skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I forgot about the debt holders. So if there was any debt (including un-converted convertible notes), the pecking order is:

1) Debt holders

2) Most senior shareholders and their liquidation preference

3) Less senior shareholders and their liquidation preference

...

99) Common stock holders

This is actually to align the founder incentives in shooting for a big exit. Insert any other order of preferences, and the founders have a stronger incentive to flip the company as quickly as possible in order to create a payday for themselves, screwing investors in the process (which also happens to be a very irrational proposal for investors, which is why you rarely see a round on those terms).
It's really hard to give people from this generation a sense of how fast things advanced and how big the leaps were in the 80s and early 90s. We went from 8 bit to multimedia 32 bit in less than 10 years. For devs it was a new box every year or two. Sometimes two new computers in a year.

My first 386 dev box was purchased in 1987. Within a year of that, I was using a Compaq portable 386 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_386). 386 was a big deal because it finally got us Intel devs a flat address space... so no more trying to fit data into tiny pages (64k). 386 killed the chief advantage of 68k architecture, and for whatever reason Motorola just couldn't get the clock speed up fast enough.

There were two things that were interesting about the Amiga in 87: video toaster for doing cheap video effects (think intro sequence to Better Call Saul, not awesome demos) and gaming.

But gaming on the PC made a huge leap in 1987 when IBM shipped ALL of their new PS/2 computers with a 256 color video adapter called the VGA (seem to remember the lowest end models only doing 256 colors in 320x260 mode... but that was good enough)... Eventually TrueVision and even ATI had video cards that could do the same sorts of things (or better) than an Amiga.

So many great computer ideas died in the 80s and early 90s... but it was really evolution... most of them died because a generalized solution (i.e. VGA with video out + software) eclipsed a specialized solution (i.e. Amiga with video toaster).
They're both about the same, but considering that "cl" is a sound by itself, I'd go with fuster cluck.
I would probably sit down an write an entire video game in the style of some old game that I liked
Google "two party consent states" and you'll learn why you are getting confused responses.

You are talking about "explicit consent" and "expectation of privacy" and so on that sound legalistic but have no meaning in this context, while ignoring the fact that there are laws, rulings, and precedent already on this issue.
Interesting, but pure speculation.

I would add an additional fact which seems to be contrary to the proposed model: I regularly wake up a few minutes before my alarm clock, in plenty of time to turn it off.

I believe I have a fairly good sense of time (but have no empirical evidence for that!)
The battle Pixar had to rebuild/replace marionette cost millions and took years. It got so bad they were seriously considering Maya instead. (I thought they had actually bitten the bullet and bought a sight license, however it appears that they wrote presto instead.)

I'm curious about the details of this. What made marionette so bad that they couldn't fix it to do what they needed it to do? From my completely naive perspective, it seems like having custom tools should be a competitive advantage -- you can tune your tools to the needs of your artists.
I'm not really sure - I wish somebody would answer this question.

I initially read 'won't the intellectual jobs continue to be automated away?' and thought to myself, yeah, probably :) haha.

Which boils down to no matter what line of work - my hunch is that a lot of it is frivolous.

I heard somewhere that scientists came up with a solution to diabetes but since maintaining it is such a huge industry - they're going to keep things as is.

Of course that's likely a fictional story but I think the basic gist of it applies - we can absoluuutely optimize the current workforce to reduce oh I don't know, at least 10-20% of it just by giving some smart folks that goal right?

How many folks past 50 who don't like what they do are just sitting there collecting maximum salary while contributing less than a 30 year old if not STIFLING potential progress? I bet the answer is A LOT.

What if we gave them the option to earn 1/2 what they make right now, asked them to only come in to work 15-20 hours/week?

What is a 55 year old dude spending maximum salary on, honestly? Golf?

Thinking about it a little bit more - shortening the life-cycle for positions like teaching or managing in fields that move fast given the above proposition would not only be smart, but likely the move of the future.

