skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Convertible debt is looking like the way to go. Does anyone have experience with discounting the equity when the note is converted? I feel like there should be a recognition of the increased risk for early investing. Would a discount of 50% be a restriction in terms of raising the 500k from other investors or is it a pretty standard term?
People would be a lot less upset if apple was charging a small processing fee, instead of a 30% cut.

If Readability wants make an iPhone app, and keep giving $7 for very $3 they make, they'll have to make their in-app purchase price $14.99. Also they can't charge less anywhere else.

IAP price = regular price / 0.7 then rounded up to the nearest integer (less a penny).
Ross, come to refreshMiami this week if you want to meet some devs. Its on thursday.
http://refreshsofla.org
I'm up for it. I'm located in Fort Lauderdale, FL so it's very close by for me.
I'll be presenting KidsAbacus.com at SuperConf and will be getting to Miami on the 23rd, so I'll try to make it to this meetup on Wednesday. If not I'll see you at the event.
Looks like Steve Jobs, or someone pretending to be him, has weighed in with a comment on that page:

Steve Jobs Says:
February 21st, 2011 at 7:53 pm
Hey Guys
Work your numbers a little bit and then tell me what you think you are actually losing out on. 30% or 70% towards your bottom-line.
Gruber on Readability's App Store rejection
The App Store does have the potential to drive a massive amount new business for an app like Readability. Apple believes they should be paid for that publishing and marketing service and it's hard to argue about that, particularly when comparing to the relative poor performance of other "app stores."

If the App Store fails to bring these developers new business then it doesn't cost the developers anything. If the App Store does bring them new business then it's up to the developers to weigh the cost of the App Store vs. the new business it brings.

Is 30% the right price? Ultimately the market will decide that, because if there's one thing this industry doesn't lack, it's competition.
Well you don't have to get in the ring and fight Tyson. You just could train with the punching ball if you want.

I'm not here to support professional boxing.
Firefox 4 Beta 8+ users can enable websockets by toggling network.websocket.override-security-block in about:config. It still doesn't work in the latest nightly, though, as I can't draw anything.

Websockets were disabled in Firefox 4b8+ because of supposed security problems in the protocol.
Keeping your brilliant business idea a secret may doom it to failure
Imagine a phone without third-party apps / any kind of app-store. Does your manufacturer have to provide some kind of software channel for your phone? No.

It's just another service, separate from the phone, you're free to use it, or not use it.

The answer to your why's is probably "because they can".
We have a C-Corp and terms with our current investor. Is there anything that would kill our application being already set up?
I think it was around $3500 all told.
"-42"
I don't really know. They never asked for a refund :)
How the green lobby smears its enemies
If there were surgeons applying for jobs who didn't know what a scalpel was, I sure hope they'd be asking that at an interview.

Anyone can write on their CV that they've got five years programming experience, unless you can demonstrate the skills you've learnt over those five years, then you might as well have spent those five years watching paint dry.

If you've spent the last five years teaching undergrads data structures, then I certainly expect you to be able to answer questions on data structures.

Medicine is a regulated profession so you don't need to ask these questions as someones already asked them and certified the individual.

What's often missed is the fact that software development interviews are an order of magnitude better than those in other non-certified professions. In many industries interviews often come down to the gut instinct of the interviewer, a practice which is known to be highly unreliable.

Programmers are lucky that we're in a profession where it is possible to separate the wheat from the chaff using objective questions.
If it was so predictable then why didn't you short the market and make millions while they were headed for the cliff?

Anyone who claims this was very predictable and didn't make a bet is full of it.
The giant sucking sound has become deafening.
HN folks: would any of you be interested in a 'Getting Started With Redis' screencast?

Edit: if it were non-free :)
Bloggers in my niche
"Five years from now, Mr. Wadhwa said he believes Indian workers will be developing software on par with programmers in Silicon Valley."

