skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm? Piracy is incredibly convenient. Cracks are consistent and easy to use, updates generally appear regularly, you can pass the installer to your friends offline, and you can happily play without internet connection long after the official servers die out.

Online play is a different matter, since you might have centralised server-side authentication. Online multiplayer is a definite advantage to going legit. Otherwise, piracy is nothing if not convenient.
> Why is it "unlikely" that they can pay the $2M over a year?

Because this will be a new product for them, they expect it will take several months before they start to make any revenue with it.

> Why such an extreme discount? I'd start digging there.

Yeah, it seems like a big jump. I asked if it could be monthly pro-rata and they agreed to that.

> Is their business viable for 3 years?

I think so, or they'll get acquired.

> 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.

Because they don't know that they'll be able to sell the product that they'll be building around my product. This way if they can't they can cut their losses without being on the hook for the entire amount.

I don't see that I'm taking much of a risk, if they terminate the agreement we get to keep whatever we've been paid to-date.
Get a lawyer, someone local and good. Talk to him. Everything else is just noise.
Your 404 is lame
1 year of Ramen Music
How about linking to the original Forrester blog entry that prompted this post?
Wow - I'm taking a bit of personal affront to this. I'm not 'one person with limited experience with professional PHP development'. I've been PHPing since 1996 (from PHP/FI), and have done work with both PHP and many other platforms. I was doing MVC in PHP4 well before most of the popular frameworks of today were even started (probably before many of their authors were using PHP).

Read this again:

"Only a portion of web work I've seen in PHP uses any community framework."

I see a hell of a lot more PHP than I actually work on myself. I've run multiple PHP groups over the last decade, and have consulted with well dozens of companies of all sizes during that time frame.

What the hell - take me out of it. Look around at most PHP code out there (go look at github or sf). It's not based on Symfony, ZF, Cake, CI or whatever your favorite framework and tools may be. That's just how it is. I didn't say it was good, but it's the state of things. No one said this was good or bad (you say it's bad, I tend to agree, but not 100%).

Yeah, perhaps I shouldn't have taken that as personally as you meant it, but I expected a bit more from you Jason. Maybe you meant that comment more at the OP - not sure.
I honestly don't think it looks better. I am a fan of "proper" color balance, not cross processed type filtering (instagram, lomo, toy cameras, etc). And I think the OP's is definitely better in that regard.
Very good point. Here in NZ much of what I want is literally years away from coming out and paying for it through legal means isn't an option. But paying in the form you suggest is an option. It's annoying to have to resort to illegal measures which actually cost money to get something.
Rethinking the Quora iPhone App
This sounds a lot like Oracle and Rackspace. (My understanding is that of Rackspace's 3,700 employees, 2,500 are sales reps and only 500 of them are engineers. The rest serve in various administrative roles.)
Microsoft making money out of Android
Thanks for the honest recap, but the concerning bit is that you don't leave previous arrangements in a good way.

- Kicked out of the startup you were working on

- Cheated on girlfriend before leaving her

- Left job without notice and ignored emails

This stuff will catch up with you. I would recommend leave previous engagements with integrity or you will start having trouble in future due to reputation.
The "NEW" Prasouda Diet Plan
Steve Jobs apparently wanted to destroy Android and for at least that reason, like Stallman, I am glad he is gone, so that he cannot do any more damage to computing.
Any company that doesn't have cash, and is struggling for survival, will tell you that their revenue will explode "next year".

They might very well be covered in debts and try to acquire you to generate more revenue. In which case, you take the risk of losing your product and your revenue.

I'd ask for money up front, like 30% of the total, to see their reaction and then negociate the financing.
I clicked on "Now click here!" and it gave me the shopping cart, then I click on "List" to edit it, and it showed the text box again. Once I click "Save", then it doesn't show the iPhone. If I click on "List again to edit it, it still does show it.

It is very cool though, I am loving the interface of it.
This thing paired with Siri would be awesome.

"Siri, what's the temperature at home?"

