skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Was I just offered horrible convertible note terms?
Was just offered $120K investment w/ a $500K cap; and 25% discount.

Some background: This is my first time taking money for my startup, so I ran it by my "silicon valley advisor" (a buddy from college who runs a notable tech startup in SV). I asked him what he thought of the terms, and he said that they are the most entrepreneur-unfriendly terms he has ever seen. His main concern was how low the cap was set at. He said I should insist on a $4M cap, and not accept anything under $2M.

My dilemma though, is we're currently pre-revenue; and I need this cash injection to propel my startup through our launch.

Isn't the cap on a convertible note akin to a pre-money company valuation? If so, I honestly agree with the investor that we are only worth ~$500K. I mean, we're pre-revenue, so $500K is optimistic IMHO.

Personally, I have a proven track record of building and exiting companies. Nothing huge; my last business was acquired for $250,000 last year.

I'm confident that I can make this business successful; but I don't want to screw myself over by taking this cash now, when in a year or so I may be seeking Series-A financing from a large VC; and don't want to turn them off by having accepted such poor seed investment terms.

Couple questions:

1) Do you feel like $120K with $500K cap, and 25% discount is really that bad of a deal?

2) If I take this deal as-is, do you anticipate backlash from future investors?

3) Where do I have negotiating leverage? Should I tell him I want a $2M cap but am willing to increase the discount to 30%? Should I offer to pay interest on the note?

4) I realize posting to HN is no substitute for bonafide legal counsel; so is there someone you would refer me to?

Thanks everyone.
DNA Is The Linux Of The Natural World
Ask HN: Are you still employable after being a founder?
Starting a business is risky. Most people would rather choose to have a comfortable life by working for an established company, taking a salary and enjoying life after work hours. For entrepreneurs who make no salary, do all the work ourselves and live in uncertainty everyday, do you regret what you have been doing? Would you rather now quit and apply for a job somewhere and be done with it? Do you think have been an entrepreneur makes you unemployable?
Collaborative consumption for Magic the Gathering? Yes please!
non-competes are not valid in California where LucasArts is located
> Was there a company that got into open-source because it was tired of how the public could just go "mucking" about in their code base without reservation? What does that even mean?

Well, there's Red Hat w/ their Enterprise Linux distributions, and Apple w/ the FreeBSD-derived iOS and OSX. You can't fork and distribute either of those products without incurring the wrath of their respective owners' very diligent lawyers.
Modding is a great way to get in the industry, especially into the design jobs the OP claims don't exist.
Super impressed by the speed of the trade transactions so far!
Does the IA even support such functionality? I thought they only took WARC dumps from outsiders in special cases of big batches.
Today's Linux schisms are a blessing in disguise
> So does every other language

I dunno. Some obscure languages are float-only. There's one called ECMAscript which I hear gets used in a few places.
http://www.predictionbook.com
Though not as cool as this, I used a similar scrolling idea back in 2011 to visualize a star that was one million times the mass of our sun — http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/4497783697/a-star-half-a-mill...
I made a 3D render of a flyby. I should have added markers from the space programs into the video. The video shows how long it would take to reach all the planets, if you flew at a constant velocity (about 10x light speed).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0JMaM_tdQ
This is the full Unreal Engine 3, all 1 million + lines of C++ code.

The art assets of the Citadel demo are I believe the same as in the Flash demo, which were optimized for a more mobile-friendly and touch-friendly environment.

However we also showed a full Unreal Tournament demo running, as I mentioned in another comment, both at our GDC presentation and in the booth where people could play it. That's a full desktop level.
It's working on Mac OS X now. I've run the Citadel demo on my own Mac. (I'm a Mozilla employee so I had access to the demo. It should be made available to everyone some time soon.)
> I'm curious, are there any academic level economic arguments that discuss Bitcoin and it's future? I'm really curious how economists are viewing Bitcoin.

Here, this may help: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Bitcoin
So creating a BTC yields positive electricity?
>So the new tarantula they discovered yesterday didn't exist until it had been measured?

