A Standard and Clean Series A Term Sheet - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/a-standard-and-clean-series-a-term-sheet/ <comment><USER2> As a Series A investor who invests in startups outside of the Valley, it's hugely useful to have something like this (independent of us) that we can point to as to what's normal, especially for founders who don't necessarily have the network to help them.

Founder's (and lawyers) who've never seen a term sheet before will often argue against standard terms (which no mainstream VC would move on) and on the flip- side, bad VCs will often try and put onerous terms into term sheets which can hurt the startup in future fundraising rounds or liquidity events.

While there's been a huge increase in transparency at the pre-seed/seed/SAFE fundraising stage, Series A and beyond is still very opaque.

Great to see YC extending their work on transparency into the Series A stage!

<comment><USER3> How do we balance against an orthodoxy setting in? As a startup employee, it was unusual and impossible to ask for ISO options until recently. It's changing now. Why shouldn't there be terms in the agreement that felt perfectly reasonable a few years ago but seems unfair to the founder now?

A standard form should be a guidance. It shouldn't become an unquestionable text.

<comment><USER4> Yes and they aren't unquestionable.

YC released the SAFE and then a few years later, after working with thousands of founders, thought it was too confusing to have a feel for ownership and conversion with pre-money valuation caps, so they moved to a post-money SAFE.

The SAFE itself has a few variations and you're welcome to add/remove things as they make sense. With more complicated legal documents, like a Series A raise, of course people should adapt.

Open standards are a starting point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Former founder here. I wish I had had this when I was raising my series A. I lost control of the board at my series A when the VC said that a 2-2-1 structure would be better for everyone. 13 months later, I was fired from the company I had started. The risks are real.

Had I known what a standard, clean series A term sheet looked like, I could have just pointed to this term sheet on ycombinator.com and said - "Make it like that."

I've found the Y Combinator resources to be some of the most valuable resources out there for startup founders. Do yourself a favor and familiarize yourself with what is available. It could help you not get fired from your startup.

<comment><USER6> Could you link to some of these resources , their start up school doesn't really include documents such as this.

<comment><USER7> Here you go:

[https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/](https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone please help me understand what common re-vesting schedules are for founders? Like, if I raise seed money, surely I'll have to agree to a reasonable 4-year vesting schedule. But then if I raise a series A, B, and C, do I have to agree to new vesting schedules at each raise? Will I then not fully vest until 4 years after my series C? Do I lose all my vested shares at each raise? On the one hand re-vesting seems unfair to me, but on the other hand if I were to give someone 20 million dollars I wouldn't want them to quit the next day.

Also, sometimes you hear about founders being fired by their board. In this case, are they getting fully vested or are they just leaving with the equity they had vested at that point in time?

<comment><USER9> Re-vesting schedules are all over the map.

Some amount of re-vesting is often required at Series A, but it largely has to do with how vested the founders already are. If for example they've been working on the company for only a year, the existing vesting schedule will probably be left alone. On the other hand, if they've been working on the company for multiple years and are close to fully vested at Series A, it's almost guaranteed that the Series A investor will ask the founder to re-vest some amount of shares (for the reason you describe).

Re-vesting generally does not show up again after the Series A.

If you get fired before you fully vest, whether you leave with the equity you have or all your equity is something you can negotiate as part of the vesting terms.

<comment><USER8> Thanks Jason

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Jason and I are happy to answer any questions people have about this document: why we included the terms we did, how to think about using, etc.

<comment><USER10> My reading is that this includes a pre-money option pool (aka the "option pool shuffle": [http://venturehacks.com/articles/option-pool- shuffle](http://venturehacks.com/articles/option-pool-shuffle)), which while standard feels dirty.

Any thoughts on this?

<comment><USER9> We send people that link all the time to help them understand option pools. The main point of that post is to make it clear to founders that when an investor is saying they'll invest $X to get 20%, the dilution is more than 20% because of the impact of the pool.

I think if the pool is not part of the premoney, investors just adjust the valuation to compensate.

Just focus on the final output. Take the term sheet and work with your lawyer to model out how much you own after the round is closed. Is that a good deal or not? If you don't like it, there are multiple ways to increase your post- closing ownership. Moving the option pool into the post-money is one of the hardest ways to accomplish that because you are trying to move the investor up on both valuation _and_ convention.

<comment><USER10> The last 2 rounds I was involved in moved the option pool into the post-money. In one case, the initial price was initally discussed and negotiated with the expectation of a post-money option pool. In the other, there was a term sheet with a post-money option pool so we asked the other term sheets to be rewritten using a post-money option pool (they changed their prices accordingly).

I'll note that in every case where someone has asked for X pre-money, they have asked for less than X in the post-money. That's why I consider that term to be dirty - it's purely a means of obscuring the real valuation, and has nothing to do with employee ownership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This term sheet template is very investor friendly primarily because of the lack of detail.

The Company has very little leverage after a term sheet is signed especially given a standard no-shop provision. You want to reduce the number of items that need to be negotiated later in the process as much as possible.

This not only reduces the likelihood of having to agree to a less than favorable term that was not addressed in the term sheet, but also reduces legal costs (which the Company is paying).

The post does make note of this:

> Some great investors still send longer term sheets, but this has more to do > with their preference for going a bit deeper into the details at this stage, > rather than deferring this until the definitive documents. The definitive > documents are derived from the term sheet and are the much longer (100+ > pages) binding contracts that everyone signs and closes on. It's common to > negotiate a few additional points at this stage, though deviation from > anything explicitly addressed in the term sheet is definitely re-trading. > Also, in a few places, this term sheet refers to certain terms as being > "standard." That may seem vague and circular, but term sheets frequently do > describe certain terms that way. What that really means is that there's an > accepted practice of what appears in the docs for these terms among the > lawyers who specialize in startups and venture deals, so make sure your > lawyer (and the investor's lawyer) fit that description.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. A founder should assume any ambiguity in a term sheet will be resolved in the investors favor (since you're very unlikely to walk away from a deal after signed). I preferred more comprehensive term sheets so that we could pin everything down while the investor was still in "courting mode".

Something we did in our later financings was to (very politely) provide an interested investor with a fairly comprehensive (~7 pages) template term sheet that had blanks for the major economic terms, but otherwise fully specified all the details of the proposed deal. This kept things from drifting off "founder friendly" after signing and had the added bonus of making offers easier to compare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pet peeve of mine: You should never take a raw screenshot of a Word doc, with its red and blue underlines, cursor, etc. Convert it to a PDF first or find a way to turn off the highlighting+cursor.

<comment><USER14> Better yet, embed the PDF in an inline iframe so text can be copied, highlighted, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> A downloadable version of the doc is linked directly above the image. That does the job nicely, since it allows you to immediately edit.

<comment><USER15> newer browsers can actually just embed PDFs natively[0] in an iFrame, but there are more fault-tolerant ways to do it that provide a better ux.

Cool note, Google Drive provides an embed code for PDFs[1] which I've found to be useful.

Filestack also provides a great API for viewing PDFs in apps/browsers[2] that I use all the time.

0- [https://pdfobject.com/static/](https://pdfobject.com/static/)

1- [https://alicekeeler.com/2016/06/05/google-drive-embed- pdf/](https://alicekeeler.com/2016/06/05/google-drive-embed-pdf/)

2- [https://www.filestack.com/docs/concepts/transform/#document-...](https://www.filestack.com/docs/concepts/transform/#document- viewer)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Curious to know what the "typical" ranges are for some of the bracketed sections:

* What are typical / optimal post-money option pool sizes?

* What are typical / optimal founder vesting schedules?

* What are the usual ratios of lead investor / follow-on investor amounts?

It seems that the majority of the Preferred can vote to change the # of directors - wouldn't that offset the initial founder-friendly board setup or am I missing how that vote is used?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ranges we see:

 _Option pools: 10-15%_ Vesting: If there are new rules here, they are around re- vesting and highly dependent on how long the company has been around. *Ratios: A bit harder to say, but the lead is usually taking a significant majority of the round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do "A Standard And Clean Employee Equity Offer" next!

Seriously.

<comment><USER18> I concur. Do you concur?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is so valuable, just to have a reference point to ask, "so I've seen other sheets with X, what's the case for your preference?"

I have neither raised or invested, but do a lot of negotiations and having an external reference for framing discussion creates a lot of value. Seed is still in front of me, but these templates remove a lot of friction.

I was going to not-comment because it was just good news, but in case there was doubt, this is great.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this term sheet descriptive or prescriptive? Are you telling us what standard straight-forward terms _are_ right now, or what they _should be_ right now (and would be, in a slightly better world)?

<comment><USER9> descriptive, but note the comment about the brackets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The only surprising bit for me was the dividends. Most terms sheets I've seen don't require the 6% dividend. Seems weird.

<comment><USER22> I was surprised by the % being included as I figured that would be decided by the board at the time a divindend is approved. I have no idea why a % which would be defined before knowing the details of the companies financial situation.

