skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: So how does this whole investment thing work?
To give this question some context, I'm not someone lacking total knowledge on this subject. I'm familiar with how things work in regards to acquiring funding and what to do with it afterwards. I'm missing knowledge for the in-between part. Maybe this can help me and others who are questioning this as well.

To better help me explain this I'll put it in a hypothetical situation.

Say I have a company that's wanting to raise a seed round. We crunch the numbers and find that $2 million is a suitable amount for what we want to accomplish. Now, because we want to have a good chance at capturing these funds we'll be splitting the $2 million that we want into eight individual investments of $250,000 from individual investors. So just to check, that's 8 x 250,000 = 2,000,000. Ok, cool.

So first question, is this a normal way to approach what we're doing?

Second part is going to deal with how the equity is distributed. So, if there's going to be eight investors in this seed round, they're going to want a chunk of the company. No problem, but this is where I (and others) can get confused. Say we figure that a good percentage for this amount of $200,000 is at 7%. So if we give everyone equal equity for the seed round, 8 x 7% equates to 56%, which is over half of the company for just the seed round.

Is there where dilution comes in? How do we get equity back to raise money down the road? Are we supposed to be offering really low equity? If we are, that can't look too attractive to investors, right?

Ultimately, is there something I' missing for how this works?
Maybe I loose it, do you support high availability ? The datacenter is distributed ?
I am amazed that the founder didn't plan the exact cost of each unit during the kickstarter phase and I'm even more amazed that people are so careless to put money in projects with no clear plan and cost figured out.

Please send me some money now for my virtual cat project. I just need to raise $100MM. I promise it will deliver!!!
=<O.0>=
Amazon takes on Paypal
I might like to buy a car with the Model 3's general parameters - I had the electrical service on my house redone a couple of years ago in part because I wanted to have the capacity to add a car charger someday - but I am almost completely uninterested in a Tesla because I am not on board with their "just sit back and trust us" philosophy. No, thank you, I don't trust you, or any car maker, and don't want your auto-updating auto-everything machine!

And I basically just hate trying to deal with touch screens. They get smudgy and gross at the blink of an eye, and their total lack of tactile feedback demands a tedious degree of conscious attention which makes them inefficient ways of performing routine tasks, which adjustment of an automobile's cabin controls ought to be.
The best side project is one where the potential upsides are big, and there are no potential downsides.

Realistically, this means you should choose to work on something that you actually want to use yourself and you should build it using technology you want to learn for career advancement. As for monetization, don't count on this, but if you have several options in terms of side project that are roughly comparable in terms of personal interest/professional development, it would be prudent to choose the one that has the best chance to turn a profit.
Mercedes has presented a prototype with joystick in 1999, said to have been easier to learn for beginners than steering wheels, and quicker to perform emergency maneuvers with.

They said that German legislation does not allow for cars with side-stick rather than steering wheels, and that it would be cost-prohibitive to introduce - the latter is probably no longer true...

http://www.economist.com/node/290976
Wiper Messaging App Adds Bitcoin Micropayments for Independent Filmmakers
Just a few days ago there was a fantastic article on the lack of competition in the economist. It pointed to the recent consolidation of the airline industry. Kind of amazed that there will be one less player.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21695385-profits-are-...
Chrome at some recent point grew a "Mute Tab" option on the per-tab right-click menu.

cf. http://i.imgur.com/QCM78rl.png
Aliyevs' Secret Mining Empire
Red Hat has supported POWER for a long time. Debian does. Even Mint had a PPC release. The big BSD's do. Amiga's are still on PPC haha. I think it's not a question of FOSS support by OS developers. It's the users and app that don't commit to x86 alternatives.
>>Surely you can recognize the merit in keeping domestic control of transportation

And yet we're almost completely dependent on foreign countries for oil, without which most of our transportation methods would crumble.
There's a difference between code tests though and spec verification.