"Can be measured", not "has been". But if someone had claimed to know of the existence of a tarantula with the specific characteristics that species has, and it had not yet been observed (not even by the person claiming to know about it), that person would be crazy. That they were right would be a coincidence.

What leads you to believe that karma is more plausible than unicorns and leprechauns?
metropcs has been doing this for ages.
Just a passerby here, but the majority of my entertainment comes from my $50/month internet connection, and I spend waaaaay more than 30 hrs/month on it.
Sigh, I'm on Ubuntu and it's not loading video. Why does this not surprise me.
Rainy Cafe: Ambient White Noise Generator
Or location-aware hashing?
There are many good reasons for this move: http://bit.ly/chinalinux
It looks like that study shows that the median CEO works 50 hours per week, with 10 of that spent in travel or eating.

To me that sounds like a very typical work week without spectacular overtime, crunch, hustle, whatever.

It says that some CEOs work more hours, but doesn't correlate that with higher productivity.

It says that few work less than 40 hours per week discounting meals and travel.

50 hours per week is 10 hours per day. Maybe like 8 to 6. Anyone complaining about expectations for crunch time would relish hours like that.
Factors Fueling Wave Of Java Attacks
p values are a measure of the accuracy of the numbers. They are measuring how close the sample mean is to the population mean. In the case of the paper, the p values represent how close the sample mean of the head gaze, eye gaze, smile intensity and smile duration measurements are to the population means of the same values.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value
Lack of money is precisely why you should not go to graduate school, because graduate students (and post-docs, and adjunct faculty) in these areas already massively outstrip available funding. The claim that more people should go into the field would be more credible if there were good jobs available for those who already did.

Part of the reason for the lack of good jobs is that there is actually not much money put into cancer research, relative to Valley-type companies. Google's declared 2012 R&D budget was $6.7 billion. The National Cancer Institute's entire budget in 2012, which is parceled out among all eligible institutions in the country, was $5.1 billion. It's no surprise that, as a direct result, it's easier to find good jobs in the Valley than in cancer research: Google alone can offer more funding to aspiring researchers than the entire national cancer strategy can.
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Speed of light: 1.07925285 × 10e9 km/h Reported speed: 200,000 km/h

So more like 1/5000 the speed of light. But as pointed out below the reported speed may be way off.

I wonder if a mistake about the speed of light was made; it's about 300,000 km per second.
Let Us Not Forget - Things Fall Apart
If you're lonely working from home and missing human contact, co-working might be suitable. It does come at a cost compared to working from home entirely, but it does help remove some of the loneliness.

If you're in London, there are a few places that offer co-working arrangements - you can even do it part-time, rather than having a full-time desk.
Crunchbase data backfills, you'll usually see the most recent 1-2 quarters lower than what they'll be a year from now.
This is correct. Once the Disney deal was announced, LucasArts folks had a feeling there wasn't much time left. I know a few people who left LucasArts for exactly the reason you describe.
CCNA Online Courses for Free
> I don't understand desire to have another compilation pipeline on the side, if everything that is needed can be implemented in the main compilation pipeline and benefit JavaScript as whole, without restraining users to a strongly typed subset. This also leads to an unnecessary duplication.

There is hardly any duplication. All the optimizing machinery is being reused entirely. asm.js code is fast because the existing IonMonkey code generation makes it fast.

The only new part is something - the OdinMonkey module - that type checks asm.js code, and if it validates, then it feeds that into the existing IonMonkey compiler, with the types that were discovered during type checking.
I think that's more good than bad, as long as they intend to make video games. Start to finish, do something. 2d RPG on iOS? Go at it. That's a great motivation for getting into CS: wanting to make things.

If they want to be "idea guys" who just go around saying, "dragons should be blue", then they need to be told that the world doesn't really work that way, and that "idea guys" who refuse to do real work are not seen as adults and generally loathed and pitied, not taken seriously. Real designers work, and hard, and most of the great designers are programmers or artists in addition.

