skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, fair enough. That diminishes your bargaining position.

So the options are:
1. Take the deal as is.
2. Negotiate the deal.
3. Keep working for 3 more years (3x revenue), and make the same money - salaries you would have made at BigCo, but PLUS you still have the company and money coming in for years after.

My calculation would be around 3: how exciting is that. Also, you have plenty to negotiate around. 3x revenue can be upped. Your employment conditions can be negotiated (ie. I get to spend 2 days a week on open source software, paid). Vesting can be negotiated (4 years is a really long time).

Or calculate it like this: current annual revenue = X. If you stay alone, assuming revenue will grow a little, work for 4 years and you get (5X + the total value of the company at that point, which is likely 4X-ish) = 9X. Work for 4 years in BigCo and you get 3X + salaries. (Adjust formula to take into account multiple founders etc). If your combined salaries would be about the same as your net revenue is now, it's a rather equal deal (except for the freedom). So it depends on how your salaries compare with your income now. A lot also depends on how you estimate the longevity and growth potential of your company. If it's gonna grow and keep going for 5 years, they're cutting you a bad deal. Also consider how much you could be making at some other company, in todays job market.

It's weird that you're sure you won't get another offer.

It also kind of sounds like a talent acquisition. Do they want you, or the company? Has that been discussed?
Ask HN: How and why does Twitter trap its users?
As I'm sure many of you have noticed, when you click on a link to Twitter you are unable to navigate back to the page that gave the link. That's because Twitter somehow disallows you from doing so when pressing the back button and instead keeps you on twitter.com.

For example, look at this article: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/twitter-let-the-tweets-flow/

Then click on the link at the top of the 3rd paragraph that says "#jan25 movement". You should not be able to return to the Wired article unless you click the back button a few times repeatedly. Otherwise, you will alternate between the url's https://twitter.com/#, https://twitter.com/search/%2523jan25#, and https://twitter.com/search/%2523jan25#search?q=%2523jan25. This seems to always be the case when an article links to a Twitter page without opening a new window/tab.

As this is obviously quite frustrating, I was wondering why they have chosen to do it. It'd also be great to hear a technical answer on how they do it if it's not too complicated.
Interview with Walter Chen about startups, school, and being a founder.
Thats why taxes like robbery is done by threat of force. Otherwise no one would hand their money over to be wasted.
> Sure. By "reject the offer" I mean to reject that offer, not that the offer couldn't be revised to become acceptable.

Ok, in that case I would word it as 'we're taking it under consideration' to buy some time to regroup. And then respond after thinking things over with a counter-offer, not with a rejection.

> As a general rule I don't think it's good to make deals with people you don't trust.

As a general rule, I'd agree. But M&A is hardball and typically an acquisition of a 'goldfish' is not going to be done by explain patiently how they're actually worth 4 times as much and by educating them. It may come in very handy that they have not managed to attract advisors savvy enough to guide them through this.

I'm actually a bit confused about how a company could get as far as 7 figure turnover and an 8 figure buy-out offer while still being this green business-wise.

Typically by the time you get that far you've got an excellent relationship with your corporate lawyer and a tax advisor.
> The version of the iTunes Music Store where people can put whatever media they want up for sale sounds

The op doesn't mean that iTunes would be used for selling media. Rather it'd be your personal media player for everything like AVI/Mpeg/etc. like VLC is.

I don't know how well iTunes can do this as is, but that's what he's arguing for.
Github now publishes all DMCA takedown notices they receive here.
A lawyer isn't the answer for everything.

Get an investment banker who has M&A experience, or alternately management consultant who can argue with the acquirer about the valuation.
Remember the key to negotiations: what's your best alternative to a negotiated agreement? In this case it sounds like you don't need this deal at all -- you're highly profitable, right? Maybe there's some concern that if you walk away, this company could build their own whatever-it-is and beat you in the market, but it will take them some time and is not a sure thing for them.

The other thing to be aware of is the anchoring principle in psychology. By lowballing you at the outset, they make the range of offers that will seem reasonable to you.

I have not sold a company. But this sounds like a ridiculous deal to me. 3x revenues, in stock with a 4-year vesting schedule? For a profitable business??

There's a key number here you haven't provided: what's your revenue growth rate? If your revenues are growing slowly, then 3x revenues in cash might be a reasonable multiple. But if you've been growing at 40% annually, then 3x is way too low; 6x is more like it, and 8x may not be out of the question, depending on how large the ultimate market appears to be.

The big question for you is how you would feel if the deal fell apart. While you chew on that, you might want to see if you can find any other potential acquirers.

Involving bankers would change the tone of the discussion, eh? To what, I wonder? Really, this makes me angry -- it sounds like they're trying to take advantage of your inexperience.

