skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of the best articles on selling a company I've come across, and I've read my fair share of them... I recently had a negotiation that went to a few days before closing and we stepped away. I've since been through various up and down periods of regret for stepping away, followed by relief. It's a nightmare, and I think Jacques accurately captured what to consider in this article (I wish I had this available before!).

I would be really interested to read articles around market timing of acquisitions if anyone on HN has come across something as good as this post by Jacques. I've found a few articles here and there, but mostly written by M&A guys who are pushing to have more deals to broker.
Uh, nope. You definitely don't need root to use Django.
Well its through the book as well. I might be wrong but at least I am consistently wrong :(

The book will be fixed, the submission not so...
Startup Leadership Program: Creating a Global Network of Entrepreneurs
There are a lot of other solutions to that.
The Ububuntu one I favored in the 8.x era was /etc/iftab, it's a shame they retired it in favor of udev.

While udev is more universal, iftab felt elegant and unixy.
How To Maximize Your Value At Your Startup
After speaking with some colleagues and seeing the replies here, I guess my presumption is wrong.
One might assume that more profanity in a langage = more frustration with that language. But I'd bet that proportion of business use has something to do with it, too.

If you're hacking on a personal project, you might feel freer to swear in your commits. And my guess is that you're more likely to code Ruby for personal projects than C#. But I could be wrong.
Over Half Of VC Firms Have Shut Down, And Many More Are Dying
The Danger Of Making Too Much Money
"The lack of an IDE is a more valid complaint, (especially if you plan to have big teams of mediocre programmers)"

Firstly, I take issue with your assertion that IDEs only help mediocre programmers - a good IDE also makes good programmers even more productive. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the difference might be greater for more sophisticated developers than more mediocre ones. They tend to take advantage of more features of the IDE than lesser mortals, who often use IDEs as "TextPad with a project view".

Also, the language subsetting concept that you're promoting helps the end user, but doesn't help the IDE developer develop the world-class tools that new languages really need to get popular. An IDE for Scala can't support just a subset of the language, it really has to support the whole thing to be useful. This language complexity massively raises the bar for a good IDE - I totally agree with the OP point that this really has to be a consideration in modern language design. Please, make it easy to parse with a top-down parser, and if at all possible design your toolchain to allow language tools to take advantage of it. The benefits you will reap are huge.
Well I'd say there is a keen difference between "giving offence", which I am of course not doing, and "presenting others the opportunity to take offence". The choice is theirs.

That's the most cowardly thing I've heard all day. But it's only lunch time, so we'll see how it goes.
I interviewed the founder of The Startup Leadership Program (now in 7 cities). He spoke to how the program is different from Techstars and Dogpatch, being focused on creating a global network of entrepreneurs a la biz school networks, except for engineers, scientists, etc.
Wordpress.com not only provides LaTeX support[1], but also renders LaTeX as an image file so that it works for people not using Javascript.

1. http://en.support.wordpress.com/latex/
90% of tech blog authors want some cool statistics to quote

90% of those will be willing to make them up to get there

90% of those will add as many steps as it takes to make the point they were trying to make, probably one about difficulty of getting from one step to the next

90% of those will be willing to publish those made up statistics

100% of those will lose a chunk of credibility by doing so.
Well, they don't sell Android phones. The carriers do. Google benefits from you doing Google searches on the phones, which is unaffected by this.

Basically, Google has no incentive to fix this bug, but the people complaining about it do. So they should do the fixing if they actually want it fixed.

(Technically, the OEM or carriers should fix this bug, and they are probably working on it Behind The Scenes.)
I believe it now says "Reinhardt" on their page, and not "Django". So you can rest easy. Sure, there might be a guy named Django Reinhardt, but surely of someone called their project "George" and another person called their project "Washington", it would be ok right?
This is posted on the very same day I heard from 23andMe received my and my wife's samples. Spooky.

(I actually bought the kits on DNA day last year, and just haven't gotten around to sending them in until now, so this really is weird for me)
I too am one that has switched back to Windows 7 from MacOS X. OK well not completely I still have one machine using MacOS X but I won't be purchasing anymore MacOS boxen for my business now that Windows 7 is proven to be so capable. Love it!
Mac OS X and Linux are the only OS's that I'm aware of that put all ethernet nics in the same device namespace.

Everyone else has separate device namespaces for - you might have an fxp0 , rl0, hme0, etc. on any BSD or Solaris machine.

Rather than looking in /dev, they really ought to be parsing the output of ifconfig -a.
It works well for 99% of the time, but when it doesn't, this design decisions make the experience frustrating. I'm-going-to-write-a-blog-post-and-boycott-this-thing frustrating.

