skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did the Bay Area Winter 2009 program (although I dropped out halfway through for dayjob emergency; I may go back for Summer 2010).

FI is great for several reasons:
1) It focuses more on developing entrepreneurs, vs. necessarily companies. The requirement that you incorporate to graduate is kind of at odds with this, but definitely the curriculum for the first half of the program is compatible with coming up with an idea and launching it within the program.
2) It's compatible with having a day job during the program -- if you have good time management skills, you can keep the day job while attending FI, launching your company, and thus not have to worry about funding. This is a major differentiator vs. YC.
3) Some of the mentors (IMO Aaron Patzer, Jon Betts-Croix, Ram from A9, and some others) were fucking AMAZING. It's worth $600 just to see their sessions.
4) You have some chance of meeting great cofounders in the program -- I actually met a few people I'd be happy to work with, and have gone down the road to doing a startup with someone from the program.

For the ideal training to do a startup (other than JFDI), I'd do an entrepreneurship program in undergrad (e.g. MIT E-Club, 100k contest), then something like YC to build a product, and Founder Institute to learn about the nuts and bolts of running a company, possibly interspersed with time spent working at either startups or funded former-startups.
Thank you. That's beautiful.
I have a similar proof that doesn't quite take so long to explain.

1 + 1 = 1

One number plus one number becomes one number.
Looking at how quickly you commented after OTToken and when he commented how quickly you responded, I could see why someone would think it was you. Just like the yahoo answers "questions" that are obviously setups because they are answered 1minute after asked.

Assuming it's not you, we have another area of comparison that is being overlooked. Besides OTToken's text patterns we also have when the comments were left. So we can throw out certain people that never comment during the hours of the day that OTToken did.

Also OTToken is obviously familiar with HN and has an alternative account by his own implication. Likely he was reading/commenting on HN then decided to make the account. OTToken made multiple comments over two hours so we could also try and pick people who's comments adjoin that timeframe. Specifically people who made comments in advance of OTTokens comments, but not at the same time.

He can switch accounts to make alternative comments, but it's unlikely he was making comments from two separate accounts simultaneously.
I disagree on the UK edu unlees they're also a non-native - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199898
Why did you put protect in scare quotes? Miep Gies protected the Franks by lying to the Gestapo. OK, they were the government, but you could protect someone by telling the killer that he's not home. Or do you disagree? So yes, an inability to receive honesty is something we want to protect.
I never use any other username besides tokenadult on the forums where I use the username tokenadult. I like to have one consistent identity wherever I post (real name some places, screen name some other places) and I'm sparing in my use of screen names, and nonexistent in my use of sock-puppets. (I have been tempted a few times, but have thus far always resisted the temptation.) Now I will go look at the comment so I can identify what about it does NOT have my writing style, and then post that in an edit to this reply.

Evidence that the comment does not come from my keyboard:

I would never write a ponderous sentence like "I fully agree with the sentiment that inspires your statement" as the opening sentence of a post.

I wouldn't write "Without even noticing it we are whoring out our privacy and intimate patterns," because I consider "whoring out" a crude expression, too crude for the polite, learned conversation I expect on HN.

The phrase "it requires a mindset and workflow not entirely dissimilar to those of spies" reminds me of George Orwell's "One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field." I may occasionally write like that, if I am composing a sentence as I type, but I try not to.

He is not me. I think he is male.
A Stochastic Model for Picking Winners in the NCAA Tournament
Are you concerned that PayPal+Bump creates additional risk? Try it out and let me know. I am not an expert in payments, but it shouldn't be any riskier than PayPal alone. In fact, I would argue in several ways it is safer (can't send money to the wrong person because of a typo for example).
You are correct. I first used the screen name on a forum, and then another forum, where the majority of users are teenagers. The screen name doesn't fit well here on HN (where almost everyone is an adult, even though I am older than most participants), but I like to minimize my use of distinct screen names. However, I am sure by screen name searches that other people now use this same screen name.
So to hedge I should buy Chinese yuan? Or better, short the U.S. dollar?
It's a good question. Paging grellas?

Anyway - single-trigger acceleration can lower the valuation of an acquisition, because the founder can then walk away. This is something VCs won't really like. Double-trigger is more usual.
Also correct. I am not afraid of expressing controversial opinions here.
MongoEngine 0.3 Released
If you "buy" a car on credit (a loan), it isn't YOURS until paid off.
Wouldn't his proposed method of returning nothing when URL==referer "destroy" a form that posts to itself (action="." or "")?
Well, you're forgetting that most people, well at least I am, are more careful when writing formal blog posts vs simple HN comments. So, the minor differences can be attributed to that.

