skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some choices.

a) Be quiet, and try to be as productive as you can.

b) Look for a job, then quit.

c) Look for a job, and while you're looking, make a first approach to the most receptive management or near management member you can think of. Maybe lunch or beers. Give him a non-emotional, short executive summary of the problem and its consequences. If you get a positive response and you think he understood (pick your manager carefully for this), consider how to cautiously proceed.

All three choices are equally valid. c) is obviously complicated and risky, so you have to consider (among many other variables) whether you care enough about this company and your relationship with it to try; whether the entrenched are "know it alls" or are they willing to learn and be better; whether management are managers or slave drivers; whether you can afford a period of unemployment. In other words, is it worth the risk.

There are likely other companies that match your goals better than this one.
I can't believe there's a risk you could be fired on day 2, and not receive any of the (bulk of the) stock.

How much can you "love" a company that would put you in the position of facing this possibility?
The control room doesn't have to be in your country.
It's tricky for anyone who isn't a superpower to remove a satelite owned and operated by another country.

Distributed DNS etc doesn't really help if all the cables in and out of your country run through one building and the government owns it.
No, there is no lead programmer and the founder isn't technical. I'm the only person here who actually understands software engineering. I have to write long essays and letters to explain why things aren't the way they should be and I often have to lecture the other developers on what I mean by O(nlogn) vs O(n^2), ftp vs version control, spread sheet vs bug tracking system, project manager vs supervisor, sys admin vs phpmyadmin user.
You've only been there two weeks and your manager is asking why you're not as productive as the others? Holy crap.

Don't just quit, but start looking hard for something else. This place is hopeless; neither the developers nor management have a clue.
Partially-instantiated data is cool/fun, but I'm starting to question its utility in programs you would actually employ for something useful. Don't hold me to that though :)

Thanks for the papers!
The first MP3 player I bought had 128MB. (A Creative Muvo I bought in 2002.) I considered MiniDisk but having to use line-in seemed like such a hassle. (I didn’t have digital equipment and would have had to use the analog route and that just seemed like not worth it at all.)

I can understand how MiniDisk could have looked a bit more attractive a year or two earlier but not really in 2001 or 2002.
So what Jason is saying is that they're actually going to earn their Google rankings, and thus admitting that before now they hadn't? Now they can say with a straight face that their results are good, instead of lying about it?

I mean, I had that impression about Mahalo already, but it's weird to see him admit it's true like that.
Smart Hotmail
This is what Hotmail displayed (trying to do something similar as GMail), when my Inbox became empty

Wow, you've got a very clean inbox! (Did you know you can receive messages from other email accounts?)

BTW, I don't use Hotmail. Just check it once in a year to make sure I haven't missed anything; and 100% (no exception) mails are Junk!
Top 5 entrepreneur news aggregator
The peace of the grave.
Guess not :(
Presumably if they can identify patients with high likelihoods of returning they can take extra precautions while they are in the hospital the first time. Potentially this could be used to stop unnecessary hospital visits (via education, proactive treatment, outpatient care, etc).
"The winning algorithm will be able to predict patients at risk for an unplanned hospital admission with a high rate of accuracy."

Algorithm says no insurance for you.
Thanks for this. I'll definitely start with b) and c)
I really want to help the company but a) is more complicated since it bothers me to know that I just potentially introduced another set of bugs by not addressing the underlying issues.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=gakuse
The answer is in the names. People want a dropbox - a place to drop stuff. The don't want simple syncing. Syncing is part of the implementation of sharing a "drop box." Syncplicity the name but also the philosophy - the product was designed around syncing instead of an actual user need.
Why and How Netflix Adopted NoSQL Databases
very good point - over that period the biz will earn that money anyway.
You could erect the Mother of All Tin Foil Hats over the entire country.
They're a good compromise between mutable and fully immutable data structures? "Oh, that? It was always there, we just didn't know about it..." Easy example: Incrementally appending to a list of conses without reversing it in the process.

Better example of working with partial information: Constraint programming.
It sounds like quitting may be the best option. But it's always worth seeing if there's a little more money available if you take on extra responsibilities to train up the rest of the team - assuming that this is a trade-off you're happy with.
At first I thought they were doing this for humor (like the piratebay's publishing of "cease and desist" letters), but when I clicked the links to the repos and realized they did get removed, I kinda felt sad.
It's too late after the DMCA request has arrived, you'll just get a 404.

I imagine they have to lock / disable all forks beyond what the notice mentions as well, unless Sony, et al don't understand how git/github works.
As long as you're not driving a bus, we're fine.
Temporary restraining order granted against George Hotz for PS3 hack
I'd take that offer in a heartbeat.

Please do this.
Symbolic Tree of Early Lispers
Only if you want to store all the passwords in reversible encryption* or do some crazy scheme which you check every possible combination of hashes within the distance of the current password.

