skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I cannot understand the mindset of someone who turns down an offer of $3 billion dollars for their company that has no path to revenue, let alone profit.

IMO, this is why you avoid investment money. Can you imagine VC "partners" forcing you into a decision like this?

$3 Billion dollars _IS_ changing the world. How much more could you possibly want? What kind of future is preferable to the one you'd have had you taken this deal?

Can anyone make sense of this?
I am presuming eu-west-1 / Ireland isn't acceptable?
This seems like a really cool idea. Would it work with multiple users? e.g. if I wanted to share one device with my spouse - would it be able to keep track of multiple people?
All valid points. With the norvig example, the longer I look at it the more I like python. With this js example, the more I look at it the more I like python.

Sadly, I can't really run python in the browser.
They are when you know that the leap-(nanosecond/second/minute/day) is coming up. When you know it is coming, you can "smear" the time difference over, let's say, the entire year, so when it happens, every system behaves correctly.
The size of the OS threads with their stacks is what I am worried about as well. It is interesting the author hints that:

> It drops further when asked to allocate 8MiB stacks like C is doing

Memory, just like CPU is constrained and costs money especially if provisioned in the cloud. If I have 2G of memory available I can spawn 250 threads and keep them around without swapping.

EDIT: actually scratch the above, _wmd pointed out that stack memory is just like virtual memory, it is allocated but brought into physical memory as needed.

This changes how code is written. It is not just an internal detail! Now you cannot think "one-connection = one-task" now it is about locks, queues and mapping control blocks to connections. That is the biggest loss.

> GC is great for multi-threading, but not so great for hundreds of gigabytes of variable lifetime objects. Even if the GC can handle it, GC still has unacceptable 2x space overhead

Good point on GC. I see the main issues in a large concurrent system (and presumably Rust wants to be a good tool for concurrent systems) is non-blocking GC. A slow GC might be acceptable, but if one errant task allocated memory in certain pattern and GC has to lock all the tasks out to run, that could be a serious issue.

Responsiveness (liveliness) of a concurrent system is something that is often forgotten and everyone wants to talk about how fast one can transpose a matrix.

Now a concurrent GC is possible, Azul built one, for Java, it is very interesting how it work. I enjoy reading their whitepapers:

http://www.azulsystems.com/resources/whitepapers
They already got that from their last round. Both founders took 10 million of the table just so they wouldnt be seduced by a offer like this.
A startup isn't looking to make tiny .5% increment improvements so I don't see how this is relevant. Companies looking to grow a small user base are making significant changes, seeking significant improvements.
We definitely have that in the plans.
OS News Just wants to get hits and create a sensation
This is regarding this article on the fromt page of HN yesterday.
http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_system_hiding_in_every_mobile_phone

I would like to say really? I am engineer and die everyday, have major issues because of crazy security on sub systems to access memory else where, sometime even the ones allocated to the sub system. OS new guys please read http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzone/index.php
OOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Snap!
'Rare' Atom Finding May Advance Quantum Computers
Bombastic, long winded and narcissistic. On target for Stephen Wolfram.

But, if you've used mathematica it is the closest thing we have right now to the star trek computer. In a single line I can get solutions to complex problems that would take days in Ruby, Lisp or Haskell. It is the same distance again as Lisp is from C.

In fact, many of the failures you see write-ups on HN I've been able to model and solve in a few minutes with MMA. In particular the rap genius Heroku queue issue.
You could always try the backdoor approach. Maybe try reading a few recreational books on computing such as The Tinkertoy Computer and The New Turing Omnibus to familiarize yourself with some of the concepts then perhaps swing back to the hard stuff with a proper textbook like Concrete Mathematics by Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik.
What kind of future is preferable to the one you'd have had you taken this deal?

The one where you sell for $4 Billion dollars.
Whelp, diminishing marginal utility of the dollar, I suppose.

