skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good place to start:

http://www.crunchbase.com/acquisitions

The left sidebar has a list of Top Acquirers. Of course most of the prices are not disclosed. Off the top of my head, these YC startups had exits that are unknown, but are probably under $20 million:

Anywhere.fm: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/imeem-gobbles-up-a-youn...

Clickpass: http://blog.clickpass.com/2008/12/19/clickpass-is-being-acqu...

Omnisio: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/30/google-acquires-omnisio...
The problem was that there was (and still is to some extent) some confusion about how much of their debt was implicitly or explicitly insured by the government. And yes, I realize how ridiculous this sounds but these things (billions of dollars in obligations) really were completely up in the air, partly due to crap EU legislation.
I prefer it on my own server, but also a "status" blog at wordpress/blogger/etc. Then you get both the benefits — full control over your blog, and a way to communicate with your users when the main site goes down! :)
The big difference is that Zimbabwe isn't playing in the big leagues, Iceland was supposedly a rocksolid 1st world country.
I was just thinking the same thing. LOL
And your point is? I don't see the content inherent to this post.
Just do what everyone does: Apply the dilbert principle and move on. </cyn>
Hey, sorry for not responding earlier. Miro is an app for downloading and watching video: www.getmiro.com
Ask HN: So I've finished College. Now what?
So first off, let me introduce myself. My name is Nik and I am soon going to complete a bachelors degree in biotechnology (bioinformatics). I am trying to decide what to do next in my life. The choices I am trying to choose between are (1) Going to graduate school, (2) going to work in the industry, (3) do a start-up.

So far, people have been encouraging me to go to graduate school but given the mass budget cuts to the california budget issues, its become very competitive and I am not even sure if I will be able to get into a grad program at the university I am graduating from.

I have lots of work and internship experience, but I am not sure if there are many positions opening up for BS degrees in the biotech industry (seems to be dominated by Phd, Md, and MBA from what I've experienced). Even if I do manage to secure a job, people tell me it will be difficult to get myself to get back into school.

A few of my friends and I have a few ideas for a biotechy web start-up, but we haven't taken the time to plan or put anything into action.

I've been reading the articles posted here and going through the user profiles of people. You seem like an intelligent group of folks. This is exactly why I am posting this question here, because I am sure there are other readers out there (registered or not), who are pondering similar questions.

So in YOUR opinion, HN, what do you think I should do and why?
You're right that there's not much money to be made - the cost is in the distribution. There are companies here in the US (such as Boston Organics) that provide this service, but the higher cost of labor/transportation (gas and refrigerated trucks, in some cases) when compared to India is what hurts. You either end up with small profit margins, or a cost to customers such that those who are interested don't perceive the service as being a good value.

Now, that being said, I could see this working if you targeted a geographically small, very dense area, and had your distribution center there. Then you could get deliveries from farmers and not have much distance to transport the goods yourself. I'm thinking an area the size of say the Mission/Noe Valley/Castro/Potrero Hill in San Francisco.

How well this all scales, and could you make a big business out of it - well, we've had a bunch of supermarket delivery businesses that have come and went, haven't we? But I bet someone smart could come in, innovate on what's already been tried here in the US, and make a nice living for a small group of people.
That would be fantastic. It would be so cool if you could launch a python, or even java dyno. I think most webapps could be structured to fit into this architecture, with the caveat of using ruby specific management tools such as rake.
At the moment there is none, it is nothing more than a game of "how much information can you get out of me before I grow tired of this toy." Obvious next steps would be to use this data to offer you "your friends like/recommend" services at some point where you are making a decision about what to buy or what to do.

