rosenjon

I think it would be interesting to have to say why you up or down voted something, along with the vote. Make the reasons public, so people can see how the system is being used, and then publish guidelines based on the aggregate results that give people an indication of the best way to use the system.

It would probably not be ideal to publicly publish names along with reasons, since this might encourage flame wars about why people voted in certain ways. However, perhaps there could be more private means of dealing with people who consistently misuse/abuse the system.

Awesome article! Thank you for posting this. I just recently started really looking at Hacker News (mostly because of my Y Combinator application), but I have been really impressed with the breadth of stuff posted here.

I am a molecular biology major and used to do lab research in this area, so I find it fascinating.

I will say that the U.S. Patent Office really needs a refresh in terms of who it hires. Both in terms of software patents and molecular biology, it is pretty clear that the people issuing these patents don't understand the core issues.

The isolation of a DNA sequence should not be patentable, any more than reading data off a disk drive is patentable. Both these technologies relied on years of publicly funded scientific research and a myriad of different technologies. This company has merely built on those findings.

If they have discovered a novel way to analyze the results of a specific sequence, and determined a provable correlation between a specific sequence variant and getting breast cancer, then perhaps this is an invention that deserves patent protection in the form of a commercializable product. In no way should this restrict further research in the area, however. The entire point of the patent system is to trade disclosure for protection. These guys seem like they want to prevent anyone else from researching these genes entirely, which in my mind is just plain selfish and goes against the spirit of the patent system.

I agree that there needs to be some benefits to companies that produce novel discoveries in the area of information technology (which is really what we are talking about regarding molecular biology and software patents). Patenting genes is not the way. Patenting software algorithms is not the way.

Bottom line: Our legislators need to get off their asses and adapt our laws for the 21st Century. Or we need to find new legislators who will.

I wouldn't ignore it. There is the real possibility that there is too much capital being pumped into early-stage companies, and when they fail, there will be too little available to all. The best way to insulate your business from bubble economics is to find a profitable business model that is not reliant on the exuberance of others, and not easily replicated by someone else.

Someone likened Google's other businesses as the moat around their search castle in another thread. I would recommend that everyone think about how to build their own castle that repels competitors as well as the effects of economic externalities that are outside your control.

"Veil-piercing isn't about "transacting business on behalf of the company in a role that doesn't legally exist." That's an indemnity issue (the LLC is trying to shuffle blame from itself to an employee)."

No... you are confusing the issue.

By way of example, let's say that I am running a member (owner) managed LLC. My official title under state law is "Member". But I sign all my documents with customers and suppliers as "CEO". Then, the company goes broke, and owes money to its suppliers. The suppliers could argue that I did not represent the company in good faith, because I was not the CEO of the company. That position doesn't exist. So they might want to come after me personally instead. Depending on the laws of your state, the court may agree that you did not represent the company in good faith, and allow your suppliers to pierce the veil and come after your personal assets.

The only way to shift blame to an employee would be in cases of fraud or gross negligence, and even then, your company would probably still be liable. What I am discussing is only really relevant in cases where the owner and manager are one and the same (as in the case of the original poster's situation). This doesn't apply to employees who may sign on behalf of the company for routine transactions, but don't have any controlling interest in the company. However, as a manager, it is best to make sure that anyone with signatory authority in your company is given such authority in the operating agreement. However, there is no such thing as piercing the veil with regards to an employee of a company who does not have a substantial ownership stake. They will always come after the owners of the company if it seems that the company is a sham to protect personal assets. The more loosely you operate your company without specific legal agreements (ie operating agreement), the more likely someone will be able to prove that the company is a sham.

That's the point of the operating agreement. It says what does and does not exist.

To quote from Nolo.com (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/llc-operating-agreeme...) :

"The main reason to make an operating agreement is to help ensure that courts will respect your limited personal liability. This is particularly key in a one-person LLC where, without the formality of an agreement, the LLC will look a lot like a sole proprietorship. Having a formal written operating agreement will lend credibility to your LLC's separate existence."

