skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launch at DEMO?
Someone I know was invited to launch his startup at DEMOspring 2010. For those who aren't aware of the event, it is pitched as "the premier launch pad for new information technology products." (See http://www.demo.com).

There is a $18,500 fee to participate.

Do Hacker News members think it makes sense to participate? Is it worth it? Have you had any experiences with DEMO?

His startup is very early stage (basically two guys working part-time, no financial investment of any kind).

Interested to hear your thoughts.
My friends and I are heavy users of BillMonk so your service definitely interests me.

However for the example in your video, BillMonk is clearly superior. With BillMonk, one person pays, takes home the itemized receipt and enters it in. Then for each item, they specify who ate or shared it. BillMonk totals everyone's part and automatically assigns the debt. The tax and tip are also split based on each person's total percentage of the bill.

It seems with Piggy Back, the payer would need to figure out each person's split manually and file multiple debt reports. How are you improving on BillMonk's model?
Really? I thought God hated both...
Check out all the unabashed Groupon copycats
Have you seen billmonk.com? This is what I use currently to keep track of tabs with roommates. BillMonk was bought by OgoPay in 2007 though and since then they haven't changed a thing on the site.
We don't think there's a correlation. We just think it's a good conversation starter. And books encourage people to get reasonably specific about what they are into.
Comments like this shows immaturity. Just because a platform manages memory management doesn't mean you can create 1 million objects. If you program in C++ or C you appreciate these aspects which will help you write better code.
Satellites designed in 1970's still going to the far edges of the solar system even though the processing power and memory is less than your cell phone. When you design your software without considering these aspect would be disaster. Example satellites designing now crashing on the orbits of other planets.
Ask that people make a donation to charity in your name, if they feel they must spend money on you.
The Death of the Fameball and the Evolution of the NY Startup Scene
You don't, of course.
Anecdotally I observed a distinct gender gap in reading material preferences between the sexes. So much so that I wanted to test that and see whether this would be a reasonable way to segment reading material.

My recently launched site [1] is based on measuring and presenting the gender split of readers of any book (and how each sex rate the book) on the assumption that men and women often enjoy different reading material. The data I've gathered so far seems to validate that assumption and points towards substantial gender bias for a great many books.

I'm currently in the process of writing a blog post highlighting the most frequently used words in book titles favoured by women vs. men based on the data I've collected. This is my first dip into the "MI" of the data but, despite the simplicity of the initial analysis, again the data shows there is a pronounced difference.

What might be interesting is some sort of combination of the datasets. Such as using an individuals reading history to categorise their "average gender preference" for books [2] and how might relate to their choice of dating partners and their book gender preference.

It's an interesting proposition and I like the clean look of the site and it's simple workflow. I'll be following your progress with interest.

1. http://www.bookhu.com

2. If such a thing even exists - just a hypothesis that needs to be tested at the moment
Yeah, my friends and I use BillMonk and it sucks that it's stagnated so much. When I read the headline, I was hoping someone had released a new service that fixes the small problems we have with BillMonk.
It's bad in SF, but it's not much better in LA. No reception in the hills, no 3G on the sunset strip, and I constantly get spotty reception and dropped calls.
They forgot to say which group more educated people belong to.
I am almost sure more educated are egalitarians/communaries.
The opinion of more educated people is more important, obviously.
What a horrible headline. This has nothing to do with wrong numbers. How about something like

Boing Boing prevails in MagicJack's suit
And then there are the people who will think, "Oh God, this is a terrible idea. My boss will make me use this. And he's probably already heard of it. Shit, I'd better go recommend it to him right away."
NYC: Hackers & Founders NYC Meetup #9 + Demos
On grabbing the third rail
If only there were an abstraction of some sort that could be applied to resolve the dilemma. Perhaps we could look to the works of Russell and earlier philosophers and arrive at a solution. We could call it a type- or, hmm, maybe a category-based system... one which could organize apps with different attributes that appeal to different cross-sections of the user base.

Yes, categories sound like the best shot at making everyone happy. Someone should bring that up with Steve Jobs. Who knows, there could be a patent in it for him.
like...blippy?
one word: browser
In the context of this article, I'd call Yodlee a library, not a platform. He wants to add data to Mint like application developers add data to Facebook. Mint doesn't do anything like that with Yodlee.
Hmm, a tiny, slim, all-RAM-and-Flash A4-powered serving appliance might not be such a bad idea...
I wouldn't want anyone to be able to pull data from my Mint account, but it would be infinitely useful if they could push data to it.
Showcase of Great Web App Interfaces
Notes on Various Virtualization options
When it comes to big dating sites, people aren't loyal at all, but people go where everyone else is, because that increases their chances of hooking up. Having the best features or design or functionality won't help you one bit if you don't have people on your site.

