skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have visited four cities in western Europe in the last ten years: Paris, Toulouse, Marseille, and Barcelona. Of those, only Marseille was not actively planning and/or building a new subway line while I was there. They're certainly not on the scale of East Asia, but it's hard to claim they're in a "stasis field". Or at least, you'll have to extend your exception to France, maybe.

Now, US systems are a different story; of a dozen or so cities I've visited recently, Portland is the only one I can think of that was actively building.
Well, how am I supposed to know if he's genuine, I'm not his psychoanalyst. And I don't think it matters. I don't see how he can change anything - that's the problem.
We are * really * liking the idea of the Dropbox referral model. Definitely.
I like that idea. Thanks!
P≠NP proof update
On the 'net with companies one hasn't previously used I think the barrier for "this company might be scamming me" is so low that anything that looks like a half-truth should be avoided. But it's probably just me!
Firefox about:config

Set geo.enabled to false.

Not clear how to do the equivalent in Chrome yet. What's alarming is, in my brief search, there does not seem to be an easy way to retroactively go back and delete permissions formerly/accidentally granted.

Same thing with html5 storage (offtopic but related). There is likewise no way I know of to browse what exactly is stored in html5 storage via the browser (preferences or otherwise).
Persuasive Essay Format  Tips
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In retrospect, the traveling salesman problem was actually an impediment for me to understand the P vs. NP question. Reasons:

1) Formally, P vs. NP is presented as a binary YES/NO question rather than a "what is the smallest number such that <something>"? Only after you grasp the Y/N format of the question are you shown the trick where you can convert any problem in FNP into NP by converting it into a binary Y/N question with the help of a binary search. If you are presented initially with the TSP as the canonical P/NP problem, it is unclear for a while how it fits into the formal presentation

2) (If my understanding on this point is incorrect, I will be glad if someone disabuses me of my misconception):
Sometimes, P vs. NP is presented as "problems to which it is harder to find the solution than to verify a solution once it's given". TSP is not actually one of those problems: if someone hands you a possible solution, the process for verifying that it is indeed correct is equivalent to finding it in the first place.
Perhaps you should give me a break with you screaming about jails. My wife's parents lived in an older house in historic district of downtown Kazan. When the government "took their property" to rebuild the area they compensated them by a much nicer and bigger apartment in a great neighborhood. I am just pointing out this is not uncommon to relocate folks for the common good in many countries.

Presumably you're expecting to be mistreated automatically just because you're in Russia and this happens to you. I don't believe there are any grounds for that assumption. Granted, chances of that happening in Russia are higher but as I mentioned earlier, on the grand scheme of things I (and most entrepreneurs I know) find those risks to be insignificant.
Perhaps the lowering of barriers for a web type startup also makes large IPO exits harder? Since any hacker can copy it in China, Russia, Brazil and Israel.

Your perspective is that Super Angels are basically taking the place of VCs for certain scale of funding, which was previously not very popular (100k-1m range).
If you're being sincere, I suggest that this is the generally-held position on this thread of discussion:

A) A lot of people are immensely fascinated by questions in theoretical science and mathematics, including P=NP.

B) A lot of people enjoy learning about things regardless of obvious utility. Personally, my choice of topics to spend time studying has nothing to do with whether it will pay off for me at some point. It's a pleasant luxury of modern life that many people can afford to do that.

C) If you are in camps A and B, it seems extremely arrogant and insulting when you suggest "Why this?" and "I think people should think more carefully about how they spend their time." Since you seem to have no perception of why anyone is fascinated by this work, it appears completely nonsensical to suggest these things to communities populated with a bunch of people who are clearly interested in it, or to readers of a big blog post discussing it.

If you really have something to say about points A or B, or something else, I wish you would say it instead of wrapping it in these bizarre, judgemental insults.
The business practices of De Beers have been less than stellar, however De Beers was founded in South Africa, has been headquartered in South Africa and is 15% owned by the Government of Botswana. I agree that they are a poor example though as considering them a start up though would be a bit like calling Ford a startup, both companies are a bit beyond that stage of their lives.
I use Google Bookmarks: http://www.google.com/bookmarks

It already merges my personal "Web History" (things I search for on Google) with my actual bookmarks (things I click 'bookmark' on a bookmarklet - http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... ).

The key feature of Google bookmarks is that searching the bookmarks always searches the content of all bookmarked pages and the web history pages. It returns the results with bookmarked pages at the top, and web history below.