By the time you're in your 50s, you're tired and likely out of touch. Give that space up for somebody young and curious while maintaining a decent standard of living. I bet my dad would take that deal in a heartbeat.
Laws don't prevent riots. If anything the opposite, they bottle anger until it explodes. But they do make it easier to demonize rioters.
Mockr, open-source developer tool to create customized API endpoints
They could do something along those lines, but that would not be "keeping things simple". Plus, there is not significant motivation for them to do it — plain and simple. They could, but so far it's not worth the time/money investment. Every little feature, every little bit of work added and layered onto things has an associated cost/benefit to it. Simply put, it's not worth it to them at this present time.
>They weren't used for their visual effects, they were used because they were cheap and easy. Why would you actively make your content look shittier?

What you're missing is that sometimes, the characteristics of a CRT are used for a visual effect that is completely missing on non-CRT displays.

For instance, it's arguable that a lot of low-res 16 bit sprites actually look better when on a technically inferior display because that's what the developers were using - and they would have drawn the sprites with the blur in mind. You remove the blur, and the sprites are a bit harder to look at [1]. (Take any of the SNES Squaresoft RPGs for a good example of this.) Scaliness were often used as a cheap method of texture blending.

A good description of this comes from here[2]:
The chunky sprites with their often thick, cartoony outlines just weren't designed to be reproduced with sharp edges resulting from nearest-neighbor upscaling.

[1]: http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2982-a-link-to-the-past-ho...

[2]: http://cyber4education.blogspot.com/2010/12/crt-pixel-shader...

It's your system and you can play your games however you want, but it's not in question that many games were designed to be played on older displays.
NSA dreams of smartphones with “split” crypto keys protecting user data
Oct 2014 thread on FreeBSD-based pfSense fork of OpenBSD pf, https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=83075.0

"2.2 should prove to be significantly more scalable than OpenBSD, since we have SMP-capable pf now, which isn't doable in OpenBSD (and will likely be a number of years until it is). Plus AES-NI, more coming soon. https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1473

Bug fixes are brought over into FreeBSD from OpenBSD as needed (sometimes by us, sometimes by others), though FreeBSD pf is essentially a fork at this point since making it SMP-capable changed things significantly. It's mostly separately-maintained at this point."
But they did get something. What they got was more money to keep trying. They didn't have to take the deal, but most likely would have been still left with nothing.

They got something before. They are paying for that now.
I have given up on Nethack. Playing UnNetHack or sometimes Nethack 4.
If they release something I will check it out, but I am not holding my breath.

EDIT: Just found out one of the new guys are the developer of Nethack 4. Might be interesting after all.
This is only with solid coins. I'm pretty sure with a liquid centered coin, with sufficient tinkering, it would be possible to design a biased coin using the changing weight distribution to keep the flip biased to certain positions.
Yep, you're right, the lesson out of this is "stick to the common stock for as long as possible". I'm aware of at least one company (5 years running, raised a B round with numbers in mid-eight digits), that still had only common stock floating around.

Unfortunately, the only way to afford that luxury is to not actually need the money, but be in high demand for investors to keep pinging you, and relent at some point with "alright, we don't need money, but if y'all agree to X valuation with common stock, we'll take your money".
It's called Draw Something and omgpop was a tiny site when they shut it down. Something like Alexa 2 million. It had effectively no users.

Every tech company does that to surplus assets in an acquisition because keeping them running would require more resources than they are worth and they'd be a distraction.

Google killed several Slide games that were relatively big. Same reason.
We need open models, not just open data
If you think of a closure as only returning a reference to a function, but a closure can return anything. What if my closure returns an ssh connection to a new machine? A database? A program that generates programs? A hash of functions specialized to my calling arguments? How is a the function that returns a closure different from a constructor?
Good for him. Whatever floats your boat. Personally for me it sounds horrible. Cooking isn't that bad - in fact it gives me some pleasure. And I enjoy different flavours, textures, in fact I enjoy eating.

