jw2013

> My question is, does he have a point?

No. He is making the wrong assumption here "that he wouldn't hire me if I wasn't already a founder and not what the company needs". First you ARE a founder- I genuinely do not believe you can't learn the knowledge you needed given how motivated you are. And you are learning. Second, he already admit you are what the company needs (at least during this 3-6 months), so why is he BS you to leave? He's mindset is so wrong for the startup world, just assuming things will take-off and by-then you are not needed anymore. You are desperately needed now; that makes you valuable. Your company probably can't make it to the next milestone in 3-6 months without you, at least it will take longer to hit milestones longer without you. You are valuable, and you feel for the company, just tell him that.

> Is this something that is common?

Yes, but not quite often at this early stage of a startup. I smell some politics of him. Do you two get along well besides tech issues in the company? Since he knows you are still desperately needed now, and he is still making BS about advising you to leave, I can only conclude he probably does not like you (not just in tech realms), and he clearly does not care about the success of the company as much as I do (the company still needs you to be successful at least at this stage of growth).

> Has he overstepped the boundaries?

First thing first, just learn things you need to know fast. You will know when you are making great contributions to the company, and you want that. Don't let your CTO stops you from that. At least when you are working, don't think about the issue with him and grow fast as a coder. I suggest a conversation with him off the work time. If I were you, I would like to know if he had issues with me beyond his doubt in my tech ability.

> It is in my interest however to remain in the company because my equity is vested, the sooner I leave the less I will get in return, apart from my time, and opportunity cost I invested all my personal wealth.

Did you have cliff in your equity vesting? If so have you past the cliff period? I really don't recommend you to leave before all your cliff equity are vested, otherwise you will get next to nothing. Manage to stay with your company at least in the cliff period. Your company wouldn't make this far without you, your company owes you that, and you know through what it should pay you off? Equity. So just manage to get the credit where credit is due.

---

May the best luck be with you.

They want an IPO. Following is from techcrunch Sep. 2012:

Zendesk founder and CEO Mikkel Svane sat down with us to talk about the funding, explaining that the new round will be primarily used for international expansion and product innovation. The company is also preparing for an IPO in the future, but doesn’t yet have a timeline for the offering. “An IPO is the goal,” says Svane. And monthly recurring revenue has grown five-fold since 2010 for the company. While Zendesk’s bread and butter has been catering to small to medium sized businesses, of late, the company has been pulled into a number of large enterprise deals, Svane says.

This is a great article. Not to take anything away from the OP (just upvoted the post actually), but just out of curiosity I wonder why it is posted on HN. Is there certain range of topic the HN expect?

Since someone brought it up, here are the radius of each planet rounded to nearest hundredth, with the first row provided by NASA, and second row used in the OP's visualization. Just for those interested. (Really appreciate Crito's formatting suggestion below.)

  MERCURY VENUS EARTH MOON MARS JUPITER SATURN URANUS NEPTUNE PLUTO
  0.38    0.95  1     0.27 0.53 11.21   09.45  4.01   3.88    0.19
  0.33    1.33  1     0.33 0.67 13.33   11.33  4.67   4.67    0.33

Many people on hacker news have explicitly asked for this: a platform for listing your open-source project that needs contributors. I tried here:

https://github.com/jw2013/gittribute

But nobody cared. Perhaps I was doing it wrong or I have not do many/any promotion. Anybody wants to take this idea and solve it for us I will really appreciate it.

The message I got when I proceed is:

------- The website at www.wired.com contains elements from sites which appear to host malware – software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer.

Below is a list of all the unsafe elements for the page. Click on the Diagnostic link for more information on the thread for a specific element.

Malware http://www.wired.com/playbook/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/soc... Safe Browsing diagnostic page

Malware http://www.wired.com/playbook/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bik... Safe Browsing diagnostic page -------

I wonder what's wrong with these two pictures?

It works for me, just go here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/s2014form

That is a good request. What will make the old url does not need any forwarding is add a new get parameter, such as:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7536719&title=Ask_HN_Mo...

It's better late than never. It's just easier to say 'I quit' because it's likely none of Node.js developers will switch to using Visual Studio rather than give it a try. Though I probably will never use Visual Studio for writing my Node.js project, kudos for MS not being the old MS.

So what's next for MS? I think they are getting the direction right for opening up for external MS product users, and now it's time to recruit top talent again. There are just too many great hackers think MS is old (just look at some of replies in this story), which to large degree is true, and it will take time to fix that, but it can be possible done with: 1) create openness [culture, keep taking more open-source project like open-day-light, keep opening tech inside MS to others, etc.]; 2) buy early-stage companies through acqui-hire. It will be an uphill-battle and I am not an expert on this, and I am very interested in what other people here on HN thinks.

