skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A friend of mine is working on a comet server in Erlang at http://code.google.com/p/erlycomet/
Hm, it should work with Safari 3. This was tested in OS X 10.4 and 10.5. (Note - it definitely does not work with Safari 2)

The initial load time in Safari is significantly longer than firefox (although refresh loads are much more speedy). You might have to wait 10-20 seconds.
Its interesting that at this very moment, we're finishing up connecting contacts between users for collaboration with our startup. (The trick was to allow users to be able to own their own contact lists and information within a secure zone (for example, a company needs to own a version of an employee's personal contact info even if the person leaves), but then be able to create a link to the people or companies represented. At any point in the identity graph, information can be deemed private and only available to owners, etc.
The things you would end up learning about Erlang while writing a web server aren't as much about processes but more about pattern matching.

Most people focus on Erlang as an easy way for multi-core/multiprocessor and distributed computing and it is wonderful at that, but the core of the language is a pattern matching engine that is simply amazing.

Also, anyone who thinks that Erlang is slow with regular expression should convert the regular expressions into a binary and try some pattern matching. That tends to be more of the Erlang Way of doing things ...
Beautiful! This was a win-win-win for everyone. I bet Mr. Zukor enjoyed reading those letters as much as Mr. Lykes enjoyed writing them.

This reminds me of something about myself that I had long forgotten. My first corporate job was as a programmer analyst trainee for a Fortune 500 company. Part of my training was to spend time in every department of the division. Every Friday I wrote a one page report to my boss even though it wasn't required. I was so happy to have the job and so grateful to have the opportunity to see the other departments, I wanted my boss to see that his "investment" in me was a wise one. He never acknowledged any report, but after about 4 months of this his secretary said, "Dave loves reading your reports."

Mr. Lykes may still be at Paramount, but I moved on when my company disappeared years ago. Thanks for bringing back great memories.

Just how old do we have to get before we stop doing stuff like this?
Funny, every Sunday morning my other half sits at the dining room table with 3 newspapers while I'm in the adjoining office reading Hacker News. She says, "Why don't you come in here and read with me?" I tell her, "As soon as any of those papers has anything as good as this, I will."
You want to check out Game Theory Evolving, by Herbert Gintis, if you haven't already. It talks about exactly this kind of stuff.
emfle is making a more straightforward point: if you anticipate your opponent will try to beat his latest move, you should not try to beat his latest move too; that would be shooting for a draw.
"In the beginning was the flowchart..."

Then came the "consulting industry" asking the question, "How can we squeeze a few more bucks out of this situation?"

So they came up with stuff like UML, DFD, Rational Rose, etc., etc., etc. to support their primary objective, which has always been...

<cue dramatic music>

To make those who do not know what they are doing appear as if they do.

</music>

How else could they take someone who knows nothing, pay them $50K per year and bill them out at $250 per hour?

Every time I read a post about "diagramming", I'm reminded of the end of a Boston Celtics game in the late 80's. Down by 1 point with 3 seconds left, Coach K.C. Jones was diagramming the play on his chalkboard when Larry Bird wiped everything off it and said, "Gimme the ball." They did. He shot. They won. So much for diagrams.
And this is one of the main reasons why you see thinly disguised RPS game mechanics in most strategy games, esp. multiplayer online games. Cycles of pwn are the easiest way to prevent absolutely optimal strategies (the I Win Button syndrome).
"No closing tag": nice, I wonder how (non-X) html became so unruly ;)
I just tried on Leopard as well. No dice. I'm able to add people, but no fields. Then, I refresh and I can add a field, but then can't add another person. It's one or the other and then it fails. I feel like I'm publically criticizing you, but am in no way trying too. Contact me if you want apgwoz at the big google mail.com
I've been using Erlang to create ErlyWeb (http://erlyweb.org) and Vimagi (http://vimagi.com) (which is built with ErlyWeb). Erlang is a lot of fun once you get past the initial hurdle.
Worse is better:

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0257.ht...
Psshh.. I make all of my rock-paper-scissors decisions with a resistance noise generator.
MIT Students Power Supercomputer With Their Feet
Scribd Launches Qualified Publisher Program
Is It Too Late To Get In? (Startup Conundrum)
Neat technology (took 23 seconds to load your home page)...
From a marketing perspective, I think you should ponder what value you provide. The home page emphasizes features.

