skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Advice/tips on meeting with a strategic acquirer
We're a SaaS company and are meeting with one of the larger companies that use our product. Our product is very good and priced very competitively, we're ahead of competitors product-wise, however as we are new to the market we don't have the large customer base that others do.

For various reasons we are interested in having our product/company acquired by this large user of our product. We are meeting with this company tomorrow and they are aware that we are interested in an acquisition - but we have no idea if they are interested or not (we will find out tomorrow).

Note: Since ours is a SaaS product we have smaller competitors of our potential acquirer (we'll call them Company X) that are also using our product. Assuming an acquisition of our company by Company X, they will probably shut down our SaaS business and integrate our product/tech within their company. (doesn't make much sense for them to keep our SaaS business up for their competitors)

From our point of view, this acquisition makes sense for the potential acquirer for a few reasons:

1. By becoming the sole company with access to our product/tech they will instantly gain a lot of credibility in a space that they are investing in and are looking to expand into.

2. The type of capabilities that our product/tech will enable Company X to have would be a large selling point in helping Company X acquire new customers for it's own business.

3. They will be able to make custom integrations into their own workflows and business allowing for much more productivity.

The main thing to keep in mind (and the main part of the reason we want this acquisition) is that our competitors are moving really fast as well and we're not sure how long we will remain "ahead" of them (I estimate this to be 6-12 months).

I have a few questions: are these benefits enough for an acquisition? Does anyone have any experience on strategic acquisitions, any advice or tips generally about them? Any feedback regarding this specific situation? Any tips on the pitch/what to say during the meeting (some of the execs haven't actually used our product, their team+manager has so we'll be doing a short product demo of benefits as well).

We don't have any outside-funding so no fiduciary duty to 3rd parties.

Note: this is a throwaway account.
they had someone responding on tumblrhelp with chat and sympathetic words throughout most of the outage.
it might be just you and a bunch of other people who don't understand prolog.

if statements are not horn clauses. if statements are procedural and specify execution order and don't pattern match.

prolog's execution is resolution, done using unification over logic variables.

as a simple example: member/2

member(X,[X|_]).
member(X,[_|T]) :- member(X,T).

if I query: member(1,[1,2,3]) this is true

if I query:

member(X,[1,2,3]), this is true, for X=1, X=2 and X=3

similarly you can ask append([1,2,3],[4,5,6],X) to get X=[1,2,3,4,5,6].
and ask append([1,2,3],X,[1,2,3,4]) to get X=4

for example:

to produce all possible combinatons of items from a series of lists:

comb([],[])
comb([H|T],[X|Y]) :- member(X,H), comb(T,Y).

so if I do

comb([[a,b,c],[d,e,f],[g,h,i]],X) I get X = a,d,g or X = a,d,h and so on and so on

as you might see, it is a little bit more obvious that it isn't just a series of 'if statements' but a series of relations between clauses
LLVM as noted. But the problem is that if Oracle's lawsuit against Google is successful, then any VM that's remotely similar to Java's is threatened.
I don't think anybody would be too surprised to see a porn site using this sniffing trick, but some other sites listed are quite surprising to me: charter.net, namepros.com, morningstar.com, straightdope.com, twincities.com.
An interesting idea, and probably the nigh-holy-grail to blind users... but I keep thinking that the biggest use of this, or at least the first big use, will be for porn.
If Oracle is in breach of an agreement, can Apache take them to court of force them to comply?

Apache doesn't have enough money to do that, and if they did their members would probably consider such a lawsuit a waste of said money.

Alternately, are there any legal obstacles preventing Apache from writing their own TCK and saying in future they'll develop against that?

Patents that are owned by Oracle.
> TeslaTouch was developed at Disney Research

That's a good start.
More than that, for typical distributed "enterprise-y" type stuff (a crap-ton of services that call each other) MS's stuff is generally superior. Creating a typical WSDL based service on Java using Spring requires a lot more work than with .Net, and all of the nice little features (like tools for manually calling a web-service API) are built-in.

