skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://searchyc.com/submissions/bikeshed?sort=by_date

Move on, nothing to see, kthxplz.
TouchTerm does not support terminal emulation. So, once you SSH into a server, good luck editing anything.
One reason why it's not easy is levels of secrecy of all financial data. Nobody has access to enough unbiased quality data, big VCs have loads of data but it is self-selected and misses almost all early failures, who happen to be the most common kind of startups.

I don't really understand why financing information of all companies isn't public by law. Companies are not people, they don't have a right to privacy.
I have always wondered what I should do with this piece of information. Does it mean that every proposal I want to have passed by people should be extremely large and complex? Conversely, if I want to engage people, should is be over something simple?

Or is it just, take simple decisions yourself and try hard to get input on the complex ones?
Web or no web, the fastest way to become an overnight success is to put in ten years of hard work.
If the information card also contained your public profile information, then a lot of phishing would be curtailed. The problem is that we are constantly asked for information. If this was largely automated, guarded by cryptographically secure means of identification, and attached to a physical device of some sort, then the number of times we're asked for information would be reduced tremendously.
Passwords and social engineering go back millennia, and both will continue forward into the foreseeable future.

What might lead anyone to believe there is a technical solution to this?

Even if the most fearful involved here manage to mass-deploy what they're told is uncrackable personal remote identification -- and undoubtedly at great financial cost to all parties involved, and quite probably at great social cost, too -- it'll (still) get cracked.

Security need be "good enough", "affordable" and "useable." Security that is unaffordable or unusable will be bypassed.
He probably doesn't, actually.

"... the fact is, that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the Lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives."

"In fact a recent study -- this almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people, suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness."

Dan Gilbert, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_...
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the "low-cost" airlines in this discussion. For example Ryanair are still busy lowering fares, but reclaimming the extra money from all the extras. I think they are doing reasonably well financially. Then again I try not to use them because it's never a good experience...

Can you image check-in desk people waiving fees? (actually I can, sometime I think they just ignore the weight of my bag :)
Testing the limits of single player gaming
The point that caught my eye is the "ramen profitable" one. We are at this point now, the amount is quite bigger, but we are 2 founders in their 30's with children so this is a lot of ramen. Also the wifes appreciate variety so "ramen profitable" for us is more like 10K/month. Our problem with financing now with this is that to built those revenue we had to sacrifice much of our vision and just concentrate on execution. Now we have a startup that needs about 4 days of work a month and generate some money. But it is not a sexy company. All the answer to basic VC questions for it are bad or not good enough. Like no barriers to entry, the competition is huge, etc...

So we could go back to the vision project and start that "great idea" we had, but instead we often find ourselves trying to make the current product generate more revenues.

I think that may be responsible with the problem PG sees with bootstrapping. "The mere fact that bootstrapped startups tend to be famous on that account should set off alarm bells." I think there are a lot of successful bootstrapped startup that are just not successful enough to be famous in any way. Ours is heading that way.
Ask YC: Best cheap or free screen sharing solutions?
I'm wondering what cheap or free screen sharing solutions people have found? I have someone working remotely on my project, and it would be handy to do some screen sharing sessions. The ideal solution would let you pass control back and forth, but passive viewing is ok (if it's free). The ideal solution would also be cross platform. Thoughts?
It's impressive that the entire argument of the article can be compressed down to the title-- and still be that thought-provoking.
I've found this to be true. The solution is to propose every single color that you DON'T want the shed to be painted, so the only option anyone has to make a helpful suggestion as to the color is the ONE color you didn't pick...and the one you wanted in the first place :-D
This is actually similar to PG's "How Not to Die" essay:

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
The first thought I had seeing that was "Man, that looks just like StumbleUpon." Probably not the best comparison to make.
The admonishment here is to the managers, not the people writing the proposals. The point is to let go and let your people do the simple stuff on their own.

If you're stuck proposing a bike shed to people you know are going to muck with it, I think you're pretty much stuck. Short of deception, you can't stop them from doing what they want.
Shelby Lynn
So...are people auto-down voting me because they see "facepalm" and their meme detectors go crazy? Down voting (at least in my view) is for spam or ridiculous posts; saying that a guy is probably kicking himself (regardless of what Wikipedia says) for selling out a company that's trading at $170/share seems legitimate. Even if you disagree, that's what comments are for, not burying
I use GoToMeeting. It's 50 bucks a month, so I'm not sure what your "cheap" parameter is.

I also don't know if it's cross-platform.