So I don't really understand, but I'm not going to force my tastes on others.
This is what I was thinking the whole time I was reading. The author and I must be talking about two different things. Because when I say I woke up just before the alarm, I mean enough time to turn it off before it goes off. But within 5 minutes.
Maybe don't take buckets of cash that you don't/shouldn't need? That $XXmm isn't free and is a good way to hand someone a leash tied around your neck.

It looks like Get Satisfaction raised $20mm. Why that much? Did all that money contribute towards success? Or was a good chunk of that money not utilized well? Why did the company tank? Were they not acquiring enough customers? Was their business model unsound? What forced the fire sale?

I don't think founders are supposed to get a big payout for a failure, but we need more info before agreeing with this sob story of founders who didn't get a dime.
IIRC, there's work going on in FreeBSD port its multithreading patches up to the latest version of pf. Hopefully the extra resources brought by Solaris using pf will help make that a reality.
I know a finance prof who is going to get this in his inbox. Seriously good explanation, great work!!
Linux 4.0
I wonder if this will suffer from the same sort of problems that other sense restorations suffer from - namely that the brain has no idea how to interpret the new inputs.

33% of the cones in your eye suddenly no longer being in synch isn't exactly a minor change.

I suppose some help is better than no help, however. Hopefully.
Wow, the arrogance of expecting 'hush money' and complaining if you don't get it? Liquidations preferences are pretty much the norm in Silicon Valley, if they didn't understand how they worked when they chose to get outside investment, then they never should have agreed to the liquidation preferences to begin with (which may easily mean they never should have gotten outside investment to begin with).

They made a gamble and they lost.
The nut of the citation is worth reading:

"In light of all the variations, it is natural to ask if inhomogeneity in the mass distribution of the coin can change the outcome. [Lindley, 1981] followed by [Gelman & Nolan, 2002] give informal arguments suggesting that inhomogeneity doesn’t matter for flipped coins caught in the hand. Jaynes reports that 100 flips of a jar lid showed no evidence of bias. We had coins made with lead on one side and balsa wood on the other. Again no bias showed up. All of this changes drastically if inhomogenious coins are spun on the table (they tend to land heavy side up). As explained above, some of this bias persists for coins flipped onto a table or floor."

You have to love Persi Diaconis. Having coins made up with lead on one side and balsa wood on the other.
I don't intend to pass judgement on this person but from all the scientific research I have read the ratio of carbs to fat/protein in soylent is not healthy. This individual may not have any visibly negative health effects but I doubt this diet will work for a majority of people for an extended time frame.
population size
Totally disagree. In Sweden almost every kid takes a gap year (or more!) which prepares them much better for college. They have some time to live alone and transition, and can focus better when they get to school.
Derrick Harris joins Mesosphere
I seem to remember at the time there was about 1/2 year - year where Google loved them and you'd get a Get Satisfaction result for googling "[company name] support". GS were HN darlings for a little bit, then started getting annoying because you'd land on this pointless page, then 37signals (rightfully) publicly called them out, then google seemed to delist them in a panda or something and then everyone forgot about them.
Here is a review:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4154388/
Sometimes they do. For example, in Spain, they protested with holograms instead of with their bodies because of a law the banned protests outside of public buildings.
It plays into a relatively new desire for all things quantified and automated. It does this - it allows for granular control over input, but it removes all of the inherent joy of eating. It's not a good trade-off for most people, but appeals to experimenters.

The only appeal for me would be removing the time constraints of cooking or dining out. To be honest, cooking is a huge time sink and dining out isn't a whole lot better.
Book Review of 'Rationality: From AI to Zombies' Parts 1-2
Hmm. Well, if Garner's[1] on board with it, I guess I can be too.

