skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How does Seattle get such a generally reasonable city government (and even better in the surrounding cities) compared to San Francisco (and the neighboring cities, too).

As far as I can tell both places are roughly the same in demographics, education, and only recently has SF surged ahead in wealth (and SF used to be even worse than it is now.)
As referenced in the article.
Thank you! Yes, we have two revenue models.

The first is business to consumer. We take 2% of fund contributions and 8% on affiliate referrals. Our goal is to keep the cost below a greeting card. The average gift card is $50, which would translate to a cost of $1 for the Seedling.

The second is business to business. We take a 5% royalty on each licensed transaction. We're building our technology as modular web services so we can license some of the underlying functionality without compromising the Seedling brand. For example, Amazon could license and white label the Seedling experience and integrate it into their checkout flow.

To illustrate how that scales:

B2C: $1 billion fund contributions processed

B2B: 20 million licensed transactions

Total revenue: $110M
Apply HN:SHARPX-Membership Based App Serving Barbers,Nail Techs,Stylists,&Beyond
Housecleaning:
-YC: We applied for Summer 2016, be sure to check out the full application!
-All SHARPX functionality described down below is Patent Pending.

-DEMO VIDEO: www.SHARPXApp.com
(sign up while you're there!)

What is S H A R P X?
----------------------
SHARPX is a membership based platform for services. It will allow Service Providers (SPs) to earn more, and clients to pay less.

SHARPX is intended to solve every inefficiency in this space. Shop discoverability, client retention, payments, booking, wait times, and eventually booth rent, and buyers remorse.(Hope those last two intrigue you.)

How It Works:
---------------------
All payment/booking apps on the market solve two problems: they replace cash with digital payments and automate booking. SHARPX does these as well, but takes it further by solving the real problem: client retention.

Barber Example: SHARPX member purchases 3 haircuts/month which translate into "Swipes". Swipes can be used to get a haircut at any shop participating in SHARPX. Haircuts are typically $25, but with SHARPX the price decreases 10% (give or take) for every swipe bought. So buying 2 haircut swipes brings the unit price down to $22.50($46/month), and 3 haircut swipes brings unit price to $20.25 ($60/month). Swipes are use or lose.

Payouts from membership swipes for each vertical will be set, but to account for cost of living, shops decide what they services they will offer for a swipe. Payouts will be set such that most fall in the sweet spot. This system allows the customer to get their hair cut anywhere, but also guarantees repeat business for the service provider.

Pay-As-You-Go: For those who are scared of commitment, the app will also have Pay-As-You-Go options to buy ad-hoc.

Monetizing
-----------------------
SHARPX will follow the OpenTable model. SP’s pay a fixed price per month plus a small percentage of every client check-in via swipe.

Questions? Constructive Criticism? Fire away.
I'm a software engineer now. I majored in math. I've literally had recruiters tell me they couldn't offer me an interview because I didn't study "computers," including once at a college career fair. I wanted to tell that woman about the people who invented computers, but I held my tongue as she threw my résumé back at me.
They have the choice to get a degree that actually makes money, not <insert anything> Studies or Art History.
This can definitely happen in some cases, but in plenty of other cases, moving off the cloud can give you an enormous cost savings _and_ dramatically improve your performance at the same time.

A coworker of mine was employee ~10 at a startup with some basic photogrammetry workloads. They ran jobs over ~0.1 to 1GB of images (lasting anywhere from minutes to hours) and operated primarily on Digital Ocean. They also had VPSes at AWS and Azure. My coworker helped them move this to LXC running on top of cheap last-gen dedicated servers. He built the entire (pretty simple) job management stack in about two weeks.

As a result, the company was able to scale to ~100x the previous number of jobs at roughly the same cost. The improvement was so dramatic that they were able to offer a free tier for their services - a business-model change enabled by cheap physical hardware.

In my own experience, I recently moved a production Postgres database off of Compose, who was charging us something like $400 a month for 2GB of RAM and 20GB of storage. I moved it to a hot-swap pair running in Rackspace on boxes that cost $2000 /month for the pair. That's 5x the cost. However, they each have 64GB of RAM and an 800GB SSD. The migration took me about two days total, including learning how to set up the hot-swap, and we have had very few operational issues with the database (knock on wood).

This decreased our mean page load times by an order of magnitude.

In some cases, dedicated hardware can really be worth the time cost.
This is part of the reason zapped moved their call center out of the bay area and into Nevada.
That is a very reckless attitude - people will use that software, and lose much more time on the problems than it would've taken for the programmers to fix them. And then we go and criticise Apple and other upstream vendors for doing the same thing…
Don't give NY credit for creating all that wealth. It creates some wealth, but mostly the tax revenue is a function of being a banking industry center which serves the entire country. That invested money comes from people in all of 50 states, from personal savings accounts or retirement accounts.

