skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've seen many startups hit the end of the term of a convertible note before raising an equity round, and it has never once been a problem.

Maybe I'm being a bit pessimistic, but this really sounds to me like "US housing prices have never fallen by X%".

Investors who fund a startup using convertible debt are not hoping the debt will be repaid, like a regular lender is; they want it to convert to equity.

I'm sure that this is correct at the point that they provide the funding; I'm less certain about the situation 18 months later. Do you really think that no investor will ever change their mind over the course of 18 months and decide that they'd prefer to cut their losses rather than extend the term of an investment in a company which no longer seems quite so hot?
Most people who live in NYC weren't born or raised there. I could see why conversation would appear to be easy for them (you?). I can tell you though, real New Yorkers don't like talking to strangers.
New TEPCO update:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031304-e....

High Pressure Coolant Injection System of Unit 3 automatically stopped. We endeavored to restart the Reactor Core Isolation Cooling System but failed. Also, we could not confirm the water inflow of Emergency Core Cooling System.
That's the case in the US as well. I think it's common courtesy more than anything else. Same reason a man doesn't take the urinal immediately next to another that is being used, unless he has to. It is courteous to give people their personal space so long as it's convenient to do so.
No one could "rush out of the market" even if they wanted to. Adeo's article is about the case where the startup doesn't have the cash on hand to pay back the angel. At best (or rather worst) a panicking angel could get the startup's IP, and good luck selling that without the people.
Join the Movers & Shakers of Silicon Valley
As I explain here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318164

cutting one's losses is not usually an option.
In general, sure it's safe. But once you admit a prior probability of a suspected allergic reaction to food, things change.

I think the concern is that completely eliminating a previously-regularly-consumed food due to potential hypersensitivity may risk a severe reaction when the food is re-introduced.
Of course I'm talking hypothetical. The original article is about an experimental p2p feature in an open source browser that is several months at a minimum from even being in a beta release of Chrome.
It was an honest question. Pro tip: try answering a question even if you consider it to be stupid. Don't just vote down. Not cool.
We need the Japanese Miracle, right now..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell#Jap...
I wouldn't say there's a winner just yet, it's still early days in the life of smartphone OSes.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that if there is no fallout, the anti-nuclear contingent should accept they are basically wrong, but if there is fallout, the pro-nuclear contingent should continue to fight (i.e. the debate will rage on)?

Why should one outcome produce a change in behavior from one crowd, but the opposite outcome should not produce a change in behavior from the opposite crowd?
POS wordpress blog covers the entire first page of text to tell me that I have JS turned off. I know that, dipshits, show me the damn blog...
IPad 2: GPU Benchmarked with Impressive Gains
That conclusion was really buried in there. Some form of confirmation bias on the part of a reader, perhaps?
Glee Season 2 Episode 16 - News Network Area
The original link describes the situation pretty well if you read it. A convertible debt is a form of loan, and as the post points out, this is currently the popular way that angels put funds into startups.
Since when angels started using convertible debt instead of straight equity purchases.
>Perhaps as part of iOS 4.3, Apple has allowed Safari to circumvent this restriction but not any other application.

Given Safari is the biggest attack surface and regularly falls prey to exploits they should also disable the JIT for Safari. (Most iOS exploits like the Pwn2Own ones, and jailbreakme.com ones are due to bugs in Safari.)
M3tasploit Schelevator Privilege Escalation 0day Demo - منتديات قروب الساهر
As someone who has met and done business with Bryce...you couldn't be more wrong in your assessment.
This thing is hilarious! I love how this renders the picked up objects so well; it really shows if you try to pick up images! Nice work!
They do have superb customer support though. I've been quite pleased with them from that perspective.
You seem to be assuming that startups will run out of cash at exactly the moment that their convertible debt becomes due -- maybe this sometimes happens, but I can't help thinking that it would take exceptionally good planning (or a lot of luck).

I know there have been cases where startups have decided to shut down and return their remaining cash to investors (including some YC companies, I think); what happens in the case where a convertible debt holder thinks a startup should take that option but the founders aren't ready to give up?
On page 500, under Discussion:
"Blood tests assessing IgG levels against foods did not predict which foods might have a deleterious behavioural effect. ... We recorded no difference in behavioural effects after challenge with high-IgG or low-IgG foods. These results suggest that use of IgG blood tests to identify which foods are triggering ADHD is not advisable. However, IgG blood tests might be useful in other diseases."
Tell HN: Got hellbanned, maybe its good for me
Hey HN,

I am not a very famous user or something, nor am I a very big contributor. But yesterday I realized I was hellbanned from hacker news website. The first reaction was shock (obviously, as I had 1000+ karma and if feels rude to be treated like this) and then the realization that it was because of my comments here[1] (search for rick_2047). But then there was this sudden realization when I was brushing my teeth in the morning, maybe this is good for me. HN has became the community which cannot stand alternate point of views. I have had these conversations before, where people just downvote stuff as they do not like that point of view (which strictly violates the guidelines). I believe what in what I say and that is how I live. And if the community here cannot stand these, its better I leave. (this is the second account that got hell banned)

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2294103
This particular official (or his office, honestly) doesn't have much to gain from downplaying the possibility of a meltdown

This is the same Japan, you'll remember, that actually doctored video footage to downplay a previous accident at a nuclear reactor -- see Monju[1] -- with the direct involvement of the government. Or when they had to take the extraordinary step of forcing the shutdown of 17 reactors because a major (the major?) utility falsified safety records [2].