[1] http://www.lawprose.org/blog/?p=502
An Introduction to Design by Contract
According to their website they have 1000s of customers paying 1200+/m. At the low end they're getting 1.2 million in revenue a month and only have 9 employees. Why did they sell? Something is not adding up.
Yes there is a Sass build, see http://www.basscss.com/docs/guides/custom-builds/#sass
I don't understand all the reactions to Soylent where people are weirded out. Didn't we all grow up watching Slimfast commercials? "A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, then a sensible dinner."
OSX only in academia or media?!

We probably live in different multiverse universes. Where I am, OSX has really become the OS of choice by people doing tech work in industry/enterprise. I see glowing apples everywhere.

The Apple in academia, media meme feels like a Rick Astley video on repeat decade after decade.
> In short - the pressures are due to having a narrow view of the world and what success means.

Except success isn't merely a subjective idea. Even if you could somehow avoid internalizing other people's perception of you, you could not avoid how they treat you.
Why Astronomers Pay Heed to Biologists about the Fermi Paradox
$1200/year, not per month, and according to this tweek the business had "tanked" in recent years: https://twitter.com/monstro/status/585797874300035072.

Edit: Actually $1200/month according to the pricing page, nevermind. That's insane, and way above competitors like ZenDesk.
This feels like karmic justice for founders whose own business practices were debatable.

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1650-get-satisfaction-or-else
I disagree that we'd be limited by human life span. I think rather that we'd see us moving away from individuals making "breakthrough discoveries" to progress eventually being something that might take multiple generations of work and research by large numbers of people working together on a problem.

We also have to keep in mind that once something has been discovered, it generally takes a lot less time to learn than it did for the person discovering it.
The NI that was created in my lab can already bullshit, lie and make jokes and from inception to the present has only taken 20 months.
Great point! Although I think Soylent also wants you to have a shake for dinner... forever...
Would you mind sharing a reference to some of this research? I haven't heard this and am currently considering working soylent back into my regular diet.
I look at cooking like I do coding, there is always something new to learn and it's not always going to be an easy process. In fact, since I work at home most times, if I get stuck on a particularly gnarly problem and don't have another outlet, I might distract myself with cooking (gardening, a time outside, or a nap are other options).

I've made things I've had to throw out, I've made things I've been able to tweak into other dishes, and I've made things that were quite outstanding.

As a poster above pointed out -- "whatever floats your boat". That said, there is more to the outside world than things like living like a hermit, avoiding food, spending every waking moment in front of the computer, etc. At some point, one wakes up and realizes there is more out there. And, if you are lucky to find someone who you want to share your life with, habits like those listed above (they seem to pop up frequently in posts here) are going to likely change.
Pretty much everyone enjoys eating. That's not why you do something like this.

Enjoyment of food can be a social, entertaining, and ceremonial activity. But eating as in 'consuming food for nutrients' is a biological necessity. Thus they are completely separate goals. There's no reason a singular activity should be forced to perform two completely unrelated goals.

If you want nutrients flavor doesn't matter. If you want flavor nutrients don't matter. You could choose what you want, when you want, and do it as efficiently and cheaply as possible.
Preventing 'flame wars' by making conversations more awkward and difficult to follow as time goes on just seems to create friction for everyone. And it doesn't prevent flame wars - people who are emotionally invested in an argument will follow a thread on their own accord. We've all seen them, i'm kind of ashamed to say i've participated in a few.

But, notifications could be opt in by default and opt out by choice, and they wouldn't necessarily have to be by email - you could be shown the last few replies to your comments in your account.
You don't have to eat Soylent for every meal.
I didn't intend to imply you should inject an IoC container. Offhand I cannot think of an example of when that would be appropriate.

What I did intend to say is that having a wide dependency reach is a negative outcome, that is usually the result of bad design choices. That high level components have many low level dependencies is precise evidence that the dependency inversion principle has not been followed.

