skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A former boss put it as: "We are not the Red Cross. We are here to make money."
In the context of that point in the article I think he was just framing that 16% as easily being in the range of the previous investors. He was noting how that $400k would have some legs when augmented with sales and another $2.5+ million round wouldn't be needed.
Ask HN: Restructure during financing round
We have VCs interested in doing a round of investment in our company. My co-founder still holds on to a sizable chunk of equity, but in the last two years has become of less importance to the company. One of the stipulations for investment is a restructuring of the existing cap table to make sure the right people are incentivized going forward. Since my partner and I (the other two cofounders) have all of our worth tied up in the company, we have no means to buy out our third partners, so the restructure would have to take place via the VC deal. In theory, everyone participating in the deal is on board with this idea. In practicality, I'm having a hard time finding precedent. For anyone who has experience in M&A, what's the best way to accomplish this goal?
European VC's are literally worse than Bankers. They have sodomized the "venture" out of "venture capital".
You might as well be as forward as possible about your concerns with the founders; it's not like it would take you more than an hour to get another job (including plenty of YC companies). It's reasonable if the founders think otherwise about these issues and are able to convince you of their viewpoint, but it shouldn't just be un-analyzed.
> Would some kind of flag go off, triggering a human doublecheck, if he started transferring quantities in the millions every other week?

People have got their account suspended for transferring and/or receiving a few thousands. Pretty sure he wouldn't be able to transfer anything close to a million before lock down, unless he had clearance.

In any case, it should be noted that the error only occurred in his email statement. At no point in time could he have touched the money, since "So he logged online -- and reality bit back. His account balance read $0."

> Of course, this leads to the obvious question: whatever error-detecting mechanism would be triggered...why isn't it in place at the point which the $92 quadrillion transaction is credited? A simple "customer.balance < TOTAL_KNOWN_SUM_OF_WORLDS_CURRENCY" would seem to suffice

Since it was only in the statement, it was probably an error in the reporting engine, and not in his actual account ledger.
I think the correct assertion would have been that more Jews would have left. Even the information you linked to suggests that, at least as of 1938, many Jews weren't convinced they had to leave yet.
FWIW, I like this idea.
We don't store anything on any server. The data is encrypted locally and transferred directly from one device to another. We may use one of our servers to relay the information because of a failed direct connection between devices, but we don't store anything. Mathematically, Infinit cannot read the contents of the transfer because of the encryption. In addition, we don't store any personal information aside from email addresses and anonymous analytics relating to the file transfers.
Is this based on firsthand experience working at Google?
I'm really not a fan of having the options on window.options. Not only is that weirdly populating the window object with single use options. It also is extremely not targeted. At least it should be window.something.options.
Socialism is essentially when the worker's own the means of production, so I'd look into worker owned companies.

Here's a list of worker owned companies that have a Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companie...
They actually intercept everything and store everything according to how Tempora is described here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-...

Tempora is described as storing absolutely all packets traversing given points for fixed number of days.

This claim "we have individual orders" is just based on the interpretation that "before you start the court procedure against somebody it's not intercepting" so of course under that premise, they have warrants. So they collect everything, store everything and they simply don't name that "intercepting and collecting."

The simple question for them is "is there a Tempora project, is it active and how many individual records are in the databases in that project and how many internet packets are on the storage at once?" -- Just an order of magnitude (the exponent of 10) of the packets is enough. If you have a millions of billions packets stored, it's certainly not from any small number of "targets."
A WordPress plug-in for LaunchRock
FOAAS Fuck Off As A Service
Rust-malloc: a pure Rust memory allocator
Quine Relay - I'll give you 20 to explain it
Remote code execution in Struts Framework
This is pg's best essay to date.
What regular expression does Facebook use to parse the 'fields' parameter?
We are currently working on improving our REST API and we need to implement the optional 'fields' parameter for some actions. Therefore, we would like it to recognize the pattern of the request in the same manner Facebook is currently doing:

GET https://graph.facebook.com/me?fields=name,birthday,photos.limit(10).fields(id, picture)

After some google searches, we didn't find anything.
So far, we came to this (incomplete) solution:

(?<expr>(?&term)(?:[,](?&term))){0}
(?<term>(?&value)(?:[.](?&mod))){0}
(?<mod>(limit|fields)\((?&expr)\)){0}
(?<value>\w*){0}
^(?&expr)$

The semantic and syntax used is PCRE with the modifier x (PCRE_EXTENDED)

Completely different solutions are also more than welcome.

