skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi lmm,

The current startup is not a $100mil idea. I built it to generate CF to fund other projects which I'll probably have $100k surplus by Christmas. I plan to bootstrap the new idea until it is viable for VC money.

Giving up equity is the last thing you should do - this is the lesson I learned from many books by people who made over $100 mil+.

I guess my real question should be "Can I pay market rate and hire a development team + 1-2% equity for each member?" .
Copyrights are for the expression of ideas.

Patents are for the implementation of ideas.

Trademarks are for the names of ideas.

See the difference?
How 2 amateur sleuths looked for FinSpy
Facebook Improving Site Integrity Systems To Combat False Likes
Unfortunately part of the Jury selection process is lawyers filling it up with the least informed, most gullible people they can find.
Some tigers can jump 12 feet in the air:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080110-AP-ti...
The return of cheap e-books? Apple, e-book publishers bend in Europe, too
My previous employer knew I was going to quit long before I told them.

But then, the fact that I was sending out resumes was probably a huge hint. I started sending them when I was a little disgruntled. Eventually, they heaped crap on me until I got serious about it and found a new job.

Not once did they attempt to do anything to stop me, and asking them to pay me what I'm worth was met with, "Can you wait a year?" This, despite the fact that every review I ever got was great. Not just good, great. The only complaints I got was that I was too quick to answer questions literally. If someone asked if something was possible, I told them. They wanted me to read their minds and ask the question they should have asked, instead of the question they did.

I eventually learned to do that, even, though. I have to admit it made things smoother. But jeez was it a pain.
Are you offering? :)
http://wikiloopr.com/Gate%20City%20Bank
I think this one is bugged haha
I find this explanation overly complicated. For the general case a*x^2+bx+c, the easiest way is to try to reduce it to the form A^2-B^2 which has the easy factorisation (A+B)(A-B). So:

ax^2+bx+c
= a[x^2+(b/a)x+(c/a)]
= a[x^2+(b/a)x+(b/2a)^2-(b/2a)^2+c/a] (only adding and removing the same thing)
=a[(x+(b/2a))^2 - ((b^2/4a)-c/a)] (using (A+B)^2=A^2+B^2+2AB)

Call D the term (b^2/4a)-c/a, if D is positive we can take its square root, factor and have our two solutions.

I like more analytical solutions.
After the first few runs, i'm kinda surprised it's not a fixed point at Philosophy.
Nicely done. I love the step by step photos of the project.
Granted that this isn't science, it's less controversial than it may appear, because it doesn't identify a border between "conscious" and "unconscious."

Most people will grant consciousness to animals that pass the mirror test:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

But those same people would draw the "conscious" line somewhere above amoebas. That's a lot of territory, and a meaningful border can't be drawn without actually defining "consciousness", which no one seems willing to do.
IMO the verdict is the polar opposite of the verdict from Judge Alsup on Oracle v. Google.

One took it's time, the other rushed.
One made sound decisions based on evidence, the other was off the cuff.
One is clearly designed to be resistant to appeals, the other was in appeals before the first trial even finished.

I wish there was some way to incentivize the former instead of the latter.
I'm surprised they didn't boot him after finding out he had a patent to his name. That seems like it would obviously put you on the pro-patent-issuer side.
The best response would be to offer a reason for people to come back after they leave for a week or so.

The worst response would to offer a reason for people to leave for a week or so if they weren't going to already.

If the company basically offers an incentive for not logging in, word will get around very fast. Then players have an excuse for taking a break, that they are gaming the system to earn an incentive.

Penalizing players is ineffective too because you want to welcome back your wayward customers instead of starting to burn bridges ("I'm going to throw out your stuff! Okay, I'm putting it in the trash right now!")

So unfortunately, I think all a company can do is have emails and community managers get in touch. Of course, that encourages players to stop playing for a week whenever they want to escalate a customer service issue. It's like you can't win.

I discovered at Blizzard that guild features were enormously strategic. When players get into an active guild, especially with people they already know, it becomes hard to leave. The glue that keeps players put is social expectations.
I bet it won't fall that low. $4 would be valuing the company at about 10x their 2011 income of $1B, which is extremely low for a company expected to grow. I wouldn't expect to see a valuation under 20x, or about $7-8 per share. My guess is ~$10 per share is the floor on this one.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/02/01/facebooks-...
>There’s formulas for more complex systems (with x^3, x^4, or x^5 components) but they start to get a bit crazy.

This is just untrue! It can be proven that there's no general formula that can work for x^5 without just defining away the problem by introducing a solution to a polynomial not solvable by radicals.
For myself, I would broaden this and say that almost every link I visit on HN, or every forum post I read leads to more than 1 additional link. Thus three windows of Chrome open with 10+ tabs each :)

I find this drill-down effect to be quite illuminating, if not productive. Strangely, it seems to provide both depth and breadth of topics in relatively equal measures.
I actually think that you're both missing the point. Marius isn't arguing that every startup needs to change the world. He's arguing that if you're going to be making something, you should be making something new. I think pg touched on this in his post.

