Amateur Radio - <AUTHOR> http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/2019/08/07/amateur-radio/ <comment><USER2> Amateur radio changed my life. In high school, I thought I was a nobody, maybe I wanted to be a truck driver, or a psychologist...who knows. Who cares? I was pretty depressed.

I'm 28 years old and I fucking love amateur radio.

I always had a curiosity about radio, being so interested in two-way radio that my parents had me tested for ASD. My mom had a police scanner and it had a button titled "HAM" [sic]. I found a repeater and no more than a few weeks later I was absolutely enthralled and was licensed in 2007.

I got a radio, an antenna, installed it, and I was absolutely hooked. It did not matter that the average age of a ham was around 50 or 60, and I was only 15. It was just so much fun and there was so much to do an learn using it. I studied for my General and got it a few months after my first Tech license. A few months after that, I got Extra. All the while, I ran a YouTube channel documenting my experiences.

I chose to go to Missouri S&T (formerly University of Missouri - Rolla) because they had a ham radio club (W0EEE). I declined a full ride to Truman State in Chem or CompSci, and went to S&T as undecided engineering. I naturally nestled into EE realizing a lot of the basic circuits knowledge was already covered under the Extra exam. Myself and one other ham became de-facto President and VP of the ham radio club, which we re-grew from near death.

I ended up working at an Electromagnetic Compatibility lab for a while, before having a co-op at the Very Large Array radio observatory in NM where I ran cabling, designed antennas, and worked on mitigation of RF interference. My manager specifically sought me out because I was a ham.

Acheving full time employment was also a no brainer. I applied to Rockwell Collins, Raytheon, Garmin, Boeing, Honeywell, Black & Veatch, maybe a few more, and had offers from everyone but Garmin (apparently proving my way around a smith chart dedicated to quiz grad students in the off-site interview, but choking at an unannounced op-amp circuit analysis by hand while two managers watched on-site wasn't good enough for them!). And now I design antennas for a living! All because of ham radio.

Ham radio never ceases to entertain me. There's science, there's experimentation, there's socialization, and there's public service. I'm a advocate for youth in ham radio, and I'm starting to get into things like ARRL reformation and other politics, since - like the author says - ham radio has a bad image. Through programs like YARC[0] and YOTA[1][2] I'm trying to help change that.

[0] [https://yarc.world/](https://yarc.world/) [1] [https://yotaregion2.org/](https://yotaregion2.org/) [2] [http://ham- yota.com/](http://ham-yota.com/)

<comment><USER3> I know that every hobby can become outrageously expensive if you really want to, but what would it cost someone to get started with amateur radio?

<comment><USER4> I started with a $25 RTL-SDR v3 kit that includes two antennas (for VHF and UHF, approximately). That allowed me to listen in on 2m and 70cm band repeaters, and familiarize myself with the language, etiquette, modes, etc. I recommend that to anyone that is interested in amateur radio, and you can still make good use of that stick once you get a transceiver, by using it as a spectrum scope / waterfall. From there, a $40 Baofeng will allow you to get used to the feel and operation of the radio, just don't transmit until you get your Technician license. You can sometimes get the Technician study book for free from ARRL by signing up for their welcome packet, or check it out from your library. The exam costs $15 or less, and you can cram study for it at hamstudy.org. (The few-dollar HamStudy mobile app is also worth the cost.)

That gets you a SDR with spectrum scope and waterfall, a portable HT UHF/VHF transceiver, and your Technician license, for ~$80. From there, you can look into getting your General license to transmit on HF, and a cheap HF radio and antenna, for less than $500 total. A higher quality HT like an Icom or Yaesu would be money well spent for VHF/UHF, as the Baofeng is notoriously hard to program and allows you to transmit outside the legal band limits.

(Note: the RTL-SDR works best for VHF and UHF. For an HF SDR, you'll want to check out something like the Airspy HF+ Discovery and perhaps a cheap $30 magnetic loop antenna from eBay, which is what I use.)

Edit: My apologies for the acronyms. SDR is software defined radio, allowing you to receive radio signals on your computer. HT is "handy-talkie" or handheld transceiver. HF/VHF/UHF are defined in the parent post.

<comment><USER5> A couple of notes to add:

* [https://hamstudy.org/](https://hamstudy.org/) is the go-to place to study for your license, and it's free. Use it, love it, thank the devs after you get your license.

* Don't listen to the naysayers (which aren't as loud these days), a Baofeng radio is a perfectly acceptable first radio, and it's impossible to beat the price.

* If your interests tend towards the tinkering with electronics side, you can pick up inexpensive/generic RTL-SDR dongles cheaply (less than $10) and modify them to receive HF. Or use them as-is.

* For zero dollars, you can use someone else's web-connected SDR, such as [https://websdr.org/](https://websdr.org/)

* Look around at the various digital modes (there are many, with FT8 and WSPR being the most popular at the moment), especially if you're into computers. Many allow a structured way to get familiar with things without worrying about messing up on the etiquette front.

* For an HF rig, the uBitx ([https://ubitx.net/](https://ubitx.net/) & [https://www.hfsignals.com/](https://www.hfsignals.com/)) is hard to beat, and they just introduced a new version (v6). $199 with a case ($150 without) will get you a full-band, all mode, dual VFO 10 watt radio. That's unbelievable value for an HF rig. Add an amp later on for more power.

* For HF especially _focus on making /buying good antennas_ before you go spend a bunch of money on radios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We desperately need new blood. If you like outdoor activities in areas where cell phone coverage is poor (camping, hiking, skiing, dense urban gatherings) or enjoy the idea of having unique access to spectrum for learning and experimentation, you need to look into amateur radio.

Some choice projects:

[https://www.winlink.org/](https://www.winlink.org/) Long range email over HF bands

[https://aprs.fi/](https://aprs.fi/) APRS real time position tracking map

[https://aprsdroid.org/](https://aprsdroid.org/) APRS text messaging + tracking app

[http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map](http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map) WSPR HF propagation map

[https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/wsjtx.html](https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/wsjtx.html) Digital high performance HF mode application

I'm an extra working on developing classes for introducing modern radio to the next generation of hams. Feel free to ask about anything.

<comment><USER7> I can listen to the spectrum just fine without a license. Why would I want to talk on it?

More to the point, why would I want to have to get the government's permission in order to talk on it?

Also:

> If you like outdoor activities in areas where cell phone coverage is poor > (camping, hiking, skiing, dense urban gatherings)

If you mention this as a possible use, mention that it is illegal to encrypt amateur radio communications, so you must broadcast your family's information and plans for the world to hear. That's quite the security risk.

<comment><USER8> If you used less regulated CB in the old days and heard what a garbage dump it could turn into, you might appreciate more regulated frequencies. Or maybe not, I don't know.

As far as your encryption concerns go, you have to go to extra effort for any of your ham transmissions to be heard by the whole world. Generally it's just a mile or two radius, line of site, only to those who are listening during the short interval while you are transmitting. Far, far different from posting something on the internet.

<comment><USER9> Funny you should compare it to the Internet. I remember the days when you could post something online and not worry about it because 1) only a very tiny fraction of the world was online 2) even if you were online, good luck finding it unless someone told you where it was.

My main point being that amateur radio only has security through obscurity as it only takes one device locally listening/relaying your signal to invalidate the distance assumption in the same way people posting things online thought 'nobody's ever going to care about this post' all those years ago. A key difference being that you have no option to encrypt and the other party doesn't need to MITM you to get any potentially interesting information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why isn't Amateur Radio a key part of STEM? What do ALL of us have in our pocket that operates on radio (you might even be reading this comment on one)? How many modern homes _don 't_ have WiFi? What's the magic that allows smart- meters and wireless doorbells to work? Heck, what's the signaling mechanism on a _WIRED_ communication? RF and radio is key to so much of modern life that unless your STEM program is geared toward training people to do basic research you're using RF in some capacity along the way.

And not only teach RF but then apply across other things like robotics and flying. One of the major public service aspects of Amateur Radio is emergency communication. Rather than humans trying to word-paint what's happening in a storm why not have a camera-equipped drone zoom out to a vantage point and shoot back HD imagery via 1.2GHz? How about weather stations communicating primarily via APRS instead of via WiFi directly?

So many possibilities... though without low-cost VHF/UHF SDR radios much of this will remain a dream.

<comment><USER3> A lack of qualified instructors would be one reason.

<comment><USER10> A lack of _MOTIVATED_ instructors is more accurate. There are more than enough retired HAMs who would love to teach interested students -- they just don't care for digital modes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see something missing in this thread. I suspect this is the audience which is highly technical and work focused.

This is a hobby. Bar the license constraints, the scope is amazing. And you don't have to achieve anything major. You don't have to change the world. You don't have to create a service or act as a service for some cause. Sometimes it's just about playing, a thing many of us have forgotten since childhood.

I myself like to climb up hills with homebrew radios and send and recieve morse code. There is no point in doing this at all. Not even one. I can't think of any at least. Some people pretend it's going to save them if the world ends so it gives them purpose. But really it's nice to have no pressure, no deadline and no dependency on it at all and just tinker with things!

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's what ham radio really needs: transceivers that can be controlled by an easy to use Android or iPhone app. The current user experience is so far behind.

Oh, we also need handheld transceivers that can be charged with a standard mobile phone charger.

