skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How much can I sell my company for?
I created a site back in 2006 to teach myself rails and it is now a #1 Google Ranked PR5 site. It has a strong viral loop and continues to grow at an exponential rate because of this. It's profitable and requires no work to maintain. The details of my sale sheet can be downloaded here:
http://myfreecopyright.com/sale_sheet.pdf

How much do you think I can sell this for?
You should probably subject everyone to vesting everyone at incorporation - to keep people from ditching early with a huge slug of equity

At incorporation, sure -- because at that point the entire value of the company is the work the founders will be doing in the future. But in the case of yousendit, they implemented vesting at a point where the company already had a significant value; the fact that it was able to survive having two of its three founders fired indicates that their contribution was made before the Series A, not after.

It doesn't make you an idiot to take that deal. It makes you a part of the VC machine. It's just how it works.

I'd say that anyone who accepts "that's just the way it works" as an answer is an idiot, but maybe that's just my cynicism showing. :-)
How about a "Deploy" button instead, Yes I like to "Watch, and "Share" is oh so social, but what would be much more useful is a "Deploy" button that would take requirement.txt, config.pl, manifest.yml and all those other artifacts, read them, and help me get the app running on the server, the instance or cloud. I can deal with the constant notifications that come with "watching" a github repository - what I want is a simpler path to Deployment.
I suppose the question is, assuming they are dead reckoning, is the current stock price 531 asking too much, or is there still profit to be made?
If there were many jobs available for qualified software developers in the US, which there are not.
It's a delicate balance. You need to be be emotionally detached enough to not let your decisions be affected. However, you also need to know how to be passionate about your project for any potential investors or colleagues to drive the project to succeed.
These roundups are getting too much.

Some of them can just easily be found by doing a simple search on github.

Maybe I should just do some articles like "Top 5 javascript mvc frameworks", "3 asynchronous libraries you can't live without"
Ask HN: What is the future of Google+
Google+ is a big debate today.

WSJ ran an article noting that Google+ is a ghost town:

on.wsj.com/zjRr06

But Inc Magazine ran an interview with Guy Kawasaki where he says Google+ might overtake Facebook one day:

http://www.inc.com/eric-markowitz/guy-kawasaki-dont-plan-your-social-media-just-do-it.html

Do you think Google+ will succeed or fail?
The Ultimate GoSquared Guide to Running a Software Daily Deal
Any easy way to set/get the exact position of nodes? rather than have it automatically generated, or overriding the automatically assigned position.
How to convert your Windows 7 UI to resemble Android Look and feel?
How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since 2006?
Uh, it's also not my job to go over to the ATM and find out why it's broken. On the contrary, trying to do so would probably get me arrested.

I have no reason to fix or even analyze a process until it is somehow relevant to me. Calling me immature because I decline to go hunting for problems I otherwise wouldn't even know about is bizarre at best.
I saw this when it was originally posted and decided not to comment then, but seeing it gain some momentum, I'm ignoring my better judgement. For a long time I was ill. My family was horribly poor when I was growing up, so the only doctors I saw were in state run institutions. Paranoia meant I never shared the reality I experienced, instead I only shared enough to get a mild "well, he's a teenager". I barely held on to sanity for a good number of years, eventually ending up where other's lives depended on me, so I sought help. I went through all manner of diagnoses and medications. The common side effect was that of, well, making my brain slow. Things that used to be easy, weren't anymore. I eventually found a doctor who ran a wide battery of tests with the end result being, if I read on an institution, he could have used those tests to keep me there. The final diagnosis was schizotypal personality disorder. Along came a battery of more medication, worse with the new diagnosis.

These new medications did wonders, but in addition to being slow, I was a foreign person to myself. And I kinda didn't like some aspects of that guy. So, with the help of the doctor, I went off my medication and developed new coping techniques. It's been 8 years, I've had some bad days and some good, I've got some odd habits, but unless someone watches me for a period of time, they wouldn't even notice.

All this to say, mental illness is a real illness, it's almost always manageable, but without the cooperation of the ill, there is no fixing it. And at the same time, the well person may be completely foreign, making the experience even more traumatic. Someone in the thread asked if folks would hire someone who said they were ill in an interview, but were being treated. I see the question as would you hire someone with only one leg. If they can do the job and fit well with the team, of course I would.
To answer these questions ourselves:

1. We plan to include the documentation for the API at the root of the API i.e. https://api.verelo.com will serve up the API spec.

2. One thing that I want to ensure we avoid is simply having return values that are not explained anywhere in the documentation, Facebook drives me nuts for this reason.

3. The main API i've worked with recently has been Facebook. I love how much info it exposes, but i hate how much it changes and the lack of documentation. There are also a bunch of surprise functions in there, very frustrating.

