skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the first person to say a number loses

This is really just a myth. If you present a buyer with well-justified and thought-out reasons for your number, it's going to be hard for them to counter-offer with something ridiculous, unless they're just being an ass. Not to mention you should always have your base number in mind, at which point you just walk away. The OP also said the company has agreed with most of his initial estimations, so he's clearly in a better position with regards to the number he can ask.

In my deals, I usually take $Well-Justified-Price and then tack on $Extra to swing the deal far in my favor. Usually $Extra brings the price close to where I think the buyer would walk away. Then it's up to the buyer to do their due diligence and we can talk about the facts behind the number and do our negotiating there. Usually it comes down, but that's the point of inflating your own value first.

Regardless, I've done this for selling my Facebook apps, vehicles, negotiating job salary, etc. If a buyer is pulling lowball crap, you basically tell them to cut the BS, reiterate the facts behind the number and make a call-to-action (i.e. "Buyer, you know everything behind this number is legit, now let's come to agreement"). If not, you walk away, simple as that.

Sometimes the buyer does have legitimate sticking points though, and that's usually where you just have to listen and go into "understanding" mode to get to the root of their concerns. Once you hear them out, you cut them a little slack on the price and then again reiterate all the facts behind what you're giving them (ABC - Always Be Closing)... When you present someone with solid facts, they can't help but agree with you, so it helps to get that final "Yes" when you ask them to close with you.

For the OP, you really need to do your research and come up with a solid justification for a number you have in your head. Drew gave one example of revenue * X, which is what I used when I sold one of my Facebook apps. If you're adding $$$ to their bottom line, then use that to make your argument also. This is a flexible process and depends greatly on industry. For websites it can often just be Drew's formula. Regardless, make sure there's at least some "science" behind your wild-ass-guess, and that way it'll at least look like you put in the work to come up with a legitimate price.

To be honest though, that's the fun of deals... it's really a flexible process and there's a ton of learning involved, so have fun with it. Don't be afraid to ask for something inflated though, so long as it's well justified and not pulled from your rear. After that it's the buyer's responsibility to negotiate down.
Btw thanks for including links!
Maybe the feature could be added as an opt-in for the user. This is what ubuntu does - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu#Adding... , works great.
Also the fact that random regular company can actually host their own apt repo and ask their users to add it to their apt configuration and then receive updates via the System Updater is kind of neat. There are several companies which do this - cloudera being among one of them, virtualbox being another.
So we're banning this the avoid deaths-by-fire? Can you name a single example to justify the restraint? And if you could, wouldn't it apply to residences in general, not just those let out by their owners?
What about open-source enterprise software? In my experience, it's better than the vendorware, but that doesn't make it appreciably more enjoyable to use, develop for, or maintain.

Maybe not all enterprise software is as necessary as it is made out to be. I'm thinking enterprise portal software here. I really can't stand anything about them.
Even better review of an earlier book of Friedman's by the same reviewer:
http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html
There are a bunch of laws regarding how your landlord can act, in fact, and they're extremely restrictive on the landlord.

Stop with the black/white nonsense, everybody in this whole thread agrees that it shouldn't be a big deal to sublet for a couple months or have a house guest. That's qualitatively different from running an unlicensed hotel.
Actually, a lot of people pointed this out, as well as the suspicious address, and other inconsistencies (her age, lack of presence in the MIT student database, ...)

Check out http://twitter.com/fakerobinsage etc.

The only question at the time was "is this a recreational troll, or is it a "security researcher" trying to test the community?" -- it seemed too amateurish to be a real intelligence gathering attempt.
you could always talk to your boss/HR/whoever and tell them you want to leave. there are a few things that could happen: 1) better offer to stay, 2) give you a letter/agreement to not sue over the noncompete, or 3) fire you, in which case the noncompete suit becomes hairier (you need to find work again, right?).

you could also tell the prospective company of the issue and see if they have a lawyer or anything to check it out.
Now-a-days the equivalent would be something like Pro Motion for PC: http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index.php
I'm in a similar situation where I'm about to start a job that has a broad noncompete. Broad to the point that they even own work I do in my spare time. I don't need the work that bad (I'm currently freelance) so I'm requesting they reword it.

The thing that really kills me about broad noncompetes like this is employers take it from protecting their business to over reaching and stealing their employees work. Personally, the best developers I know are hackers who execute on their own ideas with at least part of their spare time.

I'm perfectly okay with signing the part about not approaching their clients and not using trade secrets for my benefit. But the idea that I should turn over all IP created outside of the 40hr/week I'm being paid for is wrong.

