skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wikipedia says it (roughly) converges if e^(−e) ≤ x ≤ e^(1/e)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration#Extension_to_infinite...
Stay away from .co at all cost. We tried registered irealty.co when it came out since .com and many others TLDs didn't have irealty, and we really wanted that name. We've put the .co in the logo to emphasize that it's not .com, but people kept telling us that our logo has a typo - it's missing the m the at the end. We ended up ditching irealty all together after that.
Go2 Media Assets Acquired By Poynt For $450,000 (After Raising $3 Million)
You can configure a redis DB using the maxmemory flag instead of setting expiries, so yes it can be used as an LRU cache.

Probably not as fast as memcached, but one situation where it would be appropriate is if you're already using redis in your stack for something else (fast writes). Rather than adding another piece of complexity to your stack you can instead get double use out of redis as a cache as well.

See: http://antirez.com/post/redis-as-LRU-cache.html
Southern African All Newspapers
The Hole Hawg analogy is also used in Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line. He used to provide the text for free but I can't seem to find the link anymore. http://www.nealstephenson.com/command/
Youtube Testing ‘Watch Later’ Feature
I've never needed a supercomputer to see the Mandelbrot and Julia set! I've seen fractal programs even on DOS based systems, fractint was one of my preferred applications almost 15 years ago, the computer was an old 486 with 16MB of RAM.
Super technologies that will change the face of football
Rolls Eyes

Someone here hasn't heard of Georg Cantor.

(More to the point, this is only a paradox if you assume that there is only one transfinite number. A brisk tour of "Infinity and the Mind" by Rudy Rucker sufficed to disabuse me of that idea some years ago. Time for a re-read, I think.)
1. Rent-A-Green Box
Entrepreneur: Spencer Brown *
Product/Service: Environmentally friendly moving supplies, delivery and pickup
Start Date: 2005
Startup Costs: $7 million
Revenue: $2.6 million in 2009

2. Mabel's Labels
Entrepreneur: Julie Cole
Product/Service: Personalized, permanent labels for kids' stuff
Start Date: 2002
Startup Costs: About $10,000
Revenue: $4 million in 2009

3. Fatheadz
Entrepreneur: Rico Elmore
Product/Service: Sunglasses for large people
Start Date: 2004
Start-up Costs: About $500,000
Revenue: Estimated $2 million in 2010

4. Stave Puzzles
Entrepreneur: Steve Richardson
Product/Service: Hand-made wooden jigsaw puzzles.
Start Date: 1974
Startup Costs: About $5,000
Revenue: $2.5 million in 2009
Ranging in price from $125 to $5,000, these puzzles are made of cherry wood, covered with a dry-mounted image drawn by one of 100 licensed artists, and individually hand-cut into as many as 2,500 pieces. Bill Gates has one, and Barbara Bush gave another as a gift to Queen Elizabeth. "We try to make them hard to put together," said 71-year-old Richardson, who calls himself the company's chief tormentor.

5. Texas Driving Experience
Entrepreneur: Dawn Stokes
Product/Service: High-performance driving lessons and retreats
Start Date: 2004
Startup Costs: About $500,000
Revenue: Estimated $1.8 million in 2010

6. Litecubes
Entrepreneur: Carl VanderSchuit
Product/Service: Fake ice cubes that glow
Start Date: 2001
Startup Costs: About $100,000
Revenue: $1.3 million in 2009

7. Smarter Fuel
Entrepreneur: Dave Dunham
Product/Service: Biodiesel fuel from restaurant frying oil
Start Date: 2004
Startup Costs: $50,000
Revenue: $3 million in 2009

8. Sky Zone
Entrepreneur: Rick Platt
Product/Service: Arenas covered with trampolines
Start Date: 2009
Startup Costs: About $2 million
Revenue: $3 million-plus in 2009

9. Sanidoor
Entrepreneur: Gale Lemrand.
Product/Service: Sanitary, touchless restroom-door openers
Start Date: 2009.
Startup Costs: About $3.5 million
Revenue: Estimated $2.2 million in 2010

10. Geese Police
Entrepreneur: Dave Marcks
Product/Service: Geese abatement using collies
Start Date: 1987
Startup Costs: About $3,000
Revenue: Estimated $2.5 million in 2010
Your threshold theory of utility is interesting. In mathematical terms, it suggests [1] poor people have a utility function which is flat up to some critical value (and this critical value is considerably higher than their possible expected income).