A system with comments attached with no poster 'real' identity pretty much warrants the dilemma yelp is facing now. What about a (food critics, etc.) system where all the comments come from your facebook friends? Would that significantly reduce the inaccurate info the user will see? People can still register fake accounts to make unfair comments but the stores do not need to worry because it is likely their potential customer will not make friends with these 'fake people/account'. And the one makes comment will be much more accurate because all of their friends can see his/her comment, so his/her comments have many social implications so most people will not purposely write some unfair comment.

'

The site's security certificate is not trusted!

You attempted to reach cointipping.com, but the server presented a certificate issued by an entity that is not trusted by your computer's operating system. This may mean that the server has generated its own security credentials, which Chrome cannot rely on for identity information, or an attacker may be trying to intercept your communications.

'

Could you please fix this? Or a Chrome bug? I got this When I try to visit cointipping.com

It's a long article, so let me excerpt a few bullet points for those don't have enough time to read the whole article:

1) Don't just hire local talent, hire nationally, even globally. There are lots of successfully companies embracing working remotely.

2) Evaluate the value of a person's contribution based on how much they have done rather than how much time they showed up (what's done >> what to do). Some effective way to measure so is to track Github commits to see how many bugs they fix, etc.

3) When hiring, hire by audit. Pay the interviewees some hourly rate to finish a mini-project that is a part of your company's real work (e.g. add a feature), and let their performance in the mini-test be a large factor in deciding hire/no-hire decision. Also, try to hire from your tech community.

4) Effective communications for remote work: real-time chat, video chat, online bulletin board, weekly team status report.

5) Some big drawbacks of remote work are: brainstorming is hard + mentorship is hard. Luckily, some of the companies don't need brainstorming much. And for mentorship, don't hire people that need extensive mentoring.

Some people just don't understand that it's harder to maintain the code than to write new ones. They are probably not appreciating your refactorizations because they have not got to a point that it is almost impossible or super hard to write new code because the codebases are a large mess (they probably haven't got to this point because of your great refactorizations). But one day when they reach that point, I think they are probably going to miss and appreciate your past work.

It's interesting that MSFT has already reduced Azure's price early this January to counter the price reductions by AWS back in January. And also in April 2013, MSFT responded AWS's price drop with 21%-33% Azure price reduction.

Are we in the era of cloud price-bidding war? And the ultimate beneficiary are us the users.

"Side effects of the Pokémon Challenge may include extreme excitement and a sense of accomplishment. Do not operate the Pokémon Challenge in Google Maps while driving or operating heavy machinery. Our hiring committee must first battle to determine who can best judge the Pokémon Master. The battle date has yet to be set, so the role of Pokémon Master is not yet available."

Aha, well played, Google.

But the 1/(1-n) equation is still true no matter how many alternatives you have. The only change is if you have an alternative, say 10% for 1M from some VC, then you would ask yourself after I got 1M and the help VC, would the investment from YC still help my startup grow 6.4%?

I think you are missing my assumption in my OP "in the early stage of a startup". In fact at that stage of startup, even if you have a better deal than YC, you might still want to do YC (so you would take both two deals) because even after your take the better deal, YC can still gives your startup >6.4% growth.

What you suggested is a terrible thought. Because in the early stage of a startup, some (small amount of money + great alumni network + access to a pool of notable investor) will propels the growth so much more than the equity you gave up.

"In the general case, if n is the fraction of the company you're giving up, the deal is a good one if it makes the company worth more than 1/(1 - n).

For example, suppose Y Combinator offers to fund you in return for 6% of your company. In this case, n is .06 and 1/(1 - n) is 1.064. So you should take the deal if you believe we can improve your average outcome by more than 6.4%. If we improve your outcome by 10%, you're net ahead, because the remaining .94 you hold is worth .94 x 1.1 = 1.034."

Source: http://paulgraham.com/equity.html

slightly off-topic here, floating point operation is even much much more harder inside kernel, mainly because of trapping mechinism. In fact most OS either do not support floating point operation inside kernel or just turn that option off by default. But the good thing is you do not really need floating point operations inside kernel, but when you do and needs to modify your kenrel code to achieve that, it is extremely implementationally intensive and hard to made one (and the runtime cost is expensive also).

Statistical analysis approach can be a good educated guess at most. But if we keep observing human brain to get input/ouput dataset, we can develop a field that much like Physics, where the theory comes from experiments and even those do not must need future experimental proof to be considered valid. Yes, not all these theory based on expriments is true (that is why I say it is a good educated guess) because maybe our observed set is just a subset of all test cases we need. But using this approach like Physics we can keep pushing the limit of (AI) theory and expriements forward.

As I mentioned another half (theory first, then experimental validation) of this approach is another Einstein came along and made amazing thoeries once and for all. Then the expriments proves it is true to our best knowledge up to date. The the loop starts again.