Unless you are a big enough company to be able to roll your own infrastructure tools to make use of linux's advantages or have very significant scale requirements the cost difference is unlikely to be huge (much of the cost will be operations labor anyway) and the service and support backing of MS is a significant boon in the enterprise world.

LLVM and Javascript are contenders but they aren't platforms yet, although I think they will see a ton of use in web apps and web services, especially outside the enterprise.
Unfortunately Android (2.2) doesn't list my contact info in my contacts.
Because if it doesn't hit my inbox I'll never see it at all. The archive is great for looking up stuff ("What did I pay for Slicehost last month? Did Mary Smith get a purchase confirmation?"), but not great for push notifications. Non-priority emails in the inbox are, for me, a good compromise in terms of amount of distraction caused per unit of actionable info gained.
The new code browser is pretty sexy and comes to much relief.
Oracle has pretty much said, Java is for paying customers.

Actually, they said Java on phones is for paying customers and Java on servers will always be free. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/06/oracle_dueling_jvms/
Even if people don't find it 'sleazy' per se, you're forcing people who don't want the emails to take two actions to submit the form - one of which requires care and attention, rather than just hitting the big button. The extra burden alone may well be enough to account for the drop off.
If you'd like early access to LeanCanvas, please drop me a line ash@wiredreach.com
Apache can write their own test suite, but their products can't be legally branded as "Java™" without passing the TCK. Of course, a cleanroom implementation of Java can pass the TCK yet still contain bugs that make it unsuitable for production use. Even if the licensing issues went away I can't see how an Apache Java would ever see enterprise adoption.
This has been going on for something like eight years so it's not easy to summarize. But you might start here: http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/sun_apache_ip_in_pi...
Designers: How To Get Me To Give You Money For Stuff | Daniel Kennett
Google is a company that extracts revenue by automating everything that can possibly be automated. That's why they're much better at self-driving cars than customer support.
Indeed. Losing a transit card is bad. Losing a credit card is bad. Losing a phone is bad. Losing all of these at the same time?

Yes, let's figure out a backup system.
Here's the actual paper, which does name its units (international poverty line):

http://www.salaimartin.com/media/pdf/Africa_Poverty_NBER.pdf

And criticism of their results from someone working on producing similar numbers for the World Bank:

http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/is-african-poverty-fall...

I must say that it irks me that they would use such a easy-to-understand-and-wrong ($1/day, when they mean "below the international poverty line") unit in writing without specifically qualifying it.
I know it's a joke but it raises a good question.

As I understand it, the "friction" induced in your finger is purely a sensation. I mean how much force can it actually apply to your finger?

Also, the actual nature of the surface isn't altered - I wonder if you have two sensations at once?

Personally, I've been waiting for this for a long time... touch-typing on a screen (as it is common today, iphones and androids being ubiquitous) sucks, as you mistype regularly, even as you look at your screen.
Startup Quote: David Karp, founder, Tumblr
I think it's brilliant. Thinking about it, I'd do it intentionally at least for AV. Once a typical AV customer has chosen one specific product and is willing to buy it, I think it's very unlikely they will first look for a pirate version of it. I dare say a large amount of their profits come from retail or pre-installed trial conversions or high priced renewals. The mass of 1st tier AV available for $0-$10 after competitive upgrade rebates etc. clearly shows they expect most of their money in the long run.

But imo someone looking to pirate AV is mostly going to choose a product out of the options available for downloading. They may have a preference but if it's simply not available they'll go for #2. Also, they may choose partially based a reputation for working consistently - eg people report product x has worked flawlessly for a year but product y is always being broken and needing new cracks. Legit free versions may be option C.

If you accept my presumptions - AV makes most of their money in ongoing or addons - and pirates are cost conscious but rather brand agnostic - any one firm likely loses very little in sales by having their product copied.

On the other hand the firm gets the chance to have the user grow comfortable with the software and all of the highest tier features if they don't cut it off. Obviously there is a non-zero conversion rate here and importantly they may no longer view free options as feature rich enough.