4. We use a lot of Zend functions today, the Zend framework is my initial thought...
Long hours are the key to profitability, as Philip Greenspun put it:

"From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. A programmer probably needs to spend 25 hours per week...Thus a programmer who works 55 hours per week is twice as productive as one who works 40 hours per week.... A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week)."

"If you see one of your best people walking out the door at 6:00 pm, try to think why you haven't challenged that person with an interesting project. If you see one of your average programmers walking out the door at 6:00 pm, recognize that this person is not developing into a good programmer."
What "things" would you link together in twitter and facebook?
Finishing up Machine Man by Max Barry - it's a fun book, and a quick read about a hacker who hacks on and upgrades his body parts (http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Man-Vintage-Contemporaries-Ori...).
Lessons in Spycraft and Privacy-Hacking from the American Revolution
Apache 2.4 Faster Than Nginx?
You can't change the history - the story of Git
This seems to be a cultural problem with the US. I agree with everything the author has said, but let me play devil's advocate: What is stopping a employee -- in a free market with specialized skills -- from adding a provision in his/her employment agreement for payment for hours worked >40 hrs/wk.

If the employer values you they will either tell you not to work more than the 40, or tell you when you can -- shifting the power to you.

There is no rule -- or should there be, about negotiating such terms.

Switching back, I think this should arrive more from our culture as it takes an assertive individual to do this as of now. I am a little hesitant to make such terms gov't mandated -- but I would like to hear arguments for it.
Imprescindibles - Roberto Bolaño , Imprescindibles - RTVE.es A la Carta
Exactamente. A few of my friends that down own a "TV" love to work that fact into conversation as much as possible. (Of course they also spend many hours a week watching pirated Downton Abbey on their 17" laptop.)
William Faulkner said: "In writing, you must kill all your darlings."
Conformity != reasonableness. There are some worlds people should not adapt to, but too many do. Many used this line of thinking on abolitionists in the ante-bellum period to maintain the institution of slavery.
One of the big things I like about CSS resets is it forces me to think about every design decision rather than just going with the 'sensible' browser defaults.

I guess with discipline I can train myself to always think about things like the rhythm created by font-size and margins on headers, but I've not experienced the downsides of a full reset yet.
FSF Europe takes aim at the Android ecosystem
Our series A investors wanted vesting and we said no. They were cool with it. Vesting for founders is insane. Never accept it. Vesting for execs is mandatory and has saved me once already, ironically because our investors demanded it.

Once again I'm surprised at how very very few founders have a thorough knowledge of what they're signing up for and how to get what they want. It's your company. Act like it. You don't need permission and nothing is "standard". Also think hard before you get into bed with A level VC's and angels and make sure you are on your A game because the worlds most skilled investors come with a heavy premium.

If you're bringing real value, there's nothing wrong with saying no.
I think you could get around $10,000-$15,000 for this.
If you work for a large employer and you have a way as an individual to get comparative coverage for the same cost ignoring any pre-existing conditions,

Twelve or thirteen years ago I looked into this hard - had a family, had a kid and a wife with a pre-existing condition or two.

It was available and comparable in costs. The biz failed before it left the ground, so I didn't need to go that route.

A few weeks ago this link came into my mailbox, from a mailing list.

http://www.techinsurance.com/

Recommended by the originator, who is a customer.

I also see that USAA offers health insurance. I'm a member, I should look into that.
According to the wikipedia article about it, it's caused by obsessive cryptographic checking.
You're right, I have no source to back that up and was making a flimsy emotional assertion. (I've edited my comment to reflect that.) I stand by the (desired) sentiment of my comment, though: psychiatry and the related sciences are important and there should be no related stigma.
Short Hair styles
Short hair styles are definitely among most preferable hairstyles, as they are not just very fashionable, but also very feminine, cute and extremely easy to.
> I've seen the inside of (admittedly only one of) them, although not as a patient. My father is a psychiatrist.

So you lack first-hand knowledge, and your argument is easily seen as a biased defense of a family member -- an authority figure, even.

I don't think you're helping your cause any.
Should I Buy a Laptop or Desktop Computer?
Off-topic posts are noise that make it harder for people with limited time to participate in HN. It would be nice to make an exception for rare and tragic cases, especially one like this where the guy has made valuable contributions in the past, but if we created a mental health exemption, it would just become an achievement badge for trolls.

If you're interested, many mentally ill people are very eager to communicate, and I'm sure you can find them on the web.
Angelina Jolie Oscars 2012
Angelina Jolie Oscars 2012
Angelina Jolie Oscars 2012 All of the dazzling stance was in fact straightaway duplicated by way
> ... the hellban is ... a decision made completely
> arbitrarily by a small group of people.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that the hellban is a specific action by a specific group of people. My understanding is that it's automatic, and triggered by various voting patterns. Some of your submissions got flagged by people who thought they were inappropriate. Some of your comments got downvoted (and possibly flagged) by people who thought they were inappropriate. Net result is that the software decided you were a troll, hence the hellban.

