A founder-friendly term sheet - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/a-founder-friendly-term-sheet

<comment><USER3> Very simple. Very clean. Kudos for having the right spirit of honesty and transparency. VCs have lately taken to bearing their own attorneys' fees on occasion but I have rarely seen a significant VC deal in which the option pool is not brought in as a back-door way of lowering valuation for the founders. Removing that bit of legerdemain from the valuation equation is really quite stunning.

Of course, the question is whether this will catch on and stick, even during bad times. When markets are sunny for investors, it is not too hard to bend for the founder concerns. When things are tight, though, the pattern has always been one of merciless slaughter of the founder interest, as evidenced by any down round within memory. So too, in bad times such as the dot-bust period, atrocities like participating preferred and multiple-x liquidation preferences frequently reared their heads and would, I think do so again in any new time of debacle. While individual investors such as Mr. Altman may refrain from this sort of thing, I wonder whether such moderation would ever become the norm. I would tend to doubt it.

I also think that even this particular term sheet, though undoubtedly fair to founders in its overall sweep, would need to be adapted to avoid unfairness as it is applied to various cases. If a founder has built large value by the time of Series A, it is very non-standard to require that founder to put the entirety of his stake at risk of forfeiture all over again as a condition to getting funded. That, I assume, would be an obvious point of negotiation and one on which any investor would very likely yield when pressed.

These are mere quibbles, though. It is really the spirit of the thing that counts and not the legalese as such. Just as the best contract in the world will not really protect you if you happen to be dealing with a scoundrel, so too the flimsiest of contracts will likely not cause you too much trouble if you are dealing with someone of honesty and integrity. This term sheet reflects the right values that an investor should bring to a deal and, if you get that as a founder, you are 99% of the way there as long as your business interests can match. In the end, that is what counts most of all.

<comment><USER4> > _the pattern has always been one of merciless slaughter of the founder > interest, as evidenced by any down round within memory._

It would be interesting to see the stats for investor payoff when that dilution is included. The few cases I know: Anytime the founders were singled out for big dilution the result was sizeable loss for investors (and everyone else, because the companies eventually got sold for parts.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One clause that's gone uncommented:

        Transfer Restrictions:
        Bylaws and option plan documents shall include limitations on
        certain transfers, including on secondary markets, to
        competitors, or that may trigger public reporting obligations.

In order for investors, founders, and employees to cash out on their stock holdings, companies need to have an exit. An exit can be an acquisition by an already-public company, or an IPO (taking the company public).

In the first Dot Com bubble, companies would IPO before reaching profitability and sometimes even before reaching significant revenue. For a number of reasons (scrutiny from Wall Street, public reporting obligations, Sarbanes- Oxley), companies that intend to go public increasingly choose to delay their IPOs.

In 2004, Google went public with 2003 revenues of $960m and profits of $105m. In 2012, Facebook went public with 2011 revenues of $3700m and profits of $1000m.

One way shareholders managed their longer time-until-IPO horizons is by selling their stock on the secondary market. Many startups (SecondMarket, SharesPost, etc) were set up to help shareholders of successful companies like Facebook and Twitter sell their private company stock to qualified investors.

The transfer restriction quoted above means shareholders can't transfer (sell) their stock until IPO or unless they have the consent of the board.

Investors tend to have long-term horizons and may not care about getting locked up in an investment until IPO. In any case, investors are well represented on boards. Founders have leverage with the board and can negotiate partial cash-outs (selling some of their common stock to investors), but in any case own their shares outright and can hold on to them until IPO.

Employees with incentive stock options, however, can get screwed. Options are not stock and (even after having vested!) will expire if the employee quits or gets fired. If the company is doing well, the Fair Market Value (FMV) of the stock may be much higher than the employee's exercise price, which means exercising the options will incur a large Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) penalty. This means an employee might have very valuable, vested stock options but no way to keep them upon leaving the company because exercising can put them in a tricky cash flow situation where the IRS expects them to pay taxes on unrealized (and unrealizable, because of transfer restrictions) capital gains.

This term sheet is generally founder-friendly, but the transfer restriction is certainly not employee-friendly.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is intentional. I believe that secondary markets are usually bad, and always distracting. I'm not opposed to pre-exit liquidity, but a secondary market that the company does not oversee causes huge issues. Most companies now prevent this.

Your point about ISOs expiring is reasonable--I think a lot of companies are using RSUs partly for this reason.

<comment><USER6> Could you expand on be "huge issues" caused by secondary sales? I'm having trouble thinking of any. The most common criticism I've heard is that secondary sales can make it difficult for the company to maintain a fiction about their common share price, but that amounts to a tax dodge anyway. Love to hear some concrete thoughts on the matter.

<comment><USER7> A good example would be 409A valuations[1], which set the price at which options can be granted. Sale of employee stock on a secondary market can dramatically raise the price at which the company has to grant future options, making it harder to hire, and hurting future employees.

While this might be ok in open markets with real competition, it's possible (and in fact common) for common stock in trending companies to be overvalued on secondary markets.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Code_section_4...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Code_section_409A)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The no option pool part is great. Taking the option pool out of the pre money creates horrible incentives: founders are incentivized to tell investors they only need a tiny option pool and then once they've exhausted it come back to the board later to ask for a larger pool (that will now dilute everyone).

Founders and Investors should be incentivized to work together for the benefit of the company, not work against each other to the benefit of themselves.

tl:dr; Sam is right, and I hope this becomes standard practice.

<comment><USER9> I'm an employee with options, and I'm trying to understand how all of this works. Can you please tell me if I have this correct:

1\. During initial funding ("pre money") talks the founder is incentivized to ask for a small option pool because she doesn't want to divert a lot of her stock into the option pool

2\. After the option pool has been exhausted through new hires the founder then asks the board for a larger pool, which is now created from the combined stock of the founders and the investors - thus the founder is diluted less than if the expanded pool had been created at the start.

<comment><USER8> That's it!

Keep in mind that not all founders are this savvy when it comes to deal terms, and most investors will push founders to issue a larger option pool than needed. The investor will say something like "we want to be sure we have enough options available to recruit the best employees" or "we don't want to have to issue more options later because it would be a distraction". Both of these arguments have a kernel of truth in them, but they're not very good. You can always issue more options later and it's quite simple. What they're actually saying is, "I don't want you to come back and dilute me later when you could dilute yourself now instead". How thoughtful!

In a perfect world, this would have no effect on you. In the real world, it sometimes causes people to create option pools that are too big/small, since it's a confusing topic and it can be really hard to predict exactly what you need in advance! How people then act in those situations differs massively, but only affects things on the margin (e.g. perhaps the founder will issue a slightly more generous equity package to a new employee because "I have this whole option pool to spend").

tl:dr; this should have very little effect on you as an employee, but if your company's option pool came out of the pre, then the founders probably wasted valuable time and energy figuring this out with an investor who shouldn't have asked to structure it this way in the first place. Unfortunately, like many terms in financing (see the rest of Sam's post), this is too often the case. Fortunately, it will have little impact on the company or your experience, so don't worry about it :)

<comment><USER9> My company is fairly open about our financial state and investment situation so I'm trying to learn as much as I can while I have the opportunity. Understanding things like this helps me to ask the right questions, so I appreciate you and earbitscom taking the time to respond.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _All founders equity shall be subject to a repurchase right which also reflects a standard 4 year vesting schedule._

If we were taking outside money tomorrow, this would be a point of contention. I understand the idea behind a vesting schedule for founders (the investors don't want you to walk away two days after they invest), and I might grudgingly agree to something like that. But no way would I ever agree to make 100% of my founder equity subject to vesting or repurchase. The bottom line is, I've spend 2+ years working on this company, and without the work I (and the other co-founders) have put in, there is no company, no valuation, no nothing. I'm not going to put all of that equity at risk just to make an investor feel good. If we're all supposed to "be in this together" and have aligned interests, they would have to accept that we've already earned the right to a significant portion of the company.

<comment><USER11> I would never join (as a founder) a team that did not have 100% vesting. People quit, unpredictably. Vesting protects founders.

<comment><USER10> _I would never join (as a founder) a team that did not have 100% vesting. People quit, unpredictably. Vesting protects founders._

I'm fine with the basic idea of vesting, and you're right, it does protect the founders (from each other) to some extent. What I have an issue with, is a scenario where you work, as a founder for, say, 3 years, and then take outside investment money, and the investor demands 100% of your founder equity be subject to vesting and/or a "zero price" buyback clause. I would never, ever take that deal. A lot of things can happen, and there is value which has already been created by the 3 years that was put in.. as a founder, I'd expect to retain _some_ percentage of my equity based on that. The exact details would, of course, have to be negotiated.

