skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
YC's stake is common stock. It was presumably somewhere between 2-7%, like is advertised for current YC companies, back then. I assume it got diluted a lot since then, as Dropbox has had multiple rounds of financing.

Dropbox is worth maybe $5b. I think YC's stake comes out to 1-2% after the rounds. So, off by an order of magnitude or so. Just based on published info about the distribution of YC companies and their value, it's probably more like $200mm total fund value. Given that money-in was say 300 x $20k, and maybe triple that to account for salaries and other overhead, say $20mm, it's a 10x return so far.

Which is pretty baller for a VC fund.

On the other hand, I suspect PG etc. could have created a single startup of their own worth >$300m x 2 (to account for dilution) and probably exited it, in the same amount of time.
The 'Hollywood Accounting' that goes on in these multinationals is quite spectacular. Moving cash around between their various subsidiaries and national companies in such a way as to pay the least possible tax and to make strategic losses where convenient, all the while announcing record profits.

I can see why you would try it on, the sums involved have to be huge, but it is fundamentally immoral to operate like that.
How to Take Notes Like an Alpha-Geek (Plus: My Dream Date Challenge)
I have a choice of buying an old, slow, 4 GB stick, or buying a fast new 32 GB stick.

I'm not going to use the extra capacity, but it's there so it might be useful some day. I am going to use the speed, and the price per X is usually better for the new drives. (Where X is speed or capacity or whatnot).

It'd be great if we could easily partition USB sticks. I'd keep some OSs on a few partitions and data on another.

I'm also interested in the file system used on these huge sticks, and the gentle frustration of moving between various OSs.
I read this as “Hiring is well 'ard” and thought Catherine Tate had found HN.

I started looking for my first hire a few months ago, and it hasn't been easy. But in that time I've come across plenty of people that don't have the skills or experience I require… they do however have a lot of motivation. I'm currently helping three people learn the fundamentals of web development, and every day I'm surprised at how fast they pick things up. In-house training is the way forward for me.
Risk I/O Lands $5.25 Million Series A Funding
Risk I/O has secured $5.25 Million in Series A Funding. The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners, with additional funding by Costanoa Capital, Hyde Park Angels and Tugboat Ventures.
Why are they so surprised? They've been kicking the pilot´s butts for years... "they are just drivers... my son plays better his gameboy... they don't deserve their salary..."
But then, what about having to pay more than $100.000 for a title that only grants you a $1000 pay job? What about not having a single leave day when your family does? What about being so stressed that you can barely sleep? and if you are not stressed, what about long haul flights, where your sleep turns are so disturbed that you can't sleep back the way you should? Or having to be always fit to pass the medical? Or being observed and recorded on your activity to make you liable when you don't act as a robot? Would any surgeon accept it? And many other things.
It is worth it for a while, but not forever.
Do they thing pilost love to go the other side of the world to work for a Gulf Airline? Or a chinese? Nope. But then the salaries make it worth.
When people loose their city connections, or when "inexplicable" accidents occur, then they will pay more for their tickets, and the balance will be back. Meanwhile, we still think that it makes sense "to pay more for the taxi to the airport than for an airline ticket to a town two hours away..."
We got what we deserve.
Others have addressed some other parts that are nonsense. I will tackle some gaps.

> Also new SDKs for ios break code in undocumented ways including in features that Apple provides(like the video controller).

You make this statement as though it is a widespread issue. But it isn't. You may have simple hit one bug. The fact is that you can still take an iOS 1.0 codebase, change the SDK to 6.0 recompile and be done. All of the newer features e.g. ARC are optional.

> The simulator can give wildly different output than the actual devices and each iteration of the ipad/iphone can give its own different output on the same code.

This is complete rubbish. Common sense suggests that if it gave wildly different output then nobody would be using it. But yet everybody does. And likewise if each iPhone executed code differently people would be buying up old iPhones in droves to test. But again they don't.

> However their software is really awful and basically only caters to consumers, and really unsophisticated ones at that.

