skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TL;DR People have become so lazy they now think they have a right to drive to everything including a tucked away beach that is awesome in it's self because people have to get a boat to visit it.
What's the # of exits that result in $10m for one founder?
Maybe they secretly know it isn't that useful after all.
In an OOP design where objects already encapsulate both state and behavior, describing the ideal state of affairs as "single responsibility" seems kind of optimistic.
What bugs many of us feed reader users, though, is that Twitter and Facebook (as well as most other wall or stream based content aggregations) are very bad at information management.

One thing is the singal-to-noise ratio, but another is the issue of infrequently updated content. Anybody that posts only once a month will get buried on any normal Twitter or Facebook feed. With RSS you can easily keep track of infrequent posters even if you have high-volume feeds in your reader.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Facebook had an optional "power user" mode where you get a view that is not unlike a file browser, allowing you to conditionally hide/remove/manage parts of the information flow. Maybe I could be tempted by that.

But then again, I'm no usability expert. Maybe I'm just using reality wrong.
Depends a lot on the specifics of what the algorithm is, what market it enables, how much competition there is, and my own ability to acquire the skills needed to turn the idea into a profitable business. But as framed above - I'm taking the minority position and founding the startup. The fact that someone is offering $10M for the algorithm indicates that they believe it enables a market that is worth many times that amount. Those markets are very rare - most people go their whole lives without finding one. So it's rational to stick with it and develop it as much as possible while retaining ownership.
Could this not have anti-trust implications?

This seems very analogous to Microsoft's tying of IE and Windows, considering Google's dominant position with regards to maps.
I agree that the SRP is certainly a subjective rather than objective principle, and possibly general guidance that can and should be broken in specific circumstance. This article points that out but rather than try to apply prescriptive guidance around making it more objective in specific scenarios, the author seems to believe that its subjective nature is too flawed to fix.

What's the issue?

> A good, valid principle must be clear and fundamentally objective. It should be a way of sorting solutions, or to compare solutions.

Okay, I'm listening. What is your alternative?

> It's not a clear-cut principle: it does not tell you how to code. It is purposefully not prescriptive. Coding is hard and principles should not take the place of thinking.

And.... we're right back to subjective and general again. Set up a straw man only to knock it down with an identical straw man.

Of course, reducing coupling and raising cohesion makes the class responsible for less and less... So are we back at the authors interpretation of the SRP? Seems like it to me.
Yes, I had a similar issue with this article; sometimes, appealing to a niche market IS a path to success. There are countless successful business that cater to smaller market segments.
It depends. Is this your "dream" idea, the one you want to dedicate your life to, or not. If not, I'd take $10M and use it to build that "dream" idea.
There's been a lot of false starts on getting Java support implemented (people saying they'd do it, and then not), and one or two for C# as well. I wish I had time to just sit down and crank out a Java implementation myself -- I think it would take a week or two -- but right now I really need to be putting everything into Sandstorm.io. :/

It will happen eventually, though.
Um, the seed money would have to be considerably higher to make these numbers work out to be even approximately comparable, even before factoring in risk.
So... I don't actually live if the Bay Area, but stories like this always make me curious. Is there any wonder out there why not-tech workers seem to hate the tech sector? People literally protest google's buses, that's a lot of animosity towards an industry that have disconnected and distanced themselves so much that other people have no better recourse than to protest a bus.
Ledger inspired hledger, written in Haskell: http://hledger.org/
Sounds cool. I'm interested to try it out for a personal project.
But a family with three daughters can be "not fully pregnant". Parts are pregnant, parts are not.
I believe that in many ways, this would be ideal. Not only could any language be used (the implementers being responsible for interfacing with the browser API), but the LLVM pseudo-asm could be pre-optimized saving the browser a lot of work.

In the meantime, browsers would still be free to compete based on their JIT implementations.

With rust and by proxy, Mozilla/Samsung's experimental Servo layout engine targeting the LLVM, I can also see potential synergy in this situation.
The choice as defined above makes it seem obvious, but in the show there are some extenuating factors.

The $10M belongs to Google in the show (they use different names for companies/people, but the parallels are obvious.) You may also be "bound" to Google for some indeterminate amount of time, as an employee.

The $200K seed money for 5% of the company is an opportunity to work directly with Peter Thiel (again, names changed in the show.)

Google is going to bury your product, and/or claim it as their own.

Peter Thiel knows everyone in the Valley, and is also agreeing to invest--and other investors will likely follow suit.

