skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Differences in VC Financing of U.S., UK, German and French IT Start-ups
An interesting study on the "Differences in Venture Capital Financing of U.S., UK, German and French Information Technology Start-ups" was just released:
http://bit.ly/gDPwz9

Abstract:

Independent Venture Capital (IVC) has been paramount in the emergence of the information technology industry in both the United States and Europe. There are relatively few large global information technology companies in Europe. A widening gap is observable in the success rate of IVC backed start-ups between the U.S. and Europe in the information technology industry. This difference could be attributable to the differences in the venture capital financing of start-ups in the U.S., UK, Germany and France.

This book deals with "Differences in Venture Capital Financing of U.S., UK, German and French Information Technology Start-ups". The comparative analysis is conducted on a microeconomic level (managerial venture capital research), i.e. on the venture capital firm level. The differences are analyzed for the whole venture capital investment cycle: contact phase, initial screening phase, due diligence phase, deal structuring and negotiation phase, management phase — value adding services, and exit phase. The research framework model examines the following differences in the venture capital investment cycle: average size of investment in the seed stage, average size of investment in the start-up stage, aver-age size of investment in the growth stage, percentage of start-ups in pre-revenue phase at time of investment, percentage of start-ups not managed by founders but experienced managers, percentage of investment in start-ups with me-too products, percentage of mar-ket analysis due diligence done informal, typical liquidation preference multiple, percent-age syndicated exits that are outperformers, number of tranches per investment round, number of board seats per partner and the cash multiple X that defines an outperformer. The empirical research work is based on an extensive scientific online questionnaire with VCs in the U.S., UK, Germany and France. Before the online questionnaire was drafted, a preliminary face-to-face expert interview was conducted with 24 VCs in Silicon Valley, London, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin and Munich. The primary data collected in the questionnaire served as basis for quantitative parametric and non-parametric statistical analysis. T

The book is bespokenly written for decision makers in the venture capital industry in the U.S, UK, Germany and France; all entrepreneurs and professionals who want to under-stand the economics and mechanics of venture capital term sheet clauses; venture capital industry professionals; VC associations.

http://bit.ly/gDPwz9
Once, a PC scared the shit out of me because the motherboard started talking at bootup (was a feature of Asus motherboards). But at least it was recognisable as an error message, just having music play randomly would be even more weird.
I've been a subscriber for a few years and I'm mixed based on my personal learning style. I learn better by reading and find it tough to find time to sit through the screencasts (any screencast where the visual is not integral to the topic). I always learn something from Peepcode screencasts, but think that I could have read it in half the time.

I would rate the quality of the screencasts as high. If you learn well from "lecture", I would not hesitate to recommend their offerings.
Speed up your reload
Very well put.

Doing what you love is necessary to me and I use two values to gauge if something worth doing is something worth loving to do.

1. I grow personally from doing it
2. I am contributing to others while I do it

These two values are at odds with each other but that is necessary. Only with balancing them can I feel life long success and happiness you describe.
It's too bad they couldn't come forward with their prior-art portfolio. That may have squelched the Google-Like deal, giving the troll its due.

But part of me is thinking: If Google was looking for an acquistion in this space, how could they miss the Modista guys? Their stage of development kept them under the radar? Or perhaps there is more to the story than we are reading here?
The Future of SiLo's Language Library: My Interview with Ase Deliri
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What about flickr?
Making Our World More Respectful
تحميل مسلسل الارض الطيبة الجزء الثالث الحلقة 17 
تحميل مسلسل الارض الطيبة الجزء الثالث الحلقة 17
оригинални парфюми
Еуфориа.бг може да ви предложи оригинални маркови парфюми, който ще ви накарат да се понесе в еуфорията на уханията и удоволствието от всеки аромат. Онлайн се предлага вече всичко влючително парфюми и козметика на изгона и достъпна цена
Those filters would be very easy to add once the hard (image) technology was worked out. Sadly, the company never got to that stage.
This is an unavoidable part of compilation; there's no way a compiler could write code as well as a human. It applies to all compilers; a human programmer writing assembly language would be hard-pressed to understand the output of a C compiler.
well, nice article, it's funny to see this listed as a discovery, I'm african and have seen this insect before and probably many others in my country, and I am also sure many local folks know about this insects, too bad, they don't know it's a great discovery for science.
Google faces $50 million lawsuit over Android location tracking
Well, if they were circumspect, it would be harder to know what's really going on. I'm fine with blatant. :P

I think the article proves that the above-board way (warrant for intrusion, warrant for monitoring, exploiting criminals' stupidity rather than demanding we all be made less secure) works -- demands for back doors and such are just a power grab, one that would come at a very high price.
Secure password storage – a myth?
Make a Twitter icon in photoshop
How do I check this on my laptop?
I think it's quite telling that in all of that text there are actually no real examples as to how a program will actually look like.