As far as your situation, you may be screwing yourself by taking it to your boss at all. Good luck.
I went through this for a few weeks before I realized the cause. For me it was social media and news sites -- especially FB, twitter, mashable, reddit, and to some extent HN. These sites are carefully designed to make you ADD, so that you keep coming back for more, like a drug addiction. Call me cynical but basically, they are machines designed to numb and enslave the masses (possibly excluding HN).

If you are spending more than 5-10 mins/day on these sites, IMO it's a problem -- that is time you could be using to create something, rather than consuming meaningless social media updates from people you probably don't really care about. It's sad to see that even very talented developers, scientists, and otherwise-rational people are geting sucked into this bullshit.

Join a gym, hang out with friends IRL, travel -- basically, go offline for a while until you find your center again.

I realize the irony of posting this as an HN comment. But at least I'm on my way to the gym.
Regarding pricing have you explored whether or not companies W, Y or Z might be interested in buying your product? Until you explore other buyers you are limiting the range of offers you may be able to get. By only entertaining what company X might buy this for you have already agreed to a price range which is $some amount of money that's an obscene deal for company X to $the maximum company X might be willing to pay. The max may or may not be a good deal for you though. It may be a bit too late in your case to pursue other options - or you may feel like company X has the resources to give you the kind of deal you are looking for in which case +1 to drewcrawford's answer.

A friend and I sold an app (all IP, etc) several years ago and I've sometimes regretted not exploring other options, and also not iterating for a few more months to see if we could have made the product more valuable. At the same time though, the offer came out of the blue and both of us were more than happy to get some dough for something we had been hacking on in our spare time.

Regarding #2, get a freaking lawyer and a CPA ASAP. When you are talking about $*M, you should have no trouble ponying up now so you don't get screwed later.
WikiLeaks.org’s post of classified Afghan reports causes a furor
It's certainly plausible against the companies that aren't based in China, or resellers of those products located outside of China.

Although only certain OSS rightsholders have been keen to pursue that avenue in the past. Happily, at least two of the products on my list contain busybox, and busybox have generally been keen to defend their rights in court, so there is clear practical scope for this kind of thing.
Ask HN:  Advice for Freelancing
Hey there HN, I'm new to posting but longtime reader. I've constantly found awesome advice from quality people here. I have decided to start doing some more freelance web design outside of my family/friends, but I am lost as to how to start. Can you all give me a bit of advice of free/cheap ways to advertise myself to local small businesses and such? Help me, Hacker News! You're my only hope! :)
We had an application that was getting interest from a company that wanted to license the tech and add the product to their portfolio. I felt their licensing deal was convoluted and left too much room for us to get screwed. I then picked what I thought was a best-case kind of number and it ended up being so much higher than they were thinking that they didn't even want to counter.

It is hard to recover from that.

So I guess the lesson is that just like it is hard to raise your first price, it can also be hard to lower it.

In hindsight we would have taken 1/5 of what our number was and been happy. A win is better than nothing.
FYI, there is a Phillz in Palo Alto, too. I go often.
Wouldn't it be possible to raise the typical response time above 15msec with a denial-of-service type attack?

It seems to me that your system has to be able to adapt to situations where the typical response time changes drastically, and the attacker can exploit discrepancies in the way the typical response time will change depending on whether a packet's nth byte is valid or not. It might be possible to make keys arbitrarily difficult to crack using methods like what you and joe_the_user suggest, but the more security you add in the form of padding on extra response time, the more your regular users will suffer.
I go to bed late sometime after 3:00am and before the sun comes up. It really sucks trying to fall asleep when it is bright.

I stay up late out of necessity. I work from home (on my startup) and I have a large family. That means the only time I get uninterrupted time is after 11:00pm. I need the uninterrupted time for the difficult problems. Other work I can bang out during the day.

The down side is I sleep until noon.

When I had a 9-5, I stayed up until 2:00-3:00 got up at 8:00 and was in the office by 9:00. I would catch up on sleep over the weekends.
Most Mac apps do auto updating, not via Apple's infrastructure mind you, but at least in a much nicer way than Windows apps.
Gmail is written entirely in Javascript? Even on the server side?
It could also be that they want them to interact with locals, learn a bit more about the area they would be living if they got the job. Make sure they like the area, you don't really get that same impression staying in a city hotel.
It would be funny if it were a crime to download this data and yet not a crime to cause the deaths of innocent Afghan civilians.
That's true, but depot-level maintenance could certainly deal with that. Taliban in caves in Afghanistan probably not, but ISI/AQ Khan organizations in Pakistan are fairly sophisticated (they built nuclear weapons, after all).

More unlikely because the stingers given to the ISI/Afghans were early models with less effective seekers (more easily jammed) than the missiles available today from other sources. Current generation Stingers are the best, but current missiles from China, Russia, etc. are probably superior to first generation Stingers, especially ones that have been carted around Afghanistan.

