skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems you are saying "we'd like to recoup cash from our companies, if possible, without forcing them into premature dividends or exits, and without diluting our equity." Yes?

Well, that is a preferred equity instrument, eg, "This bit gets paid before the common equity gets a dividend or distribution."

Preferreds generally have a stated "interest" rate, but payments are at management discretion (accruing to principal when not made) but there is no reason that can't be zero. They can also have maturity dates for repayment. Yes, it looks a lot like a loan, and that's sort of typical for this "junior to all other obligations / senior to other equity" layer of the capital structure. (And note that there could well be legal and tax differences between preferred and debt. I don't know how it complicates the documentation you're already doing with the loan and equity pieces. IANAL.)

The important difference for you is jargon. "Preferred equity" doesn't carry a suggestion of personal liability, it's equity with a return clearly tied to the venture's success, but ahead of the common. Your founders won't know the term, but any advisor they speak with should.

Described thus, I still don't know if I like your proposition, or what others should think of it, but I'm closer to understanding just what that proposition is.
Probably just another Microsoft employee moving to Internet Industry. Besides that I don't see anything else special in the article.
I disagree with your analogy. iOS is not a store. The App Store is a store. I'd instead make this analogy: The owner of a bookstore is also the mayor of the town. He enacts a law (via declaration) requiring all bookstores to accept his bookstore's credit cards (of which he gets 30% of the sell price).

Luck for Apple they aren't dominant in ebooks. If they do the same thing to iTunes competitors (and it looks like they might), they could be in real trouble with regulators.
On the other hand, I can point to portions of Mac OS X and iOS that are shipping today and say: I made that.

Not only was the experience of working at Apple incredibly valuable from a technical standpoint, but from a business standpoint it's something instantly recognizable to others.
Well, he does imply that it was a mistake. The impression for me was that he regrets the time spent there.
Do you suggest respect for the law isn't important anymore?
Balsamiq Mockups it too complicated. Sketch Lab is simple and easy to use. It is much easier to make sketches with it. The website design is a work in progress. Be patient. It was just released a few days ago. There is a lot of potential here.
Is closer in performance to C than to Python more acceptable?
Launching campaign system on Facebook
Launching campaign system on facebook
Hi guys, This is a new facebook application.
What it does?
If you find any interesting article, news or some social political activity event which you think will be useful to let your friends know about then use it. This application will spread your story to seed users which are spanned over entire globe. These seed users will forward it to their friends and their friends and so on. If your story is really good then you will get a good response from these seed users and your published story will be spread over entire facebook network!!
What you need to do?
1] Click on the above link i.e.(http://apps.facebook.com/campaign_system)
2] You might see a facebook logo. Click on it
3] Allow the required permissions to the application.
4]Start using the application.
What can you do with this application?
-See the latest published stories on the main page.
- Submit your own story under some category
- Become a seed user to spread others
NOTE: ITS NOT A SPAM.
Why? The regulations erect great barriers to entry for would-be competitors, solidifying profits of the current market players and allowing them great latitude for slacking off and sub-par performance.

We're seeing the same thing now with the money transmitters.
The fundamental issue is that no one else can really compete with Apple on the iOS platform because Apple doesn't have to pay the 30% cut.
New diamond aerogel is so light that it's like "frozen smoke" made of diamonds
I've used them for a few personal sites and projects with no complaints.

The fee for wildcard certs (~60USD) is a one-off to verify your identity - usually via a quick phone call to confirm details from your official documents.

Once that's complete, you can generate as many certs as you need (incl. wildcards and Subject Alternative Name) from their control panel, subject to jumping through the usual hoops to prove that you have control of each domain.
Why Google Does Not Own Skype
A slight variation of (5): Investigating ancient code bases to discover what some long forgotten piece of code does and why it's not working as expected.
Untouched by Apple and untouched by customers...