Given the choice as presented in this light, it becomes a harder decision than the poll results above would suggest.
I gave you access, waiting for results, but I'm wondering why you insist on getting email access to do anything. Why not let me input flights manually? You're going to turn away a lot of users who aren't willing to let you scan their emails.
Try solving it algorithmically and you'll find plenty of ways to apply mathematical theorem.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22342854/what-is-the-opti...
To be Mr. Know-it-All, these types of names are often referred to as domain hacks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack

I was happy to grab dra.in a few years ago, though I wish I had bra.in.
This has nothing to do with the actions of anyone who works at Google. The line you've drawn between bus protests and beach access is nonsensical.
Ya, that's the point. It's not hipster if you can google it
hmmm

System.out.println(42);
It's the McGuffin algorithm[1]. In all seriousness in the show "Silicon Valley" the algorithm that presents the same question to the protagonists is a loss less compression algorithm that will revolutionize cloud storage. But really it's just a plot device in which value can be attached which will drive most of the character interaction of the series.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mcguffin
"These customers do not seem to be shopping at odd hours, and they are not any more likely to pay full price for the products, both of which might indicate that they are less alert or savvy than other customers."

Did anyone else read that as "too drunk or stoned to know the difference"?
A lot, when it comes to money. Because, it's all about the Money and Khosla has a lot of it.

Also, as it happens, KV is an investor of YC startups: http://blog.ycombinator.com/khosla-ventures-is-joining-the-y...
What kind of weird world do you people live in? This is obnoxious. Only one person has ever said no? I'd have made it two.
Obviously take the $10 million, but the show itself shows the difficulties about taking the seed funding, but doesn't explore the complexities involved in actually getting the $10 million (due diligence, negotiations, vesting, earnouts, etc etc etc etc).
I think the decision is a lot harder than a lot of people here are making it out to be. I immediately equated the question to one of my mostly unsuccessful startup ventures (to which I would immediately take the $10 million).

But the premise of the TV show emphasized the potential of the algorithm he developed. He had some serious IP on hand. Granted it's all fictional, and $10 million is not some trivial amount of money, but if you came up with an algorithm that proved P=NP (to put it in perspective), I'd say selling that IP for $10MM would be foolish.

And if I had that sort of IP, and if I was a person clever enough to come up with that in the first place, I'd take the $200k easy.
Power Backpack
For a variable name, sure. "foo" is a metasyntactic variable, it's used as a placeholder for something else. If you want to name it "fu", I'll be mildly curious as to where you came up with that name, but from context I'll assume it's a placeholder name (if this is production code and not example code, then why are you trying to use placeholder names? In production code I'll assume it has some meaning that I am not aware of).

But that is entirely unrelated to trying to use the acronym FUBAR in english prose. I can figure out that when the author said "foobared" he really meant "FUBARed" because I can speak it aloud and figure out that the author was phonetically typing something. But that's an error correction mechanism, the same mechanism used to try and discern the meaning of a misspelled word. It's not one you can rely on correctly identifying the real word, and it does not legitimize the use of the incorrect or misspelled word. For example, if the author had written "barfued" instead of "FUBARed", I would most likely not have been able to recognize that the author meant "FUBARed".

If you expect me to be able to understand the words that you are writing, you need to make the effort to actually use the correct words to convey your meaning.
The idea was to be Basically.. Parse, but where the users keep shared accounts across all apps and services.

The underlying idea is good but the executions and message were lost in TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE marketing. No one knew what it was other then, "that twitter knockoff site you have to pay for".
What's the nature of the side project if you don't mind me asking?
I love the idea of constrained mazes like this. Another related idea is that of "plank puzzles" (http://www.clickmazes.com/planks/ixplanks.htm), which constrain available moves based on which planks you currently have access to.
Haven't you ever heard of a nerd? False positives on this test could lead you to hire the wrong nerd after all. I've heard there are people more interested in the obfuscated C competition than anything in the physical world including filling out surveys etc.
Well, you can always pivot to the lightsided side of diseases.
Manage PHP errors and exceptions in your project
How Misunderstanding Disability Leads to Police Violence
It's particularly annoying that there's no statement from Khosla. It's hard to believe that he's not in any way sensitive to these issues, or didn't think anyone would notice.

