skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I sold my company, our own advisers (not Goldman but a famous name) did something which in my opinion is much worse -- I'm 99% sure they told the winning bidder that we'd been prepared to accept a 20% lower bid from their competitor. The winning bidder, of course, then suddenly reduced their bid by 20% on the planned day of completion. The reason our advisers did this is that it was much more important to them to get future business from the buyer, a large multinational, than future business from me and my colleagues.

I feel sorry for the vendors in this case, but you don't do an all-share deal without being extremely cautious about the shares you're taking as payment. Even a pair of PhDs should have known that.

What interests me here is that we have a lot of news stories floating around at the moment lambasting financial companies for relatively minor misdeeds, because that's all journalists can pin on them without getting sued. If the real truth about what goes on begins to leak out the public reaction could be very interesting.
And the fact that the drug is made by a German company, Bayer, makes this even more disgusting.
I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed ;)
Startup Founders Are C2C
I have been thinking this ever since I met Kashyap of Inkfruit at the first Startup Saturday I attended in February 2009. Apparently the founders of Inkfruit have titles like ‘Maharaja’ and ‘Nawab’ instead of CEO and that made me think if a Startup founder should really use a CEO tag?

While it most cases it makes no difference to what business one does, but we do have people who would frown at a CEO tag used in a 5 people company.

I wouldn’t care much on what a founder labels himself, but if I am to propose a title, Startup CEO’s are ‘C2C’ (Clerk to CEO). That’s what you really do. The day you have a CEO tag, you are probably a mid-sized company, not a startup anymore.

PS: You can always act like a startup. No matter how big you are.
Weather stops tandem lawn chair balloon flight
I'll simply note a very strong disagreement that people don't know, or can't readily obtain, their waist measurement. Particularly in a setting at which they'd be particularly interested in some measure of general fitness: doctor's office, clinic, gym, health fair, etc. Which means that your statement that other measures are harder to obtain or less accurate is simply false.

Among the problems of BMI is that it is official health policy. It's the definition of obesity according to the US government. It's the basis of insurance coverage / premium assessments and other abuses. Changing policy would mean that doctors' offices would measure your height and waist, to give a far more accurate fitness assessment. Over time, epidemiologists would have this dataset generally available.

Really. It's long past time to retire BMI.

Why are you so wedded to it?
Solved - Virus Not Removed After Format Disk
Sure: the line tangent to any point on a smooth curve approximates a sufficiently small bit of the curve surrounding the point arbitrarily well.

Newton's contribution wasn't this, however, but the extension of Descartes' algebraic tangent-finding methods to curves represented by "infinite polynomials", which he neither uses nor explains in the Principia. If you're looking to learn Newton's flavor of calculus "from the master", here it is:

http://archive.org/details/methodoffluxions00newt
You've never heard of Twilio? Every single YC founder I know have. Dunno who those power users you want to follow are. Hate => @einarvollset
> don't do an all-share deal without being extremely cautious about the shares you're taking as payment.

This.

Cash is king. Unless your acquirer is Intel, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or anyone of the other big boys.

One must remember: If someone is swapping their stock for yours - then they, by definition, value their stock less than they do yours. That's a losing deal in anyone's books. If they say they need the cash for growth - call BS - since if they grow that fast they should hold onto every last bit of their stock.

Cash or big boy stock. Everything else is a lie.
After watching the film Gaslands, fracking should leave you scared. It paints fracking as a greed driven, accident waiting to happen.

http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/
Warning: Slightly off-topic

If Gabriel Weinberg is reading this: Is DuckDuckGo planning to support SPDY? Seems like it would be a perfect fit, since you are sending everything over SSL anyway and latency is a priority.
Yeah, let's just ignore all facts, such as actual financials, those don't matter when you're a tech reporter who likes to make things up out of thin air, right?

I dislike PayPal, but this is a terrible piece, and what is it, fluff for NSFW, Corp.?
> One should really do a cursory search before throwing the citation flag.

No, it's up to the people making the claim to defend it.

> Patched faster and more often than others

Not necessarily a good thing. Also doesn't really help people off of Google's forced-update scheme.

Also, plugins are an important part of any browser now; NoScript and the ad blocking/anti-tracking tools work better on Firefox.
Keeping an eye in efficiency
The code is obscure, therefore the idiots think it is profound. Or rephrased by JG: the bigger the troll, the easier it shall pass.

The more I read HN, the more bewildered I get at the gullibility that seems to prevail amongst self called geeks and smart entrepreneurs.

Give me a rope please.
I'm 20 and use it all the time. Don't people buy used things anymore?
Well ... yes. I never thought the problems were purely technical.

That doesn't change my simple reality: the only game in town for me, right now, is PayPal.

And boy do they know it.
> Have you ever tried to read any Demeterized code?

What are you suggesting as an alternative?

