skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I wouldn't argue with the hard working and smart part. And also, I'm sure if you let anything go to your head, you'll end up missing the best deal. I suppose you could argue that nothing went to his head and he just had a great rational argument for why Facebook is worth so much.

Makes me wonder what his advisers were telling him when he was offered the Y! deal.
EasyToInsureMe.com - Richboro, PA
You could try to look at some of the often cited terms from public companies and try to see how you compare.

For instance, a publicly traded company in your sector might be valued at a p/e ratio of 10 ( p= price, e = earnings). If your yearly earnings are $50.000 then your company would have a valuation of $500.000.
When that Google Image game came out I played about 2 seconds before deciding my keystrokes could be applied to better things than helping Google improve their image service.
"What do you think is a good price?"

How much is the buyer willing to pay? To rephrase, what value is the site to them? Will your site solve a real problem for them or not?

And once you find out their valuation, what value is the site to you? Is your personal valuation higher than theirs? Don't sell. If your valuation is lower, then sell.
We don't know if Bill Joy is the most qualified. My point is that we should question Doerr's agenda. If Bill Joy did become a part of the new administration Doerr's firm would likely reap huge benefits similar to the way Halliburton did when Cheney took office.

Maybe Bill Joy is such a swell guy that not only does Doerr want him as a partner but also playing a large role in our country's government. Maybe Doerr's unsolicited advice is completely impartial and in the country's best interest. I, for one, believe that to be a very unlikely scenario.

In any case, the fact is we can't take this sort of thing at face value.
I would say that if your plan is to provide SaaS, don't worry about it until you hit profitability. At that point, if you must have a US entity, I recommend looking into Vermont virtual corporations/LLCs.

For consulting, you could look into a Nevada LLC (cheap and low paperwork requirements) but it's not necessary. Companies that are open to outsourcing to Lithuania already know they are not working with a US-based company, while companies that want a US-based LLC will most likely have a whole bunch of "due diligence" requirements that you can't meet anyway (such as number of years in business, number of employees, etc). Trust me, your big problem is going to be getting paid as promised, not your lack of a US entity.
The article is a first-person narrative from the scientist.

It's an interview. There is nothing added to its text by the tabloid apart from the introduction.

I cannot understand why you won't take an interview for a face value, unless you are after some sort of ad hominem effect on its contents.
I.B.M.’s Chief Sees Technology Leading a Recovery
There is no question, laptop use is counter productive in most classes.
Unfortunately, for the student there are many classes where a student might already know most/all of the material, but is still "forced" to attend the class. Then it is gaming, chatting, browsing time.
In fact, teachers could use students' laptop use as barometer for how engaging their teaching methods are.
Companies that benefit from the status quo won't buy ads on networks that advocate change. It's not that Americans have suddenly gotten genetically less intelligent in the last fifty years, but rather the reason our political system has fallen apart is (largely) because corporations came to control the media. Noam Chomsky has something to say about this in Manufacturing Consent.

In fact until fifty years ago working class Americans used to read the paper as much or more as upper class Americans. What happened is the papers of the rich started being subsidized by advertisers, so the working class papers couldn't compete and all went out of business. (Ads are worth much more in papers that target the wealthy, so the papers of the wealthy had a bigger ad subsidy, and thus sold for less money at the newsstand than the papers of the working class.) That's why poor people are largely illiterate and uneducated today, whereas only fifty years ago it was the working class that drove the progressive movement.
This is nothing new -- that's what all the debate on stem cell research is about. It should be noted that the term "viable" is used in a theoretical sense; these embryos would never actually become humans. Embryos are usually obtained from places like in-vitro fertilization clinics, where they would otherwise be thrown in the trash. I say, why not use them for life-saving research?
Does Linux perform poorly on laptops? I've never looked into it.

I'm not suggesting that performance tests should not be run on laptops. As I said in my reply to palish, When you're comparing software to software, hardware should not be a limiting factor unless you're testing for specific cases.
Making Sure the Shoe Fits at Zappos.com
Obama Victory Newspapers Going For More Than $100 On eBay
Human bodies are not evolved to sit idle in office chairs for exceedingly long periods of time. All the science points to a reasonable diet and exercise as being important. It's just that most hew-mahns don't like to.
The only sort of exercise I can tolerate is the type where it's you versus a landscape or individuals. I hate team sports of all types, and running faster or lifting more to beat my personal best doesn't keep me interested either. I think most geeks are this way. The most enjoyable sports for me end up being hiking, climbing, exploring in general, biking, boating, and racing.
Don't. Alt-tab or ctrl-alt-arrow around windows on a ssh session to a terminal somewhere running lynx, links or elinks. I always run screen and sometimes will lock it if I really need to but for the most part the best way to banish temptation is to give into it.
The new US administration's web savvy is going to make the rest of us look bad
Admittedly it's a placeholder (under construction isn't very web savvy) - but it's coming.
He does take sides in the debate though, by framing Lomborg vs. Scientific American as Galileo vs. The Church. Since we know Galileo was right, the reader is of course supposed to assume that Lomborg will also turn out to be right in the face of blind dogma. Therefore Crichton doesn't have to address the actual criticism towards Lomborg.

