skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know about New York, but once-inhabited structures were submerged under dam-created Lake Travis (near Austin, TX) -- and their ruins have become visible as the lake receded late last year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gwjg0jUtIuU#t=0m40s

"Most of us thought a lot of it was urban myths, but then, the lower the water gets, they aren't so much of a myth anymore."
Oui? Quel est le problème?
A quick&dirty math approach:

At a very basic level, you're working with:

potential_revenue = sum(total_market) * P(customer) * LTV_over_period

(LTV usually stands for lifetime value of customer, but we're only considering annual numbers below)

First you must must must figure out what the size of your total market is; I assume you already know this number from the top of your head (if not, you've got bigger problems to worry about).

At this point, this becomes a problem of function maximization. Assuming your competitor is the market leader, and the rule of thumb for market leaders to take 50% of the total market, what percentage of the remaining clientbase can you realistically capture? Calculate your potential revenue with this scenario. Do the numbers add up for anything sustainable? If no, pivot.

With nichification, your total market is obviously smaller, but you might capture it better. Calculate it with markets [A,B,C] ,and see what percentage of these market you have to capture, in order for total revenues to exceed that of non-nichificated product. Can you capture that amount realistically? If yes, nichify; otherwise, proceed with original plan.
The issue is that since I came back to this site the voting feels like reddit. People just vote down if they disagree. They are totally safe to do this because there are enough people now that you can't tell who did it.

As far as revenge down votes, that also comes with a risk. People who don't know the history will just see your revenge down vote and assume you are the jerk.
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Live marketing helps to get efficient brand experience to generate effective results. When you first go to any marketing agencies you're going to come across many business opportunities and there are some that are going to be legit and others that are not.
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Agreed that it's impossible to come up with a single concrete, satisfying answer to these questions. However we're not building a criminal case - it's more of a civil case, where the side with the preponderance of evidence wins. In that vein, two books that I found enjoyable were "Albion's Seed" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed) which details how cultural differences in four areas of England manifested themselves in colonial America, with cultural consequences to this day; and "A Farewell to Alms" (http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princet...) which attempts to explain why England was the first country to escape the "Malthusian Trap", enabling the industrial revolution.
We've been aiming this for a bit more of a corporate audience than Mint's. We think this works particularly well in situations with multiple employees and a single bookkeeper. Of course, we'd like to make a product that works for individuals too, but we are starting off by focusing on our strengths.
I remember that too. It was, as you say, a while ago, meaning long time outdated. And I indeed recall it to be pg-posted, but instead all I can find is this non-pg release with all links broken: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173045. I looked for in all links to tar and zip archives, could've missed something.
I'm not even sure if that possibility exists but since your account does not seem to be attached to anything personal as far as I can see and since you have barely posted / commented here what is the reason you want it deleted ?

Keep in mind that deleting an account means that all the replies to your comments / submissions would be left 'hanging' in space.
U.S. patents go to the first inventor, regardless of filing order.
You're right. And as the copywriter for the site, I'm feeling a bit sheepish for not pressing to include that in the 1.0.

If you'd like to find out more about us, you can always go to staging.thirdi.com (our new site is going up soon, we thought we'd point there) or providentsecurity.ca.

A proper 'About' page is in the pipeline.
Sony's touch screen makes the display (which is the most important feature in a reader) inferior to Kindle's. Also it's expensive compared to Kindle.
Too many. I just hope it's outweighed by people watching their communities die because nobody's setting social boundaries and standing the fuck up and doing something about it.
"Can you name an area of research and development where patents hold a valuable position?"

Metallurgy, semiconductors, superconductors, ...
I find it really incredible that a sign that wasn't supposed to be there, on a major freeway, remained up for eight years. That's impressive.
Yep, sorry, I'm always confusing commons and contrib. What I meant was clojure contrib.
Honestly, I'd start with Scheme, because it's a small language and will teach you the basics of Lisp-like languages. Once you understand closures, and macros, and continuations, and data abstraction in Lisp-like languages, and how you can build just about anything out of these building blocks, then you can learn the more advanced stuff that Clojure or Common Lisp has.

For implementations, I'd probably start with PLT Scheme for learning. It's fairly complete and easy to get up and running with. Some other implementations are faster (Stalin), and some may have more practical libraries (Bigloo, though that's debatable), and some may have more interesting implementations (Chicken), but PLT's a fairly well-rounded early choice. (Disclaimer: I started with Bigloo and my experience with PLT is limited to getting Arc to compile on MzScheme.)
Check out this patent. It appears to be for storing web page state in the web page itself and transmitting that state using HTTP POST. I'm not even kidding.

