skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plus they were working in Clerkenwell, London (around the corner from my work offices) and rent around here isn't cheap. Did they really need 12 employees to launch?
Another way to read that is it encourages sock puppet story upvoting.
Ask YC: Math problems
Hi Everyone,

I'm going traveling in se asia for 3 months fairly soon. I'm planning on doing a lot of lazing about and reading. I'd quite like to work on some math problems while I'm there. I've been enjoying working through Concrete Mathematics but it's too heavy to take with (I'm traveling light). Does anyone have an suggestions of a source of good interesting problems and exercises? Either somewhere I can download them or in a book that's small enough to carry with me would be good.
Indeed. The primary metric by which bloggers are judged is popularity, which we long ago dismissed as being a terrible measure of value. Popular books, popular music, popular movies, popular television -- these are rarely our best works.

It's as though we've forgotten this on the web though, and re-instituted a hierarchy of who matters that is based on meticulously engineered stacks of grade-A bullshit, which, surprise, surprise, favors peddlers of distraction and get-rich-quick schemes of all sorts. We've replaced "Old Media" with "Tomorrow's Old Media".

Technorati even equates machine-estimated popularity with "Authority", a dangerously loaded word and wholly inaccurate besides. Certainly popularity means something, but it doesn't say much at all about whether any person, even someone in the ostensible target audience, should pay any attention at all.
Only the elite deserves their very own pixel.

(I recently joined the elite - that's why I'm smug.)
I won't succumb to facebook anytime, soon. Sorry.
One thing nice about the Swedish systems is that students can retake the final exam. So, yes I will fail up to 30-40% of a class on the first exam, and then they usually buckle down and most can pass the second exam. Of course I make the second exam harder so most of the student who do pass, get a 'C' at that point. Kinda of sucks for me having to write and grade all these exams though. :-)
Twitter Woes Discussed By Someone With a Clue
Just work on the Collatz Conjecture. It's trivial to understand and it'll keep you busy :P
Linux newbie here. Used ec2 image for over six months now. The only problem I had is that sometimes google did not answer my linux questions on first page, and I had to tweak the search query a little.

Yes, starting is a little weird, but once you create your ami(the os) everything works great. There are free public images ready for development and I am using one of the Right Scale CentOS images.

Six months ago I did not know anything about PuTTY, WinSCP, Crons, nohups, mc, installing software packages easily(which really surprised me). Thank you Yum.

Backing up your data is needed, but it is needed anywhere anyway. I've restarted that instance once in six months and it was not needed at all. Just had to test restart functionality :)
Sorry if it came across as flammable, it's just not something that you hear about - startups working on vista. And all the startup photos you see are full of macs.
http://miraclefruitman.com/

Buy it here, would love to hear reports from people who try it...
It's a great find, but a huge security hole. The browsers have got to patch it, even if it breaks some CSS functionality.
Here's why I like this article. Unlike most commentators on Twitter's problems, Kellan has 1) worked on systems that scale (flickr) 2) is technical and 3) has inside knowledge. He doesn't mention Rails once.
One problem is that there's no such thing as 'health care'. It's like saying everyone should have 'transportation'. Does that cover bicycles? A Ford Focus? A Rolls Royce? To 'do what is right', 'transportation' should include air travel, too, right? So, free coach? First class? A Gulfstream? And so it goes with 'health care'.

The many products under the umbrella term 'health care' are scarce goods. Long experience shows that in virtually every respect the best way to allocate scarce goods is on a market. All systems (including the present one) used to distribute 'health care' that ignore or distort markets are doomed to frustration and failure.

Alas, creating a truly free market in health care is on no mainstream politician's agenda. I don't expect our situation to improve much soon.
Ooooohh - cute downmodding . . . I think this is the last time I post to this board, the modding fascism is MUCH too High School for me.
Purchased ;) heh.. it was forced on a public who didn't want it. Do you really think that if Vista was not preloaded onto computers, just XP, that people would have actually gone out and bought Vista still?