<comment><USER12> _A lot of things can happen, and there is value which has already been created by the 3 years that was put in.._

Indeed. I'm surprised to see so many people here think that a 100% lock-in is reasonable. That effectively sets a zero value on the work done to date, while at the same time presuming that a company is established enough to be worth serious investment, which is paradoxical.

I don't see how this really protects founders to a useful degree either, at least not for very long. While some degree of vesting creates an incentive for everyone to stay on board and do their best to make the project a success for everyone, it doesn't need 100% of the money involved to do that. Even if it did, there wouldn't be 100% lock-in after presumably no more than a year, and then you're back to having a significant chunk of equity that isn't locked in anyway. So again, the argument that a 100% initial lock-in and 4 year vesting period are both necessary seems to contradict the idea that you start releasing a significant fraction of the locked equity after only one year.

<comment><USER11> 100% 4 year vesting is a day-1 requirement, but how much of vesting resets on a new round is obviously a negotiated point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Option pool

I see the point that this is just a price negotiation. However, I don't understand why the form of presentation is so important to people. If you get a standard term sheet that says $2M investment at a $6M pre-money valuation and a 15% pool, it takes about 2 minutes to do the math to see this would be the same as a term sheet that said $2M on a $4.8M pre-money valuation, with the 15% pool coming in and diluting all parties after. The discussion on this thread seems to lean toward the idea that the latter term sheet is more founder friendly. I wouldn't see the latter term sheet as more founder- friendly, I would see them as equal.

Why do VCs continue to write term sheets the standard way? After all, if they thought entrepreneurs would really prefer the latter term sheet, it would obviously be in their interest to write it that way, and VCs are not dumb. I think they think that entrepreneurs prefer it the standard way, they like a cosmetically higher pre-money number, and I suspect they are generally right. I don't think on this matter they expect they are fooling the naive entrepreneur: this is pretty basic, and I doubt many would want to go into business with someone who couldn't grok this.

Now, diluting after but keeping the $6M pre-money... now that's founder friendly! Who doesn't like higher valuations! I suspect this is what a lot of people mean by founder friendly.

> Lawyers

As a founder I disliked this clause, I didn't understand why I had to pay the VCs legal bills. The major bummer on this is that VCs have less incentive to really grind down the amount if the company is paying, I agree with that.

But I have seen a lot of entrepreneurs grind on this particular term, and I think it's nuts to make this a point of principle.

VC's annual W-2 compensation is the management fee minus expenses. In the traditional customary structure of company pays, the deal expense comes out of the invested capital and doesn't impact annual compensation.

When you grind your VC on this point, you are saying this: listen you jerk, I am going to make you pay this out of your personal paycheck this year. And I'm going to make you go back to your partners and explain why, rather than customary deal terms, his partners have to eat their share of this bill personally.

Now, maybe it ought to be that way, I don't know -- I'm more with the other commenters that say what's the difference, just ask them to add $25K to the round size and scale up the pre-money accordingly and call it a day.

But running a business deciding what battles to fight or not.

As a founder, you can work valiantly to ensure that $25K of your $5M round comes directly out of the pocket of the guy who is going to be your partner in building the business for the next 5 years, instead of the family offices and endowments that are his investors, where it is customarily paid, but I think there are other points of negotiation you'd get more leverage out of pushing. Ask the VC to gross up the round size by the attorney's fees and use whatever leverage you have on more important points.

Incidentally, "company pays" can be a reasonable structure for angel investors as well as VCs: Say you have a $1M round with all angels, and for some reason your deal can't use one of the free open source docs out there. If there is a need for a lawyer (let's say you are raising from US investors but it's not an American company and they might reasonably want to understand any risks associated with this): if your lead investor is putting in $200K and then 16 other individuals are each putting in $50K, it's not reasonable for the lead to be out of pocket on the cost personally, and splitting the bill 17 ways makes no sense either, it would be much more sensible for the company to pay, and if need be the round be made slightly bigger. The same principle could apply to institutional rounds with multiple investors involved.

<comment><USER14> Hang on, if that's the rationale for it, aren't VCs essentially defrauding their own investors by forcing portfolio companies to pay what is really the VC's expense out of the money that's just been invested in them?

<comment><USER15> How is it fraud if it's a negotiated and agreed-upon term? IMHO, it's really just called 'being a dick'.

<comment><USER14> Fraud against the _VC's_ own investors – they are spending money on lawyers for a deal, which is logically an expense of the deal, but accounting for it as a productive investment, for which they receive commission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is the level of acceptance for (a) post-money option pools and (b) investors paying their legal fees amongst firms versus enlightened angels? I know Spark Capital publicly adopted (b).

If I asked for these terms from a firm today, would I get laughed out of the door? (Not that that should stop one from asking).

</comment><comment><USER17> Great. We agree to these terms. Thanks, Sam. Welcome to Team Earbits.

</comment><comment><USER18> Three pages in total, and all in fairly plain english. The simplicity of this term sheet speaks volumes of the confidence the investor has in their investments. I wonder if there is a correlation between the complexity of an early stage investor's term sheet and their over all success?

</comment><comment><USER19> On the "pay investors legal fee's", I was recently very shocked of how many things investors want their Portfolio companies to pay for them.

For instance, if investor is required to travel for Board Meetings they will require company to pay for it. Also some investors will make companies do regular financial audits with a firm of their choosing and force the company to again pay for it.

My biggest questions is, were does the 2% annual fee that investors charge their LP's go? I know some firms have on-site staff to help their companies with recruiting, PR etc, but most don't.

<comment><USER20> It is customary for companies to pay the travel expenses of all of their board members. That's not out of the ordinary.

<comment><USER21> Neither is paying their legal fees out of the ordinary. Doesn't necessarily make it right. I don't think there's any good reason a company _should_ pay board members travel expenses.

<comment><USER22> This is an odd kind of adversarial stance to take with your Board. Not all of your board members are necessarily VC's either. You might have a solid advisor on your board.

<comment><USER23> Not to mention that your most solid advisor could be one of your VC's too ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's pretty good stuff.

I'd suggest adding an acceleration clause removing the repurchase right upon founder termination by the company if that hasn't been dealt with elsewhere. Four years is a long time.

<comment><USER7> > Four years is a long time.

Perhaps that's exactly why it's there. If you can't commit for four years, should you really be founding that specific company? Maybe a different idea, or a different team that you are willing to commit 4+ years to would be a better choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> >No option pool. Taking the option pool out of the pre-money valuation (ie, diluting only founders and not investors for future hires) is just a way to artificially manipulate valuation. New hires benefit everyone and should dilute everyone.

This is my favorite part. For example if you have an early exits and don't use the pool the founder still is diluted for shares never optioned.

<comment><USER26> A side benefit of removing the pool is simplifying the math. A common way for investors and lawyers to model the fixed option pool is to use an Excel spreadsheet with circular references, which results in unstable numbers and all sorts of confusion later.

Or to frame it more generally, complexity increases transaction costs.

<comment><USER27> It's more complicated than that. Complexity is almost always more risky for the founders than the investors because of information asymmetry. Because the investors do a lot of deals, they understand all of the implications and side effects of each term. The founders, even with good advisers and attorneys will likely have trouble understanding the implications of complex terms. This is a classic wall street scam where the bank presents complex terms in the guise of sophisticated banking but it's really just a sneaky way to screw the customer. It's always good to reduce the complexity in agreements because valuing options is very difficult without experience.

<comment><USER28> If you don't understand the complexities of an option pool (either pre or post money) you are dumb and have no business starting a company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> OK, what does this mean exactly - "All founders equityshall be subject to a repurchase right"? Sorry if this is supposed to be obvious, but this is the first term-sheet I've encountered.

<comment><USER30> I've seen that used as a club against people.

A: "I want to sell to a third party."

Company: "We have a repurchase right."

A: "Well, I'm selling for $10 a share."

Company: "We don't think that's the right price."

A: "What do you think is the right price?"

Company: "We would need to hire an auditor to determine that, and you would have to pay for him."

<comment><USER24> A repurchase right is a right of first refusal at a given price, if you can get a better price then you should normally be free to do so.

Auditors for independent valuation should only come in to play when there is no price, for instance, when a block of shares is offered to existing shareholders or the company and they can't agree on a valuation.

Drag along / tag along clauses definitely can complicate this.

<comment><USER31> A repurchase right can mean different things - you'd need to go to the specific language to really determine what it means.

In the case of Sam Altman's founder-friendly term sheet, what you're describing is covered by the 'ROFR/Co-Sale Agreement' section.

The repurchase right here refers to what happens if a founder leaves before their four-year vesting schedule is up - the company has the right to repurchase their unvested stock, almost certainly (although his term sheet doesn't specify) at the original near-zero issue price.

