skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Breaking down this story as someone naïve to the company and coming from the equity side.

> Comvest blocked other capital sources, jacked up fees, interfered wherever possible (among other things, they inserted an incredibly destructive and incompetent full-time advisor, and they simply delayed and dragged when time was of the essence).

Lenders are not shareholders. Unless you violated your indenture, they shouldn't have been given the right to "jack up fees" (interest?). They shouldn't have been given veto rights over corporation actions (again, unless Karmaloop was in violation of its indenture).

> Comvest came after me personally for $5+ million [guaranty]. Comvest knew I didn't have any money - I had literally liquidated everything

Never personally guarantee company loans. (Curious to hear who Karmaloop and the author's counsel were when this was signed.) If you do, maintain (a) insurance or (b) savings to cover the liability. Either way, this could make Comvest's claim a consumer loan, thereby qualifying for regulatory action, e.g. from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and/or the author's state banking regulator(s).

> A bank can legally make you sign a release of any wrongdoing the bank may ever undertake in the future (!!) as a condition of their loan

If you signed under duress (e.g. without counsel representing you), or believe Comvest did something illegal, you can terminate "for Cause". There are lots of ways to sue or arbitrate around this kind of language. If, on the other hand, you broke your indenture - that's why you hire counsel before signing.

In summary, venture debt isn't inherently evil. It is debt, however - lenders should be seen as being separate and distinct from shareholders. Throwing in warrants can increase the pain a lender is willing to take before they drop the axe.

That said, this doesn't sound like predatory lending. (Or venture debt; more like private equity). It sounds like Comvest got tired of management barely making payments while threatening Karmaloop's future ability to pay, found Karmaloop in violation of its indenture (or some consulting contract Comvest and Karmaloop may have signed for the "fees"), and decided to see if they could salvage the investment.
If you control the client, multiple formats are unnecessary. As we transition to gigabit the need for multiple bitrates becomes diminished, but even now I would argue you could get by just fine with just 2. Most TV shows and movies you torrent today are uploaded with 2-3 quality tiers anyway.
Fleeing Gangs, Central American Refugees Fight Deportation from the U.S
I would suggest that you consider 'voting with your feet' so to speak. You are, after all, ultimately paying for that wasted energy with you backblaze fee.
Basically, it's an alternative to the "app store" model and the "web site" model that's more in tune with the social habits we've come to adopt. It remains to be seen exactly how the interfaces will look, what kind of "AI" etc, but text-based communication (CLI-like, but less difficult) with a "contact" is in many ways nicer than the other models of service interaction.
Not so much as you might think, I'm pretty much the same as are most of the programmers I know my age IRL, been programming since I was 7 so nearly 30 years, have no intention of buying VR unless it's useful for work, I'm past the point of buying tech because it's new, I want genuinely useful and less hassle than the alternative.
Right, but for a ponzi scheme contract, that's not a great outcome. Or, say, a crypto-currency, one of the sample apps in Ethereum documentation.

Either way, you have a trust problem -- who shall be trusted to transfer out all the value the contract holds?
Which is more believable? An organisation whose charter is to gain, analyse, and make use of information:

a) Deleted the document despite having extensive procedures for proper document handling, or

b) Is lying* about deleting "the only copy"

*Lying - mostly as a form of manipulation - is literally part of the job description for intelligence agencies.

Who actually believes a)? :(
Solve control challenges with JavaScript
And I guarantee that none of the Rust commits from before 2011 survive to this day, because the compiler was rewritten from scratch in 2011. :P A different argument could say that Go dates back to 1995, because Go is essentially an evolution of Rob Pike's language Limbo.
This is really incredible! I can't believe that these manuscripts have survived for that long. One thing I was never sure of was if the Mughal empire established universities/libraries/archives for scholarly work. It seems like this was more a work of art meant for the king and nobles rather than for the public though.
I have no idea, but I saw this tweet

> @Pinboard they did talk about privacy though: the video app shows your camera feed to whoever calls you before your call starts

https://twitter.com/computerality/status/732995563034169345
The New Zenefits – Becoming the Compliance Company
Why isn't this a licensing deal to established content deliverers? It seems to only alleviate provider cost. If this actually does solve a problem, why wouldn't they just work on getting Netflix to buy into it?
The Man Who Built Google’s First Self-Driving Car Is Now a Trucker
Why would localization have a big impact? In this day and age, if there's corruption to be contended with, it'll be with large monied interests that often span localities.

