skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
jaypreneur,

1) I wish you the best of luck.
2) As Buffett said, "Invest in what you know."
3) Hire the best you can afford to help you with the tech issues.

Regarding 3: You go and learn all you can, write some code, etc. The more you learn the more you will realize you are in over your head (I hope you learn that). Besides the security issues you have never heard of, or the scaling issues, or the caching issues, you are not a Developer!

To paraphrase Buffett, "Stick with what you know." If you have a good, marketable, revenue-generating idea then you are doing well. You can generate good ideas, that is great! Show your idea/attempt/mockup to potential tech co-founders. If the basics are sound any reasonable techie will see ways to improve it for you and take the bite.

I am sure that you did not mean to insult all of the techies out here by saying you can learn to code in a year a two, but there is much more to our craft than banging keys or struggling with memory leaks...we have experience that you will never have if you part-time half-ass it. Either become a "coder" full-time, or find someone that has. I am known to be a hard ass, so please forgive me, but you don't have to code the solution/vision yourself...in fact, please don't. Reading your post I see a lot of 'impossible' statements. jay, if you want your idea to move forward with realistic performance, hire someone. If you don't have the money, search for the money, if you can't do that, search for the talent. If you believe in your idea and can convince a techie to believe in your idea, well, your search is over. I am sure you have heard this before but "Ideas are a dime a dozen." It is true, even with mockups, but if you need a tech co-founder, I think you came to the right place.

Read 1) 2) 3) again.

FateCarver
I am not here to defend those engineers, but it's a very easy trap to fall in to. An interview I enjoyed reading, as a warning, was with a programmer who wrote adware [1]. It was just one more small step each time, first kicking competitors off, than maybe sneaking in an easier re-install, then maybe not going away... In the case of these overdraft fees, it doesn't even seem to me that it would take a particularily skillful or creative engineer to implement it, just a conniving enough boss to ask. After that, it's just any one person who's willing to do it for the paycheque, and we see many other people do much worse to get a paycheque.

As an engineer myself, it's even scarier when the problems are challenging and exciting, but the application scares me. Oh man, would I ever like to try and put together advanced intercept/listening systems (think cell phones, over the air)! I get excited thinking about all the technical challenges, so if someone wanted to pay and support me to do it, wow that'd be interesting! It takes me a moment to stop and think to realize that I don't want to be involved in giving that kind of power to the people who would want it.

[1] http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/12/interview-with-an-adware...
That's not entirely true at the places I've been and people I've talked to. The reason is because a lot of that overhead gets waived if the professor teaches. Usually one class/year = 1 grad student. That's why many grad students (PhD candidates) TA at first too, because unless they are really, really good, they aren't going to be worth it to give them an RA position, especially if they are taking classes and they can't be productive enough for a professor. In a large group, usually a few professors will teach, and the rest will supplement grad students with NSF or some other sort of grants.

The last NSF grant I helped with, done by a professor I worked for, was essentially for the grad student's salary they get to live off of, as the rest of the costs were waived by the school (in this case, 25k/year for 3 years)
Honest question, since I haven't done it in 10 years, but what is the big hassle in switching banks? Shouldn't it be as easy as signing up for a new account and taking a cashiers check out of the old one and closing it. I'm curious to know what other hurdles they put in place to keep you locked in.
Japanese engineers develop flying robotic orb
The PS3 is the poster child for this type of tactic, at their beginning they sold for $300 less than their cost of goods.[1] Their failure has nothing to do with locking in a market due to price. [1]http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=11740
I'm not sure why you're being downmodded, you're absolutely correct.

IAS 2[1] states "inventories shall be measured at the lower of cost and net realizable value", which is exactly what you said.

IAS is the International Accounting Standards, which is what pretty much all accounts meet. Inventories mean stock. Net realizable value means what you can get for them. US GAAP covers this as well (though I can't find a reference right now).

