skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends on the type of "sale", but for most company sales, the acquisition isn't exactly like jumping out of rocket as it's taking off. (Where you wouldn't care if it makes it to space or not, because you've got your bag of money.)

It's not atypical for every investor at every stage to have to sign something like a 180-day lockup for their stock in the event that an IPO takes place, meaning that no large holder can just go sell everything (which would drive the price way down) for at least 6 months after an IPO occurs. So in the IPO case, which is probably what Fred encourages his companies to shoot for, even the VC's need the company to last a good, long while.

For smaller acquisitions, it's possible that everybody gets instant liquidity, but the founders will always have to hang around at BigCo for a while to make sure the transition is smooth, and most M&A deals probably have vested stock that requires certain growth numbers are met (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong here). In that case, this is good advice for the founders, because 1) life will suck if BigCo doesn't treat you well and 2) you have a financial incentive to make sure things keep going well.

The other case Fred refers to is for a company that is still growing, and doing a financing round, not an acquisition. For a company to ever have a "B" in it's valuation, it probably will have to do multiple large financings along the way, so everybody is in bed with one-another for years.
His argument that Windows is no longer a game changer seems somewhat faulty.

He claims Apple has impact because they decided not to support flash, so he is now moving Starbucks to HTML5.

But if Microsoft decided to not support HTML5, would he still be using HTML5? I personally would still hedge my bets with more people using Windows than Macs.
It's in the context of football that I really struggle to contain myself, and I'm not a grammar nazi any other time.

"Manchester United is going to win", or "Scotland has no chance", Argh!! I've no real reason to hate this, but it just feels wrong!
So, to clarify, by your definition someone that does not have an original idea and that won't/can't scale rapidly is not doing a start-up?
Adobe has opened up everything that they can for Flash Player. There are only a few closed portions, such as H.264 video license stuff, that they cannot share for obvious reasons.

Yes, "you" was a general y'all, not specifically you =)

Edit: Question just came up at session at MAX. Direct from Adobe Flash Product Manager: there is a lot of code that isn't Adobe's that they had to license. Also, Flash Player is tiny/tight bit of code ( < 1 MB). It's messy to be very efficient. Finally, they have opened it up, but Adobe still writes 99% of the code themselves, so they're not encouraged to open it up more.
The big thing is that F# has graduated from MS Research and is now available as Visual F#. This is important as it could make functional programming more mainstream (or at least into the hands of more people).
This looks pretty damn awesome. Please port it to Chrome!
Ask HN: How to tell quickly if someone is professional?
Professional = takes ownership and gets things done. No hand-waving, accountable, etc. I would suggest punctuality is a strong indicator, but I was wondering if HN can come up with better ones.
Less wobble and it requires more force, so fewer accidental key presses. There's just so much more tactile feedback that it's easier to just "know" where your fingers are at all times.
I only wish I routinely got it that fresh. Rarely is that a problem, and when it is, I use a bit from the water glass.

Regular with sugar is definitely not the same. In a pinch, I've ordered hot tea, and made my own at the table.
I must have worded that poorly. Nope, I don't think the idea has anything to do with it. It's the scaling.

You can have old, boring, been-there-done-that ideas and have a great startup: as long as you can scale. In fact, I think it works the other way -- the more boring and mundane your idea, as long as it can scale, the easier it probably is to execute. Lots of folks want to make the next Twitter. Very few folks want to help plumbers find the right hex nut when fixing antique toilets (or something like that)
Ask HN: Do you consider a 13" laptop usable as a main development machine?
Do You?
I just don't see a big enough advantage compared to its parent, Ocaml. Partly because I wouldn't count Visual Studio and .net on the "pro" side. Ocaml is basically the same language, you don't have a big methodology mismatch when using libraries, it produces smaller executables that are quite fast, its runtime has some advantages if I remember correctly. (And there's the evangelist problem, but let's not get into that again.)
In some ways, I am so clueless and insulated. My financial problems really aren't related to the recession and I currently have a fairly secure job. I am not making enough money, but that really has nothing to do with the economy.

I read this and my reaction is something like "Wow, there really is a recession on." :-/
Most suicides among industrialized nations?  Japan and South Korea
I depends on what kind of work you're doing.

Meaningful programming is a creative endeavor.

If you try to do more than 8-10 hours of creative work a day, you're actually setting yourself back.

I try to average 8 hours of work a day, with bursts up to 12 hours if I'm on a roll or really excited.
I love it. The classic problem of the niche languages, in this case the ML family, has always been the lack of commercially relevant libraries. Which is understandable, the strongholds of OCaml, Haskell, ML etc have traditionally been academia. The other problem is that organizations have been reluctant to start projects in languages for which it has been, rightly or wrongly, perceived that there is poor liquidity in the job market, regardless of the inherent advantages of those languages.

