skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Yes, I did point it out to them. Their response was a polite version of "that's our problem".

But it's not actually just their problem, because you don't get paid if they don't succeed...
I'm sure you've already realized this. :)

> I think if the business doesn't take off, we get our technology back and we keep whatever they've paid us to-date. It doesn't seem like a terribly bad worst-case-scenario.

Good point. Still the opportunity cost of your time to consider (all that time you spent watching them fail, you could be spending building your own business) and your technology's shelf-life.

Also, it might be difficult to build a business around tech that failed somewhere else (even if your acquirer's failure had nothing to do with you or your tech). I don't know the specifics of your situation, but I would imagine good early hires might be wary, potential investors would be skittish, etc.
MULTIVAC aka Wolfram Alpha
Twitter Is Testing An Expandable Timeline
New DOS Tools Overload SSL Servers With Ease
Ask HN: Entrepreneurs, can you answer three simple questions?
We are an early stage startup and we need some data to help us build our product.

If you could spare 1 minute to take a quick three question survey, we would really appreciate it. The survey is geared towards entrepreneurs.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/R3NJP66

I'll share the results later on if anybody is interested.
Excellent links. Very interesting.

The problem I see is precisely the point you raise
" Given that Australian venture funds don't see the opportunity it isn't at all clear why the government would think differently"

Is there a way to help venture funds find the startups that are actually happening here in Australia. Unfortunately not all of us have the opportunity to reach out overseas for funding
> Amazon also said it ended the third quarter with 51,300 employees, up from 31,200 in the same quarter last year.

Amazon creates 20,000 jobs, and Wall Street responds with a 12% drop in stock price.
Yeah. If your country is allergic to the truth, your country is wrong.
Its been proven often enough that the masses will take cheap over quality in (almost) any scenario (unless you're talking about a niche market). Sometimes good enough is just that.
People have spent billions of dollars buying music on iTunes. Its pretty obvious that people will pay for things if its more convenient than pirating it.
Ask HN: Uses for a scalable Google IMAP/contact sync server w/FTS?
We have developed and tested an IMAP/contact sync server for Gmail and Google Apps. It was originally built for a CRM but due to time contraints we had to shutdown that project. We were using it to keep emails and contacts in sync between us and Google/Gmail. Specifically we displayed a list of the user's Google contacts in the CRM and when a particular contact was clicked the full list of emails exchanged with that contact were displayed.

The server is capable of syncing thousands of emails/contacts from any Gmail or Google apps account in seconds and storing them in Redis or Membase with possible future support for other DBs. It supports fast full text search over all contacts and email content. It can also extract message content from emails with attachments without having to download the full message - allowing you to save bandwidth and download email attachments on demand instead of having to download the full message with attachment everytime, the default in IMAP.

Does anyone have use for something like this for any projects they're working on? We were thinking of selling this to other devs working in the email/contacts space or possibly doing something else with it that has less time contraints on us..

It was built in python.

Any suggestions/feedback would be great. Thanks.
Some of those apps look pretty nice. Rather have desktop versions of them, though. I'd rather have some control over the personal information they're trying to collect.
you've got to be joking here.
A mate did it and said that you need to have a winning business plan that shows evidence that you would become self-sufficient almost immediately. That's not to say that it wouldn't work in the case of tech startup, it's just less likely.
> I think a little creativity in the payment model could help this problem a lot.