It's your call, of course. But reading this makes me hope you tell them that their offer isn't even worth discussion, and walk away.
"Our manufacturing technology has to equal or surpass that of Japan."

Good thing China's manufacturing technology is equal to or better than of Japan's!
AT&T-esque companies might own the last-mile phone lines, but I don't think that they are the same as the last mile coax cable connections. Comcast/TimeWarner/etc weren't part of AT&T (or formerly known at AT&T).
yeah a friend told me about it today
I think that of course, a judgement is one thing. Facebook's chances of ever seeing much of that $360,500,000 is another thing entirely.
The laws vary from state to state, but, generally, yes.
Quit. It doesn't sound like you're in a position (new hire, basic programmer) where you have the ability or influence to change the company culture... and with a culture like that, it sounds like the company will be hitting rocky waters at some point -- if you're not happy with their practices now, you certainly don't want to be working your ass off for them when they're in trouble.
In another comment, someone compared the PUB/SUB feature of Redis to ZeroMQ. Can the PUB/SUB feature of Redis function as a queue system for many common uses, or is there another significant difference that sets a full queue implementation apart? I ask because I am not particularly familiar with Redis, my queue usage has been fairly simple so far and I would enjoy simplifying my technology stack by combining the two if it makes sense.
Bathroom humor is a lame way to be outrageous.
Do any other countries automatically grant citizenship to children of non-citizens?

Almost every country in the Americas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#Specific_national_legi...
> Any time someone tries to convince you to not consult your advisors, run away immediately.

In most cases, you're absolutely right. With investment bankers, completely different.

Investment bankers will turn this into a process, try to pick up multiple bidders, and add to the complexity of trying to get the deal done. In general, bankers (not lawyers!) can be harmful to a deal.

They could be telling him that they're in for a simple deal, but if it gets complicated, that's not worth it to them.
FWIW, we were in opposition to Libya and Cuba for how long, and it didn't get us anywhere.

We need a real poli-sci explanation for why certain leaders are sticky, and why certain regions seem to have more than their fair share of despots.
Oooh. This is just begging for a privacy firestorm when someone de-anonymizes the data, which I'm guessing won't be super hard given the kind of medical features they'd need to provide to make this task useful.
A bit like that comic strip "funny today or not" aggregator.

http://www.isitfunnytoday.com/
SourceForge Hacked
A lawyer you can typically hire on an hourly basis, and on reasonably short notice, an investment banker will likely want to become a part of the deal. A (good) lawyer will likely also have a considerable network of contacts one of which might be suitable as a lead negotiator.

> Get an investment banker who has M&A experience

That's a possibility but a far more complicated one and it will take quite a bit of time to find a decent one. But it would be a good choice if they have a good rep and can be easily found, my personal experience with investment bankers is an extremely mixed bag.

> alternately management consultant who can argue with the acquirer about the valuation.

That would be useful anyway, but there will be time enough for that, after all if a deal this size goes through there will be up to a month of hammering out the details of the deal as well as due diligence.

If they're 'in the ballpark' then you could simply respond with a counter off offer a bit higher than what is acceptable to you to build in some room.

Then use your own cut off value to guide a walk-away decision.
I passed this on to a friend who works at Twitter, who e-mailed it up the chain... so hopefully we'll get a response at some point.
The best way to change the laws about distributed denial of service is to participate in DDoS attacks? We're going off the rails here.
"training dataset includes several thousand anonymized patients and will be made available"

That seems like an awfully small dataset. It also doesn't look like it is limited to one disease which would make the search space enormous especially if all the patients didn't have the same labs drawn!

If it was completely standardized data several thousand may be sufficient to train, but I think they are looking for something more 'magic' than that.
The Historical Perspective of Technology Curmudgeonry
Also, delete this thread now. They are probably going to be sent this link by someone in their company.
LinkedIn IPO could open floodgates for tech companies
Sent you an email about neovella. Sounds like this is a great idea, and if you don't do it, I just might!
Congrats guys! The site is gorgeous.
This is absolutely absurd logic. DDoS attacks can and do cause measurable hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. You had to have known that. You just choose to overlook the potential damage here because you support the cause.
So how much is Quora worth?
Personally, I'd leave. I've never been good at trying to introduce those sorts of systemic cultural changes. My own experience is that those have either to come from above, or be endorsed and supported by management. Without that support (or directive) efforts will fail, and you'll possibly upset people along the way (although you may upset them anyway).

As it is, if you choose to stay, you may ask for a definition of 'productive' that they're using against you. Is it lines of code? Time to get 'feature x' 'live'? Something else?

