skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Questions about #3:

Considering all the servers in the world that ought to be audited with software like yours,

1. Who is deemed responsible for security auditing by management.ownership? In-house administrators or outside consultants?

2. What percentage of these servers are owned by little enterprises (who don't feel the need to buy from IBM/CA/etc.) vs. Fortune 1000 companies?

3. Of those servers whose security audits are done by consulting firms, are those firms big or small?

I'm semi-familiar with the bug tracking software space, so I'll use it as a possible parallel. Every IBM-ish tools vendor sells a bug tracking software package. They're always expensive and sometimes suck. They are sold because a salesman visits a large company and convinces them to buy a big, supposedly integrated suite of products.

Yet, FogBugz (FogCreek) and JIRA (Atlassian) seem to be pretty good businesses. My experiences suggest that smaller customers (1) won't pay 10x just because it's from IBM, (2) buy based on perception of quality/value rather than vendor image, and (3) allow their technical staff to influence purchases like security audit software.

So, back to the questions at the beginning of this post...What percentage of the audit-worthy servers are managed by the kind of people who would purchase FogBugz/JIRA? It seems that you could build you brand reputation among these folks with good blog posts, presentations at conferences, and some guest-authored security articles (the Joel model?).

Noting that I know little about security audit software, one downside may be that companies can CYA by saying, "But, we audited with [Insert big company here]'s award winning industry-standard software tool. How can you blame us for getting hacked? Management may be thinking along these lines when choosing to spend $70K on a POS product. However, your customers may be those who actually care if they're hacked or not!

I don't like #2 because I think you could easily be beaten up on margins, and I don't see why you would be better at running this business than other entrepreneurs out there.

#1 is tough because it doesn't get management attention. Management expects to buy security audit software, and risk aversion leads them to want to make a purchase. However, you'd be relying on a bunch of admins to convince management that they need your tool -- they're likely to use "good enough" Open Source alternatives.

WRT #3, You might consider a model where some basic features are free, but customers pay for enterprise-y features along with support. It's a lot easier to get your product in the door if the users can try it out without going through the hassle of convincing management to dole out $5K.

So, those were my somewhat random thoughts. I'm considering an enterprise software start-up (non-competing) that may have similar sales characteristics.
heh. got me
TRIPod: Lycos shuts down a pioneering Web service
>>Giles is still angry that his post "Muppets" got downmodded a lot

hahaha. dude even after I clicked that I had no idea what you were talking about. however, I had to turn off a Greasemonkey script to even find the comments here. I have it set up to automatically block me from seeing whether my posts are on HN or not. if I see them, I read the comments, and get pissed off. so not I'm not still angry but yeah I did get quite mad at the time, whatever it was about.
The thing here is that we have core philosophies that are different, and our statements here are indicative of these philosophies.

Let me explain what I mean:

In Germany it's illegal to publish or display Nazi material. I believe that we both are against the Nazi philosophy, but it appears to me that you belong to the group of people who would favour censoring such material, while I believe in absolute freedom of expression, and that such material should not be in any way illegal, and people should be free to argue for and against it.

Censorship is when it is not illegal to write the material, but it's illegal to make this material available in a public forum. What you advocate is the same as the German Government policy - you want these people free to write the material you don't like, but you actively work to make it not publicly visible in a forum you frequent.

I've never read a critique about comic characters, and I'm not particular interested in this particular one, but I am a very strong proponent of complete freedom of expression.

The problem with your path is that it's VERY subjective. You say you don't like it, but where is the line? What if I post an article about how Hamas builds a Bomb using cow manure. This may be interesting from a hacker perspective but it will offend many sensibilities - the point of the upvote, downvote button is to act as a filter, so if enough people find it interesting, it will go to the top, no matter how loudly individuals complain.