I wonder if this is more of a protection against the board deciding on a dividend when it is in the best interest in the near term for the company to keep money in the bank. So defining 6% might mean "this company has so much cash that they can return a 6% dividend without harming the long-term potential". Perhaps if you aren't able to return 6%, you aren't ready to return a dividend at all?

<comment><USER23> The dividend provision just says that the common won't get a dividend unless the preferred has already received their 6% (per year). It doesn't mean that you couldn't issue the preferred a smaller dividend--that would just count toward the 6% but still wouldn't allow the common to get a dividend until the remainder is paid out to the preferred.

It's relatively rare for venture backed startups to issue ordinary course dividends anyway (for the reason you stated, funding development/growth is typically seen as a better use of company cash to try to get to a big exit or IPO, etc.).

<comment><USER9> Yes, this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now switch the preferred shares to common shares and eliminate all liquidation preferences and you'd have something closer to a fair term sheet template.

No young start-up should ever agree to preferred shares or any liquidity preferences. This is the next great battle for founders to win over venture investors. To push that risk back onto the investors where it should be instead of allowing the investors to unduly offload even more of their risk onto the founders and early employees.

Liquidity preferences should have never become common with start-ups, they should be quite rare. There is no more important territory for founders to be focused on taking back from venture capitalists than that. Liquidity preferences are a routine source of screwing over the founders and early employees. YC could do something tremendous for founders by fighting on their behalf to put that shifted risk back where it should be: with the investor; the founders and employees already shoulder enough risk as it is.

<comment><USER25> Not sure why the downvotes. The reality is preferences are what poisons employee equity grants and is what ends up surprising people when startups end in any way other than spectacular success.

It's unrealistic to do away with the common/preferred split, but protecting founders and perhaps some key employees as well as banning any kind of participating preferences or ratchets is a good place to start.

<comment><USER26> Participating preferences are bogus - obviously, as are > 1x in most cases.

This term sheet is nonparticipating 1x. Despite the first comment in this chain, this is actually a very reasonable approach, and preferred stockholder is always going to have a preference - or there would be no point in being preferred.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is extremely useful. Most importantly, I am glad that they included examples of what is non-standard. These are the real curveballs that are difficult for first-timers to gauge. whether they are "normal" to have on a term sheet or whether they're getting squeezed without really knowing.

<comment><USER26> Over 1x participating preferred I've seen a few times. A TOTAL nontransparent scam in my view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Could someone here talk more about the "no shop" clause, which seems 100% geared toward giving a buyer better than a competitive price. But, the document says it is the only term that is legally binding!

How is "nothing in this document is legally binding and the buyer doesn't have to buy, EXCEPT for the term that the seller may not talk to any other buyers in any way." What kind of sense does that make? Would you "accept" an offer to sell your car that says it isn't binding in any way except that you may not talk to anyone else about selling your car to them, for the next 30 days?

Also since it says it is "legally binding" what are the remedies? What is the history of such a term?

Why would founders agree to it and actually follow it?

</comment><comment><USER29> One potential modification would be to add some language to the No Shop clause to allow the lead investor to approve any other conversations about the round. This can be helpful when the Series A round is larger, as the diligence by separate investors can proceed in parallel.

</comment><comment><USER30> This may seem like a slightly out-of-place question, but is there any equivalent term sheet for seed funding ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our safe docs are pretty good for this: [https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/#safe](https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/#safe).

<comment><USER31> iirc the SAFE doesn't cover vesting, information rights and control rights (I guess this is because typically companies that YC invests in are set up with something like Stripe Atlas or similar?)

In many European hubs the typical term sheets for seed financing are provided by Angels or seed stage VCs and typically aren't as founder friendly as in the US.

Having more information/a recommended seed term sheet from YCombinator that explicitly covers the above (or references Stripe Atlas) would help.

Really appreciate all the documents and context that you are publishing. The impact is vast and goes way beyond the Valley and the immediate YC network.

<comment><USER32> AFAICT, the norm with SAFEs is that they're very hands off in terms of company operations, at least in SV.

<comment><USER31> ty for the clarification ericd

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> * What should someone do if they get push back from an investor when asked to this term sheet?

* If this term sheet is used, can we avoid the legal costs of a Series A?

<comment><USER9> It's meant to provide transparency on what good and clean terms are. It won't generate negotiating leverage for you if you don't have any, though on the margins it might help you persuade someone that a term is "market."

Most of the legal costs don't arise from the term sheet. They come from legal diligence and drafting the definitive docs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I love this line:

        Company: [_______], A Delaware Corporation.

Because no one is gonna incorp anywhere else. Despite 90% of SV companies starting in California.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't matter where the company raising an A started, it is usually incorporated in Delaware. If the company incorporated elsewhere, it will almost always reincorporate in Delaware prior to raising an institutional round.

This isn't true for certain international jurisdictions, but within the US, it is a near certainty.

<comment><USER34> Right, I just thought it was a funny quirk of our legal system.

<comment><USER9> Network effects don't just exist in tech.

Delaware has the most developed corporate law and support services for corporate transactions (you can file charters, mergers, etc. within an hour there; good luck doing that in most other states, including CA). Every company that incorporates in Delaware adds further value to every other company that's in Delaware. Each marginal company adds to the Delaware legal corpus and support structure because (1) it ensures Delaware has the greatest variety and largest supply of potentially significant corporate legal cases, which means it has the greatest variety and largest supply of actually adjudicated cases and thus developed and stable law, and (2) it pays Delaware annual fees for those support services. This in turn attracts more companies to incorporate there because of that ever expanding corpus/infrastructure. And so on and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is really helpful, thanks a lot! Just wondering, is the template released as Creative Commons or anything similar? I'd like to use it in some teaching material but only if it's intended use.

</comment><comment><USER36> I know this article focuses on founders, but I'd love to see something done in the industry for employees (especially early employees!) as well.

One of the former companies I worked at never allowed early exercise and issued standard ISO with 90 day expiration upon leaving, which is unfortunately essentially the analogue of "standard and clean" when it comes to employee compensation. By the time I was ready to leave (4+ years, I was very early) all my equity was vested, and buying it required spending ~250k (USD!) between cost of exercising and AMT taxes, all while the company shares were illiquid as ever. The company had no interest in helping me, despite me asking for an extension to the option expiration, they were too bitter that I was leaving and creating significant "damage" to the business.

It was incredibly painful and I felt very cheated and stupid for agreeing to those terms in the first place (actually faced some deep depression and anger against the world for a few months because of this, and thought about going to therapy), but what did I do in the end? I paid out the money. Yes, I wrote a check to my employer for 60k, and another check to the IRS for 190k, depleting my non-emergency savings (and this is from a very frugal person, who never even spent more than 8k on a car, car being my biggest expense ever). There were funds who would lend me the money, but wanted 50%+ of the proceeds, and if the company goes under you're still on the hook for a taxable event when the loan is forgiven.

Luckily AMT for ISO exercise can be slowly (very slowly) recouped in future tax years (and the new tax law made it a bit easier by increasing the deduction and the phaseout limits), but I still had to waste so much of my after tax money just to leave with what I matured over the years. And that money is now sitting in the government pockets for years, producing me no interest and losing value with inflation until I recoup all of it.

Fortunately, a year after I bought those shares one of the investors contacted me and bought some of my equity, so I was able to recoup all what I originally put in (and then some). But it's simply insane, and I am still in the hole for all that AMT that I will recoup in ~10 years, no less.

Other coworkers who left and didn't have the money to come up with the exercise and tax liability, simply lost them, justifying to themselves "well, they're probably not going to be worth anything anyway" (which could be totally true even after paying thousands to exercise them!).

It's a plain insult to startup employees. I wish all startup employees would rebel against this and refused to accept any startup offer unless there was early exercise paid by the company upon joining, or option expiration window of 10+ years.

I, for one, know that will never __ever__ join another startup again for this reason.

<comment><USER37> This sucks. Sorry to hear they did that to you and I'm glad you made out ahead of the game.

A company I worked with had the opposite approach — they not only allowed for early exercise, they allowed for immediate exercise of all unvested shares with an 83(b) election (and converted the vesting schedule into a clawback schedule). AND they offered a bonus for the amount of the exercise price.

So in effect, if you had $100k in stock vesting over 4 years, the company would bonus you $100k, you'd then exercise, file an 83(b) election, and you owned Common with a clawback provision.

You of course were liable for the income tax on the $100k, the company was liable for the employer portion of same, and when/if the shares were sold you'd be liable for capital gains accordingly, but overall this seemed like an eminently fair offer to employees and cost the company only the employer portion of the income tax on the bonus.

Everyone loved it and employees felt respected and treated fairly. Why don't more companies do this?

<comment><USER38> What a great step in the right direction!

The $40k+ you could owe in taxes is still a problem. Perhaps the company could give you an open-ended loan of the $100k (that you paid back if you returned the stock, or after a good exit).

<comment><USER37> Agreed, but: I think that might cross the line into what a loan actually is vs. what income actually is (or at least the IRS might have something to say about it).

I know the $40k in taxes sucks, but if you step back and think about it, it's actually quite "fair" (ignoring fundamental arguments about whether taxes are fair heh ;).