So by this logic it's actually in the best interests of the company to make sure their product is widely available in pirate circles instead of fighting it. Why let your competitor get a chance at a piracy conversion instead of you? Not only that but you'd want to make sure it was a good experience - trojan free - no bad cracks - up to date signatures - so the user had the best impression of it.

It's the ultimate in price discrimination - giving it away free to those who wouldn't pay anyway in hopes of future conversions - something they do anyway with free after rebate deals - while ensuring the illicit nature of the distribution keeps it from cannibalizing most legitimate sales.
Process One (developers of ejabberd) are working on an independent implementation:

http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/processone_wave_...

http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/proof_of_concept...

I wouldnt be surprised if they eventually offered corporate hosting.
Offer HN: 50 downloads for your free iPhone app 
Fall quarter is winding down at school and I would like to spend a lot more time on my startup in the coming 3 weeks. My startup is www.adsreloaded.com and it's a service that guarantees downloads for your iPhone app, whether it's paid or free. Similar to Apperang or Tapzilla (a YC company), although founded and run by a college student still learning the start-up ropes.

So here's my offer:
On AdsReloaded a free app has a minimum cost per download of $0.10 USD. As such I would like to offer all of you a small campaign of 50 app downloads for free. (Normally 50 downloads would cost $7.50 after the campaign fee). Think of it as a very very tiny early Christmas present that I hope makes you at least a little happier :)

Disclaimer: My user base is small right now. Although I have about 500 users signed up... only about 60 have been active in the past month. What that means is that I can't really provide any "burst" traffic for you right now. But I can tell you that you will eventually get your downloads even if they are in a "trickle" fashion.

If you are interested my personal e-mail is in my profile, or you can drop me a note from the AdsReloaded website. (Integration of the AdsReloaded framework to your app takes less than 5 minutes and only one line of code).
Bill Murray shows you how A/B testing can help you land the girl of your dreams
EDIT - originally this comment started with "Wow, set the snark to stun!", but the parent has since been modified, which eliminates the need.

We've all had too many examples of bad pr-attracting events and their fallout over the years. A wise man wrote 'One shouldn't be forming a(n incident-response) team during a crisis', and I don't expect different here. Do I hope for better as someone who uses and admires the Tumblr platform, and expect more communication next time? Yes.

The quantcast graph pointing to the 1 _billion_ increase over the past _two_months_? Easy to play armchair qb to that, but by jeebus, it's almost surprising they made it this long.
The more people we have on our team, the less room there is in the elevator and the more complicated everything gets.

- David Karp (@davidkarp)

http://startupquote.com/post/2129022765
aww, thank you!
Ask HN: cloud supercomputing for the masses
This is more of a brainstorming question than anything. Extremely curious what you all think about this concept. This was inspired by jasonlbaptiste's post on turning excel tools into saad offerings.

So my question is do you think there could be a consumer demand for spot queries against large scale datasets. I.e. A realtor wants to know the number of houses for sale in the us to war veterans between the ages of x and y during the lat 15 years.

This idea came to me after reading about a sports betting database on espn magazine that was selling for 15k a pop.

So could you guys see applications for letting average users run queries cheaply against a giant cloud/grid computing tool?
Who wants to take a guess as to how many TOR servers are actually run by the DHS?
I appreciate where you're coming from, but of the three gripes I mentioned whitespace is the least of my concerns. The syntax of Python bothers me much less than the design philosophy.
No, not at all! I'm actually studying advertising right now, and am a big proponent of learning to use marketing. The difference between my perspective and yours (in my opinion, of course — feel free to contradict!) is that you see marketing as a wholly advantageous thing, whereas I'm more wary — I see it as an easily abused drug which provides a shallow relief to a deeper problem.

Here's how I'd put it. When I recommend a blog to somebody, or to myself, it's never because of the factors that make a blog bloggy: RSS feeds, archives, pagination, etc. The really important thing about a person's blog is the person, and the traits that person embodies. The blog is simply the way that person delivers herself to me. Ditto Twitter: The medium doesn't make the man, the man defines the medium. Bad Twitters are atrocious. Ditto bad blogs.