The problem is that most of the time, startups who say that they're inventing a new way really aren't. Look at all the Facebook-like attempts at social networks. Or all the Farmville clones in the social games space. The vast majority of those products are basically "me too" attempts that really haven't invented anything.

Marius' point isn't that people should assume that all the ways of doing (insert thing here) have been invented. His point is that if you're going to challenge an already established space, you need to actually invent something new.

Look at Paypal, Square and Stripe. All three, at a very high level, solve the same problem: They allow people to pay other people. But each one had a very unique pitch at the beginning: Paypal was the first to allow people to pay each other over the internet. Square, through a rather nifty little hardware dongle, allows people to take payments on their smartphones. Stripe provides a full API for developers to integrate into their products(and cut out the middleman of Paypal or Google Checkout).
"Cool" is a deliberately vague metric to get people to talk about what they like/don't like.

Your other questions are good and I certainly won't neglect them.
LIVE Endurance Swimmer Attempts First Solo Swim Around Lake Tahoe (68 miles)
Shared risk is often rougher than individual risk and leads to more conservative decisions (with exceptions of course, but shared sacrifice is a distinctly different beast.)
I think I beat it...
http://wikiloopr.com/Caterham%20CSR
They make life and death decisions in criminal cases. Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover?

Given the numbers of phones Samsung is selling the per device fine isn't that high. Compared to copyright infringement statutory damages in files sharing cases the amounts are tiny.

Edit to add:

Some fair points were made in replies about the complexity of the patent law compared with criminal/murder cases but the parent to this was commenting the scale of the damages decided rather than complexity and that was the focus of my comment.

Yes it is scary but I'm not sure I can think of less scary options for really serious criminal cases.
Sometimes the truth hits suddenly.
To be sure. But it is useful in this particular case, so why wouldn't we use it? Similarly, you can write every multiplication or natural numbers as a summation, but we don't because multiplication notation adequately handles the case where the term of summation doesn't change and is simpler to reason about. The motivation for summation is that sometimes we want to add up things where multiplication notation fails. Similarly, the motivation for factoring is that sometimes we run into an equation that we can't intuitively reason about. His explanation would be more persuasive to me with an example where simple inspection fails.

If the target audience for the article is people who understand factoring and are amused by thinking about it in different ways (the bit about systemic error was new to me and intriguing!), then I think it succeeds. If the target audience for the article is people who don't yet understand how to factor, but do understand why to factor, then I think it sort-of succeeds. There are probably people (the author is certainly one?) for whom his explanation will seem intuitive and compelling. If the target audience is people who neither know how to factor or why, then I think it's more problematic.

It's symptomatic of a rush to abstract and generalize that often leaves students wondering why the abstractions are more valuable than more intuitive reasoning. An example that requires factoring would speak to that motivation a bit better, I suspect.
For me it loops between Human and Reason.
Try this http://wikiloopr.com/kumbanad
That's a very interesting reality that you live in.
Startups can't pitch
Legally, that is like booting someone out of a jury case in an auto accident because they have a driver's license. You can simultaneously believe, as most of us do, that the software patent system is in dire need of reform while at the same time understanding that individual patent lawsuits aren't opportunities to relitigate patent law.
MAF [1] - 30. Though, it's a bit of a cheat since the first page is surely disambiguation.

I also found M62 Locomotive [2] at 26 to be interesting.

1: http://wikiloopr.com/MAF

2: http://wikiloopr.com/M62%20locomotive
I've seen a number of criticisms of the article. Some things need to be kept in mind.

Presently it is standard to introduce factoring before one knows how to graph polynomial functions. It is possible to argue that we teach this before factoring and I think a compelling case can be made for this but it isn't a standard practice. Anyone who thinks of using x-intercepts to explain this probably has had some College Algebra. The topic in the article is usually covered in Beginning Algebra.

References to the discriminant in criticizing the article are not appropriate. The discriminant is taught after teaching factoring.

The normal order of topics is

1. factoring
2. solving quadratic equations with factoring
3. proving the quadratic formula
4. solving general quadratic equations
Sigh. How do I answer this with new content?

Let's try this: throw out anything you may have heard about the company prior to 2012. Don't believe any of the marketing. It's all changed, and I'll let you figure out whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. You need current assessments of what it's really like. Then you have to determine whether to believe them.