May be cliche, but when people buy a drill they don't want a drill-- they want a HOLE. When people sign up for your product they have a problem that they want to solve... What's that problem? I'd simplify your home page, focus on value statements, screenshots, and examples.

(just my 2 cents)
I don't like Apple's secrecy fetish. It reminds me of Dick Cheney.

I hate it when Robert Scoble is right, but Apple really needs to open up with respect to things like blogging.

Channel 9 made Microsoft, of all companies, feel a lot more human and a lot less evil.

I realize this is incompatible with the Mac cult and "one more thing" Stevenote surprises.
very interesting I love meeting people like Mr. Lykes and yourself that take the extra (not asked for) step. These are the kind of things that really separate you from the bunch. And I really think there is no age on this, as long as you are fighting to achieve more and do better you have room to keep doing things like this. And I guess once you are the manager and the president you can remember how much it means to be appreciated when someone does these kind of stuff, and will work harder to motivate those that do these (rather than not saying anything direct in response to the mails in both cases)
Corporate Logos redesigned for WEB 2.0
Reality mining and your cell phone
I am happy that apple wasn't able to or didn't try hard enough to find the informer
I used to do stuff like this all the time, but when I read this post, I realized that I don't anymore. What happened? I don't know, but maybe being 5 levels deep in a recursive function may have something do to with it.
Thanks for the feedback!

The home page slowness is fixed.

You're right about the lack of intelligent marketing on the homepage. Frankly, this was a problem with the earlier startup as well.
No offense taken - the alternative to public criticism is lonely obscurity :)
This is extremely cool, (check out the video at the bottom), but I'd hardly consider the guy more of an artist than an entrepreneur, especially with this quote:

"an unauthorized, ongoing video-art performance collaboration with the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, Clear Channel Communications, and its selected artists."
Anybody notice Guido van Russum commenting two messages into that chain?

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0184.ht...
Accessibility mashups: AxsJAX fun with XKCD Comics
> Obviously, they aren't good enough. In my opinion, the real problem is that lenders should never be able to profit if the consumer defaults on the loan.

How do you think that lenders make money on a default?

At best, lenders break-even on forclosure. When a forclosure sells for more than the money owed, the remainder goes to the borrower, not the lender.
Fair Use vs Free Speech in the Internet Age
Tapefailure closing for lack of funding
There are a bunch of stories like this about the young Steve Jobs.

He would totally ignore protocol and directly ask to speak to the CEO of whatever company he wanted to do business with, even as a college drop out kid. More often than not the CEO in question would recognize a kindred spirit and be pleased to speak with him.
Flows nicely with Vladimir Putin being Person of the Year and all.
Exciting billion-dollar idea:

A startup that takes a website, its current fad and the new fad as input, and outputs a transformation of the website that's adapted to the new fad.

PS: All automated, of course.
Good story. Reminds me a lot of how I got into programming console video games in 1995, a business I regarded as no less magical or exciting as the movie business was back then. I paid my way to GDC, then faked my way into E3 when that didn't work, managed to buttonhole the right guy there, got his business card, called him every other week, eventually got my foot in the door and started a nice long career in video games.

Now games are all corporate, though, so of course I'm doing an internet startup.
"Even turning the device off, doesn't get you off the hook. It still transmits a signal, which can be tracked."

Kinda scary. After 2007 was supposed to be 2008. Starting to look more like 1984.