For example, the comment has "/" in google/facebook, while the blog has "Google-Facebook".

What made me curious was not just the topic, and the identity management, google-facebook, but the fact that he is in the field of security/identity management.

But as I said, I dont know if he is on HN or not :)
Wow, -42 karma in one hour. Impressive.
This isn't a great opportunity:

1) There are tools to let you stream to airport extremes, e.g. Airfoil.

2) Competing on price is fail. Competing on a fundamental COST differential is sometimes win, assuming the incumbents aren't willing to lower prices to force you out. There is a difference. You surely won't be buying DACs and such cheaper than Sonos, so your only way to be cheaper is to accept lower margins. You could maybe carve out a tiny niche at a lower price such that it is not worth it for Sonos to lower their own prices (for fear of lowering their total profits), but I know I would rather be Sonos selling at $800 than a competitor selling a smaller volume at $250.

3) A $50 BOM is probably a $250 product. Also, in hardware, going from $50 BOM to $150 BOM (or, going to ipod-level volumes) lets you buy MUCH better DACs and such. Plus, industrial design.

The only opportunity I see is for an "embeddable sonos standard" where you actually eliminate the device entirely, and are built into AVR or TV. However, that is a lot easier for a big CES vendor than a startup. Or, something Sonos themselves could do.

Competing just on price (within a fairly narrow window, like less than 10x) seems like a fail. $100 BOM turns into a $200-300 product. If a $300 product came out, Sonos could easily come out with a feature-reduced version of their product.
AWESOME: iPad Digital Magazine Demo [video]
I actually don't understand the straight 4 year vesting schedule for founders. It seems unfairly favoring the investors. For founders who have poured their hearts and souls into building product and market initially, they still have to wait for 4 years after accepting funding to get their full reward? And risk losing their work along the way? And yes, many founders have been forced out from their startups before their 4-year schedule.

For startups that have product and market before funding, it would be more fair to have a "regressive" vesting schedule, e.g. 25% immediately vested, 30% 1st year, 20% 2nd year, 15% 3rd year, 10% 4th year.
FWIW, the chances of someone hacking my OnStar are far less then me having to use it I lock myself out of my car or if my car is stolen, in either case OnStar is a huge help. I think I'd be willing to forgive them
It doesn't appear that you can search for only logos that have not been purchased before, which seems like a highly desirable filter.
It's an interesting guess but it's not me :)

I am concerned with online privacy, but not to the extent as "onetimetoken" (my FB profile is globally viewable). Also my comments are usually short, and I avoid big generalizations.

Looking at the thread in question, though, I'd definitely guess jgrahamc.
0 is additive identity. 0+y=y for all integers y. 0 is an integer, so 0+0=0. 0+0 is closed under addition, so (0+0) is an integer, so x(0+0) = x0 for all integers x. By distributive law, x0 + x0 = x0. By closure under multiplication, x0 is an integer. By additive inverses, there exists an integer (-x0), such that x0 + (-x0) = 0. Because (-x0) is an integer, x0 + x0 + (-x0) = x0+(-x0). By associative property of addition and the transitive property of equality, x0 + 0 = 0. By the additive identity, x*0 = 0.
vanelsas
Team's quantum object is biggest by factor of billions
To be more clear, Airfoil covers both complaints about the Airport Express:
"I don’t believe you can play from any audio source on the computer, and I don’t believe you can stream to multiple AirPorts at the same time."
Both iTunes and Airfoil can play to multiple Airports at once.
Why is this a worthwhile endeavour?
Ask HN: Second-Best City to move for startups
I'm going to move this year from rural America to somewhere that is much more startup-friendly.

For the sake of a lot of things: taxes, cost-of-housing, congestion, state debt, etc -- I am not moving to SV.

So. Where's the next best place for a guy with a family to move that has lots of tech-savvy people, a good community of investors, readily-available bandwidth, potential college interns, and the cost of living is low?

I'm thinking Austin. Anybody have a better place?
http://swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnusers/?user=onetimetoken&...

Smart idea; but I just tried it and no results.
As you say, it's the novelty of taking a picture of a QR code to go to website.