The Xaomi Mijia Walkie-Talkie has all of this, but in the U.S. you have have to side load a hacked Android app to get it. Not quite there

<comment><USER12> This would be great and if there was enough demand it would surely happen. As it is, the main reason amateur radio hand-helds are so inexpensive is that manufacturers can make one batch of boards/radios for commercial, nautical, and amateur use and target the different audiences by putting different firmware and cases on the radios (or in the case of Baofeng and the cheap Chinese radios, just one radio for any use you want -- figure it out of use Chirp to make it do what you want).

Too bad 1.25m and 33cm radios are in so much lower demand; while it's not hard to find acceptable quality 1.25m radios for inexpensive prices I haven't seen the Chinese radios show up with transceivers covering 902 - 932 MHz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I could definitely be interested in amateur radio, the long ranges are very appealing. But I'm just not that interested in voice/audio. Text/data streams are cool though, I can do things with those even at 9800 baud.

For me, the ideal platform would have the following characteristics

* python programmable

* Easy to hook them together, and to hook them up to a real computer

* Consistent modem spec, with adjustable parity-checking levels

* Cryptographically signed streams, I should be able to verify the callsign/origin of anyone on the network

* Streams should describe how to decode the data on them, maybe something like a mimetype injected into the flow every N seconds?

* Basic data types for voice and image

Notice at no point did I include "packet switching". I think one of the issues with current digital amateur radio projects is that they look like they're trying to reinvent the internet, but worse.

</comment><comment><USER14> I highly recommend this site if you want to explore the spectrum: [http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/](http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/)

<comment><USER15> And a lot more receivers are available, all over the world: [http://websdr.org/](http://websdr.org/)

Also interesting: Live reports of radio amateur transmissions via [https://www.pskreporter.info/](https://www.pskreporter.info/) and [http://www.reversebeacon.net/](http://www.reversebeacon.net/)

Amateur Radio is a great hobby that will give you unlimited possibilities to play and learn. From tube transmitters in Morse code (which is still a thing, and it's fun) to sophisticated weak-signal modes like FT8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I came up as a ham in the sixties there were gentlemen on 80 meter AM calling us teenagers lids, kids and space cadets. That animus has always existed in the hobby towards newcomers.

I think connecting with maker spaces is a real opportunity. I've been a member of the Lansing club since the sixties, although I rarely attend meetings anymore. Friends with the guys who started the local makerspace and they were genuinely interested in ham radio. I tried several times to setup a tour of the makerspace but the local club is run by a clique who made it clear they had zero interest in it. I still think it was a missed opportunity.

I was president my junior year of the Michigan State club and it was strong and vibrant. A few years back it apparently had declined to only a handful of members. The local faculty advisor started reaching out to freshmen in the fall and started classes to help those get licensed.

The program has been a huge success and now the club in reinvigorated. It only takes one or two people in a community to help out because the interest among young people is there as it has always been. Elmers are what ham radio calls people like that faculty advisor. What the hobby needs is more Elmers like him.

</comment><comment><USER17> Funny: "You can home-build a device that transmits a watt or two of power (the same amount as a fairly dim lamp) into the sky, and can be received thousands of miles away (imagine trying to do that with a torch, illuminating clouds so that their reflections in the ocean illuminate other clouds, so somebody with a telescope in a distant country sees it and picks up your message!)..."

<comment><USER18> What's funny about that? I think it's awesome.

<comment><USER19> Heh, what's even more amazing is that it's not just one bounce off the atmosphere, but multiple bounces.

With js8call you can do similar with other radios sprinkled around the planet, without prior coordination.

What's even more wild is that under certain conditions you get a weird distortion... from the signal taking the short path between two points _AND_ the signal taking the long patch between two points.

Freaky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> quite enjoyable, and agreed, a lot of stuff is about WHAT amazing stuff you can do, but very little is advertised HOW to do... kinda sad AM radio is basically dead, since it can be fun making a simple AM receiver at home, it's even in a "fun experiments" kids book I have, I think it's only like, about 5 components or such... on the other hand, with teens and above you can teach soldering with radio kits (obviously not the first thing, but possibly about 3rd or 4th kit) , some are nice having like, one surface-mount chip you have to figure out too, which would be a nice next-level one "now you know the basics, wanna go beyond that?" then there's the massive amount of cool stuff SDR (software defined radio) enables which isn't even mentioned to exist in the article...

</comment><comment><USER21> I love the mystery in radio, even thumbing through AM stations on a long road- trip is enjoyable, but as a complete non-technical person, I've always been overwhelmed by amateur radio.

Maybe I will muster up some courage and dive into this.

<comment><USER22> Really anyone can get their license with about two weeks of online studying. Since the requirement for Morse code was dropped, it's not difficult at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The rich history of this topic: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Amateur%20Radio&sort=byDate&da...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Amateur%20Radio&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER24> What a nice blog! I love reading about geeky families.

</comment><comment><USER25> The presence of this story on the front page, I think, underscores how different HN is from the other technical venues I frequent. It's a straightforward overview of RF and how it's used and what that means to amateur licensees. At any of my other haunts, this would never get an upvote.

Imagine a story called "The Command Line", a straightforward take on the core concepts thereof. I think everyone here is pretty familiar with that topic, and would regard such a story as pretty much the opposite of news or even interesting.

To my eye, this story is just as out-of-place because it's a topic I just assume everyone here is already quite familiar with it. Am I mistaken? Or is HN just that different a crowd?

<comment><USER26> Can you share links to these other technical venues?

Not being snarky - I want to check them out!

<comment><USER25> Mostly I was thinking of Reddit and Slashdot. On Reddit, even outside /r/hamradio and /r/amateurradio (why are there two? don't ask me!), I enjoy /r/electronics and /r/askelectronics, /r/rfelectronics, /r/rtlsdr, /r/carhacking, /r/arduino, /r/embedded, /r/engineering, /r/askengineers, /r/homelab, /r/datahoarder, /r/vintagecomputing, /r/askscience, /r/asksciencediscussion, and a few more.

I still enjoy Slashdot because, like HN, it's a single feed and gets me stuff I might not find in my regular subreddits.

I also read Arstechnica and The Register on a fairly regular basis, but not daily.

But honestly, my main firehose of news and ideas is IRC. I'm on 5 networks and about 25 channels, and I try to read all the scrollback in about half of those. There's lots of good stuff on Freenode and OFTC in particular, but I feel like this is one I should leave as an exercise to the reader. ;)

<comment><USER27> I think HN used to regularly traffic in more technical stories and then it slowly became just another Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> #1 problem: requiring identification. Sorry, I don't want to provide ID. We are not in a police state yet.

#2 problem: the snitching mentality. HAMs sure love to snitch on those who don't follow the rules to keep their clubs very exclusive and very obedient

#3 problem: banning a bunch of interesting uses. Can't transmit encrypted - linked to #1 and #2 I guess.

Overall, a nice hobby for someone who aims to work at a FANG: if your life objective is to obey, serve and extend the order decided by the status quo, HAM is a nice matching hobby.

If it's not for you, stay out of the snitchers band, and play on low power on the unlicensed bands instead. The smell of freedom is intoxicating.

<comment><USER18> Without the first two rules in effect, your cell phone, wifi, television, and emergency services would rapidly become unusable.

<comment><USER28> You presume bad faith. I have a different opinion. I trust people, even without government ID.

Someone said below: "If you're made aware of your mistake (failure to adhere to rules, spurious emissions, etc.) you're given the opportunity to stop transmitting until you fix the issue."

I believe most people do not want to willfully commit mistakes. Letting them know is sufficient. There may be a few bad apple like in everywhere, but that's why you have laws and law enforcement.

<comment><USER29> If you -- in perfectly good faith -- accidently disrupt vital services, like emergency com's or air traffic control, potentially endangering human lives, then the identification requirement allows us (as in society) to contact you to remedy the situation.

Without the identification requirement it would take a lot longer to track you down, puting human lives at risk.

<comment><USER30> That's the official dogma, and you're parroting it perfectly. In reality, I sincerely doubt the problem would be that bad.

Communications technology has advanced since 1960.

<comment><USER29> Physics still holds true; if I create a signal in a certain spectrum, it will raise the noise floor for other signals in that spectrum limiting effective communication. It did so in the 60's, it does so now. No amount of calling it "dogma" or "parroting" is going to change that..

<comment><USER28> If someone is transmitting "signal in a certain spectrum" in a way that cause you harm, step 1) get on the mike and tell to that person their transmission is causing problem, step 2) they stop. No snitching or gov id required.

I agree with the other person, this is just parroting the official position.

The world has changed, and pseudonymous communication is a valid alternative: HAMs could simply be required to provide an email - good enough to add a layer of anonymity, and not sufficient to stop law enforcement.

<comment><USER29> "get on the mike" what frequency? Modulation? What makes you think I am monitoring anything after say a relay got stuck keeping my gear permanently -unbeknown to me- in transmit.

A reliable out of band back channel is needed. Currently that is what it is. I am not saying there are no better alternatives possible, go ahead design them and start the political process..

Pseudonymity? Yeah, that's working so well on the internet. Trolling and Spam are not a problem at all. Lets see how that works in a much more resource constrained environment like our radio spectrum.

<comment><USER28> > I am not saying there are no better alternatives possible, go ahead design > them and start the political process..

