skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Investor Warning Signs
How can I prevent being screwed over during investor/acquisition discussions and detect whether or not the pursuing company is more than just a scheme?

My latest project has attracted the attention of an acquaintance on FaceBook and the company he works for. There's talk of buying my project out right or setting up some sort of partnership.

This talk is all new for me and we've scheduled a meeting for next week to go into more depth. I'm concerned that because I am new to this, I may be missing some blaring warning signs that this is all too good to be true. What are some questions I should ask and warning signs I should look out for that would signal I'm setting myself up to be screwed?
If you like board games, this site will change your life.
It's really I don't care about money after taking care of expenses and having a little left over to splash out every now and then. I think it's more commonly used in terms of the engineer deciding between $100k and $200k under vastly different conditions than the engineer deciding to work for free or very low pay.
Werewolf is my favorite party game. Arguably it doesn't keep everybody fully engaged because one person drops out each turn, but usually everybody keeps watching the action until the game is over.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_%28party_game%29
But he's directly refusing to make --no-doc the default, which is the whole point of the request.

People are complaining about having to install a .gemrc to get sensible behavior. Making the file a few characters shorter doesn't make it less of a burden.
Westboro Baptist Church hacked by Anonymous
This author seems to make several mistakes.

First believing that async calls to actors with side effects helps reasoning.

Second he conflates Haskells exposure of monads with the math of monads. Haskell just makes more explicit (and provable) what other systems indirectly model (often times muddling the ability to reason over it).
you don't need carbs to live, but they certainly help when you're doing heavy exercise and the like.

on the flip side of that coin, its my understanding that grains in particular as a source of carbohydrates are particularly bad for you. moreso than something like a potato. i'm looking for a source to edit in.
...calling people who express a valid opinion on this "propellerheads" just seems unnecessarily insulting

When did "+1" become a valid opinion?

The few people who attempted to actually discuss the patch were more than drowned out by -- well -- a bunch of propellerheads.
I pay 1150 for a one bedroom with a one hour commute to Manhattan via subway.
How to make Montreal the Open Source startup hub
Pandemic - co-operative yet challenging board game about trying to cure disease on a Risk-like board

Scribblish - it's like pictionary but it doesn't matter how badly you draw and everyone is always involved

Carcassonne (if the 'farmers' rule confuses anyone, don't use it) - slight chance of negative interaction.
> I think you're probably reading to much into this. It's just a game. I don't think it's particularly promoting anything.

Strangely enough, cturner isn't just reading something into it, the original iterations of the game were designed "with the object of showing that rents enriched property owners and impoverished tenants".

The Wikipedia article on the history of Monopoly is fascinating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Monop...
Google plainly refuses to remove those websites, because they gives Google some money.

You may be right about what's happening, but I don't think it's fair for you to assert as fact what you believe their motivations to be. Matt Cutts and others have categorically denied these claims, and provided good reasons.
I'd say affordable hosting for the masses above everything else. If I can't play with it, I won't code for it.
You really seem to hate libraries. In a thread with thirteen comments (as of now), you've posted seven of them, mostly in response to your own posts. Do you think you could constrain everything to one main post and responses to what other people say? It gives casual lurkers the impression that there is a consensus of opinion against libraries, when there's really just one really vocal person.
And not all Hindus are Indian. Still, 80% of Indians are Hindus and the second-largest population of Hindus (Nepal) is 41 times smaller.

So, if you are Hindu, you most likely are Indian.
Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Tim Cartwright, Chairman, Tamiami Angel Fund
I like this post, because I realized a while ago that a switch in my brain flipped, and now the act of programming in a language I don't know barely slows me down. I pull up a language reference and just go to town.

There was a time when I wasn't confident enough to do that, and would avoid new languages/frameworks/whatever, because I didn't 'know' them. I am so much better now for having moved past that.

I think I agree more with the feel of the article than the actual statement. If his point is to say that you should persist even if you aren't perfect at something, then absolutely. If he's saying you should just write bad code and not worry about it, obviously, I disagree.

But when you start, you always write bad code. I learned python a few weeks ago for a pipeline for an iphone game I'm making. I'm learning Objective C right now. I know a lot of what I've written is probably crap -- but as I write more, I realize what was crap and fix it when I bump in to it.

The learning mindset is more important than the "stubbornly move forward" mindset. His skull demo example is a good story. If that person never learned another thing, he would eventually be driven insane by trying to deal with the complexity of a large scale project. If he learned ways to improve, moving forward, he could continue building even bigger and better bleeding skulls.
Interesting that the text changes font after loading. What weird thing are they using for that?