The long URL problem can be solved without URL shortener, just make your urls shorter :)

I'm really not arguing that the idea of using QR codes to indicate URLs (or, more interestingly, for other things) is totally without merit. Just that current usages seem to be mere novelties to me.
It'd be really interesting if we had challenges, both social and technical, posted here on HN on a weekly basis. Some of the solutions and discussions would be pretty brilliant, I think.
Boston meets all your criteria, except for cost of living.

If you live in New Hampshire (like I do) you can commute to pretty much any place other than Boston proper, and reduce your COL significantly. And even that, I worked in Cambridge for a while and it was manageable if I avoided peak rush hour times.

The majority of the startup activity isn't IN Boston anyway, it's in the general beltway between 495 and 128.
I'm a designer (sorta) and have done a mess of small biz design consulting in my day, and I will tell you that you decidedly do NOT get what you pay for.

I've seen $50k logos that were pretty ineffective. We've all seen HUGE branding campaigns fall face first. We've also seen cheap/free logos turn into icons (Google, Yahoo, Nike).

The difference in VALUE between a $99 logo here (or designed by a student designer abroad) and a $30,000 logo designed by a seasoned pro is NOT $29,000 for 99.9% of companies.

Interestingly enough-- this is true for a lot of coding tasks, too. Most web apps are simple CRUD apps that will never need to scale and don't really merit "rockstar" talent.

I don't think you need to sell anyone here on the value of good UX design and "good enough" graphic design. But GREAT graphic design clearly isn't a major factor in winning on the web. Don't believe me? Judged entirely on composition alone (i.e. ignoring their fame and success) how many of these sites would you be proud to have in your graphic design portfolio?
http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US
Find a video of this Blackhat talk from 2005. Pretty sure it's in the iTunes store in the podcast section. The video covers pretty much everything you need to know about the theory of such systems.

http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-05/bh-usa-05-speakers.ht...

As far as actual implementation, I'm not aware of a system that does this. Although honestly some researcher has probably implemented such a system in a paper somewhere. There's probably a commercial network IDS that does it too. I haven't been doing this long enough to be an expert in the field, so I can't confidently say what the true state of the art is in behavioral detection. I'm pretty sure there are no open source projects though if that's what you're asking.

If you're thinking about implementing your own, I'd say start at the network level and write a simple program that sets an alarm off when a specific host starts responding to HTTP requests. If you want to get complex, use Wireshark to log all your network traffic for a month. You can then use Bayesian learning to determine whether new traffic is out of the ordinary. SSH traffic is problematic, so if you need to allow such traffic you'll have some additional challenges to overcome.

Starting an open source project related to this is on my TODO list, but I'm focusing on demonstrating the
hopelessness of signature based detection first.
"In fact, the market thought it was a terrible idea: Our stock promptly lost 80 percent of its value, putting our market cap at about $28 million. It’s worth pointing out that this was about $40 million less than the cash that we had in the bank."

Efficient market my ass.
99$ and 24 hours reminds me of Wokhei.com --> http://www.wokhei.com/ - with the difference that those are not templates
All very good points, but Ben Horowitz actually completely missed the point of the Lean Start-up approach that people like Eric Ries are proposing.

"Lean" does not mean cheap. "Lean" means focused on progress, which is measured in validated learning about your customers.

Conflating "lean" with "cheap" serves no one. This article is arguing against cheap start-ups, not against lean start-ups.

This video includes some discussion, from Eric Ries, of how people are misunderstanding "lean" to mean "whatever they think will get the VCs to fund them": http://vimeo.com/9964506

The whole "lean start-up" meme emerged with Eric Ries, as far as I know, so I think his definition of it is worth paying attention to.
I'd like to propose a tag:

Challenge HN:
If your site is so delicately balanced that a single extra request can bring it to its knees then you have larger problems than a blank img tag.
more meat, far more poultry and far more cheese

Because our taxes are paying to turn the world upside down and make meat, cheese and poultry cheaper then vegetables.
On the different types of celebrity at SXSW (Photo from the YC/HN meetup)
Wow -- Airfoil is very cool! This seems like the right software (very hard to get right!) with the wrong product and marketing.
This is exactly the proof in the case of vector spaces.
x(-y)=x(-y+y-y)=x(-y)+xy+x(-y)

Cancellation yields
0=xy+x(-y)