Call me old if you like, but I've seen countless of similar "manifestos" covering everything from flight simulators to, yes, programming languages. Only on very rare occasions do they result in something concrete.
Well, except for this part of the post:

Burt had a questionnaire to which my answers were :

-I was given permission to use the camera by Carl, a superior.
-The tape I used was mine.
-I do not have possession of the footage I shot anymore and it does not exist in any other form.

Anyway, i'm not looking for foul play, just curious what it is he posted.
Check your process list for 'rcpnetp.exe'. Just checked my six month old Toshiba Satellite Pro C650, happily it was clean.
I used to use news.ycombinator.com/best , but I now follow HN using Jeff Miller's RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/newsyc100

Pros: I never miss anything. Google Reader keeps track of what I already read.

Cons: It's hard to keep up with all the articles!

Jeff created RSS and Twitter feeds for 20+, 50+, 100+, and 150+ karma submissions.

More info: http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overlo... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547998
It snot changing to a more restrictive set just a more defined set of TOS terms rather than being ignorant of things in the USA such as DCMA, etc.
I dont think he should have got fired, whats so secret about bookscanning?? Google feels it now has too much power and can walk over anyone.
8 Tips To Boost Your Energy Level
Sigh. The arms race with bike locks can never really be won.

If we really want to end bike theft, we need a legal approach. A serial number engraved into frames and all major bike parts. An easy to use web site to check provenance of parts by serial number. Hefty (10yrs+) jail time for anyone possessing, selling, modifying or trying to cross a border with stolen parts. Hell, cryptographically signed RFID tags required for all new bike frames. Hefty penalties for even riding a non conforming frame. That would get the message across real quick.

Basically, get serious about bike theft the way we are about car theft and the crime will be practically eradicated.
The misinterpretation of minimum viable product
The Startup Kids
Are you barefoot?
Please don't delete comments. It fucks up reading the thread. Thanks.
It's not that bad if you don't mind that he's storytelling rather than just reporting news and facts. Usually it drives me crazy when web writers do this, but in this case it wasn't too bad, although I still didn't bother to read the whole thing.

A good news article, especially on the web, should answer as many big questions as possible within the first couple of paragraphs. Typically readers don't appreciate being kept in the dark. If your heading is "man discovers new life-form" we should have a description of it within 30 seconds of reading. The name of the new order shouldn't be in the 8th paragraph.
Of course it costs more - more busses, drivers, meals.

Of course its a 2nd class of worker - if they were Engineers working on a super-secret project, they'd have catered meals, separate busses, social arrangements of their own. Because Engineers are special and desirable and highly paid.
I think you are misinterpreting the story. They have a separate building where low level data entry people work. The segregation is by work function, not race.
Website is here:
http://thestartupkids.com/
"Converting programming languages really doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever"
Compilers are useful.
This probably won't reach production quality but that doesn't mean it couldn't with the right effort, see hip-hop or one of those x-> javascript compilers.
The way car theft has been eradicated?
Is Ganodarma Lucidum Kings of Herbs? ~ Reishi Life
A lot of the discussion here is around what I would like the call the US/EU (not restricted to the EU but that is what I am more familiar with) divide in work ethics and what is expected from you.

In the US (apparently from comments) they can terminate your contract for (almost) any reason.
In the EU (and apparently Australia) they have to build a stronger case for firing you.

Differences are also clear regarding overtime: usually paid in the EU and expected and unpaid in the US.

There is a more than we realise that separates us (EU) from the US and if this happened in the EU I (hope) people would be in support of Andrew. I don't know enough about the US to say whether or not this is acceptable behaviour from Google.

I would appreciate if you mention where you live/are from in your comments to enhance perspective to the discussion.
Google also uses ICE-UDP and STUN, although the implementation was done before ICE-UDP was standardized, so it doesn't quite follow the standard yet.

Also, Google speaks many audio codecs, including speex. ISAC (the codec from GIPS) is just the default.
> who bothers to steal books these days when you can go to Stack Overflow or a web forum or, yes, even Google, type a question, and get an answer?

He's definitely wrong about this point. A book proposes answers to questions you didn't even know you had. A book can save you the trouble and time of searching for a thousand different queries. There is definitely value in having the information logically organized, all in one place, with the same tone, and the same assumptions about the reader's level.

Q&A sites are complimentary to books, not a replacement.
Software Patents as Innovation Tax, Rather Than Catalyst for Innovation
How to Write Thousands of Words Every Single Week
Never lose focus
With regard to the current, warrant-backed intrusion method: the default configurations of most Linux distros are far more secure than the default configuration of any version of Windows. Keep up with your browser updates, don't run anything you don't trust, and you should be fine.

With regard to the possibility of back doors in future software...