Read again what I wrote above: email. Hell, add twitter or a phone number on top of that if you really want. That's still a good extra layer of anonymity.

And sorry, but I won't design anything now - I won't touch HAM even with a 10 ft pole, let alone engage in politics.

I'm not saying that to hurt you. I just assume you care about HAM and wonder why younger people are not interested anymore, as discussed in the original article.

The problem is that several of your core values have become show stoppers for people like me. Address the big 3 problems I listed, and maybe you'll have more success interesting more people to HAM. Personally, I don't care anymore. I now prefer unlicensed spectrum.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Product is the Byproduct - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/talk/product-is-the-byproduct <comment><USER2> This is perhaps the first slide I've seen by Holman, but despite having seen what feels like a million slide decks this year, this one resonated to me like no other has.

In an older job, I was constantly battling my program manager's desire to have everybody "come in on time". It was a great offense to her if somebody came in so much as five minutes late. Despite being the managing developer for the team, and hence, ultimately responsible for all the engineering work that happened, I refused to care, so long as the work was getting done. I had a great team of talented guys that were always down to knock out a problem, whatever the problem was.

My boss wouldn't see the hours they put in working from home ("How do I know they're _working_ if I can't see them!?!?"), or the hours they stayed late when the work wasn't done.

I tried the age old arguments "So long as the work is getting done..." or "They can come and go whenever they want so long as I'm meeting deadlines..." etc., but none of it flew. I regret not trying harder to change the culture before ultimately giving up and going somewhere that 'got it'. As a result, I have less responsibility, work from home, work more than I used to, and am happier to do so. I also can't imagine giving up the team that I have now for any reason, and I honestly think they feel similarly.

I usually poo-poo all over 'company culture' lectures, but this one completely hits the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned.

<comment> think-large Your comment was very inspiring. At the risk of saying too much, I find myself in a similar situation, where the culture of my workplace doesn't seem to jive with productivity or the way I work. I think another danger of a workplace is the idea that appearance is more important that quality of character.

Anyone can put on a suit and tie, but the ability and desire to fix problems isn't inherent in everyone. I've been at government contracts where they overvalue the employees who dress well and don't value those that look them straight in the eye, tell the truth and deliver in a timely manner.

<comment><USER2> It's probably not coincidence that the former environment I spoke of was also a government contract.

Government work is hard for the reasons you mentioned, and also because generally, contracting pays well enough to price you out of other markets.

My exit strategy was to find a government vendor (e.g., that makes products for government / enterprise consumption) vs. a government contractor. The services side of the house is still pretty much a suit-and-tie affair, though we pride ourselves on being much more meritocratic than our customers, but on the engineering side, pretty much anything goes.

The one thing I will say about gov contracting is that as a result, I interfaced with much more than would have been in my normal comfort zone, and I came away from it MUCH more knowledgeable than I would have had I not done it at all, and the work was very rewarding. My advice is to hold out for the good parts as long as you can while quietly looking for a way out that seems fulfilling.

<comment> think-large Thanks for the advice. I've slowly been moving to the more technical side of the house since I graduated school, because I got hired on as an "Systems Engineer" that wrote power points. It was great in that I learned to deal with customers and push my comfort zone, but it also left my coding experience woefully insufficient for a time.

Luckily, I'm a step closer to what I want to do now, and I can fill my time with Udacity/Coursera classes when there is an abundant amount of downtime. I do have my eyes on the prize (which would be working in a faced paced and supportive environment) but I'm still building my skill set. It's just good to know that other people have been where I am and approached the problem logically to finally get somewhere that there was a better fit for them.

I plan on moving away from government contracting in general soon. I find that while they do pay well the constraints they put on the work just isn't worth it. If the company doesn't own the system that they work on then they don't tend to care about it in the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > "increases in masculine wording were sufficient to decrease women's job > appeal ratings and their anticipated belongingness in specific occupations"

> People in Silicon Valley are dicks

> Hire those bothered by suck

> [random butt statue]

<comment><USER4> Good point.

This talk got restructured at least twice this week before I gave it, but I should have reworded those phrases, too.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, I felt "Hire those bothered by suck" was the one sentence that resonated the most with me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yo. There's no proof that a great by-product produces a great product. Read the memo by Marc Andreessen about product-market fit. You can nail by-product and still miss the product. But of course, like Marc Andreessen said, it's popular for employers to champion "we care about our hires" (because who would do the opposite?)

Update: This post suffers from a cause-and-effect fallacy, and hindsight bias. More: [http://times.jayliew.com/2012/10/12/cause-and-effect- fallacy...](http://times.jayliew.com/2012/10/12/cause-and-effect-fallacy-the- by-product-does-not-make-the-product/)

So many developers are falling for this. Wake the F- up.

The irony: Zach doesn't realize he's talking like a pretentious Steve Jobs. Until you can prove cause and effect, please stop tricking developers. Yo.

<comment><USER6> Since I can't update the post anymore, I just wanted to apologize for the tone of the comment above. It was a knee-jerk reaction, and there's no need for me to sound like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favorite slide:

        Worry more about *building* the damn thing

        Worry less *about* the damn thing

Many startups have a habit of being obsessed with themselves and their "culture" more than actually _building_ the product.

There are so many things that are admirable and awe-inspiring about Github, and how they've gone about building their business. From my perspective, all of these things are a byproduct of one core value: building.

</comment><comment><USER8> This slide deck is deeply ironic. It is Zach Holman's presentations (full of macho posing and aggressive language - including this one) that give the impression that github is a macho and aggressive company on the inside. Perhaps it isn't, but the spokeman is terrible.

"I hate brogrammers" - but if I was asked to name a famous one, Zach be it. Excessive swearing in talks, "people on the internet are dicks", "OAuth will murder your children". If Zach Holman was holding a work barbecue, would people take their children?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm really curious if github's culture is the cause of their success or a result of it. I'm doubly curious if their bootstrapping was critical to this. My suspicion is that when outside investment arrives, the clock starts ticking, the pressure mounts on the founders, and this may result in a greater motivation to "manage" people's time, for fear of "wasting" time.

<comment><USER10> They were initially successful because they build a product that people needed and was good.

They continued to be successful by creating a culture that attracts good people who continue to build good products.

<comment><USER9> Forgive me, tarr11, but how do you know that culture was added later?

<comment><USER10> "There were, so far, no agreements of any kind regarding how things would proceed. Just two guys that decided to hack together on something that sounded cool."

Here's the story of how it got founded:

[http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned- down-3...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned- down-300k.html)

It'd be hard to argue that the first few months of hacking was "culture".

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the link to Tom Preston-Werner's blog post about the founding of GitHub, it's a very good read.

He has another blog post, "Ten Lessons from GitHub's First Year" [1]. Two of the ten points suggest that culture was important even in those early days:

      > Have Fun... Fostering a playful and creative environment
      > is critical to maintaining both your personal health,
      > and the health (and idea output) of the company.
      >
      > Trust your Team... In a startup, you can drastically reduce
      > momentum by applying micromanagement, or you can boost
      > momentum by giving trust.

Although I agree completely with your point that "[i]t'd be hard to argue that the first few months of hacking was 'culture'"... It sure doesn't feel like they had to put a conscious effort into building a culture at this early stage, rather that their culture was already embodied in their personal beliefs, and the company now reflects those beliefs.

[1] [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/03/29/ten-lessons-from- gi...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/03/29/ten-lessons-from-githubs- first-year.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think Github has nailed it in terms of culture. I've been trying to get my company to adopt the Github ways for a while and I can't wait to share this latest gem with everyone.

I do have some questions though. What is Github's structure like? Is it completely flat? Are there project managers? How do you 'manage' remote workers? I feel like there has to be a little structure to the chaos, or at least some techniques and tools that make things work smoothly, especially with a company that's growing so fast.

<comment><USER12> There are no project managers. Everyone is a manager. Literally. You're all responsible for the pieces of the product you're working on in equal terms.

We of course have "primary responsibility people" who are sort of shepherds of various features, and inevitably leaders emerge from among the pack. But we don't have anyone who simply "manages" things.

Our structure is able to withstand this due to the way we structure our internal teams. We're constantly tweaking how we do that, but by keeping the teams small, strategic decisions close to the people who are actually executing them, and retaining intense focus on one piece of the GitHub Product™ (which could be anything from a feature to "performance" to "making GitHubbers' lives easier" to "making us more money"), it makes things run smoothly without some sort of overlord forcing it.

<comment><USER13> This reminds me of how a friend described the role of product manager: "a person with huge responsibility but no power." That doesn't have to be a bad thing. The best product managers know how to listen, give and receive feedback, persuade and build consensus around features, deadlines, marketing strategy etc even though they don't have the power to say "just do what I said."

<comment><USER5> Indeed, and the ones that understand that they have no power is the best ones. They have a vision and educate about market and customer needs.

The ones that believe they have power tend to be dicks on the other hand :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Please pardon the imminent condescension.

Zach, this is the first of your slideshows that has left me with a lifted feeling, the feeling of reassurance that not all popular hackers are dicks, narrow-minded, or naive. Thank you!

I should probably be less judgmental, but I'm so tired of the facebook- rockstar-ninja vocabulary. Glad to see I'm not alone.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice read.

I had a hard time taking Mr Holman's work seriously at first because of his choice of self portraits. They scream "brogrammer" to me.