However if Lomborgs book is indeed bad science, then the strong rebuttal from scientfic circles is fair.

By the whole framing of the issue Crichton imples that it is SA and the "consensus" which is politicized. However Lomborg is himself a political figure (advisor for the right-wing Danish goverment in environmental matters). That does not make him wrong, but it implies we have to look at the actual content of the rebuttal to determine who has the better case.
It's worth knowing that David Bellamy claimed that he was no longer on television for other reasons (in 2002):

---
He tells me how he got talking to a man on a train some time before the 1997 election and told him he was torn between voting for Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour party and the Referendum party. The man told him he was an agent for the Referendum party, and soon after he got an invitation to lunch from Sir James Goldsmith, its founder. "It was the most fascinating lunch I've ever had. A bloody good lunch. I said: 'Why have you suddenly become a goody after being a baddy?' And he said: 'You go into a fish restaurant and the fish are full of poison, and that's why I'm dying of pancreatic cancer.' And I said, 'Well, I don't think you can prove that.' And he said, 'No, I can't prove it, but you say some bloody stupid things too.'"

It was then that Goldsmith asked him to stand against Major. "In some ways it was probably the most stupid thing I ever did because I'm sure that if I have been banned from television, that's why. I used to be on Blue Peter and all those things, regularly, and it all, pffffft, stopped."

Actually, he says, his TV career had stopped some time before that - he made his last BBC series eight years ago. Perhaps he is too scruffy for telly these days, I suggest. He gives me a look. "There are some bloody scruffy people on television these days. Very scruffy in what they think and the way they talk."
---

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2002/sep/30/broadcasting.aca...

He tried to become Prime Minister of Britain running on an anti-Europe platform.
What, they also sent him off to a forced labor camp?
In-depth look at Microsoft's Oslo and language M
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Conversely, there exist people who will do work for disproportionately poor compensation just because they like feeling useful -- the driving force behind Mechanical Turk.
Ballmer on Android: "Blah dee blah dee blah"
There are nine companies because that's how many were presented at the Web 2.0 Summit. There are no other reasons behind the decision to use that many.
Didn't you just made up the line "BBC fired respected scientist..."? I don't see that in the interview, and it doesn't look like he was ever an employee of the BBC (according to his wikipedia page).
I appreciate your angle but really the number of people working on a problem is a very bad indicator of how well the problem is being solved.
This is the worst time to sell, and the best time to buy.
"I don't know": three little words so hard to say
It's nevertheless quite a sensitive issue. I actually reconsidered before posting. But this is a pretty good community for these things generally (until the trolls show up...), so I went ahead.
I still don't understand. Hardware will always be a limiting factor in the sense that if you had better hardware, the software would run faster. So what's wrong with running tests on laptops, one of the main platforms operating systems are needed for.
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Offering project management seminars including the fundamentals of project management to the advanced Project Management Professional (PMP) Boot Camp
on "Global warming 'stopped in 1998'", from http://mediamatters.org/items/200703230007

Fox News host Brit Hume and a Washington Times editorial both cited a misleading statistic to suggest that global warming might have "stopped in 1998" because of a "negligible decrease in temperature" since that year. While 1998 was the hottest year on record, according to the Climatic Research Unit, an examination of temperature data since 1998 undermines the assertion that global warming "stopped" in that year. For example, neither mentioned the fact that five different years since 1998 (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005) have seen warmer temperatures than any year preceding 1998, according to Climatic Research Unit figures. Nor did they explain that 2005 was the second-warmest year on record, according to the Climatic Research Unit, and the hottest year on record when analysis of warming in the Arctic is taken into account, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
What I would do for the audio of Ballmer saying "blah dee blah dee blah"....
The article is interesting, but the headline here is terrible. He wasn't fired; he wasn't employed by the BBC. Instead, the BBC now won't make the documentaries that he suggests, which is an entirely different thing.
I am in a similar situation right now, and one of the things that we came up with is an upfront payment with additional dollars down the road pegged to revenue growth.

To clarify, I am not suggesting lowering your sell price but rather getting the buyer to commit to more dollars on top of your discounted cash flow figure.

One more minor advice is to negotiate a consulting fee for yourself. Clearly, you've been doing something right and the buyer will want that. I've heard of people getting significant ongoing $$ that way.

