skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm willing to bet that most people here aren't familiar with Sheetz considering it is primarily a Pennsylvania thing. Sheetz is famous in the area for having really decent food, orderable through little kiosks at every store.

They pretty well own their niche at least in the area I'm familiar with. They're a good example of a business entering a saturated market (gas stations) but doing it better than everyone else to the point that most people that I know will go out of their way to go to a Sheetz rather than any other gas station.

Typically, they have their gas just a little below the average in the area, surcharge free ATMs, the Made-To-Order kiosks (sometimes located at the gas pumps), clean bathrooms, and a bit of a more friendly atmosphere than other gas stations.

They're actually a rather good example for startups.
Akamai fires Engineer who spoke out against Music Tax
Very useful site, but not what I'm looking for.

I just tipped it with Tipjoy, which you should put on the site in addition to the PayPal link :)

http://tipjoy.com/joy/12017/
The End of Early Adoption
Warner's New Web Guru: "Fee for All"
Pad email to 64 bytes with random data and then XOR result with a private 64-byte string.
Some interesting stats and points from the article:

-companies build plants overseas to be near local markets

-US share of global manufacturing has increased since 1980

-China shed 25 million manufacturing jobs from 1994-2004
She entered university at 13 1/2 yrs old, taught a course at that university when she was 17, and got her Master's at 18. Thank goodness she's not lured by the money - this is an intellectual powerhouse!

She's also firmly in my list of successful women in tech.
Buffett's Berkshire net income falls 64 percent because of derivatives
Well, my first basic Rails app should go live sometime next week. Do I qualify?

Did I mention I can work with non-Euclidean Geometry? Plus, I have a beard.

Think about it.
I think economics is fascinating too. The problem is that there would certainly be big disagreements, combined with less actual expertise in the subject. That creates something of a toxic mix. So why not stick to discussing what we know best? That would be in keeping with the principle of comparative advantage:-)
This community has done pretty well with disagreements and the editors are good at filtering the truly toxic trolls. I have faith that we can tackle economics without self destructing.
Are you looking for help? I may be interested, and this is something that I've been working on, too.

Where are you located? Are you in the SF bay area?
I've payed less than that in income tax on income much greater than that. Legally, that is. According to H&R's calculator, you should be paying under $5k, and thats with no dependents or other similar deductions.
I've used Hiveware Enkoder for a long time, and it works. Not sure if that will help you (seems to be down now).
No idea. That guy is as inarticulate as he is unintelligent.
You can bet any amount of money you like that VCs have enough say to nix an acquisition.
Whoops, clicked the down arrow but meant to click up. For what it's worth, consider yourself +2 karma.
Disagreements about things we know about are easier to deal with than disagreements about things that we are less knowledgeable about, and that often come down to fundamental disagreements about our philosophies of how the world ought to work.

As a concrete example, I for one do not want to be spammed with a bunch of links from mises.org, and I know that there is a significant minority here who loves that stuff. I'd really prefer just to keep things about tech, startups, and the occasional science article (which generally do not elicit strong reactions).
Once they get to the front page. There is a relatively (depending on the time of day, and no I don't have stats) smaller window when stuff scrolls down the 'new' page.
I've wanted a news.yc style site for economics for a while now, but don't really have the time right now to make it and foster it to critical mass. anyone else interested?
Try using http://www.ip2location.com/free.asp that is what the wiki scanner http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/ uses.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiScanner#Technical_descripti...
I see. I think I will take your advice about a simple system, though. It's that Anybot's <a href="http://anybots.com/join.html">career</a> page seems to imply that I should have built something. :)
Hone Your Programming Skills
I'm doing one of these per night in preparation for a contest they have at my school annually. It's a fun way to keep in shape and hone in on your C skills.

It's also fun to compare your program when you get one done with the sample solution he provides. At first my code was wasteful and took way too many lines of code compared to his solution, but as I got better at it I started writing cleaner and more efficient code, and even came up with some solutions that were more elegant than his!
Pursuing the Next Level of Artificial Intelligence
Economics Forum
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180177
The first fully ecological search engine in the world
I know this comment is going to be immediately downvoted, but holy god, what a stupid idea.
rot13 seems to satisfy your requirements
Hi Fayram, fancy seeing you here.
15 people, all engineers?
I think your argument here is close to the generally held wisdom that you shouldn't talk about religion and politics. Precisely because these are considered toxic conversations is why I think it is important to discuss them. If we can figure out what our fundamental disagreements are instead of namecalling, maybe we can start resolving or at least understanding the other person.

Generally, I think more information is better. Economics is important and broadly relates to startups. It's not inherently off-topic and I'd much rather get some additional wisdom from people on this board than never learn their economic opinions.