Finding those assessments should not be particularly difficult, since something obvious has changed. It used to be that if you worked there and weren't one of the "blessed PR people", then you didn't talk about it. In fact, a lot of people wouldn't even mention they worked there. Now it seems like any post about the company brings out the Astroturfers. They all seem to be recent hires and so are probably still in the "honeymoon" phase where everything is sparkly and shiny and nothing could possibly be wrong.

You might also consider that others are quite simply stuck there, and are not going to jeopardize that relationship. Maybe they have one of the Valley's infamous sky-high mortgages, or perhaps they have one of those work visas which amount to legalized slavery keeping them bound to their current master.

Finally, ask yourself this: what are they actually doing as a company, and do you want to be a party to it? That is, assuming you care about such things.
It's not my work, but I was highly impressed with the build and the computer interface to the ignition timing.
Lol. I didn't see that until you mentioned it.

Reminds me of the Finder icons for PCs on your network.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=378638

Very passive agressive
Someone just changed the Reason page [1] which is now putting the focus on Biology instead of Philosophy.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&oldid=5...
That's radically inaccurate but I don't have the time to set you right.
ContextJS
I made this script and was hoping to share it with everyone. Hopefully you can find some use for it, cheers!
It's been modified since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_messaging...
sbahra is correct; at the very least, in release 6, the order of pointer and counter reading is incorrect. This was fixed a long time ago, but release 7 hasn't yet come out; I've added an entry to the known issues page in the wiki. The counter needs to be read first and not doing so permits ABA. The queue is MPMC and as such is much heavier than the memory-barrier-only SPSC circular buffer.
Niels Abel of abelian group fame (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Henrik_Abel) proved this for x^5.
Gain Productivity by Having Different Vim Settings for Every Project
And supply and demand is clearly in effect ... The fastest way to increase hiring and salaries would be to produce fewer graduates but this is directly at odds with the faculty in these departments goals.
I remember someone on reddit posting a python script that does the same thing (following the wiki chain to Philosophy).

Amusingly, my test got stuck in a loop between Science and Natural Science. :)
It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever
Proposal For Kickstarter:

Kickstart The US Patent System

<Donations Accepted>
That seems like a very reasonable assumption. I just randomly sampled a dozen or so articles and they all followed that theme.
Need Resume try: http://cvpro.info
If there is some characteristic Q that is true of all knowledge, then Q must be true of Q. A cycle!
Is Facebook really expected to grow that much? Even counting the 13% or so fake accounts, they have around 800 million active accounts.

That's a bit over 10% of the world's population. They can't really get the growth that's expected with their P/E, especially because of the difficulties that they're having with getting higher returns/user. They can't grow their userbase by that much either.
Periodic Table of Programming Languages
Tell HN: How to fail like an idiot
Hi HN!

Now, this is a story all about how my start-up never got flipped or "started-up" in any meaningful way.

Enough with all the success stories - let me share a gory tale of how to systematically fail at developing a concept into a real company.

First off, let me tell you a bit about the product I made. OpenPanels is its name, Consumer surveys were its game. In 2010 I came upon a gap in the market for Consumer Surveys; Only large corporations seemed to be utilizing real randomized and stratified, demographic Market Research as part of their product development cycle. Entrepreneurs were almost non-existent in as customers of Research Agencies, which was strange to me - wouldn't they find MR most useful?

The answer came when trying to buy Market Research myself. It is very expensive, and quite frankly a PITA to purchase. When it comes to getting Market Research through panel surveys, you are basically left with two choices:

* Ye Olde Guard: Nielsen et al.
- Have your survey questions ready, call their offices, wait 3-14 days just to get a price quote and a launch date. Pay through your nose, then wait some more.

* NewKidsOnTheBlock: AskYourTargetMarket et al.
- Horrible respondent quality, mainly due to dis-honest recruitment tactics ("Win an iPad! Oh and you also have to fill out this survey to enter the lottery"). But pricing at the right mark for entrepreneurs/start-ups.

(part I - cont. in comments)
Strangely, http://wikiloopr.com/Tacos takes you to a different loop than http://wikiloopr.com/Burritos
That implies to me, that Denisovians and Humans are distinct species, and can be told apart by some DNA testing.

You can tell apart almost any two groups of modern humans with DNA testing.

You can tell apart paternal twins with DNA testing, that doesn't make them two different species.

Are those sequences ever found in modern humans?

Yes.

Could they be?

Yes.

What would that human who had more Denisovian DNA than typical be called?

Well today Neanderthal DNA in humans can range from almost nothing to as much as if your great grand father was pure Neanderthal. What do we call either extreme? Human.
Send Favorite Tweets To OmniFocus’ Inbox
Techcrunch dropped from one of my favorite sites to one that I actively avoid more than a year ago due to a number of the shenanigans they've pulled. I make special exceptions if someone I know is covered there, but other than that I basically avoid the site like the plague.
Wonder if they will open source the code they built
I got stuck in a philosophy-argument loop instead of philosophy-reality ;)
A quote from the linked article: "Also, they would have a lower pitch than on Earth because Mars’s atmosphere mainly consists of carbon dioxide."

