skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting post but my position is that new companies should be matching the estimated risk of their business with the risk appetite of the investors during the first “party round”. They should not be planning for failure by taking an unnecessarily low valuation with higher odds of reinvestment upon failure.

Assuming that NewCo is basing their 12 month cash burn-rate on some production milestone or profit goal, when it comes to an additional round the company should be saying "Hey, we met % of our planned goals (production/break-even) and we need additional financing". Instead, NewCo needs more cash for "X or Y to happen” because I am assuming they did not meet their planned % of goals. Ie. They are failing. Of course, executing a business plan is difficult and really never pans out as expected but NewCo should always be prepared to justify reinvestment based on (A) current position in relation to the Seed/VC pitched plan and (B) explanations for deviations from the plan.

The investor can "protect" or "defend" when NewCo becomes a going concern. ie. The investor can sink additional funds without promise of the previously estimated returns. But as you said, the investors are rightfully reluctant. In this I do not think that it is always correct to initially take a lower valuation because that specific investor has more disposable capital and is more willing to take a gamble on you. In the end, the risk/reward/financing calculation is all the same in terms of shares lost and cash received. The only difference is it will require greater effort to raise capital when you are not meeting your goals. If deep down you know the pitched plan is unrealistic that is a separate problem in and of itself and is often made worse by the need to impress investors.

High-risk appetite investors are generally more hands-on as opposed to portfolio investors, so in some respects seeing this as a benefit can be a fallacy. It depends on the investor’s direct contributions in terms of knowledge capital and network. If the investor is overstating their value-added, the investor is really just trying to make sure they hit their homerun.

TLDR:
Match the risk of your endeavor with the risk appetite of investors. This is difficult because it involves taking a more realistic approach when planning your goals and pitching your plan. Don’t take a super low valuation so your investor is willing to blindly reinvest. Always be prepared to justify reinvestment, even if you are not meeting goals
Loving it. This is really easy and accessible stuff, and uses real world data and questions early on in the process. Perfect way to get people experience the subject and bring a bit more fun and inspiration to a otherwise not that exciting area.
Programming's Walled Gardens
To those confused about how Snapchat uses the Facebook API:

At least for iOS, Snapchat (used to?) have a feature where you can "find friends via Facebook." Taking a closer look at the latest version now though, it appears this feature has gone away and the only way to add friends on Snapchat is through your contacts list or directly by username.

I believe the OP is implying that calls to the Facebook API (even those as trivial as fetching friends) gives Facebook valuable data that it can analyze and exploit for their own gain.
Why not? Scraping is part of the data acquisition and cleanup process. You need to do it unless you're working with Bloomberg terminals or Census data.
(disclaimer: I work on the Dart team)

Good question!

The language does not anticipate backwards breaking changes (modulo any bugs we find in the spec), though we expect to add features like mixins.

The libraries are going through changes now, especially with the introduction of the new Streams API: http://news.dartlang.org/2012/11/introducing-new-streams-api...

The time is good to check out Dart and let us know what features you need for your next commercial project. However, with the libraries evolving right now, I probably wouldn't use Dart for something I need to ship in Q1 of 2013.

We love feedback, and there are a ton of features what work today (package manager, compiler to JavaScript, editor, etc) so we hope to hear from you soon :)
I don't have any output. No url is returned. :( Idea sound pretty cool, I'd use it.
if the producers decided to upload this on a torrent, then they should not call me a pirate because I download it.
how does the alias work? Are you routing the data from the shell to a certain api end point?
Coding with Notch (from Minecraft: The Story of Mojang)
I've been looking for an alternative to Raspberry Pi for a project. Perhaps someone on HN can suggest a solution. Here's what I need:

- Run minimal embedded Linux (LAMP)
- No graphics/GUI required
- Ethernet connector
- Power connector for wall-mounted adapter (P5 or something like that)
- Serial port header for debugging
- Second serial port for other I/O
- Maybe a couple of LED's or an 8 bit port available for status LEDs
- SD card for OS (just like R-Pi)
- No other peripherals or I/O needed
- Low cost (ideally $25 or less)

Barring a pre-existing board, any suggestions for a low-cost processor to design a board around that could run a bare-bones LAMP setup? A lot of what I see out there (like the i.MX233) have built-in peripherals such as LCD and touch-screen controllers that would be overkill for this project.
The 12 Months of Software [A 2012 summary]
Just curious, why is this hosted on Github instead of on a self-hosted Gitlab instance?
From: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

"In general, Gmail supports the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis."