The first part (what we see now) is easy, getting your service into the decision-making flow for part two is much harder.
Imminent Death of the Net Predicted due to RCF3484
This plugin has a bunch of reviews which were very obviously by its creator. This is scummy. As is combining a legitimate plugin (blocking parked pages) with a useless one ("lets you more easily use our search engine").
What are your ideas for a biotech startup? I've always wanted to do one of those but I don't know any biotechnology. The community here will tell you to do the startup.
His suggestion just saves the people who already know the material or who learn in other ways than homework from being penalized by having to do a ton of pointless busy work. If a person who thinks they can learn the material without doing the homework ends up trying to cram and then failing the test, that's his/her own problem. That person should just do the homework unless they're sure that they can learn the material without the homework.
Odnoklassnik
Wow, that is a pretty bold accusation with absolutely no evidence to back it up!

First and foremost, none of those reviews were by me, nor did I tell anyone what to say. Secondly, the search engine both a) provides the search suggestions for the block pages and b) has the blocked pages removed from its results. That is, they are naturally complementary.
And what of the person who correctly guessed, or perhaps had a program misgraded slightly in his favor and made the A?

I agree with the sentiment, which is why I liked some of my professors who graded in statistical clusters (of course, economic professors). They graded on a curve, so everyone's grade was bumped up by the process, never down - and the clusters of A's, B's and C's were usually obvious. If you were in between a cluster (an outlier case) most gave you the benefit of the doubt and bumped you up.

Of course, I may have liked it less if I wasn't always in (or above) the top cluster =P
The thing that worries me about this is the fact that I was already uncomfortable with the idea that Facebook might be making my private information public. For them to be integrating Twitter-like features doesn't exactly make me feel better. Twitters main draw seems to be in communicating with huge numbers of strangers while Facebook lets me talk to lots of friends at once.
Yeah, it is a funny name. I'm not sure, though, about this link. Seems a little spammy. When I saw this link on HN, with a little "mozilla.org" I thought, "Wow, someone at Mozilla is blogging about a cool plugin." But no, the DDG guys just linked to their plugin page in Mozilla's directory and got all the credibility that goes with Mozilla. Not a big deal, but I don't like seeing misleading links on HN. Maybe it's not that misleading, but the title leads me to expect some sort of analysis and a post rather than an installation page.
Facebook: More Sharing through the Social Stream
It's been known to happen. The 15" PowerBook G4 came with a FW800 port, but was removed when the 15" MacBook Pro came out. Bowing to public pressure, Apple restored the port to the 15" when they upgraded to Core 2 Duo.
The co-worker who merely fails to do his or her job has been the least of my head-aches in the various teams I've been on. The co-workers who are competent enough to be influential but incompetent enough to insist on poor design and process decisions are the one who have done the most damage to projects I've been on.

That said, you really should verify that he is the one who is incompetent. Pointing the finger at others has also been a clue that a given person isn't really a good person for a team.

The point about finding something he can do seems good. If someone knows they aren't good at difficult problems, it can work well since you can give them "grunt work" and they might be useful.

But really, the most damaging thing isn't someone's degree of incompetence but their exaggerated idea of their competence. If other people helping him is the worst effect this person has, he is low on my scale of damaging co-workers.
Will A Credit Card Solve MySpace’s Woes? Who Cares - Get Free Music.
I didn't mean to be misleading at all. The point is to announce the plugin, and that is where the plugin is! It's that simple. Actually, there is no page on our site to download it and we don't have a blog--our link to the toolbar goes where this link goes...where you download it...
Somebody, please, kill the author of that article!

If you are green, then you should think about effectiveness of your code. I mean, how much watts your code will use. Ideal program should produce result without using of any computation at all. Programs with lazy evaluation is very close to that ideal. Y Combinator is very green in such languages. But Y Combinator in call-by-value languages? Code, which produces code, to run code, which produces new code, to run code, which produces new code, ...? Author want to boil our planet?
Change mobile device text in real-time to make up for road bumps, Parkinson's, etc.?
Can this be done to some extent using the iphone's accelerometer?
The audience of my talk was mixed math, physics and chemistry with a shared interest in quantum control.