So yeah, niche dating it is, which is why I suggest that you tone down the dating aspects of it.
Retailmenot.com: January 2010 Report on Consumer Coupon Usage
The Perfect Thing: The making of the iPod [2006]
You can probably halve the price on the rate card to get the real price you'll pay after negotiating a bit. But agreed, still seems expensive even after that.
Sure it sucks but isn't it easier than configuring samba?
I laughed that the iPad joke even though I think he missed the point of it. The iPad represents the iPhone software model applied to personal (netbook like) computers. Installing software and keeping a computer is beyond the average person. The draconian control Apple exerts over iTunes is seen as a solution.

Anyhow, back to current topic, I too see his predicted future as a bad thing. It is a scientific fact that people are fairly easily manipulated by certain reward schemes[1]. With current technology, marketing people are getting good at applying those theories. With all due respect to honest people doing a job, those people don't give a shit about making the world a better place.

1. Sorry, I'm too lazy to dig up papers. Basically frequent small rewards given over randomized intervals are extremely compelling to people. This theory is applied to (or explains the success of) many gambling games.
"Don't work too hard, or you'll screw up the economy"?
Bowker is the official issuer in the US. Different countries have different issuers. The cost-per-ISBN goes down as you buy larger blocks.
Sheesh, April 1st isn't for a month and a week.
Nice article (saved it). A well-intended little tip for the next submission of an article about a list of things: Just set the submission's title to Tips For a Killer FAQ Page. From the Hacker News Guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it

But, as I said it above, it's a nice submission. Thanks for that :)
I think the real selling point for them is their moderation tool for sifting through all the twitter/blog comment noise.

I gave it a try and I liked it. I used it along with their API to make a "vanity quotes dashboard" for some open source projects I contribute to.

plug :) -> http://gwtquotes.appspot.com
Re-Mapping the World's Population (Infographics)
Regardless of whether or not this is a decision I agree with, I understand the business decision from Apple.

The incremental value of having these questionable apps does not make up for the brand value damage received by having these apps so prevalent on the app store.
Is it their job to be debugging car company code? I would think that their job would be to analyze the evidence about the putative danger of a vehicle and make a decision; pass that on to the car company, and evaluate the later proof of a fix (presumably by way of empirical evidence, e.g., crash test results).

I wonder if they have any mechanical engineers.
I'm still not sold on the idea that we all need 100Mbit+ Internet connections. It's like building 4 lane highways to replace rural backroads. Most people aren't going to pay significantly more so it's not an appealing venture for private companies to make on their own except where competition exists and they have to offer more competitive packages in an effort to play defense. They're not doing it because offering a wideband connection brings in tons of new customers or more revenue from existing customers. It's purely a defensive move. There's also some question of how much bandwidth is enough. I move from a 10Mbit connection at home to a 100Mbit+ connection at work and I don't notice any difference. Sure files download quicker but we're talking 10 seconds versus 20 seconds in most cases. I can't really think of anything I can't do on a 10Mbit/sec connection. I'm also at a loss to figure out what room exists for innovation. Better quality streaming video? Sure I guess so but all things considered that's not my top concern.

So instead of focusing on raw speed maybe we should be focusing on reliability, pricing, latency, improved customer service, and a modest increase in speeds to get us all to this 10-15Mbit/sec range that is completely acceptable performance. Get people some choice so they at least have 2 or 3 providers and, over time, they will compete with each other as faster speeds are actually something customers need/want and not just a statistic that has almost no real meaning today.
Yes. I'd suggest Seychelles.
Montana's No Speed Limit Safety Paradox
Naps make you smarter
The Economist Debate: Does financial innovation boost economic growth?
Yes, Mark's wife is obviously not tech-savvy enough to read her husband's blog.

Even if there were a big, strong man around to read it to her, she would be the first to agree that it isn't a woman's place to stand up for herself.
Demo is definitely a large event, but there is a lot of push-back against pay to play events like this, and particularly with that kind of dollar figure.

I personally think it often depends on how this 'friend' plans to benefit from going to demo.

I'd recommend looking through some videos from previous demos, and look at the companies who have presented there. Does it fit with what the new company is doing?
Are they looking for partners who attend?
Are they looking for funding? if so, is paying $18k+ (don't forget incidentals) the best way to go about doing this?