"Home is currently at 65 degrees."

"Siri, set home to 75 degrees."

"Temperature set to 75 degrees, it will take 15 minutes to reach this temperature."
OMGWTF: Passwords of 93,000 Politicians, Reporters, Bloggers Leaked
The stats on the page for easy reading:

1 year
6 issues
$13,000 paid to 75 artists
1100 songs submitted listened to by 13 jury members
44,000 MP3 files streamed
5,000 zip downloads
What The Hell Do Sysadmins Actually Do?
I would be concerned. Seller financing is generally used when the acquirer will have a stable business with concrete underlying assets (factories, real estate, etc.). I don't think this is the case for you. Your acquirer is a venture-backed startup. They only pay you in states of the world where they blow up, and you have little recourse if they don't blow up.

More generally, you are taking on the risk of your acquirer's business (they may fail to get traction in the market, they may fail to develop their product, etc.) without getting compensated like an equity holder. This is a bad situation to be in -- entrepreneurs do all kinds of things (take VC money, incorporate rather than form partnerships, etc.) explicitly to shift risk to OTHER people. Not only are you taking on additional risk by taking the offer, but you are also not getting reimbursed appropriately for that risk.

Other issues:
- You get paid more if they take longer to pay => You're going to work for a company that you hope doesn't blow up tomorrow (because you get paid more if they blow up in 4 years). => This is a dangerous spot to be in; your incentives are not aligned with theirs.

- It might be tempting to think that the acquirer could pay you with the proceeds of their next round even if their business does not take off. But $6M in short-term debt will likely scare off VCs who might fund them in their next round...
Swimming probably will not help when trapped under ice.

God says...
C:\TEXT\YANKEE.TXT

't any occasion for hurry."

We sat silent awhile, thinking. Then my mind was made up, and
I said:

"Yes, everything is ready; everything is shipshape, no detail is
wanting. I know what to do now."

"So do I; sit down and wait."

"No, _sir_! rise up and _strike_!"

"Do you mean it?"

"Yes, indeed! The _de_fensive isn't in my line, and the _of_fensive
is. That is, when I hold a fair hand--two-thirds as good a hand
as the enemy. Oh, yes, we'll rise up and strike; that's our game."

"A

--------------

That's Yer job, God. I did my job.

God says, "thats_right rose_colored_glasses talk_to_my_lawyer nope
quit why_do_I_put_up_with_this nerd how's_the_weather
awful in_a_perfect_world The_good_stuff yikes because_I_said_so
joke ba_ha taxes fer_sure yada_yada_yada horrendous astrophysics
hang_in_there That's_my_favorite are_you_sure "

------------------

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=455-CIgc7co

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI8xrnOrftM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z-hEyVQDRA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWlSw5Kb0dg

God says...
C:\TEXT\WEALTH.TXT

aith, as well as all other spiritual matters, it is evident
enough, are not within the proper department of a temporal sovereign,
who, though he may be very well qualified for protecting, is seldom
supposed to be so for instructing the people. With regard to such
matters, therefore, his authority can seldom be sufficient to
counterbalance the united authority of the clergy of the established
church. The public tranquillity, however, and his own security, may
frequently depend upon the doctrines whic

------

"Less I have, the more I gain" is an interesting lyric.

God says, "Otherwise belly savage certainty promising too increased
write kingdom implanting bond immense avenged disentangle
loose fervent slackness refer measurable pole subverted
later eternally blinded terms heart nourish relieve notes
dispensest prison ranked pleasanter laboured Rebuke communicated
charge discordant exaltedness whither repeat David's height
boyhood outwardly unconscious Unity jest impure Date preserving
shapes alas void God might Simple reason dates savour
camp lords disquiet overturned dreaded "

Ask yourself why crazy homeless people talk to themselves. God hear and responds, obviously.
I remember someone on Silicon Beach said they went through it. It sounded good so I had a look and called up about it however you aren't allowed to launch your business until you complete the program. It also seems geared towards small local businesses (e.g. businesses must be 'not competing directly with existing businesses').

