skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not just our community. There are twice as many suicides as homicides in the U.S.[1] Yet, every nightly newscast is sure to cover the murders. How many talk about the suicides? Worse, suicide is the leading cause of death among college students [2]. It's an epidemic that no one talks about. We've already lost two freshman at MIT this year.

[1] http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/09/01/suicide-vs-homicide-b...

[2] http://www2.dailyprogress.com/news/2011/nov/07/uva-study-sui...
Would you actually write the email twice? Your sent folder should let you trivially re-send it with the "urgent" flag if you care.

"Keep the email" is fine if almost all of them will need attention in two weeks. What percentage of email he receives will be important enough in two weeks to demand part of his attention during those overloaded first day(s) back?

I think the affirmative filter is a great idea - "I won't be able to help with this for two weeks, and then I'm going to be really busy for a few days. Please confirm that this is something that will need my time in two weeks."
One free book that I like is "The Z Notation: A Reference Manual" by Spivey. You can get a pdf version for free at http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/~mike/zrm/zrm.pdf. I would say that learning Z Notation had a bigger impact on my ability to understand and model software than anything else. It isn't exactly programming but it will teach you how to be a better software engineer. I never used it to prove program correctness or refinement but rather to express the relationships between the parts of a software system. It made me better at object oriented modeling.
But you were using YC as an example to support a point about startups in general.
In the spirit of freely available learning material, here's this http://hackety-hack.com/.
It's a good guide for people who want to learn with a visual aid in real time, as opposed to reading rote literature off a screen. In that sense, it's good for rudimentary basics a beginning programming student would need to understand before they could visualize what's being said in the literature in more complicated manuals, without the visual aid. It's recent, so there aren't many lessons available yet, but the authors are updating more in the future.
Thanks for this parallel. Very useful for learning other languages.
1984, Gorges Orwell
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I used to get Seasonal Affective Disorder every year around this time. Since starting on Vitamin D, the symptoms have yet to return. It's also improved my sleep patterns.
I am mind blown by this service.
Doctrine2 is being tested against SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL as well as PHP 5.3 and even PHP 5.4RC1.

http://travis-ci.org/#!/doctrine/doctrine2

Was green earlier today, guess someone will hopefully fix the red tomorrow morning :)
Has anyone considered the idea that perhaps this "AI" has already arrived in the form of the collective intelligence of the Internet? That perhaps the "Singularity" is simply a shift of scope in terms of consciousness from the individual to the group? Much like multicellular organisms evolving from single-celled creatures?

I just think this makes a lot more sense than the whole "we will build a conscious robot" thing, especially since many of the innovations that are used as evidence of an approaching singularity have helped human beings become ever more tightly interconnected.
He died of cancer of the larynx.
That's interesting. I've been thinking about doing a fraud detection startup, which seems to fit the bill.
Well, it means that the demand curve (units demanded as a function of price) is proportional to 1/price for a large range. That seems pretty unusual, since the general idea of price elasticity is compatible with any curve decreasing with price, i.e. 1/price^2, 1/sqrt(price), 1/e^price, etc.
Arguably he failed at Apple too (the first time around).

Another lesson to take from Steve's experience: the bigger the impact your startup is likely to make, the greater the chance it will fail. That might seem quite counterintuitive at first. Certainly, if there's a market and the demand is there, then success should be forthcoming, right?

Except if the problem is unsolved, it's probably unsolved for a reason. I'm reminded of something I read (I believe it was from "Germs, Guns, and Steel", but I don't have it to reference): invention is the mother of necessity! Safe startups give people something they already want. Great startups give people something they didn't even know they needed.

But humans are dumb animals. The first three times you show them something better, they'll turn their backs. So the more important your work is, the more likely you are to fail, and fail, and fail again. It's not you, it's just human nature.
It would be great if you didn't include any clone me-too companies.
Other articles, like this one, make it sound much more like an art project than a serious attempt to redesign the bike wheel: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/wow-bi...
Apple's simple take on this may be revealing:

iSomething = $X
iSomething+ = $X+100
iSomething++ = $X+200
مسلسل بائعة الورد الحلقة 50
Want to know what time it is? Ask it in an email
"interesting or insightful"?
To clarify xenophanes comment: steadily lowering the price will provide a degree of price discrimination which takes advantage of any demand curve which decreases with price. The OP is talking about a very special case where demand is proportional to 1/price.
helmet? Pfft. How about attaching some brakes!

Ugh.
For one of our app, which was selling well, we eventually doubled the price.

Revenues started growing, month after month, and stabilized after about 6 months.

Conclusion: revenues more than doubled, units sold slightly increased.
A few travel resources to help you plan your next vacation
"3. Failure leads to success."

