skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the reply.

1) For what it's worth, the web dev part of the course was given a complete overhaul to bring it to more of an industry standard this year, and 50% of the course is now design. I intended to study business but a massive amount of the curriculum (in this country anyway) would be of little use to me. I've had business as a subject for the last 5 years and found the syllabus to be appallingly orientated towards only management - there was literally just a chapter on entrepreneurial activity. I also considered CS, but there's a lot on the curriculum that doesn't really interest me, and since I'm certain I want to specialize in web/design I thought I'd be more interested in this course. Java is actually one of the languages on this web dev degree. As for networking, I've joined clubs and societies to network with people from these other departments.

2) I would definitely take that into consideration. Unfortunately there's little to no startup culture where I am, but I'm working on it.

3) I've heard that many times, but so far haven't found many personal itches. However I constantly get feedback from other people about their own itches and see what I could improve on there.
Starting a parcel delivery company may be hard. Many people get round the problem by having stuff delivered to work. So, target people who can't do that, but use the same method: start a website where people can offer to accept deliveries locally to you. You nearby pub, old people's home, anywhere that is open all day.
I'm not sure what the business model would be, though.
As an interesting side note, the COO Vinit Bharara's brother is the US Attorney for Manhattan (direct Obama appointee) Preet Bharara. In the news fairly often.
I got -5 for saying 'cool'. I understand your post has to be informative, as opposed to mere trolling
This outfit owns 2.4% of Facebook, 5.1% of Groupon and 1.5% of Zynga.

On their operating business side, they're doing pretty well. Goldman expects their revenue to increase from $200 mil to $300 mil this year, and earnings should be up 70% to $104 mil.

Go go IPO!
I object yet again! Mastectomies surely offset the breast:testicle ratio to a statistically-significantly degree!
Because in the context we're discussing, it's an escape.

Sure, tiny amounts of cocaine act as a stimulant similar to caffeine. Coca tea is just fine and safe.

But a nose full of cocaine is way, way, way more drug than the tea contains, and makes you feel REALLY good for short while. Almost every single user ends up binging every last bit of cocaine they have on them, and staying up all night.
They do it because of the reward system it kicks off in your brain.
Will they end up chronically addicted to it? Not everyone, but the thing is, it has little to do with willpower, knowledge,or strength. Statistically some people can walk away... but you have know way of knowing if YOU are the person who can walk away. You might think you are, but that's meaningless. (And the thought that you can walk away leads to "Well hey, why not tomorrow night too? After all, I can obviously walk away!")

The same pattern repeats, more or less, for most habit-forming drugs - tobacco included. Alcohol actually ranks quite low on this scale, though it's far more damaging than many illegal drugs.

So back to the original question - why do people think it's an escape? Because it generally is - people do it to experience a different reality than their own, and personal risk. That's not necessarily bad, but it IS an escape... just like many other activities, like snowboarding or skydiving.... it just has a much higher risk factor.
HDNL as an organisation is terrible. Calling the only officially published HDNL number doesn't really help in getting a package delivered.

HDNL staff working at depots are far enough removed from the management chain that their interests are more closely aligned with the recipient - you want your package, they want to offload it and re-deliveries are a real hassle for them.

Looking up HDNL on http://www.saynoto0870.com and calling your nearest depot will get you through to a non-corporate human. You can have the deliverer called while you hold to find out what the situation is, you may sometimes even get to speak directly to the deliverer with your package.

There's a clear gap between HDNL management and HDNL delivery staff that needs fixing.
They did a similar thing to me the other week. Their idea of a safe place was on my doorstep, in plain view of the street. Needless to say it wasn't there when I looked.

As others have mentioned, the really annoying thing here was that I was working from home at the time and they didn't ring the bell. Surely it's less effort to ring the doorbell than it is to write out a card?
People have had similar problems with A1, a courier service Amazon has begun using in New York City.

