skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Accepting a variable-rate mortgage is taking just a big a risk as the lender lending it to you. If you accept one of those, you should be financially prepared for the rate to rise, even dramatically. And if the rate rises beyond what you can reasonably expect to pay, well then, your risk didn't pay off. Owning a house isn't a right, and just as you can make lots of money off them (and many did!), you can lose it all.

The difference between that personal risk and the bank's risk is that the government ended up saving the banks, while the commoners got foreclosed on. And that's certainly a good reason to get angry.

Edit: Great, downvotes for not blaming it all on those evil Wall Street fat cats.
Watson needs to at least start off with a large curated dataset. Without that it would be very vulnerable to the inevitable influx of spam.

Spam and content farms are a big problem for Google, because of the market share it's in a spot where it can't curate content.

Watson tech would be best applied to specific domains, like Wolfram Alpha, which hasn't exploded in popularity. People prefer one good enough search destination for simplicity, Google's calculator is good enough for those searches.
This is a cool idea and I can actually see this being used in social situations. Along with everybody else, I'm curious as to how you will monetize this other than good old fashioned ads.

Can you elaborate anymore on your ideas in that realm?

EDIT: Figured some feedback would actually be more helpful for ya. As somebody else mentioned, may want to change the "Learn more" link to go to something that actually tells me more about what Cloudy is and examples of how I could use it. And also as mentioned, definitely show some other screens in the app other than the home screen. This is what will sell me more on trying the app. (although I'm curious enough as it is to run upstairs now, grab my phone, and download, heh.)
I dunno, I'm a longtime emacs user/addict, and I get the feeling that its actual editing commands just aren't that well thought out -- because of this, I've flirted with trying to use vim and vimpulse (an emacs vim emulator), but it's super-hard to get away from emacs once you're used to it...

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has moved from emacs to vim. (Or thoughts of people who've gone the other way.)
Nvidia Races Past Intel (Yes, Intel) With Quad-Core Chip
Buffer: A minimalist web app for people who like to tweet a lot
If you mean that maybe bitwise operators shouldn't have been included at all if javascript was only going to have one numeric type which would be floating point, maybe you're right. However they can be useful as long as your integers or bit flags are smaller than 2^32 (or 2^31 depending on what you're up to), just pretty slow as every operation needs to do a double->int32->double conversion.

on the other hand, -0 and +0 are a pretty straightforward result of the normal floating point representation, are sometimes useful, and IEEE 754 defines +0==-0. Hiding them under a single 0 would have been more of a hack than having to deal with the difference very very occasionally.
Does anyone else think "hoe" is actually a valid answer there, though? It's hard to tell from Ken's facial expression whether he "purposefully answered incorrectly" or just found himself amused at the situation.
Half Polish Half Brush New Tungsten Ring Graceful designs tungsten steel ring
I say no, because on the internet no one is aware of your gender unless you tell them, and YCombinator is by and large a website, and a non-sexist one at that.

However, for 100% of the experts at that conference to be male, is rather surprising.
I've seen it go both ways.

Flexible programmers (generalists) have an easy time learning the basics of design an turning out something that will pass snuff. Its not highly creative work for sure, but it will be easily usuable to the standards of Facebook.com, et all.

Flexible designers on the other hand, can do simple coding too when motivated. However, you're not going to see them say coding a Baysian spam filter by hand, or making creative use of minhashing for auto-suggestion.

The problem is with specialists.
Do you OCR PDFs as well? I deal with a ton of non-OCR'd scanned documents.
Ask HN: How do you do a B2B startup?
Forgive me if this question has already been asked. It seems like a lot of advice is geared towards building something for customers.

I'm curious if anyone has any experience with a B2B startup? Particularly, how would you go and acquire businesses to be your customer. Thanks!
> But you can't deny that Apple is continuously trying to prevent people from using anything but their services and goods.

I wouldn't even say that. I'd say "Apple focuses on making their services and goods work together painlessly." Being incompatible with other things is not the goal but it does end up being the end result some of the time. It's a subtle but important distinction.
3 prototypes? I guess Gawker will need to budget $15k and three disposable staff members for this product launch </snark>
Ask HN: Do you celebrate employee anniversary dates at your startup?
I work at Twilio, and we have a bunch of employees who are going to reach their first year with the company soon so I've been contemplating some special way to commemorate their anniversaries with the company. Does anyone celebrate this at their startup? What do you do, and what does it mean to you?
If I understand correctly, antitrust concerns would only kick in if Apple uses its monopoly power to screw its competitors. For example, if iOS apps were required to sell content for less at the App Store than through competing channels, then Amazon et al. could rightfully cry foul.

