skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Considering that none of the key technologies exist yet, I find that the cost is very optimistic. The "øresund" bridge linking Denmark and Sweden opened in 2000 at a cost of ~5.5 bln USD. It's 15.9 km = 9.9 miles, or $555 mio/mile. This was a successful project, using very well understood technology by people who just finished building a similar project 150 miles away, finished roughly on time.

A transatlantic tunnel would be 3500 miles, that's 350 times longer. Its completely unknown technology - no-one has ever submerged a vacuum tunnel, and no-one has build a mag-lev that actually goes 4000mph. And they're telling us it can be done for $50 mio/mile, less than a tenth of a regular bridge? I know it doesn't scale linearly, but I'd expect such a tunnel to be more, not less, expensive pr. mile. At the same mile-cost as a bridge, it'd cost $1942 bln.

I did a back-of-an-envelope calculation when this came out a while ago, that if all plane passengers from London to New York (can't remember the number now) were to switch to such a train, tickets would have to cost an average $10.000, one way, to cover 5% maintenance, interest and ROI.
You should really look into making your site less of a text decoration and weight mess. If you have 7 somethings, make those headlines the next biggest/strongest to the headline. Anything else must be less bold.
Nobody Puts Baby In a Corner
You've a enjoyable turn of phrase
"The country was too big and the political system too rotten to actually carry out any program of reform."

In other words it was bad advise for the situation in Russia. If it is not one size fits all then it is not good advise. Also I don't think this Friedman economics worked out so well in Chile either. The industries that work in the U.S. are government subsidized ones like agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and military technology spending. The bank bailouts also do not lead me to believe the U.S. follows its own advise.
Haha, well, we were also in a pool with a ton of other brilliant, driven applicants! That might have had something to do with it too. =)
the U.S. does not think long term any more

Can you give specific evidence of this?

On the one hand there is evidence of bridge failures, for example. But that's probably a result of poor initial design (i.e., many years ago) or incorrect monitoring and testing, rather than a failure to think long term.

On the other hand, I offer the insanely large (and continually growing) investment in education. That's a long-term view, although a poorly formed one.
While "no useful app" may be strictly accurate, he has written app(s) and blogged his experiences.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/18/Android-Di...

[edit: Direct link to Android Diaries" rather than a google search]
I detest this new format of business "articles" which basically just tries to bait you into loading as many pages as possible (for ad revenue) whilst engaging in the cheapest link bait possible - 20 reasons why the U.S. economy is dying? Seriously? Why not 10, 50? It's tabloid-worthy, basically.

Every good graph I have already seen elsewhere and with much better explanation. They basically lump together every statistic they can get their hands on and spin it into a story, without any stringent analysis.

Please, read good reporting by The Economist, or articles linked on realclearmarkets.com or any kind of financial blog. The real experts on finance and economics are not to be found among any major off- or online publication anymore.
I created another account just so I could get around my noprocrast settings.

Out of the 2 cofounders in YC, one I later hired to run network operations at my company and the other I am very close friends with and regularly have beers. We left on good terms. Why don't you ask the two of them what they think of me?

You're the reason why I'm an entrepreneur today and I respect you immensely. To hear you describe what I did as treachery is hurtful but worse it's just factually wrong. It was an incredibly difficult ethical decision for me at the time, but I truly believe that I behaved in a transparent and above the board way.

I take responsibility for not talking to you before or after I left - I didn't realize you felt this way about it and I'm happy to have the chance to bring this out into the open.
21 Mistakes Freelancers Should Avoid
A freelance web design business was my first venture and I made many mistakes that eventually resulted in the loss my business. In this post, I try to highlight what I did wrong and hopefully help you avoid the same mistakes. Despite the title, this post applies to anyone starting out on their own - not only freelance designers or developers.
Wow signal
I'd love to see a simple RSVP web app done.