You are receiving $100k in stock options/stock. That will grow over time. I think it's fair to be taxed on that stock as income (since it is income! you're being given an asset) and then, later, be taxed on the gain of of that asset (if there is a gain). If you leave the company, they'll have the option to buy back any clawed-back stock, so you could even end up ahead (let's say you vest 50% then leave, so company pays you $50k for the unvested/clawed-back stock -- then you're actually ahead of the game by $10k net of taxes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> We're closing our seed round this week - this is such a good reference, especially because I have a technical background.

Is anybody able to shed some light on the key differences between a seed term sheet and this Series A term sheet?

</comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone have a link to a great intro on VC for dummies? I keep seeing these kind of posts but not the big picture in blog form. Maybe a thousand words or two, not too detailed.

</comment><comment><USER41> Very useful, thanks! Is access to financial statements implied? what about requiring audited financials? or is that not common/expense at that stage?

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are diligence items that aren't typically defined in a term sheet. You'll deal with that directly with the investor, potentially as a condition to close as worked out in the full docs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> are there any good book with lots of examples of term sheet/valuation math for startups?

<comment><USER43> Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, Brad Feld.

<comment><USER42> great, i'll get the book. thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Founders should invest time and effort to ask for more board seats. The YC doc is a good start but if you follow this to the letter you may lose control in your B or C when the B and C investor also want board seats. Also it's important to keep in mind that there is no "standard." Everything is always negotiable.

</comment><comment><USER45> Can someone please explain each clause in layman's terms. Thanks.

Trying to learn the lingo of VC.

</comment><comment><USER46> For real estate, your state's realtor organization will have standard purchase forms available with a quick google search. With these, a title insurance company, and home inspector, you can easily do a private party real estate deal where everybody has reasonable insurance.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm a software guy. Most of that sheet is a foreign language to me.

<comment><USER48> Are you starting a (venture-scale) company? Learning this language is critical.

Are you working for a startup? Becoming more familiar with this language is helpful - you can figure out whether the founders/executives know what they're doing or not.

Are you working for a large company? Learning this language will not provide much benefit for you IMO.

<comment><USER34> If the answer to either of the first two questions is yes, where would I go to learn the jargon? (I do know about google, I'm just hoping there's a good resource that has everything so I don't need to search individual terms).

<comment><USER49> This book is pretty good and reasonably up to date: [https://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurs-Guide-Business- Law-4th/...](https://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurs-Guide-Business- Law-4th/dp/0538466464/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1548709331&sr=1-1&keywords=dauchy+business+law)

We used an older edition as a textbook in a Venture Capital seminar back when I was in law school.

<comment><USER34> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Is there any similar resource and guidance for seed/angel, thanks

</comment><comment><USER51> I thought the original SAFE was on casetext.com. Too bad this wasn't loaded there as well.

</comment><comment><USER52> How enforceable is that "No Shop" clause that is said to be binding in the document?

<comment><USER9> I'm going to answer this question a little differently, because enforceability can also depend on facts and circumstances. Think of the binding / non-binding distinction as more of a social commitment signal. The No Shop means that once the company and investor both sign, they're pledging to work together to figure out this deal along these high level terms for the next 30 days. They've made a commitment to each other. Venture is a relatively small community and going back on your word gets around. Social consequences can be just as bad as legal ones.

<comment><USER52> Well yes... It is a promise.

Your reply suggests that it's not binding ('legally' binding, obviously).

<comment><USER9> It can be legally binding.

<comment><USER52> Ok... So how would you enforce it? It does not seem to form a contract.

I realise that this is mostly US law and that my limited knowledge relates to British law. So with that in mind, my understanding is that a simple promise is basically not legally enforceable.

<comment><USER53> It can be enforced with a lawsuit like this, when an investor doesn't care as much about their reputation with founders: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-25/crypto- bi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-25/crypto-billionaire- sued-by-sequoia-after-funding-deal-goes-awry)

<comment><USER52> I'm sorry but that does not answer my question at all.

It's quite obvious that a legal dispute may be settled in court. We do not know the details of the case you quoted so it's difficult to comment.

I'm asking specifically about the template that is posted here because it looks like a simple promise and, as mentioned, these have no value in many jurisdictions. I suppose I'm asking how it works in Delaware, basically.

I suspect that the first reply I got is actually it...

<comment><USER23> > In many jurisdictions of the United States, promissory estoppel is an > alternative to consideration as a basis for enforcing a promise. It is also > sometimes called detrimental reliance.

Wiki: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel_2)

PDF: [https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...](https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=11423&context=journal_articles)

<comment><USER52> Yes I know estoppel.

But in this case?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Question: do investors usually vest at the same rate as founders, or at all?

E.g. if they put in 1M for 25%, do they legally receive the 25% of shares right away?

What's typical here? In terms of investor vesting relative to the founders.

<comment><USER43> Investors don't vest and (to a first approximation) can't be fired. (They can constructively "quit", by refusing to answer your emails, but they keep all their equity and you keep all their money.)

The question of whether they "legally receive the shares right away" can be a bit more nuanced, particularly in e.g. a transaction for a SAFE or convertible note.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Dewa Font Company is an award winning team of US Tutorial web,design wordpress,SEO,Business,Collection of fonts type and business design [https://dewafont.com](https://dewafont.com)</comment>


Did Google Arm Its Own Enemies With Android? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/11/did_google_train_its_own_enemi.html

<comment><USER2> What other options did Google have in this scenario? Being a software and data-focused company, they clearly were not positioned well to build and ship handsets.

Google's best option is to ensure to ensure that their services (search, Docs, Maps, etc.) are the best available options. They were able to unseat Yahoo earlier in the decade due to quality of results, they just need to continue innovating and convince users to do the same again.

</comment><comment> space-monkey Google would be in a much worse position if Apple had mobile handset hegemony. iAds + native apps isn't something they can break into. Now developers targeting mobile have a much stronger incentive to just develop a web app and cover both platforms when possible. That's a much better situation for Google, even if they don't have default services installed on the handsets.

<comment><USER3> That always seemed like the reason for the initially very limited storage on early Android handsets. The original iPhone was out with 3-15 gigs of storage for apps, while the G1 had around 100mb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What the author did not consider is whether consumers are willing to buy a phone which does not have Google's apps installed or at least available (tight GMail integration, maps, etc.).

<comment><USER5> I'd venture to guess most consumers really don't even know about the tight integration of Android and Google apps. They'd probably just want to make sure they can get to Facebook on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Google makes money off advertising, not software"

AFAIK that's not true. While the core of Android is free as in beer, if you want Gmail and any other Google-branded software on your handsets, you'll have to pay.

<comment><USER7> True, but I think when people make that point, they are implying that Google's main focus is making sure they can make good money selling ads, not that they make zero profit on Android. Or in other words, their main goal is to sell ads, not to sell Android, even if they do make some profit selling Android.

<comment><USER6> I think the strategic focus of Android is to prevent any vendor from having control of the mobile experience. By providing a free alternative phone makers can use, it creates market fragmentation and no vendor will be able to steer the market in one or other direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think that now that Google has the manufacturers and networks hooked, they will close the loopholes (e.g. swapping out the search engine) by changing the licensing for newer versions.

<comment><USER9> Sure they will, if they feel like shooting themselves in the foot. Android would probably survive the accident, but it'd certainly start limping.

The open source part of Android created by Google (which is most of Android) uses the Apache Software License (v2.0). If they change any conditions, Android would no longer be open source.

The biggest winner would be Nokia, because Meego & Symbian would then become the only viable open phone stacks, although some would defect to Apple, because if you're going to use a non-open phone, you might as well go with Apple.

<comment><USER10> Realistically, Android without the market and Google apps is not Android and Google can charge whatever they want for those apps. I suspect they're better off giving those apps for free and making money from the ads inside them.

Honestly, the whole "OMG they replaced Google with Bing!" story is overblown; there's a lot more to a phone than the Web browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer" seems to fit nicely here.

</comment><comment><USER12> YES! YES THEY DID!

This was a no-so-directly stated purpose and intention of Android since day one. That any late to the party analyst looks at the situation and thinks they've discovered a hole in the plot speaks more to how ill informed the field of analysts are than to Google's strategy.

Google's intention with Android -- they haven't been quiet about this -- was to create an open, competitive ecosystem that isn't controlled by any one vendor (incl. themselves). If Apple dominated and decided to cut Google out (and smartphones continued their path to dominance), that single point could decimate Google. However if 20 handset makers make Android, and one of them decided to cut Google out, the damage is limited. If Google provides an experience that customers want, they would vote with their wallets because they could.

(see the negative reception of Bing on some Verizon handsets)

<comment><USER13> I believe their intention was to make sure that they get a piece of the mobile ads pie. There are a lot of clues indicating this and it's the reason that I'm disenchanted by Android.

I'd rather use products from someone who's in the business to make money from products: Apple, Nokia, RIM, MS (and Palm I guess).

<comment><USER12> _I believe their intention was to make sure that they get a piece of the mobile ads pie_

Well sure -- the reason they want you using Google search is so they can advertise to you. And they can get you using Google Voice, and Google Maps, etc. They are less likely to have their products -- which are largely sponsored by ads -- cut out.