It's after college that they will realize that there are plenty of things more interesting than most video games: machine learning, scientific computing, compilers. But if video game design is the gateway drug, then that works.

What a lot of young people need to consider is that "follow your passion" is the worst advice in the world. You shouldn't do something you hate, but if your work is what you've wanted to do since you were 5, you'll hate being a subordinate. Absolutely no one says, "a subordinate" when asked (at 5) what he wants to be when he grows up. If your passion causes you get into conflict with bikeshedding executives who have terrible ideas but can fire you, then avoid. That advice should be, "find work you enjoy, and transition to your passion when you're no longer a subordinate".
Being employable is generally more about who you know then what you know. If you are just decent at being a founder then the activity of building your business will increase who you know exponentially.

Based on that rational I would say that founders generally become more employable.
Python hacker? Cue is hiring
Hint of Dark Matter Found
this is the best bitcoin article i've read, very concise description. while reading this, i came to the conclusion that even governments and central banks have no way to currently control bitcoin, it's very easy for them to get their fingers in via legislation, e.g. having to disclose bitcoins in annual tax filings.
Wow this got a lot more responses than I expected. I say this for two reasons:

My dad died in 1990 when I was 10 from cancer. He fought until the end. I spent 2 years from the time I was 8 till March 1990 watching this man do what he could to survive. I've sworn that if I ever develop cancer, I too will do whatever I can to survive. The point is that if there's a remote chance of me beating it, I can deal with temporary suffering for long-term survival.

The second reason is more that Ian Banks is one of my favorite authors. My imagination has been shaped by the worlds and stories he's created ever since I was a boy. I was introduced to his Consider Phlebas while my dad was sick and have read nearly all of his work since then. For me, this is all closely tied together emotionally.

Either way, I can respect his choices. They won't be my choices, but I can understand why.
Funny, its UI was always my #1 reason for using it. MDI + ability to completely hide tabs and Ctrl-Tab through them + Vim keybind scheme = fast workflow and maximized screen real estate.

Even to this day no other browser can match it, though Chrome/ium with a Vim plugin comes close.
Don't worry, your baby's sleep cycle will stabilize soon, even before he or she is sleeping through the night. Pro-tip: go to bed when your baby does. Mine (5 months) tends to sleep from 10 to 6, waking up around 2 to feed. If I followed my pre-baby sleep schedule (1 to 8), I'd get up after just an hour of sleep to feed her, then get another 3 hours until she woke up again. Bad news bears. But if I go to sleep when she does, and wake up when she does, I'm pretty well-rested even with the feeding in the middle. Also: you can use feedings to get a bit of work done (I save stuff I can do in 45 min to 1 hr for night). Just learn to feed the baby while typing.
I think you still have rose tinted glasses. I still remember paying about AU$80 for Sonic The Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Master System, and about AU$90 for Sonic 3 on the Mega Drive.

In real terms, games are cheaper here too.

(Another reason for lower prices would also be lower unit costs -- a ROM cartridge surely cost more to manufacture than an optical disc. And the gaming audience is now much larger than it used to be.)
AFAIK the central UltraViolet registry has a business model that will let it survive for years without any help from Hollywood.
Also, if you get closer to product, you get paid a lot more. I know a lot of people who work in pharma and all of them make $80-150k (in the bay area); even admin/support people, and many levels of management, compliance, and other crap.
Overall Chrome does similar to Firefox in non-asm.js mode on most benchmarks - slower on some, faster on some. There are however a few where Chrome is significantly slower, we've filed bugs for those things.

The big difference is between Firefox+asm.js and both Firefox and Chrome.

http://kripken.github.com/mloc_emscripten_talk/#/27
Rails is still relevant, but it's worth having a high performance language in your back pocket to deal with those high scale problems that Rails is just not very good at.

Many developers have started leaning on Java, Clojure, Scala, Erlang, Node.js or Go to fill this role.