100% agreed.
Introducing Atlassian OnDemand
the "front line" can change a lot year to year...especially if the company grows...so the front line experience may not be all that relevant .
It doesn't need to though, the key thing with the rental business model is it needs to be easy and convenient enough. It's clear that it's a rental in the name, but people will get pissed off if it's not easy to get the content and outlandishly priced, and just go back to BT.
Explanation of iPhone 4S brochure page CSS animation
This business exists in the B to B world. Be interesting to see what your results yield.
Only one of the example sites seemed to have custom 404s. Unless I'm doing it "wrong", which I'm more than willing to accept may be the case?

yayyyyy!- http://yonenlabs.com/imaginarypage

booo - http://scarfilms.com/imaginarypage (this is just a standard not found error!)

booo - http://www.wryandginger.com/imaginarypage

booo - http://tether.com/imaginarypage

BUT - I like the idea, I like your designs, and I think an obvious, flat and low fee is great!
I've been working towards this release since March. Feel free to ask me anything.
About Canary: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/02/google-chrome-canary-os-x/
Gamers are particularly reluctant to 'upgrade' to new versions of Windows, especially where there are major overhauls to the driver layer or DirextX. Doing so could break comptatibility with their existing library of games, or prevent hardware from working properly. SLI wasn't even supported under Vista for ~4 months after launch, for example.
Are Law Schools and Bar Exams Necessary?
I'm sure lots of people at HP are thinking deeply. I am unconvinced that any of them hold positions on the board.
Funny, just today I was revisiting my decently-widely-used campfire bot:

http://github.com/joshwand/campfire-bot

In the process of gemifying the bot and the plugins separately to make maintenance easier.
The only other successful startup I have spoken to in Australia was Zendesk. The founder I spoke with went 2 years without a salary and the startup was self-funded.
Thanks, that sounds basically the same as the credit reporting agencies here in the US (except maybe the thing you're talking about is government-run?)
I am interested. Please get in touch or let me know how to get in touch with you.
Thx
B
As someone who has received >$5m offer that fell through, here's what I learned:

1) until the final documents are signed, don't consider any offer to be a done deal. There are many reasons for it to not happen at this stage.

2) Keep the project running as normal, and try not to get too distracted by this. You have something of value, don't jeopardize that by taking your eye off the ball.

3) As others have mentioned, get a lawyer who is experienced with these types of deals ASAP -- before discussing any more terms. Without help, you may be leaving a lot on the table, or conversely souring the deal.
I'm a camera newbie, but I see:

1. Shallow depth of field (close objects in focus, far objects out of focus). Doesn't necessarily mean poor quality, but webcams have wide DOF, so you might associate shallow DOF with good quality

2. JPEG compression- I see more compression artifacts in the Nexus video. This isn't related to camera quality at all.

3. Sensor quality looks better to me. Details in the dark rear-view mirrow, more detail in the sand.
That's the point, they did a "limited deployment" and discovered that everything didn't work. Specifically, the VPN didn't work.

Making the VPN work would require spending millions of dollars in hardware, as well as the deployment of said new hardware in thousands of offices across the globe.

That's one option...The other option is to not upgrade to Windows Vista.

I don't understand what you mean by "mindset". The "mindset" of IT is to provide operational support. That means that they don't decide to upend the network infrastructure of the company willy-nilly for no discernible positive benefit.
This is pretty sweet - nice work! I love slinging the bird into the graph! Also love the little note about needing to seek professional help if only a few month's worth of data shows up. Way to give it personality!
There are a few different organisations trying to make things happen now. Check out http://www.pollenizer.com/funding-options-available-for-star...
It wouldn't be Wikileaks causing the riot, it'd be the people - disgusted with what they find out is being done in their names.

Wikileaks is doing what the press should have done years ago. What we need to know enough to look for in the future even if nobody spells it out for us.
Laser Cutting, Jasa Bordir, dan Embroidery Indonesia
Torrents. And I bet it would be legal because Valve would do something like releasing the games for free just before they tanked. I'm not so sure about some of the other labels that exist on Steam, though.
Really cool dudettes! Great work!
If you rent, your landlord pays property tax on your flat. Every non-homeless person pays property tax.
Amazon profits dive after heavy Kindle investment
The same purpose this forum serves: talking shop.
Maybe you could use an excel like table as well if the textarea makes a lot trouble. (I like it though..) Nice job!
Why ask for advice and then pick apart just about everything people are telling you? Seems like you've already made up your mind to me.
He did post editing on it to give it that colour
Great points.
Another thing to think about: unsure about the exact repayment circumstances. But financially, the current offer has some similarities to venture debt, and that may be a useful way to think about what you're getting into.

