skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They get 1/10th the money that folks who own 10-20% get.

That's engineer math, but not financier math.

People at 10-20% are in the room when terms are decided upon, people with 1-2% are typically not. There are a variety of mechanisms by which 1-2% of an acquisition can, in a few failure modes, evaluate to nothing.

Here's one: You own 1% (by current dilution) of a company. This company has not done well. There exists a company which wants to buy it.

The co-founders collectively own 60%, with approximately 30% being owned by investors, and approximately 10% held in aggregate by employees. You watch the M&A team, VC partners, and founders walk into a room. Two hours later, they walk out, and everyone looks fairly happy. You overhear the VC say "$20 million."

You think you're getting $200k, right?

Would it surprise you the next day when you're given a contract to sign and told that you've been allocated a $10k signing bonus with the new company? And that this is, by the way, it?

How the heck did that happen? The VCs were a little displeased with their return, since this company did poorly, so they played hardball with your founders. The VCs got $10 million. (Check those percentages again. Yeah. I know.) This represented 100% of the purchase price, and as it didn't clear the VC's liquidation preference, the common stock is valueless. You and the founders hold common stock. For their participation in the deal, the founders were guaranteed 3x $3 million signing bonuses with the acquirer. This leaves $1 million to pay the lawyers, cover the accountancy costs, etc etc etc. But hey, because you're such a nice guy, despite your options being worthless they fought hard for you and convinced the acquirer to cut a check for three whole months of your old salary.

You would be, of course, free to decline this bonus. The door is on your left.

And, to be fair, you did better than another 1% owner of the company -- employee #1, who went on to greener pastures a year ago. His shares have vested. But he was "disloyal" and "didn't stick it through", so hey, no check for him at all.
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One thing to consider is that you are competing with the entire world. So average developers in the US will have trouble. Doesn't matter so much if you start at 30, matters more how good you are in comparison with younger (or older) men and women.
In other words, you dont know what a design patent or a dress patent is. gotcha...
Sometimes I feel like Hacker News stories are like mom's fridge to some here: everything gets two gold stars.
Then open source came along. Welcoming everybody to improve the code. But it seems like there some ego issues there too.
At a hotel where they are supposed to register for you it might take 2 minutes. But in my experience it takes anywhere from half a day to a week in smaller city. Half a day is the minimum because you get directed from one place to another and wait in lines. A week is how long it could take of you're missing anything they require such as a photo. Yes, it varies widely.
Yeah, I know what you mean. There's not much information about "electronics for software guys". Every resource I could find was "the other way around": Programming for electronics guys.

There were some promising videos on youtube but it all boiled down to: "Here's this simple circuit. <no explanation about the circuit> Now to the hard part: FOR loops. <30 minutes about for loops and basics of C syntax>".

I guess this would be a great topic for the pragprog-guys. If they'd commission such a book I'd buy a dozen copies ;)
"Open source life for a year"

scroll

Macbook.
At first, I wouldn't have thought that they would use encoding to maximize efficiency. But now that I think about it, their goal isn't efficiency but rather consistency. So yeah I was wrong.

Maybe I thought this was more primitive than what it really is :/
'login' is when called with --login flag (which login(1) does)

'interactive' is when called with -i flag (which sshd does when reached by ssh with no command passed, i.e if you do 'ssh ls' it should not call bashrc, but should call bash_profile)

The only thing needed is, in bash_profile:

[[ $- == *i* ]] && source ~/.bashrc

because bash does not load bashrc when it is both an interactive and a login shell.

There is no madness, everything is explained in TFMs (bash and zshall, which I coincidentally went through just yesterday)

FWIW here are my dotfiles, which are designed to relieve me of the true madness of the startup scripts: the thousand-line hairy mess (bonus included: mutualization between bash and zsh configs).

[0] https://github.com/lloeki/dotfiles
Facebook being Forcebook? 
Today, I woke up to the realization that my facebook page, which I have so much (so little actually) worked on to keep it timeline free.. is now forcefully converted to timeline, without my permission and notice.

When the new timeline style came, I liked it, but just because I liked it, didn't mean that I want it. So for months I have not upgraded to the timeline, and simply ignored the not-so spammy message, that bugs me to upgrade to it..

Now only when I was getting successful in fully ignoring it, this happened:

Today I logged in to find my facebook style made into timeline. Did anyone ask me? NO. Did I want it? NO. Can I do anything about it ? I doubt so.
Did it ruin my day ? YES!!!!
Thanks man ! fixed !
Fascinating! I've made this the daily poll question on Correlated (http://www.correlated.org). Let's see what other surprising correlations we can make from this!
I'm a vertical man myself. I turn the corn on its side so the cylindrical part is going up/down and bite downwards.

