skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm also a loyal slicehost customer. It's perfect...if you know what you're doing.

Before jumping to VPS hosting, you need to be sure that you can handle administering your own machine. If you have some Linux experience, you'll probably be fine. If you've never seen a command-line, it's going to be a rough ride.
I'd be happy to offer constructive feedback on YC apps; just send me an email.
Can't the IRS get you for mixing personal finances with your business finances?
How about MediaTemple - I've found them to be quite reasonable.
I just started using it earlier this month. The 0.7 version is a great improvement.

It reminds me of moving from IE to Firefox way back (in this case iTunes>Sonbird).

sorry I downmodded by accident
I am wondering if there are any companies that have a CEO that was brought in from the outside not actually kill the company they are running.

There seems to be a theme:

1. Outside CEO comes in, clashes with founding members

2. Founding members start leaving

3. CEO doesn't bring in any "rockstar" developers, works with who is left.

4. Company starts running out of money

5. New outside CEO comes in

6. Company sold for pennies on the dollar to large tech company, praised as big success.
You need better buyers, not just better sellers. You need to improve the tools available to buyers — tools that help buyers with all sellers, and not just within each seller’s walled garden or silo.

Buyers already have many tools: review sites, merchants, comparison search engines, magazine sites dedicated to product verticals, daily "hot stuff" emails, price forecasting tools, etc. It's easy for them to get overwhelmed trying to navigate all this information.

With SaneShopping, our advice service aims to simplify shopping by doing some of this research for the buyers. Is anyone else here working in this space?
Comp.lang.c Infrequently Asked Questions
Fake Queues for iPhone
I'd heard this before, and it just doesn't hold as an argument.

a. Someone can do this now, they just have to pay the rates for in-flight phones.

b. If you're going to ban cell-phones on the basis of how much they annoy other passengers, you'll also have to ban babies.
Good advice Micah. A lot of people think once they sign the LLC document they're magically protected and can just ignore it until something comes up. One of the advantages of LLC's over C-Corps is that they get rid of a lot of the formalities, but that doesn't mean you get to ignore everything. There are a few things that can get you in trouble, but like you mentioned, mixing your books is a HUGE deal.
Unfortunately, I don't have much experience with the command line or Linux; however, I'm willing to learn. I'm just wondering what kind of time I'm going to spend learning. What are other viable options?
> You're telling me the user will press Reset, see the form cleared and the new Restore button immediately appear, and not figure out what it means?

Yes, I am.

Sure some users will figure it out, but an upsettingly large percent of people will not. If you're making a site geared toward computer people you'll be OK, but if it's for a general audience, well, stuff that is blindingly obvious to you is incomprehensible to them.

I've seen it too many times to take it for granted anymore. And you better not call it reset - because that's quite meaningless to a non web programmer.

This stuff is much much harder than it seems.
How to Change the World: Y Combinator: The Art of the Open House
Somebody needs to commercialize this, stat.
I would love to get visual heat map of my web site - which portions of the text user looks at?
Pretty and functional do have significant correlation. At this point looking pretty (or at least clean like HN) is a basic qualification to get me as a user.

Developers who think through clear UI are more likely to get the back end right.
Design customization lets you have a reddit of your very own
Patterns of Web Architecture
Unfortunately, in some locations, a yearly salary increase isn't even a given. I'd say having something is a pretty darned good deal.
Mistake number 1 is asking hackers for legal advice. This is far worse than asking lawyers for programming advice, because at least lawyers will tell you they don't know. You're going to get 100 opinions here ranging from uninformed to semi-informed, and all answers will be based on their own experiences and not your specific legal needs.