The operating agreement usually specifies that the member can operate all aspects of the business, including hiring, firing, etc. So authority flows from the member in terms of other people's titles, and it is not necessary to specify lower level employee's title in the operating agreement. It is, however, necessary to specify the relationship of each owner in an LLC to the business if they will be transacting business on behalf of the company. This ensures that the veil between personal and company property remains intact.

Ok, but what's your point? On $19 Billion in profit, they paid no federal income tax. I made substantially less than $19B last year, and I paid both state and federal income tax.

Also, if you read the article I posted on G.E., it talks about how you can write off up to $10,000 in start-up costs on your taxes. I think this may be for the company, not the individual, so maybe that doesn't help in a dissolution. However, my overall point was simply that professionals know about all these loopholes, regular Joe start-up guy does not. So go see someone who knows what they're talking about.

I would never use RoR for my social coupon webapp. ;P

"Regardless of if I talked to a professional, I'd actually have to pay the same amount to dissolve this entity."

Really? There is a reason companies like G.E. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870453020457623...) legally pay essentially no federal taxes. Because there are sophisticated lawyers and accountants (a.k.a. professionals) who figure out how to shift the law to their advantage.

For example, there may be laws in place that allow you to write-off of the dissolution of your business against your personal income taxes. Or perhaps there is a way to file a grievance with the state to prevent having to pay the dissolution fees, based on some statute pertaining to small companies. However, you won't ever know, because you don't want to talk to a professional.

Recognize that you're in this situation in the first place because you didn't want to talk to a professional. Now, as the situation has escalated, you still don't want to talk to a professional. This does not bode well for your future business dealings.

There are law firms that do work for free for start-ups. I'm guessing one of your friends from high school or college is a lawyer at one of these firms. Reach out to the people you know, and figure out how to leverage your connections to get some professional advice. Remaining ignorant is not the solution to this problem.

My first Python app was a Windows automation script that took a data dump from SQL Server and ran it through Tableau's data visualization software, to produce a daily report on various metrics our company was interested in.

The enterprise Tableau product was outside our price range, so this was a good way to hack together a solution using the desktop version and our raw data from SQL Server. As it so happened, Python turned out to have the best libraries for working with output from SQL Server, automating the opening and control of the desktop Tableau app in Windows, and then formatting certain Excel output appropriately (some of the data was graphs, some of it was direct output to Excel in a complex pivot table format).

Python is really powerful for a whole host of things. As people have pointed out, choose a project that you want to get done, and then start coding it. I have never liked just trying to cram through an entire O'Reilly book, for instance. It's kind of like reading an encyclopedia cover to cover. Much better to focus on a problem that might incorporate a few different competencies.

Personally, the tabbing in Python drives me nuts. Working in it convinced me that I really like brackets. I'm sure I'll get flamed for this comment, but I think it's just a mental processing thing. Some people work well with white space (VB being another example), others don't. I've always liked being able to use brackets as a reference point. Whitespace doesn't do it for me, even if I have the tab characters show up in code.

How stupid this was is dependent on the specifics, which we don't really have. Were you on the brink of raising a round of capital? Or did you just incorporate in anticipation of raising a round later?

A C-corporation in Delaware is considered the best entity for raising outside investment. The State of Delaware knows this, and charges hefty fees for maintaining a C-Corporation, and apparently for dissolving one. So it makes very little sense to incorporate in Delaware unless you will be raising an outside round of capital, because the costs of maintaining the C-Corporation itself are very high for a start-up with no money. Recognize that a "do-it-yourself attitude" is awesome for developing start-ups. It is perhaps one of the worst attitudes to take in terms of corporate entity formation and maintenance. Documents on file with a law firm with appropriate date and timestamps are virtually bulletproof in court. This is one of the many reasons law firms exist. Documents pulled out of your filing cabinet, to which only you have been privy until the time they end up in court, are a bad, bad idea. Bootstrapping your legal documents or anything else having to do with your corporate entity is a flat out terrible idea, unless you basically do this for a living (in some cases, there are startups who create LLC's daily, in which case you presumably know all of this already).