I do it so that the kernels come off cleanly and don't get stuck in your teeth (very similar to cutting them off). I wonder where that puts me?
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My Master's degree project was a webcrawler. If you're already reading this, the thesis[0] might be a somewhat entertaining read.

I had a bit different constraints (only hitting frontpage, cms/webserver/... fingerprinting, backend has to be able to do ad-hoc queries for site features), but it's nice to see that the process is always somewhat the same.

One of the most interesting things I experienced was, that link crawling works pretty ok for a certain amount of time, but after you have visited a large amount, bloom filters are pretty much the only way to protect against duplication in a memory efficient way.

I switched to a hybrid model where I do still check for links, but to limit the needed depth, I switched to using pinboard/twitter/reddit to find new domains. For bootstrapping you can get your hands on zonefiles from places on the internet (e.g. premiumdrops.com) that will keep you from having to crawl too deep pretty fast.

These days, I run on a combination of a worker approach with redis as a queue/cache and straight elasticsearch in the backend. I'm pretty happy with the easy scalability.

Web Crawlers are a great weekend project, they allow you to fiddle with evented architectures (github sample [1]), scaling a database and seeing the bottlenecks jump from place to place within your architecture. I can only recommend writing one :)

[0] http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2010/12/09/my-thesis-building-blo...
[1] https://github.com/rb2k/em-crawler-sample
Alone in the Zone
But it is not like you cannot do normal string processing using cmdlets like "Select-String". And an object missing a property is almost same a column missing in the returned text output right?
There may be less innovation in China - not because there are no protections but because they are still playing catch up to the developed world. It is a lot more effective to not reinvent the wheel if there are no need to reinvent it.

Innovation happens when you push the boundaries for what is possible - if you are nowhere near the boundaries then the fastest way to get there is to copy your neighbors map and use that to find the border. Creating protections will just make it harder for them to catch up and will make it take longer for them to get competitive innovation.
Is the quality of the tweets on a particular account not also a visible indicator of the 'goodness' of that account?
He should invest more time in writing, to make his posts bit shorter.
The Plan 9 approach is to avoid creating problems for yourself by not using spaces in file names to begin with. The file server initially disallowed spaces in file names just as nulls and slashes are disallowed. That restriction has since been relaxed,† but everyone still avoids spaces. If you cannot avoid files with spaces in their names, there exists trfs,†† a file system that transparently replaces spaces with something more convenient.

Instead of find, I run /bin/test on a list of files. For anything more complicated than what test can handle, I use Inferno's fs program.†††

† http://swtch.com/cgi-bin/plan9history.cgi?f=1999/0323/port/c...

†† http://a-30.net/inferno/man/4/trfs.html

††† http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/1/fs.html It has a misleading name. It is not a file server.
Can you elaborate a little more about it?

Thanks.
Perhaps, but consider what happens if something does go wrong with the water supply--this is not something that can be patched overnight.

A rail system is well and good, but you can at least take a car or bus if you need to. If your water infrastructure stops working, there aren't many other games in town.
Liberal vs. Conservative:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4365255

I agree with MaysonL.
In osener's reply to your comment, mark-multiple.el is mentioned; here is a talk from the developer that demonstrates using the feature many times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Te_a-AGqM
Oh sorry. I thought you didn't know how to achieve it, because I knew that I struggled a bit since I think the implementation is really cumbersome and I didn't expect it to be that way. My fault, sorry.
For the higher math involved:
http://count.ucsc.edu/~rmont/papers/cat.PDF

For the humor value:
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/87351
>>open hardware MIPS netbook made in China

More specificly, the Lemote Yeelong, which is not only made in China (like most hardware I guess), but also designed there.

It's neat enough if you can find one, with actually a pretty decent keyboard (for a netbook; rms uses a seperate keyboard with his).
I managed to crawl and store (in mongo) more than 300k movies from IMDB in just a few hours

Did you know that IMDB makes a subset of their data publicly available? http://www.imdb.com/interfaces/
Im not sure if the question but is it really forceful? Facebook, it's a free luxury not a right.

If it was a paid for service that didnt allow contract termination that would be unacceptable. But this is a free ride thats getting a bit bumpy
Just that codecs supported incremental operations and base64.b64encode did not. Handling HTTP transfer encoding in python 2 was a matter of two lines and worked on arbitrary stream data. In Python 3 that's now ~50 lines of code with different behavior for each transfer encoding and not all of them support stream processing or have the same interface.
I forked this file into a proper repo [1] and made some adjustments. Now the script does not spawn external processes any longer, making the shell lighter and faster to came up.

Enjoy. Patches are welcome.