You're talking about a company that named itself using Apple's product naming convention. They went all-in on the iOS model. They probably hired strictly ObjC programmers, they probably have no business experience with the web either. I'm not saying they couldn't switch, it just doesn't sound like this is the company with the chops to easily do so.
May be because Sriram is a HN-er (Good luck Sriram) and has been MS's measured voice here
Google is just offering to hold your shit for you
Microsoft Says Skype Development Will Continue on Mac, iOS, Android
Certainly, writing down your goals is the first key to achieving them.
Oh, and also, Sketch Lab is a web app, so you can access your sketches from anywhere in the world, and you can share them with the world. As for the current public sketches, it was just released, so not so many users made their sketches public yet. Give it some time.
I am looking to build my UI/UX portfolio and would love to work with you in improving Zena and supporting Open source software. You can reach me through schraeds (at) gmail
This is true -- the hardcore capitalist would argue that the plaster industry has been hamstrung by the quaint requirements from building code to use wood, steel and concrete in construction.

There's a give an take here... the government has a perceived duty to protect the citizenry against bad actors, that that introduces a bias against sudden change aka "innovation". "Innovation" isn't always good -- just like to some people, certain "freedom fighters" are "insurgents".

On the other hand, there are entrenched business interests like Western Union (and payday lenders in "red" states) who use their influence to keep the status quo around, even if it hurts consumers. (ie. the poor and ignorant who spend $10 to send $100 to someone)
New graphics engine imperils users of Firefox and Chrome
How was iFlow Reader a middle man between Random House and Apple?
Does anyone have sparkmuse.com account? Please invite me
Does anyone have sparkmuse.com account? Please invite me at umesh.kacha@gmail.com
It's all down to opinion. This is all IMHO.

I've found Python to be quite obtuse at times, particularly with the notion that it's sometimes functional and sometimes not. (Consider generators being promoted and map being demoted by Guido for not being 'pythonic').

Expressiveness is hard to measure I agree, but I find enough utility in Go to perform the same amount of work in a roughly equivalent number of keypresses. That's my metric.
"You know what would have been a really exciting announcement? If Google announced that it was finally commoditizing music. That—not some online tune ghetto—is the next step for music services. [...]

Consider NavTeq. Garmin, Magellan , Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, Lowrence, and even XM Radio all rely on the same NavTeq data set. Garmin and Magellan can set themselves apart with pricing, features and form factors, even though both use the same basic commodity to deliver what users ultimately want.

At some point in the future music services—like Rdio and Spotify and likely iTunes [...] will likely be completely commoditized. They'll all have the same catalogue, but will differentiate themselves by their discovery, sharing, interface and delivery features.

I don't want another place to simply store songs. [...] I don't want to just move from one island to another. I'm ready to be rescued."
How does it make the airline more money to sell you a ticket at a lower price? Your question is framed in terms of a consumer that is already buying tickets at the current price; you need to find the consumer that isn't buying tickets at the current price.
Why did you make this instead of using existing solutions? What were they lacking that this adds?
You realize Google Checkout is often lamented on HN because it doesn't operate in many European countries? It is exactly for these reasons.

Much like copyright laws are abused for business protection, so are regulations. Certainly within the US it would be better to have a federal license framework in order to minimize friction.
There is: Nokia's Ovi store. Unfortunately, Symbian isn't doing that great compared to Android and iOS, at least in the minds of tech influencers.
An Entrepreneur’s Key Assumption…I am wrong
My best advice: read "Made to stick". Not just once - at least once per year.
The X on the popup modal doesn't work when the site first loads.
Prime minister publicly warns CSC of possibility of NHS contract termination
...which is why you should define debts in terms of some weighted (USD, EUR, Gold, BTC, ...) currency basket and then pay in Bitcoin using its "exchange rate" at that time.

One option: a volume-adjusted average of MtGox.com trades over the last K hours

Another: use 0.001 of the amount to buy options to convert X Bitcoin into the agreed upon amount of (USD, ...). Market-making HFT bots will compete, making X the most fair amount.

