skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately this line of thinking is pretty infectious and affects more than just the Valley's pre-IPO startups.

I work for a large-ish company (will be approx 3000. employees by YE 2014) that has been public since the last tech bubble. We've run in the red for the last six years pivoting into an entirely new line of business -- essentially new investors bought an already public company and sold off the existing business to avoid having to IPO. Their exit strategy for the business is to eventually have one of our client companies buy us out. All of our contracts are structured to make such an acquisition a (from our management's perspective) sweetheart deal.

Only the way we've been going about it is all wrong. Basically these "very large companies" that we work hard to land contracts with we allow to give us very unfavorable terms and to pay us below cost. This is in a market where we have only one competitor and they can't come close to providing our level of service. It's blatantly obvious that they're getting better deals at the price for service they have now while we take all of the risk/loss.

We had our very first break-even quarter sometime this year (even by GAAP principles!) and the board cut everyone very big checks that put us back in the red (even by our non-GAAP principles!). Our executives are not tech executives, they're MBA-types from the retail and call center industries, but they drink the exact same Kool Aid.

I think their line of thinking goes something like this:

1) We have a really awesome product.

2) We lose tons of money providing that product. (Aside: Holy shit, employees that actually are our product are expensive! We couldn't possibly afford to hire developers to make our large staff more efficient! No way! We're a technology company!)

3) ???

4) Our customer base that we're totally supplicant to will buy us out because fairies.

Eventually this is going to end in tears and 3000 very overworked people are suddenly going to be much less so.
Everpix got beaten by Google, Apple and Yahoo who offered free personal photo libraries. Sure the big companies don't have all of the features of Everpix, but they have the ability to instantly advertise to their 100 million user+ networks. This is why VC's always ask you what you're going to do when Google does "your idea."

The thing about ephemeral messaging is that no one would trust Apple, Google, Facebook or Yahoo to actually delete your content because their business models are based on collecting and mining your data. Snapchat is in a position that could only have been achieved by being the "little guy" and no other little guys are contesting them right now.
“Fundamentally, surveillance is a business model of the Internet. The NSA didn’t wake up and say: ‘Let’s just spy on everybody, it said: ‘Wow, corporations are spying on everybody, let’s get ourselves a copy,’ ”
This one too, but it's perfectly static: http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,2,2,0,3,1,1,3...
Those funds exist. They're smaller funds. Everpix was going to the "best" (biggest) VC funds and asking for a relatively large amount of money for a Series A. VCs typically aim for 10x return (let's keep the hyperbole out of this discussion, please) so Everpix indicated they expect a return of at least (1.5M + 5M) x 10 = 65M. Add in later rounds of funding and the ~1B goal is not unrealistic.

It takes a roughly constant amount of time to do a deal, so funds have a minimum deal size below which they aren't interested.
That "we can't know anything about the future" attitude is way more absolute than what the parent is saying and it doesn't foster any interesting conversations about what could happen, why, how, when and how that could relates to our present and past.
Why sales matter and not profits?
If I go and buy Ferrari F360s for $200K then turn around and sell them for $10K I can probably get a lot of sales yet from the business perspective I am going to be in a pretty bad state.

Has MS turned in any profit from their whole Xbox affair? There had been various estimates around but I've never seen ones claiming significant profits, the best ones I'd seen claimed it broke even. They had shown some minor profit on their entertainment divisions in some quarters but the RROD alone costs them $1B not counting minor stuff like purchasing and running Rare or paying for "exclusivity".
Thanks for using the Barbara Streisand effect, Canonical. I would not have been aware of this informative website if not for your legal threats.
http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#3,6,1,2,0,1,1,3,2...
RE: "we have enough of these photo sharing gimmicks already"
RE: "I think the author is missing the opportunity cost here"

The fact that there's already entrenched photo sharing kings means that you don't have to be first to market, overspend, or rush. There's no time crunch here, meaning that a great product could have been built well - over time - on budget, and still have had success.

Did you even read the article? The photo storage / sharing / librarian market is HUGE. Definitely large enough to support multiple players, even marginal ones that make $3-400k/yr.
So, I'm trying to wrap my head around this. In order to be like Snapchat[Facebook|Twitter|and the like], you must defer monetization. But when you're starting up, cash is scarce and you need money ASAP. Since you can't always depend on getting external funding, you need to charge customers early.

How do you start a business if you can't convince investor to put money in, and not allowed to receive money from customers?
I want to know how much Sony payed Wired for that advertism... article.
Ah. So this takes my no. of tweets, * (hourly/60) and feeds me back that number? Genius.