Last-mile delivery is a notoriously difficult market to enter, for reasons that are obvious when you think about the logistics. I think it's telling that Amazon hasn't chosen to get into it themselves. They've got a ton of cash, relevant expertise, and orders everywhere that they could use for pilot programs. One has to assume they've considered the idea and decided to keep sending money to UPS et al. What would a startup do that they couldn't?
Thanks for the reply.

That's pretty much my train of thought, but I just want to maximize the potential.

Great point about figuring out something the competition aren't doing. And I understand about becoming a great hacker, that's why I haven't stopped learning despite not having solid project ideas.
Second Edition of Hacker5 Magazine Released
Defending Pyramid’s Design — The Pyramid Web Application Development Framework
I just filled out your questionnaire but I don't think I'll submit it, my thoughts don't really fit into the few fields provided, if I put that $2 is what I'll pay it won't make sense. I don't know if you remember me, but I asked about subscriptions back before you offered them and signed up once they were live. For me historious is something that's neat but something I can go with out, so sure I can afford the $6/m you're charging now but how little I use it makes it really not worth it for me. I've been a member since you posted about it on reddit and I have 166 historified sites, I use it to bookmark interesting sites that I might need in the future, I don't care for RSS feeds or auto-tweeting.

I'll probably cave and go for the $6/m thing, but I don't need any of the features so it feels like I'm paying for something I'll never use. The free package would be fine for me, all I want to do is use it to historify sites and search them. I think you need to find a balance between the features required for users and pricing. It might sound stupid, but to me if you had 2 feature for $6/m and I used them both I'd be more likely to buy than if you had 10 features and I used 2 for $6/m, because the "smart spender" in me thinks "Why pay for 10 features when I only need 2? That's me wasting $4 a month!".

The price doesn't matter to me, I love your service and I'd pay $20 a month if that's what you requested, but when you're selling 6 features and I need 2 it seems poor value for money, and what matters to most is value for money, however silly that is.
BitTorrent Records
When I still lived in the UK I was getting deliveries from Amazon through FedEx and DHL. FedEx was god awful shitty, I never got a single delivery every one was a missed delivery card, yet I'd get the card at like 2-3pm saying I missed the delivery at 11am. After regular complaints to FedEx and Amazon the service switched to DHL and I never once got a missed delivery slip mysteriously posted without a delivery attempt even made.
I don't like the tone of the article, suggesting that product failures are anything other than the natural course of events in software development.

Maybe I'm still upset about Wave...
Helicase is what unzips the genes, not RNA polymerase. RNA polymerase allows transcription (or creation of an mRNA molecule complementary to the given gene) to take place.
As far as I can see the cheapest Android smartphone you can buy on amazon.de costs €155. (It’s said LG Optimus in pink [0].) That still doesn’t make the $30 comment any less stupid but also shows that a phone with no contract and Android can be had for less than a third of the price of an iPhone without contract. (A 8GB iPhone 3GS costs €519 in the German Apple Store.)

[0] http://www.amazon.de/LG-GT540-Smartphone-Touchscreen-Megapix...
Its odd because this happened once out of the 6 times since march. Very useful when it works - but unfortunately very inconsistent.
See, my local CityLink guy is great. When I'm not in he'll either go out of his way to leave it with the neighbour, call back with my parcel later on in the evening or on one occasion delivered it to my office.
Because they have no shortage of cash to crank out new subs, and no shortage of very poor people willing to risk the journey on the chance of success. It's the simpler solution.

Plus, subs are inefficient - the regular drug busts around here (central america) , when they find them, are regularly into several metric tons, usually on boats that are inspected while refuelling. That's just what gets caught... which has to be a very small fraction of what passes.
By cloud I think OP means just linking or CNAME-ing out to multiple fully hosted services.
Scoreloop, OpenFeint, GameCenter are already quite established and comprehensive frameworks. It will be hard to catch up with any of them unless you offer something unique or unless you can identify and address some of the pain points developers might have with what they are already using.

