skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a lot of money in what RapidShare do.

I was working for a company in the same field which was doing maybe a tenth of the traffic RapidShare and we got a cash offer well into eight figures. This was a company with four employees and zero funding.
Thanks for the tool, very handy. However, I guess my site isn't IPv6 compatible yet... oops.
Problem with satellite if your downlink is within Egypt.

Conceivably a problem if your providers billing server is in Egypt, even if your downlink is elsewhere, as the RAS probably can't talk to your authorisation server in your billing system...

So let that be a lesson to you if you buy a satellite service as a backup - go to a neighbouring country to get it! :-)
For perhaps the first time ever, I wholeheartedly agree with jbooth for two posts in a row.
What exactly does this hurt? It cuts down on customer-support traffic, makes life easier for the user, and (as far as I can imagine at least) doesn't make anyone any more vulnerable. Under a fuzzy comparison scheme, weak passwords are still weak, and strong passwords will still be strong.
> A voluntary participant will talk about it on forums for example, brag on IRC, etc etc.

So it's like assassination, then: all you have to do to get away clean is to execute only on others' commands, making no plans of your own, and not discussing, bragging, or asking questions. Historically, this leads quickly to a two-level military structure: officers to point, and enlistedmen to shoot.

The only question is whether any sort of hierarchy is possible within a completely decentralized system of mutually non-trusting agents, who are nonetheless driven by either status or belonging. That sounds like it should have a mathematical answer...
Here are some more google translator easter eggs http://www.jackcola.org/blog/128-the-best-google-translator-...
#1 free iPhone app made by a 14-year-old
Don't get me wrong.

I don't :)

I know it's hard to believe, but law enforcement of different countries indeed does cooperate really well, often even if these countries don't have very good diplomatic relationships.

And it's not just Interpol/Europol.
Running the company on VC cash? Sounds unsustainable. Also isn't Tumbler just like Twitter?
Hire an M&A Attorney with experience in this type of deal. Don't waste another femtosecond of time on this, or any other board.
I meant remove them at least from my front page.
Weekly Python News: 01/28/2011
Hmm. Trust your gut feeling. Based on what you've written here, it doesn't seem like you or your partner are truly interested in doing this. It's a nice feather in your cap (the offer) but I would certainly avoid selling out until the cards are in your favor. Don't let yourself believe that because they're a large tech company they can put an offer down and you have to accept it.

Don't take it just because it came along, take it because you want it. You wouldn't date a girl (or guy) you weren't interested in just because it fell in your lap would you? Well... of course you might, but think about it. Also, I wouldn't get too anxious about the timeframe here. They've been courting you for 1.5 months, I can't see their offer and all that you guys have worked towards suddenly vanishing. They might have 8 figures they're willing to send your way, which gives an impression that they have the upper hand, but they're buying YOUR product, you have just as much leverage if not more. Take the time to think it through, write down the pro's and con's and compare the lists.

It sounds to me like you've sort of convinced yourself it is a bad idea, and you're putting that on the shelf at the sake of naiveté to find help from more experienced people. That's definitely a good thing, but I think that in the end this is really going to come down to how it will make the two of you feel. You'll fucking hate your guts if you walk away from selling your profitable 5 year old company if you're not completely happy with this.
"... Would investing more in satellite-based infrastructure be one possible solution? ..."

Old school HAM, AX.25 and Linux ~ http://tldp.org/HOWTO/AX25-HOWTO/
A bit of trivia about recall:

Recall is actually not even a feature of Exchange, only Outlook. Exchange sees the messages as normal emails.

Thus, if the receiving party doesn't have Outlook open, the message won't get recalled.
"We are also being courted by attornies/firms and investment bankers who want the business, and it's hard to get a bead on some really solid advice without feeling like the person giving it has something to sell us."

Pretty sure that's why the person is posting, just a wild guess.
It's been an interesting year for the iPad
From our experience in previous companies:

-Always counter-offer. People actually expect that you do so and that's probably why they put the offer low initially.

-Get a lawyer and a tax-specialist to make sure you are doing everything right and keeping as much as you can.

Also, since you guys are profitable and doing well, don't get too desperate to sell...
NewEgg sells a motorola for $20, just gotta provide your own SIM :P
Read the recent article M&A Case Studies: WhatCounts Sale Process : http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/01/ma-case-studies-whatcounts-s...
What? How can that be true? Were you ever a student?
Point to take away: use the right tool for the job!
Somebody bursting down your door in the middle of the night isn't "reasonable belief that you were in imminent danger of being robbed or attacked"? What world do you live in?

