skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you go about getting your startup acquired
I run a small consulting shop focussed on building mobile apps (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry). Luckily I have been able to work with some of the best startups in the Bay Area. My team is less than 5 and geographically spread out, while I live in Bay Area.

Unfortunately, we are not making a lot of money, but are able to work with well known up and coming startups. We will be a good acquisition candidate for any company looking to augment their mobile capabilities.

Having never done any business before, I am wondering how we navigate the waters and send feelers about our intent to be acquired. I also have questions on how you put a value on the team and how to go about the process. Also, issues I should be paying attention to, in order to make my company more attractive to potential buyers.
It's one thing to work long hours during crunch time, another to work long hours week in and week out.

The situation isn't being driven by the project demands, it is being created by the company culture.

Time to move on.
The Perfect Email Storm
What ~2011 business practice did Apple adopt from the adult industry?
A better question..."do you and all your friends get together and take photos together in one place? or does one person usually take the photos for the group and just send them out?"

The implicit social network concept of Color fails even the simplest of tests. I can say that I've never been in a situation, out with my friends, where we were all snapping away at our environment. At worst 2 or 3 people out of a dozen took a couple pictures of the group, then just emailed them out from their phones in 3 or 4 more steps.
I wish they'd put up some honest info about their workstation vs. gamer cards as well. We all know it's mostly the same hardware under the hood in many cases, and that the software and/or support aspects are where they try to justify the cost. Still, if you need to put together a new multi-purpose machine for any sort of serious graphics/video/multimedia work, it's next to impossible to find any meaningful guidance on what sort of spec is best. I'd have a lot more respect for an argument about nVidia not quoting benchmarks if AMD themselves didn't just assume that if you're running software made by say Adobe or Autodesk you should probably buy a workstation card, because.
San Francisco Jobs Approach Dot Com Peak -- in Less Space
You've written a very civil and calm version of the comment I was going to write. I don't get all the hate for Color from clueless strangers.

This poll reeks of hate and jealousy. Please stop it.
Skype latest version 5.1 has XSS as JS bug 
we knew xss as cross site scripting
but here is a different case it called(cross skype scripting) LOL
When i share url between me and my friend on skype for an example about XSS i got alert message fired from skype and my friend has the same message appear on his screen.
here is the way to reproduce it . copy and paste the below url and send it for one of ur friend on skype .

http://example.com/?startDate=2011-03-01&sectionId=1"><script>alert(document.body.innerHTML);</script>
What's wrong with knee-jerk uninformed speculation?
Blogging is the git repos of your business. If you don't track it, you didn't do it.
Not quite, and there has been some interesting experimental work lately... but no, not really. Here is a relevant link from Language Log, and there are many more where this comes from: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592

(edit for typo)
Essentials of Creating a Thesis
There are many elements to be considered when creating a thesis. Apart from this creation process students will have to present the thesis before a panel of judges and defend it. Understanding the basic requirements of creating a thesis will be beneficial.
"I think it will change because we still have a democracy. Eventually the power of a correct idea is felt, but sometimes it is long and delayed."

But what is the affect of the would-be plutocracy on the current democracy's timeline to self-correct?

Compare the policy influence of a grassroots lobbyist against the influence of a professional lobbyist paid by the highest bidder. This is democracy's ability to 'correct' policy with the existing officials of the democracy.

Compare the voting influence of campaign financing from wealthy individuals and corporations against the influence of campaign financing from the masses. This is democracy's ability to 'correct' officials within the democracy.

Democracy is a system full of security holes - its being hacked so it self-corrects at a slower and slower frequency (at least as it concerns the wishes of the masses). It seems to be a characteristic of a mature capitalistic democracy that the wealthy can slow self-correction driven by the masses, and expedite self-correction driven by wealth.

At some point, the time it takes for 'the power of a correct idea' to be felt exceeds the relevance of that idea. Thats the meaningful metric for when a capitalistic democracy morphs into a plutocracy.
When trying to sell some "Collectibles" on eBay, you can gain a lot by carefully crafting a detailed item description, with more than one photo of superb quality. Also emphasize what makes this item collectible or rare, and sprinkle in some sentences saying how desireable the item is.
Finally, wait until autumn or winter, because most "Collectors" don't buy very much during the summer.
That way, you may get a lot higher bids for your collectible than some other random seller who sells his items with bad or stock photos and descriptions with virtually no details.

Some time ago, I sold some old, rare computer games on eBay this way. There are several boxes of games in my attic at this time that I "collected" some years ago, and I hope to sell them for a descent price some time in the future (when I find the time to take photos and craft good item descriptions).
Most of the time in GAE is lost to latencies between the various subsystems (much like most web frameworks). Unless you are doing something processor-heavy (and you probably shouldn't do that on GAE), chances are you are waiting more for the network (or the datastore) than anything else.
If it wasn't for that about.html, I would've thought it was named after a Baldur's Gate II character, and was prepared to make a joke about sucking blood..
It's somewhat premature and reactionary to be a doomsayer with regards to Color.