1. Needs universal login features that are amazingly simple.

2. Needs a Google Mapping system with automatic directions from your Geo or IP address general location.

3. Needs to exist on a single page in a very simple non-tabbed view.

4. Needs to be extremely sharable.

EDIT

5. Use Disqus for commenting.

6. Take a leaf from Vark and make it integrate with Instant Messenger, SMS, and E-Mail.

EDIT

Revenue? Perhaps charge for repeating events or more events than 4 per month. Something like $1.00 per repeating event, or 3 events.
OT: Just curios. Would someone like Tim Bray (who is well-known and has a reputation) be required to take part in the technical interviews that other Googlers go through?

EDIT: better phrasing
Lilypond is nice, but its input language is (very powerful but) a bit clumsy and verbose. Others who feel the same way might want to take a look at PMW (http://www.quercite.com/pmw.html) which also produces high-quality PostScript output and has a more friendly syntax. Its author, Philip Hazel, is better known for the Exim mail transfer agent and the PCRE regexp library.
One word: Visas. As it now, you need a transit-visa just to change planes in Moscow. Travelling through, what, 11 countries, each one insisting on confirming the identity of each person entering the country and making sure they exit again? The alternative is sealing people inside the cars, which is what they do on the Kaliningrad-Moscow train that passes through Lithuania and Belarus, but that's logistically problematic, when there are stops in more than two countries.

There are very real political problems to this, and while some of them can be resolved easily, I'd like to remind people that the TGV rail system in France is frequently brought to a halt by protesting farmers who park a tractor on the track. And that's just one country (two if you ask the angry farmers - Paris and the 'real people').
I would be curious if the author would have followed the frequently cited studies in business and self-help books about increasing urgency by significantly reducing the amount of time allotted to perform a task--in this case to respond--would have helped.
Just a quick word of advice. I'm not sure the "Sorry, I lost all your data." testimonial is a particularly good one. Yeah, I get it that it is a reference (and link) to the mag.nolia debacle, but most people won't. It looks like a troll.
Looks like this kind of comparison is there to stay:

As of now, they’re selling around 90K iPhones per day
compared to around 60K Android handsets. It’s a horse race!

How about "they're selling X Macbook Air's compared to Y Win machines". Does this version sound right?
So, you'd say it was "fair and balanced", then?
I too have built a company bootstrapping and I've never applied to YC.

I'm not saying YC is necessarily a bad deal if you want to go through the VC funnel and flip your business - in fact, in that case, I think it makes a great deal of sense.

What I am saying is that if you don't have access to that opportunity, well, screw it, realize it's one among many and you can make things work anyway. Plus, whenever something negative happens, always look at the positive side - in this case, you get to keep equity.

Or, if you want a more Chinese perspective on the issue, an old story:

There was a farmer who lived in a village with son and they had a horse. One day the farmer’s horse ran away. His neighbors came by and said, “What bad luck! Your only horse ran away! Now how will you till the fields?” The farmer replied, “Good or bad, who can say?” The next day, the horse returned with five wild horses. “What good luck!” the neighbors exclaimed. “You’ve got five free horses!” The farmer replied, “Good or bad, who can say?” While the farmer’s son was breaking in the five wild horses, one of the horses stepped on the son’s leg and broke it. “What bad luck!” cried the neighbors. “Your only son has broken his leg. Who will help you run the farm?” The farmer replied, “Good or bad, who can say?” A few weeks later, war breaks out and all healthy young men are drafted into the army. Since the son’s leg is broken, he cannot be drafted. “You’re so lucky!” the neighbors say, and the farmer says, “Good or bad, who can say?”
/iknowpeople: Too much text on the front page. I recommend hitting the user with your tag line and a few bullet points and then explaining more on a different page.
Has all the hallmarks of an amusing fraud - the language would indicate it is of quite recent origin.
1) 2+ years