Russian/Estonian/[insert any country] are doing that for a while. Just not in their own country, but in Silicon Valley (50% of Silicon Valley startup has at least one founder that's not from USA). For creme de la creme products you need more than just good Indian "worker".
Google is smart enough to play the long game. And the long game is where the real money is. You can make money in the short term by abusing and misusing your users and maximizing short-term profits, but it's insignificant next to what can be made by building a highly trusted brand on the scale of google.
Uh, why is this getting downvoted? It's a purely informational post. Is it not considered relevant if the Steve weighed in?

Seems there's a bit of a pattern in these threads of downvoting based on disagreement with the ESP-perceived viewpoint of the poster. Not cool.
Sorry, I guess my point is, that for some of us, it gets really difficult to figure out who is breaking what in terms of compatibility.

Welcome to life as a software professional dealing with Microsoft.
I love cooking, and my approach to cooking is pretty much identical to hacking. I disassemble the components, test different measurements and combinations, and use recipes as a beach head into new forms of cuisine.

On Saturday I did a slow-roasted lamb shoulder with roasted dates, a garlic and white wine sauce and lemon and mint couscous on the side. At the moment I'm massively into slow cooking and fusion, particularly sweet and spices. I do a traditional lamb shank in a red wine sauce with various veg, but also Moroccan spices, apricots and figs, roasted for between 12 and 18 hours. Has to be experienced to be understood. If anyone wants recipes I'm happy to post them.

My one word of advice to any hacker that wants incredible meat dishes, get a crock pot. You can use the cheapest, roughest cuts of meat and with very little effort get incredible results.
"If you move to the valley and send a letter home to your mom about how you bumped into Fred Wilson in a coffee shop, she would probably not run off to tell all her friends about it."

Yeah, but Fred Wilson is the Silicon Valley equivalent of a Harvey Weinstein. And, while I'm sure some people know who the Weinsteins are, they're not as famous as, say, Tom Hanks.

Ask your random sample who Steve Jobs is. Then, you'll get some traction. He would be the SV equivalent of Stephen Spielberg. Or, perhaps Bill Gates or Michael Dell, the respective George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis equivalents the tech world.
As someone who has lived in Vancouver, saying that its weather is better than Montreal's isn't saying much, unless of course you actually like six straight months of almost daily rain. Having lived over four years in California, the weather there is incomparably better.
Your parents home is also probably worth 5-10 times what they paid for it. Housing prices increase as interest rates decrease. Homeowners are still paying the same monthly bill (adjusted for inflation) but they're just paying more for the house vs. interest.
This is also why banks pay such poor interest rates on savings & CD's. As the cost of money decreases, so does rate of return on other banking products.
I wouldn't be able to afford my house at that rate.

We'd be far better off if fewer people had been able to "afford" to buy houses in the last 10 years.
Apple already had measures in place to block that 'loophole' without these new rules—or new interpretations of the rules, if you will. Apple banned an update to ReadItLater, last year, because the reviewer believed the developer was attempting to circumvent the in-app purchase: http://readitlaterlist.com/blog/2010/08/version-2-2-rejected...
Are you implying programming communities do not have timbres?
It's their control of the software that allows them to control what people do with the hardware both via technical and legal means. It is, after all, a computing device.

While I suppose that people wouldn't have this problem if they were using it as, say, a doorstop, that's not really the issue people are having here.
You seem to divide the world starkly into black and white. A fallacy that is common to people who think this way is the either-or, or False Dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma) fallacy.

Despite your first sentence, where you try to introduce some nuance to your argument, your other statements suggest that you don't have any room in your schema for people who commit damaging, non-violent crimes but express remorse for them. Essentially remorse is less important (if at all) to you than the fact that someone, somewhere was damaged in some way.

Many people here have expressed the opinion that yes, this kid f-ed up real bad and damaged/destroyed Valve's reputation significantly. But no, there isn't a need to lock him up, because it wouldn't serve a purpose.

