skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think anyone is debating the point that it's possible that acquisitions can end up this way. But even putting aside the hyperbole and absolutism that's shown in this article, I challenge the claim that acquisitions go poorly more times than they don't. My guess is that for every public flameout, there are a hundred acquisitions that end up positive for everyone -- you just don't hear about them, because saying "everything went better than expected" isn't interesting as a news item.
You're missing an important detail: Start using the add-on in the Heroku app. Since the add-on provides feature x, you can simply depend on it and remove feature x from the Heroku app :-)
On the World of Spectrum forums there's been some interesting posts on Spectrums that are slowly dying. For those that don't know, the ULA was a custom chip and can't be replaced. FPGA technology allows the spectrum to live on in an (albeit emulated) hardware form.
With new companies like crowdflower.com and cloudcrowd.com making large pushs into this space, along with ODesk.com and similar competition, I see picking the right solution as paramount to helping a small startup bootstrap well.

I have been using oDesk for almost a year for both side projects and regular company work. Finding good workers is the initial challenge, and can be very time consuming at the start. Once you have a reliable workforce tasks start being completed timely and accurately.

Some of the new cloud staffing groups are trying to remove the touch points with individual workers and instead you work with an account manager who distills the job requirements, fulfills the work in their cloud, checks the accuracy, again in the cloud or through proprietary tools and the delivers a completed task project to the buyer. Expect a price premium though.

If you have money and no time, a manage outsourced cloud would be good for, but for a cash strapped startup, managing individual will cut your costs.
You have to be very ambitious and determined to handle startup. Also gotta be ready for ramen-profitable (if any profitable at all) months.

And you may still fail eventually.
MakerBot and the rise of libertarian tech (VIDEO)
Selling the intangibles beyond the demand is the real challenge
Perhaps; but it seems likely to me that another startup in the same niche would find it harder to be acquired, as megacorp #1 doesn't need another acquisition, and other megacorps might not choose to enter that space themselves. A new startup in that space might have to be bootstrapped, which might not be an appealing option.
HN Puzzler
Here's a puzzle for anybody that would like to take it up today:

I just heard a jet fly overhead. Curious, I went outside. As we all know, sound travels much, much more slowly than light, so the jet was gone from sight by the time I started searching for it, even though it still sounded like it was overhead.

Now, given the speed of sound, and a jet flying at 500 mph, at what elevation would the jet need to fly in order to create the greatest angle between where the sound from the jet is coming from and where the jet actually is?

If anybody wants to kick it around, I'll warn you up front that there are a couple of tricks to finding the solution.

EDIT: As commenter pointed out, the question is a bit incomplete. I'll change that to mean "at what elevation and distance from the observer would the jet need to fly in order to create the greatest angle between where the sound from the jet is coming from and where the jet actually is?"

Assuming we are on planet earth and standing standing still in a flat desert.
One might find this interesting: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/2829/texture-pack...
my favourite part about the comments this is going to get is that your question is going to be perceived completely differently by a lot of people. I'm seeing comments from people who immediately assumed you meant "competitors for the ipod touch, the game platform" and people who think you meant "competitors for the ipod touch, the media player".
... and Slysoft releases new versions about as often as the folks who write No Script do. Thankfully, for a while, they had a lifetime upgrade policy.

The funny thing is that I would have been a Blu-Ray early adopter if I didn't see this mess coming. I can't believe my parents purchased a player before I did.
That is an NP-hard problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem
>But it doesn't mean that you actually renounce citizenship of your home country.

Well from the linked Wikipedia page it does mean that you actually renounce citizenship. It's pretty clear in having you state that is the case. If you actually don't then you are lying.

>"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen;

For example if your former country required you to submit a form renouncing citizenship / sovereignty then taking the Oath and not having done that seems a highly dishonourable thing to do (ie IMO you're lying).

From that Oath (granted my first viewing of it in full) it seems that no truthful person could become a citizen of both America and some other place unless they were American first and no longer made that Oath on any occasion.
Amazing company for load balancer based on open source stuff, but with enterprise support. Can run on dedicated hardware or VMWare.

http://www.loadbalancer.org
What kind of work was it? Something highly creative?
EDIT: those who upvoted as "me too" can answer too.
Depends on your app and how sticky it is, I'd say. If it's one of a thousand other services out there then you are probably better off after. If it's unique in any way then you may be better off after. If it requires the user to input a lot of data, not be able to migrate it out, and becomes indispensable to their work flow then you may consider after.

