skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To answer your question. My original thinking in setting aside $50k was to expose myself to "positive black swans." I'm looking to place a series of improbable bets such that if one pays off in a major way...

I do like the idea of investing in an angel fund to get my feet wet. I'll consider that.
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If this is a widely practiced tactic and not just a few renegade sales reps, then it's going to get ugly. Someone is going to record these phone calls and release them. Whether it's legal to do that or not, it won't matter. Once they're on the net everyone will hear them and they will be permanent.
i use facebook.

poll people on amazon mturk. shouldnt cost much either.
Human beings are irrational :)

As Jacquesm notes below, remember the $999 "I am rich" app
Is the interactive thing being big a recent development? Back when I lived in Texas (1996-2000), I thought of it as a film/music festival, and didn't know it even had a tech component.
I work in the industry. This is an accurate representation of the two technologies for the most part except both technologies rely on batteries when commercial power is lost. With cable the power supply (might be more than one per node) is located on a pole or ground enclosure. With FIOS/FTTH the battery is located in the ONT powered at the customer's home in most cases that also includes a built in battery. Either way you'll have to bring your own power past the 8-12 hour mark of a major outage. Everything else comes down to staffing and good emergency planning. Keeping tree's trimmed away from overhead utilities is also essential. Towns or communities that mandate more underground utilities almost always fair better in large wind/storm outages.
Flixel ported to Unity
I'm a fan of Taleb's philosophy. I've actually dabbled in options trading with straddles.
Never underestimate the power of perceived value.

Years ago I advertised a "Wholesalers Secrets" handbook on Google to help people find discounted wholesale goods to sell on EBAY.

When priced at $9.95 I sold an average of 10 copies a day against ~$50 ad spend.

When I upped the price to $99.95 I sold an average of 5 copies a day against ~$50 ad spend.

That was a big lesson, imagine my surprise when I discovered that there’s a whole science behind this  ->

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand
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>> "What Hacker News really needs is a list of cities ranked on minimum cost of living"

That is an awesome request, and I would gladly help compile some figures if someone wants to take point on such a project.

Anecdotally, I lived for several years in Southeast Asia (2002-2004) and at that time Hồ Chí Minh City in Việt Nam definitely had the best "hacker price index". Cost of living was miniscule, yet internet connectivity was still decent. (Better than, for example, Bangkok or KL.)
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true, but as i recall that only had 2 or 3 purchases in total before being pulled. it also had notoriety as the most expensive app on the app store.
How was the cellular network? I assume that's what most people use these days to call 911? I haven't ever had a landline in my adult life. (OK, I have a twisted pair, but it is data-only.)
I once did some market research for a project in which I tried to get in contact with a Yelp sales rep for a real business. After waiting a full month, they finally called me. It was the most unprofessional sales call I've ever encountered. Girl was making jokes with her friends in the background, couldn't explain to me what they give you for $400/mo, kept trying to get off the call. Sounded like a bored intern, told me to 'uh call back or something' when I wanted to buy the plan. I could tell she sure as hell wasn't a trained salesperson.

I also talked to Citysearch. Called me back within 24hrs, had a ton of talking points, offered to come to my office the next day with a presentation, gave me her personal cell number. World of difference and professionalism.

I almost got the sense that the Yelp girl didn't know how to sell Yelp's plan without offering to cure bad reviews. Since there weren't any there, she didn't know how to sell it...
The good news is that we have no stores, so there is never an opportunity to collect that sales tax.
The robots.txt file's content-type is text/html, not text/plain. It won't work. I'm still able to access the contents of this site from Yahoo Pipes. Don't worry about it.
But programming actually ends up taking less time than coding. Coding a page takes an hour. Coding twenty pages takes twenty hours. Programming a page maker takes a day. Making a million pages then takes no additional time.

Unless you really only have one page that never needs to change (and when has that ever happened?), programming is going to beat coding every time. And it's more fun!
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On the one hand, in the Internet age, I'm not as concerned about what's in a textbook, since students are likely to just Google what they need to get their homework done.

Yet, the apparent lack of consultation that went into these decisions is alarming. These people can't possibly be experts in all subjects, but they made changes as if they were. This means they were being righteous instead of responsible.

Personally, I suspect the new material will be misleading, and even wrong, in some important ways. But even if you agree with the changes, can you really be comfortable with the approach used to achieve them?
M-x slime

For a development paltform that's neither brittle nor toy.
> We live in a world where the fbi/police get access to your PHYSICAL LOCATION 24x7 without a warrant just by asking, where your emails and telephone calls are scanned by the nsa with plans to open this data set to the police at large, where google/yahoo/et al see turning your emails and access patterns over to the police as a revenue opportunity, etc.