As for the physicists you cite, the ones I recognize seem to work on either quantum information or foundations of QM. Decoherence is far more accepted in these fields than in the rest of physics.
The Distributed Robotics Garden
Are there any startups focusing on doing this?
I definitely benefited from the article though - seeing as how this is the endgame for so many startups it is somewhat surprising that we see so little about this part. I guess its a little like the wedding night - everyone knows you got married, but that bit is held very close. Is it b/c of non-disclosure agreements? Tons of companies have gotten acquired and aside from the reddit's story a few years back I don't remember seeing or reading alot of those tales, though I wish I could. It would make great bedtime reading or anytime reading really, something to help keep hope and keep going.

And I agree, $1 million would make my life better, but really, I thought the first $20 million was supposed to be the hardest.
Of course, the assumption here is that grades should represent how well a student knows the material, not how hard they worked in the class. I know a number of teachers I had used that philosophy, despite the clamoring of the kids at the top of the class.

Now that I'm not there anymore, I actually agree with them. Classes don't exist simply to teach course material - there is a lot of stuff you learn simply by doing all the work. Consider a lit course. The stated goal of the course might be reading and analysis of the course texts, but you also get better at writing simply because you did the "busywork".

The same holds for quantitative classes. There's only so much you can test in an hour, even if there are tests every week. Longer problem sets cater to a different skill set that tests, and they are both worth learning. A class that lets you skate by on pure test-taking ability misses a large chunk of the education.
Aha, so that's the elegant way how this was supposed to be solved (in your head and on the spot).
That's very, very interesting.

Facebook is certainly proving to be a dynamic competitor. This could well "bring Twitter to the masses" in a way that Twitter has so far struggled to do.

That said, Twitter itself is on the cusp of achieving this.

And then again, Twitter's quiet unfollow is an important feature of keeping Twitter usable. If someone is overly noisy on Twitter, I can unfollow them. If they do the same on Facebook, what then? Unfriend them? Unlikely.

Say goodbye to Twitter spam, say hello to Facebook status spam.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424699
If you want to stay in biotech you should go to graduate school. The entry level bioinformatics jobs available to someone with an undergraduate degree are really lame. I know this because I have done them.

A startup with your friends would be the most fun. However I think a lot of money in biotech still comes from grants and pharmas so you might want a grad degree or someone with a grad degree in your startup.
LG KE850 Prada Black Full Touch Screen Unlocked
LG KE850 Prada phone up and running, and once you do there's no other cell phone you would want by your side on the runway. This unlocked cell phone doesn't do away with the button less interface as the iPhone.
how will you handle homonyms like 'bow':

from wikipedia:

# bow - To bend forward at the waist in respect (e.g. "bow down")
# bow - the front of the ship (e.g. "bow and stern")
# bow - the weapon which shoots arrows (e.g. "bow and arrow")
# bow - a kind of tied ribbon (e.g. bow on a present, a bowtie)
# bow - to bend outward at the sides (e.g. a "bow-legged" cowboy)
I hope you're right about Facebook becoming Twitter for the masses so the masses don't infiltrate Twitter.
that can be as simple as changing framework/language/db/architecture

Well, sometimes it's as simple as that. But usually it is not.

Sorry, but you're not making so much sense here...

Could it be you're just getting old? ;)
Showing that even international standards can be poorly thought out, and fail in real-world application. And when they do, they are hard to go back and fix.
Nothing is changing with privacy. Your updates are still only available to your friends (or whatever you set). The one-way follow is being added for real people to follow companies/public figures.
Dashboard May Not Be Just Another CRM
Thanks for the recommendation. I'm currently using this in place of imeem and I like it so far.

There are a couple things about it that bug me, though:

1. Loading songs take a bit longer than other sites.

2. The search interface can be a bit wonky. Example: when I click on a song, it shows action icons on the left. However, the icons disappear when I mouse over them.