Is this true for all cell phones now?
http://www.nirvanix.com/careers.aspx#sdd

They're a Microsoft shop. Boo.
Ask YC: Should a business method patent stop my startup?
It made me sick to read a "business method" patent spelling out a service I am considering developing. I know similar services exist, although not in the exact formulation as the patent and what I might create. Are these patents meaningful?
I'm now very curious -- what is Facebook using Erlang for?
They sure seem to be floundering in the good will department these days.
the auto-formatting swallowed the multiplication symbols. the actual code should be this, with "TIMES" replaced by the multiplication symbol. is there any way to escape them?

javascript: R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R TIMES x1+i TIMES x2+x3) TIMES x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R TIMES y1+i TIMES y2+y3) TIMES y4+y5}R++};setInterval('A()',5); void(0);
b. and c. are not an option for everyone.
Their risk profile may be different than what you think it to be.
That is a good and important book. It is really important for Engineers - ie if you WIN an argument, you have LOST a friend.
The actual academic papers from MIT are far more interesting:
http://reality.media.mit.edu/publications.php

N. Eagle and A. Pentland (2007), "Eigenbehaviors: Identifying Structure in Routine", Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology (in submission). http://reality.media.mit.edu/pdfs/eigenbehaviors.pdf

L. Wang et al. (2007), "Instant Message Clustering Based on Extended Vector Space Model", Advances in Computation and Intelligence, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4683, 435-443. http://reality.media.mit.edu/pdfs/Wang.pdf

E. Terzi (2006), "Problems and Algorithms for Sequence Segmentations ", Ph.D. Thesis, Computer Science, University of Helsinki, 2006. http://reality.media.mit.edu/pdfs/Terzi.pdf
U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007
This just in: global warming debated.
Who Will Be The First Tech President? Help Us Endorse A Candidate
Yeah, could we save that for some other site? Any time these get voted up, they're all about beliefs and have no real exchange of information.
The Best Software Development Posts of 2007
Ask YC: What is a website worth?
I've been approached by someone who would like to buy http://10minutemail.com (disposable e-mail addresses for spam avoidance) from me.
It was just a fun project for me, but did pull in a fair bit in google ad revenue over the last 12 months.
The site gets about 2 million page views a month.
Is there a calculation on what a site like that would be worth, based on traffic or current ad revenue or something else?

Regards,

Devon
List of Companies Currently Using Lisp and Scheme - please help me expand it
10 great Web site designs/redesigns of 2007
I recently tried Erlang and it was fun, but I am not that excited by it anymore. It could do with some convenience features, like arrays. List module could be imported per default and stuff like that. I ended up having to write my own methods for fairly standard things (could have been because of my lack of experience with Erlang, though). And I only did some simple project euler problems, nothing big.
Smart Elevators, Dumb People
Does Japan Need the iPhone?
I'd be concerned about losing manufacturing capability overseas, except for one prickly little detail. Software and services are to the 21st century what heavy industry was to the 20th. The manufacturing of what's really important is still happening here.
You could look at current ad revenue over a year or two.
Loopt just beginning, mobile reality mining is the future
Really interesting article explaining for YC founders mobile as the next step in the wave of technology. Beyond just the simple geo-location stuff.
So a 1X or 2X of annual ad revenue is standard valuation?
A useful framework is that companies should be valued at all future profits, adjusted for inflation and risk
We're very proud to see Fluther.com in such excellent company.
Business methods were held as unpatentable subject matter until a Supreme Court ruling in 1998 ("State Street Bank"). Almost overnight, a flood of business method patent applications hit the PTO, but the examiners had no prior art to cite against the applications.

As a result, many absurdly broad business method patents were issued between 1998 and 2001, when the PTO started to tighten up on the issuances for business methods. For example, see U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314 ("Network sales system"), which probably covers every online shopping cart you've ever used...

