skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but what would be worse, you recovering only about 15% (and costing your opposition hopefully as much as you lost or more), or you recovering nothing and the insurance company keeping everything?

The problem I've noticed with insurance companies is that they try to run a profit off of the individual person, when really they should be running a profit off of the community as a whole. This is greed vs sustainability.

If I charge 100 people $5 for some bogus insurance, if I only pay out $450 for the group, I'm netting $50. However, insurance companies charge 100 people $5 and will up each individuals payments for any claim to try and keep making $500.

100 people getting good insurance at a great cost will stay with a company until they die, they'll also get their friends and family to join up. Suddenly you've got 1,000 people and you're making $500 from loyal customers.
Try noscript as well as adblock.
Wow, a top 10 list article the the WSJ. I totally expect the US market to go down again for the simple reason that right now, the US looks like a failing empire that can't pay its bills on all levels from consumers to government.
You're right, I'm being a bit unfair. But most of what I've seen in terms of system plans in Western Europe and the U.S. are very minor extensions to the systems...perhaps 3 or 4 stations over the next 5-7 years.

And places like L.A. I think absolutely stand-up to the criticism of being locked in stasis. Even the planned system looks embarrassing for the second largest metro region in the U.S.

D.C. is maybe a slight exception with an entire new line (and 11 stations) actually in the process of being built over the next 6 years.

But lets put that in perspective, the Shanghai system opened in 1990, and 20 years later has 269 stations with dozens more still in the works. I'm not expecting the same thing for D.C., but L.A. is a similarly populated metro region.

One other thing to think about, and part of my fixation on metro systems I think, is how the systems tend to define how the cities develop. It's a catch-22 in a way, we build the systems to service the denser parts of a city, but the presence of the system builds density in the immediate (walkable) distance from the station. Outlier areas, away from the metro center, can become perfectly fine mini-city centers in and of themselves (see the edge city phenomenon).

Just the fact that the silver line is being built has stirred a tremendous amount of city planning and building along its length with areas like Tysons Corner being virtually rebuilt to support a walkable city center type environment centered around the stations. This type of co-development is critical I think to sustainable urban planning.

You can't build a car free urban area if people can't get into and out of the urban center.
Depends, but most of the companies that receive funding at the super angel level have a product, core team (with plans to hire), and user metrics.

Beyond that, it really varies. I've seen companies get funding without any kind of product and based on the entrepreneur alone.
1) Agreed.

2) You're right; TSP is NP Hard, not NP Complete.

But if you're talking about the YES/NO version, then it is defined (ala Wikipedia) like this: "given the [graph and] costs and a number x, decide whether there is a round-trip route cheaper than x". This problem is NP Complete; it's easy to see that verifying in this case just means summing the weights and seeing if they are below `x`.
Every geek? I'm a geek and don't own/want any Apple product. There are many geeks out there like me - a minority for sure - but enough that Apple lacks a monopoly over geeks.
I feel the same exact thing applies to software. Though, you'll get tarred and feathered for even mentioning a Rewrite.
I'm going to agree with Dewitt. I think web app will become the dominant framework for most users.

First off, I would refute the Douglas Purdy's argument about native having earlier access to the underlying platform. That may be true now where some devices have gyroscopes, while others don't, but how much useful stuff can you cram into these devices. I suspect in the next 5 years the device capabilities (gps, phone, accel, gyro) will have settled down to the point where they are commodity features for 90% of the devices similar to the PC environments.

However, I think more important is that the majority of apps that get used the most don't take advantage of these capabilities anyway. People are getting directions, tweeting, checking-in, etc. So like your desktop, you may have a few apps that you have to install, the majority of these apps function very well from a browser.

However, in the end this decision is in many ways in the hands of developers. If we aren't building the mobile web apps, then consumers have no choice but to download the native. But how many developers are going to want to continue maintaining code for different platforms. I think we'll see a few big players get great success from mobile web apps, and then the rest of the developers will follow.
In a real sense The Internet has been the manual for awhile now.
"Flemish is the best language to get rid of phlegm". I'm Phlegmish & couldn't agree more.
Is it likely that a proof of P!=NP will give insight into designing more efficient algorithms? Or mostly insight into proving other lower bounds?
Preface: I am just another ignorant westerner. Any one of my impressions of these countries could be so wrong as to make my conclusions meaningless. If I'm wrong, please be gentle.

I believe there's some differences of scale here. China and India both have over a billion people. With 10x the population of Nigeria, even with identically bad property rights and legal systems (and I suspect that both India and China are somewhat better off in that regard than Nigeria), with that difference in addressable market you'd expect more startups out of them.

