skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
eBay are just there to get more and more money out of you.

Every few weeks I get an email from them, I got one yesterday from them in fact. They generally contain something like this:

>> Fee changes

>> We will be making changes to our overall fee structure, including Insertion Fees and Final Value Fees.

With a link to the full changes:
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/pricechange08/

Even with my bad math skills, I know that if I sell a £50 (ok, £49.99) item on eBay UK currently, I would have to pay them £2.25 which is 4.5%, soon though, I will need to pay them £4.95, 9.9%, thats more than double, and doesn't even include listing costs!

What I want to know, is how they dare?

Though, I'm the fool, because I'll be using them to sell stuff in future, when selling things on auction sites, the more visitors means a higher price I will get for an item. (and the more I will need to pay eBay - god dammit!)
Oh my god they put a skin on a blog! Somebody call the papers!
The WSJ article on this says "Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.'s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld."

He's 54. I'm not one to be ageist (cause I'm old) but MS can't seem to get anything right.
"Gathering the entire MobileMe username list, and therefore email list, via a simple dictionary attack is trivial."

Umm, or not. You still have to load a website each time. Even if they're case insensitive and allow no numbers other than the standard 36 letters/numbers, just to get all 10 character or fewer screen names would take 36^10 (over 3 quadrillion) page loads.

If that's trivial for him, I'd love to have his computer and internet connection.
most sellers don't accept them

and thats another thing, thanks to eBay used things end up costing almost as much as they do new. In fact about a year ago I was bidding on something second hand, and the final price ended up being about 15% more than the thing cost new(both online and in stores).
Wazzup, Budweiser Commercials collection
Proper sentence casing (sorry for my previous bad example): "IT staff optional."
6% Ain’t Really That Much
Anyone heard of Nathan Barley?
Sarah Lacy tends to Troll her own articles, I've noticed, not only with abysmal writing, but also using math in, shall we say, a rather haphazard manner.

You do have to admit her courage in writing a supposedly carefully considered analysis of incubator funding of startups by someone lacking a firm grasp of the financial characteristics of startups.

But, I guess that is what makes Sarah Lacy, Sarah Lacy.
I hear ya. It's been a blast.

I have a hunch though that if things keep growing, we're going to need a bigger space to get together in.

Any offers?
They sold the startup, then bought it back..  (footytips.com.au)
I feel that ebay "lost its soul" when it didn't respond to sellers gaming the feedback system. If you are not familiar with this, sellers would withhold feedback to the buyer until the buyer gave positive feedback to the seller. Now, there are buyers who give negative feedback to sellers without just cause, so part of this behavior is defensive but the essence is that there grew this distrust and ebay's "karma system" just broke down. I never saw ebay doing anything to fix this and bring a better sense of trust and goodwill in the community. Anyone else have a different experience?
I respect what you are saying here, and I like to think that when confronted with a 33 ft (10 meter) high stack of 100 dollar bills I would react as you suggest. However, I suspect, looking at said stack, I would probably be seriously tempted.
An Analysis of the YC "Open Sourced" Documents In Layman's Terms
I'm sorry, but...WHY do you keep referring to Sarah Lacy as "he"?
Why does any Ph.D. student at any but the top graduate schools believe that he will get tenure at any university? The odds are so far against him, and have been for a generation, than he ought to realize that he is about to waste his most precious resource – time – on a long-shot. Investing five or more years beyond the B.A. degree, except in a field where industry hires people with advanced degrees, is economic stupidity that boggles the imagination.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north427.html
Road To Good Health
I understood the difference between trying to be healthy and trying to get to a particular
size. Being healthy is far more important than being thin or fat or any particular size and to
that end I live by the following rules to stay healthy.
Good article, but you're wasting your breath. Sarah Lacy's article had such little substance and thought behind it that pointing out the errors in it is like picking apart scientology.
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Because Sarah Lacy didn't write the original article. A guest poster hiding behind the name "Paisano" wrote it.
How are you measuring it?

