skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Equity in a new startup
I'm a iPhone/iPad developer by trade. A startup that I knew of was creating a product and service and they asked me to build an iPhone app in May '09. We discussed the requirements, and I signed an SOW that was for a defined set of requirements. I however, went above and beyond those requirements and built something that met those requirements but created a much better UI than the SOW asked for; thinking there would be some compensation for that at a later point. I just completed the app, and the hours i spent were 2X the hours stated in the SOW. I know, my fault but I believe in it. I enjoyed it. That SOW included a convertible note with a value of $7500. My max conversion rate is $4/share as stated in the note. The company's valuation per share was $0.74 in Oct 2010 based on a $150K investment; making the company worth $650K. There were 1M authorized shares, 911,250 outstanding, and 88,750 authorized but not issued.

Here are the options I've been given: 1) Convert my note at $2/share, create a second note with a value, conversion rate, and deliverables defined. 2) Convert my note at $2/share, and create a second "contract" that involves profit sharing from app downloads or products sold via the app. I feel that $2/share is very high. Is it too high? Whats reasonable? What can I do from here? Any advice is much appreciated.
Aha! Good to know. They could still use a designer to actually design their site, but it's nice that they didn't just elect to steal a design.
I'll pretty much download anything new that pops up on the free list. A lot of it is junk that gets deleted fast, but if other people are doing the same...
Aperture 2.0 came out in Feb 2009. Aperture 3.0 came out in Feb 2010. But I am basically speculating that Apple is following a very common software pricing strategy of significant cuts ahead of a major update...
iOS 3 update wasn't free - $5 or $10 IIRC.
>The image tag has worked fine without a "baseline" image format since the dawn of the web.

IE's historically poor support for PNG is probably the main reason so many sites still use GIFs where PNGs would be better. (Edit: And for that matter, as others have pointed out here, PNG was invented because the owners of the GIF patents threatened to sue the entire Internet.) Browser support for TIFF is an inconsistent mess.

In the case of the img tag, the most common browsers all supported two common formats pretty well (JPEG and GIF), so those two formats became the de-facto baseline image formats organically.

I think the situation with video is similar. If Firefox, Chrome, and Opera (the influential browsers used mainly by the early-adopter, techie crowd) all support one specific codec for HTML5 video, that will become the de-facto baseline video format organically.
Argument Against Headphones: 1 in 5 American teens has hearing loss
For anyone curious, 99.984% uptime works out to 84 minutes of downtime over one year.
It's also convenient not to need to have the disk in your computer.
It's a collector's item: you would buy this book to match your other TAOCP books on the shelf.
I've been trying to refrain from commenting on these stories the last few days, but oh well.

This whole debate is stupid and of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to go. Mozilla supports it, Chrome supports it, Opera supports it, Flash will be supporting it in the near future, meaning any of the other desktop browsers will support it.

The only reason people are complaining is that their iPhones have H.264 hardware acceleration. Well, dude, you'll just have to deal with software decode for some videos. The world does not revolve around iOS, no matter how much you want it to.

There is no good reason to support H.264 -- WebM provides roughly equivalent features and quality and MPEG-LA will be out for blood ever more as the clock ticks down on H.264 patents.

Everyone knows that there is no valid argument here for supporting H.264 other than "but... that'll decrease the battery life on my iPad or iPhone! :(". That's life, man; technology moves forward and old things get obsoleted, even mind-blowingly shiny things made by Apple.

I find the pointless hipster-fanboy whining to be pretty grating, personally.
Here is a link to the actual project:

https://github.com/apenwarr/redo#readme
The next social network will be the one that can provide different individuals allowing them to form dynamic groups around their interests, hobbies, and activities.