Fact is, Sequoia isn't a fly-by-night operation. No doubt they're investing in the idea, the team and the (non-public) direction it's going. I wouldn't be so quick to declare failure.

Spontaneous geo connections, which seems to be the idea (like most other people, I don't quite "get it" yet), is an interesting idea. It reminds me a little of Twitter, actually.

Still, it does make me worry when a company makes a big splash with what seems to be poor execution (the app). Time will tell.

In the current environment I hesitate to predict failure of any kind, particularly with that much runway. Chances are that the worst outcome is going to be a breakeven to moderate exit due to a Facebook or Google talent acquisition. After all, it's social, it's mobile, it's local... pack in those buzzwords!

For people who don't "get it" (like me), ask yourself this: did you "get" Twitter when it first started? I know I didn't. If you're honest enough to say you didn't (because I bet virtually everyone didn't) then take pause before declaring failure.
The "no publicity is bad publicity" marketing strategy doesn't actually work if your product is crap. Take Cuil for example: they launched with a disastrous product with massive hype, and became the target of endless jokes. Regaining credibility after that must have been impossible, even if they'd managed to fix their search engine.

It's even worse if your product depends on network effects; poison the well early on, and you reduce the chances of going viral later even if the issues are fixed. It seems a safe bet that whatever chance Google Buzz had died with the initial privacy controversies.
Do Electronic Gadgets Really Affect an Airplanes Instruments?
Yelp wins first round in "implied extortion" suit (technical legal)
"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."

-Mahatma Gandhi
There's no constructive discussion about the merits of Color going on this thread. It's just pointing and laughing (like what you mentioned upthread).

I like funny threads too. I use http://reddit.com for that.
That's a better place for this post and I would probably enjoy reading it here.
Let's speculate a bit more. There are two possible outcomes to letting a large bank/financial institution fail:

1. Financial institutions cannot transfer funds between each other as usual and they cannot accurately predict who might fail next, so they pull back credit access. Spreads blow up as money supply decreases, causing a sharp decline in equipment investment and a big rise in consumer interest rates. Shit gets worse from there.

2. Banks die and, in conflict with everything we know about liquidity, money continues to flow perfectly. Banks are not afraid of failure so credit flows freely.

What do you see as more likely? Can you sum it up in a one-word answer?
There seems to be an abundance of naught-era news here. On the other hand I get to keep making "200X called" jokes about Hacker News. I win either way, so I'm not complaining.
user:	Jarred
created: 51 days ago
Creating another startup to reduce the number of pointless startups is obviously the correct solution to everything!

The review may or may not be worth 100+ points on HN, but who am I to judge that. Better I start my own HN, so I can decide ... hey, that would actually work! Sort of.
There are faster ways to provide data for /dev/random...
Digression:

I remember a time when being a nerd was really unfashionable. People would laugh at us. The word "geek" actually comes from circus parlance, it means someone who does disgusting things like bite the heads off of chickens for the entertainment of the crowd. Being called a "geek" meant being socially repulsive.

The usual dynamic was that somebody who wanted to establish themselves as an alpha would pick on a defenseless target--like a nerd--and engage in some old-fashioned shaming, sometimes with physical bullying thrown in for good measure.

Then the rest of the group would join in like the good little toadies that they were, each eager to prove that they're "in" to ensure that they aren't chosen as the next target.

Our luck changed when the Information Age accelerated. Our skills were in demand and we were able to build things that changed people's lives for the better. Some of us got stinking rich and helped others get filthy stinking rich. Being a nerd no longer meant being socially ostracized. Other people didn't point at us and laugh.

So what do we do with our new-found freedom from being the butt of everybody's jokes?

Well, it seems that sometimes we look within our own circle and point fingers at someone and laugh at them, joining in together in the fun of picking a victim and socially ostracizing them.

At times like this I feel that we haven't really changed the game, we've just moved the lines around a little and shuffled the jerseys.
Actually, I've heard a lot of people pick 2 or 7. Can you confirm if this is true?
I used to work at Cisco where every meeting was delayed as every participant would set up their laptop and then proceed to type, surf, "do email" etc. during the meeting. Crazy. I work at a big bank now where the laptop in meetings thing is frowned upon. The meetings generally start on time, are shorter and people generally respect meeting start and finish times.
The assumption was that most people commenting on HN are already working on a startup.
No.

EDIT:

There should be the ability to be more granular in posting. More topic options, subscribability etc.

I've said it before - and I'll keep saying it - take the best aspects of Reddit and apply them here.