Talk to a business lawyer immediately. They won't charge you anything for the initial consultation and will answer these questions.
I'm rather disappointed that he never gave a decent justification for libertarianism in that interview. About all he said was "Totalitarianism is bad, that's why I'm a libertarian. Also, I read Tolkien."
Rack + Javascript = Jack
My point was: "Restrictions are not important(for me), because there is a lot of customers". Your "summary" of my point "Customers!". As I see it, your "summary" was an outright distortion. My conversation with you: over.
Yes, people can screw you. But if you have them put in writing that they WON'T screw you, if they do, you have a leg to stand on. Delivery on a promise and a promise aren't the same thing. But some people don't know what they should be getting promised, and this is a good writeup of the types of things you should look for.

Short of being $deity, I don't know how you expect to guarantee you get delivery.
There's not much specific to Perl in this post. Open source in general tends to give you multiple options to any common problem. The proprietary world tends to be the opposite. I thank my lucky stars I get to work with open source software almost exclusively and the flexibility it provides is probably the biggest reason.
Engineering the Organization
Recounting the Launch of our First Startup
Good point about the difficulty of setting up OpenTape for an average music lover.

Your argument led me to thinking about the difference between Muxtape/OpenTape and the mixtapes that DJs have been posting online for years.

One major difference is that most mixtapes I see have no track listings, and therefore record companies are not able to pinpoint copyright violations efficiently. I suppose then the questions is: How important is the track listing to the success of Muxtape?

Another reason is obscurity of the site/DJ. But if the Muxtape community fragments into a gaggle of OpenTape sites, perhaps it will have the same effect.
Few things I can think of..

1. Usability tests (including heat maps and replays for manual observations)

2. Measuring effectiveness of display ads (web, TV etc) more concretely.

3. Accurate Strabismus (Squint) recognition and measurement.
Yikes! "Work hard, play hard..", there has to be a company that can do better than that cliche. Other than that, it sounds like a cool company to work for, as far as start-ups go.
Our tour schedule is exhaustive, not one country has been without a show.
Where's Philip Torrone?
This is really very impressive. Have you played with it?

I think they do a disservice by talking about what this "could be". I don't think the emailing and mapping stuff they showcase is really as useful as the whole concept/package. It's really almost like an internet command shell with a lot of clever extensibility.

Out of the box reaction: I love it.

My first session was: I just hit ctrl-space and up comes a black command prompt. I type in letters and as I do (because they don't match a command), it does a Google search as-I-type. The feeling of narrowing down my results as I type from Google is really great. (If Google just did this on their own site, I'd be quite pleased. It makes me want to write a BOSS search engine that does this. The responsiveness just feels great. I know MS tried this at some point with Live, but it just didn't feel this good.)

But then there's a zillion other things I can do. I can leave twitter updates just by typing "twitter #myconference This keynote is boring". I can digg the page I'm on just by typing "digg".

Some of this will feel a lot like keyworded bookmarklets in Firefox, but it's really the next logical step from there.

Imagine if you could leave a comment on a page supporting Disqus just by typing "comment This site is great! Good idea." without scrolling down, clicking into fields, and typing. Imagine if I could do Socialbrowse commenting/sharing without navigating dropdown menus.

Then there's the fact that these little commands are really easy to write and add to your site. As soon as you visit a site that supports them, Ubiquity tells you "There are commands that work for this site. Click here to subscribe." and then from then on you can execute those commands. So if you want people to search your site easily or maybe accept friend invites, or invite a friend by email, etc. They can do that from within this console easier than clicking around.

Maybe it won't catch on with individuals, but every power user or developer should be playing with this and thinking about what they could do with it.

</passion-burst>
PDF replaced, I take it? Or are those two words the app?
Maybe instead of a new button the "Reset" button is relabeled "Oh Shit" and performs the restore operation. I certainly know that mirrors my reaction when I accidentally hit a reset button.
That's why I said it was pretty good.
TechCrunch gets a facelift
Seems like it, that's all I get as well
Also, do the people that you want at a startup believe that?
For programmers: how to negotiate your startup business relationship
In one of Larry Niven's novels, an AI who was a recording of a human mind discovered this trick on a long interstellar flight:

When things get really boring, arrange to have all references to the concept of "boredom" wiped from your memory. Then, when things get boring the next time, it's a novel experience!
Liked the old UI better :(
Download Cold Case TV Show Online
If you want to Download Cold Case Episodes and many others then you simply cannot miss amazing opportunity as you will enjoy downloading favorite TV series while saving tons of money.
Download Criminal Minds TV Show Online
If you want to Download Criminal Minds Episodes and many others then you simply cannot miss amazing opportunity as you will enjoy downloading favorite TV series while saving tons of money.
I'm more skeptical of something that would call itself The Nation or The New Republic. Wait, the whole nation is expected to think this way?
People who read Reason don't need to be told why one should be libertarian.
The feature must be costing them more in bandwidth than most small, invade-a-licious nations earn in a year.
I too believe they did their creation a massive disservice by taking these mash-ups as an example.

Their suggestions list is far more exciting:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_Command_Sugg...

I almost had one of those "hallelujah baby" moments when I read it. What I believe could make this a truly disruptive killer is when you add cloud file storage to this, and can access all your files from this interface. Then, voila, all you need is a pc with Firefox, the rest is cloud-based, making traditional operating systems such as Vista or Leopard obsolote.

</second-passion-burst>
Here's one counterexample:

6. Original company buys founder's new company, reinstates founder as CEO, becomes big success.
Great points! Mixtapes also had the quality of a physical good which meant that you couldn't mass produce them easily so RIAA etc couldn't do much. Muxtape makes distribution easy.
Seems a bit pointless to complain that a language based on the notion that "There Is More Than One Way To Do It" offers too many choices on what to use.
IPhone Web App Performance Tip - Use Inline Images
Ask YC: What do founders do after they have been bought out?
I am wondering what founders do after they have been bought out?
Consulting, sometimes, sales (for really high-end goods -- I think the sales teams at IBM in the 60's and Lucent in the 90's did really, really well).

And I'd exclude law. I'm pretty sure the successful lawyers make partner, and then are (to some extent) working for themselves.
Being from the midwest as well, I was horrified when I moved to phoenix and saw all the millionaires driving in their $60,000-$80,000 cars.

Then I found out that the majority of the people driving those things make $80-$140,000 a year. People out here tend to live at the ends of their means. Its a cultural thing.
Inventor sues Google, Verizon, others on visual voicemail
I'd prefer a FastCGI/SCGI and/or WSGI/Rack interface to Javascript that doesn't require Python or Ruby wrappers.
Yikes! "Work hard, play hard..", there has to be a company that can do better than that cliche.

I agree its got a lot of mileage but gets the point across and is a common catch phrase. Still significantly better than cliches such as "looking for rockstar..."

You have a company, right? What do/would you say?
There's almost no emphasis on the navigation and for a site with so many parts this is a negative.

On the whole I like the move to the cleaner and simpler layout but it still puzzles me that they almost completely neglect categories or tags.
List of Email Clients Available in Ubuntu
There is a Swedish company called Tobii that does something similar yet a lot more advanced, including lasers and what not to track eye-movements.

One of their ideas is that people with physical handicaps could use their eyes instead of mouse/trackpad to point and click at stuff, but if this could be done with a webcam that's even more better. If you could click on you IPhone only using your eyes, wouldn't that be cool?
Thats a pretty sweet picture tour. Great commentary as well. Being a true entrepreneur I always knew guy kawasaki would dig YC, this really confirms that.
Atlanta Linux Fest 2008
Why are more and more sites getting facelifts that completely ruin user experience? What ever happened to good old fashioned design elements like contrast, spacial awareness, things like this?