As much as Ron Paul Republicans love mises.org, it seems extremely likely that they would launch a coordinated spam campaign here. Economics comes up here rarely enough that when it does, I think it's great. I doubt that random articles from mises.org would get upvoted here anyways. If so -- great, I can easily beat mises.org economists in argument. I've never seen a forum with mises.org economists where you could have a full on disagreement without descending into trolling, but if such a forum exists on the internet, it's this one.

I remain confident in the concept of news.ycombinator -- if Paul Graham thinks there is a problem, he will fix it. This community can handle economics.
Google Software Downloads for the Mac
I'd actually be really curious what their engineer to executive to support staff ratio is.
Thanks for sharing these stories. I'm sure we can all relate to at least some of these issues (some more than others -- I've been there/done that on almost all of them! ;).

Some of the product knowledge issues we've been fortunate enough to avoid since we write our own software, but being young (19) and very inexperienced when I started I certainly learned the hard way not to over-promise and under-deliver.

I once had a "Mildred" experience myself where the person in charge on the client's end wasn't unqualified but was constantly changing his mind. Almost daily, he sent us new design plans that had nothing to do with what we were supposed to be making.

After a conversation with his boss about how the project needed to stay on track, no change. After a heavy conversation about how the project was going to fail if they couldn't get a handle on him, no change. His boss actually confided that everyone else was too busy, and that the person we delt with worked from home because if he came into the office everyone else would leave so they wouldn't have to deal with him. Strange...

So the project failed of course, and they decided to not pay us for a chunk of time at the end. I still managed to pay my contract developers out of pocket, but I definitely learned to avoid ever letting such a scenario play out for the amount of time it did.

We actually had another project recently that initially seemed like a fairly simple document manager, but a few meetings in the client had basically explained that they were planning to run their whole business on this thing, all client communications, accounting and everythin. We ended up turning the project down, which was ultimately the best thing to do for everyone.
>After three decades of disappointments, artificial intelligence researchers are making progress.

Do you think AI progress is going to continue accelerating for a while?
Greasemonkey Scripts For the Social Media Addict
I can only speak for myself and say that it's probably been 5 years since I've written a line of code that ended up in production, but I don't consider myself a "disappointed coder". I still like to code in my spare time-- but at the office, I think I can be more effective writing code indirectly through coders rather than writing code directly.
Impossible smells exhibition opens
There is a pretty popular/mainstream story, but there is a strong element of hacking here.
> But someone had to be carrying a pager when the servers went down, or eBay wouldn't still exist.

Fortunately, that can be one of multiple people working in shifts so nobody has to be up for 36 hours at a time.
Barbie Game
Create your personal Barbie Doll Collection, dress up onlinebarbies in cutest dresses and skirts. Spend your time online with fun,give Barbie a makeover and create your own personalized doll.
The amazing disappearing reappearing finger
I would think so, if for no other reason than Moore's law. As computing power becomes increasingly available, seemingly insignificant steps forward can become significant through the magnification of iteration.
At first glance it does seem like a dumb marketing gimmick. And I'm not going to start using them, because I use Google via the Firefox toolbar.

Still, if hundreds of thousands of people were to switch to this search engine, in addition to being very profitable for Echocho, it would be a net gain for the environment over people using regular Yahoo. I doubt they can manage to fully cover the externalities of their existence, but it seems better to plant trees than to not plant trees.

Is TheHungerSite still around? They should publish statistics about how much good they have done in the world.
Twitter could have been such a nice ActiveMQ/Jetty+Cometd Java application I think. And probably run on half the amount of hardware that they have now. Rails is not very efficient when it comes to resources. I have re-implemented Ruby/Rails code that runs faster and in 3 times less hardware on Java. Closer to the metal. Better usage of OS services.
> I can easily beat mises.org economists in argument.

I strongly doubt this.

The reason the issue is toxic is that the foundation of an austrian tends to be based on liberty, whereas the foundation of someone else's ideas might be collectivist in nature (e.g. supplying equality of opportunity to all). Of course the people are going to be unable to have a reasonable argument - they're working towards completely incompatible outcomes.

> I've never seen a forum with mises.org economists
> where you could have a full on disagreement without
> descending into trolling

When you are somebody with a scepticism of big government and high regard for personal liberty, it can be frustrating because these ideas are outside the norm and you won't be able to explore them in the course of day to day contact with people who don't think past the front page of the local tabloid. Then one day you pick up a book by Hayek or Mises, and find that they have found very strong and compelling ways to tie together the vague ideas you had previously. This experience can be very compelling.

You find that it gives you powerful tools that allow you to analyse public policy positions very quickly.

Once you're through that, you can then move on to Popper and start to realise that even though his conclusions are similar, he's attacking some of what's said at a very low-level in philosophy. And this gives you powerful tools to analyse arguments very quickly.