Anyway... I think I'll sit the next round of this out. O/S wars are so over.
Adding Search (with Lucene)
Use Your Mobile Phone to Stay Organized On the Go - Stepcase Lifehack
I wonder what other creative uses there are for this. For example, if someone visits digg you know they are likely to be a techie. If they visit seattle.craigslist.com you know they are likely to be in Seattle. If they visit drudgereport they may be a news buff. You could create a collection and if there user uses your site a lot you could try hundreds of things and pass them back to the server....interesting...
You should come to Germany. We have a lot of history if not much else in the east.

Johann Sebastian Bach lived around there.
I think he means, specifically, "have sold or IPO'd a company you founded".
Add an affiliate tag and you can get a 10% kick-back on my taste 'infusion'... or maybe Microsoft should add it to their new CashBack payments.
Virtually no modern VC gets back $250k-500k decisions to applicants in 24 hours.
There are markets run inside of some large private companies (Bloomberg being a good example), but these are available only to employees.
Whoa... thats $90 for 30 berries. I would pay for a couple but I really don't need $90 of miracle fruit that is probably hazardous considering:

1. I dont know this guy
2. I dont trust this guy
3. I dont trust his shipping either
You cannot simply set up a "private stock market" to bypass SEC rules. To purchase non-registered securities, you need to make more than $200k/year or have more than $1MM in assets, and attest to "accredited investor" status.
What country are you from? Just curious--most Americans, even liberals, are not quite so willing to pose the bogeyman up against free speech and property rights.
> Is there anything out there like a micro-VC or investors club for tech startups?

Yes, there are many of these.

> Say n people put up $x each to fund a project. What are the implications?

You would have $nx. :-)

> Would it work?

That depends on what you mean by "work". People do it. Some of the people who do it even make money doing it.

> If so, who's in?

Ah, there's the rub. The trick is:

> I'm a hacker who'd love to invest in other people's startups. I, of course, don't have enough savings on hand to do any significant damage.

If you don't have your own money to invest then you need to convince other people to let you play with their money. That is not such an easy thing to do. Starting an investment fund is not fundamentally different from starting any other kind of business. But you can't just join the VC club and start raking in the cash any more than you can just join the entrepreneur's club and start raking in the cash. At root they're the same club.
Something that angels, VCs, and "seed funding" ventures all have in common is accredited investor status.
"disruptive"?
"We have won an important victory that will force Dell to live up to its responsibilities and pay back its customers for profits that were pocketed but not deserved. This decision sends an important message that all corporations will be held accountable for the promises they make to consumers."

I think the message is more like:

"You can try to screw up your customers for profit, but if you fail you'll just lose those profits so you have nothing to lose, try it!"
Amazon To Offer New Streaming Video Service In Few Weeks
Mozilla guns for Guinness world record with Firefox 3.0
Too bad networkworld.com couldn't deduce that I hate splash ads, and breaking a story up into three pages. :)
Well, he's named in the NYT article and this is something that needs to be shipped frozen overnight. I believe he is the only person that grows miracle fruit in the USA. So if you don't trust him, no miracle fruit for you.
Thoughts on Microsoft and Yahoo from Barry Diller
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture
Clue: Command Line User Environment? ;)
No, I don't think that would generally happen. Clearly some people would buy the OS on its own (I did, anyone building a high-end computer now might).

But I don't think that about any operating systems. I don't know what percentage of OS licenses come with hardware, but it has to be pretty mammoth.

And I don't think it's clear at all that the public doesn't want it.
Read Katie Hafner's work (in "Cyberpunk") on what happened with the Morris Worm very carefully, and Paul Graham's involvement with that incident seems a bit more interesting.
Berlin unveils 'crewed spaceship'
I think it takes a lot of energy to raise "super-flesh-growing-bovines", the trees would have to work in a different way. Not sure what you mean by chemical feedstock.

Also, bovines are not popular in the CO2 scare-opinions.

