skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I find that I am always writing APIs, and it's not always clear which is going to be 'public' or 'private'.

I understand the sentiment, and I believe in SOLID principles. I just mean that I'm not building a library that other people will use. No one is ever going to subclass my "player" class, not even me. Unlike my sound or graphics or AI code it's unlikely to be reused even in another game.

>Hm, you mean like _char.aim_? Where char may be a Monster, Soldier, or ?

Yes. My "aim" method is 90% identical for all types, about 10% specific to the type - if(type==monster){do this}; if(type==soldier){do that}

I've heard "if you're using if statements like this you're probably not using OOP correctly", but in my case I don't want six nearly identical methods spread out in six class files. That's repeating myself, which is the real sin I'd rather avoid; it comes back to haunt me if the map format or some other data structure changes.
I also found it strange that Mint sold so soon for so little, relative to what they would surely have grown into (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821888). But something bothers me about the current critique.

The most common argument (by far!) that I've heard against VC funding is that VCs only care about home runs, so their interests aren't aligned with the founders', they don't care if 9/10 of their portfolio companies die, and so on. But here the criticism is just the opposite: the "VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation" is that VCs don't want home runs, they want early exits. Both criticisms can't be right. So, are there two distinct and incompatible schools of thought about why VCs suck? Or are there just a lot of people who are against VCs no matter what, for whatever reason is handy? My spidey sense is that there's a little of the latter at work. (FWIW, I don't have an opinion for or against VC funding in general.)
Obligatory Dive Into Mark reference goes here:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/30/pink-numbers
Most companies that change the world rarely appear as if they will change the world at the beginning stages.

By the same token, most startups that appear like they'll change the world rarely end up changing the world.
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Why is it counter-intuitive? If your goal is to make a lot of money, sometimes your exit strategy will be acquisition.
Is it only me or the whole article reads, smells and looks like an hoax? Consider the evidence:
a) "... are tuning the strength of the laser so that it kills mosquitoes without harming other insects or, especially, people." Laser barriers capable of killing people, directly out of the movies.
b)"Each time the laser strikes a mosquito, the computer makes a gunshot sound. When the mosquito is hit, it bursts into flame and falls to the ground, and a thin plume of smoke rises." Go to Kongregate and you will find dozens of flash mini-games doing exactly that.
c) "Other ideas include devices that disrupt the mosquitoes' senses of sight, smell, and heat; feeding them poisoned blood; infecting them with a genetically altered bacterium; and creating a malaria-free mutant to overtake the natural mosquitoes." I like "poisoned blood" most, because it can kill vampires too. But "Mutant mosquito from the outer space X bacteria controlled mosquitoes from hell" would be a blockbuster...
Jason's point is broader than the business deal, he's making a critique of the Silicon Valley culture. While I have the utmost respect for the capabilities of the Mint team, I agree that it's disingenuous for the community to wrap itself in the flag of "We're in this for the revolution, not the money" and then be just so damn quick to take the money.

That said, Mint seems like the exception out here. Facebook and Twitter seem to be doing a great job keeping the champagne at bay.
I really hate stories like this. Shame on Mint.
The chairman of the board at Intuit is heavily involved with the west coast VC community.
"I think the post will end up being contrarian just to be contrarian."

If your mind is already made up then you don't need to read it.
The chairman of Intuit is heavily involved in the west coast VC community.
Often times, companies have no choice but to raise money up front. Tesla and Facebook had to, and both seem to be well on their way to changing the way we behave environmentally and socially.

Also, I really really really do not understand all the crap you guys give ad based websites/business models. Advert business has well and long been an established industry, dripping with cash. There are tons of websites out there generating millions of dollars for their owners. From POF to sleazy SEO blogs, these people generate enough money to live comfortably, and they're happy with that. And when I see DHH rail against ad based sites at conferences in his snarky ways, it's very disingenuous, as if he's completely blind to the world of those who are making bank from ads.
I think Rich Hickey is all set to become one of the most influential figures of Computer Science. The process has already started :)
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Agreed. Especially, this part:

They were growing rapidly and figured out the revenue game.

