skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like a crappy situation. Hindsight is 20/20 but what I learnt from your story is that it's important to ask investors the minimum valuation and cash/equity split they will accept before engaging a potential buyer. In general, knowing your own limits is important going into any negotiation.

Before quitting and losing control over so many years of hard work, I would recommend putting your recent frustration with the VC aside and sitting down with him to understand what he wants from any future liquidity events. You say he has been a good investor so far, and may be he is under pressure from LPs or has something that would explain his strange behavior.

I can imagine it would be hard to work on a startup where your final outcome seemingly depends on a person who seems to be fickle and unreliable. Any clarity you can get on this may help align your interests with them.

Reminds me of something a very wise venture capitalist once told me in a cynical moment: "At exit, everyones' interests are misaligned". The only thing you can do to avoid this is try to 'hire' VCs who are also good people.

Sorry it has come to this. Hope it works out for you.
The problem with the Wolfram Alpha terms of service is that they forbid natural, common uses of the web site.

Exactly. For instance, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=does+wolfram+alpha+get+...
Yeah, I was rather astonished the first time I tried it. I expected it to be unconvincing, but nope, that is definitely a brand new shade of cyan.
This may be the conspiracy part of me talking, but I don't think its Ironic at all. I'm vagueing familiar with LTE, the more I learn about it, and its future capabilities the greater I imagine its proliferation will become. I imagine my kids will view internet access the same way I view landlines today. It occurs to me that if I know this, the ISP's definitely know this.
It's certainly possible to make a living on the App Store, but you can't depend on a megahit like Angry Birds or Tiny Wings.

My theory is that you'll need probably a dozen or so apps in the $1.99 - $4.99 range. The $0.99 point has too many psychological problems in terms of perceived value and competition to be worth it IMO. Ads also aren't a viable source of steady revenue for any non-Top 100 apps.

Each of my (paid) apps get downloaded around 10 times a day (and trust me, I have some pretty obscure apps [1]), so this theory is based on 10 apps * 10 downloads/day * $2.99 avg price * .7 Apple Tax = $210/day = $75k a year. That's not quite Google money, but it's all you, which (for me) makes up for the other $40k.

So there you have it: have a dozen moderate, long-tail successes to make good money on the App Store. And with what, 80 million? iOS devices in the wild, how hard is 10 downloads per day? (easier said then done, right? ;))

Other tips:

- MOST IMPORTANT: be well-designed. App Store buyers love that (take a look at Dylan's app, it's very pretty).

- If you can't design, then try stick with Apple's default look. It might not be unique, but it definitely won't be ugly.

- Have a reusable app design. It's so convenient to be able to write the core app once and just swap out data sources for each new app.

- Build apps fast and be agile; don't focus on one app for months on end without launching. MVP and get real-world feedback.

- Make it clear that your users can get in touch with you via email or Twitter. And then respond to them!

- Update often!

- Try Lite versions of your apps with In-App upgrades.

Full disclosure: this is what I'm trying to do :)

[1]: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brocabulary-new-and-improved/...
Thanks for the responses (3 at this time). I will try and work through them.
I just wondered how many of the films that were up for oscars used linux in the production process? (editing, CG, sound, etc.)
The VC controls (and always controlled) the outcome for your company. I can't say I understand his behavior - blocking an acquisition but also refusing to participate in a future round makes both liquidity and fundraising impossible. Perhaps he plans to drive the company to the brink and then do a down round.

The only leverage you have over him is the damage his behavior, if public, could do to his reputation - since VCs live and die by their dealflow. If the deal was still on the table, I would've politely discussed his future exposure - 'if this behavior keeps up and the deal doesn't happen, you are not going to look good in the post-mortem I'll be posting to Hacker News'. Quality VCs know that their reputation depends on keeping entrepreneurs happy.

Now that the deal's dead, you might as well leave - but you'd be doing a disservice to the rest of us to not reveal who this guy is. If you can't do it in public (perhaps you're worried about raising money again from someone else - which, sadly, is probably valid), at a minimum you should be describing the whole story over at The Funded.
Apple may not be against innovation, but they are trying to control innovation. That is inherently counter to innovating, and is an oxymoron.

You're saying that this simple 5 dollar chip (not 1 as you claim, by the way) doesn't hurt innovation, but it does. For instance, what if you wanted to connect your arduino to your iphone? Is it really worth paying 5 dollars to connect a 7 dollar chip?

Now suppose it is still worth it. Could a programmable microcomputer get by Apple's "Works with iPhone" standards? Not a chance.

I can think of a hundred cool things to do with an iPhone connected to an arduino, but those are all dead. I can think of a hundred more pieces of hardware I'd love to connect to my portable phone, but those can't work either.

