skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you'd get looked at funny if you were caught using Twofish in 2008.

I still see people using twofish.

But you're right, I do look at them funny. :-)
Absolutely...didn't you?

Just kidding ;-)
If you are still committed, that is just more fuel on the fire to be the YC rejected success story. If we don't get in, we are that much more determined to prove our idea will succeed and meet all of our expectations. We have launch plans and a timeline whether we get in or not. Hopefully, other rejects will do the same and succeed!
Call it a prejection party!
If not, there's always a lifetime to learn to live with feelings of inadequacy.
" ... after all what better way to distribute code and small pieces of text describing it than a DVCS. "

Not that what Reg is doing isn't interesting, but what does a DVCS blog buy the reader? Will I be doing a local pull from someone else when github is down (or when he just doesn't feel like writing :) )?

On the other hand, the blog doesn't have support for comments, so I thought about forking the repo, adding my own comment to the text, then sending back a pull request. Presto.
I kid because I love.
For sure. This is a slight change, but a big change for the better. Nobody wants to remember a URL when they already remember their email. This makes perfect sense, and solves the biggest issue with OpenID in a way that looks like it puts it on par with the ease of use for end users of Facebook Connect, for example.

If every service simply required an email address, and the standard provided for a way to find out the access point from the OpenID provider, then we'd be all set and everyone would be able to implement this change.
Talk to the experts in the field -- that is, experts in the field of web hosting, not experts in the field of startups. I'm sure people over at webhostingtalk.com will have a much better idea of what your company is worth than anyone here.
:) that's an option also.
everybody join!
In the organisation I work in we deliberately have an explicit transparency rule. We are quite small at this point, but it is very nice to be able to have open discussions around just about anything.

Richardo Semler's company Semco has been working for years on very open internal information flows with good results, in larger organisations than what we have. I recommend reading his book Maverick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler
why don't you use your ownership income to hire someone to replace you? that way, you won't have to sell your stake at a price you don't like, someone can still be doing the necessary work you won't be doing, and you'll still have a passive income stream.

just my uninformed $0.02.
If Google had stuck with the standard OpenID implementation, they could've still had the same user experience. http://zain@gmail.com/ is a valid URL, and Google could've used that as the OpenID URL.
Hmm. In that case, I think you'll eventually need to reword things to say that you can buy a used cd from people, and sell your cd's online as well for fixed prices. Tricky stuff to navigate nonetheless, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Good luck to you!
Idle question: if you had found something interesting on the problem, what process would you follow to try to get it verified?
Trying to get as much money as you possibly can fits the definition of greed, but that really doesn't matter. You want to get as much money as you can without feeling guilty.

There are different ways to determine the worth of a hosting company. One way is to look at revenues + growth in revenues + number of customers - risks. Another way is to look at the amount of money you'll get if you were to sell, minus the effort needed to sell.

Hosting companies are worth very little when you sell them. You experienced this yourself when you bought a competitor for 60k. So by comparing the revenues + health of that company with the merged company, and you'll get a reasonable valuation. I've seen hosting companies get sold for less than $30 per customer, so the number you'll get at is going to disappoint.

If your hosting company is still growing quickly you have to make an estimate of the value of the company in a couple of years, and your total contribution to that. Since hosting companies that grow too quickly always destroy themselves growth is bad indicator of value.

The bottom line - hosting companies don't create much value and the little value they have is decimated when sold. You don't have any IP to speak of, and it's a high-maintenance environment (unless you outsource everything, but the hosting companies I know still had to deal with all difficult issues themselves). Your partner also has to find somebody else to take your place (I assume), which can cost up to a year's salary easily. All in all, your partner isn't getting a great deal here either.

As the saying goes - if both parties are unhappy the deal is fair. And that's what it looks like from here.

Postscript:

- once you leave, your partner cannot leave anymore. He can't just walk away with 70k. He might not want to leave, but knowing that leaving isn't really an option can be depressing.