Showing your inventory at $20 per unit, when you can only expect to make $15 per unit selling them, would be overestimating the value of your stock. A competent auditor wouldn't sign off on your accounts like that.

[1] (http://www.icaew.com/en/library/subject-gateways/accounting-...)

(from a trainee accountant)
Is there an easy way to get into USAA for non-military people?
If they bought Duck Duck Go, that would be something. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about Siri. A product with a relatively small scope that the punditry is blowing out of proportion. This is the very same media that insisted we'd see an iPhone 5. There's no substance here -- it's all baseless wishful thinking.
How the HuffPost gets us to click
Ideally, they would be a hub for innovative researchers on a shoestring-budget that could end up working together on even more ambitious projects. Or a good leader might be able to recruit from the applicant pool to break up a larger project into small groups that could focus on specific parts of the research.
The Hubble Blew My Mind
If CoolAJ86 made it, I trust it.
I think credit card companies are starting to charge for "overdraft" fees.

I got mails asking me to sign up for over-the-limit protection program. I was like, huh? What over-limit? Just decline the charge when the limit has been exceeded. Apparently the CC companies would gladly authorize over the limit charge with a fee. Sneaky.
> The problem is that as the non-hardware costs start to become material, the pressure mounts to show that they are actually related to hardware sales

I think that implicit in Gruber's argument is the idea that just buying Apple's devices isn't radically more expensive than the competitors. I've heard this attributed to Tim Cook, that lots of Apple devices are now roughly price-equivalent with other brands, but with so many other features.
Voxel, a 3D pixel editor in HTML
High-tech Ceramic bracelet polished
The current Australian government doesn't understand economics either. A mentality of take from businesses and give to the poor. They might realize one day that if they provided more for small businesses, there would be more jobs and hence less poor.
More Pictures and Video from Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza - Thomas Monopoly
If you mean the idealistic notion that an engineer can come in and eventually run the company, sure, if they get on the management path quickly.

Spent just under a decade with IBM working on servers and even the best people I saw (technically and politically) were taking 8+ years as engineers to make it to a senior level (band 9 for any IBMers). And at that point, you're likely just a glorified project manager. If you put together a couple decades of awesomeness, maybe you make Distinguished Engineer or even IBM Fellow. They don't end up as VPs or CEOs.

As a disclaimer, I now work at HP. With respect to the culture in the trenches, I see IBM and HP as almost identical. Some great people to work with, interesting projects, and way too much bureaucracy :)
USAA banking is available to everyone. Some nicer services (deposit by phone, insurance) are for service members only.

For what it's worth, my brother (Air Force) sold me on USAA after he signed up with them. I worked at Wells Fargo at the time, so I had the best accounts. I'm happy I made the switch. Also, their web interface and iOS apps are excellent. By far the best I've seen.
It wasn't enough. They may have been selling at a loss, but the introductory PS3 prices were at least twice as much as the Wii. When Sony began to cut prices, sales jumped. A $100 price cut in 2009 doubled sales: http://kotaku.com/5356885/npd-ps3-sales-gain-ground-on-price...
The About page reminds me of a Dijkstra quotation:
"Computing is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
> That actually pissed me off a little more

I greatly admire that.
It doesn't talk out loud if you hold the phone up to your ear. To use Siri with minimal noise (aside from your own speech):

Push the power button to turn on the screen.
Hold the phone to your ear.
Wait for the be-beep sound, played quietly through the ears-only speaker.
Speak.
Keep the phone against your ear. Siri will respond through the ears-only speaker.
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IBM are probably no longer making products. Many of their products have been stagnant laying around just as cash cow via long term support. This is straight coming from the inside. But what do I know...
I've never done a deal any where near as big, but I've wrangled the bulk of my income over the past twenty years from clients rather than employers - you won't hurt my feelings if you decide I don't know what I'm talking about.