Ignore the silly mechanism described, and imagine you're sleeping in bed with your wife at 3am, and are a completely law abiding citizen as far as you are concerned. Why would you possibly have any reason to believe that the people violently breaking down your door and and yelling have good intentions?

This isn't hypothetical, this kind of shit has actually happened. Both innocent people, and cops, have died in these sort of situations.
Or use a phone that doesn't vibrate when you switch to vibrate.
Happy, well-fed, unevicted peasants don't riot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure#Enclosure_riots

And people in the east end of London were most certainly not well fed:
http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/PeopleOfTheAbyss/chapter25...

Please try not to be so knee-jerk dismissive of everything that doesn't fit into your free market viewpoint.
What's the old corporate training line American's get before doing business in Japan? Something like "In Japan it can take forever to come to a decision, but once made, it's executed at a frightening pace."
Are we doomed to have heterogeneous data storage? I keep wondering if the NoSQL landscape will settle down. The RDBMS world has really consolidated around SQL and there are a few major databases out there such that it's not too hard to pick which one you should use. You can answer 90% of RDBMS selection questions with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle.

The NoSQL landscape is not as well defined, and perhaps it covers so much more territory that it will never settle down. Perhaps we will all be stuck using three different databases for their various features because we can't come up with a few technologies that are good enough for 90% of cases.
If I was building a bomb activated by a mobile phone, I would try to keep the two separate until necessary.
Shop around now.

You have 1 offer. You're quite likely to get a much better offer (by either the current oferee (?) or another one), with just a few weeks of work.

Shop around, for real.

"Has (without saying so) implied that they make an offer and that is it" -> standard negotiation practice.

Shop around, even if "selling" isn't your strong point.

Practically, tell them you need some time to think this through. Then, when you have another offer (either better or worse), tell them very briefly: "We've had another offer. We don't want to turn this into a bidding war. We need some more time to think about our next steps." (Of course you want to turn this into a bidding war.)

I once got an offer for a startup out of the blue, just after I decided I was tired of it (karma!). I was going to take it. My girlfriend told me to ask for 50% more, and they gave it to me with only a little pushback. I could have likely gotten double.

3x revenue in STOCK sounds like a BAD deal. 3x revenue basically means: if they pretty much abandon the whole thing and let it run out a few years, they'll still make money. If they offer you just 3x revenue, it should be cash.

Ask for 6 time revenue in cash, as your counteroffer.

If you're really doing well and in a growing market, I'll offer you 3x revenue in cash myself, that'd be a steal.
Don't be afraid to counter, make it what YOU want, plus a bit.

You should have some amount of guaranteed cash at closing, plus earn-out, plus stock, plus a clause for at least some kind of acceleration if your employment is terminated for any reason.
If they were caught before they could manually set it off, there is a chance they could be restrained.
For [nstoolbar bottom bar], searched from my logged-in window, a permalink to this comment is the top result.

Um...
I thought arch moved to python 3 for /usr/bin/python so maybe that is causing the issue?
Macs are a small minority of the total computer market. They're a huge percentage of the trailing edge, however--the tech-savvy people who are willing to try a new service like Dropbox or Syncplicity.

I agree with your first paragraph but would note that I think you're shooting for "Leading edge" rather than "trailing edge."
Engineering school makes even the most dedicated student wonder why they're even bothering at times. And now you'll take away commiserating with your friends about how none of you are getting laid because of the school's abysmal male-to-female ratio, fucking off, bitching, and Starcraft. And you'll have them do additional manual labor on top of that.

There. Fixed it for ya.

Sincerely,
The Engineering School Truth In Advertising Committee
Could not figure what this site is about in 30 seconds, lost interest
"Pub/Sub is a unique and useful feature."

Pub/sub exists in a multitude of different pieces of software. ZeroMQ has a pub/sub feature. PostgreSQL has the NOTIFY/LISTEN command which is also a Pub/Sub channel allowing all those listening to be notified of certain events.

This is by no means unique to Redis. It is very useful, so I'll agree with that!
> I've seen docu-drama's where they actually break in when they know the suspect has gotten up to go the the bathroom/kitchen so that he can't reboot the computer.

Any specific examples? I'm interested in watching them.
You need an experienced hand to help you with this. Don't do these negotiations yourself. You aren't objective. Think of it from this perspective, this is probably your biggest asset and if executed on properly an acquisition will provide for you and your family for the rest of your life. So bring in an expert. When selling a house, you use a realtor, when selling a company use a banker. My personal friend on banker is Mike Lyon with Vistapoint Advisors. But find a referral out of your own network so you are comfortable or call Mike.
> 3x multiple of revenues

Yes but what is your growth rate of you / your sector. If revenues are set to double next year, the multiple will be higher.

