skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, I may be missing something, but the fact that they put together a research group doesn't mean that they just started; or that the other people in the research group are less interested or motivated or experience than you. Maybe explain your special circumstances.

When I started, I was initially a bit distraught at the fact that there were a lot of people taking, and making a lot of money in my space; Everybody with any experience told me "They are solidifying the fact that there is value in that space, go do it better"; If you honestly believe that you can do it better, and you have the option, eh, why not?
This is one of the foundations of building an actual sense of community. If you were having a discussiion in the real world, wouldn't you feel a bit put-off if someone jumped in and started talking without spending even a moment to hear what other people are saying?

Requiring that someone has SOME positive karma before posting is just a way of saying "yes, this person has shown some interest in participating in a reasonable manner".
I've often thought about putting together a good mix of infrastructure software into one distro/appliance.

You could provide:

- Router

- VPN

- VoIP

- Email

- Version control

- Issue tracker

- Wiki

- File server/SMB/FTP

- Etc.

You could save a startup a lot of headache if this stuff was boxed up for $500-$1000 or so. It would be well worth it if it buys you more time on your product.

As for processes, it seems like engineering processes are mainly affected by one decision: how do you break up milestones/versions? You can 1) aim for a constant amount of time per cycle, and cut a prioritized list of issues to fit or 2) decide what you need to do for a milestone, estimate the time required for each issue, and go at it until you finish. I've seen successful projects in both areas, so maybe it's a style thing. The important thing is that you do something.

Another important thing is deciding the lifecycle of a bug/improvement/feature. And toss it out the window for things that are easier to do than to file.

Also, as the project matures, you need a story for the division of eng time between bug fixing and creating new features. If you do support, you'll need a way to respond to the pressure from that. Maybe alternating responsibilities between engineers would help keep a constant response time to customer issues.

For team organization, trying to split things up into silos with less than 4 engineers or so seems pretty counterproductive, unless there is a huge disparity for some particular skill. As you grow, organize teams around major areas: frontend, backend, developer support, etc.

If you're going to be hiring, decide on how interviews will be carried out and what the decision criteria will be. Keeping it fairly uniform will allow you to measure it better.

The important thing is to stay responsive to feedback from the trenches (even if "the trenches" is just you for now).

Just some off-the-cuff ideas that your post brought to mind.
Have you Designed or Developed Something that Could be Used for Evil?
"In ten years, this computer will be talking to us."
Why don't you share your idea. This is might be a great place to find your tech co-founder?!

I don't understand why many people are so determined to keep their ideas secret a secret. First off odds are somebody has also though of the same idea. Not every great opportunity is immediately obvious in the early form of the idea. An idea alone does not make a killer startup imo -- execution is very important. Second, if only you have the expertise to make this idea work then all the more reason to share it and hope to find someone that buys into your dream.

Just my two cents worth. From my experience there is nothing more frustrating then not iterating towards your goal.
I'm at the same crossroads right now; 2 Guys, 6 months in

I've started playing with SugarCRM (It's good, but not great, and in my mind, i do fine with a couple of post-its and an shared address book)

FogBugz is doing wonders for development, Time Tracking, ticketing, CVS/SVN integration.

I know in the last couple of days I've become somewhat of a fanboy, but I'm serious, it's great stuff.
With a more mature company, the valuation method is fairly straightforward. The ratio depends on your industry. Find a few equivalent companies and average their PE ratios. Then subtract somewhere between 20-40%, depending on how new/mature your product and customers are. Multiply it by your current earnings (on a run-rate basis). That's the fair price.

If you aren't profitable yet, you can do the same thing with the Price/Sales ratio, although that's more subjective and less accurate. It sounds like you may be new enough that all of these methods are out the window, and your valuation is based purely on your hotness and growth potential. In that case, I don't really know what you're worth. The only way to establish a fair value is to get a bidding war going.

Actually, if you are truly on an exponential growth vector then 3-4x earnings sounds low. Why would you even consider it? In a year, you would have earned more than you would have made by selling the company. Is there any reason to think your earnings have leveled off? Also, is this a cash or stock deal? Is the payout no-strings-attached or is there an earn-out requirement with target revenues?
I can't conceive of a single reason to move to Dubai. I would seriously rather live in a shanty in the middle of Appalachia.
You need an intro. Ditto for VCs.
don't sell at 4x. This would be a ripoff. Stay with the company and see if you can grow it further. If you really want to sell ask for 15x or more.
Despite the old saying that the trains always run on time, just about everything else seems to go to hell.

Note Singapore is one of the few modern examples I can think of of a dictatorship that turned out pretty well. Of course the plain-clothes police everywhere probably have something to do with why in two solid days of counting I never saw a single person laugh or grin. I didn't even notice that it had been happening until crossing over to Kuala Lumpur I was struck by seeing laughing and smiling people.
A big spike for The Big Switch
Many projects have extendible interfaces with good documentation.