For example, U(I) = sqrt(I/$15k), i < $15k, U(I) = 1, $15k < I < $100k, and then U(I) = 2, $100k < I. (I is income. The discontinuity at $100k is not necessary, but the flatness on [$15k, $BIGNUM] is.)

I.e., consider a poor person making $15k/year. If they spend $100/year on lotto (assume 1 in 1 million chance of winning), with virtually no chance of success, that suggests that 1e6 x Utility(big 'thing') > Utility($100 worth of goods/services). In particular, this suggests that the poor person assigns a very low value to an extra $100 worth of goods and services. If this is the case, then the lottery is actually a very efficient tax! It only deprives people of something they barely care about at all.

If correct, this theory would also explain why poor in the US work so little - they don't value the things that the extra money could buy.

[1] Like PaulJoslin, I am implicitly assuming that lottery ticket buyers are rational and inferring their utility function from their choices. It's also possible that lotto buyers simply don't understand probability, in which case all this speculation is irrelevant.
Actually the systems which will allow to target the "heat exchanger" are not that easy to build and only recently we have seen big lasers mounted on planes which can barely hit a rocket.
So it's not that easy and anyway it will be weapon technology.
Naming is hard, but try to keep at it! It's so important to get a dot-com domain name that's spelled like it's pronounced. You'll be surprised how many times your name will be used offline: conferences, interviews, phone calls, tv appearances, print publications, etc. What you like about any other TLD domain name will be quickly overshadowed by having to explain the URL each and every time.
This is close to what you want, since a hack is inherently creative: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/10/applied-philosophy-...
Last one is impressive. At $7000 a day the guy only has to work 143 days to reach a million per year.
It's very difficult to accurately price bandwidth by the GB.

At the wholesale level, bandwidth is sold as a committed throughput rate. Essentially like an "open pipe" of various diameters (to use a semi-bad analogy).

Wholesale bandwidth is currently around $15/Mbit/mo. This means that for $15 you can get a 1Mbs connection to a wholesale Internet provider for 1 month (not really, because they generally want you to buy at least a 10Mbs handoff). If you leave this connection completely idle, you pay $15/mo. If you saturate it 24/7, you pay $15/mo.

Because of the bursty nature of Internet traffic, ISP's will typically resell multiples of their committed bandwidth. You might have a 100Mbps handoff, but could sell 500 or 88Mbps worth of traffic to your customers.

Bandwidth really doesn't get metered down to the MB or GB until you get to the consumer level. This is mostly done to "shape" demand somewhat, and allow for a billing method to charge users who are heavy users (eg: if your customers all tried to actually use that 800Mbps you were selling them and you really only had 100Mbps of available bandwidth, you're going to have to do something about that...). For higher-level datacenter type customers, it's typically a 95th percentile billing method, not a direct $/GB overage charge.

You can do some math and take your operating costs and divide by your bandwidth and figure out your cost/GB, but that's not going to be highly accurate. In many cases you can go from say a 40Mbps connection to an 80Mbps connection with all the exact same equipment, and just pay the upstream for the extra 40Mbps/mo. This would mean the same infrastructure cost is divided over a larger amount of bandwidth, resulting in lower cost/GB (until you need to add another card to your edge router, or add another router altogether...).

I think that part of the problem people are having with coming up with fair and realistic pricing for bandwidth is that unlike gas or water or electricity, you're not really delivering a physical commodity with costs that vary directly by quantity used.
Brilliant of you to post this, champ!
I just edited the company bio - how long do I have to wait to see the update ?
If you can, get both. Our latest product is called Player.IO, so we got both http://player.io and http://playerio.com. This means that if you type either "player.io" or "playerio" in your browser you'll go to the same place.

Bitly does the exact same thing, http://bitly.com works just as well as http://bit.ly
That's either a nice troll or you don't know what you think you know!
Internet Buttons: a page of buttons that make it easy to use the Web
+1. Just being "interested" in your own kids (all they really need is your time, agreed that it might be your scarcest resource -- but hey I have assumed it was a conscious decision to have kids) helps.

In particular, I am rather disappointed with generalization of the art of parenting done by Amy in her article. Sometimes, some things become instant hits by being controversial.
Depending on which people-in-charge you're referring to, generally by false-promises, cooperative back-scratching, and a proven ability to squeeze dollars from sand.