It seems like it's a "late to the game" situation. However, the space is hot, so if you're clever you might put some pressure on those guys.

A little background:

I've assembled a team of devs, we've started developing our game ( http://traingame.tumblr.com/ - yes, shameless..), and we're currently favoring Scoreloop.

Convince me: Why should we choose Mogade instead?
$30 is sort of low to expect for any phone, smart or not. How much was a moto razr off contract?
Thanks for the reply.

That's reassuring to hear. I highly expect it's less about laziness and more about not being keen on the idea!

My expectation of success isn't really retiring at 17. It's just not having to work for some big corporation when leaving college. Hell, if I had a few million in the bank already I'm pretty sure I'd still want to work on startups. The money would just be good security and also help fund projects.
What would a startup do that they couldn't?

Please correct me if I am wrong, but there are no domestic delivery services that offer:

1. Realtime tracking.

2. SMS upon delivery failure or address confusion.

3. Deliver to you not to your home.

#3 is probably hard, but 1 & 2 should be fairly straightforward.
This is true unfortunately. Out of my high school class, probably half of technology-oriented people ended up either working directly for someone abroad, or moved abroad themselves.

It's a bit sad that all this effort / work doesn't stay in local companies, but there are simply not enough local opportunities. Outside of the big cities mentioned in the article, the offers are typically for 20yo with 5 years of experience and student-level wage...

One can only hope that some of the actually successful people who left will at some point come back to sponsor local projects.
How fortunate that in the West incumbents never benefit from government favoritism, or bailouts when they fail spectacularly.
Right-clicking seems to unselect a build order.
The cost of the phone is almost becoming irrelevant. The cost of the data plan is the real barrier to entry as it dwarfs the cost of the phone.
Thanks to this article, knowing what they think will help you simulate the game of future funding rounds.

I keep in my mind that the same thing can be said to entrepreneurs. talk to VC's like you know them in person to person.
The targeting seems off. I expected the towers to attack the enemies furthest along the path, but it seems like they might be attacking enemies closest to them.
That's not really a useful comparison, for several reaons. Toyota and Nissan were, at one time, the "Kia" of their day. Up until recently, Hyundai was known for nothing more than producing worthless junk and today they're producing a very well received (and relatively inexpensive) luxury car. The world changes. I just bought a Samsung Captivate which is not quite an iPhone4 but I'm quite happy with the minor downside for the ability to swap in batteries, avoid iTunes, be free from censorship etc.
Just a little comment about your "plans and pricing" page: the double negative of a cross next to "no affiliate links" is a bit confusing at first.

I am used to ticks and crosses showing features that either are or are not present, in this case though there is a feature (even though its a negative one) "affiliate links" that is not not present. Kinda obscure.

Perhaps you could just have a smiley or frowning face next to each feature, that way you would see that the paid plans have more "good" things? eg:
:) - tags!
:) - filter by date
:( - no tags when historifying
:( - no rss
:( - affiliate links

Or something to that effect.
Yes, exactly, thanks for clarifying. Just wanted to be fully buzzword-compliant, I guess...
My startup has a slightly similar pitch to developers (shameless plug: http://www.famigogames.com/developer). Well, we DID have a similar pitch at one point. After many customer development discussions, we've iterated on our pitch greatly and I think you should too.

Keep in mind to whom you're marketing here: developers. The average casual developer doesn't need a ton of help when it comes to adding neat new features to their games. After all, they're developers; they can build those features themselves and probably enjoy it thoroughly.

Where they do need help is in marketing and sales, and they need more help than you realize. (Speak to several casual developers and you'll quickly realize that it's both very hard and quite expensive to compete with the major players.) For us, that meant changing our messaging from "Features! Yippee!" to "We bring you a huge new base of customers via these features, and here are metrics and stories to back that claim up!" Features for the sake of features as the value prop, when the developer is probably already losing money, didn't work well for us.