I find it interesting that the timing of the decision coincided perfectly with beginning of the internet tech boom, so the overwhelming majority of business method patents are related to internet businesses, for better or worse.
I think it's usually a 1x at the smaller scale. I would take a look here for comparables:

http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/

Since the other party sought you out, don't feel the need to discount too much.
I think what davidw meant was that you should monitor your ad revenue of a year or two and then project your future profits (as DaniFong said), adjusted for inflation, and base your valuation on that
10 minute email... Why stop at 10 minutes! What about 5 minute email? ;)
I can think of other services that violate this patent and still exist. On the other hand, I can't really do too much if I get sued... The current patent system is such an anti-competitive blight. Ugh.
It is worth exactly $7,328.91. Not a cent more or less.
For ad based/impression revenue, using the Google Firefox/Toolbar referral fee is a good rule of thumb.

For Google, each user that installs the F.F/Google Toolbar, and hence will be exposed to ads each time they search the web is worth $1 Dollar, or at least that's how much they are willing to pay for each user having Google as their default search engine.

So I would say $1 Dollar per signed-up user, +/- fudge factor if you really have or haven't additional leverage on your users.
A baseline, if you have predictable revenues, is the Net Present Value of those revenues. Basically you treat your business as a machine that produces money on a schedule, like an annuity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value

Of course, you'll need to adjust for (1) risk and (2) growth. If your buyer has better ways of utilizing your website in their business than your ad revenues, that can increase the value of your site to them. For example, if your buyer is a spammer himself and wants to use 10minutemail.com to deceive people and harvest the addresses of people who go to great lengths to avoid spam, and those addresses are worth $1 each to him, then you should include that "revenue" stream in calculating your site's present value.

On the other hand, things could get worse for your business, and any risks will be reflected in the price. Some risks are very hard to price, which is why it's much harder to sell a company that e.g. looks like it's going to get sued.

If you're not an experienced negotiator, be careful not to sell yourself short. If you have to throw out the first number, you want it to be as high as it can possibly be without causing the buyer to hang up immediately.

Good luck!
The book "Everyware" offeres a great introduction to this topic and the complex issues surrounding it. I think mobile+attention data startups are going to be big next year, with FireEagle from yahoo brickhouse one of the first.

Are any news.ycers working on everyware/ubicomp style startups?
Bluetooth helps Facebook friends
Shooter, Zak, joshwa, vikram, ias, chris_l, gibsonf1, phony_identity, herdrick, and brlewis - I mentioned all of you from comments you made about using Lisp/Scheme in your startups/companies (pg too, of course)
Bond yields are a little fucked up right now (thanks, credit crunch), but they provide a way to figure out an investment's valuation.

Let's assume the 1-year government bond yield is at 5% (it's not, but it simplifies the math, so bear with me). As a gross oversimplification, that means that a $20 investment today will produce a risk-free return of 5% ($1) at the end of a year. The converse is also true: if a risk-free investment produces $1 in revenues over the course of a year, then the investment should be valued at $20.

So, if your website was risk-free, it'd be valued at ~20x your yearly earnings (after-tax net profit).

Of course, it's not risk-free, so that will discount the price.

On the flip-side, it has potential for growth, so that will increase the price.

For comparison, other tech companies trade at:

Microsoft: 23x earnings

Yahoo: 46x earnings

Apple: 47x earnings

Google: 53x earnings

Salesforce: 688x earnings

Facebook: 500-1000x earnings (http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2007/10/25/keep-an-eye-on...)

1000x earnings is what Yahoo was valued at in 2000. That's probably a max on what you can ask for :). Given your growth potential, I'd say 20x earnings is probably a min.

Good luck!
2008: Year of Reckoning?
Common Man that's just stupid, nobody will buy that!
That depends:

What are your current ad revenues like? How many uniques per month? How many email addresses created so far?
What is with these candles next to Google results? Is this a seasonal artifact? (screenshot)
How 2 people started Remember The Milk (simple todo list with 300K users)
Inc.'s Entrepreneur of 2007, Elon, wants his old job back!
"So I would say $1 Dollar per signed-up user"

This makes no sense for an anti-spam service. They aren't "signing up", they are "opting out" of all future emails from whatever they are using the email for...so this user will probably come back, but if you spam them even once, you've lost them for life. They aren't the same as "signed up" users for a toolbar or installations of software.