2) Never applied

3) Nope

4) http://duckduckgo.com/

Btw, a lot more single founders left comments here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045694) and on the associated blog post (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/01/will-single-foun...)
bitbuffet seems cool, but the prices might be a bit high. Are you using something like S3 to keep your costs low?
Yep, that's the point where the alarmist and biased article descends into superstitious doom-mongering. It's a pity, the topic deserves a better treatment than this. How about submitting a better link to replace it?
Hey Waleed, I didn't know you were doing NetworkedBlogs. Cool!
What is interesting is that this is precisely the kind of signal that SETI is looking for. Yet, by its very nature, such signals would be almost impossible to intercept a second time: what are the odds our planet would stumble back into the beam?

In reality, an Ophiuchi Hotline would be damnably frustrating.

A similarly interesting and incredibly frustrating signal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop
The Big Bloop
Plastic Logic Delays Its Que Tablet
> Wow, why all the negativity?

Why all the positivity? It's a great project, but it's also a project faced by immense obstacles. If China wants to do this, good on them, and I wish them all the best.

Most of the suggested route go through political volatile areas, such as Iran. Say, they develop the nuclear bomb and NATO decides to bomb and/or invade. Now it's a war-zone and every foreign service in the world advises against travelling there. The link is unusable for 5-10-15 years. Russia frequently has fall-outs with their neighbours to the extend where they shut off gas in the middle of the winter.

But the biggest issue isn't what we know now - it's what we don't know. Such a rail road has a lifespan of decades, if not more. The Train-Siberian railroad is 100 years on. The combined expected volatility over a 100 year period of all the areas the route extends through is extremely high.
It's photoshopped in. There are 10 photoshopped easter eggs on the map, placed there by the developers, and this is one of them. Another example is a fake grafitti drawing of what is assumed to be the dev/photography team photoshopped onto the side of a building.
Quick Tips on Secure Shell
Andrew Gordon has a history of pretty interesting work this area, and is probably one of the best researchers in the overlap of symbolic knowledge representation, data-mining, and pragmatic approaches to commonsense-reasoning problems--- areas that often like to resist overlapping.

This sounds like the sort of work he's as well placed as anyone to do. As a commenter on the linked article points out, it's "epistemologically unsound" to mine data in this way, and not even humans really understand causality. And yet, as that comment misses, humans are able to make routine use of casual inferences, even though we don't "really" understand causality, and we acquire our causal information in ways that are almost certainly epistemologically unsound (people do not usually use careful scientific experiments in building their everyday models of how the world works). Even uneducated and very young humans can do stuff along those lines that'd be amazing for AI to be able to do! It'll be interesting to see if approaches like this one can help computers pragmatically acquire similar levels of proficiency about causal relationships, as an alternative to, say, large databases of consistent, carefully hand-authored facts like Cyc.

His page: http://people.ict.usc.edu/~gordon/
Color e-book devices coming from E Ink in 2011
One area where Android might easily be very successful is for businesses that need to do custom things, and don't want Apple sticking its nose in their affairs.
Vitiligo white hair
Graying of hair is caused by massive development of hydrogen peroxide due to wear and tear of hair follicles (a small tubular cavity containing the root of a hair).
> I think the terrorism threat is overblown. This is going to sound horrible but very few people are killed by terrorists compared to pretty much every other cause of death.

Between the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the work of intelligence services, we've been successful in keeping jihadist terrorism out of the west for five years now. But the safety we have within our borders here doesn't extend to a 10.000 mile railroad passing through a dozen countries, several of which are anything but politically stable.

I mean, would you take a ride in the countryside of any ME country in a bus with "I'm a rich American/European infidel" painted on the side? Then why do the same in a train?
A program with such visual output could really benefit from a gallery page on its website. I found some examples of which it is capable of on http://lilypond.org/switch/tour
Pomodoro- what's in it for me?
Here is what the world will look like when you're done:

http://tqft.net/wiki/Maneki_Neko
I don't consider the comparison wrong in this context. We are talking about Operating Systems here. Not phones.