 _I'd rather use products from someone who's in the business to make money from products: Apple, Nokia, RIM, MS_

Apple is a _terrible_ example of that. Aside from the fact that they have a very big advertising initiative, a big part of the iPhone experience is lock- in with various other Apple products and conduits. Want some music? Oh well look, Apple is your conduit, taking their piece of the pie. How about a movie, or a book, or a newspaper? Hi, Apple here, ready to tax you.

Nokia...sure. Apple -- absolutely not.

<comment><USER14> Music, movies, books, newspapers - I can get all of these painlessly on the iDevice without the Apple tax. The only lockin I have with the iphone/ipad, is iTunes. That's an aggravating piece of software, sure, but it doesn't really _lock_ me into paying apple anything.

PS- When i say newspapers, I mean news delivered digitally. Not issues, so to speak.

<comment><USER12> Just as you can use an Android device without ever seeing a single Google ad.

However Apple's media strategy is a big part of their iDevice push. Simply selling you a piece of hardware is only a small part of their plans for you.

<comment><USER5> _"However Apple's media strategy is a big part of their iDevice push. Simply selling you a piece of hardware is only a small part of their plans for you."_

You say this as if it's a bad thing, like it's some secret plan by Apple. They tell you up front they are selling you the complete package. It's what they tout as their advantage. You want music on your phone? Tap one icon on the screen and you can pick from arguably one of the most complete catalogs there is. Movies? No problem, they are just as easy. Want to play a game? One tap away from the store.

If you don't like to use Apple's services for getting your media, don't get the iPhone, but don't pretend they are hookwinking everyone by integrating it all so nicely on their phones.

<comment><USER12> There's a context to this thread that you disregarded.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sorting data in parallel CPU vs GPU - <AUTHOR> http://solarianprogrammer.com/2013/02/04/sorting-data-in-parallel-cpu-gpu/

<comment><USER2> I do enjoy these 21st Century partial rediscoveries of the good old trusty Fibonacci Polyphase merge sort. It's like the late 70's / early 80's all over again, only with commodity rather than custom hardware.

There's some online discussion here: <http://flylib.com/books/en/126.96.36.199/1/>

The book references are: External Sorting, Section 5.4 in The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 3: Sorting and Searching by Donald Knuth, Addison-Wesley, 1973.

and External Sorting, Chapter 13 in Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick, Addison- Wesley, 1983.

Sorting and merging blocks is the beginning of the journey, learning the various tricks to doing it optimally is where it gets interesting, although perhaps no longer relevant; 30 years ago the OPs approach might take nearly a day with polyphase tweaks reducing the grind down to under half an hour, these days it's all over in a fraction of a second and more or less bound by I/O throughput speed - does optimising sort times still matter?

<comment><USER3> > does optimising sort times still matter?

Yes, not all new computers are fast (calculators, cars, µC, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tangential factoid: GNU libstdc++ has a parallel mode that includes parallel std::sort, [http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/parallel_mode...](http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/parallel_mode.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have an idea what might cause the small bump/spike in performance is on the CPU-8 graph at approx 1e6 elements? It looks to be worth around 20-25% of the performance.

If it's related to a sizing parameter of the parallelisation, that suggests that choosing that parameter well could be important.

<comment><USER6> It looks like a sudden degradation of performance. Might be the point when the caches become full. That CPU has 6MB L3 + 256KB L2 x 8 which means ~8MB. The bump is at 1043786 elements which require 8154KB of memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've rerun the tests on some slightly more recent hardware: a Tesla K20c and Xeon E5-2630. See the 'new benchmarks' section on: <https://github.com/aseidl/Sort_data_parallel>

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, yet I'd have liked a little more of a break down of the results. For example the GPU will probably need to transfer the sorted data to and from the card. This will have a dramatic effect on performance.

<comment><USER9> Take a look at CUDA's pinned memory.

<comment><USER10> Pinned memory doesn't help a whole lot. It's a page-aligned memory buffer for DMA transfer, it can only avoid doing one memcpy on the CPU. It does not improve the latency over the PCI-e bus, which is a lot bigger factor than the memcpy that can be avoided with pinned memory.

<comment><USER9> I've used it to hide the latency of the copy back (GPU -> CPU) inside the actual algorithm so I didn't need to suffer the large stall (4-5ms). It helped tremendously because most of the data was fully computed before the algorithm was actually done running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Please post the numbers for that box with vanilla (non-parallel) std::sort, on the whole array, as well! I'm curious!

</comment><comment><USER12> It looks like the OP should be using std::inplace_merge instead of std::merge/std::copy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Using 445M to compare against an i7 is ridiculous (Even if the i7 is 3 generations old).

<comment><USER14> You think the average programmer (user) has a Tesla computing device on his computer ?

<comment><USER15> You can buy an hour with two Tesla GPUs for $2.10 on EC2.

<comment><USER14> Are you allowed to install software on an On-Demand Cluster GPU Instances or you must use what is provided by Amazon ?

<comment><USER13> cuda comes pre installed with gpu instances. but you can install sotware as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Service for poker players and rails devs - <AUTHOR>

We developed this from a need we had as two poker players ourselves, it is a fully managed postgres service, with webui, that allows you to lock down your database based on IP, and change passwords etc.   We are obviously marketing towards poker players, but some people who find heroku's pricing for pgaas to be a bit much may find us a decent alternative.<p>cloudpokerdb.com <comment><USER2> Cool! Can you even play online poker in the US these days? I used to play semi-professionally on fulltilt and pokerstars.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://cloudpokerdb.com></comment>


Economic Recovery - Slight, but significant - Logic-Shop http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/02/news/economy/personal_spending_income/?postversion=2009030211

<comment><AUTHOR> Related article:

"In the meanwhile the adjustment of US consumption and savings is continuing. The January personal spending numbers were up for one month (a temporary fluke driven by transient factors) and personal savings were up to 5%. But that increase in savings is only illusory. There is a difference between the national income account (NIA) definition of household savings (disposable income minus consumption spending) and the economic definitions of savings as the change in wealth/net worth: savings as the change in wealth is equal to the NIA definition of savings plus capital gains/losses on the value of existing wealth (financial assets and real assets such as housing wealth). In the years when stock markets and home values were going up the apologists for the sharp rise in consumption and measured fall in savings were arguing that the measured savings were distorted downward by failing to account for the change in net worth due to the rise in home prices and the stock markets.

But now with stock prices down over 50% from peak and home prices down 25% from peak (and still to fall another 20%) the destruction of household net worth has become dramatic. Thus, correcting for the fall in net worth personal savings are not 5% - as the official NIA definition suggests – but rather sharply negative. In other terms given the massive destruction of household wealth/net worth since 2006-2007 the NIA measure of savings will have to increase much more sharply than has currently occurred to restore the severely damaged balance sheet of the households. Thus, the contraction of real consumption will have to continue for years to come before the adjustment is completed."

Nouriel Roubini, Professor of economics at the New York University Stern School of Business, "The Rising Risks of a Global L-Shaped Near Depression and Stag-Deflation", Mar 2, 2009, [http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini- monitor/255816/the_rising_...](http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini- monitor/255816/the_rising_risks_of_a_global_l-shaped_near_depression_and_stag- deflation)

</comment><comment><USER2> Slightly increased spending does not equal an economic recovery: "economists expect consumer spending to remain weak in the months ahead as the economy continues to deteriorate."

</comment><comment><USER3> _CPI-adjusted_ Dow Jones Industrial Average predictions:

<http://itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=80503#post80503>

iTulip has been very successful in its forecasts so far:

<http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=39099#poststop></comment>


Ask HN: What to use for world zip codes? - <AUTHOR>

I'm developing a website and need postal codes for as many countries as possible. All I need is City, State, and zip/postal code. I found zipcodeworld.com but, they're products are a lot more than I need. Wondering if anyone knows of a low cost solution? <comment><USER2> Address formats are different all over the world. Lots of places call them "postcodes" not zip codes (e.g. the UK). Some places have no postcodes (e.g. Ireland). Lots of places don't have 'states'. And the US has lots of 'cities' whereas lots of places would have local towns or counties.

You usually need addresses to send someone something. I'd suggest just putting in a text field and letting the user just type it in freeform.

<comment><USER3> And you can check that the address is sane using a geocoder. Both Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps have freely-accessible APIs for that.

<comment><USER4> I asked the same question several weeks ago. Google's reverse geocoding api is a great solution. Instead of inserting hundreds of thousands of records into a database and juggling different tedious validation techniques it's a much better idea to only use latitudes and longitudes for locating people geographically. However, the project's details may require other routes but still thought I would share:

[http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/examples/geoc...](http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/examples/geocoding- reverse.html)

Users just click on their location on the map and Google hands off the nearest address info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also, keep in mind, don't make the Zip Code required. Some countries (Ireland being the most prominent) don't have them.

<comment><USER6> Also, don't make state required, most countries don't have them.

<comment><USER7> Generally don't make too many assumptions about the address format if you're dealing with international customers.

