skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As neophyte founders, my partner and I talked to Corp Dev of two top 8 tech companies. In retrospect, I don't think either had any intention of acquisition despite spending months at a time with us.

We shouldn't have talked to them, but as I said, we didn't know what we were doing. One of them basically had us reverse engineer our stuff through demos for six months and then abruptly ended contact. We heard through the grapevine they had decided to develop their own version, which came to fruition. The takeaway is they probably did this with a few of our competitors and simply took the good stuff. A lot of awful, sleepless nights working with their tech team under the misguided impression we'd see a nice exit.

The next one came not six months later, another one of the big (although aging) ones. As part of the dating process they gave us free access to a bunch of their APIs but nothing else happened or happened incredibly slowly. The takeaway there is they weren't serious, they just wanted to keep us on the hook.

When we talked with VCs later (yes, later), they laughed at our naïveté and offered essentially the same advice - don't do it. Don't do it unless someone is talking numbers, very, VERY soon after the MNDA.
Huge thanks, specially since we'll be parents in june

Regards
I'd say that Corp Dev, shouldn't be looking at your company in the first place unless they have some confidence in you, and the break up fee you ask for sets the level of confidence you require for any kind of talks.
Before you talk yourself out of a startup idea again STOP and read this
Measuring Unknown/“Dark Social” Traffic from Facebook
If the purpose of these science experiments is to "move the ball down the field" (add to the sum of human knowledge/science), wouldn't it be fair to say that if the results can't be duplicated by other scientists, then the original authors haven't succeeded in increasing human knowledge?
Absolutely, I don't disagree. I'm saying that for most end users, there's no distinction. Status codes are for machines, but if early browsers did something noteworthy with those codes, developers wouldn't have been so quick to dismiss them in a way that is now largely habit.
ISIS Hacks Defense Department social media accounts and threatens personnel
The "incrementally even more convenient than piracy" for Spotify (and also iTunes Rentals on Apple TV) has really surprised me.

I used to use oink/what.cd to download all my music, but now that I use Spotify I never stray from it. A friend emailed me J.Coles newest album in MP3 but I opted to just wait until it was on Spotify for the sake of simplicity and accessibility.

Similarly with movies, whereas I would once always simply torrent them, sitting in front of my TV and just renting them for $4 feels so much cheaper than battling an advertising laced torrent site and figuring out how to stream it from laptop to TV.

Pirating stuff was much easier than buying CDs or DVDs, but purchasing stuff online has became even easier than piracy.
Cloudflare passes details of abuse reporters to 8chan
Happened to me once or twice when I was young and naive.
Who filed the DMCA takedowns? Can we find out?
I'd rather have a happy child who appreciates what shes has than a successful one (measuring sucess as having a bachelor's degree and a high paying job and an assortment of material goods).
I gave Dark Sky an honest shot for a few weeks, but their reliability was atrocious. Could you please explain what is responsible for your "unbroken faith"? Is there something about the idea, app, or people that I'm missing here?
It also seems par for the course to remove Durham DA's...Nifong's successor (Tracey Cline) eventually fell as well: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/20/d...

Also, for those who don't know the accuser was also later convicted on second-degree murder charges: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Mangum#Second-degree_mu...
Surely best practice for abuse reports that you want to pass on would be to anonymize the complaints and act as conduit if appropriate. If the complainants wanted to complain to the site directly (rather than the proxy/CDN) they could have done so.
It's good to hear that my initial impressions about this may not be correct, thanks!
Let's be honest with ourselves - there is not one shred of evidence in there. Yes, for the reasons you state, America could have staged a false flag attack. But that's just a list assembled after the fact to suit the narrative the author has already created.

"And there can be other purposes not apparent to me."

Oh, well, why didn't you say? Wrap this one up as a one and done case, then!

It goes without saying that he is also a 9/11 Truther:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Craig_Roberts#September_11...
> i.e. the kind of people who you want to hire.

Are they able to match salaries with Google? :)

It depends on the level of the developer you can find and are willing to pay for. Not every dev shop is able to hire top talent, simply because that talent is limited (by definition) and not always necessary.

Most shops that are adopting Scala are doing so because Java has been so stagnant and they need to stay on the JVM. The argument of Python vs. Scala is less clear.
But from the user's point of view, if you have two directories called Documents, which one are you looking at? Or are you saying that the file system should merge them into one directory? Are you saying that the user should know which directory is which by something else, say position in a list (which could be re-ordered by user action)? By some icon associated with the list?