Why can I easily see top, new, threads and comments - but I have to go to my profile to see my submissions? I can't see if there have been replies to my posts etc.

Rather than making it harder to post - lets make what we already have better to use.
A billion people die of old age all the time. That doesn't imply that we shouldn't care about other causes of death.

The Tsunami deaths have nothing to do with radiation. hence they don't belong into an article about radiation.
I'd imagine that sort of data is what they're looking for.
I felt like I "got" Twitter right from the get-go because Leo Laporte did a pretty good job of explaining it and hyping it up on TWiT right after it launched.

I still haven't figured out Evernote. I mean I get the idea, but I haven't been able to get any use out of it that I wouldn't get from Pinboard, but the fact that Evernote is pretty successful just lets me know that I don't have to personally "get it" for it to work.

Which is why I'm not counting Color out just yet.
Yes! Making a new function in Obj-C is so unnecessarily complicated. I would bet that Obj-C functions are much longer on average than more functional languages. Though header files are great for documentation, most functions one writes should NOT be public but small Lisp-like macros which should not be part of the object's header.

Yes, I know you can make 'private' functions by declaring them at the top of your implementation file. However, this seems like a hack insomuch as you never look at these declarations again until you write another private function - they're just there so your code compiles without warnings.

Here's hoping for Obj-C 3.
Something tells me Bill Nguyen, DJ Patil etc. are not socially ostracized in Silicon Valley.

EDIT: Don't confuse social ridicule with vanilla-flavored skepticism.
It might be biasing it's results by having it set to one by default...
College Students and the New Apprentice Economy
Excellent. Now give us the data!
Is it analyzing your level of frustration, the shaking in your hand, the defeated angle of the device?

Hm, that thought should have crossed my mind as well when first using Color. Guess I'm even less clever than the reviewer.

Anyway, version 1.0.2 just hit the market. It has "Welcome flow fixes", so at least they're working to improve it.
But these days everyone wants to be the first one to call a failure a failure. Why? Well, it’s a lot easier than predicting a winner. Read an interesting article on the Color phenomenon http://thegeoffreyhull.com/post/4094961998 that describes almost an insatiable desire of the blogosphere to see Color fail
He wants a "human" random distribution, not an uniform one. To see what numbers are picked most of the time.
Ok, so you've facetiously applied our correct definition of faith to include dragons in basements. However, under further analysis, we also realize it takes an equally great amount of faith to claim that science can rationally answer questions that cannot be empirically validated. Existential questions like:

- Where did we come from?

- How did we get here?

- What happened X billion years ago?

- etc, etc.

We can establish mathematical and physical models in the present, but knowing present models does not rationally give us any clue as to whether those models were the same in the past, especially as we go farther back in time. Even knowing present rates of change do not establish whether that delta was the same throughout history. Extrapolating present models into the past functions on several underlying assumptions (oh hey, faith!), and ultimately we realize we truly have no way of empirically validating the past.

So yes, I think it's good we've come to common ground on a definition of "faith". Now apply it to your own models of thinking, and you can see why on existential issues we stand on common ground of faith. I'm all for science, but it's good to recognize the limits of empiricism.
It feels like we're laughing and shaming them right here in our cozy little tree fort. Or do I misread things and this is all really constructive, healthy analysis designed to help YC Startups do the right thing once they've raised M$40+?

UPDATE: You added a point about skeptism after I replied. Well, simple skepticism would lead to one or two stories. They raised some money, their app doesn't work, their business plan is flawed. Ok, move along, nothing more to see here. The attention they're getting here on HN and the emotional investment people are pouring into this "skeptism" goes above and beyond what one would expect from dispassionate observation.

The tone and disproportionate representation suggests this is not just skepticism, but rather it's a social feeding frenzy. See the comment elsewhere about making fun of Colour for a week or two until it has jumped the shark: I think that author nailed it exactly, we are not expressing skepticism, we did that when it was first mentioned. We are now beating a dead horse for purely social reasons.
No. It will take some time for people to 'get' the concept, and then people will either use it or not. I don't think it'll be 'spectacular' in either case.

They're calling it a 'moving social network', but it seems to be more about collecting photos/videos attached to specific locations. The 'social' aspect is a partial byproduct - almost feels like a buzzword thrown in to give you some justification for taking pictures - "take pics with your friends!".

But really this seems to be a stab at making large-scale data collection 'fun'. However 'fun' it may be, the focus is still on data collection.

"Sharing Content publicly with others from different locations is what this App is about. If you find this objectionable, please consider not using our App or Site."

How much of the info they collect will they make truly public?