All this complexity could be handled by user-friendly software...
http://www.couchsurfing.org/
The author of the blog post is a head-hunter. Since the Ladders is disrupting head-hunters, he's not exactly an impartial participant in this conversation.
It's unreasonable to task the patent office with determining novelty and non-obviousness in software. Imagine examining mechanical engineering patents if millions of people carried machine shops around in their backpacks.
Ask HN: any of the HNers have kids & work from home?
This is probably irrelevant to 98% of HN so apologies in advance. I'm looking to speak with any female hackers/programmers etc who have kids and work from home. (I figure HNers are more likely to beat there own path, so might find what I'm looking for here...)

I am currently working 9-5, 4 days a week. My 18 month old is in nursery (daycare). I am increasingly feeling that I am doing the wrong thing. Little tales of things going on at nursery, little snippets of an 'upbringing' I don't want her to have.

I am considering ditching the job, but cannot afford to NOT work because my partner doesn't earn a fat lot, thus need to work from home/freelance. I am a competent PHP developer with 10 years experience (5 hobby plus 5 professional). Can I make this work for me?

Any guidance or advice most welcome....

ETA: just to add - what complicates matters slightly is that we're in the process of buying our own house. Everything should be in place by the end of May. This will reduce our monthly outgoings though (currently paying much more for an old rental cottage, v. expensive to heat). I have about £7k in savings.

ETA2: removed 'female' from the title - thinking about it, I'm sure anyone working from home with kids will have useful input!
Actually he does. Re-read the last few lines of the post.

Hint: the word "mistake" usually implies something you shouldn't do

Read down further:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2536093
Ultimate Tutorial - How To Design Custom Templates For Joomla 1.6
It's all about trade-offs. GC does eat more memory but with the proliferation of reasonably sized chunks of RAM on ARM embedded systems for example, it's of little concern. Not only that, you reduce the time to market and likelyhood of your code falling over due to pointer and memory problems. That is probably preferred (in my experience) when your product is in situ and has no form of upgrade possible other than shipping an engineer out to do it.
aaaand, the music industry takes yet another step down the long stairwell to obsolescence. Really guys, we want your product, we'll even pay for it, but you gotta update the delivery mechanism to get with the times.

That's all you have to do.
That's not saying don't work at apple.

That might be saying. It was a mistake that I worked for apple.

Or it was a mistake that I worked for a place where I wasn't allowed to show what I did

Or so many other things.

But no where does he advice people against working for apple.
Probably the size of the respective markets. Also that the content is mainly American in the first place.
You can use the blue button to close it, though.
Every company in Silicon Valley is actually a Delaware corp anyway..
Enterprise vs. everyone startups, e.g., fewer but more lucrative customers vs. popularity contest. What's awesome and not about each?
Yes, Europe is full of regulations, and I don't think anyone that's read HN for long enough isn't tired of hearing about a lack of innovation in Europe vs. the US (especially SV).
Waste Services
My Dumpster Rentals providing nationwide compactor services to compress your garbage. Find the best prices on compactors and other waste Management equipments.
Your judging an action by its consequences rather than arguing about the greater principle.

Is it OK for me to kill a murderer? After all, I'd be rendering a service to society.

We have a rule of law for a reason and the right way to bring more government transparency is through peaceful persuasion, not disregard for the law.

Why not establish laws that guarantee government transparency instead?

Why not elect a government that is committed to transparency?
Sounds like a great move. Looking forward to see what happens on there.

Again, I must say, this govt seems to actually be moving its ass and doing things (even if they're not always perfect). Impressive and completely unexpected.
I really like this, and I'm excited about the fact this was apparently developed "in house" rather than by some speculative design firm.

