skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not about PR. It's about a halo effect. DST needs a pipeline of new startups to continue the web x.0 hype-cycle, so he can offload his Groupon, Facebook & Zynga. positions.

He can afford to gamble $6M on YC startups, if they will create demand in the market for his hundreds of millions dollars worth Groupon, Facebook, Zynga shares.

It's a good assymetry position to have.

If one of the 40 becomes the next google, he wins. If he can exit his DST positions, he wins.

However if the web bubble burst, he is sh*t out of luck. And DST will be a huge bagholder.
It's a fucking disgusting world we live in.
Great for entrepreneurs, but eventually it will be the relatively unsophisticated angels who will get burned by these valuations.

I have no problem with that, really. In 2001 it was different - everyone was playing with public money through IPOs. Now only a few quite established companies can afford to go public.

Don't be mistaken, though - this will turn into a bubble, whether you wax romantic about "entrepreneurs just do it!" or not. It always happens - it will happen again, life will go on, but it will happen.
I recommend that any decision you make should be within a regret minimization framework. For each decision you could take think of the worst case scenario and go in with the full acceptance that this scenario can really happen. The things you might regret are.

* Not taking the deal when it was presented
* Taking a deal where the valuation was low
* Not being able to work on your ideas
* Being cheated
* Regrets that go with being employed(there are limitations)
* Being stuck in a bad situation for 4 years

As far as the specific circumstances you mention, the deal somehow sounds dodgy, what with them controlling the vesting period and having the ability to terminate your employment as well.

One real possibility is not selling, because you already have a pretty good idea of how the future is going to be down this path and from your post, you seem to be happy where you are. Another factor you might consider here is, How long would it take, for you to accumulate personal wealth at a similar level to what you get from being acquired and what is the level of independence you'll have to work on your ideas.
" But such blanket offers will mean lesser money available to non-YC companies"

I actually think precisely the opposite will happen.
So, according to you which one of these color schemes is best for a personal site for which the target audience are other entrepreneurs, hackers and investors?

If none of these are good enough, can you suggest some other color scheme or links of similar sites that you like?
I think that depends on how the note is written. I've never seen a note without a cap but usually it converts at the cap on acceleration. No idea how a conversion at acceleration would work if there is no pre determined valuation but it could be possible.
May not be well known for startups but be thankful it's a big city and there's still some activity. (DFW is 75x as big as Iowa City, my home).
There's a shipped project that ties this in to OpenID. http://emailtoid.net

Some of the OpenID crowd were aware of it at the time, but it hasn't really caught on. It's kinda fun to use it as an OpenID provider to log in to itself. Very meta and clean.
Default/Dark: Makes me think of a "hacker" blog; a lot of the ones I've been to have that kind of theme, perhaps because it reminds them of terminal windows?

Light: The blue background is a bit wishy-washy -- it's not pale enough to be unintrusive, but it's not dark enough to seem professional/formal.

White: Facebook. This is completely facebook.
The fact that this story generates so much excitement at 10 PM on Friday night says something about the community. Good things.
Fair enough. I was just wondering whether there were any legal barriers built in to stop people doing these sorts of dodgy deals.
DST needs a pipeline of new startups to continue the web x.0 hype-cycle, so he can offload his Groupon, Facebook & Zynga. positions.

I don't get it, how does this help with that?
"And as an entrepreneur, do you really want to take money from some one who might not have enough knowledge about you and your business?"

Um, yes. Taking money with these terms is a no-brainer. It doesn't preclude you from taking on more active money or taking on advisors. Anyone who puts together an angel syndicate almost always has investors who say, "I'm really busy, so I can't help out much, but here's my money". Most angels think about your business for a few hours a month, at best.
I think you're right. It's like the concept of "anchoring", setting a new normal.
Patiala House Hindi Movie Review, Patiala House Wallpapers, Photos
It sucks to be a graduate from Summer 2010. Missed it by 1 term.
There are two key technical challenges in making moving holograms:

1. Amount of computations and bandwidth required -- simply because of the amount of information involved, which is much more than stereoscopic 3D.

2. A moving display technology that can display these computed holograms. My understanding is that the display needs of the order of one to ten giga-pixels or more to be useful to a non-technical end customer. A common approach then is to tile a large number of displays in cost-no-bar systems.

In this work, they seem to be using an ordinary display to render the holograms, which is why the rendered image is nowhere close to the source content.

Achieving 15 frames per second using a GPU for hologram computation is an advance but does not seem to be extra-ordinary to me, and nor a significant breakthrough. This is because the amount of computations done I guess would be no more than what the display can render, so significantly short of what a good holographic display would need.

Here are some links worth checking out:
http://www.digitalholography.eu/varasto/05473052.pdf
http://www.zebraimaging.com/products/motion-displays
When News results show up on the search result page, they link directly to the story, they don't link to the Google News landing page or category where you'd then have to click on a link.