The page looks like a Word Document now.
Hey guys, sumon from snaptalent here. Who else would you love to see interviewed? Digg, Apple, Google... let us know
GigaCrunch?
That's a fair point.. but I think Ruby and Javascript seem like such good friends, they go so well together.
if there are any companies that have a CEO that was brought in from the outside not actually kill the company

Here's another example:

Big U.S. automaker going down the tank fast. This company hires former president from rival automaker, who was fired by the rival's chairman. Big U.S. automaker comes back from the brink of bankruptcy to be a market leader.
On the Requirements section it says: "PHP 5 curl extension is required for update notification and publishing to the Opentape Discovery Network."
Would be nice to have that more prominent or available as an option to enable (instead of hardcoded and kinda obscure).
Oh gee, maybe launch another startup or a venture capital firm?
The American Language in 3000 AD
Some of the cooler commands/features Ubiquity has:

* As-you-type Google searching

* translate the selected text from some language to another

* syntax-highlight the selected text (guesses language)

* maps to the selected address

* tab sometitleword (switches focus to the first tab that matches)

* close-related-tabs somekeyword

* calc mathphrase

* email blah to someone@someplace

* twitter sometext

* command-list
I scanned the article. Is he saying we're going to speak in regex? I thought we would all sound like the future people on South Park.
i want sex
Liability and blogging, are bloggers journalists?
usually they go work for the company that bought them out
That was my first thought too -- it has a very GigaOm-ish feel.

Most interesting change to me is that they moved the RSS link/Feedburner button to the footer.
I don't know, it sounds like a sweet gig if Nos. 3,4 & 5 are the problem. I'd say start saving and keep the resume polished though. Oh, and steal your chair on the day it ends. :)
"Big, established, but failing company hires outsider CEO to turn company around" seems to be a different pattern (and one with a better track record - Lou Gerstner at IBM also comes to mind) compared to "young company takes large investment, has outsider CEO installed as adult supervision by investors", which pattern seems to often lead to trouble.

Google comes to mind as a company that's well known for beating the curse of the investor-installed CEO; they did so by having the founders carefully vet the potential outsiders. Unfortunately this takes time so if you are running out of runway and need that investment in order to reach V2_min, you perhaps don't have that luxury.
Looks like techcrunch got a redesign
Can't say I'm a fan of the new look. With adblock the site is like 40% content, 60% white space
become a snarky venture capitalist?
Ahh. The original criteria of "if there are any companies..." which I replied to is much broader than "young company takes large investment..."

As far as the second condition, I'd agree that pushing a venture backed CEO is usually a recipe for failure. Once the company matures, well our thread hear shows that is a different story.
and I hope the active/jobs/video comments is a CSS bug
However, it's quite improbable you'll get an interesting resolution for your movements with a webcam, compared with lasers or other methods. Image-based eye tracking needs to be real-time (so probably inherently low resolution these days), tracks objects that are an important part of the captured image (so you get like a much lower resolution mouse, because of the size of your eyes or pupils compared to the webcam resolution), and needs to compensate for errors so it needs a lot of redundancy in data to generate output (so decreasing the resolution even more).

Anyone working in computer vision can tell me if I'm right or wrong? I've been working in the area in some small projects, but they were extremely related to this eye-tracking stuff.
Go to work for their corporate overlords. Slowly become disenfranchised, resentful and restless. Until they give up and resign before their shares fully vest.
Young Innovator Awards
Grants for innovators aged 18-25 to bring their most visionary ideas from the “garage” stage to implementation
Another minor problem with the suggestions is that the equity being asked for is basically participating preferred. I don't think you are going to get this from _anyone_ unless you are actually putting cold hard cash into the venture. Founders usually don't end up with preferred stock, so I can't see an employee getting any; if you want to prevent dilution then work to keep the burn rate low so that you don't need to ask for as much money from investors and endeavor to increase the valuation of the company when it becomes necessary to seek investment.
Mixing isn't the right word. Its more losing track of who owns what and who owes what. Then when they ask you to prove something such as if it was your business taking the deduction, or if it was your business receiving the income, not you, then you can't. And then they get you.
There is always TIME.
Plenty. The problem isn't so much hiring the outside CEO as hiring the right outside CEO.
Um. I didn't see foosball tables there. Sorry, can't work with you.
I prefer: http://opensourcecms.com/
It's often less awesome than it sounds: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpstyles/460987802/
10 Ways to Use LinkedIn That You Never Thought Of
LinkedIn is a great resource for any professional, especially those in business. This post provides some new and interesting ways to use LinkedIn as more than just a simple profile social site.
If they don't have the money to pay you, you're not an employee, you're a founder and you get the same deal that they get.

