skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is currently the model that most big consulting companies use: find a thousand niches and fill them all with people. I have a feeling that if you enter these markets as a startup, you'll find they're not really as high margin as they look, and that the margin will get eaten up by integrators anyway (integration work doesn't scale exponentially and causes your costs/outputs to lag your pipeline).

Anyway it's not a bad idea; just not one I feel is especially well suited to the VC investment model.
How Viruses use Wasps and Caterpillars to Survive.
Don't Start a Company – Be Obsessed with Something
As I said the last time this story got discussed on HN: just because it's publishable, doesn't mean it's publishable in a physics journal. The method they're using would provide a nice, orthogonal, independent piece of evidence on the topic of time travel.

However, it doesn't fall into a physicist's area of expertise (sorry, "wheelhouse" is the hip term now). Their method depends heavily on related hypotheses about when people would post about things, and thus relies more on the expertise of sociologists and journalists.

So they were right to reject it from physics journals, although they probably should have said, "hey, this would be of greater interest to the guys in this other kind of journal ..."
It's big as a watermelon, but with a different shape. Their trees are tall, what makes dangerous to stay under them due to risk of the jackfruit falling over you.
If you have a bad history with fruit allergies (I'm apples, plums, peaches) watch out with Jackfruit. I had a piece once and it was one of the worst oral allergic reactions in my life.
That is what the posted article is about, actually.
That's great!

How do you actually know you're making the world a better place for others, when all you talk about and think about is work?

See, what gets me about that attitude is, that kind of closed-off attitude is what I took into my first few startups. It's a tunnel-vision kinda thing, where I was pushing my ideas out into the world, but not engaging as a person with people (who, I assure you, are not all so focused on work). It never worked well, because people all want a lot of different things, and rarely does that all just line up with what I want.

But talking to people about their interests, listening and engaging with them on the human level? There's gold there, both in the friendships and the business that comes out of it.
Ronn – convert markdown files to manpages
Audi A2 was a big step towards that. The hood wasn't sealed, but it wasn't meant to be opened by the owner either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_A2#Service_Hatch_.28Servi...
If those numbers were the case, then that definitely would be correct.

But cost to obtain the average user is $3, nearly double from what it was last year. http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/30/it-costs-more-than-3-to-ac...

I strongly doubt the average user spends $3, given that the current freemium environment is hedging by offering freemium perks for free periodically to get user retention. Which makes them less likely to actually spend money.
But the picture accidentally makes use of forced perspective to make the fruit appear as though it's on a hardwood floor in an otherwise empty room, which it dominates.
Mmmm. Not really "Snowden's solution" per se:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=75775.0
> He can’t trust his employer, who demanded ultimate loyalty and gave nothing in return.

Jason Bourne, Independent Contractor & Free Agent.
I like how the story reads like a 3rd grade book report on jackfruit.
> Bullets are indiscriminate. Small, precision warheads are becoming more in favor because the safety margin is better.

How are bullets less discriminate than a bomb?
This article is a submarine ad for the Jackfruit industry, right?

(see http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html )
Interview with Shkreli about this price increase: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-09-21/why-turing-i...
The 21 Bitcoin Computer
I live in Florida, and sometimes as I drive throughout the state and see the hundreds and hundreds (though it may be thousands) of oranges alongside the road I wonder just how many go to waste that could be sent to places in need, and then I wonder if there's other places that do the same... Most of the United States is uninhabited, so I always wonder how much vegetation is just sitting there that could feed others. Now I understand there would be a cost in transporting these goods, as well as other factors, but still...

What if the same companies that sell you oranges could give some of those same oranges to the homeless? Or use a portion of their profits to (without deceit) send them to countries in need? Maybe I don't know enough about these things to really talk, but having fed the homeless once upon a time for about a year without the aid of government assistance I think we make too many excuses for things that really should just be done. Ah well, maybe someday soon we'll see true change that benefits all.
Crops infect insects with viruses? Wasn't that the plot of the X-Files movie?
Pretty interesting, but it feels like the vague category 'literary fiction' is being used to make the results seem more surprising than they really are. You could also say, "fiction which requires readers to model the internal mental states of characters improves empathy"—and the results seem pretty straightforward: modeling mental states of others improves ability to model mental states of others.