If you're just starting out and want to build something that can gain traction, Rails is a fine choice. Just don't abuse it.
Nibbler - Hate HTML forms? Love JSON? Check this out.
I'm no stranger to open source, but can you please explain what a "hostile fork" is? Especially in this context, it just seems like diction for the sole purpose of making Google look like they were 'in the wrong' in that situation.
Awesome, awesome site! Among best things to ever happen to paper magic!
I'm no expert but that sounds pretty bad.

You say you "need" the cash. What do you need it for? At the very early stages you may need cash much less then you think you do. Cash feels like it will remove headaches but you are adding an investor to the mix at terrible terms which could add headaches. Could be a wash.
Cross-functional skills key to running data centers
I ended up with a job at Google about 4 months after folding up my startup, so no, I don't think it makes you unemployable. As long as you keep your skills current and don't just sit on your ass, the skills you learn as an entrepreneur are valuable at a lot of firms.
Ubuntu for Android: Everything You Need To Know
The reference prompted me to curse Google for not giving me any good results to "how long does it take for 50% of the atoms in your body to be replaced."
Most of the time companies appreciate the fact that you have experience running something, even if you to close your startup eventually.
Since we are on the question of visibility of Heroku dyno, what is the amount of CPU power each dyno has?

What about 2Xdyno?
Transit and peering providers aren't going to do that. Certainly not tier 1 networks.

1) They can't get away with it
2) That'd slow everything to a crawl, inspecting traffic is expensive at the scales most large providers operate at.
Phone Pages introduces ALLinONE, a complete web solution
MONTREAL, April 04 2013: Phone Pages, Local Business Search, is now making it easy for small businesses and professionals to have a successful online presence with an all new ALLinONE package to enhance their online presence. Employing profitable web solutions such as Preferred Listings, Search Engine Marketing in Google, Yahoo and Bing, Phone Pages’ new ALLinONE package guarantees consumer awareness resulting in effective growth for businesses.
ASP.NET MVC? It's very fast, very secure as far as I know, very easy to develop (extremely good debugging tools) and it has the same coding efficiency advantages of ruby on rails (it's heavily inspired by RoR).
> Jesus also has nothing to do with the Christian religion.

I don't think it's correct to say that. Christianity is based on the life and teachings of Jesus - although it also incorporates Abrahamism -, so it does have a lot to do with him.

That said, Christianity was born long after Jesus, when the Roman empire adopted it. So Jesus' philosophy and the Christian religion are not exactly the same thing.
Thank you - I really liked the 1st video.

"A native-AAVE speaker will use SE when speaking to me, even if their preferred dialect at home is AAVE, so I don't get exposed to it."

I actually wonder if two black guys who can speak AAVE but want to discuss something intellectual (ie physics or literature) will resort to SE. My hunch is that they would.
You can easily build an in 1:2e9 scale replica of the Solar System. You'll just need a 90cm sphere to use as the Sun, some 4-5 km of area do arrange things and a paquimeter for measuring the planets. At this scale, everything is just about as big/small as one can manipulate.

Bu you won't be able to place the Voyager in there. For that you'll need a car and a road trip.
vote for django.
I've never met a one language programmer. I have, however, met some who were only proficient in one. That's the big difference these days. You now have to be proficient in various languages in order to build stuff.
Yay for a hyperniche journal vertical! Too bad StoryWorth won't be around in 100 years so that your progeny can read all these interesting stories. :)
Frankly, this post makes you look really ignorant of the actual experiences of disadvantaged people in America (of which I am one, by the way). Maybe you should check your assumption privilege.