3. Multi-song selection is weird/broken. Not sure if this is due to #2, but I can not add multiple songs to my queue at once. I am able to select multiple songs, but dragging them to the queue area does not work-only 1 song is added. Since I can't click on the icons, I am not able to quickly add multiple songs to my queue. This made creating my playlist a HUGE pain because all songs needed to be added one by one.

On the bright side, the interface is cleaner than imeem's and, for the most part, it's easy to use.
When you make such dire claims, you kind of owe it to your audience to have a brief summary of what you mean by "death of the net" at the top of the article.

Found it at the end:

"So we're going to have to take a slight hit to our resilience and reduce the number of A records we return for a DNS lookup to one instead of two."

Imminent death of the net indeed.
Do what Elaine did: promote him!
sure stuff :P
Ah, no blog. Ok, my bad :)
Robotic Nation from Marshall Brain (the "how stuff works" guy)
There's no sense in prescribing a change to "our grading system" without even referring to the content of the class that's being graded, based on the assumption that all the work a teacher gives out to students can be classified as "homework", which is for the purpose of practice, and "test", which is for the purpose of comprehensively measuring one's performance.

For example: If the teacher assigns a 10-page research paper or critical essay, most people wouldn't classify the paper as a "test", so under this schema it must be "homework". But I don't see how the skills that one could demonstrate by writing such a paper could also be demonstrated in an exam.
I have to admit, if big red had the iPhone, I'd switch over in a second. The ecosystem they've built around the iPhone is amazing.

That said, I think the article's title is a bit misleading/linkbait-y. Asking customers about the iPhone in a survey is far from "grilling"
When you owe 850% of your GDP it doesn't really matter if you nationalize them or not - your country is screwed.
Making homework optional across the board (e.g. you can get an A if you ace the exams) is silly. It makes sense for a few courses (e.g. freshman writing, calculus sequence, intro language) which exist to train a specific mastery that can be objectively tested in a short period of time. It doesn't make sense, though, to pass a CS major based on exams alone (as opposed to programs), an English major without papers, or a math major without take-home proof assignments. He could argue that such assignments are tests, but then the distinction between tests and homework becomes so blurry as to be useless.

Making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic.

I'd argue that the problem is inherent in the fact that different grading scales (0-100 vs. A-F) are appropriate for numerically-graded exams and subjective assignments like papers. Converting a 0-100 scale to A/B/C/D/F has the problem the OP mentioned. But when it comes to papers, most people can only judge 4-5 levels of quality before inconsistencies pop up. This is one reason why the "E" (high fail) level of the original A-F grading system almost immediately dropped away, and D is rarely used. A/B/C/(D)/F exist, in effect, to mirror those separable levels of quality.

In fact, I'd argue that innate this 4-level limitation is one of the reasons many colleges (esp. Ivies) have such grade inflation in qualitative courses: with plus/minus grades, the three discernible levels of respectable work are mapped to A, A-, and B+/B, the one of mediocrity to B-/C+/C, depending on the professor's proclivities, and the truly awful work to C-/D/F... whereas a solid B (85%) in an intro science or language course is still a respectable grade.
Live tour of Anybots through a robot's eyes, today 4-5pm (PST)
Ask HN: how would you protect a URL redirection service from spam?
I run DecentURL.com, and many people have found it pretty useful to date, but the problem is that now most of the URLs submitted are spam. Legitimate users don't see this, which is great, but as sysadmin I don't like the fact that 95% of the links in my growing database are spam (or that spammers are then using DecentURL as a kind of spam proxy).

Mostly it's some site like nycshorttermrental.com submitting say 200 times with a different random title each time, over the course of a day or two.

Something like Akismet doesn't work, because there's not enough data. All you give DecentURL is one URL, and Akismet can't tell it's spam from a bare URL (you can try it at http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cgi-bin/akismet/test_akismet.py).