Once you have a definition, quantify the issues you're seeing - the number of bugs that are introduced by 'fast' developers is probably a prime candidate. Ask that bugs be documented - either over a short time period or just outstanding bugs everyone knows of.

Get everyone to understand that speed != quality, and that getting stuff done 'fast' is most likely a false economy. If you can get everyone or almost everyone to agree on some of those basics, you can then propose some new processes and measure the effect.

None of this will be quick, and it might not be adopted at all. But... I'd suggest documenting this dispassionately, no naming of names or pointing of fingers to specific people.

If you are having problems getting up to speed, anyone else probably would as well, so even if they decide to fire you, they won't get anyone else to be as productive. That's probably not actually true - it would depend on how they measure productivity. If it's just a matter of people throwing code out in to production without worrying whether it works or not, then yeah, someone else might be more productive than you. But it is a false economy over the long haul. Also, any new person coming in has a huge learning curve, because there's institutional knowledge gone by not having documentation, unit tests, etc.

If they really truly do not see that, it's probably better for your own sanity to find something else. But given the job situation, do what you can to make your case without stepping on anyone's toes.
Sometimes, the best way to change a law is to break it.

Very few sit-ins are protesting the same law (trespass) they're breaking.

Protesting censorship-via-government-pressure with censorship-via-DDoS is similarly nonsensical, a tantrum more than a statement.

Build censorship-resistant systems instead of more censoring weapons.
That's pretty good.

Instead of "a little low", say "low". Instead of "a little long", say "long". Don't qualify. That way it's even stronger.

"We feel the offer is too low and that the vesting schedule is too long."
How the hell do you have a 5-year-old, highly profitable company with multiple founders and $3MM - $10MM in annual revenues, and think that HN is a better place to ask this than to your attorneys and bankers?
Direct link to AnyLeaf: http://www.anyleaf.com/

Doesn't reveal much for those who are not members. Might benefit from some "here's what it looks like" screenshots or did that test poorly?

Where does the data come from? Scraped from websites, provided by the stores, or scanned from physical catalogues?
Try IPv6 on Amazon EC2 using 6to4
It's 3am and you're sleeping. I don't know about you, but I certainly wouldn't notice first what they were yelling, but rather that there are a lot of flash-lights and load yelling where my locked front door used to be. You could also argue that you're supposed to trust them because they have badges, but the fact of the matter is that expecting you to be reasonably aware of that is, well, unreasonable.

Go read the accounts of people who encountered this sort of situation and were lucky enough to not get killed in the process, whether they fought back or not (just jumping out of bed or daring to act surprised can get you shot here).
Double of what you want isn't outrageous :) 10x would be. Double let's them make a lower counteroffer that you're both happy with.
http://www.homebasedesign.com/unusual-pergola-designs-deck-a...

this site has copied numerous sites on the net and though Google adsense was taken away, it still ranks well. No page is their own. All are copies. The link above is referencing a search for unusual pergola designs, of which my lens is first in search. It has copied my whimsical garden art, etc. These are mine and the rest are copies of other people's sites. Though they never seem to update their garbled text and offend with blown up pictures, they still continue to rank well in searches.... Simply Amazing and this situation has been ongoing for a year. Yes I asked them several times to take out the pages to no avail.

The whole site should be taken down. It's a joke.

here is their copy of my Whimsical Garden Art:

http://www.homebasedesign.com/whimsical-garden-art-ideas-for...

my lens that they copied: http://www.squidoo.com/whimsical-gardens-art

There are other sites they created and did the very same thing:
homedesigndecorating.com
hometrendesign.com
onhomedesign.com
hahoy.com

no original content, all copied.

MiaBellezza
One of my clients has so many web-based requests that he asked me to build a better system, and this system is basically what I came up with.

A visitor wants to use one of our request forms so he enters his email address and clicks Submit. The next page says "Check your inbox, spam and junk mail boxes for the email we just sent you, then click the link to complete our request form."

Nearly all of them click the link. SPAM and bogus requests have dropped to zero.

Once in a while we get a complaint stating that they never received the confirmation email, but we know they were all sent because we BCC copies to a special gmail account for archival purposes.

The client is happy.

No, this is not a login system but I'm going to implement it on my new website as a login system because it is MUCH simpler than dealing with passwords ... and there is far less resistance to this system than some of you seem to be complaining about.

The fact is, people really dislike dealing with passwords and this system gets rid of them.
Are you being deliberately disingenuous? It's a distributed Denial of Service which by definition means someone who wants that service can't have it and by extension means that the merchant performing that service expecting revenue from it is denied that revenue.

