skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Jack,

Great question. It's pretty complicated, but I think naming a valuation can only lead to problems. Bottom line: it's not your job as an entrepreneur to value your company. It's up to the investor to "make the offer" in most cases. Angels and VCs are professional negotiators. Most entrepreneurs are not. They see thousands of companies every year and can very quickly assess the value of your company. I have seen situations where an entrepreneur shoots himself in the foot by stating a valuation that is lower than the VC had in mind, as you suggest above. But the reality is that the "market" will value your startup. If 3 VCs want to fund it, it's probably worth more than you thought. If 0 VCs want to fund it, it's probably worth less than you thought :( I think it's best to let the investors compete and the interest level drive the valuation of the company. If asked for a valuation by a potential investor, my suggestion to entrepreneurs is to say "We'd like to raise $X. We're realistic about valuations these days, so you don't need to worry that we want $20 pre. But we're going to let the market decide the valuation." Most investors respect that response from what I have experienced over the years.
8lb Gorilla Paradox
This looks like a pretty useful project. If you're using a Debian-based Linux distro, you also already have "alternatives," which is a pretty powerful framework for doing almost this exact thing.
Humans and lemurs are both primates. And some people theorize that both chicken and dinosaurs are aves.

If you ask me, all dinosaurs were birds and some survive until today, makes more sense then some dinosaurs were birds and it's just those that survive.

But I'm not a paleontologists.

And what bugs me is that we have all manner of lizards, even huge turtles and crocodiles and warm blooded birds, but not a single small dino.

There being no huge dinos makes sense, but if we have Nile crocodiles and ostriches, why not one chicken sized dino?
The aim of the research- as clearly explained in the article by the way- is not to gain utility from mutant chickens, but to prove that birds evolved from dinosaurs.
Graphs help. If you can measure tasks completed and clocked time accurately, seeing that you've spent less productive time than yesterday can give you the kick you need. I don't use this for personal projects, but I was an intern on a website fix-it team that used this method, and it was pretty damn effective.
Good point. I like the term 'smart-sourcing' - having a presence 'on-shore' & 'off-shore' & having the customer-relationship stuff done near the customer (on-shore) & the non-relationship stuff wherever's best (sometimes, but not always 'off-shore).
Hi Sachinag, thanks for your comment. The reason most (but not all) of the firms I listed are in the Valley is because this group of startups are all in Palo Alto and meeting with investors here over the next few weeks. Of course there are many great investors outside of the Valley (some like Union Square, Foundry and First Round are all based outside) but I live and work in the Valley, so most of the investors I've worked with are here.
Why shame? They're building a business, and figuring some things out as they go. I say good for them for recognizing early on what is going to help them create a sustainable business.
Note that this actually originates from the SomethingAwful Forums.
Exactly, HTML is still boring with sections and navs, but Javascript and CSS3 make it a different beast worth taming.
AKA the Labour Theory of Value.
Hack Your Palm Pre - Reviews by PC Magazine
Amazon/AWS Startup Challenge entry deadline extended
Though epub is nice, scanned PDFs might still be the only feasible option given the current limitations of Google's OCR tech illustrated here: http://ebooktest.blogspot.com/2009/08/googles-one-million-eb...
Maybe this is a stupid question but do people switch between vm's a lot?
Apple Snow Leopard's hidden malware protection
Librarians' delight: A device that helps readers borrow e-books
Although I generally tend to advise against buying new (and take that advice myself), I disagree with your initial assertions/assumptions.

Cars aren't any more "expensive" a depreciating asset than anything else. For example, I have yet to see any evidence that they depreciate any faster than a major household appliance.

I also disagree that there is, necessarily, such a thing a "initial depreciation." The big hits up front are sales taxes and agreeing to a price higher than the value. The former is an issue for used cars, too, as is the latter, though, perhaps, to a lesser extent, considering high-margin add-ons new car dealers try to sell.

