skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Issue with Startup Valuation 
Dear HN members,
as I have been following this site for quite a while I have seen these questions come up over and over again. Therefore I decided to post mine. Thanks in advance for your help. I am about to fund my startup. We own the licenses for a killer software product, have 8 large business customers in the pipeline without having a website, done any marketing etc. The issue is the following. I have trouble scaling. Hence I decided to take in foreign capital from Mr.X who will work for the startup for 1 year (guaranteed), and invest 50 k for a 20 % stake. Does this seem like the right valuation ? I would be highly grateful for any comments on how to find a proper valuation. Thanks
NY Start-up Holds Architecture Competition To Reinvent 'SkyScrapers' (video)
Thanks for checking out the site. The search functionality is pretty basic at the moment. The main purpose of it is really to filter for availability. I will look the bug you found in the next update.
http://timecube.com for the confused.
Luckily, as someone else mentioned, I noticed that they provide the number of subscribers from them in the Google Reader User-Agent.
In a couple of semesters writing medium-complexity R programs, I never had any problems using = for assignment. I'd recommend it, as it's much easier to type than <-, and looks more natural coming from a programming background.
Yeah, I just turned everything over the Feedburner, but it's a mysterious process. It took a while to figure out the right way to do it, and I can't find much on how they collect their stats.

A nice and elegant RSS tracker with a clear explanation of how to integrate it and how it collects the stats would be nice.
Why would img.4chan.org DoS an AT&T customer? It's a webserver, not a botnet.
Thanks for the great feedback. I completely agree with you that the front page is not exactly exciting and needs to be more inviting. For the search layout, I will probably give people the option to display the results in their prefered format.

Going forward I hope expand to other regions, once the usability kinks have been ironed out.
What keeps people from starting startups is the fear of having so much responsibility.

I'm not convinced about this. I think if anything it's the exact opposite -- many people avoid starting startups because they're afraid of seeming irresponsible.

I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has been asked the question "when are you going to get a real job?" -- as PG's essay points out a paragraph earlier, a company which isn't making any money yet tends to feel rather theoretical. At an age where the perception of being responsible is largely tied to making the transition from education to employment, it can be difficult to explain working at a not-yet-profitable startup to people -- especially in computing, where the default expectation is often that students will graduate and walk into high-paying jobs with Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft/Cisco/etc.
It will be interesting to see how much a story's position depends on these kind of "advertising" tactics. The explicit "asking for upvotes" tactic feels a bit sleazy to me.
I realise this is probably the least relevant comment this essay is going to get... but you can make good rice in the microwave - the only advantage a rice cooker has is that it will keep your rice warm for hours.

Get a deep microwave-safe covered dish (your grandmother probably has some old corningware lying around, also easy to find in garage sales), put 2 cups of water for every cup of rice (but don't fill more than half the dish), a bit of salt, a bit of olive oil, cover and microwave. Some microwaves have a rice setting, otherwise microwave on high for about 10 minutes and then let stand for at least 10 minutes.

If you are making white rice, it will turn out nicer if you rinse it before you start (that washes away the starch); a trick for doing this is using a sieve and a bowl. In some cultures it is traditional to rinse the rice 7 times - I find 6 is less symbolic but equally adequate.

I now return you to your normal programming.
I always found it extraneous to force elementary school students to learn another form of writing. Why not just focus on refining existing print writing skills. In the end, everyone develops there own personal style anyway which inevitability inherits some of the characteristics of cursive.

How will this impact signatures?
Using Python does not prevent parallel execution of tasks. It's just the build tasks graph that gets created by a single process, but then the build system can use all the available CPUs to actually execute it. See e.g. -j flag to SCons http://www.scons.org/doc/production/HTML/scons-user.html#AEN....
But in many cases, it's throwing them back to a relative wilderness, where much of their training is of little use. The density of excellence, the concentration of experts in a physical area, can make a significant difference to getting something new off the ground.
Different rules. In the presidential election, the candidate is like the post. It has to root for itself.
I am a programmer by trade but still find myself writing a copious amount on paper, I like the tactile feel. My writing is a mixture of print and cursive. I think that when hand-written notes and letters were a major component of communication it was much more important to have a standard writing system for communication's sake. The reality of the situation is that normally the only person reading anything I've handwritten is me, so I write in my print-cursive hybrid and read it just fine. If I'm writing to someone else it will more than likely be typed. This isn't really anything to be happy or sad about, just the reality that time marches on and things change.
Can anyone explain how blocking incoming access to a server reduces the affect of that server's outgoing traffic (presumably required if it was participating in a DOS attack)?

Or are they saying that people who happened to visit img.4chan.org were also participating in a DOS attack... in which case, people who participate in DOS attacks also probably visit google.com, so lets just block access to google.