Edit: OK, just font-face. It's too bad it has to be such a jarring transition when it loads though... Arial is nothing like Marker.
Well then, the solution is obviously to throw more money at the problem!

In the US, you spend $20K per student.

I think part of the solution in the US is to tear down the whole system, go local and market-based.
What the world needs is cheap satellitte based internet that can't be 'turned off'. Or someone should figure out a low tech bridge... Ham radio-to-twitter or something.
The only real evidence they present is the Stanford study that found charter schools don't perform better than regular public schools. So their argument is that unions can't be the problem because charter schools don't have them and are doing just as bad. But that's a straw man.

Charter schools allow for better management they don't guarantee it. So in the first few decades of a charter school system there will be a lot of bad ideas and a lot of good ideas. But the bad ideas will throw off the average.

But the bottom line is at least the well managed charter schools can take steps to correct problems where as regular public schools can't because of union rules. Which is why some Charter schools do dramatically better.
I found that after a few games the group works out who is good at lying and just lynches them first no matter what - it's too risky having a good liar alive. Otherwise it's a great game.
Here's a long shot but it might work. If the company is a dominant player in the field you might be able to intimidate them with a lawyer's letter that insists they cease and desist from anti-competitive practices (i.e. that could bring scrutiny from regulatory bodies).

IANAL so get some real legal advice before pursuing this angle.
Has there been an announcement regarding ATA TRIM support? It's about time.
This is ludicrous. It's the people making a stand, not social networking sites. The oppressed could be using Twitter/FB to talk about entertainment, sports, or other frivolities. The tools in any revolution, regardless the century, are of minor significance.
Jury Nullification Advocate Faces Indictment
Breaking News Online
Obwire is a social news and networking site which brings you latest updates around the world.
Students doing well should not be an unexpected outcome.
In most cases, though, using jquery to do something like adding a class, or setting a value, is still plenty fast enough. We're talking about code that runs in the browser, where things move on human timescales. Don't optimize prematurely.
In Settlers the catch-up mechanism is meant to be provided by the other players stopping trade with the leader. In the two-player version this is somewhat explicit (there's a trading cost to be winning)
How to create a cool and usable CSS3 search box
In this article, you’ll learn how create a cool and usable CSS3 search box using the HTML5 placeholder attribute. For the browsers that don’t support this new HTML attribute, fallback is created using Modernizr’s feature detection.
You don't need to think the human species is chosen, just that it's extremely unusual. It's not superstition to notice the worldwide explosion of human population displacing many many specialized species (e.g., top predators). It's not superstition to notice that even though many species are capable of manipulating their environment in complicated ways (e.g., a million variants on the concept of "nest," some quite sophisticated), only humans have picked various certain low-hanging fruit at all (e.g., fire), and human progress on other low-hanging fruit where other species have made a little progress (like tools/weapons and agriculture) is so far beyond other species it's ridiculous. The existence of an unusual property (or properties) of humans which cause the observed unusual result is not absolutely guaranteed, but expecting that there are such properties is not just superstition.
Lighthouse FTW! Its lightweight, simple, easy for non-technical team members to use to report issues, bugs, suggestions, etc. and the tag-based classification/search system is inspired. Love it!
London Stock Exchange is live, offers no real explanation for outage

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3262766/lond...
It's a pain when you're using rvm too, you end up with a copy of the docs for every gemset.
According to proxy.conf:

#turning ProxyRequests on and allowing proxying from all may allow
#spammers to use your proxy to send email.
Thanks! Now I'll actually look up some library card prices.

$26.22 per Peterborough resident
$1 Unitah Co, Utah
$0 CA if you're a resident, $10 for non-resident
$0 Peoria, AZ for residents
$0 (resident or youth) or $60 (non-resident) Austin TX

So, most are free for residents, and pricey or unavailable for non-residents.

What is a resident? Somebody with a driver's license, voter registration card or utility bill, typically. Which can be a significant barrier to a segment of the population. Not only the homeless, but bus-riding apartment-dwellers may be barred for instance.
Just talk to people. There are tons of interesting and friendly people at conferences. Even if you are shy or don't know anyone, just remember (especially at tech conference) a lot of the people there are just as shy/uncomfortable with 'networking' as you.
It's shorthand for agreeing with the original idea. It saves space and allows a much quicker scanning of the comments to find people who have something unique to say.