With a billion dollar valuation, the founders will have found ways to make themselves rich - http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57591017-93/snapchat-founde... - and if you already cashed out fuck-you money, then you might as well keep going and see where it lands.

If I was broke and offered $3b, sure. But if I had $10-20mil sitting in the bank… anything I do after that point is 100% risk-free.

Mind you, I'm really racking my brain on how this isn't all totally insane.
I will write in detail about each of the things they have said, which are outrageously misleading for folks not in companies making the chip! Disgrace..
How to Pick the Best Papasan Chair - Papasan Chair
Are there any interest in social deal bookmarking?
Hate to re-hash the Innovator's Dilemma here, but this makes me judge big media companies less harshly. With Facebook, we have a company that is roughly just a decade old, and yet instead of organically creating a service that is well within their capability and talent, they find it easier just to acquire.

Just a decade or two ago, newspapers also had this kind of buying power and tendency to acquire rather than create...the New York Times bought About.com for $400M in 2005, and then sold it last year for $300M (in cash).

I was never a big user of About.com, but the way its layout didn't change much over the years, and how it seemed to be built on a not-very-flexible CMS, makes me think that if instead, the NYT in 2003-2005 (when it had even more money to spend) just had an in-house team of technologists and a budget of $20-40M a year, could've built a much-better info source, and one that would've, by now, been as dominant as About.com, but with the quality of NYT-in-general.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/times-compl...

I know Facebook's clone, Poke, ended up being a failure...but it can't be just because the engineers and thinkers who work at FB are, on average, worse than the SnapChat inventors. How much management and political baggage did it have? (I'm assuming that the cost to build Poke was also under $1 billion...I hope)
I don't see them touting it as saving licenses. BUT presumably you can save by making these floating instances.

If you have 1000 workers using software locally, you need 1000 licenses.

If you have 1000 workers using software in the cloud, but only 100 at any time, you only need 100 licenses.
I'm having a hard time understanding how,

1. Facebook figures Snapchat is worth $3B, and

2. Snapchat figures Snapchat is worth more than that, and refuses the offer.

The valuation multiples lately have gotten me to wonder what I'm doing. I'm quite familiar with a growing startup that has 9 figures in yearly revenues, and a 9 figure valuation. It makes almost as much money as Twitter, but the valuation is less than 300x smaller. It makes infinity times more money than snapchat, but has a thirtieth of the valuation. What is going on?
You picked an unfortunate example. $2500 - $1500 = $1000, so it seemed like you were talking about a guaranteed income (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income).
I don't think that is it. If you self identify as a good engineer/developer/progammer you get the same response. It's the self identifying thing that's seems to be the problem.

Look at this thread, there are several who are very explicitly doubting me in no uncertain terms. Even doubting the idea that I'm good compared to my current peers.
i got As in almost all my classes in math without really understanding anything. It was like a train I couldn't stop. I couldn't ever slow down for a month and say "I'm going to work on trigonometry this whole month so I can know what I'm doing when I do integration." I just had to memorize the steps to get the right answer, get my A, forget it all, and wait for whatever was coming next.

Years later I go straight back to the beginning and figure everything out, starting with Serge Lang's Basic Mathematics. I didn't even know where the Pythagorean Theorem came from, and when I learned it the second time around, it was damn beautiful.

my advice is to go back all the way to the beginning and get a book written by a real mathematician. I.M. Gelfand's Algebra and Trigonometry were truly enlightening.
The $35/mo is a very aggressive price for VDI in general. Their TCO calculations for on-premises VDI[1] isn't too far off the mark. Microsoft still needs to be paid and SPLA licenses presumably account for a good share of what you're seeing here.

Amazon doesn't have a history of entering the market at a high price point. It might be high for your use case, but your use case isn't what they're after. VDI is a desktop replacement where you run all your applications, not just one or two on an as-needed basis.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/njlJklF.png
Not anymore. They were later released under the Apache 2 license.

http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/license

http://entityframework.codeplex.com/license

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2012/03/27/asp-net-mv...