If NY didn't exist, the same tax revenue would appear in some other city, whichever other stock exchange became dominant.

So it's perfectly fair that the tax revenue is reshuffled from NY back to the actual source of that revenue, in other states.
There's a tool called HelloBox

http://www.hellobox.co

Which lets you create your very own HN-like community. Check it out, you can always start one yourself!
The actual site for the project: https://www.nextrembrandt.com/ It has some weird scrolling effects.
Can somebody compare this (let's call it a Student Loan Bubble) to the Subprime Mortgage Bubble? I'm trying to get a sense of how big the problem is by comparing it to the last bubble we just experienced.
Do it! But only if you believe in what you are building. Actually, do it even for the sake of trying :)
If you manage your money right >75k is plenty. You are at the best age to take risk, it will only get harder as you get older. Also, I think you are asking the wrong questions, you can't start off with an "if I fail" mentality, be optimistic. Are you European? :) haha jk

The journey is ...Fun, challenging, stressful, extremely stressful, rewarding, requires huge sacrifices, unfair, vicious, a great learning experience, mostly filled with lows but the highs are totally worth it.

I don't know if I have answered your questions but the best way to find answers is to try, you really have nothing to lose but a whole lot to gain. Godspeed!!!
You can see Fred's papers here: http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Holt_F/0/1/0/all/0/1

You misunderstand me. I don't claim that the dRRS is a magic bullet. But it certainly isn't crank..
I really wanted to go to MIT, but I couldn’t believe my eyes when they were bragging that average student debt after graduation was “only” the price of a brand-new minivan or sports coupe.
I find it frustrating that while everyone seems to be fine discussing privilege afforded by ethnicity, lack of disabilities or gender, the elephant in the room tends to get ignored: people like Zuckerberg or Gates weren't just privileged because they were born in the right skin (including the dangly bits) but also because they were born into the right families.

If you are studying in an Ivy League tier university in the US and your parents know influential people in major companies, you are incredibly privileged. And as the article lays out, this actually reflects two forms of privilege: social class and economic class (of parents, close family, potential love interests and eventually yourself as an aggregate).

The number of trans, non-male, non-white or non-heterosexual founders and leaders in major tech companies gets talked about every now and then. But I doubt any of those (proportional to the absolute distribution across the population) is significantly more concerning than the number of people from lower social and economical classes in the same roles.

Of course these attributes can compound (e.g. "race" is often used as a handle for social class) but diversity needs to take all factors into account in order to fulfil its promise. Nepotism isn't just about skin colour and dangly bits, and class discrimination is far easier to hide behind "culture fit" than other forms of discrimination.
At some point, the student is responsible for getting themselves a job. How do you differentiate between a student who is trying and failing to get a job because they were unprepared for their field vs. one who decided they don't want to be a journalist/biologist/whatever after all and backpacks around Europe for 2 years?
Oh, I've worked in big companies. I was just trying to be an optimist here.

As an example where my optimism is warranted: broken builds. You can either make it a `people problem' and tell people to be super careful; or you go for the technical solution and automate the whole thing, so that only commits that build and pass tests get merged into master.

Of course, there's no office politics in my example; so this was easy.

The humble spreadsheet liberated white collar workers to do automate simple (and not so simple) calculation tasks themselves. No begging the computer folks necessary any more, who can hold your department `hostage' at will.

You can bet that from the point of view of spreadsheet adopters, they sidestepped a whole host of political problems.
naah, just invent some irrelevant to the eye bacteria that when submersed into the eye's liquid reacts and shivers. Hookup a dynamo to its move and viola! You have a power generator!

Of course minimize it all from what we can do today somewhere like 100,000 times.
I was fairly financially literate, and I was fortunate to have a family who supported my education, and grandparents who wanted to do what it took to fund it.

That said, it's a very ... odd process for most people. You're told to go to college, so you jump through the hoops; SATs, applications, etc. You choose a school. Now, hopefully as you're choosing a school, you're aware of costs and whether or not you can reasonably afford it. But, if I remember correctly, you don't have full information on what forms of aid you'll be receiving. Some schools offer much more generous financial aid and scholarships than others, and you don't have all of the info up front (again, from what I remember). You also don't know how much you'll be borrowing.

So then during your orientation you go to a "responsible borrowing" class and sign the paperwork for your loans and find out how much they'll be. It doesn't really feel like you have an option.

In my case, I only had to take out federally backed loans, which (for me) had very low per-year borrowing limits, so we're talking a minimal debt burden; a few thousand a year. I knew I'd be borrowing, and knew it wouldn't be an obscene amount.

