Hacker News Reader

ryanburkon Google and LinkedIn announce massive land swap

there are roughly 3000 microsoft folks in the bay area. most are at the mountain view campus next to linkedin and moffett towers across the airstrip. but also a bunch in san francisco (yammer) and palo alto (skype).

ryanburkon Defending Our Brand

impressive that he doesn't follow anyone.

ryanburkon Investors and their incentives

I agree this since private equity investments and buyouts seem to be accelerating and it is important to understand their motivations.

I thought this post covered the differences versus VCs, angels, etc well: https://medium.com/lightspeed-venture-partners/what-happens-...

ryanburkon Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet Trends Report [pdf]

http://www.recode.net/2016/6/1/11826256/mary-meeker-2016-int...

there is video from her at the code conference

ryanburkon Twilio S-1

tesla is a good example of a company that did this at ipo.

really, there are no financial implications. the valuation of the company stays the same with a split, but the price of the stock changes proportionate to the quantity outstanding. valuation = # shares * $ per share

what the reverse split does (or split - as twilio did a 2:1 split just over a year ago) is put the cost per share in a range that appears more attractive to buyers. in today's market, that is ~$15 +/-5. so if the internal valuation pre-IPO has the stock at $8, the company often reverse splits 1:2 and then you have an initial price back at $16. that way you don't look like a penny stock going out the door.

ryanburkon Meet the YC S16 Batch

from the article: "From now until Demo Day, Meet the Batch will publish profiles of our S16 companies and founders..."

ryanburkon Ask HN: Is any of Dave Cutler's code open source?

there is exactly one "senior technical fellow" at the company - davec.

while is wasn't entirely a solo effort - folks like forrest foltz, landy wang, etc were involved - it was amazing coming in on a monday morning and seeing the email that said "sync your enlistments and rebuild, you'll see a new amd64 version" and 95% of the system was now building and running for x64. it was crazy.

ryanburkon Ask HN: Is any of Dave Cutler's code open source?

I had the privilege to work on the windows kernel team in the NT5 then XP days. I really wish they could share some of his code. it was the cleanest, well segmented, and commented code I've ever seen. it made the system much more maintainable and understandable, in areas that are inherently complex. great interfaces with a clear understanding of what was going in and coming out. and it helped all the other devs raise their game.

ryanburkon google.com/humans.txt

the nest one has always been great http://www.nest.com/humans.txt

ryanburkon KH-12 Kennan Keyhole Secret Military Spy Satellite Photos

website seems down, but google cache here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9jrWlnp...

ryanburkon The Madness of Airline Élite Status

$100 for 5 years [1]

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/comparison-chart

ryanburkon New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

yes[1]. I thought I read that they promised this at the surface pro 3 launch but I can't find proof of that.

[1] http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/tablets/1403174/microsoft-sur...

ryanburkon Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

they didn't take venture capital and instead self funded. even if you aren't generating revenue, you can bootstrap

ryanburkon Why Cant Commercial Airplanes Go Faster? (2012)

the article includes the link to the previous HN discussion on this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4644712

ryanburkon Microsoft Shakes Up Its Leadership and Internal Structure

yes, but he didn't bring office with him to windows.

ryanburkon Microsoft Shakes Up Its Leadership and Internal Structure

no, even before the antitrust fun they were always separate business divisions / orgs.

ryanburkon Microsoft makes it easier to build Minecraft Mods using Visual Studio

the brilliant long play here is that if I program with my kids using this, they are growing up on the VS IDE. gets them in the ecosystem really early.

ryanburkon A look at Stanford computer science: Challenges of a growing field

agreed. it has been over 15 years since I graduated from a pretty good CS program in an engineering school, and we definitely had math professors teaching many core courses that were math focused (e.g. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs2800/2015sp/). and professors from other engineering disciplines taught courses across (e.g. OR/IE profs doing stats).

this might have been possible at my school and not possible elsewhere based on how the different departments are focused / rewarded / isolated. more math profs might have been interested in getting CS experience back then.

ryanburkon Etsy Vendors to get option to buy $2,500 of shares before public float

only if they issued additional shares to do this, which doesn't come across in the S-1

ryanburkon Etsy Vendors to get option to buy $2,500 of shares before public float

I love this. but it does cost the company in terms of shares available to their underwriters to sell. and when you assume there will be easy first day gains to be had by getting the shares at the offering price that everyone wants a piece of, I'm sure it took a lot of convincing of their investors & bankers to do this.

ryanburkon Deleting any Facebook album

things might have changed over the past 12 months, but if you report an app from the store app in windows 8, the report gets looked at and they were good about removing apps that had issues.

I say this since I went through this process myself about a year ago and the app I reported was taken down. full disclosure: I worked on the app store team, but didn't use any internal mechanism.

ryanburkon Microsoft Acquires Calendar App Sunrise for North of $100M

I would say it is probably both. calendaring tech is actually much harder than most people believe. both for usable design and efficient implementation. I say that having worked on the outlook.com/hotmail team a few years ago.

and interestingly this is the second calendaring acquisition microsoft has done, having bought jump.com back in 1999.

ryanburkon [dead]

it would be great if the title was changed to reflect that this is a concept / design, and nothing real.

ryanburkon Why the data center needs an operating system

having a ratio where you scale linearly is really not common in mega-scale web services since you have infrastructure services like borg / mesos / omega / autopilot / etc.

you can take a snapshot and say you are 1:n because today you have so many sre and so many machines, but it is very unlikely to be the same ratio down the road.

ryanburkon WatchKit

you can start here, but you might need to be a registered dev to get to the content:

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

ryanburkon Announcing Soylent 1.2

could you try to describe the taste? there was nothing in the FAQ and while I'm sure it is challenging to articulate, it would be great to get an idea before ordering only to be horribly disappointed.

ryanburkon Tom Magliozzi, Co-Host of NPR's 'Car Talk,' Dies at 77

yes, they both were. it is in the NPR article.

ryanburkon Amazon Fire TV Stick

the remote for the fire tv is bluetooth[1], so I think that is a safe assumption.

and the picture of voice over IR made me think of the IR stream coming out like morse code...

[1] http://zatznotfunny.com/2014-04/tale-three-remotes/

ryanburkon PSA: Don’t Open Random PowerPoint Presentations from Strangers

exactly. the lesson could even be "don't open * from anyone, especially strangers."

you can get code to execute in all sorts of presumably innocuous file types.

ryanburkon How Wizards of the Coast distributed equity as a startup

thanks. totally get the life savings risk - the risk to the investor. I read it as risk to the company, so didn't know how this would be any riskier than standard round raises.