Key consideration about venture debt: the lender (you) is basically making a bet about financing risk. If the venture (your acquirer) gets a subsequent round of VC money, they will pay you back. If they do not get another round, they will not.

Venture lenders typically don't look at their borrowers' business fundamentals too much, but they are very careful about who else is investing with them and how many rounds the venture has raised. Basically, if a new venture is (1) raising their first round and (2) backed by a big-name VC firm (Kleiner Perkins, Bessemer, etc.), the venture will almost always get another round of funding and the loan is safe. Other investors are always willing to give a KPCB-backed venture another shot. If (1) or (2) is not true, the loan is much riskier.
NY Fed's $40 Billion Iraqi Money Trail - Yahoo Finance
I'm one of the devs behind this. We'd love your feedback on this. Anything else you're dying to know about your twitter stream?

regards,
Jeff
My understanding is Apple doesn't make all that much money off the iTunes Store using a similar model. Does it really work for digital media? (besides console games)
In Sweden.
"US persons" is a term of art. Who do you work for?
Asking for advice is not an assurance that I'll accept it uncritically.

If you can't or won't back-up what you are saying then you should probably refrain from giving it in the first place.

Indeed, that is my general view on advice. Advice that can't survive a bit of "picking apart" isn't worth much.
"By the time Jobs did have surgery, nine months after being diagnosed, the pancreatic cancer had spread through his tissues and was largely unstoppable. He died soon after."

6 - 7 years is hardly "soon".
There's an obvious problem with thermostats... your heating bill. Many people have financial trouble caused by heating costs -- Nest's challenge will be to 1) create a product that actually reduces heating costs, 2) convince people they've done that, and 3) create an easy adoption plan (dead simple installation, and financing of the cost, or making a compelling investment case)
A very beautiful and probably very correct interpretation of Jobs' management approach was given by 'alexqgb' in a not so old thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078669

This difference, I suppose, is between someone bending your will to theirs, reducing you terribly in the process, and someone who sees you failing to deliver everything you're capable of, and pushing you (hard) to do what he thinks what you can.

The former doesn't care about who you are. The latter cares deeply, and expresses in by placing genuine faith in you. Everything being said by the people who worked with him indicates that they feel humbled and honored by the experience. It's hard to get upset with someone's approach when you know in your bones that it got you to the top of your game.

What people feel in response to that is love.

"He was dubbed a megalomaniac, but Steve Jobs often gambled on young, largely inexperienced talent to take Apple forward; Jony Ive and his team prove that such faith was spot on."

I say probably very correct owing to the Al Gore's remembrance speech about the love and genuineness in respect that Steve held for others in the 'Celebrating Steve' event.
I'm skeptical about Siri. My wife got an iPhone 4S on opening weekend, and we both did the requisite amount of playing with the new feature, and it was amusing, but after the first couple of days she pretty much abandoned it.

There are some reliability problems, but I think the main problem is that Siri still lives firmly in the AI uncanny valley. Which is exacerbated by the way that Apple presents Siri, i.e. as AI.

With a clearly defined set of commands, you can be confident about what's going to work and what isn't. And if you try something that isn't a command, you relegate the failure to "oh, that's not a command." But with Siri, because it's presented as an anthropomorphized, intelligent agent, it makes the failure feel a lot more brittle and frustrating.

For example, "What's my next appointment?" works, but "When's my dentist appointment?" doesn't. Why not? Well, I know why not, and you probably know. It's because it's really, really, really not AI, and unless we make some kind of breakthrough on strong AI, it's not going to be for a long time. But my wife doesn't know that. All she knows is that Siri is cool when it works, but is actually pretty stupid a lot of the time. Which means she's not reliable, which is important because Siri is most useful when it must be most reliable, like when you're in a rush.