But screwing your customers is not an antitrust violation: it’s capitalism as usual. :-)
The problem with Rolling Stone pieces if even when they have a good point to make, they're far too emotional and devoid of details. There's a real bias to how they attack their stories, and rarely seem to do much fact checking.

I wish more places reported like the New Yorker.
OP, are you the writer of this post? If not, was it really necessary to change the original title of the article?
IBM Watson: Overprovisioned “Big Iron”?
One of the startups I'm working on is in this B2B niche.

The most effective way I've found is to find some keywords that these businesses are searching, then start an aggressive SEO campaign on them.

Also, contacting them (By phone not email) works well too.
Right I got no problem with people getting foreclosed on that is the deal you make. But typically in law one looks at who is the professional and who is the laymen. Generally the burden of responsibility falls on the professional so from a legal perspective and from a moral perspective blaming the consumer is kind of backwards, that was the only point I was getting at. It is not right that the banks got bailed out but the fact that they did, further reduces any moral responsibility that one could place on the consumer. They are loosing their house and footing the bill so in my opinion they have paid their dues. I personally don't feel that the banks have paid their dues for their part in the mess.

I will give you an up-vote because I think your point of view is valid and this thread is going to get political. No guarantee it is going to remain up though.
I never said it did. DRM is a problem no matter who provides it. But Apple definitely ties it much more into their devices than other companies. There's an iTunes app built into the iPhone that can't be removed unless you jailbreak. Google has yet to do something like this with Android. You have more options and aren't tied to one specific service.
We should rather call IP an intellectual monopoly privilege, than a right to a piece of property.

I could not have said it better. It's not property, and no allowance for treating the intangible as property exists in the US constitution. It grants a monopoly for a limited time in order to encourage artists and inventors. Obviously that's been perverted into what's now called IP -- fake "property" that is "owned" by corporations rather than artists and inventors.
What's with the flamebait thread title? Why not just keep the title of the original blog post: "Will the Female Founders Please Stand Up?"

I don't see anything in that post to support any suggestion that "YC is sexist" at all. If anything, it's just the opposite; some YC founders came out for the explicit purpose of helping aspiring female founders. What's the problem again?

As for this bit:

But the circumstance produced an outrageously uneven power structure between the men and women in attendance.

YCombinator created a dynamic where every man at the table was there to “advise” and every woman at the table was there to “be advised”. Every man was a “guest of honor” and every woman was a “paid attendee”.

I know my way around a conversation about startups, and I regularly earn the respect of my male peers in conversation. Were I to meet any of these men in a different context, we would have been on a level playing field. But at this dinner table, for my life I could not convince these men to engage me as a peer. My comments were interpreted as questions and were met with “well, actually…” remarks. There was very little back and forth, and my opinion was of no consequence. The power structure of this dinner precluded any woman from being taken seriously at the table.

How does gender even factor into this equation? Would it have mattered if some of attendees were men? The attendees would still have been the "aspiring" founders and the "advisers" would still have been the "advisers," the ones brought there to serve up knowledge. Or what if some of the advisers had been female? Would that have made any difference to the "balance of power" bit? No.
I do think if you're putting on a Female Founders event, you are under obligation to show up with some female founders. Like many other types of relationships, having mentors are as much about empathy, understanding, and having good role models as it is about actual business advice. The women can get advice from many other places, having Female in the title means the advice should have something to do with females.

> YCombinator created a dynamic where every man at the table was there to “advise” and every woman at the table was there to “be advised”. Every man was a “guest of honor” and every woman was a “paid attendee”.

No. This is just self victimization. It's called a coincidence, and something that should be changed. But reading into it too deeply will hurt you more than it helps you.
BitTorrent is to movies what repeating a friend's joke is to humour.
what do you mean pointless? if you find "normal people" condescending you'd probably be shaken to know that i actually prefer "muggles".

to be blunt, i can't even find the arrogance in the quote you fabricated. are you suggesting that people who are considered tech savvy don't have an easier time navigating new technology?
> Why is there never any blame put on those on "main street" who took the loans that they couldn't repay?

They did repay them; they gave the bank their house back. In a non-recourse state (which California is), when you make a loan you the lender agrees that it will take the house at any time instead of the full value of the outstanding loan.

Given this, any sane lender wouldn't make a loan without a reasonable down payment to protect against any downside. The lenders however were giving no money down, no income, no asset loans where one didn't even have to pay the full interest (though it still accrued) for the first 5 years (and then selling them as quickly as possible to investors).
Quora founders photo gallery
Obviously, they're brilliant. But they're handsome too. They pretty much hit the genetic jackpot.
Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez have a stake in some prisons: http://wonkette.com/404469/dick-cheney-and-alberto-gonzales-...

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Dick-Cheney-Indi...
No; for some other posts on this, I did some checking in the agreement and IAP is explicitly disallowed for rental content or services or for goods or services for use outside of the app.