I anticipate you are someone with an interest in both coding and essays, and therefore expect that you may appreciate what that would feel like even if you disagree with the actual position. I'd expect that some of the postings that you describe as trolls are motivated by that feeling.

The best way to do economics is to have an area where there's room for people to make themselves more stupid (digs and reddits), and then have highly moderated separate sites for people who are interested in learning more about a tradition and where they can talk about it without constantly being pulled off line by people with incompatible value systems.

If you have any further comments to discuss about this in response to my post, I'd appreciate if you'd instead email me directly at craig@cowoh.org because I don't want to discus further in this forum. Thanks.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180177

Submit a thread and start a discussion! You or anyone reading this can be an admin.

And you're right, economics is much too complicated for me to easily win such an argument. In a nutshell, my argument is that libertarianism is great, but if we're talking about idealized utoponian economies, I'd like one that was completely free except for government provided health care, schools, fire protection, police, recreational facilities, water, 2000 calories a day, basic shelter, clothing, vocational training, and puppies. A 20% sales tax should be enough to cover it. Also, in such an idealized economic society, the government provides seed stage capital/services for companies and ends up owning minority shares in otherwise public or private companies.

In other words, I love freedom, but I'm very willing to pay a fair, flat tax to provide a basic standard of living such that no one is sleeping on the streets, unless they really want to be.
Ask YC: Early morning brain exercise?
I'm sleepy for a good 30 minutes after I wake up. Right now I spend that time reading RSS or watching last night's Daily Show, trying to get my brain going. But I've been thinking about doing something more intellectual to get up to speed faster. My best idea so far is to solve 1 or 2 Project Euler problems each morning. Any other suggestions?
is it true most AI was based on logic stuff? no wonder it failed. it's like making a building out of iron legos and wondering why it isn't flexible
Demographics of Tech Entrepreneurship
An interesting quote from the abstract: "But, even though Bill Gates and Steve Jobs founded two of the world‘s most successful companies, they are not representative of technology and engineering company founders. Indeed, a larger proportion of tech founders are middle-aged, well-educated in business or technical disciplines, with degrees from a wide assortment of schools. Twice as many U.S.-born tech entrepreneurs start ventures in their fifties as do those in their early twenties, as this paper will show."
"Had Xobni taken $1 million instead of 4, they’d all be buying beach houses right now. On the other hand, Microsoft might come back and offer the $40 or $50 million it would take to make the VCs agree (I think it would be a good idea for them to do so) and they’ll be buying beach house and Bentleys."

Let's say an angel would invest at the same valuation as the VC, then for $1M they would get 12.5% of the company. That would mean that when acquired for $20M, founders are left with $17.5M. For VCs with 50% stake and $40M acquisition founders are left with $20M. Not sure where Bentley's come from.
I really recommend Atlassian's FishEye (similar to trac) and Crucible (peer code review, with a friendly forum-like twist) - both of which are tightly integrated - for anyone into some serious teamwork-based coding on SVN, CVS, Perforce, or several other version-managed development.

Fisheye: http://www.atlassian.com/software/fisheye/
Crucible: http://www.atlassian.com/software/crucible/

Atlassian's great about open source, and give free licenses to any non-profit or FOSS projects.
Tim Bray on tech aggregators
Maybe new, yet unused forum would be more appropriate.
Well yeah, true, but I somehow managed to overlook that on my way to the Clickpass site.

I found it difficult to understand the benefits Clickpass offers, but maybe having used OpenID would help.
Mind Hacks: Uncanny valley of the dolls
Sure. He writes plenty of stuff that no one's even heard about or doesn't use. All in all, very few people use his stuff. He's a niche within a niche. Only people that play with language even know or care what he's up to.

That said, he has the mental playfulness to come up with interesting things.
Ask YC: Is it okay to tell VCs who else you're talking to?
Simple question: when talking to a VC, when they ask if we're talking to others, can I give them specifics? Is that bad form or can it help with leverage? Of course, this assumes we have well-respected investors or VCs who are interested!
Safari for Windows market share triples following SW Update push
It's unfortunate that most of the comments so far only engage either with the title of the piece, or with it's (acknowledged) debt to "A Mathematician's Lament".

I think the author's main point-- that most teaching of mathematics tends to undervalue the "aha!" types of insights that connect various pieces-- is a good one, and it looks like he has some concrete ideas about how to go about it.

I, for one, look forward to seeing the author follow through with additional concrete examples.
I didn't follow the first round of coverage on this story. Was the mainstream press really as gullible as the author suggests? Ouch.
Why do people use Facebook? (stats based on installed apps)
Sorry to hear that-- it's difficult to live the start-up life even with a good support network; to do so on your own will be quite a challenge.