If the purpose of the lockup is only to punish him (for punishment's sake), which you seem to be intent upon, then yeah it makes sense to give him 10-20 years despite a marked shift in his personality and outlook on life. To me, it seems like a horrible waste of money and of everyone's time to punish him so severely given that he's already had a change of heart, has the beginning of a successful career doing legitimate work, and he didn't commit any violence.

Also, we have the benefit of hindsight here: Valve went on to be an even bigger success after this, as HL2 + Steam is practically a money printing machine for them.
I'm guessing the downvotes are because it's vanishingly unlikely that Steve Jobs posted a blog comment.
Planned Parenthood donation page: http://bit.ly/gDIrl5
Brad Rutter - Why I Lost to Watson
I'd love to hear the concepts behind this, I'm guessing you first do a radial search from current location, yield list twitter handles, fetch last n dozen tweets, extract links, cluster, intersect, introduce.

I don't have a 4[] account to try it but im curious what you used. Obviously in 8 hours there's only limited technology that can be done, but if you're using python or another language with a rich set of libraries it's possible to do quite a lot during that time. Obviously 8 hours means 6 when you factor in HN time :)
Vostu, The Zynga Of Brazil, Raises $30 Million At $300 Million Valuation
Ask HN: Can you be friends with your boss
Thoughts?

Personally I don't think you can no matter how much you may act like it because ultimately they have power over you creating an unequal relationship.
Irrelevant, but I love how you cited n-grams.
Blog de noticias plataforma Android
Academics, Enthusiasts to Get Kinect SDK
A lot larger as in landmass. People pay attention to what goes on in their geographic area, regardless of its population.

For example, a beating in California isn't going to be as troubling to a resident in Vermont. They'll simply say "different state, different police force". On the other hand, a beating in Berlin is going to trouble someone in any part of Germany.
I wasn't talking about how regulated they are, I was talking about how much of their paycheck is due to value extraction vs creation.

As far as how many permits you need to open a bank, the answer is "a lot less than you did 25 years ago", due to continued lobbying pressure. I'm all for phasing out obsolete or poorly considered/implemented regulations, of course, but it seems that the regulations everyone wants to get rid of are those that limit risk. So they can be more "dynamic" in their search of profits. Then when they go belly-up, we're stuck with the tab.

Buddy of mine estimates that he was personally responsible for a fraction of a % of the housing meltdown. He got out in 2007. Hasn't had to work since then. Good thing regulations didn't stop him from making all that money while the getting was good :)
do you know what the main reason was for them buying the assets? Traffic, Codebase, Domain, YC fame?
did you post all your traffic stats on the auction at the time?
We're Looking Forward to Yobongo's Secret Sauce
Well maybe not for you but Grooveshark moved to Cydia after it was kicked out of the AppStore...
Soon most of the management will be outsourced as well. It makes sense to have someone who understands the culture of the workers.
Typically when trying to learn a new language, I do the following:

* Go through any of the main tutorials or walkthroughs to get a basic understanding.

* Have a read of the API docs.

* Gain an understanding of concurrency, bounds checking and memory management by writing simple apps to test each.

* Write a program to execute another program

* Write a program to access core system info (e.g. registry etc.)

* Write a program that uses sockets or network connectivity (normally a client and server)
Well done, but it looks awfully similar to DontEat.at. ;)

I was also at the hackathon. A couple of friends and I hacked together a lists feature: http://foursquare.heroku.com.
How obsessed are we with Facebook? This video tells all.
Note the bit about Infosys establishing comprehensive training programs, implying they are taking STEM graduates and bringing them up to speed on the current technologies. 30 years ago Intel had training programs (I don't know if they do now). So did Apple in the late 80's. (n.b., I was employed by both). Now the expectation for many large employers is that the applicant have already mastered the technologies. "No training for you!"

