skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I disagree that it's completely unapproachable. And I take a slight bit of offense that you think my comments are disingenuous. You don't sit down to "solve" an open problem. You sit down to learn things about it. And your claim that you can't learn anything useful or discover it's intractability is just flat wrong.

Collatz has two parts, one that there are no cycles, and two that there are no divergent trajectories.

For example, you can trivially prove that there are no cycles of length 2, or even 3, or 4. It's not hard, at all. It's not unapproachable. It's easy. For a slightly more difficult problem, you can try to generalize your method of proof to show there are no cycles less than some number N, given some criteria. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

I've developed my own proof about the smallest possible cycle. It was actually pretty good. Once I decided it was legit, after alot of work and refinement. I read a bunch of papers on the issue from actual mathematicians. Mine wasn't as good as theirs, but still not bad.

Or, you can categorize numbers by how often, after undergoing the 3x+1 step, they divide by 2. For example, the number 3 only gets divided by 2 once (3->10->5). You can very quickly find the patterns to show all the numbers that divide by 2 once, twice, and so on.

You can go farther with this pattern idea, as well... by finding the sequences of numbers that, for example, divide once on the first iteration of the Collatz function and then divide twice.

Using this idea, you can prove, for example, that there are no divergent sequences that only divide by 2 once at each step.

I have a few dozen pages in a notebook with a whole bunch of interesting but likely useless facts about Collatz. So please don't tell me it's "unapproachable" and nothing can be done except stare at it dumbfounded.
Try campaignmonitor.com. These guys rock (and no, I'm not affiliated with them).
I second this - I've never really found Steve Martin funny, but I thought his book was very interesting and different from most biographies in that it was about success achieved not through prodigious talent but just years and years of grinding it out and slowly improving.
Intro to Innovation
Very cool, seriously impressive. I love the simplicity of the resize, copy, delete, and move handles.

My only quibble- something has to be done about the logo.

I get what you're trying to do... make the logo look like it was designed with the whiteboard itself. Not a bad idea, but I think you should use it more abstractly, like the logo is inspired by the idea of a handwritten writeboard (not quite so literal).

The thin black lines with fat blue outlines is a little funky.

All around though, great work.
I must have read close to 50 biographies.

I love "Titan" about John D. Rockefeller (in many ways a hero of mine).
and
Losing my Virginity - Richard Branson (so honest and realistic).
Were they recognized at the time?

Michelangelo did get one of the most prestigous jobs of his time, but what about the rest of the now-recognized great artists - were they more popular than the hacks of their day?
> The path is the goal, or how is that saying translated to english?

Probably most often heard as...

The journey is the destination
http://code.google.com/p/pyrfeed/wiki/GoogleReaderAPI
cl-smtp http://www.cliki.net/CL-SMTP
I don't know much about Michael Arrington, but what you're saying about PG is a crock. Money is just not the main motivator for the YC partners.

Also: "a 6% cut on ticket sales"? So... PG and MA get a slice of the money startups spend? Or of the money invested in startups? I think you mean they get a cut of the lottery winnings. Try petitioning the Firefox team to add AnalogyCheck.
No, that was Andy Sudduth, who was sysadmin at Aiken then.
I can't remember who, but someone observed that (according to them) the reason people will emotionally invest in teams, players, artists etc., instead of just cheering for whoever performs best at any given time, is that they like to bet something. There's a risk if you have a favorite team or player and they might lose, because then you lose: so, there's some excitement to be had not just over the play but also the ultimate result.

How this relates to the present topic I don't know; hell, I'm not even sure this hypothesis is correct. I just think it's interesting.
The commenter. Under current law you have copyright on something you write as soon as you write it.
I would advise doing it yourself. It isn't that hard, and assuming email is an integral part of your service, I wouldn't trust anyone else with it.