It will be much like high school cliques. They will be exclusive, relevant, and intimate. Individuals will have different cliques.
Love this. There used to be an interactive geometry program for Linux called Dr. Geo - is anyone aware of something similar, preferably on Windows?
A big part of a marketer's job is projecting oneself into the role of a consumer. Jargon can become a distraction from understanding your audience, and this site is a healthy reminder of that.
carriers want you to take the subsidy bait. because it makes you less likely to jump ship than if you were only paying the monthly usage fee. I hope that having ~4 providers on compatible LTE bands will reverse that behavior.
Ask HN: Review template syntax for mail-merge style emails
I suppose it's possible for a company to exist indefinitely, but how many companies that existed 1000 years ago exist today?
The War on Poverty is the name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty
Evented pretty much gets rid of the need for locking and critical sections.

How so? If I write two events that access the same data structure and both events fire at the same time (totally possible in a concurrent world), I still seem some sort of locking on that data to guarantee consistency.

You may not need to write the locks explicitly, but they'll be there at least implicitly. Personally, I'd rather control my locks (allowing coarser grain access) than letting the compiler try and handle it. Exception safety will mean that they'll either version the function, use a transaction, or not be able to coalesce accesses.
>because (apparently) this style of parenting is common.

It is not common. Every Chinese mother I know (that would be quite a few) found the Amy Chua article to be repulsive. Just like the American moms did, except that they knew people would equate them with Chua's ideas so it makes them even angrier. My own wife (a Chinese mom) and her friends and relatives have been circulating the Chua article and talking about it and the consensus is a universal "WTF is wrong with this woman?!"

Then you read that the Wall Street Journal article was, at least to a certain extent, not representative of the actual tone of the book and you realize that this piece, so disliked by real Chinese mothers is an exaggeration of the whole phenomenon.

People like the mom in this linked article are responding to an exaggeration of a caricature (and should be aware of this, though, from their own defensive and annoyed tone I suspect are not) and it strikes a chord because people are too sensitive to perceived criticism of things that matter deeply to their psyches... like the job they do raising their kids.

So the WSJ takes an extreme point of view, exaggerates it to fit a caricature of a certain racial stereotype, people get annoyed at this mostly made up thing and start reacting angrily and the WSJ and those involved in the book make money off of the whole mess. Shameful.
I appreciate that they are trying to do things right.
I found it sort of silly in both articles that they make a universal qualification, but then follow up their reasoning based on more or less anecdotal, personal evidence. Whether you're Chinese or American, it doesn't make you superior at all. What makes you superior is the direction and tone you take with your children based on who they are and who you are. Where this jingoistic element came in, I'm not really sure. Call me naive, but I think that China and America are both really big places that probably have many different cultures and families that take different approaches to raising children.

These labels don't advance the conversation much for me.
IMHO Google is just showing off their power. They can do whatever they want.
> I'd love to see these anecdotes turned into evidence.

Give it 20 years.
I realize that my comment was a bit imprecise.

Surely some firms will do better than average, it's just that humans are notoriously bad at anticipating which firms those will be, hence the superior performance of index funds compared to managed mutual funds over the long term.
So, most people he encounters deliberately do this, most people who don't also do this think that they should be, and yet he feels confident saying they're wrong. "Bold" is an understatement.

It's a arbitrary convention either way, as he admits. Invoking "writers, editors, typographers, and others" means very little in the context of correspondence, personal or otherwise.

I've been teaching myself Emacs and having decent success in teaching myself various shortcuts. Re-teaching myself to not put two spaces after a sentence in prose? Ha.
Not sure. I came across this on r/math and figured HN might like it. I just found the visual correspondence between the unit circle and the resulting graph to be great.

I sent Matthew Trost, the creator, a comment asking if he could implement cosh et al. Apparently, he decided to make this after taking Calc II at a community college and realizing his trig was pretty fuzzy. He's also just learning to program. Pretty impressive.

http://www.touchtrigonometry.org/about.html
If I had to pick between the two, I'd actually toss out MVC. I've used both, and I've seen the results (and horror) of people doing the "Teach yourself ASP.NET in 21 days" version of ASP.NET, but really the stuff in those books isn't the stuff you should be using.