> the offer is low by about 20%

Don't accept the offer. "We don't go back and forth on it" is equivalent to "We think you are naive and will accept the first offer on the table." Also you are right not to value stock as highly as cash. If the offer is stock, heavily discount it, or refuse the stock and accept cash only.
> strong passwords will still be strong.

I think you meant: strong passwords will be truncated down to 8 chars, making them weak.
Sourceforge Detects Intrusion Attack, Resets Passwords
If you are highly profitable, why sell at all? Use the $ to to allow you to focus on other things you want to do and keep that golden egg laying duck in house.
Beside having very thoughtful founders, I think US revolution succeeded because the power was not concentrated in federal government, states were more or less as powerful. Most other revolutions failed because a dictator was removed to install another dictator without any devolution of power.
My point was not to debate MiniDiscs but that just about everything the OP is using to support their argument is factually inaccurate. It's basically gibberish with a little ZOMG APPLE/IPHONE indignation morsel thrown in at the end.
Social Media Advice from Peter Shankman, HARO founder
A good example is probably progressive enhancement with javascript. You create a page that is just HTML, CSS, and images and send that to the user, at the end you specify the scripts that load and add all the functionality and enhance the page. For most users they won't even notice that the javascript isn't loaded for 0.5 seconds. If they do click in that small window of non-operability, they get a little confused and click again, by which time it works. Most people won't even notice though.

This can be used to add fancy animations, add an actual embedded video over an image of an empty video player, add comments to the end of a blog post via AJAX. Most people won't even realize you're giving them static content initially.
A strong password that gets a lot of its strength from length and mixed case will not still be strong under this error.

For example, the password fOoBaRbAzbArBaZFoO would be a pretty strong password. foobarba is much weaker, and this error would make foobarba (and foobarbaz, etc) work.
I'd say definitely delete this thread. You are showing the other side all of your cards.
John Paulson Makes $5billion in 2010
The OP was correct about saying that you need line-in. That’s what I, too, always perceived as the major downside of MiniDisk. (He said micro-in but already corrected himself on that. An honest mistake, he actually meant line-in. That doesn’t make it gibberish.)
Unless you are truly prepared to walk away from the offer, you won't receive what you are actually worth. It's scary as hell to do it. But if you turn it down, work hard for another year they make come back with a 5x offer.

Are you strategically valuable to them?

Also, if you've worked for 5 years on it and have an actual business, you should receive at least some up front.
In the worst case, they could fire us on day #2 and we'd have only the token money we got up front to show for it.

To me, this would be enough to immediately reject the offer. I don't believe in doing deals which make my worst case worse unless I will be in a position where I can prevent the worst case from happening -- and it doesn't sound like you'd have any way to avoid getting screwed here.

they've expressed to us that involving bankers would 'change the tone' of the discussion, whatever that means

Any time someone tries to convince you to not consult your advisors, run away immediately. If they think they're offering you a good deal, they should be encouraging you to talk to everybody.
It would be great to go into a bit more depth than TechCrunch does with their articles on startups. Problem is though that you are more likely to capturer a wider audience with the shorter articles and they are easier to write. For most people around here though I think it would be great to see more long articles really getting into details about the founders, their stories and exactly what their startup is doing.
> such a contention is intellectually and morally bankrupt.

Could you expand on this a bit? I actually believe that it's very close to the same thing, but I'd like to hear your reasoning.

> Moreover, sit-ins are not legal either.

You are correct. This is why it's called 'civil disobedience.' Sometimes, the best way to change a law is to break it. And break it publicly. It doesn't mean that you'll be spared a sentence, but the idea is that the sentence is worth it.
How can I know which parts in the code are never used?
What about a bargain version of cellular which only handles SMS? Is this possible? This would still be valuable to activists in a situation like this.
Also where I heard about it, and Chen's page is exactly 10 billion times more entertaining than the original link for this thread.
While the headline isn't exactly wrong, it is highly misleading.

"Porembski was alleged to have obtained the login details of at least 116,000 Facebook users, and sent more than 7.2 million spam messages to victims' online friends."