Thanks in advance.
Moving off the home keys is nothing short of awful. After 15 years of using vi daily (but not as my primary editor) I still can't switch to it for just this reason.
A) Our government doesn't need to engage in active repressive because our financial disparity is already so repressive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6057191
What selectors? They are given right for blanket surveillance:

> "Under a little known clause in the Ripa statute, GCHQ is permitted to collect vast amounts of data under a single warrant or a special certificate issued by the foreign secretary."

Do you find that "normal" or something you can support? A single warrant to collect everything? Why even bother with warrants then? What both US and UK are doing is the bare minimum of legal paperwork to allow them to have a surveillance state, and when they get caught, they can say stuff like this in the media, and hope the public buys it. It's not even close to trying to respect the spirit of the law or of the constitution, or human rights.

> But Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: "The painfully careful words of the ICS's report clear absolutely nothing up. There's nothing to allay fears that industrial amounts of personal data are being shared under the Intelligence Services Act and concerns that all UK citizens are subject to blanket surveillance under GCHQ's Tempora programme aren't even mentioned. This spin-cycle is marked 'whitewash'."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/17/prism-nsa-gchq-r...

I would avoid stories on this from BBC. From what I've noticed they tend be on their side, and won't report everything or make it sound as if what they're doing is okay.
This is just a proof-of-concept, showing how it's possible to write standalone Rust programs that make syscalls directly. Be sure to heed the readme's warning: Only useful for segfaulting and generally making programs incorrect.
The whole thing is just a spin. They actually intercept everything and store everything according to the description of Tempora here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-...

It looks that the idea is the same as in US. Once they introduce the interpretation that "before you start a court procedure against somebody it's not intercepting" then of course under that premise, they have warrants. Their idea is that "all data intercepted, collected and stored is still just as nothing before we decide to use it. Only then we call that an intercept."

See my other post here for the right question to ask. Ask about number of packets that are in the storage at once, or how many packets contribute to the data in the storage. From how many different users from UK and the rest of the world. The answer is, according to Guardian, "from exactly all users from both UK and the rest of the world." It's an impressive technological feat. It certainly doesn't sound like "nothing."
is this on github ?
Windows has indeed missed the text-mode boat big time. Eventually I think people naturally gravitate to running Linux with Windows in a virtual machine. I remember trying many of the tools mentioned in the article and it always never quite felt right. A lot of the niceness could be attributed to a combination of bash, readline, and the accompanying *nix tools--the experience just isn't the same in Windows. Having terminals open in front of you in something like terminator is simply a joy in Linux.
Wouldn't that be even easier if you used LLVM IR, as you'd then be able to write your runtime in any language that LLVM supports?
I think it's worth distinguishing between the iron-fisted totalitarianism of the 20th century, colonialism of the 19th century, and military based hegemony going into the 21st. The iron-fisted path to empire didn't work out too well. But I think "total" control is the goal in all cases.
I fail to see what Mitt Romney has to do with this. Care to explain what exactly you're proposing?
Slew of court challenges threaten NSA's relationship with tech firms
Going up and to the left is far more common for me than needing to go up and down at the same time.
That's why it's common to be taxed (benefit-in-kind)

It is not the practice of the United States to tax certain types of food benefits, including (almost certainly) the way in which tech companies customarily deliver food to their workers. You can read the test here:

http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html

Search for: [Meals on Your Business Premises]

I am not a tax accountant, I am not your tax accountant, etc, but I'm 99%+ sure that I'm right on this with regards to the IRS.
Is it possible to short startups? Because I would love an opportunity to short Tim Feris, even if only by proxy.
> like hardware address whitelisting

I wouldn't recommend that in any circumstance, it's completely false security really.

MAC filtering is incredibly easy to bypass, all Malory has to do is wait for another device to connect and clone their hardware's address.
With the street view wifi scandal, this on going encryption problem and the revelations about prism this looks very bad.
Might you have some idea of whenabouts Windows support will be arriving? I spend almost all my time with OS X, but some of the project partners are more Windows-based.
ROAM - Mobile Payment Innovator Won't Be Under the Radar Much Longer
Ask HN: How often do you click on the "ask" link at top of page?
It's occasionally asked how many people here click on "new" to see the "newest" submissions, rather than just clicking on the Front Page, but I was wondering ..

How many people actually look at the "ask" link?

https://news.ycombinator.com/ask
Could you do a little write-up on your paredit workflow. Like the post you replied to I've found it mostly annoying to use in normal Emacs and nowadays with evil-mode.
Clickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/ask
If he were true to his own principles I would expect each employee at that startup has only to work 4 hours a week. Would love to see how far they get with Ferriss' success strategies.
Well, they're obviously working on improving their documentation and have made public statements about some of the high-profile complaints. Is that not what you want? Or would you prefer they do nothing so that you can continue making tired accusations against them?
As someone working on a hardware project one of the biggest challenges we have is finding a tablet that is cheap, mass-produceable, and rugged enough to stand up for months/years of abuse. This might do the trick.