ASP.NET done right actually feels a lot more MVC than ASP.NET MVC. You can still route whatever paths you want, but you get to use actual files where files make sense. And you get to sanely base your pages on a common class, and you can manipulate properties on your HTML from the backend. It's the best of both, really, since all the fun stuff from MVC got poured into ASP.NET too.

I still do MVC work for clients, but as of now, new project stuff where I'm spending my own time (and therefore money) still gets done in regular old ASP.NET.
The Biggest Challenge Faced by Technical Founders
Let's just go ahead and coin the term "lol ads".
I'd be pretty mad if that was in my SLA, unless it was very carefully worded. If the system's going down for a minute every hour or two, it's probably more of a disruption to me than if it goes down for an hour or two once a month.
You're totally right;
https://groups.google.com/group/django-users/browse_thread/t...
Why would the Chinese lift the cap for institutional investors? They would be the ones that would try to use the Yuan at some point. With a 20K cap, it's more like a novelty than a real investment.

It seems unlikely the Chinese have a need for many dollars flowing to them. I mean, look how many they have - unless something truly weird is going on...
You could argue about the weightings all day though. Will people actually use every single one of those composite operations in real life? Shouldn't the important ones be weighed more? etc.
"This website's music is great, turn it up!" - LMAO!

The funniest part is that most of this stuff actually works: on message copy, brand structure (http://bit.ly/fmyD7T), the word "solution" has sold hardware for 3 decades, buzzwords like "social currency" causing enough confusion to get your attention, focusing on intent increasing conversions/revenue, font size increasing conversions, branded apps (REI ski report, Oakley surf report), website users love introspection, stock photos increasing conversion, focusing on benefits (value prop).
Why since 1.0?
I don't see any signification changes since 1.0...
The twice the work wasn't really addressed. No one really cares about the desktop. You can get whatever codec you need whenever. It's mobile that people care about. That's where HTML5 will really make a difference. Firefox is nowhere in Mobile.

If this was just about the desktop I'd say just randomly encode every video. I'm going to have every codec installed anyways. But that's not the discussion.
>Which means you can catch Atlas Shrugged [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/] in a movie theater near you before you play the game.

Didn't expect that.
You would think an actual statistician with a thesis in psychometrics would be able to do better than that, yeah. It's fine to talk about anecdotes and her experience as an employer and what not, but without the facts, it's like a dinner with only dessert.
Saying that you can't think functionaly in Java is not a "bad habit" - that's a style choice. Likewise, being verbose is not a bad habit - it's an issue of style.

As for global state - using singletons is a design decision. If you don't like them, don't use them!

So many people on HN hate on Java just because they've made the switch to functional programming. All power to you, but none of what's good about FP makes Java bad - it's just different.

I'd agree that there are some inherent design issues with Java - I've never liked primitives and I don't like how generics were implemented but other that that, it's a really excellent tool for a number of tasks. Just because it doesn't look like what you like, doesn't make it bad (this reminds me of when Java came out in the first place and all the C++ programmers were saying that it was useless because it didn't have operator overloading. not bad, just different!)
I don't know if I agree that the average user will try again in several hours. There is a big difference if my email is down for 5 minutes or an hour, if I need to check something now, since "now" includes 5 minutes from now but likely not an hour.
Sold me
Security Researcher, CyberCrime Foe Goes Missing
(if you aren't happy with your release schedule and you have a phone that allows custom ROMs or you use an exploit)
A a well designed and simple GIT Tut this seems to be easy to run through. In addition, the steps are broken down into micro chunks which are always easier to people who have no clue. Wonderful and thank you.
I don't think the post was intended to say that advertisers
actually think that people talk or even think this way, I
think the post was to point out that often, marketers will
have a certain perspective on their product and try to
force that perspective onto its users. The reality is,
users don't care about your perspective. They only care
whether or not the product meets their needs.
Happy 5th Birthday to jQuery, 1.5 Beta 1 is released.
Only for iPod Touches, not for iPhones.
> I suppose it's possible for a company to exist indefinitely, but how many companies that existed 1000 years ago exist today?

