skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trains in vacuum tunnels would be able to go as fast as a jet plane.
You'd lose the sightseeing though, unless the tunnels were built of glass. :)
Well, I think it's still a little too early to tell if you blew it ;-) Raising capital != successful company, so we'll have to wait a few more years to see if I can make something of the opportunity.

There were some significant problems with the company/idea when we applied. Hopefully, we're fixing things quickly enough to win in the end (I think we are!) :-D And thanks to PG's advice, I have a new-found appreciation for some aspects of the business that I'd overlooked before.
I know I only see a small part of a whole and I lack full perspective on things, but from where I'm standing the biggest challenge of every funded/profitable company I know is hiring good people fast enough. All the good people I know (even in non-tech fields, including finance and real estate) are employed. Even most pretty marginal people I know are employed (at salaries they aren't happy with, but certainly nothing unbearable). Perhaps the people that are losing jobs weren't that good at them to begin with?

I realize that not everyone can be super-professional at what they do, and that's fine. But in my social circle (which includes all kinds of people from no skills/no education immigrants to highly specialized professionals in a variety of locations throughout the U.S.), nobody is really struggling. So what gives?
Apparently the developers felt that the LGPL wouldn't be fine, given that they GPL'd it.
Red Reynolds
RedReynolds.com helped us completely redo our website from scratch. Took the time to coach us through the decisions that needed to be made to get our website off the ground.
I agree. I "work for a living" (whatever that means, though in the context used here it's as opposed to being a "greedy banker"), and I can sympathize with the plight of the unemployed, but I've also made sure I had sufficient savings as a rainy day fund and am also prepared to reduce my living expenses if necessary.

I think that I have every reason to be concerned that my little nest egg might be devalued. More apropos to the community here, this could also mean a shorter runway for a bootstrapped startup; I don't see how founders would be pleased by such a move.
Even actually good events need to offer something to get students to come out - at least in colder climates.
> I wish there was more than that baby-sitting co-op to support those ideas

There are people who dedicate their careers to studying this stuff... and they have better examples. That's just a simplified example used to communicate the idea.

> why don't they just exchange services and products

What money makes possible is more complex exchanges. Say, I make a web site for some guy, who gives a book to some other guy, who gives some steaks to another guy, who gives some pasta sauce to another guy, who gives some milk to me.

Without money, complex interactions necessary for a modern economy wouldn't be possible.

> Of course, it is always appealing to blame everything on some rich elite.

Actual economists generally don't do that. I wish if people wanted to post economics articles, they'd 1) do so on reddit, but if they really can't contain themselves, that at least they'd 2) post actual papers by real economists (and not just their opinion pieces) or something more than politicized handwaving.
Still doesn't work for me.
I think this is more about the idea of a grand project filled with dreams of a better future than trains.
There are other problems with the babysitting co-op. For example, imagine that the co-op now has a whole lot of members who have kids and want babysitting but aren't suitable for babysitting themselves (for some reason). Which is analogous to the real economy, where we can have people sitting around who can make shoes or repair furniture but we have all the shoes/furniture we need really cheaply thanks to China.

Ultimately long-term, sustainable economic growth can only come from improvements in productivity. So if quantitive easing is undertaken to build things that boost national productivity, it probably isn't such a bad thing. If the money is just going to go on buying consumer stuff from overseas I question its value.
...and this is why programmers should just program, vs. spreading some unsupported gutty-feely conjeture of an economic problem way too complex.
Crap... anybody feels they can write about economy after misreading a couple lousy quotes from a guy who actively proposes inflation to any bleeping crisis around the globe.
How to convert Video AVI/WMV/MOV/MP4/MPG/FLV/DV/M4V to AMV on Mac
I'm not trying to justify Aaron's economically illiterate conspiracy theorizing, but I would like to reiterate some of what I first emailed Aaron a few years ago when he first started talking about this (e.g. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/predatorstate ).

It's true to a degree that bankers don't aim for zero unemployment - i.e. implicitly they "let millions and millions of people be unemployed" - because to do so would create inflationary effects. Such an economy would be overheating. In an economy the size of the US, you would expect there to be a few million people unemployed at any given moment, simply because of turnover.

But this is pretty basic stuff. See e.g.:

http://www.investinganswers.com/term/unemployment-rate-809

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAIRU

It is however true that the Fed has a rather ridiculously overloaded mandate. It has basically one lever - the interest rate - with which it is supposed to target multiple goals - "maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates". If you think about this for a moment, you'll realize it's not possible.
One open, free High Quality PSD a day
No, Google didn't invent MapReduce
I thought this was an excellent explanation, but I really don't appreciate the impeachment of the Fed. The author starts with a very nice explanation, but then goes to an extreme simplification of the complex process of balancing inflationary pressure with the rest of the economy. It's certainly fair to criticize the Fed, but to present their objectives as one-sided where inflation is always good is as equally foolish as the people calling for the gold standard again.