Final point : don't take my arguments seriously. I argue this dispassionately, and I don't expect you to take the points personally. Read my text critically, not emotionally.
That's not true because of the way the money comes in and out. They don't bring in the money for the entire fund in the beginning, or wait and pay it out at the end. The actual time period over which that 3x would be realized is considerably shorter than 10 years. The 10 year mark is just where any going concerns that still haven't exited are purchased by a new fund or dealt with in some other way.

Also, it's closer to 12% annually. And VCs don't take 30%. It's generally 20-25.

For a detailed explanation, see this article which shows that a fund that returned 3x would net investors about 30% annually:

http://www.vator.tv/news/show/2008-08-03-venture-capital-eco...
Programming (arguably) is not an end it itself. Programs are written to be useful to people, who don't care what tools/languages were used to create what's useful to them. A website does not turn out useless if its backend is written in PHP rather than Ruby, just as a novel does not turn out less interesting/intelligent/whatever if it is typed on a cheap typewriter rather than some Mac Pro.
#1: Take it and make it applicable to distributed systems/clusters and maybe you have something.

#2: Is this Fashion News? I kid. This might be a fun site to write, so long as you aren't saddled with the inventory.

#3: Consulting around security is a great way to make a buck, but building a security company of size is very difficult. Automated tools are tricky to write due to false positives due to weird user configurations.
It takes more than 20 seconds to install a keyboard layout switcher on an unfamiliar Linux distribution, or, for that matter, on a poorly-set up Windows installation. Also, if you just need to type for a few minutes on someone else's machine to help out briefly, it's rude to install or switch a fundamental setting like that. "Can you help me out with this..?" "Sure, let me first install my custom keyboard layout on your box."
Oh, but the worst thing to do is read this comment stream. Just pick one and do it for a while. If it flops, start another :-)
YouTube - 'Work on stuff that matters.' -Tim O'Reilly (2 PARTS)
yeah but that's what bothers me. you've got a site founded by the guy who wrote "The Python Paradox" and everybody there thinks it's interesting to discuss PHP. come on! it doesn't matter if it's wrong or not. there is nothing interesting about PHP. there's nothing to learn there. there's no story. even my rant was just Economics 101.

trying to extract lessons from the design of PHP is like trying to win the lottery by wearing a trucker hat because you saw some dude in a trucker hat win the lottery. there's nothing there! you might as well be reading tea leaves. which is what I said in the rant, but you didn't get the point. you might as well be posting a picture of some tea leaves and then having a discussion about that.

yes a good enough conversationalist can extract something meaningful from anything, and that's the real challenge I was after when I wrote the rant, but if your goal is to write something interesting about what you saw on Hacker News, let me tell you, Hacker News does not make it easy for you by talking about PHP.
Do people really value karma on this site?

I'd think that the lack of discussion is more because there's not much to be had. There's the anti-Israeli bigotry and the pro-Israeli bigotry, and beyond that there's not much else. You can't debate if it's right of them because most of the end results will be the same (Geneva-convention, no-they-didn't-sign-that-part-of-the-convention, I-still-think-it's-wrong, then the conversation ends). There's nothing much that civilians can discuss here, because none of us are in positions of big know.

That's why I'd prefer the discussion focus on other things. Not because these things aren't important, but because the userbase is more interesting discussing other topics.
gaius is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I cant stand light backgrounds, i prefer dark ones(but not black). This is the vim colorscheme im using:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1778

I like it a lot!
Summary: In taking this job, you will be my bitch.
The invisible hand of the market only works when there is a market. If you learn anything about the way VCs work, you'll know that it's a less a market and more a good old boys network. There is a ton of collusion. It's a lot more like a market would be without anti-trust protections.