Russia -- which has a shrinking population now roughly the same as Nigeria's rapidly-expanding one -- is a more interesting comparison. I think the only difference here is that Russia was formerly a wealthy country (as opposed to a country in which a few extremely wealthy people live) which invested heavily in education, while Nigeria is a formerly poor one that has yet to catch up.

So if Nigeria were to suddenly pour as much money into education as the USSR did, you might expect a flood of Nigerian startups in a decade's time. But that would explain why there aren't too many of them right now.
I think Mark Shuttleworth's Thawte (bought by Verisign) is the only real example of a startup in the sense most on HN would think about it, at least at scale.

It's also worth noting he started Canonical which gave us Ubuntu.

But in South Africa at least, there are plenty of startups - again a much smaller scale than US or Europe - in software and Internet. Few people even in SA know about them, so I wouldn't expect pg to leap in to fund a bunch. Africa needs to develop it's own pg's. I actually think the approach of "micro-angel-seed-VC" is a good fit for the funding problem.
Basically this interest in P!=NP is like yielding to authority.

I would like to decide for myself what's worth studying -- not have it dictated to me.

Having said this, of course anyone who has an interest in computing should know what the P vs NP problem is about, but learning enough to be able to follow proof strategy for P vs NP is another matter.
The other design flaw is why it needs to reboot on every system update.

One of the things that I love about Linux is what you only need to reboot to use a new kernel. 95+% of system updates will activate without reboot.
The best sites for content
I love hacker news and I check it everyday for a stream of great information. I was wondering what other sites do people use for other really good content, it doesn't have to be business related.

Not the common, digg, reddit etc, but the underground ones :P
That makes a lot of sense. We are focusing on the GTD crowd and you're right that we need to differentiate with respect to other GTD apps because anyone that does GTD will have some sort of system already.

Thanks, that's very helpful!
I feel like you need to better define the purpose of the website, I like the interface but I find myself thinking "why do I need this?" and your website does very little to convince me that this is going to make my life easier.

Best of luck!
People have done it before on a WT visa. I'm not sure that the INS would treat you kindly if they found out was was going on though.

Other than I'm not aware of any good options unless you have a company to back you (L1/H1B), serious money (7 figures), family in the US (7+ year queue), or a Nobel prize (not kidding - take a look at the 'alien of extraordinary ability' visa).
You're right, and so we're going to change "GTD" to "Getting Things Done" as well as make it a link. Thanks!
Given the ad hoc way in which this peer review is being done on the web, perhaps there's a startup opportunity here...
Not so sure about that. JavaScript is a quite advanced language, below the surface. To be able to do anything non-trivial in JavaScript, you have to be a developer and have to have a good understanding of Computer Science.

Also, I don't do any "design", in the creative sense. I implement the design of my partner. So I think your terminology is wrong.
Defining new infix operators in Python
Ask HN: How much does it cost to browse the web on a Kindle 3?
After feeling disgusted over the prices of wireless data packages in the US, I noticed Amazon is offering its Kindle 3 with "Free 3G" access. Does that mean I can really browse the web anywhere for free, or only download purchased books over 3G? Also, does the experimental web browser support rich web apps like Google Maps and Gmail?
Read any economics paper on the issues involved in insurance and you'll understand why things are the way they are. Moral hazard abounds on both sides of the transaction, there are many other transactions that each party is a stakeholder to.

It sounds like you have an issue with the premium the company charges for taking the risk vs. how they are making their money as the only difference. Do you feel that the guy who leaves his doors unlocked and thus gets broken into a lot should pay the same premiums as you? (I assume you lock your doors / take other precautions)

Oh and your loyal customers they left because they saw an ad from progressive / geico about how they could save thousands on their insurance. Or conversely GEICO/Progressive see the rates you are charging and think about how much money they could make if they substituted their service with yours and then make you a "crazy" offer to sell.

Also, part of GEICO's rates are the investment genius of Warren Buffet, by making shrewd investments with the premiums they are able to discount the insurance rate by a portion of the interest accrued on the premium.
Navigating the Marketing Path in a Social Media World
UC Berkeley Students Denied Genetic Test Results
Hmm, would this be a contrarian signal to invest?
Who are you to say how I should spend my time?
If I had a good idea, i would probably consider applying, at least
I really enjoy using Historio.us. Here are some features I might consider paying for:

Update notifications. Store the page content, url, and date I historified a document. Alert me to any changes in the document; sort of like an RSS feed. Use the wiki format to display changes in the document.

I also like being able to see all my links at once. I am playing around with an idea here[1]. I know there is an "iframe = bad" mentality, but most places use them- more so with the ajax web. If all my links were to the right and there was a blank iframe that I could load them in on the histrio.us website you keep users on your page longer and increase your traffic. Combine this with the updated views and you have a nice little tool.

