skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How would you manage an existing software team?
I'm a 30 year old guy who built a small business selling desktop support and general office IT consulting. I sold this company 3 months ago.

A very interesting opportunity has come along : an old client of mine has setup a small software company with 2 coders. The plan is to sell subscriptions on a SaaS basis to small businesses for common small business requirements - invoicing, expenses, timesheets, forecasts.

He wants me to manage the company, and get the product built and delivered.

I've examined the business plan, and I think the business model is workable. There are plenty of competitors in the market, but with my insight into small business, I have some unique ideas that would make for a compelling product.

My problem is that I know very little about software. I've run a few successful software projects in my old business (websites, inventory tools and so on), and I have a decent understanding of IT and business, but this would be a very new venture for me.

There is an existing team working on these solutions, and they say they're about 50% ready to launch. In reality of course, this could mean 20%.

I'm comfortable with the marketing, sales, budgeting, accounting, business side, but I'd like HN's opinion on actual product development.

My current plan for the product development is :

Have the existing code independently examined by a 3rd party with no stake in the project.

Setup a SVN Repository, and Bug Tracking systems.

If the code checks out, work with the developers to build a realistic set of phases and milestones in the project.

Hire a part-time tester to test the coder.

Give the developers plenty of space to work.

Once I'm sure they're the right guys for the job, consider some kind of share arrangement for their services to increase motivation.

Release.

Improve.

Repeat as necessary.

Am I coming at this completely the wrong way? How would you approach this challenge?
Is there a consolidated list of business models being used on the internet?
Rohini here
I'm based in Utrecht as well. A a meetup would be cool!
Down the road from you in Annapolis, MD
Many operations in Flex occur asynchronously, such as when accessing remote services. That is, they spark a remote query, and you must explicitly wait for the response (such as by binding a function to the appropriate change event) before you can continue a computation. Sometimes this occurs when you may not expect it, in which case you'll see problems such as UI controls not being updated, or exceptions from using nil values (because they are used before the response comes back).

When you do expect it, you have three options: 1) you always wait for a response before returning, making your function sychronous (thus maybe killing performance), 2) you pass the responsibility to handle this behaviour to the caller (thus creating an abstraction leak), 3) or you define a custom event that you trigger when the response occurs (best behaviour, but needs extra code).

Certainly not a huge issue once you get the hang of it, but something that can definitely trip you up when you're just learning it.
For someone without experience you're doing pretty good, I've seen plenty of people approach this in the dictatorial style and fail miserably.

Asking the coders to set their own milestones and then keeping them to it has worked well for me in the past. That way it is not your deadline they have to make but their own, which goes a long way towards making people accountable.

good luck!
Oh, I agree with you wholeheartedly (except for the single-handedly part; many people had a hand in it).

But the title of your post says "Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon." And there's no math. Even though it is relevant and interesting, it's mis-labelled.
I am reminded of the orientation for a volunteer organization I was a part of. They served lots of Vietnamese, and one of the experienced volunteers was explaining little differences in culture.

"And this thing with saying 'Thank You' -- in our culture we do not thank people for doing what they are supposed to do. And when we get the electric bill, and it says previous payment...Thank You for Your Payment! We think -- who are they kidding!?"
About 45 kms from there (at the moment) :)
Hacker News.

Because you guys separate the wheat from the chaff.
I'd like to but I'm far away (limburg...)
Charter Cities
TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer.html
"I think if you work on some of the strengths of having a start-up in India but with global reach and applications ..." - Can you please elaborate on these strengths of having a start-up in India (apart from lower costs of living)?
Helter Skelter
Heidelberg here too!
Doesn't URL shorteners break PageRank?
Thanks! I'm an IT guy at heart myself - Dilbert style management makes me break out in hives.

Appreciate the feedback on the milestones. I'm very interested in what a coder would generally consider to be best practices in a software rollout, and how to keep people interested, motivated and on track.

Any further insights or feedback would be great.
I wouldn't mind something simple to start on either. I lost my job a few months ago and I've been working on my objective C skills with a few iPhone applications but nothing that will really fall under the 'solve a problem / find something people need' definition HNers have for a successful startup idea.
Rejected by Apple, iPhone developers go underground
.info are particularly popular with kids wanting their first domain - because they're normally v. cheap. Probably not what was had in mind for them, but they're definitely more popular than many realise.
Florianópolis, Brazil
I started coding back in the day with plain old Windows Notepad. I think not having line numbers, not having syntax highlighting and all that fancy stuff definitely helped me.
Mee too! Lamington Road
Twitter could solve it by allowing metadata around links

Twitter could also solve it by upping the 140 character limit to something more reasonable. Any magic reason for the 140 char limit is pretty much gone now.