Since founders typically own 100% of their stock for tax purposes (hold it for a year, only have to pay long-term instead of short-term capital gains), the only way companies can subject founders to a vesting schedule is to have the option of buying the unvested portion back.

<comment><USER24> It all depends on who causes the leave, if the founder causes the leave I have no problem with such a repurchase right, but if the company causes the founder to leave (and this does happen) then the company should lose their repurchase right. Subtle stuff this.

<comment><USER31> Sure, absolutely.

The standard mechanism for this is accelerated vesting - I think Nivi wrote the definitive bit on it, here:

<http://venturehacks.com/articles/acceleration-termination>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sam,

Thank you very much for sharing this. Two questions:

1) Without an option pool, how do you prevent founders from issuing more options to themselves?

2) On the other side, do the Participation rights include the right to purchase into the option pool when it is created? i.e. is creating the option pool a "offering of new securities".

<comment><USER33> I'm not Sam, but I have some insight;

1) The Board has to approve all new shares, so founders would have to go to a vote in order to give themselves a new chunk.

2) There won't be an option pool created. The participation clause is in relation to new rounds of funding. As new money comes on board, new shares will be added and the pro-rata participation means that Sam will be able to invest alongside the new round to maintain his percentage of ownership.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Love this. Would consider myself super lucky to have someone as founder- friendly as Sam as an investor.

</comment><comment><USER35> The liquidation preference reads like a 1x participating preferred statement: "We have the RIGHT to get back our capital AND then everything is split pro rata."

Shouldn't liquidation preference clauses read more like: "We have the OPTION to get back our capital OR ELSE everything is split pro rata."?

Also... can you explain the dividend clause? I understand the preference (preferred dividends get paid first), but what is the significance of 8% (8% of what)?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, after the liquidation preference, everything is split among common holders.

<comment><USER23> To be clear for those who aren't following the salient detail here - <USER2> preferred stock does not convert to common if the liquidation preference is exercised. The investor gets up to their money back (1x preference), and no more.

If they choose to participate pro-rated they convert to common first, and participate equally with everyone, without the preference.

The investor would chose to convert to common when the sale price is greater than the post-money valuation of the deal. On this basis their pro-rated participation will be greater than the amount invested.

If the sale price is less than the post-money valuation of the deal, they would be sensible to keep their preferred stock, and exercise their 1x preference, meaning they get their original amount back 100 cents on the dollar. The remaining is then split between the common shareholders proportionally (in effect without the dilution from the investor that exercised their preference).

Mark Suster (@msuster) from GRP put together a good spreadsheet [1] that shows the preference effect on sale, including preferred non-participating stock and preferred-participating (PP) stock (essentially double dipping into sale proceeds).

Brad Feld (@bfeld) from Foundry Group has a good write up of the different types of participation on his blog [2].

[1]: [http://www.docstoc.com/docs/47831420/Venture-Capital- Valuati...](http://www.docstoc.com/docs/47831420/Venture-Capital-Valuation- Spreadsheet) [2]: [http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2005/01/term-sheet- liquidati...](http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2005/01/term-sheet-liquidation- preference.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > There is a 1x liquidation preference, but I'm willing to forgo even that and > buy common shares (and sometimes do, although it has implications on the > strike price for employee options so most founders don't want it).

+1 for that - common shares mean non-founding employees have to pay through the nose if they want to exercise early.

</comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone have a .docx-version I can customize (as my company was not Incorporated in Delaware... I tried brute, without success: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20673425/misc/founder- fr...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20673425/misc/founder-friendly_pdf- docx_yikes.docx)

<comment><USER37> I found this site: <http://www.pdfonline.com/pdf-to-word-converter/>, which got it the pdf into rtf format. Then I used Word to open the rtf and saved it to a docx (without any conversion/formatting issues alert)...

Then, for yall, I uploaded the docx in my public dropbox folder: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20673425/sharing_dont_de...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20673425/sharing_dont_delete/founder- friendly_term_sheet_new.docx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is truly excellent, I've had some such nasty stuff come up in term sheets and it just creates animosity straight away between founders and investors.

If I ever get the chance to invest back into another startup one day I wouldn't think twice to use a straight forward term sheet like this.

</comment><comment><USER39> I understand its founder-friendly term sheet.But Is this fair enough term sheet for both founder and inverstor?.

</comment><comment><USER40> A three page term sheet? Wow.</comment>


Ask HN: How to intercept UDP traffic? - <AUTHOR> I know I can use something like Charles to MITM myself to inspect SSL traffic via proxy from my iPhone, but how do I do a similar thing for UDP? I can't seem to find any info for techniques on this? <comment><USER2> Simplest way would probably be to set up a box on the local network to act as a router, then use the usual tools.

Wireshark or tcpdump</comment>


Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (June 2012) - <AUTHOR>

Just the monthly "Who is hiring?" thread. Please include the type of position, visa status, and geographic location. <comment><USER2> San Francisco, CA - <https://singly.com/jobs>: Full-time Platform Engineers and Lead Developer Evangelist

Hi, HN! Thanks for the nearly 10,000 hits yesterday [1]; that was a blast for us. Each dollar of the $10,000 prize in our app challenge this weekend [2] is now dedicated to one of you.

Singly is hiring a lead developer evangelist and horde of generalist engineers to build a cross-service API that provides merged, normalized and deduplicated data from all of your personal sources (Facebook, Foursquare, Fitbit, email, text messages, you name it). We recently closed $7MM in funding, which we're using to expand the team and ramp up developer outreach, as well as put on huge events like this weekend. Mega bonus points you've got tons of experience building or heavily consuming APIs, but if you're smart and like burritos, let's chat.

Apply through <https://singly.com/jobs> or firstname.lastname@example.com. Or, just come hang with us in #singly on irc.freenode.net and at our monthly happy hours [3].

Happy hunting!

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4048324> [2] <https://singly.com/appchallenge> [3] <http://www.meetup.com/Singly-Happy- Hour/events/65360972/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Mobile Developer

Location: Malvern PA

Job summary:

Us: The emerging technologies group at FIS; the world's largest global provider dedicated to banking and payments technologies.

You: Mobile developer, hacker, innovator.

Job: Work with a talented team of architects, U/X engineers and thought leaders to assist with ongoing proof of concepts and research.

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Requirements: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline; or equivalent combination of education and experience that is required for the specific job level. Post-graduate education is desired.

ADA Disclaimer: In developing this job description care was taken to include all competencies needed to successfully perform in this position. However, for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) purposes, the essential functions of the job may or may not have been described for purposes of ADA reasonable accommodation. All reasonable accommodation requests will be reviewed and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

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Please contact John Koscielak at firstname.lastname@example.com

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</comment><comment><USER4> Wuaki.tv, Barcelona, Spain. <http://jobs.wuaki.tv> : Several open positions: RoR Developer, DBA, SysAdmin... We are building a Video On Demand Platform for web and Connected Devices. We have launched in Spain, but we are growing and expanding the team and project Internationally. We are a young and funny team. We look for a team builder, with strong knowledge of RoR that will bring more "power and muscle" to the team. Someone that knows how to deal with pressure and work with a multidisciplinary team. The position is full-time job in our Barcelona offices.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the monthly whoishiring 'bot' will probably be posting this within the next few hours.

</comment><comment><USER6> We should keep the thread in the official one: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053076>

</comment><comment><USER7> Nutrivise - Mountain View - (full time, intern, frontend)

We're turning the problems of nutrition, health, and weight-control on their head by inverting the current standard for how software helps people decide what to eat. Current market solutions are broken and tedious and we're building a way for people to be healthy and achieve their goals without preventing people from living their normal day-to-day lives.

We are an engineering driven company of 5 who are very product driven and love building things that solve peoples' problems. Our stack is Python (Flask) and MongoDB on the backend and we use a modern combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the frontend. People who have portfolios, interesting projects, or funny little hacks will be noticed the most.

Contact me at the email address in my profile...please include any material about yourself you like, resume/cv, portfolio, github, past projects, OSS contributes, anything. Cheers all!</comment>


I developed this website, now who wants to be my co-founder? - <AUTHOR> http://bizspeaking.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, my name is Jerry Ji, sole founder of Bizspeaking.com. Bizspeaking is a social network connecting shoppers. In other words, it's like a Twitter for shoppers. I developed the website <http://bizspeaking.com/> mostly in my spare time. It's a Python (Pyramid), PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Solr stack. AngelList profile <http://angel.co/bizspeaking>

I'm looking for full-time co-founder, preferably someone who complements me with deep US connections. About myself: I've made a self assessment pie at <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6612298/jerryji_self_assessment.png> (following Steve Blank's "Hiring – Easy as Pie" <http://steveblank.com/2011/08/22/hiring-easy- as-pie/>).