US military helicopters and other aircraft have a variety of countermeasures -- electronic systems, well chosen flight paths, low altitude operations, and multi-ship operations (where one helicopter supports another), plus support from other aircraft for ECM. Compared to a commercial airliner, they're non-trivial to shoot down. There are plenty of contractor/NGO/etc. operated Mi-8s and other crappy ex-Soviet helicopters flying, but those crash on their own quite frequently -- no one needs to shoot them down.

There was a period where people were really scared that stingers would wind up in the hands of international terrorists who would shoot down a commercial airliner in the civilized world. There was a huge CIA buyback program for these weapons; during the Afghan civil war, they were actually too expensive to expend, and were mainly just kept by various leaders as totems of power.

I really doubt US stingers are being used to shoot down US military aircraft in Afghanistan. I admit I'm fairly biased on this, being a frequent passenger, but I'm pretty sure small arms fire and RPGs (unguided rockets) are still the primary threats.
If that's true, I wonder why. Maybe is they are trying to get O(1) access? Storing it the 'default' way would be O(log n) which isn't bad, but might still be unacceptable.
A mind-bending simulation of the movie Inception, in C and ASM.
For hostels, there are sites like hostelbookers.com and hostelworld.com, and reviews matter a lot with those sites. If you choose only top reviewed places, you will get good service for sure.
I'm not sure that chart shows that food has become dramatically cheaper. It measures food expenditures of families and individuals, but there were more and bigger families and fewer individuals in past times, so of course you're going to spend more on food when you're a 1950s family with 4 kids and one breadwinner than when you're a modern double-income couple with 0, 1, or 2 children.

I don't think you got Elizabeth Warren quite right.
From http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap

"So we looked at the data for two-income families today earning an average income. What we found was that, while those families certainly make more money than a one-income family did a generation ago, by the time they pay for the basics -- an average home, a health insurance policy, a second car to get Mom to work, child care, and taxes -- that family actually has less money left over at the end of the month to show for it."

As for houses, you have to pay an arm and a leg to not live in a neighborhood that has crime problems that didn't exist in 1960.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/airbnb-brian-chesky/

Airbnb's founder is himself living on Airbnb for the next coupla months (or even indefinitely - though he doesn't say). If that isn't a plus for dependability, I don't know what is.

Edit: here's the first blog post - http://blog.airbnb.com/living-on-airbnb-0
If youre passing any state around with the callbacks or have shared global state then having callbacks will not buy you anything over the sequential code with loops, branches and joins imo. I think to prove correctness about the shared state you pretty much have to infer the loops, branches and joins.
It's more intuitive in the sense that you just do:

while (read(...)) {
...
}

instead of:

if (read(...) == EWOULDBLOCK) {
yield();
} else {
manage buffer
}
Another take on "Femme Fatale"
Re: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546650
Ah, I've been reading up on this, and indeed they've redacted some information. According to Assange, this is to prevent anyone operating in the region from being attacked by insurgents. I'm guessing that it would be bad for Wikileak's publicity if they got somebody killed.
Why doesn't Quora use PostgreSQL
I can't tell if you're being facetious or not. Our last trip to SF I swore I'd never go anywhere near Pier 39 again. Having said that, if you've never been to SF, you might head over there for lunch at Pier Market Seafood and look around a bit. But it's pretty much like any kitschy carnival like atmosphere you've ever been to. Near there you can get tickets to go across and see Alcatraz. Down the street and up one is Ghiradelli Square, go have a pint and something to snack on at The Pub. If you've brought your appetite, I recommend the jambalaya. There's a guy that plays guitar on the sidewalk at the corner of Beach and Larkin, be sure to throw this guy a buck. Speaking of, there are alot of street performers at night down in that entire area if you're into that sort of thing.
Wow, I now hate where I live 74% more than I did yesterday.
"This is really just a myth. If you present a buyer with well-justified and thought-out reasons for your number, it's going to be hard for them to counter-offer with something ridiculous, unless they're just being an ass"

Wrong, you're missing the point entirely, I'd like to buy a business from you...

The point is that if you offer a price first, this is the HIGHTEST the buyer will pay, he might have valued the business at more, in this case you have left money on the table.
awesome movie. see 8:33 http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=0rI2anb5Da0

here's the above quote in the movie: http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=IR_EHMDhcnw
at 3:42
"Rob Pike digs his own language".
go to a place where there are many trees, what you need is a break of what distracts you.
The languages tend to be interpreted rather than compiled, meaning the programs written in such languages aren't compiled before running....