In other contexts it might be wrong, however.
My company is a YC-reject, we're doing ok. With that being said, I still love YC and it makes sense for a lot of companies and I agree with pg that it just wasn't right for mine.

Here are a couple things I have learned about funding in my last 2 years building my startup:

1. Funding is mostly a security blanket. An expensive and usually unnecessary one. I think most startups do worse with funding because they lose that fight or flight mechanism that drives entrepreneurs to do mind-blowing things. I don't think most ideas require funding exceeding the seed stage, which is usually a lot cheaper if you can find it elsewhere. For example, I launched my company to profitability with just 3 laptops + servers, which you can usually dump onto credit cards if you're growing way faster than your cash-flow (which makes your startup cost almost $0 to start).

2. You cannot base your startup's success on whether or not one person (pg) believes you can make it. If nothing else, pg cannot possibly be an expert in every field.

3. Money is EVERYWHERE in the valley. It is absurd how many different VCs there are, and how much money they're obligated to deploy in behalf of their LPs. There are definitely less opportunities than the money out there to fund them. Getting funding is pretty easy. It's all about building models that you can plug a # into and get a bigger # out, which if anyone needs help with please feel free to email me.

4. Lastly, if you believe you can make it, no one can stop you. Go be a tiger.
Nice design.
Success of a Marriage in 15 Minutes?
"Folks have explained" isn't a useful data point. It just reflects some people's perceptions, which, as you point out, are already negative.
At the moment, yes. But the Android experience is rapidly improving, and all it takes is one single killer app that's not possible on the iPhone because of the walled garden approach.

One such killer-app could be the competition on the handsets. I have an HTC Tattoo - it's a low-end device, compared to Nexus One and HTC Hero, and it feels cheap, but it packs the entire smart-phone experience. And it's less than $200 (subsidised on the plan I'm getting anyway) and falling.
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I think you may have missed the point of the blub story, then.

> What troubles me though is when you go out of your way to do everything functional-style, even when you know there are easier ways of doing it.

The point is that you (to possibly generalize a bit since I don't know you) are 'going out of your way' to write everything in an imperative style because you don't know there are easier ways of doing it.

This is exactly what the blub story is saying. You are looking 'up' at functional languages and saying "in most cases that's just esoteric weirdness that I don't need" because you think in blub.

Here's an alternate version of your last sentence from a hypothetical functional programmers perspective:

> Some imperative programmers just push the idiom into everything they do, to such a point that understanding their code is like untangling spaghetti.
Google Street View slammed as 'a service for burglars'
You might want to read the section "Will you sign an NDA? How do I know you won't steal my idea?" on http://ycombinator.com/faq.html which also refers to the section on the application form which says "Though we don't make any formal promise about secrecy, we will try to avoid disclosing your plans
to potential competitors."
But even if you define "socialist welfare state" broadly, as "some of the left-ish countries in Eurpore that have a comprehensive social safety-net" (and purely by co-incidence to be sure, also are peaceful, democratic, affluent and have a high standard of living), then the US of A is not "very quickly becoming a socialist welfare state." Not even close.
Cisco Targets Federal Market With Data Center Containers
Facebook opening an office in India
eeek, fun stuff. Working now.
Had similar problems when I got married a few years ago, as did a friend. No tech issues - these were physical invites, with an RSVP card and stamped and addressed return envelope included. IIRC response rate was about 60% of attendance. The only thing I think I could have done to improve that rate was to ask guests for a meal choice - no response implies you won't eat. :)
I have seen what happens when elected politicians print money by popular demand. Hyperinflation, money are worth 3-5% of their value from a few years ago, economy halts. Bulgaria in 1996, and you don't want to go there.
"There are people who dedicate their careers to studying this stuff... and they have better examples."