The entire point of the principle is to decouple high level components from low level ones and to flatten that hierarchy so that the components become peers that each own their own abstractions around dependencies.
Just to be clear, does embeddable have a specific meaning here? I'm a firmware developer, often writing code for small CPUs and microcontrollers. Does this apply? It seems like here "embeddable" means it can be compiled into an app, as opposed to getting accessed through a server. Is that correct? Thank you.
Where's the new name?!
I usually eat one "normal" meal a day for lunch, and obtain the rest of my kilojoules from drinking 1L tub of yoghurt for dinner. Perhaps I could improve my diet going over to soylent...
He also has a relevant tweet deeper in the thread

> Taking VC is like getting the world’s worst boss: Shitload of opinions, undue level of influence, never actually shows up for work.

https://twitter.com/monstro/status/587413328055635968
I'm curious if you have a budget. Do you track all of your expenses and income in a package like Mint or Quicken?
The 140 character limit isn't just an arbitrary number to see how creative people can be within it. Many people forget or never knew that twitter started out with its 140 character limit because of SMS limitations. SMS limits messages to 160 characters, and twitter reserves 20 of those. The final result of your message, including URLs has to fit within 140 characters to reach any SMS bound audience in a single message.
"Making of" -> http://www.gar1t.com/blog/otp.html
"NAME = Hurr durr I'ma sheep"
How accurate are the iPhone's accelerometer and gyroscope?
There is no need to assume PP, since it is still relatively rare. They just had to sell it for less than the sum of preference.
I think as more and more tech co-founders go through the meat grinder and deal with the realities of the business side of VC backed startups, we'll start to see technologists start very interesting companies with very different ideologies and goals then people seem to have today. Diversity in how we approach business is a great thing.
Personally, I found that the granular control is huge for dieting.
From the pigeon hole principle.

Pigeons impersonating love birds?

Pigeon collision?
I don't know if you meant for your comment to sound as ageist as it does, but it could really do without that last sentence. The 'golf' quip as well. Sure, some 50 year olds might be tired and out of touch. The same could be said about people of any age. Also, being 50 does NOT preclude curiosity.

Your 'earn 1/2 of what they make right now' option would be nice, if it were actually feasible. It doesn't take into account the rising base cost of living everywhere. Forget giving up a 'luxurious lifestyle' -- I'm talking about the base cost of living for living in a modest apartment, that's close enough for you to be able to visit your family and friends.

So no, I think many 'old dudes' (oh and newsflash - 55 isn't exactly old these days) are spending their money not on 'golf' but on their own mortgage, possibly helping their kids with their mortgages', their medical expenses, their food, etc.
I used to like the idea of Soylent, but after subscribing to one of those weekly boxes where they deliver all the fresh ingredients and recipes to you, I've found a lot of enjoyment in cooking.
I've never tried the "official" soylent but have toyed around with a few recipes on http://diy.soylent.me/ . You can adjust it how you please and set your own nutrient profile to get as close as you can to what you want. (...I am not a health expert)
Anyone know how this was done?
I love eating and the social aspect of sharing a meal with others, so I can't see myself having Soylent in this capacity whatsoever, but I would definitely like to try it as a breakfast and quick lunch alternative. I have the bad habit of rushing in the morning and rarely eating, so Soylent seems like a great fit.

It's also interesting to realize that the food most people eat really is not very healthy, even when it consists of mostly healthy ingredients. It seems like most of the people I know probably don't get nearly as much fibre as they should, so a product like Soylent could be a beneficial addition to many people's daily nutrient intake.
I, too, sometimes dislike cooking, so here's what I do:

I take 1 cup of raw oatmeal, ice, and 2 cups of lactose free whole milk and put it in a blender. Thirty seconds later I have a meal of 600Cal with 26g protein. I have this at least once a day. Sometimes three times a day.

I heard somewhere that we need to actually use our teeth once in a while, so I microwave frozen broccoli florets. I soft-boil 2-4 eggs with an egg steamer and combine all of that in sesame oil + soy sauce.
Goat Simulator compatible ;)
Looks like he is really bitter from this whole deal. Meanwhile there are 100s of start-ups taking on VCs with Ycombinator.