Google News itself falls into the second category - an aggregator that stands on its own, as a destination. Much like Hacker News. I personally don't use it, but the people that do go because they find it lets them discover a bunch of content that they otherwise wouldn't know about.
That might be true, but I don't think this particular news provides much evidence either way. The total amount being invested across all 40 companies is less than many companies' A rounds.
Fat Cells for Broken Hearts
⁵
Really awesome to hear that! Please do keep us posted on progress :)
I think you got downvotted my MS-DOS fans. You turned a shell variable into your own regex glob :-/
Probably black since entrepreneurs/hackers tend to be non-conformist. But tweak it some. Here is a black/dark gray Wordpress theme I picked for one of my sites (site is under construction, please ignore that as it is not the point of your question): http://www.solanorail.com/
I love the first quote: I'm not retarded ... Yes, I'm fking dumb.
And it helps when your investment company now owns 10% of Facebook. Smart guy who takes bold risks.
Will an assured $150k investment hurt the spirit of Y Combinator?
Too young not to work, too old to get a job
The FBI, by raiding everyone involved in this, is taking the risk of setting a precedent whereby protest-DDoS is proved legal

How is that a "risk" for the FBI? On the offchance it is proved legal then that's no skin off the FBI's nose -- they have plenty of other crimes to be investigating.
Remember that life is not a race, neither is investing.
For those advanced programmers in the audience, Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford is more appropriate.

Or just read through his site:
http://javascript.crockford.com/
I wish you the best. I"m 35 and have just started my 3rd. The first two failed. But man did I learn a lot. I have a good feeling about #3. And I hope you're successful as well. Don't look back.
Most things I learnt about my own business had been through quality meetings with quality investors who can ask really good questions. At least from first set of investors, thats what I look for the most rather than money.

Having said so I do see your point as well and we can just agree to disagree.
Much like I look at "200,000 visitors! Whoa!" and think it is a big number, and you guys might think "Hmm, perhaps there was something interesting going on that second.", I think we collectively share a borked perception of what constitutes a big amount of capital.

$150k is a meaningful amount for an early-stage startup. Multiplied by 40, that is $6 million. $6 million is, seat of the pants calculation, two orders of magnitude lower than 2% of United States VC funding in a typical year. VC funding is three orders of magnitude lower than the amount of outstanding bonds in the US. That is one asset class: there are others.

Or, for another visualization: if this investment is one pixel, then the US bond market is a grizzled old neckbeard sporting six monitors at 1024x768. The remainder from that calculation might fit an iPhone, but I don't know the resolution on those off the top of my head.

Long story short: there is always a ridiculous amount of money in the capital markets.
I think the rules against sabotaging others' commerce are good rules; a moral person would follow them even if they weren't written down.

Also, even if you get the desired headlines and attention, I don't think you score points against bad rules by violating good rules. I believe more people concluded Anonymous/Wikileaks are vandals and bullies from hearing about (or being affected by) the DDoS attacks, than came around to sympathy for Wikileaks.

So orthogonal from any 'letter of the law' analysis, it was an immoral and counterproductive thing to do.

If the 'sit-in' directly blocked the objectionable activity, a different analysis might apply. (And, more bystanders might be sympathetic.) But this, and most other 'sit-ins' I've seen, are just rudeness for attention. Moral and effective activists will choose other tactics.

And regarding: "its important enough that the consequences are irrelevant"

That way lies zealotry, madness, impotence, chaos. The real consequences always matter. The advocate who forgets, in their passion, that consequences matter becomes others' tool, often against their own interests.
This turn YC into a market index.

The payment pg and company receive for this service is the increased negotiation power in the deals they fund.

Theoretically this makes entire YC batches without a single dollar invested by YC itself possible.
That's $6M every batch, at least $12M a year. Assuming YC classes does not expand. I think PG mentioned about 1/3 of the YC companies fail. So that's $4M in the water every year. Out of the rest 2/3s chances of being a Heroku are... actually I'm going stop here because I'm sure they've worked out all the math already.
I, too, would be interested in knowing this. I live near FW, but work near D, so it would be great to make other technology contacts in the area. It's interesting to hear that DFW is one of the worst areas for startups. Perhaps our notoriety for incubating restaurants is more attractive?
From the article: "Now he’s partnering (as an individual, not as part of DST)"
Don't keep us in suspense, what are you storing?
I dont have first hand experience of US placements. But this is what happened in India when IT services started booming.

If you go to a top college, they dont interview much. You get a very fat paycheck. If you go to tier II college you are interviewed a bit more and given a bit thinner paycheck.

Over a period of time this became a positive feedback cycle and is the core reason for very low quality yet expensive workforce.