I mean, it is pretty interesting that it works with fictional characters—but still: nothing I read in the article lead me to believe this is due to some elusive quality of the intentionally undefined category 'literary.' If anything, these results give a little more info. on how we actually do define 'literary': that a typical requirement for a work to be called 'literary' is that it pushes readers to model mental states of characters.
I was thinking less of the reverse-engineering costs and more of the hard production costs. Equipment, personnel, production time, etc. Those are non-trivial costs even if the complete formula and process is known.
That wasn't my implication, and a bunch of people around here have understood that, so I don't think it was a problem with me being unclear. You have to pay taxes on any Bitcoin transaction you would pay tax on if the same transaction was conducted in cash or gold or any other similar medium of exchange. Which contradicts your "if governments want to collect tax on Bitcoin transactions, they will need to run a mining farm" statement without being a blanket statement that every blockchain transaction needs to be taxed.
Yeah; Uber had a unique opportunity because the taxi business was stuck in the 20th century and had a bad case of regulatory capture as a result. That said, in Uber's more "mature" markets you're starting to see a lot of the problems that caused the taxi business to regulate in the first place: too many drivers, no way to guarantee steady revenue as a driver, etc.
Just out of principle. You are mis-using crypto primitives, which can lead to bugs so subtle you would never guess they're there. And thanks to the random looking hashes, you will never immediately see that i492tr7gf89que092378gt827 is actually a broken hash and not a strong one.
This is probably the most accurate description of the novel in this thread. I agree that there's no particular reason to think that Heinlein is saying we'd all be better off if tomorrow we took away the franchise from everyone who hasn't served in the military. Nor do I think it's fair to say that the novel is pro-war in the sense of glorifying warfare.

At the same time, based on large swaths of what Heinlein has written (including non-fiction), there's also no particular reason to think that we're supposed to roll our eyes and take as satire the various lectures about honor and duty in the book. Nor take it as a general condemnation of the "military mind" or anything like that.
> Equating Tereshkova to a dog is as disrespectful as it is dishonest.

.. as is taking what being said out of context and twisting it into something it wasn't.
Thanks for your answer akshat!

That's what I'm planning to do, but I'm not sure that I'll work. Seems like most startups hire remote workers only from U.S.
Where do you think that I could begin to search?
Tangentially related: Since the deep learning field is moving so fast, what is currently the best resources for learning the field?
It seems like VCs ought to be more sophisticated than to naively apply the model for SaaS to low margin consumer facing products, but I don't know enough - this really could be the case.

Similarly, I have no understanding of all the money that flows into the space (from the outside). The margins are low (to non-existent) and the space is brutally punishing. Screw up a persons laundry, food order, or plain just take too long and you have to give away a year's worth of margins to keep the customer. Delivery as a service is a commodity - who cares who delivers your food or does your laundry? At the same time, the cost of switching between providers is as close to zero as it gets (they are doing home delivery after all!). In the parallel universe that is SF, VCs subsidized (thanks!) the industry to the tune of making it comparable (or actually cheaper) in price for me to pay someone to pick up my laundry, wash and fold it, and return it, to doing it myself at a coin operated laundromat. Whenever the service I used raised prices to stop hemorrhaging money, I simply switched to their latest VC funded competitor.
My level of English is low, so I cannot beat you in word game, so I cease fire, but let me explain my position better.

About decade ago, I played engineering game written in Flash (I cannot remember it name), where player must solve various tasks, e.g lift ball or stop ball which is dropped from high altitude. Unique idea of that game was fixed amount of money for whole game, which player need to spend wisely to pass all levels, or redo some levels again but with better efficiency, to save money. My first implementations in this game were simple: I understood problem and implemented most obvious solution, to advance quickly. Second solutions were improvements or optimization, to save money, to advance further. I beat game, but then my brother started to play same game and beat my score, so we started competition. Third solutions, made during competition, were true innovations: they are non-obvious and highly efficient, but each of such innovative solution had "lightbulb" moment first, and then sometimes hours of tweaking to implement it.
So my gradation is: understanding of problem leads to obvious non-optimal solution first, then understanding of problem with first solution leads to improved solution (local optimum), then "lightbulb" moment leads to non-obvious efficient solution (global optimum).
What precisely in the Wikipedia article you linked to made you suspect that her parents aren't rich? I saw, 'One of her ancestors was a founder of the Fleischmann's Yeast company', and immediately thought old money.
Seriously chaps - we can do better than this.

- All credit to Holmes' accomplishments in business and technology, but...

- As amazing as her accomplishment is, ...

- I take it she is taking the supplements to make up for a vegan diet? ...

- I always wonder why articles like this don't make any mention of how Ms. Holmes is a billionaire, on paper ...

My daughter is only alive because someone in Belgium ticked a box in a blood test form in Belgium that the people in the UK missed. This shit is important.

What Holmes is doing is awesome, life changing work. Good on her.
USDA zone 9b or warmer. If you are looking for a versitile, exotic fruit with high protein content that will grow outdoors in many cooler climates, check out the pawpaw:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba
Are you suggesting that CCS and GoW have negative unit profit? That seems surprising to me. They probably have somewhat slim profit margins per user, but that's because they have a large market and great scalability.