I said "if it consigned the startup to failure" because the entrepreneur in question seemed to feel that way, and the writer seemed to not disagree. My sense is that the VC did disagree.
You have too much faith in the efficiency of the market in a field with:

a) lots of players making decisions based on very imperfect and very incomplete information.

b) very large consequences for random events. Yes, there are many important contributing factors to the success of a company besides luck, but the difference between a mere success and a multi-billion dollar homerun involves a large degree of luck. These sorts of exits are often associated with winner-take-all markets where randomness is more important. Example: I play a competitive game against you where you beat me 60% of the time because you are more skilled. Given the option, I would much rather play one game against you for $100 than one hundred games with $1 on the line each time. I contend that the one-game option is more analogous to to businesses with lots of "lock-in" or "network effects".

c) a relatively short history - if a funding cycle for a VC is several years, and most venture firms haven't been around no more than a couple decades, that's not a lot of generations for funding strategies to prove themselves, especially in the presence of randomness (see b).
I wonder if there's a rule-of-thumb formula that can be applied. "Don't attempt a product with an N-month sales cycle unless you have a company of at least N*M employees."

I suspect M is closer to 10 than 0.25.
I never said founders can reliably predict the future. I never even said they could do so better than VCs. I simply said the author was missing the point. It wasn't that the VC just won't accept anything less than 10x. They do it all the time. It was that in this particular case, he probably felt that by not exiting he would, on average, get more than 3x.

I have no opinion whether or not that's true. But I know for a fact that VCs (at least ones with a clue) don't just categorically reject every exit below 10x.
Science imitating art imitating science...
I think Mr. Maas of c.l.l offered to write Lisp for minimum wage. I think he's in Bay area.
d) high barriers to entry
e) well-known collusion
2000000 bottles / 5 minutes = 400,000 bottles / minute

400000 * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day = 576,000,000 bottles a day.

576 Million bottles / 300 million americans = 1.92 bottles per American per day?

I have a hard time buying that.
> What makes Google what we see is that relentless pursuit of increasingly tiny increases in efficiency.

Absolutely. This fact is literally in the comapany's dna. A lot of issues that were mentioned in that article are a direct result of this.

I'd be curious to know how this affects all of the startups they acquire that remain dormant for so long.
Ask YC: Feedback on new TrackThis design/features
My recent move from student to unemployed has given me time to completely rework one of my side projects.

Old site: http://www.usetrackthis.com
New site: http://zend.usetrackthis.com (new design, email/SMS/Facebook tracking)

I'd appreciate any feedback on the new design or features. Thanks.

Note that the new site isn't totally live, so if you add any packages they won't be updated (yet).
Free bananas in the kitchen!!! (what happens when reply-all goes amok)
Full-Time Startup: Skribit Week 2
Advice to Old Men from a Young Man
Interesting comments on the psychology of going out of business sales
I like #2, especially given the other testimony by 'brk' about having made money with a small-scale version of the idea.

There are potential problems in tariff/trade laws, consistency of customer experience, and fraud. But solving those problems gives you your defensible advantage.

Beyond your initial friends, you might wind up with an enthusiastic community of 'buyers'/traders who are working more for the fun/access of it than high salaries/commissions.

And the ads write themselves...

"Where did you get that top?"

"A little shop in Milan!"

"When were you in Milan?"

"I wasn't! Let me tell you about my little secret..."
Here's an interesting comment (I couldn't find a way to permalink to it), quote:

"I once worked for a major electronics chain that closed down... The most heartbreaking experience of the whole ordeal, were the customers that showed up on that day. These were not the same people that usually came to our store. Something had changed. They all had greed in their eyes. Not one single person that came into the store was the least bit sympathetic towards our situation. Not one person said they were sorry to hear myself and thousands of others would be losing our jobs. No one, not a single one gave a damn.

The only thing on their minds was how much money they were saving. They asked how much a certain product was marked down, and regardless of my answer would then demand that I take off more. When I tried to explain I was not allowed to lower the price further, many would become angry, some would actually start screaming! Some without hesitation, would even call me a "liar" when I told them the product was already marked down below cost."
Umm...these people either have been reading too much xkcd or not enough: http://xkcd.com/531/
... or ... How to annoy me with visual tasks, hang my browser, and ensure that I don't go back to your site.

