skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's absolutely astonishing to me that SV investors and incubators pass along ~4 million USD to a team of people with so little business experience, as to neglect hiring an accountant. End result being unpaid payroll tax for almost 3 full years!

No one ever asked what accounting firm Amicus used? No one ever just glanced at the finances and thought hey, where's the frigging payroll tax? Is valley capital so readily available as to warrant this kind of extremely low investor engagement in funded companies?

No written founders agreement either. I mean this is basics, and it should have been caught or taught by the accelerators and the investors.

This is not a shot at the OP, who I think is exceedingly brave to write such a public, honest and informative account of their screw-ups. Competence comes from experience and everybody in business has been incompetent at some point.

Rather, this is a massive failure on the investors' and accelerators part. With all the talk of "funding the team, not the idea", you'd think there was a bit deeper understanding of team experience and competence, than just some degrees from an ivy.

It's mind blowing that investors can be so careless with their cash. I wonder if it's a common occurrence or if this is an outlier situation.
GoDaddy is actually not profitable.

In 2013 the company lost $199.88 million and in 2012 they lost $279 million .

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/09/godaddy-files-for-100m-ipo/

(just a minor correction as I am not the biggest fan of GoDaddy)
Facebook Gain Makes Zuckerberg Wealthier Than Google Guys
I absolutely agree.

edit/justification: given the length of this thread and other interactions, I think this 'agree' post is a non-trivial recognition of consensus on a point rather than a non-contribution.
>Most kids want the thousand bucks, Lee said, but the pennies doubled daily over 30 days eventually adds up to more than $10.7 million.

30 years perhaps?

Anyway, it's cool to hear about Microsoft Research. This quote is especially exciting, since scalability is the main question I've had about quantum computing (and really quantum mechanics as a whole) being viable outside of a lab.

>“The problem of coherence is a major focus of our research here,” Lee said. “Every researcher connected to this field dreams of building a quantum computer. We are not trying to build a quantum computer. Our belief is that trying to build a quantum machine by controlling electron spin and using surface codes is like trying to build a computer using vacuum tubes. Labs all over the world can do that, but you’ll never be able to scale up. We’re taking an outrageously hard, unreasonably difficult approach, and if we succeed – and it’s a big if – then we will have a building block for a scalable quantum machine. We have a chance, a tiny chance but a real chance, to completely upend technology and society in a fundamental way just like the transistor did.”

Edit: oh, wow, I was thinking about the 30 day thing really wrong. Thanks!
Loopback 2.0 is out
only it's not capitalism. It's crony capitalism / government enforced oligarchies where there _is_ no market rate...
You really skimmed the post so quickly you didn't notice any empathy with the employees?
HelpMonks is now completely responsive
Sadly I staid in a room the other day where the wired jack just lead to a wall-wart 802.11 bridge. Needless to say, it wasn't faster than the wifi.
I was thinking about this. Also everytime I have been forced to find a solution without using the internet I have been thrilled about what I learned. Too bad I never make that happen more often... :(
Yeah we're long-time in-house Fogbugz users as well. We wanted to move to a local Kiln but it wasn't available any more so we rolled our own Git setup. I see why running things as a cloud service makes sense for Fog Creek but unfortunately it's not for us.
The main body of the text was extremely difficult to read. There's nothing wrong with the font itself, but the size is far too small and colour too faint. I had to turn off the font stylesheet to get to the text. It's too bad the same font as the sidebar section wasn't used throughout the body.
Having been in the position of living in a city of over 1 million residents and therefore being able to choose my broadband provider from a generous selection of one option, I would really like to be welcomed to capitalism. Capitalism sounds lovely. Even if it doesn't promote higher quality service, market competitive pricing alone would be a huge improvement over what I'm used to.
A bit over 10Gigs a week between two people with a Verizon mifi.