If everyone wrote a short paragraph on their agreement with the original idea it would be very hard to find the comments where people were either dissenting or had something original to say.
Pretty doubtful. We've seen lots of photos of blown-up people from various war zones, and they do very little to spur intervention. You've seen these:

http://mindprod.com/politics/iraqwarpix.html

but no one stepped in to stop the U.S. from killing well upwards of a million Iraqis. Don't dream that future massacres will be stopped. I would tend to argue the other side: due to individuals being numbed to the grotesque, they are less likely to be shocked by images and videos coming out of future conflict zones and thus less likely to want to "do something".
The advice is really good for someone who wants to sell stuff. I kind of do comparable things without wanting to sell anything. I just like to hear what people are working on and what there plans are so I can stay in the loop of new developments. My goal for a conference is 20 business cards, not 200 to 400.

The talking to new people thing is pretty important. I am terrible at this. When I attended my first conference in 2008 a continent away I stood there in a room of 400 people literally not knowing anybody. That moment it dawned me that my boss just paid thousands of dollars to get me here so I better use this opportunity. Three years later, one of the first five people I talked to at that conference got me an H1-B visa and a six figures job.

There are related mistakes to make. I've been to so many conferences by now that I know a lot of people I want to hang out with at any given conference. It's easy to just keep talking to these people because that means I do not have to leave my comfort zone again. This is obviously bad because I will not meet new people that way. The same happens when you go to a conference with other people of your company and just stick together the whole time. Do not do this.

About this demoing thing. I used to demo our software a lot at conferences. However, our software was so popular in our niche market that people always asked me to see it. I don't think I ever pushed it on anybody. Demoing works perfectly fine if you just leave the main room and sit somewhere around the corner. Most of the conferences I attend are in hotels, so they have plenty of chairs everywhere.

What is not mentioned in the article is that you should try to be a speaker at conferences. It is not very hard to become a speaker and it puts you into the spotlight. This makes it much easier to make new contacts. Additionally, many conferences pay travel and hotel costs of their speakers which is awesome.
Maybe not attention but just trying to add a gizmo to sell the same lemon every year.

It seems like every six months they bring out a new Monopoly :there was one with sewerage and skyscrapers recently, before that the ATM, and that's not including the 1000 different brandings like Simpsons, Manchester U, etc
When he gives more details (in the actual post), it is better.
I've tried Chrome on Mac OS X and found it to be generally faster than Safari but also a bit unstable. Freezing up occasionally etc. It's solid and blazing fast on Windows though.
I'm disappointed at the general trend of ranking shopping sites higher than review and information sites when searching for a product name. If I'm looking for some products, most likely I need information about it, and I don't need to be bombarded by what equates to the circulars. If I want to buy it I can go directly to Amazon's site or any other online store. I think results from shopping sites should be kept inside the Shopping search (unless they also contain product reviews I suppose.)
Your entire post looks like speculation without expertise to back it up. Your ideas about hot plugging are completely wrong. Have you ever designed a hardware device, or at least implemented a driver?

Seeing as how you created your account right before posting this, it feels like astroturfing.
Mahalo is the top result here. Brazilian Google, but with language set as English. Removing the .br from the url takes Mahalo to the second place.

http://www.google.com.br/search?client=opera&rls=en&...
Why couldn't the social graph also be used to aid in genocide?

Imagine if Hitler knew all about the "impure" friends you had.
Loggerhead turtles have a magnetic sense for longitude
If you play monopoly by the rules written on the box, it only lasts 30-45 minutes, with intense interaction between players. It's much more exciting, but it's also a really miserable game because of its brutal zero-sum nature. (Bear in mind: the game's creator intended it to be unpleasant to play.)

"House rules" like free parking, non-compulsory property purchase, non-auction-mortgage etc seem like very small changes, but they really terribly break the game balance. Putting money under free parking is all it takes to turn a 30 minute shouting match into a tedious three hour snooze-fest.

In short: Monopoly is never "fun," but it can be very exciting. It's the house rules that seek less painful gameplay that make the game so very, very dull.
Happened to me. Worse, competitors started copying my exact Adwords text and headlines as well.

I was able to remove the ads that included our trademark fairly quickly by contacting Google.

For the rest, you just have to start your own campaign against them. Since our own company's keywords are pretty low search competition they are extremely cheap to bid on. When competitors see that you are bidding against them, they might back off (they did in my case).
The R&D costs are still the same.

Sure, today you can develop prototype or MVP at fraction of the costs in 1998, but it's only 10% of total costs. The 90% is maintenance and support - and today it's not cheaper than then.

It can only be cheaper if founders willing to work for free. But this doesn't scale - sooner or later you need to hire employees, which will be demanding market priced salaries.