The spread between price and value may be even more with a used car. Specifically, with a new car, one has at least something of a lower bound for value. With a used car, the value could well be 0, though, with well published price information, one tends to have an upper bound for price.

The other important aspect seems to be risk. With a new car, while it is under warranty, one has paid to avoid the risk of a sudden, expensive, mechanical failure. What I like to remind my friends is that, though this may well be the case, one is never compensated for time or inconvenience if there is a failure.

With a used car, although the operating costs over the short term may be unpredictable, over the long term, it evens out. More importantly, if one chooses a reliable manufacturer, the overall risk of breakdown can be adjusted very close to zero with adequate preventative measures.

All that said, I, too, am against the Clunkers program for basic economic reasons: it encourages the wanton destruction of wealth.
Great for comparing performance and testing compatibility!
http://developer.spikesource.com/wiki/index.php/Projects:Tes...

http://wtr.rubyforge.org/

http://seleniumhq.org/

http://ssscripting.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/dont-be-afraid-t...

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-aj-doh/inde...
Anybody that writes Gem's will cry when they can test multiple versions without useing multiple computers or VMWare. Imagine if you could only test your work with one version of Ruby how many bugs you'd miss/hit.
Did you forget about the alcohol prohibition period?
I'd be very interested in a small scale version of this. Say if ramen profitable startup has 100k revenue per year -- how does that compare to other noodle startups, and what kind of growth rates can be expected from that point on?
This isn't a bragging announcement, more of a call to action/support by enthusiast community to help the project by providing computational power to build the rainbow tables. (Read the linked slides, that should have been the initial YC submission instead of this sensationalized neowin article https://har2009.org/program/attachments/119_GSM.A51.Cracking... )

My Sideproject++ gotta do something with all these EC2 nodes laying around.
You're going to need to explain why you feel that Prohibition has any relevance to the points I made in my previous comment, because I'm not sure what you are getting at. Yes, religious movements caused alcohol to be banned for a period of time, but it was recognized as a mistake and repealed. Plus, it's not like Prohibition was a unanimous thing. There were 14 states that voted against it.
The "uncreative" could recognize creativity and join creative projects. Better yet, both could join valuable projects.

So you need a lot of uncreative people who would be happy to implement other people's ideas? Hiring too many creative people would be bad?
all dinosaurs were birds and some survive until today, makes more sense then some dinosaurs were birds and it's just those that survive

Um, no. Birds are members of the larger dinosaur family the same way you are a member of the primate family. They are dinosaurs in the way that you are a primate, but they aren't dinosaurs in the way that you aren't a lemur.

There was a time when a whole host of other animals were a part of this family, but they have died off. The entire group of animals is collectively known as dinosaurs, but since birds evolved and were proven distinct prior to the extinction, it is correct to say that birds are a subset of dinosaurs, not that all dinosaurs were birds.

People who speculate that such a split is incorrectly classified, and that birds are simply evolved dinosaurs have a pretty big uphill climb in my opinion. The presence of fossils that show that what we would classify as birds living before the extinction is a pretty major hurdle.
It's not a straight conversion to aggression. Germans, I believe, drive fast. Maybe aggressively too. But, if you put them in an auto, they also pick up the behaviour of building speed fast for 1-2 seconds then braking hard. It happens a lot in dense, halting traffic. It's not the only way of being aggressive, but it's another way

People don't do that in a manual because it's not fun.

*In Italy people drive mostly manuals. They also drive like suicidal grandmas in fast forward.
Instead of this sensationalized neowin article, link to the actual guts of this https://har2009.org/program/attachments/119_GSM.A51.Cracking...
12 Words You Can Never Say in the Office
I think you'll suffer from the 2G and 3G cameras not having macro mode (I don't know about the 3GS), so you wont have very good text focus/readability at book sized print.

For your own use, probably - especially if you got one of the jackets with a macro lens built in.