I suggest updating your comment.
Facebook spurned a $2bn Acquisition offer from Yahoo.

I'll say now about SnapChat what I said about Facebook at the time: They probably know something about their market that we don't that leads them to credibly believe they're worth more than $x bn.
US patent moves are 'profoundly bad' in leaked TPP treaty
Steel clays need to be fired in an oxygen-free environment or you'll have major oxidation problems. I don't realistically see this ever becoming a thing.

>5000 psi

Possibly. Again, it depends on the metal you use. With the right steel or aluminum alloy I could imagine seeing something on this order.
They're trying to buy them out because SnapChat is a problem, just like how Instagram was. At some point, everyone was just posting a link to their Instagram photos in their status. In other words, it is validation that you are being disruptive, and you should definitely hold on.
Hey, remember when Google offered to buy Groupon for $6 billion or whatever? Good times.
In Erlang GC is boringly easy. It has separate heaps for processes and processes are isolated. The price to pay is copying some data between processes and handling immutability. But boring is good. They manage a pauseless and concurrent GC without a sweat.
Interesting, but this review shows there's no SD card, so I won't be buying it. http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/motorola-moto-g/4505-645...
The idea that they have no path to revenue I think is become a common theme but not entirely true.
Who is this product aimed at? People with medical conditions, or "fitness enthusiasts"? What's the relation between "muscle quality" and strength? Are there any use cases for powerlifters, for example?
Show HN: Hadoop in Excel
Forget about investors. Bootstrap your Company. When you are successful, don't mind them. They like to reap where they have not sown.
Is Google Maps so hard to figure out? http://goo.gl/maps/hvarb
It might be more interesting to look at number of funded projects rather than dollar value. Video games dominate because they are so ludicrously expensive to produce - whereas if you look at a typical art Kickstarter the asking sum is a relatively low number (you can get a lot of art done for <$10K).

Side note: I'm not sure if I really want to support another video gaming Kickstarter. With the exception of Planetary Annihilation everything I've backed has turned out far below expectations. Lots of projects shipping after endless delays and not even hitting the original bullet point promises after basically running out of money.
There is already something like Notification as a Service. You can push notification to iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows desktop, Mac OS and even to all browsers.

check http://push.io/
Here are some links to Carl Sassenrath World's smallest spreadsheet program he wrote back in 2001 using Rebol (under 100 lines):

* Announcement on Rebol mailing list - http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-thread.r?m=rmlNHPK

* Code (Rebol script library) - http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=rebocalc.r

* Code (in Gist for nicer syntax highlighting) - https://gist.github.com/draegtun/7454495

* Recent blog post with screen image - http://rebol2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-worlds-smallest-spr...
Also, I wonder how much of this code would survive if you want to get beyond this 1%. Probably nothing, which makes this a road with a dead end. This doesn't mean it is not a useful and brilliant demonstration of cool language features (hacks?), which is how I see it. But there's no relationship between this amount of work/code/lines for this percentage and the amount of work/code/lines for any reasonably higher percentage of spreadsheet functionality.
I think it depends on how risk averse you are, if you're willing to press on you may potentially end up with a higher valuation or it could start going wrong and you've got no chance of getting as strong an exit. Also depends on your motivation about building a business, if it's about money then taking a strong early exit is a sensible idea, if it's about building the business and exploring it's future then selling and seeing your vision disappear is probably a worst fate than losing out on the money.

I'd personally sell and I'm not very risk adverse, I always push for more when I'm gambling, but if you're exiting at a $1bn value you're going to have enough to explore most ideas without worrying about outside investment.
20% of Google Searches Have Never Been Made Before
I agree, saying "Wow, this is a viable and useful language" because you can do something in just a few highly unreadable lines seems... like a pretty odd judgment.

It'd be a bit like saying that C is a great language because someone wrote a raytracer that fits on a business card[0] using it.