* If I find out you've been storing passwords in plain text I will hunt you down and slap you. :)
Reusable in the component sense. On Android you can use intents to let apps work together, you can get one app to manage your podcasts, and another app to play them at the speed you want. So you don't need to have the ability to adjust the playback speed in your podcast app. Truly component-oriented.
This looks like classical negotiation tactics from people knowing how to play hardball. They try to take control of the situation by setting limits to the offer.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO ACCEPT THESE LIMITS !!! THIS IS A CLASSICAL NEGOTIATION TRAP NEWBIES FALL INTO !!! THEY WILL TRY TO MAKE YOU BELIEVE THAT SURRENDERING TO ANY OF YOUR COUNTER REQUESTS IS A VALUABLE CONCESSION. IT IS NOT. THEY HAVE SET THE OFFER FAR TOO LOW FOR THAT SPECIFIC REASON !!! DON'T FUCKING BUY IT !!!

Guys, you have to learn to play bitches: i) be very patient (time is on your side, you are profitable), ii) talk to other interested parties (i.e. confront the offers to raise the price, and yes I mean multiple rounds; one shark smell blood? get more sharks in the pond! now is the right time!!), iii) don't show you cards, reveal your intentions or commit now, because you are in the process of finding what your intentions are and it depends of theirs too, iv) set YOUR own rules ON THEM whenever necessary (have no hard feelings about it, because they don't have any for you by making a low offer; from your own description, they are not being nice to you), v) never ever buy into whining and strong or manipulative emotions from other parties, they know how to play bitches like you don't (and sometimes, bitches fake friendship, caring and honesty very well; they send the nicest guy/lady, the one that has the highest chance to win your sympathy; it is nothing more than fucking smoke to get a better deal than they actually deserve; YOU did the hard work).

If you don't feel comfortable enough, find an independent professional negotiator with strong AND proven experience who can do that job for you. Discuss the limits within which you are ready to sell and list what you consider acceptable and unacceptable terms. Be honest and candid about it, no early concessions. Then, (re)open discussions starting with the double (at least).

Reward the negotiator with a percentage of the deal. Pay him well, because he/she will obtain a value that you will never ever be able to obtain yourself considering your experience in negotiations.

The hardest thing to understand (or to remember) is that 'no deal' is better than a 'bad deal' in your case. You must be ready to consider that option as the best option, especially if there is no zone of possible agreement between you and the other parties. Negotiating IS PRECISELY about finding out if there is such a zone.

And don't listen to those saying you should turn the offer down because 20% 'is an insult'. They are ignorant morons of no value (really). Now is SURELY NOT the time to quit discussions.

You are in the power position, but you don't act like you know it, or that you know how to play it. Take your time. Buy no drama. No rush. Let your brains run this show, not your hormones.
Per http://help.github.com/dmca/ it is up to the user to make the counter claim.

Fighting your legal battles is not a feature of Github. At least not of any of the advertised service levels.
Vote with your own dollars, sure. Boycott Mastercard, sure. But interfering with others' legal expression and commerce is just repeating the same injustice that was done to Wikileaks, and damaging innocent bystanders. Leave their dollars alone.
Strange. I can't reproduce. It should look like this:

http://www.webpagescreenshot.info/img/2476-129201145015AM

I'll see if any mac friends can reproduce. It may have been a temporary outage or something.

UPDATE: I think my parser was breaking on something. I've added begin;rescue to tighten things up.
In Mother Russia, SMS bombs YOU!
With respect, you are comparing apples with oranges. Those two pages are not about the same specific thing.

The specific Mahalo page for GTA 4 is

http://www.mahalo.com/grand-theft-auto-iv/

and it has much less info than the comparable Wikipedia page

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

I don't doubt that Mahalo has some detailed pages. However I think these are the exception rather than the norm (and almost certainly created to benefit from particular keyword trends).
This kind of transparency should be the norm, rather than the exception. Kudos.
And replace him with who ?

That's really up to the Egyptian people, no?
The Future of Search: Who Will Win The Spam Wars?
This is not accurate. India has agreements with various countries around the world to avoid Double Taxation. I don't pay taxes for the monies I send to India to my parents because I've already paid taxes on my income in the USA.
While Google publishes the DMCA takedown requests in relation to their search engine results, it does not publish the requests for removal of content contained within their own infrastructure.

Perhaps Github should do a little further research before feeling "inspired".
How to Glue This to That
Eloquent Javascript now in print
Good stuff, all of it.