(Protip: if you estimate at 60$/h, it's 1$/tweet. You're welcome.)
You're completely missing my point. You seemed to be claiming that since you can type in a competitor's address easily that somehow web-based businesses are inherently unable to build economic moats. The valuation of a marketplace like AirBNB has almost nothing to do with the fact it's an Internet based business. For marketplaces the natural convergence is one large player since sellers go where the buyers are and vice versa, and hence newcomers cannot overcome the big guys sucking all of the air out of the room.
I consider myself a newcomer in Linux. Started playing with Redhat then Ubuntu. After being introduced (more like forced) to Slackware, I can't get back to any other distro.

However, nowadays I've been torn between Slackware and Debian for the server setup since I've started exploring Ansible to quickly get a server up. But as long as Slackware doesn't offer package dependency management, Ansible won't be that much help, unless of course I do all of them in bash script.
There is at least one case of character assassination that we can with near certainty attribute to the US surveillance apparatus.

Eliot Spitzer was Governor of New York, former AG of New York, famous gadfly of Wall Street, and a top contender before the 2008 election to be Obama's pick for Attorney General, when it was discovered that he was paying prostitutes.

The explanation as to how this information was discovered is as follows: he paid for these "services" using a wire transfer to the madam, who had created an "anonymous" corporation to collect payments, as a convenience to her wealthy and famous clients. According to Wikipedia, "The investigation of Spitzer was reportedly initiated after North Fork Bank reported suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as required by the Bank Secrecy Act, which was enhanced by Patriot Act provisions, enacted to combat terrorist activity such as money-laundering." [1]

Every bank is required by the Patriot Act to file "Suspicious Activity Reports" regarding certain activity to FinCEN, which reports must be kept secret from the person being reported upon. SARs are typically filed electronically, and then centralized in FinCEN review centers, where patterns are analyzed and information is distributed to law enforcement personnel. Spritzer was being monitored because one of the chief criteria used in determining whether a SAR should be filed is whether an individual being monitored is a "Politically Exposed Person" or PEP (that acronym is actually used actively). [2]

In other words, by explicit provision of the Patriot Act and US DoT regulations, all financial activities of politicians must be monitored and reported on in secret by financial institutions.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want the US Attorney General to be someone who frequents call girls. It was Spitzer's own self-destructiveness that created the opportunity for this take down. But you have to ask, if it weren't for his aggressive anti-Wall St. stance, would he have been targeted? Perhaps he wouldn't have been. There are certainly similar transgressions committed by less "problematic" politicians that never leak. For instance, even after the whole Spitzer hullabaloo, we don't know who any of this madam's other clients were, even though it was reported that some were famous politicos.

What's most significant here, though, is that we don't need to speculate about how this power can work to the advantage of certain interest groups.

In this case, broad-spectrum surveillance may have resulted in Eric Holder becoming AG at the height of the financial crisis, instead of the one man perhaps most qualified by experience and temperament to prosecute financial crimes, Eliot Spitzer.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scan...

[2] http://www.sowal.com/bb/showthread.php/21466-Unintended-Cons...
> How much more complicated does the Go code get if you want to allow for addition of inches and feet, but still prevent nonsensical things like adding inches and seconds?

You can't do it, because Go doesn't have operator overloading.

Also, I'd argue that the automatic promotion of bare numbers to a wrapped type is not really "a matter of taste" but rather severely hurts the ability of Go's newtype feature to catch bugs. In languages that have stricter newtypes, such as ML or Haskell, you can design your APIs such that the caller has to think about which unit to use. Someone using your code might accidentally write the number "12" to mean 12 inches when your API takes feet, but the Go compiler will silently let this mistake pass.
34 Medical Studies Proving Cannabis Cures Cancer
It's a numbers game. Let's say that 99% of your investments flop. That means the 1% of successful investments have to make up for all of the losses from the others (and earn a return). To earn a total return of Y%, you need that 1% of investment to earn (100+Y)x returns. If you want to do this annualized over a 5 or 10 year investment, the required return jumps dramatically (and you start talking about 1000x deals)
You're right and this is the actual measured risk taken by VC in this case. It's a straight forward bet: if the horse they are better on (snapchat) is given enough of an opportunity (money) to implement far better than any potential competitor without that opporunity, then Snapchat can become a Facebook.

The key differentiator between Snapchat and other competitors is that Snapchat has millions of dollars to throw at problems which, if implemented well, will give them considerable product differentiation through access to the best talent and marketing.

It's a high risk gamble - welcome to VC capital - but it's the business VC is in.
Raining (or a helicopter moving and you looking down on earth): http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,0,1,3,0,2,0,2...

show is up : http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,1,2,1,2,2,1,3...

wait wait brb: http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,0,2,3,3,2,0,0...

lines moving up: http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,2,2,2,2,1,2,1...

pixles moving: http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,1,2,3,2,2,1,0...

space rocket shooting: http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,0,2,1,3,2,0,0...

powerpoint effect: http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,1,2,2,3,2,2,2...

undo powerpoint effect: http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,3,1,0,2,1,1,3...

sorting algorithm (reminds me of insertion sort lol): http://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,0,2,1,1,2,1,3...
I'd love to give it a shot, how may I contact you?
I'm so sad about this. I really, really love Everpix. It's one of the best photo-related startups out there.
> Apache 2.4 with the Event MPM is pretty much equivalent to NGINX in terms of performance and memory footprint.