Frankly the Fed is probably only doing their job if everyone is angry at them. Which seems to be the case, so I tend to think they're probably making a decent trade-off at this point, as hard as it is for both sides to stomach.
Actually, most likely they thought it would have been fine. Just not as fine.
1) Since March 2009

2) Rejected YC S10. (Attended/enjoyed Startup School 09.)

3) Not yet

4) http://p10q.com
I think this was one of the better writeups about Lilypond's commitment to good music typography I've read: http://lilypond.org/about/automated-engraving/big-page

That essay is a very nice rundown on the types of problems lilypond has dealt with in terms of working out how to create beautiful sheet music.
That Italian restaurant example drives me nuts: the economics of a small trattoria are pretty much night and day from most software products.
Thanks for sharing your experience and giving us some useful insight. Just based on your whole approach to the process and dealing with the rejection, I think you will be fine with or without the YC experience.

best of luck
If you can structure derivatives and other products in such a way that you can sell them to other people for more than they're worth, then you come out ahead. The cleverer you are at structuring them, and the better able you are to model their valuation, the more you can profit from other folks' stupidity. Basically, mugging people with your brains rather than your brawn.

As far as I understand it, beyond the basics of arbitrage, risk hedging and market making etc., investment banks are a zero-sum game - which after you add in the overheads and the profits, they destroy value.
Your missing the point of the analogy. The idea is focus on customer acquisition in a niche rather than trying to go big with VC funding/IPO. You could have just as easily replaced "Italian restaurant" with "local flower shop" or whatever.
More relevant to the general population: when your nest egg's value is anything but safe, you are going to spend your money as soon as you get it - this has more ill effects than I can enumerate

This reminds me of my grandfather's stories during the Chinese Civil War (or shortly after the capitulation of the Nationalists anyway), where he'd get his pay and immediately bike at lightning speed to the market to trade it for sustenance.

Of course, the only thing that fixed that was a complete currency reset:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Taiwan_dollar

I'm not sure if the US would really be better off with that.
The problem I have is his basic premise is flawed. He's using the dropping of the Gold Standard as proof that pumping money into the economy will create new jobs. But if you look at unemployment after 1933 (http://bit.ly/9k4xVu) you see it did dip but then started to rise again. Because eventually printing that money devalued the dollar.

See the inflation charts here: http://bit.ly/aA5MXb

So Roosevelt's plan failed (and it did fail) because the dollar's value dropped. So while more money was getting pumped in to the economy that was being negated by the assets of U.S. companies dropping in value. That drop caused business owners to stop hiring again.

My understanding of the Obama administration's basic plan is to pump money into the economy while trying to control inflation. That way companies will get the benefit of the Government's money without having their own assets devalued (and Ideally that will cause them to start hiring again)
Well, you can already do something like that, just a little slower (which gives you more time to appreciate the landscape changing):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Railway

It essentially connects Vladivostok with Europe, going through countries like North Korea and China, making the railway even larger than the railway proposed in this article.
Thanks for submitting the story!

There's some more background to the power monitoring stuff here:
http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/441
The green cross is the symbol for a pharmacy. 3:14 is the time, not the date, since we'd use 14/3.
I would go for YC if they can make me a Visa to USA (or just the Bay Area). But since they can't, what's really their role?

Everything can be learnt: You can read articles, papers, books and learn how to manage your company, deal with legal issues...

Once your company is profitable, you'll have the choice between fast expanding or remaining in steady growth.

If your idea is genius, successful... you don't need YC to sell or get money from an investor. Example: Admob.

No one can predict the future of a startup, so applying to YC won't really make you successful. It's you (the person) who predict it ;) just go with it.
I agree. Although Aaron does offer support for the idea that Bernanke is choosing unemployment over inflation [1], he doesn't support the idea that the bankers are motivated by selfishness. (For example, they may be motivated by the fact that inflation would make the dollar an unattractive investment vehicle to other countries.)

[1] Via quoting from the Economist: “Mr Bernanke does not want to risk a de-anchoring of inflation expectations. He is willing to accept 10% or greater unemployment and the resulting economic and political fall-out in order to avoid that risk.”
So increased skill leads to markets that are less efficient because of complicated bundles of investments/loans? Why are complicated investments/loans even legal? What's the given justification for them?