However I like the idea behind it. I was even thinking of some program similar to the way university is funded (HECS scheme) that provides interest free capital (maybe right after you finish uni) to explore starting a business. After spending 4 years at uni, an extra year to learn and explore business ideas would be very rewarding even if you end up working after that.
> Any company that doesn't have cash, and is struggling for survival, will tell you that their revenue will explode "next year".

They aren't struggling for survival, where did you get that idea?

> In which case, you take the risk of losing your product and your revenue.

Nope, if they don't pay the agreed amount we get the product back.

> I'd ask for money up front, like 30% of the total, to see their reaction and then negociate the financing.

I might seek more up-front, but I can see why that would be tricky from their side.
May I ask what problem does your project solve?
It just happens that my roommate works with this kind of research things. I'll ask him about it but it might be hard to accurately define tags. Might be useful with adding a extra level of accuracy to search.
Any person with so much of the spotlight on them is gonna go off the farm a ways. I won't even get into the eccentries of Hollywood celebs so lets just focus on "our" tech world.

Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and so on and so on.

The point is, with that much money and fame and responsibilities would any of us not be a little "off the mark"? (This is assuming "we" aren't already). From my point of view, people are strange.

Hasn't anyone seen Citizen Kane?
With Group Policy you can install a new VPN solution to everyone in your company at once. I think this has more to do with training (and IT having other priorities).
I think you make a good point regarding taking the risk of their business, without getting compensated like an equity holder. I may be able to use that to negotiate for some equity as part of the deal.

The risk to us is relatively limited though, as we get the technology back if they can't pay for it. The main risk is that we won't have made progress on it during that time, but that could have happened regardless (given it's experimental nature, we didn't really have much of an idea how we would market it).
I'm 20. I dropped out of high school, studied for a couple of years in community college and am taking classes and workshops at an art school right now (no accredited degree). For me this provides a solid compromise between the extremes of fascist discipline and anarchist chaos.

The first extreme relies completely on papers, degrees, and the value of adderalled-up memorization of facts and focusing your life on passing the tests. Life isn't about passing tests and I didn't want to go that route. So I dropped out of high school.

The second extreme is an anarchist, 'fuck the power' immature, spontaneous chaos. It disregards discipline, it ignores the beautiful life-rhythm of doing something everyday. It glorifies chaos and disorder, and ultimately for me it would probably lead to jail and homelessness. I decided to ignore that, since I realized the value of discipline and the value of education in a classroom (but not for a degree).

I have very little interest in the opiatish dream of a 'start-up that will make me filthy rich' too. Hence why I avoid startups. In fact I am skeptical of everything that alludes to 'becoming filthy rich'.

I am not a typical successful dropout like Bill Gates (yet) nor do I think I will be, and I'm not a stereotypical dumb lazy fry-flipping dropout (yet). As an experiment to test my discipline and knowledge, I decided to spend a year working in a full-time IT job, and I have spent exactly one year there.

So yeah, I'm that other guy :) Your mileage may vary.
They're losing $50 per kindle fire.
We're more focused on the bookmarking. I think we both are trying to solve a similar problem but with a different approach.
If your product is worth $X million to this company, it may be worth $Y million to one of their competitors - and one of those competitors may have the cash on hand to make a much more compelling offer...
I may be very wrong, but I have a feeling Jobs was the "dad" and Woz was more like "mom" of the employees. I think this difference was Apple's greatest asset in their first year.

I have run some two-headed departments and it's my preferred way to manage.
Don't want to steal any thunder from this amazing project but check out SimplyListed. They are a YC company doing exactly what you describe.
I might recommend you get in touch with someone like Sandy Kory.

http://www.horizonpartners.com/users/show/skory

He specializes in brokering technology deals and has done some pretty major deals involving figures well north of what you are looking at now. I bring him up only because I recalled a Mixergy interview he did:

http://mixergy.com/sandy-kory-horizon-interview/

Import thing to know at this point: your focus should now be on a separate negotiation entirely. The one you will be having with a lawyer and/or broker to help make this deal happen.