Honestly, the people being policed simply don't have input into oversight. That's the root cause of corruption.
Whiteboard Interview Guide
Don't lawyers do this to real-life contracts?
About $10-$20/day on 1.5M pageviews/month. My cpm/ctr sucks.
From my review of some of these contracts, even fairly obvious flaws are not being exploited (yet).

So, flaws will become known, and presumably there will be ratings and trust ratings and so on eventually. In the interim, though, some of the flawed contracts moved well over $100k in their first week of existence. That seems worth paying attention to.

I would propose flaws like these are unavoidable, unless you can pay what NASA paid. And remediation techniques should be developed urgently, not at some later date.
TLDR: Google's following in Samsung's Gear VR footsteps with OS optimizations/additional sensors in devices to improve VR experience.
There's no way I'm putting something like this, collecting data directly for Google in my house.

Anyone else have privacy concerns?
There is a big difference between not being profitable as a business by either reinvesting revenue or using loss leaders to grow market share and losing money on every single product you sell.
A proper response indeed. The wolf often comes in shepherd's clothing.
Vector and recently Tensor are pretty awesome.
Accusing other users of astroturfing is not allowed on HN. If you think you see genuine abuse, you're welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can investigate. But slinging such accusations to score points in an argument isn't allowed. Usually people do this merely because they don't like someone else's view, and that's not a legitimate move to pull in a discussion here, no matter how wrong someone else is.
Definitely the culture. It seems to be a Java axiom that you should never use one object when eight will do.

I've never seen another community that would actually have a builder for the configuration for the factory for the settings for a class.
I am not sure you two are idiots or just trolling. I am referring to the fact that the guy is trying to steal traffic.
54 Mbps / London / Virgin Media

Same w/ Speedtest (~50Mb / ~2Mb, 16ms)
Killed in the line of duty
I worked on Facebook's Trending team
They are selling it. Goldman Sachs is selling the stock on behalf of Tesla.
This is the correct answer. Labor and materials costs, nationwide, exceed $300 per square foot (and often much higher) for a high-rise project [1]. Once you factor in efficiency, land, insurance, financing, sales and marketing, and all of the other costs of a project, it's difficult to make a profit until costs start pushing the $1000/sq.ft. range. That's luxury housing.

However broken SF's development process may be, it isn't the limiting factor to new development. SPUR estimates the regulatory costs for a San Francisco project at about 20% of the total costs [2], and most of that is the low-income housing set-aside (which is ~10-15%, varying by project). The majority of the costs of any new project are land, labor and materials. And San Francisco truly is an exception, in that it's one of the few cities in the world where there's no more undeveloped land.

People love to make generalizations based on community meetings (which are always a circus, in any city) and the cost to do a bathroom renovation or alter a garage door, but to a large construction project, these kinds of bureaucratic costs are a fixed expense. Land, labor and materials drive everything.

Edit: I'm stating facts here, and citing sources for those facts, directly from developers. I have no idea how you can downvote factual information. If you want to have a reasonable conversation about housing in SF, you have to take these basic economic questions into account. They matter.