It also has tags (they call them labels) and collections (they call them lists), and collections are shareable, and tags are searchable (find X only in Erlang tagged bookmarks).

You can import bookmarks from other services, and export all bookmarks to XML (one of the reasons I stay with Google is that they allow me to move).

My question to you is: What do you offer that trumps that functionality that I already have? Why should I move? Snowman?
19%, actually
Forget causation, there's not even correlation there. What about all the startups in China, India, Russia?
I didn't mean to imply that Vibram produced a mediocre product that took off thanks to a book and a trend. Vibram did do their design homework, and the shoe itself is well-designed. My point is that without Born to Run and the "natural" footwear trend, it's unlikely Vibram's product would have the following it does without that.
ISLAM
Come on, is this really news?
Could anyone from outside the US give advice on the process for getting a visa? I'm from Israel, and am wondering how difficult the whole visa situation is, and where I should start researching about it.
Sounds like atom = snippet
Hi rueleonheart,

I can tell that you're a C# enthusiast, but I'd just like to say something. Looking at your posting history over the last four days you've blessed us with 23 postings about minor, pretty much trivial, points of C#.

I admire your energy, but can I ask, please, give it a rest? This is "Hacker News" and I would guess that most of the people here really, really don't need assistance at this level.

To provide support for my point you've got a total of 7 up-votes, and 4 comments. One comment pointed out an inaccuracy, one offered a small correction, one offered a work-around, and one - I like this - pointed out that this stuff is trivial and doesn't really belong on Hacker News.

Since you're clearly a C# advocate I'd really be interested in deeper insights about the structure, or the philosophy, or "gotchas", or neat tricks. These simplistic syntactic points are, well, pointless.

Let's have some content. I'm ready for a main meal, not constant appetisers.

Thanks.
The bugginess/underdevelopment of its linux plugin is one huge issue.
Well, the snowman is pretty awesome... There are other features, such as the ability to share bookmarks on your personal site (http://stavros.historio.us/) for an example, automatically add things to "read later", one-click bookmarking, automatic sharing...

A few features that are coming are the ability to import RSS feeds from other places, as well as more social elements (and, of course, support).

For you, though, David, I'll throw in a free subscription!
That's the odd thing, I saw them one day and then they went away again. It's no big deal, I was just wondering, thank you.
I don't think that IPO exits are necessarily harder because barriers of entry are coming down. I think two things:

1. It's a hard economy in general, which is suppressing IPOs overall.

2. The IPOs that the tech community are "used" to were during artificially high periods, setting the watermark at levels that realistically, not many companies can touch.

Addressing your point about copycatting, I think that there will always be competition abroad and it will be successful, but not nearly as successful as the original idea. There are countless Groupon clones out there, but only 1 has earned a $1.2b valuation. Further, I think that an integral part of the nebulous equation that makes a successful startup is the founder/team. Getting the right people behind the right idea is absolutely crucial, and if you don't have the right people, it will almost always fail.

I think that Super Angels are offering startups a metaphorical stepping stone where previously, financing was tough. As the niche grows, however, I think that the stepping stone will start looking more like its own plateau.
There is one thing and one thing only that would help Africa and that is the dismantling of the trade walls between Africa and the US+EU.

Africa's current financial ecosystem is deeply flawed as there is no way or very little way to spiral outwards instead of inwards.

The current scenario is like saying to Microsoft that they can only sell their products internally in the company. It creates an inward spiral that have very hard terms for growth and is deeply depending on money from the outside.
Article is spot on about the corruption - if anything, the tone is too mild - but overall I can't say the situation for businesses has become worse since the 90s. Police methods have simply displaced blatantly criminal methods from the ecological niche :-) Yes, today businesses get taken over by corrupt police and courts. In the 90s it was done by kidnappings, soldering irons and automatic gunfire in the centre of Moscow. And also corrupt police and courts.

Disclaimer: I'm a Russian living in Moscow. Wouldn't dream of starting a business here. Life as a programmer is pretty nice, though.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587250

Much discussion there ...
True Story:
One of the first startups I ever joined had a consulting business. I was employee number 12. 4 of the employees were bringing in enough revenue to fund the whole company while we developed the main product.

We started talking to investors, and the first thing they said was "We won't consider you if you keep the consulting business, shut it down."

So the company shut down the consulting business. This meant that we were now on the clock.

The investors then waited until we were just about to go under and offered us a bridge loan....on their terms. No negotiating power.

Then finally, they closed the first round of VC.

Needless to say the company capitulated on all the terms of the term sheet for that first round.