So when go with "before"? After you've launched, created a market of trust and are backed by many, many satisfied cheerleaders (clients). The word of mouth will lead to the easy overcoming of that trust barrier that leads people to reconsider handing over their CC#.
Ask HN: Who's the best programmer you ever worked with?
To become better programmers, it's really helpful to have a sense of what's possible at higher levels of skill. I'm curious to hear from HN'ers about master programmers you've personally met/worked with. What impressed you? What were they capable of?

Edit/update: At this point in my learning, people in software I consider $DEMI_DEITY-like (but have not met/worked with) include Peter Norvig (I have PAIP in front of me and think, He wrote this in his mid-thirties? Gah!), Abelson and Sussman (authors of SICP), and some of the people who created the tools I use (Stallman for Emacs, GvR for Python, Hickey for Clojure). As for personally-encountered greatness, there was one fellow at my last firm who later went on to be in the top 5 in the TopCoder competition, whose speed and ability to build the right abstractions were really impressive - that's vague, but at the time, I wasn't good enough to appreciate his skill in-depth either. :)
I consider people spontaneously tweeting or blogging about it to be huge. I know it may seem trite, and as everyone loves to point out, it's not revenue, BUT it does mean they are putting their own reputation on the line that their friends will like it.

I also have metrics within my app itself. Like out of the people who want to signed up, how many completed useful chunk in the application. Out of those, how many took the next step. So far I haven't spent too much time looking at bounce rate and repeat visitor rate, but those are valuable metrics too.

I also use UserVoice and it's been really great. A lot of people have taken the time to post something (and that in itself tells me a lot about how people feel about it) and their comments feed me energy to keep going and making improvements.

I also put my email address right on the account page (at least during the beta period) and invite people to email me feedback. A lot of them do that too and I always respond and get some sort of useful feedback (beyond just a bug report).
They open sourced the parts that have been solid for years. What's always been a huge problem is the runtime — the implementation of the standard library. It's it's mostly the same across all platforms and more than just 'glue code', it's what's actually using most of the CPU cycles when a Flash applet executes, it's all native code, and it's not sandboxed at all by most browsers.
I hadn't heard of this game, but it looks fun. And, yes, you could run this on the iPod Touch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_Birds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNNzRyd1xz0
A colleague once had a candidate who dutifully listed PostScript on his résumé because he had been using a "print to file" feature.
What you are doing there is multiplying something by a power of two, and 'ar' should have the value 1 for 'sr' to be set to two to the power of 10.

Multiplying by a power of 2 is easily done in C using the shift operator.
I use a Dell XPSM1530. Dell's build quality has been, well, variable to say the least of late but the XPSM1530 although now discontinued is an awesome laptop. The best part though is the 16" 1920x1200 display. I do a lot of proposal and report writing and it allows me to have two documents side by side.

It's also good for coding, gives me plenty of space in PyDev, Immunity Debugger, plenty of terminals and everything else I need on the one screen and it's still portable too!
That's it, I'm moving to Canada.
Google Engineer Stalked Teens, Spied on Chats
Way ahead of you. The tricky part is being able to bootstrap if the service crashes. It's pretty neat being able to basically provide artificial respiration for your web app in an emergency.
I have to admit that I and most programmer types that I know hate that feature but maybe its helpful for those less tech savvy.
As far as nearly comparing him to Henry Ford..in the book "New World Coming" it is mentioned that Henry Ford came up with the term "Messiah Machine" which I find unsettling when I associate it with industrialization, factory work, and this story.
Yes, there are several papers on the subject. I found a few by searching "rectangle packing algorithm."
And the other big fail - it feels like a hobby to Microsoft.

I think that many divisions at MS pale in comparison (revenue-wise) to the Office (Sharepoint etc) and Windows divisions and thus feel like hobbies to the corporation.
No it isn't, sorry - but interesting find anyway!
That's debt held by the public, i.e. bonds. A lot of the debt is owed to old people through the SS system rather than to bondholders through the treasury.

Obviously one can debate the exact definitions of what should constitute debt, but I'm using the following definition: promises to pay out money in the future which will be politically very difficult to renege on.

If you want to look at debt held by the public, Bush had surpluses too (though not as large).

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?chart_type=line&...
The population of Japan is significantly lower than that of the US.
I stand by this statement. There is one pocket of the Mission around 16th & Mission that's really diverse, and then say between Potrero and Bryant is mostly hisanic between 14th & Cesar Chavez

The rest of the Mission is pretty freaking white, especially since Bernal tends to be grouped into the same "Mission" umbrella.
What about your HFT outfit, Mesh Capital?