It also doesn't solve the mechanical-turk / porn-capatcha-redirection issues (since the spammers are using other people's cycles anyway).

Your site exists, presumably, to make it easier for users to do whatever it is they do on your site. It seems silly to work the other direction...

The arms race is between you and the spammers. Don't let your sites users be the casualty.
I made myself inline typing macros for all the common stuff I write when coding and it has done wonders for me both in reducing RSI and increasing speed. Some of the macros I use are:

,i = int
,f = float
,9i = (int)
,9f = (float)
,r = return
,f = for (;;) {}
,, = { (newline) } (up)(newline)
etc...

Basically, I virtually never have to use shift+ to get either a ()'s or {}'s which I just love. The macro program I use is called Perfect Keyboard and I've registered 3 different versions over the years, FWIW.
And the other comment:

"...Where were all these customers in the last 3 to 6 months? Your financial situation is likely not better than it was, but I sold almost $15,000 alone, as did 2 other people in the TV department. As a store, we made 275% to our budget today. And that's even with people mad that it's "only" 10% off. Our regular sales blew the liquidation prices away, but it was a ghost town for the last month. That flow would've been nice, and might have been able to save our company...

...I don't know what's worse: the vultures at the liquidation companies that mark prices up before marking them down and will fire a CC employee for taking off 11% instead of 10% if their math was wrong, or the vulturesque customers that complain that they're getting ripped off on the sale that they were never forced to make... Picking at a dead and rotting company's carcass when it could have been saved is why I call you [the liquidation companies and customers] vultures."
I recently switched from a black & white scheme to a colored scheme. As of now I'm enjoying a black-greyish background with some nifty colors.

IMO, colored code makes the process much more fun. I'm not sure if it makes me more productive though, but I wouldn't rule it out.

Small screenshot: http://photos-f.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v2102/219/106/34...
Where's the tour / example "what this service looks like" page? I ask this partly because I dont have any packages to track, and also because I'd want to see what kind of stuff your service would tell me :)

Also, why do I have to register for an account for Email/SMS/RSS but not twitter? I like how twitter is encouraging developers not to have sign up forms.
"Den of Thieves" by James B. Stewart covers the Milken, DBL and Boesky years. It's a decent read--I just finished it about a month ago.
Why do professors deplore enterprise?
I've done #2 a bit while in Japan, but stopped because I didn't have enough scale. You have to first communicate about what they want, find where it is sold, take a trip there, box it, stand in line in post office, fill customs forms, do bookkeeping, answer to "where's my package omg wtf!?" e-mails and so on. For customers it was sometimes inconvenient because the packages would be stopped by customs in their home countries.
"...but he is such a part of the value of that stock"

Just because you say it doesn't make it true!
Sifting out the right/wrong places to spend government money is not the responsibility of those asking for it. It's the government's job.

The problem is not vendors, it's the lobbying system.
The arms race is between you and the spammers. Don't let your sites users be the casualty.

This is totally GI Joe (~knowing is half the battle!~) but I'm totally stealing it.
Django vs. Rails: The Dead-Tree Edition
GASP A JOB AT GOOGLE IS A JOB?!!!
I've been using dark/black backgrounds for literally years. The question that most interests me now is warm vs cool colors for syntax highlighting. Without realizing it, I had been using primarily warm tones for a long time. Then, I installed MacVim and started using the default dark bg theme, which uses cool tones... I kinda like it!
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here.

If you're talking about my usage of mnemonics such as ol, understand that those mnemonics wouldn't find their way into neither the implementation nor the operation of the editor, I just used them in my explanations because I thought the operation streams would take too much space otherwise. But in general I'm a big fan of using long-and-meaningful-identifiers.