I'm a convert now, though

<comment><USER16> Honestly, I felt the exact same way. This is excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _"Nothing great was ever not shipped"_

That's gold.

<comment><USER18> I actually found myself disagreeing with that. There are many great ideas that were killed by corporate bureaucracies before they had a chance of being shipped.

<comment><USER17> I guess we just interpret it differently. I don't ascribe "greatness" to merely ideas or potential. Execution or application has to follow.

A great idea killed by a BigCo bureaucracy is like a talented athlete who is injured before his/her pro career even starts. All the talent in the world will never put such a person in the record books or hall of fame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You know, I don't think any new ground was broken here with regard to content and message, but aesthetically, Holman's slide decks are invariably great.

<comment><USER20> I do like his slide decks as they are better than 99% of the ones that I see, but what it really points out (to me) is how little time everyone else puts into how their decks look. In my experience it isn't particularly hard or time consuming to put together a deck that looks like this. You just have to do it.

<comment><USER21> It's better than others (mine included), but it's still didn't seem great to me. I just watched a TED Talk (www.ted.com/talks/melissa_marshall_talk_nerdy_to_me.html) that really hit me as to why tech presentations are usually very boring. I'd rather see someone take the time to turn a presentation into a well-written blogpost than fumble through slides that sometimes just have a 1Password logo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Love the slides, they don't even need a soundtrack. Was going to leave a FU comment, but it was too obvious.

I'm in a BigCo and every time we acquire a LittleCo I get massive culture envy. I think you nailed how great product happens.

</comment><comment><USER23> FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUU

<comment><USER24> Is that an FU to Zach? The message? HN? Me? Lol.

Edit: I'm an idiot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Holman's slides are always top notch.

</comment><comment><USER26> Transistor was a byproduct. Bell labs was a place where great/smart people and their ideas and thoughts were simmering for ages. Transistor from what I read almost didn't happen, but by accident it did.

Isn't pivot is a synthetic replacement for the essence of 'happy' accident?

</comment><comment><USER27> Anyone who made it to the "people on the internet are dicks" and wondered if that HN post is real and was too lazy to type: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4583>

<comment><USER4> Not that one. :) Just took a random URL and truncated a few numbers. Didn't want to tie it to anything in particular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 'Nothing great was ever not shipped."

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish people in my company prepared slide decks like this.

</comment><comment><USER29> The only reason I went thru his slides was his starting sentence. "People in Silicon Valley are dicks." Amen to that.

</comment><comment><USER30> News FLASH: Microsoft doesn't create software, despite all appearances [VMS++, Spyglass etc.] -- neither does that Italian restaurant make its living off of pasta [capo dei capi!]. VW doesn't make cars. It creates car factories. The cars are just byproducts. Intel doesn't make CPUs. It makes fabs [ _fab_ rication plants]. CPUs are byproducts (they were RAM, and could also very well be ...well FLASH).</comment>


Show HN: Simple SaaS Price Optimization in 30 Days Using Your Stripe and GA Data - <AUTHOR> https://saas.aristander.ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://saas.aristander.ai/](https://saas.aristander.ai/) Hi everyone, we made this tool after watching Kevin Hale's pricing video. This tool helps SaaS companies better price their products using price optimization. You upload a Google Analytics CSV, and a Stripe CSV - and we return the next (best) price to test. Over time, your prices will become optimized. We don't store any data. Let me know if you have any questions.

<comment><USER2> Very interesting. Data differs significantly from our estimates. May I ask how you get to your results?

<comment><AUTHOR> We fit a Bayesian model to your data (profit/session) - which gives a mean + variance at each price point, and we sample randomly from the model within the confidence intervals - this balances exploration + exploitation.</comment></comment></comment>


Who Needs High-Tech Film Editing When There's the Thrill of the Single Shot? - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/02/09/802248145/who-needs-high-tech-film-editing-when-theres-the-thrill-of-the-single-shot <comment><USER2> Single shot movies are the definition of high tech editing since there is so much compositing to make the shots blend together to look like a single shot.

</comment><comment><USER3> Movies like 1917 and Birdman (and perhaps even Rope, if I'm being pedantic) only have the illusion of a single shot.

The best true single shot movie I've seen is the German movie Victoria (2015), which really wouldn't have worked half as well if it was shot in a more traditional way.

<comment><AUTHOR> The most spectacular single shot film I've ever watched is Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov. I have the dvd but it's worth seeking in any available format.

<comment><USER4> +1. It's kind of jarring at first--I kept wanting to see some sort of cut or break from the action. Quite an accomplishment, though.

Also, and perhaps inspired by this movie, the pilot for Battlestar Galactica begins with a five- (?) minute-long single shot that introduces most of the lead characters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh wow, I totally forgot about The 2000 movie Timecode! I saw that in an indy movie theater back in 2000, it was great! At the time it was super interesting an original.

</comment><comment><USER6> The story structure makes it possible. Most stories don't have such a structure.</comment>


How the ICIJ revealed the secrets hidden in Swiss Leaks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@linkurious/how-the-icij-revealed-the-secrets-hidden-in-swiss-leaks-31368c17ebc0

<comment> saiya-jin Not commenting the content of article which was beaten to death dozens of times, but whole article appears to be an add by "Linkurious", name is mentioned 9 times in article, and it's also posted by them.

Nice success story to show your customers, but label it as such, and not as some sort of investigative journalism like original topic was.

</comment><comment><USER2> HSBC and drug money is like Microsoft and software.

Impressive work.</comment>


The dating game - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-35548475 <comment><USER2> The page contains only the link to another article; you should have used that one instead:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-2e3f0042-75f6-4bd1-b...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-2e3f0042-75f6-4bd1-b4fe-9056540c65f8)</comment>


How to sue your employer and win - <AUTHOR> http://unposto.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/how-to-sue-your-employer-and-win/

<comment><USER2> Just wanted to give a bit of feedback on the attorney situation (I am not a lawyer - my wife is an employment and labor attorney).

Lawyers working on a contingency basis on what is likely a fairly small matter are going to put as little time into it as they can. You'd be surprised (or maybe not) how little there is in a case like this, a few letters and memos that they likely bust out in their free time. Unless your damages are significant expect a few hiccups in the road.

Also your state bar is usually a good resource to start when looking for attorneys (here's CA's). Also with the glut of attorneys out there (my wife, sister, cousin and the best man at my wedding are all attorneys) are usually great places to start when looking for recommendations. For example I had a friend with a small business who was dealing with a lawsuit who went to my wife's firm for help (through my wife) they were too expensive but were more then willing to recommend a smaller firm - and the smaller firm was more then happy to help (and kicked ass).

[http://www.calbar.ca.gov/state/calbar/calbar_generic.jsp?cid...](http://www.calbar.ca.gov/state/calbar/calbar_generic.jsp?cid=10581&id=2165)

</comment><comment><USER3> The opportunity cost of pursuing this is huge. Cut your losses at 100 hours and spend your time looking for new clients.

Spend $5 and buy a used copy of "The Check is Not In the Mail" [http://www.amazon.com/Check-Not-Mail-Without- Customers/dp/09...](http://www.amazon.com/Check-Not-Mail-Without- Customers/dp/0962483354) it will give you a number of suggestions for how to structure an engagement to avoid some of the problems you faced here.

The real warning sign on this was the inability of the company to set a date for a partial payment, telling you to "be patient" instead.

<comment><USER4> > The opportunity cost of pursuing this is huge. Cut your losses at 100 hours > and spend your time looking for new clients.

The strategy of cutting losses and not retaliating might seem rational and it is - in the same sense as overgrazing in the tragedy of the commons is. If everybody chooses this strategy, then it becomes rational to screw anyone for 99 hours pay (and switch to another sucker.)

<comment><USER3> He can go public and warn folks if after three written interactions they acknowledge that he delivered the work but refuse to pay or give a timeline for payment. Has the same effect as spending a lot more time on a client that will never be a reference.

Also, read the book, there are a number of things you can do to manage your "credit policy." Essentially you are loaning the customer N hours of work: if you look at it that way you may engage differently.

Finally, life is short and getting screwed out of 100 billable hours is not the worst thing that will happen to you even in a two or three year period.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel sorry for OP. It really sucks to be waiting on the receiving end of an invoice with no hope in sight of getting your hard-earned money. It really sucks to be in that position.

I don't know the specifics of this case, but I have encountered some of the same red flags that the author found. I worked as a remote contractor for a company, was interviewed over Skype by the CTO, had most of my interaction with the technical manager over Skype. I worked mostly by myself outside the scope of the other developers. Best of all, the codebase was mostly written by offshored developers.

This all sounds like a recipe for disaster, but instead it was an amazing experience. The tech manager was incredibly competent and great at managing umpteen developers in 4 countries. The codebase was reasonable to work with and I was able to move really quickly to get things done.

Maybe I got lucky, or maybe these red flags don't have any bearing. I only have anecdotes, so I don't know the answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, the 'red flags' I mentioned probably have very little predictive value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> While many people hiring contractors won't go for this- it's a good cause to ask for 50% upfront and for the remainder payment to be held in escrow. It doesn't hurt to ask at least. Of course it is hard to tell what your total number of billed hours will be, but always ask for 50% deposit of whatever your estimate of the job is.