Our only options so far has been very cheap knock-off tablets and the questionable long term viability of the pengpod.

It's too bad nobody has made a 'cheap-hacker-tablet' something that might be 2" thick and weigh 4-6lbs but have a touch-screen, metal body, usb ports, screw placements for mounting, and easy to access replacable hardware.
Damn, I first read "Geek philosophy".
Convenience isn't an excuse to not encrypt security data, it does not matter if it is a limited to a few areas where it could be exploited. If Google (any companies, including Apple) can not be trusted to protect such information, they should not be offering it in the first place.

If it can be exploited, it should be protected as much as it can be.

We all saw what happened with Google's StreetView cars capturing the local Wi-Fi traffic. The same thing could be used by somebody hacking into Google's servers, downloading the Wi-Fi passwords and any possible maps data if possible and workaround getting into people's Wi-Fi networks. If it is not likely but it is not impossible.
Extensive discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053783
But where is the problem that google encrypt them?
To restore, i have to use my account and my password.
And why can i not change the option, to backup the application data without WLAN passwords?
For a billion dollar company, this should not be so complicated, or ?
I am baffled and amused that this is a top story on HN.
"We tip servers more if they tell us their names, touch us on the arm, or draw smiley faces on our checks."

We? I tip 20%, rounding slightly up. I have never worked as a waiter, but I did several turns as a busboy, getting a cut from the waiters' tips. I'm not out to impress waitresses, I'm not out to make a statement that affects somebody's main source of income; this is financial. (I once tipped damned near 50%, but that was after I took four fourth grade boys to lunch on one's birthday, and they left a very messy table; that wasn't a reward, but an apology.)

"Quality of service has a laughably small impact on tip size."

Quite. See above. I'm not going to penalize the wait staff for what might be the faults of the kitchen.

A few weeks ago, I had beers on a couple of occasions at a hotel bar in Boston. There the "gratuity" was included in the charge, and that was fine with me.
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6057117
Since it was only in the statement, it was probably an error in the reporting engine, and not in his actual account ledger.

Oh summer interns
Let's see if he comes and comments about that! I think that his nick is tferris.
don't know what kind of statement it is, but if it is a statement as in a bill, an amount of $140 means 'you owe us $140'. A negative amount would in turn mean 'we owe you'.
Great idea, pretty site.

Very minor concern: I see "Hu" instead of "Hi" in 'Hire', because of the script. I didn't see it on first glance, but when I navigated to the demo profile I did, and now I see the U shape much more strongly than the I or R, and it's bugging me. :)
So the guy who did this must spend his time solving the problems people cause for themselves by eating too much, exercising too little? And smoking?

I don't think so.
Absolutely agree — I think that's the most important thing we want to test with this iteration :)

I'd think that people would choose the professional connections they trust rather than their stoner roommate from college, but there's only so much hypothesising we can do without real people trying it out!

I'm not a huge fan of Bob Marley either, but I know what you mean. It could be your friend who is, say, a prominent Rubyist tweeting a joke about PHP as you're applying to Facebook. We'll see how that plays out, but I'd think that an 'old school' job reference would have the same risks.
Yeah because dietary modification is no way to treat a disease [1] coughPKUcough

[1]- http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria#Treatment
We're currently working on Windows. It should be done in a couple of months. In parallel, we're really making sure that the OS X application is solid. It's clear that this could be a constraint, but we'll do everything we can to push something out as soon as possible.
This is a question for your lawyer, but you'll probably want to replace the more typical "Issue X new preferred shares to the VCs" with "Issue Y new preferred shares to the VCs and, additionally, effect a secondary sale of Z shares of founders stock to the VCs in exchange for monetary consideration of $N with said shares to be converted into preferred stock on completion of the transfer."

Playing with the numbers gets you virtually any combination you guys want of:

+ money injected into the company
+ money transferred to your cofounder to buy him out
+ resulting remaining cofounder diluted ownership of the company
+ resulting VC ownership of the company

Those numbers will probably be subject to contentious and highly consequential negotiation. Again, run it by your lawyer and, if you have them, other advisors that you'd routinely tap to discuss cap tables.
When Dylan Gets Hit By A Bus
Looks like someone that is jealous of a rich person.

Seriously, what is this world coming to... When did people stop working so hard, but rather coveting their neighbors house?
In my experience even a significant pay increase is usually not what makes you win/lose a candidate to a more established company.
I was expecting an article for the youth pretending they don't know about the "new coke" debacle and/or possibly a new product "white coke" being released as a repeat of "new coke".