I interpret this as IE10 and IE9, at least for Gmail.
Verona – One of the Most Beautiful Cities in Italy
The first potato chips were meant as an insult
Air Force $1 Billion Software Blunder [Part 2]
Jobs saying that was just sour grapes because he couldn't buy it.

Dropbox is invaluable for me. I've tried to move away but there is nothing out there that's even close.
The alias employs curl to send data to the server hosted at datafart.com. The parameter @- supplied to curl means, send the data on stdin as the body of the request. So the user, via the alias, sending data to the server where it is processed, and the curl response is a URL to the temporary location of a viewable plot.
Oh i actually make scrapy do that to. Do you use the scrapy crawl with -o and -t json options? I did not know spinx can index json files etc. Any reason why sphinx was chosen rather than an alternative? Thanks for the info.
Exactly. Other than the tight-knit tech circle referred by sites like TechCrunch, who in the "world" reads Quora?

It's an extremely niche site that has walled off all its content. Contrast that with Wikipedia, an extremely open site dedicated to sharing and growing the world's knowledge.

Quora will be gone as soon as the money runs out.
12 Sources Of Outstanding Mobile Design Inspiration
Trying to build a largish software project without tooling for Pull Requests seems almost foolish.
Developer CEO thinking = "How do I make this work?"

Sales CEO thinking = "How do I get his money?"

For many tech people, the product is the goal - getting some techie thing going. The other things (like: funding, getting some type of customer) are just tasks that have to be done but they don't really know or care about. Between them, the tech people are quite open (as the tech culture is based on Internet and open source) so any kind of question is fine - and when they find somebody that knows how to do the "other tasks" they try to get into details, as they don't have them.

For many sales people, the customer is the goal - attracting the customer to get his money. The other things (like: product/tech) are just tasks that have to be done but are done by someone else. Usually sales people are not talking shop (customers) between them, even if they work at the same company, so every time you ask them something they immediately wonder why did you ask that question, what is your hidden purpose and how they can benefit from it.
My guess: discoverability. Also, Gitlab is for self-hosted Git repos--probably aimed mostly at private projects, not open source. Gitlab itself is open source, so it seems logical to put it on the site that contains the largest gallery of open source projects in the world.
(disclaimer, I work on the Dart team)

Thanks for the question!

We released Dart as a Technology Preview last year, which means we released very early in the project's life cycle. We've been collecting feedback and updating/refactoring the language, libraries, and tools. We've recently started releasing Milestone builds, which are essentially beta builds of the SDK and tools. The language does not anticipate backward breaking changes (but we still anticipate adding features like mixins). The libraries are currently undergoing changes, driven by feedback from the community and internal users.

The question if you should use Dart now depends on when you need to ship your projects. Too much will be changing to bet on it to ship your project in Q1 2013. However, my impression is that if you're shipping in Q2 or after, Dart should be a good bet.

The Dart community and team is standing by to help if you have any questions or concerns. You can find us at misc@dartlang.org, dartbug.com, and Stack Overflow.
It amazes me too. I hardly view Dropbox as a stalwart company. But good on them for hitting the jackpot in the short term.

Amazon AWS, upon which Dropbox relies, is open to all, not just Dropbox. Even Xen, upon which Amazon relies, is open to all, not just Amazon. Things are still very primitive and there's ample room, and plenty of motivation (e.g. data privacy), for experimentation.