</comment><comment><USER7> Note that if you're an employee instead of a contractor like in this case, your state very possibly has a unit that hounds companies that don't pay your final paycheck(s).

I and a number of coworkers had to do this in Virginia when a couple of investors (worth $600 million between them) revealed they were devils rather than angels. The process was pain free compared to the "sue them" route tallyho00 had to follow (the state employee(s) we dealt with were experienced and had heard it all before), and in theory it was backed up by their (in)action being an misdemeanor.

Kudos to tallh00 for cutting them off promptly and pursuing them, we need a more feedback like that in the system.

</comment><comment><USER8> The OP seems to be confused about his relationship with the company he sued. He uses the phrase: "if you want to sue your company" and "my company" to refer to his customer. They were not his employer, it was in no way his company - they were a customer who hired him in bad faith when they had no money to pay him.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://unposto.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/how-to-sue-your- empl...](http://unposto.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/how-to-sue-your-employer-and- win/#comment-9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm really hoping that my own experience isn't going to be this bad. I'm owed close to $20k from a client who's so far failed to pay, and I'm working on taking them to arbitration (as per the contract) while looking for other work. Luckily, I brought it up to my startup's lawyer and he offered to take it on, so at least that part will be simple. I'm really hoping that arbitration will be as quick as I've been told it is, but as OP found out, nothing is ever that easy.

I feel for anyone in a similar position; it always sucks to be out a decent chunk of money, waiting for some third party to decide you really do deserve it. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting my money in escrow from now on...

</comment><comment><USER10> So far, I've had a policy of never being owed more than I could collect in small claims court.

Two reasons: If it doesn't happen, I have two options a) drop it, it's only $3000 here, or b) Take them to court w/o a lawyer, and very small court costs.

Is this moderately viable?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you charge a reasonable rate, not really, unless you always ask for payment before you complete work. Let's say you charge 100$/hr. That means you are going to demand payment before you complete a full week of work. Say you charge $50/hr. Now you are demanding payment (in hand/check cashed) before two full weeks of work. Good luck finding a company/client who will pay you on that schedule.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, most of my consulting is really low-quantity in the hours arena, as it's not my main income stream. Anything more than a week f/t I'm really careful with.

I meant more viable from a legal standpoint I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's odd to me is that the OP sued them, won, is offended by what they did... But won't reveal any of the company names, or executive names.

That seems like it would be the most effective way to keep them from doing this again.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here...

Trust me, I thought about doing this. I even thought of this as a strategy to get paid before I ended up suing them. But considering this wasn't a huge amount of money, I figured the potential damage to my reputation by making the situation a public affair could end up costing me a lot more in the future.

<comment><USER4> > I figured the potential damage to my reputation by making the situation a > public affair could end up costing me a lot more in the future.

Hmmm... What exactly would the damage to your reputation be? Hey, let's not hire this guy, he might sue if we screw him!

<comment><AUTHOR> how about, "hrm... here are two almost equivalent candidates, oh wait that one sued his last company and ruined their rep"

or... what if the HR department of some big company doesn't hire people who have sued their employers?

I'm just making things up but I have a feeling there is some potential situation where it would cost me.

Also what do I gain from it? Vengeance is one, not really a good reason. Helping out the probably not so huge number of other people who might get conned by them in the future is the other.

That reason is pretty decent, but weighed against the personal cost to me, not so much. Also you need to factor in if these future employees would even find my warning. I did a little SEO testing with this already and it wouldn't be that easy to create something easily discoverable.

<comment><USER12> While I'm loath to quote xkcd, <http://xkcd.com/137/>

For people like text: Essentially not doing something because someone, somewhere, who might at some point give you money might be offended is a bad idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> You need to weigh both sides, if there was something great on the other side, then I would agree with you. In this case, I don't gain all that much for going public with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Finding the laws that govern us - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER3> "full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts"

If it's actually comprehensive, this is a very big deal. I don't know how LexisNexis Westlaw are going survive now that Google is giving away a huge chunk of their services.

(Of course, this stuff has always been technically in the public domain; and much has even been online in disparate and badly organized sources.)

<comment><USER4> > I don't know how LexisNexis Westlaw are going survive.

I don't think they will. I interviewed with them and there was a general atmosphere of desperation, suggestions of needing to work weekends and hollidays. I mentioned Google to them and how Google will eventually want to get access to _public_ court records, and it seems like that question made them really uncomfortable.

Well, they enjoyed their (virtual?) monopoly for so many years, now Google gets to enjoy theirs.

<comment><USER5> West Publishing goes back to the 1890s and had a long-time franchise, gained through official channels (the courts), by which it had exclusive rights to publish the "official" versions of virtually all the case law in America.

Mead-Data (Lexis) came in during the 1970s with its Wang-style dedicated workstations and its newly formed databases and had a huge disruptive effect by offering the first system of electronically retrievable legal authorities ever. The system was very clunky when I used it in law school in the 1976-78 era but has since been highly refined and is highly useful for those willing and able to pay the high price associated with the service.

Lexis eventually undercut the West monopoly and sent West scrambling for a competitive response (hence, Westlaw).

The competition between Lexis and Westlaw _did_ lead to far better pricing for some users, from the old "x dollars per minute" model to flat-rate pricing for users in specific categories (e.g., small firms), but this still involved hundreds of dollars per month at minimum (anything beyond the specific categories remained x dollar per minute).

Of late, other services have cropped up (LawNet) that have made a lot of the case law available at much cheaper fixed pricing (e.g., under $100/mo) but their offerings were incomplete.

The trend is unmistakable. For Lexis and Westlaw to compete, they will eventually have to lower their pricing considerably. Even then, there is a serious question whether their resultant margins will leave them with a viable business model. Only time will tell on this.

By the way, the downward trend for Lexis/Westlaw is tied to the vast disruption that has occurred with Big Law, which, in its heyday, was a massive user of such services that paid little attention to the cost aspect (costs were simply passed on to clients). In our cost-conscious era, Big Law is reeling in the short term, as are Lexis and Westlaw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The potential value of this offering is great but it is nowhere close to competing with LexisNexis/Westlaw in its current form.

For example, I had clerked for a federal judge in the Northern District of California in the 1979-80 era. I tried searching for published opinions by that judge and could not get any to come up. I also worked on a large securities class action while at a large firm thereafter and this resulted in a major opinion by another judge in that matter - couldn't get that one to come up either.

Don't know if it is me fumbling around with inept searching techniques, or if it is the search algorithm, but I do know that I can easily retrieve these items through the major legal search services.

Thus, my initial impression is that this Google service is full of great potential but is still at too early a stage to be of use as a systematic legal search service. As one who supports the idea of law being made broadly available to average people, and as one who pays a lot of money for the Lexis/Westlaw type of services, I look forward to the further development and refinement of this service. For the moment, though, it appears to be still too immature to be of real help yet, at least when one is looking for specific things.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a huge deal. Having worked in this space for 1.5 years, I can say definitively that Google's ranking algorithm works extremely well. Their UI is solid, though it has room for improvement. They tackled a number of other huge problems relating to document formats (pdf's, footnotes, etc.), and citation formats. In any event, this is most definitely a game changer, and I am sure Lexis and Westlaw will see an immediate hit to revenue in 2010.

<comment><USER7> Honest question:

I don't know what exactly you do, but do you think you could do it without keycite?

<comment><USER6> I am a lawyer and programmer. I put together a site - www.tracelaw.com - <USER2> I launched last week. Almost every innovation that I came up with, Google has put into Google Scholar. There is one key technical aspect where what I have done is better, but aside from that, I would say Google Scholar largely does everything extremely well.

I was not saying in my above comment that Google will replace Lexis/Westlaw. What I am suggesting is that they will change how lawyers perform legal research. What this does is separate case search from case hosting. And case search is the really expensive part. Basically, as I see it, lawyers will start their searches on Google, and eventually migrate to Lexis/Westlaw when they've narrowed their focus, or run into a dead end. And if that happens, all those searches that migrated to Google, are searches that are no longer run on Lexis or Westlaw (and for which they can no longer charge a fee).

<comment><USER7> I guess I didn't think of the "per search" charges.

That said, Using West's Digest and their case histories is a neccessary step in legal research for me. I can see this for general searches on a topic, but for the real nitty gritty you need to get into West/Lexis. To summarize, I think West will do just fine. It might mean one less leather portfolio for law librarians every year.

<comment><USER8> When I worked at a biglaw firm a few years back, we were told that the shelf- price of one of these wide searches was upwards of $800 for the firm and we were encouraged to narrow down the search as much as possible. The cost for recovering a single case: $6. They didn't actually pay these fees and had an umbrella agreement, but the cost of this umbrella agreement was determined by how widely the firm searched.

However you look at this, this is a big blow to Lexis/Westlaw and their monopoly position has taken quite a hit. I agree that they add a ton of value and will still be around, but its hard to overstate how big of a deal this is.

Its especially big for non-profit legal clinics and independent lawyers practicing on their own, which had difficulty doing any sort of legal research without coming to an agreement with one of these duopoly actors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As long as they're out to disrupt complacent information aggregation businesses, I hope they have Bloomberg and Reuters in their sights. Like Lexis and Westlaw, they reap enormous profits from providing structured access to mostly free information.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is this what Aaron Swartz got into trouble with the FBI for trying to help set up? (freeing the contents of the PACER database.)

