skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Careful investors do not generally value companies based on revenues or earning potential in future - they first find the worth based on the current earnings or assets.
But then again internet startups are not usually evaluated for their worth by careful investors.

EPV (Earning Power Value) is a good way to calculate the worth of the company based on the earnings.
EPV = Earnings/cost of capital

So if the company can raise money at 10% interest, then the EPV will be 10x its earnings.

Please take the above with a grain of salt. You should value it as high as you can negotiate. It will help if you know what the buyer plans to do with your site - that is an important factor that raises the valuations of web startups. Youtube or facebook get such crazy valuations not for their profit potential in isolation but based on the plans of their acquirers.
The images are coming from http://www.google.com/images/k3.gif

I thought it might be related to the keyword "solar" but looks like "solar module characterization" is the only thing that brings it out (I only tried 4 other combos with the word solar).
Customer Service is the New Marketing
An easy way to find more would be to go through http://weitz.de and look at the page for each library. Most of them have a list of some of the users. Clutu, TwitterBuzz, Jalat, Heike Stephan, xOs, and the NIST all use Hunchentoot. CafeSpot, Cleartrip, PK Bass & Tackle, and the Cork Multitext Project use its predecessor, TBNL.
Obviously. The problem here is estimating profits and risk.
That calculation assumes that the risk-free rate is 5%, and that you will get $1 per year forever (i.e., considering the company to be an annuity that pays $1 per year forever). A more general formula is:

Value = (Annual revenue) / (interest rate - growth rate)

The interest rate here is the interest rate that takes into account how risky your business is--the rate you'd be able to borrow at, the "cost of capital". Let's say you could get a loan (secured only by the assets of the business) at 15% interest, and that you expect to grow by 5% per year. Then per $1 of annual revenue:

Value = $1 / (.15 - .05) = $1 / (.1) = $10
I wonder what they did to get the word out about RTM?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90211
I hope it was 'oh, that's obvious' rather than 'duh... obvious'. I mean, many people just try to evaluate the dream. Others try price earnings ratios. But rarely do I hear mention of this type of analysis, so I decided to mention it.
At YC we use Arc not only for this site but also for a bunch of internal software we use to run YC itself.
From "How to Rate a software developer"...

"A great developer dresses in great business clothes Monday to Friday."

Sure...
No! NO NO NO. Not 5. He said 10. Nobody's doing 5. Who uses email for 5 minutes? 10's the key number here. 10 commandments! 10 doors! 10, man, that's the number. 10 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch! Step into my office!
My guess? Not a darn thing. It was valuable, people liked it, and told their friends.
Apple uses Scheme in the new Leopard security scheme.
cool - good luck, I will have a go.
Picnik is a really nice looking website... Some good ones for inspiration there... Thanks jobenjo

P.S. - jobenjo, are you involved with Fluther.com?
Removing any of the three words results in no candles.

They are clearly Kwanzaa candles -- red, black, and green.

Googling "kwanzaa" or "candles" does not produce the candles, but googling "kwanzaa candles" does.

"hanukkah candles" and "christmas ornaments" also result in decorations along the "sponsored links" box.

Must be a hash collision.
Apple Rumor Site, Think Secret, Shuts down
Wow. Impressive analysis.
The Daily WTF - "Could You Explain Programming Please"
Vote it to the top of sites like this? I'm pretty annoyed I read that article/advertisement.
"SimpleDB simply sucks"
So old school, I love it.
Peer Into The Minds Of Digg Users: Digg Adds New Photo Visualization
Why doesn't Google buy them? The stuff they've done to integrate it with GMail (via a Firefox extension [I think]) looks impressive!
Hacker jobs at twitter
I think driverless cars need to be supported and mandated by government. It's far easier and safer to make cars that drive themselves when the roads are designed for that purpose and all other cars as well. Making a car that can drive on our current roads and dodge blind old ladies is a far harder problem.
You don't need any. Just email your business plan into Sequoia.
$8
Have you tried Prosper? http://www.prosper.com
No, it needs the jPhone. ;-)
Lesson learned: never have the word FAILURE as part of your business name!
Laptop.
Is Pownce Going To The DeadPool?
Probably too late for those who do not have the capital to get in the game.
I agree. But I think it's easier said than engineered. Consider that each car in the DARPA Grand Challenge cost millions. Economies of scale will eventually kick in, but that could take generations. For instance, think of the bandwidth needed to monitor and control all the cars on the on the highway system, let alone most side roads where you're more likely to find grandma.