Innovation can't get out of Apple's box.
Wow, well I feel a bit dumb for answering with such certainty then! Apparently I have been misled. Thanks for setting me straight!
Yes. It's full of really good, pragmatic, and practical advice, but isn't particular geared to a specific language or environment.

> This should be required reading for any junior hire imo.
Senior folks should give it a read, too. Just cause you've been around a while, that doesn't mean you know everything.
On the desktop, I couldn't agree more. On a mobile device, its a handy shortcut to the pages I will most likely visit next anyway.
I don't get a single blue-yellow colour that I'm happy with, instead it either swaps from one to the other and back (patchily), or it holds semi steady as if I was looking at yellow through a blue mesh (or blue through a yellow mesh) but doesn't feel like a single colour, more like a checkerboard grid of two colours.
For more nerd out of water action, there is a Penny Arcade TV episode focusing on Gabe and Tycho's invitation to the Time 100 dinner. Not a lot of footage of the actual event for practical reasons, I'd imagine.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/pa-the-series/119/
Henry Rollins has a monologue about this sort of thing he did for his spoken word tours. The one time some hot groupie takes all of her clothes off and knocks on his hotel room door, he's freaked out by some news story and afraid to come to his door! The only reason he knows about it is because of another band member that spotted her.

I play Irish Trad, and I'm as far from a rockstar as you can get, and even I had a groupie once. Once. It was a good one, though. We literally broke the bed. Nuff said.

Unless you know them really well, and you're actually good friends (not acquaintances) just stay the frack away from roadies. Some of them are utter scumbags and their wanna-be ism drives them to do rotten stuff. (Like invite me and my two cool, cute female friends to an "after party" where I end up being slipped a mickey and shoved to the side like luggage and one of my friends winds up with herpes. True story.)

EDIT: No, I didn't wind up with a sore butt and herpes too, thank God.
Fixing security vulnerabilities in every piece of software ever written (or to be written) seems like a hell of a lot more work than hardening the processor. Non-executable memory, for example, eliminates a whole class of vulnerabilities in which illicitly added code is run from the stack or heap.

To suggest that further work on the processor security model is a waste because people ought to have done it right the first time is blind to the fact that people will screw up no matter what.
I think it is admirable that Google is able to look at the long term here.In the short term it is probably not in their best interest to make such a move.

They have a firmhold on the search market, and most of these "spam sites" use Google Adsense to generate their revenue. This means that while Google is improving their search results, and cutting off these spammers, they are also limiting their own revenue generating potential.

But by making this change they are probably going to decrease their revenue in the short term, but improve their search accuracy, and in the long term I am sure this will help them.

I'm wondering what will happen to firms like Demand Media though? Does anyone have any thoughts?
If WA lived up to its promise—which it doesn't, not by a long shot—then 30 seconds would definitely be an acceptable wait for the perfect answer. I don't see how it would bring anything to its knees? Why should the latency propagate? Just need a loading page, problem solved.
Righto...thanks for the explanation, and sorry for the confusion on my part.
While I don't use Erlang, I found this book to be full of very practical and accessible examples. Erlang is a pretty elegant language (IMO) and pretty easy to read after learning pattern matching.
I think you made an arithmetic mistake here.

> With X = 5/13 (40+X), or X = 100/3.

Should be:
With X = 5/13 (40+X), or X = 25
If he doesn't want to participate in future rounds, you could try to raise a new round to cash him out, or you could take a down round and dilute him.
These critiques seem to fundamentally misunderstand the point of Groupon. For businesses, Groupon is a promotional expense. It's not an engine to make shopping more efficient. It's not a dating service that matches the best possible customers with their ideal vendors. It is, instead, a better way to spend money on local advertising than plowing it into radio commercials and newspaper ads.

From everything I've read of small business experiences with Groupon, the overwhelming majority of complaints seem to come from the quality of the leads Groupon generates. These complaints, too, miss some of the point. Groupon converts like online ad impressions convert. This isn't a tragedy: online ads are brilliant for businesses that can harness them, and the promise of Groupon is to do the same for local business.
Great article. One maybe naive question since I have no mobile app development experience: it seems that many apps experienced a spike in downloads when they were first launched; but the downloads tapered off in the long run. It is quite the opposite of websites where the traffic start to build up only after a period of time.

Could this have something to do with the lack of app search engines/recommendation engines to direct users to niche apps? Or is it due to the fact that mobile users only care about the latest (and presumably best) apps out there, hence the shorter life cycle of mobile apps? Thanks.
Story is 2 hours old and has a bad href displayed as text in the body of the article. Is there no quality control at techcrunch?
You're app looks pretty funny.

It seems like the development cost/time is pretty low on that app as well. Good idea.