> I definitely don't want to be a part of this.

OK.
The first thought I have is the echo of Steve Jobs, cursing Google for getting into the smartphone business. The whole "We did not enter the search business" quote in particular comes to mind.

We're seeing Android@Home and in the car and I wondered where Apple was going to slide in. And here it is. Make no mistake – going to the high-end car and then slowly make available to the general public is a smart, but classic Apple approach. This is where Apple creeps in without really announcing anything specific.

I don't know if Apple acknowledged this, but this method is a way to get into a market (smartcar) without the pitchforks and conversations about who did what first.
If you focus on individual points, then the discussion will degrade. Take the time to synthesize what the overall message from the post is, then respond to that. The danger of responding to individual points, instead of the message, is you start arguing about the trees, not the forest. It's the difference between an honest discussion and a game of "Gotcha!" I admit it's a difficult balance.

I will sometimes pull out individual sentences from a person's post, but only if I feel that sentence is representative of their overall point, or it is a mistaken premise that when corrected, the rest of the post is moot.
I understand very well that my feeling is not (completely) rational - but for me this has another benefit:

Having a Tegra2 based phone and being interested in the latest and greatest Android experience is a .. pain. Counting on NVidia was already annoying for my desktop and Linux, but - well - I kind of am stuck there between a rock and a hard place if I want to play the occasional game.

On a phone? Or tablet? Thank god for alternatives and I'll vote with my wallet. No Tegra* for me until NVidia understands that a driver/documentation for their piece of silicone cannot be treated as secret sauce - and neglected
in Vim:

{range}!command will pipe content from vim to another command and back. Examples:

Sort contents of lines in place

:'<,'>!sort

Replace lines with calculated results (ie, line contains "2+3*5" and gets replaced with "17")

:'<,'>!bc
It would have been valuable to Shaikh if he had someone he trusted who could counsel him to just chill and not shoot himself in the foot. What happened to him at YouSendIt doesn't seem fair to me, but sometimes life is that way. Now he could learn from his experience and give it another go. Good luck to Shaikh and his family.
> Customers would be more likely to use your project if it were more active, not less.

Right, but if I'm a customer of your simple project, and a customer of Node.js and Homebrew, then I will never see your update and issue notifications that might actually have more relevance to me than Node or Homebrew because those two have near constant updates.

On the other hand, If I'm a customer of your project that is just as popular as Node or Homebrew, I'll be receiving hundreds of notifications from your project every day. You'd be effectively spamming me.

To fix this problem, we're asking if we could find a middle ground that lets the simple project with a dozen forks and 40 watchers maintain about the same level of notification real estate as the popular project with 5,000 watchers and just as many forks.
I really never understood the WebSQL single-implementation problem. It doesn't have to be - SQLite is public domain. Fork it. Maybe even change it so it fits a bit more smoothly with JS. But instead we invent something new, with new optimization problems, new usage annoyances, new inconsistencies between browsers...?
> its a perfect replacement for cookies without the HTTP overhead

Or for a big global object (to reload on each arrival/page)
What if the guy giving the job has a mortgage and a family, too? I think what you say is a sweeping generalization.
How Big Data is Changing Everything
I see -- your definition of working hard includes an effort quantifier? I can see that, although I did not interpret the phrase that way. I took "working hard" to be some determiner of resources expended. Time is certainly a resource -- whether or not it is highly valued by the employee is a different matter.
Your comment seems to have nothing to do with the OP. It starts with "In my career as a psychologist..." so it's not like he's trying to tar all psychological treatment with the one brush. He's specifically talking about a tendency to use psychological diagnosis as a tool to dominate and marginalize resistance to established norms. You can still see value in psychological treatment even if you stipulate that it's sometimes used as a tool for domination. E.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madness_and_Civilization#Impact
>>It cant happen and wont happen, but this downward spiral of competing to the floor can only be stopped if the entire world sets minimum standards of employment. Even them places like the US and EU will need to revise down, while the likes of India and China will have to revise up!!!<<

This is preposterous. The "downward spiral" as you call it is already slowing, as can readily be seen by many US companies "reshoring" jobs now that China's labor costs have risen so dramatically.

India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc., are all following suit because as demand for labor in those places increases, so does the price of that labor. No government intervention necessary.
Neurotic with a Side of Paranoia
One thing I’ve come to accept about myself is that I’m a textbook neurotic. Well…if it was in textbooks anymore. Psychology may have retired the term but, for good reason, it’s found a home in my vocabulary...
> localStorage is not the solution for offline and clientside storage (which it is being pushed as).

localStorage is A solution for offline and client-side storage, its fitness depends on the application's needs.
Patent: centralized registration for distributed social content services
If you find this interesting, I can highly recommend Porthcurno Telegraph museum in Cornwall (UK). http://www.porthcurno.org.uk/

Its where many of the first underseas telegraph cables came ashore, and was a hub for the British Empire's telegraph network.