Many of the address forms on US-sites are a bit challenging to europeans because even after selecting "Other" in the State-dropdown we're still left with a bunch of input fields that don't quite fit our local address format.

Most people (including myself) are probably used to that by now and just duplicate stuff as needed (City/State) and leave others blank. But I wonder what the bounce rate amongst less savvy users is for these forms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What language are you using? I don't know of a datasource for it but I'm familiar with the Django project's localflavor contrib app:

[http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/localflavor...](http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/localflavor/)

You can also try searching through programmable web:

<http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory>

</comment><comment><USER9> The best resource that I know of is addressdoctor.com.

See their demo here: <http://www.addressdoctor.com/lookup/default.aspx?lang=en>

Via a web service, they enable you to produce the right address form fields on a country-by-country basis. I've met with their CEO in person and kicked the tires and would highly recommend them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's a few <http://www.geonames.org/postal-codes/>

<comment><USER11> Geonames is great. It doesn't get any freer than this (in both senses of the word).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I use what came with freeside, my billing system. <http://www.freeside.biz/freeside/> but it's not complete, so a better solution, if someone has one, would be great.

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes>

</comment><comment><USER6> What do you need the postal codes for? How are you going to use them?</comment>


A 5-star Amazon review in return for a $20 bribe? - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-04/amazon-review-bribe <comment><USER2> I've gotten those too, it's usually a little slip of paper or something that says you can get X if you review the product and email them a link.

It makes me pretty suspicious of the thing I just bought.

</comment><comment><USER3> This helps explain why reviews on Amazon tend to be worthless.</comment>


How I Start: C++ - <AUTHOR> https://www.howistart.org/posts/cpp/1/ <comment><USER2> Starting with a meta-makefile in Premake is one way to go about learning C++, I suppose. But it seems to add an unnecessary layer of complexity and abstraction for beginners. And shared libraries, while an important thing to know about for many real-world projects, are not really part of the C++ language at all.

Yes, eventually you will probably want to figure out how to do cross-platform development. But if you really want to just learn the C++ language, I would start with an actual IDE, such as Visual Studio or Xcode, and just stick to one platform.

Or better yet, just use an online environment such as cpp.sh or ideone.com or codechef.com.

<comment><USER3> I think these are salient points. Part of my rationale for writing it the way I did is that howistart is slightly editorial in nature and is a collection of opinionated overviews of a professional workflow by design. In the real world, C++ is never used in vacuum (since its runtime is a very thin layer on top of the operating system). Also, C++ is generally chosen because it compiles on many platforms, and awareness of meta-make systems and how executables are structured and run is important in a professional working environment.

This is why I make it clear at the beginning that the article isn't meant to be an introduction to the language (non-goal!) and also point out references for a beginner to learn from later. I also mention that learning a single IDE first and learning it well is a good idea.</comment></comment>


After 27 Years Reporter Who Exposed ECHELON Finds Vindication in Snowden Archive - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2015/08/03/17-years-reporter-exposed-echelon-finds-vindication-snowden-archive/ <comment><USER2> So, the Snowden archives were released years ago.

Why is this news today?

<comment><USER2> So, the article is from 2015. But the archives were released long before then.

My question remains. Why is this news today?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone else hear that ECHO?</comment>


Drew Curtis: How I beat a patent troll - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_troll.html

<comment><USER2> He should also talk about how he himself is a bit of a patent troll (although an unsuccessful one). He's tried to patent some pretty fishy things before, but USPTO stopped him. He's tried trademarking smileys, the acronym "NSFW" and other things but also failed. The worst thing is, when he was rejected, he said on Fark "It was a joke!" I have a feeling if he'd actually gotten the trademarks, he would've been singing a different tune.</comment>


Malware Uses Router LEDs to Steal Data From Secure Networks - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malware-uses-router-leds-to-steal-data-from-secure-networks/ <comment><USER2> This technique is sometimes used when reverse engineering. For example, if you can find a way to run code on a device and control an LED on it, it can then be possible to dump the device's firmware through flashing the LED.

This is exactly how the CHDK project[1] managed to obtain firmware dumps[2] of various Canon cameras when they were first being reverse-engineered. I used the same technique myself when I soft-bricked my camera and needed to see the camera's internal log messages to understand where the problem was. I redirected the log out to the LED, recorded them using a photodiode and my PC soundcard input, then reconstructed logfile from the soundwave that was recorded. To my surprise and pleasure, it worked first time and gave some of the clues needed to eventually revive the camera.

[1] [http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK](http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK)

[2] [http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Obtaining_a_firmware_dump](http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Obtaining_a_firmware_dump)

</comment><comment><USER3> _Computer keyboards have LEDs on them that are essentially kind of useless: one to tell you when NUM LOCK is on, one for CAPS LOCK, and a third one whose purpose Randy can 't even remember. And for no reason other than the general belief that every aspect of a computer should be under the control of hackers, someone, some where, wrote some library routines called XLEDS that make it possible for programmers to turn these things on and off at will. And for a month, Randy's been writing a little program that makes use of these routines to output the contents of a text file in Morse code, by flashing one of those LEDs. And while all kinds of useless crap has been scrolling across the screen of his computer as camouflage, Randy's been hunched over gazing into the subliminal channel of that blinking LED, reading the contents of the decrypted Arethusa intercepts._

\-- Neal Stephenson's [http://www.cryptonomicon.com/text.html](http://www.cryptonomicon.com/text.html) (2009, as what's left of its custom website shows!). $9 Kindle edition: [https://amzn.com/dp/B000FC11A6](https://amzn.com/dp/B000FC11A6)

Apparently he has a new novel out next week.

<comment><USER4> > Apparently he has a new novel out next week.

A time-travel adventure involving a scientist trying to resurrect the power of magic! Wow. I had no idea this was coming, thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google's security expert Michał Zalewski (lcamtuf) explored this subject in his book "Silence on the Wire" (2005). He even described how to build a simple device to read these LEDs.

It's a great piece of the writing (much like the whole book). The chapter is available for free:

[https://www.nostarch.com/download/silence_ch05.pdf](https://www.nostarch.com/download/silence_ch05.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> There was [earlier work]([http://www.applied- math.org/optical_tempest.pdf](http://www.applied- math.org/optical_tempest.pdf)) on pulling Ethernet data from the LEDs of a 100MBps switch, as they were hard-wired to the cable.

There was also a paper from around the same time about a keyboard hack that flashes the caps lock key imperceptibly fast but brightly enough so that a remote watcher can see the encoded keystrokes on your curtains or ceiling, but I can't seem to find that one.

<comment><USER7> > a keyboard hack that flashes the caps lock key imperceptibly fast but > brightly enough so that a remote watcher can see the encoded keystrokes on > your curtains or ceiling,

it's in that same paper you linked, page 20.

Now the _real_ beautiful result is the one where Kuhn deconvolves the _diffuse_ light output (not an image, the _total_ instantaneous light output, as would be collected by a fast photomultiplier tube or a photodiode) of a CRT with the impulse response of the phosphor -- to obtain the original image! [https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't see what's the huge (besides higher data rates and a different modulation waveform) difference between that 2017 paper and this 2002 one: [http://applied-math.org/optical_tempest.pdf](http://applied- math.org/optical_tempest.pdf)

Did we really need another "LEDs connected to serial lines / GPIOs can be made to blink arbitrarily and a camera/photodiode that looks at them can decode data" paper?

</comment><comment><USER8> Saving you a click: if you have malware already installed and a camera nearby, you can use the LEDs to transmit data to outside.

</comment><comment><USER9> Clickbait. "an attacker with visual access to the LEDs and either control of or knowledge about exact on/off meanings could steal data".

Otherwise, when lore comes up again and again as "new", you realize that you are not the youngest... from the jargon file[1]:

       :blinkenlights: /blink'@n·li:tz/, n.

       [common]   Front-panel  diagnostic  lights  on  a  computer,  esp.  a
       {dinosaur}.  Now that dinosaurs are rare, this term usually refers to
       status lights on a modem, network hub, or the like.

[1] [http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.7.dos.txt](http://jargon- file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.7.dos.txt)</comment>


Microsoft to show Bash running on Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-show-bash-on-linux-running-on-windows-10/ <comment><AUTHOR> Could this mean apt-get on Windows in future?

</comment><comment><USER2> wait, so now you can ssh into your windows 10 machine to run bash and then in that run mingw to compile Windows binaries?

</comment><comment><USER3> Checking calendar. Nope. Not April 1st.</comment>


Yahoo to auction over 100 domain names ranging from $1,000 to $1.5 million - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/13/yahoo-announces-week-long-auction-100-premium-domain-names-ranging-1000-1-5-million/ <comment><USER2> > The company has simply decided it wants a quick revenue bump as these > domains have likely hit their peak in value.

This is a ridiculous observation given that Yahoo has revenue in billions of USD, and no, selling domains for thousands of dollars will not be any kind of meaningful "quick revenue bump." Tech reporting at its finest right here.

<comment><USER3> Did you not read the last paragraph?

> For a company that sees quarterly revenues of over a billion dollars, that's > not a big deal, but it definitely can't hurt either.