- most hosting companies go kaput within the first 5 or so years. I haven't looked at the data since I left the scene, but chances are your company will be gone in 3 years. You didn't mention any problems in the OP, so I take it's all sunshine now. However, if you're leaving (partially) because of burn-out (boredom) then burn-out is probably not far behind for your partner. In that case, you'll get 45% of 150k, and he'll end up with 100% of nothing + a total burn out.

- if the person your partner hires to replace you doesn't work out - see above. Big risk for him there too.

- in his position, how would you feel about your partner leaving and having to pay him 70k? Would you gladly give him 110k (or whatever amount you had in mind)?
http://www.loveforbiz.com/getting-started-with-an-unactivate...

According to the above article, if you are persistent, you can eventually find a t-mobile dealer who will sell you a full price gphone for $399. It would be nice to have a cover story that you are an android developer, blah blah blah, and don't need a service contract.

You can also activate it by temporarily borrowing a valid t-mobile sim card.
I have submitted a 2 page CV with a 1 page personalized cover letter in the past. I have signed reference letters as well, which are handy to bring to an interview. That being said, with all of the jobs that I've received offers for, the employer knew who I was and had a good idea of my background before ever receiving my CV.
I've heard such negative things about the DMCA, I was surprised to see this article.

The general thrust of the anti-DMCA on the wired site seem to be that the DMCA was bad law, not because it was 100% bad, but because it went far beyond the needed provisions like you just described to push through a lot of restrictive provisions that hackers seem to dislike.
I use smarty mainly for it's templating benefits. Also you can write your own custom functions to call from the template files if needed, I found this to be very handy.
Ah, but AOL did it first with Bob Pittman, and they weren't even selling music.
append to this question. Has anybody tried gmail as an smtp with postfix ?
For what it's worth: you don't get a "go to VC free card" even if you're accepted --- last I checked, a minority of YC companies had closed A rounds, and that certainly isn't going to get easier in 2009.
It's awfully hard to sell and to code while you're holding your breath.
I read somewhere that a reasonable measure it to consider the invenstment. If you were to buy your share, you'd have to put $X down to get a return of 45%*profit(not salaries)/year. Calculate backwards to get the interest rate on various down payments, and see what makes sense.

Considering that the 100k is profit and not your salaries, the share's profit is $45.000:

$100.000 = 45% interest rate .. a little too nice!

$1.000.000 = 4.5% interest, keep your money in the bank

$300.000 = 15% interest - pretty sweet spot.

Back-of-the-envelope, I'm niether an accountant or an auditor.
Yeah sure. I'm not saying the price point is unjustified. Or that there are no added benefits to users that justify it.
He'd still have to be active on the board, and make sure his partner doesn't run the business into the ground.. e.g. by hiring someone to do his job, and go live of his passive income stream :)
Only a minority try to raise A rounds. Most are looking for angel funding, and most who do get it.
I second or third that. Great on the mobile phone for uploading quick notes and pictures.

Evernote is to my memos what dropbox is to my work in progress files.
Hold on tight, still 7 hours to go...
Signing credit cards has always seemed a bit absurd. Any thief that cared to forge my signature has a perfect reference right on the card. Five minutes practice should be enough for anyone to approximate a signature to the point that no clerk is going to challenge them.

On the other hand, if someone steals my card and the signature isn't on the card, then they'll have no idea what my signature looks like and it will be obvious from the receipt that the purchase was fraudulent.
"... But a great business idea would a small shop, that owns one of these and sells its use. You send them your plans, come in the next day and pick up the part. ..."

You mean something like this ~ http://www.shapeways.com Shapeways allows you to make some pretty interesting 3D things. You can read more about them in their blog ~ http://www.shapeways.com/blog/

If you have taken a classes in polymer chemistry you will have fun choosing the materials, the properties of those materials & associated costs when you choose to construct your "thing" ~ http://www.shapeways.com/about/material-options
If you applied for this cycle, please tell us your email address
We're about to send out the responses for this cycle, and we've found that a lot of applicants haven't put their email addresses in their profiles. So if you applied this cycle and you want a response, please edit your profile and put your email address in the email field.