How much is attributable to "R$wages + R$cost of training" < "US$ wages" I cannot say.
I believe they did pay the judgment but didn't rectify the original QWR request. I still don't understand how that allows him to foreclose on the property though.
If Apple really does go so far as to claim that then someone needs to challenge them on it legally, this is going too far. Or maybe we need a $.99 boycot or something, not buying apps.
Yeah, their handling of the Kinect has been unexpectedly good. And it really does stand in stark contrast to Sony's actions.
I like that app, it's wise use of API's to mashup a feature like that...
Current software engineers are roughly equivalent, in terms of field maturity, with the 'doctors' who put leeches on people in order draw out bad humors

Balls. The medical profession killed more people than it cured until some time between the 1930s and 1950s with the discovery of antibiotics. Walmart's supply chain management software alone has bdone more good than the entirety of the medical profession up to 19##.
I asked them how they valued the auction. Response:

- 50k for the domain name

- 175k (or so) for two man-years of engineer time and the code

- 25k for user base

This is all a bit fuzzy and from memory, so I could be somewhat off.
Right, I guess what I'm getting at is that neither case (the one in the article and the one I mentioned) was about Double Jeopardy because the police could partition the crimes to different jurisdictions.

Legalistically, its correct but ethically it means that police can try you multiple times so long as they narrow the jurisdiction on the first attempts. For instance, a car chase that crosses multi-jurisdictions can result in multiple trials (and consecutive sentences) even though its really just one offense.
Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance
Yes it is possible, and it is just as easy. It works in much the same way - there are differences between the two countries - but the option of refinancing your loan is pretty much the same. In both instances you'll be up for fees for breaking your old loan, and up for fees for originating your new loan.

What's more likely is that due to changed circumstances this guy wouldn't qualify for his loan again. So while a bank can't force you to leave because your credit situation has deterioated, you are effectively locked in because another bank wouldn't want you. The same can happen in Australia (and will probably be happening in increasing amounts in the coming years).

I have built software for American mortgage lenders and Australian mortgage lenders (and UK ones, for that matter). The three countries have very similar systems, although the USA has a much wider variety of product options, the laws around originating and terminating loans are pretty similar. This is not surprising, all three countries have laws evolved from the same system, and mortgages are a very old legal construct.

A deteriation in his credit might be : loss of job, reduction in income, another loan default (say, car loan or credit card) or the value of his house being less than the mortgage (most likely I would guess).

In effect he just wants the mysterious charges removed so he can manage his budget. As long as you're paying your mortgage the bank can't touch you. In reality Wells Fargo are probably trying to get him to leave of his own accord.
Congrats! This is inspiring and motivated my business partner and I to consider selling our mobile app business. We just hit 1 million users across our portfolio of relatively unknown apps.

If we are able to sell our company, we would be able to use the cash to pay for living expenses so we can start another company.
This should be a wake up call. What about north american universities? Aren't they the best?

Maybe, but they're not affordable to every american. This countries subsidize upper studies so their citizens can access this kind of education.

I think is just a matter of priorities. Instead of spending so much on X thing, spend more on scholarships for the top students in the country in specialized science areas. Universities know how to compete.
I really wish this was in miami... I have been wanting to checkout collide space though.
A SIMPLE SOLUTION TO  CRISIS IN WISCONSIN - tonybordonaro thoughts and stuff
I believe Jobs actually made this point fairly directly, though couched it in terms like "if people start using 3rd party tools to generate cross platform apps, you wind up with crappy apps that don't suit the platform, have undesirable performance characteristics, and fail to take advantage of platform specific features that get added."
Or the somewhat used Faux-Tudor. I don't think modern "Tudor" houses engage in wonderful building materials like daub wall plaster made with urine and other "fancy" stuff.
Not everyone clammers to profit off of the collapse of a financial system.
This reminds me of the recent allegations that Groupon sales reps were coaching businesses on how to mislead Groupon customers by artificially inflating the "retail" price of the products/services pitched via Groupon. Certainly much less worrisome than allowing outright fraud, but similar salesforce incentives were likely the root cause.
$0.