[1] https://westnorth.com/2014/03/18/between-rocks-and-a-tall-pl...
[2] http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2014-02-11...
The "API for advertising" you described is called native advertisement and is already a thing out there :)
I'm on Grande's gigabit and am getting ~180-200 Mbps over 802.11ac a couple rooms away. Sadly I don't have an ethernet dongle for my macbook pro to test a wired connection.
Maybe you weren't downvoted over the terminology. Putting the year in titles isn't required if it's an evergreen article (i.e., not news, not timely).
Should farmers or city pay to clean the water? Iowa may decide
What I like about the tablet is the size, the battery life, the switching between landscape (generally: composing w/ keyboard) and portrait (generally: reading long-form content) modes. A 10" form factor plus bluetooth keyboard is sufficient for some Real Work (though that's hugely crippled by system and software limitations).

As a comms device, on a sufficiently fast WiFi/broadband connection, it's also useful. I've not done that often, but it's been done, and I was impressed.

The OS is a mess in many particulars.

It handles external storage poorly. It doesn't multi-taske well. Multi-window mode is specific to application. The default shell userland is unforgiveably anemic (Termux, one of a few available add-ons is much better). Lack of comprehensive privacy controls, or insight, is a huge issue.

The app "ecosystem" is pathologically broken. I've written on this at G+, my feeling is it needs to be scrapped.

Samsung's own tweaks are also pretty bad. The fact that the device is entirely locked down from a bootloader perspective (it was a bit of a panic on-the-road buy) has become beyond annoying. Inability to remove certain stock apps is a major concern.

Google's "Play" store is beyond annoying.

I'm watching for news of Firefox OS and Ubuntu's mobile offerings. I'm not particularly hopeful. A small laptop _might_ be a suitable replacement, if I can park Linux on it (without systemd).

Mostly it's a very effective advertisement against itself.

And more generally: the tech world very, very, very badly needs to find a non-advertising business model.
THIS. OMG, the anti-development mob on Nextdoor is horrifying. I live in southern Marin and you would not believe the hysterical and shameless level of NIMBYism. People in my area use the platform to try to block new single family residences from being built even on privately-owned parcels, and post to Nextdoor urging everyone to come to the planning meetings to try to block the permits. After all, the person who wanted to build the house was a developer who lived in Sacramento, not a local person, and everybody freaked. Why, there was even a possibility that he might build five or ten houses in that area further down the line (the horror, the horror).

When I posted comments objecting to the attitude, one of the local anti-development residents apparently ran a deep background check on me and posted to Nextdoor that I surely must be opposed because my family must be real estate developers and have some kind of vested interest. Actually, my grandfather started a commercial real estate company on the other side of the country, not residential real estate nor any kind of new development. But the implication was clear: try to block NIMBYism and people will actually dox you (albeit poorly), to the point they will seek out your deceased maternal grandfather's name and business.
I mean, at this point you have to define what an 'ancestor' is then. HGT kinda breaks the rules of what an ancestor is. With us, it's a little easier, we have tons of genes and a few viral infections don't break the concept of ancestor. When you have 100 genes total, 75 of which are from HGT, 10 from viruses, and 15 from the mother cell, who can be called the ancestor then? Remember, this was WAY back when too. Modern prokaryotes have some complex stuff to deal with all this, the first million generations did not (maybe). In that early soup, the basic concepts of what life is today don't have relevance. What is a mother cell anyways? Was it really gene transfer, or was that just what they all naturally did all the time? ETC.
Ooh, a chance to plug a toy side-project! I wrote "pingd" [1] to ping an address continuously and dump (timestamp, latency, dropped) tuples to a SQLite database, and also report results (tables only, no plots) via a web interface. Slightly less hacky than "ping host > logfile". Also to shame Comcast.

[1] https://github.com/cfallin/pingd (in Rust, requires liboping)
Synchronous systems have the same problems you describe in your first paragraph, but worse (they tolerate less failures), so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

I don't buy the rest of your post for two reasons. First, partitions are not only problematic for writes. Externally consistent systems also cannot generally serve reads during a partition either. Furthermore, it is not true that partitions are not a realistic worry - i know of at least one large system that encounters partitions on a weekly basis.