A cursory googling of japan nuclear safety would have immediately informed you that officials often downplay and conceal information.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3548192.stm
I wish that there was some widely agreed upon standard for "considered harmful" articles. Like, they have to be serious problems. They can't just be nitpicks or of the "this will mislead the already clueless layman when the press gets wind of it" bent.

There are so many vulnerabilities and exploits developed every year. How can it matter very much if a small handful of them are rewarded more substantially and disclosed using a slightly different than normal procedure? Pwn2own considered a wash, if you ask me.
MFA Thesis Writing Process Understanding
Students doing the Master of Fine Arts degree will have to write an MFA thesis. It is a two year program which requires students to produce original art work in the field specialized. A student’s creativity is judged by the manner in which he or she writes the MFA thesis.
Contrarian Tropes in Journalism
Is there any way to play this on a Macbook trackpad without connecting a USB mouse?
You might try nginx instead of apache - it's a lot lighter for serving static content.
If there is 'some' fallout, then it will be on a spectrum which will be interpreted very subjectively by different groups. However if there is 'no' fallout, then there is no spectrum, and no room for subjectivity. Those against nuclear power would have to admit this whole episode is not ammunition for their argument. Until 'the results are in' there will continue to be a lot of nuclear apocalypse sensationalism, I'd just like to see it retracted afterwards when/if it turns out to be unfounded. Put another way, we already know that it's possible to have nuclear accidents, what we don't know is whether it's possible for nuclear facilities to withstand major disasters with no such accident occurring. If that's the outcome, then to ignore it would be sort of like a type 1 error.
It only takes one or two investors to pull out of one company, and that company faces bankruptcy. With so many newbies entering the angel market, you just never know.
If the startup is doing really well, this seems like a more likely outcome than the angels calling back their debt.

If a startup is doing well, the worst-case scenario involves issuing stock to new investors in order to pay off the convertible debt.

The problem would come in the marginal cases -- where a startup is still running and still has cash in the bank, and the founders aren't ready to give up yet, but hasn't produced anything interesting enough to bring in new investors... or to convince the convertible debt holder to keep his money in.
If it's static, serve it directly from S3, and turn on cloudfront for even better delivery.
As cperciva mentioned too, it's about the potential desire to cut losses and get out, and the damage that could do. I don't disagree that the Angels trying to cut their losses would get little back and there would be no value in rushing out. But in a panic logic is seldom the driver.

In your experience, would most startups survive if their angel investors with convertible debt wanted out, even if the cash wasn't there to repay it anyway and there were no tangible assets to sell?

Adeo's post reads to me as being a warning about the potential fallout in a context where people want out. I don't think there is much argument that the Angels wouldn't recoup much anyway. But neither is that the case when people sell public stocks that they've acquired at the top of the market when it hits the bottom. But even professional investors do that too with predictable regularity.
You were downvoted mercilessly not because of your opinions, but because you were expressing them crudely and without a trace compassion.

"this is the second account that got hell banned"

And you still think it's us, not you?
It’s Just Fine to Make Mistakes
It's sort of like the new wife (husband) clearing the home of all pics/references_to the ex. Or maybe:

...of the ex. whom she killed. :)

Completely to be expected from people bent on total domination.
I don't think so, they're already labeling this the 3rd worst nuclear power disaster on news networks.
Mark Stephens (the Bob Cringely we're talking about here) graduated from college in 1975 with a bachelor's in physics. The Three Mile Island report was sent to the president in 1979: http://www.pddoc.com/tmi2/kemeny/transmittal_letter.htm

It's not inconceivable that he was hired to dig up some facts.
Ctrl-Click == right-click.
Unless you have a very specific need, consider switching to a web server more explicitly designed for static content. Nginx takes minutes to install and configure.
On the multi-touch trackpad you can just click with two fingers.
New Rules for the New Bubble
IBM leaps to mind, but they are old enough that it's probably not a fair comparison.
I have used yacc and its offspring like bison for a long time. Writing the grammars is really simple, but debugging them is really arcane. The problem is that the place where the parser generator discovers the error can be some distance from where you introduced the ambiguity. Grammars have their own debugging style, particularly with yacc/bison output. Eventually you have an aha moment and you start looking for an improper empty state or trying a reduction at the wrong place in the parse tree. It isnt hard if you grasp it and probably an intractable bitch if you dont.