Evernote has some discussion on their site about using the iPhone camera for business card / general text recognition where they recommend the macro-lens-jackets too.
Thanks for commenting Sridhar - congrats on all of the success - i love seeing success derived from long term commitment.
Nokia just became PayPal with the launch of Nokia Money; built on top of Obopay
> I don't think the scoring system is good. According to it the best behaviour would be to build all tetraminos on one side and wait for "I" tetramino to arrive and score 4.

Except, of course, that's exactly the way every single real game of tetris works.
Vista Secret #1
Seven Sales Essentials
Essential Learning for RoR
This is exactly what I was looking for last weekend when we tried to build our rails rumble app with Ruby 1.9!

I'm installing now and excited to start building 1.9 apps at home without interrupting development on the 1.8 apps at work
I'd like to hope that this will light a fire under Amazon to get the Kindle to support epub, but I know that's wishful thinking. =\
Am I an academic?
the thing to remember about P vs NP is that you can solve NP problems very quickly, but it takes NP time to verify that the solution is correct.

I think you have it backwards. A problem is in NP if the solution can be verified in (deterministic) polynomial time. But (as far as we know) finding the solution may take much longer.

For example, the statement of TSP as a decision problem is: "Given these distances between the cities, is there a closed tour of length less than K?" If someone hands you a proposed solution -- a list of the cities, in the order you should visit them -- it is easy to (a) verify that the list contains all cities, and (b) the length of the tour is less than the required K. That is why TSP is in NP.

I didn't really follow the rest of your comment, so I'm not sure what bearing this has on your ideas on protein folding.
Depressions/recessions are like forest fires, necessary evils that purge old models to make way for new ones. It's the best time to innovate and impact the world.
> Do you want someone down-modding your posts simply because you ,,, had nothing ... valuable to say?

Yes, that's exactly what I want. Based on the vote count, I conclude that I'm not the only one.
Does anybody know what sort of card they're using for this?
Either birds are dinosaurs, or they aren't. My brother says there ain't no two ways about it-- as you say, they are dinosaurs the same way I'm a primate. Obviously they aren't Composognathus* the way I'm not a lemur, but that's not what I was wondering.

*a small theropod, most probably an ancestor of birds
Freedom.app
The entire world is full of academic that have been sedated by failing school systems.
It must have been interesting to work for the biggest tech company's research division.
It is worth elaborating on bootstrapping. When we started, the hottest tech company in the world was Netscape, and Yahoo was still an infant. So you can see how long it has taken us - nothing much happens to you in 1 year, 2 years and so on. The only thing we had going was patience. It helped that I was educating myself about Japan.

We didn't set out with the mission of bootstrapping. It was sheer necessity: we had no big ideas (only some little ideas), and had no way of impressing anyone to put money on us. Our very first product was this: http://www.webnms.com/snmp/ - the amazing part is we still make money on it! But sexy it isn't - a VC who stumbled on us told us "Why are you focused on such a tiny market?"

By the time money was offered to us, we didn't need it, and we were having too much fun building stuff to even bother pitching to VCs. We came close to a VC round once in 2000: a term sheet was offered. There were things there I didn't like and I was too lazy to negotiate with them, so I simply let it die.
Before you know it, entire libraries will be replaced and paper will be obsolete altogether. The Times They Are A-Changing.
Wrong meaning of "depression", as you'd have found if you'd read even the first two sentences of the article.
I'm hoping somewhere in the Jenga rule book that it negates the use of anything "but" the complete use of fingers to move the blocks. Otherwise, everyone is going to show up at the World Jenga Championships with these guns, and the entire competitive industry surrounding Jenga, will collapse.
That makes sense. But I still don't see how it adds up to a bootstrapped product company. Especially not one like Zoho (wide product range, products directly competing with major players, products in long established categories and classes).

India is one hell of a resource. It's kind of raw at the moment. IE, you can't easily just buy services there and expect good quality. Being able to make it work well could be one hell of an advantage. As you say, you can't just take elance rates and calculate what you save by producing in India. You would probably end up paying many times more to attract, train & keep the best. Could still be cheaper the California, but probably within range.

