skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do angels require liquidation preferences and other arbitrary terms (like paying their lawyer fees) that VCs do? Do angels impose bad decisions? (I've seen more than one company lose %50 of its ultimate market value as a result of a VC imposing bad decisions on them.)

Are angels more or less likely to follow the heard or be arbitrary? (EG: he's nervous while pitching us therefore, he must be hiding something)

Since Angels these days have rather large amounts of funds, and the cost of running a company is much smaller -- I believe we'll be able to service up to 200 million customers for about $300/month operating costs excluding salaries which nobody is taking right now.

Do we really even need to deal with VCs anymore?

Why not take a series of Angel investments? Seems many companies could be done in three:

$100k: Seed stage

$100-$500k: Have product/market fit and getting traction.

$500k-$2M: Profitable and want to spend heavily on marketing and growing the team.

Seems like those rounds should be sufficient for a lot of companies, like say Instagram. And they're small enough to be handled by a syndicate of angels. And if the company is of the type that it then needs to raise $5M-$15M for further growth, at that stage you could probably get VCs in on much more reasonable terms.
Yay! I've gotten annoyed at seeing the links in HN to theatlantic.com and others, posted by people who only post dozens of links to a single domain, and who never respond to comments in the thread.
The alternative is becoming like reddit so I personally like the heavy moderation, warts and all.
> And I see the flip side, people that are past the age of 50 [...] are not capable of creating compelling social products.

This tells me everything I need to know about this ass monkey.
Hellbanned for violating a site guideline, huh?

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties.

If neglecting to observe proprieties is a characteristic of the most successful founders, surely we can shrug off a minor violation of the site's rules that led to what many thought was an interesting discussion.
Bacteria actually do a lot of the digestion in a human as well.
PG posted an excuse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103210), then the thread he posted it on was killed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102907
Moderators may make mistakes here and there; they are human so just deal with it. It's what makes this place great. The hand of god's helpers has always been here, most of the time you don't know it.

Can you imagine how snarky this place would be without it? I don't think (reddit * intellectuals * anonymous) would sustain for very long.
The reason why VCs will not tell "team is not strong" is because they can be wrong about the team (people can learn, be better, or they can be misjudged etc.) but that mistake might burn bridges.

Only real friends will tell you "you suck": so step 1 - get some friends.
There's also bcache, which may make it into mainline linux one day.

https://lwn.net/Articles/497024/
http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/
I agree. Wake up, sheeple!
Ah! thanks for the quick answer!
This is a great idea! I'll explore it for my own (world-domination) purposes.
UX Research, eh?

Let's just say your downvote on the original comment didn't make a dent, so much for a quick, unrepresentative poll. What I call Common Sense is ultimately no more than the essence of past UX research and can be obtained by a mere glance at what prevails in the grand petri dish.

Cf. Altavista/Google, Myspace/Facebook, and the rise of Apple for just a few major case studies in the area of UI clutter. With regard to the siren-song of social-lockin I'll recommend to study the fate of Ping, which exemplifies what happens when even the big guys try to go against the grain.

If you find a piece of formal "UX Research" claiming anything else then I'd be curious to see it.
Reddit is now banning entire high-quality domains
During my hellban about two years ago (I posted an article which had been silently banned, and was flagged for spam, I guess?), I was anonymously advised that the HN moderators were "capricious and tone-deaf", and that my recourse was to contact PG directly.

After a curt and unpleasant email exchange, I was back on my feet. Pretty stupid that I had to bother PG at all, and even stupider that my one interaction with him was so needlessly distasteful.
That's also a fair point and I hope that doesn't happen. I guess we'll have to see, although the niche industry that has grown around even iPhone repairs suggests that companies may provide the service.

Unfortunately I don't see a way for any company to make machines like the Retina MBP in future without using custom and tough-to-replace components.
I agree with the honesty part, but if you are basing your self-worth on the ability to roll up on someone in a Maserati...

Of course I'm being partially facetious here. The point is to take negative feedback as a challenge and use it as motivation.