That being said, it's a great piece of software; I've been very pleased with it.
Depending on OS, iChat works pretty damn well, and it has a feature for sharing presentations as well. But I'm uncertain as to whether that works at all with Windows or Linux programs.
Has anyone here read Parkinson's original book? I'd be interested in comments about it. It's been on my radar for a long time but I haven't got to it yet.

Incidentally, the article is wrong to date Parkinson's Law to the 1960s. It was very much a creature of the 1950s. That maybe isn't as trivial as it sounds; IIRC the book was part of the wave of post-WWII systems thinking that really got going in the 50s. A lot of that stuff remains pretty interesting. It certainly fed into the cultural explosion that happened later, and was an early sign of disaffection with 50s rigidity, but is a different sort of critique.
That seems a gripe about monolithic frameworks... There's no reason a framework can't be organised as a coherent collection of libraries of which you can pick only the ones you need and that lets you assemble an "instantiation" of the framework by choosing a variant of each type module you need.
http://www.teamviewer.com/index.aspx

Good thing is that you don't even have to install. Free for non-commercial use.
I really thought passwords would be dead by now, I'm amazed they're still the primary authentication mechanism. Public key is trivial to do these days, it's done by browsers all the time to secure communications but not to authenticate who you are. The article focused on the client side hardware, the cards that hold your private key, but the big issue is websites themselves. Sites need to switch from "enter a password:" to "upload your public key:"
Public key is a solution, or at least a huge detriment, to social engineering. The problem with passwords is they're fixed; once an attacker gets it they're in forever. If we used asymmetric crypto to login to websites people wouldn't even have to know how it works. Instead of a password text field on a website there would just be a button, and the site would do a check with your browser to make sure you have the private key corresponding to the public key they have for your account. People wouldn't even have to know what a private key is, let alone where it's stored on the disk to give to somebody asking for it
I'm baffled how this is Google's problem; because they provide a platform for running apps? That's like saying OSes are bad because they let malware exist too
That is an extremely stupid comparison. They used whale oil for reading at night. Crude oil is a critical ingredient of modern industrial civilization.

And the implicit assumption that superior substitutes always emerge is also childish. Just because they figured out kerosene says absolutely nothing about our relationship to crude oil.
"But NBC, which paid $894 million for the exclusive rights to the Olympic broadcast in the United States, intends to show some premier events like swimming live on television only to reach a wider audience and charge higher rates for advertising. "

Hum... Don't ask what advertising can do for you, ask what YOU can do for advertising!

Seriously, I don't get it sometimes. So much effort expanded on advertising... for what? For bugging people, mostly. Why are we even bothering with all this shit? When everyone (ok, mostly big corps) has "high visibility" because of advertising, then nobody has high visibility.
Well not sure about what part of the world you are in, but here in Manhattan the MTA subway system pays for itself. Only about 4-5% of their operating budget comes from taxes, with the remainder coming from fares. A serious vulnerability would crush their budget.

I can just imagine going into some back room to buy a $1,000 metro card for $5. However I can't imagine many people really bothering, an unlimited card is only $81 a month. When rent is $2500 a one bedroom apartment in brooklyn, and lunch is $15 every day, $81 for all of your transportation really isn't a big deal.

Excellent hack though.
I read it, a long time ago. I remember feeling that it had lots of interesting stuff in it, but that it suffered from the problem of being something that should have been just an essay, expanded into a book. (Practically 100% of books on "business" have this problem.) So it's the kind of book that's worth browsing through, reading bits that catch your attention, but not worth reading every word of.
For me this is the best article I have read on Hacker News in a while. More of this please!

ps I got a perverse enjoyment from being scolded from beyond the grave.

pps I think that's my first ironic pun
There is no id on the cards, I pay for cash with mine every time, how are they going to know? I usually put $60-100 on mine each time, if I just kept refilling it at home how would they know? Sure they will notice a guy with a $50,000 card, but if you just update it to a modest amount every day they would never notice.
I have to suspect that B is less fact than it is VC posturing. To my knowledge, a partner who only invested once or twice per year would soon lose his position. His job is to make money for the firm, and if he's not investing very much, he's not going to make money.

While I have no reason to doubt the indubitable PG, I have a feeling that Mr. Hornik is fibbing or is in a unique position to under-deliver for August Capital.