Best of luck and congrats.
I sometimes use Temptation Blocker (http://sourceforge.net/projects/temptblocker/). It prevents access to certain applications for a specified period of time. I'll block Firefox -- where all my typical news/blog sites are bookmarked -- but leave IE unblocked in case I really need to google something (some sql syntax, for example) work related. I could of course cheat and surf using IE, but that generally causes enough cognitive dissonance that I'm able to resist the temptation.
Do you honestly feel that someone saying "Global warming is part of a natural cycle and there’s nothing we can actually do to stop these cycles. " has a reasonable grasp of the issues. Humans could drop global temperatures by 2 degrees if we wanted to use a bunch a nukes. Granted it would be short term and the down sides are far more than the value but saying "we can't" is not the same as saying it's a horrible idea.

Over time people have constantly increased their control over the earth. Changing the weather is a large scale issue but so is building a dam. Like a dam the amount of energy you can control is significantly larger that that needed to build the control structure. And like a dam it's much simpler to channel the forces that are already at work than to start from scratch.
the essence is the same

No; there is a big difference between that and firing someone for their opinions.
Ask HN: How do you look for QA jobs?
Hello all,

I've been in QA for almost couple of years. Any QA folks who follow HN? Any websites that you follow to find about new QA jobs? What do you guys do to look around for QA jobs?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

--Aneel
Well... given his track record, I'd say this sets up Android to be an enormous success.

This says a lot about Microsoft's stance on the phone market as well (we won't innovate unless we can make serious money!).

Edit: I'm not the only one! (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/06/ballmer-android)
Sorry. But title should have been "Where do you look for QA jobs?".
There doesn't seem to be any xml / html generation libraries and they call it weblisp?
Unfortunately, I don't think it's ever possible to completely segregate an argument from its proponent. It would be nice if the world were that objective, but it's not. Intelligent design is a similar issue in my mind.
After reading this article I went to take a look at Google Image Service. I played for about two seconds before deciding my keystrokes could be applied to better things

But then I felt like I was doing really poorly entirely because my partner was dumb and continued to play for 30 minutes just like that.

My point: rationality isn't always the most important driving factor.
http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/29/do-it-fucking-now/
How much are they willing to pay? That's what you need to find out.
Anti spam, anti phishing and email security in business - AllSpammedUp.com
This is as much for my knowledge as the original poster, but what discount rate would you use? He doesn't exactly have a beta to do Weighted Average Cost of Capital with, or am I totally missing something?
“Single?” Lawn Signs Conquer the American Landscape
Former IT Manager Sentenced to One Year in Prison For Hacking Former Employer
if you're going to get talking about a competitor making a big move, never say "i don't understand their strategy" or "they don't have a strategy"

of course they do. and you just look like a schmuck when you tell the world basically that you don't care enough to do some simple research and come up with some pretty common sense conclusions.

if search is your money maker, and mobile is the new vogue, what do you do to get it so that your search is what everyone will be using?

android is a genius solution, google paid mozilla for years for control of search on firefox, then they came to their senses and made chrome. android is simply a leapfrog of a similar mistake. sure they can partner with RIM and Winmo and Symbian and Apple, OR they can make their own platform, innovate its features, open it to attract a huge base of developers and manufacturers, and tie core features to its own products seamlessly.
Just think, had McCain won, we might have ended up with Carly Fiorina...
On Democratic Peace
Cool that someone from Launchbox is involved. Seems like Google.org hasn't done much yet given all the resources they have.
Pocket projector shows the magic of miniaturization
Shrink the web browser window. It really helps.
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 11">
Word? Really?
Check out www.bookhuddle.com, a site where you can track the books you want to read, are reading, your favorite books, etc. Find out what books are newly released, top selling, in most users' lists, and more, by book category.

Here are the books I want to read: http://www.bookhuddle.com/list/4/Books-I-want-to-read
Here are some of the books I've read: http://www.bookhuddle.com/list/2/Books-I-ve-read
Ioke JVM Lang: The power of Lisp and Ruby with an intuitive syntax
When slashdot ran this story, the readers commented that the results seem suspicious. Misconfigured power saving settings are likely the cause of the speed difference.

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1008879&cid=25...
The Ftrain piece is not so much about that particular lawsuit. It's about the general problem of how, these days, just organizing your own data can lead to unintended legal exposure. Taxonomies are now bound to technologies, and often proprietary.

I like reading Ftrain because the guy is not at all from an engineering culture, and yet he is a self-taught hacker who is turbo-nerdy about the Semantic Web as applied to publishing.
He also dismissed iPhone initially and didn't understand why people would buy it. How can the CEO of one of the world's most well-known technology companies be so completely clueless about technology?
I was wondering what the background was also, as those signs are posted everywhere around where I live. Great investigation.