What you have right now is tremendous leverage. You have a multi-million dollar business deal on the table. And that can get you top priority with lawyers & brokers. You can leverage that not only to get appointments and your phonecalls answered promptly - but you can leverage this to offset perhaps all or most of the up front costs you would typically have to fork out to deal with these professionals. What they'll be looking for however is a significant cut % of the deal so that is what you have to think about next. The ball is in your court. Goodluck.
Oh, yes. Terribly, terribly provincial.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned: you don't want the acquirer to pay you until they've found a market and then build a clone. Some kind of noncompete may be desirable.
Sorry, some more:

> Other issues: - You get paid more if they take longer to pay => You're going to work for a company that you hope doesn't blow up tomorrow (because you get paid more if they blow up in 4 years). => This is a dangerous spot to be in; your incentives are not aligned with theirs.

Yes, I did point it out to them. Their response was a polite version of "that's our problem".

> - It might be tempting to think that the acquirer could pay you with the proceeds of their next round even if their business does not take off. But $6M in short-term debt will likely scare off VCs who might fund them in their next round...

I think if the business doesn't take off, we get our technology back and we keep whatever they've paid us to-date. It doesn't seem like a terribly bad worst-case-scenario.
I use Gmail for my personal and educational (Google Apps) and I haven't once gotten spam in my inbox (Google has caught all of them). I don't see why this better.
7 Reasons to Teach Kids about Open Source
I think the most important metric is return on equity. Profit is not really a consideration on Wall Street.
Again, just asking, why wouldn't you do a limited deployment to your QA group to make sure everything works, and then do the company-wide deployment over a weekend after you know everything works.

I've worked at a programmer at companies where you weren't allowed to touch Widget X because it works, so I understand the mindset, but more often than not in programming departments the focus is on shipping so nothing is off the table completely. I guess I just don't understand why IT has a different mindset.
That's pretty awesome actually :-)
Yes, perhaps, if it's all going well enough. Good point, I'll have to think on that.
Has that been confirmed? I've heard anywhere from $5 to $50, and its always been from analysists trying to estimate the cost from parts. As far as I know, the only people who really know how much the Kindle costs to make are Amazon.
And I put up a website too: http://ideaperdiem.com
Hi, really hard to evaluate based on the info you've laid out. As a 49 year old guy who's been in the Valley since ~1988 or so, running his own company, been courted by the VC's (Hummer-Winblad), had a buy out offer from Borland (yeah, I know), I'm happy to pay things forward with free advice that might be worth slightly more than you paid for it :)

Email in my profile if you want to talk. Send me a phone number if so. If not, best of luck.

BTW, this sounds sketchy to me based on what little I know.
It is a tried and tested method for selling technology. Look at the history of the Sony Playstation. Sell the hardware at a loss and make double your money back from software and content.
This is a good sign - they think your software and their expertise, whatever it is, can make money. I'd recommend that rather than selling it all for $6MM, that you evaluate it for a couple of days, and if you are comfortable with them, suggest selling 60%, perhaps for the same $6MM, which gives them the control they seem to want, and retain 10% each, with the option for each of you to negotiate a sale of that 10% later, with them getting first dibs.

If the product does very well, it'd be good to have some skin in the game. If it fails to grow as much, then you have secured some upfront cash.
The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model
To me this seems to hit the same market as Etsy. People who spend their time creating things, selling one-off items, are just going online so that they can put it on a business card, ect would use something like this. I showed this to a girl who I was just talking to about putting her stuff on Etsy, she likes this FAR more, but the only thing she wanted was to use her own domain.
Tips for Note Taking #2
Man I already booked a flight that leaves around noon! This would have been a great experience. Oh well, I will have to suffice with the other festivities.
Or they can simply renege on the contract, quarterly minimums be damned, and dare you to sue them.