What's your actual solution?
No company that is executing on patents is doing so without some amount of trade secrets. If they demand itemized financials, for instance, they have a snapshot of your suppliers and your costs, which makes them a stronger competitor in your industry even if they can't use your patents.
This attitude is exactly what pg is warning against. Corp Dev wants to wave a million dollars in your face and say "Isn't this a lot of money? It's more than you've ever had and probably more than you ever really thought you'd have. Just sign here and we'll make all of your problems go away." That's how smart people spend one million dollars to buy a company that will soon be worth one billion dollars.

As pg said in the essay, the company making the offer got big enough to be an acquirer by resisting the urge to sell before they could achieve their full potential. They would like nothing more than to profit from others who lack the fortitude to do the same thing. Because the acquiring founders have been in those same shoes themselves, they know how appealing a million dollars can sound to a weary entrepreneur and they know what buttons to push. Do not give them what they want!

The numbers in your example are made up, and they can never really be known with certainty. The trajectory of a startup can change with one phone call. There's no way to know whether it's really a 10% chance at a $1MM or a 3% chance at $2.3B or a 7.8% chance at $10MM at any given point in time. When so much is in doubt, it probably makes sense to err on the side of a belief in yourself and what you honestly feel that you can accomplish. Don't sell yourself short just because there's money on the table. That's what I took away from this well written and insightful essay, at least.

And finally, this whole idea of "paul graham is trying to use his essays to manipulate founders into decisions that will benefit him financially" is silly and needs to stop. It's good to question the source, and to understand the motivations of those who give advice. But if there's anyone who has rightly earned a reputation for genuinely helping startup founders and generally doing the right thing, it's pg. He just doesn't want to see good people make the wrong decisions.
It depends on the type of business.

If you're working with content licensing (i.e Spotify, Netflix), product integration (more common in b2b SaaS), marketplace supplier relationships with major partners (say if Airbnb wanted to offer Mariott rooms on their platform), etc. than partnerships are important.
The original Cosmos by Carl Sagan [1] has a fantastic episode called "The Persistence of Memory" in which he compares the collective intelligence and pathways of cities to the brain, DNA, etc. if you've never seen it, I highly recommend it.

1: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage
The utility of a person's first million dollars is much more than the thousandth.
Clauses could be added for anything that would obviously break due diligence that the sellers may know in advance. I am thinking of IP, Patent, Contract problems etc.

"product is terribly architected, teams don't get along, they cannot track their customers revenue" - none of these things make a startup worthless as they can be fixed.
You just admitted you are not a ballistics expert.

- How do you know how much recoil that rifle will generate?

- How much blood splatter should you expect? Where do you get this information from?

- How fast or slow does a bullet have to be going to be visible on a phone camera video?

Given the statements you are making, I assume you already have all this information.
This assumes, of course, that your utility curve for money is linear. If it's not, it's not a stupid question.
Neanderthal – Fast Native Matrix and Linear Algebra in Clojure
Ask HN: What would you gladly pay $30/month for?
Looking to hear about things that don't exist, but should.
... as long as you don't have the Chinese definition of "interesting life".
Not just the government, probably most of the sites you visit in one way or another link to Amazon. Look at how many sites go down when there's an AWS outage.

What does this mean for personal privacy when most of the services you use are backed by one platform?
What it appears to boil down to in the article is: do what's best for your kids by taking your ego out of the picture.

JK Rowling did the Harvard Commencement Speech in (IIRC) 2008 in which she speaks of failure, where she basically tells the audience of students (along the lines of) "For you, just being ordinary is a failure."

It was the Michele Zavos one that reminded me of this, where she's talking about her daughter basically following in her footsteps to become a lawyer, and was on the path to go to Harvard.

> So she’s now 19, and she’s the youngest assistant cook they’ve ever had. And then I guess after about a year and a half, she says, “I’m going back to school.” And she does not do well at all, and she says, “I don’t want to be here.” She gets a job in Boston as the kitchen manager of the Beacon Hill Friends house. We go out to dinner, and she says to me, “Mom, I think I want to go to culinary school. Are you disappointed?” And, sort of your whole being a parent flashes by. And I thought, I better get this right. I said to her, “You know what, Add? Even if I am disappointed, here’s what you say to me: ‘F--- you, Mom, it’s my life.’ She sort of flinched and said, “My therapist said that, too, but not like that.” It was really funny.

It kind of eloquently paints the angst of a teenager against her mom just wanting to do what's best for her. However, that situation plays out very differently when you've got a parent who wants to live vicariously through their own child's successes as determined by the parent.