Even if the article wasn't worth reading (which it was), the first (and so far, only) comment is worth it alone: "You are the Upton Sinclair of lawn signs"
these embryos would never actually become humans

I think you must mean something else. My son and daughter were embryos once; what were they if not human?
For an easy and effective solution, quite a bit.
I've always estimated the discount rate based on the expectations for growth from the buyer. At the end of the day, the valuation on a site or business is simply whatever you can get for it. A site might be worth more to a buyer who sells a similar product whereas it might have less value to someone in another industry.
Getting rid of Ted Stevens for good is the first thing that should happen.
Disclosure: I know the guy who wrote the post but it's still some pretty good investigative work and an interesting read.

What strikes me as odd is that they are able to charge 3k-15k for the matchmaking service.

Whoops: Was a repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=355819
First and foremost 30 pageviews per visit is amazing. That's a bounce rate of about 3% which is nearly unheard of (porn site? :)).

Asking for 2 years of income is a good general rule.

Also factor in growth rates over the next 2 years. Estimate growth based on past growth, not on "well I have this new feature that should double traffic.

Factor in any assets you may have, this includes but is not limited to:
- Newsletter subscribers
- RSS Subscribers
- High search engine rankings
- Good domain name
- Industry leader

Think about the sentimental attachment. This is worth something, figure out your price.

Finally forget about the lump sum of money. Its sexy to think about a big pile of cash, but you have something in your hands that is making a consistent profit. Think in 2 years if you'll still be happy with this decision.

Take this advice from someone whose sold a website that has seen enormous growth since I sold it. Its amazing to see something you've made become huge, but also a little sad thinking it could still be yours.

Good luck, you're in a good position. A buyer approaching you means you have something they really want. Don't forget that!
Change.gov
change.gov is up, if not exactly pretty :-)

(and i'm curious to see what the Obama administration will do with whitehouse.gov.)
Very cool automatically created 3D map of Oslo
I googled, and found this site. http://www.websiteoutlook.com/ It has pretty interesting information about any site that you want to check. It gives information such as daily page views, and avg daily revenue. Should be atleast helpful.
Hey, if he's a good reverse-oracle, then that's valuable too!
Quite a hassle to start (need to install their own plugin as a .exe), but worth it.

They have used a special aerial photography technology for this. My Norwegian is quite rusty, more info here:

http://labs.finn.no/blog/sesam-3d-kart-3d-revolusjon-folket
I must be one of those people Linus wants to kick. Too bad for him. I love taking a break from staring at a screen, and I feel way better, physically and mentally, after a good run or a good rowing session. My lower back starts to feel stiff and cramped if I go for more than a day or so without exercise.

Also, I can't imagine life without skiing, and that requires a pretty decent degree of fitness. Anyone who doesn't ski, or doesn't ski hard enough — you don't know what you're missing, and I feel sorry for you. :) (<--- Smiley for the humor-impaired!)
I'm very, very optimistic about signs like this. Effective use of Internet-based communication, organization, and collaboration tools appears to be something that, generally speaking, comes naturally to younger generations and doesn't come at all to older generations. Appointing a few key people who get it to powerful positions in government could go a very long way toward delivering, in government, some of the same productivity improvements and transparency that we've come to appreciate in tech companies.
really like how he talked about go to work at his last company and not liking it, not wanting to be there, that an amazing confession from a founder and a huge responsibility.

Building a company that doesn't suck has far more to do with people / culture / and fit then free sodas and catered lunched.

additionally, he talks about the huge value of WOM and repeat customers which are often overlooked by tech startups where its all about uptime and new features. Love the perspective he brings to the table.
What type of business entity (LLC, S Corp, etc) was your company when you were approched, if anything?
My cousin is a Philosophy professor and he says it's annoying to hear "tappity tap tap" all the time, even when he isn't saying anything or before class starts, you can tell people are using IM.

I say jam the wifi signal, set up an access point with a signal booster but don't have it attached to anything. I'm not sure if that will work but it's worth a try.
I could be entirely "off the mark" here but I think it is a javascript lisp interperter which clearly has hooks into the dom directly. So it's more of a nifty client side tool. I think the potential for writing some cool games with this + canvas is huge. But really just writing games with js+canvas is huge, this would just make it feel a little nicer.
Richard Feynman's appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the failure of Shuttle Challenger.

http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html

The section titled 'Avionics' is a good read for any programmer and relevant to Dijkstra's discussion (@ 13:00) of the software developed by IBM and used in the Apollo lunar module.
Main Entry:
per·turb Listen to the pronunciation of perturb
Pronunciation:
\pər-ˈtərb\
Function:
transitive verb
Etymology:
Middle English, from Middle French perturber, from Latin perturbare to throw into confusion, from per- + turbare to disturb — more at turbid
Date:
14th century
1 : to disturb greatly in mind : disquiet 2 : to throw into confusion : disorder 3 : to cause to experience a perturbation

Thanks!