Personally I'd rather have the choice to buy HFCS free soft drinks rather than carmel-4 free soft drinks. Completely sweetener free, both natural and artificial, would be a unique experience, probably taste much like tea.
Thanks — we'll take another pass at the logo this sprint :)

btw if you're interested in that kinda thing the logo is based on a heavily reworked Candy Script by the amazing Sudtipos http://sudtipos.com/fonts/94
Four Factors to Consider Before Moving to a New Neighbourhood by Timmy Griffin
Intro to Angular, Yeoman, and Chrome Apps
link for BitBargain is broken
I guess my assumption has always been the McDonalds cashier isn't a career, it's a way to enter the job force, earn some money, and move on. This seems to reenforce that perspective. I'd liken McDonald's to an internship... either you like food service and move into management/supervisory positions, or you move to another job that pays better.
Well, supporting a single target hardware device means you can hugely streamline your development and testing processes. You can also guarantee peripheral specifications and availability to applications (camera, microphone, speakers, motion sensors, etc). All of that leads to significantly reduced costs, which are a big deal to an ambitious shoestring project like this. I'm sure it would be possible, with sufficient effort, but what would their motivation be?

This project funds itself by selling the hardware. Releasing the software as a free app would kill their revenue stream, and hence take away the project's air supply. Releasing it as a paid app would present all sorts of logistical problems regarding distribution and payment collection given the intended user base in the third world.

It's important that they have a lean development process, but it's equally important that they have a lean and robust revenue and deployment model.
And it's not even more expensive than the non-referral version.

I've always found this total, absolute hatred of referral links to be pretty absurd. I KNOW YOU JUST RACKED UP THAT 30k KARMA TO EARN $$$ OFF OF HN ZOMG.

_Especially_ on a site like this. Other posters here will freak out about how you're recommending something based on a financial incentive, but don't care about the myriad of other advertising they're bombarded with on a regular basis.

It's simply about context. If most of your posts were spammy, and had affiliate links, I could understand it more. But this sub-thread is ridiculous.
PaaS Profiles: Making Platform-as-a-Service offerings comparable.
Saving Bits and Pixels: The Geek's Gospel
> It's too bad nobody has made a 'cheap-hacker-tablet' something that might be 2" thick and weigh 4-6lbs but...

That's very difficult criteria. You might find cases engineered for industrial environments, but there is only so much stuff you can put over the screen before the touch sensor stops working. And if that is the "weakest link" what's the value of having a back panel you can use to drive nails?
Kids Reacting to Controversial Cheerios Commercial
Some people have the power to tilt the system in their favor, some do not.
It's a good point that you can't be responsible for the things that people who recommend you say online.

The idea is that you'd share the link privately just with people you really trust, so it's unlikely someone you don't trust would add their recommendation. I agree - you probably need to be able to remove any recommendations that you don't think are appropriate...
That's actually not at all what he preaches. He's just an advocate of minimizing work you don't want to do and don't do the famous idle-work/pseudo-work the whole day (I can work 12 hours a day, adjusting power point slides, but that doesn't really make me productive).
Oh ya, Mitt, the epitome of a hard worker.
German UAV Crashes into a C160 Plane
How does earning interest qualify as "work"?
http://www.adequatelygood.com/JavaScript-Module-Pattern-In-D...
i'm surprised there's no crystal gravy on that turkey leg.
What key are you going to encrypt these passwords with?

If you were to encrypt passwords in the cloud with a key that's stored on the device, you can't unlock the passwords on a different device (or the same device after flashing), which is the whole point of backing it up in the cloud.

If you were to encrypt them with the user's Google Accounts password, the device would need to ask for that password on every startup or store the GA password on the device at all times (the latter option is a far greater evil than the current "situation"). As long as Google is ever given the clear text password (i.e., before hashing), this would be open to interception by Google -- or infiltrators thereof.

If the GA password were to be used to authenticate in a way where Google doesn't get access to the clear text password (through digest-like authentication), a user wouldn't be able to access the backups after resetting her password. However, this method is not reliable if you don't trust Google (or its infiltrators), because Google provides the clients that would do the hashing before sending the password, so they could obtain the clear text password (by skipping the hash step, or by sending it through side channel) on any client they control such as HTTP login pages or mobile apps provided by Google.

Like all things security, it's a trade-off between security and convenience.
Scaling a Django Application with Memcache on Heroku
Given the tolerant friendly loving environment of their government in that era, I'd prefer drinking clear drinks. There are plenty of 100% soluble clear poisons, but clear drinks would exclude at least SOME poisons, or at least make prospective poisoners work a little harder.
The point is presumably that it's rather unfair. That MR isn't really that many times more worthwhile than a McDonalds employee but that there are perverse incentives or a bad opportunities structure or something that, so to speak, is there to keep people down.