skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your first point is not true. In the absence of partitions, all "eventually consistent" data stores that I know of will give you strong consistency. The eventual consistency bit only comes into play if a problem occurs. (It's probably also worth noting that many RDBMS replication strategies won't give you strong consistency at all - even in ideal circumstances.)

I suppose you could retry if a write fails (e.g., can't reach a quorum), but you could theoretically end up retrying forever (and 10 seconds or so is forever as far as an interactive user is concerned)... eventually you need to either fail or write inconsistently. So we're just delaying the inevitable.

Also if you're accepting quorum writes to the "major partition" you still have to repair the "minor partition" when it comes back online. There's no traditional DB that implements the sort of read-repair/hinted-handoff/anti-entropy mechanics that Cassandra, Voldemort, and the various proprietary big data stores use.
What he's talking about is not news, but analysis. The Economist _really_ shines here as a model.

News isn't dead, only our consumption patterns have changed and it is definitely still more mainstream than being limited to news junkies, I don't know why everyone keeps saying that. Like, ask anyone if they watch the news, and the answer is no, but we're all on Hacker News or digg or insert_community_of_choice here and consuming "news" in other ways.

I think that twitter will probably be the platform that the next generation "news" app is built on. What it will do, and who it will appeal to are open questions...
It seems the article misses the point of outings with the boys. Men tend not to bring things up unless there is some discussion about how to fix it. 4 dudes can't fix someone's health problems, but they can go fishing, which at least makes the now pretty good, even though the immediate future might not be. Having good people around you reminds you that if you did come across something that could be fixed, the guy next to you in the fishing boat would help out.
Interesting! I wonder if people know this instinctively, or we just sort of pattern match in the background and pick up on it.
I wonder if this is rejected to cripple an app that builds on googles picasa..
Darkreading.com persistent XSS vulnerability
darkreading.com was found vulnerable to persistent XSS injected in published articles. Details are available at http://secureappdev.blogspot.com/2010/04/darkreadingcom-vulnerable-to-persistent.html
This article seems like it belongs on some sleazy askmen.com type of site rather than the WSJ.

There are a number of things wrong with the logic here. These are sweeping generalizations that in my experience don't come close to reality. If there is any truth to this, I could see it only existing in select situations as described in the article like poker night or going to a football game with a group of men. People behave differently in groups than they do in one on one situations.

Also, as raju mentioned, I'm sure that a good amount of this is cultural. Even within western culture there are vastly differing cultural groups. Generalizations like this simply don't work, and I think it's harmful to entertain "stories" like this.
The case that I have to retry indefinitely will only occur when the partition is permanent. And in that case an eventually consistent system will not help either, because clients will not see the writes (as long as the partition exists), so the eventual consistent system doesn't offer me any advantage.
What's wrong with this code? (Symbolically executing C with LLVM's KLEE)
I am a racist : Good Math, Bad Math
Forgive me if I'm being dense, but I'm not certain what that has to do with the point being made. Could you explain it in greater detail?

My understanding is that there are entire classes of programs where "let's put it on a website" is not a viable method. You can write many types of apps that way, certainly, but you pretty much give up anything so much as pretending to be performance. Additionally, it prevents you from doing anything particularly low-level - if you were desperate enough, you could always set up a web interface to gcc or something, but that won't help you if you want to hack on a device driver or something. Systems programmers are people too, you know. ;)
Cappuccino 0.8 released
Given the transparent nature of Javascript, it’s entirely possible that
developers could just rip the framework from Apple’s guide and start stabbing
away — but they’d be doing it without documentation of any sort.

And a necessary licence. I don't think Apple would be best pleased if you stole their code when they weren't planning to release it publicly. Which I doubt they are, as they'd much rather you develop a native application.
Read Mark Suster's blog, cover to cover:
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/

Start here: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/pitching-a-vc/
What?

I've got an HTC Hero with 200-some megs of RAM. Open a couple apps, thing slows way down and gets choppy.
Tangled Up in Tools: What's wrong with libraries and what to do about it
I don't think they're trying to make the experience worse for users per-se, but trying to drive customers to use the native Apple applications.

Why?

Here's my theory. Let's say you have a fantastic application such as Web Albums HD (I'm assuming it's fantastic for the purpose of my argument). Then presumably once there are competitive tablets on other platforms, the developers would port their application to other platforms. The user would say, "Gee, I can get this application on any platform. So what's the big deal with the Apple tablet".