On a side note: I know I would be very reluctant to give up the psychological thrill of driving. The government would literally have to pry the steering wheel from my cold dead hands.
My goodness, that couldn't possibly have been the plan all along! Nobody would want to work for an evil corporation like Google. Also, acquisition is not a viable exit plan. Last but not least, they don't seem Googley enough.

Oh, wait -- you were serious? Because I wasn't... I will feel a teeny tiny bit bad for these guys if Google doesn't buy them, because it's so obvious that acquisition is their desired endpoint. Not that they haven't created a desirable product for people to use and Google to acquire, mind you -- it just doesn't seem like any sort of an afterthought.
I figured as much but didn't want to presume :). I'll update that.
Thanks for the additions, keep them coming! I'm going out of town for the holidays but I'll add these and more in the next week or so.
So, the calculation you want is called a valuation. There are a number of different methods, but all are based on particular assumptions. You can either base it on cash flow or EBITDA. So essentially you have three parts that are factors in the calculation: (a) the sum of current and future earnings divided by the cost of those operations, e.g. over five years, what is the return on this website (b) time period for estimate, e.g. how long will 10minutemail last? (c) discount rate to dampen those estimates, e.g. how likely are these scenarios to occur?

Check out this article and you should easily be able to do it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuation_using_discounted_cash...
How to program a computer
Samba Team Receives Microsoft Protocol Docs
Tcl/Tk 8.5 Released
Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) on "Eventually Consistent"
Personalized Education -- how would you do it?
Each student is different. So why not provide a web service that personalizes a topic to each student so as to maximize learning in the shortest time possible?

How would you build something like that?
I've been able to get it to happen more than once, but not every time. As far as I can tell, the candles only appear when there are ads on the right-hand side.
Off-topic: Understanding Ayn Rand through the music of Rush
Mysteriously, if you search for kwanzaa or kwanzaa candles, the candles appear. However, they do not appear for kwanzaa ham sandwich or kwanzaa dogs.

What the deuce?
Traffic does keep me homebound here quite often. I'd probably leave my house at least twice as much in any other suburban area. I guess that's good when you're working on a startup though.
Pownce Is Still Alive
I was in a similar situation to you a little over a year ago, although from the sound of it our situation was a bit more dire:

I learned that there were a number of patents (12+) that covered nearly every variation of our business method EXACTLY, and all were held by just two large companies. They were also the only two companies I could find that were using these business methods, and I couldn't find any pre-existing art. I was ready to slit my wrists. [One of the two companies has an IP division that will license the patents for royalties, but the other company wouldn't even talk to us except to threaten us.]

I spent a few weeks reading the competitive patents, and then found a 'loophole' than not only enabled us to compete with them, but that allowed us to generate several new revenue streams and to strengthen the strategic position of another one of our portfolio companies. The companies with the competitive patents had also been successful enough (Billion$) that they essentially proved our business model, so signing up partners is becoming easier for us. The fact that our competitors had great patents actually ended up helping us in the end.

