skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a shit deal.

What they are essentially doing by tying your pay to the growth of the site is pushing all of the risk onto you, and you're getting NOTHING in return for assuming the liabilities that come with. If they don't have the cash on hand to pay your full asking price upfront and instead want to pay it in installments (with interest, of course) then that's fine: they assume the risk of their purchase and operations, as well they should. But that's NOT what they're asking. They're asking you to do it.

edit:
For example, say a month after they acquire your site, the company decides your site and only your site is going to start running huge, 45-second flash video ads for all incoming traffic. Why just you? Because they've invested far less time and money in your brand than their others. You get to be the guinea pig for their stupid business plan ideas because you're the most expendable. Wham. You're fucked, they're not.
Ya, the how does it work is a very good starting point. I think it is a little 'programmer/musician combo' centric at times but it is a much better introduction to what solid composer is.. after reading that, I am really looking forward to when you support cubase.
Perhaps those in charge of such decisions in China and Japan will ask not "How can we make literacy easier for our people?", but ask "How can we maximize the benefit of our people knowing the Kanji writing system?"

One benefit that's often mentioned is its near standard semantics throughout Northeast Asia; another benefit not usually mentioned is that very few Westerners learn it. Leaders in a place as competitive as modern China might be thinking about this.
I was thinking something similar. Not knowing anything about the actual applicant demographics, my intuition is that they would skew younger.

From personal experience, the overlap of the sets:

1) of people over 30

2) of people who are entrepreneurial

3) of people who have actionable ideas

4) of people who are in a position to take income risks

5) of people who need the money/PR/connections that YC provides

is pretty small. There just aren't that many 30-something entrepreneurs who are in a position to need what YC provides, and who are able and willing to take a vacation from what is probably a substantial, stable income.
This seems to be due to asymmetric information between seller and buyer. The buyer can not measure exactly the true area, which only the seller knows (buyer doesn't have access to the standards, the criteria that have been used, doesn't understand them, doesn't have time or is physically not allowed to measure it.)
Too Many Tourist VCs, or Too Many Apex Predators?
There was a time that only experts could "make" websites (mid 90s). Today you can get a wordpress blog with a nice template and look as good as a lot of major websites. So we're partially there as far as the web goes.

I'd argue that frameworks like Rails have significantly lowered the barrier to entry for web programming. It isn't "easy" per se, but significantly easier than just 10 years ago.
Quoting from http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writjap.htm ...

"Kana are read phonetically and kanji are read visually, with a dissociation between the processes involved, according to Morton & Sasanuma and popular Japanese belief. (This must be a little awkward in reading pages of mixed text, surely?) Nomura found that meaning was extracted faster from kanji than kana words, and thought that kana pronunciation was data-driven and that kanji pronunciation was conceptually-driven. Morton & Sasanuma (1982) also claimed that evidence supports the intuitive belief that kanji can give direct access to the meaning of words, but that kana always require translation into a phonological code when they are being read, and there is no development of automatic visual recognition of the kana symbols. One of the most intriguing ways of studying what differences there may really be in processing is in observing brain-damaged patients - following certain lesions some patients can still read kana but not kanji, while other insults to the brain leave the ability to read kanji but not kana."
Epic MIT Professor Erik Demaine Comic
Your claim that I was responding to was "it's impossible to write a clean room vm implementation without infringing these patents", which is false (J9, JRockit), and which is also a different issue than whether Harmony has a patent grant.

Harmony doesn't have a patent grant now, that's true. But the reason it doesn't is because it refuses to accept the current license terms. I don't think this is "grandstanding" - it's absolutely critical, and I completely side with Apache. But the simple reality is that Harmony is in a much more secure position than Dalvik, and Apache has a much more defensible position than Google. To claim otherwise is pure FUD.

Why does it matter? Because people should care about the Google suit independent of the idea that Apache might be next. When you try to sell that idea, you make it sound like this lawsuit isn't actually all that bad compared to what it could be, but that's wrong. This is the case that matters, not some hypothetical against Apache. Get pissed now.
I don't disagree with you; in fact, it's the hiring manager's misunderstanding as much as the prospective student's.

The Bachelors is required simply because it's an easy screening mechanism; the colleges have already whittled the list down to a more manageable size for the manager to go through. It used to mean that a person had an interest in learning beyond what was required, which was nice for jobs. Now it's just that their parents/friends/teachers have told them to go.

Really I'm saying simply that people are expecting and demanding the wrong things out of a liberal arts (traditional definition) degree. Most of the time what they'd really want is a vocational degree, or at least something more similar to what the English do with law school, where you enter directly out of high school.
nice! if you don't mind, what other tools are you using ?
> There might be a case to take them really serious if the job posting really differentiate between what the candidate have to know and what they wish for.

