skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the same way I feel, or at least how I think I feel right now. I am absolutely passionate about Fogbeam Labs and what we're doing (applying social-networking, machine learning, semantic web, etc. to enterprise software to improve productivity, knowledge sharing, learning, etc.), BUT... if somebody offered me enough money to where I could legitimately walk away with "FU money" it would be damn hard to say no.

I mean, if it was legitimately life-changing money, I could take the buyout, spend a year or two traveling, relaxing, exploring, enjoying the "good life" and looking for a six foot tall redheaded supermodel with a Scottish accent to be my girlfriend... and then, when I got bored with that, I'd have seed money for the next venture already in hand.

OTOH, how do you see your baby? When you pour blood, sweat and tears into something to that point that it's basically your life, how can you just walk away from that with some cash?

So I dunno... which is why I say I think I'd take the buyout, but I can't necessarily swear to it.
In minecraft, you can chat with other people within the world. So there is communication. If you raze someones creation (which may or may not be possible depending on the access you've been given), someone else may react to that and tell you to stop. In extreme cases, you may be booted or banned from the server. Likewise, if you help other people in the game, they will likely praise you and be willing to help you on your own creations.

In real life, if you destroy or hurt someone else as a child, you are told that was bad and why. In extreme cases, you may be put on a time out, or forcefully removed from the situation. If you help other people, you make friends who will be more willing to help you.

So what is the fundamental differentiating factor, as far as emotional development goes, between minecraft and real life? Both have comparable consequences to a person's actions as it regards other people's feelings.
We're about to open source a similar deal (redis-based "soft guarantee" mutexes) -- ours is written in Python and mostly used as a way to coordinate (very frequent) parallel task execution a la CountDownLatch, so 100% reliable exclusion in the face of failure isn't critical.

I'd be interested to hear about your implementation if you can share (email is HN username at gmail.com)
It was renamed and became the basis of Yahoo! Store.
It became Yahoo! Stores.
You don't have the right to "not talk." You're expected as a citizen to cooperate with the justice system. The 5th amendment protection from testifying against yourself is an exception to this general expectation.
It's not about the legal consequences. It's about money and reputation.

Suppose you quit an acquiring company and bad-mouth it in the press.

First, you're probably losing money just by quitting. If they kept you around, they probably gave you some sort of incentive to stay. E.g., stock that gradually vests, or a portion of the acquisition price that was held back.

Second, you probably own a good chunk of the company's stock. If your bad-mouthing is successful, that price will go down. So you've just lost money that way.

Third, if you had partners or employees who also have stock, you've just cost them all money. Man, they'll love you for that.

Fourth, you are now on record in the press as the kind of person who bad-mouths the company you're working for. That might mean that the next people you work for won't cross you like that. But it certainly means that people are going to be more reluctant to hire you or acquire your next company.

Generally, I think the better play is to be classy about it. If you keep a strong reputation, odds are good somebody will eventually ask you on the quiet about the acquiring company or one of the executives involved. That's your chance to stick the knife in. Rather than making a little quickly-forgotten noise, you might be able to kill an important deal.
Ask HN: What are the "big five" dedicated server hosts to look at first?
I am after a basic entry level dedicated server and don't want to go with a fly-by-night operation.

What are the first 5 dedicated server companies I should take a look at before anyone else?
"Time spend on early revenue is a distraction"

This sentiment has been surfacing here more and more lately it seems, and frankly, I find it sickening.

Companies make money.

Maybe I'm crazy, but the idea of constantly seeking funding for my company instead of simply asking my customers to pay me just seems absolutely ludicrous.
Connecting like-minded people, the problem startups have been trying to solve for the last few years, but still haven't succeeded to.
Show HN: tromboone))) - Use the knowledge of your customers to grow your startup
They would even if it wasn't an all cash deal.
So a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, when the network was purportedly the computer, these questions kept me awake at night.

When Remote Procedure Calls were a new thing technologists got into an interesting debate about whether or not you could create a distributed infrastructure which had the same semantics as local execution. It was after all the holy grail to be able to write code and them seamlessly pull it apart into as many pieces as you wanted for scaling (caveat Amdahl's law).

There were great flame wars over something called "At most once" semantics, where a remote procedure call would either succeed or fail, and if it succeeded it would have done so exactly one time. And marshalling between systems, with "network canonical order" vs "receiver makes it right" order for bit fields, integers, floats, or strings.

I have a lot of scars from those days.