Besides prgmr, who else is offering Xen-based "cloud" (=hosting)? Are there a wealth of Xen-based alternatives (that could support "Dropbox" like functionality)?
Strive for understanding, not for grades
I'm confused. I can't hit the link because I'm in the UK.

They may have uploaded it to piratebay (would have happened anyway), but are they giving carte blance to download it however you like?

For example, since pirate bay is blocked here is it legal for me to search other torrent sites and download it from there?
Functions in Redis Scripting
Pudding Monsters: The New App from the Creators of Cut the Rope
I'm pretty sure that entropy is pretty much the only sane definition you could give of "amount of randomness".
I disagree. I have 16 years' experience programming in C++ (and substantial experience in other languages before that), and I find that an important factor in code clarity is not writing stuff like this.

Yes, you can understand it, but it takes more brainpower to do so than it should, especially once you get beyond trivial cases. It is much better just to write it the long way.
Greetings Pirate Bay!

This is 2 Player Productions here, and we hoped we could be the first
to upload our new movie "Minecraft: The Story of Mojang". We've
never uploaded a torrent before so hopefully this isn't all screwed
up.

We wanted to come here first because we knew the movie would end up
here eventually, and the best thing to do seemed to be opening a
dialogue. Torrents and piracy are a way of life and it probably won't
be going anywhere anytime soon. There are many people that want to
punish you for that, but we have a more realistic outlook on things.

We've been there. We've all needed to do it at some point. Maybe you
don't have the money. Maybe you want to try before you buy. Maybe
you're pissed at us for premiering the movie on Xbox Live. These are
all fine reasons. But if you feel that piracy is, in Gabe Newell's
words, "a service problem," please consider that we are selling DRM
free digital downloads that you can watch in whatever manner you
please.

We're just three guys trying to make a living doing what we love. We
love the world of video games, and we love making it real. If you
buy the movie, you support those efforts. The reason we Kickstarted
this movie in the first place was that we didn't have enough money to
make it ourselves, and even then, we still put A LOT of our own money
into it. Not to mention nearly two years of work.

Watch the movie. Hopefully you'll like it, and understand what we're
trying to do. Please consider supporting us by buying the $8 DRM-free
digital download of the movie at www.theminecraftmovie.com, or the
$20 DVD from fangamer.net.

We've worked with a lot of amazing people in the games industry and
had the incredible fortune to make some great films the way we wanted
to make them. Please consider helping us continue on this path. The
best has yet to come.

-2pp

The Piratebay is just a directory of magnet links, they only shared the magnet link on the Piratebay.
>Who considers these people 'the very best'?

It's the mentality of the financial sector: If you spend the most money, you are going to get the very best. If you earn the most money, you are the best. They assume that because they pay more than anybody else, they obviously must have the best talent. It's probably unfathomable to a lot of these people that there are motivations for developers other than financial ones.
Agreed, but by definition BDFL is FL - For Life.
https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/1085

The authors use Github because they want to make it easier for people to contribute to Gitlab.
Description for those who can't access the URL:

Greetings Pirate Bay!

This is 2 Player Productions here, and we hoped we could be the first to
upload our new movie "Minecraft: The Story of Mojang". We've never uploaded
a torrent before so hopefully this isn't all screwed up.

We wanted to come here first because we knew the movie would end up here
eventually, and the best thing to do seemed to be opening a dialogue.
Torrents and piracy are a way of life and it probably won't be going
anywhere anytime soon. There are many people that want to punish you for
that, but we have a more realistic outlook on things.

We've been there. We've all needed to do it at some point. Maybe you don't
have the money. Maybe you want to try before you buy. Maybe you're pissed
at us for premiering the movie on Xbox Live. These are all fine reasons.
But if you feel that piracy is, in Gabe Newell's words, "a service problem,"
please consider that we are selling DRM free digital downloads that you can
watch in whatever manner you please.