I was previously working on an early childhood education app. I didn't get very far until the numbers just didn't make sense. Perhaps I was being too ambitious but the velopment costs were extremely high, and I didn't think I could see it for more than $1.99. So I had to sell quite a few to even turn a profit. It's interesting though that you say even you're obscure apps sell 10 per day. During my research I found many that sold one or two per week. So you must be doing something right.
Did you criticise partly so you could add two links to your own articles :P
Not only is it good enough for mainstream adoption, it is mainstream. It's available in cars and practically every GPS device these days. Any time you call your credit card company, you deal with TTS (plus a fair bit of speech-recognition).

As for robots, sure we don't have robots of the kind in the images shown, but the machinery we use to build skyscrapers in a fraction of the time it took 100 years ago is quite amazing. The heavy-earth machinery, cranes, railway-track building machines etc don't look like robots, but they do the same stuff.

The future is definitely here :)
Seeing all the buzz about CUDA I can not stop wondering if OpenCL has any future. Does it?
The real question is, who does a demand-driven approach serve? Businesses spend money on Groupon to get a reliable boost in awareness for a specific period of time that they budgeted for. They don't do it to make Groupon work better for its users.
Oil Analysis Condition Monitoring software
I would be very nice to know the intention of the data. Most of the companies won't give a clue on why they are collecting some information, however folks here are as curious as they seems (or just me), it would be nicer to have that information as well. At least we know what we are contributing to.
Your friend is there to work so the band doesn't have to.

My friends opened for Weezer and I helped them with guitars on stage. The whole thing was hilarious to us. We just pointed and people did whatever we asked.

Also, all those guys (Weezer + Angels and Airwaves) mostly took their family on tour and hid in their catered rooms til it was time to come out.
Because with you camping below a window - you will be seen, get hungry, get caught.

Imagine you get an interview at some company and you gain access to some area, like a lounge. You could potentially smuggle a pluggable box into the facility and plug it in behind some plant, or a copier, or even a coffee machine.

(Copier being the best option)

This machine could ideally auth with the local wifi and gain access to the internet, and provide you tunneling access back into the network.

When Aruba Networks first came out, the initial default config of their system allowed anyone to associate with the network and VPN OUT to the internet - while not giving them access to corporate resources. While we found this behavior at Lockheed Martin, and had them patch it - the same scenario could be found elsewhere today - where you could then connect to the pluggable and scan/hack your way into the network.
Somebody should make one for pictures of corporate stock art. You know, the glass skyscraper shot, the white-guy-wearing-glasses-standing-over-laptop, the empty board room with leather chairs, etc...
Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee claim the internet flourished because of the maintenance of a common carriage agreement, which net neutrality advocates want to cement.

I can understand how common carriage rules lead to great things on the internet. I have a lot more trouble understanding how cementing these rules would stunt the internet's development, and by contrast, I can easily see how the dismantlement of these rules could lead to Bad Things.
[video] 4:60. nice spoof on the 'era of the app'. styled like errol morris's apple tv ads, but from the year 2050.

apparently, whales and dolphins are quite profane.
Capybara (and Selenium) with RSpec & Rails 3: quick tutorial
You negotiate a price based on (x) number of designs and (x) number of modifications.

Otherwise the person will just keep draining you, because everyone thinks they can design, except they can't. So they dilute your work to the point that it's a terrible mess if you give them a chance.
This is really great information. Having seen similar charts many times in the past the question then seems to be, how does a developer for iOS or Android go about getting visibility for their apps? Clearly the visibility as a new app is pretty good, but it tails off fast and it doesn't seem that current methods are providing the visibility necessary for sustainment and/or growth. Outside of the obvious (a traditional marketing campaign, which is expensive) what kind of methods are available?
YouTube
يوتيوب فيديو ديليس هو موقع يوتيوب YouTube لاكتشاف ومشاهدة ، وتحميل ومشاركة مقاطع يوتيوب فيديو مع الأصدقاء والعالم
Of course design is subjective, but my skill isn't operating photoshop. It's an understanding of the subjective forces in a way that I can interact with skillfully. Any random joe blow can have(and does) have an opinion, but it's not equal to mine. That said, there are definitely designers who are better than me, and who I would be in a similar position with.
How hard will it be to take another round with the original VC refusing to participate? Supposedly, it's pretty hard.
I like how this video uses different camera perspectives during the interview. That's some quality editing, Tim. Keep up the good work!
Chromium Security Rewards Program Surpasses $100,000
It would probably help if the "+" were a more visible color than white, as it gets lost a bit in the yellow when crossing.
4b11/Arch x64
Mac OS X Lion hands-on preview
When using shadows on text with css you put the users CPU to test, if the users is on a mobile device or slow computer the CPU will work hard to make the shadow look good, so keep that in mind and try to avoid text shadow.
I prefer this out-of-code:

／l、
（ﾟ､ ｡ ７
l、 ~ヽ
じしf_, )ノ

(works best non-fixed-width, and requires Japanese characters)

I keep it here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/363028/ascii%20images.rtf (I should really add more...)
I like Bayesianism because I think it's mathematically and philosophically cleaner. Then again, I think MCMC seems to show that it isn't so computationally clean. In realtime systems I am more than happy to use Frequentist models for their speed.