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=wIEoAAAAEBAJ&dq=5...

It's especially interesting to read the "referenced by" list on that page. "Incorporating state information into a URL" ... "Method for transmitting images over a network" ... "System for tracking the purchase of a product over the internet."

Seriously, what are we going to do about this?
Plorkyeran claimed that college is about more than a diploma, which you responded to by saying that you learn things on the job that you wouldn’t learn in college. My retort was that colleges are incredibly diverse, and enable many conversations and experiences that simply wouldn’t all happen in any other single place, and the best you can do is to tell me that people are still interesting after they graduate?

I’m sorry, but the constitutional law scholar, the electrical engineer, the chamber singer, the neurobiology review editor, the congressional staffer, the south asian dancer, the ancient babylonian historian, the photographer, and the basketball player aren’t going to all be sitting at lunch talking about the lecture they just listened to about Kant with their venerable philosophy professor in any job I’ve ever heard of.

Yes, there are interesting people everywhere (in the supermarket, for instance, or at a rock concert or hiking through a national park). That doesn’t mean that the college experience can be easily replaced anywhere else I can think of. Which is not to suggest that college is essential, but only that it has value beyond certification or specific curricula.

> ... they're more fun to deal with once their goal changes from "Continue getting financial aid / parental aid" to "Do something that pays well."

Both of those sound like awfully boring goals. I’d be pretty disappointed in any friend of mine whose chief ambition in life was to make lots of money.
As you know, in HN we all are trying to maximize the quality of the content without over-engineering the system itself. Once you add a system to monitor the votes, that will itself be a point of discussion. We want people to talk about the topic at hand and not go meta.

(Besides... big change requests like these are usually turned down by the HN admins.)
I wasn't aware that Clojure had a steeper learning curve. I'll do as you recommended: start with Scheme to grasp the basics of Lisp and eventually move on to more advanced stuff. Thanks.
cofounders typically have a lot more equity, and hence are typically much more motivated to work 24x7 until things are up and running. employees are not motivated in the same way.
Depends what you are trying to achieve. If you primarily want to learn the language, Scheme is a good choice. Ifd you want to write code that would benefit from Java's extensive libraries, Clojure is the obvious choice.
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Well, Kindle is $259 and Sony is $273 at Amazon.com, so the price difference is negligible. Don't know about the screen quality, though. Real side-by-side comparisons would be interesting; assuming that Kindle is better, how much better it is?
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I don't know about the US, but over here in the Netherlands any service must respond to a request to remove your records. They must comply, or provide a very good reason why your comments/submissions must remain.
(In discussions comments can stay if required for the discussion to make sense, but the name has to go).
In my reading, trolls rarely have just one patent. They tend to buy silly, trivial patents in bulk from wherever they can. Since a single lost lawsuit could cause the troll to lose only those patents they assert in the suit, the damage to them is minimal. I think this makes trolling even more insidious -- even if you (as a startup) win, you lose.
Ask HN: Who has a Merchant account & can I ask you about it?
Hello!

I have a few questions about merchant accounts that I can't seem to find the answers online, I was wondering if a few fellow HNers have some time they are willing to devote to answering a few questions I have.

If so, please let me know by commenting here & I'll contact you.
Every piece of software in existence has competitors. If you can't beat your competitors (even by iterating), then listen to your existing customers, and find out what they want.

You might drift into a vertical niche, if your product is a good fit for that niche.
I doubt deanonymizing per-comment up/down-votes will have the effect you intend; rather seeing names when 'stung' by a downvote will only lead to more negative feelings.

My hunch is that there are people who disagree, and have enough energy to express that via one click, but not enough energy to compose a reply. It's not incontrovertibly clear that the down-arrow isn't for disagreement -- "it's a vote, and I'm supposed to vote my opinion, right?" -- so it's an attractive nuisance, and some percentage of users will use it for lazy-disagreement as long as it's there.

I think the most effective remedy would be to provide another equally-easy one-click-disagree -- separate from karma-downvote -- that doesn't imply a community demotion/sanction. (I don't care if a thousand people disagree with me, but if one suggests I've transgressed the bounds of good behavior, I'm motivated to reply.)
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It's good to know they exist, they'll probably be aware that you exist sooner or later as well.

It's a big world!