But if you end up primarily using Apple applications because they are the only version available due to app store restrictions (web browser, email, voicemail) or they have a superior experience due to app store restrictions (photos, ebook readers), you'll be less likely to switch to another platform.
No, they don't. Stop repeating this lie. They reject App Store applications which allow users to load in external code which is executed.
By these standards, hasn't Steve Jobs been notching up final victories over Woz for at least 25 years? In fact, I'm pretty sure I've read people claiming it repeatedly! As far back as the early 80s, the Mac marks the turning point where Apple became primarily focused on a self-contained, don't-touch-the-tech computing appliance. The introduction of the Mac, and the way it won out over the Apple II successors, also marks Woz's personal influence in Apple effectively coming to an end.

It's not as if this is a recent idea Apple's had. If anything, OSX's relative openness was the aberration, given their history. Despite how exciting we find the Apple II era, I tend to think of the Mac as a bigger part of their history, certainly in terms of the Mac era's influence on today's company.
gaúcho here
For all the rights and wrongs of the Flash/No Flash argument this author doesn;t appear to understand any of the technical issues with Flash on the iPad/iPhone.

Indeed the article's headline suggests he has identified problems with Apple's argument - but I can't see any in the text.

Next.
That's incorrect. An invention is infringing an issued patent if it includes all the elements of any independent claim.

Dependent claims, in this case 2 - 5 (the ones that refer to another claim), add specificity, but do not narrow the scope of the original independent claim. They exist as a legal tactic; helping to ensure that a more specific variant of the invention is covered, in the event that the parent claim is later invalidated (ruled too broad, revoked upon discovery of prior art, struck after re-examination, etc).
This type of passive-aggressive attitude towards end-users is not helpful. People who buy the iPad are not doing so because they are too dumb to be programmers. They are buying it because it meets their needs, not yours. To you it's a dumbed-down device. To them, it may be the first computer they can confidently use without your help.
Awesome, thanks! I have his blog on my RSS list, so I'll check out that article and read from there.
And both were the most beautiful machines ever built...

It never ceases to sadden me.
I'm a third-generation programmer too.

My dad's dad was a programmer, as a desk-captain in the Navy right after WWII. He was still programming well into his retirement in the early nineties, writing little database apps for his PC. My dad started programming while working on his PhD at Berkley in the early sixties, well before UNIX.

My mom's stepmom was an early non-technical employee of a computer accounting startup in the seventies (shared mainframes!), grew more and more technical as they transitioned to PCs, and eventually became the CEO. The company sold to Intuit a while back and she was a VP there for a few years. My mom started programming around the same time, her high school had access to a PDP somewhere.

My parents met when they both worked at a PC database vendor (Condor) in the early eighties, got married, and founded a startup together by poaching one of their customers (which lasted about 20 years).
I must respectfully beg to differ.

Few the women I know are "emotionally weak." They do tend to be less stoic than men, but that is very different from weak, and I suspect that is at least partially cultural. I do think men are more stoic about dealing with minor problems in life (in general), but that has to do with how they express it, not how well they actually deal with it.

I also tend to find that men, in general, are less wordy, especially about emotional topic, but I think that is less about men being better at nonverbal communication. In fact, I find in general, the women I know are stronger in that area. The difference is that women tend to spend a lot of words agreeing as a cultural means of bonding, where men don't. This doesn't mean they do it for communication, they do it for affirmation of the relationship.

I will agree that, in general, women are more interested in feelings and relationships then men, but not because these are simple things or unimportant, or even that most men see them that way. It is simply a difference of focus. For instance, I do not find medicine "a simple thing unworthy of too much brainpower", I rather find that it is outside my domain and I let doctors worry about that while I worry about normalization and effecient storage structures...
Agreed, he doesn't even mention the #1 technical problem that Adobe is trying to solve in Flash Player 10.1, which is still in beta and not in a publicly usable format: CPU usage.

If he can't even acknowledge that Flash 10, in it's current production form, requires excessive CPU utilization which would drain the iPad's battery too quickly, he doesn't deserve a read.

This whole article is just another business type that doesn't "get it", expecting Apple to support some feature to prop up his dying media company.
I don't have any direct experience, but my understanding is that:

VCs will give an amount that seems appropriate to getting to "the next stage", however that is defined. Their take is determined by the pre-money valuation and the amount given. A web startup might be able to sell 20% of the company for $1 million, implying a $4m pre-money valuation. Biotech startups typically give up 90-95% in order to get $20-40m invested.

VCs will want to know where their money is spent, and generally want the CEO to pay himself $125-175k. Paying the CEO a million, if not vetoed, would quickly ruin the relationship with the VCs, which you do not want to break.