This has piqued my interest enough to look into it.

Aside, are you guys hiring remote? ;-)
21 Hard To Believe Facts About 'Wealthy America' And 'Poor America'
Yeah, exactly. They owe me $79,168.00

I'll let them know I take credit cards.
Linux From Scratch?
There is a very good reason why investors and a lot of entrepreneurs in the consumer space tend to support free or freemium products and that is because building a paid for consumer service is extremely difficult.

Reaching users is incredibly expensive (once you have the audience, you can charge others to access it - see how it works), conversion rates are low and consumers are reticent to spend.

By being free your product becomes your marketing. You either have a paid product and start paying $50-500 to acquire each user, or you have a free product and pay $0.05-10 to acquire each user.

You can't just cut out the free product part and magically retain the paid part, as this example does with Everpix.

There is also an element of network effects in a lot of consumer business models, with a winner-takes-all (or most) landgrab.

Things are entirely different in the enterprise sector, or selling to people at work.
I think they purposely show the protagonists serving in forces and promotional videos as too cheesy. That's the whole idea. We are over-glorifying violence. In the movies, they dumb down the bugs. In real life we dumb down human beings. There is a scene where kids are squashing roaches commenting 'everyone is doing their bit'. Ah hate hate everywhere?
actually Path is valued at $250m

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/07/path-loses-biz-head-amid-ru...
> What it doesn't have is any major character questioning the state that they are living under - but then looking around today, sometimes that seems pretty accurate as well.

That's the "problem" - the film assumed the viewer had enough brain to see the satire instead of spelling it out. Apparently that wasn't true of most reviewers at the time. (I saw it when it came out and loved it. Much more than the book which was depressingly fascist apologetic.)
Instead of paying employees half market rates, those employees can go and work on creating a VR app that could be used by millions of people, or some other opportunity. And they could receive full pay.

Why should these employees need to receive half pay when there is opportunity for them to receive full pay working on a different problem? I'm sure they could make great waiters at a local restaurant and receive a livable wage, but is it the best use of the opportunities they have? I'm going to go out on a limb and assume those 6 employees were excellent given how well Everpix was run.
If they are still in the probation period and haven't signed an employment contract then I don't believe you are legally bound to pay them any severance but IANAL and the rules vary widely by jurisdiction. Check with an employment lawyer before doing anything. You won't regret spending that money.

I would not recommend trying to buy yourself out (i.e. pay to relieve your guilt). Save the cash for your business and do only what your lawyer says you have to do. There's a chance this employee will see it as a sign of guilt or weakness and try for more. It happened to me.

If this employee does good work but is toxic to the work environment, you might want to suggest a contract arrangement instead of full time employment. You could pay him to take on well defined tasks (offsite) and keep the interpersonal interaction to a minimum. That way you keep the talent but lose the friction.

Add "good communication skills" and "plays well with others" to your job description for the next round and tighten up your employment contract to provide for a probation period where any party can terminate within the first N days. You write up the conditions but get an employment lawyer to help you draft it into something legally enforceable in your jurisdiction.
Interesting link, thank you!

But I don't see how it's relevant - this is a site about start-up news and Bitcoin is exactly where the opportunities for start-ups are. It's not like they're posting porn or something - probably the next PayPal will come from someone reading these links and comments here.

Although I admit that sometimes there are too many links about politics on HN, but you can say politics is also kind of relevant to the start-up world, especially when it concerns policy decisions about technology.

In conclusion, I'm yet to see an irrelevant link on HN. The algorithm works as advertised IMHO.
A New $1 Million Prize Competition Aims To Fight Gun Violence With Tech
Simple earthquake monitoring app
I read the text...and got no usable info. Plus the awful map and a table that's not sorted by rank but by region (thus only doubling the "information" of the map).

Where can we downvote? ;)
This is a country that took the original Red Dawn as a serious drama. Nicaraguans invading the Rockies.

There's nothing too ridiculous a good portion won't buy.
I was at a social apps conference a few months back and some interesting statistics were shown about Snapchat. One of the statistics was that Snapchat allows picture messages to be sent 10x faster than regular SMS. I found this fascinating because this is when I stopped looking at Snapchat as an incognito picture sharing app and more of a new, more efficient communication channel.

I don't know how Snapchat plans to monetize. It might be advertising. It might not be. But it's hard to dismiss Snapchat as being valueless when clearly millions of users are using it every single day.
Yes. I'd figure out a way to give some attribution to the original creator of said idea.