You should be careful about who you call unsophisticated when you clearly don't even understand the fundamentals of the OS. Hint: it's Darwin not Linux. And I would say that much of their 'sophisticated' software has been pretty good e.g. Clang/LLVM, GCD, LaunchD, WebKit, OpenCL.
To add to Breakthrough's answer, the article states:

"The patients were repeatedly asked to imagine playing tennis or walking around their home. In healthy volunteers each produces a distinct pattern of activity, in the premotor cortex for the first task and the parahippocampal gyrus for the second. It allowed the researchers to put a series of yes or no questions to severely brain-injured patients. A minority were able to answer by using the power of thought."

So, I imagine they could say "To answer YES, imagine playing tennis. To answer NO, imagine walking around your home". Then they could ask yes/no questions and monitor the patterns of brain activity.
The problem the quoted blog post was having was trying to hire a unicorn (http://www.designstaff.org/articles/hiring-a-designer-2011-1...) – they want expert Javascript skills and design skills. They don't tend to happen in the same person, and so command a high price.
This is a very good point. I should have clarified that I mean to charge more for new accounts. If you are going to increase prices on existing accounts do it on a case-by-case basis.
Baraja: A Plugin for Spreading Items in a Card-Like Fashion
It's a tricky one.

As a product owner there are massive benefits to having Facebook accounts over your own login system. I don't like it either but being able to tap into friend networks & social activity streams is really useful:
http://blog.intercom.io/designing-for-viral-distribution/
http://blog.intercom.io/measuring-viral-distribution/

Spotify is the poster child of the sort of success that it brings, pretty much every interaction (play, fave, playlist etc) is streamed to FB constantly spreading the word about Spotify.

Not saying it's "cool" , just that it's a very sensible thing for a business owner to shoot for.

Des
I like to have beer and listen to music and write code productively, at the same time!
I think it's explicitlydrawing the reader's attention to the fact that the author is using the term in a way other than it's common meaning. To be pedantic I think the quotes are unnecessary grandstanding, if you believe in the term then just use it, but whatever.
Show HN: attract mode likes
The Dog Index: What man’s best friend tells us about global economic development
Apple Stores tops Tiffany's in sales per square foot, again
Aspartame linked with cancer in humans
It wasn't easy, I went through a lot of rejection before I finally found this job.
> fundamentally immoral to operate like that.

err. no it isn't.
taobao.com is like ebay, tmall.com is another branch, with certificated salers. There's no fulfillment like Amazon, everything is up to the buyer to choose.

The discounting began a month before Nov 11 where the price of the item is set as the ceiling, from the then price can only be made lower.
Frobenius Primality Test
Your own lightweight nameserver with DNSmasq
I don't want to hear the author crying about how bad tax avoidance is ... it's the tax laws that allow companies to behave that way in the first place. How about simplifying the tax code so it's neither profitable nor legal to manipulate the books.

I'm guessing the UK would love to have the 12% taxes that are currently paid to the Swiss ... There's an easy solution! Set the tax rate to something reasonable. Start a tax war and set your corporate tax rate to 11%. Eleven percent of everything is going to be way more money than 30% of a loss right? I live in the US and would love to see the same thing happen here as our tax code is atrocious.
Achievement Unlocked: Venture Funding
Risk I/O is excited to announce our latest round of funding and welcome our newest investors to the Risk I/O team: U.S. Venture Partners, Costanoa Capital, Tugboat Ventures, and Hyde Park Angels.
I'm not angry with companies that avoid tax legally. It's in their nature to maximise profits! Of course they'll do that if you give them the opportunity. I'm angry at our government for making it legal, by allowing loopholes and flawed laws to exist in the first place.
Transferring, for instance, the steamapps directory between machines is an utter pain over anything other than a very fast network. It's not that I want to store big stuff there, it's that I want a fast conduit.
They're feasible, but a lot less interesting if you're not taking advantage of multiple cores.
It's not fundamentally immoral; it's more of a tragedy of the commons.