It really shouldn't be so surprising, all things considered.
Someone should do a YouTube of "What if Don Draper was in charge of NASA?"
Bing & Google - Finding some facts
Interestingly enough, I think Verizon is paying Lucasfilm trademark rights for Droid; they don't actually own it. Not being pedantic, I just think it's interesting.
Why don't you buy historious.com and make that redirect to historio.us? That way you get the best of both worlds, you get the funkier name, but will still be reachable by people typing "historious" or "historious.com" in their address field or search engine.
Really? I stopped at the second one and decided to read this thread instead (where the currently top voted comment is a pertinent summary)
A great bunch of ideas but hopeless presentation. Why the heck does Forbes use this slideshow style of presenting ?

Loved the rent-a-green box idea and also the socks subscription :). Who could've thought about socks and underwear subscription, really :). Thanks for posting.
This makes me wonder what are the fixpoints of f(a) = x^a, and whether they are attractive or not. For example if you take x=sqrt(2) then it appears that 2 is an attractive fixpoint while 4 is a repelling fixpoint.
VCs Are Not Your Friends
This video sums up my attitude to the national lottery:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3JwS4RcYyk

A tax on poor maths skills.

EDIT: To expand, there is a cognitive dissonance here: although this is still fair, you still have a chance at winning, we feel instinctively that playing the game is futile.

This raises deep questions of philosophy. What if this same thinking is applied to everyday life? If you believe that we live in a deterministic universe, then we are all just futile scratchcard junkies, forever diligently scratching the silver stuff off the face of the universe, innocent of our predetermined (and probably crappy) destinies... If you believe in determinism and don't want to kill yourself, you have nothing to say to scratchcard/online gamblers :)

And don't get me started on Deal or No Deal.
I wrote a script that scraped a white pages website. It basically pulls down the telephone directory listings. I ran it on a small city and was able to run it against smaller cities over and over again.

I then gave it to my uncle who ran it against cities with 100,000+ people and they banned his IP. He could run it from another location just fine.

The script was really dumb though. It would do searches for names that started with dfh, which I don't know of any names that would start with those letters. But a three consonants name could be 'Schwartz'. The shortest string you could search for was three letters and then you could just page through the pages until you go to the point where there wasn't a new page and you could start the next search.

Obviously, if you cleaned it up to run only actual real world three letter combos it might not be detected.

You might Google Feist vs Rural[1] as for current case law in the United States.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
I need to get better at creating these kinds of titles for my vulnerability writeups :P
Watch LIVE the 9:30am IPv4 Address Exhaustion Announcement by IANA, ICANN, ISOC
Didn't we all already figure this out during the first dotcom bubble? The brand is the important thing, not the URL.
Excellent. There's been quite often that I'm sent a video and want to watch it later, and I'm forced to stuff it in readitlater with other random links.
LA, Then and Now
11. Neuberg & Neuberg
Entrepreneur: Larry Neuberg
Product/Service: Importing gold for gilding
Start Date: 1962
Startup Costs: Virtually none
Revenue: Estimated $3 million in 2010

12. Deeplocal
Entrepreneur: Nathan Martin
Product/Service: Promotions mixing the digital and physical
Start Date: 2006
Startup Costs: Financed out of initial $30,000 contract
Revenue: Estimated $1 million-plus in 2010

13. BlackSocks
Entrepreneur: Samuel Liechti
Product/Service: Sock subscriptions
Start Date: 1999
Startup Costs: $30,000
Revenue: $5 million in 2009

14. DNA 11
Entrepreneurs: Adrian Salamunovic and Nazim Ahmed
Product/Service: DNA artwork
Start Date: 2005
Start-up Costs: $2,000
Revenue: $1.4 million in 2009

15. The Fiero Store
Entrepreneur: Matthew Hartzog.
Product/Service: Parts and accessories for the Pontiac Fiero
Start Date: 1991
Start-up Costs: $5,000
Revenue: $2 million in 2009

16. Heritage Link Brands
Entrepreneurs: Selena Cuffe and Khary Cuffe
Product/Service: African wine
Start Date: 2005
Start-up Costs: $75,000
Revenue: $1 million in 2009