But it just feels like the borrowing component is so far down the line that you're already committed to a school before you even get to it. Again, I'm not saying you shouldn't be prepared and have frank discussions before even choosing a school. Just that the system makes it easy to NOT be aware of it until it's too late. Nobody wants to back out of their freshman year in college at the last minute (likely after some money has been put down) because they balk at the loan paperwork.
Court is fine, but in the meantime, I'd just find a loophole.

E.g. it might be ok to take a picture of each piece of art with a person standing in front of it, so retake the pictures or just superimpose a picture of a person with a transparent background onto each picture.

Then once you've found that loophole, exploit the heck of it and sell prints on the street with that person superimposed on the art. Just give a big middle finger to the law.
Anecdata here, but Google have been constantly hiring in SRE for as long as I can remember (in London).

As someone who's moving in that direction career wise I don't think they're any harder to hire than a good software engineer, the skillset differ somewhat, but the culture/thought process is very similar which is what you hire for.
An update: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11322600/plains-eastern-transmi...
(1) How established is the science on EEG data effectively diagnosing mental health problems? Could you link me to some relevant literature?

(2) Who is your target customer? Are you planning on selling these through therapists/psychologists as a way for them to follow-up with and monitor their already-diagnosed patients? Or is it a direct-to-consumer product that lets an average person diagnose themselves and seek help? I think that the latter approach could have an insanely high adoption barrier.
> we'll add a top link for these

Could you add an Apply HN endpoint to the Firebase API in the same style of ask and show too?
1. Is there a limit on the material that can be used to make the pattern?

2. With your catheter can you use the same plastic that is being currently used so all you are changing is the surface structure?
No. They were hand outs. Only some banks got them. PNC got $5 billion from TARP. They then bought National City Bank, a regional bank in Ohio. National City was not allowed to even apply for TARP. PNC bought NC with that $5 billion, then got a tax break for $5 billion for "saving" them.

PNC bought National City for free, using tax payers money. TARP was not a loan. It backed every bank debt 100% (when it should have been pennies on the dollar) and allowed the strong banks to kill all the weaker ones, literally for free.

Had TARP not gone though, the banks would have had to sell mortgages back to debtors at a fraction of the price. Instead, they continued to collect loans on debtors, feed the rich and destroy the savings of the middle class.
Thank you for the vote of confidence :)

The first customer is our easy part. We've already signed up Florida Hospital, the nations largest hospital (3,282 beds at one campus) to agree to be our clinical trial partner when we are ready. Obviously that's a ways away, but they are on board. IF the trials are successful they'll be our first customer.

The business model is something we don't know about yet. Using the YC Fellowship money we want to go out and further understand where we fit in; can we license, do we need to do this ourselves, what is the most profitable business model, what is the lost cost to market model, etc.
We haven't been on this for very long, it was over a year that we spent trying to figure out were we fit into the solar market (with no funding) before we learned it's not a good market just because a $20 price increase per panel. It was 2 months ago that we pivoted to infection resistant materials and wanted to find out if the science worked. Well it does and now we feel comfortable committing real cash into understanding our model.
I remember seeing an article talking about removing some advanced math in high school and replacing it with something more useful like statistics.

IMO it should be replaced with basic finance.
I would be nervous about RF energy directed towards the particularly sensitive parts of my eyeball.
Or if students had the option to discharge their debt in bankruptcy at all, how many would do it. I suspect enough that we'd have something resembling the last debt crisis on our hands, but depending on how that gets handled it might encourage lenders to be a bit more careful with who they lend to and how much they're willing to lend in the first place which may then encourage schools to lower costs.
Apply HN: Brodlist – a new type of database
Brodlist (http://brodlist.com) is new ground-breaking database that aims to replace the relational database.

Its features include Schema-on-Need, so that you don't have to model your database, just start using it. History is built in. You can query the current state of your data or how it looked a week or month ago just by specifying 'when' as part of the query. It's performant on commodity hardware and scales horizontally, which is why we can offer it for next-to-nothing. Because it's offered as a REST-ful service where the language is the interface, your API is built-in. What's more, the authorization is specified as queries, so you can easily lock down any set of rows or columns for any user.

Finally, it uses a new query language that is much simpler. To get the list of employee equipment in the Sales Department would be queried like this:
Employee.Equipment : Employee.Department = "Sales"

The same result in SQL requires this query:
SELECT q.* FROM Equipment q INNER JOIN EmployeeEquipment ee ON ee.EquipmentKey = q.ID INNER JOIN Employee e ON ee.EmployeeKey = e.ID INNER JOIN EmployeeDepartment ed ON ed.EmployeeKey = e.ID INNER JOIN Department d ON d.ID = ed.DepartmentKey AND d.Name = 'Sales'

SQL and the relational database has been around for 50 years. It's finally met its match.
Fund Nim and help its development
For the purpose of selecting startups, HN should have an option to vote for each apply outside of up votes, and then the votes ought to be weighted by reputation and account age.
How does the average homeowner know what's going on with the leading architects, without mass media?