Obviously it needs work, and a few design elements/features need tweaking - but it's a massive step in the right direction. Hopefully someone internally will see and understand how great this is and help it move forward.
Notes:

1. This only runs on CPUs. Does not take advantage of any GPUs. However, it is great to have CPU implementations for both development purposes as well as for portability of code over multiple types of platforms.

2. AMD also has had an OpenCL 1.1 CPU implementation for a while now and you can use it for running stuff on either CPU or AMD GPUs. I have been using AMD SDK and it has been great as well.
That made me feel a little better about yesterday.

Then I took a long lunch and wrote a specification for something elegant that can be done in two days, instead of the presently planned weeks... And then I got cursed out by the boss for taking a long lunch.

(I am quite happy here, but today I feel like trawling jobs sites for telecommute Perl jobs where it is ok to be very rusty on web development.)
"They could wind up being the major provide for driverless cars."

I'd say they could be the major provider for driverless car technology. I don't think they should get into actual car manufacturing.
I don't know that much about working on operating systms, but here's Linus Torvalds on maybe using Go in the kernal:

"Hey, I think Go picked a few good and important things to
look at, but I think they called it "experimental" for a
reason. I think it looks like they made a lot of reasonable
choices.

But introducing a new language? It's hard. Give it a couple
of decades, and see where it is then."

http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&...
At first I was a bit meh, so what, especially as the welcome splash screen wouldn't close and required a screen refresh to get rid of it.

However, the blog's an interesting read on what they're trying accomplish. The point is to make the user's journey much better for common tasks (their example is a lost passport):

http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/

Check out http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/alpha-gov-uk-design-rules for example. They're openly ignoring IE6 and accessibility while they iterate interactivity, fairly brave for a government site.
And has Kindle been updated in that time? I think they meant that any new app (including new releases to existing apps) would have to obey the rule, but they wouldn't start kicking apps out of the store until June 30.
http://worrydream.com/Apple/ for javascript impaired people.
Especially regarding IT, keeping up with technology is a rare thing; there's no reason we can't have a modern website for all government services. But impressive as this may be, in other areas I'd reserve judgement as to whether it's a good thing.
This is actually pretty decent, its clean and usable which is enough of a surprised, but it looks like it might actually be useful as well. Geolocation was broken for me and @alphagov asked me for more information

Something feels strange about the govement asking me on twitter to give feedback on getsatisfaction
One should know better then working for such a crappy company like Apple.
Big vs. small: Challenges in responsive web design
As the number and variety of devices from which we access the internet increases, new web design challenges present themselves.It’s no longer simply enough to have a mobile version and a browser version. Now, we have to consider whether the person visiting our site is visiting from a tablet, a smartphone (and whether that smartphone has a high-res screen or not), a netbook, a desktop computer or full-size laptop (and whether it’s one with a high-res or low-res screen), or some other device entirely.
OK, that makes sense. But if Apple does the same to Amazon or Netflix I can see them going the web app route if they are not allowed to raise prices, because it would eat all their profits, too. Amazon has already showed a web app version of their store, and Netflix is experienced with HTML5, too.
More on splitting equity 50/50 or not
Do you have any examples from reality where [an unregulated market spawning entities that provide trusted rating services] has happened?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwriters_Laboratories

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports
nolite - as far as I know most existing clients (in nodes case there aren't many) just expose the native redis command set.
redback has added densityset, keypair, socialgraph and cappedlist - pretty cool commands if you ask me!
20£ DIY kit computer goes Forth against Braben's RaspberryPi
It's a higher-level abstraction. With most traditional clients you call commands like `hget(key)`, `zinterstore(key1, key2, key3)` or `mset(key1, value1, key2, value2)`

Redback gives you the same power/flexibility but hides the complexity. You call `hash = redback.createHash(hash_key)` and then call something like `hash.set({key1:value1, key2: value2});`

It's more than just convenience though. I had a few goals with the library:

- Make Redis more accessible

- Create some useful derivative/hybrid structures (SocialGraph, etc.)