Feel free to shoot me an email (address in my profile) on anything, and please bear with me if I don't reply immediately because we are in different time zones.</comment>


A scenario in which the Euler fluid equations fail - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematician-makes-euler-equations-blow-up-20191218/ <comment><USER2> To cut through the not particularly helpful analogies, the core result (which the article finally mentioned near the end) seems to be finding a situation where the Euler equations work, but only for a finite time before hitting a singularity. Previously, the only known cases either hit a singularity immediately or never hit one, i.e. every case either works forever or doesn't work at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if the illustration clip comes from this contraption by SmarterEveryDay: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVbdbVhzcM4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVbdbVhzcM4)

<comment><USER4> The attribution is from Shutterstock, so unlikely unless Destin uploaded it there or someone stole his work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Off topic, but if you're interested in fluid simulations and want to learn more about how they are actually made, John D Anderson's book on Computational Fluid Dynamics is worth working through.

It's been quite some time but I remember going through it in Matlab to make small, numerical simulations in the book.

The problem with fluids is that it's a very complex branch of physics with many gotchas and many difficulties that you must navigate through, often blindly, to get a reasonable approximation to a solution.

The fluids specialists I worked with on the past almost always needed actual physical tests to prove out their engineered designs, rework simulations, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does this lead to anything useful in the Navier-Stokes existence problem?

<comment><USER7> I'll guess no, or that would have been the bigger story.

<comment><USER6> Oh, true. And the article implies mathematicians were generally expecting this result. But AFAIK there's not a strong consensus on which way the Navier- Stokes problem will go. So probably unrelated techniques.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The constant attempt to break this down into easier analogies make it more confusing..

</comment><comment><USER9> > They should be able to describe the motion of any fluid under any > circumstances — and for more than two centuries, they have.

The Euler equations neglect viscosity.

> They also assume that fluids are "incompressible," meaning that under the > rules of the Euler equations, you can't squeeze a fluid into a smaller space > than the one it already occupies.

The Euler equations are compressible flow equations.

\---

These two mistakes could have been corrected had the author read the first sentence of the wikipedia page about the Euler equations.

The TL;DR is that there are two papers that show that under many assumptions, simplified versions of the Euler equations (which are already a big simplification), blow up.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04795](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04795) [https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.14071](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.14071)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for toning down your attacks on the author! Although when you completely rewrite your post after a couple of replies, it's polite to note that it's been edited.

Your criticism is still incorrect. It's true that there are both compressible and incompressible forms of "the" Euler equations, but the papers you linked to are very clear that they're referring to the incompressible equations. The abstract of the more recent one begins:

 _We study the stability of recently constructed self-similar blow-up solutions to the incompressible Euler equation._</comment></comment>


Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project - <AUTHOR> https://media.fb.com/2017/01/11/facebook-journalism-project/ <comment><USER2> This is sort of like Amazon announcing that it wants to strengthen its partnership with mom-and-pop shops, and help those mom-and-pop shops sell products in new and innovative ways.

I'm a former journalist who used to work for a metro daily newspaper that has long suffered, as most newspapers have, from declining ad revenue.

For these papers, the only reason to partner with Facebook is because they feel they have little choice. They would much rather have a healthy revenue stream and be self-sufficient.

But so far, the news industry has not found anything that adequately replaces the print-ad-driven business model that served it so well for so long.

So they're willing to try just about anything -- including, apparently, accepting a dinner invitation from a reputed cannibal.

<comment><USER3> I am currently tinkering with something that might help.

Basically you would "sell" your readers CPU/GPU time to us via a small JS- script embedded into your page to power ML/DL and scientific computation tasks (similar to BOINC). Thoughts?

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of the hackathon project made by MIT students. It was the same idea but it would mine BTC instead of doing ML in Javascript.

Site archive here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20140425180831/http://tidbit.co....](https://web.archive.org/web/20140425180831/http://tidbit.co.in/)

To be honest if I had a dead simple way to pay a few cents to read an article I would do it for a number of publications. But I'm not willing to signup individually to each one.

<comment><USER3> Seems like [https://flattr.com](https://flattr.com) is what you are looking for. It's a shame it isn't integrated widely.

<comment><USER5> The thing I don't line is that it's still very active instead of passive. I've been using rescue time to track time wasting. it'd be great to have a if there was something similar that presented the places I went and percentage of time I spent there with my budget spread accordingly.

Ideally with some kind of black list or white list feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there anything Zuckerberg _doesn 't_ want to get his company involved with?

It's been said on HN again and again, but I'm really looking forward to a decentralized digital publishing platform that gains momentum and actually gives Facebook a run for its money.

Anyone know of any such existing platforms up and running now? Last I looked into this, I discovered "Steemit", but it doesn't seem very promising.

<comment><USER7> >Is there anything Zuckerberg doesn't want to get his company involved with?

I've seen quite a few comments (on HN and elsewhere) since all the "fake news" buzz started saying essentially "Facebook needs to stop pretending they aren't a news company. They are where people get their news, and they need to take responsibility for that"

And I completely agree. Whether zuck wants to be in the news business or not, he already is. Might as well do a good job of it.

<comment><USER8> >And I completely agree. Whether zuck wants to be in the news business or not, he already is. Might as well do a good job of it.

No, they're not. Facebook is a news aggregate. They are no more in the News business than I would be if I wrote a script to scrape news web sites for articles to read myself.

The confusion between actual news sources and information aggregates online has caused this "fake news" crisis in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sure this will be used for censoring political groups, and alternative media. As mainstream news sources become less popular / reputable they have really started pushing for methods to censor their opposition.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Yesterday was a great example of mainstream sources losing credibility.

They were all over the (as far as I know) totally unverified document that an intelligence agency decided to leak to Buzzfeed for some reason.

They wonder why no one trusts them anymore...

<comment><USER11> The mainstream media did a fine job. Your criticism is completely misplaced.

The New York Times, CNN, Guardian etc all reported the verified facts. Which is that a report was produced by an ex-MI6 spy looking into allegations that Russia had amongst others compromising video involving prostitutes/golden showers and President Elect Trump. This report was obtained by John McCain and passed to the FBI for verification. They didn't publish the report. They didn't publish the allegations. The presence and gist of the report is newsworthy because the spy in question has by all accounts impeccable credentials which McCain and the CIA/FBI made statements about. That is all they reported.

BuzzFeed were the ones who decided to publish the report and all of the above organisations heavily criticised them for it afterwards questioning their ethics etc.

<comment><USER12> >They didn't publish the report. They didn't publish the allegations.

That just makes it worse, doesn't it? The actual allegations are so insane it's obvious they're fake. By hiding them, they make it appear credible.

<comment><USER13> Wait, what?

So if they do publish the report (ie, Buzzfeed) then they get blamed for publishing false news.

If they report that the report was published, they get blamed for making it appear credible

I'll also point out that if they don't report things they get accused of being involved in a cover up.

What do you propose here exactly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm interested to see where the local news initiative goes. Big outlets have plenty of room to innovate with or without Facebook's help, but newspapers outside of state capitals seem to be in a difficult position of falling subscriptions and no way to replace that revenue online.

<comment><USER15> The local news piece was by far the most interesting to me as well. Until recently, nearly all journalists got their starts in local news, and as Facebook correctly notes, it has the advantage of focusing on stories that actually impact the intended audience's day to day life. Also, since the readers are often closer to the actual events, players, and issues described, it's arguable that the readers are less susceptible to the opinion disguised as reporting that typifies much of partisan, new media (although I'll admit that this is arguable at best, and assumes that the readers actually _want_ their reporting to be factual).

<comment><USER16> My personal social media experience at Nextdoor (which is focused completely on the local), and I know this is anecdotal, is that that a lot of the people cut out the big, over-dramatically sweeping hyperbolic politics when the topic / scope of conversation is more localized in nature. At least, I mostly see reports on the neighborhood, events and complaints, services advertisements, etc. People have opinions, of course, but its not the binary hyperbolic type stuff that personifies too much of national politics (and sadly tends to leak over on too many Facebook posts).

(From this viewpoint, I'd see a model like Nextdoor an easier fit for a local news initiative... Facebook's scope just seems too global at first glance for them to do a very good job.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Notably absent:

Any mention of compensating the "participants" that Facebook is, I'd wager, pitching behind-the-scenes as a gigantic pool of free talent / labor ripe for monetization both as advertising targets and content generators!

Disclosure: I'm on Medium and don't get paid diddly for my writings on there, nor spend much of any time investing in the Facebook ecosystem because it reminds me too much of AOL.