[1] https://github.com/gioele/bashrc_dispatch
Nice! I didn't even know there was a problem, I'll definitely be trying this fix out soon!
Am I correct in thinking that instead of symlinking .bashrc, etc. to new_bashrc.sh, you could simply have them 'source new_bashrc.sh'? This would also mean you could keep all your dotfiles in a git repository without worrying about the symlinks.
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As a physics buff, I'm sure this is fascinating, but I just could not bring myself to watch the video - I love my cats too darn much, lol.
IOS Game Dev Open Source and Paid Frameworks
Show HN: Dictation
Like running crawlers what can be some other use cases where free inbound is a blessing?
Indeed! In your dealings with an agency, you might only have one designer working on your project. But (unless the agency is pretty bad) they should be getting input on their work from other designers (especially more senior designers in the firm). And if you really dislike their work, the possibility should exist that the agency will draft a different designer in.

Connecting users to a single freelancer isn't like being an agency. It is valuable, for sure - but agencies offer value in a different way.
I buy corn in a can and heat it quickly in a microwave.

Not the tastiest, but it's quick and it gets the job done.

And yes, I'm a PHP programmer.
What you need is "electronics engineering" not "electrical engineering". Electrical engineering means building things that can handle huge currents, not something you want to do with "zero experience". :)
Have you seen RecordStream? It's some good cli tools based on streams of json which might be handy.

https://github.com/benbernard/RecordStream

I've used it a lot and it's a godsend for a most "record-y" manipulation.
Great stuff!

Your Android app says "Double click an app to start."
I think it would be more fitting to read "Double tap" instead.
> I don't really understand what it means for physical items like shoes to be open source in the sense that some software is.

Tangentially related, but despite the article's definition of open source: "It's definitely not just software", it's a peeve of mine nonetheless to hear the term "open source" applied in non-software/programming contexts. Especially with some of the examples you've pointed out:

> He also claims he wants to be open source in "how I get around." What would it mean for walking to be open source or closed source? Is it "open source" to ride a bus?

Not sure if I'm alone on this.
This is great! I made a little tweak where you can change the locations of the scripts: https://gist.github.com/3323840

I set PREFIX to ~/Dropbox/rcfiles/, and the scripts will follow wherever I go :)
You might want to check out Flow by MetaLab. They have a really native iPhone client and quite desktop-y web interface.

http://www.getflow.com
IIRC he has a bot use wget then mail the page to him. He does this because it means that he will be able to read the page offline as he travels a lot.

If you want fully open browsing you can always use IceWeazel:

http://www.geticeweasel.org/
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BLHack:

Thanks - couple of thoughts here. You demonstrate good potential to disrupt some big companies with the coffee shop video. But you need a lot more momentum, so please hold off on coffee shop work until series A.

I would also have loved to share the render with my niece's dog, who's really crazy about the moon, but I couldn't find any social buttons. This takes precedence.

I'd like to introduce you to a social media director who would be a very good fit (cc). Please set up an interview.

Thanks,

Your board.
Yes, but it's hard to tell how complete and updated that subset is. There is (was until few weeks ago apparently) also http://www.imdbapi.com/ which was retrieving their data by crawling. Unfortunately, it was shut down.
This article identifies a secret weapon that startups have when competing with a large, established business.

I have worked as a programmer for (a) several large banks and (b) my own startup business: Nothing comes close to the level of care you feel to your users when you run your own business.

When a user gets a NullPointerException, I take personal responsibility and want to fix it as soon as possible. When a user emails me a question, I want to answer it well and as soon as possible. If the software looks ugly or is not intuitive, I get a strong urge to improve it.

They say that a good programmer can be 10 times as productive as an average programmer. Well it is also true that a good programmer can be 10 times as productive as him/herself - it depends on the environment.
A second visit to this thread got me thinking and I got curious about your reasons for offering cheap hosting for Africa.

I could only think of 2 reasons, either you are trying to do some good or you just a guy on hustle trying to build something successful.

As a web/software developer from Africa who spends lots of time working on the next facebook, I pay my bills from the revenues from my web hosting business.

By offering hosting for $1 per month you'll end up leaving a good number of African tech hustlers broke. When you think about what you're doing, there is no big difference between you and Franc Lucas.

I don't mean to judge your intentions and I totally understand you trying to make a buck(its actually a cool idea and am sure it'd sell) but I thought it'd be nice for you to know the impact you'd have on Africa.

#SmartHustle
Xkcd: All 786 known planets to scale
Your text might profit from a few breaks, it's somewhat hard to read without.
Good news: a first version of the Chrome/Chromium extension works!
If you’d like to try it out you have to install it yourself at the moment, it’s pretty easy though: https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76...
We now have a first version of the Chrome/Chromium extension working!
Feel free to install it and let us know what you think: https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76...
You're raising an interesting question that drifts to being off-topic but I'll post a reply anyway.