This is one of the great overlooked points.
> And those rapid responses would in turn trigger another round of email, and another.

This reminds me of an effect of specials at a supermarket: it's not just that people will buy more, to stock up; nor that it becomes affordable to more people (price elasticity); nor that new people will try it - but that if you have more, you will use more. Like more roads create more traffic.

This is partly personal price elasticity, in that when something is cheaper, you can start using it in more ways - as a substitute for more expensive (or, if you have previously found substitutes for it, because it was too expensive; now you can stop substituting). But this is a change in behaviour which persists into the future (familiarity/habit), bumping up your consumption a notch.

A quick email response is like a special at a supermarket. It's so cheap, you use more. Not responding is like a price increase - sales drop off.
I always cringe when I see math or programming or anything I know something about in popular media as it's usually done so poorly.

So how badly did they butcher the concept of the Dirac sea for the episode? Of course it's all fiction anyways, so it doesn't really matter, but the inner geek in me wants to know!
Ahhh.. I've came across XMPP before but not ejabberd. Many thanks mate! I am working on a similar project which is why I'm fairly intrested.
Because it was probably written in ColdFusion.
thanks for the advice.. I watched it and I bought it and works great..
There are several lists like this floating around, but this one is just amazingly comprehensive. Reading a subset of these books (and actually building stuff with the knowledge gained) will most likely provide one with a better education than all but the top-tier computer sci programs.

And the cost is $0. Now one might argue that a college cuts down on the time it takes to select courses, find and work with other students, get access to mentors, etc. But I doubt it. Whatever learning inefficiencies colleges address, other inefficiencies more than counteract those gains.

Consider that colleges also force you to spend more time on classes you could complete more quickly on your on, plus all the required coursework that might be completely unnecessary for your goals.
Honestly though a lot of the Google Chrome experiments didn't work on my iPad either.
This is the most worthless post I've read in a while. Why did you ditch the real programming languages again?
Reboot every 30 days transates into 120 reboots over the course of 10 years.

In 10 years you are likely to have your application being re-written anyway (with old bugs removed with old code and new bugs introduced).

It may be cheaper to do 120 reboots that debug and fix unknown cruft.
Hah I was just going through the list of Lucasian professors, and found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_King

When he died, it was felt that the memory of such an extraordinary man should not be permitted to die out, and his papers should be published. So his papers were examined, and nothing whatever worth publishing was found
The one big flaw with that interview is that it doesn't compare organic farming with western agriculture in terms of long-term viability. Yes, the carrying capacity of the Earth is only 4 billion with organic farming. But I don't know that mechanized farming can do much better over the long haul.

If we look at the third world, organic agricultural techniques actually do much better than mechanized production methods, even when measured in yields alone. The reason for this is that not everyone has forty feet of topsoil, like we do in Kansas. In a lot of places, the soil is marginal, and simply cannot hold up to intensive agriculture for more than couple of years. Mechanized agriculture on land like that is disastrous and leads to crop failure and famine within a decade (for example, Ethiopia). The only way to make these lands agriculturally viable is with organic farming techniques. [1]

That said, I do agree with the point you're trying to make, even if I disagree with the specific example. We should support or oppose things not because it is fashionable to support or oppose them, but because of reasons that we've worked out for ourselves.

[1] Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Measures to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. 1999. Print.

EDIT: fixed typo
And we also need Plumber anonymous and Taxi driver anonymous...

Stop it! Don't downvote me just yet.

In all seriousness i think this is about expectations; not specifically related to start-ups or even business; expectations from parents, friends and even from yourself can be very stressful... and if you are prone to depression it just gets worse.
This is one of the silliest claims in his piece. It supports the thrust of his argument that our generation's friendliness is affected and skin-deep, and therefore we need anonymous outlets for our underlying negativity. But in reality vicious anonymous comments are outlets of the insecure and jaded. It's not like the friendliest and nicest people we know spend the most time making nasty anonymous comments on the Internet.
now playing fallout 3 lol....
adding to that..

@ half the price and twice the customers you have all the customers who would have bought at the higher price "earning" whatever their surplus would have been + the (half) price - . On top of that you have all of the new customers "earning" a surplus beteen zero and the lower price.
>> If you ever believe the possibility of something like happening is > .00001, do something, anything. If you don't know what to do, contact me (see my profile) and I'll help in any way I can.

Its a nice thought, but people in this position often don't want help.

My best Friend was doing a PHD in a Biochemistry related field at University College London back in 2003. He was an outgoing person, had a hot girlfriend and lots of friends. He had a what seemed like a great life and an even better future.

One night we went out together and had a great night. We went our separate ways about 4am and I we arranged to meet at 5pm the next day.