In terms of specifics, I like qmail. In terms of spam management, there are lots of things to do. First and foremost, have daily monitors on all the major email providers. Get on all their feedback loops. I've found that contacting them with problems is annoying, but does work if you are following all their guidelines and are persistent about it.
Impossible. Lisp, as is well known, lacks the necessary libraries.
impossible ??
Privacy Concerns Stunting Growth In Online Advertising 
"Federal, state and consumer discomfort with Google Inc, Yahoo Inc and other companies tracking consumers' online behavior could slow the growth of Internet advertising."
Doing it yourself is hard, especially if you want any hope of getting past the major email providers spam filters. We deal with this every day.

Current stats say that our % of users who have signed up that make it through email confirmation step is about 22%.

Around 33% or so of our signups have yahoo.com addresses, and only about 12% of those manage email confirmation.

It is similarly bad for hotmail. GMail used to be quite good, but has slowly gotten worse over time.

I'd be very curious to know if others are measuring these things, and how you are doing. Feel free to contact me directly as well.
The real estate here in Bulgaria may be a bubble too, although it hasn't bursted yet. Vacation properties' prices are already falling. Few people can afford to buy a place to live in Sofia. For those who can, quality is another problem. There are a lot of expectations connected with future better standard of living (result of entering EU) factored into the prices.
YC only benefits from a small percentage of startups. The rest on average decrease our returns, because some compete with the ones we fund.
First of all, I'd advice NOT doing it yourself. (sorry epi0Bauqu).

Spammers ruined email and it can now be pretty hard to pass some spam filters. Of course, 95% of your emails will make it through if you do it yourself, but the last few % can be hard to get.

I recently started sending through Fastmail.fm for our website and it's been working fine. I simply setup sSmtp on our servers and everything that is sent through Sendmail is now relayed through Fastmail.

Another company I've considered is authsmtp.com. I haven't tried them, but their pricing seems to be very reasonable. The reason I didn't go with them is that I already had a Fastmail account (and I hate paying twice for the same thing ;-) )

We did Gmail before, but setuping Postfix to relay through them can be a major pain (mainly because of the way they authenticate). Fastmail (and I assume authsmtp) was a no-brainer.

Another thing that will help delivery tremendously is SPF. Make sure to set it properly (with hard fail if possible, ie: -all).

Good luck!
I never really thought about how accessible this kind of research actually is to kids these days. Really cool article.
My business relies heavily on e-mail (we send e-mail proposals on behalf of hotels to their customers), and we use AuthSMTP (http://authsmtp.com). $168/year buys you 10000 outbound e-mails per month.

That said, guaranteeing 100% success with the delivery of e-mail is pretty much impossible. You just can't control what the recipient has installed in terms of mail client, spam filtering software.
"Made in America" by Sam Walton turned out to be an unexpectedly good read.

"Let my people go surfing" by Yvon Chouinard (climber and founder of Patagonia) is an all-time favorite.
ha, ha
I use SPF from a slicehost IP for membership confirmations, more-than daily mailings to most members, and occasional announcements. No reported failures yet and all my tests have worked. I figured hitting a large percentage was enough. When volumes get high enough, I'll worry about what could only be a very small percent of failures.
Yes, some people don't get vaccinated due to cost issues. (It's a small group for many diseases but they are out there.)

What I am saying is the real cost of treating a broken leg is less than what people with or without insurance pay in the US. When you seek treatment the hospital / doctors office does a quick "what are my chances of being paid back" and then they charge you Total Cost of Treatment * Profit / (pay back%). So someone with insurance might pay 500$ * 1.2 / .8 = 750$. But someone without insurance might pay 500$ * 1.2 / .5 = 1200$.

Now if relative to the rest of the world our system was cheaper or more effective then I would say stick with it but it's not. At the most basic level Insurance does not lower costs because it does not prevent coverage.
i volunteer to dispense this large tax windfall. i promise i'll do it fairly. i also require a large hat and must be referred to as 'Oh Benevolent One - Giver of Life, Taker of Evil Corporate Profits'.
Yeah it's a problem but !=problem doesn't neccesarily = solution, it may just be another stupid problem.
That sounds unreasonably low. You might have a different problem than just spam filters.