I think you have mistakenly limited "mass media" to radio, telegraphy, TV, etc., and omitted print.

As a reminder, "big-print advertisements" have been around for a long time. The penny press predates useful electric telegraphy, though just barely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper#Industrial_Revolutio... says "In France, Émile de Girardin started "La Presse" in 1836, introducing cheap, advertising-supported dailies to France." 60 years previous, Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" pamphlet was distributed by the 100,000s during the US revolution, and I would put that as part of mass media and political propaganda.

Aspect of mass media in Europe of course go all the way back to Gutenberg. I'm not trying to establish a certain date, but rather demonstrate that mass media and its effects on propaganda have been part of the US for its entire history.

Even your 1917 is a semi-arbitrary date. Why not the yellow journalism of the 1890s, or more specifically the propaganda of the Spanish–American War ?

Going back further, the 1840 campaign song "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too", coupled with printed sheet music, helped bring Harrison to power. I'm a bit iffy of if that counts as mass media, but if not, it's close. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tippecanoe_and_Tyler_Too , that song "firmly established the power of singing as a campaign device", and surely was not ignored by future candidates.
How do you make money?
What prevents the local contact travelers privately, bypassing your platform?
This is a planned feature. Will be fixed soon: https://github.com/feross/webtorrent/issues/163
I'm also curious what marriage did to her perceived ability to repay, in the eyes of the system.
> Don't you think TE will be able to provide with more, stable updates thanks to the stable income a subscription provides?

Sure, but there's a return on investment calculation. If TE bumped that to $50 a month, they'd be able to make lots of stable updates. They might even be able to justify it with "but look at how much time/money we're saving you!" But psychologically, it's a small tool that does very little compared to other things that cost less. The direct competition is priced in the $5-$25 forever range, and other apps in its price range are vastly more complex.

Even if it made financial sense for me to pay 10x its current price, I'm not going to shell out that much for what I perceive as a convenient-but-replaceable little utility.
Even that can differ between rural and urban. I've lived in the midwest for most of my life, and apparently there's all sorts of "terms midwesterners use" that I've only rarely heard anyone say, and most often only to point out that they don't say it.
It anyway isn't the case that TARP and QE are aimed just at the financial sector. They are aimed at preserving the existing economic order. If insurance companies start defaulting, things get exciting.
Interested to hear what you think some possible solutions might be.
I work in infection control and conduct CLABSI and SSI surveillance daily. Have you tested your application method on implants?
He speaks like a child, it works because his base is stupid and they relate. It's not a skill, he just isn't that bright.
Either you're trolling or you should take my advice to heart.
I also noticed while doing taxes that if I borrow money, I'm going to pay interest on that money I borrow. One of the incentives to this self investment is that I can deduct the interest that I pay.

However, apparently, if your salary is above a certain threshold, you don't qualify for education deductions and credits.

It's a first world problem, I know, but I just found out and it kind of sucked.
Replying here because the above comment is too many levels deep: this shows exactly what is wrong with hiring. Especially the HR manager who is so used to getting 100 resumes and trying desperately to find a reason to throw out 80 of them. Some of the best people I ever worked with didn't have CS degrees, and it's sad that HR still works this way at so many places.

(We are working to change it in our niche of Sales, but even there we have these same battle stories).
Absolutely false, interest payments make up only 6% of Federal spending.

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
> splitting hairs

No we’re not! The framing of higher education as a career enabler with positive ROI is the #1 bit of propaganda that has justified and reframed how tuition is evaluated and is directly responsible for the steady and insane yearly tuition hike since the 1980s.

Fighting for the essence and purpose of higher education is therefore not trivial but in fact paramount.

The fact that we are having this conversation in a thread suggesting that the federal government enforce universities as job mills is, I trust, enough evidence to make my point.

For a more in-depth treatment of this topic, see "Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media" on Salon: http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behi...
Agreed, it won't fly. I'm not going to vote to spend $50E9 on a transit system that will be finished just in time to be rendered obsolete by autonomous vehicles.
More victimization of the people who take these loans on. If you can drive one ton of sheet metal 60 miles an hour among peers, you can understand that spending other people's money on something requires you pay it back. The problem is people think it is worth it, not that they are victims.
Many of the people I have worked with had degrees in math. I'm not sure if more had CS degrees or math degrees, to be honest.