Yeah, but last I heard, not all of them agree with Keynes. Also, please point to some examples. I have heard Krugman repeat that baby-co-op several times now. You'd think he'd provide some other examples occasionally if they are so abundant.

I know that money is a very useful tool, but it still seems to me that if only money was the problem, people could find workarounds. They could create their own money, if the state did not provide enough. The baby co-op did just that, it seems.

It just takes a little more than one baby co-op to convince me that availability of money is the only factor that makes an economy work.

It is however a very appealing theory to governments, because it justifies them printing more money. And as we see, it appeals to conspiracy theoreticians, too.

My own view (without academic seal of approval) is that efficiency is the main factor that determines our well-being.
Right, so, any two things that get you from A to B are identical? Unix isn't more powerful than Windows; You can outrun a cop-car in your Prius; Apple pie is apple pie?

There's a lot more that goes into doing a job than just the physical possibility. In the context of programming there's maintainability, developer time spent and a million other factors. The blub argument, specifically the part about 'looking up', is quite literally talking about you.
In that situation with only 8-12 people you just need to pick up the phone and personally invite them. Will take all of an hour and you'll know the picture instantly, as well as make people feel wanted.

When I'm having a dinner party, or even a small party, I still call everyone personally. The difference it makes to getting people to come is enormous, it makes people feel wanted. Failing that, a personal email (rather than a batch send) also makes a big difference.

I agree that this works both ways - people are getting lazier at inviting people in the same way people are getting lazier at responding.
Jonathan! O HAI
Agreed. In fact, "getting rid of cocks" would go along way to making most things in life more interesting and successful!
From the article, it sounds like it. "I think I talked to eleven people in the course of my day there, failing one logic puzzle but acing the what-does-a-browser-actually-do test." - sounds like my Google interview a few years ago.
What a joke. The author seems to believe that Apple invented tablets, and that people would rather carry around a tablet than a smartphone.

Reality check, the reasons for NOT buying a tablet still applies, and whilst the HP slate might change that, the iPad certainly wont.

But yeah, as written by machrider, the heading here is more intended as flamebait, and the author of the article only used TV adverts for research (rather than perform non-biased research).
You do have a point there; trains are a lot easier to stop than planes or ships and the visa thing can be a pain here, even with a very good passport. Consider, however, that most countries in this region have a +lot+ of experience with commercial land passenger vehicles going across multiple borders.

I'm in Sofia, Bulgaria right now. There is a daily direct bus connection from here to Tehran. It does take 48 hours but it's safe, it's clean, and it gets me there.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, yes, there will be problems and setbacks, but more likely than not they will find a way eventually.
Not every country in the region is a disaster area like Iraq. Turkey and Egypt are destinations for mass market tourism from Western Europe and Russia - they are full of obvious non-locals in buses and hire cars. Jordan is a popular excursion as well, with even Syria becoming a fairly popular destination.

We've been to both countries loads of times from the UK and have always felt perfectly safe. I've felt safer walking round Cairo than some American cities.
Tech apocalypse: Five doomsday scenarios for IT
Una settimana con Jolicloud
Hm, this doesn't really seems to be an attempt to divert passenger traffic from using the planes to some cross-continental HSR. On the other hand, it'd allow China to export much much more goods and much much faster than nowadays with ships [1]. And of course, it would also very much strengthen China's influence in the Middle east and around, as in this area, HSR travel times would be very interesting and provide (in comparison) wonderful connection with China.

You wouldn't travel from China to Europe by train even with this, of course. I wonder what would the Russian response be, as they are quite expected to maintain their strong influence in this region, and this isn't exactly going to support that.

[1] This is already being done, in a rather small scale.
Tories may 'lose broadband vote' 
The Conservative policy on rural broadband could see its own voters miss out on fast services, research has shown.
Could you elaborate on that? I think a lot of people here probably don't share your reservations and it would help to say what they are.
20 Ways Your Independent Contractor Might Actually Be An Employee