I've worked on several business that had to send confirmation emails (via our own servers), and the figures were never anywhere near as bad.

If there is any way that your users can benefit from signing up other users (e.g. if you run an MLM site), you might want to look into whether your stats are not being falsified by a few users submitting vast numbers of email addresses into your system.
Honest to god hockey stick growth

Can someone explain this?
Following the above, I was relatively spam free for about 3 and half years. At the high point of my last company, I was sending about a million messages a day. There would be spam flare ups of course, but I would get them resolved through persistent contacting of support staff. Now that I have essentially no users in comparison :), I'm not sending hardly anything, but I'm still monitoring and am not having any spam problems.

In my new services, I did have issues originally, especially on Gmail. So there was an initial ramp up with spam issues on the majors. But like I said, after following all their rules and then persistently hounding their support staff to investigate, I've gotten past their filters.
How many outbound emails does FM allow?

EDIT: Looks like for the Enhanced service, they allow 2000 messages per hour. Cost $40/year.

http://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html

EDIT2: Looks like that's inbound :(
I think that's the for the free version. There's now a paid version. It's not cheap depending on how many email accounts you need for your startup ($50/year per email account), but it will give you a reliable email provider that gets you through a lot of spam bins

It's good to note to that you can do aliases for each account too
It would help if you could provide some more info of what you do and what you are looking for. Thanks.
Let's think about it:

* Was huge in the 80s

* Had a big downturn in the 90s

* Everyone speaks fondly of it today but doesn't really want to go that way?

It's gotta be Reagan.
Guestimating around 100K+ per month initially. Google Apps Premier allows 2000 per day per user. Which isn't bad for $50/year. That is not a bad option but quite manual.

Authsmtp seems pricey in comparison.
Thanks.

I would posit that the celebrity nature of professional sports is the biggest contribution to making them becoming huge money-making enterprises in the last few decades. If you made all players anonymous, I would bet money that the enterprise would shrink and become a more local phenomenon.
CM focuses more on newsletter management, rather than automated emails like confirmations, invites, etc.
"Yeager"
The biography of Chuck Yeager -- first test pilot to break the speed of sound. His description of going above 80,000 feet, the subsequent failure of the aircraft and what he does to regain control is chilling. The book's a good read. Direct and to the point -- like the man himself.
Mock Roles, not Objects
pdf version: http://www.jmock.org/oopsla2004.pdf
Do you mean the Eee PC?
Looks like the dupe-detector is broken?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203122 links to the same URI.....
VerticalResponse.com works pretty well for sending out email campaigns.
I think it's unreasonably low too, but haven't figured out a way to solve it.

You can benefit by signing up other users, but this is not a very often used feature. It's not an MLM site, but a subscription chess service.

We track signups by ip and by browser cookies, so we're reasonable sure these are distinct people. Since we switched to the freemium model, there is little incentive for people to make duplicate accounts now, so I was hoping to see activation go up.

We do domainkeys and SPF and I have gone around the block with hotmail two times already.

We send approximately 25k emails a month, the bulk of which are sending out confirmation emails to people that signed up, and then a thank you for those that confirm. The rest are forgot password emails and invites.
http://www.danablankenhorn.com/images/hockey_stick.jpg

http://www.jleung.com/main/system/files/images/hc-2006.GIF
For newsletters, ConstantContact.com is THE standard and what I recommend to all my clients. They make sure that ISP's don't block your email, report on bounces, spam reports and provide statistics on opens, click-throughs etc.
Speed Up with Wordpress and Gears
Campaignmonitor seems to be "permission based", so you cannot send out Invites since invitees gave no permission. A current user deciding to invite another doesn't cut it as "permission".

If permission based is OK for your needs, AWeber is top of the line (www.aweber.com)

Here's a similar discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190633
I second this. Crazy expensive for large lists, but it worked like a charm.
No problem, I'm used to being contrarian.