<comment><USER11> <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile>

Link for those interested in that case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This has amazing potential. It would be interesting if someday you could ask Google if something were legal or not, and it could give you an exactly correct answer, with an interpretation on par with or better than a professional lawyer.

Google needs to do this with the entire United States Tax code, Federal Statutes, and work with States and Counties to get their legal texts online and into their index.

</comment><comment><USER13> _We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all._

Google has a really optimistic definition of the "average citizen". :)

In all seriousness, this seems like a pretty cool development for legal folks, but if I'm looking for info on a particular case or general legal topic, why wouldn't I just use Wikipedia?

<comment><USER14> this is a primary source, wikipedia is not.

<comment><USER15> Also, wikipedia articles can now site the relevant cases through google. This means you can actually verify the information you find on wikipedia, which is crucial to wikipedia's credibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Imagine a statistical correlation of the semantic content of briefs versus the deciding opinions. The result might highlight the outliers holding attorneys and judges to consistent standards of professional practice heretofore hidden in the court records.

>If< it can be done what a wonderful result for the betterment of the practice of law.

</comment><comment><USER17> Now if we can just wikify the US Code, then we can do away with those irritating legislature things and techno-utopia shall be ours.

Seriously, I can see some great possibilities for integrating this with the Google visualization APIs for statistical purposes, or for business intelligence (eg try searching for cases to which Google is a party).

</comment><comment><USER18> I still can't tell which laws apply to me, specifically (my state, for example).

You have to know a lot, just to know which decisions could possibly apply to you.

<comment><USER6> That is very true. The value in this is for lawyers; lay people have always had a hard time finding and understanding the law. This may help a lay person, but Google's implementation appears to really be focused on lawyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great potential, but still couldn't find something to get out of my gym membership contract.</comment>


High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL  - <AUTHOR> http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/12/22/high-performance-click-analysis-with-mysql/ <comment><USER2> I have a lot of experience with considering the tradeoffs necessary to do click analysis on a decently large scale (and the results of that will be shown, provided I can finish VisTrac).

Analysis and collection presents a very interesting problem, given the mass of data being collected. Determining how much depth will be provided and how/when to aggregate is really important. I'm not advocating premature optimization, but this stuff requires a lot of structural consideration.

The biggest hangup I've come across is filtering data by things like location/browser, and similar, as they would require aggregating data in many permutations...at least, as far as I've found. In the long run though, it seems that those levels of granularity aren't as important as they might seem and can often be dropped (as it will be, to an extent, in my case).

(Random side-note : I'm potentially looking for a second brain to work on VisTrac with, as I haven't found one yet.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had to independently discover many of these observations by hand while doing jtv stats as we've scaled...this is an excellent overview I wish I'd read 6 months ago.</comment>


San Francisco's only hacker bed and breakfast - <AUTHOR> http://www.up13.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> The chef does molecular gastronomy or food hacking. Anyone here ever booked dinner with him?</comment>


Bootrom exploit for all A5 to A11 iPhones and other Apple devices - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/axi0mX/status/1177542201670168576 <comment><USER2> What makes the permanent? Is bootrom actually still read-only in iphones? surprising.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can somebody verify this?</comment>


Microsoft's PR Boss Slams NYT Gadget Guru David Pogue After Infavorable Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.conweets.com/nytimes/fxshaw/

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty amazed that Frank X. Shaw still has his job; being openly aggressive to people who review your products doesn't seem like a smart strategy, especially in the twittersphere.</comment>


Ask HN: Can we brainstorm a better way to find a co-founder? - <AUTHOR> I haven't seen a great solution to this problem - have you? Many thought leaders have weighed in from Drew Houston who summarizes the dilemma well (http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founders) to Jason Freedman who gives great advice from the perspective of a non-technical person (http://humbledmba.com/please-please-please-stop-asking-how-to-find). The reality is that entrepreneurs come from a range of backgrounds across all sectors and finding someone you know well, trust, and is fully committed launching a biz (especially an unproven concept) is really hard. The advice many people offer is to use your network, go to meetups, and try online tools like http://founderdating.com. I have tried this, but frankly it's not a quick process unless you are willing to pick someone you barely know (this works sometimes a la Kevin Rose).
So what's the solution? My process is to put myself around the "type" of people I need to meet (this could be technical, a specific skill, etc). For me, I want to meet a CTO. However, instead of rushing the process I am simply looking to meet people as determined to build a company as myself. If they are technical or non-technical it doesn't matter, but I believe opportunities will come from simply getting to know like-minded people. In the meantime I am following this approach: 1) Learning to code (at least the basics) 2) Do as much as possible to validate your idea (talk to customers/users, presell, etc) 3) Find a technical adviser that you trust (help with finding the right person) 4) Paying someone to prototype ($1-5K isn't a lot to test a business) 5) Get to know potential Co-Founders
What do you think of this approach? Would a private facebook group an interesting ice-breaker to show what you are working on, get feedback, and make friendships - with the goal of helping and getting to people rather than solely finding a co-founder. If so, I made this: https://www.facebook.com/groups/842762052466224/. What's your solution to this problem? I am open to any and all ideas. <comment><USER3> I was a developer that partnered with a stranger. He's an MBA with a purely business background. I'm the full stack + product guy. I'm never co-founding a business with a stranger ever again.

We failed probably because of not what you're thinking. My business co-founder brought more to the table than I could imagine. I've gained a lot of respect for the hard work of sales, marketing, fundraising, and the people that make these tasks seem so easy.

We got hundreds of customers, made $10k revenue per month, and had a staff of 5 at one time. All bootstrapped over the course of 12 months.

The thing is, we were not happy working with each other. When shit hits the fan (which happens often in a new business), we just get on each other's nerves. On paper, we have perfectly complimentary skill set. He's a charming people person. I'm a proficient developer. In reality, the fact that we're so opposite means that we're always seeing and doings things differently. When we're in a grind, he wants to hi-fives to boost morale and I want to put my head down to ship faster.

If I were to do it again. I'd find a smart, hardworking person that brings me energy and that I'd bring them energy when the shit hits the fan. I wouldn't care if they're a CEO, CTO, C-whatever-O. I'd look for someone that I'd enjoy working with above all else.

<comment><USER4> A thousand times this. Life is short, don't work with assholes, and more appropriately, don't work with people you don't respect and enjoy.

In larger companies you have to work with people you respect but don't like. Don't do that in a startup, it takes away the passion and the motivation.

<comment><USER5> This is the mistake everyone makes. Don't think in terms of someone being an asshole (unless it is you). Think in terms of chemistry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >For me, I want to meet a CTO.

You have to realize that it's harder for a "business" guy to attract a technical cofounder rather than for a programmer whiz to attract a business guy. It's definitely a handicap. The programmer can _build_ something and that can jumpstart the cascade of people (including business people) to join the cause.

As a non-tech person, what do you offer potential tech cofounders? If you give off vibes that _" I'm the idea man!"_ or _" I'm the guy with the big vision!"_, it will not impress quality programmers.

Therefore, you have to play up your strengths if you have notable ones. For example, perhaps you can call up some friends & family and raise $750,000 in cash to launch your product idea. A lot of programmers don't have the contacts to raise funds like that. Or maybe you want to create a digital music distribution website and you have Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Lady Gaga's personal cell phone #s on your speed dial as potential first wave of customers. Again, the typical programmer isn't going to have social connections like that.

<comment><USER7> I disagree. I've found in my experience it's far easier in theory for a business guy to attract a technology co-founder than the other way around. This insight isn't clear from the outside due to a) the existence of "business" guys who do no business and complain vocally and b) the existence of tech+some business guys who know enough business to get their product off the ground and then find a good business guy to balance them out. Every purely tech guy I've seen come to me looking for a co-founder, I've had to tell them I could help you find one but you'd basically have to throw away all your code and start again from scratch. For the tech guys for which their code is their baby, this is not a welcome message and they instead go find someone else to tell them how they've made the best mousetrap in the world.

Here's how to be a non-technical co-founder that makes tech guys excited and willing to hop on board:

* Articulate a vision that's broad, compelling and unique. Filter tech guys by the ones who are already excited by that vision rather than trying to convince them away from their pet cause.

* Become so educated in the field that you can confidently answer any of the tech guy's questions and that you can educate and provide insight into the field from the very start of the conversation.

* Talk to customers, find ones for who this is a hair on fire problem, take a short video of those customers explaining their needs and edit it down to a short sizzle reel.

* Create a landing page, put in a field for explaining why leads are signing up, demonstrate to the tech guy that you're not just capturing random email addresses but passionate fans.

* Use that same landing page to A/B test pitches, show data on how you can hone product/market fit via experimentation.

* Get signed Letters of Intent from businesses detailing what their purchase commitments are willing to be if a set of well defined features were to be built.

* Map out a series of go-to market strategies, research the pros and cons of each one, demonstrate you have some unique insights or resources that would give your startup an unfair advantage.

* Build out an early front end prototype using non-technical tools. Have it hooked into a completely human powered backend (it's surprising how far you can get with just SMS for example, or email), run the entire system yourself to better understand the user's needs. Show how a small piece of technology could immediately super charge both the quality and scalability of the operation.

* Go out and raise money contingent on finding a co-founder and search for co-founders contingent on raising money. Both groups are risk averse and like to see validation. Providing the mutual validation gets both to hop on board at the same time.