Also, and this cannot be stressed enough: watch out for downright evil terms such as participating preferred and multiple liquidation preferences. VCs usually ask for a 1x liquidation preference, meaning that they take out their investment at par before anyone else gets paid. (This only makes sense, because otherwise you could sell on a down round, liquidating but screwing the VC). However, evil VCs will ask for a multiple. So, on $4m invested, the liquidation preference might be $8 million, meaning that if you sell at $7.5 million, you get nothing. Another evil term is participating preferred, which means that they get an equity-based share after taking the liquidation preference. So if you take $2 million for 40% of your company at 2x with participating preferred, then sell at $8 million, the VC gets $4 million plus 40% of the remainder ($5.6 million) instead of the $3.2 they deserve-- and you, the founders, just got ripped off. These kinds of terms exist because, although there are a lot of great VCs, there are also a lot of silver-spoon entitled shits who actually believe they deserve that sort of thing for the gift of their existence.
Exactly! If the wife in the story wanted to know why her husband didn't talk about any of the various men's problems on their fishing trip, she could have just asked the rhetorical question "how would talking about the problem while fishing make the problem go away?"

I will talk to a friend about a problem only if they can help solve it. I have absolutely no desire to try to get empathy or sympathy.
Why do I even have to care what other people like their computer like? Lots of people like TV, too, and I don't - but I am not scrambling to create fancy TV shows.
Well... At least you can emulate a Symbolics with a PC or, with some luck and effort, on FPGA.

Sadly, you can't do so with a Blackbird or a Concorde...

Oh... And they had no cursor keys.
Yeah, but building your own widgets is suicide. It'll be good for games, not much else.
In the UK, there's The Week

http://www.theweek.co.uk/
John Biggs of CrunchGear reviews the iPad
The Farmville segment is already well covered by a billion odd native games.

Porn will adapt and already is doing so; HTML5 is going to be a better alternative to Flash so they will convert eventually.

But more importantly; people don't buy a phone based on it's ability to browse porn sites :)

(honestly; I know this is a tired argument but I dont notice not having flash on my iPhone. So much so I now only have one PC left with flash installed "just in case")
Or release an App.
Or release content as a book.
Or sign on with any of the mobile ad providers.
...
http://www.sleddriver.com/biography.html
Toronto HN Meetup - Let's pick a date
After the recent HN article on which countries we all come from, it came out that there is a definite need for Toronto hackers to meet up to masterfully plan the destruction and downfall of "social media" gurus.

Just kidding, lets get together and talk about hacking, startups, and other geekery. My favourite place for this type of thing is Sin and Redemption, a fantastic pub with amazing beer selection and moderate prices, but I'm sure there are plenty of places around.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Am3Hh0VwEoxOdGRWNnM0cUZPNzZfdGtsNnQyd2x0VlE&hl=en is a spreadsheet we can get organized around.
Reading that I tried to think about what is the progress in the iPad, and really couldn't think of much. Except that it is closed. Portable - done by netbooks. Touchscreen - appearing in Notebooks by now, too, it's obvious that they can make for a nice GUI. Also, closed computing environments have been around before (gaming consoles). So what really is new about the iPad?

In any case, I don't see why I have to care about progress if that progress doesn't care about me. Maybe because of the iPad I'll be back to becoming a weird minority again? So what, as long as I'll have fun doing what I do.
Not sure why he's being downvoted. As an avid gamer, I can verify that most foreigners who speak English don't care enough to try to write properly. I'm not bashing, I'm just saying, from my observed experience, that is the case.

For example, I once bought virtual money for an online game called Ragnarok Online. The sellers I interacted with appeared to be from China, and they all spoke pretty much like the guy in the article. These were probably adults, since they had accounts to receive (real-life) money transferred to them. And this is just one example over many years of gaming.

So based on experience, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that he was in fact at least 20-30 years old.

Does any of this matter? Nope. I'm just trying to work up the motivation to implement a particularly annoying feature, so I'm chilling here talking about randomness. :)
Maybe those APIs will be available in 4.0, and Apple wants to discourage the roll-your-own approach to maintain system-wide look-and-feel?
Tell HN: Accepted to DreamIt for Summer. Looking for Hacker to join us.
We're looking for a front-end guru (Flash, AJAX) to join us for the DreamIt program. Expertise in media streaming (FMS, Wowza, etc) is a MAJOR plus.

Ideally we'd like to find hackers to join as fully committed co-founders. If you want part-time/contract work or an internship, we're open to that too.

LearnBat has created the most interactive e-learning platform in the market, bringing live video/audio, online test materials, and collaborative whiteboards using a tablet interface. The app is currently on Flash and iPad platforms (not in App Store yet)

email san@learnbat.com - thanks yall
Were you being sarcastic? I'm not trying to sound like a dick, but I truly can't tell. (I would have asked in a private email, but you provide none.)
Thank you for the perspective from a different culture.

I was struck by the articles "Oh! That's too bad" part too. If a close friend told me they were having a problem, I would want to know how I could help. If they were having serious health problems they may need some extra help with their "honey-do" list or someone to watch the kids so they can take their wife with them to the hospital. If they lost a job, maybe I know someone who is hiring. Etc...