Are there people whose judgment you respect that you can ask? Even if you don't know them well, they might be willing to point you in the right direction.
did she invent bayesian spamfilters? i know there was ideas about it before paul graham did it.
This is a dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180047
YouTube Down... DNS Hacked?
Yahoo, Microsoft deal back on track?
Ask YC:  Is it possible to build a computer display that corrects your vision?
I know that 3D displays exist that don't require special glasses.

So maybe this is possible as well?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Social networks are still too closed
Has anyone used Angelsoft?
Article content is pretty empty, other than saying she uses statistics. Any pointers to her papers?
I usually cringe at the idea of paying someone to help shop an idea. But I've heard of the folks behind this and it seems interesting.
you cannot know anything for sure before it happens
you overestimate the price of bentleys
Maybe this thinking makes sense on the larger sites, but for here, it just sounds stupid.

I have often wondered how this "organism" call the Hacker News community works and have finally satisfied myself by not even thinking about it any more.

I often find what I think is the coolest article and wonder what others will think. So I submit it and it sits there with no comments or upvotes.

Did I submit it at a bad time? Or a bad day? Were all the people who would have liked it busy doing something else? What time was it in Europe? In California? In New York? Did I submit it while there was free beer and munchies at a Super Happy Dev House somewhere? Was pg speaking somewhere?

Or maybe people just don't care about the same things I do sometimes. (I suspect this is the most likely reason.) But that's cool too, because that's still a good answer.

So instead of trying to understand the unimportant and elusive, it's probably a better idea to submit what we think is interesting and see what happens. And comment when we have something to say and shut up when we don't. And vote, too. But mostly, use most of those cycles on our own startups and save hn for breaks.
How disappointing that your only contribution to this discussion is to be snide and rude. I've offered an opinion about an application and the utility I derived on my blog. Thereafter I've commented on the price offered for a company. By definition these are subjective matters. Isn't the point of this forum is for you to articulate where you differ and why, rather than offering childish playground insults.
NVIDIA is shaking up the parallel programming world
The rake gems:build and rake gems:unpack are a subtle addition, but pretty awesome.

http://ryandaigle.com/articles/2008/4/1/what-s-new-in-edge-r...
I once read somewhere that they will tell each other anyway, because they all know each other. I don't know if it is bad form to tell them anyway, but bear in mind that they might know the truth anyway.
Good point. I guess 'the truth' for us is not a bad thing. I'd rather they know that we have some pretty good options but I don't want to sound swarmy or conceited. To be frank, we are honored that people are interested in our product, but just want to make sure we give our startup the best chance of survival.
Entirely. I was shocked at the original BBC article, which touted the claims as "hard science" and made it all seem like we could be regrowing our limbs back in no time thanks to this amazing new "extra-cellular material" discovery.
"Plus, I have a beard."

That's worth $100K right there if you put it on your resume. :)
Old-style AI solved a few of the "smart" things that people do, such as playing chess and proving (simple) mathematical theorems. I predict that new-style AI will solve a few of the "dumb" things that people do, such as keeping our balance and getting a visual sense of our 3d location and orientation.

The difficult part will continue to be those areas where we're not just doing combinatorics and we're not just doing statistics. The meaning of a sentence is formed both by the grammar, which is nearly combinatorial, and by the meanings and connotations of the words used, which are hardly combinatorial at all. I doubt that this sort of thing will just fall out from bayesian networks, or from any simple development based on bayesian networks.
Is SEO a waste of time?
You mean to correct farsightedness? One could imagine displaying an image corrected by a real or virtual convex lens, but the farther the "lens" was from the viewer, the smaller the image would have to be (or the larger the display).

Or the lens could be placed closer to the viewer:
http://www.50plushealth.co.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2128

But if it's that close already, why not just wear glasses?
New Study Debunks Myth That Most Tech Entrepreneurs Are College Kids
A new study from researchers at Duke University and Harvard University challenges the popular assumption that most technology entrepreneurs are twee college kids launching businesses from their dorm rooms.
I work from home so I have to put in extra effort to get myself going on many mornings. I make sure I go through the same morning ritual as I would if I were to go to a real office. Take a shower, get dressed and eat breakfast before even thinking about reading email. By that time I should be good to go. If you still can't get going then starting off on something you really want to do than something that is just work is a good way to get going too.
The coming backlash over green marketing
And raising it beyond a reasonable amount (with people still wanting it) makes you a purple cow. This makes the demand go up even higher.
the download of the safari is 3 times more but that doesn't mean the usage is 3 times more as well ... there are many dumb users who dont even know that safari exist on their machine ... market share is not correctly defined in the article ... if the person is not using the safari then you cant count him to calc market share. Having an option and using that option is 2 different thing.