skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a character evaluation here, but if they are willing to cut this other company loose, I think you should evaluate how binding they consider contracts to be before you enter into one with them yourself. At the very least I would ask them to make a substantial (500K minimum) deposit against the balance up front. If the don't have the cash to do that, I would not deal with them as they probably shouldn't be doing acquisitions.

Other crazy idea: this is HUGE validation, go raise VC against this offer and make it a real business.

Also, if they are truly in the enterprise space and can afford to acquire companies to "solve a difficult problem for them" they should be able to pay you serious money and $2m in first 12 months should be no big deal.

Another thought, If you are really going to get in the business of giving a $6M loan over 3 years with your 3 cofounders, you should consult a lawyer about more than the LOI. The entire corporate structure needs to be designed to make sure people get paid out correctly and that taxes are accounted for.
So, you got me curious. It turns out that the IP ended up with Intel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha , I can't seem to find out who owns the brand, but the DEC brand definitely ended up with HP.
Thanks. It's definitely way less effort (and I speak as an Objective C coder) but doesn't have the ease or slickness of taking the photo then starting to sell.
> The policy can be updated remotely (both by us and by the user) [Emphasis added]

Exactly. That's why it would be difficult to use your service in most of Europe without risking legal trouble.

I wish you luck. I'm sure you'll launch with a very elegant solution to a problem. I just hope it's the problem that most of your potential customers actually have.
It provides the casual Web user with the familiarity and ease of the Desktop and App Store format.
Network marketing informational tools | Network Marketing
I never heard of payment plan to acquire a company. There's something fishy about this.

Unless it happens sometimes (that I never heard about), get a top lawyer in acquisition deals. Make sure that they at least understand the payment plan thoroughly and you must pay them a retainer because you will need the lawyer for 3 years to ensure the company does pay every time and not try to delay it, unethical-style. I think the deal is just extra costs on both sides. Your company is taking extra risk as other posters said because the buyer may go under and you'll be SOL, retainer or not.

Straight-up acquisition means only getting the lawyer for the purchase and to get company to pay one-off. Much cheaper. I would reject the deal due to the overhead but I do not know your full situation.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, or had an acquisition, accountant, etc.
Make it work - with a single window - on pc, that can access all your notes, unified into a single interface. Just having this portable isn't useful, but emulate dropbox: have it EVERYWHERE, web/desktop/mobile etc.
Try CodeEval.com. It's free to use and we've helped dozens of awesome companies hire awesome talent through out platform. We run the only free technical screening tool out there.

And with out sourcing product, unlike annoying recruiters - we send very little but high quality candidates that are pre-screened.
Thanks, great job on trying to change Tourism Australia - some of the campaigns I've seen from them are just embarrassing. It really does feel that those startups which have been successful have done so in spite of being in Australia, not because of it. I, like you, am determined to try and do it on my own.
It's from the late 70s so you probably won't find a transcript online. The speech was delivered at a Nation of Islam temple. See footnote #22 in the link below.

http://books.google.com/books?id=r_p_Q6TUrQoC&pg=PA261&#...
Cloud-based service promises 99% spam-free inbox, or your money back
I'm pretty excited about being able to sync open tabs and search engines. Still have to enable it in about:flags though.
I make no bones about being raised in a tropical climate and being unable to deal with cold effectively. In the same way that people who come from a cold climate can't deal with a bit of tropical summer heat.
I have a Philosophy degree, and there was definitely an opportunity cost associated with getting it. If my goal were to optimize my life in terms of income generation, it would have been a mistake.

Happily, that hasn't been my goal in life, and I wouldn't trade my philosophy degree in for the world. There turned out to be plenty of time to go back to school and learn the technical skills I needed after I figured out that programming was what I wanted to do with my life.

Having said that, I would be somewhat reluctant to counsel anyone to take a career-path-agnostic approach to college in the current climate. Times are tough, decent jobs for people without demonstrable technical skills are scarce, and college is even more breathtakingly expensive than it was 20 years ago.
They will for sure pay you $2M in 12 months.

The options this deal gives them make it extremely profitable to seek outside investors to lend them 2 million for a few years.
Customizing Flexibility3 For WordPress
Close your eyes. You're still here.
Techcrunch looks terrible on my iPad. Divs on top of content and text that goes blurry when I use the iPad's zoom function.
> By itself it is nearly worthless (my not-so-humble opinion) for anyone but the most technologically incompetent thermostat users out there

Last year, I was living in a house with several people much, much fatter than myself. The living room was upstairs, where the heat collected. My studio was downstairs, partially buried in the ground, which sucked all the heat away. There were heated arguments over the thermostat settings.

