skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With everything you've posted (including the comments) it sounds like the company is trying to make you and your partners believe they wont be able to pay the $2M within 12 months in order to get you to agree to the deal. You're under the impression that you'll make a cool $6M and that's what their betting on. In all honesty I think they have the money all ready. Probably more too. You mentioned they where on the verge of making a deal with another company right? Who's to say the other company didn't demand $4M+ up front and the whole reason they're bailing is because they can get it from you for $2M?

I know it's depressing to hear but you really need to think about it and do some financial research on the company. Get legal advice. Don't be forced into signing anything just because the company is "short on time". Remember they want YOUR product. If they want it bad enough they'll stick around for a few weeks. Hell they may even offer more money.

Best of luck!
Google had something like a Chrome Extensions Center before this but then added apps that you can pay for and started calling it a store. Apple's Appstore also calls itself a store, yet many of the downloads are free so calling it that is not misleading, at least in a new way. I imagine it is called a 'web store' since other stores tend to be either mobile (Apple, Android, ...) or desktop (Mac App Store, new Windows 8 Store coming next year) and it promotes the idea of a webbrowser being an operating system (albeit it is redundant).
Man Created 130 Fake Facebook Pages To Torture His Ex
Yes. I started reading the biography. I am about 1/5th through. The author meticulously tried to depict true facts, and Jobs' true personality, often directly quoting 3-4 persons involved in some of the "incidents". In the preface, it is also revealed that both Jobs and his wife asked the author to not attempt to sugar-coat reality. So I would say it is pretty well done.
Or, if you don't want to pay for a phone number and text messages: https://github.com/tysontate/siri_says
they can't buy you with money they don't have. What have they got? Technology or just vc money?
Similar to something I have: https://github.com/charliesome/here

You just run it like `here` and optionally pass a port (uses 8080 by default) or directory (uses current directory by default)

It's written in C and has support for modules. I was planning to write a PHP module for it, but that idea never got off the ground.
Nothing stops Google from creating an alternative, but that won't be available on iOS, which for now is a source of Google searches.
SFMTA Allows Taxis to Block Bike Lanes
there's a lot of value. A chunk of text is in many ways much easier to deal with then a bunch of fields in a form.

Changing the order of items is trivial, you can copy and paste stuff, it's easy to email the whole thing to someone for review (say, before publishing)... That's for the typical user. For geeks there's more: it's easy to keep archives of old versions, easy to see what's changed, trivial to backup... text IS powerful.
Click: http://www.rentmethod.com
Congrats guys. We look forward to more deeply integrating BugCam (getbugcam.com) with JIRA and your other OnDemand services.
I just asked a similar question and got some good responses:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3138574

Sounds like paypal might be viable.
Why African Mango Plus Is The Best Natural Supplement For Energy
Adidas adiZero Crazy Light
As you may already know, you should be able to hold the 4S up to your ear, so at least it looks like you’re talking to another human, and Siri won't speak aloud. (I have not actually used a 4S, so my apologies if I'm mistaken.)
[Show HN] Pluss.es - Your Google+ Profile as a blog.
Apple doesn't use a similar model, they use the exact opposite model. They sell content at minimal profit to enhance the ecosystem for their devices, which they make a very tidy profit on.
Sale Nike Air ForNike Air Force 1 Low Michael Lau White Black shoe
You haven't addressed his issue, at all.

The problem with used PC sales is that, particularly when it comes to multiplayer games, there is no way to guarantee that the seller isn't going to hang on to the CD key and keep using it.

I've long since moved onto Steam, but I remember very distinctly that before digital distribution, stores outright refused to take used PC games that are primarily multiplayer, and made no guarantees about multiplayer CD key validity for the rest. It's a huge gaping hole in the used market.