Both those problems have been solved in one fell swoop. Not only is the entire .NET ecosystem available, but it's a shipping, fully supported part of Visual Studio 2010. There is no reason not to use it, from the organization's perspective. Finally, all the FP programmers who've been hiding in the closet, hacking in Haskell on their personal projects, can come out! These are great days!
Cereal

Fruit Juices

Burritos/Tacos

Pizza

Sausage

Cheese
Demo of Dog training framework (dog trick meta 'programming')
I've used it for some pet projects, mostly to get my head around a functional language with an easy entry (and exit) route for me: I'm a C# guy by day.

I started doing the Euler things etc. and did a quick dive into lexing/parsing (one strong point that your list is missing, imo). I got hooked. While I still cannot use F# for most of my things (technically it would even be possible, but try to convince your higher-ups that it is a good idea to switch to a language that they've never heard about, "because it is fun"), I use it for small things on a regular basis. You can mix functional and structural/iterative style (which is a plus in my book, the latter just _is_ faster if your program really wants to lend itself to mutable loops in places). You have a huge and well-tested library - the interaction with everything .Net is trivial.

Deployment isn't a big issue anymore: In the past you needed to either compile it statically or ship the F# stuff as well, with its status as a "first class citizen" in .Net 4 there's really no reason to back away from it anymore. It's here to stay.

I didn't have any trouble running it on mono/linux - but I've to admit that I last tried it quite a while ago.

Full Disclosure: I'm a kind of a fanboy here, I guess. The wall in my back is painted with a very nice/succinct 13 line prime number generator in F#, roughly 4cm line height, done as a decoration by my so.. ;)
“So it’s not an ability thing, just a speed thing?”
I also like have a DVD, but I actually like several of the the external ones better. I never use it on the road so I tend to have a powered hub with some toys attacked.

You are so right on video, it really needs a bigger machine.

I think the biggest difference this time (I have used a MacBook Air in the past for dev until I switched to 17" MacBook Pro) is the added option of 4gb of memory. That will really help. Also, the lack of heat right under my left arm would be a nice touch.

// do not buy the official external drive - it doesn't work on other machines
I used it in a computational finance class about a year ago. I develop solely on Linux, and although it was painful to get working, it definitely wasn't the worst thing I have had to do on Linux...

The actual language was weird. Apparently it was inspired by OCaml, but I felt it was far more verbose 90% of the time, and then randomly succinct. F#'s error messages were straight up useless.

If you are looking for a good functional language, I would probably look elsewhere, but it does have the advantage that it is currently still being worked on, and it has all of the benefits that the CLR brings.

At the very least, I agree with the other comment that it will probably bring more people into functional programming, which is always a good thing.
Stanford's Pervasive Parallelism Lab: Scala, STM
In law the authorities have 20 working days to respond, with a few defined exceptions.
another great extension for improving sanity and privacy on facebook is f.b purity. The app blocking functionality, helps protect your privacy from all those spammy quiz and game applications that appear in your newsfeed http://www.fbpurity.com
Even better, how about enabling the military functions in all US commercial satellites? They all have military override abilities to serve as communication backups if the primaries are taken out during war.
I'm generally very wary of these services because they usually lump a lot of stuff I don't like into it, but the results starting from Nas' Memory Lane have been great so far.

It'd be nice if there were a better way to tell if the youtube video is actually the video or just an mp3 with a shot of the album, but since its just playing in the background, it hasn't been too much of an issue.

Also, it would be nice if there were a restart, or some way to scrub the actual video.
The AirBnB cereal boxes is more genius than desperate. I consider desperate things like the Zappos story where Tony literally sold everything he owned to keep the business afloat.
I doubt they're hoping to get people to convert from Ocaml to F#. But .Net has a huge dev base, and this is a great opportunity for functional programming to go (more) mainstream.
F# is a somewhat simpler language than OCaml. Plus, it has decent concurrency support (which is a bit of an issue for OCaml if I recall correctly).
"Off the scale" is a complete fucking BS term. The carboniferous period had a mean CO2 concentration of around 800ppm and was marked by glaciation and low sea levels - our current correlation between CO2 and "global warming" is off the bullshit scale.

The mean global temperature in the carboniferous period, with CO2 concentrations over double of present day was an astounding, just wait for it... 14C, which is the incredible, * unbelievable* 0C above the mean present day global temperature.