* Learn programming in your spare time using free tools. Demonstrate to your tech cofounder that you're committed to understanding where they are coming from and respect the work they do.

* Help everyone you can in your local community. Offer advice, intros, free work (but not too much) and be known as the connector and who everyone needs to know. Follow up with people on a regular interval and ask how they're going and see if there's anything they need help with that you're uniquely suited to do. At the same time, be cynically strategic about this. Like hangs out with like and you eventually get connected with higher ability tiers of people if you demonstrate the value you can bring. Find people slightly above your talent range and deliver the world to their plate. Skill up and repeat.

* Just, in general, be a nice person and someone people want to work with. There's many different shades of nice and you also have to be someone authentic to your personality. Don't be afraid to be polarizing, I'm personally the "asshole nice" person in person and that turns quite a few people off but the ones who it clicks with, we click really well.

In general, when I meet a non-business co-founder who's in the process of trying to get something started, I advise them not even to start looking for a technical co-founder yet. You can get so much done nowadays without touching technology and the class of people you're able to attract exponentially increases the further along you are. The people who get excited about hearing this message, I pay attention to more and try to help in any way. The people who balk at this, I can't see them ever getting far.

edit: Another psychological factor that makes a huge difference is shifting from what I call a "scarcity" mindset to an "abundance" mindset because scarcity attracts scarcity and abundance attracts abundance.

For example, it's immensely frustrating to me when I meet people who are job hunting and I ask them what they're after and they reply with some version of "Oh, I could really work anywhere". The reason they say that is because they think any job is better than no job and better to be overly broad so as to not miss out on any opportunities. In actuality, it's the opposite, telling me you could work anywhere means I can't find anything for you.

Instead, where I can really add value is if you outline a set of broad theses about what you're excited about and I can suggest companies working towards those aims I know people at. During the course of that conversation, other areas of interest or other companies come up and by the end, there's usually 3 or 4 very strong intros I can send. The reason why these people are successful is because they are in an abundance mindset where they feel like they could work at a lot of places and are really more concerned about finding the right place for them and they're willing to be polarizing to do it.

For job hunters, especially junior ones, I'm willing to go through the work of shifting them from a scarcity mindset to an abundance one and help them when networking with other people in the future. If you're at the co-founder stage though and you're still in the scarcity mindset, I have no sympathy for you and I'll just politely disengage.

<comment><USER8> Honestly, most of the things you list above make one sound like a semi- technical founder.

<comment><USER7> What about it sounds semi-technical? I've helped two people (a doctor and a restaurant chef) who I was the first person they've ever talked to who knew programming and I helped push them through these steps and they got pretty far. But they were people who were in the top 0.1% of something else and were thus, willing and able to be helped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's like asking if we can brainstorm on a better way to find a spouse. Do you really want to find a spouse quickly? Or would you be more comfortable marrying your high-school sweetheart?

The YC folks will say founder breakups are the most common reason for start up failures. So what I'd want to see is a highly granular failure analysis of founder break ups. It's psychology, right? So something like the actual stories of 100 randomly selected startup failures would inform us as to the most common causes. Could be working styles, asymmetric effort, personality disorders, personal/family issues, health,... Once you have a histogram, find a way to test for those failure modes before getting hitched to a co-founder.

<comment><USER10> This list of 92 startup failures was recently shared on HN: [http://autopsy.io/](http://autopsy.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I gave a presentation on "how to find a co-founder" several times. Guess what: by slide 2, I give away the answer: the best co-founder is someone you already worked with. Not helpful? That's the truth.

Instead of trying to find a co-founder quickly, find a good contributor to your project. They may grow into becoming a co-founder over time, or they may "just" be your first employee. No one can really tell until time passes. So give it time, resist labels, and keep making progress.

From the perspective of the potential co-founder, the co-founder title is earned. "Be so good they can't ignore you" is exactly the mantra you want to become a co-founder. Make your contribution to the startup so significant that everyone will think of you as one of the founders.

Don't be that "paper co-founder" who negotiated the title but never put in the effort.

<comment><USER12> > ... the best co-founder is someone you already worked with. Not helpful? > That's the truth.

Not really.

I started-up with a co-worker (of 2 years) and a guy whom I hadn't worked with before and guess who was the first to bring problems to the company and quit? The guy I previously worked with...

Truth is you don't really know a person until you're both in a seriously f*ckd up situation. That's what my experience has taught me.

<comment><USER13> I think what Alain is saying is you don't know how somebody is until you have worked a significant period of time with them, including stressful times where things went wrong (my own benchmark of whether someone is trustworthy is pretty much how they behave in such times - agreeing with your experience).

Going with a stranger might still be a good option if e.g. your previous company had bad quality staff, or if you were a business person and never had any contact with any technical people, but it's still akin to playing roulette.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The explanation for why there's no good answer is because the people who most want a co-founder are the people who least deserve a co-founder. People who are easily able to find a co-founder just do it instead of asking questions on the Internet. This is intensely frustrating to the people asking because they feel like life owes them a co-founder somehow and if they only found the right hacks, one would magically appear. Instead, the answer is simply to be more impressive and tell more people how impressive you are and things by and largely fall into place.

I'm also highly skeptical of any marketplace solution like Founder Dating. The median outcome of a startups failure so a median quality co-founder will almost certainly result in failure. You need to find people on the extreme end of the bell curve for success to be likely. Those people are highly unlikely to frequent marketplaces since they have more demand than supply. To the extent that any successful startups get formed from Founder Dating, I wager it's more accident than engineered.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you're technical looking for a cofounder, you should have a prototype built already in order to attract good business / operations people and you should understand that you must own everything and toil for endless hours to get that product built.

If you're business / operations looking for a cofounder, you should have some money raised already and you should understand that you must always be raising. It doesn't stop. Ever. Just as building the product doesn't stop. Ever.

Operations focused people should be really fucking good at sieving hires. Heart, skill, engagement, and team coordination are critical in an early stage startup and hiring one grumpy butt or that intern you think is smart but cheap could really screw you badly.

(just a few thoughts on my numerous lessons learned over building four startups)

</comment><comment><USER15> My approach is the following: 1\. Learn to code 2\. Build the prototype 3\. Try to sell the prototype to verify the market 4\. Bootstrap the business 5\. Get the business going then people (co-founder, investor,etc...) will show up

<comment><USER16> I couldn't agree more with this. People will come to you once you have something that works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would stop focusing on finding a co-founder and focus instead on starting a business. A CTO isn't the solution to wanting something developed and not having money to pay someone. Find something you can do by yourself. If you're capable you will find and hire a CTO later.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is a co-founder needed? What are you expecting a co-founder to bring that an employee won't? Is the real question here "how do I find someone with the needed skills, willing to work for peanuts in exchange for shares in the new business?"

</comment><comment><USER19> There is no such a thing as "technical co-founder". A developer can start and test a project faster alone. Smart "business" guys with money sometimes meet with someone that could do it alone and find a way to share the ride. If you want to develop something, I'd suggest you to learn how to develop. Or spend enough money to hire someone to do so. But for free, as a "co-founder", it'll always be hard and when it happens, usually it don't last long. And the fault is on the "business" side. Technology is not about business. If you start a free/open source project with a great purpose, you'll find tons of developers willing to help your endeavour.

</comment><comment><USER20> You just don't "search and find" for a co-founder. I think it's rather that you already know him but you don't know he will be your co-founder sometime soon.

Engage in a lot of side-projects, it doesn't matter if you are in high school, college or a full-time job. You'll know what people you like working with, but most importantly, like as a person.

Now, the question is: Once you have a group of talented and smart people which you have a background working with and who you like their personality, how do you choose just 1 or 2 of them? That's a hard question. The good thing is that you're scratching your head not because you have a potential co-founder deficit, but rather a surplus.

</comment><comment><USER21> If a business founder is looking for a CTO to double staff from one to two, it's already a bit of a lost cause. The title doesn't add value and suggests a mindset that isn't focused on whatever it takes to get things done. Instead it emphasizes a tendency toward bureaucratic partitioning.

If I were a technical person, the primary trait I'd want in a co-founder is a willingness to do whatever needs to be done, and an aversion to structures that allow "it's your job, not mine" discussions. There's a difference between complementary skills and specialization. At 30 people specialization becomes hard to avoid, at two people both need to own everything.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER22> Imho:

Get traction with whatever you got at your hands.

There is nothing more trustworthy and attractive than traction.

Not being engineer has never been an excuse not to get traction. Not in the last hundred generations and wont be in the next.

Business != Building != Engineering

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER23> Those two articles you linked to were spot on, but I don't think you really took to heart what they were saying. I'll make it explicit (and know that this comes from a place of tough love): The reason it's hard to find a technical co-founder is that you don't bring much value, if any, to a startup.

You don't have a proven track record running technical companies, because if you did, you wouldn't have this problem.

You don't have a programming background, so you won't understand the implications of your decisions on the product (basic programming won't help you here, I'm afraid, though it's a good start, and I absolutely encourage you to continue).

You can't make hiring decisions for technical staff, because you can't evaluate their skills.

Perhaps you have some great idea. But great ideas are a dime a dozen. The moment you gain any momentum, a dozen clones will pop up. Execution is what matters, and that's up to the CTO to deliver, for the most part.

