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I was on a voice call on Gmail this whole downtime. The email UI didn't react, the contact list went dead etc., but the call quality was crystal clear throughout.

I spot-checked some of the profiles in the original post screenshot. Four out of five were realtors. So it could be the profiles in the screenshot were ranked by profession, or that this is a lead for where the leak came from. Or coincidence.

This book was worked on as "DIY Accelerator: How Startups Can Accelerate Themselves for 0% Equity". I changed the name to appeal to a broader audience, but the working title might tell Hacker News audience a bit more about what the goal of the book is.

If we'd treat alcohol medically equivalently with other similar substances, a suitable recommended dose would be about a teaspoon of wine per day (digging up reference). So no need to keep the workplace boozeless.

A friend hypothesized coming up with a 'reverse doomsday clock', which would count down to the estimated time when virtual sex would that much more satisfying than real sex that the species would stop reproducing. It's ticking down.

Well at least they didn't say "God particle" in the headline. Points for that.

I thought about this more after my comment. Yes, this is very true. Finding employee #1 is different from finding a co-founder but not by much, especially if you want them to stick around and work well with you. And founding a company with someone you are already friends with is I think much more common that founding with someone who you've just met.

While I appreciate Carson's candidness in blogging how they do things, there's a couple of dangerous things in his recommendations.

"I’d recommend waiting until you’re overwhelmed with your work." This is a bad idea. Do not. Hire when you can afford to pay close attention to what you are doing. Your first hire is crucial to your company culture and direction, so you need to be on the spot here. Packed schedule and cognitive overload do not a good hiring setup make.

Additionally, that recommendation assumes that you are hiring someone to do the stuff that you don't have the time to do. While that's certainly true and helpful in many cases, it shouldn't be the whole truth. I like the maxim "hire people smarter than yourself". Because if you do, maybe you'll see that you weren't packing your schedule with the right things after all.

"Avoid hiring a friend as a first employee." Right, there is the fact that it potentially changes the dynamic. But not in all cases. If you, say, hire your closest friend since childhood, it's very possible that your friendship will survive anything the work life throws at you, and makes that in turn stronger. On the other hand, hiring a more 'distant' friend has the massive benefit that you not only know the person, but likely know their network, too, and there is no better filter or background check than sharing the same social circle. Carson does mention this in "ask friends for recommendations" of course.

"I’d recommend your first employee should be a designer with strong frontend dev skills." Um. What if that's exactly what we don't need? Ok, cheap shot, but it's a bit silly to say that everyone needs a designer-dev (then again, Treehouse training does prepare people for that...).

And while he says that you should start with freelancers, he doesn't mention that the first hire can also (in most legislations) start as a contractor or on trial period, which is a safety net for both the employee and the employer.

LOL. The closed captioning in the beginning of that demo video reads like a haiku from an emo kid:

"Tear out your day / all that information is rainy days / actually needed."

Not sure if it makes me trust Google's efforts to bring me "just the right information at just the right time."

Great, thanks, this is now addressed in an edit in the post. Also good point on making a separation based on skills.

Thanks! And you're right about the text editor. I should do that for myself too. I guess vim is one of those things that you keep running into, and unless you never figure it out, it will remain a mystery (and if you accidentally do get it, you can do damage - I have!).

And that's a fascinating point about your professor not mentioning StackOverflow. Would be great to hear about what 'unofficial' or community-based resources do get mentioned in 'official' education.

I completely agree. Necessary, not sufficient. Covering the specifics, which are just the tools and a basic foundation, is empowering and motivating IMO. A big part of learning basics like this is just learning the vocabulary for describing the larger challenge you want to tackle. Knowing that you have the tools and the basics is necessary for learning more, and ultimately, getting to the point of building, polishing and delivering.

Thanks. This is partly why I made the point of there being good comments to that post - I can see there are plenty of differing opinions on this, and I'm can't say what is right. But, for a newbie to thinking about program structure (well, at least for me) presenting that with clear borders is helpful. But I think you're right, calling it MVC is not helpful. What should the HTML/CSS/browser bucketing be called instead?

Thanks. One specific example could be resource sharing. We use Github for code, but also for issue tracking (which brings with it discussion threads) so using Github properly even if not making code commits is valuable so you stay on top of issues and questions and can contribute. And in my case, I know I can make small fixes myself, so I want to have the infrastructure in place and know how to use it.

If you are working remotely, you want to be able to see the latest development version and run it locally, not just the latest alpha push. In the real gritty details, I just had to update Maven on my local machine and fix a Github conflict, and had to ask for help figuring out where the missing components were and how to fix the error messages. If someone has to take an hour helping me get this done, it is unnecessary overhead. I still almost broke things in vim though, but know what I have to learn.

More generally, a technical product understanding just helps in communication. If the tech lead makes the decision to refactor the code, which leads to delays affecting the business, it's good to know why.

The "credit score system" where you lose points for making comments contrary to the official truth sounds like gamification of censorship. And as with all games, players will try to test, game and bend the rules to their advantage. They may well see this backfire in terms of censorship, but it could still work out for Weibo...

Congrats, great to see this in the App Store. Notice though if you are a beta user of Cobook, you need to delete the beta before you can install it from the Mac App Store.

I think this is a special case of a big fish in a really small pond (Finland) trying to make it out into the ocean. Having said that, it underlines how adding more dumb money doesn't make you any smarter and that just makes for an ever bigger non-trivial failure in Fruugo's environment (obviously that's my biased theory confirmed).