Spec verification is (should be...) black-box integration testing. And yes, this is a good chance to get a second set of eyes on the spec to make sure nothing was missed in the implementation. (unit-tests can't catch missing code!)

Code tests should be more white-box and should be measured against line/code coverage instead of spec coverage. These are what I think the original devs should write, and should be 95%+ of the total test volume.

The problem with expecting testing to pick up spec errors is that it takes comes at the end of the design/build phase instead of the beginning when you can make changes easily.
While I agree that IP (patents and copyrights) are currently a farce, many creatives do make a living using IP frameworks as a backbone. And I think many of these creators view the current farce as better than nothing at all.

Regardless of accuracy, just look at how many creatives are apt to blame piracy for the various media industry declines.

So yes, the question of how a creative type can make a living without an IP framework is huge in these sorts of discussions.
>there is a little man inside your pc... and his thing is bigger than yours. Your wife knows this.

I'm supposed to believe this technology is dangerous. But the advocates are children.
From Repositories, APIs and Dependencies
Solution

1. Regulate market capitalization of corporations

2. Tax corporate revenues, not profits
Interesting concept.

Just a friendly tip about some of your homepage's display elements. You have some detailed graphics in your hero image header that would benefit from slowing the image-carousel timer down a bit.

I would also consider slowing down the timer that controls some of the other animated 'switching' elements on the page, such as the 'word-rotator' you are using to cleverly change sentences.
Show HN: All US pubs and hotels for mobile apps
When I saw the cooler I thought it was great and I would own it. But when I finally saw the price tag on Amazon, I just couldn't justify the purchase. I can't say the speaker is necessary and I wonder how much cheaper the cooler would be if I could just remove that feature.
Passengers almost always choose price over anything else. RouteHappy [0] does most of what you ask, and Google Flights has partnered with them - but I don't think the average customer really cares. Profits at the ultra low cost carriers like Spirit and Frontier are extraordinarily high for a reason.

[0] https://www.routehappy.com
At the same time, going public is usually one of the worst things a company can do for itself. With few exceptions, instead of being ok with mild profits, shareholders demand extreme amounts of profit and growth, and will bitch and moan and threaten to takeover if that doesn't happen.
Wigl: the DIY, educational, musical robot
Cool, will check it out. Thx!
I wonder what makes USDOT think a foreign national is any more or less likely to follow the rules than an enormous multi-national corporation like United or Delta?

These foreign-ownership rules do strike me as counter-productive protectionism.
Right click, mute tab.
A credit-card sized device to measure heart functioning and ECG within seconds
Yes it was. In 1910. Do you honestly expect that to always be true?
The drive motors must need some sort of air cooling.
Yes of course, thanks for the correction - I'd edit but the hour is up - going back over the case, enraging injustice.

The sum you mention was the 1st amount, on appeal this was raised to $1,920,000, then lowered to $54,000, appealed again to $1,500,000, then appealed to $54,000, appealed finally in 2013 to $220,000.

She denied ever using Kazaa and no such files were recovered from her hard drive.

Conviction was on IP address alone from MediaSentry.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Tho...

Over six years in court, mess your life up some, threats began in 2005, so 8 years of harrasment over 24 songs.

IMHO the many years she was dragged through the courts already more than sufficient.

Flippin bonkers.
I know plenty of fishermen that have spent more than $500 on coolers which do absolutely nothing more than keep cold things cold. People are willing to pay money for the tools that meet their needs.
"JavaScript must be enabled in order to use the bytejail website."

Good way to keep stubborn technical users from learning about your project, whatever it may be.
Well, the streaming is combined with DRM that makes obtaining the stream difficult.

Unprotected streams are not an issue.
Anti-Submarine Warfare Program Speed and Maneuverability Tests
The possibility I see is their semi-custom business. A cloud provider or someone else with the money can have them make one that strips out all the spyware or DRM stuff. Leaves everything else. Optionally, strips out some other baggage from backward compatibility that FOSS OS's don't even need. Preferably, though, smallest possible changes to the chip like straight up removing the wires connecting ME.
The Kickstarter charged $165 or $185 per cooler.