<comment><USER18> I'd imagine that in a pay-per-whatever, traditional news orgs aren't going to beat clickbait trash orgs. They talked about trying to help the news orgs subscription funnel, which seems a better solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This will not work, because the problem is not a lack of "news literacy," the problem is confirmation bias.

</comment><comment><USER20> I get it, fake news is a problem because a new product is coming to solve the 'problem' of fake news.

<comment><USER21> I wonder if the product will be a revamp of the old Facebook paper/reader-app ("all your contents are belong to us")

honestly though I don't think FB/Zuck is quite so cynical yet

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Facebook wants to solidify being a content portal for news. Its competition is Google with AMP, Google and other search engines without AMP, and first-party content producers, and 'orthodox news aggregators'. Both Facebook and Google have an advantage: they have hyperlocal info and tons of data on users collected through their tracking and ad networks, they are two of the most- visited websites and most-used apps in the world; meanwhile they subsume all the advantages of an old-style news aggregator by having a wide variety of third-party content they never had to pay for.

'Emerging business models': Facebook is a large IdP containing identities that they monetize through data mining with the goal of display ads. But this IdP allows their users to log in to other sites and engage in microtransaction- like behavior. Aside from making actual payments to FB, users could trade off 'ad credits' or whatnot. Flattr, Webpass are in this space; Google tried this with Contributor [1], which is about to see a revamp; Brendan Eich is trying this with Brave, but Facebook's install base and ability to focus and deliver means they could probably pull this off better than everyone else.

[1] [https://www.slightfuture.com/blog/google-contributor-no- new-...](https://www.slightfuture.com/blog/google-contributor-no-new-signups)

</comment><comment><USER23> There's a continuing thread through these 'fake news' and 'new journalism' discussions, namely that there is a need for express interference in information circulation. This is premised upon the notion that there is a defect in circulation, but little discussion of the actual details of that circulation, its aims, and its qualities. The result is a discussion which has no direction, buffetted to and fro by the winds of self-interested parties.

Is there any appetite to begin a multi-disciplinary conversation about what constitutes an effective conversation? I feel as if there's disconnect here, one that leaves us all poorer, if only intellectually, as a result.

</comment><comment><USER24> Oh come on, everyone and their mom knows Fakebook is the prime peddler of corporate and government bullshit; smearing more lip stick on that pig changes nothing.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this can only be positive. The status quo now is that real journalism is dying while clickbait nonsense makes makes money. If Facebook can work with traditional news agencies, whose strengths are their rigorous fact checking and journalistic integrity, to help them monetize more effectively then everyone wins.

</comment><comment><USER25> I love this. I don't think FB is the stream of consciousness feed it once was. So why not embrace a new use case: A one stop news shop for both micro & macro news!

</comment><comment><USER26> Here's a big punchline buried in this release: crowdtangle is now free. That's $30k value (+/\- number of seats) given away to struggling news organizations.

</comment><comment><USER25> It would be amazing if FB was to try & use sentiment analysis to offer opposite stories for every issue. Maybe that would help people to see more sides to an issue.

</comment><comment><USER27> It still doesn't change the fact that news orgs universally lack the time to conduct real journalism -- fake news is a direct result of reducing the time that journalists have to vet and verify content.

Frankly I'm quite happy about "fake news" proliferating, it makes obvious how hopeless and useless news orgs are. They peddle claptrap and tripe with reckless abandon.

Facebook could throw ten thousand engineers at the problem and 1) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts Facebook 2) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts news orgs. Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan needs to taken as religious dogma -- everybody gets as voice and Facebook has no say in who can't speak.

To any news tweeps reading: combating "fake news" by partnering with Facebook is a partisan attempt at self-fellatio -- all you do is get yourself off without accomplishing anything. Conduct real journalism with well-paid staff that have the time to do their job and anonymously share it with the public is the only way to restore trust, not 1) procuring access to high-value talking heads (eg: celebrities, pundits, "experts") that will regurgitate your propaganda or 2) shoving out unverified garbage (eg: 99% of reporting on Trump this past election cycle) at light-speed.

#1 is just a sad attempt at remaining relevant while having someone authoritative make an empty appeal to viewers and #2 is plain laziness.

<comment><USER28> What do you mean by fake news?

It seems to have started out as actual made up news by organisations/people/websites pretending to be news organisations, but actually just making things up - eg. The pope endorsing Trump story and I'm sure loads more on both sides.

Then some professor published his list of fake news sites, and included a bunch of conservative media sites as well as satire as well as obvious fake news, there's probably some liberal legitimate media sites there too.

Then after Trump won conservatives started saying every liberal media site had been peddling fake news when they reported polls etc had him way down and Hillary was winning.

I've probably missed a load more things but my point is, I have no idea what fake news is at this point - but I do know that at least some of it isn't a result of a lack of time by legitimate journalists, some of it is just people making stuff up.

<comment><USER11> Fake news should only really refer to the type of news that was generated from the kids in Eastern Europe i.e. completely made up with zero truth behind it.

Unfortunately fake news has come to mean "news that I disagree with".

Like today when Trump tweeted that the BuzzFeed story was fake news even though there was nothing fake about it. Just that the claims were as yet unverified.

<comment><USER29> There's plenty of fake news on both sides. It's amazing to me that people can be so far up their ass to no not notice that.

<comment><USER30> > Coler's company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won't say how > many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, > which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.

> Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they > just never take the bait.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...](http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr- finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs)

<comment><USER31> >> Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.

If you see this and your bias alarm isn't going crazy, then it needs some heavy readjustment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Introducing: The Facebook Censoring Project

<comment><USER11> Fine line between censorship and moderation.

<comment><USER33> pretty clear line:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook- censo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship- tool-china.html?_r=0)

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38073949](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38073949)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/xiangwang/2016/11/24/doing- busin...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/xiangwang/2016/11/24/doing-business-the- chinese-way-facebook-develops-a-censorship-tool/)

list goes on

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I read this as if Facebook is posing itself to become kind of a "Journalism PaaS". That'd be an interesting shift.

</comment><comment><USER35> >Local news is the starting place for great journalism.

Not in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER36> Just in time!</comment>


Hubii - News Discovery Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.hubii.com <comment><USER2> Congratulations on launching :)

Just a little feedback...the language icon isn't immediately clear [at least to me] and I only found it once I started clicking on random things.

Maybe a slightly more standard version like one of these?

* Flag for the current language * [http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/language/](http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icon/language/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi fweespeech! Thank you very much for your feedback! We really appreciate your opinion and we will check new options for the language icon.

You can follow us in our Social Media accounts for updates.

Best regards!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks very clean - but I worry at how much it takes away from users' clicking and going to the content-creator's sites. I think pure aggregators like newsbae.com will outlast sites/apps like hubii and Circa. I feel it just isn't a sustainable business model to take away visitors from the magazines that wrote the articles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi hux3, Thanks for your feedback. Actually, we're contacting with all the publications. We're working very hard to create a great business model for both sides.

If you want to know more about Hubii you can also follow us on our Social Media accounts.

Thanks again and best regards!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks very great! :) Good work!</comment>


A 'lorem ipsum' for images. - <AUTHOR> http://dummyimage.com/

<comment><USER2> Shouldn't the example 640 x 480 image instead be labeled DCXL x CDLXXX?

</comment><comment><USER3> Lenna is the lorem ipsum for images (<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/24/Lenna.png>). For a bit of history, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna>

<comment><USER4> Not really, Lenna is more like the Utah teapot of images.

<comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot>

<comment><USER6> We had one in our demo store for Viaweb, a version of which still seems to exist, probably unbeknown to Yahoo: <http://store.yahoo.com/acme/teapot.html>

<comment><USER7> Are they still running your code? I'd curious to know more of the history of Viaweb between 1999 and now. Is the architecture still the same (CLisp backed by files)?

I'm curious from a "how good is Lisp long term" angle.

<comment><USER6> The code later got translated into C++. However, we had a template language for describing pages that was basically Common Lisp with a few macros. These templates are stored on disk as s-expressions. They couldn't change the template language because some users had created their own. So the C++ version literally had to read Lisp programs off disk and execute them. I.e. it was a Lisp interpreter.

That's what I was talking about at the time when I described it somewhere as a new world record for Greenspun's tenth rule.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty cool. I usually just use: <http://jessefornear.com/images/mr-t.jpg> (Dimensions be damned!)

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty partial to this one: <http://newslily.com/default.jpg>

(It's called default because it used to be the placeholder photo on my website for people who hadn't uploaded a profile pic. I don't know who originally took it, or how to ask them for permission to use it, so I replaced it with something else. I keep it around because it's really funny though)

<comment><USER10> I think both don't work. The point of a placeholder pic is to have something tangible there while looking at a layout. If the picture is more interesting than the layout, then people will focus on the picture. That's the motivation behind "lorem ipsum": it superficially looks like English, but it's gibberish and people won't focus on it instead of the layout.