From the objective view, I totally screwed up. My dad had his own rags to upper-middle class story, and my parents only wanted what's best for me and wanted me to succeed. I wanted to be--I feel there should be a drum roll here--a novelist. I've lived my life predicated on the belief that "well if it all fucks up, at least I got a story out of it." So far it's served me well. I'm married, own a house, have a kid and one on the way, two dogs, and I did it all early. I sleep pretty good at night, because I get to walk into my kids room, stroke his hair and I go to bed with a smile on my face.

My brother is the success. He did well, better than my father. Except, I don't know if he's happy and he basically broke of most communication. All I know is he keeps himself very busy, and seems to drink a lot.

I think I've got a bottle of Scotch stored somewhere for a special occasion, but I'd be hard pressed to actually rustle something up to get drunk off of. I haven't drank at home in almost three years, me and my wife used to do Fuzzy Navel Wednesday before my kid was born, but that was about our extent after we bought our house, which is about where I hit my own metric of success and where I actually became happy, or at least satiated.

So I think the trick to raising successful children is teaching your kids to set their own criteria for success.
How're you rendering the clouds? A friend of mine did a thesis a few years ago on real-time cloud rendering [1]. It was very interesting learning about cloud transference functions (and what a Glory is!) and how they found a way to optimize that into a manageable database (IIRC) usable for real-time and realistic rendering.

[1] http://www-evasion.imag.fr/Publications/2008/BN08a/
In defense of the author, a fairly feature full IRC client in 115 LOC with a single typo is pretty impressive. I applaud his work.
Sounds like you were using Internet Recovery. It's downloading the OS installer from the App Store - if you had install media it'd work fine.
I don't have a specific solution, but whatever it is, it will be considerably different from what we as programmers understand a filesystem to be. It has to be something new. There's no point trying to put little band aids on filesystems to make them friendlier like this. In contexts where the user might have trouble with concepts like C != c, they shouldn't be exposed to raw filenames at all.
Exploiting Lync for iOS to gather OSINT and force join conference calls
I wonder if academic journals should be treated similarly to Linux distros (or other software projects really) where less proven/stable features are considered beta and published in journals like Arxiv (say, the Fedora to draw a Linux reference). Once the research has been proven or repeated, it can be published in more "stable" journal like NEJM or Nature. That way the original author still gets the credit, but you have more confidence that what you're reading in those stable journals is indeed truth.
The word "vulnerability" doesn't make sense when talking about TempleOS, since it does not even attempt to offer any kind of security.
This looks suspiciously like implementing Maybe every time you need to deal with a series of errors.
>Per the article, the "mainstream" is literally music for people who don't like music.

No doubt your parents thought the same about your music choices.
Up front give them a high salary number (plus one off for your project) that you'd be willing to accept, and tell them you talk if they are willing to meet that.

Saves you time in the worst case, but still lets good offers through.
Well, it depends on the process. Normally when this sort of thing happens, those trying to build upon another's research will contact the lab that did it and try to figure out what's wrong.

My favorite professor, Jerry Lettvin, discovered a marvelous thing about frog's eyes: unlike/in addition to the basic edge detector sort of things we've got, they have a specific "bug detector", simulated in the lab with a bowl over the frog's head, and something black that's moved into the frog's vision via a magnet on the other side. And of course probe(s) in the optic nerve.

Another lab had difficultly reproducing this (this was seriously novel, and in theory easy and cheap to reproduce), so Jerry practiced for a while doing the procedure with side-cutters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonal_pliers), and then showed up at that lab in his usual not clean shaven, simple and slightly dirty blue work shirt and black pants, and got the experiment to work with the lab's equipment (e.g. probe(s) and oscilloscope) ... and the side-cutters he brought ^_^.

(The frogs were, BTW, reported to apparently not be terribly hurt by this, and after healing up exhibited normal frog behavior. Then again, if I was in that lab, I'd be harvesting them for their tasty legs, as I did with all the bull frogs I shot with my BB gun growing up, in addition to dissecting them :-).
When did you use quaternions? (Genuinely curious!)
...your smartphone has an alarm clock.
Exactly. And one thing about cloud compute is that it is cheap for a subset of use-cases. Try going cloud on a high-bandwidth / low-cpu use-case.
I wonder's what's been used in real world code more, quaternions or Peano naturals. =)
The clouds are done with multiple-scattering path-tracing with participating media. Basically the ray bounces around inside the cloud until it exits :)

The cloud density is defined by a shader, which basically takes the form of a function from position to density (scattering coefficient).
Good point. I haven't found the Cló source code. To make it educational for others, I hope Glenn V. shares it.
A couple of things this doesn't address:

1) Corp dev can also do strategic investment; you probably don't want this at an early stage but can be worth considering at a later stage.