Hackers, as a culture, are pretty anti-Big-Brother -- I can't imagine any of us voluntarily distributing back-doored packages. If we distributed compromised code, one of our peers would catch it before too long in the case of any but the most obscure packages. The thing is... when might it not be voluntary?

As far as American courts are concerned, source code is speech, compiled binaries are not. So, the government could conceivably force distributors of binary software to comply with a back-door policy, but they could not restrict the distribution of uncompromised source code. (This is why source-based distros can distribute things like DVD-decrypting software, while binary distros leave you to acquire it elsewhere: the distribution of source code is unrestricted.)

The only binaries on my laptop I haven't compiled myself are my video driver (I'm giving you dirty looks, NVIDIA) and the blob for my wifi driver (I'm giving you dirty looks, FCC). I'd like to get rid of both of them -- I'd absolutely pay more for a decent video chipset that didn't require closed-source anything. The wifi blob is the fault of the FCC -- no one in the US can legally distribute wireless hardware that could have its frequency usage changed by the owner. Many wifi cards get reverse engineered at some point, making the binary blob unnecessary, but manufacturers are legally prohibited from aiding in the process of creating completely open-source drivers.

Compromised source code coming from a tool's creator is both unlikely, and hard to pull off for long. Compromised binaries are more likely, but there are plenty of distros not based in the US which would have more leverage in resisting such demands (of course we don't know what their own countries are requiring of them). Getting source code with an "added" back-door (i.e. from a third party rather than the code's maintainers) is easy to avoid if you only use signed code -- make sure to watch for packages that stupidly download code for their dependencies during build without checking signatures instead of using what's already on your system.

As for those drivers with binary blobs -- until consumers become more resistant to using them, they aren't going anywhere.
The T135 is a pretty old laptop which explains why it was present after vendors stopped using it - I bought one around January or February last year, it doesn't seem to have the rootkit but it's a Latin American model which might have been exempt.
Java/C# are different in that they compile to a bytecode which is like vm assembly its also not meant as a high level programming language(note that this isn't always compiled to assembly at the end as it can be interpreted, standard java for instance does both jit and interprets for best results).
Google Talk on Android uses the same XMPP-based signaling as all the other Google Talk products (gmail, the win32 app, etc).
Agreed. Most web sites are summaries, indexes, databases. Blogs. Not in-depth treatments of a subject. In fact, the very idea that the watered-down free pablum provided on the web is a substitute for knowledge is frightening. Similar to the notion that sound bytes are a suitable replacement for indepth reporting, which we used to hear criticised but now seems to be accepted.
Honestly, yes I am ;)

My point was that there is obviously a difference between guys and gals, and those who are into their fashion vs. those who are not...
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I believe he's advocating not sabotaging oneself while examining issues of class, race, and labour.

The author's ability to investigate this from the inside is now gone, because he got fired.
great comment :)

((and shows how western euro/american/.. science in not end all, know all thing))
i understand the frustration, but how else would a laptop tracking software work if not by connecting to the web and listening for commands, etc?
It seems that this app is created by: http://www.absolute.com/en-GB/
And they don't get free ice cream sandwiches when the ice cream truck pulls up. Is that racism or is it economics?

Scanning books is a manual process that is much like sewing or factory work in the repetitiveness. (Maybe less skilled than sewing).

The "racism" of the situation happened years before anyone walked onto the Google campus. The socio-economic opportunities of things like safety, education, nutrition, books, time, parental involvement all feeds in to the situation where the workers in building 3.14 get one level of education and the engineers get another.

If it were true that they were segregating "people of color" then it absolutely would be outrageous. However, it is absolutely NOT true that they are segregating for reasons of color.

It's a red-herring argument.

What if the 4 to 2:30 schedule is to control traffic flow. Setting a non trivial number of workers to arrive and leave at a certain time means that the twice daily 'mega traffic jam' arriving and leaving doesn't happen.

Which puts everyone at their desks longer. Which saves money.

What if the reason that yellow badged workers aren't allowed to freely wander the rest of the google campus is down to security? Would you want low paid wage workers wandering around amongst your industrial secrets?
That is correct. We are working hard on it.

By the way, libjingle, the Open Source library for writing jingle applications, already mostly speaks XEP-166 and XEP-167. We're still working on XEP-176, though. http://code.google.com/p/libjingle
"if you are targeting a specific platform you really should (completely imho) use the tools meant for it. Anything else will easily lead to issues that may not be debug-able if you aren't already familiar with your target."

By that logic, since my processor doesn't natively run Ruby, I should be coding in machine language.

I can't speak for CoffeeScript yet, but the front-end developer who sits near me is using SCSS to generate CSS for our web pages, and he is able to do things that wouldn't be practical with plain CSS. For example, change a base color variable from blue to green, and have all the other colors on the page adjust to use complementary colors.