Now look at that page you linked to - of the ten games on that page, only one has a multiplayer component, and even then it was far from what the game was known for. Second-hand multiplayer PC games simply aren't resellable.
Because your company might have a JVM-only ecosystem but you want to write and deploy Ruby within that ecosystem. JRuby is a great way to bring Ruby into such enterprises.

Not only that, but JRuby tends to be faster than the de facto official Ruby implementation under most high concurrency or long running process conditions.
Apple launches new hardware with new software features. ALWAYS. Siri is the, "What if I could just talk to my device, and it would be able to disambiguate and give me exactly what information I wanted." Okay, Siri explained.

Just like FaceTime and Garageband and iMovie before it, Siri will help Apple to sell more devices.

And I didn't even need to write dozens of paragraphs to explain that.
I like the visualization, love the unexpected little game. Very entertaining. Best of luck!
Chrome has a wee bug that is incredibly annoying once you notice it, and it's still not fixed in V15. To reproduce, go to any web page with a confirm dialog:

1. Think of a secret number between one and ten (or higher if you are a patient person!)

2. Trigger the dialog.

3. Count up to your secret number.

4. Click OK on the dialog.

5. Count up until the page disappears.

6. And that's your secret number!

Basically Chrome freezes after a confirm dialog for the same amount of time that you take to click the OK button. Most people assume it is just the following page is taking a while to load. I'd be interested in how widespread it is - it's affected every instance of Chrome I've come across, on Windows and Linux.

Oh, and please star the issue here if it affect you. http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=98275
At my old job, I was initially running xp on a thinkpad with 2GB of ram and I never had any issues with performance. I was doing standard web development work and used a relatively lightweight editor.

I switched over to win7 on the same laptop and they gave me 4GB or ram. Using the same software, the system lagged so much I had to go back and upgrade to 6GB of ram just to get the PC running at the xp-level of performance.
Interesting. To summarize, it looks like the $50 loss comes from an analyst comparing it to the iPad, whereas the $50 profit claim comes from a firm comparing it to the more-similar BlackBerry Playbook. The research firm that did a tear-down estimated it at about a $10 loss.

In other words, no-one really knows, but it looks like they're probably closer to breaking even than chugger claims. Chugger is taking the worst-case estimate here, and also the one that seems the most unsubstantiated.

Thanks for the link.
MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing
Only time will tell if the gamble pays off. Like when Amazon started spending heaps of money building warehouses and people thought they were crazy. It paid off in the end. Efficient shipping attracted customers.
1. The only shots with a shallow DOF are the macro shots, this is standard for any point and shoot or modern phone camera.

2. Agreed. But it seems like a lot more post-processing was done on the 4S video, which may have reduced the compression artifacts.

3. That scene looks like it was shot on an overcast day. Even with my Epic 4G it would not be difficult to get that level of shadow detail.
Considering Siri is the commercialization of a lot of public research, it wouldn't be that hard for a company like Google to extend their existing voice actions technology using the exact same body of research. They might even be able to license much of the exact same technology as Apple did when they bought Siri the company.

My complaint with the quotes and blog post is somewhat different. They both seem to claim Siri will revolutionize search. But Siri isn't about search at all, it's about taking spoken words and turning them into an appropriate text based search query. It still relies on databases and search engines to do the actual searching. At most, it can add a bit of extra context to the query that you might not be able to infer from the text alone. It also represents a unified interface to several domain specific databases. If anything, Siri is a complementing interface to existing search technologies. Buying a bunch of databases won't let Apple solve the problem of search.
Why is rmc downvoted for having an opinion? Maybe that's just how he saw it.
I had an annoying run in with them. It happened because I didn't know Suntrust didn't take out charges in the order they occurred. They take out the largest charge first, and each charge as they decrease in value.

One day I had had a few small charges, and realizing it was a week intl payday, I figured I'd run to the grocery store and make a large precise of groceries, to ensure I had food taken care of, expecting to make s single overdraft.