I spend a lot of time along that stretch of coast in the ocean. Anyone even remotely familiar with the place should know that this kind of thing wont go over very well. It almost seems foolish.
The novel is dead (this time it's for real)
With $10 million I'd never hate to worry about again, which would be very helpful when pursuing my next venture.
I used Posterous a fair bit to do blogging by email when abroad. Attach photos from my phone and it auto-created a gallery. Saved a lot of time.
I think what 'forgottenpass was probably getting to was the idea that a regular joe doesn't know much the difference between the all-glorious tech company 'Google' and the tech guy 'Khosla'. Right now Khosla is making all of SV tech place and beyond look bad. Khosla is in some way coloring the perceptions of all tech people, all tech companies, etc. in the hearts and minds of regular joes. It's kind of the way people work - not that there's anything wrong about being ill-informed, a lot of folks don't have time and resources to get good information. We just have to work with what we've got -- and I think this is one of the reasons we should strongly denounce Khosla's douchebaginess and make normal people understand that we're not all like him.
Stripe, to pick a HN favorite, recently raised a big round in which Khosla was a major investor.
Re: tl;dr that's what the trial court judge found, but the case is currently on appeal. It will almost certainly be heard eventually by the California Supreme Court.
Email is for me a convenient way to pass data.
And client are more easy to manage or interact with emails.

And one of the best is that you can keep your data with emails an decentralised it.

Very nice works, the idea is pleasant i'am thinking on a private open source network. Would you mind if i use your idea ?
Well that explanation IMHO is just another argument as to how people in these positions have zero regard for shared spaces and others in general. I reckon the valleywag has a pretty funny response to that self serving article he wrote.

I'm not going to start a bikeshed over the technicalities covered in the coastal commission report though - my original point was how little regard many of these individuals have for others. And how no one should really be surprised that the technology community seems to represent the worst case examples of this.
At this point I can't even tell anymore if this is some subtle sarcastic commentary on how ridiculous interviews can get or a real way to hire employees. I no longer care. When I'm looking for work I'm game for anything. I'll perform interpretative dance if you happen to think this reveals my true personality, I don't see the harm (at least to me). Any judgements you make based on it will be purely justifications you come up with for the decision you have already made based on other things - probably whether or not you like or trust me. I'm all right with that.
I probably have the unpopular opinion here but I don't like it when people try to tell me what I can do with my own property. I understand that people have been using that road for years and it was never a problem with the previous owner. But there is a new owner. He does have a problem with people using the road on his land. That sucks for those people but it is not their land and it never was. The beach is still public... just hard to get to. Once you get there, he can't do anything about it (up to the high water mark).

I'm not sure what angle they are taking with the permits on the land improvements. Those seem like unrelated issues and even if they beat him on the permits, how does that give them back the road access. Wouldn't he still be able to keep them off. Trespassing is trespassing even if the land owner violated some permit rules. If the California Coastal Commission (in charge of issuing permits) categorically denies his permits just to spite him, they'll be just as much the asshole he is.
Easy choice for me. $10M is my all time, f-you money retirement number. Invested conservatively, you get an annual income in the hundreds of thousands and no need to ever do anything work-related again. I could carve out a pretty bitchin existence on that...
I am thinking that it could be a way to make a extended kind of mailing list.

A maling list where you can publish things more easily ....
For HBO, it's all about making 'good shit'
Property is, in most cases, property. It can be bought, sold, inherited, transferred, etc.
Good clarification. The only thing I'd add is that the many people banging the "RSS is not dead" bandwagon tend to be talking about RSS as a consumer technology, in my opinion. A lot less people are talking about "XML is dead", for example. Even software devs don't care so much about technology :)
It really depends on the idea. I would sell most ideas for much less then $10m. But there is one idea, where I would not even take the seed money: A distributed censor free search network to kill Google.
That's not a fair characterization of the choice in the show.

The algorithm he's developed is, we're led to believe, potentially the seed for world-changing, billion dollar business possibilities. The reason he's been offered $10M for it is because the potential buyer believes they can realize that potential, and that without them its inventor can't.

The question he's faced with is not "Take ten mill or start a company", it's weighing up, given that this is a multibillion dollar idea, can you, with a little seed funding, realize at least $10M of value out of it by going it alone?

Saying "take the $10M and then start a company anyway" is ignoring the rather crucial step "*come up with an equally valuable idea which you haven't sold the rights to"...
Exactly. I'd love to use this service, but I am hesitant to connect anything to gmail.
Why? Don't get me wrong, I would totally support that kind of property principles, but given how it would apply to e.g. IP rights, I don't think it's viable in the current corpocratic atmosphere.
Newly revealed emails show Google met regularly with NSA
There also may be people who spend twenty years working on an algorithm and believe they can only monetize those years with a successful business.

For them it might be a real quandary and not a no-brainer, because they won't get that algorithm again.