I would also like some metrics tools- why store it and not doing any thing cool. Maybe the ability to put pages in sets and query those sets for keywords, images, ect. Do something different than google bookmarks/delicious/et al.

Better facebook/twitter integration. Until you get on the social bookmark list and have your icon plastered on pages you should offer this directly. A icon beside an already historified link to facebook or twitter would be enough for a user to know what it is there for. "Jane just historified URL".

Other than that I am content with it just the way it is now. Keep up the good work.

[1] http://christopherwoodall.com/trendy/
I think the interest in P=NP specifically is for two reasons besides authority:

- Anyone with a little bit of CS or programming background can understand the formulation of the problem, similar to how anyone can understand Fermat's Last Theorem.

- There are only so many open problems that anyone can understand. Open problems are interesting to casual observers since they represent a boundary between the known and unknown, and since they invite the imagination to think up ways to attack them.

Once you've invested yourself a little bit in the problem for these reasons, I think it's natural curiosity to want to spend twenty or thirty minutes, or more, learning about the outline of a novel proof strategy.

That said, this article was a general introduction to what the problem is about, not a description of the proof.
I've thought about it some more.

Beware and embrace the slashdotting (insert digg, reddit, HN here).

The cache is both your killer feature and your risk. I hope it's statically stored or can be put in memory quickly... are you using Varnish?

Encourage it's use... if people are bookmarking using histori.us and a site goes down, you've just gained a very large audience to your service. But only if your site survives the onslaught itself.
960gs is awesome. You might also want to check this one out:
http://www.tinyfluidgrid.com/
Yeah I was referring to the smartphone market rather than the mobile market.

Smartphones aren't expected to reach 50% mobile market share until Q3 2011.
I don't think that's too surprising. The iOS development community is larger and more established. Should Android development ever make it to a similar scale, I'd imagine the community would be similarly complete.

Documentation, on the other hand, is entirely dependent on Google. And we all know how much engineers love writing documentation.
None of his personality traits matter until he fires his puppetmaster buddy Putin. And that just ain't gonna happen.
If the voting on your post is any indication, HNers are also eager to demonstrate their willingness to self-deprecate, even in total anonymity. Reddit also has this to a very high degree, but samples are rarer on HN so it is difficult to compare that aspect directly.
That's pretty fucked up. When the legal system has failed this badly, armed revolt is about the only option left.
You really should have a look at Wajam which is another startup that seems to have the same goal as you. They do it differently thought.
There's the pricing factor too... a population with a median income of between 2 and 10% of US median income simply isn't going to buy SaaS subscriptions in comparable volumes at comparable prices to US companies. For much the same reason, these consumers are also worth less in raw money terms to advertisers.
which means a lot less revenue for typical Y-combinator startups in African domestic markets even before transaction costs (quite possibly higher?) are taken into account.
What's funniest about your comment is you're arguing with hyperbole on twitter.

>>> Amusing, but only until you really think about it.

When I really think about it I think, What great use of the twitter character limit for up-to-date populist rhetoric. When I read your comment I think, True believers are so predictable. ;)
I am also curious about the situation when applying from Turkey, is it possible to apply with B1 visa? Are there any previous example of sth similar?
The US may be gentler, but I take issue with "properly compensated".

My grandfather owned a grocery store on the path of a new highway in Texas. The government bought every house in the neighborhood first, depriving him of customers, then made him an extremely low offer based on his now extremely-reduced revenues. Better than arson or threats, but not exactly nice or fair.
I think some of the other commenters addressed this well, but as for Russia, it's a terrible example and has a lot of the same problems that Nigeria appears to; Newsweek just ran an article on the subject: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/14/putin-s-russia-exile-busi... .

As for China and India, both countries have GDPs that have been growing at 10% per year for more than two decades, and not purely from oil or other natural resource profits, which appears true of what growth Russia and Nigeria have experienced.

That's not to say India and China will continue their incredible growth forever, or that either country is ideal for startups, but my impression (once again: might be wrong) is that despite the problems startups face, those problems are not as tremendous as they are in Nigeria or Russia.

In addition, as far as I know neither India nor China has produced any global Internet software product companies along the lines of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, or Facebook.
What about XenSource? I believe they were later than VMware, and they made a tidy sum when Citrix bought them.
Well, my one datapoint on this whole matter is that the overwhelming majority of scams on my sites come from that region of the world, so I'm about ready to write off the whole continent in terms of doing business. If I were to write a bayesian scam filter, "Comes from Africa" would be one of the most important positive signals.

