgets, wages &c in units of Rovers (millirovers for small items) for some years in a place I worked in because the Principal decided to buy herself an official Rover - while at the same time freezing expenditure on such fripperies as textbooks, photocopying paper &c. That one ended up on extended sick leave and then a payoff...
It depends on the kind of work they do.
I'm on the fence. I think it's a matter of age, and being able to follow on damaging content/encounters.

My kid if too small to go around the web yet, but I have the feeling there will be a point where as parents my wife and I will need to let him do what he wants without asking us anything, but we keep the ability to check the logs of everything he accessed with any device in the house

It means being able to have red flags triggered on specific things or be able to trace what happened on some social network 2 days ago. 20 years ago my parents didn't care much what I saw of who I talked to in a ny given day as long as I looked fine, but there is a huge gap between the content we could randomly access to physically, and the kind of content one can now stumble on online.

The hard part of course is at which point (8 years old ? 10 ?) will it be ok to let a kid with unlimited internet access and just try to guide him/her to dismiss corruptive infos and follow up on things the kid is not able to deal with alone.
That's an excellent question! I am thinking on a blog post explaining all the development process alongside with the commented code
Range voting still has its issues - every voting methodology has some issues - but range voting pretty well dominates plurality voting IMO.
Yes - there is a middle ground for self insured companies called a stop-loss provision. Companies can still get lower premiums through being self insured, but are also covered against huge losses over a specified amount.

In addition to the horrible way this was handled by management, this is clearly the failure of the AOL benefits team, who exposed AOL to more risk than it was actually prepared for.
Because AOL chose to self-insure, there's no insurance company, just an asset pool within AOL itself.
You typically find this idea of teaching abstract advanced concepts first in anyone who believes in a constructivist theory of education, which this article smacks of quite a bit. The problem with constructivism is that it really only works with beginners who stumble onto a natural talent that gave them these foundational skills, or whose parents were wealthy and educated enough to have them and teach them to their kids. Constructivism's lie is that it claims to want to teach everyone, but then is only successful with natural talent.

If instead you teach basic skills in the best way, through fairly rote learning combined with application, then later abstract concepts are possible and can be discussed. The idea that you have to do one (abstract concepts) without the other (basic skills) is simply an attempt to limit the types of people who can succeed at an activity to only those people exactly like the teacher.

In other words, attempts to teach abstract concepts first as if basic skills are pointless are simply attempts to weed out undesirable people, which is what this article's proposal would do.
Cryptocurrency Auroracoin Given to Every Person in Iceland
I think it varies, actually. Nearly everything on the peninsula, and everything in the East Bay south of Oakland is pure car dependence. But SF, Oakland, and Berkeley grew up in the streetcar era and are still walkable with decent rail and bus service that can be readily improved when the cheap oil interval finally ends. The string of little towns from Concord to Walnut Creek to Alamo and Danville have walkable nuggets at the core of their sprawls and these can easily be connected by streetcar on the old Santa Fe rights of way if anyone wants to. Livermore also has a proper downtown and even mainline rail service to San Jose. Plus Livermore is dead level and you can bike all over it in no time.

When driving becomes too expensive there is definitely going to be a lot of abandoned sprawl but there's also plenty of decent places to live. By definition, few people live in the sprawl. It's a shame that they wasted so much of their and your money building out those subdivisions in the middle of nowhere, but that's a sunk cost now.
> Since it is impossible to autonomously do payments on the internet before age 18, my parents' willingness to let me use their credit card

I'm a high school teacher, and I teach some intro programming classes once in a while. I teach primarily low-income/ at-risk students, and this is one piece of the puzzle that keeps my students from gaining more real-world experience. It's a hard issue, too, because you can rack up a big bill if you think you know more than you do. So I can't really tell parents they should give their kids access to a credit card. Many parents probably don't even have a credit card.

That said, there is plenty of learning you can do by building your own server. This issue is not the main thing holding my students back, but I am aware that it will be an issue as soon as I start building stronger skills in my students.

Thank you for sharing your story!
Big data is changing the whole way humans will solve problems
I wish establishments that thought this would post it in their windows so I could walk my money right past them. It sounds like you don't live in an urban area, correct me if I'm wrong... because most people I know walk to where they are going in Philadelphia.
It seems that Europe is tightening its immigration policies.

I would say it makes sense given that previous policies gave rise to some suboptimal dynamics.

I wonder if they manage to still make holes for qualified specialists.
WordPress is doing pretty well with no tests!
The problem is that unless enough people make a conscious decision otherwise the 30-40 years of C libraries/collected-knowledge means it's always "what's appropriate" even in cases where no: fortran, ada, pascal... forth/lisp/whatever-you-have-that-can-talk-to-metal would actually be more (or as) appropriate.