Smells fishy.
The paper is cheap. With print-on-demand, there is no worry about printing too many copies, or storing them.

Paying the editor, someone to typeset the book, someone to redraw the diagrams, technical reviewers, and so on gets expensive, though. I think authors should get more money (as an author), but the publishers do theoretically add value.

(Without the publisher, your book is just the man page or a blog post. And despite the time required for the author to prepare those materials, people are entirely unwilling to pay for them.)
Virtualization doesn't let me manage all my windows servers as if they were Linux servers. I boot up a virtual Ubuntu now and then as well, but cygwin makes Windows unixy in a way virtualization doesn't.
microwave-safe covered dish

...and be careful that the cover isn't on too tightly. We all know that water expands explosively when it boils, but every year some people get severely injured by microwaving water inside sealed containers...
Pirate Party's copyright reform cannon could sink copyleft
If you haven't tried it already, I recommend you take a look at NumPy, which is the Python module for doing array math. R is great, but as a Python programmer, I really prefer staying in Python to using R or Matlab for numerical stuff.

It doesn't have quite the shortcuts for making basic stuff completely trivial (in the 10-50 LOC range), but for anything with more structure, I find it generally works out better in the end.
My thoughts exactly. I think there would need to be some penalty for not paying out.

Also, what if you WANT to pay out to multiple people? What if multiple answers were best?

Also, if you know 100 people are going to answer, what is the sense in answering if only the best answer gets any money? What are your chances?
One thing I did recently was go on a two week vacation where I was barely reachable. When I got back my company was in better shape than when I'd left and all of the people working for me had stepped up to do the things I had been doing. It was really eye opening for all of us.
To be fair, the equivalent Makefile with autodeps generation (using gcc's -M options) is about the same length.

However, as soon as you start adding more complex stuff the fabricate gets much easier to work with and maintain. Make's $< $@ stuff, but also because you're forced into a targets-are-files mould, and because you don't have a real programming language to work in.
Attacker spoofs source IPs (with an AT&T customer's IP) of SYN packets. img.4chan.org responds with SYN-ACKs to the spoofed IP.

It's one of the reasons why this is important: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/bcp/bcp38.html
Why are beautiful women more likely to have daughters? Women only have X chromosomes to contribute to the kid, Men have X and Y, so the gender is more or less chosen by the male. Are they suggesting that the most successful men are both more likely to get the most attractive women and more likely to have daughters?

Strikes me more as correlation rather than causation, but maybe I'm missing something.
I wish more articles would start that way.

"Now that the term "[vague term co-opted by people who don't know what it means]" has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails."
It's possible that the DOS attack was coming from forged IP addresses which the 4chan server was responding to.
The problem was that everyone wrote their own serialization formats, and called them all the same thing. (Example: mbox.)
Fair call. So far that hasn't been a problem for us -- but if you want to make it one, please donate us some cores! :-)

Seriously, as vr said, Python's not stopping us. And I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to add code to spawn off a few background tasks based on the dependency list.
Paradox seems a strong word for something that could have any number of legitimate reasons behind it.

There is no compelling, logical reason to expect that becasue crows can differentiate between humans, we should be able to differentiate between them.

You would expect crows to need to be able to identify predators pretty precisely, whereas humans have little reason to differentiate between different members of the crow species becasue our survival would never depend on it.
I traveled all the way from Norway to witness the eclipse in Asia last week. Since most of HN is American, I assume that most people in here have never seen a total solar eclipse. You should. It's the most stunning natural experience I have ever had, and I happen to live in a place where beautiful nature is very common ;)

Just make sure you can be pretty certain that the sky will be clear during totality. The experience isn't about having a few minutes of darkness, it's a package deal. Black sun with visible corona, birds not singing, night-like darkness with dawn in every direction, the temperature dropping at noon..it's surreal.

I haven't seen any pictures or videos come close to giving justice to how it really feels. The dynamic range of our imaging equipment is far too low ;)
WD ships first 1 TB mobile drive, doesn't fit in Mac laptops
It's long, but it's very interesting if you feel partial towards the language design.
I'd really like to hear any answers to "Are there Open Source projects which demand a high level of algorithmic knowledge?"

I know at a minimum that the FreeBSD kernel uses sophisticated algorithms for keeping track of virtual memory, TCP connections, and internet protocol routing, because I've seen CVS/SVN commits related to those. Beyond that, I can't really say -- I know algorithms, but I don't know kernel.
New Golden Age for Venture Capital
I think a way to improve the situation would be to change the way income-tax scales. To citizens, it increases percentage as wage increases, scaling exponentially. To foreigners, it could scale sub-linear-ly, by lowering percentage as wage increases. This would encourage foreigners to take high-paying jobs in the US, but not low-paying ones.