If you trust Ruby to produce reliable C code and C to produce reliable assembly code, etc, isn't it possible that Coffeescript could produce reliable Javascript? Mightn't it give you advantages like Ruby gives you over plain C? I think this is less a matter of "compiling X to Y is good/bad" than "do I trust this particular conversion to be done correctly?"

As far as compiling Ruby to PHP - well, I can't see any use for that at the moment, but I'm sure someone will come up with one. :)
Home Page Harvey CP - Harvey CP
Show HN: My first site made purely to sell stuff. Would love feedback.
OT: I usually dislike if something pops up when I hover over a word. The implementation on this site is different though. Select a word and hover "learn more" for a while, or click it. I still don't know how I feel about that but the ease of use to get to a Wikipedia article, images or videos is nice.
Actually, the standard deviated from the original implementation, as Google Talk pre-dated the standard. Either way, we're working on it.

Also, the mobile version uses the same protocol as all of the other products (such as gmail). You can take our Open Source library (http://code.google.com/p/libjingle) and use it to make an app that calls the mobile version, just like you can for the other products.
Yeah, correct. But what if some Absolute's employee turns out to be dishonest? A non-removable process, not detected by most antiviruses, that listens to the commands from the Net... Seems like a botnet to me.
All the process was faulty. Kickstarter is to fund projects but in the case of software the best thing is to show a prototype before being funded.
Answered like a true techy :)

You can't build a filter for "I've worn a top from this store before and it fitted me nicely" or "I know garments from this store wash up nicely" or "I shop from this store because it defines part of my character"

Most shoppers buy into a store because of lots of things, quality, brand-values alignment, friends shop etc etc.

What I'm essentially saying is a lot more goes into buying a product than what it looks like.
This is the first side project I've worked on solely for the purpose of making money. I don't expect to make a lot - rather, I hope to learn about selling. I think the very simple format will allow me to quickly experiment and run a/b tests.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
My suggestion is to start your own accelerator program or join an existing one. Investing in FB is a blind bet. With $150k you could fund 8 promising companies while still having some left over for design and legal work.
Minor point of clarification, as the tone of many comments seems to presume that google fired the author of this blog. This could be, but seems unlikely based on the blog.

The author was not employed by Google, but by a contracting firm hired by Google. The author's actions spooked the owner of the contracting firm, who did not want to risk his relationship and business with Google.

The author even reports his direct phone conversation with the owner of the firm. "He told me the issue was very serious because it could jeopardize Transvideos contract with Google and potentially lead to 60 people losing their jobs."

That is, if Google ended their relationship with Transvideo, then the sixty people Transvideo hired to work the Google contract would lose their jobs.

Google security may or may not have asked the firm to fire the author. Most likely, however, I suspect the firm took the decision on its own as the simplest, cleanest and quickest way to end an issue before the lower level google security staff finished drafting a report that may have risked Transvideo's relationship with Google.

So, as the owner of the firm what would you do? The choices are:

a) support an employee who plans to quit in two months, but before he does wants to use his job to investigate "issues of class, race, and labor". The downside is that Google might decide to work with a different firm, thereby causing you to fire the 60 people you hired to support the contract and perhaps lose your entire business.

b) Terminate the employee to protect your business and the sixty people who work to support it.

Not a pleasant decision, to be sure, but the choice seems obvious even if Google says nothing.
Actually Thai surgeons in general are very good. I recently entrusted my fiancee to one and the medical care she received was outstanding.

The fastest growing tourism segment here is medical tourism. High quality care at a relatively low cost & lots of good food.
"I Know Kung Fu"
advocating a self interested "keep your job, stupid" perspective is very much siding in favor of perpetuating the system
Nobody is going to sue ($5000) before a C&D ($200)
> You missed the part where he kept talking about race and unequal treatment and the ScanOps people of being mostly 'people of color'. He said these things explicitly in his letter that Google Legal reviewed.

That was a huge mistake on his part.

> Google did the absolutely correct thing. They don't want to deal with that shit

From whose perspective? What I mean is that it's possible for them to do something that is "absolutely correct" for their own self-preservation / convenience, but that is not correct from an ethical or societal stand-point.

I'm not saying they're doing anything wrong. It just seems that you're angry that the OP wanted to investigate race / class issues.
The Complete Guide to Not Giving a Fuck
I deleted that comment before I saw you replied. But the gist of it:

-It was a descriptive comment - looking at what probably happened, not judging right/wrong.

-I think saying things like, "So you advocate ignoring issues of class, race and labor?" is bad form. If you think class, race, and labor is important, just say "I think it's an important issue." - insinuating someone else's beliefs leads to miscommunication, especially because people skim.
Post embedded Gists on GoogleSites
A gadget to use on Google Sites to embed github gists.