"Some of the spam messages directed users to phishing websites that stole usernames and passwords"

I assumed from the headline that the defendant made his/her own accounts and spammed people. What he did is much worse.
Ask HN: Change company culture or quit my job?
I recently join a startup which claims to be a tech startup. The spirit was high during the first week but when I got exposed to the code base, it almost made me cry. There's just no quality in it. The dev team just doesn't have the proper skills and they don't keep good practices like using a version control system, unit tests, code reviews, documentation, so on and on.
There's so much code duplications and gotchas that every time I submit code, it takes days to figure out why my code isn't working (didn't set a flag in the config file, didn't update this in the database, so and so...). The bug fixes are hard coded as if statements and no formula makes sense in this code base.
Now just after a couple of weeks, my morale has dropped badly.
I have two options - to quit or to challenge the culture (and potentially make enemies).
If I quit, jobs are hard to find in country X where I am.
The other option is to challenge the dev team over the code base but they just doesn't understand anything I say (caching, refactoring, unit tests, etc...) and management is still pushing for new features and asking me why I'm not as productive as the other team members - who spend most of the time fixing and introducing bugs.
What should I do?
Best way to publish an e-mail address without being attacked by spammers?
Good idea, sadly OpenBTS being 1/10 the cost of existing infrastructure, still makes it (ballpark figure) $5k to operate something like the BurningMan 1 BTS network

This is well within the budget for a well publicized Kickstarter campaign. Just a dozen of those in the capital city for 1 week would be extremely valuable.
Highcharts - Interactive JavaScript charts for your webpage
Ask HN: Any hackers in Berkeley?
My partner and I just recently grabbed a place in Berkeley and were wondering if there way a hacker news population around here. Any events we should check out? Any groups?

Any information is appreciated! Thanks!
Your account page doesn't say anything. I assume you work for Google?
I only have limited experience with things like this, but my advice would be to not let them pressure you into anything.

As a rule of thumb though, you probably won't be able negotiate a good deal unless you're willing to walk away from it. They will have way more leverage over you if they know you are desperate to sell.

When negotiating, I find it very helpful to switch positions and think about it from the opposing perspective. What are their motivations for acquiring your company? What is it worth to them? How much do they want your company? Could they easily acquire someone else or duplicate the same functionality. Knowing the answers to these questions and gathering as much relevant information from them can help you gain more bargaining power. Ideally, you want to sell your company at what it is worth to them, and not you, because there could be a gap in your favor.
I think he was thinking of truncation by crypt, so that even passwords that are completely different (bar the first 8 chars, bar collisions) would match.
Step 1: Be sure you and your fellow founders are on the same page. United we stand, divided we... Key areas for agreement are (a) decision to sell, and (b) minimum price you'd accept. Nothing will expose cracks in your team's facade like M&A discussions.
Step 2: Tell the buyer the price they've offered is too low, and offer to explain why. The first offer is just the beginning of the negotiation process. A buyer who is not willing to discuss an offer is not the sort of partner you want to work with. At it's best the negotiation process is a mutual education process, with you explaining your value and them explaining why your value isn't what you thought it was. At the end you'll either agree to disagree or you'll agree. If you agree, you'll do so for the right reasons (i.e., you are both roughly on the same page). While outside advisors can help here, the real work must be done by you, as no one will understand your business and its prospects better than you.
Step 3: Ensure that the deal you've struck is a real deal. If the deal pushes a lot of the pay into the back-end, it is not a real deal. It is an option. Earn-outs and other back-end payment structures can help bridge a disagreement in valuation, so they have their use, but a seller who isn't desperate to sell should ensure that he is happy with the deal even if none of the back-end targets are satisfied. Otherwise he's traded his business for a dodgy option. Rarely a good trade. Here again advisors can be helpful, particularly for tax issues, but usually a good deal is clear enough that you can understand it without the help of advisors.
A good lawyer is essential. A banker less so.
Fred Wilson's blog has had some good posts on M&A recently.
It would take an inordinate amount of KoolAid for one to take that statement over reality.

Going by your own statement, if Israel is declared a Jewish state but a secular democracy in "practice", then all rights granted to others are only nominal and on case by case basis. There is absolutely no separation between Church and state.
searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content

This is great news, but I have to wonder: How do you figure out which site wrote the original content?

I'm wondering based on what happened to Tarsnap last week, where hackzq8search.appspot.com outranked tarsnap.com on a search for "tarsnap".
You should also post this on Quora.com under "Startups" to make sure you get all possible answers.
I am both encouraged and discouraged by this. I am building something sort of like it.

On one hand it validates the idea a bit and on the other someone beat me to the punch.

Good luck guys!
How Egypt Turned Off the Internet
They're trying to take advantage of you.

Always assume the counter party will try to stick you with the worst case scenario and ensure your agreements and contracts guard you against that.

HIRE A LAWYER and incentivize them correctly. If they 'work against' you, they work against themselves, and they will be investigated and disbarred.

It's not about the people you're dealing with - the entire upper management of the acquiring company can change within months, and boot you with 3 years of equity that isn't vested, or dilute you to worthlessness, or any number of things that will short change you.

Cash is king.
MS Office in the App Store: The Business Perspective
Is Internet Access a Human Right?