What I feel in my gut is - such blanket investments normally take up valuations to such levels over a period of time that it becomes unsustainable. Whether it is with job markets or investments or real estate.
When you guys started the company, was the plan to sell out? If not, and you guys are making good money, then why sell? If you guys would like to try something new, that is a different story. But given you are happy where you are and you received a low-ball offer, I'd wait it out.
A wide ebook formats will be available from http://nostarch.com/ejs.htm in a week or so. (They have an external party doing the conversions, which is apparently taking his time.)
The name "Syncplicity" is also ironic because the co-founder said part of their failure was making their product too complicated.
1. It makes more sense to value your company on the profit as opposed to revenue, and throw in some expected growth for good measure. For example, would you rather buy Ford with $132B in revenue, or the Google with $28B in revenue? The market cap of Google is 3 times that of Ford $197B vs $65B. Or Yahoo (revenue $6.5B, market cap $20B) vs Google ($28B, $197B). Google's revenue is <5 times that of Yahoo, but it's market cap is 10x.
2. Why do you judge the offer to be low by 20%. Is it 20% lower than what someone else would likely pay, 20% too low based on your expectations. If you can get a better deal somewhere else, why would you accept this one?
3. They know you are young and are likely leveraging this to their benefit.
4. IANAL show maybe you should choose to disregard all of the above and find one to help you.
Do we get the names and addresses of the people who did not contest they were copyright infringers? Fair is fair.

An increase in transparency would allow members of the public, such as employers, to make better decisions on whom to trust with their intellectual property. Enterprising hackers could facilitate this exchange of valuable information by doing a mashup between this data source and LinkedIn.

Oh, sounds less fun now.
Congratulations and happy trails!

I do have some cautionary advice, though... I say everything here without knowing you, your wife or your idea.

First off, make sure that you read this article and follow it unless you have a good reason not to:

http://startuplawyer.com/startup-issues/if-i-launched-a-star...

Specifically, both you and your wife should have vesting shares. After all, there's a reason that most people do not start up with their loved ones - they say that the best family business is a sole proprietorship. This isn't a corner store and you and your wife might find your marriage taxed by this radical twist on your relationship.

Would you start up with your wife if you weren't married? If not, then my polite suggestion is that you hire your wife and give her lots of equity for her contributions. Taking on a business partner is an incredibly important decision, and if you wouldn't hire her otherwise then it's a potentially questionable decision now. I wouldn't belabour this point but you didn't explain her background.

The other thing is that it pays to startup with a good idea. I'm a big believer in MVPs and pivoting and trying things until it works... but the fact remains that most ideas are terrible and it's hard to tell when one of your ideas is terrible. Most people around you are inclined to tell you how great an idea it is, because they can see in your eyes that you want them to love it. This is an extremely dangerous confirmation bias because you can and will waste your valuable energy and enthusiasm.

In short: seek people that you can trust to give you honest feedback on your ideas. Steve Blank's 4 Steps to the Epiphany is worth the kudos it receives. And most important of all: make sure all founders have vesting shares.
That may be the case sometimes, but as far as I'm concerned they are spam. I would like the option to blacklist sites from my results. Wouldn't it be great if we had choice.
We need a real poli-sci explanation for why certain leaders are sticky

Some people are just better at being despots than others, just as some people are better at being actors, CEOs, basketball players or programmers.

Give me unquestioned power over some tin-pot little country and I'd probably be chased out of my palace within two weeks. But a really good (in the sense of efficacy, not morality) despot knows just how to crush dissent among the masses using just the right amount of force while keeping all his generals (and anyone else with the power to depose him directly) dependent on a drip-feed of favours and constantly afraid of a knife in the back. It's a delicate balancing act, I'm sure, and some folks are just really good at it.
ok I will try that.
Well, HN can be hard to predict. My coupon-code-including submission two weeks ago [1] hardly got to the front page at all, yet this one does great. Oh, well, I'm not complaining! Thanks for submitting. (The coupon code is no longer valid, though.)

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2117600
But at least if he ends up in bed with his cofounder, it won't destroy his marriage.

Edit: I'm actually not kidding, though the downvote doesn't surprise me. There was a post here (that got killed) about that exact situation occurring.
I think the more controversial part of his statement was the claim that every class has had 1-2 big wins.

I don't believe that's been borne out yet.
It was always possible - the value proposition for YC has always been the advice, connections, and reputation from being associated with them. The monetary investment is just so that founders who wouldn't otherwise be able to do it (eg. those newly out of college) can take part.
Actually, if we assume that Heroku's post-money valuation in their first round of financing was $10m (reasonable since they raised $3m) and that they took a 30% dillution hit each time, this would have returned $2.88m to someone that got in on these terms, or not even enough to cover the investments for that batch.

So either the homeruns have to be further out of the park than Heroku or (as is likely) the median return needs to keep things in balance a bit more.
Precisely. Nonviolence as a strategy only works when you're dealing with someone who has ethical qualms about, y'know, just killing you.