(Sorry for the inconvenience. In the next version we won't let people submit applications unless there's a valid address there, but this sw only gets used every 6 months so it doesn't evolve very fast.)
When you start a new startup it's better to have cash in the bank, so you can estimate how much run way you have left.

You don't want to worry about two startups. It's too much.
The DMCA has some completely unrelated things in it: notice-and-takedown: good, anti-circumvention: bad. There have been some more balanced articles published this week.
One interesting idea is to format your resume as a mind map[1]. You're likely to get either very positive or very negative responses, but I'd be curious to know if anyone's tried it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map
Is is OK to send spam? No.
Key duplication from photographs
There's no ironclad rule of valuation, but a normal way to go about this would be to set the whole company valuation at N x forward revenue, where N is a function of how much value is locked up in the company due to its youth and lack of sales, marketing, and distribution.

Two benchmarks:

A solid services company sells for 1.5-2x forward revenue; a services company making $5MM a year might be valued at around $10MM.

A solid product company with a really bright future might sell for 5x revenue; a product company making $5MM might be valued at $25MM.

You're definitely more towards the "services" side of this spectrum: you're an IT services company (with a productized IT service) in a totally commoditized market segment.

You don't have a "right to liquidity". Your partner is within her rights to give you no money, allow you to maintain an equity stake in the company should it ever be sold, hire someone to take your place, and pay them out of the operating budget for the company.

You also don't usually value a stake in (what is now) a 2 person company at 50%; a more typical structure would reserve a large chunk of the company ownership for employees, rather than diluting and restructuring with every hire.

So, if you have 40% margins --- ie, you're more efficient than Rackspace --- you're aiming to gross ~400k in the next 12 months. Do the math, then discount heavily because nobody is actually buying you, and your partner is taking all the risk.

For the business you're talking about, less the value you brought to the table (presumably 50% of all the work), 70k sounds like a great deal.
Nova Spivak"Web OS" Midde-Ware Will turn the Cloud Into Your Personal Desktop
I thought the application instructions said YC will finish reading the application by 29th, and after which they will contact the applicants.

If i read it wrong, I'm grateful for not living in constant anxiety for two weeks.
Is the US only trading foreign oil dependence for foreign energy storage systems?
You should consider having your business audited and valued - a valuation could be as high as 4-5 x EBIT. In terms one partner acquiring the interests of another, a (significant) discount would normally be applied.
NAY. Fucker. :-)

Seriously though... If you are going to do this, offer a "don't send me any more crap option" at the bottom of the email, and listen to those that respond - forever.

You don't want to get placed on any naughty lists.
If you look at any other field containing "engineers", the mathematical basics are not abstracted away over time. Mechanical engineers have taken courses in math and physics; that part never goes away. Technicians are the guys who may have impressive technical knowledge and skills but never learned the theory behind it. From the perspective of the old-fashioned engineers, if a programmer calls himself a "Software Engineer" instead of a "Computer Programmer", he'd better have some fundamentals to back it up. (Of course not all programmers need to be engineers -- technicians are great. But somebody in the building needs to known why things work they way they do.)
A majority raise angel rounds.
Syscon's list of top 50 cloud computing firms
When you have another partner who has no other ventures to worry about, there shouldn't be anything to worry about.
I realized that unsolicited bulk email (spam) is not a good idea. Its just the only quick and free way to reach a huge number of people. Ohwell
I'd doubt my sanity :) But if I was convinced I had something interesting, I'd send it to my friends before making it public. If I didn't have friends who were respected theorists, I'd post it to a cs-theory mailing list. Most importantly, I wouldn't title it "P != NP"; I'd rather say, "here's a line of thought that might have implications for P =? NP; please tell me where I'm going wrong."
Entering http before your email address doesn't make any sense to the average user.
Hello Edb,