It left me with one really strong belief though. That was that to reason about distributed systems at all you had to be ruthlessly simple in your designs. You have to be able to know exactly what the lowermost piece of the puzzle is going to do before you can reason about what pieces that depend on that may or may not do. And at each layer every alternative cuts like a scalpel and make reasoning about the next layer that much harder.
Yes. It would mean that even if it was not an all cash deal. Yahoo! bought 100% of Tumblr and owns them outright.
I don't understand how entrepreneurs expect to sell their business and reap the rewards while not expecting the acquirer to make modifications to their own benefit.
Hi, I'm the founder of tromboone. I created tromboone to allow startups iterate faster with their customers and partners. Use people's knowledge and skills to make your company grow faster and better. Any suggestions are much appreciated. Reach me at http://tromboone.com/gustavo.
That's the approach I'm taking :)
if sifter is out, then something like sift could be winnow or winnower. might be a bit obscure for non-agrarians, but it has 'win' in it!
It's not the legal consequences that matter in this example but the financial consequences. In this example, the acquisition apparently had a big stock component. So now his financial interests are aligned with the rest of the company's owners. If his hypothetical rage-blogging were effective, it might hurt the company's value which be a big hit to his finances.

The point of the anecdote is that these deals are designed to align the acquired with the company if there are personal-career-satisfaction/play-along-nicely conflicts.

edit: typos and a recognition that this point was already made well while I was typing.
Folks, we are in the beginning of the digital currency era..

the idea is that the founders of a company say "Starter", create the Starter currency.. make a evaluation of how much the whole company worth.. translate this value to Starter units.. and decide the amount to share, and sell..

Then people would buy it, indexed with bitcoins and/or dollars..
The idea is to create a digital crypto-currency the same way bitcoin is..
but indexed by each company evaluation by trading, sell/buy operations..

how about that?
I can has cheazeburgers?
Can I ask what sort of libraries you're using for the canvas-in-page-browser-selector? Is it server or client side?

The technology here is spectacular. Great job!
And what happened to that?
How Amazon's Rising Headwaters Could Threaten Google
I'm fairly certain that Grubhub also allows (and powers) restaurant ordering on the "restaurant's website" -- essentially it brings you back to a Grubhub page but it can be directly linked from the restaurant's site.
Larry Page's I/O Keynote
Interesting comments and observations as usual.

A guess regarding what the next social phenomena will be all about:

value proposition: interacting with cool people that you don’t know
I would like to know if he wanted to keep his Hardware or data that he didn't back up :-/
To clarify, I was thinking more along the lines of startup ideas.
> Can Kickstarter be used to solicit investment or loans?

> Nope. Kickstarter is a new form of commerce and patronage, not a place for investment or lending. You’ll never give up ownership or pay back any funds raised on Kickstarter. Ever.

http://www.kickstarter.com/start
Las Vegas Police now have two in custody:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/may/19/two-arrested-ipa...
Cash or not, won't the buyer have absolute power over the property (Tumblr)?
We're talking about someone who contributed a lot to the internet as it is today, so a minimal measure of respect would seem to be in order. Not that personal attacks are OK in other cases.

But if we're doing character critique, I wouldn't say he typically whines a lot. He does occasionally come across as bitter and self-indulgent on his blog however.

I have to say that in this example, he either doesn't do a good job of explaining what's so horrible about "the button problem", or it is indeed an instance where walking out on the conference call was probably the kindest thing Mayer could have done. A lot of us would probably have either laughed or yelled at him.

On the other hand, I can see how the intent of making the Blog This! button software-agnostic was ahead of its time. I certainly wish there had been more of that, it would have led to a different set of rules for web apps as they are today. But I guess (or rather: hope) the point where the web globally recognizes the value and spirit of openness is still in the future.
Show HN: Crowdsourced Environmental Monitoring
I presume you have "show dead" on and are seeing his responses directly. But for those who don't, he points out below that his post had a net score of -2, making it seem unlikely that the downvotes triggered a ban automatically. Perhaps the ban lies to you about the score? My previous belief was that 'flagging' brings the post to the attention of moderators, who then decide whether to act, but that downvotes are independent.

calling people psychopaths is toxic

I agree, and this is what makes it tricky for me. But I think the problem here is with the opinion itself, rather than the way it is expressed. I don't know Andrew, and don't wish to insult him. But some reasonable recent research suggests that 4% of CEO's are clinical psychopaths. Is this possibility simply off limits to discuss here? Maybe it needs to be, or maybe there is some way it can be approached more tactfully.

http://suggarynicedeath.blogspot.com/2013/02/psychopaths-in-...
In his blog the list's maintainer explains why he has mostly stopped maintaining this list. [1] However, I think this list has a high value from a historical point of view.

If that list would be added to a collaborative platform like Wikipedia or GitHub, maybe some more people (or even the listes persons themselves) would be able to incorporate corrections and/or do some research on the unclear facts (maked with "?" in the list).