As CO2 levels spiked in the carboniferous period, it is marked by the drop of sea levels by 120m to the present day level, and as the CO2 level subsided, the sea levels rose 80m.

Sorry, but "off the scale" only counts when you actively pick and choose what scale you want to use, which in terms of geological temperature, CO2 and O2 concentrations quite literally means disregarding millions of years of geological time.
From what I have seen, it seems that MS is pushing this as a way to parallelize a section of your application. Meaning that you would use c# for most of the app and write a performance critical/parallel section in F# to avoid using locks/ critical sections.

Maybe I'm seeing things wrong, but it seems that MS is not looking to make F# as mainstream as c#.
Doesn't gossip, unless it's harmless teasing. Does not do anything to spite another colleague, only interested in getting things done. Doesn't let his ego get in the way. If his proposal is passed for another team members, he still pitches in as much as ever. Likewise, he doesn't walk all over people who gave losing ideas, and listens to them as much as he would have. Moves discussions along to make decisions, understands that conversations are not productive unless something new is decided upon. He should move like a shark, but not in an evil way: keep swimming, or sink.
I don't know if this is what you mean, but Kyu levels are ranked lowest to highest in decreasing numbers (lower number = higher ranking) but Dan levels are ranked lowest to highest in increasing numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings
I actually find the Mac laptop keyboards to work pretty well (other than the crap placement of the fn key). I am not sure why, but I don't feel as great with the wireless keyboard. I thought their was no difference but it sure feels like it.

My desktop setup is a matias keyboard.
One of the best meals I've had in a long time was in Singapore. I stayed in "Little India" which is chock full of tiny little Indian restaurants. The best dish was the mutton masala. Absolutely delicious, but the finishing touch that made it amazing was the simple ginger beer. I want to go back to Singapore, just to eat some mutton masala and drink ginger beer...

EDIT: And, on a hot summer day, my absolute favorite drink is this, with ice: http://www.rwknudsenfamily.com/products/natural_juices/hibis...
I don't so much see the transfer of power as being from governments to social networking services themselves as much as it being from governments to the users of social networking services.
Ask HN: How can I contribute to Open Source as a Designer?
I am a designer. I do web designs and UI design.

I've been noticing how Open Source has contributed to my growth. Just wondering what are the options for a designer like me to contribute back to the community?
As someone else commented: The MS research link is kind of misleading (that's the origin, but not the place you go to for F# now).

I'd suggest to go directly to the site http://www.fsharp.net/ - which, granted, is linked on the MS research site as well.
I highly suggest looking at http://cs.hubfs.net/ as well.
http://www.pixiim.com
The key caveat is buried in one sentence in the second-to-last paragraph:

> I know a lot of folks who keep cable for live sports, but cable surviving as a sports-only service is hard to fathom.

As long as sports are not available live anywhere else, cable will continue to rule. Because of the bundle packages people are forced to buy, they'll keep buying everything else as well.
Fexl Version 00
This is a highly preliminary release of a Fexl interpreter written in C. All it does is run a few test cases. I haven't even integrated the parser yet. But in the spirit of "release early and often" I'm letting it out the door anyway so that fans can get a sense of the code and data structures and how to write extensions.
Been doing the same thing - Argentina, then later Thailand and Vietnam - while working on my startup and turning flash projects to pay the bills. Telecommuting from the third world is where it's at.

Made the arguable mistake of spending 9 months in Australia on my way to S.E. Asia and it ripped my pocketbook to shreds. That was when the AUD was almost 1:1 with the USD.
I have a macbook, and a PC with a model M keyboard, so I'm familiar with both types and use both regularly. I hadn't noticed before reading this, but I do tend to type similarly to you do on the low-profile macbook keyboard. It's more "sliding" than lifting. I think the low profile necessitates it, because otherwise it's just a lot of wasted movement through thin air and leads to less accuracy.

This may also explain why I was extremely inaccurate when I first started typing on the macbook (until I learned to adjust and type as you do), and why I still find it to be not as comfortable to use as the model M. It is the best laptop keyboard I've ever used, but I don't find that style of typing to be as comfortable or natural.

I guess it's just personal preference, though. I learned on a model M back in high school.
This is a highly preliminary release of a Fexl interpreter written in C. All it does is run a few test cases. I haven't even integrated the parser yet. But in the spirit of "release early and often" I'm letting it out the door anyway so that fans can get a sense of the code and data structures and how to write extensions.
This is a bit of an off-topic rant, so feel free to skip it if you would prefer a direct answer to the question.