[0] http://fabiensanglard.net/rayTracing_back_of_business_card/
Unfortunately this is what happens when unions go wrong.
That's an interesting point. We don't have demographic data on the backers, and if KS knows, they haven't released it. Two things to think about. "Torment: Tides of Numenera" raised $4.2 million. If you look at their pledge levels, they got nine backers to pledge $10,000 or more. Yes, those people have a lot of money, but if we assume they pledged 10K and no more for their rewards, then they account for just one quarter of one percent of Torment's funds. The real pillars of the campaign were pledges in the $20-$28 range. Almost 38,000 backers signed on at that level, and their pledges totaled more than $900,000. Our conclusion is that video games are actually more dependent on the mass market than on high-end backers. We'll get a post on this out soon.
I keep dreaming of the day where I'll travel with a keg of water in my trunk.
> Götz Werner

While talking about basic income we should not forget that he's running one of the largest drugstore chains in Germany. If everyone would have a basic income the difference in income would be going into consuming products. So retail would benefit a lot from it.

On the other hand removing tax on labor would benefit retail too because it's a major cost factor there.

I'm not convinced that we would have better society if we would implement his proposed scheme.
I know that some of you guys have some issues with hosting data in US datacenters...but I have to tell you...I'm so fed up with IT. I'm actually sitting on hold with a major "all hands" issue with our IT department...

I've done this for years...maybe 20 years at this point. I can tell you this..."We" (meaning everyone in IT) don't do desktop management well AT ALL. I can't remember the last time I used a corporate baseline. They take 10 minutes to SHUTDOWN. (That's private industry...government is worse.) I don't know why users put up with it and it makes me realize why everyone hates Windows. (The average baseline literally forces it to stink like a rotting fish.) Couple that with networking guys that are useless at telling you anything other than "its up"...ITS ALWAYS THE FIREWALL.

Almost everyone that I work with just doesn't get how precarious their position actually is...if people don't want to use the sh!t that you work on you just might find yourself screwed at some point.

I work in IT and I would use something like this in a HEARTBEAT if it meant getting better boot times and less "what port is open" bs.

It seems to me that most people in IT actually think that the servers are more important than the people using them.

Thanks for putting up with this little rant...
> The DSP pool is egalitarian, shared equally amongst the first fifteen employees we hire. So it’s a rich incentive at 1 percent of the company (before any future dilution).

The fact that the author considers 1% of a startup's illiquid equity pre-dilution to be a "rich incentive" highlights just how much rethinking is required.

For argument's sake, lets assume an early-stage startup has no future dilution and five of the first 15 employees leave before a liquidity event. In 2012, over half of startups exits were $50 million or less. With a $50 million exit, the 10 early employees would each receive $750,000 pre-tax from the DSP pool. Even with a $100 million exit, each employee's DSP pool share is not likely to net $1 million after taxes.

Of course, at a typical venture-backed startup, dilution is likely to be meaningful, liquidity preferences can prevent employees from receiving anything at all and the odds are against a $50 to $100 million exit ever occurring. Experienced and/or savvy employees know this, and they can do basic math. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that early-stage startup equity is generally a poor retention tool. It's like using a screwdriver with a nail instead of a hammer.