Please don't make stuff up. The efficient propagation of sound depends on atmospheric pressure, nothing else. A specific gas, compared to another, wouldn't change sound propagation efficiency as a function of wavelength.
I've already shared my existing compensation, and I'm not drastically underpaid. If their offer is not 15% better than what I'm making now, it will make me think they aren't that interested in hiring me.
In practice I think it comes down to whether you're trying to minimize risk or maximize reward. The former, conservative, strategy values past experience, since a known entity would seem to reduce the possibility of massive failure. The liberal strategy values future potential, thus attempting to optimize on likelihood of massive success, but simultaneously increasing the chance of massive failure.

If you want to make X, think of it as a machine, isolate the core parts and tools. Then hire candidates based on past deliverables and years experience with what you think's needed to make X.

If you want to disrupt X, hire people with a) ideas you subjectively find interesting, and b) valuable skills and knowledge which exceed your own with those tools/topics.

In my experience, as hiring groups grow, they become more conservative. What a company looks for in Engineer #1 is different than Engineer #1000. The more opinions involved, the more the group seems to decide based on risk rather than reward.
When the Price of Shedding Student Debt Is Hopelessness
What happens for Biology? http://wikiloopr.com/Biology. For me, it goes down until it gets to Biology, and then highlights Biology over and over.

Biology
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Proof (truth)
Argument
Philosophy
Problem
Doubt
Belief
Proposition
Logic
Reason
Human
Mammal
Class (biology)
Biological classification
Organism
Biology

The first link on the Wikipedia page for Biology is "Biology(disambiguation)", but the first textual link is "Natural Science". I assume it loops on Biology because it keeps going back between Biology (the article) and Biology (disambiguation), but that doesn't explain why the first redirect is to Natural Science in the very beginning.

Am I just missing something here?

Edit: This no longer happens. Now it properly loops on Philosophy and Proposition.
Hmm. Obviously you'll need to give your technical person control over technical choices, but I assume you're talking about overall business direction.

I don't think it's unreasonable for you to keep control (and at a technical/legal level you will as long as you have >50% of shares, right?), but you will need to be able to prove your own abilities to whoever you find - you're asking them to entrust a decent chunk of their career to your sole judgement. Particularly with your youth and business degree that's going to be a hard sell. I'd want to see plenty of evidence that you can steer a business in the right direction; that $30000/month is probably your best argument for this.

If you're treating this as a way to generate money for a new idea, what's your exit plan for the current one? It seems a bit odd to be insisting you need complete control over this if it's not even going to be your primary focus.

And of course, be very upfront about what you expect to have sole control over and what will be their responsibility.
If you have cable and a separate HBO subscription from your cable provider, you mean.

This is completely useless to people who do not want to be obligated to subsidize Disney, ESPN, Fox News, all the other channels I have zero interest in.
Microsoft is starting to listen.... Interesting turn of events!
Samsung Galaxy Camera: 16.3mp,Android 4.1,Network connectivity and more
(part II)

At that time, Cint AB (privately owned panel admin service. International scope, HQ in Stockholm, SE. www.cint.com), launched Cint Direct Sample (Today, Cint Link). CDS was an API providing programmatic access to their +5mio vetted(!) respondents in 42 countries. They would take care of re-imbursement and administration of all the respondents, quality-control of the panels in use (mainly making sure that no "professional" respondents were allowed to answer). My end of the of deal was to supply a survey tool and the customers of course.

/* Sidenote: Google has since my "launch", opened the doors to http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home. I consider this an affirmation of market viability for Openpanels or similar. */

Enter Openpanels.net. An unholy Frankenstein using WordPress as a CMS (Hacker gag reflex #1), and a heavily customized (also imposing the venerable "spaghetti-architecture" upon the code) fork of Limesurvey. I was the glorious Taskmaster, endlessly hiring and firing freelancers until I found someone that actually worked out. For you Hackers, this will seem crazy, but it cost me nearly USD10,000 and 9(!) months to get it running at the current state. But it worked. Just barely. But it worked (still does, technically speaking). And then I ran out of money.

The project was self-funded (read: under-funded) because my bloated sense of self-entitlement didn't allow me selling myself or my project to anybody else. So, when I ran out of money, I literally didn't know how to pay my upcoming rent.

(cont.)
I think that is a poor comparison. I think a better one would be booting someone out of a jury in an auto accident case if they work in/own an insurance agency.

The juror has something to gain with the legitimization and precedent that his jury will decide especially in such a high profile case. Diminishingly so for someone in an auto case.
Of course you don't. You are too busy writing the shiny new stuff.