I will agree however, that the parser and the bison source look like someone barfed C all over the floor, unless someone has given it serious TLC in the past dozen years.
I agree it doesn't sound very good for Rackspace and I would have really hated the phone signup hoops they apparently make you jump through for no good reason.

> But the prices are a fraction of what it would take to run on EC2.

I'm not sure that's true for every use case. When I moved away from MediaTemple in search of a real virtual server, I wanted a major hosting company that gave me a reasonably good web interface and community support, which is why in the end I just had to decide between Rackspace and EC2:

On Rackspace you can have a 512 MB RAM instance with 10 GB in and 1 TB out (I'm not sure how much disk space) coming an at $202.70 per month. Now, EC2 is more complicated because they make you pay for things like I/O operations, but base cost for a Micro instance with 613 MB RAM + 10 GB in and 1 TB out makes $175.70 plus some change for I/O. So from where I'm standing they're both in the same league with pricing, and it's not surprising that the major component of each offering is bandwidth cost, both offered at comparable levels. Just the servers themselves cost $22.08 at Rackspace and $5.11 at Amazon.

Obviously, this is all with a big YMMV. In my case, I went with AWS, mainly because it felt cheaper and was easier to set up from Germany (this is where the phone verification shenanigans come in the article is talking about). They say EC2, especially the EBS-based Micro instances, are slow and crappy. But my instance is pumping out moderately complex PHP pages to visitors at a rate of about 8 requests/second, with an average speed of 10 milliseconds per request, with a Linux load avg of 0.04. I'm quite happy about that. So that's not a high load scenario but my guess is it's fairly typical for some dude with a couple of low-profile web projects - and EC2 was the right choice for that.
I hope you don't mind, but I just mirrored it on Github (https://github.com/seancron/kathack). You can use the following javascript to load it from the mirror.

javascript:var i,s,ss=['https://github.com/seancron/kathack/raw/master/kh.js','http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min.js'];for(i=0;i!=ss.length;i++){s=document.createElement('script');s.src=ss[i];document.body.appendChild(s);}void(0);

P.S. If you do mind, just let me know and I'll take it down.
I'm not sure the author is questioning the quality of startups. He's just reminding everyone about the goal of starting a business, not a website.

You're absolutely right, the author is frustrated. It's because many startups have innovative technical visions but no clear business model. The stand outs have both, right?
Google Search NoAPI
move the mouse to wear you want the ball to move, then hold down right click.
I tried that, but it works too slowly to continually press with two fingers next to the ball.

I meant is there a way to change the javascript to use a different button?
Title is misleading. It is not 'VCs' leaving but rather a 'VC' discovers an opportunity and takes it. A few others may follow. Expect it to be filled soon,
“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html
To elaborate, I got it to work this way:

* Hold two fingers on middle of track pad
* Click thumb on bottom of track pad; katamari should start to move at this point
* Release two fingers on middle of track pad
* Use single finger to move cursor while still holding down thumb
The original "considered harmful" article was essentially one big nitpick, so this use is probably quite appropriate.
Pretty sure TippingPoint ZDI gets the details of your vulnerability as part of the contest, and they notify vendors and either a) release publicy if there's no real response from the vendor or b) give them a 'reasonable timeframe' to workin to fix the vulnerability.
The information that the smooth touchy people deduced automatically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edh2GQHZmtI (in case this link dies, it's Lance Mason's "How To Kino")
Arable land gets people excited? Really? I can't say I don't know anybody that gets excited over arable land, I know one guy, but he's a soil and water commissioner.

That's still too intellectual to make most folks even notice. California farmland is getting poisoned by selenium from groundwater wells, but not a lot of folks picketing about that.
Oh awesome, that worked beautifully. Thank you!
The login has now been changed so that you can start chatting without logging in with Google. Again, thanks for the tip.
A Review of Aurora Feint for the iPhone | AllTime Best
strtotime() considered harmful?
Right now, Paul, convertible debt is not a problem today and was not a problem in 2010. Most startups with debt negotiate an extension when the note comes due if there is not a Series A. However, the amount of debt is ballooning, and there are many new angel investors entering the market. The signals are not good. This is a preventable problem with a better angel investment structure that gets widely adopted. I am just pointing out the problem.
Is it the case that you might explain such a thing with words that look something like "Some small effect from a different mass distribution will be caused and it will have to be taken into effect, but when you care about these effects as far as I know you have to measure them empirically anyhow, because if you care at that level of detail it turns out there's a lot of noise as the Earth warms and cools and has various flows within it and as water moves hither and yon and so on. So while it will have some effect it is merely one of very many such things."? If only I had thought to add such words to my original post. Alas.
Google search result page for 'earthquake'
I wonder if the IgG test they used is that reliable, though.