How do you guys do real-time P&L and risk calculations? Given the frequency and volume of the orders you guys pump to the market, I imagine that there must be a latency between when you receive ack/fills from market vs. real time market price of your positions. Given that HFT makes or breaks on pennies, cancel/modifying your orders in sync with real-time market info must be critical.

How do you guys solve this problem, both software-wise and telecom-wise? Via colo, but that solves the issue with only latency to trading servers. What about streaming and constructing your own consolidated quote book (because there's latency on CQS)?
Should Your Startup Stay Stealth?
Why are you anti-marijuana? Are you anti-beer and anti-coffee too, and if not I'd be curious to hear your reasoning! Also, out of interest, where are you from?
Well, if they made Ken Thompson do a C programming test before letting him check in... (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_ou...)
An Introduction to Geddy - A modular, full-service web framework for Node.js
Although I didn't read it until after I had created my solutions, I found Andrea Lodi's paper [1] very interesting. It wasn't quite the approach I used, but it's a pretty thorough explanation of the problem and possible solutions.

[1] PDF http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.98....
If rent control went away along with the Ellis act, in 5 years the average rent in San Francisco would be 15% lower than what it is today. Rent control very severely distorts both the rental and the real estate market in many direct and indirect ways.
I was thinking that perhaps the Indian gov had taken the Chinese device and, still using the external case, modified the internals to replace them with cheaper components.

Indeed they could even purchase the dies for the case and actually manufacture the whole thing in India. Would the lack of Indian case design make it not Indian? Not quite a smoking gun.

What one needs is a powerful Indian media company to ask for an example to look at and a trip to the factory.
Ah, thanks, I thought it was the dimensions.
I totally disagree, the back button is the single greatest UI improvement of the web.

There are a lot of non tech savvy people out there who are so afraid of breaking things that they won't even open context menus in Word without saving their document first.
All of those use facebook and the web like champs because they can never totally screw up because the back button takes them to safety. Don't forget, many grew up during times when using technology wrong meant that you would loose an arm. Back button fixes that anxiety.
Portland has most of the benefits of San Francisco with all of the drawbacks of Seattle. As gray as SF is, I don't understand how anybody lives in Seattle or Portland without committing suicide from the lack of sun.
On linux you have http://www.libimobiledevice.org/ which worked until the most recent update to iOS4. I'm going to assume they'll get it working again shortly.

Doubletwist also syncs music on the iPhone.

Then you can always download music directly onto the phone or use any of the streaming apps.
Perhaps the position they were interviewing you for actually involved writing efficient software, and thus required thorough knowledge of the fundamentals of computer science (data structures and algorithms &c) and systems programming?
I'm learning Haskell, because I've heard good things about it, and it sounds like fun.

I already know most of the better known languages, at least on a read level, so I figured I'll learn something else, for fun.
Boy Scouts would teach knife skills and knot-tying — both useful skills for kidnapping and torture — but I doubt you have similar misgivings about that. Making somebody competent at efficiency and rational decision-making under pressure doesn't make them a killer. Video games are not strongly correlated with homicide, that one data point 12 years ago notwithstanding.

(Incidentally, I'm not the downvote. I don't think your logic works here, but it's an interesting correlation.)
I see your point, but how much of that work lasted longer than [arbitrary unit of time]?

While I can see bursts of undirected creativity stimulating small, quick discoveries, anything that takes longer than, say, a week (probably more like a day), just doesn't seem achievable.

Then again, you said your "best work", not biggest. I suppose those are actually be mutually exclusive in many cases.
It'd be really interesting to see this break down by "legal" vs "illegal" purchases. For instance, in Colorado (where "medical" marijuana is widely available for whoever wants it) is it cheaper or more expensive with a card?
GCreep: Google Engineer Stalked Teens, Spied on Chats
Shouldn't we have the right to know how many Google engineers are there who can access private info freely this way?
The value investor gets an abstraction over the ocean of algos and traders trying to out-game each other. The abstraction is that there's a market price and a book depth. The deeper the book, the more stock the value investor can move around without being gimped by increasingly undesirable prices. The more traders, the deeper the book.

Finance pundits worry about the implications of traders gaming each other. Let them game each other. The value investor sees a market price backed by millions of dollars of offers within pennies of each other. Should his trades move the market, much more liquidity will spring to life. The value investor feels fine.
Erosion of trust due to lack of user control is the only real issue I see outside of guesses like "people will get tired of it".