We're just three guys trying to make a living doing what we love. We love
the world of video games, and we love making it real. If you buy the movie,
you support those efforts. The reason we Kickstarted this movie in the
first place was that we didn't have enough money to make it ourselves, and
even then, we still put A LOT of our own money into it. Not to mention
nearly two years of work.

Watch the movie. Hopefully you'll like it, and understand what we're trying
to do. Please consider supporting us by buying the $8 DRM-free digital
download of the movie at www.theminecraftmovie.com, or the $20 DVD from
www.fangamer.net.

We've worked with a lot of amazing people in the games industry and had the
incredible fortune to make some great films the way we wanted to make them.
Please consider helping us continue on this path. The best has yet to come.

-2pp
Doesn't really clarify the legal situation. If they are offering the product for free then it isn't "piracy" to download it.

If on the other hand they are sharing the file (seeding it themselves?) and then intend on persuing people who download it then that is a pretty shitty trick.
That's fair. It'd be interesting to examine your perspective viz Milgram with regard to non-American military groups.
most people I know use the app folder function
We just moved over to Gitlab from just pure gitolite and it is such a great tool. Certain things like opening and assigning issues, wiki pages, merge requests, all on our private servers are amazing. I highly suggest running Gitlab on your servers if you're not comfortable with github or would rather have things on your own servers.
Better weapons mean more civilian deaths.

Counterintuitively, this isn't true. Suppose you need to take out a bridge. Are you more likely to kill civilians with a PGM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision-guided_munition) or with a dumb bomb?

Improvements in accuracy reduce civilian deaths.

Improvements in effectiveness reduce deaths, too. For example, suppose you want to destroy a country's air-defense system. Which is the costlier way--in terms of loss of life--to do it: a conventional air engagement, shooting fighters and pilots in the air, and attacking missile defenses directly with bombers (and losing some)? Or evading defenses with a stealth bomber?

Better weapons enable you to do what you want to do. When what you want to do is eliminate leaders or destroy infrastructure, that's a good thing, from a humane perspective.
That is just wonderful :)
A neat utility. The short-lived nature of the graphs doesn't bother me at all.

But with that name I couldn't even recommend it to a number of people I can think of in my professional circle.
If GNU BDFL is not supported by the community, and he wields his power unwisely, then maybe it is time for a fork - GNOME?
It will be nice to ditch openjdk. It's a massive install just to get the reliability of the "official" AWS command line functions.

Would be nice to ditch Python too. Imagine if netcat and a basic UNIX userland were all that's needed.

But, beggars can't be choosers.
Hope you don't mind the plug, but I've been working on a Minecraft-inspired real-time cooperative game-making platform geared towards gamers (both young and older) and I think you might find it to be a great place to have fun with your kid, learning programming (Lua) and making actual games together, if you want to take it further. It's called CraftStudio and you can get it at: http://craftstud.io/

It's still in alpha (I've been releasing updates every few weeks for a bit over a year) but it's already capable of some very cool things. Videos of some games & creations made with it: http://www.youtube.com/user/craftstudiodev/videos?flow=grid&...

Alternatively I know there are some great Minecraft mods like ComputerCraft (also Lua-based) which allow doing programmy stuff directly within Minecraft if you're so inclined.
I really like the elephant and gazelle argument. I am a huge emacs proponent and I love using it, but I feel like it need to be forked and gutted. The whole beauty of an extensible editor is that extensions should be optional. Including more shit each release is not justifiable.
Assuming you're a developer......Pick a Y Combinator company that has gotten to the point where they are hiring sales people (ie probably 18 months + old) PG has a mantra that you should hire engineers/developers to do a lot (all?) tasks - non engineering ones. I think you'll therefore find companies with a pre-disposed culture to hiring developers into sales roles.