It might be that their results are limited by the accuracy of the ImuPro test, which would be a shame.
That's a great point.

People always say mean things about the Soviet Union, but in comparison to North Korea, a factory worker in the Stalinist era had a great degree of personal freedom.
I think probably you really aren't quite groking the vibe we got from the 51 hours thread.

There once was a man on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Everyone knew he was innocent but the system is what it is and could not be stopped. Everyone gathered 'round to wish him well during his last meal. He ordered macaroni and cheese, which was his favorite. A lone voice rang out from a cell down the block, "Ha! macaroni! He could have had steak and lobster! What an idiot."

This is how your comments played. It did not seem at all like an alternate point of view, but a most inappropriate troll instead.
Japan Nuclear Accident: Worse than Worst, Again
You can't actively want what will always be. I love Webkit/et all, but people need to get this through their heads that native will always trump JS when it comes to iOS development.
Are you from New York? Reason I ask is because I am and even born-and-raised New Yorkers don't mind talking to strangers (or are you just talking about parts of Brooklyn?).

...just don't be a creep or do it on the subway.
"... There are ways that those with superperfectionist traits can try to take things down a notch. They can try to break down tasks into more manageable bites, so it does not feel overwhelming. ..."

Decomposition works because the tasks are do-able. The downside, any lack of resolution, timidity or weakness at any particular point at the transition from one chunk to another can trigger failure.
Lol...
This is from one of the comments below the article (I did not write this):

"Feet? Degrees Fahrenheit? This is so funny. How many feet wide is your nuclear reactor core? How many stones does it weigh? Surely this must be a joke.

The article is laden with namedropping but has no information at all on all crucial points such as the actual explosion. That anyone takes this seriously escapes me.

And, seriously? Measurements in body part lengths? Any engineer who went to school must have learned the proper system. I seriously doubt this article is genuine."

I kind of agree. Japanese reactors do not use feet or retarded Fahrenheit scale. If you write a scientific article, use a proper scale and SI standard of measurements in order to be taken seriously (hint, hint, nudge, nudge).
Being fired launched me into my own start up..which has been a great thing for me.

biggest thing I learned was you have to pick you battles, and really only stand up for the ones you are passionate about.

though lack of passion in the 9-5 didn't directly lead to my being fired, it pry played a part in it. My boss an I butted heads a number of times, which I know is what lead to my firing. I always had support for every argument, but at the end of the day he was the one in charge. I'm much happier now though! I'm excited to get up and jump in every morning.

when some doors close others open up.
Partial meltdown likely under way at power plant
The race to make the world's strongest magnet
That sort of app would be called a "web browser".
The author is chronically unhappy with everything (apparently Amazon EC2 also sucks). Complexity of the password for his account? A checkbox? Really?

Rackspace is a great company with strong ties to developing open source software. They are reliable and professional. Amazon EC2 is also an excellent service. I use both.
Top TED Talks by PostRank engagement data
Earthquake in Japan (photos)
"... HN has became the community which cannot stand alternate point of views ...'

Ideas, facts, concepts, suggestions, theories, yes. Opinion, a little. Attitude, No.
If they wanted to market to techies then they might want to mention that Duncan Jones also directed Sam Rockwell in "Moon"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_%28film%29
Last month, 30 days seemed longer.

This month, a month seems longer.

Next month, they'll seem equal :-)
The SEC's shrinking credibility
I disagree. While Pwn2Own is not evidence of the relative security of browsers, I don't see how it can be "harmful" when it causes Google and Apple to find and ship numerous fixes for the competition. It also raises awareness to the general public; if IE 8 being hacked at Pwn2Own gets even some of the less technologically-inclined to switch to a better browser, I'm all for it.
Now, if their philanthropic arm were able to apply this data-driven approach to education...
I live in a small town (Sedona Arizona) with lots of international tourists, many I talk to while hiking two or three days a week on our local wilderness trails. Mostly, everyone seems to want to talk to a local, but perhaps they are just trying to be extra friendly visiting a foreign country.

I consciously try to be helpful with visiting tourists and suggest fun places to visit in our area. Even though I would prefer to carry a sidearm in the wilderness because of mountain lions, etc., I don't because I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable: I think that people from most European countries aren't used to seeing people carry guns.

Here in the USA, we do seem to have interesting behavior regarding hugging friends of the opposite sex vs. same sex. At least in our circle of friends, men almost always hug friends' wives in greeting but we only hug each other on birthdays, after especially good dinner parties, etc. - mostly special occasions.
I didn't think it picked up images. I guess I needed to roll my ball a bit bigger before trying that!