It was later dug deep into the rock to protect it during WW2.

A great day out- highly recommended.
"The Hunger Games" and "Catching Fire" by Suzanne Collins. Am now waiting my turn for the library's copy of "Mockingjay"
> Our series A investors wanted vesting and we said no.

It's really a noop on their part. They know full well that if a founder ever leaves the company they can recover the ownership by diluting the bejesus out of him after he's gone (and bonus: everyone else who has already left is also diluted to near-zero).

Vesting just saves them the energy they'd have to exert on the backend.
Essential Sublime Text 2 Plugins
Twin Pillar Gated Hillside Estate
Ivilla offer Wine Country Luxury Estate Rentals and Wine Country Vacation Rental Homes in the ‘heart’ of Sonoma County’s Wine Country.
Depends how the recommenders are designed. If they are properly designed, they can remember what they have served you, and automatically inject some diversity into the mix. Actually, they could probably do it much better than current news solutions.
This comes recommended to me from an email thread a few weeks ago on this topic ...

http://www.techinsurance.com/

Not a customer, but the fellow who sent it along is.

Not every system will catch every person. I didn't have a problem obtaining coverage for my family a dozen years ago, but a) it was a dozen years ago and b) perhaps our pre-exisitings were not so bad.
1) Will we be able to spend money on some sort of hobby for my spouse? I can't imagine why not.

2) What kind of car insurance rates are we looking at as new immigrants (also young and relatively inexperienced drivers)?

Probably similar to ours. My wife's driving history isn't pristine, and she pays <$1k per annum for car insurance. Maintenance is simple enough in California as it's warm enough, too. Though we are married now so the price should come down even further.

3) What kind of vacations could we be looking given the income and living expenses?

That's a loaded question -- apples to oranges and such. My version of a vacation is a road trip somewhere with the wife (e.g. grand canyon) and most of those can be had for a car rental & $500-1,000.

Travel is relatively inexpensive in the U.S. -- you can often fly somewhere for $100 anywhere in the continental U.S. as long as you book properly in advance. Better yet, Hawaii & Puerto Rico are accessible, and as long as your visa is alright so is most of Central America / South America at reasonable prices.

Even local doesn't hurt either, I'm preferential to road trips myself and there's the great state of California to explore -- and Oregon / Washington not too far.

4) Will we be able to have nights out, go to a sporting event every once in a while etc?

Can't see any reason why not. Even a night out once a week wouldn't be difficult to have, esp. in light of them offering you $2k in housing assistance.

>> Basically, will a $90K salary for a household of two in SV/San Jose force us to carefully set up a budget, or will we be able to not worry too much about money? I think money is worth auditing / following closely all of the time.

You won't need to be counting every penny, but attach something like xero to your bank account just to keep an eye on it. It never hurts to use Chirag's online script to keep things under your finger: https://zetabee.com/cashflow/

>> Also, you mention that you're in a 4 br house with a garden for $1800. This sounds amazingly cheap to me, at least from what I've seen looking for housing online. How does one find a deal like that?

You don't in Northern California from what I hear. Housing is going to be your largest burden, but luckily that doesn't fluctuate as long as you're renting.

All in all:
Truth is so far from what we've experienced (admittedly, we're frugal, cook at home often, and when we do eat out it's banh mi or burritos) on $4k-6k a month is that there's really no surprises that can't be dealt with even on a monthly basis.

http://www.bestplaces.net/col/ is a good little cost of living calculator that allows you to compare areas / geographical regions. Also, might not hurt to pester @jordansissel who I know lives in the area & seems frugal enough -- also probably has a good idea of local medical costs, housing, etc.
He also said "Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written."

Sounds like a driven person to me!

I completely agree with what this article is saying. A lot of people pickup an idea, run for a while...and beat it to death while it continues to fail. The term "Fail fast" has been over stated a bit recently, but at the same time there's a lot in it...if something isn't working or you cant get what you wanted out of trying to validate it, move on.

Lots of people who have been in failed start-ups have gone on to be massive successes...if they didn't have the ability to recognize their success and pickup something new, they would have never made it. Failure is just another word for learning...so yep, if it doesn't work hate it and start something that you love.

The tricky part is knowing when to hate it, to borrow from the quote book again...

"The problem with the Internet startup craze isn't that too many people are starting companies; it's that too many people aren't sticking with it. "

- Steve jobs
Mojang hires lead devs of biggest Minecraft server mod