There is more than room enough for two, three or 50 companies doing what you're doing, the market is more than large enough for that, especially if you look overseas as well.

A three year headstart is your advantage. After all, you get the benefit of their three years of product development without having to go the long way round. Check out what they've got and learn from it.

Stick to your plan, observe them like a hawk and make sure that you give your customers excellent service. They won't go looking for a competitor until you mess up.

Don't worry so much about keyword rankings, a solid business does not solely depend on search engines for its traffic. And there is always advertising if you want to go and acquire new customers in a higher volume.

As for going 'niche' that might be a great strategy to stay under their radar until you've been able to level the playing field and you have a bigger war chest.

But in the long run their existence shouldn't matter much, it's not like you're going to go head to head with microsoft or google on operating systems or search.

It's just another company, they come and go. Likely there are other competitors out there that you haven't picked up on yet.

In a market with no competition, anybody can be 'top dog'. Such markets are illusions, any way that you find to make a living someone else will come and see you and think 'hey, nice idea'. Some of them will be better, some of them will be worse. There is no hard and fast rule that says that the first mover will be the one to win the game.

The there is the subject of locality. If you are going to address the 'self employed' market then there are so many options so 'slice' that market that if you make it easy to adapt your product to a niche that you could also address many of these niches in parallel, effectively you are still 'broad' but you now have a unique advantage for each of those little sub markets.

Which should remedy some of your keyword worries, since it is much easier to rank high for combinations of keywords than that it is to rank high for individual keywords.

good luck!
If it took you a while to find the competition, it will also take your customers time. And by that time, they will be used to your software.
Separately, when only seeing the headline, without the detail (about naming names), I thought this suggestion might instead be:

(1) History of up/down votes like a sparkline. For example, ↓↓↑↓↑↑↑↓

(2) Show a person's outbound karma -- the total up, down, and net comment votes they've cast (rather than received). Who's more positive about others, or relentlessly negative? (This is more likely to discourage people from hair-trigger, anonymous negative votes.)
I'm curious, how do the Intel X25-E's change the IOPS scaling challenge?
His name isn't there, it's just a non-specific alias.

I read it to mean 'dave australia', if he is actually called 'dave au' then that's slightly different.
Very interesting talk on generic security, definitely worth the 1 hour spent watching.
This prospect is just scary to me. Personally I'd be looking for a co-founder as driven to succeed as I am. I've sat down with 1/2 dozen potential co-founders for one of my projects and have decided to go it alone because of this. I'm building a company to make money, not to give away the fruits of my labor.
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Shawn also had an incredible amount of help from Jordan Ritter and Ali Aydar before the company was even a company. He also would have been a lot better as a single-founder, as his co-founder uncle John Fanning took advantage of his inexperience.
David Lean, the great film director, said you can only have one director on any film or you risk diluting the vision.

I think the same is true for creative startups. I find that getting employees and giving them stock and calling them 'co-founder' is all fine as long as there's no confusion that they're to follow my lead.

I think you can argue that all great startups are, in a sense, single founder startups. Woz for Apple, Gates for MS, etc.
What do you do? You man up and kick their asses.
Is it just me, or is the writing incomprehensible? I have read the article and the author's site, and I still don't get what happened. He put up a sign. But what does the sign say? What was the part that was confusing? How did his sign make things less confusing? Where's the "before" and "after" pictures that I can compare?

I'm confused. Perhaps the artist should hack good.is and update the article with some text on what actually happened...
I think this is a quite disturbing article, comparing religious belonging to some sort of intellectual superiority.
Do you think there's some government official that drives from sign to sign, comparing each to his notes on what it should look like?
I agree that is an invalid categorical assertion. To make it explicit: I learned to program (quite well, I hope) on top of closed platforms. However, I suspect that I would have learned faster, better, and more completely by working with open source platforms. My perspective on code has changed dramatically since I've embraced reading other people's code.

As an aside: although my integration work is "low-level", I do not get the opportunity to make changes or additions to the shipping VS bits. I can only file bugs and plead my case. I can't call secret APIs, nor do I gain any special powers other than the weight an @microsoft.com email address carries. I'm developing against the closed platform as all our partners, and non-partner customers.
Maybe this should be added to the FAQ?
You already have a couple of clients prepared to pay for your software. If the 'three years ahead' competitor is so great, why aren't they using the competitor's product rather than yours?

It sounds to me like your competitor is targeting a different market to you, and picking up some of your target market as a happy accident. If you focus on the needs of your market, it becomes less and less likely that those sort of people will use your competitor's product.