In the end, I don't know how much any of this matters, Twitter seems overrun by marketeers and self-promoters now, hard to tell if there is enough of a future in it for the URL shorteners to really have much of a future.
out of interest does the existing team work out of an office or from their own locations? And also is it their full time project?

(I have some comments to make but the specifics depends a bit on the answers to those questions)
Work culture in India sure is way different and sadly not quite entrepreneurial in nature in fact non-professional to some extent :(
I am not talking about some particular company but the general work culture here.
You have some great suggestions there, I would love to hear more (simpler ones if you have any, for a person just starting out with web technologies).
Valley Forge, PA
No, that the reported popularity of COBOL is at odds with the anecdotal evidence.
Second Life creator Cory Ondrejka leaves EMI
Thanks for your reply.

Currently they're working out of an office, but I'm open to more flexible arrangements. Yes, this is their full-time project.
They changed their provider each year, forcing everybody to re-evaluate your insurance with a completely different company with different plans each year for three years. Frequently your doctors wouldn't accept the new company's plans, so we were forced to pay out-of-network to keep our doctors, or change to a new doctor. Each year they were extremely late in providing information about the change. Their phone system broke down EVERY year during enrollment periods, and the people on the phones frequently gave out incomplete or innacurate information. They then decided to become their own insurance company. The details about the plans they offered was vague at best, and they were unable to provide clarification on maximum out-of-pocket costs on phone conferences with some very specific questions. It felt like they had a conflict of interest in that they were trying to sell their company rather than provide potential applicants with information to decide whether it was the right solution for them. I jumped ship at this point, and only use them for my dental insurance. I figure if they're unable to operate something as basic as a phone bank, I don't want them trying to administer my health insurance.

There's a lot on the web about their screw-ups. Here's one link with some coverage:

http://gawker.com/tag/freelancers-union/

http://community2.myfoxny.com/service/displayKickPlace.kickA...
Those who are idealess, why not contact me on alexander D blom (AT) G mail DO-T com.

I'm the opposite, too many ideas, no time to make them all.
Home is Orlando, school is Chicago.
I've worked for a company a couple of months that hit a hot spot on the mortgage market (oh nooooos....;-). They really compare all the products of lenders and give advice to independent advisors and consumers what to do. It makes all the products transparant and even has an overview of terms and conditions etc.

This has been done in the Netherlands before, but not so thorough as they do. If implemented right, it can be huge in any country. It is based on a subscription model per (part of) year.
Columbus, Ohio, USA
It all sounds good, but I would be careful about planning.

As a manager coming in from the outside, you're going to want long-range plans. What we've found is that coders are notoriously unable (along with the rest of us) to predict on a long-term basis.

That doesn't mean don't plan months and years out, but it means as far as commitment, have your programmers commit to little chunks of work at a time. Put together a big list of stuff that needs doing (but not too big, maybe 50-100 items max), then pick a time frame, like every two weeks. For each time frame, ask your programmers to commit to doing whatever they think they can from the list. At the end of the time frame, have them demo what they've done -- and fight the urge to micro-manage in the middle.

By having fixed timeboxes, a prioritized list of stuff, and giving control over commitment to the team, you can have lots of little wins over time, which is a great morale booster and also helps you spot problems much earlier than with a long-range plan.
Fukuoka, Japan. Planning to go to Costa Rica in a couple of months.
Seems like a pretty sensible view, and probably fairly close to what Google is aiming for.

I know a number of non-technical people who have watched the whole GW presentation and they can all immediately see the potential of Google Wave to be used within their work and adapted to their workflows. It's very smart of Google to support developers first, because GW's success will probably be highly dependent on specific applications/customisations built on top of their platform.
Thanks for the feedback. I understand where you're coming from.

If I could simplify your view: Stuff happens, deal with it. I don't mean to ignore the nuance. But to generalize it further: the universe is stuff happening that you can't control. You can think you're controlling it but you aren't.

That's a metaphysical view I can't rule out. But I was thinking about control in the sense that, I have more control over a car once a learned stick shift. Or humans have greater control of over the Earth resources than since our hunter-gatherers days; we know how take sand to silicon.

But I never meant to suggest (with the original car metaphor either) that I'm completely in control of life. I did mean, and I do think, that I can get greater control over life. In the same way I can chop down I tree and turn it into a table. I just need the skill. Though, it's hard to learn.
East Lansing, Michigan
I can see a copy of The Daily Show book: America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction
Near Nagoya until mid-September, then I'll be in Tokyo as well.
Really? here are the numbers I just got for comparison off the containers (both are serving size 2 Tbsp)

Nutella: 190 calories, 11g fat, 21g sugar, 3g protein
Organic Peanut Butter: 210 calories, 18g fat, 2g sugar, 8g protein

Nutella isn't really that bad. I'll sometimes eat it on bread before a long run.
Very interesting perspective - I've tended to work with people by doing big picture proposals with a list of deliverables, but this kind of bite-size requirements could be a great way to get a feel for the team.