Eventually these arguments resulted in a housemate trying to solve the problem by installing a "fancy" new thermostat downstairs - it was a programmable monstrosity with a completely unintuitive LCD display. To this day I am never sure if I ever actually managed to change the temperature it was trying to maintain, or merely dinked around with specifying a temperature that would have taken effect IF I'd put it into the program.

There was probably a manual but I really wanted to talk with the housemates as little as possible to find out where the hell it ended up being stored. I have written fricking 6805 assembly code, I am not technologically incompetent by any means, but I sure as hell couldn't be bothered to try to deduce this thing's operations from first principles.

(Arguably this means the thing did exactly what they hoped it would - make me quit bitching and put on a couple sweaters instead of maintaining a shirtsleeve environment comfortable for a skinny chick in a house largely full of 300lb folks. But I digress.)

> A real thermal management system for the home does not start with a high-design thermostat on the wall. You need multiple types of sensors in every room and multiple outdoor points.

Well, let's see: a Nest has an activity sensor, temprature, humidity, and an Internet connection, which means it can find out what the weather's like outside. Plant one of these in every room and you've got something starting to happen, if you're using local heaters rather than a central system. Admittedly you won't be doing this yet until they get the price down.

> As far as control, a very simple embedded PC board running embedded Linux would be the "lazy" way to build it. It would actually be overkill, but there's an argument to be made for the COGS aspect of it.

Care to lay wagers on what's inside the Nest? I'm betting it's exactly that. You may be willing to spend the time and money to get the thing going and write software for it. But there are a lot of people out there who are not. This is a really attractively simple version of that.

You're describing a level of commitment akin to "I compile my Linux kernels from scratch", this is for the "I open my Mac and it just works" crowd.
They also have the patent on touch screens. Soooooo. I don't think this is a really big deal!
http://www.pcworld.com/article/230892/apple_gets_touchscreen...
congrats on the raise
It seems that everybody's written something similar. My entry is Slinky (http://github.com/mwylde/slinky) which in addition to an auto-compiling web/proxy server also includes a build tool with dependency resolution and minification for scripts and css.

It's in Ruby instead of Node and is a bit less opinionated about how a project should look like. I wrote it when I became frustrated with the options for writing rich client apps in compiled languages (HAML/SASS/CoffeeScript). It's so convenient to be able to cd to a directory and do "slinky start" and have a static file server running.
Often this comes up in the context of a conversation with people you don't know very well. (Like, on an internet forum.) When you're discussing some subject X with people you don't know that well, and you complain about X, people might get the impression that you don't much care for X. For all values of X, not just kids.

People that mostly like their kids and kids in the abstract, but nonetheless want to complain about some aspect of kids (understandably!), may not wish to create the impression that they're not into their kids. So they make sure to include a disclaimer in their complaint that their kids are wonderful, etc.

It's different among close friends -- there you find people complaining that their kids kept them up all night or whatever without feeling the need to include a "my kids are wonderful" every third sentence. Because their close friends know this implicitly.
Their Q4 earnings don't matter because they are transitioning to a much different business model... quarter-to-quarter analysts don't take that into account.
@vailripper, People love Jobs because he was not perfect. You are so quick to judge him I bet you've done things that are far worse.
This payment plan and the amount of discount strikes me as a point of concern. Why is it "unlikely" that they can pay the $2M over a year? Why such an extreme discount? I'd start digging there. Is their business viable for 3 years?

Why don't you to ask them to borrow $5M, pay you that amount now, then let them pay off the loan over 3 years? At 12.5% interest, total payments come to about $6M for a 3 year loan term.

It's a way of shifting risk from you to them. Somehow, I doubt they'll agree; but their response may be very informative and helpful for further negotiation.
MLM Excuses Silents The Trickster
Groupon's Fall To Earth Swifter Than Its Fast Rise
With this deal structure stringing us along hurts them as they have to pay more.

Only if they actually pay you in the end.
haha yes so sorry but it seemed like the best example.

Well of course if you have power to change history you could avoid any war, but that doesn't seem like it answers my question.
The Right Entrepreneur – Angel Mix can be very Disruptive – Part 2
Just make sure that they don't "own" the product until its paid for. They get non-exclusive rights to use the product until they've paid for it, then they get exclusive ownership. Its like rent-to-own.

Worst case scenario, they are paying licensees for a time.
Why not combine the two?

CLIs can benefit from autosuggest, a lot. I don't want to type too much or risk making typos. So they should suggest the legal choices, and order them by most common first (or maybe alphabetically). For those who don't like the autosuggest popping up automatically, you'd have a setting to establish a key combo to bring it up. Also, it's nice to underline possible spelling mistakes, and be able to hyperlink words to lists of related locations when I click on them.

Meanwhile, GUIs can include a "drop into CLI mode".

If we have a GUI that has a CLI mode with autosuggest, I would think this is the best of both worlds. Often times, I just want to design a COMPONENT, and then go right back to using the GUI.
Unless you are Amish.