We have no idea how close Mint was to making good revenue, especially if lead-gen was their only source. Maybe they figured lead-gen wasn't lucrative enough and decided to take the early payout over losing time and money in the longer run?
What the hell do you mean by "Just building an audience with nothing to sell (beyond ads)" - you're attracting the audience with content - that's what you sell to those brains behind eyeballs and you sell ads on the side. Where is the problem with that? That's what media business was/is about for the last couple of centuries.

How can you build an audience with "nothing to sell" anyways? What kind of audience is that, spam bots?
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The problem with that wish is that the iPhone was "big" before there were developers for it as there wasn't even an api initially. Developers were clamoring to develop for the iPhone because they saw how big it was going to be in the market. If all the iPhone developers today decided to go to android, it wouldn't move the android needle one bit, it would just open up a huge hole to be filled with other aspiring iPhone developers. What needs to happen is there needs to be a competing device that gains as much traction with users as the iPhone and that doesn't look like it's going to happen very soon.
If you have one repository you've just created a monopoly. If you have multiple repositories (probably one per app) then you've just shifted the problem to installing new repositories.
It's just a guess, not a certainty. Your mind seems pretty made up about Mint without knowing all the details surrounding the acquisition.

What's kind of funny is the vast majority of the 37signals philosophy I agree with. Hell, we turned down VC funding in part because we really liked what you guys were able to do without it, and the fact that investor interests and founder interests often conflict. But to lambast someone for taking the payday of a lifetime without knowing all the circumstances surrounding not only their company, but their life, doesn't seem right.
"Tesla and Facebook had to"

Tesla makes physical products. They manufacture. They have inventory. They have a factory. Money is required because they have significant initial capital expenses.

I take issue with "Facebook had to". Facebook chose to, they didn't have to. Software companies don't have to. They choose to.
Jason you're projecting your ideology on others. That's a Fail smell.

There's nothing wrong with a decent exit. The old guard doesn't have to die, and right now we're relying on the old guard since they're almost the only way startups can get liquidity.

The Silicon Valley venture game isn't about making lifestyle businesses. It's about making good returns on investment. $170m was a respectable return for everyone involved.
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I approve of the entrepreneurial initiative.
Lordy, it's just a 20% project.
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It must've been added within the last couple days.
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Thanks. So the exchange really are messing with price-time priority in exchange for cash? Wow ...

But then why would any non-flasher ever place a single order on these exchanges? Couldn't a boycott could solve this problem without any legislation --- they could just go to an alternative venue which wasn't selling them out in exchange for more fees?

---
Appendix: Bear with me while I think out loud so anyone can point out mistakes I'm making.

Time n-1, Order #0: Some seller posts an offer of size N > 5000 at $21.00. (It has to be $21.00, otherwise Order #2 would have nothing to buy at that price).

Time n, Order #1: Mutual fund sends buy 5000 "at market" (i.e. fill me at any price from here to the moon).

Time n+1, Order #2: Would-be flasher sends buy N at $21.00.

Time n+2, Order #3: Would-be flasher sends sell 5000 at $21.01 (and prays that no other flasher beats him to it).

Time n+3: Repeat from time n-1.

Under normal price-time priority, #1 matches #0, #2 matches #0 and becomes best bid, #3 doesn't match anything, and your new market is $21.00 / .01. The total traded volume is N. (The would-be flasher is now long N - 5000 and has to trade out at a loss of fees + stamp duty, so the first time around the total traded volume is 2N - 1, but that doesn't happen again: he either stops doing this shit or goes out of business).

With "flash trading", #2 matches #0 (despite #1 having time priority) and #3 matches #1 (despite not even being in the market at the time #1 arrived). The total traded volume is N + 5000. The exchange earns some extra fees, the flasher gets the arbitrage profits, the mutual fund gets screwed, and the sellers (#0) don't care either way because they were willing to trade at $21.00 all along. Weird.
Of course, but a key implication of the article and many of the responses was that this was somehow unfair, in that connected companies had special access to these spaces. In fact, if the ability to make billions were predicated so highly on the precise location, people would likely be willing to pay quite a bit more. If the advantage were that great, one would expect the price to be higher.
Simple proposal.. How about a zipping an application and merely naming it .appz (or just plain zip)

The only reason why Mac application can't be distributed like Windows .exe files is that Mac applications are actually directories. Excluding .pkg installers 99.99% of the time the .dmg file is merely just a container for the single .app directory.