Apple will certainly continue to add commands and make Siri smarter and smarter, but this will necessarily be incremental, and that failure will always feel brittle to lay users.

[edit: btw, John Siracusa talks a bit about this on the most recent Hypercritical: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/39-quasimodo-backpack]
What's going to stop Google from creating an "open" alternative to Siri? Siri is just a technology, not a business model. Google is really good at recreating competitor technologies around their own ad-driven model.

I'm not trying to be a contrarian, either. I use an Android phone, but only because the iPhone isn't offered on my carrier of choice. I love Apple. But I don't see how Siri ("Finally") gives them occasion to undermine Google.
I use the Readability bookmarklet when I encounter this.
Indeed. Finances ended my college career after my first year and never getting that degree hurt quite a bit. Note: avoid the D.C. metro area and others where people tend to value credentials over ability.
Insulin pumps may be the latest hacking risk
I had heard about mr Myhrvold exploits but I had no idea they were so enthusiastic about hating him or that his position was such a threat to the innovators community. I thought his more dangeorus idea was a $600 cookbook.
Thanks a lot for all the replies, I will email personally anyone who posts a comment here and shows interest. I don't personally use anything yet, as I am not a coder, I have just developed the idea :-)
I've worked with third-party recruiters for many jobs I had while contracting. The pitch you mentioned can work, but only in the high-turnover world of contract consulting for big companies.

Big companies have a specific reason for going with contract employees. It gives them (the company) a legal separation from the person who would otherwise have been an employee. That person can be unceremoniously dumped out onto the street if things aren't working out, and the company is willing to pay extra for that option.

Startups can't afford to pay a 30% premium on technical help just so it's less risky to fire the bad apples. And anyway they aren't big fat targets for lawyers like big companies are - good luck finding a lawyer to take your case on contingency when you're suing a company that's having trouble making payroll.
On one billion-dollar run, Basel used garbage trucks to throw the insurgents off
the trail. "I hired garbage trucks, and in the back of the garbage truck you had
$1 billion dollars."

He used a different driver every time, used cell phone jammers so nobody could report his position, and rode the whole way with his pistol pointed at the driver. That sounds like a movie. Definitely somebody who knows how to overcome problems.
I can't shake the feeling that the Siri of today is like the app ecosystem of the iPhone 1.

• That Apple has a really solid plan for this feature, and we're only seeing the very beginning of it now — the phase where we are introduced to the interface, before they blow the lid off and open it up to every imaginable use-case.

• That it will be significantly improved before most people ever buy a supporting device, so the handful of customers being burned by the somewhat-lacking version 1 product are vastly outnumbered by the people who get their first taste of the mature, fully-realized vision.
What does WikiLeaks spend its donations on and where do they come from?
What about the feasiblity of using voice commands in a public environent, e.g. at work or on a train? I'm interested in hearing how people deal with that.
Okey dokey. Good luck.
tl;dr, Honest apology, and honest rant around people who litter HN with stupid posts.

I was a bit harsher than I should have been, but I also see quite a bit, and it's encouraging. Sure, if you look around github and SF, you see a lot of libs/class that aren't built for Zend or Symfony, but then they shouldn't be built around a specific framework. Heck, even Zend/Symf attempts to make each component indecent and replaceable.

And while you have big names like Drupal and Wordpress, people constantly prop those up as if somehow they are prime examples of professional level PHP code. It would be like me saying Ruby can't run on busy websites and use Twitter as an example. It's just old news.

And regardless of when you started PHP, it's fairly clear you haven't been as involved with the community over the past few years (or if you have, nothing in your comment gives that impression). Otherwise, you'd know about all the projects that are being launched/have been launched on top of frameworks. Open source projects, community projects using Zend, Symonfy, CI, etc.

The professional PHP community isn't made up of some rag tag group of people who don't know better. It's made up of incredibly smart people who write excellent code. I'm sorry, but nothing in Python or Ruby or any other language makes you a better programmer. They are excellent languages, but I've yet to meet a language that can fix stupid (though, some support it better than others).