In our case, the initial breakthrough for finding the 'loophole' was realizing that by focusing on an alternate "concrete and tangible result" to the competitive patents, we gained an entirely new perspective. Say, for example, that the competitive patent's "tangible result" was financial savings for retail investors. Our "tangible result" might then become generating new business for a brokerage firm, not saving money for the retail investors. That little change in perspective might suggest a different business method, perhaps even one that is better. I'd give our specific example, which would be much more clear...but that would be giving away the store a bit. We're still in the process of patenting OUR new business methods, so that we can cause some other startup intense psychological pain ;-)
WiMax Licenses Going To KDDI, Willcom by Wireless Watch Japan
Ask YC: What are the most profitable online markets?
I've been looking but i can't seem to find any information as to the size of different online markets.

for example.
The size in revenue of Travel (expedia,kayak,priceline)
The size in revenue of Gambling(pokerstars,fulltilt)
The size in revenue of Rentals (gamefly,netflix)
and so on..

also the spending of ad dollars and how they pertain to the web ad based economy as a whole.
umm, i think to improve the service you want to increase the expropriation time of the e-mail address. so "why stop as 10 minutes! Whats about 15 minute e-mail? ;)
What is your source for 300k users?
i think its more to do with functional aspects of the language rather than it's "user-interface" aka the syntax. erlang as first intro to functional language might be non-trivial (imho ofcourse). starting with sicp to understand it's (functional programming's) essence should put anyone on terra-firma.
34th rules of business. Everything and Everyone is a product... no explanation needed :)
Smart startup math. 1+1=2 . It is crucial when you first launch your company that you hire people who will train you rather than you training them
I have no idea what your service is worth, but I'm a happy user of it.

I have my own bsd mail server and before I found out about your site I would simply edit /etc/aliases, register somewhere, get the confirmation and then delete the alias. That still took a minute or so and required me to have access to a root login. Your site works almost as well and is much more convenient. Since I've discovered your service, I've used it plenty of times and have shown it to several friends.
There's a helpful "give me 10 more minutes" link on the site.
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/about/ : they say they have over 350K users
For those interested, here are some more references on this sort of thing:

Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems by Bernstein, Hadzilacos and Goodman - http://research.microsoft.com/~philbe/ccontrol/ (downloadable zip/pdf available there)

Recovery in Parallel Database Systems by Svein-Olaf Hvasshovd - http://tinyurl.com/2dku75

Transaction Processing Systems by Krishnamurthy and Murthy - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=131334

Readings in Database Systems by Stonebreaker - http://tinyurl.com/22btgh

and of course

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques by Gray and Reuter - http://tinyurl.com/ywrx7a
Now I shall pretend to be completely ignorant on another thread, talking about Steve Jobs.
Well, yeah, who wouldn't take a call from Steve Jobs?
What program isn't a toy? Stop being opprobrious and come up with a better example.
> So, what you mean by saying something is more intelligent than something else?

Obviously people say that all the time despite our lack of a definition for exactly what it is, so we apparently don't need an exact definition.

> and unless they are deterministic, you can't write code.

You might be interested to know that the behavior of your OS isn't deterministic once you add a second CPU.
I can't speak from experience yet, but I think it is premature to say SimpleDB sucks just because it's not your run of the mill relational dbms.

SimpleDB is really a distributed, durable, indexed tuple store with read-often write-seldom in mind. It looks like a great platform for implementing something like a directory server.

If rumors are to be believed, SimpleDB is really just Erlang + BerkeleyDB with some cpu limits (which makes sense since BerkeleyDB really only gives you access methods and raw storage).

Personally, I'd like to see Amazon start providing a little tighter integration between their services. I'd like to be able to register a callback on an S3 upload that would enqueue an update to SDB via SQS and then bill the customer via FPS.
Naively I'd say you can't do it without a mind-reader. Someone may not know what they don't know; thus an intelligent agent probes to determine. This is where tutoring/mentoring comes in, but it's never exact, as the instruction from any given person is probably hardly ever the most effective way to get the concept across to someone else's brain.

Just present all the material and they can skip ahead as warranted. But books tend to be better at reinforcement than introduction; e.g. go out in the field with a paleontology dig and you'll probably remember stuff you learn much better because of the associations with all your senses at once.