A single denied credit card transaction can easily exceed the $500 misdemeanor limit. And try telling a business that's operating on razor-thin margins that not being able to process credit cards for a day will "only make some sysadmins lose some sleep."
It's very hard to get rich by scamming other people.
You can make some quick money that way, but long term end result is usually pathetic.
> 3. Keep working for 3 more years (3x revenue), and make the same money -

That's three times revenue in three years, but not the same as a stock deal which vests in four years in stock that may be worth 0, also, revenues are not profits.

It would require far more insight in to the actual figures involved to say whether this is a good deal at all (or a bad one).
Serious stack overload. Why so many sites to get answers? We need a "which site stack" to ask which stack site to go to. Isn't that what tags are for?
If done deliberately, could this be a useful feature so that users can typo a password (say levenshtein distance <= 1 or 2) and still login? Obviously the major downside is that you would need a longer password to get the same level of security and it could be difficult to implement especially since the password should be hashed. Is this feasible? I'm guessing the answer is no, but was wondering what other people thought.
The idea of vesting is to prove that founders can build value before getting rewarded with their stock. When founders start, they usually need to build in some form of vesting to prevent one of them from just walking away with a windfall while the others continue to work hard to build value in the venture. Even then, however, if founders have already build some value before the formal structure is put in place, they will take their restricted stock grants with some portions immediately vested (usually 20% or so, maybe up to 33%). At Series A, the investors might insist that founders restructure their stock positions so that they have to vest at least a significant part over some period. This can vary but usually means that the founders get cut back so that only, say, one-third of their stock is vested, with the balance subject to vesting over a few years. This ensures that the investors will not get screwed and that the founders will earn out their positions as they use the investors' money to continue to build value. Finally, at the M&A stage, the purchase price is sometimes divided between a cash/stock portion that is given outright to the stockholders and another portion (usually an option grant) that needs to be earned out. The basic idea behind such a division is that x amount rewards them for the value they have built and the balance will reward them for continuing to add value in the future. Usually, the x part is by far the largest part of the consideration, with the balance (the part that needs to be earned going forward) amounting to, say, 10 or 20% of the total purchase price.

The consistent theme in all such cases is to make sure that those who have built value get non-forfeitable equity as a reward while those who need to prove themselves going forward get equity that can be forfeited.

If you have built true value, then, of $10M and you take your payment in stock that is 100% forfeitable, you set it up where you can be cheated out of all the value you have built with little or no legal recourse.

This is a HUGE red flag. I have seen founders do such deals and have begged and implored them, at the very least, to insist on 100% acceleration clauses in their employment arrangements should they be terminated without good cause. In the one case where the founders went through anyway without such protection, the company (a prominent public company) wound up terminating one of the main founders within months and all he got was a few crumbs for years worth of effort.

Check with a good M&A lawyer on this and then use your best judgment. It is ultimately your call, whatever the legal risks. But do it with open eyes and that means getting good help in assessing what those risks are.
They'll need a lawyer backing them up just to make sure they don't sign something really stupid. No way should they proceed without legal backup.

Agreed on the bankers, they can and do kill deals, I've seen that happen up close. Oh, and they did get paid.
The benefits of finding these folks are many:

http://kottke.org/11/01/controlling-healthcare-costs-by-focu...
The point I was making was more about the prospect of adding condition handling as a language user to an existing language. Basically that most language implementations make it impossible to add something like this using the tools provided by the language. I suppose at points go it was a bit of a silly one.

The difficulty in adding it to the language when modifying the language implementation is an open option is much lower.
For a while there was a Google feature that let you do that, along with up/downvoting results. It got removed though, and I've never read why :/
I guess what you're saying is that keeping this as a lifestyle business is not attractive to you. I'm not sure why not, but let's go with that. How about selling it to someone who does want a lifestyle business? They can probably get a bank loan to buy you out, or they can pay you an annuity, or some combination of those. There are people who would be thrilled to do that (someone here has already expressed interest).
I think this is a great approach. The way to execute is to write several short articles on the startup, then stagger the publish dates
Is pivoting the new synergy?
Welding fit-up
Saw Jason live at DLD talking about "the pivot" it seemed like a genuine change backed up by some very quality video snippets from the new site... much different than his internet persona I had read about in the past. He even apologized to the crowd for "talking too much" when he was younger. A new leaf for sure.
Absolutely get a lawyer and/or banker involved on your side, just be there to control all their interactions with the other side.
The business he actually runs turns off many people more than his personal style.
This is what I see in Chrome 8 on a Mac:

http://cl.ly/0U3d2B0E3y431s1C270X
I also like Children of the Secret State. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1875007335054132657#

Most of the footage was shot with a pin hole camera in regions no press is allowed to go.
Wild guessing here, but it is also possible that they are just trying to take your product off the market. Have you considered this?
You're obviously right. Sorry for misreading.
Wait a second... a spammer company even HAS $360M ???