This could even become my standard way of working with coders.

Thank you for taking the time to comment.
Just about anything is far away when it's Wednesday mornings. Especially if it's only for half an hour or so...
Kanseung? Or are you on the other side?
Now there's something I haven't thought about in like 15 years!

RIP script was cool, I remember the editor they had for it was pretty slick.
Wow - at times I have pondered learning COBOL for fun, as I assumed it to be an easy language. That code snippet killed that illusion good and proper.

If I was religious I would now pray that I will never, never, never ever have to deal with COBOL, ever.
Motorola MOTO U9 
Motorola MOTO U9 efficient earpiece of Motorola obtainable inside the good-looking assembly phone for you by multi tasking skin tone and astonishing good quality signal.The Motorola U9 offers an eye-catching drawing,an honest melody player with hi-fi Bluetooth and tempting show.
Toronto, Ontario here. I'll be visiting some friends in Ottawa at the end of this month. It'll be my first time there, any suggestions for good places to eat?
Ok, I'll do some more digging later (busy now... shouldn't even be here ... hm, that noprocrast starts to look good :) )
cool Idea and really useful.
I like to read street smarts at inc.com the guy invest on any startup and gets 75% of its shares, but 50% will sell back to the guy with the idea at investment value.

So for a successful startup, the guy who puts the money ends with 50% back of the initial investment and 25% of ownership of the new business.

It would be great to have all this throughout a website and be done by many people.
FUJITSU FPCBP186 Laptop Battery 5200mAh Fits FUJITSU FMVNBP157,FPCBP186
Setup a SVN Repository, and Bug Tracking systems.

If those two developers haven't done that yet, step 1 should be to fire them and hire real developers.

I think I'd need to know more about your specific situation to help. Ultimately your success will depend on two key principles:

1) having quality developers in the team

2) giving them the right structure (including plenty of space) to work effectively

From the sound of it, you don't trust whether those existing developers are any good. There's a million ways to find out if they are, some of which are described in my old article at http://inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good... , but you'll have to figure this one out for yourself, I guess.

If they're no good, you need good ones. If they're good, then I would suggest toning down the control/paranoia in your plan and trusting them.
that's a good one!
I think 80% of active code being COBOL can not possibly be true. Computer use and "active code" have probably grown exponentially over the years, and the new stuff hasn't been in COBOL for a long time.
i think this kind of model is doomed. trying to get the old-skule record labels involved is a recipe for failure.

i'd prefer to see a whole bunch of boutique web 2.0 record labels, making new stars out of heretofore unknown acts, using entirely new revenue models.
Horoscopes for entrepreneurs
In which I resurrect a 13 yo 3.5" floppy disk and reprint my doctoral thesis
ReplayTV had the ability to automatically skip commercials on TV 6-7 years ago and I'm sure the same articles were all over the news. It didn't really happen, now did it?
As a successful social skydiver, do you have any recommendations for hacker-oriented events in Seattle around Sep. 21-27? I'll be in town visiting my family and geek brethren, and often experience a paucity of recreational activities during such visits.
Chicago, and I'm awake now at least :-)
Down the road from both of you in Silver Spring, MD
Congratulations! :)

I was wondering how it turned out. No problems at all then. Did you verify the whole floppy or just those files ?

Nearer the hub they tend to get harder to read.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
I think if you started calling around to banks, hospitals, transport companies, oil companies, old-school manufacturing facilities, etc., and started inquiring about their existing codebases, you'd get a whole other set of anecdotes.
Funny, it doesn't even say that it worked (it apparently just happened). I think given the choice between this clever ad campaign and having sufficient supply of whiskey to sell, they'd pick the whiskey.
Daniel,

Thank you very much for your reply. I got some great pointers from your article, and I look forward to chatting with the developers and casually bringing up some of the points you mention.

I'm interested in your proposition - if they don't have an SVN repo and bug tracking systems they're not real developers.

Are there any other very clear indicators that these aren't the guys you want on your team?

Co-incidentally, if I do need to setup this kind of environment, do you have any recommendations on the software infrastructure I should use?
Awesome to see someone else from Milwaukee!
Wise for bit.ly - It would mean more market share for bit.ly plus it would be a proof of reliance for short URLs. Plus inheriting a good brand has additional value.