I think the first cases may be the most prevalent because insights are not very easy to come by without seeing experimental result first. If we can make a organized way to keep working on the first half, the second half might come by some time. Just some random thoughts, primarily made to inspire some followup conversations amongst us.

monthly_wage_to_break_even_by_article = $37.62 * work_hours_per_day * weekdays_per_week * weeks_per_month = $37.62 * 9 * 5 * (52 / 12) = $7335.9. Let assume the tax is 35% of wage. monthly_rent_by_article = $7335.9 * (1 - 35%) = $4768.335

Wow... that is prohibiting. So you have to earn $7335.9 * 12 / 2 = $88030.8 / 2 = $44015.4 a year to break even if you are sharing a 2br apartment... Are rent price in some less urban area of SF much cheaper (say 20 minutes drive from Pacific Heights)?

Could a solution to rising rent price be some brave enough founders migrating tech startups to a new growing area, say rtp? Just like what Eventbrite did when hot startups were all in valley but Eventbrtie chose SF at then.

But x is not necessarily smaller than n though. For example:

Duplicate array: [1,2,2,3,4]. If you do mod 2 sum, then you have 1+0+0+1+0 = 2 mod 0 = 0. But another possible duplicate set can be: [1,2,3,4,4].

10 + x = 0 mod 2 (see 4%2 = 0 and 2%2 = 0? So x can be either 2 or 4.) If you let modulus number N be larger than n (e.g. n = 5 in my example, just let N = 6. Then 10 + x = 0 mod 6 will yield only one possible solution that is 2) then I think your solution will definitely work.

But I think the big problem is: you said x = (b - a) % n. That is true, but how do we get "a" (the sum of all unique numbers from 1 to n) without overflowing? The reason we do modulus summation is for avoiding overflow, granted that can get "b" easily, yet now we have to find "a" still, I find we are still stuck. Any suggestion?

Even if assuming everything will work out and my previous question can be responded, still the modulus function is WAY MORE expensive to compute than xor operation.

> One can do addition mod n. As long as 2n doesn't overflow, you are good.

I wonder if the result will still be correct. It's possible to have multiple answers. e.g. (7 + 10) % 6 = 5. But both 5, 11, 17 % 5 == 5. Can you find which one is the actual sum though?

---btw, the xor solution--- (defn find-dup [dup_set test_set] (reduce #(. clojure.lang.Numbers xor %1 %2) (into dup_set test_set)))

What if the summing overflow? Why not just XOR all the numbers in the set with 1...n (assuming the question is there is only one duplicate in integers in range [1,n]).

So now let me be the bad guy in good faith:

1. you may want to consider edit your post url to link to you site. some people will not even bother looking at your site if they need to type your site name into their browser.

2. your site looks terrible on my mobile phone (samsung galaxy s4). I can't even see any content except a video, background and buttons. I tried to reload 10 times and all I got extra were some non-text glyphs. if this bug is reproducible, I suggest you fix your mobile site asap. you probably do not want to push your potential user away by having a not working mobile site.

Sorry if it sounds a bit harsh, I do not intend to be. Just want to provide some, hopefully helpful ,feedback.

then the question is whether there are really no others want the product as bad as you do, or just simply you have not found a superfan yet. I don't know which one is your situation, but I found it work to go to your niche group (say you are developing product for lisp, then you probably. want to go to lisp meetup). For my experience one or two superfan is enough to at least push your product to moderate userbase. Idk if it helps.

Why not start with making something you want? If you don't know what other people want, you know exactly what pains you and just fix that. Why not even stop thinking about starting a startup when you start solving your own problem? If your product solves your own problem, find your niches to see if it bugs them also.

Someone put it nicely - facebook is Mark's side project 6, probably? Of course not all startups start that way, if you don't know what others want, that is a good way to start and at worst it is a good way to sharpen your programming/non-programming skills.

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You may publish and present papers or articles on the results of your research, and while distribution of all or substantial portions of the software is not permitted, you may include in any such publication or presentation an excerpt of up to fifty (50) lines of code for illustration purposes.

Deena Varshavskaya (Wanelo) at Startup Grind 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgtHV8DSrgI

Glimpse Conference SF 2013: Fireside Chat - Wanelo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1g4s4HmLIU

May be you left out the most important thing, that is talking to users to make sure you are making things people want. Jessica Livingston in startup school 2012:

"We tell people that during YC there are really only three things you should focus on: building things, talking to users, and exercising."

I had one on for several days and then never wore it. Charging it is annoying and just using it for a phone notification pusher does not do much for me. Maybe it is the problem on me to expect 'the future is here' on a watch that is nicely executed but nowhere near future is near type. I hope there can be some great apps as they released ios/android appstore. I might change my mind and put it on again if there are some great apps along the way.

But I very much admire Pepple's hard working in its involvement with tech related events. Saw them talking and trying to let hackers write apps for them in many hackathons, and that is great. And I know they were/are talking to universities to offer discount, and that is great, too. To me that is a great example of a YC company not satisfying with its current success and keep pushing forward with determination. Way to go, pebble.