It should be noted that the original Demeter system would fetch sentences (or whatever) based on a description of the data structure that was provided by the implementer of the data structure alongside its implementation. In this system, you wouldn't have to examine code to answer your question, but you would have to be able to understand some perhaps complex computer-understandable description. That, of course, might be about as fun as reading an XML Schema. Also, since the real Demeter system never caught on, these days we have to do the computer's job manually, which is surely a chore.

Regarding many functions that all have the same name obfuscating things, there's nothing in the Law that requires that, of course, though I can see how it might sometimes happen in reality.
We are still looking for partners to our startup
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Anyone can be a candidate for our team From around the world Just leave a comment here With email or your blog Or portfolio of work Thank you all Successfully
Digg, Palm, Kodak and Yahoo are poor analogies to PayPal. None of those companies had positions which were defensible against a better technology. PayPal does.

PayPal's barrier to competition isn't technology. It isn't service. It's not network effects.

It's that they've done the infinitely tedious schlep of jumping through thousands and thousands of hoops all over the world to make it possible for me, an Australian, to do business with a person in the UK in USD if that's what I require.

Nobody else can do that unless I arrive with millions of dollars in tow. Nobody else comes close.

I desperately want that to change.
You brush your teeth so your mouth doesn't taste like shit and your teeth don't fall out. You hire an accountant to do your taxes because the tax code cannot be understood by anyone who hasn't devoted his life to deciphering it.

The difference is that there's not a damn thing you can do about your teeth getting dirty (but brush them), but the tax code could be a hell of a lot simpler if only they'd stop making it more complicated.
Go Ahead, Feed The Trolls
mouhahah
okay read the code.
It mainly writes: you have been hacked on a web page.
End of the story.
There's "incomplete", and then there's "broken", and then there's this code. It's not even broken; "broken" would imply that it could be fixed. There's simply nothing there.

See my analysis: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4246338
I fount it really funny how Goldman counter-sued Ms. Baker knowing full well the Bakers were broke. What a bunch of dogs. Doesn't surprise me... with all the crap they pull these days and get away with.

I hope they get taken for the full amount claimed by the Bakers. Even though they made some huge mistakes, a firm that's supposed to advise them and act in their best interest failed to do the most basic of tasks no matter what bs excuse they cooked up ie vacations.
That sounds very eerily similar to J.K. Galbraith's description of trader collusion on the New York Stock Exchange in his classic The Great Crash 1929. In it he describes how traders would fix prices. The general public, though aware of this, still participated in the market -- there was no where else to invest, and there were some gains that could accrue to them as well.

In a sense, a stock exchange is also a sort of social network. Curious thought, that.
> more inclusive, more dynamic, more egalitarian, more accessible

more spammy, more full of nonsense written by homeopaths and similar nutballs, more full of hateful crap written by Neo-Nazis and their ilk, etc. etc.

If you opt for the radically inclusionist policy, you no longer have much of a justification for deleting that page that says cancer can be cured by chugging bleach and shoving silver up your rectum. It's wrong, sure, but deleting it would be a tad... deletionist.
I assume he's referring to this [1], although Newton invented his calculus because he couldn't use this approach to solve practical problems.

[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_of...
> naming an anecdotically supported observation "Law" is a bit of a stretch ;)

Maybe, but it's a common thing to do. C.f., the Law of Thirds.
Let's keep perspective here: Instagram is a popular photo-filtering gadget. If it disappeared in a day, the human race would not be pushed backwards at all.
I just wrote my first distribution hack tactics post just now based on this thread and how you can use negative comments to drive greater engagement and push a post higher on Hacker News. This tactic is not for the faint of heart though
http://distributionhacks.com/go-ahead-feed-the-trolls
Yes, I'm agreeing with you. My point is that most people who think "paypal is doomed" probably don't understand the business with any degree of sophistication. Paypal has spent the last decade wriggling into every corner of the global economy, that's not something you can replace with some clever ruby code.
Indeed talent does. I make no claims about productivity. Your note is intriguing, references invited.
Modelforms for appengine models with WTForms and debugging with pdb
I see vBulletin boards getting hacked over and over again.
Are there any forums that use bcrypt for password encryption (xenforo, phpbb, smf... etc)?
I think I was confusing the global "you" for the personal "you".
Fujifilm Sues Motorola Mobility Over Patent Infringement
I hate wearing pants, makes my sack sweat. Let's boycott pants!
I think this comment comes the closest to the truth.

The author responded to detractors on twitter by posting a link to the C proof-of-concept that he was apparently attempting to translate into javascript:

http://pastebin.com/dHgn0fP7

The C source is definitely what the javascript is based off of, but the modifications (even if for "protection against lamers") are puzzling to say the least.

Source: Author's twitter: http://twitter.com/sanjar_satsura
Wow, CLU! Those were the days!
What is SPDY? read the spec:

http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol/spdy-protocol-dra...