I went there for a job interview in 2008. They had a vague idea of what they should do, which was more or less "revolutionize global e-commerce by facilitating cross-border trade", I guess fueled by the realization that gee, stuff is cheaper in some countries than others. They had ideas of solutions for things like shipping, price consolidation, translation and customer relations. They were also planning to take what I thought to be an insane commission per trade. I'd worked with European SMEs a lot in the past with the world's biggest search ads product, so I thought I knew what they were ready for and what they needed, and the three chats I had at Fruugo didn't really reflect this at all.

Most alarmingly, while they were in really early startup mode, they had a very front-heavy team of 'top talent' and loads of telco-pedigreed 'old boys' in the helm. I dropped off the interview process when I was told that to continue, they'll do a psychological profiling by an external consultant and that they do that for all candidates. Really. First, wow, that's expensive. Second, in a startup, the recruiting process should be all about the team and the product, not a standardized test. I told them this.

Now, I almost regret not going in for a bit more, maybe even to work with them for a while, to have a better idea of what all went wrong and if there would've been a way to save the company. Will make for a great case study, no doubt.

Because the law for individuals and companies is different. In this case, the franchised companies are companies in their own right, and they have employees. Franchised companies usually (?) have a licensing contract with the mothership, not an ownership arrangement. MCD does not 'contract' the franchise employees - that would be trouble. In the redditor's case, that's exactly what he does, down to giving them uniforms.

Other than being an awesome exposition of a Kickstarter project, this is an example of incredibly valuable feedback. Now thinking what I can do to stimulate even a fraction of this level of customer feedback in my startup...

The biggest challenge to the model mentioned in the article is "Will employers value these degrees?" but that's already being solved. The academic system is a great set of hurdles, and most of the time clearing those hurdles is enough of a proof. But employers are already supplementing with other hurdles: programming tests, for example, either homegrown in the recruiting process, or off-the-shelf tests like Codility. The only thing that surprises me is that the shift hasn't already happened.

The “we’re X for Y” is awesome because it is a simple, powerful positioning. That's also why it can be misunderstood so easily.

The same model is used in pitching screenplays and movies. Alien, famously, was pitched as "Jaws in space". It works because it sticks, but doesn't define the field (the plot etc) too much. Similarly, startups using the “we’re X for Y” are giving themselves a quick mental positioning in the mind of the listener, but without carving an exact niche. It is easier to work up or broaden from defining the idea ('the beachhead') that way.

The way to misunderstand it is think that they mean to do exactly that. "What, they're taking a giant shark onto a spaceship?"

This beachhead thinking is key. The trouble is that it is harder to represent in the “we’re X for Y” way, which is usually the thing that sticks with the audience (which is also the reason why it works so well).

"Game theory explained" with too many assumptions. Such as that punishment is so costly that it creates another problem of the commons, as the punishers (who are a subset of the cooperators) get less our of it than the non-punishing cooperators. I'd say this is wrong: in repeated games punishment is not a cost but an investment. A threat must be carried out in order to be credible in the long run, and thus a cooperator who punishes a defector (or a 'joker' for that matter) is better positioned in subsequent games to be treated fairly.

Just another crap blogger. Move along, people.

Summary: certain ant species are shown to carry latent genes that produce supersoldier ants. This can be activated with hormones, or importantly, by certain nutritional or environmental conditions, even in species that are not known to produce supersoldiers normally. This implies applications elsewhere (for example, crops) where beneficial latent traits could be activated.

Nice one - could work. I'm afraid that could add needless complexity though. Person pledging now is pledging for a particular project, which is meaningful to them. Making them think of another future project via a voucher or credit can confuse them. If there's one thing I've learned, it's never get in the way of what is meaningful to your users at any given moment.

Could be a future use case, though.

Thanks for the comment!

I have to wonder where you think the money will come from? What will be the motive to donate?

If this is a question about the crowfunding site itself, this is a non-issue. Any running costs will be covered. Donations are not required. If the service becomes meaningful to a lot of people, there will be motivated people to support it in different ways.

Do you have experience with the not for profit model?

Some, yes. I don't mean to brush aside your valid concerns for the long-term financial health of the project, but the initial costs will not be unsurmountable.

I have serious financial problems and could use the money. I wish I could find a way to crowd fund what I do. If I do, most likely that won't be called "crowd funding". It will be called "sales to the public", perhaps in the form of t-shirts, merchandising, etc.

So this is part of the reason why I want to do this. A lot of people creating content have to just throw the content out there and hope it sticks and is monetizable. The crowdfunding model however is a good "sales to the public" model, I think, especially when used as a pre-demand and pre-order model. The biggest projects on Kickstarter for example have been pre-demand projects, where someone has created a wriststrap for the iPod Nano or a tripod mount for a camera phone and sold pre-orders for these.

We know that digital content is distributed freely, and this will not go away. For a writer, for example, this can be a serious problem. Say you create a non-fiction how-to book on something very specific and niche. A couple of people buy the ebook, and finding value in it, want to share it with the people they know in the same niche. They (at least many think this way) get more social value out of just sharing a digital copy of your work, instead of pointing their friends to buy it. If you flip this model, and ask for money upfront for the upcoming content, the same person who has donated will now be more inclined to find others to donate too, so that the content will actually get created (this is why Kickstarter's pledge minimums work to motivate sharing). Of course, in addition to getting the content among the first, they can get other perks. By all means you can consider this pre-sales or pre-demand instead of crowdfunding.

But that's going into the CF model in general. If people benefit from a new platform like this and it creates more copyright-free content while supporting the creators of such content, as far as I'm concerned it's successful.

28K is an indication of nothing if they don't know what your product is about.

Finally! Awesome work. Do we get points for finding "unlisted" video platforms it supports :) ?