I suspect the competitor is unlikely to care too much about your product - they'll see it as a 'low end' solution that only has the potential to take away customers they don't make much from anyway.
This deserves the down votes because it's a little more smirky than funny, but there's a valid point here.

YC has has been called a cult before, and I don't think anyone would argue that there are some eccentricities, and one of these is the over-valuing of the two founder model.

You can't become a trailblazer until you embrace this dogma.
That's a great line, actually, and says it all.
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Roll-call for Entrepreneurs in Bombay, is a meetup possible?
Hello, entrepreneurs in Bombay, India. Are you involved in start-ups for low-tech, high-tech, web-tech, dating-tech or green-tech in India?

I am interested in meeting you folks. Is the heat driving you crazy? Is it the lack of infrastructure? Is it the difficulty of finding motivated people? or is this the land of milk and honey. I want to know your experiences. Please send me your email and I would love to chat before I take off from here.

[EDIT] I am of course, also interested in meeting hackers/potential entrepreneurs and folks interested in start-ups!
"The issue is that since I came back to this site the voting feels like reddit."

And how long have you been on this site? Your score is 17 at the point of writing and your account was created 7 days ago.

So unless you had an earlier login id, (which is very possible, I am just asking) maybe you haven't been here long enough to make an informed judgment of how the voting system works? Just hang in there and use it for a while.

From the HN guidelines (at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) , "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.) "
If it's just a functional language you want, you ought to consider other things too:

* Haskell: very 'pure' functional language from academia, much more so than Scheme.

* Erlang: slightly more practical functional language that's used in industry and has some nice properties, but is probably not a 'thing of beauty'.

* F# and Ocaml seem to have their supporters too...

Clojure seems to be popular these days if it's a Lisp you want.
HN is not in the Netherlands, so this is completely irrelevant. (Just like when some company in the US sends a DMCA takedown notice to the Netherlands.)
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Woz for Apple... Really?
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The "learning well" of a dialect is more important than agonizing over choosing any particular dialect. Pick one at random and write some large (5k to 10k line) programs in it. Read some programs written by great programmers who use that dialect.

The knowledge you gain will transfer very easily into the dialect you choose next (and you will get more informed by then and won't have to ask in forums).
In this case, the regular people are the airline.
It is a tad overwritten. He tacked "North" and "5"(shield) on the empty space top left of the big leftmost sign.
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You ought to add working SSL (certificate is invalid and when I choose to add an account, it doesn't switch to SSL).
This short video explains the whole thing better than the article and shows how he constructed and mounted the sign.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1442683884005576315...
I don't think that was the point of the article?
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He wasn't implying that Dutch law was valid in the US, he was simply stating that because perhaps there is some similar law in the US (hence the "I don't know about the US").

Besides, does one really need to provide a valid reason to delete an account ? Isn't "just because" good enough ?
Try to hack into the HN servers and drop your records ;)
It's boring, it's an enormous quantity of useless information. Dealing with patients and working is another story. The reason why people think medicine is a good career is that doctors themselves never talk about the down sides of the job, but always consider it as the most respectful job ever.
The exit for the 5 North from the 110 freeway is a left exit with a wicked left turn. This means that a) people unfamiliar with the area don't know to be in the left lane to make the exit and b) because of the sharp left turn, everyone has to slow down to <25mph and traffic backs up making the exit difficult to merge into if you're late getting into the lane. It's a bad interchange because that one lane can back up for a mile during rush hour. It's such a poorly designed exit that Caltrans recently added in lights to the lane divider in the pavement to signal that people cannot merge into that lane within about 1/4 mile of the exit during rush hour.
>Can you give me some examples of Micro-ISVs?

Read this forum, all the information you need are here http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz

>On Medicine again, I quite like the idea of helping people, such as in a charity like Doctors Without Borders, but it's just a dream right now. To each his own I guess.

I like to help people, but are you ready for it? If so, then you can consider this career. Just be careful in this choice.
Sure, there are more polite ways, but this is the most effective one.
A bit late now. I was answering a comment on "direction".

I have no idea if Nokia is able to do an "Ubuntu" on Debian for mobile phones. But I'd love it, if they managed.
http://xkcd.com/327/ should give you a start ;-)
if you took a few seconds to explain why regexp is the wrong solution rather than just saying "don't use it", I'm sure the user would not only leave a lot more enlightened, but would also stop asking the same question.
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