I agree with noodle's comment(s) below. Your best bet is to hire someone to replace you and retain your stake in the company. The cost of an employee will definitely reduce your annual income, but then you won't have to worry about being cheated out of your share of the company's value.
while true it wouldn't be a clean break, he'll still have a lot less responsibilities with free time to work on the new project
may want to fix your post, just to make sure you don't get any spammy junk...

please edit your profile and put your email address in the email field.
Yes, we'll send them tonight regardless.
No. And depending where you live it may be prohibited.

To send any form of unsolicited commercial electronic message (email, SMS, MMS etc.) in Australia (or to an address accessed within Australia) you must:

a) have consent - make sure you have consent to contact the recipient and can prove you have obtained it

b) identify - include accurate information to identify yourself or your organisation as the authorised sender of the message

c) unsubscribe - make sure your messages have a functional unsubscribe facility, so that recipients can unsubscribe at any time.

No matter where you live these are good guidelines.
You don't need a CS degree to read the API documentation. But if you do bother getting a CS degree, shouldn't you learn something beyond how to look up the cdrom API documentation?

Some knowledge about OS design would be good, I suppose. You've got a degree; what fundamental knowledge do you find the most helpful? (Meaning, things that will be relevant in 20 years, rather than familiarity with what's hot right now.)
Doh. That's a pretty good reason.
there's a huge difference tax wise: stock vs. asset sale. asset sales can get taxed through the ass and back out again.
SmugMug is a cloud computing company? If they are then every web co is.
Just to clarify (this bit me last year): many people put their email addresses in the "about:" field of their profiles, so that other HN readers can email them. Here, pg is referring specifically to the "email:" field, which isn't publicly viewable but is the canonical email address used for YC announcements.

In sum, the problem is that

a lot of applicants haven't put their email addresses in their profiles

and the solution is to

put your email address in the email field [and not just the about field].
> what does a DVCS blog buy the reader?

I don't know about the D part, but there are some advantages to a CVS. For example, if you cared to you could get everything for reading offline at your leisure.

And while it seems cumbersome for words, it is more convenient than a blog for code that I post. In the past I put some code up on web pages, some on FTP, and some on rubyforge, all linked from my blog. Now all the code you might want to download is in one unified repository.

This is an experiment, so we'll see how it goes. But I'm hoping that it will be a win for things that are code-y rather than wordy.

> On the other hand, the blog doesn't have support for comments, so I thought about forking the repo, adding my own comment to the text, then sending back a pull request. Presto.

I think you're onto something.
Is this the case? I figure they'd have to let you know a few weeks ahead of time, so the decision would have to come down around the 29th.
ZERO

resumes never win me any job offers, neither does schooling; however, past projects and works do

on topic, my 5? years old lost resume was 1 page long
For some more SPL examples, read through the source of the KohanaPHP framework (http://www.kohanaphp.com). The framework was originally a fork of CodeIgniter, but has evolved into a completely new and powerful framework -- completely written in PHP5. The framework source is very well written and has some excellent examples of using SPL and OOP along with some nice helpers and libraries.
Are You Evil? Profiling That Which Is Truly Wicked
Except what the other partner thinks about you leaving, while still holding significant stake in the company. This is perfectly acceptable if you're Paul Allen escaping Microsoft after it goes public. But expecting a partner to work full-time, while you outsource (or just stop taking part) and maintain ownership, is a way to lose friends and get into legal trouble down the line.

Vesting schedules are designed to help prevent situations like that, among other things.
I just emailed myself letting me know that I won, and that I will be getting $5,000 in Monopoly money to start my new Web 2.0 Monopoly game.

If anyone else would like $5,000, let me know.