A prerequisite would be to put this list under a free license, maybe some Open Data license, a Creative Commons license or just Public Domain. In that case, the author wouldn't even have to do offer it to Wikipedia or GitHub himself - anybody would have the permission to do that.

Also, this could encourage people to write a parser for that regular plain text format, or even convert it to a format more usable for data analysis and/or auto-merging with other kinds of lists (e.g. some XML or JSON format, maybe there's already a open standard format for that kind of information). Then, data journalists could pick up that list more easily.

[1] http://prog21.dadgum.com/102.html
Ah IE5! It has been a very long wait. :) We are hard at work to launch Sieve. Optimistically we should be ready in a couple of months.
I think that's a very reasonable thing to bring up. But I wouldn't expect a lot.

The actual deal is an understanding between people. The contract is the bundle of sticks you use to beat one another if the deal falls apart.

Any contract term that tries to force a good relationship is basically nonsensical. If you're trying to enforce a contract, you're already in the situation where the relationship has gone bad.
"A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site [1]. I thought it might be interesting to look at one day." [2]

[1] http://ycombinator.com/viaweb

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/vw.html
Also worth pointing out that in 1999 Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.57 billion in stock. Geocities had a similar audience and premise as Yahoo - it made building and hosting simple websites easy.
Puppet/Chef is overkill for a site running a config this simple.
19-Gigapixel Filmstrip of the Earth from Russia to South Africa
This is why my family has always told me that if a thief comes and wants your [whatever, not-life/body], to just give it to them. It's not worth your life :<

It's really sad to hear that this happened. I just wish the kid's parents had taught them that.

And as for the thief. I wonder how they feel about committing a murder in addition to what would have just been grand theft.
I have quite a bit of devops experience myself, especially on Amazon Web Services and their CloudFormation service combined with Chef. I would be very interested in a blog post (or a series, go nuts!) and I'm considering doing a series of write-ups on our setup as well.
Just to be clear: I am paying $70/mo for SSL and Postgres, so it's not that I'm paying nothing. However, based on the minimal server requirements for my app (most users are using our client-side Javascript tools), one dyno "should" be enough.
Margins on website development are shrinking
It remains one of the largest hosts of online stores in the world, powering more of the top 500 internet retailers than any other hosted store platform.
Didn't realize cell phone theft was a big thing. Don't personally know anyone it's happened to. What value would a cell phone be to a thief? I would assume a theft would be flagged in a cellular provider's system for the given ESN and disallow any future service registration by someone other than the original owner. Are thieves getting someone to change ESNs on these phones or do cell companies just not care?
Are all submissions moderated manually?

Pointless observation: This is one of the few times I think a .io domain would have worked better.
Are you suggesting he would look a lot like a patent troll today? Could be heretical talking there.

Generally fundamental infrastructure improvements are very very hard for the individual contributor to capitalize on. Part of that is because there are usually alternatives for everything so its pre-commoditized and thus hard to extract value from, and partly because the legacy of 20th century was rent seeking businesses which polluted the waters for everyone.
The goal of a business is ultimately to make money.

Meh... that seems to be the "received wisdom" around here, but I think that is either flat out wrong, or - at least - overly pedantic. A business needs to make money to stay in business, but I see no reason a business can't have other goals, where "making money" is simply a means to an end.

I don't intend to build in order to have clients; I intend to have clients in order to build. -- Howard Roark

In a company which is still owned by the founders, the "goal of the company" is implicitly the same as the goal of the founder(s) and it certainly may be more than just "making money". Take my startup... we have a very specific mission statement[1] that isn't just something we cooked up because "you're supposed to have one". It represents the mission and goals of the company, beyond simply making money. Now we obviously have to make money at some point or shut down. But we can certainly make decisions that prioritize fulfilling those items from our mission statement, in favour of optimizing profits down to the last cent.

[1]: http://www.fogbeam.com/mission_values.html
this?: http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/
The internet and mobile have created opportunities to make large amounts of money faster than ever. You can't blame the VCs for choosing a quick billion vs a slow billion. Along the same lines, the referenced VC deals of the past (Khosla + Juniper) were not comparing those opportunities with the hyper growth startups that we see today.
knowing that's how you feel, why would I (or anyone) use anything you make?
I think this is awesome. Obviously it's not geared towards intermediate or higher level WordPress developers, but for someone like my wife who is just digging into WordPress looping it's a wonderful learning tool.
I suspect Tumblr beat out Posterous because of its community features. By showing a feed of new posts, a la Twitter, it aided the discoverability of content. And there's nothing to spur on a community like the addiction of getting likes, notes, and reblogs from other people.
FWIW, I tested juju a few months ago and found it to be buggy and unreliable. Sometimes the instances would connect together correctly, and sometimes they would fail inexplicably. Didn't seem ready for any kind of production use to replace config mgmt tools.
I think that's "black swan", but I like the idea of a black albatross :)
Show HN: bl0g - The Blogging Platform
Should've shown the invention first ... or maybe the slides. It says a lot about the garbage that is being built here by engineers treated like slaves who report to clueless idiots. These problems are an epidemic here and a pandemic across the world. In the 60's we put people on the moon. Now, money is basically given away by committee (couldn't think of a better way to make bad decisions) to any company to play with it and fail. This model of expecting constant growth out of even the ones they do and out of the area as a whole (or the world as a whole) is insane and unsustainable, especially as salaries have actually dropped in the last two years.