AFAICT, Mahalo is Yahoo circa 1997. Perhaps the market has made this old business model relevant again, but I don't see how.

Mahalo never comes up in my Google results. Where is their traffic coming from?
The author of the article isn't on a tenure-track, it is the author of the article excerpted in the above article. This author (Tom Coates) does make an excellent observation: "The aim of doctoral work is not - no matter what anyone tells you - to think up good stuff and write great works and reveal your genius to the world. The aim is to make professional people who can teach undergraduates, deliver papers and - yes - also (subsequently) push the discipline further in one direction or another. You have to approach your post-graduate work in this way. The most successful doctoral students in my experience are the ones that are thorough and careful and take on relatively unambitious projects which don't stretch the assumptions or structures of the discipline too much. They're the ones that finish their doctoral work and go on to useful teaching positions (and then may or may not start exploring more widely). It's definitely not the best and the brightest, the most imaginative thinkers or the people with the great ideas that get through. If they get through it's because they're thorough and they're careful and they're professional and treat it as it should be treated - as a job of work rather than a calling or an exploration."

This resonates really well with my personal experience. Conscientiousness is the word to keep in mind.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the 22-year old kid just starting graduate school is very different from the 27-year old standing at the other end with a burnt wick. You cannot predict how your interests evolve, but you should at least try and gauge if your current interests run deep enough to allow for the sacrifice of four, five, or six years.
To avoid the charge of being sexist?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280082

(jk)
Thanks so much! Shoot me an email at krista{at}travelfli.com if you'd like to beta our site.....
It's great advice.
Thanks for your interest. Please send me an email at krista{at}travelfli.com and I will get you a beta invite...
"huge" is relative.
It's possible you're right, though I honestly don't understand why anyone would buy something through eBay when they can get an identical item through Amazon for the same price without the hassle and risk of fraud.
Good simple primer to those just starting out.

If you're getting into the nitty gritty, I suggest checking out the great folks at Venture Hacks, Get Venture, and Startup Company Lawyer. I know that the Venture Hacks guys hang out here from time to time.
Stuff like this, improvements in battery tech, and the daylight readable OLPC screen are going to make e-ink irrelevant.
Intel demonstrates how to send electrical power wirelessly
Cool project, what CMS did you guys use?
I'm pretty much completely nocturnal. I work the night shift, so my standard bedtime is 9am, and I wake up at 5pm. Occasionally I flip my schedule around, just so I can get some sunlight in my life and run errands.
Duh, noooo, really ?

This isn't slashdot. Please be civil.

Read Section 5 for the rationale provided by the committee members who proposed the syntax: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2004/n170...

In particular, the name collision problem does not happen with classes because each class is a new scope.
Should all kids learn Algebra? (Dr. Schank's Educational Outrage column)
What is happening at reddit? I'm trying to log on but I can't
What is happening at reddit? I'm trying to log on but I can't
I was wondering when someone else was going to figure this out and write about it. I abandoned the site about 2 years ago.
First particles injected into Large Hadron Collider atom smasher
I really thought I was the only one. Seriously.

I call it my "sleep clock", one day I'm awake from 10am->11pm, and a week later I'm awake 10pm->11am.

Not good though when you have things planned, you have to make sure your in the right timezone when you need to be.
Sellers can't leave anything but positive feedback these days. I imagine the next step is for the system to add those "fast payment good ebayer AA+++" lines to your profile whenever you do anything.
you have no idea the kind of good karma (real, not HN :-)) that is going to come YC's way thanks to this!

Thanks very much!
Can you also provide one easy zip file to download?
Great article. A friend of mine finally secured her first faculty position in English this summer; you need balls to slog through that many years knowing there's no guarantee you'll be able to find a job at the end.