I like to swear a lot when I'm at home, but that doesn't mean it's proper language for when I'm in the workplace. Why can't my bosses stop oppressing me with their managerial privilege!? :( :(

But by all means, continue the condescending ad hominems, I actually find histrionic people hyperventilating into comment boxes really hilarious.
Hey, you would have thought SimCity would have needed "strong math abilities". But no. Bottom line is, these things don't have to be "accurate", they can bumble along faking it, so given the lack of scientific rigour the industry clearly doesn't require strong math.
In a legitimate land grab style business model you could be working lots of hours for a rather good shot at very large amounts of money. I don't see anything wrong with burning the candle hard for a few years on a well calculated risk for high payoff. However, those situations are quite rare and for the most part people are working themselves to the bone for an expected value payout of peanuts, IMHO. In the 90s software and internet booms there were lots of clear land-grab plays going on where among a handful of entrants first to market with a strong product was going to finish rich, and that was indeed ultimately the case.
I've been in the same position and it sucks a lot, especially when you aren't even being paid for the extra hours and you don't want to have to leave a company you feel invested in.

Please you need to stand up for yourself and likewise all of us, employers need to know that if they want quality engineers they need to treat them like quality human beings.

We cant let this become the new normal in our industry, the more of us that demand our right the less likely employers will be to try to take them in the future.
Not hussling is the new hussling

Also see > https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/ef4772e3c628
If you are still following, there is an interesting peiece on DRM from the head of CD Projekt Red marketing Michal Platkow-Gilewski, and their Managing Director Adam Badowski:

http://kotaku.com/everything-ive-learned-about-the-witcher-3...

"We are trying to get rid of DRM," said Szczesnik. "If someone wants to pirate a game, eventually he will." "Which is bad, of course," Badowski interjected. "But you can't do anything about it, so. We want to give the best user experience possible. When we removed DRM, people on those torrents were actually asking people not to download our game, because we [weren't using DRM]." While they were clear that they don't want people to pirate their games, both Szczesnik and Badowski said that invasive DRM isn't the answer.
The Raspberry Pi Part III: Installing Arch Linux ARM
PyData 2013 Videos Begin to Emerge
Just for fun: It also works to "copy" over an existing function and execute the copied function using the same technique. In this case, if you are debugging and there is a breakpoint in the existing function, that breakpoint gets copied over too! The debugger (Visual Studio in my case) did stop over this breakpoint but did not know where the source code for this is!
How DRM free approach reduces piracy (from the managers of CD Projekt Red)
"We are trying to get rid of DRM," said Szczesnik. "If someone wants to pirate a game, eventually he will." "Which is bad, of course," Badowski interjected. "But you can't do anything about it, so. We want to give the best user experience possible. When we removed DRM, people on those torrents were actually asking people not to download our game, because we [weren't using DRM]." While they were clear that they don't want people to pirate their games, both Szczesnik and Badowski said that invasive DRM isn't the answer.
Not a reddit reader, but I do follow Tarn Adams & Dwarf Fortress pretty closely (serious amount of respect for someone who can build a single game over a really really long time and call it his life's work, and live only on donations.)

This quote from his recent AMA really stood out to me -- "I'm sure my code is considered garbage by people that know what they are doing." And he has a very strong math background.
Had the same kind of page at his age. AngelFire and Geocities. Was also scripting my own "eZine" in ASP for a music news page that summarized articles around the web, linked to them and allowed reader comments. This was a pretty new concept at the time (in the "mainstream"... Slashdot started it in 97) the term blog didn't really exist yet. However, I'm not sure I saw the web as "small," it just was what it was. He had good sensibilities to recognize its potential at that age and time.
Why doesn't Google just make its WebCore open source and then merge with Webkit2 and make everything better?

Google doesn't make money off Chrome...
The Wayland/Weston Fork Is Now "Banned"
Last time I measured (late 2012) the entire mozilla-central repository was 4.488 million lines of code. So I don't believe that by simply streamlining things they'll be able to remove anything like 4.5 million lines. Perhaps an extra zero got inserted somewhere.
Mozilla, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and I think one of the IE's too. And now this. So yeah, 5-6 is a good estimate.

Edit: Also the original Netscape.
There's no way that "HTML/CSS/Javascript" should be lumped together.
I don't have a very strong opinion or thought one way or another here really, but perhaps it just became more mainstream "knowledge" (right or wrong), or more common / trendy even, to not look for VC money quite as aggressively...