<comment><USER11> [http://clientsfromhell.tumblr.com/post/253757614/i-sent- out-...](http://clientsfromhell.tumblr.com/post/253757614/i-sent-out-a-link- to-the-beta-of-a-site-i-was)

<comment><USER12> I have a _programmer_ friend that acts like that customer...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://dummyimage.com/1x8000000>

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 94371840 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 64000000 bytes) in /home/kingkool68/dummyimage.com/code.php on line 18

Opps... Sorry.

Curiously <http://dummyimage.com/8000000x1> works

And should have option to set RGB of image.

<comment><USER11> Thank you for exploring the bounds of my shared-server memory limits.

<comment><USER13> That wasn't really my intention, (why the oops). I was trying to see how massive a a scroll bar I could make (sadly firefox does not scroll images (hmmmm, or maybe it was autoresizing it to fit on available screen). Also, being a programmer and very much into testing I naturally think of pushing bounds.

<comment><USER11> Don't worry you didn't break anything. Firefox will show scrollbars if you click on the image which will show it at actual size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Author might not want to distribute arial.ttf for reasons of copyright violation.

<comment><USER15> He isn't distributing the font, is he? Rendered representations of fonts are explicitly permitted by US copyright law under all circumstances as far as I'm aware.

<comment><USER16> He is, actually. Download the source.

<comment><USER15> Ah, I see, I didn't realize he was including it with the source distribution. That might ruffle some feathers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very cool. Suggestion: If you make the background pattern of the image a 1px checkerboard (light gray on dark gray or something else not too obnoxious) then that will make it easier to spot places where an image is being rescaled in-browser. A 1px border might be useful too...

<comment><USER11> Good idea! I'm working on making an option to change the background color. Ideal syntax would be <http://dummyimage.com/300x200#ccc> for a gray background. Too bad the server is never sent anchor information so I've got to find a better way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a bit confused. It doesn't seem like this is very "lorem ipsum". Lorem ipsum looks like actual text, whereas, this does not look like actual image content (due to most images not being solid gray). To my mind, a better lorem ipsum image would have a variety of colors, shading, textures (which is probably why Lenna is a popular choice). This way you could see how a variety of image colors work with your design, color scheme, etc.

If this is simply for formatting placeholders while designing web pages, wouldn't  be a pretty easy workaround, and a lot easier on the network bandwidth?

<comment><USER11> See here -> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077158>

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure I follow your response correctly, but it seems like your response is: it's easy to switch image sizes this way. But you still have to edit the HTML, and it's not that hard to edit the width/height. Maybe I don't understand?

The more important point to my mind is that grey is definitely not lorem- ipsum. It doesn't help me evaluate anything except image size. And since it's easy to get a sized placeholder, a server to generate a URL seems not that helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hmm, I might do this with a ruby script, except pull random images from WikiCommons with the exact size specified. (And color!)

<comment><USER20> You might want to make sure they're safe for work. I would hate to pull a random image into my demo that was not appropriate...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was hoping for Lenna.

</comment><comment><USER22> How about allowing named arguments for common sizes, like IAB ([http://www.iab.net/iab_products_and_industry_services/1421/1...](http://www.iab.net/iab_products_and_industry_services/1421/1443/1452)) or common display sizes ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vector_Video_Standards2.sv...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vector_Video_Standards2.svg))? So you could do, <http://dummyimage.com/skyscraper> instead of <http://dummyimage.com/120x600>

<comment><USER11> Hmmm it's a thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For your safety sake I hope you're not forking a userspace imager like imagemagick.

      http://dummyimage.com/640x480+--gravity+Center+--text+%60cat+%2Fetc%2Fpasswd%60

might not be too fun.

<comment><USER11> Nope. Turns out I'm using GD's imageCreate function -> <http://php.net/manual/en/function.imagecreate.php>

<comment><USER23> Cool[1]... nice single purpose app BTW.

My normal advice to you nifty niche App'ers is to look at long standing apps to see what they did right for revenue. Namely <http://www.network- science.de/ascii/>

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

[1] GD still has its own problems, but it seems like subscribing to secunia for GD would catch most, like this recent one :: <http://secunia.com/advisories/38055/>

</comment><comment><USER24> Thanks!

Some features that would make this really useful:

\- custom colors (as mentioned by others)

\- an X across the image, corner to corner

\- Optional text instead of the size (i.e. "lead photo", "thumb")

\- a tag (or the resolution) repeated in an offset "brick" pattern across the entire image, similar color to BG

The last one probably overkill but useful for when you are doing something like scrolling window, where not all of the image is displayed.

</comment><comment><USER25> I whipped up a Ruby/Sinatra version of this.

<http://github.com/xxx/fakeimage>

<comment><USER22> I love the simplicity of this, a good reminder why Ruby is so awesome.

<comment><USER26> thanks!

I've now gemified it for use in Rails apps without having to hit a separate site. It emits data URIs at the moment only, so no IE love yet. I had immediate need for it.

<http://github.com/xxx/placeholder_image>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's an interesting solution but couldn't you just resize a 1px grey GIF with the width and height attributes to act as a placeholder? You could also add the dimensions to an ALT and TITLE attributes so they are displayed when you mouse over it.

<comment><USER11> Try doing that with a print designer over your shoulder debating on two image sizes.

<comment><USER27> That's a good point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is pretty awesome for front-end developers. Nice work.

<comment><USER11> By a front end developer, for front end developers. Let me know how I might make it better.

Planned additions include

True file format support (add .jpg and you get a real jpg etc) Right now you can add an extension but it still serves up a gif.

Easier syntax for making squares (/250 would work instead of typing /250x250)

Ability to change the background color

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The next step is to generate these images as advertisements targeted at web developers.

<comment><USER30> While an interesting idea I know I wouldn't use it if it was an ad. Despite the problem of my sample images trying to sell to me it would be annoying when trying to mockup a design (with images that randomly have undesired colors, patterns, etc.)

<comment><USER29> It's a solvable problem, and with the right targeting could actually be useful. How many people would discover Basalmiq for the first time via the placeholder image on their WIP site?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> <http://dummyimage.com/640x-481>

<http://dummyimage.com/640x-1e37>

Warning: imagecreate() [function.imagecreate]: Invalid image dimensions in /home/kingkool68/dummyimage.com/code.php

<comment><USER32> Probably because those are invalid image dimensions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I would like if he clarified the license.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Too big of an image!" just bugs me stylistically. Maybe: "The dimensions input are too large!"

<comment><USER11> How about "Could not compute"

<comment><AUTHOR> I think giving a brief explanation is useful. Maybe "Sorry! We can't generate images that large!" or something. That explains what's going on without going too deep on the max dimensions and whatnot.

<comment><USER35> "Our program can't withstand images of that magnitude!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> <http://dummyimage.com/64xbanana>

</comment><comment><USER37> Doesn't handle negative parameters. Otherwise, it looks pretty cool

<comment><USER38> For what possible purpose?

<comment><USER39> So that people on Hacker News can't find a flaw with your program.

<comment><USER40> I just implemented a 3-layered payment processing system with infinite logging, and a double-ledger accounting system. Perfect. However, during testing, my colleague found that typing a negative number and clicking "Add Funds" deducted money from the user's balance and put a fund-transfer ticket out (unauthorized withdrawal!) And when the balance reached zero, no visible feedback or error was giving, but still the electronic fund transfer was initiated (free money!!)

That taught me to process my financial side-effects with _explicit_ , visible, calls; the generic dispatch, and abusing behind the scene meta-object features will make you broke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I tend to use this image (NSFW): <http://files.myopera.com/coxy/albums/106123/trex-boner.jpg></comment>


Data Mining Moves To Human Resources - <AUTHOR> http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/15/120203 <comment><USER2> This one links to the actual article instead of the lame Slashdot discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518342></comment>


Similarity in Postgres and Rails Using Trigrams - <AUTHOR> https://pganalyze.com/blog/similarity-in-postgres-and-ruby-on-rails-using-trigrams <comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, how does this compare to using tsvector?

[https://coderwall.com/p/vngr0a/simple-full-text-search- using...](https://coderwall.com/p/vngr0a/simple-full-text-search-using- postgres-on-rails)

EDIT: Found my answer

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15884309/postgresql- full...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15884309/postgresql-full-text- search-and-trigram-confusion)

</comment><comment><USER3> I used this to replace an aging ElasticSearch implementation our company was using. Simple and fast, and 1 less piece of tech in the stack to maintain. Postgres really is a brilliant piece of software. Yeah I know paid solutions which arguably work better exist, but for a "free" product Postgres does astoundingly well in many areas.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm somewhat confused why the author didn't use bind variables since as far as I know the standard PostgreSQL adapters fully support them. Even if you trust that quote_string() will never have a vulnerability it's safer to not use string interpolation at all and it doesn't cost you anything.