Not saying that the trees couldn't work, but so far they don't exist, so they are nothing but a miraculous cure. Thinking about it, their mentioning makes that article lose a lot of authority in my opinion.
Technically it is medical schools that are kept in short supply. Most medical schools operated at full capacity, and about 2/3 of qualified applicants are turned away.

This is certainly fixable, though the time horizon (medical school construction/expansion time + doctor training time = 10-15 years) is longer than most politicians like.
We're 95% Google, 2% yahoo, 1.7% live/msn. Of course, these are stats reported by Google.
and in safari
How can they claim no PS or Diff fluid? If they have power steering, it will need lubrication, even if it is electric pump driven. And even if the diff is open (non-LSD), the gears will need lubrication. That is a bit fishy to me..
Now and then I work through problems on projecteuler.net without anything more than a basic calculator. I've gotten 17 of them so far (1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 15, 17, 18, 19, 24, 52, 63, 76, 164, 190, 191).

Also, there are a bunch of contest problems on John Scholes's website: http://www.kalva.demon.co.uk/ . It seems to be down at the moment, but I'm sure it'll be back soon. Of the contests I'm familiar with:

AIME is for fairly advanced high school students (say, on average, one person per high school might take it, and most won't get any of them right)

USAMO is a step up from AIME -- the top ~150 high school students in the US take it each year

IMO is a step up from USAMO -- basically, don't even bother

Putnam is an exam for US university students -- it's generally considered difficult, since the median score is usually 0, even among those willing to take it in the first place, but A1 and B1 are usually pretty easy on every test; I would say it's between AIME and USAMO
Anything by Martin Gardner.
No word about Vista's DRM and the difficulty this is causing many multimedia content providers and others. Economist David K. Levine called Vista "one of the colossal business blunders of all time" in the following article in the Against Monopoly blog:

http://againstmonopoly.org/index.php?limit=10&chunk=0...

Here's an excerpt: "the demand for degraded computers that can play "premium content" is limited. People just don't buy computers to play movies on them. Michele and I previously dug out some numbers on the size of the "premium content" industry versus the IT industry. According to the RIAA, the value of all CD's, live presentations, music videos, dvds in 1998 was 13.72 billion US$. According to the SOI, in 1998 the business receipts of the computer and electronic product manufacturing including both hardware and software was 560.27 billion US$. I looked up at the census 1997 revenue in the telecommunications industry: 260.50 billion US$. So: are people going to give up their general purpose computers they spend $560 billion on to access less than $14 billion in content?"

From an economist's perspective, a $13.8 billion industry is negligible compared with a $560 billion industry.
Holy crap, no kidding. I count 23, including the one on the guy's signature... maybe that is his signature? :)
Jerry Yang: “We’re Done”
Ask YC: Why do people submit TechCrunch stories?
I'm guessing 90% of the active visitors to Hacker News get the TC RSS feed and already have plenty of visibility to everything posted there. If you want to comment on the TechCrunch post, doesn't it make sense to do it there? I'd rather see activity here around more obscure news and posts.
I've always called those "pity passes", as in you really failed, but the prof took pity on you and bumped up your 45% to 50%.

I know that at my school I need an average of 60% to graduate with an honours degree (not that that matters, because I need a 70% average for Co-op).
Gee, I routinely ignore queries from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Clay vs. Shirky: Here Comes Everybody review
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/resources.php is a good source of problems. I'd just stick with USAMOs (click on the "USA" link), they're varied and of pretty high quality.
do i need to be accredited investor if i'm helping my friend and he is readily giving me equity in his startup?? does model like YC requires such accredition? if yes, then i think the law is not favoring startup growth, is it? : there has to be some way out or may be rules are only for the people who are investing over million $$.
Québec, Canada.

If most Americans defend spam/outright lies/defamation/deliberately inacurrate and misleading information/gratuitous hate speech in a misguided attempt to protect free speech while simultaneously waiving all their rights whenever Bush utters the word "terrorists" then I pity them.
This issue has been raised before, to which some said they don't follow TC and appreciate those stories showing up on HN.