2) Corp dev teams don't magically know that they want to acquire you, assuming they're not connecting to you via an existing investor (in which case they probably have some inside knowledge on you already), they may well just be at the stage of trying to figure out what you actually do and how you fit into the ecosystem. So it might be worth having a conversation but not necessarily giving away any secrets,

3) Acquisitions are like investments, having a warm relationship helps. But they can be time-sinks and you have to judge how much time you want to invest when you're not actively seeking.
Problem is, a lot of this stuff is expensive to reproduce, and you certainly can't get a grant to do that, so what normally happens is either the research is so unimportant it's ignored (a product of publish or perish, I suppose from both sides), or if it's "high impact" enough, other labs try to build upon it. If the foundation is rotten, they'll figure that out soon enough, and at worst case word will filter through the grapevine.
It's exactly that (well, EitherT Error IO () perhaps) and the pattern would be far easier to replicate if Go had generics. So we're back here.

Edit: I wrote an elaboration, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877732
Yep, I also think that's a good way to think about it. But I don't think implementing that one or two times for an entire program is too bad if it forces you to think error handling into your design.
Acquirers can be surprisingly indecisive about acquisitions, and their flakiness is indistinguishable from dishonesty

There's some hidden gold right there. Non-malicious business as usual can be just as damaging to you as if they had actively tried to screw you over. Expect it and don't become angry or take it personally.
I don't think asm.js is a very good fit for garbage collected languages. You really want to integrate with the browser's existing, native GC instead of implementing your own GC on top of a huge typed buffer in JavaScript.
This line of thought works with CDNs too.
Good point.
Like reviewing the strategies of successful entrepreneurs. :)
>We recently scanned all the open source projects we could find and discovered that this snippet occurs only once per page or two, less often than some would have you believe.

once per page? that's once per 30 or so lines. 2 or 3 percent of the code is this same repetitive structure? Also, only takes one time to forget this for everything to fall apart.

We've spent so much time trying to deal with uninit'd pointers and things like that on the language level, and here we have something that's much simpler, yet super repetitive and should be easy to catch on compile time.

Maybe I'm just a bad programmer, but I really prefer the Java "force you to catch exception" model much more to this.

>It's worth stressing that whatever the design, it's critical that the program check the errors however they are exposed.

If it's critical to check the errors, I think that it's worth writing language rules in a way to force people to write a "has error " code path (think pattern matching).

I get go is trying to be as small of a core as possible, but I think there's a lot of value in extra compiler checks (with no runtime cost!) to catch this sort of thing.
This paper rightly points out that there will be overhead of object creation and potentially virtual calls (though that will be very JIT dependent). That said, my cursory examination (and it was very cursory) of their benchmark for C# is that they are really benchmarking the time difference between the iterator of an IEnumerable (or maybe IList, don't have an ability to decompile it right now) and the highly optimized case of looping through an array (which is literally one of the most highly optimized tasks on modern commodity hardware).

On one hand, it does prove their point that in certain very specialized cases (looping through an array with no abstraction atop it), you will have significant performance penalties in the generic iterator case.

On the other, I'm not sure I would attribute this to LINQ. I'm reasonably certain (and in these cases the space "reasonably" represents could have a truck driven through it) if you were to write the same code as a foreach loop using the same iterator and generic collections you wouldn't see significant performance differences. I'm definitely confident in most "real world" uses, where you are already using generic collections and iterators, you should bias towards using the LINQ implementation (assuming you believe it is better code) until definitive performance testing proves otherwise. For instance, in the case of the sum of squares, that looks like classic loop unrolling optimizations not being applied which any indirection in the looping code can prevent.

Further, they show that there already exist optimization libraries that can eliminate much of the overhead.

I will say, I'm quite impressed by the java results on this benchmark.

Also, I didn't write any tests to prove any of this, so could be wildly off the mark. Further, I've spent more time than i ever wanted either hand translating or writing macros to, translate high level collections code into while loops. But that was in an extremely performance sensitive environment.
How to Manipulate the NBA All Star Voting Mechanism
I think those are exactly the deals he had access to in his IRA.
I'm a Go developer, but I don't buy this. At best it's showing how, with a bit of work (often times by the developer), errors aren't that bad. But I don't see how it's showing that it's better?

If you log the error when checking if ew.err != nil, which might be many lines or even a different function, you'll have a hard time getting a meaningful context (which is hard to do in Go in the best case), like a stack.
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A cheaper Tesla.
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Military social media hacked by Islamic sympathizers? – The Navigator Online