Virgin would give us around 1.7gigs per week at the $5/day. It would be more expensive at our levels.
I think the title is a tad bit misleading, I saw this and immediately thought "Why would anyone even ask? It's obviously rails" then I checked the link and saw that they meant the Standard Library.
I used to be a frequent business traveler... and while I didn't mind the charge, poor speed/reliability was enough to avoid a hotel on future visits.
Yes :) QuickBasic enabled you to build your EXEs. Biggest IDE upgrade I have seen for a long time!
Poor bank UI crushes startup's bank account.

Thanks for posting Seth. Must have been a tough one to write.

I can't say this enough, use Zenpayroll.

In a prior company I had one of the other payroll giants (Zenpayroll didn't exist 10 years ago). It was awful. We switched from one giant to another to make 401k easier. But in the switch, both companies reported earnings to the IRS. All my employees received notices from the IRS saying they each owed $10k+ in back taxes and penalties. No one ended up having to pay, but when the IRS comes calling, it's stressful even when you're not wrong.

Zenpayroll is fantastic. New game, new level.

https://zenpayroll.com/
Amazon expects to lose half a billion dollars in the next three months
Yeah, particularly if humans also park in the same spaces. I thought after posting that if the robot knows a space is available far away, then maybe by the time it gets there the space is taken by a human! :-)

I can envision tons of opportunities to mess with this robot.
Content takedowns without the DMCA or any sort of due process.

(though, IIRC, Twitch does those already for pre-release game titles through agreements with various game publishers)
In NL we actually do have such a 'bright line', a very reasonable amount that anybody in the hot seat is required to pay out of their business on an annual basis as a salary.

If the business is not doing well you can negotiate that down to ridiculously low levels provided you do not borrow from the company at the same time. That last bit is the bit that bites, many business owners already have a line of credit with their company from the founding days and they'd have to pay that back before they can reduce their salary.

On the whole that arrangement works well though, and the one time that I needed it I found that the tax people were very much understanding of the situation and offered a few suggestions that helped making things easier.

If all government institutions were as reasonable as the tax office in my dealings with them this would be a much better country.
I think the key point here is that it was profitable for the founder :)
He's not being open and honest about anything here. He's a liar. He lied to his partners, he lied to his investors, he lied to his employees, he lied to his customers, he lied to the IRS, and he lied to the press. Every single item on his list here is the result of him stretching the truth and calling it "hacks".

That's fun new word for "lies".
#1 is what happens in Fremont,CA when cops are running a DUI check, works fairly well.
"2. If you sent the phone company that $6 today, they would file criminal charges, because that cheque is an admission of guilt for stealing money from them."

Uhm, yeah, pardon my French, but that's complete bullshit.
Maybe Google can fix Twitch not working in 32-bit Chrome on Linux now. Or better yet, introduce HTML5 video.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=295984
The map is just for this summer, so it's not really trying to show a progression. Just which areas are in continuous drought vs a 1 off.

An annual map going back a 100 or so years would be vary interesting, but I don't think we have that data.
Exactly. You could pull in sometimes 250-500K as a consulting company, specially if you outsource some aspects of projects. S-Corp is ideal for that.
I thought you could observe quantum effects but only when it was the superposition of all the eigenfunctions? You never observe the ones with a low probability density because they are dominated by the others. And also does it matter if you could solve numerically all of the functions for a macroscopic group of particles if in the end all you would care about is the average value (due to Planck's constant and the uncertainty principle)?
Oftentimes, the reason for this is that those hotels were particularly early in offering their guests internet access but then bought into a draconian external service provider with awful service, high fees, very long contract duration, and slow speed. Usually, when I'm in an expensive hotel with awful (paid) internet, I speak up and they explain this to me.

The last hotel where that happened explained to me that management bought into a internet contract in 2005 that will last until 2015 at which point they plan to simply rent their own DSL. But until then they're, by contract, obliged to offer their guests only their contract partners awfully slow internet.

Just like in business, small companies / hotels can move faster.
> That's a mistake. The author is describing NP-complete problems...