Find web apps with APIs (FB, Twitter), they are a good start because you get good results quickly for the most part.

Then write a plugin for something like jQuery (if you're into javascript)

Go from there.
Peak, or level off?
I would be more worried about C... which this already runs (apparently securely)
Get yourself a new job, because the dollar has lost so much value you need a 10% yearly raise to stay even.
1. Write some code.

2. Register a domain.

3. Copy and modify Terms of Service and Privacy Policy from someone else.

4. Write some more code.

5. Profit.
Having sold two sites: the first a website and the second a company.

At your size its all about how much they want you ans how much you want them. Step into their shoes for a while and see what they see. Do they see a 10 million dollar a year business if they roll it out throught their sales channels? What value do they see? Position it from that angle. Don't fall for pe ratios or crap like that. Its one thing if you are a solid stable company w/ predictable revenues but you are not. Be polite but firm. Don't let them pressure you. If you need more time, tell them you are taking more time. They'll try to rush you.

Finally, as you are doing this, think HARD about involving some professionals. Lawyers to help you get favorable terms, tax ppl to help you understand the tax implications (there is a GAINORMOUS DIFFERENCE between long term capital gains and short term). I know its difficult since they cost an arm and a leg but you can me losing out on a lot if you don't get some advice. Reach out to you uncles cousins buddy. Everyone likes helping the young kid trying to fight the corporation. They'll give you some free advice esp if its a favor.

Don't be afraid to ask for help and advice! We live in a society. People will help you out.

Finally, if they really want you, they will be back, no matter what they say. Think hard if this is really what you guys want. But as hard as it is, also be stone cold and make some probabilistic calculations. I'm sure it is a passion, but its also a business transaction. The irrational guy loses.
World of Warcraft is a direct descendant of D&D? Someone's going to want some royalties.
It's quicker and snappier. It has tasking, a better contact manager, and a full scheduler. It feels like a desktop application, and doesn't have any of the odd performance delays and quirks that you see with Java apps.

And I'll guarantee AOL/MSFT wrote it in a fraction of the time it took Google.
How about some JavaScript support. Here's I'll help:

document.write(eval(inputString));

Of course that lacks any sort of security measures...
It's called OS X.
I found it faster than Gmail and like the interface better. I'm focusing more on the Silverlight vs. Ajax side of this so I ignored the pervasive ads and mail receive speed issues.
Las Vegas, Nevada
89109
702-278-XXXX
How about "reel" instead of "portfolio"?

Reel is a much more common word in the business for anything that moves (film, animation, etc), whereas portfolio implies static imagery.
sounds like the offer is 6M-9M

to put things in perspective.

@ 10M and 3% you earn $300k a year in interest.
@ 10M and a good money market you earn 8-12% or $800k-$1.2M a year. If you only spend 250k a year you will grow your money very fast.

in Wisconsin 1.5-2.5M and 150K a year in income qualifies you as an angel investor, and you can invest 100k and get 25k off of your taxes.

i think the guys are right, 10x is standard for tech growth.

you might consider a few options to the deal, like
a payout bonus if the company performs better than X
a percentage payout of lifetime earnings of 1% annually (which will keep you from being broke) technology licenses are normal.
*the buyout price is for control, but not for all of the ownership, you might retain some shares which could be sold later.
This is an advertisement for her ebook (insider's guide thingy). Trying to establish herself as an expert. Marketing huey. Annoys me that I'm voting simple by commenting.
SQL databases are such marvels of engineering and computer science!

(cough, like hell they are...)
I read the book:
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law

Great read with a lot of practical advice - This really helped me discuss issues with potential attorneys. In addition, after selecting our attorney, we were able to lower our cost by asking more pointed and specific questions.

Also, I was able to use some template documents that I worked with at a previous job, to include: NDA's, Contractors, Term sheets - I took these documents and massaged to our liking - In cases where we needed a more 'bullet-proof' contract, I forward my copy to our attorney for review. This has saved a lot of money.
creating ways to break stuff is a creative, inventive process. and doing it well requires heavy automation including skillful programming.
Something orbiting the earth at thousands of mph is too fast by .01 mph and we know something is wrong? Physics is awesome, and space is a very cool laboratory.
> I think there was also a TV show

Yes. It was a kind-of science show. Thank you for the jaunt down memory lane. I'm trying to play the theme song in my head now without google assistance. "3-2-1 contact. Reason mumble everybody"
Or move to India. Your money will appreciate.
Wow. Thats crazy!
Why not call IBM? You might enjoy it. More resources. Maybe you can make progress faster.

Going it alone is hard. It's necessary if no one agrees with you, or no one else would do it right. But here? I don't see the compelling reason not to team up with IBM. You'll cooperate with people and see valuable work done; you'll be part of something good and effective.
Peak, and level off.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-06150...