If you do this try and ensure that your boss or at least whomever runs sales overall does have a strong selling background. Like any discipline you'll want a great mentor - especially at your first gig. The recommendation to start as an SE is also a great idea.
Kind of old.
The UI looks completely different now.
I agree wholeheartedly, as Eben Moglen succintly put it in Die Gedanken Sind Frei: "The revolution runs on working code". Those write the code, make the shots. Free Software is a push effort.

http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote....
U.S. and Russia Announce Online Piracy Crackdown Agreement
Thanks! I am always looking for ways to ween my kids off of consuming activities (eg. TV, most video games) and onto creating activities (playing Minecraft, programming, etc). I'll definitely take a look.

Would a Linux version be possible? I can't afford Mac systems for my kids, but they will both be getting Ubuntu laptops under the tree this year. I want them to wrestle with Linux because using the OS naturally leads you to learn about Unix.
As a soon-to-be-father myself... this is the kind of parent I want to be! Kudos!

Any chance you could do a full writeup of your setup? Good job!
Retina is not a big deal
How many people have access to cruise misiles?
Nice, but there should be

1. Some stemming/normalizing such that "créme" and "creme" (as in, say, creme de menthe) are not two distinct result sets. (To your credit, whisky/whiskey appear normalized)

2. A list of sources available apart from mouse-scrubbing the results. Any reason Esquire (considered borderline definitive by certain cocktail snobs) isn't in there?

Wishlist:

-A way to make a search for "brandy" return anything containing "cognac" or "calvados," but not vice versa. Ditto for whisky vs scotch/rye/bourbon.

-Ability to exclude certain sources from all searches
The same is basically true of any non-phoning-home copy protection scheme though. It is crackable, but it's a barrier. After all, the game is not to make the data impossible to get to. It's to make it more work to get to the data than the data is worth.
I find Richard's response perfectly reasonable. The work was donated to, copyright-assigned to, and done under the auspices of the FSF / GNU Project for years. Resigning from GNU and forking the project is one thing, but trying to remove the project from GNU is something else altogether.
Getting a grenade is pretty easy, and I meant stealing the tacopter to get around the flightplan issue you can order him the taco using a stolen credit card, the intercept it using a butterfly net.
Come join Elastic (https://elasticsales.com/) and we'll teach you.
Aah, title has been fixed.
Probably, but undergrad classes in Statistics are not available to everyone.

Did you notice any specific weak areas?
I would say in this case our goals were identical. Meet with the hope that striking up a relationship could help our organizations either now or in the longer term. If not, perhaps the personal professional connection would be beneficial at some future point. So our goals were the same but our paths quite different.
That was very witty. However the point of comments is to have discussions about the posted content whether it be positive or negative. Your comment adds no value.
I a huge fan of Ramanujan and one of my favorite story of his is: Ramanujan was in school and his teacher was explaining the concept of division when the numerator and denominator are the same. The teacher says "if there are 5 people in the class and we have 5 apples, then each one will get one apple. If we have 10 people and 10 apples, then each one will still get one apple".

Ramanujan asks the teacher, if there are zero people in the class and there are zero apples, will each person still get one apple?

I am not sure how old he was at that time but going by the topic, must have been in middle school. Amazing how his mind worked even at that young an age...

I believe the story was also mentioned in The Man Who Knew Infinity (but don't remember if the narrative is the same or not).
Copyright assignment is impractical, and a great way to eliminate outside contributions to a project.
It's kind of interesting you mention that because the one place that fisheye lens videos WERE extremely common in previous decades has been in extreme sports videos- especially skateboarding videos.
Absolutely. I'm going to start blogging about all this stuff in the new year. The site will be at http://milesforrest.com. I think the RSS link should be working.
It has bothered me for a while that something like 50% of retail sales happen in November and December. It really makes is seem like around 25% of the retail economy is people buying stuff for others that the others did not value enough to buy for themselves. That's a pretty huge distortion in the market.
Reasonable, but dumb.

The maintainer will fork the project under a new name, and continue to work for it. GNU will be left with a piece of software that slowly bitrots and becomes outdated, unless it can attract someone else to take it over.
Including Wells Fargo, US Banks Websites Hammered By Al-Qassam Cyber Fighters