Let's play with your case study a little more, though (it's fun!):

Because IAP cannot be used for goods or services outside of the app, your IAP subscription would have to be clear that it's for access to the premium feed only and not contracting your wife for fitness bootcamp services. What would you do if someone who lives 3,000 km from you purchased the bootcamp service through the app? You'd never be able to fulfill it (which is one reason why IAP can't be used for non-app goods or services, I suspect).

So, in reality, you might offer the premium feed a lot like the Schlock Mercenary app does (and has since it was introduced)[1]: one month for $0.99, three months for $2.99, or six months for $4.99. There's also a way to enter a subscription token, although I've never had one so I don't know exactly how it works. I would presume that they could start offering these directly for sale on the Schlock Mercenary store if people wanted to give Howard more money directly, rather than letting Apple take 30% of his definitely-worth-it $4.99.

Anyway, you'd have a nominal fee for your premium feed, and then you'd give the people who have contracts with your wife for her non-app services access codes to get at the premium feed without having to pay an extra fee.

Everybody wins, especially you and your wife, because now you're making money that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, just for writing extra premium content.

[1] <http://www.plus14.com/iphone/schlock-mercenary-for-ipad/>; The in-app purchase is really cool: it gives you access to strips three days before they're published on the web. Love me some Schlock Mercenary. See als one of Howard's posts about this: <http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/free-schlock-for-iphone.... I have nothing to do with the app or the comic except being a satisfied reader.
That's certainly one of them. But even in the physical book business, they were falling behind --- their inventory control systems were state of the art in the mid-1990s, but B&N leapfrogged them, while Borders management instead spent money on remodels and improved cafeterias, and trying to bring in other lines of merchandise. (It didn't help that the executives responsible for this came from retail operations like Linens n Things, and didn't know much about selling books.)

More from a literary agent:

[1] http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2010/12/borders-post-mort...

[2] http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2010/12/cold-equations.ht...
Anyone else find the link between the title of this thread and PG's point (in one of his essays) about "-ism"s?
A few weeks later I hit uninteresting roadblock

Did you use speech-to-text to write this post, or is that just an odd mental slip?
I would agree with you were it not for what they're doing now with this whole in-app transaction thing. They're forcing other services out. It wouldn't be a problem except they don't let companies adjust their prices to reflect the cut Apple is taking and they don't let you advertise the fact you can get the same service outside the app.
So under the new guidelines, can Amazon distribute an app that lets you read Kindle books you’ve already purchased in other ways, with a note “we can’t actually make a clicky link here, but open up Safari and go to amazon.com to buy more books”?
Re the last paragraph: excellent point and sorry for the confusion -- just changed the title.
Thanks for the quick reply!

Is there some way to validate what these businesses are searching for? Also, did you think of making the product and then go out to find the businesses or did you identify some inefficiency that these businesses have and exploit them?

Yes I have heard about cold calling though I'm wondering if there are any techniques for getting them to switch over. I suppose if some are locked in to some sort of vendor contract then it might be challenging.
Yeah, you pretty much need to change the laws, rebuild the regulatory bodies, and vastly increase the penalties for white collar crimes. Then do it all over again in 30 years.

I do think there should be a law that allows you to lock people up retrospectively though based on their degree of douchebaggery.
I think this was the greater crime, that a disparity existed between what Y Combinator was offering and what they were perceived as offering.

I wonder if Ms Livingston or other women founders were perhaps unable to make it, or if there was a greater flaw in choosing the advisors. It may be that, rather then being sexist, Y Combinator is strenuously avoiding the issue of gender, and it just so happens that most of their founders are men. In fact, I think this dinner might have been about that issue...

I also think that the issue of having all the woman there as "Paid Attendees" and the men as "Advisors" is less an issue then it seems... It's a fallout issue of their not being any woman founders (and there might be fair or foul reasons why THAT happened). It was an event where ONLY women could pay to go, so naturally all the Paid Attendees were women.