I would assume that many other businesses have shared this experience and come to the same conclusion. Things are getting better, I'm sure, but they're not near the "worth my time" threshold yet.
India is known to be a very corrupt country too, but in my personal experience and the experience of others I know well, the on-the-ground-reality can be quite good. India is a vast country, so all generalizations are very likely to be both right and wrong and many many times of each, but where we sit in India (Chennai in the deep south - but this applies to Bangalore as well), India is a good place to do business. The main thing to accept about India is the general atmosphere of chaos, the feeling that everything-is-breaking-down-but-somehow-running, but if you can mentally look past that, there are huge opportunities.

The reason I say all this about India is that a western journalist could write a similar story about India or China, yet there exist many versions of reality in which the story would be wrong.

Both India and China export a lot of people too. But normally you would not describe that as "fleeing corruption" but more of "seeking economic opportunity." Is Russia any different from that perspective? I don't know the answer, I am just asking the question.
One of these companies, I think it is GEICO, was able to offer low rates because they only took drivers with spotless accident histories, and they would drop you after one claim. I'm not sure they still operate this way, because they advertise on a lot of mainstream outlets now, and before I remember them being almost a "by invitation only" sort of deal.
Thank you, I'd never heard of them! I'll have a look right away.
Russia is not a developing country though.
It may have been founded there, but only because that's where the rocks are and they can get away with running a cartel. It was founded by a Englishman and even then it was 120 years ago. Terrible example of an African startup.
How To Make a Solar Panel Review
Decision of Marc Andreessen as Interim CEO of HP
Using Ubuntu themes in Linux Mint
it doesn't support rich apps, and you can only browse wikipedia on 3g.
Here's a more scientific way of predicting crashes:

http://videolectures.net/risc08_sornette_fcrm/

"Most attempts to explain market failures seek to pinpoint triggering mechanisms that occur hours, days, or weeks before the collapse. Sornette proposes a radically different view: the underlying cause can be sought months and even years before the abrupt, catastrophic event in the build-up of cooperative speculation, into an accelerating rise of the market price, otherwise known as a "bubble." "
I suspect Andreessen is rather busy, as parter at his VC vehicle ...
A lot of them are on Buzz and the debate there is pretty cool (intelligent, balanced, active).

My concern is whether they have the right people to do "social networking" for the layman... i.e. the one who doesn't know VI keyboard shortcuts and just wants to upload a picture of their cat.
Technical Co-Founders Are A Myth
Demand Media Faces Harsh Spotlight En Route to IPO
We are using Varnish, but we're storing the sources in the DB (to take advantage of automatic compression and all-around ease). It's trivial to get Varnish to cache the entire source and invalidate the cache when the document changes (the public/private setting, basically, so it doesn't accidentally share a page that's been changed to private), so that's all good.

The biggest problem (by far) is disk usage. The rest of the service is very easily sharded, really, as every user is isolated. Solr is also fantastic (much better than Sphinx, in hindsight we should have gone with that for TP), so that can also scale very well (there's even an implementation of it on hadoop).

We'll add the caching feature to the front page as soon as we finish the current round of A/B testing, thanks again (that feature was basically an afterthought, so it was great that you noted its importance)!
From what I understood in India corruption is kind of societal. Government officials take a sort of 'cut' for doing things (this can be seen in France, however from what I understand in France it gets things done now rather than getting it done whenever), otherwise you're screwed.

From what I got in Russia the cut is an all level corruption, often with organized crime involved taking their own cuts.

Ex: Say in India you have to pay a bribe for a business license, in Russia you'd have to pay a bribe for a business license and then you have to pay for protection from the mob, then you likely have to pay protection from the crooked cops.

At least, this is how it's always been represented to me.
Part of me wants to vote myself down. Kudos to that.
Watching this process unfold has been extremely entertaining - solely from the perspective of watching how highly scientific / mathematical communities resolve these types of occurrences. There is a LOT of tip-toeing going on, and it seems there is a very established, methodical, and specific process that is followed by those in these communities. You have to wonder if some of these mannerisms could (should?) apply to open source development :)

I've attended college, but I'm not a graduate and never really experienced any of the higher-level mathematical courses, so this proof (and discussions thereof) are completely greek to me. But I can certainly tell that based on the discussions and claims the researcher dropped an A-bomb and the math and CS communities are abuzz.

For those that are in my situation - is there any layman's summarization that describes what this proof really means to the computer science community? Even the Wikipedia entry has me lost at the second paragraph.
hey! Thats my github profile. Cool!

BTW here's the issue thats tracking this http://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/issues/#issue/...

apparently another guy is working on a compass plugin for it. IMO if you use compass thats the way to go
Any HN people in Dubai?