Safari automatically unpacks .zip files by default on download. Where's the mystery here. Why bother with dmg in the first place
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Wow I just looked and I also am 939 days old but I don't for the life of me remember coming here and thinking this had opened yesterday. I feel like I must've seen it on programming reddit or something because I followed that pretty closely back then.
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> Mint had their number, but they sold it for $170 million. A big payday for sure, and if that was their two-year goal then they nailed it, but I can’t believe that was the point behind Mint. It had too much potential.

Ummm... He can't believe the point was to make a bunch of money?!?!
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From two years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSIWpFPkYrk
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From a comment posted on the blog: "You may not realize how fragile Mint was. All the hard part was being done by Yodlee.com; Mint simply built a thin layer over Yodlee, and collected affiliate fees. Mint was not built for the long haul, it was built to flip. (Check out the free yodlee.com to see that this is true.)"

I think this point is important. Mint was adding value to an existing set of services rather than creating from scratch. This made its offering relatively easier to replicate. IMHO this point is not given adequate importance when considering why Mint chose to sell.
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Actually looking at the archive it looks like it started being interesting around January 2008 or so.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://news.ycombinator.com/
At that rate it would take you about half a year to resolve every IP4 on the net.

According to http://www.zooknic.com/Domains/counts.html there are 107,235,401 domains, so you could resolve them all in under 4 days. Allow some extra time for the country TLDs, and perhaps subdomains.
He was correct too. There have been incidences when the ration card has been forged when the rightful owners were never given one.
Tell that to Elon Musk. There'd likely be no Tesla and certainly no SpaceX if he hadn't sold PayPal to eBay. Anything customers 'lost' in PayPal's acquisition was vastly surpassed by the innovation of his subsequent companies.
What community?

Okay, I'm not in the Valley, but businesses are in business to do business - to make money for their shareholders. Arguing against that as a reasonable motivation is disingenuous. You can disagree with the business decision; that essentially amounts to "I think their expected value is >$170m and I'd take their risk profile". Fair enough. But if you're arguing it on any other basis than that, then you're substituting your morals for economics, and what's more, your morals for those of all the individual shareholders. Not cool.

Isn't it easiest to just assume that Facebook and Twitter haven't been bought because their equity holders think they make more money doing it their way? They've got a case too; as Twitter's paper valuation climbs past $1bn, the crew there get proved more and more correct.
How technology is driven by time to market rather than quality
"A great hacker .. described it to me as "the best programming book out there" (even if you never touch AI or Lisp again)."

That is a great description of PAIP. It is almost a blow by blow description of how Peter Norvig thinks through problems.

One of the great things about PAIP is that it provides a step beyond the "Introduction to ..." books that most languages have.

Some languages have books that expose how great hackers use that language and are targeted towards people really trying to master the language, eg: Common Lisp has PG's On Lisp and Peter Norvig's PAIP, C has David Hanson's "C Interfaces and Implementations", Forth has Leo Brodie's books and so on.

Many other languages, even very popular ones, don't have these intermediate-to-expert level books written by outstanding hackers and are restricted to "Introduction to X" type books often written by people who aren't necessarily great programmers, something I've found a bit strange.
FU money isn't only a big lump sum of cash. It can also be a residual flow of payments for SaaS or royalties or dividends. As long as that money is coming in every month, you're fine and can do most anything you want as well.

Flipping a company is just one way to say FU to the man.

I've said FU to the man lots of times, even when all I had was some cash I had saved up from working really hard and long hours at a salaried job.

There's a sense out there that you need lots of cash to break free, but lots of homeless people break free all the time and many of them are way happier than those receiving big exits for startups. That is not hyperbole.

Breaking out of the machine is about mind not money. If you believe it is about money, you'll never break free even if you have lots of money.

Even with lots of money in the bank, you get bored. You end up wanting to go back into the system, to be part of a team, to do something productive. FU money is not all it's cracked up to be and it's mostly those who have never had it who think the world of it.
Hmm... tell me again why I would want to live in Silicon Valley?
Will this leave a bunch of C++ and OCaml programmers unemployed?
I always felt the fight against ad-driven business models has been slightly misguided. I think if you set out to draw a very targeted audience and make money with displaying ads around quality content you can create a very strong business. Look at Mashable, the Tuts sites, Problogger, even TechCrunch.

I think the real mistake is that so many people don't ever stop to really think through their business model and "selling ads" is just the default thing they fall back on.