Thanks for that brilliant bit of journalism there.
How about a car, then? If you mess up, you are quite likely to kill lots of other people, while causing little damage to yourself (my world-view supports the idea that causing inconvenience to people in a house which you are a guest in is akin to driving on the sidewalk, and that being polite, pleasant, and quiet is similar to driving in the street; yours may not). Still not a good comparison, of course.

(EDIT begins): The above paragraph is not only "not a good comparison," but a really bad comparison which entirely misses the point and argues against the below paragraphs (as jbooth's comment succinctly points out). It's only still here because I don't like deleting text I've posted; I still support most of it (especially it being common courtesy not to cause discomfort to your hosts, regardless of any regulations or laws regulating behavior), even though the basic idea is horrible. You should disregard it, and focus on the paragraphs below. (EDIT ends)

However, if you are going to get up in arms about the potential for noisy guests, and require legislation to prevent it in some way, it makes far more sense, to me, to empower apartment owners to kick out anyone who sublets an apartment to noisy guests, and allow legal recourse for the people in surrounding apartments if this does not occur. A system of incentives would thus be created for people renting out a spare room to make sure to educate their visitors about the behavioral standards they are expected to follow, and to enforce these standards. This would create greater freedom for everyone, and the owner of the building has the option of stipulating that short-term sub-letting is not permitted in whatever contract they have with their renters.

The problem of actual unlicensed hotels - a set of rooms lived in by no one but short-term renters - is entirely different, and is the problem which should be removed by legislation. It's also the problem which many of the people who are against AirBnB and similar sites are thinking of; there is a world of difference between a group of tourists given free reign in an apartment and one or two tourists renting a bedroom from someone who is living in and present in the apartment. This difference is perhaps why so many of the people who have tried such services are in favor of it; they have been in the latter situation, which seemed quite pleasant to them and which was completely preferable to hotels (all of the stories I've heard of users of such services describe this situation). The people who are angry about it (outside of the hotel industry) without actually coming into contact with it (short-term renting of the adjacent apartment, with whatever results) are thinking of the first situation.

Or at least, that seems to be the case, from reading many of the comments on this article. It's quite likely that I'm misunderstanding something, of course.
Not only is SLO an awesome town not far from some great beaches, but The Madonna Inn has 100+ entirely uniquely designed rooms (which sorta calls for visiting a ton of times), some with odd features like waterfalls, turret rooms, and rock walls. The main restaurant is an upmarket steakhouse - I've not had a steak beat any of theirs yet. There's also a cake deli of sorts and my wife testifies that their cake is unbeatable. Oh, and there's an awesome menswear place on the top floor..

Last, the entire place is designed in a totally crazy and idiosyncratic style that I've never seen replicated anywhere else. It's certainly not to everyone's taste, but I'm more blow away by how unique it is every time I go there than my opinion of the decor per se.
Buy jimmy Choo shoes
Jimmy Choo Shoes-- the most exquisite design, ladies all over the world are crazy about these beautiful shoes. It is not just charming but also comfortable. And we will give you a jimmy Choo shoes discount at special products.
I sure have my doubts. I have a friend at Google who works closely with that team; I'll ask him about it. He spends most of his day writing Java (not Javascript).
OK, but that doesn't mean you can't have a specific startup idea in mind when you're learning to code, and work on it as soon as you're able. Why spend time writing software that certainly won't make money when you've got the option of writing software that just might make money?
Video of his talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE&feature=playe...!
0.9 to 1.6 as a multiplier is absolutely terrible, that's a crazy discounted cash flow rate, at those multiples you are guaranteed to be better off just holding onto the business unless you know it is going under very rapidly. 5x is starting to become reasonable.
After watching the demos a safe two seats away from the closest attendee,
I approached someone and introduced myself. They didn’t seem interested
in talking to me and walked away a few minutes later. After standing around
for a few more minutes acting like I was looking for someone, I just walked
out. Ouch.

Wow. That's messed up.

People, please if you're at some tech gathering, keep an eye out for newcomers and make them welcome. That's what makes a community.
So, how has being a member of the NY Tech community helped you? Is this something we should also aspire to do?
The article is frustratingly inaccurate on many, many counts.
BP's Tree Fell on my Lawn
Machines and emotion
California does protect you against getting into new non-competes. But in finance I have heard of New York non-competes being honored in California. I don't have any case-law (and it could be a successful example of bullying) but you may want to double check.
From reading a lot of VC blogs, the thing that affects their valuation the most is competition. I think the most important thing you can do for your deal is get a competing bid of some kind, any kind, any outside interest at all will do more for the price than you can do within the confines of the deal with company x. This may sound difficult and it is, but I think it's absolutely critical.
Just enough to live the rest of your life from it.
Inside Second Life?
also (paraphrased):

a. Javascript is less than 10 years old

b. It was developed in response to the growing complexity of Java/C++