I don't think the original essay means "hey, your gross unit margin is only 10%, but your market size is 500,000 units at $5 per month." I think it means, "Hey, your gross unit margin is -20% and with a lot of luck you might increase it to -5%."
One job is when auto-generating source code. It's much, much easier to generate a graph as a collection of blocks connected by various goto's and if statements.

This does not adversely affect modern optimizers - they'll figure out the loops from the goto graph. At least the D compiler does.
Maybe the Apple car will be a BMW outfitted with Apple software. Tim Cook visited BMW premises last year, allegedly there has been at least another visit from an Apple delegation since then.
Not popular in India? News to me. Maybe not all over India. But in Kerala, the state I am from, Jackfruit is pretty popular there and is used to make a wide variety of dishes. My grandparents house has many jackfruit trees and we always had jackfruit to eat.

It tastes nothing like pulled pork to me though. It's mainly sweet and very slightly tangy/sour. Fresh jackfruit has a kind of "crunch" to it. I can't really describe the flavor without being self-referential... I mean, it kinda tastes like... jackfruit. Or maybe like pineapple mixed with banana?

The smell can be overwhelming, especially when it goes bad. But it's not that bad when it's fresh.

Oh and that sticky stuff is really sticky - hard to get off your clothes or your hands.
Probably the lack of "mainstream" popularity. Once a site gets big enough it goes to shit.

I remember once upon a time both reddit and dig had smaller, higher quality tech oriented communities.
When a private actor is exploiting a flaw in the regulatory system, it might be easier to fix that flow or strengthen other parts of the regulatory system (eg perhaps there are remedies in antitrust law), rather than impinging on a property interest because we don't like the outcome.

Here the problem is that other manufacturers can't take up making these drugs at a sensible price because they have to get FDA approval for their copies, and doing that requires test comparisons with the original drug which you propose to copy to ensure that they behave identically. So either we need to change that requirement to a different testing approach (eg proving your copy is good through chemical assay rather than in a clinical trial) or by making licensing contingent on cooperation with regulatory priorities (so if you want to sell your off-patent drug, you have to make samples available to would-be competitors or provide the FDA with samples on request and at cost).
FTA:

That’s a staggering amount of Hitlers and Nazis in various forms, but it’s still a relatively low frequency — 1 out of every 1,500 submissions — which Hoppe believes discredits Godwin’s Law. But a few other findings surprised him: Hoppe found that comments on a Reddit post typically peak within hours of an item’s submission, regardless of whether or not they fall victim to Godwin’s Law, and that Nazi references often crop up early in the commenting lifespan of a post. “What this means is that conversations keep going,” he said. If playing the “Hitler card” in an online conversation really does effectively end it, as Godwn’s law assumes, Hoppe’s analysis should have shown that Reddit’s Nazi references come toward the end of a thread. Instead, he found the opposite.
I agreed with you up to the last sentence. I see no reason to call rational only wholly selfish behaviour.
Jony Ive was "promoted" to Chief Design Officer a while ago. I say "promoted" with quotes because many people believe he was moved to a position where he can do less damage. Jony is no longer in control of Industrial Design or User Interface Design at Apple. Those disciplines now have new heads: Richard Howarth and Alan Dye and they don't report to Ive. So to answer to your question, Jony leaving Apple will have zero impact.
Forget the ones by the road. Your mind would be blown if you knew how much produce was discarded right out of the gate, even from the farm, simply because it doesn't look quite right.
Would it be hedonistic or would it make her less successful if she spent 1 hour/day hanging out with a significant other or her best friend? It would almost surely make her a better manager/leader, as leading involves other humans and gain a certain perspective on her business.

Also, what happens if thing don't work out?
Her company is not public, may not get the next round of funding and then what? Or there may be a hostile take-over and she will be left with a decent amount of money, but no business. And nobody to talk to.
The problem is that all the employees are just playing minesweeper, a $3k macbook pro running windows in a VM is the wrong tool for the job. $200 notebooks are perfect.
It's not just a mental association. It's reality for nearly everyone on the planet. For the vast majority, work is something you're paid for that you would otherwise not be doing. That's why they call what you get in return "compensation". It's to compensate you for the time you spend doing what you otherwise wouldn't.

If you get up in the morning to "pursue your dream" you're among a lucky fraction of a percent of the population.
> 3 times too big

I know you exaggerate, but I just tried zooming to 33%, and it's really hard to read, even on my 15 inch retina screen.

75% was nice, though.
It tasted like banana for me. But yeah, definitely not pullpork. I ate a lot of those in India, I really loved it with fresh mango (I never eat imported ones now). I remember we bought a whole pre cutted fruit with friends after a 2 hours walk in the mountains (close to Kodaikanal, a beautiful place). It was far bigger than the one in the video. The trees are really impressive.
If you have negative contribution margins, scale only accelerates your demise. Driving toward scale with those economics is exactly what it means to "lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume".