So you're saying that since government agencies have access to a lot of my private information, I shouldn't care about any of my private information remaining private? Sounds like you're creating a false dichotomy. You're presenting things as if you can only care about all of your private data or none of your private data; since the government has access to large portions of your private data and you don't have much (or any) control over that, you should therefore care about none of your private data. Isn't it possible for me to care about all of my private data, but to choose the battles that I fight?
$249 or $2499?

The $249 for 60 days is less than your original price of $199 for 30 days ($4.15/day vs $6.63/day). Does that mean that you've in fact seen more success at your lowest price point?
Ask HN: Does College Choice Matter (And What Choice Would Be Best)
Hi, I'm currently a senior in high school who is looking at a number of choices for colleges:

* High-end, potentially competitive -- Stanford U.

* Great atmosphere, very fun, no engineering -- Reed College

* Potentially cheapest (not sure on this yet) -- Gonzaga U.

I plan on majoring in electrical engineering and I love really academic, non-competitive environments where I can freely philosophize and espouse my crazy ideas without them being stolen or whatnot. Does anyone with experience with these colleges (or not) have any advice or information for me?

Specific things that I wonder are: Would I probably get a better job if I went to Stanford? Is Stanford competitive or impersonal (think lots of grad students teaching classes)? Can anyone recommend any of those three colleges, and why? Is Reed or Stanford worth paying more over Gonzaga?

Let me know if you want clarification or whatnot. Thanks a lot!
x, as in "f x = x + 2". What else are you going to call it? "addend"?
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Of course, I long ago personalised my top colour away from Orange. Alas, I changed it to Teal.
OK looks like we are done here. So tomorrow when I wake up I will be working on... drum roll ... Simple Invoices :)

Well done Mr Kelly, I will be emailing you with the details in a little.
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Anyone know a good book for non-introductory statistics?
Google's Biggest Blunder - Driving YHOO into the hands of MSFT
Please. There was a long thread about that link here just the other day. Correlation is not causation; the decrease in sex crimes over the last thirty years cannot just be attributed to the increase in availability of pornography, as the authors of that paper seem to think.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1184510 for discussion about your link and its dubious methods.
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Interesting idea. I wonder though, how big is the potential market, money-wise?
Gramify.com does personalized audio greetings by phone or email in cool voices. MIT startup.
This isn't a generic solution, but we (my co-founder and I) actually put something together specifically for us. http://untitledstartup.com/backstage/ - right now it suffers from an abundance of Twitter ideas, primarily because I'm fairly active in that space and ideas in the system beget similar ideas.

The possibility exists for it to be abstracted.
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Invest in something you know. For me, that meant becoming an ISP, buying servers, virtualizing them and renting 'em out.

Knowing what you invest in is a huge advantage, one that you will certainly need if you only have $50K to invest.
To quote justokay quoting Mike Jordan

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1055389

I've read a number of books from that sequence and they are definitely the core you need to start hitting for advanced stat.
Sorry for not getting back to you, not used to HN yet. It's not that the color scheme is hard to see-- I can tell apart faded and bright green fine enough for the purposes of discriminating that they are different. What I can't tell is whether faded is numbers and bright is strings, or vice versa. It's not really obvious, and probably isn't no matter what color you pick (although red seems to be exclusive to strings in all the highlighting schemes I've used) no matter which colors you pick, is what the problem really is-- perhaps, instead, you could enclose strings with quote marks.
This is not as big a risk as it may seem. Making use of a fraudulent check in this system requires opening a bank account (presumably using a fake identity), depositing the check, waiting for it to clear, then withdrawing the money (from an atm or other means). The first time this type of fraud is discovered you won't be able to use or open a bank account using that identity (it'll be flagged in chexsystems). And you can bet that depositing a large check or a large number of checks will result in your account being flagged and human beings calling around determining if those checks are legit before you can withdraw the funds. The only way to successfully pull off a significant level of fraud with this method is to open up a large number of bank accounts and use them simultaneously. However, a perfectly simple roadblock to that is to only offer this service to people who have had their accounts open for longer than X years (where X is at least 1).