Here is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs in 2005 at Stanford where he announces that he had cancer.

Edit: not agreeing or disagreeing with anyone's opinions on CNN mentioning his pancreatic cancer, I'm just linking this because I was reminded of it after reading the comment about his cancer and I recall it being an interesting read.
Genes 'R' Us: The new dot-coms?
What's wrong with them?
> He was suggesting you give the pickled object back to the client in the session cookie and load whatever the client sends later right back into the interpreter. Whee!

I've done that with signed cookies.
Right. If your growth really is exponential, then drag out the deal a month or two, at which point their valuation is so outdated they have to make a new one.
Perhaps if you shared more about what kind of work you were interested in doing, we could offer more specific advice?...
If infrastructure spending is the solution (not sure I agree with that one) then federal funding for fast-tracked subway network construction in regional population hubs would be ideal. Massive up-front costs (pouring money in the economy) coupled with long term huge productivity gains. Never happen though, sigh.
I'm working on a project where we're in the process of storing de-normalized links for a recursive table relationship, so we can query from the top-level table directly to the bottom-level table without worrying about the messy inbetween. One of the few non-speed reasons I've ever come across where denormzalization seems jutified.
3-2-1 Contact was awesome! Of course, I was 5 or 6 at the time... ;)
Well, these are good points. I guess I could do the evangelist part or let someone else do it, but really I think it could speak for itself. As for the article in your link, I could be wrong since I'm not him, but something tells me his reputation had something to do with that "I got my application built for $12,000" equation.

Even if the market hasn't changed yet, I'd say that them devoting brainpower/budgets into looking into it full-time might meand that they, too suspect it may change this way. Quite honestly I can't believe it didn't change this way a long time ago.
the request to the chart's url will be made by the client browser, which is a unique ip for practically every visitor. so, maybe that's 50,000 charts per day per visitor? unfortunately they don't really clarify what they mean, as they could be tracking the request referrer.
It depends what you need done. Any corporate lawyer should be able to handle an incorporation or vesting documents. They'll probably just hand it off to a lower-paid associate (or if they don't, ask them to), so it almost doesn't matter who you hire. They won't be doing the work. It does matter that you trust them so that you're not surprised when the bill comes. On the other hand, if you find yourself needing a criminal defense lawyer for a specialized case at the last minute, you might very well find yourself paying that hypothetical $800 per hour attorney.

In worst case scenarios, you can always harass law school professors, who are sometimes amused by the interesting travails of undergraduates and non-law graduate students.

Basically, just pray you never need to hire any of them.
Not a big fan of Wales but I really hate this kind of article. This is the tech industry not politics. If it's shown he did something wrong then we should all hear about it, but there's no substance to these allegations yet. It's wrong that his reputation is being smeared by innuendo.
This might make sense in some cases (i.e., C programming), but I don't really know that it does in the case of HTML. I wouldn't want waste time learning, in this day and age, how to make table-based layouts that are strictly compliant with the HTML4 spec.
Swiss graphic design: a history in photos (or, where trendy web designers get ideas to steal from)
Take a look at Google's Adsense and Adwords terms of service. These are pretty much the standard that similar ad models follow. Stating the percentage is similar to a retail store telling everyone what their profit percentage is. If you try walking into a store and asking "How much did you pay wholesale for this?" you will probably not get the nicest response. It's a trade secret for them. This is why your advertising earnings can't really be broken down like that. Imagine if you found out that Google took 75% of revenue from ads on your site. It's the same as finding out that your hardware store charged you $10 for a hammer that cost them $2.50.

Some ad networks are more transparent with their rates. They'll tell you right away "50% goes to us, and 50% goes to you." but it's not required and it looks like the service you want to use doesn't do this.

You could try buying ads for your own game and see how much you receive vs. how much it cost you. Just make sure that you don't get caught :P Some companies don't allow this, so if you are going to do this, have a friend do it or use a different account.
Where to start..

For one, while we're on this denormalization topic, postgresql refuses to use indexes sanely when I run queries against views. Heck, I don't see why postgresql even has views if they can't really be used.

Yes, I am complaining about the performance of current implementations of relational databases, not how good they "theoretically" could be. Still, after this many years, it's apparent that they aren't going to be getting better any time soon!
Or ... Or ... OOOORRR - you just gave me another idea in a way: What if I go up to BigCo and THREATEN to publish it online for free, thus rendering their money spent on research/subsequent patent-based revenue streams completely useless? Just walk up to IBM and say, "I know what you guys researching, here's what you'll discover, now pay up or I'll write a white paper and just put it on the internet ... or mail it to Microsoft or whatever!"

And since the legal departments of most major corporations use game theory in analyzing transactions, their lawyers would easily tell them it's in their favor to pay me what I ask for just to get me to agree to shut up.