Second, you seem to be arguing that for some reason it is easier to solve consensus at the application level. This is simply not true, otherwise we wouldn't have consistent databases.
Inequality, Bargaining Power, and Startups
FYI:

"He stole very important information that has fallen into the wrong hands so I think he should not be brought home without facing the music." --Hillary Clinton

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/13/clinton-sande...
The comment you're replying to was bad enough, but turning up the rhetorical indignation like this takes the thread in exactly the wrong direction. HN needs fewer grandiose denunciations and generic tangents, and more concrete and thoughtful discourse.
The mugger would also get all of your separate credit cards. Coin doesn't have any disadvantages here.
Only if the phone is connected to a charger, at least on mine. If it could always do "ok Google" on a phone regardless of whether or not it is connected, it would be infinitely more useful. Since I opted in to use Google Now in the first place, I actually want that.
Cool developers game in I/O – firebase.foo
I imagine Facebook, Google (and Amazon - make no doubt they're gunning for this) are tired of sharecropping on Apple's platform. They see Apple as an unnecessary gatekeeper.

iOS is still king for apps, but this move benefits the above players at the expense of Apple (Google seems very hungry to cannibalize the Play Store if it can make the bot store work).

Furthermore (specifically for Google and Amazon), if text-based bots can work out, they're both making a play for the Echo/Home market, bypassing smartphones devices entirely.
> http://journalstar.com/legislature/a-positive-step-forward-b...

Umm, not sure if it's just me, but this link doesn't even let me read the article without answering a survey like "Do you currently have auto insurance?"
tbh I felt like realizing what you meant earlier at the end of my comment. I should have ps'd it.
I did a part-time master's in CS while working full time. I was able to take one course a term and it was really rewarding. I could dig into the material for each course without worrying about 2 or 3 other classes - really nice. I also wrote a thesis rather than just taking credits. It took me a lot longer (1.5 years start to finish on thesis), but it was immensely rewarding. I learned so much beyond my thesis + class topics - a lot more than I expected when I started out. Also helped that my employer paid for the whole thing!

Never thought a part-time PhD was possible (US), but maybe its worth thinking about.
Only one sentence explanation unless I missed something. Its an Echo competitor.
The usage of the term 'requirements' is traditional in the software development industry. It may be unusual for many teams, but it is common in the literature as well as larger, older organizations.
The bigger deal for me is that they are licensing their brand to make new phones and tablets. I'm still sad about the Maemo line of phones, but I'm hoping they bring back a brand of linux phones after this new deal.
> Once code becomes FDA approved, you don't change it.

And that's why medical software is so buggy.
Yeah, that might work too. That would be pretty clever.
Pandas Are More Plentiful Than Blockchain Developers – Blockchain News
For sure, but I think there's opportunity/vulnerability in bitcoin too. From the top of my mind I recall reading about people grabbing coins quickly from: bad random number generators in at least android, brainwallets/rainbow-tabley private keys, non-standard script for fun or error to the tune of having to solve "2+2"

A little similar to how bad guys hook onto github feeds and instantly exploit leaked aws keys etc
My phone has had present SMS responses since my Motorola RAZR. I've never used them. I can't imagine why I would start now.
GA is also a great way to get yourself killed. Whereas modern passenger air travel is the safest form of travel known to man.
Exactly, considering the way language works with different language sentence conjugation, even simple things like adjectives in most romance languages have relative to the noun and article, a translation to a language like English in realtime would sound like someone with a head injury.
A phrase like "Did you see you see the big red truck? It was driving very fast would be:
¿Viste el gran camión rojo? Conducía muy rápido.

In real time this would be in English:
See the big truck red? Driving very fast.

That's just scratching the surface with the most basic communication. There's simply no way this product can work with any real accuracy.
My work blocks a lot of ad sites, completely out of my control. Forbes and Wired are two where I have to just skip the links, if I'm browsing from there.
This is an absolutely fair observation.
There are also airplane bombings, weapon and drug smuggling, human trafficking.
Isn't the rule in the us the "appearance of conflict of interest", which is even stronger than actual actual collusion?
Or go with the more direct route, ala Snow Crash, and drive around with a nuclear motorcycle sidecar.
My apologies
That's a fantastic improvement in word choice that I plan to steal.
My bad! I went by the old Samsung Note-based price range. Had no idea they lowered the price that much.
This cultural reference I get even less than the first one, but I'll just ignore the references.