Suntrust had other plans. They took out the large grocery bill first, meaning a quick lunch at Taco Bell cost over $40, shipping a small box cost over $50, and a Slim Jim and cream soda cost almost $40. In addition to the overdraft on the groceries.

It's a very easy trap to fall into if you're living check to check and make even the slightest mistake.
I personally would love to see a service like you are talking about.

I recently did an ask hn in search of a payment service and someone else posted a similar question today. Seems like there is some need for that sort of thing.
Ugh, I'm trying to keep this anonymous-ish.

May I ask why you'd like to know?
(I sold my company a year ago for $0.5M with me at 67% owner in a similar structure as you are describing, and another company six months ago for low six figures.)

Do it as a "stock" sale, rather than "asset" sale. You get double taxed as an asset sale: first as corporate income, then as dividends which are taxed at zero-basis (unless you were very smart about how you paid into the company), meaning the whole thing will be taxed twice and at bad rates rather than capital gains, which are modest. This is regardless of whether you lived in ramen for the last few years building it, which is probably as you described not having yet formed a company. The buyers will probably want to do it as an asset sale, because this reduces liability; they are buying only the assets, not the entire company. If you have customers, a stock sale has them purchasing the liabilities of those customers. And, they can depreciate the assets, not stock. But, you can state that you should get a higher price under an asset sale, or at least have it in your pocket when you ask them to give something up.

Make sure you have a good lawyer. I know a great one in Seattle, contact me privately if you want his information. You need to make sure you have good contracts.

Remember, the buyer will be less motivated in a year. Excitement and possibility have a bad half life. What leverage do you have if they decide to pay late, or tell you they cannot pay you the next year? This situation is happening to me with the first of my deal. The structure of my buyout was a three year deal, with a new company formed, with one of the buyers putting in a large cash payment up front to purchase 40% of the new company, and then the other buyer buying the rest over three years. He has been perpetually late, and I am unclear if taking him to court makes sense, or waiting it out as the payments trickle in. Make sure you have clauses which indicate what happens on late payments. It sounds like this structure is there basically, not sure if you are unhappy were they to pay you $2M early. Sounds like a fine deal to me.

I would recommend getting to know your buyers and their history. In the second startup I sold they were very motivated to pay me because they did not want to scuttle a round of investments. If you have good contracts and they start waffling on payments and you know they are trying to keep their nose clean at that moment that can be an additional motivator to following through on paying you.

Always a great idea to have a second buyer. Even if you have to make them up. Said a different way, look around and see who else would want what you have, and give them an opportunity to get in on the bidding.

Good luck!
1. Getting funded can generate a great deal of buzz, which can be very beneficial.
2. Having investors means having access to their networks, which is sometimes worth more than money.
3. If you bootstrap, every single dollar you make is yours. Also, every dollar you spend could have been yours to keep.
4. Without having investors freaking out about their 30x returns you might not move as fast as you could.
5. It is nice to have your investors pushing you outside your comfort zone (to give that talk, make that phone call).
This may sound arrogant, but I don't think they could build a clone. Our stuff is pretty sophisticated and non-obvious.
> then do the company-wide deployment over a weekend after you know everything works.

Even if there weren't serious network infrastructure issues involved, I wouldn't dare do an OS rollout like this.

This isn't a new version of some webapp you can just upload to a server and be done with. You're talking about fundamentally altering the operation of thousands of desktops and laptops around the world being put to diverse use by people who are very probably not technically minded.

And it would be impractical at best to upgrade all of that over the network on a weekend. Every piece of hardware would have to be turned on and connected to a high-speed link with appropriate netboot infrastructure. That's not going to happen.