If you can adequately explain how integration leads to dollars, then your developer base will skyrocket. This part of the story is missing from your site, imho.
> Categories like this tend to support just two or three brands at the top of consumer mineshare.

The consumer electronics market seems a lot more varied than two or three brands holding mindshare. Walk into a store to buy a TV and you'll see at least 7 brands you recognize (Sony, Toshiba, Sharp, Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Mitsubishi). And those are just the asian ones.
Thanks. Quickly tried to improve it with a shorter and better description, along with a short FAQ. A small start, but totally need some screenshots to get that picture is worth more than words thing going.
Old HP computers (the 95LX, 100LX and 200LX) still sell for upwards of $100 on eBay. Still, there probably aren't enough enthusiasts to justify launching a new product.
Oh, and one more point. If you can prove that integration leads to dollars, you can drop the free angle. Developers are quite happy to share the wealth if your secret sauce leads to sales.
Thanks for the reply.

Great point about the cross-referencing, will take it into account.
My point is that people using Windows XP must be used to ugly type, because type in general looks ugly on Windows XP, so it's not worth worrying about. The only solution is to render everything as images, or use Flash, or something equally horrible. Why bother if ugly type is par for the course?
Terrible post, but it's sad to see TC lose its edge so quickly after the AOL acquisition. I'm not sure AOL understands the secret to TC's success.
The article is just really poor, and mostly shows the author's complete lack of knowledge on how science is done, and even what it is about. One the biggest reason for not opening your code is to avoid given an unfair advantage to other researchers: academic research is extremely competitive, and the risk for free ride is significant.

I am all for opening tools more, but I don't think reproducibility is the reason for it. In any case, reproducibility does not mean everyone using the same software (with the same bugs) - it means independent experiments.
British Columbia didn't even get a mention.
In a competitive labor market, a dev should be paid close to the marginal value they generate. And I should generate close to the same value wherever I'm working. (with, maybe, a 20-30% premium for working local do to increased efficiencies).
Thanks for the reply.

I'm far from rushing at the moment. Launching one of the ideas is exactly what I intend to do, especially after this thread.
Shutl (http://shutl.co.uk/) is one startup trying to shake up this market. I believe their trick is to aggregate the spare capacity of multiple same-day couriers. They claim they can offer delivery in 90 minutes, or delivery during a specific hour instead of "between 8am and 8pm, probably", at a cost comparable to standard single-courier delivery.

Their marketing right now seems to be targeted at retailers rather than consumers, since they have to get retailers to use them as a delivery option before consumers will care.

Really hope these guys can deliver (badoom-tssshhh) on their promise.
The offers page was a temporary addition to the server, so it was lost on restart.
Its missing from more than our website :) Launch early and try. Great advice though and delivered in a non-crushing manner, much appreciated. Food for thought!
Investigating the world through computation is a relatively new phenomenon for science.

Science is discussed and advanced through papers. These papers aren't an exact recording or rendition of what was accomplished, but a discussion of the idea, methods used, and eventually a conclusion. Methods may be algorithms, but it doesn't necessarily mean the actual source code.

The idea is that the actual code that a scientist used isn't terribly valuable. If another scientist wants to verify the conclusions, they should just whip up another bit of code (or, do the same experiment) themselves.

Asking for scientists to contribute source code is not wrong, it just isn't done (to my knowledge) with other modes of scientific exploration.
in my experience, it's common in academia for code to "float around". often it's not officially open source or distributed, but you know someone who has the code for some paper, so you can use it. there's even a few textbooks in this state (for years).

i think the real reason for not releasing this code is time---you might be surprised at just how much effort goes into making a paper/talk/article polished. sure, you could just release the hacky code you used to do your calculations, but you'd like so much more---for it to be useful, for it to be a credit to you, for it to also do XYZ. research code is efficient in that it gets exactly what you want for the paper; it's rarely usable by anyone else. there is essentially zero payoff in academia in publishing code, and so there's no time to fulfill these desires.
Or, why I spent ten years in an attic on a silly proof.