You see "value" in these various marketing positions, as if the problem is "does not market well". I think the problem is somewhat more multifaceted than that. Part of the problem is that people use tools they cannot competently handle; while I suspect that your post won't be popular enough to, say, motivate a man to suddenly try and get speaking roles, I imagine that a man who sucks at writing and at speaking and at being interesting who suddenly decided to present at a conference might find your advice more traumatic than useful.

A similar presentation that uses the same facts you do but shifts its perspective somewhat might sound more like this: "Here are some tools you have to express yourself. These are the ways that people use them; this is why they use this one instead of that one; here are some instances of good behavior with this tool that might inspire you." Perhaps you then explain why expression might be good for people, might get them work/recognition/whatever. By phrasing it that way you get to a core issue — what's the point of using these tools specifically? — and also move away from suggesting things like, "if you are not happy then it's probably that you're not using these tools", which is frequently wrong and occasionally harmful.

I'm on your side here. I just think you presented your thoughts in a somewhat problematic way. Hopefully there's some ideas worth turning over in our discussion here that lead to future ideas. :-)
It didn't say anything about how much power this draws. Any EE majors care to comment on whether this could be a reality on battery powered consumer devices?
That's why I never bought a Kindle.It's like paying for a book but be forced to keep it only at the shopkeeper's shelf.

I don't know of any actual Kindle owners who feel that way.
> What the appropriate level of force is, I leave that up to people smarter than me.

Why leave it up to people who are smarter than you? Aren't decisions concerning the level of force that is used against human beings a matter of ethics rather than intelligence?

> I just have decided that I support whatever decision is made legally.

So if X is legal, then X is good?
No,getting older is not bad at all, life takes its own sweet time teaching us its hidden tricks/ secretes to succeed:)
Don't forget Little Skillet
Right because those of us that feel that way, don't buy Kindles.
Mine did the same thing, I sent it in for a replacement and HTC was easy to deal with and shipped me a phone right away.
Foxconn to ship iPad 2 by the end of February 2011
How many other people started scrolling through to find the "force it in others" section first?
Naming Your Business
Rethinking the scientific method
Why should a nation involve physical borders anymore? Perhaps there is no territory that captures how some of us are feeling? What then?
I don't think you understand what "that claim" is. Nobody's claiming that Oracle literally said the words you put in quotation marks. The actual claim you are disputing, as far as I can tell, is that Oracle's recent actions have shown an intent to take Java from a free programming language to a money-making venture and oppose implementations that don't put money in Oracle's pockets. See, for example, the suit against Google and the sidelining of Harmony. The article itself notes that even the groups supporting Oracle's technology roadmap are troubled by its business decisions around Java.

None of this is the kind of thing most people would look for in a press release.
Safari 5.0.3 (6533.19.4)
Shockwave Flash 10.1 r102

I'm having difficulty reproducing the issue, though. The videos weren't loading either, so it's possible that clicking the close-box while buffering the tutorial video created a race condition or something. I hope that helps.
Ask HN: Tips for LAMP app recommendation engine solution
I was asked by a friendly company to improve their current product recommendation system which is currently a couple of complex SQL queries using fulltext search that match similar products based on title, description and tags (a single comma separated field).

The new system must also take into account the click rate of a product (in regard of similar ones) when it's being recommended, meaning that when products B and C are presented as similar products of A and the user clicks on B, it's click rate in regard of A is increased and may influence the next recommendation of similar products of A which orders the result by similarity and click rate in relation to the displayed product.

As a note, my customer is also interested in obtaining for example 8 products from this set plus 2 more with a low click rate to give them a chance of obtaining a higher click rate.

It's also required to be able to configure the weights of the "variables", for example, 0.5clickRate+0.3description and so on.

Instead of starting to hack a custom solution i've been looking for recommendation engines in PHP (the database is mysql) but haven't found much.