I bet everyone will get an email at 11:59pm PST. :D
Not here. In the email field of the profile of the account you applied under.
I don't know if I like this idea of your data being stored on whatever service is cheapest, especially if that data is valuable / sensitive.
Ah yes, 5. The drunkards half-dozen. :P
Does this really make a difference? Are there any studies of gmail with addresses that are hidden vesus those with plain text email addresses for bots? The critical number is the false negative/positive amount, not the absolute number of spam. And surely spammers can already find ivan[at]tipjoy[dot]com
Entering http doesn't make any sense to the average user.
"... We're about to send out the responses for this cycle, and we've found that a lot of applicants haven't put their email addresses in their profiles ..."

A form of self selection in a way. I can't believe that after multiple selections this message hasn't got through yet. Only 4/16 on this thread ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348070 (not a true indication of application) had contact emails.
I hate how all the big players (Yahoo, Microsoft, Google) are implementing the OpenID provider half of OpenID, but refuse to be consumers of OpenIDs from other providers. It really defeats the purpose of OpenID. I'd even call it arrogant. Though I suppose it's better than a completely proprietary system like Facebook Connect.

It's painfully obvious they just want to remain in complete control, while reaping some of the benefits of OpenID. I'm really hoping this will backfire on all of them, and OpenID becomes hugely popular to the point where users demand they become real OpenID consumers. It's going to take awhile though.
It seems like the OpenID guys should have included the ability to use an email address as an OpenID in the first place. But this does increase the chances of uninformed users falling prey to phishing.
How a Facebook hiring manager "grills" potential recruits
Death is not necessary to give life meaning.

That's an unfalsifiable statement, I'm afraid.
I kept wondering why I didn't get the confirmation email until I saw the last line. Curse you.
Come out and get accepted or rejected with us:  irc.gnome.org #candyisdandy
Defeats are softened and victories sweetened because we did them together.
Not really.

Google's telling you pretty much exactly how to do it yourself. They appear more interested in improving the standard for everyone.
Will YC send emails to all the co-founders? Or just the ones that submitted the application?
It's more like pre-jects...
Very insightful social analysis of the web (though a small part of the web). Maybe rewrite it so it's more succinct? I'm picky about writing because I'm a bad writer.

In any case, I feel you.

However, I think "individualism web" will deflate if it's not deflating already. And "collectivism web" is making its comeback. Many community-oriented people are working on this, myself included.

Not saying that either one will die out. Individualism and collectivism are evolutionarily inter-dependent traits that we've all inherited. I just wish we can address these issues more as suppose to always talking about getting more user, more traffic, and more buzz. (Not that they don't matter.)
Prejection party! Woo!
Classic search on the main page for CD title, song or artist.
W. R. Stevens: TCP/IP Illustrated Vol. 1-3, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, and UNIX Network Programming Vol. 1 and 2.
A good way to stop spam is using JavaScript to ROT13 encrypt the address. This way you can display it in plain text, but when a bot looks to search through the source on a page it just sees JavaScript jibberish.

TextMate can do this for you automatically.

For a site, you could just have a small back end script that looks for an email address in standard format and then encrypts it. You get something like this:
<script type="text/javascript">document.write(
"nneba\100nangbzlnqf\056pbz".replace(/[a-zA-Z]/g, function(c){return String.fromCharCode((c<="Z"?90:122)>=(c=c.charCodeAt(0)+13)?c:c-26);}));
</script>
"the blissful masses who don't examine anything," huh; masturbate often?
Consequences of Covert Racisim in Our Coming Election - Associated Content
Could you elaborate?

I assume that even without actually hiring someone to replace you directly, you could differentiate between salary & dividends. Then you continue to pay the salary to the remaining founder & any replacing employee & split the dividends. I guess the remaining founder would receive gradual increase to his equity share as part of his package.

BTW, wouldn't most vesting schedules have already left this founder with quote a bit of equity (2.5 years)?