I often note important but subtle points in material when re-reading on a subject after personal experience, which I missed when reading the same thing previously. In the repeat case I now have references, and the written word causes those experiences to spring forth from whichever compartment of my mind contained them, whereupon I can hold up the new piece of information to see how it fits, compare it to what's already there, add it in, and then pack the whole thing back up.

The best way to teach someone is to get them as engaged as possible through as many avenues into their brain as possible. You can read about elephants all you want but there's no substitute for meeting one in person.
This is awesome. Sounds like Cargo Cult development almost.
Is your website a leaky bucket? 4 scenarios for user retention
Not that I know anything about this, but at least for the bigger industries you could look at their financials. Add up the market capitalization for the companies in an industry (Google says Expedia is $9B now), and that should give you the overall value of the market.

Unless, of course, you think there's another bubble...
When the creationists tried this same kind of foolishness, 856 scientists named "Steve" signed a petition supporting evolution.

Are the anti-global-warming people really so history-blind as to make the same political miscalculation?
There are lots of points to address in your post but I choose not to. Thanks for the Blumenbach post; it was very interesting (but nevertheless does not show Germany to be the origin of the concept of race).

Anyhow, I saw this on reddit and found it related, and interesting in general:

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/mit-corrects-inherited-retard...

"The MIT study found that FMRP and mGluR5 are at opposite ends of a kind of molecular seesaw." These kinds of "molecular seesaws" are everywhere in the body. When things are only slightly out of balance you _may_ get drastic effects. Emphasis on may, because at this point nobody knows exactly what and how much of it is required to achieve what effect. But there you have it -- once it is identified, it is manipulable. The more important point is, many symptoms are graded in severity, and as this study shows, autism could be found to be less disconnected from normal than you may think.
Though I'm an Apple fan, it bothers me the way they seem to skate just along the border of evil. Can you imagine Google shutting down a Google rumors site?

Theory: Steve Jobs is overreaching to the point of evil, but he's also smart enough to hire hackers who are more than yes-men, and they push back when he wants to do something too bad.

I suppose this is ultimately what keeps Google honest too. If so, then being good and hiring smart hackers are inseparable; and that means as companies increasingly can't win without smart hackers, they'll have to become increasingly good.

(By "become" here I mean in the sense that populations become a certain way through evolution. I'm not proposing any given company will get nicer. Just that good companies will increasingly triumph over evil ones.)
I highly recommend this. We have a still on the bulletin board at YC.
I'd like to see a version of Wikipedia with prerequisites. Each article would list the articles you'd have to know and understand in order to understand the current article. It would also store which articles you'd already knew, and show for which articles you'd be ready, much like the knowledge tree in Civilization (the game). This would work best for the exact sciences, since most articles don't have prerequisites.

For instance, given the article about the Heine-Borel theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heine-Borel_theorem) I'd love to know which articles I'd have to read before it will start to make sense.

About personalized education: I think it's going to be huge, (good human teachers will always be better, but who can afford private sessions with good teachers?). I'm working on it as well.

But you need a lot of knowledge about the domain you're teaching, apart from all the usual technical bagage. Finding co-founders or employees with both these skills is awfully hard.
Why are you discussing capitalization preferences with complete strangers?
Symphoniacal: Sound Occupies Space
_Works_ is better. "Functional now" beats "theoretically great but not quite usable yet".
Am I the only one who is not that enthusiastic? To me it reads more like the story of a puppy dog sucking up to the big guys. I see not much entrepreneurial spirit whatsoever, the guy just alway does what the boss tells him (hand out leaflets for 4 years - ok, go to school and write to me regularly - ok). OK, there is some chuzpe talking to Gary Grant and writing to the boss even though he has the message he should write less. But still....
With regards to Wikipedia prerequisites: while they aren't explicit, usually they are linked in the article. For the Heine-Borel theorem, I think if you understood the Wikipedia articles subset, Euclidean Space, closed space, bounded set, open cover, compact space, metric space, complete space, and totally bounded you'd be pretty much set. Of course, these articles have their own prerequisites, like set notaiton.
I like it. Damn, I wish the Camel one would say "nobody likes a quittr" instead, though.
Unlike the 2000 "bubble" The current bubble i would say is in private equity. the first time around there were more IPOs so the market took a big hit. If the current bubble; if indeed their is a bubble; bursts then it shouldn't affect the market as bad.