What I don't understand is why this was so exciting in the first place. It looks like a normal cooler with a few cheap accessories (ice crusher, blender, light, usb charger, bluetooth speaker) and it's not even very big. Why were people so damn excited about it that they were willing to put up $165 for this Sharper Image wannabe.

Their website doesn't even talk about how good it is at being a cooler. How long does ice stay frozen in the hot sun? Can you keep your meat from going back over a long weekend at the campsite? Not that there is enough room in this thing for a camping trip. It's apparently focused on the beers on the beach crowd. How the hell did this shatter Kickstarter funding records?
The problem is that what is legal is being lobbied by those who have the money to manipulate the law.

So the real scandal is what's legal not what's illegal.
To be fair, auto-braking isn't useful until you need it, and by that point you're about a half second away from smashing into another car so you don't have much time to think about it. That feature alone could reduce total crashes by 10% [1]

[1] http://www.autonews.com/article/20160128/OEM06/160129871/aut...
Windows has other user space file systems, and has for a long time. OpenAFS goes all the way back to 2000, and had a windows 95 client even[0].

Comparing libfuse to Dokan is like comparing fat16 to HAMMER. It's recent, but not the first by any stretch

https://github.com/openafs/openafs/tree/ba3d4666cbd19b56bcec...
PostgreSQL Performance Monitoring
Pay for priority boarding and sit at the front of the plane?
Techies Project – Portraits of the Underrepresented in Silicon Valley
Presumably at least some techno-optimists would agree, but suggest that transitioning to electric cars is a step towards making our bad situation better. Restructuring our cities, getting everyone to bicycle, walk, or use public transit (and killing off the auto industry, which is a significant chunk of the manufacturing economy) would be much harder to accomplish in the near future.
Bluetooth speakers are like $5. Seriously. It's not like this is some expensive Bose nonsense or like it comes with 18" subs. This is a shitty shower speaker glued into the side.
Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
Alaska Airlines flies to a lot of places that aren't on the west coast.

https://www.alaskaair.com/travelinfo/destinations

Also, they've recently put in for a route to Cuba, if I remember right.
Govt can do nothing due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Graffiti Clothing Line
The battery has a front air intake. It's smaller than one for an ICE, which might be why many HN commenters seem to have not noticed it.

(Same thing for S and X.)
1) Hyper_ offers EBS-like volume and snapshot for your container. You can failover volumes cross containers
2) Given the instance startup time, you can program the APIs to do the scaling/HA, etc.
3) Yes, think Hyper_ as a virtual container host with unlimited capacity, but under the hood, it is still a cluster of machines.
Sounds like the internet is going back to the early 2000s with mass popups? and auto playing sounds?. I recall the banner ad that made me learn how to edit my host files. It'd play a sound of a bee buzzing away on loop. I learnt how to edit host files pretty quickly, never looked back. Threw TV out soon over a decade ago too. Native ads are on the rise, that's the next wave.
Just because your parents give you a few bucks/access doesn't mean that you instantly become billionaire status!
Also, stopping the timer if a user manually presses the arrow to go back would be nice. That's a pretty common feature.
There is a relevant comment on the article, reproducing here in case it gets edited out:

"Hi DigitalEngineer,

I am a member of the PULP group as a researcher in both University of Bologna and ETH Zurich.

You are right that the tool chain and the multi-core platform have not been released in the open yet. However, we are working hard toward releasing both of them - we never intended PULPino to be the "final" step in open-sourcing the PULP platform, but merely the first step. Eventually, our plan is to release the whole platform, save of course for IPs that depend on private agreements between ETHand/or University of Bologna and other parties.