I doubt their competitors will learn awesome secrets from their code-base and I doubt the pirates will compile their own binary instead of just using the standard DVD-Rip.

Yes, they embarrassed themselves. But they have nobody but themselves to blame for not investing in security.

And, as ramidarigaz points out, it was even free PR for them.
Yes, I'd pay. Especially if it was Ruby/Rails based too.
I'm not impressed with anyone here...

Readability was trusting enough to release their code with a license which allowed Apple to put the code in their product and then freeze readability's product out of Apple's store.

And now the readability folks don't seem inclined to admit their trust was a might miss-placed.

But perhaps that's because the readability model is aiming for a kinder, gentler version of Apple's monopoly. They distributed a "product" that reworking website in a manner that steals the original site's advertising revenue. And then they "offer" to give the authors a different revenue source (along with "offering" a lack of choice concerning how their product is presented).

Edit: And problem with readability isn't in it just distributing a web-site-rewriter in itself but it doing that AND then asking revenues from content providers...
It's probably a factor that Kinect hardware is sold at a profit and that they have plenty of supply, so someone buying a Kinect to hack with on their PC (1) isn't making Microsoft lose money, and (2) isn't depriving a gamer of one.

I don't know if Sony ever got the PS3 to the point that the consoles are profitable by themselves.

Another factor is that Kinect hacking is unlikely to lead to game cheating. It's just an input device. The code that does the processing for the games is in the software on the XBox, and they have locked that down tight.

With the PS3, since it is the PS3 itself that is being hacked, I would expect that there is a lot more potential for using the hacks to cheat in online games--something that does hurt Sony financially.
That's a good point, but for me at the time, I did not know how to short. All I knew was that I should save a third of my paycheque so that, when the crash comes, I have money with which to buy a house at a much cheaper price. (By the time the crash came, I sunk all my savings into my start-up, but that's another story.) At the time, this everyone else thought this was madness because money had to go on a mortgage now, before prices rise yet again.

So my error was not that I was full of it, just that I lacked the financial knowledge to maximize the benefit of the money that I had used to support my bet.
I do not understand your use of the word timbre.
How is this different from all the doom and gloom predictions of the 20th century?

It turns out that it's now quite easy for nations to be self sufficient in food. Many developing nations already are food exporters. The idea that an increase in population will cause resources to become more scarce is silly nonsense. People create resources, very few resources are actually all that limited (even gold). More people and more demand means more resources will be produced. More clean water. More Iron. More Aluminum. More food.

And it need not have such a drastic impact on the planet. The US has vastly increased its per capita food production and its population over the 20th century, yet the impact of farming has actually diminished due to improved and more efficient practices.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
There's already a $20,000 prize for a natural interaction based browser: http://www.openni.org/developerschallenge

There are probably more.
The - is ignored it seems.
I wasn't talking about public good, I was talking about relative maturity within a field.
I am guessing it will be more like the OpenNI drivers, since PrimeSense is already a MSFT partner.
Neat! Though, on Ubuntu with Chrome 9.0.597.98 I never got loaded after 2 minutes. This could just be due to traffic load though. However, I was able to see other people scribbling, which was still fun.
I've been thinking this for years. Why not just outsource management?
Absolutely you can. Good managers support their people and do their best to make sure the people they're responsible for are doing their best. Bad managers abuse the outdated hierarchical model for ego trips.

You can absolutely be friends with your boss, because his or her job is to make you great, which is more than I can say about a lot of friends.
The Exit Mindset
The tech industry drove itself off a very predictable cliff at one point as well, do you have respect for it?
That doesn't actually work, but for different reasons: Google drops the punctuation and just searches for "42".
Testing: thoughts on improving it
Thanks!
DontEat.at tries to solve a different problem. They send you a SMS when you checkin at a place that health violations.