I'm not much of a Rand guy, but I think Roark's response is the best: "But I don’t think of you."

Yeah, ya know, I was just watching The Fountainhead again last week and that scene really jumped out at me. I do admire that outlook, but I also find value in choosing to use doubters doubts as motivation. I know it seems contradictory but it works for me.
Is the hint to Epimenides on purpose?
Not true AFAIRC. Lipids are absorbed as lipids (fatty acids), proteins as amino acids. Aminos can be broken down into sugar, though.
Do you think that CEO would have made the introduction if I had told him he doesn't have what it takes to be a founder at a VC backed startup?

Maybe, who's to say?
The thing is not about using some other producer's chipset. It's all about making wrong choices about driver and software side.
Trying really, really hard not to make a sarcastic comment about the gov't protecting Americans from itself...
To you and zemo's point, those are specific instantiations of the general point I'm making. I'm sure Go will get there, as long as it stays alive, but it shouldn't be a surprise that Erlang is more polished at the moment. That's not a criticism of Go per se, it's just an effect of where they are in their lifespans. Erlang is basically mature and just polishing, and Go's still a rambunctious early teen with a wide-open future.
Pyasay Din Pyasi Raatein..
I was using Unix long before Linux came along, and you're right it was the fork that pushed the most for the desktop. Even though today I am using it as my desktop that's really only because I write server software. I think the main thrust for Unix on the desktop was in fact OS/X, but among us geeks it has been Ubuntu. But that was really my point, it was the distros like RH and Ubuntu that put together something installable with a mostly workable window manager that most people associate with Linux, not the kernel.

While I am very much not taking anything away from the work that Linus has accomplished, my point was that much of the credit for today's Linux installations comes more from RedHat than anything Linux did in the kernel.

There indeed was the BSD wars, but most of the old timers that started their career with a flavor of Unix (for me, it was HP-UX on an HP9000), since then they have all been much of a muchness, varying only in their applicability to a given problem (including suitability to the desktop.)

I am reasonably sure that the number of Linux desktops is very small, nearly every practical use for Linux is running servers. I would wager that OSX dwarfs Linux in terms of unix-on-the-desktop comparisons.

Since history provides no A/B testing capabilities, it's very difficult to isolate the impact Linux has had. Would we today be all using some form of BSD, or maybe Solaris/Intel with ZFS. Who knows, but I am thankful to Linus for a number of things including his efforts to promote OSS.
From the article:

>There's no good evidence of that

I love when people use "there's no good evidence" to mean "there is a tiny amount of evidence to the contrary, and that's the only evidence I am choosing to pay attention to". People are silly.
Simple syntax highlighting library written in JavaScript
Discuss HN: We're not a community if we can't discuss it.
The recent article, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108008 (mirror of content here: https://gist.github.com/2926119) attempted to discuss the hellbanning of a HackerNews veteran for talking about moderators changing submission titles.

The submission itself is now dead, after rocketing to the #1 spot of the front page.

How can we be a community if we aren't allowed to discuss ourselves? The lack of maturity by moderators who kill articles that offer criticisms to HN is astounding. What are they so afraid of? That if they allow discussions of criticisms to develop, the community might start to ask for changes?
The New API: Apps, Partners, Income
Fudge, that was just a typo. I did mean de. Too late now. (On Dvorak, d is on h and g is on u, but that's still a bad one.)
Hmm, it'd probably be doable. In particular, you can use the "commands" command to script what happens when you hit a breakpoint (a friend talked about this in a Ksplice GDB blog post: https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/8_gdb_tricks_you_shou...)