Later, it turned out that we were ahead of the market by about 5 years.

So, the company failed because they listened to investors who gave them bad advice. The advice was useful for getting better terms for the investors.

Now, what would have happened if they had not shut down the consultancy-- they could have negotiated good terms, and wouldn't have needed a bridge loan, and they could have hung on until the market took off. Might have been a delayed payoff for the investors, but 7-8 years is not that long to wait to get a home run, especially compared to the complete loss alternative.

IF the investors had invested what they did without the requirement to shut down the consultancy, then the company could have added the employees they wanted to, and had both the investment and the profits from the consultancy to invest in the primary product.

The end result would have been a better primary product and a better return for the investors.

Blanket advice is generally not good advice. Don't run a SEO consultancy when your primary product is videogames. But if you're primary product is videogames and you can fund much of your overhead with a few employees and a licensing deal for that engine, then it is a good thing. It is easy to tell if it makes sense if the income more than covers the cost of the employees dedicated to the "side" business. And reality is, this side business will often present opportunities or your main business and generally underwrite advancement of the main product on someone else's dime.

If you're a couple college kids and this is your first startup, then maybe you're not able to keep focus on the main business when you have customers for a consultancy.

But when they are aligned and the consultancy covers hiring extra manpower so that more total effort goes into the main business, then giving up the consultancy would be a bad advice.

So, if you can do a similar split with time-- where you spend 4 months consulting to cover expenses for 12 months, then you're in a position analogous to this company. In that case, it makes total sense and the advice to "never do consulting" is bad advice.

You'll be better off in your TC application or any other aspect of your business having those 8 months of free time to just work on the product... because you consulted for 4 months.

The alternative is likely keeping a day job the whole 12 months and not being able to focus on the startup.
I take it mercury-free pill form.
Your biggest problem, as someone pointed out, is that nobody understands what AtomBox does.

I land on your page, and the first thing I see is a screenshot of "categories" and "atoms." Most people will leave at this point. Some will read further and see that "AtomBox keeps your GTD lists in one place." Okay, so it's [another] GTD app.

If you're targeting the GTD audience, then realize that they most certainly already have a GTD app. This means you have to convince them to switch over. Unfortunately, none of the 6 bolded features you listed are "killer features." The "full-featured, for free" part is a little enticing, until I read on to see that I have to pay anyways.

Go google "best GTD apps" and figure out what makes your app different. Make a short video or draw a diagram signifying those key points.

Good luck.
Actually... I've just tried your site end-to-end and you do have a killer feature and it's not the thing you are making most prominent.

The killer feature is the cache.

To know that what I bookmark will have a snapshot at that moment in time, citable and impervious to changes that happen to the source.

That is a fantastic feature.

My advice to you would be to highlight that. Bookmarks against things that can and will change, disappear or move are moving targets... what you're offering here is a permanent bookmark as it stood at that moment in time.

That's a big deal, definitely enough to make me consider trying it out. But you need to communicate that this is possible... it would really help researchers and those who use bookmarks as a searchable source over a long period of time (which is when the effects of things changing becomes most obvious).

I think you should possibly look at features like verifying a source (it looks like you cache from the browser, which the user could've modified) and allowing tags to be shared with other users or publicly. Basically... allow academics to use this and to include web citations in their papers and such with histori.us providing the verified cache.

Perhaps even extend the bookmarking functionality to include the ability to highlight and add notes to part of the bookmarked page.

Permanent cache = big deal.
That's (again, probably) not true, although none of the recent flurry of blog posts have explained why not (possibly because it's hard to make this convincing if you're not familiar with mathematical research).

The point is that solutions to such problems as this do not exist in a vacuum: even with the million-dollar incentive for solving the particular stated problems we do not expect that they will be solved without building a network of related sub-theories and sub-theorems, reusable tools which will also help with solving future problems which we don't yet even know enough to formulate.

Fermat's Last Theorem was a good example of this: nobody cares about sums of nth powers, but everybody cares about the Mordell conjecture, Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture etc. which were proved along the way. FLT itself is just a line in the sand to illustrate how far we've come since 1637.
I agree that progress, if any at all, would be slow. President Medvedev recently toured Silicon Valley, opened a Twitter account, and proclaimed Russia "open for business". Unfortunately, with articles like this I don't think he will get many takers. However, I do think such efforts can plant the seeds of improvement better than doing nothing at all. That's why I mentioned a long term view. This article looks at Russia now, today, and we see people even is this thread talk of leaving. But if there were at least honest attempts to change things for the better, maybe people wouldn't be in such a hurry to leave, hurting chances for progress before they even get started.
"What's the math of those annoying guys who never send kisses in text messages?"