All these loopholes are perfectly legal and companies actually need to exploit them to remain competitive.If they didn't then any competitor could decide to do this and could earn 30% less and still make a bigger profit.

It would of course have been great if the representatives had been self-aware enough to agree that they might not be taxed effectively in a global market and that they would be willing to co-operate with aligning global tax incentives in a way that leaves it a level playing field for all competitors; but that's probably a bit much to ask ;)
Update: the correct link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_the_People%27...

The single quotation mark is filtered by HN comment system
Fisker Karma, you say - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnYuO0bGSTc
Do Not Disturb will be default let calls from your Favourites through first-time, only calls from other numbers will be silenced the first time.
Google checkout/wallet is possibly the worst product Google ever made (excluding products that were eventually killed). If you've ever used it as a seller you've probably come across multiple issues that are never solved despite many people desperately trying to contact google (mostly failing to contact any human being, let alone one that would forward issues to developers) about them. It's no surprise it couldn't handle shit. The team left Google a few months ago too (there were some stories here about it I think).
Great post! Lots of interesting points, but I disagree with:

"You need to pick a large market if you want to raise venture capital investment. A business that makes £10m profit per year may look great to you, but it's small fry for a VC."

If one is making 10MM a profit a year, the company is clearly worth >= 10X the amount. I am no VC, but I would assume most VCs would be drooling over investing in such a company.
It is a remarkable idea how far an IDE can go; I wonder if an emacs poetry mode would do the same job.
Not everywhere you have Internet connections powerful and reliable enough to stream video in tolerable quality, not to mention the availability of services in different countries. Massive sticks are handy for things like coming over to a girlfriend with a movie to watch, etc.
I think there is hope for this whole mobile and tablet future if, and only if, it will be possible to plug your phone/tablet into something that has a keyboard, mouse and two large monitors on your desk to work on that (and then take it elsewhere and do the same there). On top of that, optionally the device needs allow you to install and run any software you want without restrictions, and basically have unix shells and desktop UI when plugged in the stuff mentioned above. Of course, also, the CPUs and RAM need to be on-par with current desktops, but it's kind of realistic that this can happen, and the actual desktop box could be reserved for things that require some extra computing power.
I usually have one with every file I own. I don't watch video or listen to music, so thumb drives are plenty large enough for that. Any source code is all in off site source control too, of course.

The rest I keep around are just for file transfers. Although even those have many GB on them because I keep a full Android development setup ready to go to help out at hackathons.
brilliant, one blog post not to have comments on if ever there was.
4.1 has built in call blocking, including the ability to turn it on and off at certain times of day etc.
The Nexus is super attractive, except for the glaring lack of LTE. I'm currently on a SIII rooted with AOKP Jelly Bean ROM and I'm loving it. I can't believe how fast it is, not to mentioned the high level of customization available. The Samsung ROM was just too bloated and felt sluggish. Jelly Bean has definitely won me over!
It is in my moral code - Availing yourself of a market and using the facilities and workforce of the UK, without chipping in your fair share (as decided by the people of that country). Sounds immoral to me.
Manage your AppFog data from your workstation – AppFog Blog
Almost certainly. You'd need a marketing gimmick to let people know that this drive is optimised for speed. You'd need to let people know that this is easier than eSata or whatnot (and more available) and what they can expect over USB 3 and USB 2.

Add in some foolproof encryption and you've increased your market to anyone working in healthcare.
Sometimes quotes are sent yes, but not the rest of the article. Usually the quotes are not off but the facts of the actual story.
The new Samsung Chromebook. Thin, light, portable. For $249
Whether it's a tragedy of the commons or not is orthogonal (IMHO) to a question of morality. Same with legality.

I don't disagree with what you're saying otherwise.
I'm streaming Netflix on my Android tablet. Not quite sure what you mean.
"Fundamentally immoral"

In the US a corporation's legal responsibilities are to it's shareholders ... it might be fundamentally immoral but it would be unethical to operate the company against the interests of the shareholders too.