No one's saying you're going to get screwed. Some people are saying you should take care not to be, and they're right.
I don't think anyone's opinion changed. It's just that it's socially conventional to try to speak well of the dead (at least for a while). Pointing out Jobs' flaws helps us remember that he was human too, and so perhaps not that far removed from the rest of us.
The only 'piracy' I've done recently is to purchase a Kindle book using convulted means (fake US account, Proxy service, using gift card) then crack the DRM on the books so I can read it on my Kindle.

I'm sure the publishers and licensing people think they are very clever restricting content to people in other countries, but in reality, they are shooting both feet off.

The old ways are gone. There is now one global IP market, whether they like it or not. They either get with the program or they lose money and die. Sucks to be them, but that's creative destruction at work. You can't differential price, you can't licence in one market but not another. You either release the content for sale to everyone, or you will be worked around.
Thanks for the feedback. We'll be having some kind of setup where people can use their own domain for their site for sure.
I realise i'm missing the point here, but I have an Intel GMA950, and it runs Aero flawlessly. Windows 8 is introducing ubiquitous DWM compositing regardless of hardware.
I'm pretty sure that it downloads 100% of the game in an encrypted format, and the decryption keys get sent out on release.
The $36 soda: Overdrafting in America
Yeah, I suspected it might be artificial pressure, but the pressure is only to sign an LoI, and their justification is plausible (we need to cut the other deal loose).

After signing the LoI there is 45 days to complete the deal during which everyone will do due-diligence.
I use Evernote as well. I have one journal that is only devoted to my ideas and expanding on them. When I'm on the go, I sync on my phone using the Evernote iPhone app.
The startup situation is a bit more complex. I certainly wasn't going to just drop what I considered to be pretty much my whole life for a year and a half and I had the largest stake in. In the end it was really more of an amiable agreement that we can't work together anymore and that I will repay my debt by turning over my share of the company.

The others are also quite rare occurences. This was the first and probably last job I have ever left without notice or in such a silly manner as not responding to emails.

Cheating ... yeah, no excuse there.
Thanks for the the nice comments and the bug report. The text area is currently very buggy, something I'll be fixing very soon.
Show HN: The Most Advanced Tweet Scheduler With Customer Search
Ask HN: please review RentMethod
RentMethod allows landlords/property managers to quickly and easily screen potential tenants by just entering in a tenant’s email address. The tenant verifies their identity and pays for the screen directly, and the landlord/manager receives a detailed report (credit score, background check, eviction notices, etc).

We would love to hear what the HN community thinks of what we’ve built. With limited UI/UX expertise in-house, we hacked together the front-end of the application and would certainly appreciate some feedback for future direction.

http://www.rentmethod.com

Thanks in advance for taking the time to check out our stuff!
I encountered recruiters who were a bit short with me in that era, but I encountered more who had a who had a different sort of desperation than they do now. Third-party recruiters rely on a steady stream of jobs coming available so they can collect placement fees. In 2002, they faced a real pinch in what jobs were open and in what companies would pay to both developers and recruiters. Many recruiters went without work as they didn't have any jobs to place people in.

I talked with one recruiter about a job that paid about 1/3rd what I made just 2 years before. I said "has it really gotten that bad?" He opened up about the situation as he really didn't expect me to go after the job as it paid far less than what I was making, even back then. IIRC, it was the only job he had open at the time and rates had hit bottom, so he couldn't even find anyone willing to take it. Fortunately, things turned around for both of us.
A tried and true strategy. That has worked for (in no particular order) : ATM's, Printers, Razors, Mobile Phones, Gaming Platforms and probably even cars in some cases.

If Sony had cottoned onto this strategy, Beta would have been the worldwide video standard and they would have been paid back massively in royalties.

Shifting hardware at a loss to lock in consumers is the oldest trick in the book. Nowhere is it more important than when introducing a new technology and a new way of working. I can see that in 10 years time a Kindle will be almost free.