For many years I've made it a point to studiously ignore languages that come out of Microsoft, having been burned too many times by their constantly shifting and sometimes suddenly-expensive tools. Before anyone mentions price, sometimes the expense is hidden in places like what system I would have to run, with what total cost of ownership, in order to use their stuff. There may have been some unknown opportunity costs to me, but I am blissfully unaware of these and have had plenty of other fun languages to use.
And this gives you what? doesn't even talk about that very much... anyone even try this before? hm, $150 application fee...
Repeat is on the todolist, for now press the close button and reselect the video from the bottom bar. See comment below for reaction on mp3/still image issue, hard one to solve.
So the majority of our users are either running commercial software, or running something home-rolled. The home-rolled software is generally the product of years of slapping bandaids on something someone wrote at such-and-such university. Almost always written in fortran 77.

It's becoming a bit of a problem, because we know they have terrible inefficiencies in algorithms and are not very well optimized for our system. But a ME Professor is more interested in the splashback effects supersonic turbines create than how efficient his simulation is. If it takes an extra 100,000 CPU hours, thats only an extra week for a 500 processor job. As long is it works well enough, they generally don't want to touch it.

So in that climate, there is very little research done using languages other than fortran and C. When it does it usually it comes about as a result of an interesting library that does X and is written in Y.

We are a small shop, especially for a 10,000 core system. We've only got 3 full time employees and three student employees:a part time web dev, a part time hardware tech, and me (Also part time.) . I've been trying to spend my time working with users and optimizing their code but for the most part they just aren't that interested. I think the prevalence of fortran shows a lot about the overall mentality. Just use what works, and get as much use out of it as you can.
Simulated Animals Incorporate Electronic Drugs in Collaborative Art Film
If that happens (and it almost definitely won't, at least for a long time), then switch. Making a decision based on pure speculation is a terrible idea. There are plenty of good reasons to switch to Ubuntu, but "I have a feeling Apple has a secret plan to turn OS X into iOS" isn't one of them.
Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, took the last $5000 in the company's bank account to Vegas so they could afford to make the ~$30k fuel payment they needed to stay in business. Turned out pretty well for him ;-)
Sure, if it's plugged into a real keyboard and a 30" monitor.
The author also developed git-flow, a set of extensions to help manage this workflow: http://github.com/nvie/gitflow

Related discussions:

- Why aren't you using git-flow? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1617425

- Ask HN: What's your dev teams git multi-environment setup workflow like? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1738934

- Our Git Workflow: Private Development, Public Releases (at Braintree): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1611667

- My Git Workflow (Michael Ivey): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441670

- My Common Git Workflow (Yehuda Katz): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343753

- Git Workflow for Agile Teams: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624319
F# is free. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=... . You only pay if you need the fancy "enterprise" features.
Sure, but to get to the "open menu" scenario, I already have to take my hand off the keyboard. At that point, it's a waste of time going back.

Control-F5 isn't doing anything for me on OS X at all.
http://fsharp.net is the new official site post-graduation from MS Research, I believe. For a nice introduction to the language, the Wikibook at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/F_Sharp_Programming is quite good.
Holding alt / control / command to modify a right-click menu is one of the most useful and worst UI decisions in OSX (IMO). Easily 95% of people I've encountered on Macs don't even know it exists, and when they do, they don't know how many places it exists.

I really wish there were some kind of hinting to help people discover this.
Maybe, you seem to know that better than I do. I remember it being described during 80s as socialist realism. For example, this note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1000din-1963.jpg depicts this guy here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alija_Sirotanovi%C4%87

Guy won the international miners contest where he shoveled 'with ease' 25kgs in one go and similar mythic stories behind it.
And every single note had a similar story behind it that furthered the myth of "workers in the spirit of socialism".
I play, can't even remember how I heard of it but my girlfriend and I learned together a few months ago, I've just got another friend hooked on it too. Having SmartGo Kifu on the iPad and the free go Client from Pandanet has made it easier to learn.

Funny thing is, a co-worker caught me playing it, then while he was slaughtering me in a lunchbreak another couple of guys came out of the woodwork too ^_^

I find it very cool that there's just one piece that can be used for everything.
I use a 13.3" laptop as my main dev machine.
Buying Lion with the proposed changes is voting with your dollar that you want more of those changes in future iterations. Not buying it and switching to something else says that you don't like the product. I use Snow Leopard right now but I think brand loyalty is stupid. I don't owe anything to Apple to keep using their product if I don't like the direction it is going in.
Ah, quite possibly. I haven't had anything in Macallan but 12 year old. In spite of nearing 40, I only started drinking, really, this year. So I have much study, yet. ;)
Hey, that's great! App Store, instant-on, implicit saving, restore on open—wonderful features.