Correct. I think that quote basically killed the whole article for me.
Guerilla user testing at FutureLearn
This is brilliant. As a developer, whenever I have to travel somewhere, a decent connection for moving files around is paramount. You often see, "High Speed Internet" being advertised at most hotels, it is usually anything but high speed.

Speed is a crucial factor for me when staying somewhere. Nice hotels seem to focus on the service and aesthetics, but the poor old Wifi connection gets left behind.
Fair point, but it's easier to successfully campaign a low density region (i.e, a state with around 7M people like Washington) than a high density metro area (the metro area where I live in has 6M people, so traffic is already a daily nightmare).

Those campaigns in Washington and Minnesota just wouldn't fly here.

When our metro population was around <=3M, people still zipper merged (in the mid 90s and earlier).
You realize these documents are not carved in stone like holy scriptures, right? DSM is in its 5th edition already. Homosexuality used to be treated (or still is in other cultures) as paraphilia or worse. Who knows, maybe in 50 years from now pedophilia will follow suit.
"I've chosen to never speed because it reduces my cognitive load."

That's a utilitarian approach which is completely orthogonal to what this thread is about.
For real? Existing JS module systems are just closures, they won't stop working in ES6
Not growing rice may also help.
I don't know why people get PO'd that companies make money. That's the way capitalism works. It's not like anybody can just invest billions of dollars in infrastructure and hope to make money on it.

Then again, the town of Chattanooga TN may be on to something:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8064947
I know there are mods that incorporate turtle graphics-controlled agents for automation. Of course, there is also redstone automation, which is useful, but also much more complicated.

For slightly older kids, there's the Minecraft Pi edition.
IMO the biggest problem here was not accurately forecasting liquidity, if they had done that they would have seen within two months that something was badly wrong. Excess cash in a business that can not be explained should be just as worrisome as having too little. The latter is an indication that someone is raiding the till in some creative way, the former that you are not paying someone that you should be paying, which can lead to the sudden demise of your business if the creditor has a long enough arm.

No matter how small your business you should at least have a general ledger and a liquidity forecast running 6 months to a year into the future.
http://fiber.usinternet.com/coverage-areas/

They must be a major ISP?

Such coverage. Oh my.
It's not necessarily "cozy." They needed that to deliver service to places that would otherwise not get it.

Another POV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8064947
from Chattanooga TN.
True, but if the price is actually as high as $1B, it means that "other concurrents" at least tried to do something about it!
Two thoughts in response to your thoughts:

1. Sure, it's possible the phone company didn't "deserve" the money (perhaps, as you say, the phone failed to make calls). But it's just as possible the phone company did "deserve" the money (and that the phone made calls but refunded the change). There's no way to know what happened for certain. However, what is certain is that the kid did not earn or "deserve" the money.

It also becomes quite dangerous to reason based on who "deserves" something. Am I entitled to rob any person who has not lived a moral life by my standards of morality? (No.) :)

2. I think this is hyperbole and a total strawman. Mailing $6 to a phone company will not result in a lawsuit. Do you actually think this would happen? I worry that attitudes like this come from the selection bias in the media, where rare outrageous stories are reported far more often than commonplace stories, resulting in shifted perceptions of reality. If you would care to bet or fund me, I would be happy to send $6 to a phone company. I highly doubt that criminal charges would be filed against me.

Your thoughts seem to be trying to rationalize taking money that isn't yours. I think this is precisely the attitude that his grandfather was hoping to avoid instilling in his grandchild.

(P.S. I mean no offense or snobbery, in case any came across.)
The Beautiful Unpredictability of Coffee, Clouds, and Fire
The address was wrong. Probably a mistake, but that trick has been used on purpose as well.
> watering with a hose (a loophole...)