Normally, the "finish" command will interrupt any script you're in the middle of executing, so we have to do a bit of an ugly hack to make sure our script keeps running:

b PyEval_EvalFrameEx if strcmp(PyString_AsString(f->f_code->co_name), "handle_uncaught_exception") == 0

commands

disable

frame 3

python

gdb.execute('finish')

gdb.execute('shell git stash pop')

gdb.execute('call PyImport_ReloadModule(PyImport_AddModule("monospace.views"))')

gdb.execute('call PyImport_ReloadModule(PyImport_AddModule("monospace.urls"))')

gdb.execute('set $self = PyDict_GetItemString(f->f_locals, "self")')

gdb.execute('set $request = PyDict_GetItemString(f->f_locals, "request")')

gdb.execute('set $get_response = PyObject_GetAttrString($self, "get_response")')

gdb.execute('set $args = Py_BuildValue("(O)", $request)')

gdb.execute('set $rax PyObject_Call($get_response, $args, 0)')

gdb.execute('enable')

gdb.execute('c')

end

c

end

(Bah. Edited because I couldn't get monospace text working)

You could put those commands into a file and run "gdb -p <my django process> -x <my commands file>"

Of course, instead of shelling out to git stash pop, you'd probably want to pause so you could update the code. And you may need to reload more modules than just monospace.views and monospace.urls, depending on the change.
Nine times out of ten, the cabal makes good calls about hellbanning people, and the bans improve the site.

But when they get it wrong, boy, do they ever get it wrong. For instance, Paul Graham personally hellbanned Maciej Ceglowski for calling Sebastian Marshall a "prolix douchebag". Maciej's comment was not a high point of Hacker News decorum and in that instance probably degraded the site slightly, but no reasonable person could have looked at 'idlewords comment record and not come to the conclusion that Maciej is someone we want on the site. Sometimes, you take the bad with the good.

There have also been times where it's apparent that there is, if not "automatic", than at least "mechanical" banning for reasons other than nasty comments. I don't know or care what the abuse mechanisms being tripped are --- I buy into the idea that in this case, obscurity is making some baseline level of security cost-effective for Graham and his team. But it's important to know that whatever mechanical process is banning people for abuse, it's imperfect.

Ultimately, I think Graham is in a bind here. A more typical forum site would enlist more community support to help police the site. Graham can't do that, because HN also runs important parts of YC's (very sensitive) applications and communications process.† I have a hard time holding this against him. Managing a sprawling forum site is a hard problem. Doing that while having the site do double-duty as the front-end for your startup seed fund system must be a nightmare.

So I'd generally say: assume good faith; don't make a production of the mistakes; but, know that the mistakes do happen, are pretty annoying, and are worth at least remarking about.

† (It's worth knowing that YC members also have some silent perks on HN, beyond the job ads).

e45f8d80989cd423c9bfa66738395f8d71c89d8f
Apple's '647 Patent: What It Is and Why it's Bad for the Mobile Ecosystem
Quote: "
I'd talk to the OP again, after I make it bigtime and roll up in the Maserati, with a 6' tall, red-headed supermodel with a Scottish accent on my arm... and I'd say "fuck you, dude" and then buy a round of beers and sit back and laugh about the whole thing."

He might be a professional success but based on this sample size, yeah, writes and thinks like a cocky 13yo until proven otherwise. No offense intended to anyone, of course.

Maybe it was satire.
Launching All of the Links – a daily dose of the best links on the Internet
Preprocessors evaluate CSS and the cascade so there's nothing stopping them from adding local scope or specificity to variables. On the other hand, if you can really edit variable values with Javascript then that would be client-side only, although I haven't seen anything that says you _can_ do that - for all we know Javascript may only allow getting/setting of the evaluated value, not the variable expression itself.
Bizarrely I listen to Alphawaves

http://itunes.apple.com/be/app/alphamind-alpha-brainwave/id3...

It keeps me really focused for extended periods.
To put it in perspective, though, most of Apple's customers only started buying their hardware in the last two years and rarely purchased older models.
Why VCs judge people:
1. The team/people do matter
2. They aren't smart/knowledgeable* enough to truly evaluate the merits, weaknesses, etc. of a pitch, so they use people as a proxy.

* smart/knowledgable are used here loosely to encompass the wide range of reasons why a VC might judge an idea poorly
Dear OP:

You always say the team is important. I couldn't agree with you more.

The Team is important not only in the startup, but also in the group of people that make up your investors. Thus, given that we've decided your team is not strong enough to be investors in our company we're going to pass.