It's the laws that need to be changed rather than blaming the companies for being good at accounting.
A post about user identity that is thought provoking, or just utter bullshit.
New Arrested Development coming soon too.
The problem is google wallet/checkout, it's a joke. Worst payment processor ever.
You'd have thought for all that effort they could have made some decent coffee.
Being persuaded in another discussion on HN, that chromebooks should not aim to be for developers, now I read the complaints that Apple does not target developers neither. I am curious, how is the situation with Win 8? What is the future machines for developers?
The thing is that to address this tax strategies would need to be aligned on a global scale.

Accounting like this is very much like (grey-hat?) hacking; you have a very large and complicated system and you simply need to find the weakest spot.

Defending against that can't really be done when you only have control over a single component of that system.
The question of immorality is irrelevant unless it is also illegal. It is the government's fault for putting so many loopholes in the tax code. They knew exactly what they were doing when they put them there, and have just as much culpability as Amazon, Google, and Starbucks.
Surface RT Display Technology Shoot-Out
Yep. Also, a lot of kernel code originates from Mach via NeXTStep. Some parts of the userland are from NetBSD as well.

It's really a mixture of Mach, FreeBSD, NetBSD, GNU and Apple's own additions and modifications. So, the I guess the only proper names for this beast are XNU and Darwin.
Netflix only functions on desktop operating systems with Silverlight, a Microsoft plugin for some browsers that only is supported on modern OS X versions and Windows. Additionally, there is a native Android and iOS version. People who want to watch it on Linux, are forced to something extremely impractical like emulate Android - it is a closed system.
I'm not sure the law cares about morals.

I do think though, that US law dictates that they must work for shareholder value.

It's hard to see how we wouldn't end up here if they aren't actually breaking any laws on their way to this destination.
It's an interesting conflict, and clearly they do have a duty to investors to maximise their profit. If it was a privately owned company it might be more clear cut.

Absolutely agree the laws need to be changed. I, personally, would be looking to stop the 'convenient' reporting of losses in markets that are actually highly profitable but not tax efficient. There's an interesting comment on the Starbucks press release that coves it quite nicely -

"How can Starbucks tell Companies House and HMRC that its UK business is loss-making but tell analysts in SEC-regulated calls that the UK business is profit-making, without either making misleading financial statements or filing false accounts?"
These big corporations are playing divide et impera with European countries. It's very easy when each country has veto power on any important choice in the EU.
Galaxy Nexus And Nexus 7 Can Manually Update To Android 4.2 Jelly Bean Now
I love Netflix ... with the brief exception of splitting shipping and streaming accounts, they've shown a corporate culture of innovation and still kept things "fun". It's rare that a big company embraces openness this way.

Thank you Netflix
Oh yes, lets race to the bottom! That always turns out well!
That would mean encouraging, in the long term, offloading more taxes to people rather than corporations.

It makes sense to try enforcement instead.
Any idea what they would be testing for exactly? What behavior would they expect to be different in entangled photons at that distance?
I'm pro-European, but I would argue that pulling out of Europe to force accounting for UK sales to occur in the UK legal domain might be a very good start.

At least this way each country would be incentivised to enforce tax locally in a controllable and predictable way. And I'm sure that whilst some companies might wish to pull out, most would stay.

a profit is a profit, it may be less than before but if you're still creating profit you wouldn't give it up.
There is no sense in frantically racing to charge as little tax as possible. That is not a viable solution unless you really want to see what budget cuts look like.
IOS6 AutoLayout backport to iOS5
I think the hypothesis described here is pretty much refuted by the work of William Sethares (http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/), who finds that severely non-harmonic intervals can sound just fine when played with (synthetic) instruments whose overtones are suitably non-harmonic, and that using such instruments can make nice harmonic intervals sound just as nasty as severely non-harmonic ones do on conventional instruments with harmonic spectra.