<comment><USER5> (not the author, but I've discussed this with him previously)

This is a problem with `order` in Active Record in particular, where you can't pass in a bind variable the same way you'd expect it to work with `where`.

Therefore the slightly less elegant version that goes through quote_string. You could use bind variables by going directly to the pg driver, but I think there is no quick shorthand to do this in Active Record/Arel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice one. Postgres trigrams are definitely a powerful feature. I've written on this topic as well [https://dev.to/saashub/postgres-trigram-indexes-vs- algolia-1...](https://dev.to/saashub/postgres-trigram-indexes-vs-algolia-1oma)

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh wow, thanks to this post I learned that SQL has "order by <number>", the index of the column in the select list. That after 30 years of SQL...

<comment><USER8> It also works for group by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a really powerful feature. Combined with metaphone/soundex you can have a nice lightweight fuzzy+phonetic search using vanilla postgres.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nicely written and easy to follow. Also more proof that you don't need a specialized library / dependency for every thing - sometimes you can get most of the way there with a few lines of your own code.</comment>


PSVR vs. HTC Vive vs. Oculus Rift vs. Gear VR: Which VR Headset Should You Buy? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/best-vr-headset-2016-psvr-rift-vive/ <comment><USER2> For all the hype of Occulus, it seem like HTC Vive is better at the high end, and Daydream, Samsung and even PSVR are better at a lower end.

There was a recent story about the failure of MakerBot. It was the best at creating hype, but not the best product. Made me think of Occulus.

</comment><comment><USER3> Having just tried the Oculus tonight--and no others--I think each buyer should try them all personally before dropping the minimum $400 cost.</comment>


Pain at the Pump: Gasoline Prices by Country - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/gas-prices/20133

<comment><USER2> Sure wish the prices broke out the taxes and VAT in the fuel price.

Germany, for example, is listed at $8.01 USD per Gallon, or about €1.62/L. The germans pay about €0.70/L in fuel taxes on top of the 18% VAT. The true cost of the gasoline is pretty close to what Americans pay.

(Granted, I'd gladly pay that much in fuel tax to get the quality of roads they have there)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice job with the data visualization.

</comment><comment><USER4> lots of info, but the presentation is a bit confusing</comment>


Lockheed Martin Claims Sustainable Fusion Is Within Its Grasp - <AUTHOR> http://www.eweek.com/news/lockheed-martin-claims-sustainable-fusion-is-within-its-grasp.html

<comment><USER2> No new information here. While past success may be an indicator of the quality of a team, it does not guarantee success.

<comment><USER3> What are other companies currently working on the same technology that appear to be more viable?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to connect with experts outside of the tech domain? - <AUTHOR> I had an idea that came about after a dinner with an acquaintance, where he told me about the time he used to work as a professional chef. An interesting thing I picked up on was a decision making process that chefs go through by eyeballing some numbers and just going by their gut feeling. I thought the decisions could be made faster and more accurately if the users had an app that showed how their choices would affect their costs in real time. I even put together a small demo, and I think the recovery after the pandemic would be a good opportunity for restaurants to save costs by removing some inefficiencies.
The problems is I have no contacts in the business so I have no way of knowing what users actually need, and whether they would even be open to using insights from an app. Normally that would be the end of it, because I have zero experience in marketing to that sector. But I'm wondering if there's a way for me to get in contact with people in the restaurant industry and see if they'd be interested.
Are there any strategies for making contacts in domains outside of your own? How can you find people to work with you who aren't in tech? <comment><USER2> The book called "Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick has a section on this. He likes to organize Meetups targeting the types of people you want to meet. But maybe those people don't have time. So also he says there's almost certainly there's a chance you know someone, who knows someone etc. So know what you want to ask, and just put it out into the world on your network e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook etc. "I interested in finding out about x, does anyone know someone in Y/someone who works at Z" etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> A well planned "cold call" can break you into any industry.

In times of COVID-19 this does not apply, but if you go to a Subway franchise, a cafe or any kind of restaurant during off hours you might meet the owner or a manager. For years I've gone to the food court at the Subway at the mall and talked with the owner about business and life.

<comment><AUTHOR> The cold call approach is something I've been hearing a lot. It's scary to just start talking to people when you have no experience, but I think that's just life. It was the same with negotiating salary, learning new thing and meeting new people. You just need an objective goal, courage and a way to learn from failures.

Thanks for your input!</comment></comment>


Show HN: LiveDive – JS-Based Website UX Testing and User Interview Tool - <AUTHOR> https://livedive.co <comment><AUTHOR> With LiveDive, you install a JS snippet on your website or web app and you can talk with your users/visitors via audio or video calls (using WebRTC) and watch them use your website live with no browser plug-ins or apps for your visitors to install.

It's the insanely easy way to do live remote UX Testing and User Interviews.</comment>


When I open Firefox I get pacman sounds in the background... - <AUTHOR> http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/677839

<comment><USER2> This is funny. Obviously the preview function of Firefox hitting Google's Pacman gag. But in all seriousness Firefox's urge to pre-load stuff is going to be one of the things that gives people reasons to more away and kills Firefox (I guess Chrome benefits from that in the end). I have an earlier complaint about this and cookie pre-loading during Google searches on Firefox: [http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom- use-g...](http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom-use-google- search/)

<comment><USER3> I've been refraining going on google because of that pacman crap. Its NOT ok for websites to play sound without me manually enabling it, not even google.</comment></comment>


Amazon: Chronicles of a Personalization Giant (PDF Book) - <AUTHOR> https://www.dynamicyield.com/files/ebooks/DY-Book-Amazon.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> In the first-of-its-kind research project, 6 analysts from Dynamic Yield, AI- powered Personalization Anywhere™ platform, identified, tracked, categorized, and analyzed instances of a tailored approach across Amazon's various digital properties for different geo-locations, devices, demographics, subscription levels, and more.

The result of 600 hours of exploration, Chronicles of a Personalization Giant unearths all of this and more – highly valuable intel for any company looking to deliver more relevant experiences, the free resource comes with 70+ real use cases Amazon currently deploys.</comment>


Top Android apps for IT Professionals - <AUTHOR> http://www.itsmdaily.com/2013/12/02/top-10-android-apps-for-it-professionals/

<comment><USER2> good list, thanks</comment>


Color plans to permanently block objectionable users? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#!/BillNguyen/status/51727261874913280 <comment><AUTHOR> More detail here: [http://www.quora.com/How-will-Color-Labs-startup-handle- inap...](http://www.quora.com/How-will-Color-Labs-startup-handle- inappropriate-photos)

"Simply swipe a photo from someone, and a popup will show you to choose Nudity, Violence or Hateful. That person will then be banned from Color, thus the only way to get back on the system is buying a new iPhone or Android. It's a pretty expensive way to get back in the system, which keeps a very balanced environment. The web is very easy to just recreate an account if you behave badly, it's not the most economical way to behave like this.

We also will ban a person from Color for abusing the reporting system.

More important is that since all the photos you take are public, and they travel around with you, people behave. When you go to work, go to school or are with your friends, and family, they'll see all of your pics you've taken on Color. People who take inappropriate pictures don't want everyone they spend time with in real life that they are that type of person." --Peter Pham, President & Co-Founder of Color</comment>


Expo – Helps you build React Native apps - <AUTHOR> https://expo.io/ <comment><USER2> Duplicate of: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14322829](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14322829)</comment>


Explaining to BBC Newsnight some of the problems with the CRU code - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8395514.stm <comment><USER2> Having source code reviews via Newsnight is the ultimate confirmation in my mind that all of this should have been open source from the beginning. It would be trivial, and cost CRU nothing, to set up an open source project which would render scandals such as this impossible.

A subject like global warming is potentially of such high importance that it shouldn't be left to cowboy programmers to process the data. I could have said "amateur" programmers, but there are many amateurs out there who produce very high quality code.

<comment><USER3> All software used in science should be open source, because if it isn't, the science isn't repeatable.

<comment><USER4> Not true. For instance, if a report is originally typed in a closed-source, commercial text editor, that has no impact on the repeatability of the science. Similarly, Mathematica is (to my knowledge) a closed-source program, but calculations done by it can still be independently verified (so long as those calculations are made public).

You're on the right track, but need to narrow down the wording some.

<comment><USER3> > You're on the right track, but need to narrow down the wording some.

You're right. I was actually thinking that as I typed it.