QA can't catch everything, so rolling it out all at once means the entire company goes apeshit on IT all at once. Watch the senior IT people walk out the door because they don't have to put up with the abuse and can find a new job. Watch the young and inexperienced IT people have nervous breakdowns and take months to address all the problems, possibly costing the company millions in the process...
Ask HN: How do I download a website for offline viewing?
It seems like the problem is not solved by a trivial wget. Links get broken, files are missing etc. Is there a tool that works perfectly?
Just to nitpick a bit: CPython (analogous to MRI), has a GIL. That's not the case with Jython. PyPy will eventually get rid of it too, but it seems it will sidestep the non-reentrant GC problem using STM.
I would never have thought that MySQL could handle massive databases, but it honestly isn't that bad. You just can't expect it to behave like a normal database.

I had to use mysql to build a 200 million row 200gb database. The trick was using myisam and indexing it as little as possible (just the pk). I used sphinx to handle full text searching. Searching and retrieving records was very fast.
Fear not, a lawyer will review the deal before anything is signed.
This is a massive sticking point for me as an Englishman living in Japan. The huge delay in getting films and, especially, TV over here coupled with the IP address and other restrictions in place by certain providers is a huge encouragement to me to Bittorrent instead. Luckily I now have a UK and US iTunes account that serves me well for most things.

My biggest gripe is with the UK sports companies - a lot of American friends can legally stream NBA, MFL and baseball via a global site that charges for high quality content. The English Premier League and cricket bodies are absolutely blind to this - there is no way for me to legally watch these sports via the web (and cable TV here isn;t possible in my apartment), even though I'd happily pay through the nose to get a fix. Because of this, I'm endlessly looking for ways to catch games via means that they spend huge amounts trying to chase and shut down.

Now that language and communication face such a low barrier, staggered releases and restrictions by market make no sense.
Unlike some of Apple's other features, UI, Apps, and operating software, Siri is not something that will be easy to improve. Siri represents the cumulative efforts of decades of computer science research by numerous public and private entities.

While it's easy to add more voice actions, making advances on the underlying technologies will require additional decades of hard computer science research. Apple, having no R&D division, will not likely even contribute to this.

Unless your main complaint is a lack of canned question types that it can answer, you won't likely see the fast improvements you are expecting in the next few years.
That is why this is your new focus of negotiation. Cause its up to you. And by the way, you can go to the professional with this same question. You're the one with the hot deal. If he wants in, he'll have to give you a compelling reason to bring him in. And perhaps that could be a combination of experience, legal assistance and a reasonably modest commission. You're looking for win/win.
I'm not sure it's a valid comparison.

Apple sold more iPhone4s than all previous iPhones combined. I expect that iPhone4S will sell even more. Releasing Siri as a beta to such a large customer base is not the same as releasing the "somewhat-lacking version 1" iPhone, and then iterating it forward.
My fault for not being a native english speaker. I meant trading as in speculative/electronic/realtime/valueless trading.
This number is meaningless(and probably wrong) if you don't know the extra profits it would generate, and what's at stake here.

Some estimates(read:guesses) think that 50% of kindle users will subscribe to to amazon prime. Prime users are extremely loyal to amazon, do all their online shopping in amazon and use brick and mortar shops much less than before signing with prime.They tend to buy 3x-4x than before, in amazon.

Prime is a very hard service to provide. It requires a big and expensive logistics chain. It's a monopoly level competitive advantage. It can make amazon a monopoly in the range of walmart (maybe).

Also the kindle fire is a great advertising unit. Better than TV - because the ads can be much more targeted, And you can buy with a single click from the ad.

Combine the two, and amazon gets almost total control of the customer.

And given Bezos's brilliance that's probably only the tip of the iceberg.

So what's a little discount on a little gadget to get all of this ?
All the banks do this. They treat overdrafting as a way to make money rather than as a "service" for consumers (which is how they present it), and the way to do that is to ensure they charge as many overdraft fees as possible.
Since the story went dead - you folks in SF might want to read this link http://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/10/25/sfmta-allows-taxis-to-b...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3156628
FTA: There are a few limitations to be aware of:
- Our priority has been getting the main source code mirrors back online,
so for the moment gitweb source browsing and Gerrit Code Review are still
unavailable.
I work with PhDs. I assure you that nobody is immune from imposter syndrome.
How To Watch TV on the Internet
The article he links to is a really fine specimen of inane tech punditry. Why are tech execs downplaying a feature of a competing product? Uh, gee I dunno, because it's a feature of a competing product maybe? Is there really nothing better to write an article about?
Sounds like a good countermeasure.