I don't see the point of over explaining the spec. The spec is straightforward and simple to read.
Learn the latest in open web technologies (Step by Step guides)
Which may be why almost everyone calls it the "rule of thirds". [1]

[1]: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=%22rule+of+thirds%22,+%22law...
Exactly what problems would this "pollution of search space" manifest as?
When you realize how easy it is to write Lisp programs that recursively define other valid Lisp programs, it's not hard to see why it's such a favorite of the AI community!

I think Lisp's success in early AI work had as much to do with its support for higher order functions, repl, dynamic dispatch etc as it did with the macro facilities. Lisp was way ahead in those respects.

But you don't see nearly as much use of Lisp in AI now that many other languages have learned all of Lisp's tricks except homoiconicity and that a lot of "AI" in the field these days is really statistics and linear algebra.
So what is the natural and clean design for an operation that represents the sale of a property? Say we have these objects: the buyer, the seller, the agent, the property and the contract. Which one of these would you prefer?

property.sell(buyer, seller, agent, contract)

seller.sell(property, buyer, agent, contract)

buyer.buy(property, seller, agent, contract)

agent.sell(property, buyer, seller, contract)

contract.sign(property, buyer, seller, agent)

The state of all the objects may be modified, and there are different types of properties, buyers, sellers and agents. So you might want polymorphism along any of those hierarchies.
Tested it on my c2d (P8700). In chrome it claimed my cpu is not buggy, and in firefox the script didnt even work.
I'm very happy to have you as a reader, and look forward to answering many questions about customer acquisition based on my experiences past and present.
> I can't think of a simple example that must be a macro (and not a function)

Implementing IF in terms of COND or vice-versa.
His history is wrong. OO won in large part for a good reason -- it was a way of implementing, if not enforcing, modularity. One that people accepted, unlike LISP.
related to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4246008
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Pyar ka tarana uphar ho
Khushiyo ka nazrana beshumar ho
Na rahe koi gam ka ehsas
Aisa navratra utsav is saal ho!
Happy Navratra!
Spelling problems are not necessarily due to a failure of the education system, they could also be caused by dysgraphia, dyslexia, or even just plain hangover.
Storing stuff? Isn't that what my hard disk is for? If I wanted a cloud solution, I'd just log into Google Docs directly.

I would have thought the whole point of an app like this is to take advantage of the benefits of native UI, not to add yet another point of failure.
I started reading this comment and immediately knew you were talking about Pattern Calculus. Awesome to see someone else interested in the idea.

I live a couple of blocks over from UTS and went to a programming language event there. I only found out about pattern calculus after talking to Barry Jay. Turns out UTS students have been working on an implementation, called Bondi:

http://bondi.it.uts.edu.au/

If you're interested in playing around, Eric Torreborre posted some of the UTS lab tutorials online and some of his solutions:

https://github.com/etorreborre/bondi-tutorial
Should we be considering coding 'kindness' into Artificial Intelligence?
LOL! Yeah! :D
Yes! I think the basic encryption has been cracked! So the hackers are finding it easy to get through!
Who else is going to rally against the people that view Wikipedia as their own personal Bonsai?
One plan I used in the UK and it worked well, was to send every new UK company formed the previous day a letter detailing what we could do for them. In the UK there about 100-300 companies formed everyday that are discoverable via the companies house website. Obviously this requires a small amount of capital to send the letters but it is minimal.
Incidentally I'm about done watching one of Rich Hickey's talks about complexity, the one called Simple Made Easy. Thanks for the recommendation; it has given a me a lot to think about. Are there more, or was that the one you were referring to originally?

"You may be right that your design for the representation of the book may be better than the typical naive OO representation, but there's nothing that forces an internal OO representation to be naive, or for an FP one to be sophisticated."

Well, there is, in that OO is inherently more complicated, in the most trivial sense; compare an idiomatic implementation of storing, incrementing, and displaying an integer in Java versus C. At a minimum, for Java, you're going to want an object. For C, you neither need nor want any such thing; a function or two and an integer are sufficient.

If the only thing that exists is a bag of data and code which pulls out that data, you have a much simpler system. I don't think this is controversial; an object is the same thing, in essence, except that due to language implementations and semantics, there are additional layers of complexity that are inherent and inextricable. Hickey goes on about this better than I could, although one of my favorite recent discoveries from C++ is the explicit keyword. The point is that with purity and referential transparency, it is far far easier to reason about you program. Pure functions are orthogonal, no?

I have heard of the Law of Demeter, but in practice, I'm not sure I see it obeyed that often if ever. APIs tend to return objects, or assume you'll chain method calls, or what have you. It's a fact of life, at least in my experience with Android development as well as vanilla Java. Maybe there's some subtlety that I'm missing out on? Otherwise it seems like a dud, if only because nobody wants to maintain those niggling chains of accessor calls.