Totally agree. It would be unfortunate if anyone takes away from this that incorporating is a bad idea. What is a bad idea is incorporating with no idea of what you're doing. I disagree that this is a story of dissolution. It is a story of having incorporated with no understanding of the consequences, and finding out too late that he should have sought legal advice to begin with.

There is a lot of talk online about Delaware being the best state for incorporation. This is true if you are seeking outside financing, and most angels/VC's want to see a Delaware C Corp prior to investing. However, if you are going to raise investment, you need to have a lawyer anyway. So at the point you take investment, your lawyer can handle doing an incorporation in Delaware. No one should be filing for C-corporation status by themselves, with no background in the legal requirements.

In the meantime, if you are a startup who wants to put out a product for public use, or need to bring aboard paying customers of any kind, you should probably have an LLC. These are relatively cheap to create (and dissolve) and you can generally find law firms who will do pro bono work for startups in filing the appropriate paperwork (I have found several). Even LLCs require operating agreements and other paperwork before they are considered true legal entities. Any decent law firm does this all the time, and has the appropriate documents on file. Doing this yourself is again asking for trouble. For example, if you do business on behalf of your LLC as the "CEO", "President", or "General Manager", and have not specified that title in an operating agreement, you may be at risk of having the veil pierced (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil), because you are transacting business on behalf of the company in a role that does not legally exist.

In most states, if you have an owner run LLC, your official title is "Member". However, most people don't want to represent their company as "Member", as this sounds weird, and is not a commonly used term. So in practice, you call yourself something else, like General Manager. If your operating agreement says that you can run the company under the title of "General Manager", or anything else you want to call yourself, then you are totally cool. If not, then you will be in trouble if a customer ever takes you to court.

Bought a Mac off Craigslist a year and a half ago to do development for iPhone; it was a beat up MacBook Pro 15" from 2006 with slightly messed up screen (backlighting was uneven). However, it was a good deal compared to a new Mac ($600).

It turned out I ended up using the Mac much more than my Windows machine. Why? Because it would come back from sleep in < 15 seconds, whereas my Lenovo would sometimes take 5 min to come back from sleep. Also, Windows would sometimes reboot my machine in the middle of coding a project. It had apparently "warned me" with some difficult to see message, and then just started shutting down my machine with no significant prompt. It would then sometimes hang in the update process, forcing a hard reboot and then another 10 min wait for startup. This was Win 7, mind you.

I took a nice paying dev project back in October, with the intention of using it to buy myself a new machine. I ended up buying a new MacBook Pro 15" with the anti-gloss screen and on the higher end of the hardware specs. Am in love with the computer. One of my housemates asked if he could borrow my Windows machine for an Excel class this weekend; I handed it over without hesitation. Haven't turned it on in months.

I originally thought I would have to install Parallels or boot camp when I first got my new Mac, not wanting to have to parallel path with the a separate Windows machine. In truth, I haven't ever installed any of these options. With Mac Office 2011, 99% of what I need to do is available. In the rare case when it's not, I may boot up the Windows machine for a one-off look at an Excel spreadsheet or something like that.

If I were MSFT, I would be worried. Around campus, the Apple logos outnumber the Macs in a big way these days. Two years ago, this was not the case. I'm a business school student, and Windows has always had significant crossover on campus from the corporate world. Our official school laptop is the Lenovo I don't use anymore.

Windows was always kind of a pain, but the variety of software available for it gave it tremendous leverage. I was a Mac addict as a kid, all the way up to around Windows 95, when it just became impossible to continue supporting the platform; the ecosystem had wilted at that point to a shadow of its former self. I have basically been on Windows since then, until the recent switch back to Mac.

Windows continues to ride the legacy train all the way to the graveyard. You can't do as bad of a job as MSFT has done in terms of maintaining a core platform and expect to maintain market share. Everyone from the CEO down should have been fired for Vista. Win 7 is basically the maintenance release that Vista should have been. In the meantime, the Mac has exceeded it by leaps and bounds.

Ummm.... what's the date again people? This looks like way too much work to just "give it away". I was expecting an empty homepage with a single search box. Nice prank though. Me likey.