I'd would think that it would be VERY difficult for a small start-up to justify that kind of cost, but in some instances, it may be worth it. For most companies, I don't think it is.
Sorry. I left one item of importance off my list: the valley has no respect for intelligent, professional women who aren't camera whores. Leah whatever her name is the worst example you could have cited.
Is my ego too big?
This thought came to me when I caught myself advocating non-mainstream technologies all the time. I was doing PHP in a company consisted entirely of .NET developers and was advocating Python - and I was only beginning to use Python for anything useful. After I changed my job to a more pleasant one, doing Python and Javascript in a company that has all kinds of developers (but again, mostly .NET/SQL Server) I found myself thinking about advocating Lisp (again, I am only beginning to grasp Lisp). That whole time i actively opposed using my work PC because it had Windows on it, and I was secretly, then in the open, using my Macbook. I was also advocating Mac OS X and Linux to people that clearly were never going to switch. At the moment of writing I'm in a dilemma whether I am deliberately putting myself in the position of an underdog in order to feed my ego. It's good to be the mad scientist. It's better to be not understood and dismissed because they know that behind all that weird talk there's something really special about you. Whether there is or not, it's not important; the real question (and fear of mine) is whether I'm doing this because Python and Lisp is really going to improve my work, or because I'm just feeding my ego. After all, you have to admit, those guys built a pretty big company using c++ and Microsoft MFC and it worked fine for them. Then again, most of the people I've met are of the "I don't want to program after work" type. Is it again egotistical to suppose that these people aren't good programmers? Is my ego to big or am I just inexperienced ?
Is there anything that you do in the office or within your home LAN that you can't do remotely? Extremely large video files, transparent network storage, etc.? Then you'll find a use for 100 mbit Internet.
No, going back to buying directly from the producer is horribly inefficient. Consider just the additional travel required between:

(a) Each producer sells their goods to a central location (say, your local Walmart). Each consumer goes to the central location to purchase goods.

(b) Each consumer goes to each producer he/she needs goods from and purchases those goods directly.

(c) Each producer goes to a central location (e.g., a farmer's market) and directly sells his/her goods there to each consumer.

Scenario (a) is closer to current practice (it is missing many more levels of aggregation). You're proposing something like (b) or (c), as far as I can tell.

Hypothetically, assume you want to have milk, eggs, toast w/ jam, and apple for breakfast.

In (b), you wind up making several trips: one dairy farm, one chicken farm, one bakery, one orchard, and maybe one more for the jam. This multiplies by number of consumers. Also, farms are fairly distant from population centers, so this is a good deal of driving!

In (c), you only make one trip, but the problem winds up being on the other side. Each producer needs to drive all the way from the farm to each farmer's market and spend all day there. You wind up with number of producers times number of markets, and still a fair bit of driving (though nowhere near as bad as b!)

We haven't even considered the difference between growing produce in CA and shipping it in bulk vs. growing it in a heated greenhouse locally. Otherwise you're giving up a lot of wealth by having very limited selection during the cold months (or driving the CA to deal directly).

Nor have we considered other transaction costs of having to deal with many more vendors. For example, if you think of a checkout aisle, there are variable time sinks (vary basically linearly w/ number of items) and there are fixed time sinks (same for any number of items, e.g., credit card processing time). Those fixed time ones are going to be a problem.

Directly dealing with producers just doesn't scale.

It turns out that fuel and time is a actually pretty expensive, so every part of the supply chain is very efficient.
Great feedback. Other's have noted the formality of those two buttons, and I'm going to nix them for something that communicates better.

Facebook integration is coming.
Huh, that's funny. I read your comment and thought, "That's not right - the article has hedges in there, 'this may cause xyz to some extent' or some such." And then I went back and re-read it, and nope, you're right. It states what are probably minor effects with rather large certainty. It's like I was mentally adding the hedges based on the context (new study, journalism, speculation at the end). But it was definitely less hedged than I processed.
> "Nazi" is short for "Nazionalsocialiste"

Nationialsozialist. In analogue to Sozi, meaning socialist (or rather more specific to its German origin social democrat).

> The Soviet countries called themselves Communist [...]

Didn't they call themself socialist? As far as I know at least the GDR called itself socialist. I only ever hear English-speakers use the term "communist" for the east-block states. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_socialism)
The Emergence of VC/Angel Syndicates
See also the article lunk to here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1145376
The 'what type of card' field should be before the number. I believe it should be a method of informing your users what cards you accept, rather than figuring out what card you are using.
The same can be accomplished with an image of accepted cards, but I think the text version is more accessible.
Am I not allowed to have opinions that are divergent from those held by DHH five years ago? Is he required to remain static? Sure, he's arrogant, and he changed his tune despite slagging anyone who disagreed with him for years, but so what? I'm just glad that Rials is bigger than him.
She's a great marketer, but I'd hardly say she has the programming ability.

Truest words ever written. I can only respect people whose _work_ I admire, and who understand. What has she built? Leah hasn't contributed anything of value to the Internet, unless a few videos or popularity contests count.
It's unfortunate that BillMonk has stagnated.

It currently is cumbersome to enter in multiple debts simultaneously (i.e. splitting a big check). However, we're developing this functionality now and are excited to debut it.
> U.S. [...] where manufacturing [...] [has] been decimated [...]