Are you sure that's a loophole? I've seen statistics that hand watering and drip irrigation systems are much less wasteful than sprinklers. And sprinklers are the only thing that are banned to twice-weekly in my region of DFW at least.
So, looks like this topological approach is to Quantum Computing what the Space-State is for radio transmission and Phasors are to electrical engineering...
Spolsky is a great writer and has attractive ideas, but there are so many counter-examples: companies who violate one or more of his rules/preferences, yet have achieved greater success (measured however you want: financial, cultural, technological, etc). It makes it hard for to me to see his advice as necessarily better or smarter than anyone else who is running a company.
It's a tough one though. It takes a lot of resources to bring the service to you, regardless of how much it sucks. Imagine if it did not suck. We would have to pay more for that.
Prosecution of downloading pedo material is as close as it gets to thought-crime.
Have you done any pear/apple combinations? Surprisingly (at least to me), there are some varieties of apple that are compatible with both pear and apple rootstock. Winter Banana (an apple, not a banana) and Bartlett Pear is one of combinations known to work. You can then use the Winter Banana graft as an interstem, to which you can graft apple varieties which are not directly compatible. Or you can go the other way, graft the Winter Banana on your apple tree, and then graft pears on to that. I've got a Winter Banana started in the back yard, but it's not yet large enough to start playing around with.
" It's honest, and frankly sounds more impressive to the client."

LOL, how much have you sold in your career? Because really, it seems like you've never had a sales meeting at all.
"In March, Twitch represented 1.35 percent of all Internet traffic"

Wow, I didn't realize Twitch had that much traffic. That's something to be proud of.
These are caricatures to make the point - of course most people aren't going to be twirling their evil-villain mustaches. I'd say that the defining characteristic of MacLeod Sociopaths is that they are self-interested, not that they are evil; if their interests align with yours, they're actually quite good, and most of them actively work to align their interests with a large number of people. Much easier to get things done that way.

The vast majority of MacLeod Sociopaths would just keep silent on discussions about the MacLeod hierarchy, as there's fairly little they could gain from participating in the discussion, and it just makes them look Clueless. That was my initial plan, but I'm a pretty recent Sociopath and it still doesn't quite sit right for me, so I'll indulge my momentary impulse toward Cluelessness.
It means being accepted on your merits, rather than on your ability to pay a few hundred dollars.

It also makes you part of a relatively small crowd that tends to use that particular fact as a credential. At least they earned that, the OP did not.
The underlying problem is the market economics of laying fiber basically means it doesn't make sense for more than 1-2 companies to do it in a given geographical area. :/

We need municipal public fiber that is leased to anyone who wants to operate an ISP.
GitHub is one of the most famous stories about successful bootstrapping [0]... Until $100M in series A, didn't take a penny... (4+ years or so)

Here are more cases: http://is.gd/lSgnWB

[0] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-...
You may not even need to use stolen cards or buy them, Amazon was susceptible to fraudulent purchases via kindle just because the card number supplied matched the luhn algorithm.
I hope at some point down the line this leads to the adoption of streaming VP8/VP9 codecs and using an HTML5 player rather than the resource hog that is Flash.
https://class.coursera.org/ml-005/lecture/39
I find the idea very interesting... Nevertheless I always expect determinism when browsing webpages so I think this would throw me off more than not. :)
I was hoping for a Windows Phone Twitch app soon. I guess this kills any chances of it given how they refuse to make a Youtube App and even lawyered up a took down a Microsoft made one over a year ago with no sign of an official app still.

There is no place for Windows Phone in Google's ever expanding empire.

Google's Mission Statement: “To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

They should tack on a ",except on Windows Phone" to that if they wanted to be truthful.
Yeah, I love to collect data on my running, for example. But my point is I'd (and probably you would also) be doing it anyway, with or without the data.

The basis band you mention looks pretty cool though, going to check that out further.
Not only are there penalties, it could be construed as an attempt to shift the tax liabilities onto people that thought they were employed, not freelancers.
Web Trackers Paint a Fresh Picture of You
How American.
"I've often wondered why startups locate in the SF/Bay area instead of elsewhere."