Is selling something at a unit loss better than shipping something for free? Maybe, but in the case of software the marginal cost per unit is near zero, so scale can be achieved without huge amounts of capital. Hardware doesn't quite enjoy quite the same leverage.
Getting weird bug in Safari (Version 8.0.7 (10600.7.12)) where if I click an annotation then close it, I don't see the rest of the annotated bubbles on the left.
We just had a local pawpaw festival, I had no idea such a fruit existed - like a cross between a banana, mango, and papaya, but growing plentifully at 42 degrees north.

Apparently they have a short shelf-life - the fruit must be eaten or preserved within a couple days of being picked. But they are quite tasty.
Last time I checked mbed TLS omitted lots of pretty critical functionality such as certificate verification to the user - this stuff is far from trivial and is a core component of the MITM protection.
I don't think Tim Cook can create the tech.

Tim Cook can't even keep apps made with hacked versions of Xcode out of the app store. He can't keep obvious, infuriating bugs out of iOS or OS X. (I found a few within hours of downloading the public release.)

A self-driving car would be - to mix a metaphor - a legal minefield, and would demand a level of corporate and personal responsibility and reliability that only a handful of organisations, most in med or aerospace, have ever been able to approach.

As a project it's almost literally a moon shot, and a very risky one because industrial car making is a difficult industry with problematic tooling, logistics, and distribution, and very high capital costs.

I think Musk is in with a better chance, because he's a careful, thoughtful, engineer. At Apple, engineering has always had trailed slightly behind branding and design, and the gap seems to be widening. That doesn't bode well, because a project like this needs world-leading engineering before everything else.

Design and marketing are worthless if the product isn't seven or eight-nines reliable and better than human.
https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/asset-correlations?s=y&n...

Correlation = -0.49 for 2008.
> "Not popular in India? News to me."

Yeah, you could find them everywhere in Karnataka and most of the states I went to in the South.
Why Your Microbiome Is Older Than You Are. Where Baby's First Bacteria Come From
Happily, I'm here to help! This is what you missed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...

Anything else you need?
I wish I had my 20s back. Spent too much time in startups.
You are describing the taste after the fruit ripened. Before it is ripe (in raw), "stuff" when cut would look like pulled pork. From my little experience with pork, I do not agree with the conclusion about the taste, but it does look a bit like it.

Jack fruit Curry, tastes Awesome!!!
http://www.blendwithspices.com/2011/12/andhra-panasa-pottu-k...
Trader Joe's has jackfruit chips occasionally.

Pretty expensive, though, per pound or per calorie.
in terms of car manufacturers, I think there are a lot who do luxury better than Apple.

What does that even mean? Are you from the future?
Cloudstitch is pretty neat for low-tech workers too. Reminds me of the same audience that Zapier targets. Great for marketing, report prep, etc.
Wouldn't the responsible thing be to limit the creation of new businesses where there is insufficient housing? If there is a scarce resource like water or parking, you do things to reduce dependence on it don't you?

In other words, if someone wanted to put in a new restaurant and there was no parking available, you make them wait until there was parking available or require them to supply there own parking.
Uber is profitable in many of its mature markets. This is
while charging less than half what you would pay a legacy
taxi service, while paying drivers more than they would
make at the same.

What? Seriously? Are you saying that say the cost of a "medallion" is more than twice the cost of all other costs in a taxi service? Can you give any examples?
Some people enjoy working. Some people don't want romantic partners. Most so called friendships really aren't the deep, meaningful, supportive experience depicted in popular media. Most so called friends are really "fair weather friends" -- people to do something shallow and fun with, not someone who has your back when it counts.

I thought her story was interesting because it does fit nicely with my understanding of why I did not have a successful career: Because I supported my husband's career and devotedly raised our two children. I don't regret that and I hope the world will eventually come up with answers better than "A woman can have a career OR a family." But given how many men have a career and not much of a relationship to their children, I don't feel like that is a thing society imposes on women only.

I feel like that is rooted in the reality that there are only so many hours in the day and both parenting and a serious career are big time sinks. Serious careers tend to consume your life. Most good parents have intentionally made choices that put family first, at the expense of "getting ahead." Middle class families -- a shrinking minority at this point -- are the ones that tend to be best for kids. At least according to one study, you see as much neglect and drug abuse in wealthy neighborhoods as you do in the ghetto.

Life is richer when we embrace diversity. Some people like putting all their time into their work. I hope her work winds up being a net benefit for the world, as she seems to envision. Some things cannot be accomplished without one person babysitting it 24/7 for years and years and years. Some of the things that need that kind of attention do make the world a better place.