It was something like ten years Andrew Wiles spent on it, wasn't it?
Nabokov's Ada is given similar hypertextuality here:

http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
But would you be happy knowing you're working as a cheep code monkey? Working for a company abroad, I'd expect salary to be close to their local level. I don't think serious developers would work for 1k/mo in the US and even if that would be "ok" salary in PL, I would expect more from the employer.

If you pay the minimum, then that's what you get in return. (or as smanek put it - you generate the same value - why should you be paid less)
Thanks for the reply.

Yeah I'm trying to discover said problems in any way possible. Possibly could with a startup but there's very few anywhere here, especially in web/tech. College seemed like the best way to network, and I don't mind having it for a fall-back plan since it's free.
Exactly what these two said. I was reading through the copy and kept getting distracted by the slides scrolling down rather than up
I like what these guys did with one of his boards :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8hL3Eiqh_c
The issue here should rather be "I don't like Facebook putting artificial restrictions on what I can do with my data."

FB restrictions > Google restrictions
Yep, I don't doubt it varies with employee nature and workload. My beef is with the company's standards.
When I was living in the UK (York, later London), DHL regularly failed to deliver stuff. Once they even claimed my address didn't exist.

Not that it's much better here (Vienna), TNT, GLS and DHL tend to display "out for delivery" on the tracking site multiple days in a row, prompting me to stay in all day, yet no delivery (with some excuse on the tracking info, and no slip in the letterbox). They of course do finally turn up when I'm out at the supermarket after running out of food. My theory is we're located at the end of their run, so if they don't complete it by the time they feel they want to go home, they just make something up.

The Austrian post is even worse. For some reason amazon tend not to show the tracking number for items sent by post even though they have one. I've had orders which hadn't turned up 8-9 days after the shipping notification; after a bit of back and forth amazon revealed the tracking info, which I then took to the local post office along with ID. The parcel was there and one day from being sent back. As if to mock me, the next day there was a "you were out" slip in the letterbox for the same parcel.

One upside of living here: I once had a box of RAM sitting on my doorstep untouched for a week or so - I'd received no dispatch notification and went on holiday, expecting to come back to a delivery failure slip. (I'd ordered it a week earlier, when it was "in stock for next day dispatch" - not amazon though)
Thanks for the reply.

Ha, that's an interesting analogy! Will take it into account and sample all the ladies.
Ping me - I've got some ideas. bradcater@gmail.com
That page is giving a 403 error now. What am I missing?
Github pages has worked great for me. It's free, you don't really have to worry about anything, and it's all Git.
One could argue the US Government still is - but the list of reasons they would provide is long and may not contain any bullet points related to drugs.

America is the land of the free (for all). I consider the steady-state employment of government powers at the federal level nothing more than a score board on a death match server.
The thing about articles like this is that the authors are not interested in a real analysis of the situation. It is just unvarnished cheerleading.

"Android" is always going to sell more units than Apple's phones, because Android phones are much cheaper for the cell phone stores to buy and sell. They are to the phone store as the Promaster lens is to the camera store. Comparing meaningless graphs like percentage of market share is deceptive, and it is clear from his analysis that he doesn't actually want the people who skim his little blurbs to actually understand what they are seeing. If he did, he'd show a graph of the dollar turnover of the various app stores.

Short version: you can roll into any phone store in the world and pick up an iPhone clone, and it will be cheaper for you, and more profitable to the phone store.

Refute if you can.

On the edit: typing this on my iPad and yes, a soft keyboard, while pretty good, still isn't good if you a re a touch typist. Corrected for spelling errors.
Building the Simple Enterprise
The video is excellent :-)
Happy to help! It definitely looks compelling, and you're well positioned to do some great things here. Best of luck, and keep us updated.