My own train of thought lead in a similar direction as yours. What I'm really hoping for is the opinion of a hard core classical economist, because I feel like that's what I'm lacking. Are you familiar with such arguments? The free market determines salary, after all.
It's the financial engineering area. In layman's terms it changes banking from being a dull industry where you loan money to people who you're pretty sure will pay it back to you to an exciting casino where you pit your really smart people against other banks really smart people to design really complex financial structures and collect fat commissions along the way.

The former is useful to the economy, the latter is a tremendous waste of valuable human capital.
This falls on both sides, imo. With it being so easy to send out hundreds of "e-vites", as opposed to the effort/expense involved in sending nicely printed or handwritten invitations by mail, I can't be sure that the invitation was actually intended specifically for me, with any modicum of thought involved, as opposed to just being an email blasted out to someone's entire address book. So I tend to only respond to the ones where either I actually am going, or I have some reason to believe the sender wanted me in particular to come or give regrets if I can't (e.g., if it's a close friend, or I know I'm part of a smallish group of invitees).

I do agree that not RSVPing and still showing up is a breach of etiquette; a non-response ought to be treated as an implicit no, imo. But to help that along, it does pay to make sure to explicitly request an RSVP fairly prominently. Among the flurry of emails I get, an invitation that requires an RSVP, versus an open invitation that I can just show up to or not, aren't always that easy to distinguish (for example, I don't have to RSVP to show up to visiting speakers that my university sends me email "invites" to).
Dew Quiver iPod Shoulder Strap
right now it's -4 + 4 = 0 ;)
""Me?" you say. "Why would I have such a need?" But this possibility is not far-fetched at all. For instance, when Howard Dean ran for U.S. president"

Ok, what if you are not running for U.S. president?

I also would like to teach programming to people, because I enjoy it. But lately I have thinking about the people working at the checkout in my local supermarket. While obviously software can improve supermarkets, I am not sure what software need they could program for themselves in their spare time?

Also, I have come to think that installing apps on an iPhone is actually also something like programming. By installing and using Google Maps, you have essentially reprogrammed an aspect your daily life.
For what it's worth, I doubt Krugman would support eliminating the independence of the central bank. For those of you unfamiliar with Krugman's writing, Aaron's wrongness shouldn't lead to a wholesale condemnation of Krugman.
It's not "bad," but trains are better. For example, it's very easy to work on a laptop on a train and very difficult on a plane. At best your bag is under the seat in front of you and cramping you and you get interrupted to take off and land. Outlets are difficult, so batteries die. Trains have plugs and wireless internet, sometimes. It's easier to pack more stuff. The process is easier, no lines to wait in, just get on the train.
Wow, that's really neat. Do you have to hand typeset everything in its library, or are you mining some online set of lilypond files, or what?
The article makes wrong conclusions.

Money doesn't run the economy. Confidence does. Economy is and has always been a confidence game.

If people in the baby-sitting co-op are confident to find / earn more scrips in the future, they will spend their scrip today - even if its their last remaining scrip. But if they have no confidence of earning a scrip in the future, they will save it.

But if everyone starts saving the scrip, exchange doesn't happen. And economy suffers. And because the economy suffers, people save more scrips. And it creates a downward spiral loop.

On the other hand - if everyone gets over-confident and starts spending scrips they don't have, we see a bubble and then a bubble-burst. Which leads to some very bad consequences too.

So the trick has always been: make sure the people remain confident about the future. But that they don't become over-confident.
Wondering what % of Americans invest their money via stock markets?
1) Registered the domain in Aug 2008 to do market research and to decide whether I wanted to go ahead with it. That was followed by minor prototyping and learning about the industry. Started working on it full-time a year ago.

2) Never applied. I'm not in the USA anyway.

3) Nope. One of my first customers did want to invest, but I didn't need it.

4) http://www.simplepay.co.za (Online payroll software. Not really applicable if you're not South African. For now...)
So why are complex financial structures legal? There has to be some justification for them, even if they turn out to be gambling in practice.
There are some “making of” blog posts linked at the bottom of that page: http://blog.paris-26-gigapixels.com/en/?p=115

(yes, St. Sulpice)
This would have been an amazing read if the author had included something more than a few quotes. Charts and Graphs and Statistics and Links Full of Research. I don't have the time to check up on this information myself (hence reading the article), but if the author had backed up all of his crazy theories with tangible evidence- this article would have been amazing.

So to answer your question, Mr. Author, I will listen to you when you back up what you say with something tangible I can hold onto.
Los Cabos Hotels Accommodation - Los Cabos Tours
Four reasons off the top of my head:

1) Officially a lot of the stuff is there for hedging/insurance.

2) It's quite hard to regulate this stuff out of existence, because the aforementioned really smart people will find holes in your regulation.