The way Facebook connects data and people is very clever. There is lot going on behind the scenes that you never see as a user. One of the results is that you just don't know who will see what. This results in a lack of perceived control.

Here's an example. At a friends wedding, I got introduced to a friend of a friend that I hadn't met before. She knew all about my child and has lots of pictures of him. How? My wife sends picture on her cell phone to her sister. She, in turn, uploads those to Facebook and tags them with my name. That opens up those pictures to her complete circle of friends. One of her friends comments on a picture, and another group of people gets exposed. The result is that I can only assume that hundreds or thousands of random people know everything about my child.

The result is also that Facebook is building up a profile of me without my knowledge or participation.

That's why I prefer Twitter. They don't try to outsmart me. I know who will see what. It's obvious that everything is public.
I'm actually not sure what the 'correct' answer is to their given problem. The problem statement says "Files can be rotated 90° if it helps...any files sharing dimensions should be considered identical/interchangeable." That could mean that 3x4 and 4x3 are identical boxes. The final area would still be the same (88), but the given ascii drawing output would be incorrect.
If I follow correctly.. it may be more expensive in some cases.

Their email states the outbound <Dial> is 2cents a minute.

Take the case of an minute long inbound call that uses <Dial> for two short outbound <1 min calls.

How much does that call cost?
Previous it was 3cents, does it now cost 1 cent, or do those outbound calls now add to the price making it a 5cent call? (1 in + 2*2out)
Okay, so where is the line "What does not kill us makes us stranger" from then?
I haven't had Flash installed since that first vulnerability where Adobe pulled support for x86_64 Linux. The web looks the same. (I used Adblock anyway.)

Yeah, some Youtube videos don't work... but you can get those videos elsewhere.
Copyright infringement is not theft.

Copyright needs global reform.

Patent law requires global reform.

And ACTA is about as far from the appropriate reform as one could possibly be. But that's what you get when you leave these things to politicians who have zero experience of them. And have zero buy-in and ultimately zero responsibility for them. They have no idea of which they speak. But they aren't going to admit it, are they?

Caveat: I own both copyrighted and patented works. I say: reform, reform, reform.
Just make sure I can still copy a link, give it to a friend, and let him get to the same page.
Disclaimer: I have never seen a single episode of The Wire.

Am I alone in thinking that this is a complete waste of time? Why would I go to Harvard to hear learned commentary on a TV show? Granted, this is a critically acclaimed TV show, but it's still just meant to entertain.

If I paid the exorbitant Harvard tuition, I would be incensed to be made to study a TV show.

Maybe others wouldn't? Does anyone here feel like it's a positive instead of a negative?

EDIT: I see that I have apparently angered some people by asking this question, judging by the downvotes. I didn't mean to offend - I just wanted to see what made this show different from other TV, which several of you have explained. Again, my apologies.
There's a tag in most exchange's trading servers that you could include in your orders to not execute if it's a self-trade.
Interesting, 1 thing to add on that hypothesis, right around April 2010, Google dropped a lot of pages from its index. That really messed up SEO play companies.

As a proof, search on any seo play company on Alexa around April 2010
GCreep: Google Engineer Stalked Teens, Spied on Chats
Yes, the difference between theory and practice can be startling in finance. But I am more wary about fleecing the customer than about counter parties in a high frequency trade. [1] And of course there's also always making money by rent-seeking behaviour. E.g. the implicit subsidy banks get in lower borrowing costs on the market once they are to big to fail.

[1] Mutual fund managers or hedge funds who take a lot of fees are probably quite a drain on your their clients returns.
It is the psychiatric journal with the highest impact factor, considered a flagship of psychiatric research.
It's not a bad idea and possibly even worth pursuing. One of my little favorite things about frameworks like rails is how much effort was put into making human readable URIs: http://www.foobar.com/products/kitchen/blenders/1, in most cases working your way up say to foobar.com/products/kitchen "does the right thing".

I also like how easy this guy's idea would be to implement in a framework like rails. By that I mean generating the required <nav> elements would be trivial for rails to figure out.
There's a pretty good article by Seth Godin about this...

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/10/the_new_rule...

One thing to think about is how specific is it? recipes.com should be about recipes. yumit.com could be about anything that is yummy. "Hey, do you know any good vegan potluck ideas?"..."No, Just Yumit!"

Now, if you pivot and end up building something like a cat finder for eskimos...

"Hurry up, man! It's cold out here looking at all these cats free to a good home! You can just yumit when we get home"

It still works!