Yes, if it is something I can't do anything about than offer sympathy, then they probably won't get too much more than a "that's too bad" from me and they may be better off talking to women close to them. But you often don't know what kind of advice or direct support your friend is capable of offering until you make your friends aware you have a problem. That is often why men I know share their problems, they are hoping for something useful even if they know the odds are low.
Self-promotion in the age of annoyance
IPad Orientation CSS
Paris :)
Definitely worth reading, more detail on that incident that the parent article. And just awesome.
Mixx Partners with Marketfish for New Ad Platform
Still looking. See, one of the tables is named AttendanceProductionType, and when I search it over the net, I get many results related to Tally. But that would not be enough since he claims that his design was inspired by tally, and he thoroughly studied the software while he was designing. But whenever I ask him a question regarding some aspect of his design, he says that he will get back to me
Sigh. The price of a product is wholly unrelated to the cost of its raw materials. The price of a product is determined by the intersection of how much buyers are willing to pay, versus how much sellers are willing to accept in payment. That's it, the whole story.
Also: you can't be a successful technology company, across many decades/scales/markets, running the exact same strategy. The terrain changes too fast.

Indeed, it it the overwhelming triumph of openness in many spheres -- the cheap standard components, open-source operating systems, open protocols -- which means other 'sealed appliance' strategies need to be tried, to explore those areas not ideally served by total openness.

The sealed iPhone/iPod isn't a rival to openness, but a necessary complement and outgrowth. Just look at the Settings > General > About > Legal page. You'll see 20+ pages of mostly open-source license/copyright declarations.
It works in Spanish :) ("conocido" is a much common word than acquaintance)
I meant this comment in a positive way: I genuinely think this is smart marketing.

I think the real objections would be things like (and I'm not necessarily saying these are true/false, just that they're the ones that people should really be thinking about):

* Are NoSQL databases the object databases of the modern era?

* Is our pain big enough that we're willing to be a guinea pig for any new technology?

* How will making this technology choice impact our future ability to hire and to work with future technologies?

* Is this the right time to adopt a new database, or will the world be so different in 3 months that we should limp along until then?

From my viewpoint (@ FathomDB), that last point is the most interesting. We're seeing the start of NoSQL convergence; I expect both rapid development and serious teething issues. We see FathomDB & VoltDB announcing early availability of scalable relational databases. Rackspace hired the core of the Drizzle team, so this project will likely start to bear more fruit. To borrow from the wife-selection problem, it feels like immediately getting married to the first attractive person you meet on your first day at college, when there's a freshman mixer that evening.
DropZap as a two-player strategy game
So we have an Apple response arriving back to a submitter that's listing a different app?

With few (no) details on why.

It is not clear if this Apple response is even relevant to this submitter's application.

These folks could have gotten punted for some other expected reason.

Or this could be advertising their stuff by submitting something they knew would get rejected, and then resubmitting without it.

We do not know what's really going on here. On most any aspect of this.
The very first personal computers, like the Apple II, were sold as development kits to developers/hobbyists because these were the only people who would even think to buy a personal computer in 1976 and 1977. These development kits contain all of the information one would need to create software and hardware for these machines. Is that so unusual?

Although I was very young, and it was a log time ago, I'm not sure I agree with you. My dad purchased an S-100 bus system from George Morrow's Thinker Toys in 1977. It came with CP/M, there were games, including Star Trek and Adventure, there was even a word processor of some kind (not WordStar, something else). It certainly wasn't used as a "development kit" -- outside of maybe knowing a little BASIC, my dad didn't know how to program and used the computer for writing letters, and for playing games (which drove my mother nuts :))
I would recommend you check out a few sites like:

http://www.venturehacks.com
http://answers.onstartups.com
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com

To answer your questions directly:

1) You generally tell them how much money you are trying to raise (based on your financial projections). The valuation determines what percentage ownership you end up giving up in exchange for the funding. The total amount you end up with is negotiable.

2) The VC takes a percentage ownership of your company, and generally ends up with a seat on your board, Officer salaries are generally determined by the board. As the founder, you usually specify your salary requirements during the fund raising process....an overly large salary is a red flag and could turn investors off. The total amount of control the investors end up with depends on your specific situation.

3) Usually it is done as one big check. However, it may be split up into 'tranches', which are delivered upon meeting certain milestones.

4) Most startups do end up failing, the investors know the risks associated and factor that in their decisions about what companies to fund. If it fails, it fails. The fact that your company is a separate legal entity protects you from personal liability.

5) Generally investors end up taking a 20%-40% ownership stake in your company per round. If you raise multiple rounds, each new investor takes a new slice of the pie.

I would definitely recommend checking out the sites I linked above to get a much more thorough overview of the fundraising process. I would also recommend looking into angel investment.