It has worked maybe two or three times in history.
The only redacted part is the name/email/phone number of the lawyer sending the notice, which is totally reasonable given penchant for on-line lynching.

There is enough there to satisfy your transparency requirement i.e. the name of company owning the copyright in question, the name of the law firm representing them and enough details for you to contact them if you so desire.
I thought it was funny that he needed to emphasize or even say "real." You either have a gun pointed at you or you don't. Does the FBI sometimes burst in with water pistols?
WordPress add ID column for category listing
Yeah. Inspired by facebook. Is it something bad to do?
All of the tier one carrier hotels have battery backups, diesel back ups, and contracts for thousands of gallons of fuel. Some are even looking at more interesting solutions to that.

However if you really wanted to just cause some mayhem. With a good map and a chainsaw lots is possible.

http://signalfire.org/?p=2039
But it's "WITH HD videos"... Sigh.
I wish the blog post went into more details about which Netflix services are implemented with SimpleDB, HBase, and Cassandra. He stresses that these (seemingly very similar) systems have unique capabilities, but he doesn't explain why they need all of them.
This really is crazy. I'm sure this will only lead to i liar deals for TechStars and others. Angel Investing needs to evolve.
I'm not a fan. These are guns we are talking about, not paperwork. Paperwork is the shit that's real, guns are just there to make you feel helpless. And also to kill you.
You're talking about defending against the hypothetical and implausible situation where for some reason the US Government decides to turn off the internet.

I don't have any good ideas about what could possibly cause that to happen, but I'm pretty sure that if it does happen then things are sufficiently screwed up that a lack of internet access will be the least of your problems.
> When I can't get something right, I keep on trying. Maybe not always a good idea.

I'd say it's a good idea, as long as it's core to what you're doing... if in the case of Dropbox, it was an ancillary feature, it's good to cut your losses.

If it's part of your core business model - get it right.
So does this mean that Stack Overflow could remove the first tag from the start of the title and they would still rank above the scrapers? I found it really distracting and often double take on a SO result in google because I've scanned the first word and saw a spammy looking tag first.
Sit-ins are inherently sacrificial acts.

The purpose of a sit-in is to stage a non-violent, disruptive protest which forces a response, typically being arrested, from a business owner or government. If there is no response because, for example, the business owner is too shamed to respond then either the disruption continues until the protesters demands are met or the protesters eventually give up. If there is a response, such as use of law enforcement, then there is the opportunity for the protesters and their cohorts to get the message out, raise awareness, and gain sympathy and support from the public at large.

Anonymity changes the equation entirely. Sit-in protesters blatantly flout the law and beg to get arrested, so as to demonstrate their conviction for the rightness of their cause and to gain publicity. Anonymous DDoSers aim only to disrupt, whatever message they have is lost to the public because nobody can know for sure who the people responsible (4chan also apparently DDoS'd minecraft.net for a while, what was the purpose of that? wikileaks itself was DDoS'd for sometime, what was the purpose of that? it's hard to say because these are just anonymous attacks rather than actual, disciplined protests). DDoS participants don't expect to get caught, let alone to be arrested, as witness the reactions of the folks in the main article.

An anonymous, or attempted anonymous, denial of service attack is more akin to throwing bricks through a storefront window or arson. It is disruption completely unmoored from personal sacrifice, civil disobedience, or the context of a cause.

It is thus properly a more violent form of protest than a sit-in and we have all the more reason to despise such things because of it.
It seems like it was less inspired and more directly copied. That color scheme is 100% synonymous with Facebook for me right now, and it looks like you're using the exact same colors, too.
For highly technical analysis of the ECMA Script (JavaScript) language I highly recommend the series of articles of Dimitry Soshnikov.

http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/ecmascript/javascript-the-core/

These series of articles are probably the deepest series into the language on the Internet (surpassing even Crocford's articles as far as depth goes).
They are still localized - no one has beat you to the punch - yet. Make it and make it better if you can.

On the other hand, I am actually working on something similar as well, however I have already been aggregating nationwide data for far too many stores. It's time for me to remember the MVP mantra and get it done.
I wish it was interesting, or even sane... one day my website got like a million more users /that day/ and every database mechanism I had to do some of the user statistics I was keeping totally failed: the website ground to a halt. So, rather than decide what I really wanted to keep, I frantically developed a little library that stored all of that data into S3 as a giant key/value store, with my own little makeshift inverted indexes. Needless to say, this was stupid, and when I next checked my S3 bills I noticed I was doing a billion puts per month (which costs like $10,000). Lukily, this has only been a few months, and I'm now fixing the situation during a giant cost-cotti g endeavor... but yeah: omg that was stupid.

(typed on my iPhone and therefore a little shortened: hacker news comments suck on the iPhone)
The recession is over.