Especially the point about getting an experience negotiator in there, you are not the right person at the table because you have too much riding on this deal.
2% of queries is huge. If you average that across a population (which of course isn't how it's actually distributed...), a searcher could expect to run across such a query every few days.
I'd argue that in an ideal world even 30 seconds is too generous. This is why the tagline is so prevalent: summarize what you're doing in as few words as possible. Less than 10 is okay, less than 5 is ideal.
Fully agreed, I also completely fail to understand how they got this far without a set of good advisors.
I have been in this position twice before with a services-based consultancy. The first time it was a similar low-ball offer with 50% paid up front and remainder over 4 years as an earn-out. The total deal was for roughly 4x revenues, and was all cash. We actually didn't think it was such a great deal at the time, but we ended up going all the way to closing. Lo and behold, they actually tried to change one of the material terms of the deal AT CLOSING. These folks were not to be trusted at all. We immediately said "GOOD BYE!" and hung up the phone (we were in Switzerland at the time working for a client and actually tried to do the closing virtually). I don't think they expected that we would just walk away if the deal went sour, but they had nickled-and-dimed us so much along the way that the trust was already frayed. By the time we were done, there was no trust left. Without trust, you can't do any deal.

Fortunately, like you, we were already profitable. Almost five years later, we've actually made more money (and pocketed) than we would have gotten in the deal. Meanwhile, the other company has gone belly-up. If we had taken the deal, we would have been screwed.

The other deal was such a stupid lowball, we couldn't even take it seriously. We simply replied, "this is not a good deal. Make us another offer." We felt it would be ridiculous for us to counter offer such a stupid deal that rejecting it out of hand and making them negotiate against themselves was a better option. Needless to say, they didn't make a better deal. Good riddance.

This is a great conversation here (tagged for future reference). For those of us who are trying to learn as much from other startups' experiences, would it be possible to keep us updated (in the same sort of anonymous style you have done here)? It may not be possible, but I'm very interested to hear what you end up doing with this offer.
Intense.
You can call Chuck Palaniuk an overrated writer all you want, but this is what Fight Club is about and did a good job of illustrating.
Oh, please. What exactly are you suggesting? Do you think Wikileaks reported any crimes or turned over firewall logs to the FBI?
what do you mean by "content contained within their own infrastructure"? I thought they forwarded the notices they get to chilling effects (and youtube ones are just posted in place of the video itself).

edit: this page http://www.google.com/dmca.html has about a 50/50 split across products between "may" and "will" be forwarded to Chilling Effects.
Yipit.com aggregates Groupon, LivingSocial, and hundreds of other daily deal sites(including non-location specific ones like Woot). It will filter the deals based on your location and specific interests you have.

Disclosure: I recently started working for Yipit.
> Gross profit would be far more useful.

Yes, and they have not mentioned their margins anywhere. 3x revenues might be generous (no further growth, lousy margins) or it might be terrible (lots of growth, great margins).
Isn't there an allowable delay in DMCA Takedowns? Some reasonable amount of time for the target to file a counterclaim before the content is locked? The way you've described it here sounds like you lock the content before notifying the user (or simultaneously).
MIT unveils fastest 3-D holographic video to date
But is it trivial to jam most ham frequencies across the 3.8 Million Sq. Miles of the U.S.? Or Europe (Same Size)? Or even just Germany (135,000 sq. miles)?

Edit: For comparison Egypt is about 387,000 sq miles.

I realize that you would not have to cover the entire country to be effective, but probably at least 90% of residential areas. Especially in Europe where the radio operators only need to reach over a nearby border.
I found this part interesting:

"Biologists have long known that flow through these channels is orders of magnitude greater than conventional fluid dynamics predicts."

It sounds like they're talking about a fluid dynamics equivalent of superconductivity.
Electric cars may be a new trend, but the concept is decades old
It may, it may not. There is a lot of information lacking.
Well I guess that delegitimizes any response I could conceivably make.
Less than $100 is too small for a collections agency to bother with, unless you've got a big pile of such clients.

I'd suggest charging dodgy clients in advance, or better yet, not doing business with them in the first place. Over the years, you'll get better at detecting the "vibe" of the non-paying client.
Bootstrapped and highly profitable after only 5 years with an 8-figure deal on the table? Enviable, my friend.

>>In the worst case, they could fire us on day #2 and we'd have only the token money we got up front to show for it.

If you're 'highly profitable', it hardly seems worth that risk.
Future School Day: Self-Paced Learning, Creating, and Collaborating
They can't do #4, as they don't have the old password. They'd either end up having to reverse the hash (with the same problems as #3), in which case why keep the crypt() hash? Or they could use the crypt() output as the input to the new hash, which wouldn't change the set of passwords accepted, and therefore wouldn't help at all.
The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz
The user can file a counterclaim immediately and indemnify github.

After that it would take a court order to get it taken down again, but that would mean the repository owner will be liable for the damages, not github.