Calling the behaviour sexist (Because the ? is really only there to soften the blow) without all the information would one of the least respectful forms of criticism... Using terms charged with negative emotions in lieu of thoughtful criticisms.
I can read "Java application" and a "/home/wind(?)/workspace/watson/" path, so it's probably real code and it's written in Java.
I was not trolling. The GPL nominally stands for freedom but yet the means by which it forces restrictions is the opposite of freedom. I say if you want people to do something, do so by setting an example, not by writing weasel-worded legalese that ties peoples hands. Write code, release it under MIT, and let people do what they want with your code, and by doing that you're setting an example and encouraging others to do the same. You'll also encourage participation by businesses who would like to make use of your code in their proprietary system and everyone benefits when they contribute back because they don't have to worry about the stringent restrictions of the GPL.
Open office dilemma: OpenOffice.org vs. LibreOffice
This is the way to do it. Google gives more control to the content providers and in the end, the users still win and have more choices (accessing the content they paid for on any device). As time goes on, the contrast between Google and Apple is much more glaring.
Upvoted. For those who want more explanation of how bubbles work, see this: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/12/why-wall... Atlantic article, which should be required reading for anyone who pontificates on the issue.
Good point, the fact that he went to a 4th level boss above the agent is telling. When a trader has a direct line to the top of the SEC, there is a real problem.
I voted you up for "you are under obligation to show up with some female founders", but I disagree with your self-victimization paragraph. She went out of her way to engage the adivsers as peers, and they shut her down. Repeatedly. I don't know if it was sexism in particular, or just a badly-considered power structure for the evening, but whatever the reason, that's not how founders are supposed to encourage each other.
Why Wall Street Always Blows It
Obama to Meet With Mark Zuckerberg Thursday
Animoto, Bon Jovi and GPUs in the cloud
Don't forget selling the split up mortgage out of the back of the house before the ink was dry on the papers. So the people extending the note where not the people backing the note.
Doug Cutting works at Cloudera. Also, this is non-tech media reporting on tech so if they are even sort-of correct then good for them.
We'll see. Your logic was impeccable a year ago, before any iPads were sold; that's probably why iBooks is such an also-ran today. (Contracts take time to run out, the iPad isn't even a year old, and its success has taken even the optimists by surprise.)

But ignoring the iOS market gets harder by the day. There's a lot of tasty, tasty customers out there.

We'll see what happens. Note that Apple's new, um, clarification of its policy doesn't take effect for several months. I expect there will be weeks of furious behind-the-scenes jockeying for position among Apple, Amazon, and various publishers, after which there might be more announcements.
Women might have had a little more insight on navigating the 98% male world of tech as a female founder. I think the dinner's a great idea and hate to criticize YC for trying to do a good thing (good on them for trying in general), but some successful women (from outside the YC diaspora if there aren't enough in it) could be more encouraging and englightening, given the topic.
The Final Night Of IBM’s Jeopardy Challenge
Given the description of the event structure and its explicit organization as a Women's only event, the question is legitimate particularly since describing someone as sexist is in no way equivalent to describing them as a child pornographer.

That's not to say that YC's motives were necessarily poor, but their execution was less than brilliant - given a somewhat reasonable expectation of Jessica Livingston's participation at a YC event.
I brought this up with the founder of SEOMoz during the follow-up to an interview last night when I noticed one of my sites doing exactly the same thing -- http://bit.ly/f5iFvV -- and it's really got me perplexed.

What's happening, I think, is that different social sources are providing Google Juice with different decay rates. Which sources have which rates? Your guess is as good as anybody else's. Ugh.

I wonder how complicated the entire business of figuring out how to tell people about your startup or your web article is going to get? The trajectory isn't looking too good.
I'm not sure it's all Java, but there's a lot of Java in there; looking at the systems team pages[1], there's mention of two Apache Java projects, UIMA and Hadoop...

[1] http://www.research.ibm.com/deepqa/systems_team.shtml
The women can get advice from many other places, having Female in the title means the advice should have something to do with females.

I can certainly see how someone might have shown up and found a disconnect between their expectations and reality. It would be natural to assume that some - if not all - if the advisers would be female for something like this. Fair enough. But just making the event "females only" for the attendees does make it "something to do with females." To hear the stories you hear, some women are intimidated by the possibility of attending an event and finding that they are the only woman present, or something of that nature. At least by restricting the attendees to females, they created an environment where women could feel secure about coming out, knowing there would - at a minimum - be other female attendees to mingle with, etc. That's still a win, even if the advisers weren't female, so far as I can tell.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear the female take on how this wasn't still better than a similar event without the "females only" restriction.
Hoe is not a valid answer because the other word you are looking for is "ho" which is a shortened form of "whore".

Rake, on the other hand, is a homonym.
Interestingly, Ken Jennings says about Watson what most people say about ordinary players:

Watson sometimes takes some time to get acclimated to a category, so starting at the bottom gives me a chance to rack up some money before it gets confident. In theory!

Supposedly that was Mr. Jennings' reasoning for jumping around during his streak, that the other players didn't have quite as long a time as him to consider the category.

Not sure how tongue in cheek that remark was, though.
Congrats and thanks for sharing - out of interest, how did you meet your co-founder?
I'm not sure experts exchange were making that much of a killing selling access subscriptions? There's clearly a lot of ill will towards them, but I would imagine they are still in a pretty good place if they want to move to a more usable ad supported model they would hardly be starting from scratch.