If they balk, suggest that they find another code monkey while you find another biz monkey and let the market decide who ends up with the bananas.
Shouldn't they mention their compensation strategy when discussing what they do to make everyone happy and productive?
Finally a C REPL (in Haskell)
Jamaica’s Usain Bolt
Sportsman or entertainer? Watching his 100m dash was purely entertaining, but yet utterly competitive. Beating his fellow runners and making it look laughable is just the beginning. And what a show it was. A broken world record included.
This would be more informative if it were layered with some other data; some metric for geopolitical instability, trade deficit, local currency valued in $, oil production in barrels, similarity of votes in the U.N....etc.

You know, anything to see if the troop placements were good investments.
How did your talk go?
work for the man. dream about leaving. feel some responsibility to see your product through to success. get frustrated at the bureaucracy and politics. wait for shares to vest. worry that you are getting soft and won't be able to leave when the time comes.

read news.yc to remind yourself of what it used to be like.
I think the redesign is absolutely terrible, and I'm not talking about visuals. The emphasis of the UI is on advertising / sponsorships, and not on content; for a content-focused company, this doesn't work. I can't help but think of a tirade that David Cross goes on about Arrested Development where he basically ridicules the network for shortening the length of the show, minutes at a time, in order to increase ad revenue at the expense of the show and its viewers. Techcrunch appears to be doing the same thing, albeit in a different medium.
"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
Kurt Vonnegut
If you mean immediately after, kegstands are usually involved.
Download Desperate Housewives TV Show Online
If you want to Download Desperate Housewives Episodes and many others then you simply cannot miss amazing opportunity as you will enjoy downloading favorite TV series while saving tons of money.
Address your Credit Card Processing and Merchant Services needs :GoPaynet.com 
Start Accepting Credit cards today! Contact with Gopaynet.com for Merchant Accounts, Merchant Services, Credit Card Merchant Accounts, Merchant Account Credit Cards, Merchant Account Service, Merchant Card Processors.http://www.gopaynet.com
Download Gossip Girl TV Show Online
Imagine how easier and cheaper it would be if you could Download Gossip Girl Episodes . The reality is that you can actually download all Gossip Girl Episodes from the Internet at very High Speed
ITA Software!
Not nearly as big of a change as the last redesign.

The original TC design: http://web.archive.org/web/20060101080638/http://techcrunch....
Painful to read. Definitely should not be read by beginners.
As a cloud service provider, it paints you stupid. At least for potential European customers. We can't store personal information about clients outside EU. Storing that kind of data in the cloud, without knowing where it... roams is a liability. Not helping your clients avoid liability makes for very bad business practice, hence you're stupid (CSP (Cloud Service Provider)).
Like Groucho Marks, "I don't want to be a member of any club that would have me."

This is actually a good test. If you're a hacker and you proposed this to your business-person co-founder and they accept then fail them.

Many of these terms are reasonable over time but not initially and not for everyone. For example, agreeing to severance in a company that is not funded is silly (e.g. firing an employee could force bankruptcy).
Helpful Resources on Web Crawling?
Lately, I have been trying to think of a project to work on that would occupy my time while I'm bored in the dorm. I don't really know what it will be yet, but I want it to involve a web crawler because those are really interesting to me for some reason. For example, The Hype Machine (http://hypem.com) has a crawler that pulls MP3 links from a bunch of music blogs. That is awesome! How does that work?!

I found some open source crawlers, but have no idea where to start. I've read some research papers on them as well, but they seem outdated. I'm looking for resources that would help me get started with the most modern approach--if that makes sense.

I would really appreciate any helpful resources you might have to share. Thanks

I am most familiar with PHP, but I am open-minded.