Also: http://paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html
Maybe their ovules are more receptive to heavier sperm or can detect whether a sperm is XX. Or fertilized eggs that are girls attach more easily. There are a lot of ways this can be the case.
I wonder what's the minimum environment size for humans in general to stave off "cabin fever"?
FYI there's some concern regarding microwaves heating food so quickly that they destroy much more of the nutritional value compared to conventional cooking.

Lower end microwaves are especially bad -- when you set them to half power (or defrost, etc), they modulate between full power and no power, rather than actually using less power.
I'm confused. Surely the "8 large business customers" would be providing enough revenue to make 50K irrelevant in terms of scaling the business up.

If I were you, I'd be going about it the opposite way: put together a good, detailed business plan, and figure out your most effective growth path. Then, decide how much (if any) outside capital is required to finance that plan. Then, try to find what is the best way to raise the needed cash, and how little equity you'll need to give up in order to get it.
Backup Your Google Docs With LTech's New Tool
Without further information (such as the size of your average sale, the potential market for the product ('killer' is not enough), the time invested and so on) it is very hard to put any kind of value on what you have there.

My suggestion would be that you approach a professional in the field (for instance a friendly VC contact) and give them the figures as much as you can and then work out a reasonable bandwidth together.

This will take you some effort, but at the end of that you will know a lot more about your company than you do now.

Make sure that you do not end up paying Mr. X his own investment back as a salary, otherwise he's just an equity-for-work employee, not an investor per-se.
Ads and Atmospherics - Outdoor campaigns are suddenly hip (Inc)
An awesome alternative to rice and beans, just to throw in some variety, is rice and dal (lentils or split peas). The dal requires several spices, so it's a good idea to invest in a good spice collection. Actually its always a good idea to invest in a spice collection.

Anyway, my favorite dal recipe is thus (six servings, keeps forever):

1 1/2 c. dried lentils/split peas/etc...

4 c. water

1 1/2 tsp salt

3 tbs butter/oil

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp ground tumeric

a small stick of cinnamon (or 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon)

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

1/4 tsp fresh/ground ginger

1/4 tsp mustard seeds

6 cloves

Cook the lentils.
Cook some rice.
Heat the butter in the pan and then fry all the spices until the cumin and mustard seeds begin to pop.
Pour the spice mixture into the lentils and mix.
Possible toppings include: plain yogurt with dill (dried or fresh) diced cucumber, any variety of chutney.
I'd add a recipe for chutney, but the cooking and canning process is too long to put here.

This stuff is so filling and delicious (if you like Indian/Nepalese food), and it lasts forever in the fridge.
I did about one year ago... Now with the debacle around the iphone app registration process and the tightening of warranty rules (with water detectors that set off in tropical countries and void the warranty), I'm not so sure...

I think that now that apple is successful again, they have turned back to being arrogant...

Now I love mac OS X and I really like most of apple products but I've got a feeling that for apple the customer or developer service is not all that high in the priorities if they can get away with it
Has anyone considered taking a day job that essentially involves loads of free time and no intellectual property constraints? Perhaps some sort of support or attendant role where your primary duty is to monitor and occasionally deal with incidents.

Assuming such a job existed (I have to believe it does), would this have most of the benefits of ramen profitability?
True, one normally doesn't -- and shouldn't. But I saw a surprising number of Makefiles on Google Code Search done this way.
Surely they could get some reading done?
These days, there's also better healthcare, makeup, and plastic surgery so women can look "younger" and more "beautiful" for a longer time.
In case people have an unsolved problem in this area, you can also check the "Email This" Firefox add-on. It's an easy way of getting non-techie family members to send you links.
SFLC: Microsoft violated the GPL
Formal cursive was taught to kids (including myself) rather poorly, with no emphasis on practical use or even readability. It was just supposed to look like the shit in the picture. It seems to have mostly fallen out of the curriculum in US elementary schools, it's not like they don't have plenty of other crap to teach by rote in its place.

But flowing connected lettering is not bad! Cursive : Print :: Touch Typing : Hunt & Peck

At some point I realized that I was developing my own cursive style, starting with print letterforms drawn without PENUP. It looks pretty decent, but my mom's formal cursive is amazing with a fine felt pen -- especially because her fingers aren't dextrous (she moves her whole arm) and she was forced to be right-handed as a child.
"many people avoid starting startups because they're afraid of seeming irresponsible."

That's a great point and I think supports another one. Getting older is generally incompatible with founding a startup. Not always, mind you.

Point #1: Ramen profitability is a higher number the older you get. People generally accumulate obligations faster than they can get rid of them (loans, kids, wives, elder parents, houses, etc)

Point #2: Yours. It doesn't look irresponsible for most 20 year olds to punt normal life and build something crazy. "It's a phase, he'll learn a lot, and then grow out of it". A 40 year old will get a lot more flak for setting aside a cushy $200k/yr job for some wild idea.