That's just crazy enough to possibly work. I wish I could up vote you like 20 times for inspiring this thought.
On the other hand. Just de-normalizing ahead of time can really save you on code complexity and is usually the highest performance setup.

So I would say, de-normalize ahead of time and if you find you have performance problems then normalize it. That's the most probable way of avoiding pre-mature optimization:)
That might work. If it doesn't, I'll threaten to publish everything online for free, thus negating their own efforts and rendering their money spent into a black-hole of no return.
I also live in Atlanta. I don't know of any "hacker hangouts" but I like to go to Apres Diem in the afternoons.
Well, they could be motivated and interested, but I doubt they have the experience, otherwise they would have, with their resources, started a long time ago.

About the do it better part, a bit harder. They have resources, but if they're just now starting to figure out what to do ... I know exactly what to do, but ... kinda hard to do it. So far it's a draw outcome wise, but they're making nice salaries doing something I like, meanwhile I lose interest in my gig while I spend more and more time doing this as a side project for free.
Warren Buffett is now the richest man in the world (beating Bill Gates after 13 years).
Zuckerberg is youngest billionaire on Forbes list, #785, with $1.5 billion.
As Gauss said, pauca sed matura (few but ripe).

When it comes to the number of programmers you need, I think the fewer the better. The fewer daycoders and code monkeys, the better, at least.
According to a Google Group forum post by a Google Employee, the 50,000 limit refers to the webpage, not the person who visits the site: http://groups.google.com/group/google-chart-api/msg/b53c39a5...?
This was very well thought out, thank you.

The only thing I would say with regard to something I can't figure out is that while I couldn't care less if this gets copied, and in some ways prefer it, if I was first to deploy, I'm not in a position (yet) to deploy first and I'm just trying to get as many things lined up as possible to increase my advantage before "blurting it out". I may find an ally, but I may inspire 3 competitors who now have the idea AND the technical ability I lack to put it together faster than me. Can't find a solution to this conundrum.
...why can't you find someone to work with?

the excessive examples of sarcasm don't help, and your other comments could be insulting, and offending the people that you're trying to get advice from doesn't give much credence to your cause. (trust me, i would know http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127717)
> An idea alone does not make a killer startup imo -- execution is very important.

Aaaah - but if I blurt the "what" to someone who can do the "how", then they have the "what" and "how" which means my negotiating leverage = 0 and I'm dependant on their good-will. Just to give you an idea of why I'm reluctant, see some of the above posts where people say things like, "If I partner with you and do your idea, why should I share the results with you?"
Hmm. At your current position I would seriously consider the lifestyle options you currently have. How much are you earning currently from this? Are you the only founder? If you can take a 6 figure salary from this and still pay all business expenses and be profitable then I would reconsider selling, especially at such a low valuation.*

*Quick note/question: You're saying that you hit 160K net profit last month, and that you're being offered 3-4 times earnings. Depending on your gross margins you're being offered at least $7.7M (assuming no change in monthly net profit). What are your earnings, might we ask?

If you have very tight margins (<10%) then I think this is a great deal, technology and speculation aside. If you have a high margin (>50%) then it probably isn't such a great deal.

Things to consider:

- How much of the buyout goes to you?

- How much are you personally making now?

- The average American (depending on education) earns about $3M in his/her entire lifetime. Will you have this or more after the deal? (This is a little test I apply to see if I would do or not do something).

- How risky is your company?

- How much risk are you willing to take?

Good luck with this. Congratulations for getting this far!
82-21 rule?
> You spent 6 years on this idea with nothing to show for it[red flag]

I wouldn't say that. For example I have some practical insights into how to apply it that is apparently worth millions/time for a major company to just explore it. and that in turn is based on the belief that there will be a huge market for it in the near future. So I'd that's not quite "nothing" ... although it's hard to put a figure on it.

As for the "couldn't convince anyone to join you" ... well, in NYC people either: 1) work on their own dream startup projects, so I never even get to discuss my thing becasue they're too busy sharing theirs ... 2) go to work for i-banks, Google, or now, Facebook. Bit hard to find programmers who ask you to compete with the terms a well-funded company like that puts on the table.

> "dreaded idea guy that wants 99% equity

Funny thing - I never approached anybody with anything near thos terms. I always said I just wanted what everyone else in the primary group got. So if it's me an 1 other guy necessary, 50-50. If it's me, 3 programmers, 2 other guys doing who knows what, and 4 whatevers, 10% each. I'm not the one with the reluctance to share.

> I would at least call them to see where they are with their research.

Do you imagine they'd share that with me though? Like, "Oh, hey, I just found out about something I wasn't supposed to find out about. BTW, what exactly are you guys up to and how far did you get? I won't tell a soul, I promise!"