I'm also aware of Apache Mahout, i could suggest the use of Mahout or a similar java engine as a webservice but i know the customer is very much prone to a "pure" PHP solution, as their applications are very basic stack-wise.

Additionally i don't have experience with Mahout or recommendation engines in general, so i'm currently not aware how they manage the "related click rate" feature.
My questions are:

- Any suggestions?
- Have i missed any tool?

Thanks
The big win with an SSD, even with a 1.5Gbps interface, is the seek time. It's amazing how much faster simple things like "du" are with an SSD vs. a spindle.

Seriously, if you can at all stomach opening your laptop again, a 120GB-240GB SSD will make it seem like a brand-new machine. For the first week or so, you'll start ten applications at once just to watch how they all come up with no bounces on the dock. :-)
WikiLeaks founder Assange may surrender to British police
Agreed. Whether I'm automatically opted-in or opted-out to the marketing checkbox on signup forms is usually my first indication to the validity of the company/service.
PayPal, PostFinance Hit by DoS Attacks, Counter-Attack in Progress
I wonder how much of the incident and poor handling of the response is due to losing their particularly good CTO (Marco) a few months ago. I would be a bit concerned if I were a tumblr user or investor.

Experience with LiveJournal, Friendster, Twitter, etc. has been that problems don't just magically fix themselves; absent someone with enough vision to figure out potential problems and actually solve them in technology and business process, you're kind of fucked. In the case of Twitter, they had enough money to buy some excellent talent. In the case of LJ, Brad stepped up as an amazing hacker (with limited financial resources, and really one of the first to solve the problem). In the case of Friendster, bad executive leadership (CEO/board being ineffectual, VP Eng being a tool) killed them.
Avenged Sevenfold Lowell Tickets 
If you want to be singing along and tapping to the beats soon, you may want to grab some Avenged Sevenfold Lowell Tickets and get ready to lose yourself in the best music. All you need to do is you’re your friends or family together and TicketsMate will do the rest for you with some great deals on your Avenged Sevenfold Lowell Tickets.
Want To Build A Mobile App On An Android Phone With Rhodes?
BestBuy will sell Nexus S for $529 Unlocked (or $199 w/ 2 year contract)
The postmortem is pretty weak and us, geeks, would have loved to see more detail. Tumblr would have gotten some good karma with a detailed explanation. Well, unless this is all made up just to look impressive and the real reason was something else like human error that wiped the production DB. But even in that case honesty would have paid off - remember GitHub's recent DB wipe and their excellent explanation?

On a side note - anyone know what DB they are using? The cynic in me is thinking "Hey, another MongoDB + FourSquare 'success' story of webscale awesomeness."
I think people are very, very wary about pre-checked checkboxes just under payment details, because it reeks of cramming.

That is, they set off alarms not just that they might be subscribed to some email list, but that a "free trial subscription" (that auto-renews to a paid subscription) is being added to the order.
But LDAP is an Abomination unto the eyes of the Lord.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/2010-09-06-nfl-t...

"Last year's blackouts were confined to five teams, all of which had losing records: the Jacksonville Jaguars (seven blackouts, seven wins); Detroit Lions (four blackouts, two wins); Kansas City Chiefs (one blackout, four wins); Oakland Raiders (seven blackouts, five wins); and St. Louis Rams (three blackouts, one win)."
| நடிகர் கமலுக்கு இந்து மக்கள் கட்சி நோட்டீஸ் Dinamalar
மன்மதன் அம்பு திரைப்படத்தில் இடம் பெற்ற பாடல் தொடர்பாக, அப்படத்தின் தயாரிப்பாளர், இயக்குனர், நடிகர் கமல், நடிகை த்ரிஷா மற்றும் இசையமைப்பாளருக்கு இந்து மக்கள் கட்சி ஒருங்கிணைப்பாளர் கண்ணன், நோட்டீஸ் அனுப்பியுள்ளார்.
I would love a relational database with some less horrible language than SQL to manage it. That'd be NoSQL, no lie, but considerably different than a KV store.