Reading comprehension at its finest right here.

<comment><USER4> The statement is presented as a fact in the article, yet as even the author admits it is probably not true. So I would agree it is amateur journalism.

<comment><USER5> Tying the sale of these domains to Yahoo's quarterly revenues -- even bringing them up in the same sentence -- is the wrong context in which to discuss them in the first place. Even if Yahoo raises a million dollars from this sale, it'll have no material impact on the bottom line.

That said, there are other factors at play in a move like this: 1) PR value (it got the attention of the tech press, after all); 2) the sale of nonproductive assets for any sum greater than $0 isn't necessarily a bad thing. Even if it has no measurable effect on the quarterly results.

If I own a broken appliance that I lack the time, financial interest, or skill to fix -- but I can sell it to someone who _can_ make use of it for a few bucks -- I might as well sell it. It won't make a dent in my yearly income, but it'll be better than holding onto the useless (to me) asset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Direct link to the list of known domains for the fellow "enable javascript to see our content"-boycotters out there: [http://cdn3.tnwcdn.com/wp- content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/11/...](http://cdn3.tnwcdn.com/wp- content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/11/yahoo_domains.png)

</comment><comment><USER7> A lot of them are good old (noun).com. Those seem valuable at first, but is that still the case? It used to be that people would build a brand around something like pets.com, but now it seems much more popular to create a brand name that is more identifiable and trademarkable.

<comment><USER5> Back in the day, before people understood how the web worked (or was going to work), those people generally assumed that recognizable nouns would (somehow) correlate to higher organic traffic -- as if someone looking to buy pet- related items would think to type "pets.com" into his URL field.

Search engines rendered that logic laughably naive, but I still think there could be some ancillary value in (noun).com as a recognizable and easily recalled domain name. I wouldn't overpay for one, but I wouldn't pass one up if the pricing made sense, and if I had actual plans to do something productive and value-adding with the name. (Buying domain names to squat and flip, under the "Greater Fool Theory," is a game I wouldn't recommend playing.)

On the other hand, the biggest non-technical challenge with buying a generic noun as a domain name is trademarking. Picking too generic a company name is setting oneself up for an uphill battle in today's trademark landscape.

<comment><USER8> Right, so sled.com is probably pretty good, but webserver.com is probably useless. Sled could easily be the name of an app (totally unrelated to sledding of course), but Web Server can't be anything because it's too technical to be useful for anything not related to web servers and too general to be useful for anything that actually is related to web servers.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. The value of something hyper-specific and enterprise-sounding (webserver.com) is dubious at best. In the B2B sales and service business, having a generic domain name doesn't carry much upside, and what little measurable upside it does confer will be outweighed by downsides (such as the difficult registration and enforceability of the trademark).

Apropos of nothing, a domain like truestory.com is an interesting tossup. At the expected going rate of $25k+, it doesn't appear to make a lot of sense. But if someone were going to buy this name and develop it as a blogging or magazine format, I could see some value (again, barring trademark difficulties). As a writer and aspiring publisher, I'd scoop up this domain if it were priced within reason: say, the $1k-$5k range, tops. As a businessman, I'm a little gun-shy about the price tag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ah, av.com. The good old redirect to altavista.com. I wonder how much they payed for that back in the days...

<comment><USER10> That was exactly my thought. Well is there anything left of the old altavista?

<comment><USER11> There's the way the exclamation mark in the Yahoo! logo at altavista.com temporarily morphs into a mountain....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here are some that caught my eye:

• webserver.com (250k-500k) • finalcountdown.com (10k-25k) • sandwich.com (50k-100k) • airtrafficcontrol.com (10k-25k)

I imagine sandwich.com might be a good asset for a chain sandwich restaurant (subway or quiznos, perhaps).

<comment><USER13> Maybe in 1999...but who actually types [thing I'm interest in].com into a web address bar these days? Even my grandma knows better than that by now.

<comment><USER14> Its not about typing. Its about cool name I guess. Everyone loves and remember a cool name. When you remember things, you communicate that easily and more often. Good for marketing I suppose

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really hope the producers of _Arrested Development_ buy finalcountdown.com

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems more likely that Yahoo is preparing to take a write-down on a collection of assets and is trying to mitigate the total amount by auctioning off the leftovers.

</comment><comment><USER13> I guess they're still holding on to broadcast.com. $5 billion for a 301 to yahoo.com, maybe they're waiting for the right buyer.

</comment><comment><USER16> Webcal.com for $5000? That seems way too cheap.

</comment><comment><USER17> This article reminded me how mammals.org would redirect to Apple. I just tested it and it doesn't work any longer. :(

</comment><comment><USER18> Mostly significantly over valued. They will draw attention though so maybe they'll get high prices.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yahoo is cleaning up the house before vacating it and relocating elsewhere. This is just a garage sale.

</comment><comment><USER20> Fellow HN'ers,

I had purchased a domain which I'm planning to Sell now. (iAppleService.com)

I'm totally new to this Domain Selling business.

\- How do you guys proceed to find the Right buyer? Can someone share their experience. Looking for help.

<comment><USER6> That looks like a prime candidate for a lawsuit over Apple's trademarks.

<comment><USER20> Thanks. is it so?

Apple's service is very poor here in India. They just don't care for second world countries. And I had purchased this for that reason. I like to give it away, if goes for a good cause.

<comment><USER21> Apple's service is poor in India because they are required by law to partner with Indian retailers to sell their products. These restrictions might be lifting though, I recently read that Wal-Mart would have a retail presence in India.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how much legacy code can be pushed malware using one of these.

</comment><comment><USER23> Honestly, I think this is great. Let these solid domains get used.

</comment><comment><USER24> jumpcut was an amazing tool. I wish they didn't deadpool it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why buy westerns.com when you could buy .westerns instead?

</comment><comment><USER26> surprised not to see broadcast.com on there.

</comment><comment><USER27> truestory.com sounds cool

<comment><USER28> truestorybro.com sounds more complete</comment></comment>


Cutting-Edge Taxi of Tomorrow Coming to New York City in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/04/04/new-york-future-taxi/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if the $30,000 price tag is fully retrofitted to NYC's standards. If it is that doesn't seem to bad at all.

I couldn't find the picture, might have been in the physical magazine or elsewhere, but they put this through decent testing (built a mock NYC street) to prove during the bid process it would hold up to our "uniquely" maintained roads. ([http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/reviews/preview/first-l...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/reviews/preview/first- look-nissan-nv200-the-next-new-york-city-taxi))</comment>


Pmarca donates US$28 million to Stanford's hospital - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/11/building-a-stat.html <comment><USER2> very inspiring, pmarca! with your blog -- you have given a lot to the startup geeks! and with this, you have given something amazing to your local community. Thank you. and looking forward to your "fondest hope"!!!

</comment><comment><USER3> wow - 28 million is serious cash -

whats up with the rest of the ultra rich valleyits?

while I agree that stanford hospital is not the needest place - its his money and I like the idea of funding local. Plus emergency services are the frontline service to the community and have been getting cut left and right.

anyway you skin it this is amazingly generous and deserves an applause.

</comment><comment><USER4> Finally, a generous donation to our home soil.

We need to stop giving to other countries so much and fix our own [mounting] problems first.

</comment><comment><USER5> utterly retarded, and he will have a poor social ROI. He should have used it ( $28m ) to fund 3 or 4 hospitals in some of the less fortunate parts of the world. Instead, people ( like me ) will ask questions like "Why didn't he give it to a part of the world that really needed it?". I'm pretty sure Stanford hospital can take care of itself. Just my 2c

<comment><USER6> (a) Stanford is a research hospital, and the work they do in research hospitals improves healthcare everywhere.

(b) This doesn't preclude him from making other donations.

(c) Even if it were an unwise choice (which I don't believe), it was still a generous thing to do. No one deserves to be called names for giving away $28 million.

This seems to me the meanest (in both senses) comment I've seen on News.YC to date. Ending it with an ass-covering "Just my 2c" just makes it seem that much more contemptible.

<comment><USER7> Although poorly articulated, I don't think his intention was to come across mean-spirited. I think he meant _this money could have more positive impact by doing y instead of x_. At the end of the day, since the money was earned through honest work instead of tax revenue, none of us have a say in how he chooses to use it, as many people here have already stated.</comment></comment></comment>


List of websites and whether or not they support 2FA - <AUTHOR> https://twofactorauth.org <comment><USER2> This site should call out common 2FA implementation mistakes, like requiring a special app or device instead of using standard TOTP, not providing revokable printable recovery codes, not allowing SMS to be disabled when other 2FA methods are added, or not supporting multiple hardware keys.

<comment><USER3> Here's a decent list: [https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/06/20/getting-2fa- right-in...](https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/06/20/getting-2fa-right- in-2019/)

(FD: I wrote it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great opportunity to bash Spotify. For their abuse of credentials is abysmal. Not only there's no 2FA, but there's no email confirmation for password reset.

Yes, I've said it - if you leave an open Spotify running somewhere, someone can walk by and takeover your account.