This is the one part of the DMCA that actually seems to work reasonably well. If you're confident that your stuff does not infringe then it's back up within a very short time and you know you're on the hook for any further fall out.
Advice for Writing a Peterhouse Essay
Winning the Peterhouse Essay Contest is an excellent opportunity for students who are applying for college. With the experience and knowledge gained from writing this essay, students will be able to input that knowledge to better options especially when writing their college essays.
48 hours is the time require for action I believe, however the claimee can respond in however long they like, but the content must be unavailable until they file a counter claim.

(IANAL)
One very good reason to review what you fork.
I curious why the names and contact details have been redacted from the notices?
Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss talk knives, iPhone apps, flutes, and dog handling
Instead of 404ing repos, GitHub should redirect to the relevant DCMA takedown notices. Also, I'd like GitHub's responses to be public too.
Odd, Safari 5.0.3 (6533.19.4) works fine for me.
That's a sensible implementation if you want to be sure you're covered (or aren't ballsy enough, I'd probably take out the forks), but I wonder how long they could go by not taking action on the forks unless the specific forks are identified.

Just consider Youtube a moment. Couldn't they minimally run a hash on any uploaded/embedded sound and see if it matches the hash of some taken-down material before? It'd probably catch at least a significant number of users even if it's trivial to bypass and susceptible to compression losses and quiet-extensions and so forth. (An AI could always "listen" to it though and probably perform pretty well.) Anyway, Youtube doesn't make an automated effort to take down infringing material (that I know of) so I don't see why Github has to.
I love the Goto Anything features and the MiniMap. I must have those, somehow, somewhere. I'm playing around with all the Cmd-P and Cmd-R stuff in the Alpha on my Mac right now and love it. Intuitive and very useful in common use cases that come up. I think there's some overlap with what vi can already do, but this might go beyond it. I notice with the Cmd-P stuff it has a stack-like quality as you refine your query, meaning that as you refine your query and jump ahead to see the result, you can incrementally backtrack/unwind your query, to the changes live, and then ultimately you can totally pop back to the file/spot you had been looking at before you entered the Cmd-P query mode. Good stuff. MiniMap is a nice visual hack to help scroll around your code. It feels a little more like chrome than substance, but it's chrome I like, so I don't care. It also gives a birds-eye sense of where the most complex parts of your code are without having to manually look directly at every area at the 1:1 zoom level.
Check out the article on p. 476 ("Wireless of the Future"). There are some great quotes and very accurate given that they are from 1909. "It will soon be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world ..."
China journalist fired for writing about corruption, Tibet, truth...
A quick search of term "xenu dmca" should show you come of the shit that google has to deal with in respect to the DMCA.

Any complaints about content on blogger, youtube or the adsense/adwords network get taken seriously and aren't forwarded on for the worlds entertainment.
I always liked:

X-The-Number: 09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0
Actually in a properly setup mesh network you DON'T need service to your house. You just need to be within distance of the next node that can pass your packets along.
I love how this sits right next to "How Organized Spam is Taking Control of Google's Search Results" on the homepage.

You couldn't make it up.
Excellent point, you could infringing on copyrights with the click of a button and the code never hitting your machine or another server.
Reading between the lines, it sounds as if your market might have some overlap with, or technical dependency on, the acquirer's market and ecosystem--perhaps even only allowed to thrive at their pleasure. From the acquirer's motivation, it could be that they're trying to fill a niche they have no desire to invest in organically, especially if there's not a lot of growth in that niche.

If it's as you say, I think the question to answer is "Can we stand to be employees again, in particular, as employees of this company?" If you can, then this starts to look more like a job offer, in which case you need to negotiate more cash up front and more favorable vesting terms. (This may also explain why the future employer says the tone will change if bankers get involved. They probably see this as a talent acquisition with revenue attached. Getting a lawyer involved makes sense no matter what.)

If you can't see yourself as an employee, then my guess is that you're fearful that your market is going to go away (and the acquirer may suspect that you're road kill). In which case the thing to do is start trying to diversify outside the niche as the current niche revenue stream winds down. Is there time to do that?

End of rampant speculation. Good luck.
Either they do have a good set of advisors and they're just being thorough by asking HN (free advice from smart people, what's not to like?) or you have a new datapoint about the necessity of advisors.
My internet persona is largely curated by the SEO black hats trying to spin me, and the people I've fired. :-)

I'm a normal dude, just trying to build brands people love.... engadget, autoblog, joystiq, silicon alley reporter, mahalo, launch, this week in startups, open angel forum, etc.

I just like building brands. :-)
Our video game team is amazing.

We are making 900 high-quality videos a week. 105 people at Mahalo now, and we will add 100 more this year. We should be able to hit 3k videos a week this year.

The next wave of videos we create you guys will actually be using.... so I'm looking forward to hearing what people think of our lynda.com-like stuff. :-)
Illustrated even nicer by this comic: http://buttersafe.com/2011/01/27/traps/
Why don't they mention a well established project like Freifunk?

http://wiki.freifunk.net/Kategorie:English