They could position tr.im for a different target market than bit.ly
bit.ly as the comprehensive one, tr.im as the quick and easy one for instance.

Even in the short it means a wave of good publicity like you see here.
I think it typically boils down to the following: "We spent quite a bit of money on the website/newsletter redesign that we need to justify. The big bosses want to make sure we promote it"
Santiago de Chile.
How much faster is Ruby on Linux?
Characteristics of a good web developer
Look at the Wikipedia article for Scrum (development). It outlines this approach reasonably well, and is "easy" to implement (e.g. the developers will not reject this as "over process") Be agressive in terms of commitments (making and missing) and hold to the fixed timebox. I -highly- recommend a 1 or 2 week timebox (-not- 30 days) as it forces more decomposition and only has people commiting to what they really know. Do the demos. Focus on vertical slices of functionality (e.g. don't just build the breadth of the UI component, take a single button and get it working down to the DB (for example))
-force- the developers to use a CM system and as part of the retrospectives, review checkins/branching, etc. This can evaporate after you are convinced that they are using a CM system (a month or two?)
ask about unit tests (even if you know little about software) if you sense BS, then you have a real problem. If they are developing UT's as you go. This is a good sign. Your hired tester should be able to review unit test coverage breadth with you (plural).
hth
Doesn't it kinda remind you then? You know - the folly of specifying the future before it happens. RIPscrip made tons of sense until... something unpredictable like interwebs happened :) The pipes turned out to be different in practice than the BBS perspective told us. Wave has that same kind of feeling to me. Not saying there's not some neat there, but the style of the announcement and marketing... feels like RIPscript to me - doomed, arrogant, silly.
I'm joining this city next friday :)
Eindhoven, the Netherlands and occasionally Kaiserslautern, Germany.
I'm a Utrechter as well representing neighborhood Lombok.

Wednesday morning at 9? I have enough trouble Wednesday mornings just waking up by 9 ;)
This is funny to me for some reason, but still a good idea!
So as a payment receipient, does this bypass the regular fees for receiving payments?
Web - Hadoop - Pig - Excel Connector
Yes, they look wonderful:

http://www.matthewdavidwilliams.com/2009/06/12/technical-doc...
South Mumbai, India
Article says that listing is free and no comission is taken on transactions. Without these I'm very curious how Taobao generates 200mm/year. It says revenues are from adverts but what is the trick?
Now, I upvoted this as an indicator that I live in London too. But I see inconsistent numbers on other locations (such as a comment with 2 votes and two "me too" replies). Seems like a better solution is required.
Depends on what you like!

Pizza = Colonnade Pizza http://www.colonnadepizza.com/new/

Burgers = The works(this place is incredible) http://www.worksburger.com/

Asian = Mekong (neat atmosphere, good food) http://www.mekong.ca/

Mexican: You will have to look it up but Ahora on Dalhousie is a little hole in the wall, but I think its amazing.

I love food if you couldn't tell. Another thing I would suggest is just get your friends to take you to the byward market and just walk around down there until you find(smell) something you like. Lots of trendy spots down there, lots of gems.

Last suggestion is if you go to the market and you're interested in having some casual drinks Mambo (http://www.mambonuevolatino.com/) has an incredible rooftop deck, the food is pretty great and they have happy hour with cheaper drinks and half price Tapas.
This is a .mov file !
Buildabrand offers startups high-quality branding for the price of a domain
Well at least there is one other florida person here. Too bad, im Melbourne....
me too.

Coffee Meetup

This Wednesday at 11:00am. Starbucks on Wenceslas Square, upstairs by the windows. Don't RSVP; just bring something visibly orange.
Melbourne, FL!!! Contact me if your from the same, would love to meet up!
Huntsville, Alabama
Of course there are open source software written in COBOL! It's not the first time I have to post a link on Hacker News to COBOL's Ruby on Rail equivalent, COBOL ON COGS: http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

It is a great framework built around the new super-awesome REPORT-HOST-TERMINAL pattern!
This is great. I posted a similar thread comment a few days ago on websites and RSS feeds. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745260 But this is a really great list for someone looking for new content.
birmingham, alabama
And that would be an interesting thing to see a blog post about too!
I wanted to do that for Twitter, just for fun :-) Wouldn't even require active participation, because presumably most people Twitter about feeling sick anyway.

It should be mentioned that Google already does some kind of flu tracking, too. Too lazy to look for the link, but I think they pick up on increased searches for flu related stuff, and show it on a map and with trend charts.
> What keeps them going

Switching costs.

Perhaps long time readers find my recommendations for this book tedious, but 'Information Rules' is a great read and explains why lots of things like this work the way they do:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X?tag=dedasys-20
Just across the Delaware from.