But even, even those people should take the $10 million. Even if it seems like you're selling your one opportunity, you should do it. Because as others have mentioned, serious success is about execution. Even the best algorithm ever won't be worth more than $10 million if you are a lousy businessperson. And if you are a good business person, you'll be in a better position to succeed with your $10 million than with your one idea.
0 to Basic Regular Expressions in 150 Lines of Scala
Haha, sorry! I snagged it for a friend. Bought it immediately upon sight - wasn't gonna let it get away after someone got sailbo.at from under me.
I think it's interesting that many popular nouns can modify other nouns in English, and that the order of the words matters, e.g. you would never say "shoes hipster"

From A Canticle for Leibowitz:

"In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended... house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection."
2048 in Go
I think reality means that the Facebook business is based on stuffing as much near-relevant garbage at you as possible, which is much harder over RSS.
Well, take the 10M, part out $200K for your own seed money then hire the required help and retain control. Have your cake and eat it too. $10M is a lot of money.
"Afterward, Bellenfant watches and evaluates, along with a statistician from Vanderbilt, a psychologist from Vanderbilt, and the president of the Nashville Table Tennis Club."

Seems a little overkill, but I like the idea in general.

"One young woman recently interviewed for an intern position. 'During the recruiting process she displayed a high level of confidence and enjoyed making people laugh,' Bellenfant says. In the original questionnaire, she rated her excitement level at the prospect of playing at 13 (on the scale of 1-10), and her ping pong skill level at seven.

When she played, it became obvious that she'd overestimated her abilities. 'We would have put her at two or three,' he says. Yet in the questionnaire after the game, she rated her skill level at six. 'She maintained that high level of confidence, which we think is a positive thing,' Bellenfant says. The company hired her, and he predicts she will be a strong performer."

Wouldn't being ridiculously over confident like this player be a negative sign? That seems like the kind of person who would power through things by themselves and do it completely wrong while being convinced it's right.
That was my first impression too, but it gets tricky.

What if your descendents want to live on the same plot of land where they grew up, after your death? Does the plot regress in size?
Meh. I remember back when you could only register .ly domains using a Japanese registrar. Now it's so mainstream.ly
What a douche canoe. Which is now ironically the only way to access the beach.
Speaking as a reformed SEO nerd, Google does take it into account as part of their overall rankings, but by no means does that mean that your site will tank. They also know that your site is in English and that all the links are coming from English domains, etc.

Please source this. Plenty of popular domains using ccTLDs rank just fine.
I don't know what Sama's plan is but it doesn't scale very well. If you plan to fund thousands of promising startups, I don't know if you would want to bring them all to the US. The biggest reason for that for the first few years startups succeed more in one geographical region (as in one industry industry segment and one customer profile) and asking them to move might not be the best of idea. It will work for some but will destroy some other promising companies.
Show HN: Mark up Alibaba's SEC filing
A new service where you can share notes on company financial filings...
Any company that demonstrates this kind of thinking is actually only interested in drones willing to follow whatever orders are at the table.

"We don't know what data we're getting but it is interesting"? Dance my minions!

Reminds me on that "It's fucking startup" quasi enthusiastic story from the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7619439
Your other examples are good but OpenID is somewhat murky: the concept was good but the design was completely misconceived. The basic ID primitive should have been the email address instead of a URL — far fewer people have a stable homepage or think of its URL as representing their identity – and the entire system needed to be both simpler to implement and built around delegation to avoid requiring large companies to jump on board before anyone could adopt it.

That ship may have sailed – I think there's still hope – but I think there would have been a real chance for success had BrowserID shipped before everyone was pushed onto Google / Facebook / Twitter because those were the only options which didn't turn into a support disaster.
It wasn't just given to them by the Mexican government: it was also included in the US-Mexican treaties, and ratified after an appeal to the US Supreme Court.

Makes it a lot harder to deal with.
It seems primarily because his comments aren't adding significant value without mentioning his product. Take out the product, and it's basically "Awesome!".

A low value comment + product mentions = spammy smell.
The $10M belongs to Google in the show (they use different names for companies/people, but the parallels are obvious.) You may also be "bound" to Google for some indeterminate amount of time, as an employee.

What does it mean that the $10M belongs to Google? What's the point of the poll if you don't actually receive the $10M?

Getting $10M in exchange for being a Google employee for four years is such a good deal that it's hard to imagine how turning it down wouldn't be a mistake. You're not rich until you exit, and achieving an exit is much harder than getting a high valuation. Remember, pg sold Viaweb for roughly $10M (his share), and it took him about four years to do it.
A Half Life fan site/blog?
The Case for Rebooting the Network Neutrality Debate
Codeanywhere, The Google Docs For Developers, Rocks Startup Alley At Disrupt NY