My point was that you can't attack a perception or an idea with rational tools made for splitting things to right and wrong. You can only either resonate with his idea or not. Those who do resonate, are able to explore the idea further. Those who apply the rational tools will obviously reach a rational conclusion but that per se still can't give them decision of whether they're in or out as for the idea. It's an idea of Yegge's and simply, it's out there. It's not right or wrong, it's just there for some people to maybe make something out of it.

When you ask if being right shouldn't matter, you're assuming quite a lot about what's right and wrong and what can be known about right or wrong. The world as we know it rarely works out with facts; the problem is that facts are only facts within some commonly agreed context, and they're only true and untrue within that context.

I don't know the origin or context of the text you quoted but the author seems to play with the idea of what can you know really. For example, how much of human history is factually 100% proven to be absolutely correct? If it's not absolutely, undeniably correct then it doesn't matter whether it's 95% correct or completely false; what's left is only what we decide to (collectively) think about it.

The history of the same event, such as a war, as described in two opposing nations can be very different—which one is correct? It's foolish to think there's only one and only description that is correct and even more foolish to think it must be the one which is "ours". The event affected both nations and how it hit them both is both correct. If we want to remove subjectiveness of the nations themselves and we assume there was a third, objective observer to that event, then his would be the third truth, not the one and only one.

So, to come back to Yegge's idea—or to just reduce it to the old static typing vs. dynamic typing divide—how can you determine which one is right? How can dynamic typing be more right than static typing? How can you determine whether liberalism vs. conservatism applied to programmers is right or wrong? You can only argue for a specific point, such as whether frowning at macros makes Clojure conservative or not, but you can't extrapolate from that to make a decision of whether Yegge is right or wrong. It will come down to whether it resonates with you, or "strikes a chord", or not. If it does, then you don't care about the details and if it doesn't, then you're just arguing for nothing since you're not into his idea anyway.
Heads up – we have a first version of the Chrome extension ready to try out: https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76...
A first version of the Chrome extension is ready to try out. Feel free to install it and let us know what you think! :) https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76...
I really like the idea and I hope you will release it for the iOS appstore as well.

Just a small detail: While sharing it on facebook I noticed that the sharing popup was cut off by the navigation frame and it was a bit hard to complete the message.
Aaand a first version of the Chrome plugin is done. Install and try it out: https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76...

PS: hey Ben!
Can you give examples of spam sites with more inbound linking domains per IP than wikipedia? Have you crawled this info yourself or is it from something like linkscape?

Google apparently solve this with a domain trust factor discounting link juice from low value domains for SERPs purposes but I'm not sure what they feed forward to control their bots.

This means that for some time it has appeared that large numbers of low quality inbound links has been a negative for Google SERP placement ... so I'm wondering if such [spam] domain owners are being as smart as you think??
I don't know how modern DDoS works, but couldn't Wikilieaks just start repeatedly broadcasting files over UDP streams. Like how it's done in Carl Sagan's Contact?
Something that seems easy to verify with a digital signature?
We now also have a first version of the Chrome extension ready to try out: https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76...

Let us know what you think!
You can find a lot of discussion on HN where people hitting frontpage for a few hours (or more) go into details on the number of visitors they had and other statistics.

Examples:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4230885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3933016

http://blog.elastic.io/post/22253468976/featured-on-hackerne...

Hope this helps
I mostly have a problem with the people for whom it CLEARLY was a bad decision and they continually try to insist that it was a good one when it clearly did not work out at all for them. Such unwillingness to think rationally about poor decisions only makes it all the more easy for these ridiculous tuition hikes and loan schemes to continue.

The reasonable people (like you seem to be) who have their regrets along with their debts have my sympathy. I hope that things manage to improve for you someday. :(
Check out NerdKits (http://www.nerdkits.com/)

It includes all the hardware to build a simple microcontroller kit, along with step by step assembly instructions. The best part is that the instructions also explain why you are doing what you are doing.
Very true indeed. I was also randomly changing user-agents (Mozilla, Safari, Chrome, IE). I thought that this will be harder to tell whether there is a lot of traffic from the same network or someone is just intensively crawling the site.

For me, it was more a proof of how efficient and fast a crawler can be.
Also, a response from IMDB was very fast in less than 0.4 seconds, so not that much time was lost there.
Considering the placebo effect (unless you think bioresonance therapy is true) cured me of several allergies, I'm pretty happy with how strong it is:)
For me it has been Farcebook all along, I want nothing to do with these phenomenons, all it generates is meritless gosip by extroverts.