Meanwhile, in order to successfully steal a lot of money using fraudulent physical checks all one needs is a fake identity (or not even that if you plan to go into hiding and/or don't mind burning your current identity) and the knowledge of making fraudulent checks (which can extend as low as stealing someone else's checkbook). Then, you simply cash lots of checks at various locations around town in a short period of time. By the time the fraud is detected money is already in your pocket and you may be in another town already (depending on how savvy you are).
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Not showing the review would put users off. Users need instant feedback. "I wrote something -- it got posted in a second" If they had to wait a day or two, they would not use the site. The second idea of showing reviews but not counting the rating is better, but then after a while it seem these reviews should be garbage collected, which is apparently what happened.

On the vendor's side, telling your users to post good reviews for discounts or for promotions is a bit like spamming I think. There is no good way to 100% detect spam like this, so there is always going to be controversy.

Also, hopefully Yelp has enough lawyers if it operates in a country with loose libel/slander laws.
They won't stop. Warm-cool color combos (orange/yellow vs blue, teal vs orange, cyan vs red, steel vs red etc.) provide the most color contrast, so the picture always looks "bright" and "vivid" to a casual viewer.

BTW, the trick is far from new. Some examples that come to mind are Aliens and Terminator 2 (blue/gray vs red/orange, done via lighting) and Empire Strikes Back (again, blues vs reds/oranges -- very well nuanced across the entire movie except the Yoda swamp scenes).

See also: "Superstimulus":
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Superstimulus
The real answer to your question is that the system is highly regulated. Paypal survives by being just enough of a hassle in terms of limitations and fees to avoid being suitable as a 100% replacement for existing banking. And nobody has the balls to do a ground-up rewrite of the way banking should work in the modern age of ubiquitous telecommunications and computing. So instead people work toward tweaking the existing systems just a little bit, because that's safe and won't get you burned at the stake by the regulatory agencies.
Out of curiosity, why 'women and couples'? I know guys don't like to talk about that sort of thing, but speaking as a guy who has spent more time single than I would perhaps like, I imagine the market for things like the fleshlight is rather, um, large.
Obligatory refresher course for those just joining the HN party. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Minimal features and instant usability seem to be two (of probably many others) characteristics of these superficially high priced products.

Any thing sufficiently complicated or with steep learning curve is not going to be purchased by deep-pocket people.
If you think letting a baby cry feels inhuman, you wont believe what you see yourself doing in a few years' time. Raising a happy, balanced kid requires you to do a lot of counter intuitive stuff. It's worth it though.
other than the US

It's legal in Nevada, except Las Vegas.
Much appreciated! Now I know how I'll be spending my free time.

Edit: I also never realized how good basketball players were at statistics.
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If you're interested in taking things in the opposite direction, try reducing the prominence of parentheses via ParenFace (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/ParenFace). I use a very light gray face for parentheses, which is barely visible on a white background.
Psst, your double-standard is showing.
I like your 2000-2020 copyright. Beats having to update it every year.
Not sure whether you were joking. If you were, pls ignore the rest of the comment :)

This Mike Jordan is not whom you think he is :) (as can be seen from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1055823)
thanks for your feedback on foodguts. I really hadn't considered making personalized cooking pages but that sounds like a great idea. I was really unsure about the name, but other feedback has been mostly positive, and that's good enough for me.
Daily things to do as an entrepreneur (part 3): searching for the melody
yes, and you may end up with a psychopath child
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

Or somebody with full blown npd (narcissistic):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disord...

Pick your poison.

That experiment was actually painful to watch.
I'm always wery surprised, that for some people USSR and company was as good as "the West". I mean - ok, you were sending rockets to space, but at that time people in eastern block were many times less wealthy than people in the west, were less free, couldn't even choose the gov.

It was not sustainable, without Gorbachev it would have ended the same, only later and probably more violent.

When you build your civilization on power and military strength and keep people on your side without their consensus, it isn't surprising that you have to spend on military a lot. And when you add inefficient economy to the mix, it's obvious it will fail.
While I would agree that students shouldn't be passed with impunity, I'm not sure the fix is kicking students out.

The motivational factors that make sense to adults don't necessarily work on kids. Thinking back to when I was 13-14, being kicked out of school would have been a good thing to most of my peers. It would mean no more school, and school was a total hassle at that age.

I think the answer lies partly in finding ways to motivate students to learn, and I think the root solution to that is going to lie somewhere with teachers that can sell what they are teaching. I had history teachers that were so into their material it was almost infectious. I had an Algebra teacher that taught everything as if it were the coolest thing in the world. It's hard to not care about something when someone else is visibly excited about it.