Any suggestions? How do other URL redirection services kill spam? (Or do they just ignore the problem, and let the spam come in?)
the title is a joke, but the content of the article is good.
And how would you try to express something which is outside of our own possible experience? Sure, you could say "eternal present" or something; doesn't seem to sound much better...
Did they announce Facebook status search like Twitter search?

I need this for marketing and social real time search is going to either be extremely complimentary to Google or possibly Google's biggest competitor!
Maybe. But iTunes, and sellers crippled digital music in general, was competing against free and unrestricted.

I am skeptical that Amazon or Apple will remove the encumbrances if there is no market pressure from having the same content available in an open format.
A de-anonymization walkthrough
Here's my best stab at it, from the perspective of a guy who saw the internet in its infancy (not myself):

Email was the first great asynchronous digital mass communication tool built on the store-and-forward idea. Twitter (or SMS'd tweets, really) is another, much more limited form of the same technology.
Synopsis: When choosing between multiple A records, RFC3484 changes the old "choose at random" behavior to a deterministic "choose one with longest matching address prefix", given the huge proportion of home machines at 192.168.. it will favor some A records over others.

Avoid the issue by not returning multiple A records with different address prefix lengths compared against 192.168 and 10. That will make hosting selection a little trickier.

The internet will be pronounced dead in 60 seconds.
You're missing the point of HackerNews. We're here to have polite, intelligent, and constructive conversation.

This is not the place for memes, inane jokes, or anything remotely similar.

Please reserve it for reddit its ilk.
the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

with damaging info in your hands, you will have new-found friends. you just need to plan ahead, instead of reacting.

also, in the real world, your enemies will try to sever your connectivity; the last mile is the weakest link, so don't use something they expect.
Well, I don't want to give too much away, but I suppose I can humor you guys :-D. I think it may be more of a web start-up than a biotech start-up to be honest. It's a web start-up with a biotech foundation, if you will. We are basically taking our knowledge of genetics, (insert mass biotech-major curriculum here), and bioinformatics to people via the internet. It'll be full of cool stuff that joe the plumber will be interested, if not curious, in knowing. The only issue is that we haven't found a way to make any sort of income off of this yet without inconveniencing potential users :-(, which is one of the main reasons we have yet to put the wheels into motion on this project. I'm afraid we have only minimal business experience.
Then your teacher is admitting that my design only the few tenths of percents surrounding the letter grade cutoffs are worth anything. I suppose it's just a matter of opinion, but I find this system remarkably arbitrary.
Both graduate school and a startup are good ideas.

This being the worst economy since 1930, graduate school may be the way to go.

You can also do both at same time.
I work for Netlog as a web developer (great job!). Netlog's main audience are indeed teens and people in their twenties. The site is extremely popular in Europe, kinda like the Facebook of Europe.
I believe that talking about "social real time search" as Google's biggest competitor is vastly overstating things. Twitter simply cannot produce most of the content that Google can provide. Short opinions, yes. Lengthy product reviews, no. If you're trying to figure out how to solve X problem (say, in an OS installation or in your code, for a technical standpoint), Twitter may well be useless. It's difficult to fit specific, real information into 140 characters.
Facebook Polls Developers To See Which They Prefer: Facebook or Twitter
I doubt the author of the blog post is saying projects and papers shouldn't be assigned. He's probably just saying that normal homework is a complete waste of time for some people.

I personally abhorred homework and loved projects and tests.
Exactly. Struggling students already have the option to not do their homework with the existing system, this new suggestion doesn't change that.
If you plan to create a popular product that handles tons of data and tons of users, then include sharding as soon as possible. Bolting sharding on after you have lots of data, lots of code, lots of traffic and lots of users is a nightmare and worst-case scenario.

You can postpone it thought if you are unsure how popular your product will become. If you do postpone it, then be sure your joins are "sane" - normally, you don't really do joins in a sharded environment as data is located on different databases, so you will do yourself a major favor in not doing joins that will force you to re-model your data when you switch to sharding.

And in a sharded environment you also copy things around :)