How many markets that existed 1000 years ago exist today? The point I'm making is that markets are composed of individual stocks, they can't be inherently superior in terms of ROE to the stocks that the indices track.
Isn't it more stable?
I submitted the bug as feedback. It looks like he hard-coded all of the main identities, so it's likely a pretty easy fix. Nice catch.
You could just as easily make a blog "Things Real People Don't Say About Your App"

"I like the functionality, but it doesn't follow best practices."

or "Things Real People Don't Say About Science"

"These findings are compelling, but I'd like to see some corroborating studies in peer reviewed journals".

Any consumer facing industry is going to have a world of jargon that is inaccessible or ridiculous to the layperson. And similarly, these industries can support those who want to participate but don't have anything to add.

I don't see this as a jab at advertsising (although, it very well may have been intended as such) I see it as a jab at wannabes.

If you still don't believe me, try reading tech job postings...

[edit: typo]
This is a standard negotiating tactic. Google will back down once they prove that WebM is a real threat to MPEG-LA's business model. They'll do this because you'll find Google getting an exclusive sweet deal from MPEG-LA for streaming h.264 on YouTube (which is what they really care about). Once that happens, h.264 will be back in play on Chrome, leaving FireFox and Opera as the odd browsers out. Which, incidentally, is great for Google because users of those browsers will just switch over to Chrome.
Ask HN: Review my startup - xuland.com
http://www.xuland.com

I'm reposting this on HN because my last post went "dead"? Not sure what happened there...

Xuland has been a passion of mine for well over a year since I started working on it. I've blogged about it on eonflex.com, and it quickly became the 6th most visited blog story through Adobe Feeds (http://feeds.adobe.com) in the past year.

Since then I've recieved variable levels of traffic, nothing big. The blog was the only public announcement made. The number of new registrations is very low, even though you can login directly using your existing Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or Google accounts.

As you can see, the site was completely developed in Flash (Flex, to be exact) and lends itself a Facebook feel. The was done on purpose to keep the learning curve as low as possible.

My official blurb about Xuland goes like this: "Xuland is a social network based on location, rather than a friend's list. Xuland allows you to share comments, photos and links with those around you. Follow those that interest you, or see who's following you!"

On load, the application should geolocate to your city or neighborhood (based on IP). You would then see comments posted in that area. YOu can change the map to any city in the world - a nice and unique feature I think. You can post a comment, or a photo, which you can modify slightly before upload (you can even remove red-eye).

I built the site because I felt it would be great if I could talk to folks in my own town, or the next town over, that I didn't necessarily know or who wasn't already on my Facebook friend's list. Yelp is similar, but your comments are always centered around some business or restaurant. I wanted something more...

There's still quite a bit of work to be done, but I receive very little feedback. Most of it has been positive, but these are friends and family. I'm very interested in what you, the hackers, think???
There is no good reason to support H.264

What?

Except for the fact that as a video site, all of my existing video is already in H.264. All of my encoding tools support H.264. Every other device I need to stream that video content too including mobile devices, tablets, Connected TV's, Blu-Ray players and Over the Top boxes (Roku, Boxee) support H.264 (generally at the hardware level).
No mention of CSP? sigh
FYI, the person in charge (Mike Jazayeri) previously worked at Microsoft. I am not suggesting anything, just find it is quite interesting.
http://www.headsethotties.com/
how does automatic dependency detection using strace work?
> This website's music is great - turn it up!

Definitely. No one has ever said that, ever, in the history of the web.