Therefore
-(xy)=x(-y)
I guess randomwalker, cuz this sort of thing seems to be his specialty. And the writing style seems to match up fairly well.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=randomwalker
A Mozilla Project To Give You Total Control Over Your Contacts
To be incredibly picky: Meticulously correct grammar would join "privacy is dead" and "there is only identity management" with a semicolon, dash, or conjunction -- or just split it into two sentences. ;)
When you shouldn’t listen to your users
China has been the world's top economic power for the VAST majority of the past two thousand years. People need to accept that they are just assuming their rightful place atop the world order. Chinese people come over here and dominate Americans academically. Their top students now beat our top students (including Chinese immigrants) in every major academic contest. Theirs is a society that values intelligence. Ours is a society that praises ignorance.
so is there a similar constructivist proof for x*0 = 0?
It prevents a founder from quitting early and keeping all their stock. The article doesn't mention it, but usually there is an acceleration clause that fully vests the shares if the company is acquired.
Contact me offline if you want to pursue this (BTW, I've been using Airfoil for years).

I've got a good background in hardware AND home automation/home audio gear. In the 90's I had an online and brick/mortar business that dabbled in home theater (among other things).
TED: Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
Show HN: The result of donating 8 hours design time
Early this week I offered to donate 8 hours to any project that needed some design help. There were a few candidates and thanks to everyone that emailed me and posted in the comments. I decided to lend my time to Simple Invoices, an open source invoicing system.

You can see the result here:
http://jasonstrachan.com/clients/simpleinvoices/

And the original site here:
http://simpleinvoices.org/

Comments and feedback welcome.
For people interested in this kind of analysis I recommend Mathletics by Wayne Winston. He's written a blog and a book about similar subjects.

The book itself is approachable with a basic knowledge of mathematics, probability, and statistics. It provides a good introduction to things like Sabermetrics (for baseball), and applications to the NBA and the NFL.
Hmmm, both points of view have merit.

IIRC PG/YC fund the team and not a specific idea. If you are on shaky idea, they would want you to persist and figure out a better idea as a team. This is clear to anyone who follows HN. So it does make sense that PG/YC don't like it if the founder(s) quits when something else interesting (like great job offer or another idea) comes along.

And your POV, that it is something you did outside of YC and don't want to share, makes sense too.

I don't know what I would have done if I was in the same situation.
Committing like Crazy - GitHub
Sounds good. Anyone with a challenge, email me at kyro@kyrobeshay.com with title/text of the submission. I'll post them on a weekly, or even bi-weekly, basis and credit the author.

Edit: The intention behind this was to keep it structured and organized, contest-like, and not for karmic purposes, which I take is the reason for the downvotes.
Darn. Thanks for letting me know!
This would be great if:

1. They provide some way to upgrade the software and actually bother maintaining it a few years. Not like people buy TVs at the rate Android is evolving.

2. They provide some way to install 3rd party applications

3. Give you root

Generally what's bothering me about Android is that although it is kinda open-source, the drivers for the device you buy most likely aren't. We need a way to get around this and actually be able to upgrade the system or maybe even install some other Android-distro.

I didn't understand what Intel has to do with it, I presume (?) that Android runs on ARM processors. Because if the TVs end up having Intel Atoms, they will soon have Microsoft Windows 9 TV Home Starter Edition(TM).
The bump part seems unnecessary in fact. "Select somebody from your contact list,then bump their phone". The bump just ensures... what exactly?
I've read it. GGandS claims Africa and the USA were slowed down by their geography (vertically oriented continents makes sharing crops and hunting technology difficult) and native flora (Eurasian wheat and rice is good, African crops aren't so great, and corn is poor) and fauna (African animals are too dangerous to domesticate, and the good American animals were wiped out roughly the time that humans arrived).

He may mention that the Arab world was delayed by climate change (deforestation, desertification and other reasons?), but I think he says assumes that Europe only beat Asia to the industrial revolution through dumb luck.

Thus my suggestion that latin scrip was far superior from 1400 to about now (when laser printers and LCD screens are replacing green screens, movable type and dot matrix printers.
Diversity in the tech world
WHY is it a poor choice for you? I've always been impressed by your metrics-driven choices.

Do you think that if you A/B tested your favorite choice from this service that it'd meaningfully change your success? I don't hate your current logo, but as an (sorta ex) designer, I wouldn't nominate it for any awards. What is the business value of "embodying the unique values and messaging" of your business?

Related: trying to ignore what you've come to believe about Google, do you think their original logo embodied their unique values and messaging? I sure as heck don't.

My view is that the logo is a pretty damn tiny part of the BRAND-- and the brand is where the value is. Your business is awesome because of your brand. A great logo or crappy logo can nudge the quality of the brand but not as much as designers think.