That is the problem. Very many of them say things like "flash in the pan technology X a must" or "latest silver bullet Y mandatory". They are basically advertising that their start-up only hire liars and people who actually believe management consultants. And then they are surprised that all the good people run away screaming.

RethinkDB says "For that matter, you think SQL is a terribly designed language." Oh, dear. Refined by the hardest of the hard-core engineers for half a century, foundation of the world economy, and they only want people who have an ironclad, dogmatic belief that it is unconditionally terrible. Good luck recruiting actual information retrieval experts, guys.
I'm in school in NYC, and my school's hacker culture isn't that great either. We should organize a large hackaton like NYU did last summer. Any interest?
Bach's preludes, some of considerable length, need their fugues,... Each of Chopin's Preludes is self-sufficient, but they were composed, like Bach's, with one for each major and minor key. Since nothing follows them, one may ask what these works are a prelude to...

Excellent article, but this little bit is inaccurate. The article gets the above almost exactly backwards, because one could make a case that it is the fugue that needs the prelude - but I say "almost" because both are self-contained pieces and neither needs the other. Rather, the prelude exists as an aid to audiences with untrained ears. That is, it is not the fugue that needs the prelude, but the audience who "needs" it, for it was intended to help them make better sense out of a fugue, which were considered to be sufficiently complex to warrant a little extra context prior to listening.

The prelude helped them by being a less complex piece but in the same key as the fugue it precedes. Listening to the prelude prior to hearing the fugue helped to "establish the key". By the time the prelude was finished, it would have taken the listener's ear on a brief journey around the notes of the piece's scale, resolving to (and thereby drawing the listener's attention to) the note that serves as the key's tonic, and also to whether the 3rd was a major 3rd or a minor 3rd. Once the ear was calibrated in this manner, it was thought that the interweaving lines of the fugue would be easier to follow.
It is very hard to give you any advice due to the vagueness in your post. Personally, if its < 100K deal as it sounds from your post, I'd just want the cash without any future commitment. You say they want you to work as a contractor - what if you quit the next day?

Bottomline: if it is a tiny deal, figure out a fair value for your site, get the cash, work for them without any longterm commitment so you can quit tomorrow if you'd like.

When I sold a site in high school for 5 figures, I was so over it the next day. That would have been a problem if I'd made a commitment to stay and maintain.

You say they turned down your initial offer. I was expecting the other way around. I know when I got the initial lowball offer, I multiplied it by 5. I sold it for 4x the initial offer.
I would think a more stable life situation would involve lesser cash needs...
> while fs-like interfaces, unless one gets widespread support to the extent of being a POSIX-like "assumed to be on all UNIXes"

FUSE runs on pretty everything, doesn't it?
It's like StumbleUpon for the planet.
But then you have to implement the solution in every language, while with FUSE, you implement it once and each language runtime instantly has access to it.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you suggesting that older individuals are less willing to take financial risk? I agree with that, but where is your 30-40K number coming from?
Seems preferable for most cases, at least, for it to be user mode, though... maybe you'd want to do this for performance in certain cases?
If you don't want to wait for whatever this is, you can get the one that's been actively developed on github for some time now:

http://github.com/behlendorf/zfs
Almost never have I been on an interviewed where they actually checked to see if I was qualified competently. And universally the ones who did, didn't ask me to write code for them.

What they did the companies who actually checked your competence ask you?
Knock yourself out, then. Every language I use (including C) already has a sugary socket API, though.
I don't understand your target demo well enough to pass judgement, but I did notice that the word bane is misspelled "bain" in one of the testimonials. Superficially, it looks clean and corporate.

I'd also guess that you won't get a lot of great feedback here. For me, the site design and presentation called to mind a "business for business's sake" stereotype that I, and I expect many on HN, are a little suspicious of. I'm not saying my reaction is fair or accurate--just observing a superficial kneejerk--but my impression is that HN-ers are interested in business only insofar as it is a means to achieving cool stuff, and not necessarily for its own sake. If you think my assessment is inaccurate or undue, I'd be happy to read your reply (and I'd also like to hear from HN if I'm off base about the community--still getting a feel for this place). Good luck with this and the next.
Blackberry Quickpull
I'm upvoting this just to hopefully start a discussion and hear more about this topic from fellow HNers.

I hear the Dragon Book mentioned almost daily around here; I'm intrigued. Do you think this book could be read by someone who's not actually interested in writing a compiler? Does the book stand by itself? I'm interested in reading it, but I don't really think I have the motivation to start writing my own compiler (even a mock one).
> While Roman alphabets are phonetic, they have the trade-off that people with differing dialects cannot communicate. There is no 'Roman' language, there are dozens of European languages, learning all of them would be harder than learning one set of glyphs.