Never say never. It depends on the type of a site e.g., http://www.thesixtyone.com/
Amen! Just another troll post from PC Mag.
Is Google really that concerned with saving a measly $6M per year? It looks like they would pay it back anyway ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361442 -- less efficient codecs, greater server loads ).
so we're back to plugins, what was the point of the <video> tag again?
GS CEO Blankfein visits Groupon HQ
What'd be the point? The days when the Swiss wouldn't rat you out to your own government are long gone.
TouchStamp: Multitouch for Preschoolers
I have absolutely no feeling, as they should be the top search in google. I do not use the .com or the .net at the moment, like I pointed out. I was just asking if they are a business called SoleSearch, why settle for the domain sole-search.net? It's fairly easy to come into contact with the owner of domains if they are not available.

I'm sure all of their customers find it in the app store and that's why they've never worried about it. But take a successful app like angry birds for example. If I go to angrybirds.com, it takes you to their shop where they earn additional streams of revenue. If these guys want to create something special and "be bought out by yahoo for a billion", in my opinion they need to offer something more to a customer than just the name, address and phone number of a sneaker store. It's all stuff I can do myself by using a free app like google maps.
The title of the submission has been changed. It used to be "I didn't realize MIT hired Luddites."
I work at an interactive agency and none of your experiences hold true for me. It might be time to upgrade your employer.
I really love this guy's writing. He cuts through the layers of BS so well and exposes something closer to root causes better than anyone I've ever seen.
The same argument applies to video sites. We shouldn't be held back and stuck on a proprietary format just because you don't want to write a script to go through and re-encode everything to WebM.

H.264 heretofore has been "the standard", so of course most existing devices will have better support for H.264 video than for the not-even-one-year-old WebM. Google and Mozilla are attempting to change that to avoid a repeat of GIF or even MP3.

The argument boils down to "I don't want to put in the effort to switch to the new stuff, and my old stuff likes the old stuff better anyway, so Google is a jerk for trying to make the old stuff less common." And that's just a silly argument that could easily be applied to any number of things in technology, which is a very fast moving field. Things change a lot in this space and it's just one of those things you have to accept.

Google has not obliterated or disabled your H.264 decoders. You are welcome to keep H.264 video around all you want (according, of course, to your license terms with the MPEG-LA). Removing native support from Chrom(e|ium) does not mean that all H.264 video is now magically broken or unplayable. If you are happy with H.264, you are free to continue to use it.
Ignoring the cost in ignoring the revenue from millions of iOS users, let me focus instead of the looming legal question of WebM. If Google were to indemnify WebM users (sites who encode in WebM, developers who release decoders, OEMs who release hardware decoders), I would be much more willing to embrace WebM. As is, there is a very cogent argument to be made that the MPEG-LA group has already suggested that some of their patents may be encapsulated in WebM and users could be opening themselves up to lawsuits as co-defendants with Google. H.264 isn't free, but it's a known cost and licensing from MPEG-LA indemnifies you from any legal costs that might be associated with patent trolls popping up to sue you to death.
HelpYourMates - a Queensland flood relief effort
In the spirit of lean/mvp, I spent last night building a registry of I haves/needs of accommodation, food, services etc for the people Queensland affected by the floods. Still barebones atm (eg no search). Your feedback welcomed.
In the spirit of lean/mvp, I spent last night building a registry of I haves/needs of accommodation, food, services etc for the people Queensland affected by the floods. Still barebones atm (eg no search). Your feedback welcomed.
YouTube - Partners, we’ll cover how to make money on YouTube
Bernstein's work is really understated. On his site you can see a better glimpse in what he's worked on: http://cr.yp.to/djb.html
In Arc, square brackets are shorthand for an anonymous function. The argument is an underscore. ([+ _ 2] 2) returns 4.
I built the site using the PlayFramework (Java). I'd say it is as rad as Rails, Django, Grails etc and for me much more pleasurable to code in. Who says Java is clunky and deprecated?
IBM's Watson defeats Jeopardy stars in warmup match
Афтар! Пеши еще!

btw, advices are really good