Assuming they maintain the birthrate they've had for the past 100+ years (and there is no reason to suspect otherwise), in 2150, the Amish run America[1].

What happens to global politics when a culture that eschews violence gains control of the world's largest nuclear arsenal? What happens to transnational industry and innovation when a culture that balks at accepting the latest technological trends dominates the public arena? Additionally, the 21st Century may be the high-point of multiculturalism in the US. In 2150, over half the population of the USA may be of Swiss-German descent.

[1]I know the link seems dubious, but the math behind the projections looks just as credible as the UN's projections. http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/859411-Amish-population-...
How about the $50 Amazon is losing per Kindle Fire sold?
Inter-operating between processes is difficult and may be inefficient. That's why languages try to call each other's libraries within the same process.

By embedding Ruby or Python within the Java Virtual Machine or the .NET CLR you start your program/library with a single process.

For instance, Ruby by default didn't have great concurrency so users ended up spawning more processes to handle amongst other things concurrency. JRuby's selling point is that you don't have to work with so many processes and you can instead rely on the battle-tested multithreading of the JVM. It opens up the chance for more bugs when using threads, but you do cut on the need to use so many processes.

Besides, scripting languages have always made it easier to string together a program for testing, managing and prototyping. Not only do you not need to spend time recompiling programs in scripting languages, but you also have more freedom regarding your code. Java for instance demands one class per file. With a scripting language, you can have as many as you want. With a scripting language you don't need a Makefile as it's easier to use just a few files to get your job done.

Now you could question the need to have so many different scripting languages. But you could also question the need to have so many different non-scripting languages as well.
Fuck yeah. It's called "googling for a recipe with it". I do this regularly.
Hurry, supplies are limited. Call NOW! Why are they rushing you? That was the part that bugged me. Don't play that game; take your time and do the work to get it right.
> Investors shouldn't be allowed to invest until they've purchased at least one product from Amazon.

Seriously. My wife gets Amazon Prime for free through school. Within the first month I was looking for the best opportunity to buy stock. The service is quite literally amazing, and handing it out free to students is just damn genius. That's just one small thing on top of all the other things they do really well at.
Home Remedies For Bedbugs
> Just a character evaluation here, but if they are willing to cut this other company loose, I think you should evaluate how binding they consider contracts to be before you enter into one with them yourself

I'm fairly sure they don't have a contract with the other company, the time pressure is that they were about to sign an LoI with them.

> At the very least I would ask them to make a substantial (500K minimum) deposit against the balance up front. If the don't have the cash to do that, I would not deal with them as they probably shouldn't be doing acquisitions.

I'm not sure, they've been open about their financial situation and I understand why they've proposed the deal structure that they have.

> Other crazy idea: this is HUGE validation, go raise VC against this offer and make it a real business.

Problem is that I've already got other projects that would be extremely difficult for me to abandon.

> Also, if they are truly in the enterprise space and can afford to acquire companies to "solve a difficult problem for them" they should be able to pay you serious money and $2m in first 12 months should be no big deal.

Like I said, I'm familiar with their finances, and that isn't an option for them.

> Another thought, If you are really going to get in the business of giving a $6M loan over 3 years with your 3 cofounders, you should consult a lawyer about more than the LOI. The entire corporate structure needs to be designed to make sure people get paid out correctly and that taxes are accounted for.

Lawyers and accountants will all get to have their say before anything is signed.
You're loaning them millions of dollars at interest. Without a down payment. With all of the interest paid at the back end. With a cap on the accumulated interest.

My bet is you'll never see the money. Either there will be a clause hidden in the agreement that allows them to reverse the sale if their project doesn't pan out. Or they are on the brink of bankruptcy. Either way, they are structuring the deal as if they know they'll only have to pay if the project is a home run.

Don't waste your time with HN. Get a lawyer.
They have to pay us on a quarterly basis, there are quarterly minimums.
i'm sure i'll get down voted for this, but i'll say it anyway. what is the point of posting this on hacker news? are you just trying to show off? i mean you are smart enough to have made a product that seems to be worth a significant amount to an third party. what advice can anyone here offer without knowing the exact details of the deal, doing a little research on the company, reading the loi, etc? i seems obvious that the only route of action to take would be to talk to a lawyer (or possibly two) that can advise you.

i think a better question to ask would have been: anyone know a lawyer that would be willing to discuss this with me and give me a little advise?
I can only assume those objecting to this article and responding to it as an attack, haven't really looked at the book or watched the Isaacson interview yet.
Umm, I will have to disagree that an early employee status is a guarantee to making millions.
First of all i havent heard of that many early employees getting anywhere close to 3%, most of the time its between 0.5% and 1.5% for a salary thats several tens of thousands below market.
Secondly, if we are talking about companies that will get more funding, that means that your ownership of the company will be diluted further.
So in laymans terms, if you get 1% of the company and that gets diluted to 0.66% after Series A/B/C funding, in order for you to reach your $1 million, the company would have to acquired for more than $150 million. And what are the chances of that?
Furthermore, dont forget that while youre giving up some tens of thousands of dollars a year(that you might make at market), your equity stake is vested over 4 years, so if you do decide to leave after a year, you would have given up two years worth of potential market salaries for half of the equity that has potentially no value.