If you're saying that it's not worth it to make a structure editor just to have more CPU efficiency, I wholeheartedly agree. It's true that a structure editor would probably be more efficient on that level, but it's only a very minor bonus compared to the real advantages of the computer always being fully aware of the editing context you're in (thus helping in ways it normally couldn't), and without the need to write such a complex piece of software as a reliable incremental parser.

If you're saying that the keystroke savings are not worth it, I'll have to admit the very simple example I used doesn't make it seem very worthwhile, but the benefits of a structure editor would become much more obvious the more you looked at complex examples of the kind of thing it could do.

I didn't even talk about the modification of structure yet. I can't tell you how many times I had to edit

(something (stuff)
(something2 (stuff2)
body1
body2))

into:

(something2 (stuff2)
(something (stuff)
body1
body2))

and how slow and painful it is. With a structure editor I could do it with perhaps 3 key presses... And there are lots of use cases like this one. If you say that I could simply write an emacs-lisp function to do it and bind it to a key, you'd be right and you'd be missing the point.
I really like this ad. I'm not sure if I think it's good, but at least it's different.

Will they actually get what they want? If so, I need to consider changing my business models. The world's a lot different than I thought if you can actually get someone good for those rates.

I'm tempted to do their 2 hour test, 10 hours of development, and get started on their work just to see what they're doing, what they're like, and get some of my other questions answered.
"We will pay each developer $1500- $2200 for working 200 hours per month. That is 7.50 US dollars to 11 US dollars per hour."

...will you now.
Love (and annoying) by Seth Godin
This ad is strangely compelling. anc2020 is right, they are a bit blunt and demanding, but there's an honesty and intelligence in their approach that's admirable. A lot of employers expect you to be their bitch but they'll cover it up with fuzzy words.

I'm probably not going to respond to this ad; the pay is just too low, but I'd like to have lunch some day with whoever is behind this.
I'll work on adding some examples.

I did consider email tracking w/o an account, but haven't yet implemented it. At least creating an account is fairly low friction due to OpenID.
I know, but it's a nice visual demonstration of how quickly things can go south in a water landing. Dip something into the water and it's just all over.
Ask YC: What are some early, start-ups near SF?
I'm a software engineer at one of our favorite massive companies, ready to jump ship for a start-up. Besides the option of starting my own company, I'd also like to consider opportunities that are already out there.

In particular, I'm interested in finding early start-ups in and around San Francisco with realistic business models; especially those looking for seed capital.

Any recommendations?
Ask HN: SUP nightly challenges at Cambridge, MA hacker space
I'm hosting an MIT IAP event that might be of interest to local HN readers.

The goal of the event, called Social Undergroup Programming for the friendly 'SUP? acronym, is to learn by doing using co-working and competition. Each night one person challenges everyone else to make something. For example, last Friday we made music visualizers in processing (http://processing.org). The challenge runs from 8pm to whenever the challenger wants to make a call and award a goofy prize. Judging criteria are up to the challenger. In the above example, all participants were new to processing, so as the challenger I helped keep everyone rolling. I think even advanced hackers can have fun doing this, and of course the challenge changes every night!

Challenges can cover anything: web mashup, data mucking, scripting, game making, ai, microcontrollers, etc.

I'd love to hear ya'll's challenge ideas, though of course I'm hoping ya'll will show up in person to test your mettle. If you want to throw down the gauntlet for real and challenge in person let me know (diN0bot@bilumi.org).

M-F Jan 19th-23
8pm to whenever the challenger wants to call it
mitERS http://miters.mit.edu/node/4

ps - Originally I tried to organize regular weekly meetups--Friday night SUP challenges--but I couldn't muster enough interest. I realize I could set up a blog and do this all through the internet but I'm hesitant to completely give up on human contact (though the blog would be a great way to get people interested and encourage more SUP gatherings). So, if you're interested in getting this off the ground with me, or have feedback on how to better get this organized, please let me know.

Thanks.
So, is tickling learned or innate? How can they leave me hanging like that.
Shoot, sorry about that.