For several reasons our RISC-V toolchain could not be open-sourced together with PULPino. I cannot give a definite date, but we should be able to solve most problems related with it relatively soon, and then it will be open-sourced immediately.

For a public release of the multi-core platform (which is one of our main objectives - hence the name PULP that stands for Parallel Ultra-Low Power Platform), there will be need of a bit more time. We want this to be well polished and ready. However, parties interested in collaborating can already contact us privately (e.g. via the contacts on our website http://pulp-platform.org).

Hope this solves some of your doubts!"
Also planned obsolescence by gradually slowing the machine over time.
According to the investor slide deck [0], it's to get into the California market, which they're not dominant in. This acquisition will mean that Alaska will be #2 at SFO, and a major player at LAX.

Virgin America's aircraft are almost all leased, so they'll be easy to get rid of and consolidate into Boeing aircraft.

[0] http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?t=1&item=VHlwZT0yf...
It's not clear to me that this cooler is actually good at keeping things cold. Their kickstarter page doesn't seem to want to talk about it.

I'd thought maybe this thing had its own tiny built-in compressor and that's why it was so exciting, but it appears to be a boring old regular cooler with a bunch of cheap junk bolted on.
You can also write sets in a more compact notation in python as:

{1,2,3} & {1,2}

Which gives {1,2} as a result.
> It's apparently focused on the beers on the beach crowd. How the hell did this shatter Kickstarter funding records?

I guess you're underestimating the size of the "beers on the beach" crowd.
> "In this trove there are administrative documents that could actually be brought to public knowledge, such as records of incorporation, shareholder registers or directors or creation of bank accounts. But there is especially a lot of personal information, such as private postal and email addresses, scans of passports for internal and external correspondences Mossack Fonseca, with many private items (such as vacation rentals, electricity bills or, more sadly, the discovery of cancer)".

https://www.reddit.com/live/wp1fvdxxwb45/updates/02ec05f2-fa...
People are already doing it. India has a thriving secondary market if you are not aware. Many can't afford to buy new phones so they buy second hand phones from these markets. But this buying and selling of used devices happens within the Indian market i.e. the seller of the old phone is an Indian and so is the buyer.

The problem is that this is the first time a foreign company has requested the Government to grant license to sell second hand phones in the secondary market. What this essentially means is that Apple would dump second hand phones it receives from it's recycling policy World over into Indian secondary market. If the Government allows this then it sets a dangerous precedent with all other electronic manufacturers wanting a license to sell e-waste in India's secondary market. This is already happening with e-waste being smuggled into India illegally creating environmental hazards. Read this article published in 2007: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-china-idUSKCN0V4200. Imagine the amount of e-waste already imported illegally into India since 2007.

This has nothing to do with poverty or human development index. US environmental laws are strict enough to not allow e-waste from accumulating in US soil. So Apple is using it's "Recycling policy" to dump e-waste in India which doesn't yet have strict environmental laws. If Apple extends it's "Recycling policy" to second hand phones there would be no barrier to entry into India's secondary market. It's up to Apple to clarify it's policy.
I suspect at some point they will simply drop Intel for their own (ARM) platform. I think moving will be easy once all app store submissions are in bitcode.
> it's ubiquitous across hosting services

So? No one needs 10 different hosting services. You only need one, and you've been able to choose a (cheap!) one that offers Postgres for many years now.

> easy to use

I strongly disagree, and the entire article is basically rebutting this assertion. It seems easy to use, but silently failing, breaking promises, and being noncompliant with standards are all issues that make MySQL harder to use.

> very fast once you've tuned it a bit

You can tune Postgres as well. It actually optimizes its queries much better than MySQL does, so you can go longer without starting to optimize.

> and there's clients for pretty much every language

Unless you're using some fringe-y language, this isn't an issue either. Some languages have gotten a Postgres client before MySQL, simply because their communities have a culture that's more similar to Postgres.
That’s not contradictory. It may well be that the leak contains that and personal information that would be literally unreasonable to publish.