For a non-trivial number of startups, the founders were already working at a big tech company in the Bay Area before they started their own company.

For others it's access to investors or really critical employees. If you want someone who can build Amazon/Facebook/Google-scale datacenters, you're not going to have much luck in St. Louis.
I can see how it can be read that way, though you should also to look at this from his perspective (or at least my guess as to a possible perspective).

The internet (and the field) is flooded with nonsense papers that don't respect the hard work of others. A lot of them really do come from these "common novice mistakes". The authors are taking very superficial views of complexity theory and physics against the advice of researchers in those fields. This particular one hasn't, but a lot of them have incredibly bad and egotistical attitudes. I think researchers see this as incredibly insulting, ignorant, and a severe lack of humility. People aren't showing enough respect and care to this field.

This wouldn't be such a problem if it didn't happen more often than not. On top of that, these poor findings end up swarming around the media and dilute the field. Look, Aaronson is a well known guy who has spent a lot of time trying to point out and explain these mistakes. Though people, including pseudo-scientists, completely ignore him. They even start fights with him. He and others get spammed with this stuff weekly if not daily. For him, I bet it's simply too much to ignore.
Absolutely. And then you still check on them to make sure it is all done 100% right. You are responsible.
That is capitalism tho. It doesn't make sense for rational actors to build out more than 1-2 separate sets of fiber in a given area.

We need municipal fiber that gets leased to ISPs :/
Parking spaces generally have about 2.5ft of extra space for door opening. Airports often a bit more due to people carrying bags.

It's also the fact that a Smart car takes up the same space in a parking garage as an original Hummer. I've been in a Costco parking lot where someone in a Mini has parked over the line into the opposing space (overlapping on the front not the sides). I drive an F150 so I pulled tight on him and bumped him and the parking gear rolled me an inch away. I didn't grab much (I think it was pop, water and hotdogs/burgers for a party) and got out while he was still loading his car. I dropped my tailgate and started throwing the cases in (and pushing against the tailgate) so that my truck rocked and hit his car. The guy said "Hey buddy, you're hitting my car." I walk around, look at the fronts of the vehicle, take a picture with my phone (my trucks a company vehicle so we get targeted by all sorts of morons who think we punctured their tire) and I said "I don't know, it looks like you hit me. I'm well within my space."

The TL;DR: to that was "People are idiots who can't park small cars in big spaces" so I'm quite confident parking efficiency can be increased dramatically by decreasing wasted parking space.

You can also presumably halve the amount of driving lanes required. If only 3 robots serve the entire complex there should be enough routes to never run into them having to travel the same lane at once. That alone could likely increase efficiency dramatically; if a lane is wide enough to drive in, it's wide enough to park a car in, and by a guesstimate with no room between vehicles you could likely pack 3 vehicles wide in the width of 2 driving lanes.

You also mention packing the cars in. If the software has access to boarding times, and return times then they could presumably pack vehicles in 5 deep or more. You could have a parking space 10 vehicles deep, if you've got lane access on either side you put the cars in ordered by arrival time. Row 1 gets in at 3pm, row 2 gets in at 3:30pm, etc. and you just unload from the opposing side.

If you made an entire parking lot structure accessible this way, you could presumably increase parking efficiency well beyond a 50% increase with the reduction of all driving lanes.
god bless you both!
In the U.S., if you pay yourself the wage base limit, then you at least won't be delinquent for any social security taxes:

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc751.html

So people doing high value software type consulting are probably playing games if they take that much compensation but oops on fully paying those particular taxes.
I am happy to answer questions about this, if anyone has any. Or if anyone finds any bugs or has other feedback, that would also be great.
Microsoft was a government enforced ogliarchy too? :/
This article is about systems Microsoft built for handing over specific users' data that Microsoft was given a court order for.

Again, there is no evidence of Microsoft freely divulging any user information to the NSA without a court order.