I give popular science talks, and in one we ran a "Math Improvisation" session where people were invited to ask about the math of a given topic. that was one of the questions. I spoke for 5 minutes, and got a standing ovation.

One day I'll have to write it up.
You can replace Russia with almost any developing country and that sentence would be equally true.

For some it would be war more then corruption and for a very few it's not true at all, but they won't be developing for long.
If I was an average user and saw GTD in the first line like that and didn't know what it meant, I'd probably lose interest in the site. The definition is in the copyright text at the bottom, but some people may not make it down there.
How would you characterize the traction or stage of the companies that receive funding?
"I really like the idea of introducing difficult problems like these to outsiders (I'm an outsider in this instance) for the sole reason that it greatly increases the odds that someone may come out of left-field and either solve it or at least provide an insight that helps solve it."

Really? I kinda doubt this happens often (or even at all) with hard Mathematical problems like P vs NP. We're talking about problems that tend to have so much history and theorizing about them that it would take enormous effort just to understand what is known about what's hard.

Does anyone know of any statistics on Mathematical problems being solved by "outsiders"?
Clickable: http://www.findsignal.com
Ah, thanks for that, you're right in that we don't publicise it almost at all (and we should). As for the sharing, you have your personal historious at:

http://buro9.historio.us/search/

You can publish sites there (including tags) and refer people to it by giving them a link of the form http://buro9.historio.us/?q=some+query. Personally, I think that's pretty handy for answering the question "do you have any sites about X?"

No items are made public by default, but do note that, when you do make an item public, you are also sharing the cached version.

Thanks again for the feedback, and I'm good for that free subscription if you need it!
I personally fear for them too. HK is probably not an issue but for some of the other places, I find them risky.

That being said, if you can't find money in the US/Canada for your idea, do whatever you need to succeed. If I lived in those countries, I wouldn't give a crap and just try. At least I'd have an idea of what to watch for better than us looking at those countries from afar.
Every third order my company receives from Nigeria is a scam. The cheap, effective and over reaching solution to this issue is to simply stop shipping to Nigeria. This is the path I chose and the one that most small business owners will choose.

Perhaps we're missing out on some money but the cost in time and effort to capture that little bit of money isn't worth it relative to other projects. I'm in business to ship product to those who will reliably pay, not to figure out which of my customers will actually pay ahead of shipment. If I can't know, I won't risk it.

I don't think my experience is unique. I think this situation has repeated itself in most small businesses in America. I think this group of individual experiences has been generalized as "It costs too much to do business with Africa". Unfair? Sure. Poor Logic? Absolutely. Am I going to change this? No. Its not worth my time and effort.

I'm also going to be very skeptical of business deals or services originating from Nigeria. Do you see a mint.com or inDinero taking off in Africa? Would you personally trust your financial data to such a service and if so, what are your reasons given your lack of recourse through rule of law?

I believe what I'm saying here is what most are thinking, but won't say. I want to lay out what it looks like in the trenches on this side. I fully realize that I am half of the reason that this situation exists. Until I need your money more than you need my services, I do not see it changing. I know that is harsh, but I sincerely believe it to be the case.

I hope things improve. I hope bad experiences are replaced with good ones and Nigeria specifically and Africa generally are looked at as reliable business partners. I hope you create a ridiculously successful business. Most importantly, I hope you'll take this post in the spirit in which its offered.
> Neuroscientists are split between a traditional view that the brain is organized as a hierarchy, with most regions feeding into the "higher" centers of conscious thought, and a more recent model of the brain as a flat network similar to the Internet.

"Higher" centers of consciousness seems to be a predictable bias given our view of humans in relation to the outside world.

What are these ambiguously "higher" centers of conciousness that are most advanced in humans? I think it is succinctly described as the following: analogical reasoning. The capacity for not just associating relations between things, but the capacity for relating relationships.

What makes humans unique is our massive capacity for analogical reasoning. Humans have by far the highest capacity for analogical reasoning in the animal kingdom, with bottle-nose dolphins coming in a more distant second and great apes third.
Google to acquire like.com
Will we see any news RFS posts? (http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html)

Do the existing ones still apply?
I have no idea what will happen in 10 years, but I don't see training costs as an issue. When 99% of work is done in a web browser and one or two desktop applications, switching OS's is pretty trivial.
Warren Buffet once said, invest in what you know.