<comment><USER5> I experienced this in a different way! For some reason I had duplicate user names or something tied to my old email address that I could no longer receive emails at (or wasn't receiving, on requesting a reset link). I opened a chat (I recall?) with the customer service, and after explaining, the person typed, "ok I have reset your account email address to email@example.com" (which I provided).

What!? Without any verification or corroborating proof of me being the account holder? This is really shady.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good idea. Unfortunately any 2FA using a phone number (SMS or phone call) is highly insecure -- see Jack Dorsey having his Twitter hijacked, or any number of people having bitcoins stolen from Coinbase. That implementation should be marked with a big red X, not a green checkmark.

<comment><USER7> > see Jack Dorsey having his Twitter hijacked

His account was hijacked because his phone number was a single factor.

<comment><USER8> I think a better description is using your phone number for 2 factor auth and account means if you steal someone's phone number (via simhacking usually) then you can do anything, because you can reset the account through the phone number, and then you can set the password, and now you control 2 factors (phone + password).

<comment><USER7> That sounds like a bad way to implement 2FA, indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a useful site for me. Though not (only) because of the intended usage, but because of having a list of websites and services by topic curated by the developer community (who else adds a website by pull request?)

<comment><USER10> Their policy is to reject otherwise-fine PRs if the site in question is not in the Alexa top 200K, so no this is not a good resource for either the stated purpose or for your stated purpose.

<comment><USER11> The Alexa top 200k seems like a good bar. Beyond that you're going to get a lot of noise.

HN ranks pretty highly, and we're a "niche" community.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry but how is "site xyz supports 2FA" noise, given that you essentially need to search, regardless of what site you want to check?

Are you saying only the top 200K sites are important enough to warrant 2FA at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd be more enthusiastic about this if it were about more than just 2FA. That's not the end-all-be-all of website security, and there's sites here which get the "green checkmark" of approval but I'm suspicious of for other reasons. Security is complex, and I wouldn't want my website to be shamed for not having someone's one pet feature. Especially if some other site got a thumbs-up for a flawed implementation.

A site like this would be great if it included columns for other security features so I can see whether they take security seriously overall.

</comment><comment><USER13> Didn't this page used to say whether or not a site supported U2F specifically or was that some other very similar looking page?

Its unfortunate that they don't have this information. I would switch services to a site that specifically supports U2F/FIDO/FIDO2 but not to a site that uses a random proprietary hardware token that is still vulnerable to phishing.

<comment><USER14> Wouldn't that fall under the "Hardware Token" column, or is that a different technology?

<comment><USER13> I'm trying to say that all hardware tokens are not created equally. A hardware RSA TOTP-esque fob offers no phishing protection where as a FIDO key does. Its unfortunate this site doesn't distinguish between those two cases.

<comment><USER14> Ah, thanks for the clarification. I didn't read/parse your original comment properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Google is rumored to support TOTP, only I have to first provide my phone number to find out. Which means their '2fa support' is useless to me and looks more like those 'put in your phone number to download the pdf' websites.</comment>


Why Groupon is Worth $25 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://stevecheney.posterous.com/why-groupon-is-worth-25-billion-dollars

<comment><USER2> I have trouble with these sorts of arguments. Hopefully I'm not putting up a strawman, but this is what I read:

      1. There's a massive opportunity for *X*.
      2. Nobody is doing X, including business *Y*.
      3. Y is well-positioned to transition (or "pivot") to X if it chooses.
      4. ...
      5. Profit.

Even though I might agree with points 1, 2, and 3, there are a lot of moving parts and uncertainties between steps 3 and 5, what the fictional Reginald Jeeves calls "imponderables." I think that investing in a company on the basis of what it might do if a new market pans out is sound reasoning when making a VC investment. If you make ten such investments, perhaps one or two of them will pan out and you will make enough of a killing on them to pay for the others.

However, I do not think this is sound reasoning when picking stocks in the public market. I think you have enough trouble just trying to figure out if a public company can succeed doing the business they're currently trying to do, much less a whole new business they haven't tried yet.

<comment><USER3> Actually, this is first Pro-Groupon argument I found remotely convincing.

The point isn't so much that it shows Group _will_ succeed, merely that it makes an argument that they _could_ succeed. A Ponzi or pyramid scheme inherently _cannot succeed_. If an enterprise is Ponzi scheme, the smartness of the management, the prowess of the employees, the enterprises' momentum and everything else does not matter. But if an enterprise is _not_ a Ponzi scheme, you _can_ start looking at these factors.

Groupon may or may not succeed like Amazon. But _if_ there _is_ a massive opportunity "out there", this means it is not completely irrational for investors to give them rooting around in this market until they succeed or convincing fail.

<comment><USER2> I'm prepared to agree that the post makes an enthusiastic case for points 1, 2 and 3 with respect to Groupon :-)

And I think that the expression "Ponzi Scheme" is ridiculous, and you don't need this essay to know that Groupon are not paying dividends to public shareholders with money they raise selling stock to other shareholders.

<comment><USER4> The Ponzi moniker is somewhat relevant in the sense that existing investors (angels and VCs) could cash out to the next series of investors (public market) before the company turns a profit.

<comment><USER2> A Ponzi Scheme rests on misrepresenting new investments as income for existing investors. To date, I have seen no evidence of misrepresentation.

Cashing out before the next round invests is not a pyramid or Ponzi scheme, it's exactly what happens when you buy a public stock for $100 and sell for $200: Somebody else is willing to pay $200 and you sell your shares to them.

The fact that this happens before they make a profit and before they go public is irrelevant, that speaks to the mindset of the people buying the stock for $200, not to those selling for $200. Now if they _lied_ about being profitable and were merely using invested funds to generate fictitious revenue that turns into fictitious dividends, you might have something.

During the last bubble, there were cases where investors put a bunch of money into a company and then demanded that it spend a bunch of that money on another company in their portfolio, effectively creating fictitious revenues. I'd go along with calling those deals "Ponzi Schemes." But this one? Not a Ponzi Scheme, just people who are willing to make a bet on Groupon's success.

p.s. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme> is instructive. Especially the description of "similar schemes" and the word "bubble." (I am not making any claim about Groupon stock being or being part of a bubble).

<comment><USER4> I agree. I was almost going to make a similar argument a few days ago, but ultimately decided not to because the masses have effectively redefined what that term means. At this point, "Ponzi Scheme" has become a general term for financial sketchiness.

The challenge becomes how to how to denounce the Ponzi term without also denying the presence of financial engineering. Your argument does this as well as possible IMO.

When a pundit claims that Groupon is a Ponzi scheme, he really means "Groupon is raising money and using the money to buy more revenue at more than face value". We don't really have a classification for what this is, and the proposed scheme seems somewhat scam-ish, so the Ponzi term is being used.

I'm not claiming that Groupon is simply raising money and buying revenue. But I do believe that's what the pundits mean to say when they call Groupon a Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER2> Groupon is absolutely buying revenues. I read somewhere that $1.00 of revenue costs them $1.43. Given estimates as high as B$4 for 2011 revenues, if investors will value the company at B$15, it is clear that each dollar of revenue is worth $3.75 to investors.

Groupon's financing strategy exploits the difference between what an investor will pay for a dollar of revenue--$3.75--and what it costs to earn a dollar of revenue--$1.43.

Let's say they have a dollar of revenue in hand. They can sell $3.75 of stock based on that dollar of revenue. At $1.43 per, they can buy $2.62 more revenue. Which they can use to raise $9.82 from investors. Which buys $6.87 in revenues. Which they can use to raise $25.76, and so on and so forth, until they exhaust the market's capacity for buying Groupon stock or everyone tries to cash out at once.

Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If a dollar of revenue is actually a dollar of recurring revenue, it could be worth much more than $3.75. It all depends... How much churn do they have? How much competition will they have? It costs $1.43 to get the first dollar of revenue. How much does it cost them to get a second dollar from an existing merchant?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions. If it turns out that these revenue dollars are not recurring and the participants in the business know this but are disguising the situation from investors and misleading them into thinking that these dollars are just like regular business revenue dollars...

If that were the case, maybe one day people would be on HN claiming that such- and-such a company is a "Groupon Scheme." But if it turns out that they have been spending $1.43 to buy a growing revenue stream, investors might end up looking exceptionally smart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a pleasure to see someone take the stand and go against the rash of blog posts and articles against Groupon.

The main point of this article is that Groupon has value in connecting the online and offline world. Even if people use Yelp to decide on a restaurant, or search Google to figure out where it is- those companies never get profits from that because the restaurant never knows what sent the customer.

Groupon is able to monetize the online to offline sale by clearly letting the business see that Groupon brought in a customer.

He also says that while the daily deal structure might be risky/dead they can easily pivot to other online to offline connections like instant deals to your phone while walking by a restaurant.

Personally, while I think that monetizing the online to offline transaction could be a huge business opportunity I don't know if I am willing to risk money on watching Groupon make the pivot. If daily deal as a model is crumbling (which many people have blogged about), then you are betting a whole lot that the database of merchants and customers can be leveraged in a new business model.