On the other hand, if a person has an interest in grad school, I'd encourage them to give it a shot. At worst you waste a couple of years. Once you get out into the real world and start piling on a car, house, girlfriend, and then the 2.5 kids plus golden retriever, it becomes that much harder to go back and get that degree if you realize it was a path you wanted to follow.
Wow. 75% efficient at 1 meter is amazing.
Digg is Down
But I do understand calculus. I have no problems using lambdas or binding arguments in many other languages. Only C++ manages to make it so baroque.
Is Apple’s MobileMe Secure?
for a different perspective: http://www.devx.com/SpecialReports/Article/38813/1954?pf=tru...
It's almost impressive that someone with such a lengthy resume can write such a bad article.
Good looking, but useless, like the top 0.1 percent of women.
Fair enough. I probably could have made my pronoun usage a little clearer.
Very many.
I've had Mahalo pop up for several recent news topics.

I suppose its a bit hit and miss right now.
"AFL footy tipping business"

"I wouldn't call myself a footy nutter, said Isterling."

No habla Australiano
"Translation of the AIST press release of February 7, 2006".
"Soljacic, who didn't work with Intel, said Thursday that he was pleased that Intel is getting behind the technology.

For me, it's like a confirmation that it's so exciting, it's something people would like to have," Soljacic said."

Yeah, I never would have guessed that people would want wireless power. Good thing Intel's there.
When you steal something, the person you stole it from no longer has it.
You said it: Nearly identical. But in Europe, and more so in Switzerland where distances aren't so vast as in the US, 4.4km is "far away". Sounds silly, but it's true.

As for "my issue", it's the fact that I'm in more or less dead-central Lucerne, yet I can't for the life of me get the google maps widget to interact with your geolocation script to show "Lucerne". It gives me "Within 0 miles of" and then a list of suburbs and villages just outside of Lucerne: Emmen (4km away), Horw (about the same distance), Kriens (just outside of Lucerne), and Weggis, which is about 20km further down and on the other side of the lake! :D
success factors: [be] thorough and careful and take on relatively unambitious projects which don't stretch the assumptions or structures of the discipline too much.

irrelevant factors: [being] the best and the brightest, the most imaginative thinkers or the people with the great ideas

You can do great work outside a university, be an artist or industrialist, in poverty or in wealth. I love the idea of working in splendid isolation, but (I feel) you need something to push against, to measure yourself against, peers to celebrate or hate you. Each discipline in academia is all that (as are industries and arts). How can you rebel without a cause?
>most sellers don't accept them

That's not true. Very very few people are willing to pay by cash, so it's basically paypal or nothing, and eBay requires
paypal accepters to accept credit cards.

I can't speak to the price, except that I find ebay items by using google product search, and price is king.
I don't want to sound like a neophyte here but I'm afraid of beams that carry that much power. I have no problem at all letting the milliwatt beam of my cell phone go through my head but lets just say I don't my bedside alarm clock powered by this just yet.

Coupled resonance seems safe to stuff that doesn't resonate in between but when I hear beam and watts I still freak.
The relevant question, for one who does want to produce great work, is not whether grad school is suited more towards conscientious professionalism than truly novel, ambitious work, but whether it is a better day job than your other options. There are many circumstances where grad school is a fine place to stabilize the ebb and flow of creativity. There are smart people, exciting people, young people, old people, quiet spaces, interesting places, filled libraries, helpful secretaries, lab space, scholarships, grants, cafeterias, late cafes, open projects, secret projects, rich people, hackers, artists, scientists, writers, politicians, playwrights, music, sports, and a reasonable story that you can use to answer family questions about 'what you're doing with your life'.

There are problems, though. There's a lot of pressure to do things that are either in the academic norm, or are part of the academic fashion. Unfortunately, such things tend to get popular after the first people start getting interested in it, who often cover so much ground that there's little to do. So you need to stay away from academic groupthink if you want to do good work there -- but otherwise, it's a good place.
This author is primarily talking about a phd in the humanities... ...does the same thing apply to science and engineering fields that aren't as ummm useless in the real world?
It scares me to think that many programmers are not comfortable with the command-line. Sure, GUI integration is nice, but I actually prefer using Git from the command line for most things, except for viewing history (Gitk/Giggle) or differences (Kompare.)
Ask YC: Obama Saying "Developers" ?
I need a clip of Democratic nominee saying "Developers" in a sentence.