- Expose useful atomic constructs such as auto-incrementing keys

- Make it as easy as possible for users to create their own structures (e.g. see the Queue example in the README)
I think that was another commenter's speculation. All we know is that Apple says existing apps have until June 30. It remains to be seen of they make exceptions or not.
How much larger does the Bitcoin economy have to get ( I believe it's currently ~$30M) before the same money transfer companies will start pushing for them to be regulated.

Remember the cab companies going after UberCab?

How about the Louisiana Funeral Directors going after the monks for making caskets[1]?

[1]http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100825/11152810773/funera...
No, you can't have a link to the web store.
It renders correctly in my customized firefox, unless many sites on the web nowadays. However, Google, WikiPedia and HackerNews render without problems too.

My settings are: Zoom Text Only, do not allow pages to choose their own fonts, Comic Sans MS for all fonts, minimum font size 20pt.
Buy cheap UK SPARES & REPLACEMENT PARTS - Stagebeat
Relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2536196
Please, a little consideration. I just finished breakfast, and it was tasty. I'd prefer to keep it down.
The question was not whether unregulated markets spawn "trusted rating services". It's whether society could function with private rating services in lieu of regulation.
It might not seem so at first, but I'm a hardcore libertarian which believes that the way towards greater freedom and transparency is through peaceful persuasion and respect for the law.
All of this seems to assume that 50/50 ownership is 50/50 power. That really doesn't have to be the case (and usually shouldn't).

I think it was Joel Spolsky who explained that point of view best some time ago.

Beyond his explanations, though, the non-tech world has lots of "silent partners," people who may own half or more of the company but give up the actual power of running it. Ideally, you give up some ego, power, and responsibility without giving up freedom and financials.
It doesn't impose a large fee. It requires a bond. The details matter.
A web company is the most independent company that exists. They are even, in some cases, outside of control of the government (although this is starting to change). And it isn't mind-bendingly hard; a couple of the biggest companies in technology (Google and Facebook) were started by college students in their dorm rooms / garages.
Unfortunately, you lose autocompletion (other than history autocompletion) when you use something other than the built-in Google search.
When something is left up to interpretation, no matter how obvious, many will simply not get it.
To be fair, the poster didn't ask what features it had that made it unique, he asked if it had "anything" going for it that made it unique.
Build a graphics demo? I say take it a step further and build an actual game. It doesn't have to be original or fun, it just has to work correctly. The idea is to learn the technical aspect of games. Most companies that will hire you already know how the rules of the game are going to go. You just have to implement them.

And if you do end up with an original game, or at a company that lets you help decide the rules, more's the better.
20pt Comic Sans? You are beyond saving.
Starwood Hotels Adds Foursquare to Loyalty Program
"Comic Sans MS for all fonts"

... I don't know what to say. At 20pt, too?
That was also my first thought. The app would be much more informative by providing the results instant.
Already posted:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2536186
Earthquake rumor shivers Rome
7 low cost ways to grow your app's user base
A primer for learning how to acquire users when launching your mobile app.
> You track me to sell my data and to profit from the ads. I gain nothing

Sure you do; you get to use Gmail and Facebook for free because they generate enough money from ads not to have to charge.

I can understand that there people like yourself that don't want to be tracked, that's cool, but if the majority of people don't care, should the system at least be opt-out? Or left up to the user to use the do-not-track features of browsers?

I'm not saying tracking must be forced on everyone, but this piece of legislation seems like a massive hammer to hit a very tiny nail.
People defend it due to a failure of this:

http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

People seek validation for their purchasing decisions and identify themselves by what brand of cell phone they carry around.
I wouldn't start a company with someone where the relationship wasn't based on fairness. If I don't trust my potential co-founders enough to share the company equally, they shouldn't be my co-founders.

EDIT: s/your/my/, s/you/I/ ... my personal position may not be best for you.
Bah, thank you. Deleting.