I suppose believe in a world where Bayesian methods are the primary didactic statistics useful in sciences and communication and Frequentist methods are used when closed form estimators are necessary and coherent with Bayesian estimates.

Or maybe an even better world where we have closed form, useful estimates from both camps.
Interesting thinkgeek statistics from 2010 reddit secret santa
This is only two cents' worth, but there are a few things you must first discover:
What do you personally want out of life, our of your career, out of this company, out of this deal?
What does the VC want, in as much detail as you can understand? It may be critical to understand why your VC behaved that way and what his reasoning was for doing so. Also, it sounds like you are describing a liquidation preference, which is common down-side protection that only has a big impact when you miss the goals. It is part of the insurance they demand to take the risk.
In both cases, this includes ideas like "to make money", "to feel like I was treated fair", "to feel like I made the best decision available", etc.
Then, what is the best alternative to your current situation?
What is the VC's best alternative to the current situation?
Finally, is it at all possible to find a way, any way, for you both to get as much as you want? It is important to try to keep the negotiation from being about who has more power (worst) or who is right (bad). It should be about what you both want.

You've got a good team. You have successfully served a niche. Now what? Spin off the existing product and start from scratch? Take the technology and launch a new product, while managing the cash flow of the existing customer base? Much of this depends on what you want: a good lifestyle (where you should bootstrap) or to get rich (where you should take on a VC).

Since the relationship with the investor is important, try hard to repair it or find a new investor somehow, even by starting over.

I know the advice is very generic, but I hope that helped.
Sorry for not being clear. Blender is by no means an example of a superb UI. The learning curve is exceedingly high and even after hundreds of hours behind the controls there are many things I do not understand. Much of this is because the UI controls do not make sense. Of course, with the release of 2.5 there were some improvements, but it is still not that great.

That being said, one thing they did EXTREMELY well was put shortcut keys on all of the things that you do frequently. After doing Inkscape for a while I get really frustrated by the lack of easy navigation.
You're making an assumption that Wolfram Alpha has any right to specify how they are linked to. You can only "break the rules" if you believe this is a rule in the first place.
"I’ve long believed that Groupon was basically a Ponzi scheme, enriching itself while acting like a parasite on the businesses it used to deliver its daily deals."

I'm not sure I understand this comparison. Am I missing something here or did the author simply make a poor analogy?

Groupon's users aren't investing their money, unless you view a 50% off coupon as a guaranteed 100% return investment. Even so, the performances of this "investment" isn't paid off by subsequent investors.
Studies Say Night Owls Have Higher IQs
What is Premium Social Advertising?
Apps get some extra visibility when they are first released by being visible in the "New Releases" section.

There have been various attempts at improving app discovery, but I don't think there have been any outstanding successes yet.
Oh, Republicans are against net neutrality, so we should be for it, right?

If there's one dominant theme I've seen over the years when politics rears its ugly head in an online discussion, it's that

Republicans = Corporations (Evil)
Democrats = Workers (Wholesome goodness)

Now, it's entirely possible that those statements are true 100% of the time, but isn't it much more likely that there are exceptions to them, and if you're intellectually honest, you can acknowledge them? I'm not sure if Google results are a trustworthy source, but look up "corporate donations by party" and you'll see countless examples of corporations taking advantage of whatever party is in power. So you must acknowledge that neither party is completely beholden to "wholesome goodness".

Whichever side wins in the net neutrality debate, some corporations will lose, and others will win. If net neutrality needs to be enforced, it means that politicians will hold more power. Do we really want to keep giving those people more power, especially over something that's pretty free at the moment? Give more power to the same people who just renewed the Patriot Act?!
This was discussed on HN a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1617186
you might want to try "magazine view"

https://w1.buysub.com/pubs/FC/ICM/10for997.jsp?cds_page_id=5...

(Jason's article is the cover story this month.)
There is no old wisdom, only old people ;-)
profit: From Middle English profit < Old French profit (French: profit). < Latin profectus (“advance, progress, growth, increase, profit”) < proficere (“to go forward, advance, make progress, be profitable or useful”); see proficient. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/profit

Similar use in French means something like "I took advantage [of it]".

...or it could just be a reference to the Underpants Gnomes...