Any advice about where to go to find this elusive clip?
Help me, Hacker-News; you're my only hope

Q. Does "scanning" have the same meaning as in "raster scanning", where you cover the area (volume) in a set pattern? If so, I would have thought a vector approach would work better here...

Q. What is a "motor orbit"?

"The linear motor system enables the position of the laser focal point to be varied by high-speed scanning of a lens set on the motor orbit. Incorporation of this system makes the image scanning in the direction of the z-axis possible. For scanning in the x and y axis directions, conventional galvanometric mirrors are used."

It took me a while to realize that it's not the intersection of two lasers, but the focal length of one laser. I didn't realize you could do that with coherent light, but of course you can.
Agreed. In some cases, the best response to an argument is silence.
SlashBe
I think what he is describing is talking about quality of sleep rather than quantity.

I'm no expert, so I'm really just regurgitating something I read awhile ago, so please bare in mind that it is probably not 100% correct, but the seed of the idea is there. I'm more or less going to describe what I've done based off what I've read.

The body only needs a couple of hours of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep to feel fully refreshed, anything over that and you're essentially wasting time.

I'm surviving pretty well on about 4-5 hours a night, it really depends but I find that if you exercise first thing in the morning as soon as you wake up, you do not miss that sleep.

I've actually purchased a recumbent exercise bike so that I can read blogs and forums in the morning while I exercise - this helps me compress my time so that I can get more done during the day.

The most important thing I've found is to ensure you have a consistent pattern for sleeping, otherwise my body will invariably want more sleep as it tries to get back into some sort of pattern.

To aid this, I've had my doctor prescribe me 10mg Temazepam which I think is a fantastic drug. I'm not on a high enough dosage to get hooked, but if need too, I take 1 tablet and it knocks me out fairly easily and unlike other drugs it is not one of those ones that will keep you asleep.

Hope this helps in some way.
What do you figure are the chances something like google docs (via the GFS) would work for this?

A bet that google will still be around in 100 years, or will buy insurance to guarantee long term storage via some foundation if they do go out of businesss, seems reasonable to me.

GFS does CRC and multiple copies to guard against data corruption right?
Deprogramming From the Academic Cult
10M is a lot of sleeping pills
While I agree, I think the same argument can be made that most frameworks impose some of the same problems as a pre-built CMS. I've never worked with Django, so I won't accuse it specifically of having this problem, but I know that Ruby on Rails in the past made building anything other than a CRUD application a pointless exercise in working around rather than working with (I specify "in the past", as I haven't tinkered with RoR in a few years, and I'm certain it has evolved dramatically in that time).

I'm fond of the phrase "libraries not frameworks", and I've been hearing it from lots of folks lately, and I think it's probably a backlash against choosing tools and then trying to figure out how to bolt your ideas into the poorly fitting framework. TANSTAAFL, and all, being what it is, sometimes it's better to build bottom up rather than choose a framework that was designed for a different kind of application.
"Entrepreneurs start businesses because...they have no choice. Passion and energy drive them on good days and sustain them on bad days." Barry Moltz in "You Have to Be a Little Crazy"
> This isn't slashdot. Please be civil.

Take it easy. You don't appear to have a good understanding of the compiler guts. What you said above was quite clueless, hence the reaction.

Also, slashdot as a metric of incivility - that's bold :)

> Read Section 5 for the rationale ..