Comments like this always remind me of Germany during the dot-com boom --- when people complained that the country was stuck in an industrial past and had missed the train to the service-economy future.
Yeah but probably not as easy as configuring MySQL?
Piggy Back's goal is to make it ridiculously easy to create debts between people. This is our first version and can't wait to release some of the other features we have in the hopper.
> The conditions for the paradox to apply are that the short-term nominal interest rate is zero and

Things are already broken very badly if free money is being given away. Or if things aren't broken very badly when the free money starts being given away, it will be broken very badly very soon.
Defending the University Tech Transfer System?
Leading "with authority" is an oxymoron. There's the authority inherent in your position (which applies in a business or a bureaucracy, not a marriage) and there's authority (respect, actually) that you earn through leadership. If you mean just "puttin' a little bass in your voice"(+) then good luck and don't forget to wear a cup!

(+) Chris Rock recommends this as a way to get a woman to lick your balls, if you're interested in taking relationship advice from Chris Rock's stand-up act.
Limits of Predictability in Human Mobility
Browsers, URLs, Facebook and expectations
(To be clear: I work with Jonah, so I share his concerns.) I think jonah skimped on one big point: Mint.com as a service is a security feature.

I want to give some financial information to company X. Right now: The way that I do this is by giving that company ALL OF MY SECRET FINANCIAL INFORMATION. Being able to granularly release only a relevant fraction of my information to a third party is much better.

Sure: Giving secret information away without users' consent (a la google buzz): Bad idea. In this case: That's not the point.
Here you go (the original paper):

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1652/2715...

The newspaper misinterprets the study's conclusion. The study only says that pill affects odour preference and that "if odour plays a role in human mate choice, our results suggest that contraceptive pill use could disrupt disassortative mate preferences." Clearly, that's a big "if" and it doesn't seem to be discussed in the article.

PS: I live in Japan, and reading the newspaper my first thought was that at least there's some upside to the fact that Japanese women don't use the pill...
I used to think the same thing OP said because I had done it. It turned out, though, that my niche was poker, a game that conditions the people that play it to blow through money like there's no tomorrow. My niche was full of a) people who have a lot of discretionary income and aren't as attached to it as people generally should be and b) people who makes six figures (or more) per year off of group a.

Your niche is probably much poorer and much thriftier, and then much smaller on top of that. So you're going to have to get tremendous market share (pretty much all of it perhaps) to make real money.

The same is true with ads. I could get thousands per month running ads on my poker blog at a time when I hadn't posted on it in 6 months because anyone who clicks an ad is going to make the poker site $100 on average. My guess is you'd be lucky to make anything off someone who clicked an ad on your site.

I still think that most passion's are monetizable enough that you could make a real amount at them, but maybe not all are, and the difficulty in doing so and the maximum you can make varies widely.
So, I haven't thought about your premise at all. So this is off the cuff.

I think that gambling about real-world events (election outcomes etc) can be a kind of futures market and are a valid kind of market. I'd want to be able to hedge against elections and so on.

Manufactured events (horse racing?) and raw probability (die rolls) are probably not valid markets, IMO.

Personally, I think that the problems we see because of financial organizations misbehaving are due to regulatory issues rather than structural issues.
Excelerate - YC-like program in Chicago, Summer '10
This gives a cool idea for side project. Port http://www.jibble.org/jibblewebserver.php to Android and use Nexus One as web server. I wonder if somebody has already done this.
It uses very little expensive material, it can be printed roll-to-roll, and it absorbs a lot of light. Seems like a very good foundation for a solar panel tech, though it isn't there yet.
To somebody just using Tweets (keep in mind that we currently also pull from Amazon, YouTube, Blogs, Blog comments and any RSS/Atom feed), we provide an extra safety net with our moderation. If you just incorporate the Twitter api directly on your site, you have to accept whatever users say showing up. With our moderation in between, you run no risk of the random or ugly comments showing up on your site.

Also, if you do to use more than just Tweets, our API returns normalized data so you have a consistent and reliable set of fields no matter the source.

You can see an example of results from our API here:
http://www.habitstream.com/api/service/http?key=973dce2bcf7d...

If you look closely at any of the Tweets in the set, all the data you can get from the Twitter api is still there.
Thanks for doing your part

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yread
The real issue is that most folks don't know how to be real entrepreneurs. They are think they are in business, but they are actually just engaging in a personal hobby.

If you are creating a forum, tossing AdSense of it and waiting for the checks to roll in, you may be in for a long ride. But when you start asking: "What do my people want?" and then going out, hunting and digging for it and finally determining the best way to present it to the audience -- now you are thinking like a entrepreneur. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Now watch the checks roll in.

The failure is not the model, it's the implementation.
not exactly news
Or if you want to have immunocompetant children.