So, why then angels and VCs pushing entrepreneurs to do lean startups? The answer is simple: it allows them to reduce the risks, at the expense of entrepreneurs.
Not sure everyone feels that way -- Rails took off plenty before there were any good hosting options, and I'd say Rails hosting is still harder/dearer than PHP (despite the awesomeness of Passenger/mod_rails).
Thanks, I'll try to get everything under one post. I admit this topic has set me to thinking. And as I think, I research. Then I think some more.

No, not a library hater, actually just coming to realize as I write that libraries are obsolete, underutilized, expensive to maintain.

Those stats for instance, from Alaska. Bigger libraries have nearly a million visits per year! (smaller ones, hundreds, but it's Alaska after all).

But consider: even a mildly avid Library Guy might visit once a week. Add a couple of thousand of that type, and we've covered 25% of the visits with 6000 people. 25% are using the internet. The other half? Declining.

Sorry, that just slipped out. Didn't mean to ruin your day with more facts.

{Edit} Btw did you object to the actual points I raised? Was I wrong? Is your library experience different? I'd welcome a response to any of them.
Sorry, I don't understand your comments.

1. Work rules created the quality problems? The quality was engineered right out of the cars through cost-cutting and bad priorities.

2. 2008? American car companies got into trouble decades before 2008.

3. Google is profitable, whereas GM and Chrysler failed, took bailouts, never punished their own management, same as the bankers.

4. Paying $3 million for failure is acceptable? Okay, so why is paying $50k to a line worker "too much" then?
And if worst comes to worst and you miss a day, go back and visit the states HN was in every hour that day: http://hackerslide.com/
Your claim is a false dilemma unless you can prove otherwise.
47 times faster in Firefox 3.6.1
7 times faster in IE 8
Obviously its not just Facebook and Twitter, but those global media you refer to are getting their leads from and even literally reporting tweets and Facebook stuff for a large portion of their broadcasts.
I was up until recently a bus-riding apartment-dweller, and my driver's license is from out of state. I was able to get a library card with my voter registration card, which I got with my electricity bill. In Boston, you can get it with just about any form of documentation, including a credit card, a health insurance card, a student ID, or a photocopy of your lease agreement, and it's free to sign up.

It's a huge problem that homeless people can't get registered to vote, but I don't really see how shutting down libraries is going to solve any problems for the homeless.

Like I said before, if you can't prove residence because you're homeless, you're probably better off reading the books inside the library anyway. Anyone can do that, regardless of residence.
There's a difference between the US military claiming that you "give up" (or sign away) your rights when you enroll, and whether you actually do or even can give them up at all when you enroll.

Depending on whether you think rights are inherent and inalienable, there could also be a difference between which rights some courts rule you have and which rights you actually have.

The courts might rule and the military might claim you have no rights whatsoever, and they can torture you to death, or imprison you forever, without cause, whenever they feel like it.

Does that mean you have no right not to be tortured? Does it mean you have no right not to be imprisoned without being found guilty of a crime? Or does it mean such imprisonment and torture (even when legal, or when the US military claims its legal) is a violation of your rights?
I prefer to have fun, learn things, then get very drunk afterwards. If I meet people along the way that's cool too.
This post is full of spurious reasoning. Haskell's monads are mainly (ignoring the specifics of IO) syntactic sugar for a series of lambdas akin to a series of asynchronous functions linked via callbacks. While I get that this can be hard to grok given the magic of the syntax, it has nothing to do with the difficulty of monads in math.
Jim Blandy wrote a similar program for X Windows around 1992: a beautiful color clock that would sit on your desktop's root windown and slowly cycle through the colors over the course of an hour. It didn't even show digits -- you just had to learn the colors :-). I think it depended on X supporting writeable color cells, though, so it would need to be rewritten to work on most modern systems (which generally seem to not be set up that way).

http://svn.red-bean.com/repos/circles/trunk/

Hmm, but that's after I started making some mods. For best results, try an earlier rev (this was converted from CVS, hence the weird log message):

http://viewvc.red-bean.com/circles/trunk/?pathrev=3
i think your ipad emr is a great start to the mobile emr space. and jay is the man! looking fwd to seeing drchrono grow.
> At an exchange being great a low-latency means ... well not much, your exchange gets a bit more flow and you get a pat on the back.

Exchanges pay out bigger bonus' than you'd imagine. 7 figures for a programmer is high but no where out of the ordinary. Says a guy who has worked for an exchange.
One might wonder how the Berlin Wall fell without those antibodies. And examples like Libya and Iran demonstrate that social media will not save you from a regime determined to mow down unarmed civilians with automatic weapons.
Whatever happened to 'Japan'?
I'm struggling to see how Twitter is of any use in finding customers.

On the other hand spending on Adwords links me directly to people who are looking for my products. For me it is consistent, reliable, directly measurable and profitable.