At 2pm the next afternoon I got a call from his flat mate saying that he had committed suicide. He had access to all kinds of chemicals and substances at the as part of his PHD and he had been taking little bits for months and months and making a potent cocktail of poison. He drank the poison and died instantly.

There was no note, no explanation and no reason anyone knew. I was the last person (friend) to see him alive.

I guess I'm saying - even balanced, successful people have their reasons and you will never know or be told what they are.
Workout Regimen for in shape hackers
I've been working out for the past 3 months now and have made some progress but want to gain more muscle. My current regimen is 120 crunches, 100 push ups, and 40 chin ups 5 times a week as well as 50 body squats 3 times a week for legs. Can any one suggest any improvements for my regimen? I've also been thinking of using creatine what do you guys think? Thanks!
I'll try not to, at the moment I'm trying to get into contact with some of the startups that came out of Startup weekend Melbourne.
Well at least suicide is a legitimate personal choice. Murder is not.
See the video. it's the bumpest ride of all history.

utter crap. and i'm not even trying to figure out how to break!

if you want "A Smoother Ride" get a 29er
> Graphics Interchange Format... was dropped from every usage all over the net in the blink of an eye and replaced by a fresh-new format named Portable Network Graphics.

If by "in the blink of an eye" they mean "over the course of about a decade, gradually, and with hanging-on remnants even today"....
What kind of startups are you looking for? My father runs Tyro Payments (http://tyro.com) and I could try to get in touch with Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian), although I don't know if he would be willing. Are those startups too old/big?
If you look at the letter as a whole, I think it is safe to say that he was alluding to the fact that Feynman had a great personality, unlike many renowned intellectuals.

To me, the quote from Wigner clears up the author's meaning. Wigner stated, "He is a second Dirac, only this time human." Dirac was brilliant, but he may have had a high functioning form of autism which left him socially crippled. He was painfully shy, he didn't have many friends, and social interactions with him were extremely awkward.
Did anyone else see those and think of the smartwheels that YT's board had in Snow Crash? Granted, the wheels pictured aren't actually "smart", in that they don't dynamically alter their rigidity to compensate for detected imperfections, but they're a damn good start towards a mechanism for building smartwheels.
Thank you; you're right. It's not surprising that there is some relationship, but what is actually surprising is that the relationship would so closely match an idealized, particular relationship (unitary elastic demand). (And this should have been obvious to me, since the general use of the demand curve is not, by any means, to prove to people that the price they choose doesn't matter.) I'd edit my original post if I were still within the edit window.
It DOES slow you down. can't you notice on the video? They guy is pedaling standing up and it barely moves.

btw, this is the same concept that forces racers to use slim tires. less cushioning, but less drag.
It's art. not design.

design is the marriage of form and function.
Flash was never alive, so it can’t be dead
That strategy would sell to me better, than dishonest "organic saves the world" rhetoric.
As long as they are based in Australia I would love to hear from them, big or old they all would of started somewhere and that's where the valuable information lies.

So if you could get a hold of them for me that would be excellent.
Because people don't say "he died suddenly" without saying the cause unless it was suicide.
>> I attached two charts to illustrate that. I recently lowered the price of the iPad app (http://bit.ly/92xWv1) from 5 to 1 Dollars.

Try $3. I think it was a coincidence $5 and $1 had the same revenue. The maximum revenue price point should be in between. // guy who studied first year microeconomics.
What this kid say in the first minute is really true. I was craving to make video games when I was a kid, if there was a book about creating video games, I would buy it. I tried everything, my parents didn't really know how to help me...

I ended up choosing flash, it was back in 2002 and started to learn action script (which was very basic then). Made a lot of crappy games, but got bored by the limitations of the software.

Now, years after, I still really want to make a game, but I'm in the wrong major, I'm trying to get into directX but It's really too difficult for me... I don't even know where to start.
It's money you're leaving on the table that people would otherwise be willing to pay you.
In theory, yes. The student would have to be highly self motivated, but this is actually how I learned to program, until I started joining open source projects. It's cost effective, and in my experience, the majority of engineering jobs (especially in startups) that such a student would apply for care more about your ability to code than your degree. A recent topic here actually showed that most programmers applying for a job can't do all but the simplest of programming tasks in languages they list on their resumés. There are fields where a degree is essential, like medical fields with a lot of hands on work. But the beauty of programming fields is that you can learn from the machine that is principally used in programming: the computer.
Ahhh frontpage, we never think about it when we talk about microsoft failures.
I suppose it is when the narrative is the next Facebook killer which the media fostered and perpetuated creating some unreasonable expectation for their team.
I actually see that a lot in the appstore.
The Nobel prize has become such a joke in the last two decades I am surprised that rejecting it hasn't become the norm.