Can you say bubble? Because the housing market's screaming it loud and clear.
I used to be a big fan of Heroku for a few customer's projects and for small stuff (mostly free hosting) of my own. At least for my own projects, I decided that for the monthly cost of a large VPS (I use RimuHosting) I can run 5 web apps written in Clojure (I mention the language because this is an efficient run time setup, once the JVMs warm up). I am giving up temporary scalability for a lot more bang for the buck. I also like dealing with smaller companies because you get great personal service.
PG's thoughts on why he immediately saw that Yahoo had problems upon entering the company have provided some really important context for me. The startups in my town tend to be well funded for no discernible reason or non-existent, and almost without exception I see founders who don't have any immediate problems that force them to find PMF or die. As a result, they mostly die.
What is Marco's (erstwhile Tumblr CTO) take on the Tumblr Buy-Out?
I presume you run off to Craigslist and dump it off on someone else as soon as possible.
Yes, actually I remember that day. Transactions sent in even buys took hours and _hours_ to execute. I didn't know the final state of my fb trades until the next day.

The problem as I understood it:

(1) Consumer brokers often consolidate trades/buffer them up and send them on

(2) More centralized entities actual have access directly to the trading systems and execute these batches of trades coming in

(3) The trading system does it's magic and responds

My understanding was that (2) and (3) became _incredibly_ overwhelmed and latency spiked, queues filled, and trades took _forever_ to go through.

Unfortunately, the consumer broker is stuck at the mercy of waiting for responses from (2). So yes, they can take in customer requests, but they are not the ones that finally execute and latency can become huge.
Hacker News Song On iTunes
Probably not. There's a lot of competition (Plivo, Tropo, etc) in this space now, so they have to keep their rates low.
If you look at five of them you are overthinking it. You only need to pick one.
I did not know that. Cool. Thought Yahoo stores had somehow gone away.
> "I, Dave Winer, will draw from my own personal experience, including my interaction with one of the participants of this deal, to speak with authority on this".

I honestly don't understand the problem with that. He has experience, with this type of situation, and with the people involved, and he's using that to back up the more general point (which you agreed with). Why is he not entitled to some authority here?

It just seems like a lot of the commenters have much more of a grudge against Dave Winer the person (I don't follow him that closely) than the actual content of his argument.
I think that I'd start with Rackspace, Amazon, Softlayer, and "other".
Agreed, it would be more instructive to look to the acquisitions that shaped Marissa and board members like Max Levchin, Maynard Webb (Yahoo), and Roelof Botha (Tumblr)- YouTube, PayPal, perhaps Instagram. Surely top of mind and a big reason why Tumblr is staying independent.
The goal of a business is no more to make money, than breathing is the goal of a human.
I’m training new Growth Hackers. Email me.
I am kinda disgusted by cnet, the only reason they are posting this is because of the ipad/apple connection.
That video was a cariacature of bad VCs. A real Tesla of today should approach VCs like Thiel or Andreesen, if they're not already at DARPA or some other well-funded government blue sky R&D lab (or, say, inventing memristors at a corporate research division).
Rackspace, Softlayer, Savvis, Hetzner, ServerBeach.
Yeah I plan on doing a batch of updates this week and flesh out more of the content next week. Let me know what topics are of most interest to you and I'll prioritize those. Thanks!
Show HN: File watching with powerful expression parser
Weekly Digest 14 - The most interesting links from programming community
Biggest Challenges for Google Glass
Thanks for your kind words. The stack is a mix of both. Browser runs on the server and sends updates to the client via websocket. Then it is painted on the client. On the client-side a part of noVNC js library is used to capture input and is sent to the browser running on the server.
I think reddit has done a good job at it. Many of the focused, smaller subreddits are great arenas to discuss and grow in particular fields. /r/fitness and /r/keto are crucial to my improving physical fitness. And unlike dedicated forums, I can use a single username for participating in various topics I am interested in; like programming, math, cooking, dating, [local city], etc.