Basically what I am saying is this: You can probably save a lot and still get quality by being exceptionally good at producing in India. Sounds like Zoho is. But that still doesn't bring your costs down by enough to give a competitive edge to a product company. If you are a service business, cutting production costs (without harming quality) to 60% is a massive edge. If you are a product company, does that still apply?

Side note: It sounds like Zoho's important "technology" is knowing how to produce great quality products in India. I wonder if that is technology another company would pay to acquire. How much would it be valued at?

- update: - I have just read some of the other comments and found a link that sheds some light on my questions, I think. The product company / service company split is far to simplistic. Zoho sees itself as a business software company. An area where (apart form MSFT's monopoly), margins do count and success is not binary. Getting employment costs down and productivity up, even marginally, can make a difference here. I recommend reading the blog post.

http://blogs.zoho.com/uncategorized/why-we-compete-with-goog...
I don't want to flag this as irrelevant, but I would love to flag it as terrible. Where to start? It's a top N list, it's USA-centric, it features whether a 'tween'age kid knows a term as a good guide to whether you should use it at work, it talks to a nontechnical consumer trying to say which technical terms aren't necessary, it's written by someone who doesn't know (or doesn't care) about the distinctions between the terms they talk about, who doesn't care that terms have different meanings because those are useful distinctions to make! Gah!

Intranet is perfectly useful, push technology evolved into the kinds of long timeout HTTP requests used by Exchange ActiveSync and Comet connections and doesn't require too much bandwidth when you push just what's necessary. That's kind of the point - updates as they happen instead of needless polling. RSS is not the evolution of push - it's the evolution of pull.

I don't think anyone who isn't a journalist ever talked about surfing the web in the first place.

Today, the preferred generic term for a handheld like a Blackberry or an iPhone is a "smartphone"

No, smartphone is the generic term for a smart phone. PDA is the term for a smart not-a-phone (e.g. Dell Axim).

Thin clients replaced PCs for a lot of people, and are still in use. I think I'll keep using that term to refer to our thin clients, otherwise I'd have to call them "hard disks" or "cpus" or something else inaccurate and unhelpful.

Thanks to flat-rate calling plans available from carriers for at least five years, nobody needs to distinguish between local and long-distance calls anymore

The USA isn't the world. Local calls are free, nonlocal calls aren't. We need to distinguish, thanks.

Nobody talks about the "World Wide Web" anymore

Unless they're saying something where the distinction between the web and the net matters (irc, ftp, webdav, tor, ssh...).
I think it's the usrp, which is a USB device and not a card. I know that there have been a lot of people doing gsm hacking with them.
A Prolog Introduction for Hackers
I have been thinking a lot lately about Indian professionals moving back home. I always thought that India's catch 22 was loosing the better (or at least better educated) talent.

What do you think about returnees? Resource, potential talent pool? Too many hang ups (salary expectation, etc.)?
I love investigating the marginalia (doodles in the margins)
of medieval Italian, English & Irish manuscripts.

Sounds interesting. Care to share some of your findings, or maybe the methodology you employ for your research.
I think I'll be there. I just joined up a few days ago, but this could be fun.
Every one of you owes it to yourself to read The Art of Prolog. If you liked On Lisp, SICP, or Paradigms of AI Programming you will love it and it will change how you view programming. And, as Alan Kay said, point of view is worth 80 IQ points.
I only speak a little of German, so I have to read the English translations.

Home page:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl...

Screenshots:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl...
I may have my terminology backward. (I am a computational biologist, not a mathematician.) I think we're saying the same thing, though. Given that a protein folds to a particular conformation (3-D arrangement of atoms in space), you should be able to verify that a specific folding pathway is valid for getting there. However, without knowing ahead of time what the folded conformation is, determining the lowest energy conformation would require trying all possible conformations.