Check this out. http://everythingisaremix.info
Of course that's ok.

Nothing is ever entirely new. Everything has parts of other things in it.
VCs typically aim for 10x return (let's keep the hyperbole out of this discussion, please)

Thats why I said $100m should work. You suggest $65m. That's the same order of magnitude. It was reported that the VCs were turning them down because $1B was "never gonna happen"[1]. That's why the math piqued my interest. If its just reporting hyperbole...that would be one explanation.

[1] Which implies they were looking for that extra ~order of magnitude
Oh yeah... besides, the prevailing wisdom is this: execution > ideas.

Most people talk up an idea, but never do anything with it. Talk is cheap.
Yes I have read, but in real life.. not everyone is able to accomplish what is expected of him/her. Its not just a matter of choice, but also circumstances.
You're right. It's still a MVP with. Sorry about that!
Got That Friday Feeling? You Need Desk Beers
And PS2 is officially the best selling console in the world [1]. But I agree - other than PS1 (which was easier than Saturn), Sony hardware was never easier than competition.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_conso...
HN comments
I just created account on HN, how can I post a comment to an item?
real experience? cmon man, everyone knows real experience is bullshit
Thanks a lot for letting us know! :)
I agree. The grandparent's rule seems to exclude many of the classics of satire.

Consider Voltaire's Candide. Taken at face value, its genre is somewhere between "young man's growth story" and "colony-era adventure novel". Is it a good example of high-quality writing in those genres? Certainly not.
> and (b) private entities, such as corporations or other organizations, that are incorporated in and maintain a primary place of business in the United States.

That’s not hard.
Caching doesn't only happen in proxies. Clients can do it too and your app is a client and should cache what it can.

But the real problem with REST is round trip times and that is an artifact of REST being build on top of an RPC protocol. The future is EVENTful and I am not talking about websockets or any specific implementation of events. Fire and forget messaging is the way of the future.
Just don't do anything as a surprise - make sure the person understands the possible outcome - and give her enough time to reflect your position. She might think that she's doing good for the company, even if she have to argue with you, and she might be actually right, but at the end, it is you who is paying so you're the client - so make sure the service provider understands what are your needs - including things like "don't argue with me, even if you're 100% sure my decision will harm the company".

You mentioned personal conflict - so this might be arguing on some irrelevant subjects. Even in this case, it might sound odd for her but she should clearly understand your PoV - "Justin Bieber is better than Led Zeppelin, if you disagree vocally, I'll fire you!" - again, this might sound odd to her, but it depends on her compensation package whether she accepts your conditions or not.
This was a sect, not a company.
Both AirBnb and Holiday Inn are difficult to replace. But Holiday Inn is definitely far more difficult to replace than AirBnb. If you try today, you may be able to replace AirBnb, but it may take you 1000x the effort to replace Holiday Inn.

For one simple fact, Holiday Inn is a physical entity providing service to people with massive brand in a industry which is capital intensive and requires endless customer focus.

The easiest example is Elon musk trying to make a car company Vs building Pay Pal. Difference is so enormous, though both are difficult, they are yet no way comparable.
Yes, this is how it works for alignment, so you don't need spaces to align the x there

This is a non issue when you have nothing to the left of the code (that is, when indenting)

(and the x should be under the 9 btw)
I have a more modest request:

Could debuggers please store the code paths and variable values, over the last 50 executions or perhaps the test suite (deterministic)? This is particularly useful for understanding someone else's code.

[edit: a context-free version of reverse debugging]

I've recently been enjoying using IntelliJ for Scala, because it can show me types, and jump to type declarations, and usages.

However, I still have to do a bunch of print debugging when trying to understand someone else's code, because I want to understand what values certain variables take. This is a pain using a compiler as slow as Scala.

Something that captured relevant information, so that it would be easier + faster to do print debugging against previous code runs or the test suite, would be awesome.
Sure - and you can test types in your unit tests using the OP's technique. :)
Multiple sources I've come across over the years have claimed that the movie started out as an original property and only became an "adaptation" of Starship Troopers shortly before it went into production, when the studio realized they had an option on Heinlein's book and that it was sorta-kinda similar. (This is much the same thing as what happened to the movie I, Robot, which started out as an unrelated script, I believed called Hardwired.)

My suspicion is that Verhoeven -- like Alex Troyas with I, Robot -- knew full well that their movies had very little to do with the source material and put on a game face in interviews. I've always wondered if the movie might not have done better in its initial run without the studio forcing that connection onto it. A film can't really be both a military dystopia satire and a good adaptation of Starship Troopers, any more than a brutal deconstruction of Objectivism would make a good adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.
I think you missed my point.. also, individual politicians represent their respective districts, I would sure hope that people in a democratic society worry about them