I read the whole thing before I first posted in this thread. Since they are extending function declarations with a new construct, nothing precludes them from creating a scope for it. In other words, declspec() arguments should have a scope of a function declaration they appear in. Their claims that this also complicates parsing is just a speculation, and not too convincing one.
I'm not saying that its "new" new. I'm just glad to hear about a 3d technology that's not just a bunch of hype that turns out to be the "Pepper's Ghost" illusion again.
Gnomedex Rumor: Adobe in Talks to Buy Yahoo
Read it later - no more clutters on bookmarks
we are still alive.... phew....

I have wondered, why there are no time travelers? Maybe time traveling is not possible, or humanity disapears abruply by a catastrophic event (perhaps caused by the HLC), and never has the chance to develop the necessary technologies to allow time travel?

Or maybe we just live in that paralell universe where time traveling doesn't exist, while our forked twin universe is living something different.

who knows.
How to choose your badminton racket?
If you are in the process of choosing your badminton racket, I am sure that you are in a confused state in terms of deciding on the right badminton racket. There are many brands in the market and each one boasts of a specialty of their own. How do we select a good badminton racket from these endless products and brands that are available in the market? What criteria should you use to select the best racket? Here are some guidelines that will help.
I would take any rumor that appears on Truemors with a grain of salt.
Nice analysis, especially the highlighting of the effective veto power over acquisitions in the protective provisions.

To nitpick, I think Agarwal's wording about the liquidation preference gives the impression the term sheet implements what's called 'fully participating' preference, where even after collecting the preference amount, they also share in the remaining money.

IANAL, but I think the wording actually implies a 'non-participating' preference: series AA can take the preference amount, or convert to common and share pro-ratably with commons, but not both.

To picture the difference: take Agarwal's example of selling 10% for $10K. But then imagine the company is sold for only $110K. With fully-participating preferred, I believe the investor gets their $10K liquidation preference, then also 10% of the remaining money, for a total of $20K. With non-participating, they could take the $10K liquidation preference, but then they would share none of the rest with the common. Instead they will choose to convert to common and get 10% of the total, $11K. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.)
Let me guess, you want to recreate the infamous Steve Balmer "Developers" music video with Obama?

I'd say your best bet (though I haven't looked) is the his Google visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwo
I don't normally agree with a lot of things Jason says, but I am 100% behind him on this one. From day one, I've tried to talk/walk/eat/sleep/breathe the way he describes a CEO should be. Not because of him, but because it seemed like the right thing to do if you're passionate about something.

They say the proof is in the pudding? When we started 8 months ago, I didn't know a single person in this industry or any journalists or anything about how startups worked. When we launched last week, we were on every bigtech blog, BBC, Reuters etc. How? Perserverance and creativity. That's really all it takes, and I'll gladly share all my tips/trials/failures on my blog. Or e-mail me if you have questions.

Whatever you do, don't hire a PR agency.
Also (bookmarklet instead of extension) : http://www.instapaper.com/
Ah InstaPaper they are very similar. But I found the readitlater plugin better (readitlaterlist.com)
- One you don't necessarily have to register and all that. Its not yet another community. You are just an anonymous user.
- There is an offline reading mode which comes in very handy. You have anyway loaded that page might as well cache it for a while.
I've heard 100-150 years, but time will tell I guess!
"The mission is to end oil," he says, "not create a company."
OpenGL 3.0 - A Big Step in the Right Direction
Video: iPhone holographic illusion
"I’ve showed this video to a couple of friends in Berlin (where I’m staying for a few days), and they all freaked out." Amazing what you can do by using the motion sensors on the iPhone...
Yes, I'm afraid it does. Take two people, equally as smart, both in their late 20s, one did a PhD and one's a CEng (or PEng). They will have very different skillsets at that point and the CEng will be very much more employable. The PhD will have slightly more options however if they decided to move into another field.
No, he's quoting a tenure-track professor - the author of the article never completed his PhD.
Well, Agarwal says the remaining is split on an "as converted" basis which implies non-participating preferred. So it seems right to me!
Was anyone else at IDF?
a big grain!