Though its a problem if they take your phone without asking for your password.
Peter Thiel launches Breakout Labs to fund bold early-stage research
In case you find the graphs as confusing as I did:

In the first graph (predicted results), the dotted line is "internalized" (command line), the solid line is "externalized" (GUI), and the Y axis is "higher is better".

In the second graph (actual results), the solid line is "internalized" (command line), the dotted line is "externalized" (GUI), and the Y axis is "lower is better".

Kinda funny in an article about cognition.
Yes, most banks do this now as a way to take advantage of their customers and generate more revenue. I had it happen once on a road trip -- you know, the type where you stop frequently and purchase $2-$3 of junk food or drinks all the time -- and ended up with hundreds of dollars in overdrafts on what would have actually only been about $20 of overdraft.

Several banks are being sued at the moment in class action suits for this behavior if I recall correctly. It's an unfair tactic that takes advantage of customers.
Well... First of all - bitcoin is not "digital coins" or "digital gold", but p2p distributed ledger in first place.

Once you truly get it, most comments become irrelevant.
You see, when you mention those things (Mediawiki, CakePHP monstrosities, Drupal/WordPress/Joomla), I don't equate that to professional development at all. And no, I've never run across that.

Maybe this is why my view is the way it is. I've never had to deal with the above. And I honestly don't see how a professional could work in that environment (I mean, honestly, how does someone choose to work with Joomla, and then have the gall to complain about it).

The majority of people I deal with (the very large majority) are professionals in their craft. This means they aren't just PHP developers, but when they write PHP, it's professional level code. It's what you'd find being written for any other language.

I find it odd that every time someone rags on PHP, it's generally always involves WordPress, or Drupal, or Joomla, or something akin to that. And when I read that, I understand why someone might feel that way. But then Drupal and WordPress or Joomla aren't fair examples of anything I've written in PHP. In fact, a part of me has the hutzpah to think that if you decided to use them as your tools to do something, it's your own damn fault.

So yeah. Maybe their is a large population I'm not involved with, that I know nothing about. I can't say your examples strike a chord with me. I don't have a hate for developing with Joomla because I never wanted to go there. And what little work I've done with WordPress was painful because of the architecture of WordPress, not PHP.

I'm just tired of very HN post on PHP has to result in retards (not necessarily you are mgkismal) coming out to post childish comments, or how everyone has to pepper their comments with weak shit like "Oh, I'm such a great programmer, and if I had to use PHP -- not that I have to, thank GOD for THAT! -- I'd polish that turd, LOL!"

It gets tiring. And it's insulting. Not because they are insulting a language I use. Rather, it's insulting because the community here encourages it. It's accepted. And I like to HN is filled with smart people who will judge me based on the results of my work and not the fact that fact that I didn't use a Craftsman hammer, but instead a plain wooden one that goes the job done equally well.

Sorry for the rant.
You're right - perhaps, even though their threat letter mentions the TOS, their legal strategy is based on the laws of their country instead (e.g. maybe they have a libel law that's more plaintiff-friendly than the US).
It is a free economy, you can make offers to anyone you want. To say you can't is to denounce capitalism itself, isn't it?
Banks do this but they will easily reverse all but one of them if you call without even arguing. If you argue a bit, I think they would reverse even the legitimate one.
MLM Myths
Great to see a technologist at the helm of IBM. Granted she made her marks in services, then marketing and sales, but the past 3 CEOs have been a salesman, a strategist, and an office politician. I hope she does well, as IBM may need a move as big as hardware to software or software to services.