In the future, it might be wise to hire partners who are not biased based on age, or prone to making decisions based on irrational conjecture (such as a presenter in an important meeting being nervous.) Also, be aware that one of the signs that a VC firm is not going to be a reliable partner is a pattern of cargo-cult investing. Just because Instagram just got sold for $1B does not mean you should be investing in every social-mobile-location-picture sharing startup (not run by anyone over 50, of course!) The best opportunities, by definition, are the ones with a novel approach.

Thank you for your time, and if you should have a major turnover in partners, feel free to contact us again in the future.

Signed-

Startup Founder
iosbuildenv looks interesting, but it doesn't come with a simulator. You can only see the actual running app on the device.
I doubt this will pass. Many have speculated that Rand is angling for the VP nomination by positioning himself as Romney's biggest competitor for 2016 (if Romney wins), meaning that nominating him as VP would be a smart way to take out his biggest competitor. He has been doing a bunch of things like this lately in order to raise his own profile.
There shouldn't be any issue about where rebase is usable versus merge. It's more process than technical except if you're expecting git to handle things right out of the box.

None of these arguments are anything new: Any one who's worked with ClearCase should recognize them [1]. Read up on the UCM lifecycle.

[1] Software Configuration Management Strategies and Rational ClearCase (1st edition: http://www.amazon.com/Software-Configuration-Management-Stra...). And yes, it's from over 10 years ago...
SinglePlatform Acquired by Constant Contact for $100MM
Back in the ARPANET days, the convention was that if you wanted to be removed from a mailing list info-foo@mit-mc, you sent email to info-foo-REQUEST@mit-mc to contact the maintainer of the mailing list, instead of broadcasting a "please remove me" message to the entire mailing list.

Of course there were people who didn't know the convention, and would violate this rule of netiquette. So a mischievous hacker who got sick of all the people asking "please remove me" set up a special mailing list called "please-remove-me@mit-mc" just for them, to which he subscribed people who didn't know the convention, so they could all talk to each other about how to remove themselves from mailing lists.
I wasn't even aware this was happening. Frightening stuff.
I want to be a disqus user, not a user of 4000 tiny blogs.

Yes! And in addition to the above arguments, I would say, having a single identity across a variety of sites may be convenient.
BlackBerry PlayBook hacked to run iOS apps
When to kill your startup
Understanding OAuth: What Happens When You Log In using FB/Twitter/G+
Bus Information API on Time for London Olympics
Correct. It seems faulty RAM will be the real trouble beyond that first year, as it's soldered to the board.
And now this will be deleted because it's not what this site is for.

It's fine to want to have a meta discussion about the board, but there's nowhere on HN to do so, by design.

A) it's a site for posting interesting links and discussions, not meta-conversations about the site itself
B) I don't think the moderators/administrators really care, and nothing engenders them to listen to you

So, this is a fine thing to talk about, but this isn't the place to talk about it. Start an off-site discussion, start your own site, do whatever you want, but making this post won't accomplish a thing. It will be deleted.
So is Apple aiming for a future where you have to buy a new laptop every 2 years to have a machine that is relevant?

Or Apple's simply trying to make machines that are thin, light, power efficient, sturdy, and reliable. A user-servicable or upgradable machine does not necessarily lend itself to all of those traits.

And is a non-upgradable machine that's two years old really irrelevant? That machine could still run Mountain Lion, and could still run all of the apps available on the App Store. It could still play Diablo 3. It could still surf the web.

Just because a machine cannot be upgraded to the latest CPUs or graphics cards does not make it irrelevant. And the vast majority of users are often fine with the amount of RAM which shipped in their machines.

Quite simply, I posit that Apple could not build a machine like the Retina MacBook Pro if they relied on user-upgradable, off-the-shelf parts. It would necessarily be bigger and heavier, and there's a good chance it'd be less sturdy. It wouldn't be a machine that lives up to Apple's standards.
It's not really any more difficult to keep your nutrition balanced as a vegan than as a carnivore. Either way, you have to pay a bit of attention to what you eat, not eat too much of this, and not eat too little of that.