How about this: when scientists take raw input data and use complex processes to convert it (by complex I mean more than you could do with a pocket calculator in a minute), then the programs doing the conversion must be open source, so that others may repeat the work done in processing.

I'm not familiar with Mathematica; how complex is the work that it does? And how easy is it to verify that its results are correct?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great presentation John. You made your points very clearly, and it seems very helpful for the non-experts watching.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The only thing they got wrong was where I said I was 'shocked'. I'm not shocked, I'm surprised, and disappointed by the quality of the code.

<comment><USER5> No, I'm not shocked either. Mathematicians and scientists have no formal training in programming (at least in the UK). They're expected just to pick it up and get on with it.

They don't generally put in the necessary hours like the "self taught programmer" does, because they're generally not interested in programming itself. It's just a calculational annoyance that gets in the way.

<comment><USER6> > Mathematicians and scientists have no formal training in programming (at > least in the UK). They're expected just to pick it up and get on with it.

That's an unreasonable generalisation.

For one thing, many university courses in science and mathematics do seem to incorporate basic programming training these days, either as part of the course, or via other facilities that the university makes available to those taking such courses. Any programming skills acquired may or may not contribute directly to the grade of degree awarded, but that is a different issue.

For another thing, I can attest that some scientists do make an effort, because I have personally been paid by PhD students to tutor them in the appropriate programming techniques to implement their models soundly.

<comment><USER5> I'm talking from my experience of attending the most highly regarded mathematics undergraduate programme in the UK. There was basic programming training, but the emphasis was on the "basic". There was absolutely no emphasis placed on writing maintainable code. We (in fact "they": I didn't attend the classes) were simply taught some technical details of C. In fact I think the number of hours of teaching time was single figures.

Now I can't speak for the engineers at the same university. As far as I know they were given excellent training in C++. But simply, the mathematicians did not take programming seriously, so I'm not surprised of the low quality of the implemented models.

<comment><USER6> > I'm talking from my experience of attending the most highly regarded > mathematics undergraduate programme in the UK.

That's a bold claim. Which undergraduate programme would that be, and by whom is it the most highly regarded in the UK?

<comment><USER7> I don't know which university the parent is referring to, but I can confirm that this was also the situation at the University of York, a top-10 UK university, at least at the time. (90%+ were people who hadn't quite made it into the top 2 - hence nicknames of "University of Dork" and "University of Oxford/Cambridge Rejects")

The problem existed not only mathematics, where I ended up giving extra programming classes to friends because the teaching was practically non- existant. Also physics along with the computer simulation and theoretical branches of physics, which I happened to be studying. In fact, we were only taught rudimentary Fortran (!) syntax, and laughably, OpenMP and MPI later on. Nobody who made it through the course alive did so without having either learned to program earlier or investing a large amount of time in self-study and then "winging it" - after all, the final project depended on being able to deliver a simulation of whatever physical system was being investigated.

I started programming when I was 10, so I had no trouble; together with a colleague who had a similar programming history as I, we introduced the rest of our year to basic good programming practices and workflows (split your functionality into stand-alone functions and files; use version control; avoid global variables; the merits of code reviews; etc.). A lot of people had already switched to experimental physics before we started doing this. Obviously, expecting people to understand concurrent programming at that level is pretty dangerous. In my experience, this sort of attitude breeds a view that computer programs are magical things, and once they compile and don't crash or hang, you can trust their results. This exact attitude is what I'm reminded of when I read about this CRU incident.

I don't think any of the staff ever took the issue seriously, though. Even if they weren't prepared to teach it, they should have told everyone to teach themselves over the holidays and provide exercises or whatever. At no point did anyone point out that programming was a difficult craft, and that mastery of it would be expected.

For context to those unfamiliar with the majority of UK science degree programmes: they are typically not as modular or flexible as in other countries. If you failed a module, you had one chance to re-sit the exam a few weeks later. There was no option of re-taking the module including lectures during the next term/semester; each term had a pre-assigned set of modules, there was no flexibility in when they could be taken, so you couldn't defer your concurrency project until you'd taken some more programming classes or so.

<comment><USER5> _split your functionality into stand-alone functions and files; use version control; avoid global variables; the merits of code reviews_

Yes, these are exactly the kinds of things I'm talking about that I have not seen taught in undergraduate mathematics programmes, but they are _vital_ to writing good quality scientific code.

 _At no point did anyone point out that programming was a difficult craft, and that mastery of it would be expected_

Not only difficult, but even experienced programmers introduce serious bugs by accident. Often they find them because they do extensive testing! This is not done to such a degree for scientific code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The unveilings of the CRU materials now also caused Al Gore to cancel his talk at Copenhagen. [http://www.examiner.com/x-11224-Baltimore-Weather- Examiner~y...](http://www.examiner.com/x-11224-Baltimore-Weather- Examiner~y2009m12d3-Climategate-emails-force-Al-Gore-to-cancel-talk-at- Copenhagen)

<comment><USER2> An inconvenient cancellation.

<comment><USER9> Responses like this, while quite popular on reddit, hurt the overall quality of HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This has to be the stupidest critic I have seen yet on this whole thing. In particular, complaining that the code is not commercial quality is laughable.

Most of the scientific code is awful, in climate science and elsewhere, because the constraints are totally different than commercial code. Maintainability is not so much a concern, and it is only a tool to obtain a result, not an end in itself. People don't care about the code quality most of the time.

There is another concern, which is that you rarely know what you exactly want when programming for research. You don't always have the time to design reasonable API, because the requirements keep changing - and keep in mind that you cannot spend too much time on this because you have to write papers, do some actual research, etc...

Even in my field, which is engineering and where people are expected to be more "programming methods-aware", most of the code is awful. My own code for research is awfully bad compared to what I release as open source for scientific programming: when I release something, I easily spend several times as much work on the thing, because of documentation issues, etc... Doing this for all my code is simply not possible.

If you want to dismiss climate science because of code quality, be ready to throw away the majority of science, from biology to IA through EE. Just look at lapack code: the code is awful, using goto to avoid structured programming, etc... (e.g. <http://www.netlib.org/lapack/double/dsgesv.f>). And it is used by 99 % of code which does linear algebra, including commercial software.

<comment><USER11> That's a pretty cavalier attitude to have when so much depends on the results (and I mean research programming in general, not just the CRU case). Maintainability may not be a concern, but verifiability certainly should be.

<comment><USER10> Verifiability in science is not a matter of having one program checked by different people. The reality is much more complex than that. This so called climate-gate says more about the perception of research than climate science (although it has certainly became a PR-nightmare for climate science). I think it is just another case of people have an idealistic, out of reality knowledge of how science works. Verifiability is less a concern than most people meant it to be for research. In an ideal world, it should be, but it isn't how science has been done - I would argue it has never been the case.

Scientists are actually very conservative for most parts exactly for this reason: in practice, it is just not possible to rely on consistent repeatability, etc... When you have an established, widely shared view on a topic, it takes great leaps to break it. Most research is not done to break the consensus, but to reenforce it. That's why today, if you want to show that climate is not caused by human activity, you will need to present data which are not as good as the ones one has now, but which are much, much better. So it is most likely true that if you want grants, etc... the easy way, going along the consensus is the right path.

That may not be how people think science should be done, but that's how it is done in practice in my experience. I think that for most researchers, all this affair sounds like a storm in a teapot. The behavior may look shady at times, the experiment is not always great, but that's exactly why for a new consensus to be created, you need to have better proof than the existing consensus. And yes, politics come into play, yes a lot of it is mean and some of it is not ethical. But this does not invalidate science in general - it invalidates how people think science works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this code available anywhere? Is there an effort to embrace and improve this codebase?</comment>


Oak Ridge NL is hiring a Data Engineer – Come help us build cool stuff [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/Data-Engineer-GIST.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys

A few months back I posted an Ask HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16885344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16885344)) trying to get general input on what people knew or thought about Oak Ridge National Lab, where I work as a data scientist and realized that the "if you post it they will come" approach wasn't really working well for our positions we were hiring for. There were a lot of great, brutally honest comments.

To summarize, there were 3 main categories of responses

\- I've never heard of ORNL

\- I've heard of ORNL and the national labs, but aren't they just low paying government jobs?

\- I've heard of ORNL, but I don't really know about living in Tennessee

Based on this feedback, I tossed the existing job posting and rewrote this one to try and address, or at least acknowledge, the main points that were mentioned in the Ask HN.

If you are interested, let me know. The position is a part of my team so I should be able to answer any questions you might have. Also, general feedback on the posting itself would be great.

Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Please submit job postings to the monthly "Who is hiring" threads, not as individual submissions.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> mea culpa. I suppose my enthusiasm got the best of me.</comment></comment></comment>