This is a pure ad play, in its current form, and has revenues from that source. There might be ways to integrate this with other anti-spam, anti-malware, privacy, whatever, features to build a product suite that is worth more than the sum of its parts, but right now it's an ad-supported model.
I've noticed a lot of cellphones nowadays don't do a full power down, like televisions, for quick bootups. The solution then is to take out the power source.
The traditional rule of thumb for a starting point is 10x if there is any growth at all. Selling for 1x makes no sense, unless you have some liability concerns that you haven't mentioned--keep it for a year and get the 1x revenues, and then you're ahead. Unless it's taking more time than you'd like to spend on it, a 1x or 2x offer should be laughed out of the room.
For folks doing simple net present value valuations, please keep in mind that small businesses and small websites are a different world. Most require work and promotion to maintain. Thankfully, IRobot, whose stock I own a few shares of, has never asked me to run an adwords campaign, pay their hosting bills or do their customer support. Selling a small business is often like selling a job.

Take a look at the sitepoint marketplace at closed sales and see how many you see going for 10x multiples. In terms of selling, the value of any business is exactly what the market will pay.
Scribd woos publishers
I am a designer myself, and so I know who they are because they are very active in the design community, I have interacted with some of them, others I have simply heard good things about.

They are all "leaders" in design, many have written books that are widely available in bookstores, etc.

You can look at their portfolios and get a sense of the broad range of products / services they have completed designs for.
I have sold a few small websites and have gotten between 15-30 months of revenue in the sale.
Kayak Raises $196 Million, Buys Rival SideStep
could your elaborate on the following paragraph? i'm not sure how something is worth 20 dollars because of 1 dollar yearly revenue. what assumptions are you making?

Let's assume the 1-year government bond yield is at 5% (it's not, but it simplifies the math, so bear with me). As a gross oversimplification, that means that a $20 investment today will produce a risk-free return of 5% ($1) at the end of a year. The converse is also true: if a risk-free investment produces $1 in revenues over the course of a year, then the investment should be valued at $20.
It simply listed the next stops it was making. If it was stopping at floors 4 and 7, when the doors opened at the 4th floor, the electronic sign above the elevator doors would be displaying 7 - and people going to the 7th floor would see it and get off.

Evidentally, the "dumb people" are the engineers, and the "smart elevators" are the ones invented 100+ years ago.
Ultimately the site is worth whatever you get paid for it.

To get an idea of what others are getting for similar sized sites: http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/ . I really haven't seen another market for small companies like sitepoint's.

Mind you, this is just from poking around on sitepoint's site, but from what I understand 1-3x annual earnings is fairly typical for companies like yours. But, it also depends on what your page range is, how many different sources of revenue and traffic you have.

For instance, a company with a high page rank one search engine will be worth less than a company with a high page rank on all 3 major search engines. High page rank on multiple engines means multiple sources of traffic and your site is less likely to suffer next time one of the engines reshuffles their rankings.

Also, if you have multiple streams of revenue, that increases your valuation as well. For example, if all of a site's revenue is coming from Adsense, then the site tends to be valued less than if you have multiple streams from different sources. If you're using some affiliate networks, direct advertising as well as Adsense that increases your multiples. Why? Because your revenue stream is diversified and less likely to suffer suddenly.
I think that's the sweet spot. Engineers have to be smarter by being dumber because changing user behavior and expectations is really hard. Indeed, the hardest part is getting people to enter in their floor number before getting in.
It's a ridiculous metric. They're talking about the power at which the panel peaks in full sun.

If you buy a panel that peaks at 200 W for $600, that's called 3 $/W. It's dumb.

A better metric would be $/kWh. Some related calculations here: http://pingswept.org/2007/12/20/i-retract-all-scoffing-remar...