I think that's really the crux of the issue: culturally, OO tends to value taxonomy in the form of object hierarchies; polymorphism; inheritance; and the like. All of that adds complexity. No, there's no reason why OO has to rely on mutable state and hierarchies. But the conventional wisdom about best practices is a powerful influence. You could compare theoretical implementations, but honestly, taking a look around would probably give you a better idea of how this theoretical scenario is likely to play out. That's the basis for comparison, here: Hickey is contrasting a simple approach with software development as it happens now, typically, not as it might or ought to happen.

Also, for what it's worth, I don't think encapsulation is irretrievably the province of OO. APIs are not a concept over which OO has exclusive ownership, right? The idea that you might want to sequester state goes hand in hand with concepts of purity and referential transparency. Or the idea that you should use a function which implements an algorithm as an entry-point to a data structure rather than muck about in it yourself (think of a heap).
All these years I wondered how internet famous people deal with trolls and immediately followed by - why do they even take the crap. Looking back at all the cringe-inducing comments on reddit, youtube, or even on HN... and the thought in my head was: "man, Im glad I dont have to listen to that". But wait! That's part of growing the community!!
I love my clickety-clack IBM Model M, and they'll take it away when they pry my cold, dead fingers from it.
It's great to see how such a fundamental change in how browsers and servers communicate can get rolled out so quickly! I would have guessed that this sort of thing would require many more years of effort than it did.

The author of the post, however, does seem to misunderstand SPDY's server push feature. He states that Facebook requires a substitute for long-polling for low-latency message delivery, and seems to think SPDY provides this. Unless I'm mistaken and there's some Javascript API available, server push is merely for cache-priming and reducing latency of requested objects alongside a regular pageload (eg, push the CSS and images along with an html page).
Bankruptcy is a laundromat for assets, it's pretty much impossible to get them back.
To me, the lesson here is clear: trust your instincts!

There are too many stories of founders who built a successful company and then let the "experts" run it into the ground. In almost every case, the founder(s) felt like something wasn't right, but they swept their concerns aside, because they had hired "experts" and felt compelled to listen to them.

The reality is that no one has more expertise in your company than you do, and more importantly (particularly in this case), no one cares as much as you do. So yes, surround yourself with experts and seek as much wisdom as you can from them, but (almost) never go against your gut to follow their advice. Your instincts are usually what got you to that point in the first place.
I feel for the Dragon founders, but with $580 million of L&H stock at one point, they also could have and should have done some prompt and serious hedging/collaring. Perhaps they did, but not nearly enough?
it is sick but true, sick but true
or bring kit, leave it in the bag/car pop out to a wifi connected cafe at lunchtime or in the evening after work? I was wondering that as well.

UK: Regulation of Investigative Powers Act and European Privacy Directive might need to be read carefully but I'm pretty sure e-mails of this nature would be private.
I'm not disputing that it was suicide. I'm pointing out that your claim as to why he committed suicide -- an "inability to deliver on the kickstarted campaign" -- is pure conjecture.
Note: I never said "current." 2nd and 3rd order goals are fine and sometimes require cleverness.
Was L&H public though?
PHP's is just... better. Whenever I want to find something, I just google "php" plus the vague description of what I want and it's almost always the first result. When I go to the page, the first thing I see is a very succinct description of the function followed by everything I could possibly need to use it correctly, most notably a simple example.

In python what happens? I google something simple like "python add on to list" and I'm greeted with... "5. Data Structures". I mean, maybe that's what I'm looking for. I google "python current time" and the first thing on the page is "This module provides various time-related functions" at which point I have to read each function definition one by one until I find the one I want.

When I'm in the docs it's because I want to know how to do something, and I want to learn how to do it in as little time as possible so I can get back to work. Playing find the function on a module page just doesn't stand up to the first result on a google search.
Aha! The C PoC could possibly work, but the JS translation is hilariously amateurish. The author doesn't appear to have actually understood the code they were translating at all, and I'm pretty certain that it's actually impossible to run from JS anyway.
Start building your consulting business or freelance presence on the side while you still have a steady stream of income. For example, by the time I left my full time job, I had:

- full time contract work for at least 6 months

- my LLC formed (US only, I think)

- my site built, setup w/analytics, a blog, Google webmaster tools, etc.

- my first set of business cards in hand (may not be that important to some people, but they came in handy for me)

- other misc. stuff (spoke to my CPA about taxes, researched sample contracts, looked into software I'd need, etc.)

Doing all that while still having income meant that I didn't have to trade billable time for those once I became a consultant. When you're running your own business, you'll always have to invest non-billable time, but those first 3/6/12 months are always the hardest, so do what you can to maximize billable hours and finding more clients or work, w/out overwhelming yourself.
The Invisible Power of a Bias