Retention requires a sustained effort to keep employees happy on a daily basis. This is usually best accomplished with financial tools that provide for near-term, recurring rewards such as bonus and profit sharing packages, as well as non-financial tools (pre-tax benefits, flexible schedules, etc.).
If they had a version of this where I could rent photoshop by the hour I'd be elated. (I know these are billed monthly, I saw that, I'm wishing for two changes simultaneously)
I recently played Shadowrun Returns which was funded via the Kickstarter. Although graphics were bad, on many levels it was the best game I played in a last few years. Kickstarter for games give me some hope that there will be some games reaching to niche demographics, like old school players. Majority of new games are targeted for 15 year olds with 15 seconds attention span looking for flashy graphics :(.
I am surprised the server side is windows. If you stream your app to a device the server platform does not matter, and would have thought linux to be the first choice in that case.
Best Marketing Concept: How To Turn Your Weakness Into Powerful Weapon
This is just insane to me. I don't care how much you believe in yourself. You have never made money, and are offer $3b in cash. That should be enough to more than satisfy your investors. Facebook seems like they are pretty good as acquirers, based on the Instagram acquisition, they have let Systrom and his team basically do their own thing, with a bit of prodding on faster releases and a monetization plan. I don't find the Instagram experience to be any worse. Plus, they now get the essentially unlimited Facebook resources, and likely a pretty awesome salary and gig there. I honestly haven't heard anyone effectively defend this.
Somewhat. It is generally not recommended to take things dogmatically; even a potentially dangerous and frowned-upon techniques might be suitable in certain scenarios.
if it's on node.js I imagine there's things to worry about like malicious injection
Its been 'fast tracked' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_track_(trade)).
Two challenges for $ on ideas on how to use AppStream and building out early prototypes on it here: http://www.topcoder.com/aws/
Good point. Working on it.
It seems as though the founders are intent on becoming billionaires. Hard to imagine not cashing in (at 22!) for enough money to live the rest of your life and the rest of your children's lives without a financial worry in the world. I mean, what is the end-game for him here? More money?
Or at least makes the comfortable gambling on it.
No. It's just you agreeing that the _contact_ information you provide to them in the exchange for buying the TLD is true/correct/current/etc, and that it will stay true/correct/current/etc in the future. It has nothing to do with the content being hosted or anything of that nature. This is just about the domain registrar.
>> Mind you, I'm really racking my brain on how this isn't all totally insane.

That's the best I have come up with too.
We analyzed $500 million in job offers, and seed stage companies are the only ones still trying to hire senior software engineers for $120K or less... see the chart here:

https://devauc-static.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/2013/10/Late-Sta...
I'm taking you up on your suggestion.
I think one argument is that if you have multiple cores you can switch most of them into powersaving mode when they're unused, so you can have lower power use overall with more cores since max utilization won't be reached as often.
We would have competition. How healthy it would be is less certain.
I just went on Wikipedia to check my rough estimates. I was off by a few orders of magnitude. A WaPo article in 2010 claims 854,000 people had an active clearance. That's a lot of potential leakers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08...
Ooh, that seems unwise. I'll be happy to be proven wrong but man is 3 billion gonna be tough to beat. I know a lot of people use it and all, but still. Wow.
Except that you know where your neighbor lives and are able to find him in the event something goes wrong.
...an extended 90-day trial (enough time to write the next
Instagram or billion-dollar Enterprise app from scratch!)...

Seems a tad hyperbolic to me.

I wish Microsoft would just buy Xamarin and freely license the runtime to all under liberal (e.g. MIT/BSD) terms. That would surely be a big win for C# from a mindshare / platform growth standpoint.
Yeah, stateless datagram protocols are pretty much the optimal problem for unadorned async I/O.
How do I invest in this startup :)
That is how I read these signals, and sometimes it was true. I'd study a bit more, meet with the class's TA or a university-provided tutor to go over the material, and I'd be fine.

But even then, in many cases, the professor was simply expecting us to have made an intuitive leap. And those of us who hadn't made it were left behind, with no explanation as to why or what it was we needed to understand.
I used to be one of those kid webmasters working from the basement of my parents. Though I did technically have a company. So having a company doesn't really mean anything.
I'm glad you found the Enter key towards the end. You should use it more often :-)
Something Very Big Is Coming: Our Most Important Technology Project Yet
I've ridden a lot of public transportation all over the world. Caltrain is actually a little tricky, and the signage isn't great.

If I'm flying into SFO and I have to get to Mountain View later that day there's no way I would do anything else but shell out the hundred bucks for the cab.
The difference between a gamble and an investment is merely whether the NPV/Expected Value is negative or positive.