My opinion, the LOI in a week is fishy. A cursory glance at your situation should be enough to scare them off such a tight timeline until you guys have your shit together regarding corporate structure and IP ownership - right now, there is all kinds of risk associated with your acquisition because there are no formal relationships between your team's members. Nothing personal, but you guys sound like a litigation clusterfuck waiting to happen. Not just for them, but for their enterprise customers as well.

The $2m now or $6m later is also suspect. Notice that you've pegged the deal at the higher figure in your title? The four of you are thinking low Fuck You money, but do you think they're really going to cough up an additional $4m when they can't raise half that? And if you are worth $6m, you can bet your ass someone will probably loan them $2m pretty damn quick.

Of course that's assuming you ever get paid at all.

Ever heard the expression, "Borrow a thousand dollars from the bank and the bank owns you. Borrow a million from the bank and you own the bank?" These guys are going to own you.

Once you have several million riding on their success, their problems become your problems - even those outside the scope of your software.

So now for the answers to your questions:

1. Screwy deal structures are not uncommon in the industry I'm in, people getting screwed is not uncommon either.

2. The biggest gotchya's are greed and an unwillingness pass on a sketchy deal. If your team and project is really worth something, this won't be the last deal you ever see in your life.

3. The starting point for negotiation should be to put all the cash in your pocket today. The reason they are "able to move so quickly" is because it won't cost them anything to try out your software - and they can probably get you guys to throw in a bunch of effort to make things work without any additional cost as well.

Take it for what it's worth and good luck.
Some great examples: http://apps.blois.us/Voxel#browse=true
It's great to see this in Melbourne! I'm an ex-Perth-ite and I made the move to Melbourne nearly 3 years ago. It was the best decision as the culture, coffee, people and general positivity is amazing (less tall poppies).

Over a few months I've come to know the Inspire9 crew and startups within - and also just recently went to the party at York Butter. It's a brilliant building and hosted by a group of people who passionate about the Melbourne tech scene (you couldn't ask for better than that!).

I think right now is definitely the time to be in Melbourne with all the buzz from these spaces (and big events) and if you are focusing on the weather you're missing the point.

Rock on Melbourne!
Stephen Boyd: Distributed Optimization and Statistics via ADMM [pdf]
The obvious question that I don't see anyone asking is what happens when pirates build a more convenient service than Steam? There is no way a legitimate digital distributor can offer more convenience when they are saddled with many business and legal limitations.
A few weeks? Thanks to rainbow tables (and several online sites that allow you to look up MD5 hashes), it's trivial to get at least 26,025 of those passwords. A plain MD5 hash of a password is as good as the password itself.

No, I'm not going to try logging in as any of these users (I don't want to go to jail, thanks).

EDIT: I've posted some stats on the main article: http://falkvinge.net/2011/10/26/omgwtf-passwords-of-93000-po...
Wow, this is SO like the Half-Life scanners... Life imitating art??
Babolat Drive Z-Tour
The same idea was used in a real-world attack. It used to be possible on the Tenex system in the early seventies to recover a password by laying out an attempted password across a page boundary, and observing whether the checker incurred a page fault.

The bug was that you could align the given password string so that it was at the end of a page boundary, and have the next page in the address space mapped to a non-existant page of a write-protected file. Normally, Tenex would create a page when you tried to access a non-existant page, but in this case it couldn't (since the file was write-protected).

So, you did a password-checking system call (e.g. the system call which tried to obtain owner access to another directory) set up in this way and you would get one of two failures: Incorrect Password meant that your prefix was wrong, Page Fault meant that your prefix was right but that you need more characters.

[ via http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/hh-4.html ]
Wow. I wanted to LOL at that and claim you made it up, but it really does sound plausible.

I've considered putting together a training course for tech recruiters - something like a one day bootcamp to familiarize them with specific tech, so they know the diff between java and javascript, for example. but... need to find the time to do that on top of everything else!
Thanks for the questions. I will be asking myself those questions and analyzing the answers.