Hard fail can send people who use email forwarding to their spam folders.
Let's put on a show
What do you make of it's data protection policy? Zattoo shall make reasonable efforts to protect personal data. Is it stringent enough?
I'm assuming your forward and reverse DNS match?

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2007/12/05/sending-email-servers-bes...
I would recommend other biographies over his autobiography. He flatters himself and omits too much.
TechCrunch UK - The Hospital’s mashup of real and virtual networks
J Paul Getty - As I See It.

Carl Icahn (unofficial, out of print) - King Icahn
I found Cato more interesting. The Cato vs Caesar rivalry almost has a good vs evil dynamic to it. A Caesar biography should be required reading.

On the subject of evil people, Mao's biography is great. It's hard to believe people so nuts exist, and that people will follow them.

Albert Speer's autobiography is also good.
Clever we are for a Moment | Tech Jaws
Project Euler: Test Your Skills by Solving 195 Math Algorithms
Again, with a guy like Gandhi you're going to understand better from a frank biography than his autobiography. He was a deeply flawed man in many respects.
Kiva: Improving People's Lives, One Small Loan at a Time
I'm not sure what you mean by "quite manual?"

You just need to set up the Google Apps service manually; everything else (including creating accounts, new addresses, sending emails, creating email aliases, etc.) is fully "automatable" via their API; with wrappers available in Python, PHP, C++, Java, Ruby, Perl, and more....
The default qmail install will accept and queue incoming messages for accounts that don't exist on the system, and bounce them later (usually to an unrelated, innocent address) if the account isn't created.

Did you do anything in your installations to address that problem? If so, what was it?
Yeah. "It's about enhancing/enabling communication with the whole world" is a far cry from "I'd like to match up my peers' harvard facebook pictures with farm animals on something like hot or not" (http://tinyurl.com/4vb8dy slate.com) - I imagine the valuation for the latter wouldn't have been as generous, nor its reach as comprehensive =)
yes, sorry - guess the brand did not really infiltrate my mind...
one thing i learned at art school: having crummy paint and worn brushes doesn't mean you can't produce a great piece of work.
Neat. I knew about the Morris worm, but never connected it with YC's Morris.
Whatever provider you decide to use (and whether or not you decide to host it yourself or use an ESP), you should:

A) be sending from your own dedicated IP address (so that spammers sharing your IP address don't cause all your email to go to spam) and

B) work with a deliverability provider such as ReturnPath or Habeas.
I'm working on an application where I need to send emails to 10,000+ users. The emails can be sent: multiple times per day, daily, weekly, or other. The content of EACH email is completely custom HTML (not swappable fields, but sort of like a custom RSS feed in an email.)

Can anyone suggest a solution that allows tracking of opens, bounce backs, and other standard metrics?
Assuming you're looking for a slightly hacker oriented biography then I can heartily recommend "The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Inventive Life of Robert Hooke" by Stephen Inwood.

It gives an interesting insight to what it might have meant to have something of the hacker mindset in the 17th Century, and his connection with some of his contemporaries (Newton, Halley, and Wren notable amongst them) add to the general interest. Plus he was a supremely odd and cranky person.
Jason Calacanis: Poker ace with a Twitter problem
That's a great piece-- Atwood at his best.

The lesson that "When good is dumb, evil will always triumph" is a simple one, but surprisingly hard to put in practice.
Akamai Details Winners, Losers in Broadband Race
An iconic middle east image is found to be a hoax
Yes -- anything by Smullyan is a pleasure to read. I think much of it is out of print, but should still be findable. "Lady or the Tiger" and "Satan, Cantor, and Infinity" were both good reads. "Alice," as well.
"look like".

It was actually made with Dabbleboard itself (except for the word "BETA"). I had the general idea for the logo, and I thought to myself "which is the easiest app for me to make the logo in... oh wait".

It's just a placeholder for now, and will get replaced eventually.
Zattoo is illegal (in the UK), as it doesn't have any partnerships with the TV channels as well as the fact that we have to pay a license fee and the TV Licensing people can't track "illegal" users of the service.