Of course, older folk who manage to live lean and don't give a crap about what people think/say will do just fine... :-)
From personal experience with some people very close to me I believe that it is actually better not to have the option to borrow at 25%.

All it means is that they are able to live outside their means until they can no longer pay the minimum payment on their credit card, and at that point they are in deep trouble.

I firmly believe that the banks are too predatory these days. If a particular person is deemed too much of a risk to lend to then they should not be lent money. How is it a better idea to lend them money at a higher interest rate? All it does is (possibly)make more money for the bank and forces the rest of us to offset the risk in the form of higher interest rates.
These essays are largely intended for start-up people, and the term is common among them to my knowledge. (or at least I use it...)
Speed has nothing to do with it. Cooking destroys some heat sensitive vitamins, but the method is neither here nor there, and anyway you are not going to eat raw rice as an alternative.
For context, http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thre...

My reasons for choosing Django templates over pretty much anything comparable. Everything else tries to make things easy for developers, Django templates makes things easy for designer.
Night security guard at an office building.

EDIT: I haven't done this, though I did a lot of standing guard in the middle of the night overseas in the Navy, and you've got lots of time and solitude.
You have to have a very specific culture in order to enable employees to feel as if it is acceptable to ask for more responsibility. It may not seem counter intuitive to you, but to an employee receiving a paycheck for a specific set of responsibilities, the cognative leap can sometimes be pretty large.

There are a number of reasons for this. Not wanting to appear dissatisfied is one. The false understanding that if a manager wanted them to step out into another area they would ask is another. Perhaps most difficult to overcome is the feeling that if you haven't been given more responsibility in an area, it is becasue your superiors do not see you as competent in that area.

There is a fairly well studied phenomena that highly skilled people don't necessarily feel that they are competent. Sometimes the fact that you have not be specifically asked to step into a roll is enough to confirm any suspicion that you may be less than competent in that role. Given that, it is very easy to fall into a "If they need me, they will ask" attitude.
I think your susceptibility to the industry echo chamber has more to do with your personality and where you come from than where you are. There are lots of people outside of SV who don't want to work on anything that isn't related to the iPhone or Twitter. And there are lots of people in SV working on unsexy but massively profitable things like Facebook apps (which were sexy two years ago, before they started making big bucks) or whatever else.
We're talking about two difference senses of responsibility. You mean responsibility in the sense of prudence; e.g. "He made a responsible choice." I mean responsibility in the sense of something you have to worry about; e.g. "He was weighed down by responsibilities."

For anyone who cares, the reason both concepts have the same name is that they share the property that you have to be able to respond to someone. The difference is that in the first case you're responding to people who are judging or depending on your choice (e.g. your parents, friends, or dependents) and in the second to people you've undertaken to do something for (e.g. customers, employees, or investors).
Well, our experience says that as soon as you step outside that "minimal amount" you have to write all the build steps explicitly anyway, so we're specifically avoiding implicit rules. And we end up being explicit pretty quickly in all our projects -- maybe more than some folks because we're embedded developers and tend to need full control, but even so.
There are very few cases where it is not rewarding, if only from a personal development standpoint. Asking for, and receiving greater responsibility allows for accelerated personal growth and oftentimes gives you a great specific example to use in an interview if you ever change jobs.
Theory of Games and Economic Misbehavior
Open Social Media of the People, by the People, for the People
The effect's been observed with a lot of traits that benefit one sex more than the other. For example, taller parents are disproportionately likely to have sons, because height reproductively benefits a male much more than a female.

The mechanism proposed is sex-selective abortion. Apparently, women's bodies have the ability to spontaneously abort fetuses of "the wrong" sex early in the pregnancy, either by preventing implantation or by cutting off blood supply to the placenta. Many other mammals have similar mechanisms, eg. mice will abort pregnancy if they undergo a sustained lack of food.

For that matter, human sex ratios change in a famine or ice age, with many more daughters than sons being born. Women have significantly less reproductive variability than men, since their ability to bear children is largely limited by their uterus and not their socioeconomic standing. When everybody is poor, then, it makes sense for more women to be born because daughters will not be as unfavorably impacted by poverty as sons.
Oh, that cleared it up. WTF??
Point #2: Yours. It doesn't look irresponsible for most 20 year olds to punt normal life and build something crazy. "It's a phase, he'll learn a lot, and then grow out of it". A 40 year old will get a lot more flak for setting aside a cushy $200k/yr job for some wild idea.

I agree, but I'd s/40/25/. This is probably why so many successful startups were founded by college dropouts -- if you haven't graduated yet, people are likely to see whatever you do as a learning experience, but as soon as you graduate, there is an expectation that you will "start being responsible".
I've never really yearned to live in a commune