And I think that has to be coupled with real expectations. People generally rise to the expectations that are set, and kids are no exception. The worst teachers I ever had were the ones that tried to pretend they were on the kid's side. The ones that would admit that what they were teaching was "pointless" but were "just trying to help us get through it because it is required". That is not inspiring.

Not only is it uninspiring, but it creates a responsibility vacuum. If things are pointless, and everyone knows it, and there is no real responsibility to take it seriously, then why take it seriously?

And finally, I think the biggest fix to the cultural problem has to come from our parents. Most parents are really just older kids, and deep down they have the same outlook on school as those teachers that admit it's "pointless". They talk a big game about education being important, but they don't back it up by actually considering it to be important. I don't think this has to come at the expense of other activities, but getting an A on a test should be at least as important and noteworthy to parents as winning a little league game or Prom night.

So yeah, part of it is structural, but it's by no means all structural. The education of people does not occur entirely between 8am and 3pm. Much of what we learn is from our peers and our parents and really anyone else we are exposed to socially. And crucially, the attitude we learn to adopt towards school comes almost entirely from these people who are not part of the school system, and that attitude is crucial in determining how much we get out of that 8am to 3pm period.
Does WINE-like emulator for OSX (Core API, OpenGL) make sense for games?
The WINE project has been the only way people can play games on Linux.
Yes there are other "windows software" that leverages WINE to be usable on Linux, but a significant (if not the majority) number of users run games with it.

With Valve declaring support for the OSX platform, you have a unique proposition - arguably, the most popular medium for games (1000 games, 25 million active users) is now available on a Unix based OS and one of the most popular engines (Source - HL2, TF2, Portal) is now available as OpenGL.

Does it make sense then to target the OSX platform APIs for playing games in Linux ? IMHO, the biggest challenges for WINE is the Direct3D versions it has to support. Currently, it support D3D10, but it will soon have to support D3D 11 (Win7).

Is targetting the OSX platform, easier and more achievable for games ? I am asking from a pure technical standpoint (w.r.t graphics, mouse and sound APIs) and not whether WINE should be dumped.
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This reads like an onion article. Terrifying stuff.
The world is always changing and only those with no historical perspective cling to bygone days.
Ask HN: Experience earning side income with elance, oDesk, RentACoder, etc?
Does it work for lets say earning $100-300 a month with light works over the nights and weekends?
Should Yelp just tell people how it decides what is spam?

This would alleviate some of its reputation problems but, then adversaries would know exactly how to game the system.
Sure if that's your goal. I use oDesk. You probably make a little less than elance or guru, but it's a piece of cake to beat out any of the outsourced providers who can't communicate in English for a job (nothing wrong with people speaking their native tongue, it's just very easy to stand out as someone with great English).

I make roughly $250-$300 a week in my spare time on there (roughly 10 hours?).
He implied that anybody who has pornography and a family is "doing great harm" to their family, and engaging in "dangerous" activity, and offered no reasonable basis for his widespread accusation.

That's pretty clearly malicious, and it most definitely breaks the "would you say this at a dinner party if you wanted to be invited back?" rule.
Likely a steep decline in the pound against other currencies.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=GBPEUR
my understanding is that sales of any app over $5 are quite hard to come by

Do you know of any data to back this up? It was my impression too, but thinking critically about it, that impression is founded only on seeing lots of apps competing on price. Eg, it is based on what developers sell apps for, not what $800 phone owning people are willing to spend.
The only people I have time to wish a happy birthday to, I care enough to call or say it in person.
I am a current sophomore at Stanford University so my comment is going to be biased :p

So far I love the Stanford atmosphere (I am a CS student). Is it competitive? Yes, but I have found that CS isn't as competitive as pre-med. I only have ok grades (3.0 GPA at the moment) but the classes themselves I am learning a lot in, so grades aren't too much of a concern to me.

As far as jobs, Stanford engineering does a very good job putting together career fairs. We have 2-3 a year, plus a start-up fair, and a nonprofit fair. I have accepted an internship for the summer so I think internship placement is fairly good.

Also Stanford has a very good financial aid program, how much are your parents making?

If you have any more questions about Stanford I will do my best to answer!
Exactly my experience too.

To ad to the stimulus/response.

Dawkins has a pretty interesting theory in "The Selfish Gene". In it he talks about why little birds peep.

One conclusion could be that they peep because they are hungry. But another more interesting conclusion he makes is that they peep to attack predators thus forcing the mother to silence them by finding food.

The important part is to spot the difference between when they are really sad/afraid and when they are simply trying to get things their way.

On top of that some children like my son don't use pacifiers which makes it quite a bit more challenging to balance things out.