A CTO could just hire you as a strategy consultant, salesperson and/or market analyst, just for a salary. You need to be able to say why you merit equity and decision-making authority if you want to be CEO. Could you answer that question if you were being totally honest with them? If you can't, perhaps you _should_ look for work outside of the C-suite for now.

</comment><comment><USER24> The real question here is what you bring to the table in an early stage startup. You can put yourself around the type of people you need to meet, but at the end of the day they are not going to be your co-founder unless you bring something to the table. Why do they absolutely need you in order to succeed? Maybe:

\- You are a sales or marketing wizard

\- You have domain specific knowledge and experience

\- You have critical connections

\- You have funding

You probably need several of these to be an attractive co-founder. Another way of saying it is: what will you be working on every day that will cause the startup to succeed? The technical co-founder is going to work on building the product every day. Without that you can't succeed. Why does he need you to succeed? That is what you need to communicate to potential co-founders.

If you have a good way to convince potential co-founders that they need you, then how to find them? It could be that you are successful with founder dating programs but starting a startup is a huge commitment. Do you really want to do that with a stranger? I think it makes a lot more sense to do it with a college friend or a former colleague.

</comment><comment><USER25> While at it, its important not to forget the amount of founder disputes which kills the company as often as any other factor. Going solo can be hard but its not impossible. If your vision is clear as a business guy, you can hire freelancers to get a prototype, and market it yourself to get the early validation. Worrying about co-founders before that would be a waste of time in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't know if there is a good answer to this question simply because I don't think we're looking at it the right way.

In my mind, a product/business/whathaveyou should be a collaboration between two or three individuals, who, should the project grow, become cofounders.

I don't think the process should be:

      1) create idea
      2) idea becomes business
      3) "oh shit who will help me cofound this co.?"
      4) find cofounder through means described in this thread
      5) run successful business

...rather, the process should be:

      1) with friends, create idea
      2) develop idea
      3) create profitable business, with the aforementioned friends as cofounders.

In my mind, the later described process works with a high success rate since you have essentially "vetted" your friends in step 1. However, I don't know if you really can vet your friends against the challenges described in step 3, but perhaps that is what dooms a large percentage of startups.

Who knows.

</comment><comment><USER27> Maybe you're looking for me?

If you're interested in becoming co-founder of a growing, cash-flow positive business in a giant market, please reach out.

In short, Forkable is "Pandora for Lunch". AngelList profile: [https://angel.co/forkable](https://angel.co/forkable)

My email can be guessed from my first name, "Joe"

<comment><USER28> I absolutely love these "$EXISTING_BUSINESS for $TOTALLY_RANDOM_THING" startups, and this might just be my favourite. What does "Pandora for Lunch" even mean? Is it Pandora the streaming radio service or Pandora the jewellery company? Neither seems at all applicable to lunch!

<comment><USER27> The streaming radio service. You sign up, tell us about your diet, and every week we email you a calendar of lunches from awesome local restaurants. Easily modify the suggestions with our online interface, or just sit back and let the good food come.

As for the "X for Y" meme, I agree they tend to oversimplify. Nivi of AngelList provides compelling arguments why they are worthwhile anyway: [http://venturehacks.com/articles/high-concept- pitch](http://venturehacks.com/articles/high-concept-pitch)

<comment><USER28> That article does little to justify the "X for Y" meme. The reason for it is that "X" is famous and successful already and people are trying to capitalise on that, and because a three word summary is pithy and easy to remember.

As to your startup - Pandora is a streaming radio service which actually, you know, streams radio, as a service. Emailing lunch menus (or calendars, or whatever) is not as to lunch as streaming radio is to traditional radio, so your "X for Y" makes very little sense!

<comment><USER27> If you agree with the underlying premise that a good high concept pitch is essential to a startup, then those seem like pretty good reasons to adopt this sort of meme, at least if the comparison holds.

Anyway, I'm surprised you don't see how this particular comparison holds. Pandora auto-suggests and delivers musical content over the course of a few hours or so. Forkable auto-suggests and delivers "nutritional content" over the course of a week or so. Does that make sense to you?

<comment><USER28> Pandora delivers music that you can listen to; unless your startup delivers food that I can eat, I don't really see how the two are all that similar - unless you're suggesting people print out the emails and then eat them.

But hey, perhaps I'm too stupid for your startup (usually I just make a sandwich for lunch, so I'll probably cope either way!).

<comment><USER27> I see the where confusion is coming from. We do in fact deliver the food. I stated that in the above comment. It's also in our AngelList profile and I alluded to it in my first response ("let the good food come"). You don't seem stupid to me. But perhaps you are reading too quickly?

The image of people printing out emails and eating them is pretty amusing, though. :)

<comment><USER28> I've been known to print out the more objectionable emails from my clients and eat them...

OK, great, you deliver food. If your AngelList profile is your main publicly visible page at this point, you should - in my humble opinion - make it really clear what it is your service actually does: however slowly I read "we send you a calendar of lunches from awesome local restaurants", it doesn't suggest to me that you actually deliver food. The second paragraph does mention delivery. Make your copy accessible even to people who read quickly and don't care very much and you won't go far wrong (with your copy, anyway!).

<comment><USER27> That's a good point. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You're not going to find a better way than founderdating (already established), LinkedIn (already established), and networking events in person.

You're not going to tick off some company-optimized checklist and magically fall into the lap of your perfect co founder.

People work for months or even years with a co founder only to realize they aren't a match.

You even said it yourself:

>I want to meet a CTO. However, instead of rushing the process I am simply looking to meet people as determined to build a company as myself.

Networking events, Linkedin, Founderdating, Angel.co etc. Your facebook group is tiers worse than the above listings so I'm not sure why you posted at all if your "solution" is a facebook group.

Sorry to be a dick but this doesn't remotely solve the problem. You just made Facebook group #1857126126.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't think this is actually broken. The traits needed for quality cofounders are actually pretty rare and even more so for founders who get along well enough to make a great company.

I see this the same way as I do looking for a spouse. You can't shortcut this process and founder "dating" sites or mixers will have the same problems as dating ones. You have to make sure you are bringing to the table the skills needed to fill the roles you will be playing. In this regard it's a bit more straight forward than dating because you should be able to point to a history of accomplishments that prove you can fill those roles.

Beyond that though it's just a series of interactions that make the other person feel comfortable partnering with you.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think one key is to find someone who has the same motivations as you - <USER2> you aiming for the same goal? Do you have the same drive? Why are you looking in the first place?

But I also don't frequently see this drive to "find a co-founder" outside of discussions tied to YC. For YC, yes, having a co-founding team is a key component. But outside of YC, if you want to start a company, you just do it. Maybe you have other people involved, maybe not. Circumstances vary. Finding a co-founder is an option, and maybe even a good idea, but is not a road- blocking milestone.

</comment><comment><USER20> For people who have absolutely no technical skill and are extremmely business oriented, who want to build a high-tech concept but don't have the time to acquire the skills, I'd recommend to outsource the development of an MVP and start monetizing. If a technical co-founder sees that he is more likely to join.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you are non-technical invest your time into learning how to build, or paying someone to build MVPs. Once a product has some traction, bringing in talent will be easier and certainly cheaper (equity-wise).

If you are a technical founder, invest your time into learning marketing. It really only takes trial and error.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not looking to found a startup, but I have spent some time thinking about how to network effectively. I agree with others here that there are no shortcuts, but I've had success with some of these tactics:

1\. Do put yourself out there. Go to a lot of events, accept invitations, make it known that you're interested in meeting more people (encourage friends to make introductions).

2\. Don't let social events fatigue you: get in, get what you want, get out. However, once somebody opens up to you, i.e. invites you for dinner or drinks after an event, you need to switch modes: put in the time, treat them well, even if it compromises other parts of your life. If you're not giving something up, you're not giving anything.

3\. Make friends in different cities or countries, then travel and stay with them. They will introduce you to their friends, who may then introduce you to _their_ friends, etc. (Best, of course, if you're invited.)

4\. You must actually be worth meeting, so be sure you've already put in the work and thought out a narrative that ties your past accomplishments into a story building toward future success.

5\. Be interesting. Read, think, write, have a point of view.

6\. Be interested. If you talk too much, you reveal that nobody wants to listen to you. If you show authentic interest in other people, doors magically open.

7\. The best "hack" I can think of is to make use of the Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn social graphs. Pay attention to the suggested friends / follow feeds. For people you particularly like, go through who they follow and identify potential friends, allies, collaborators, social gateways, etc. After you have a list of people you might like to meet, you can start to be strategic about framing yourself and putting yourself in the right places to meet (and interest) them.

8\. Remember that meeting one person is an opportunity to meet their friends and anyone they think you should know. After you've gotten to know somebody a little bit, it's ok to ask if they know anyone you should meet. Or you may not have to ask: if you get an invite to an event, always accept it – you never know who you might meet.

9\. Think in terms of building a social graph. Read a bit about the study of social networks including "social capital", the roles of different nodes in the network, strong ties vs. weak ties, etc.

10\. There's no excuse for bad social skills. Learn good manners and be prepared to adapt to new cultural expectations.

Again, as others have emphasized, there's no easy way. High value people are already overwhelmed by demand. As a friend once advised me in regard to dating, "be the flower to the bee."</comment>