So basically, its a gamble and hopefully people do their research before taking a leap into the startup world.
> hmmm, "almost" 2.5m round and $10m in revenue "booked for next year" is not that credible of a company. you are taking a lot of risk that the money does not come through.

What is the risk? Only that we end up back where we were before their offer, so far as I can see.

Their fundraising deal seems well underway, I've raised venture capital myself, and these guys know what they are doing.

> venture backed companies _consume_ cash, they usually don't throw it off (6m extra in a few years) until later.

It's a line item for them, they pass the cost directly to their customers.
Is this the best you can do to add to the discussion?
You comment is on the level of stating "I hate Steve Jobs" as a comment on the "Steve Jobs is Dead" new item.

The purpose of these comments is to spawn discussion. A comment of:

iPhone does better video

leads to nothing but flame wars. A comment of:

iPhone does better video and here is why ...

leads to actual discussion.

Your comment was either an inadvertent or purposeful attempt to troll. Just FYI.
Convey works in any directory too, you just run `convey` within it. The `init` command just creates a skeleton file structure to get you started.

Like the idea of using JSON to populate templates though, that's neat!
Is Google down?
Is google down? I cannot search for some reason for the last bit...
Not trying to show off, I mean, this is a throwaway account FFS!

I'm posting it here because I was told to: http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/loylh/need_advice_...

> what advice can anyone here offer without knowing the exact details of the deal, doing a little research on the company, reading the loi, etc? i seems obvious that the only route of action to take would be to talk to a lawyer (or possibly two) that can advise you.

Just because I'm asking you lot doesn't mean that I won't also seek advice elsewhere.
Lifelong game pirater here, back to the Amiga 500 games bought on floppies from a software cracker (yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me! went the into screens)

Australia has always been shafted in price - a AAA game for $110-$120? Total nonsense, even when our dollar was very low.

Steam is largely what's turned my behaviour around. I've always bought a few, pirated a few, but the convenience of Steam is hard to beat. I mostly wait for specials or bundles, and have a lot of indie games (my catalog is up around 200 games, slightly less than half are unplayed bundle-fodder). Mid-year and new year sales are great times for bargains. But a AAA game at a ridiculous price? Hello pirate bay. Duke Nukem Forever at $80? Good luck with that (not that it's a AAA title... but it theoretically occupies that space).

I've found that over the years, with few exceptions, once a game is played, it's done and I don't go back. If I do go back... it's pretty dated and I realise it was better off in the realm of nostalgia. For me the issue of "but what if Steam dies / goes offline - you'll lose all your games!" is a non-issue - I have a couple of racks of dusty game CDs behind me that haven't been opened in years.

Long story short: it's mostly about the convenience, but partly about the price.
Twitter-ish task delegation, tagging and filtering
You're right, it does check the weather through the Wi-Fi connection:

"Nest uses its Wi-Fi connection to keep an eye on current weather conditions and forecasts so it can understand how the outside temperature affects your energy use."
I know it's at a different scale, but I'd be interested to know what Australian HNers think of the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme:
http://www.deewr.gov.au/Employment/JSA/EmploymentServices/Pa...

(In short: program runs via Centrelink to give 13 weeks small business training then 52 weeks of income support allowance while you start a business. Available to anyone who would otherwise be eligible for an unemployment allowance.)

I'm told the business training is very simplistic, but from what I understand they will accept people looking to start any business.

Getting just enough to scrape by for 12 months while focusing on your business seems like a good opportunity to me.
Why it’s impossible to make money with a free app in the Education Market
How Volume Purchasing is bad for the app store
Well, I'm certainly glad of it — developing something you think nobody's ever done before always feels a bit insane, so these replies are a welcome sanity check.
> Obligatory troll comment (it is).

Fixed that for you.

(If you disagree, then respond with how that comment was supposed to lead to meaningful discussion rather than flamewars)
As far as I can determine, a university education in the liberal arts does little to nothing to refine the quality of one's thought and mind. Someone intelligent, talented, and motivated enough to gain anything from a liberal arts education would undoubtedly achieve most of that on their own for the proverbial $1.50 in late fees at the local library. And someone who isn't will gain nothing but a now useless credential. Most 18 year olds would gain more perspective from two years in the Peace Corps or military than from a liberal arts education.