So, yeah, I think I've got the terminology backward, but the point remains. Nature can solve protein folding very quickly (depends on kinetics), but to know whether the fold is the best (depends on thermodynamics) requires trying all possible folds.
Karsten works with Chris Paget at H4RDW4RE, a consulting firm they started to focus on hardware security. While all the high-end pentest firms will do hardware, only a couple have a practice focus in hardware; they compete with Nate Lawson's Root Labs and after that there's pretty much just Paul Kocher's Cryptography Research. These guys are going to have a blast.

A direct link to the presentation:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18668509/HAR2009-Cracking-A5-GSM-E...

The long and the short of it, they're going to take the academic result that you can precompute A5 and use a GPU cluster to build a rainbow table cracking implementation.

This result is a couple steps away from apocolyptic, but not all the way there:

* They haven't subverted GSM base stations (this is going to turn out to be doable, though). They can't pick a phone at random.

* They aren't publishing the GNU Radio code to sniff GSM. There are several free GSM projects, but putting the pieces together still requires talent, unlike wifi cracking.

* Regardless of whether these attacks are ever used in the wild, this will probably have a big effect on financial security, where GSM is used as a safe out-of-band authentication mechanism.
The Most Notorious Counterfeiter
Reddit removes atheism subreddit from front page; Redditors go insane
SCALA, SCALA and then SCALA.
I'm working on idea #2 along with other location aware services for mobile browsers. The domain I've picked up so far is http://this.st (standing for This Street); figured it'd be easy to type on a phone. One of the services is going to cater to schools, starting with mine (University of Waterloo). MIT has done a great job with m.mit.edu and it will be a good benchmark.

Other services for densly located areas will be in places like malls and theatres.
Sex Search being Sued
It'd be really educational if you can roughly share how you scaled the company employee-wise over time? ie. when did you you go from 1 to 10 to 100 to 500 to 1,000 employees?
Zoho quietly did it by getting funding from a source other than VCs.

Source? Or is this just conjecture on your part?
Ask HN: Rate my idea
I was thinking about a problem my friend and I had. We both LOVE watching videos online, we usually watch shows like The Office via youtube/megavideo etc. Now it's a pain in the ass to set up a voice/video conversation, run the video at the same time(as the friend(s)).

My idea: A bookmarklet that allows friends to invite other friends with the mission of connecting them as if they were in the same room. Basically you run the bookmarklet, invite your friends and when you guys are ready you(as the host) just click RUN! and the video starts on all the friends browsers at the same time.
Creating "traits of dinosaurs" in chicken is as useful as waking the dead or speaking with ghosts.

I'm not sure about useful, but both of your examples would definitely be very interesting, which would be good enough for me if someone managed to pull one of them off.
Except that Debian's packaging policy shits all over how people actually use and distribute libraries in languages that have native packaging systems -- in my experience both Ruby and Haskell are totally fucked, and Python is done pretty decently considering.

The glacial release cycles and pointless package freezing don't help, nor does their anal-retentive insistence on rearranging everything to fit just-so into their standard filesystem layout. It infuriates them that gems are intended to be self-contained and allow multiple versions to be installed with no symlink assery.
When I was in IIT in the late 80's, the hot topic was brain drain out of India. So it is interesting we are talking about returnees now. As the Indian economy liberalizes, talent naturally stays home to pursue opportunity. In any case, India could export a lot of talent, and still not run out (!) - so I never worry about the "drain" part.

On returnees, it is harder the longer someone has been out of India. Two of my brothers returned and they are doing really well (both start-ups http://vembu.com and http://gofrugaltech.com ), but they didn't stay in the US much at all.

My advice: if you are returning, assume that you never left. Lower your expectations (in every way), you will find it easy to exceed them. Traffic is chaotic, civic administration sucks, water problems and so on. But there is something else to India ... the interesting part for me has been that in such poor surroundings, I have always enjoyed a very intellectually stimulating atmosphere. I still can't explain that part.
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