Let's put it this way: if very very few startups ever get funding, how do you explain Podshow and Meebo getting so much money with such unproven/unreliable revenue models? Don't tell me it was "pure chance". I think it is/was because VC is more readily available than Mr. Hornik's self-important attitude would imply.
I don't think anyone who knows anything about Kafka sees him as a 'saintly' type. But then, this kind of journalism doesn't typically let reality get in the way of a good story twist.
If you're using a text interface, GNU Screen is excellent. I use screen usually; VNC if I need to share a GUI

http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/
Check out http://meeting.zoho.com

It is in free while it is in Beta and even later it should remain affordable.

Supports Flash, Java and ActiveX modes, so your platform concerns are addressed.
I can't find the story I read it in now, but I thought Google was working on a similar thing for Google search results
New blog for beginner
i don't understand, you're only sharing with one person? isn't that perfect VNC territory? both people can control the screen, it's free, it's open source, it's cross platform... what am i missing? what's fundamentally bad about this that no one else has mentioned it yet? maybe i'm just behind the curve on this.
$200 per song instead of $750 doesn't really count as "foiled", if you ask me.
I'd like to know if Kafka will eventually be regarded as highly as he has been so far. Obviously he's brilliant. But it seems like much of what he's about is specific to modernity, and it's not clear that these are concerns that people will always have.
He makes an interesting/controversial point:
"It still takes ten years to become a success, web or no web."
...
"Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul."

I wonder how many people doing startups are prepared for success to take ten years.
Disqus + SnapTalent Office Bookshelf
The argument that humans will "always find another/better way" has more to do with faith in humanity than it does about any commodity and it's successor.
Two awesome YC startups who know how to throw a party.
Founders at Work (!) by Jessica Livingston
Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts

Awesome.
What if the iPhone turns out to be a disaster for everyone?
Sounds like they just walked into the transit authority offices and said they were there for a meeting if anyone questioned their presence.
And Kafka's pr0n relates to HN how?
Well, there certainly was such a myth, if not of saintliness then at least a kind of purity, and its effects persist, and the porn does contradict this in a nicely vivid way.

There was an interesting NYRB article a few weeks ago that said similar things about the myths around Kafka that mostly came from Brod (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21610).
Denmark 1970: 99% energy from the Middle East. 2000: 0%. 100% energy independent.
Well that reads nice on a hallmark card, but back here in reality societies have fallen into decline, crisis, and famine many, many times because of resource shortages.
That's pretty silly! Upload your public key? Most people do not know how to find stuff to upload, how will they find their public key?

This stuff needs to be built into the browser, and it needs to be on your keychain. Hence my USB stick idea.
http://www.mikogo.com/Welcome.aspx

Mikogo is great and works seamlessly with Skype (but only on the Windows side). We use this internally; launching Parallels is a small price to pay to be able to be on the same page without having to be in the same room.
Saying you get 0% of your energy from the Middle East implies that you don't buy any oil at all, since the market isn't partitioned by where oil comes from. Is that really the case?

Edit: the "99% in 1973" claim is even stranger. Even if that is how much they depended on oil (the number sounds a little dodgy), the Middle East part can't be true.
I actually would buy a Zune over an iPod, mainly because I have so many song files in WMA, and I love the idea of being able to load it via wi-fi and integrate with my media center. Creative would generally be my first choice though due to DivX support.
The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century  
The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims' names, we must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East.
By John Pilger
People is down-voting you because that comment is only adding noise to the thread. It's the kind of comment that populates digg and reddit and that makes such places such a terrible visit. People is more interested in more informative, argumentative, etc comments (humor is sometimes accepted, but it is when it shows some kind of subtlety I think).
Try Python in the Browser: an IronPython and Silverlight 2 Interactive Interpreter
Get rid of ATM pin codes, too. All you should need is the card. And the same card for all your bank accounts!

Anything that requires physical access to a card or usb stick or a specific computer to do things on the web is a non-starter.

Given this constraint, passwords work fine. The problem boils down to the completely unavoidable security vs. ease of use trade-off. I say just get rid of the complexity requirements. If someone wants to enter a blank password for all their needs, let them. I personally will keep track of my varied and complex passwords.
You might be referring to this, or a similar article:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future-of-s...

And here's Wikia's reaction to that story:

http://search.wikia.com/blog/2008/07/17/google-tries-to-copy...
the annoying thing about screen is that both people need to log in using the same username to share a screen session. correct me if i'm mistaken.
Some of the methods are similar, although the goals are quite different.
god?
"The breakthrough could lead to systems for rendering anything from people to large objects, such as tanks and ships, invisible to the eye – although this is still years off."