And if the description is not clear (as in the Rdio example), it'll surprise the user. And surprise is not good. Let's say you are mindlessly managing your collection, doing some syncs along the way. When you finish, you notice that there are musics in the collection that you didn't put there. Even if that was exactly what you wanted, you don't know how you did it and now the software is not predictable anymore. You'll flinch before using it again. I know I would.

Multi-action options are a bless when aligned with your flow, but if not used carefully they'll bring down the whole user experience.
There seems to be a small bug, when I try to search for an author with a german umlaut in the name (for example "Kühn Eva") I get an error ("UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xfc' in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)"), however searching after "Kuhn Eva" works.
Max Levchin: Groupon is probably under-valued. The fastest growing company ever. I came across a startup recently that had a Powerpoint and no engineers, no product and it had a $16 million valuation. That's an over-valued company.

Interesting how different his opinion of Groupon's valuation is from the prevailing sentiment.
This would work a lot better if there were social integration with your friends and colleagues - maybe scraped from Facebook?
Network interfaces should not rename themselves after reboots. On Red Hat derived distributions, the device name is tied to the MAC address of the interface, so it never changes.

On other distributions, "udev" accomplishes the same thing.

The only point when interface naming is arbitrary is at installation time, then it stays the same forever.

Not only this will add confusion by introducing a bunch of new names for network interfaces, it will also break applications that rely on them being called "ethX".

It will also make it impossible to manually assign names to interfaces. For instance, if you have a configuration that uses an embedded interface and you want to add another interface on a card, you can manually assign the same "ethX" name to it, but not if the names depend on the physical characteristics of the hardware.
OCaml looks like a great language for implementing programming languages. I wish I had the time to explore it further.
On the other hand, names are meant to be used, otherwise why have one at all. So there would have been people referring to the Django release of WordPress - at least for a while. That would be very confusing.
> Pascal has a lesser "complexity budget" than C.

Well, the point of the "complexity budget" idea is that you just have a fixed budget, and can spend it on things. So everybody gets the same budget - maybe Pascal just didn't spend parts of what'd been available.

Regardless, as I said, this is not about good or bad programmers. The shell (i.e., not the horrible abomination called "command line" on Windows) is not a complex tool. The number of different concepts in a shell like bash is actually quite low - commands, functions, environment variables, substitution, globbing, if, for, pipes & streams. Escaping is a bit idiosyncratic, but hey. I'd even argue that using a well designed shell command is actually simpler than using a Windows wizard - the number of concepts and hoops you have to jump through are less, you just have to learn a limited number of concepts once.

Same goes for Erlang. That's actually a remarkably simple language. Once you wrap your head around functional programming, to the point where it could use some more complexity IMHO (like better typing/structs).

Understood like that, the "complexity budget" is actually a valid concept. Languages have features (concepts), and they tend to interact with each other (e.g. static, initializers, final and constructors in Java). If you have to many of them, the interactions get unpredictable and messy, and the language has too many concepts to keep in mind easily at the same time.

I'm not arguing for dumbing things down to the minimum here. Complex features are fine if they give power, but having too many of them, and possibly ill designed ones, will yield an unnecessarily difficult language. The difficulty of language design is IMHO what to take, what to leave out, and how to pick features to give a maximum of power/expressivity with the minimum complexity.
We run a program that monitors a significant number of Facebook Pages. It drives me crazy because every once in a while a certain attribute, like the author, is just omitted. It'll usually show up again later on.
I kinda expected Go to lose. It's HTTP library seems optimized for simplicity, and I get the impression that very little performance tuning has been done on the scheduler.
I'd like someone to do a Shootout-style multi-language continuous benchmark for network-type apps to help judge the general suitability of languages to IO and memory-management heavy tasks.
Hehe ok, that clarifies a lot. I had to smile a little reading about the CGI script, I didn't think there were people who would do such a thing just for themselves and their friends! But nice... and it shows that there is a problem to my solution.

I think you made a good point about a more understandable presentation of the idea. I disagree that tech savvy people would not use the site, because even though I consider myself tech savvy, I would rather spend some minutes googling for some webpage that does what I want then writing my own script. In any case, Fasterplan should be usable by non tech savvy people, too, and I will work on that.
Look, at first this kind of thing was all fun and inspirational, but Seth Godin-style aphorisms have been demoded for about three to four years now. Content with substance, please.
Libya: Who is propping up Gaddafi?
Have you tried sending them a patch? They accept them.

There are also a number of third-party Android distributions (CyanogenMod, etc.) that accept patches and do nightly releases.

If there is a bug in Android, and it is "ruining your life", it's your fault for not fixing it.
Having all ethernet devices called "ethX" makes it much easier to parse the output of ifconfig and exclude any non-ethernet interfaces (tunnels and such).
This is Your Brain on One Page: Workflowy (YC S10)
Cloudata: A New Open Source BigTable Inspired Database
I think one of the big reasons you don't see startups changing the world anymore is that the name of the game has changed from 'go public' to 'get acquired'. Many game changing technologies that big companies have released in the past 10 years (since the dot-com crash) have been through acquisition. With the IPO market now completely stagnant, its nearly impossible to aim for a public offering... and your investors want an exit.