The Nobel peace prize has been awarded to a child molester, a supporter of international terrorism, and a president who had just been elected. In addition to these travesties there was also the "Inconvenient Truth" debacle. (I'm not denying global warming, I just don't think being a narrator warrants a medal and a million dollars.)
Apple App Store Pricing Matrix
>I see

No, obviously you don't see at all. My point was there's no benefit for a country to create more jobs than it has people. The rest is just projection. It must be easy pride yourself in a good post when you respond to things people didn't write.

>From a strict economic point of view, there is no surplus of jobs. The price of labour should rise until the demand for labour abates; and the German workers would be better off. To the degree that that isn't happening (though Germany's population overall is decreasing, not increasing), it is because Germany has an open economy with free movement of labour.

Which was my point. This doesn't benefit the Germans. They would have been much better off allowing the price of labor to rise, which would have meant broadly-shared prosperity. As it is, only the large corporations and the state will benefit. But that was the point of the EU, wasn't it?

> If you're attacking that, you're attacking the whole foundation of the EU, and I don't want much more to do with you.

Oh my! Has the EU become a sacred thing now? It was a stupid idea, or at least a stupid implementation, one that Europe will be regretting for generations. Personally, I try to see the humor in it all - beyond that it's not my problem. Now, if you'll excuse me I need to find a soft shoulder to cry on now that you don't want anything to do with me.
Kindle crash: then maybe you could have removed this line, because it sounds like a software issue.

Businesswomen: if your experience doesn't involve hundreds of women of power, it is incomplete and you must get the experience of others in the game, eg read books.
Accordingly to article, such a price comes from:

- It's not uncommon for this photographer to sell his photos for huge money.

- There are only few prints done.

So this is mostly about who do it. And why his photos? I would say, luck.
Ok, I will look into it (no guarantees :-])!
It's been a very long time and I'm very glad to see a new IOCCC. I clearly remember the day I read about (and successfully booted) the 2004 "best of the show" entry.

http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2004_gavin
I don't know how I lived without cinch.app
Ask HN: Stock trading company that was hiring Hadoop Engineers in NYC?
About a year ago, a firm was hiring Hadoop engineers in NYC. The company had no clients and was involved in stock trading. There were no prescribed hours, generous pay, excellent benefits.

I've tried numerous searches on Google, through my browser histories, etc and haven't turned up anything.

Can anyone recall that company's URL?
CrazyCall - Caller ID Spoofing and Voice changer
Tips for Working With an Interior Designer
Awesome news. So much going on in the Australian tech scene at the moment, the coverage it can get the better. We're launching our beta Friday (ggBet.net), if you need content :)
Ask HN: Has PG ever used an idea from your YC application?
I was just watching PG's Office Hours: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298808297 and at around 28:40 he has an insight that is almost word for word from our 2009 application: make a tool that targets the busybody matchmakers to circumvent the chicken and the egg program with dating sites. Don't make a dating site, just make a tool for matchmakers.

I guess the lesson here is that if you have a good idea, 10^n people have also had the same idea, 10^(n-2) are working on it right now and 10^(n-3) have a decent shot of making it work.

I was wondering, though, out of interest, how many other people have had the same experience of being unsuccessful with their YC application only to find their idea being touted, or, more gallingly, another team being accepted into YC with the same idea?
http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298808297
Marketing does not just involve promotions.

Marketing should always be on your mind when running on the company. Marketing is involved when you choose your target market, when you tailor your product towards your target market, whether you have one product or a whole line of products for a similar function, how to price your line of products to get maximum profits... Advertising to your target market is only one aspect of "marketing". // guy who studied first year marketing.
The funny thing is that I applied for Y Combinator funding three years ago centered around a Blackberry app version of a similar idea. I figured you could tie in ads or shopping recommendations based on actual behavior (rather than desired behavior). Unfortunately, I didn't get funding and the idea was too half baked at the time anyway. I ended up shelving it for over two years.

I resurrected the idea about 6 months ago when I learned Android development. I even built a very crude prototype. As you pointed out, however, data entry is a real problem. However, if you're willing to stick with it, these types of applications can be very powerful and useful for behavior modification because you get feedback on what you actually do. For example, if you're trying to lose weight or change a bad habit (or start a good habit) the power of actual statistical data is amazing. It's like there is another person watching everything you do that you have to be totally honest with. Just being aware of your routines at this level of precision changes you.
I'd be interested in hearing about the legal hoops you guys have to jump through to launch a betting agency in Australia.. I'd imagine it wouldn't be easy?

edit: oh and by the way, I only knew what your site was from the title bar, though I'm sure you'll have more up there on Friday. Good Luck!
Unusually, I don't think it was butchered particularly badly. The sea I believe existed inside of the attacking "angel," and had certain psychological-probing properties.