I'm not sure if you're missing the context. This branch of the thread forked off me asking the same thing as another poster, namely the likelihood of being bothered by IP or Copyright claims for a real, proper clean room implementation of the protocol, zero code copied, assuming there is sufficient documentation available.

Oracle vs Google is relevant, but it seems we're talking past each other and maybe I'm missing a point you're making.
It used to be we had to go outside, find a newspaper box, and put a quarter in it to get a paper. And it was probably just the local paper.
How Startup Can Build Brand Loyalty and Easily Exceed Customer Expectations
Sorry, I'm just eager to deploy Frinkiac.

I simply disagree with you that Moxie Marlinspike is in any way accountable for what Oracle does with Java.

I also take exception to the argument that Open Whisper Systems needs to do something to mitigate your false impression that they've disallowed developers from using their documentation. They have not, nobody has credibly claimed otherwise, even the Wire people, and so I don't think it's proper to suggest that OWS take this "opportunity" to address a fictitious concern.
Looking in the Amazon description, 6.6 pounds each?
Netflix throttles Verizon Wireless to 600kbps at the A/V codec level to minimize data usage:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/netflix-throttles-vi...
Google’s Allo – Blue vs. Green Bubbles
Holy shit, you've just convinced me to reconsider having fingerprint unlocking active on my phone...
The Improvisational Oncologist (2016)
Music Industry Buried more than 150 Startups–Now they are Left with the Giants
> "Working at Facebook, even as a contractor, was supposed to be the opportunity of a lifetime."

Does anyone really say that working at a tech giant as a non-engineer is an opportunity of a lifetime?

I have had multiple friends who worked at Google on AdSense sales, and it certainly didn't do anything for their careers. I can't imagine it did much for their savings, either.
The author did promise a series of followups explaining in greater detail what happened. I'd wait for those before passing judgment.
What queue systems guarantee non-duplicated message delivery?

At-least-once and at-most-once delivery can done with relatively easy hand-off strategies, but I don't see how you would guarantee exactly-once delivery between the message queue and your application.
It seems every google product is more invasive than the last. It makes me wonder if google sees a golden opportunity or is pushed into this themselves. I get the feeling people aren't really clamoring for these types of invasive products.

It reminds me of webcams in laptops. Overnight it appeared that manufacturers were including them as a non-optional component. Yet it never seems to be something the public really cares for at all.
"hile he can be very irritating when he touts out loud that he was right against every other analyst... We should conceded that he was remarkably good at predicting the outcome of the appeal."

I'm not sure what analysts you are talking about. Since the appeal was to the federal circuit, pretty much everyone i'm aware of thought google would lose hard.

"And while i don't agree on him on every points I'm pretty sure that the ruling about copyrightability of API is a very good one and might one day prove beneficial to the FOSS community.
"

We are going to really strongly disagree on that.

"I give to Mueller that he's probably better than many to understand complexity's of theses matters."

I also see no evidence this is correct either. He pretty much has no insight into the way people work in any real basis, only what he thinks he can sell to people.

He has literally no real software experience, he was a writer :)
I honestly didn't find it that hard to understand as they recently released a machine learning library that started with a T.
Cost has totally different determinants at different scales. At the smallest scales, fixed costs overwhelm variable costs. As you scale up and architectural needs change, there are steps in the cost function. Just because something is cost effective at one scale doesn't mean it's cost effective at all scales.

Personally, I think peer to peer streaming is most interesting for open source projects. You can host static code for free and then use something like this to do streaming. The developer pays nothing, and bandwidth fees are born entirely by the user.
"they're selling at a loss but making it up on volume"