3) The financial industry is quite powerful and can hire a lot of lobbyists that talk about "improving efficiency" by reducing red tape surrounding their industry.

4) During the good times it looks like a lot of wealth is being created and no-one wants to commit political suicide by spoiling the party.
"Fifteen Aphorisms" would have been a more accurate title.
EDIT: I just updated my app.... So, if you sign in, you will get 5 free texts that you can use to try it out....
The niche a trattoria competes in is inherently limited by geography, whereas there's no reason a VC funded bingo card creator can't try and muscle in on patio11's turf. The only reason is probably that there is simply not enough money there to support that kind of investment/expected return.

So I guess if there's a fair point in it, it's to go after some niche that has an upper bound to its profitability as a defense against large competitors. In the US, at least, though, chain restaurants make the 'little restaurant' example once again a bit suspect because they end up competing in a niche that can, to some degree, be filled by a large corporation.

I think it's a flawed analogy, and that rather than trying to make it work, it would simply make more sense to discuss the economic factors and business decisions that make something like patio11's company successful.
Yes, of a consulting and services company. Black sheep of HN!
Lilypond is the music equivalent of TeX. The thought put into how the final result looks is amazing.
MuseScore can also export to LilyPond.
By curiosity: What framework did he used?

(I did he wrote with Flash from scratch or used a specific, flash framework)
While I personally believe the GPL to be a poor license (in fact, I don't consider it to be pro-freedom in the least), criticizing others' license choices is just obnoxious. If you dislike it, don't use the software. If you really don't like it, compete with them.
Indeed this would be very useful; however, the possibilities for spam are endless =/
Oh great find for the sheet music archive! I'll now be drowning is music thanks!
Do people who add to a bounty after the fact get any say in the acceptance of it?

Do you manually accept all bounty completions on a site management level? I started a site like this but ran into all of these trust or moderator required processes. I'd be interested to know how you plan to combat them.

Other than that though I like the design/layout of the site and the flow seems pretty nice.
Psychopaths' brains wired to seek rewards, no matter the consequences
> Last time, my cousin agreed to let me use him as a token cofounder.

This is interesting in that it's kind of the culmination of the 'get a cofounder!' idea from YC. Rather than actually having a good one as per YC's actual intentions, people are just dressing up a dummy in the passenger seat to try and get in the carpool lane. My guess is that this sort of thing is fairly easy to spot, though, and doesn't look good.
Would it impress you more to know that I can this trick live and without assistance?
Maybe not so hard. Variables defined by defvar will still have dynamic binding, and the byte compiler has warned about using undefined symbols for a decade or two.
The old Swedish word for orange is "fire yellow", but now everyone uses orange. Just a little FYI :)
But people change as the idea do, no?
Perhaps. But I can do this live, without assistance.
I think the best advice Ive ever gotten was "dont be such a pg fanboy"
What Have You Learnt From Friends?
The same thing happened in Argentina and the same thing could happen in the U.S. Countless fiat currencies in history have experienced the same fate. The only solution I have ever seen in my research is to return to a commodity backed currency.

If there are other solutions, I don't know of them, but would like to.
And tweakable via Scheme to boot!

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/In...
Investment Banking has sky high salaries, not banking in general. That's mostly Mergers & Acquisitions, IPOs and Trading. The reason trading is so lucrative is obvious, if someone can make lots of money for you, they can do it for anybody so you haver tyo pay them lots to do it for you.

For M&A and IPOs it's also relatively simple; the differences in the amount of money you get can relatively easily be 20% or more depending on who's representing you. These are complicated transactions, you need a lot of expertise to do them, and you need a sales team in place to sell it, and an organisation capable of doing the research to drum up the deals. When you're dealing with huge amounts of money anyway and the top guys are vastly better than the mid market they'll be able to demand $BIGNUM because they're judges to be worth it.
I could use this please
According to CIA World Factbook, you're not the largest in terms of percentage of GDP. At least Germany, Japan, Italy and even Switzerland rank better in that metric.

All of these single-metric comparisons are flawed. E.g. the world largest manufacturer? In comparison to what? Germany, a country with a labor force that is over 3 times smaller than the labor force in the US?

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
Did this guy toss in the subheading "The Magic Bullet Secret To Getting 17 million followers in 3 hours!" in order to pull in some search engine traffic on that phrase?
Diskspace is basically close to free nowawadays. I've made it known on a number of projects that "I never want to hear we're out of space, ever, eliminating copier paper is more worthwhile to get an extra TB of space for a project."

Diskspeed however is worth its weight in gold for some applications.
Now I only regret that I described some of my ideas in detail. There is no any guaranty it is not gonna be shared with existing yc companies...:(