A question they bring up in my mind though would be the opportunity cost of creating it myself vs. outsourcing.

If I ultimately plan on finding a tech co-founder to come on board and revamp it, hopefully playing the part of CTO, then it seems wise to compare the costs of getting there via my own work vs. outsourcing, no?

DO IT MYSELF

Benefits

1. I learn skills that will help when doing simple iterations (before having tech partner on board), assessing future tech partner, and attracting tech partner.

2. I hate my job and would rather learn to code and build my business.

Costs

1. The time it takes to learn is time I can't be earning a salary. This could be up to 6 months or more. Let's say this costs me 30k.

OUTSOURCING

Benefits

1. I keep my salary (even though I hate my job) while MVP is created. This could be positive 30k+.

2. Outsourcing the MVP is likely far faster, let's say 2 months. This also means I can potentially get to customers faster and gain traction (maybe find partner faster as well)

Costs:

1. Of course, the outsourcing itself over those 2 months could very well be 250 hours of work. At 50 dollars an hour (reasonable?), that's 12.5k. Let's assume 10-15k range.

2. Unfortunately, I lose out in terms of learning, which helps in terms of iterating (before having tech partner) and finding and evaluating potential tech partner.

To me, it looks like outsourcing has the potential to save me in both time (a couple of months, at least) and money (15 - 20k). I guess I need to assess if learning to code myself extensively if worth that cost if I don't plan on really becoming incredibly proficient (as I recognize it takes years).

Any opinions on that analysis of the situation?

edit* I just wanted to mention I don't claim that my above analysis is accurate. It could very well take an entire year to develop a useable MVP myself, which would be 60k in opportunity cost. Additionally, the outsourcing estimate of 15k and 2 months could be 30k and 4 months, or more. I am not expert on the implementation and realize that. Please consider that and take the idea behind the analysis into consideration rather than the numbers themselves.
Maybe for domain independent stuff, but for a domain specific thing (like scheduling), I think heuristics could go a long way. Yes, it's like a programming language, and yes, it has quirks.

Just making sure the weak AI is clear about its interpretation through explicit confirmation ("Sir, I understand that you would like to launch the missiles at Russia in 15 minutes, am I correct?" "No. Siri, please book lunch with my sisters at the Russian restaurant on the 15th.") would probably make up for a lot.
SEM BUSINESS BLUEPRINT
Uh, they had a bad quarter but they were still profitable.

It seems to me that Bezos is making long term investments.
I think an army of top end CS grads with caffeinated beverages is what Facebook currently employs.
No they're not. There are a lot of jackasses in the world.

He didn't "cajole" anyone to do anything and the truth is the vast majority of people don't care one way or the other.
Hardest thing about making money on the Internet
what is the hardest thing for you to make money on the internet ?
That's the thing. He was exceptional. You don't achieve repeated success like he did without being exceptional. The point I was (also) trying to make was that he never cared to stop and worry about what others thought of him. That's a way of life he chose for himself and he stuck by it.

As far as opinions not changing goes, isn't it safe to say that the biography's media coverage has already contributed to that?
Mitchell & Ness New York Jets Adjustable Snap Back Hats White Green
Given that it's specs aren't much more than $100 chinese Android 2.3 tablets I doubt they are losing anything. Especially since they don't have a retailer taking 30%

Their policy for the other Kindles was to recover the R&D initially and then sell them at not much more than cost.
Spending on day-to-day expenses is termed revenue expenditure. This shows up in the income statement and affects profits.
Spending on future investment is termed capital expenditure. This is not shown on the income statement and does not affect profits. (It's on the balance sheet instead)

Eg. Buying a new warehouse does not decrease profits (but it will of course affect your cash).
Blue-sky R&D is also recorded as an asset (and depreciated as normal).