<comment><USER6> > It's a pleasure to see someone take the stand and go against the rash of > blog posts and articles against Groupon.

Just because an argument is contrarian or counterintuitive doesn't make it right.

<comment><USER7> I don't think he implied that. And I agree with his sentiment - for those of us who haven't made up our minds on Groupon, it's nice to see a view from the other side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That the possible market for Groupon is big is without dispute. The reason people aren't sure about its prospects is that their reach still pales next to that of Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, etc., and they're still not doing anything that can't be copied.

</comment><comment><USER9> Read the whole article, but wanted to stop after the second paragraph. Choice quotation:

"The real innovation Groupon brought ... was their ability to profit off of closing the attribution loop in online-to-offline commerce. And this is a huge land grab that others had completely missed."

That's funny, because I thought that Groupon showed just the opposite of that. How exactly has Groupon proved that there's a _profitable_ business in hooking up customers and businesses with slash-and-burn deals? Even taking half of the revenue, Groupon is bleeding money and admits that it is going to have to invest even more to keep up the growth curve.

I get that Groupon is popular, sure, but they'd be even _more_ popular if they didn't take 50% of the coupon revenue. Of course, they'd be out of business sooner, as well. The "naysayers", like myself, are pointing out that Groupon (willfully or otherwise) hasn't found a balance that allows them to grow and actually turn a profit. What they have done is grow their userbase at an astonishing rate by raising and spending huge chunks of cash. That's not a business, that's a party. And parties, while fun to attend, are a bitch to clean up.

<comment><USER10> _Even taking half of the revenue, Groupon is bleeding money and admits that it is going to have to invest even more to keep up the growth curve._

I live in a moderately large regional area - Raleigh/Durham - close to a million people in the metro area. I've gone to groupon.com several times, and each time it doesn't seem to remember me - I end up putting my email in again each time, and then I'm shown a few 'deals', but nothing to suggest they're 'daily' (maybe they are, but I can't easily tell).

When I hear 'daily deal site', I'm sort of expecting to get emails daily with a deal. I've given my email address. I _want_ these things. If they can't make that happen in a metro area with nearly a million people, and having a large org (8,000 people?!) I just don't get how this will survive long term, other than perhaps by name recognition (it's a damn catchy name).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _The same can be said for services like Yelp. Yelp might drive people to restaurants, but it doesn't benefit Yelp if merchants don't attribute the new customer to Yelp. And how would they know? It's not like you walk in the door and tell the restaurant owner you just located them on your iPhone via Yelp's app. Foursquare hasn't solved this either, despite having 250K merchants signed up and literally inventing the act of announcing your presence to the world. Both are great companies solving problems, but only Groupon has closed this attribution loop._

Hrm... maybe because most service companies that care ask how you found out about them in the first place? Well, most should. The fact that most companies don't try to determine that source _when they're serving you_ (restaurants, haircuts, pet spas, printers, etc) is more an indication of really not understanding business and marketing in the first place. Outsourcing some of that - in this case, to groupon - may be a short term win, but you've just handed over your customer relations to a third party who has no real incentive to get those customers _back to you_ any time soon.

Small service businesses need a strong CRM process. I don't think groupon is it, although it could morph in to that.

</comment><comment><USER11> So the $25B number is entirely made up then? There seems to be nothing in the article to justify this number.

<comment><USER12> One thing that _was_ in the article is this...

"The real innovation Groupon brought to the table wasn't in advertising deals per se, it was their ability to profit off of closing the attribution loop in online-to-offline commerce."

To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I'm not sure that "p" word means what he thinks it means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> They have a list of some ~60,000 merchants, email addresses in the tens of millions, no patents or 'moat', and they're trying to sell a dollar for fifty cents and make a profit. Also, how do you scale when you have 8,000 employees? That's a huge fixed cost. And these aren't huge barriers to entry for your competition--Twitter/Facebook/any website with an audience can basically do this.

I don't see how their model is sustainable and the entire premise of their success seems wrested on Groupon succeeding at things they haven't demonstrated yet.

Also, I see Groupon as a sales company, not a tech company.

<comment><USER14> Salespeople are marginal costs, not fixed costs, and that is why they do not scale. (Unless those salespeople are converting prospects into long-term renewal sales) Engineering and design is a fixed cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Again, if this really is a 'land grab' as he claims, why did they pay out hundreds of millions to early investors? Why not spend that money grabbing more land? Assuming he's correct, the returns would be several times greater if they continued investing rather than issuing huge payouts. It seems like a huge red flag to me -- a sign that even the earliest investors see Groupon as a big risk and want to hedge their bets.

<comment><USER16> Does anybody remember how Yahoo/Google/Ebay handled this? I know their early investors got rich, but were they cashed out before the IPO?

<comment><USER17> For Google and EBay, they were making money hand over fist (the main problem they had when Meg Whitman joined was opening envelopes full of cash fast enough) and growing rapidly. Nobody wanted to cash out.

I don't know what the story was with Amazon.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to negotiate a job offer without any counter offers? - <AUTHOR> I recently received a job offer from one of the giants in SV for a software engineering role in the bay area (I am not from the US originally). The base salary they gave me is lower than the average of what you see in Glassdoor and the like for a similar position with my experience (about $10k of a difference).
When trying to talk with the recruiter about this I was pretty much told that unless I have another offer in hand (he literally asked to see a contract, is that a common thing to ask?), there's nothing he can do about it.
So I'm basically left with trying to get another offer from a company I don't plan on joining, or accept this offer which I'm not happy with, but from a company I do want to join. Is there a third option that might help me here? <comment><USER2> I've never heard of somebody asking to see a contract with another company; that sounds super weird, and I would definitely be uncomfortable with that request.

There's very little downside to trying to negotiate your job offer, even without a counter offer on the table. The outcomes are pretty easy to enumerate:

1\. You ask for more money. They negotiate; you end up with a higher salary. It might not be what you initially asked for, but that's how negotiation works, and it should be higher than what they offered. This is a success.

2\. You ask for more money. They say, "Oh geeze, we're really sorry, but there's straight up no room for negotiation here; you're either going to have to accept the offer as it stands, or walk away". This isn't a success, but it's not really a failure either because you haven't lost anything; you're in the same place you were before, making the same decision, but now you've got a little more information.

3\. You ask for more money. The company is offended that you have the temerity to negotiate, and they take their offer off the table. This looks bad, but it's a success as well. If a company gets salty at you for trying to negotiate a better salary and rescinds your offer, that's a pretty clear sign that you wouldn't have been happy working there and you've dodged a pretty major bullet. In my mind, that's good news.

For advice specific to negotiating, even without a counter offer, I'll point you towards Patrick Mackenzie's blog post on the topic; it's got some very good advice and is worth reading: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary- negotiation/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/)

</comment><comment><USER3> well, the fact that you don't have another offer does not change the negotiation much. They want to hire you so you should use that as a leverage. It's relatively straightforward.

solution 1) Tell them you won't join unless they revise the salary. Be ready for them to refuse.

solution 2) If you are willing to join with this salary, tell them you expect a higher salary and talk with them. Ask them why they won't match the local average. There is no negotiation if you don't talk. Maybe you'll learn the reason they can't match. Otherwise they'll realize that you are really serious about the bump but that you can negotiate. If they still refuse the raise, do not just accept the job. They will feel they owe you something because you were refused what you asked. Accept the job and immediately ask for something else. They will probably give it to you (should it be a specific laptop configuration, Giants tickets, arranged work schedule, whatever..)

These solutions are the same with an offer in hand and bear the same risk too: they can refuse.

Also, at that point in the negotiations, you should bypass the recruiter if he/she is a contractor. Ask to talk to the hiring director directly.

If you're in Silicon Valley, it won't be long before you find a great company anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually believe the company in question is a great one, the one I set out in the first place to end up in. 1) is probably a risk I'm not willing to take. I'll try to use your advice from 2), thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Glassdoor doesn't show how many years of experience, years at the company, or education are tied to each salary. Maybe those people listed on Glassdoor started at your salary or even lower. That is very likely because lots of times people post on Glassdoor after leaving the company, and typically they have gotten a raise since joining. It is also possible that people are inflating the salary they post.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that Glassdoor can be misleading and it's not the best source out there. I did ask around and tried to find out if the numbers there are close to reality, and for the most part the answer was yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Recruiters can ask for anything they want, but you don't have to give it to them.

Some places will match salary but otherwise bring you in at a lower level.

You could explain that the market research that you have done shows the offer is about $10k lower than the typical salary.

Also reinforce the skills that you bring to the job.

</comment><comment><USER6> i am not able to give you an advice on how to negotiate but i'd like to change the way you think about this problem.

ask yourself what is going to make you happy? earning $10K more? working in the valley? is the money worth to leave your country and work in the us? did they make any promises to increase your salary? will you be able to live comfortably with their offer?

<comment><AUTHOR> you raise some very good points, which I've spent a considerable amount of time thinking about. I think for the most the answer I have is a positive one, except that I feel that the offer I got could have been higher. It's certainly not going to prevent me from doing this, because I see this as more of an experience, rather than an opportunity to make more money.</comment></comment>