Personally, I agree with you. I think it's pretty lame that almost all of the daily TC stories get posted here, regardless of what the article talks about.
you didn't submit it

There's nothing wrong with submitting your own stuff. To make the front page, people still have to vote it up.
Free ideas. Just add execution.
I can't tell if this is a joke or not, but if it's serious it's not a good idea. Working on one impossible problem is a good way to get frustrated as hell.
I think Seattle says: "whatever"
I am not a lawyer and am probably wrong. But, the way I understand it, if you "buy" equity in your friends startup, you can at any time demand your money back, or sue your friend.

There are all sorts of weird little rules about equity people ignore. For instance, if you have an LLC, there are rules about people drawing salary and simultaneously holding equity in the company. Most probably won't bite you in the ass if you're just working with friends on a company, but they may take on significance when you try to start your own private VC firm.
some of the data is free, the article claims they also licensed rights to data from other sources.
I'm suffering severe internal ambivalence; this is either great or terrible.

Business part of Jacob's brain: "Great"
User part of Jacob's brain: "Terrible"

I wonder how the public would split? And then I realise there will always be more users than businesses.
I read the TC comments to gauge public opinion and the comments here to get understanding, perspective, and ideas. Whenever I'm on TC, I feel like I'm at a horse race surrounded by people who are passionately debating which horse is going to win. But no one there seems to know how I could become one of the horses. That's why people should keep posting TC articles here.
Because there's always a greater fool. Not that I don't enjoy reading TC, but come on, we don't need duplication just to keep a couple of non-TC readers happy.
I totally agree. The reason why I unsubscribed to TC is because the news there will be echoed in so many places. Digg, Reddit, TechMeme and Hacker News.
Techcrunch posts NEWS. About software startups. They are the preeminent news source and incredibly relevant here, even when they are talking more general business (like Yahoo/Microsoft) Get used to it and please stop complaining, at this point it is just annoying because Techcrunch is not going to be banned. There are greasemonkey scripts to filter out domains from this site if you never want to see Techcrunch again.

http://internetducttape.com/2008/05/23/filtering-reddit-and-...
You could print out a couple Project Euler problems. Most of them can be solved with pencil and paper, but most people make programs to help them out. They're quite fun.

http://www.projecteuler.net
We're now just going around in circles.
Maybe instead of trying to change everybody else's behavior, you could just solve the problem and move on. If you subscribe to news.yc's rss feed, write a filter. If you visit the front page, write a greasemonkey script. This is not a hard problem.

I also subscribe to steve yegge's rss feed, raganwald's, jeff atwood's, joel spolsky's, paul graham's, xkcd's, TED's, and so on. It would be ludicrous to try to get people to stop posting links from all the sites I subscribe to.
How do will they close this vulnerability? Make it impossible to check the color of text with javascript? I don't think that's going to happen. Besides you could easily check a different attribute.

Maybe browsers should restrict the :visited attribute to one domain. Or maybe just base it on a daily history instead of your all-inclusive one.
"Ha!" I thought. "Why buy the book when I can just cleverly search Google for the right keywords?" But then: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&suggon=0&client=f... . This is getting to be more of a problem: people pose questions to a bigger audience than they pose answers to, so Google is likely to find the question rather than the answer.
Guys Like Us Avoid Monopolies …
I second that. It's really satisfying to take a crack at these. The forums are fun too, as there's usually several approaches to a given problem.
I wonder if 'the point is complex enough, then you have to give up on conveying it to certain people' is true.