Imagine being able to see/hear/watch activity that went on at any location at any point in history from multiple points of view. Color.com could end up being the wikipedia of realtime-location-based-multimedia-sensorfied data.
I remember reading an article on this about year ago on HN. I think that the conclusion seemed to be that human prefer odd and prime numbers (at least in range 1 - 20).
Here's their Publications page: http://research.yahoo.com/publication

Yahoo Research people regularly win "Best Paper" awards in web-related conferences. For example, from this page: http://research.yahoo.com/node/3443
"For the third year in a row, Yahoo! Labs took the Best Paper Award at WSDM 2011"
Economics isn't boring at all; it's the study of choice, incentives, and why people do the things they do. It's applied psychology in the large. Learning even a little bit about economics teaches you why so much of the world is the way it is.
Making a machine "think" the way humans do.
I hope you are not mistaking "hired" for "acquired".

that said, your value proposition is "the team". a group of people familiar with each other and working with each other. so, the value of company directly depend upon how each member is committed to work after the company get acquired.
I was just thinking it'll be 7. My own theory is most people don't want to be in the middle, so they go for the middle of the upper half. That's what I did anyway.
One wonders if this means that home prices in the bay area will recover to dot com levels as well. Should be interesting to watch.
Your requirements are a little beyond the scope of this site, but I generally post to conceptfeedback.com when I'm looking for design related critiques and (if lucky) UX feedback.

They also have premium options for more 'hands on' feedback. Sounds like what you are looking for requires a little investment anyway.
I still don't get Twitter.
Sub-suggestion, once you have a little time: add a radio button group at the top to group alternate designs for the same site - the first one being the non-changed one.
It also seems he wants to see how different number-picking interfaces change that distribution. Try refreshing.
1.99 a month? no way.
This is free and gmail is free and is full text searchable:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/email-this/
Wait, so he comes to HN looking for a hacker to steal money for him, which you (rightly) point out is wrong and are interested in forwarding his email address to the FBI - yet you yourself are posting on HN looking for a hacker to find an FBI email address for YOU because you're too lazy to fill out a form.

Sound funny at all to you? :)
Try reading the article. It's not about politics.
From what little I've used of Evernote, it's the OCR capabilities which seem like the killer feature. Photograph or scan a receipt and be able to search it anytime. I don't know how well it works but it seems pretty useful.
It's all about the position of the mouse I would believe.
I also chose 7. Human Random Distribution is probably not very random. I hope that he'll release the data.
The frugal startup guide to consumer research on the cheap
Although they own colour.com, searching for 'Colour' in the App Store takes you nowhere. Doh.
Are you trying to estimate the bias depending on the type of selector used (slider, input, options, ...)?

Very interesting concept :)

EDIT, forgot to add: if this is the case, have you thought of storing the type of selector in a cookie, so that refreshing the page gives always the same type?
Two Ways To Get Through a Door
La Reina Del Sur Capitulo 21
In this case, it's negative, hateful, doesn't benefit anyone involved and given how ill-informed people are, is almost guaranteed to be wrong. It's like people feel personally insulted because a startup got funding.
It's amazing how many of these so called CS topics that fell out of favor in the 90s have come back in the web world in major ways.

Consistency, concurrency, parallelism, persistence. Yup we're back to basic distributed systems over larger networks.

The vast majority of developers don't need to know all of those things of course, i.e. forms enterprise or some level of RoR applications, but it is kind of interesting to see the resurgence in systems level skills needed in the industry. At one point OS and high transaction developers were down to a negligible percentage of practicing developers and we thought everyone would move to certification type education and high level abstractions.
The notion of Larry Page becoming the President's "Commerce secretary" scares me. The last thing we need is our google-cars, google-os computers, android-phones, basically every aspect of our lives controlled by one company which then hands over control to a government that is moving towards socialism.

The moment Google shows any sign of linking up and synchronizing/cooperating with the government, that is the moment google becomes my enemy. On the plus side, if the president does start changing how things are done at Google, then it won't be long before Google dies and some other better company comes to provide a superior service.
Read it carefully: There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

Nowhere does it say that the people doing the complaining are always the people who use it. I'd guess that the people hating lisp (or perl, php, etc) are ones who were told that it's great by someone who does use it, and who then tried it and formed a different personal opinion.
The problem I see is that the whole concept relies on selling data for profit, while the app itself is (from what I've read) poorly assembled. If people won't use it, the sellable data isn't going to come.
Great suggestions!

I've improved on #1 (added a "Discover Pivots" button that displays the url's as well).

I'm working on #2 and definitely thinking about #3! Showing the number of pivots for a specific domain would also be quite interesting!
It's like OOP. It doesn't make perfect sense until you actually use it for something.
Same. If it wasn't for this, I'd probably never have used git, or any version control for that matter (given that I hated svn and all the others).
Is this an actual app or is it just a trojan horse designed to collect our data?!
The article says that Eric Schmidt may become Commerce Secretary, not Larry Page.