my 3.4 cents
One element would be the ability to browse topics freely, just like browsing the web.
And it would probably be helpful for the "student" to set goals for the tasks. Maybe choose from a set of goals.
I think it's going a bit far to compare Cheney and Jobs. One is an elected official subject to the transparency of a democracy and who costs lives and billions of dollars when he lies. The other is the CEO of a commercial enterprise who's a control freak and occasionally gets a little nasty with people who leak news about his gadgets.
There is good work being done on intelligent tutors that adjust what they present based on how the student responds.

See for instance: http://www.pitt.edu/~vanlehn/

They have pages of completed projects toward the bottom that may help you generate some ideas.
from datetime import TimeMachine
But surely these elevators, from the users point of view, are inferior.

What if they change their mind about which floor they want once they've got in?
What if they see a closing lift and jump in, not realising it's not a general purpose lift, but one that only stops in certain predefined places. They'll have to get out at the next stop and start again.

You have to ask yourself why these lifts are a good idea for the user. If they reduce wait times by 10% I doubt the users of them will care. The convenience of being able to get a lift to stop where you want it to from the inside is more useful IMHO

I really can't see them becoming common place.
A Tour of Xerox PARC
The advantage is in very large buildings with large banks of elevators.
that looks pretty smart. Anyone know what the hardware to connections ratio is for it?
my website is so wet;(
This has been four years in the making and includes a lot of new code, so it's perhaps a little bit more noteworthy than your average release.
Speaking of that, anyone heard from Arc recently?

A 'works now' version would be nice, release the 3000 version later.
Top 10 reasons you might want to avoid taking this class
Aspect-oriented programming
Universe - Laws of Nature, Source Unknown
Your House Without You (vid)
Reverse-engineering Gmail's spam filter
Interesting to see who wins in this space between Scribd and Docstoc. Docstoc is targeting the legal world and form documents, while Scribd is targeting publishers. Both are reluctant industries, so I think whichever one gains traction in the industry will be a victor.
Mixx Democratizes Categories: Something Digg Should Have
If Pownce Is Headed For The Deadpool, Then Is Mint Headed There Too?
There is a TON of information out there. If even one firm in an industry is public, you can look up their SEC filings at Edgar. You can then look up their web traffic at Alexa, and look up that of their competitors. Hand wave a ratio between the two,and assume that the competitors have the same ratio.

Google the business press for interviews with founders, and press releases.

Find industry wide statistics ("hunting is a 12 gazillion dollar per year industry").

Call up a wholesaler who sells to the competition and say that you're thinking of launching a firm, and you want to know the process to purchase from them, and what their maximum discount tier is. Chat with the new accounts rep and ask how many folks qualify for that top tier. If you're thinking about selling shovels online, and Shovel Wholesaler Inc. has a maximum discount tier of 40% off retail for $1 million/yr in purchases, and they let drop that "just two or three" retailers qualify for that tier, then you can figure out that shovels.com, allshovels.com, and ishovels.com (the three biggest retailers) likely come in at 1.5, 2, and 4 million per year (or something like that...if the top seller was a light year ahead, they would have negotiated a higher tier).

Although I've not used this approach, you can call up SCORE and see if anyone there has info.

Ping your network on LinkedIn for contacts with info.

I note that your example (gamefly, netflix) is one that I've actually done, because one of my two firms (SmartFlix) is in this space. Their numbers were easy to get from the SEC. I've got a spreadsheet comparing all of their financial ratios to ours (cost of customer acquisition, lifetime value, revenue, profit, revenue per employee, etc., etc., etc.).

Never before in the history of mankind has it been as easy to get info on competitors.

Put on your Sherlock Holmes hat, pop that pipe in, and get to work!