English seems on the way to be on the fast track to being universally understood.

> Similarly, because Hanzi and Kanji implies visual meaning, rather than being attached to sounds phonetically, they are more suited to communication methods like texting and email, where it's easier to discern meaning even if you don't know a word per se, and where phonetics don't matter at all.

In theory - in practice, a lot of the characters require memorization instead of having any real connection to their visual imagery.

I'm not sure why the Japanese don't adopt romaji more - Romanized Japanese. What you lose in richness you more than make up in efficiency, especially in Japanese which doesn't have the same difficulties of Romanizing that Chinese does with tongues and inflections.
I think this would be cool if the software would try to obtain the dependencies automatically.
Yes, I agree...GitHub or any text-centric SCM is a very simplistic solution that really only works (and not very well) for metadata in audio projects. These points are good answers to the question, "How is SolidComposer better than using another version control system for my compositions?"

But I guess my gut reaction — which you can take with many grains of salt because I don't do any work in a collaborative music composition situation — is that of "Geez...it's hard enough to get technical people to jump into my version control workflow, how could I get musicians in on this?" (Which I think you already addressed in another comment that your target audience is maybe the overlap of developers/composers.)

I'm reading through your Introducing SolidComposer page and I think it would be helpful if you could condense that down and put it somewhere more accessible (maybe on the front page). I find myself not really wanting to spend time figuring out how the app will help me.

Also, the How Does It Work? section actually does not seem appealing. The first situation seems simple and straightforward, whereas when you talk about SolidComposer complaining about missing dependencies, that starts makes me feel uncomfortable.

Anyways, I hope this is helpful and good luck with the project.

Side note: I recently started playing in a band and one thing I notice is that whenever we get together to practice a particular song, we are always reinventing the song and it never really seems to gel. It's always "How does that part go again? How many measures were we supposed to play that riff?" Could SolidComposer help in that situation?
Japanese Officials Reveal Execution Chambers
I will create 50 YouTube Video posts on your Wordpress website for $5.
I'm in Chicago, but I read about the idea in the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/dining/05diet.html

Here in Chicago, I use Organic Life: http://organiclifeonline.com/flash.html.

It's expensive and you don't get a lot of food, but everything is very good for you and I've lost about 8 pounds in 2 weeks. Lots of green vegetables, fiber, and fish. And I get steak and potatoes every so often!
Of course I don't know you, but my impression based solely on this post is that your missing skill might be getting knowledge across without making the person you're talking to feel bad. That is, coming across as a patient, friendly teacher without being condescending. People like that are worth a lot.

The "I'm more technical than you" game is commonly played in hacker circles but encourages us to behave badly.
My network programming background is a bit small. Could someone explain for me the difference between what OP calls for with sockets and a tun/tap device?
It does, if you've ever uploaded the dependencies before. It would be copyright violation to do it if you hadn't.

Also since the studio uses only the filename as the identifier, you might make invalid assumptions.
Yes. It wasn't in my original plan, but as this thing shaped up, I realize it must be added. So, just wait for a small while, and I will surely add better user discovery. Of course, any and all suggestions will be much appreciated
The question is if fopen() would then still work with embedded or archaic architectures. Examples such as radio links on tiny 16-bit hardware come to mind.
So, regarding the shit storm brewing over at Digg, what do you guys think?

If you made changes and your users rebel, do you a) revert or b) adress problems and move forward?
Chris actually has some interesting elements there that you should consider - terms etc. are important to a lot of independent contractors.
SEO is not inherently lacking in ethical fortitude - I find that suggestion offensive. You might as well say all lawyers are corrupt or all financial advisers are swindlers.

Lying about the objectively measurable characteristics of your product is wrong.
Awesome. I'm an FLStudio fan since version 2.

re: soundcloud

Consider removing the reference to soundcloud. The best it can do is give give the lawyers an excuse to go after you for UI Copyright infringement.

re: value prop

The intro page does a good job motivating someone to use the product, but the homepage doesn't help sell the product at all. See if you can summarize the pain points on the homepage.

Also consider putting up a forum for musicians to collaborate/share/find each other (ala FLStudio Looptalk). The fastest way to get people to use a sharing product is to help them have people to collaborate with ;)

Good luck!
I have added some more info to the landing page, plus I plan to add screenshots etc to help the user understand what the app is about. However, I wish to keep it plain and simple. That is till I start getting more complaints.
YC have answered this a zillion times. The demographics of who they fund are the same as those who apply.
C is just a thin wrapper around raw machine code, so naturally most of the details depend on the implementation. When a good C programmer wants to understand the stack, he leaps straight for the system documentation and source code for the target architecture. (A file named something like "crt0.s" or "fork.c" is a good place to learn how the stack works and where it comes from.) K&R is just background reading.
I think you're possibly getting taken for a ride here.