Dude...shouldn't it submit to TechCrunch and HN for you, as part of the setup?

All you should have to do is $myApp = basecamp_style_app();

Then it emails your friends and Michael Arrington, and posts to all the blogs. Anything else is too much work.

I think that these two programs offer starkly different things. A focus on the money alone is very short sighted.

ycombinator has established itself as the "Harvard" of tech startup incubators. MassChallenge is... well... MassChallenge.

As an analogy, when I was deciding between business schools, I had the opportunity to take a scholarship to a lesser MBA program. Or I could pay full price and go to a much higher ranked program. The difference was minimum $50-60k of my own money.

I chose to go to the higher ranked program, because of the network that I would be able to build and the long term reputation that came with attending that program. Part of me wishes this wasn't the case; that one's success in life is purely based on their talents and how far they are able to propel themselves on their own steam, regardless of their affiliation with universities or other organizations. Unfortunately, that's not the real world. People care about which organizations you are affiliated with, regardless of whether the education at one is truly better than another. In truth, if you're motivated, you can probably get an equally good education at a community college as you can at an Ivy League school. However, the network you build at these different institutions is vastly different, and I would argue can't be replicated between the two.

ycombinator has a track record of producing successful tech startups. This leads to high demand, and the ability to set its own terms. Likening that to "molestation" is not only insulting to the program, but also to all the people who applied to the program (like me). It implies that we don't know what we're doing, and that we are suckers for giving away equity to Y Combinator. I would counter that, contrary to this assertion, I am fully aware of the equity stake that is taken, and believe that it is worth having the Y Combinator organization on my side, as well as the cache with future investors that comes from having participated in the program. I will admit that this decision was not taken lightly, however, and I talked with many founders and funders in the startup world before deciding to apply.

This is still an emerging area of law. I'm not familiar with Feist v. Rural, but what you are discussing is very similar to Ticketmaster vs. Tickets.com, in the case of the latter scraping the former's site for data.

There appears to have been some previous discussion on HN about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411555

The unfortunate part of all of this is that the court system in general does not have its act together with regards to Internet Law. This is largely a function of Congress completely failing to pass any laws related to Internet/software property rights, especially in the area of patents. Which is why the entire patent system is a disaster now with regards to software IP. There are similar problems in the area of data scraping and intellectual property copying online. Basically for every case you can find where the court ruled one way, you can generally find a counter example where a different court ruled in a contradictory manner.

Move to a host that will allow you to upgrade resources on demand. Shared hosting is a bad place to be if you think you're going to get slammed with traffic.

Either move to a VPS Provider who can scale you up to a dedicated server if necessary (i.e. VPSLink), or go with AWS (Amazon), which basically has unlimited scale, but may also have unlimited cost (at some point, it may be better for your dedicated server to go down than to spend $60,000 in a month on server resources). Of course, this is both a personal and business choice, and really dependent on how much promise you think the site has and whether you can use your traffic stats to raise some money and grow the business.

"At the end of the day, it's really what the developer is most comfortable with."

Totally agree. I would maybe extend to say its what the team of developers is most comfortable collaborating around (assuming you are more than 1 person).

Basically, it should be about building a good product. The end user generally couldn't care less what programming language your project was built in. If you can deliver the best experience in the fastest amount of time with programming language X, then that's the one you should use.

Yes...it sucks so much, that Facebook used it to scale a network worth $50 billion dollars today.

From a coding perspective, it is a very "loose" language (not that kind of loose). This has advantages and disadvantages, depending on what you are doing.

It is very easy to learn, and therefore there is a large degree of stratification with PHP devs. Professional coders turn their nose up at PHP, because it is kind of like telling Tiger Woods that you play golf. Maybe you do...but you don't play his game of golf. It's more impressive to say you code in a language that is difficult to do well, and that will punish you badly if you don't code in it well. PHP is pretty forgiving, even for pretty crappy code (I've seen some pretty awful stuff).