There's a slightly convincing example at http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/mp3s/challoct.mp3 -- what you hear there is two successive sequences of (note A, note B, chord A+B) where B is an octave above A in the first case and about 1.07 octaves -- an octave and 0.8 of a semitone -- in the second. The instrument has a weird spectrum that makes the second A+B sound better than the first -- but it's weird enough that, to me at least, even the individual notes sound really odd.

A better example: http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/%7Esethares/mp3s/tenfingersX.mp... is a piece in "10-tone equal temperament", in which notoriously almost all chords sound dreadful with normal instruments. http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/mp3s/Ten_Fingers.mp3 is the exact same notes, but played on an instrument with a spectrum designed not to sound horrible in 10-tet.
The 10 Steps to a Startup Marketing Strategy
Well, the Mac was the "Computer for the rest of us", so I am not sure how this is news: developers were never the target market.

IIRC, the original Mac also needed a Lisa for development with the MPW (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/macintosh/programming-faq/#b).

So things have actually improved tremendously since then, with free and improving dev tools, open-source Unix underpinnings etc. The end of the world will be postponed...
And a right way up relative to the floor/table so that big devices can be tall not wide.
Imation Ironkey are supposed to be "indestructable". Expensive, and with some questionable marketing.

There are others - Corsair survivor is one.

It's a good point. There've been a number of important data privacy breaches because of lost USB sticks.
Sorry if I gave offence. We seem to be agreeing now anyway.
Apple's target market always was the uninformed and unskilled untrained masses, including many so-called developers who are clueless enough to prefer OSX to linux.
I think it would be a race to some balancing point rather than a race to the bottom. Why shouldn't governments maximize their tax incomes in the same way companies maximize their profits? I think here that balancing point becomes the maximum taxes gathered when weighed against competing tax bases.

And the bottom has been reached if the profits are being parked in Bermuda ... that's an effective tax rate of 0% for the company and an effective income of 0 for the government too.
It's not just developers. It's PRO users of any kind. Graphic designers and video professionals haven't been catered to as well. Heck, we're still waiting for a new Mac workhorse that's not an iMac or laptop. Video editors have been duped by the new iOS like Final Cut Pro that was not backwards compatible.
I'm sure if the UK precisely defined what they mean by "fair share", and enforced their own laws regarding companies paying their "fair share", these companies would pay it. Or leave and do business elsewhere. Trying to do business without paying the legally required tax would be illegal, and immoral in your system, but not immoral in any system that views forms of income taxes as evil. (There are a lot of those around.)
I think it is wrong to simplify it in this way. It isn't just a question of a country's tax code and tax rates or corporation tax piracy, but a combination of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Dutch_...

(That said, I'd love to see the world's longest tax code, the UK's, simplified).

A multinational's access to resources and ability to exploit tax systems internationally is at the least unfair to smaller national businesses, and you could say to nations as a whole. Either we need to admit that corporation tax is dead and we need to tax end points like transactions or consumers, or we need to admit that unilateral taxation is dead and we need to collaborate internationally.

Centuries old thinking about business and tax does not apply in globalised business - and that includes your own, which would just provide a race to the bottom and would achieve little.
"An SSD..." / "A solid-state drive"
Tax laws are needlessly complicated almost everywhere (the UK being a particularly horrid example). That's part of the reason loopholes are so easy to find.
It's weird how with all the adulation over the GSIII, no one dings the screen. The quality hit is pretty noticeable in an AT&T store. I wandered back and forth from iPhone, Lumia, etc, and had also checked out the RAZR HD earlier that day -- which has the same subpar sparkle-grains display.

This is one of the cynical things that makes me wonder if sites ever actually have time to review new devices. Their "one job" should be to see through the marketing-speak ("Super AMOLED", "IPS", "retina display") and tell us what A) looks better, and B) uses less power at a given nits.

I've had an iPhone 4 for 2 years now, and can't really stomach going to one of those poorer screens. The Optimus G is beautiful, and that's why I'm going to snag a Nexus.