Close??
You are mistaken. See here:
http://aperiodic.net/screen/multiuser
here are some credible reviews (i think)

http://earthcode.com/blog/2008/02/cheap_rails_vps_options.ht...

http://groups.google.com/group/rails-business/browse_thread/...
I don't really need to have a USB stick to use this system, as it is just software. In emergency situations, I can ask another site to act at the USB stick, and then type in my pin code there. So it's still secure, as people do not know my pin code.

Sure, keep using your passwords, my grandpa also loves using his walkie talkie.
The problem is the lack of convenience when you are away from your primary computer. Having to take a memory stick everywhere to login to websites is going to annoy a lot of people an awful lot.
The 5 hidden costs of running a CMS
> I can ask another site to act at the USB stick

That's OpenID. I assume you're going to use a password for your StickKey host provider.
MBTA, the system they hacked, is notoriously inefficient. Apart from fares, they get 20% of state sales tax, or 1 cent of every dollar you spend in the state, even if you don't live in a place that has a train station. The new (electronic) fare system was introduced about 18 months ago and was accompanied by a fare raise from 1.25 to 2.00/1.75, and one of the major reasons quoted was the cost of the new system.
That's not Open ID, because this is just a backup solution, and is not the main authentification scheme.
Hmm, didn't realize they allowed you to use local development tools. Question for people who are using Heroku: Is it fair to call it a tool for beginning Rails developers or does it have benefits for "advanced" Rails devs? This blog post is definitely making me take a second look at the service.
Interesting, the article makes me want to write something entitled: "How fundraising is similar to selling a house, and why." (at least in the UK)

The timescales, rejection rates, legal layers and lack of trust between the participants seems very similar.
Interesting but I'm not sure if it's any better than digram or trigram frequency. The real difficulty of course is the k-nearest-neighbors problem when you are trying to search for the duplicate.
We will find another/better way, but we still have a long time to find it, and it's probably just going to be shale oil, which isn't going to run out for a very long time. What comes after that hasn't been invented yet and there is no hurry.

The idea of a "sustainable" way of life is one which never encounters new problems. What it really means is a static way of life. It's not a bad thing to have a dynamic way of life which depends on human creativity to deal with the new and unknown.
You can't present at DEFCON -- Federal Judge to MIT Students
I took the bus yesterday and they just starting rolling out a new magnetic card system. I was actually thinking of buying a card reader off ebay and try to reverse engineer it.
It is more efficient, as the distance between the duplicates in their case is a lot shorter (because effectively they only compare the important part of the page). That lets you use simple algorithms that are a lot faster. This is still not foolproof: some sites have an about header with lots of text or blogs that have a blurb before and after a quote.
There is so much ink spilled about going through conniptions to scale mysql and postgres. I really wonder if anyone has actually bothered to confirm that it's not better to just buy some big iron and run db2 or oracle once you hit scalability problems. There are a ton of corporate data centers running oracle/db2 handling WAY more throughput than your web app ever will, and they're not using memcached or sharding.
Implementasi MYOB - 3 : Membuat File Data Baru
i could see "a twit" in the dictionary, with some meaning similar to "a haiku"
This is interesting. I used to to work with SVM document categorization, and this was a huge problem.

This was years ago, so forgive me for not ever having an elegant solution, but I never thought to use something similar to Markov's chains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain) to detect duplicates or avoid layout data. I ended up doing custom layout detection and trying to ignore headers, navigational menus, footers. It was always a constant battle and very brittle and hackish. It worked OK for my purposes, but I still remember going through and checking a whole bunch of new entries every time the crawler pulled down new stories to see if I should add some obvious ignores to the filters.
I'm a huge fan of 'three factor authentication.'

In my mind, ideally, secure auth. should test:

1. "something you know" (password)

2. "something you are" (biometric)

3. "something you have" (cryptokey, dongle, etc)

I'd heard this idea probably 5 years back, and it's stuck with me
It's dirt nice and easy for putting online smallish stuff. And word is that support for Sinatra is soon to come. Now, that is kick ass.
Zoho Founder Offers 5 Rules for Recruiting Well
It's a build-buy decision, right?

When you're seven guys sitting in a garage eating pizza, you build it because it makes the most sense.

If you've got a million records going through an hour and you're making the big bucks, get the commodity solution as close to wholesale as you can.

The problem is that if you're giving away your app for free, you're spending dough -- perhaps lots of it. Then you're stuck on the back-end of the curve, scrambling to tweak every little bit you can.