I'm sorry if I offended you. But, I enjoy PHP. It's an amazingly flexible language. Yes, it has warts, but it gets frustrating every time the topic comes up on HN, people rag on it like somehow it's the worst thing since sliced bread. It gets tiresome. Worse than that, it gets insulting.

And for what? What's the point? What's the fucking point? I could easily point to Diaspora's initial launch and say "Yeah, awesome! That's what all that money buys you for an awesome open source Ruby project." But I don't. Because it's stupid. Its childish. Its pointless.

So yeah. I get it. PHP is the red headed step child that everyone likes to beat on. And that I like it makes me an immature stupid twit that doesn't know the first thing about programming. My respect for fellow professionals be damned, as they don't have a clue either. And by choosing PHP as my choice for a web language is based on clear brain damage at the hands of too many cold winters up north.

So yeah, this is me venting. And I don't mean to do it all over you. But it gets tiresome that every time there is a post about PHP, it has to consist of people bad mouthing anyone who chooses to use PHP, let alone the topic at hand.

Sorry for going apeshit all over this, and sorry for ragging on you. Your commentary is generally well appreciated. It's just getting tiresome, and I guess a part of me responds to all the comments in one.
Thanks. That's a nice idea. Long term, we're going to format the text area so people can copy any paste any list format from almost any source - word, excel, csv, tab delimited etc.
That's definitely another issue too. My wife has specifically said that she doesn't like to do that, even in semi-private (e.g. work), because she doesn't necessarily want to say stuff about her private schedule out loud, or broadcast her next text message, or even who she's calling.
> What they'll be looking for however is a significant cut % of the deal so that is what you have to think about next

The thing is that I've got a termsheet on the table that doesn't look half bad. What is my RoI on engaging someone like this if they are going to take a significant portion of this deal?
Which is why I prefer the Nexus video. :)
What people don't realize about DRM, is that it's asymmetric warfare, and the corporation is in the role of the guerrilla! If you have a popular product and everyone in the universe wants to play your game, then your few development groups (formed against bureaucratic friction) are going up against the vast resources and nearly frictionless meritocracy of the internet. Don't take the pirates on head-on! Be sneaky. For example, err strongly on the side of false negatives (be forgiving) and greatly separate in time pirate detection from any consequences. Never set up a situation where one crack gives the pirate the keys to the kingdom. That's like facing a huge army in a set-piece battle with your guerrillas. Only depend on a given detection scheme for a short while.
A good percentage of the contact I get from recruiters is for Django jobs, for which I have zero experience to offer. "Hey I noticed you have a lot of Django experience, I have a great role for you!"...yeah, actually not, I have never even installed Django, but I do have a lot of Python experience.

I guess this is slightly better than what you're seeing since they're at least in the ballpark, but still horribly annoying. It just gets marked as spam for me.
Germans Confused Over Presidential Contender’s Nein-Nein-Nein Plan
In all fairness, they did miss on revenue as well (albeit not by much). Given how highly valued Amazon is (something like 5x Walmart on a price/revs basis), exceeding estimates is expected. That's not to say they aren't an amazing company, but their valuation is extremely high.
> But it should be noted that Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken. So it's not like they don't do DRM...

I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean that there's been no Steam game that has not been pirated before it was released, I know for a fact the recent game "Orcs Must Die" was pirated. I was impressed playing it at a friends place, tried to buy it on Steam when I got back home but it hadn't been released yet.
So much awesome. This looks like an absolutely great example of why node.js rocks.
October 21st, 2011 - NFL Probes Steroid Abuse by League’s Referees
This piece gives a run down of all the analysts claims, with some calculating a $50 profit instead but as you can imagine none of it is substantiated.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20114722-93/amazon-kindle-f...
Today's high end smartphones are more powerful than the last machine on which I ran XP. Vista ran like a bloated pig, but Win 7 seems to be the sweet spot, much like XP was in its time.