The truth is that PHP is a great web language. Rails and other frameworks provide tighter integration with the db and view layers, but this isn't necessarily a good thing. PHP allows for that level of integration if you want it (as mentioned, there are many PHP based frameworks). It also happens to have a large, open source code base that is reviewed by many, many eyes, so bugs get fixed quickly and the language evolves quickly. The help manual is superb, and it performs well across hardware platforms.

You will hear many baseball fans saying the other team's players suck. Most of the time it isn't true.... it's just a pride thing.

See a mental health professional. I think lots of people see this as some sign of weakness or personality flaw; that you're "crazy" if you see a psychologist or psychiatrist. That's a bunch of bull#*$(. They are there to help you put things in perspective, in ways that might be difficult to discuss with your family or friends.

With that being said, not all mental health professionals are created equally. Put together a list of those in your area. Have a session with a few of them before deciding on one. This sounds like at the very least depression, and maybe there are other things in play as well. None of these things are a big deal if dealt with properly. If not, they can last for years and put you in a bad place. Don't let it get to that stage. Make the decision to fix it now and get some help. Feel free to contact me personally if you would like to discuss in more detail.

Yeah...pretty sad. But at the same time, if the site isn't down by now, there is probably server side checking in place as well.

This works ok: http://open.dapper.net/developers/webservices/search.php

If you're talking straight rss feeds, its probably just easier to write it in code. But Yahoo Pipes is more a GUI tool than a coding solution, so I'm making the assumption you don't want to code this yourself. In that case, check out Dapper or Kapow! Technologies. There are others, but those are probably the best.

One of the first projects I ever built for myself was a wiki website for the Motorola RAZR v3m cellphone. This particular version of the phone was sold by Verizon, and had been locked down at the firmware level to prevent the addition of third party applications that could run on other, unlocked version of the RAZR.

There were many customers who were unhappy about these restrictions, and lots of talk on various forums about how much it sucked that Verizon locked down the phone. There were also other forums where people shared their knowledge on how to unlock the phone using various software applications and a < $10 cable you could buy online.

However, most of the talk about this subject was spread across a variety of forums, and not well organized. There were golden nuggets of info spread amongst posts about how various techniques didn't work or how the user couldn't figure out how to complete the process. The bottom line was that it would typically take a new user hours just to compile the information they needed to successfully unlock their phones.

So I decided to build a wiki website to aggregate all this data. I put up an instance of my favorite wiki variety, and added a couple placeholder pages. I then added one page that described all the steps in detail to unlock the phone, from my own experience. This wiki page could then be changed to incorporate other people's experiences and tips.

I went to all of the forums where I had learned this info in the first place, and pasted links to my wiki, saying that we should collaborate and create an easy to follow set of instructions all in one place. The community thought this was a good idea, and effectively built the site for me.

Within 3 months, the site had gone from being nothing, to having 4000+ registered users and sometimes getting 50k+ hits per day. I ended up having to move the site from Bluehost to a VPS because my BH account kept getting turned off due to excessive traffic and CPU load.

The reason I tell this story is that I think it's really valuable to target a community that has a specific pain point, and then go where that community hangs out on the Internet. While social networks will work, it may be even better to go to a place where you can dialog a bit more with users (i.e. a niche forum), and tell them why your solution is better than what they are using now. Of course, it actually has to be better than what they are using now. But if it is, you should be rewarded with adoption. This method also happens to be free in most cases.

The technology never kills the business; it's ALWAYS the people. However, I think this points out the extreme importance of getting good people who make good technology choices.

MSFT products are not inherently evil; they have some advantages for some types of projects. But a proprietary closed source stack always puts you at a disadvantage.

Worst case scenario with open source, you go patch what's holding you back in the open source. With bugs in MSFT products, you are at the mercy of MSFT to prioritize your issue. If you are a big enough fish, then they will pay attention. Otherwise, good luck.

I don't understand why anyone would willingly tie themselves to the Microsoft web dev stack as a startup. Even if you don't have to pay upfront, you will pay dearly in the future when you go to scale. At one startup I worked for we were hamstrung by not being able to afford the upgrade to Enterprise SQL Server, for example. So our data replication was tedious, time consuming and prone to failure.