*I might be biased since I run advertising networks, but then again my business model isn't really ads either.
If Apple can be persuaded to do something, either prompting user to move an unzipped .app to Applications folder or treat .appz (zipped app) as an .app should work.
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Holy crap, I had no idea. My mistake.
On launch, your application can check to see what directory it's in. If the directory is mounted as the same name as the .dmg image you shipped, then you could prompt the user. "You appear to be running this application from a disk image. This will make the application run slower. You should copy the application to your Application Folder. Do you want to move it there now automatically Y/N/don't show this again." or whatever.
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Jason: if Mint had taken a bunch more money, sold for say 2-5 times as much and returned less money to the founders, would that be better or worse?

Also, if you had a chance at a $170M exit, what would Jeff Bezos say?
"And there was some recent article on ycombinator about anaesthesia which I found also interesting."

Do you have a link to the article or remember the title?
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>Facebook had to

Facebook was started in some kid's dorm room, and I'm still not entirely clear on what they're selling.
Honestly IMO Mint wasn't all that revolutionary. It's an online personal finance tool that Intuit more or less cloned to make their own Quicken Online service which is actually pretty good. Mint was going to have a tough time competing with such a well known and established brand with a huge installed base. Who's to say the Mint founders won't turn around and make that $170M into something really revolutionary?
If that's true, then it's a first. Firefox still doesn't have stable support for Flash on Linux. (I kid. A little. But not really.)
To illustrate the last point, a lot of journalists love the explanation that what is happening now is a result of the change in ownership that happened 15-25 years ago away from families. They wanted to increase margins by reducing costs (journalists, etc.). The lower quality has finally caught up with these. For example:

It was a time of “greed is good” in American capitalism, and newspapers were still profitable in those decades. The old family owners were bought out by chains that sought returns of 10 to 15 percent a year, far more than the former owners had ever expected. The new owners’ first priority was to keep the share prices up, so they had to keep the profits high, so they started cutting costs–and the biggest cost in running a newspaper is the journalists.

There are few newspapers in the United States that employ even half as many journalists as they had 15 years ago. Yet news-gathering was and remains a highly labour-intensive business.

In effect, the new owners and managers gutted the content in order to maintain their high profit margins. Now, most of them are out on golf courses, and the newspapers they ran are on the rocks.

The normally insightful Gwynne Dyer: http://www.straight.com/node/246627

I have heard variations of this reasoning a few time in the last month or so.
"I want to see huge audacious failures and huge gaudy wins"

Then of course everyone should put aside their own personal financial interests to satisfy you. Right?
Yup, we all did.
Pretty sure that would be the case regardless of language.
"lots of homeless people break free all the time and many of them are way happier than those receiving big exits for startups. That is not hyperbole."

I'm sure you can find several homeless people who are happier than several people who made FU money in a short amount of time, but I'd be willing to bet that on average, people who started up a company and sold it for dump trucks full of cash are happier than homeless people.
I highly recommend reading his book 'iWoz'.
Wozniak is simply a genius inventor with highest ethics.

His book will inspire & motivate you ( as an engineer and person) & may even leave you completely in awe of this genius.

good talk btw , thanks for posting.
Because things should be as simple as they can be, and no simpler. He made a case for simplifying square -> rect -> poly. He made no such case for Twisted, but still tarred them with the same brush.
They were on their way to redefining an industry — one that was left for dead by the current custodians.

I have never seen Mint and haven't used Quicken in ages. But isn't Mint the same thing only hosted? Where exactly did they innovate, I haven't heard of any exciting features. Anything here besides just "onlineness"?
Interfaces and Implementations is another great book, sitting on a shelf just below PAIP. There's code I've written based on that book that I use to date (in multiple languages).
The last startup I was a part of was designed entirely to make money for everyone involved by solving an extremely specific problem that you've never heard of. At least, you've probably never heard of it -- maybe you're a dentist, in which case, yeah, I can help.

(The entrenched startups from the 80's that we're competing with? You've never heard of them, either.)
Could this be adapted into a crowd sourced game? Take turns at the helm of micro laser canon to stop Imperial Mosquitoes from taking the blood and lives of the Rebel forces.

Save some money on the AI. Pay to play the game. Prizes, badges, and acheivements. :)
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