And what's wrong with taking supplements? You keep invoking the concept of "natural", but there is nothing intrinsically superior about nature. Humans are in control now, and we're doing a lot better for ourselves than nature ever did.
You mention Greece; there were also Italy (Mussolini), Spain (Franco) and Portugal (Salazar).
Why Cans Are Good For Beer
FLAME – Leaked Data Carried by Human Vector
The Song Machine: The hitmakers behind Rihanna
Create a new Discuss HN section even - if mods don't want the front page to be inundated with meta-discussions. Those who have grievances would be able to voice them and discuss those publicly - even the mod replies ought to be public.

If that doesn't happen then the mods at HN are not responsible people - in the truest sense of the word.
Should Google index the  symbol? - Poll
Experience more with expanded Tweets
Construct.js: simple sugar for prototype-based inheritance in javascript
http://as.reddit.com/r/CablePorn
Acer Iconia Tab A700 With 1080p Screen Announced
Alloy, an MVC framework for Titanium Mobile
I agree with this, however I'm specifically pointing out that this is not about polish of Go in general sense -- while there's a lot things to improve in the compiler, etc., in this instance, there's something wrong somewhere, perhaps in websockets library. It doesn't mean that there's something wrong with Go per se. Note that websockets is not included in the standard library yet.
Correct. I am talking about people who are not very good at logic and scientific reasoning. People who know how things "are" (because someone taught them so in the university) and don't care why. People who blindly follow "design patterns" and use their "hammer", regardless of the screw they are trying to deal with.

People who say "I only learned Pascal at school. Let's use that for the problem at hand" (No offence to Pascal and people using it).

People who know the Java standard libraries by heart (and have an excellent diploma because of that), but can't produce a simple working program, because they lack understanding of the nature of computing.

The above are real examples of people I have worked with.
We're not a "community". It's news for hackers. The site's owners have a very well-defined vision of the kind of site they want. Either you like that or you don't.
I got similar results compressing data for a mixed memory/disk based cache (Ehcache) using Java's in-built GZIP compression. Can't believe it took me so long to try this.

The cache values were in the 2-8K range and GZIP gave me about %90 compression. I also "compressed" the cache keys (which could be in 1-2K range) by using their MD5-sums instead of the actual key. The tiny chance of a collision was hugely outweighed by the memory savings.
Olark has, by far, affected our ability to communicate with prospects. Instead of sitting in the dark, passively mulling over Analytics numbers, we can put our finger on the pulse of a potential customer. We have several productive chats per day; if nothing else, they reinforce the decisions we're making, or provide great feedback on what we can do better.
Reminds me of LiveZilla's visitor monitoring.

It's a pity I had to give up LiveZilla because of its terrible UX.
Verizon's Share Your Wallet Plan SUCKS 1 million strong
I have gotten same day turn around for a trackpad problem on my current MBP. I know others that have gotten similarly good service for their own devices.

Have you ever tried to claim the warranty from other companies? If you rely heavily on a piece of equipment, $350 for really good support is a bargain.
If it had an electrical cord as a tether, it could stay up indefinitely.
Now how about a bill protecting humans from drone surveillance? This is like a bill that says 'torture is okay, as long as you don't torture US citizens'. I don't have any strong opinion about the moral correctness of drone surveillance, but if you admit that it's not good enough for your constituents ...
I don't really have time to research everybody on HN.

Especially people who write like a cocky 13 year old.

N.B. This is far from my first account. Also, bringing out the 'tenure' argument is pretty old/lame. I was seeing that crap on Usenet and EFNet over a decade ago. Grow up.

People are accountable for what they do and say regardless of their track-record.

P.S. What makes it even funnier is that he's a consultant and he's only living up to the stereotype of greedy consultants. Outrageously comical.
> programming is complicated

I'd like to hide in the corner and applaud the recognition of this reality. I grew up with Windows, I've been learning cli and vim and ... for 5 years and I still suck. But as Kennedy said, "don't wish for easy lives, wish to be strong [wo]men."