17. Jimmy Beans Wool
Entrepreneur: Laura Zander
Product/Service: Knitting and crochet supplies
Start Date: 2002
Startup Costs: $30,000
Revenue: $2.8 million in 2009

18. PetRelocation.com
Entrepreneur: Kevin O'Brien and Angie O'Brien
Product/Service: Pet travel
Start Date: 2004
Start-up Costs: $97,000
Revenue: Estimated $4 million in 2010

19. Murray Associates
Entrepreneur: Kevin D. Murray
Product/Service: Eavesdropping detection and counterespionage
Start Date: 1978
Startup Costs: $5,000
Revenue in 2009: $760,000
I interviewed Spencer Brown of Rent-A-Green-Box almost two years ago via phone. He is a really cool guy and was happy to talk to a student for about half an hour. His strategy for marketing was mostly what he calls the Gorp cloud - the interconnected world of green media which can mention him to all prospective customers. He spent a fortune on R&D in the beginning (http://changingclothing.recojeans.com/introduction-2/) but was profitable cashflow wise in the first week.
The style is hypothetical.... I hope. There may be many reasons in this hypothetical case that punitive damages could be awarded - no details, sorry. The lawfirm costs in this (hypothetical) case are insignificant - think of it as your father's lawfirm.

I'm mainly interested in the "Would people push for as much as they can get, even though they know the fair price?".
> "for such a reputable company as Camelot"

Um excuse me? Reputable? Given the way they conned the public out of a non-profit lottery, I don't agree they're reputable.
Yeah..and the best part is when this feeds into the leanback product
We got inquiries about creating cases for the Air (that we're prototyping at the moment). Also, inquiries about wholesale (and asking us to brand the cases for them). We declined this for the No1 product. But we're willing to do the branding and manufacturing for other products designed by them. Unfortunately, towards the end, they didn't reply to any of our emails. So, I guess, lost opportunity there.

At the moment, the process is not very scalable: manual Skype calls, but no automation whatsoever. I thought about scaling it, but so far we're okay without the automation. So, maybe when there is a huge demand, we will try to scale it.

Thanks for the Cafepress idea, but I'm not sure whether it can work. I think people can go to Etsy and do the design/manufacture??
I spend a tiny amount on lottery every week (almost minimum). The reasoning is like this:

- If I never win, there is no practical loss (total spent sum too low)
- If I win the jackpot, it's life changing
- If I never play, life never changes (or at least there is not such a chance).
- Most of the spent money goes to charity anyway

Why not play then? :)
Vodafone slams Egypt PM Mubarak over text ‘hijacking’
Possibly. What do you think I don't know?
For your second point, what evidence do you have that all click results that point to google redirects aren't simply discarded?
The article is titled "Setting the record straight", but it is not fair to say that "Bing sets the record straight"
It's also a tax on the busy.

I go to a petrol station, to buy petrol. Then have to wait in line for 10 minutes while some idiots buy scratch cards and lottery tickets.
Good writeup.

Was the vulnerability in Zendesk or in how Twitter had configured the system?
Crash plan runs anywhere there's a java vm. Even headless.
The page contents are being crawled and added to the index, but by Bing Toolbar users, not a computer program. I consider that to be an underhanded way to circumvent robots.txt, but others might not.
some benefits for disability and other things are moderately generous by European standards, which is pretty generous by US standards. They are being cut though. The normal unemployment benefit is about £63 a week. Bear in mind that the UK is a very expensive place to live. Housing is in short supply. VAT is 20% on almost everything and petrol/gas is £1.30 a litre or nearly $10 a gallon.

Most people are not "precarious" unless they have a lot of debt or a small debt with a loanshark. Crime makes things bad, not money as such. By the standards of the 50's or even the 70's, basics and luxuries are affordable as long as you don't waste it.
There are a number of points I could address, but I'll just say that any diet that leads to weight loss while also keeping you feeling satisfied is going to be way more effective than something that requires you to control your appetite. I'm sure there are others that do this, but Tim's version of Slow Carb is one of them.

Of course, with a whole lot of knowledge and a whole lot of self-control, you could be more effective, but Ferriss's whole idea is being effective with minimal effort.
What To Do If Traffic Disappears?
That photo of the Danish suburbs is really depressing.
I've seen life in a fair amount of detail in some of the poorest areas of cities in the north of England. In these areas life is very precarious indeed, crime and vandalism are a daily phenomena and educational opportunities are minimal. Looking at how kids in these areas are raised its very easy to see how they have a systematic disadvantage when they become adults and compete with the rest of society.