That Feynman could explain fairly abstract physical concepts such that laypeople could understand them may imply that one needs to understand the 'complex point' better before trying to explain it.
Yes, people sell things, oftentimes using the internet on "web sites."
MySpace Uses Gears to Grind Down Server Costs
Monkeys Control a Mechanical Arm With Their Thoughts
Blockbuster to launch in-store movie download service
Maybe the market could be run out of a foreign country? Or perhaps the investments would be funneled through a holding company that was SEC registered? In other words, the holding company would own the stock in the startup, and the small time investor would purchase contracts from the holding company that would pay back cash in the event of a liquidity event for the desired startup.
Yahoo's Yang: "I Understand My Obligation To Stockholders" - still talking to MS
Yeah that's fucked up right there.
Reading a TechCrunch article on HN is different than reading it on from TechCrunch; the discussion generated on Hacker News is often very interesting and high-quality, and I think is the reason most of us visit the site in the first place.
If you are looking for a physical book, try Problem Solving Strategies (http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solving-Strategies-Problem-Boo...) or Problem Solving Through Problems (http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solving-Through-Problems-Larso...).
I make it a point NOT to read TechCrunch.
Okay, maybe it's not mindblowing, but Microsoft's OS doesn't need 'saving.'
We just got the Wii Fit yesterday (great job, Amazon, on that whole "pre-order" thing, getting it to us only a week after release), and it's made of awesome.

It suffers a bit from some of the same problems as the Wii-mote--it doesn't quite behave the way it seems like it should, and the further from your feet the body part it tries to measure is the less well it works (the heading soccer balls game is a bit frustrating, because it just doesn't respond very well), but the skiing stuff is great and very responsive. The girlfriend also likes the hula hoop game. Now that I think of it, I like the hula hoop game, too...not so much playing it myself, though.

Anyway, the wide array of controller options makes me want to write software for the Wii. A live music performance system would be wonderful with a Wii-mote, a nunchuk, and the balance board. I'm a little giddy just thinking about it. Might be a good time to learn one of those new-fangled music languages...maybe I'll drink the Lisp Kool-aid and go with CLM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_Music
The 16-year rewrite
It does very much so in the sense that users are not viewing it as an upgrade worth using. Sure Microsoft is wining on the front where it is preinstalled on all new systems, but they haven't given anyone a compelling reason to get Vista, or 7 for that matter.
thx - too tricky though - i wish there is some knowledge base available for this kind of investments.
Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out
Ugh. The absurdly misleading title totally ruined this article for me.

Usually when you put someone's name followed by quotes that means, ya know, they actually said something. Isn't that supposed to be journalism 101? Don't put quote marks around something unless, ya know, it was a direct quote? And not your personal interpretation of body language and tone?
Dell Mini Inspiron, Their First Mini Laptop
True, and Chris (from TC comments) is not here.
> If you subscribe to news.yc's rss feed, write a filter.

There's an easier technique with no code required. Access http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/ and list all of the terms that you don't want, for example, -alleyinsider -codinghorror -techcrunch ( http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?... ). Then subscribe to the RSS.
Bah.

I love working on impossible (or rather, impossibly difficult) math problems... especially on airplanes when I get sick of reading. The point isn't to solve them but simply to understand why they are hard. When you get a glimpse into the complexity that is these problems, you begin to see why mathematicians go insane.

Collatz is great for this because anyone can understand it and anyone who understands rigor can try to prove it.
TC has many stories, if a TC story submitted to YC gets points it means it's worth it to read it.

If your "90% guess" is right, then if the story gets points in HN, then the fact that "is worth it for a read" is only increased.

I don't see where is the problem.

Oh, you know I guess the 10% reads Paul Buchheit blog, or 105% reads Paul Gragham essays from his site, 60% reads Philip Greenspun's blog, 25% reads Aaron Swartz blog. With the same logic no story should be submitted.

I am sure you are going to say but their posts are not subbmited every day. Well that's because they don't write so often something of general interest, which means that TC because of the fact that is writting too many stories they have higher potential of hitting something of general interest more often...

I don't see where is the problem
International Olympiad in Informatics Problems
I'm guessing 90% of the active visitors to Hacker News get the TC RSS feed

I'm guessing it's closer to 10%...
I was thinking is that possible to use Gears, BrowserPlus and Flash to do something useful.