At least, that's what I was taught as a trainee accountant. Though I've learnt in practice that things are reclassified for tax purposes. Lower profits mean lower tax after all.
NET BLAZE
Their precious human capital could be used to create further knowledge and advance progress, instead it's used to exploit.

You've just described the entire history of finance and nearly all of modern economics.
Which is why I like the method of increasing the login processing time per invalid login. It seems to be the easiest way to prevent most attacks.

1st attempt - 1 second sleep

...

nth attempt - n^2 second sleep

Something of that nature.

[edit] - the sleep time INCLUDES the time required to process the login credentials
I pay for DirectTV, Verizion FIOS, Netflix, and have an Apple TV, yet I still can't get content delivered how I want it.

The only thing the big networks get right is sports.

If I forget to record something, I have to go to Hulu, where I can't stream it to my TV in HD unless I buy another device. My alternative is to pay 99 cents (or more) on iTunes.

I also have to buy a switch so I don't run out of HDMI ports, and it's a pain in the ass to switch between all of my boxes.

Yeah, piracy is starting to sound good.

Oh...forgot to mention that Netflix's selection currently sucks big time.
If Steve Jobs isn't a role model, then who is?

The writer of this piece, Gary Stix, seems to assume that in order for one to be a role model they must be perfect.

Using this logic the very notion of a role model is foolish.
Off-topic, and not really a complaint, but the moment I saw "Lauren Ipsum" in the beginning I got the sense that I was looking at an incomplete website. It kind of caught me off guard.
How old are you? Outsourcing? To where? Part of the problem is a "Tech Co-Founder" is already making $300k+ a year. If you want someone to throw a few hours your way, you need to sweeten the pot and step up the talk a bit. Some "Tech co-founders" would actually have to use their time spent on your idea as a write-off. jay, I'm not trying to smackdown on you but what do you have to offer your tech co-founder? Even if you learn to code, what can you offer? Will you need a Marketing VP too? Or legal advice? Or accounting help?
New denial of service tool knocks out encrypting servers
Blitz.io: Geo-located traceroutes
Tulips In Spring
An Effective Way to Create EPUB Ebooks from 10+ popular formats
Did you actually read the article you linked? The article and the fund are quite consistent.

Thiel argues that the economic growth and tech breakthroughs of the past few decades are being taken for granted, that not enough people are taking on the ambitious projects needed to realize a future that we all assume is coming.

This initiative is him putting money behind his words.
curious if anyone can relate/offer advice
+1. (Especially) for a startup, there is no reason for announcements to come from no-reply@startup.com. I have, as a consumer, replied to emails coming from info@startup.com with praise/complaints/feedback, simply because it's easier than copy/pasting customerservice@startup.com from the bottom of the email. You _want_ to get those kinds of emails, so make sure you monitor whatever address the automated emails come from.
off topic but to me living with no regrets does not mean literally that. Sometimes it means not regretting just one of action/outcome. Sometimes it means knowing that you did to the best of your abilities. And sometimes it means (eventually) accepting your fallibility.

e.g: not too happy about taking that chance, but happy that had the courage to take that chance.
I use this and will often reply to the emails whenever I want to expand an idea. It allows me to track the growth and trends of specific ideas.
I particularly like "Wee"
Can you add a web editing interface too? The thing about notes is that they need to be everywhere, not just on mobile and your desktop.

I'll definitely try this out though!
The obvious question to your obvious question is that if it was possible, wouldn't there be one already?
"Even when he was dying, Jobs wasn’t in the mood to analyze his strengths, his weaknesses, his victories, or his mistakes."

To me, that represents profound mental blockages and I wouldn't be surprised if they contributed to his cancer.
Network Marketing Incentives
Doesn't this open up the opportunity to basically DOS someone from logging in to their own account?

If HN did this, I could theoretically have a ton of bots attempt to log in to your account, thus pushing your login timer ever higher, and making your login attempt fairly frustrating and slow.
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