The idea of a "tax on the stupid" comes from the point of view of people living comfortably. If most of your basic needs are met then gambling money on the lottery seems like irrational behavior (throwing your money away when you only have a small income to begin with).
Let there be properties
> "Why the heck does Forbes use this slideshow style of presenting ?"

To artificially inflate page views and advertising impressions.
Sure, it was just a placeholder for some weird name.
That's still twice the page views that they would have received if it was all on one page.
As a simple counter-example to your claim, the sequence:

x, x^x, x^x^x, x^x^x^x, ...

when x = sqrt(2) is strictly increasing and bounded above, and therefore converges. It's not hard to show that it's bounded above by 2, because x^x^2 > x^x^x, and x^x^2 = x^2 = 2. Repeat for any length sequence of exponentiation.
The UK post-Thatcher doesn't have hugely generous social welfare, though it has some benefits, and health-care is covered.

The main benefit you can receive indefinitely if you're poor is a housing allowance, which is equivalent to your full rent (if you have low enough income/assets), capped at the 30th-percentile rate for rents in your area, for an accomodation suitable for your family size. For a single person, that maxes out at $400-600/mo, depending on what part of the UK you live in.

For cash benefits, there is a jobseeker's allowance, which you can receive if you show you're actively seeking work, participate in some mandatory programs to do so, and have a mandatory progress meeting every two weeks (and meet some other miscellaneous requirements that keep getting added). That has a max of about $100/wk for a single person.
Dell releases Ubuntu-powered cloud servers
Answers.com Acquired By AFCV Holdings For $127 Million In CASH
To crawl Google URLs of the form google.com?q=x would be to disregard http://www.google.com/robots.txt , which seems like bad netiquette to me.
Russia’s DST invests where other angels fear to tread
do the poor actually live in a precarious situation in the UK?

Ummm yes. If you have no money or no job, you will not be living well. The steryotype is that you'll be living in a grimey 1960s style concrete block of flats with not a lot of money.

Compared the USA, "free healthcare" would be seen as generous, however not in the EU.
It's not as catchy a headline, but I'd phrase it differently: whether or not VCs are your friends, their relationship with you is a business one.

Imagine Steve had been in a somewhat different situation: a friend of his was running a company that was a potential strategic partner, and after an initial investigation decided that it didn't make sense. Would that mean they weren't friends? Of course not: it just means that the business relationship didn't work out in this case. Real friendships survive that.
the HN crowd is a bit myopic and focuses way too much on simplistic websites.

Perhaps. But we focus on websites because those are what we know. This is a web-based community of web-based hackers. We've got that in common.

Presumably the communities of "breeders of goose-chasing dogs" spend a certain amount of time discussing the realities of the goose-chasing dog business. I know for a fact that communities of chicken breeders know something about the free-range egg business, and that if you hang around with enough folk musicians you will eventually learn something about the folk-musician business.
Just for context, I heard multiple eyewitness reports on Al Jazeera on friday that protestors went through cairo systematically destroying vodaphone stores in response to them suspending GSM access at the behest of Mubarak.

EDIT: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/vodafone-confirms-role-eg...
Provided it's done with care, the argument that removing a point from a countable set still leaves a countable set is perfectly valid. The trick is knowing that sometimes care is required.

There are many proofs that rely on removing finitely many points from an infinite set still leaving an infinite set. The definition of division on the equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences in the one of the definitions of the real numbers is just one example.
Just curious, what is the UN definition of "Overall Poverty"?

The US poverty threshold is irrelevant when comparing to India (and determining whether the graph/title is misleading) since we have no idea what fraction of Indian households fall below it.
Interestingly, and perhaps mistakenly, this story in the print edition of the Financial Times (where I found it) had the headline:
"Y Combinator invests where other angels fear to tread".

Not seeing YC explained by way of pg's personal credibility was also a good sign, I thought, of the incubators rapidly-realised credibility.
two incredibly useful tools that will make finding a good .com name less of a hassle:

http://www.wordoids.com

http://www.domize.com

be sure to double check wordoids' results, as it sometimes report taken domains as free.

good luck!