Its not about changes in innovation, its about changes in exit strategy.
- do a portal on class action lawsuits. almost everyone is applicable to win some class action (e.g. eat french fries from Mcdonalds 10 yrs ago? you won a class action. have an ipod in 2004, you won a class action, etc). High keyword spending there. No portals are good.

- buy up popular domain names with the words misspelled (e.g. www.eatingdsorders.com, etc) - then do appropriate content (scrape sites) and google ads. Put together a portfolio of these names for cheap and sell to Demand Media

- Write e-books. "100 Ways to Lose Weight". "40 stocks that can Double this year". Use simple google ads to sell them. Write 10 books / mo to make decent living and one might be a breakout. Traditional publishing dead. Get your friends to write e-books. You'll market, they write, split 50-50.

- Therapists charge over $150-200 /hr. Charge $10 / hr and offer to do therapy over skype.

More coming.
Hear hear.

The positive comments, as of this comment, appear mostly to be of the form "I got more money" with an implication that, technically, there was still interesting work. However, I'm not seeing much in the way of remarks regarding culture clash or lack thereof.

Having now been acquired "successfully" twice (once quite recently), and having seen numerous other acquisitions from the acquirer's side or second-hand through friends and family, I have yet to see one go well.

More specifically, for the startup-minded folks, who joined a small company in large part because of the size, being integrated into a larger company is, at best, temporarily tolerable. For all of the reasons you outlined, the outlook tends to be much more bleak. Effectively double an already good salary would help assuage the pain, without totally eliminating it, and, usually, the retention packages are on a time scale of years, rather than months or even quarters.

I could imagine that a totally hands-off acquisition would work out much better, but I have yet to see such a one.
No, the problem is google doesn't make enough money off android to devote more resources to the project. Droid has more technical issues (supporting more platforms) than iPhone but generates less profit. That formula inevitably leads to less development resources and a worse product.
Also, some things like relationship status might go from 'dating' to blank after a breakup if the person doesn't want to scream that they're single right away
I get this sentiment a lot ...

Secondly, it is the ultimate language to date for writing libraries
and embedded DSL’s with static types. ... These abilities go
way beyond any prior statically typed language.

The author conveniently left out dynamic languages; but regardless of that, I don't like Scala because:

1) you can't override the method dispatching mechanism to make use of those types in interesting ways (e.g. multimethods are possible with DLR in .NET)

2) You can't get the syntax-tree of a block of code, then recompile it to something else (e.g. LINQ - and F# supports this as a general construct). There was a compiler-plugin at some point, but it's deprecated and incomplete and full of bugs

3) All OOP languages should have optional dynamic typing; OOP just doesn't blend with static types, being one reason why Haskell is not OOP (while providing other similar tools for polymorphism)

What you do get in Scala is a flexible syntax, that can lead to awkward behavior (I often find myself asking whether some line needs a semicolon). And the type-system, while better than the one in Java, is also too complex, too verbose and definitely not elegant.

You know what would be elegant? Being able to test if some object is an instance of List[String] (and yes, I know about manifests and implicit parameters: it's still an ugly hack that doesn't solve all problems).

One could say that Scala is a pragmatic language, but so is C++; and C++ has no replacement, while Scala does have many.
With so many non-technical entrepreneurs looking to start web businesses, I think there's A LOT of demand. Like everything else, you might need to spend some time trying to find your market, but I think you'll find it quite quickly. As an aside, email me offline: hello [at] launchbit [dot] com. (My website LaunchBit helps new web entrepreneurs do their customer development and vet their markets first before writing any code. As a result, many of my users are non-technical and may be interested in speaking with you after they are done vetting their markets.)

There are a lot of freelancers in the Bay Area that do this already. But, that said, my best guess is that the demand currently is greater than the supply. There are also some shops that take equity in exchange for their help. (e.g. Originate Labs)

The range of these freelancers/shops is tremendous. I've heard people quote between $30/hr - $200/hr for both frontend and backend work. Like bradleyjoyce mentioned, I think it's more of a factor of how much work you're looking to find and how quickly. You can start out lower and raise your prices with future customers.
Guido van Rossum names his new programming language after CMU's Lisp compiler...
Microsoft to Open Up Motion-Sensing Kinect to Developers via SDK Release
I remember seeing a proposal years ago that dealt with that problem by producing a standardized listing of Chinese homophones, numbered and ordered. In Pin Yin or Bopomofo one could clarify a homophone with a simple numeric subscript that somebody could simply look up in a dictionary. Most of the time you could leave them off and just rely on context. It had applications outside of China as well for countries with large Sino-loan word lexicons like Korean (a language which deals with the homophone problem routinely but has no standardized system for sorting it out without putting the Chinese root in parens).