You can take either A> Convertible Debt or B> Non-convertible debt.

Convertible Debt would be you agree to some smaller payment, with an option to convert the debt payments into a certain amount of revenue share if it does in fact work out very well. Non-convertible debt would just be payments over time. But in neither case should you take this currently offered deal.
That's not because programming has gotten fundamentally easier, though, but rather because the tolerances have been widened by the progress of the underlying technology, removing some of the constraints. It's like saying tightrope-walking is easier now that all the ropes are a foot off the ground and falling off, touching the ground, and getting back on--that is, screwing up--is now a regular part of the show (like consuming 800MB of memory is now a regular part of peoples' applications.)
I know at least Buxfer was. Try asking the founders.
They want your product!!!. You set the rules unless they see that you are craving for a "little" money.

They want you website because they are going to earn profit from it (trust me the company looking to acquire already analyzed the possibilities) Don't forget that!!!
We have had companies that have died quicker because they had high burn rates, but we haven't yet let this consideration affect our investment choices.
I don't work at a software company.

My current job consists mostly of listening to people whine in meetings about a broken system that my team is trying to maintain. No need to be awake for that.

I wish I could go into more detail about this project. But I'll just say I spent a few hours completely rewriting this project, and my version uses no proprietary libraries or protocols, has the ability to scale linearly, and was 200 lines of Perl. The real system is too slow for our users, impossible to scale, dependent on 5-year-old proprietary libraries, and is 100,000 (or so) lines of C#.

Now you know why we charge those $35 overdraft fees.
The answer is a lot shorter than your question: we fund the best people out of those who apply.

As far as I can tell, the age distribution of people we fund is the same as the age distribution of applicants.
Too many ideas on the main page. I showed up looking for version control due to the HN link, but when I get there I see composer, compete, collaborate, "the producer in you", backup, studio support (?). I suggest focusing on one compelling feature/message.

It would be a lot more credible to feature a few (good) tracks on the front page.

The Arena and Workbench buttons have no mouse-over help text, and at first glance seem unrelated to everything else on the page.

It's not entirely clear what sort of software/hardware I need to get involved here. I used to work with Cubase and Wavelab, for example. Can I just upload WAV files from whatever? The "How does it work" section isn't explicit about which formats it deals with.

It seems strange that you can go visit competitions, but not project or user pages, which I thought were the main point of the site.

I love the legal section.
All modern virtual machines (that is ones that use VT or AMD-V) install kernel extensions. The part of kvm that you interact with is all userland.
Seriously, why isn't this litigated so that it becomes a uniform part of commerce/law?
Distorm - Powerful Disassembler Library
Mandarin is standard in china. Not only does almost everyone know it, schools everywhere, with the exception of hong kong, are required to teach in it.
Daily math/regex/tex facts via Twitter
Perhaps this is why they are seeking payment before they even make it. Which is actually not a bad idea; some donors "do some good" or "support the arts" or whatever, the movie makers get to make their movie, and the world as a whole gets a work that it can freely enjoy for the rest of time.

I like that model a lot more than I like "copyright"!
FWIW, Bash has this built in;

cat </dev/tcp/www.google.com/80

It's unfortunately disabled in the bash that ships with debian, but should work pretty much everywhere else.
If he had spoken with him (like I have) he would know his name is pronounced "BROKE-P" (short for Broke Peter).

Wait, it's not a Common Lisp reference?
Yes. I bought and read it out of interest rather than a desire to actually build a compiler. As long as you're OK with set theory and general math notation, it's not a particularly tricky read, and you get to learn a lot of cool stuff about automata/state machines in an applied, practical sense.
Tuis is something me and my friends have wanted for years. We're primarily Reason and Live users but this might be worth trying FL Studio for.
OK. I'll probably get down voted the hell out of me for writing this but it is useless "core value" statements like this that make my stomach turn.

I'm sure Hitler had a lot of passion too in what he did and that he thought he was making the world a better place.

What passion is can be interpreted in many ways and passion can be down right evil. You might also want to ask supporters of Shia religion what a "better world" actually is. I'm sure it will be different from your vision.
وقت يوتيوب YouTube - يوتيوب طبخ
I played around with this a bit when we were discussing it in the #startups IRC the other night, and I think this is a very cool idea. It certainly would have helped back when my band was in the studio, in terms of making ongoing collaboration with our producer much easier.

The best way to think about this is full-service multi-person versioning for sound projects. It also analyzes your project files and makes sure all the dependent sound files are present and error-free (from what I understand).

I think this will especially become useful for studios when it supports project files from Logic, etc, and especially when it can work directly as a plugin for these programs without needing to log into the website and check stuff out and upload updates.