And to be honest, TV is crap. Here in the UK we have online catchup services for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 only Five is missing a catchup service. And if you want to watch live news coverage BBC News (24) streams video via the BBC site.
Mercurial Hosting using hg-admin-tools over SSH
It seems like a lot of YC startups have more partners than competitors, but maybe those are just the ones most visible to me, e.g. disqus, clickpass, tipjoy. Snipshot, one with a lot of competition, still has more than twice as many partners as competitors. The only YC company I know of that was stopped by competition was Kiko, and its competition was not a small startup.
I mean to say that if you need additional quota, you have to sign up/add a new account. It's one of those "you-wish-it-was-automated" thing.
Mhddfs: join several real filesystems together to form a single larger one
I found Crazy Horse fascinating. He was this eccentric loner and then much to his dismay thousands of people started to follow him around in a time of crisis because he seemed to know what he was doing. Then he had this bizarre christ-like death.
I was hoping it would fit in 1024x768. How many toolbars does your browser have enabled (in addition to the address+tab bars)?
> As I’ve programmed in various capacities and looked at hundreds of thousands of lines of code over the years, I’ve never once thought to myself how the task would have been easier if that supposed missing feature were truly there.

I think we've got a Blubber here.

> Ah, reply the nay-sayers, you only think that way because you have never known Feature X and how it could help. To which one must reply: hogwash. [...] If having Feature X really would make my web application development significantly easier, somebody would have already written a language or environment that used it.

Supporting Feature X is one thing; supporting it in a way that makes it worthwhile to use is another.

PHP's anonymous functions are a perfect example.
'Missing link' memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?
Unfortunately some people think that means there's no point in seeking out good brushes and paint. (or worse, that good brushes and paint are an elitist myth)
The main problem with your essay is, I think, confusing "academic (ambition)" with intellectual. There are just not the same and do not necessarily go hand in hand.

Does having an intellectual conversation in cafe in Harvard happens as easily as it does in Paris. How are people of what's going on outside their discipline, or their country? Those are measure I would use.
I totally disagree with this essay, but wow is it nicely written.
Software and Tutorials for Instruction in Symbolic Logic
It's sad that this was even written.
Very cool. Now it only needs an API, IM backend and SMS'ing ;) Twitter should hire Yariv :p
Just thought you should know... your app caused a crowd in my cubicle when someone walked by and saw me playing with it. They asked what I was doing and I told them what it was and everyone had a "damn, thats cool!" feeling about it.

nice job!
but the point is, wouldn't having all the brushes you need and all the colors/paints you need ... aid you create more art ... or just make your life better in anyway

no body said PHP or Java are unusuable, the argument is usually that using Groovy, Perl or Ruby, just make working more interesting fun and rewarding, just like having more brushes and colors as you paint

a great painter can create amazing art with just one color
i would argue that an even greater painter can create even more mindblowing art with thousands of colors

i am saying this because many people argue that the sign of a good programmer is one that can write any program using even the most primitive languages

but its still equally impressive to create a program using many differnt design patterns, and complex programming language features ... got me ... it takes a lot of brains to wrap your mind around those advanced feature and use them, and remember to use them

whats the benefit? it depends, but if it only serves boosting the programmer moral and motivate him to create more useful programs then this should be enough for more software vendors who care about hiring motivated employees
> Javascript's ability to do graphics is very limited; you have to do hacky 1pixel divs

There's <canvas/>. It can even be used with IE these days: http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/
Most services with primarily user-generated content have already covered their bases; check out the reddit ToS ("Rules of Usage," item #3) or digg's ToS (item #6) which dumps all their content under the CC umbrella.

http://reddit.com/help/useragreement
http://digg.com/tos
Akamai Releases State of the Internet Report
as do I. the important stuff hits techmeme (which I pull the RSS feed to) and/or HN.

I do however read TC:UK, @mbites does a pretty good job there without pollution from mike arrington's insufferable soapboxing/linkbaiting

I'd love to be able to just pull Eric Schonfeld's TC material and leave the rest to rot