That’s what ethics is all about: weighing different things against each other.

The journalists widely shared the data with other journalists and outlets to make it easier to work through the data but probably also to combat the problem of being blind in certain ways …
Tay is nothing new. Eliza would be verboten in Germany by now, _except_ Eliza doesn't "learn" from interacting with people like Tay does.

Kids understand how to use systems. They don't necessarily understand how those systems work, though a few do.
if they're already profitable (original co-founders) then I'd say you might be offered %5. Could go up to %10 if they think you can help double/triple that profit. If it's only to take care of the technical aspect of the company, then %5 seems reasonable. Salary might be competitive though I believe.
From Merriam Webster:

Full Definition of discourage

dis·cour·aged dis·cour·ag·ing

transitive verb
1 : to deprive of courage or confidence : dishearten <was discouraged by repeated failure>
2
a : to hinder by disfavoring <trying to discourage absenteeism>
b : to dissuade or attempt to dissuade from doing something <tried to discourage her from going>

To hinder by disfavoring. Foreign investors are disfavored -- they can invest, but under different (and less favorable, hence disfavored) terms. They are hindered in the process. You can make a case that this hindrance is a good thing, if you want to, I guess. But you're trying to do so while at the same time claiming it doesn't exist.
Letting Users Add Custom Domains on Heroku
Is it really hard to pilot a spaceship? You maneuver it out of the solar system (should not be _that_ difficult, certainly not if your destination is in a direction outside of the ecliptic), point it in the right direction, move to full throttle, and let it do its thing for a few centuries while you sleep or watch history on earth go by.

Yes, there's a risk you may hit something and be killed, but per passenger mile, I expect it to be even safer than the space shuttle.
This is a real concern. But another one is if the media outlets are being biased on their choice of which data they choose to disclose. They haven't done a good job in showing they are being correct up to this moment, but let's give them some more time and see.
After Xbox dev mode, I think Sony needs to be more open about their console development.

This might just be stepping stone in the right direction.
It is actually a grey area since the start. Today they get a zerox copy of your entire ID card which includes Identity Number as well but they should not do that.

The terrorist example I gave came from this grey area in fact. IIRC 2 years ago it was in the news that terrorists open up new SIM cards with regular citizens' information. When I checked it with my info, there was only 1 registered which was mine, when I checked my father however, had 4 SIMs registered and only 2 of them were his.
Mesa 11.2.0
I used pgloader for a project, and it was harder to use (and lossier) than I was expecting. Make sure you carefully look what you're losing in the conversion and are able to add it back (either during conversion by hooking into pgloader or after conversion).
Most of the houses in these areas are already hooked up for water, gas, electricity, and telecom - and the power comes from throwing a power line to the roof. Bringing it down to ground level would be cheap-ish if you're already tearing up the street, but there isn't all that much new construction, either.

Yes, you can slowly convert the whole area to support street-level chargers over the next few decades - but until you do, having chargers on ~20% of the streets would be next-to worthless. There is a dire shortage of street level parking in this neighborhood - if you limit your possible spots to the ones where chargers are available, it's quite unlikely that you'll be able to get a space.
Agreed. Alaskan was one of the first to have check in kiosks and app base checkin. They just released a pre-print bag check tag as well. Best experience of any airline I have flown people and technology wise. ( I'm a former Delta Platinum miles member )
Reread the comment you are replying too. They are talking about the increased time to turn a aircraft around. There are lots of direct and indirect costs associated with keeping a airplane on the ground stuck at a gate.
> Reservations are not sales

Straw man. No one has said that. What they've said is Tesla just got a couple hundred million in free financing.
Cat 5e is 1Gbps
@mattbeckman said you could do it before anything starts playing, is that possible?
Still, it matters how that process happens and who drives it. There have been stories for weeks about what a shitty boss Tony Fadell is. There's nothing about businesses making money that necessitates that sort of thing.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11362442 .