Most of the homophones are sorted out with the tonal marks anyways, and in cases where that doesn't clarify enough, there's usually less than 9 homophones anyways making a single numeric subscript a reasonable clarifier.
Sprint & T-Mobile’s Fate
But the Wordpress.com support of LaTeX is very limited. For one thing, it uses a LaTeX to image converter and the images always pixelate when you zoom in. Another advantage of using MathJax is that, right clicking any equation gives the LaTeX source. And lack of good LaTeX support on Wordpress.com was just an observation, I had no intention of comparing them!
One area where there is an obvious hole in the market imho would be catering for the disabled traveller. If she could provide a service whereby she could organise disabled friendly flights, assistance to and from the airport, guarantee accommodation would meet your requirements etc it would be a great load off the mind of those who fear travelling due to their disabilities. A "disabled holiday planner" effectively.
PyPY typically uses 2x more memory than CPython.
I know that Google doesn’t sell phones and you know very well that I know that. Don’t patronize me.

Your opinion seems to truly be that you can expect no reliable help from Google when you encounter a bug in Android which is pretty mind-blowing to me. I don’t think that Google is quiet so deaf.
I'm doing this already. Let's chat via email (my email is in my profile).
Looks like this https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ConsistentNetworkDev... is going to be the default in Fedora 15.
If you read the title carefully, you may also interpret as Microsoft's Open XML embarrassment. Since I am unaware of other Microsoft products that implement the standard, I see no problem with the title. It's embarrassing, it's embarrassing to Microsoft and it's about MS Office Open XML.
It's easier to diss on Ayn Rand because her claims are so much bigger. I am not American btw, so I don't have any specific problem dissing Jefferson, I just don't see why I should. I am not against property rights I am against the idea that property rights are natural rights.

I can forgive Jefferson for living in different times, but Ayn Rand should have known better.
Switching from gnu screen to tmux
This makes no sense, arbitrarily applying the 80/20 rule to any and all circumstances holds no grounds - really. The 80/20 fallacy is one of the most overused and misunderstood concepts in stats...."applying the 80/20 we won't worry about this aspect of our customer base....or this aspect of our business...". It's pernicious, it really is.
An Entrepreneurial Journey With SpotHero
I understand that having to work around fluctuating data might produce less than desirable results. But your users might find the feature useful anyway.
I think basically everyone agrees that XML literals are a bad idea. There is a little more background described here:
http://www.quora.com/Will-Scala-ever-remove-XML-literals
MIT OpenCourseWare Turns 10: What's Next for Open Education?
What's with the edited title on HN? Now most of this doesn't make any sense.
Decoupling content management with RDFa and Backbone.js
It's also an area where businesses have to work constantly to resist legitimate forces: the desire to know more about customers, the desire to reduce piracy, and the desire to outsource tricky business processes. VMWare might be an extreme example, but most checkout processes trend in this direction without conscious effort.
I like how Joel explains the necessary reasons why the file formats in question have to be so bad, while tacitly admitting that having a good reason for being bad doesn't make bad code any more useful.
Heh, I'm 26 and I've started calling myself old.
3.6

Never tried 4. In benchmarks it's way faster than 3.6. Downloading it now.
Stack Exchange launches programmer recruiting site
Considering how agressive Automattic was in competing with SixApart a few years back, I wouldn't be surprised.
Are you suggesting that the only trade marks be totally made up words? That flies in the face of hundreds of years of tradition. People have been using their own names in their business and need to be able to keep others from unfairly trying to confuse customers.

If Roberts and Sons Cleaners is an established brand in a community, we would want a legal mechanism for that business to protect their brand - without having to change every business name to XYZZY, etc.
> in a way

You mean you interpreted as me saying something about Netscape.

> Throwing bodies at something doesn't make it right in software engineering

Usually no, but Microsoft can throw a lot of bodies and rebuild from scratch, this time with good engineering.

> Apple is a bigger company now.

I don't think so. It's just more valuable.
That's nice work to go back in time. If you need to go back for a more frequent interval in the "newest" page, try http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/new, that snapshots HN newest every 15 minutes.
Another great example of how one can seek opportunities where others don't look -- because people misapply fundamental laws and principles. In years past, many people would have told you such a program is a fruitless endeavor, because of the Halting Problem. (One would have been a CS professor of mine!) The Halting Problem only shows that such programs can't be perfect, not that imperfect but tremendously useful examples can't exist.

A priori knowledge and fundamental principles are valuable, but they are often widely misapplied. This is a great "rock to look under," as such principles are often very powerful, yet a great many are mistakenly scared away and don't bother to look closely.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Another option is the test framework used for jQuery itself, QUnit: http://docs.jquery.com/Qunit