skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to Use Pinterest without Breaking the Law
Well crap. Now I wish I had gone... next year. maybe.
Books don't need a cadre of software engineers pushing out updates for iOS + every Android device, video transcoding licenses, account servicing, servers, an 800-number staffed with tech support...

The book model was far better.
One feature of parking capacity often ignored is perceived convenience.

For a business such as a CVS or Walgreens drug store, more than the minimum parking will be provided to avoid giving the appearance of a full parking lot to passing motorists because a parking lot which appears to be near capacity causes people to anticipate long lines at the checkout and thus reconsider stopping to shop.

The malls do the same thing to a certain extent (remote satellite lots and transport at peak times would probably be significantly cheaper than utilizing prime real-estate for parking).
The 11 Emotions of SXSW (from The Intense to The Unforgettable)
> Not because they were looking for new ways to spam people with ads

I think you are wrong. I don't think Google "spam[s] people with ads". I found myself and most friends to like Google because they have been exact opposite what was before, such as Altavista: one huge Las Vegas Board, where you were forced to see ads totally irrelevant (spam).

Most GOOG revenue comes from the front page search engine. You search for something. Therefore, you ask to be "spammed".
That's interesting but I'm not sure what your asking of us to solve your inability to filter the things you don't want to see. Site would cease to exist if everything one user wasn't interested in was removed.

Your filters will always turn up some things you want to just like they'll always filter some things you wish they wouldn't. You'll have to live with that degraded experience the rest of us have and not click on those things. Bellyaching about unsolvable problems is just lowering the sites signal to noise ratio unnecessarily.
Would you allow a team to defer until the winter cycle if they applied without an idea and were accepted?
As someone who has gone through YC, this makes perfect sense. My company, along with 15 others in our group, radically changed their idea to the point where it didn't matter what idea we came through the door with. We started out with a Facebook app for sports stuff and ended up as a successful video advertising business. Absolutely zero correlation. PG bet on us in the beginning, not because he loved our idea (it actually was a pretty bad idea), but he saw that my co-founder and I gelled and that we were determined to make whatever damn thing we touched into some form of success.

The other thing to think about is that everyone, i mean everyone has some idea they have thought about which could be a business. If you're the 1% that have never thought of something that could use a change in this world, then the no-idea application probably doesn't apply to you. For the other 99, you can come in with a handful of things that bother you in the world which could be solved by software and YC will more than likely help you pick something they know has a pretty good shot if you are willing to put in the hours.
Works (poetry, prose, songs, art, source code, etc.) are protected by copyright.

Inventions and processes can be protected by patents.

Names and branding can be protected by trademarks.

Secrets can be protected as trade secrets, often in the form of non-disclosure agreements.
I can't imagine professional authors and reviewers putting up with Wikipedia's culture and political bullshit for long.
> But if someone does defend himself, the law allows the prevailing party in an infringement case to be awarded its legal fees and costs, even if it were the defendant.

I know it's a common strategy for patent trolls and extortionists in the US to count on the fact that the defendant cannot afford to defend themselves and would lose money even if they win the case. So small developers usually settle before going to court even on bogus patents.

Is it a different when applied to patents than to copyright? So on which cases are the defendant actually awarded its costs? Which ones are not? What's the difference? Is this case in the article maybe an exemplary case that might change how judges award defendants with its costs? Could this help set patent trolls back from suing small developers?
The Sony Ericsson MBW200-series are probably the least "techy-looking" bluetooth watches http://www.inglue.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/sony-ericss...
How would you get your car back if it went and parked itself?
I think there's no story there. If the platiff won the small claims case and the HE initiated further contact with AT&T on the matter then all bets are off and AT&T is entitled to respond as it pleases, even if it's a "we won't talk to you about this matter we just settled in court unless you sign an NDA"
Oh, that's the same guy? I remember being tickled by that particular blog post.
That's awesome. Glad to hear a Sass port exists.

Out of curiosity, (and assuming you use the sass-twitter-boostrap gem in your projects) do you use any other Sass libraries besides Bootstrap port?
Great job.

Just curious, I have had similar ideas, but saw this NYT article about sites like CureTogether.com and PatientsLikeMe.com, & decided it was a met need.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/business/30stream.html?pag...

I am passionate about using tech to improve healthcare & would love to talk over email/IM about your idea in detail

All the best & keep up the great work
Low sales isn't interesting in itself -- the Golden Ring of retail is a low volume/immense markup business. 244 years of history should also hint at the fact that pricing isn't the issue.
If you're enraged over relocating a "+" prefix to a double quoted word, then you might not want to use a post-2005 version of Microsoft Office...
His complaint that you won't be able to walk across the campus is silly -- the current HP campus is fenced off too.

And I'm not really sure who would be walking where across it anyway. It's bordered on the south side by I-280. There is a strip mall on the other side of Wolfe, on the west side, but immediately to the east is office buildings and a Kaiser Permanente facility -- well, I guess there is some housing on the other side of Tantau, but not much, and east of that is Lawrence Expressway.

It's only across Homestead on the north side that there is much of a residential area.

In short, I don't see that there are many people who would walk across the campus even if they could.

(I live a couple of miles away, and drive by it all the time.)
>>What if one day the other side of the globe getting sunlight powered the grid for the other half? Of course this would require very peaceful nations on each continent, so even if we had the cost-effective technology now, it would take hundreds if not thousands of years to happen politically.<<

Why? Look at the world today. Russia supplies energy to Western Europe, Saudi Arabia provides energy to the US, Australia provides coal to China. None of them have much love for each other, it's just mutual self-interest.
For me it's nice that one company doesn't know/own everything about me. When you put all your eggs in one basket and then the company turns, getting out can suck. And sometimes I route for the other guy to prevent a total monopoly or to spur innovation.
smart phone.
Sorry, health insurance providers.
Trust.

If you invest time/money in something, you want to have a good feeling about it. I want to know I'm not going to get screwed down the road.

I think of if like a relationship with person. Do you want to be friends/lovers with a thief/liar/cheater?

Reputation matters.
People who're not on the west coast apply to YC too.
There's an obvious opportunity that most people miss - put energy-intensive manufacturing processes in sundrenched places. Industrial energy consumption is about 30% of total use in the US, representing a greater share than either transport or domestic use. Aluminium smelting requires massive amounts of electricity, so we're already locating smelters near to hydroelectric dams to take advantage of cheap electricity.

There are hundreds of other processes with huge energy inputs that are currently satisfied by cheap fossil fuels, but could well be met by equatorial solar facilities. Considering how quickly manufacturing transitioned to China, it seems entirely plausible that we could move most high-energy, low-labour processes to equatorial regions within a couple of decades.
I wonder what technologies and goods would a survivor be able to recreate based on Britannica alone.
Its sad to see, and in another way a little scary. I sure hope we have enough dinosaurs to burn to keep the Internet running. Long live "The Cloud".
Very interesting. I wonder how much power it takes to operate something like this.
Yes, those services were cool (at the time).

Google+ is only cool for geeks, if even that. I'm not sure what to do with Google+. The technical folks I work with aren't sure. The non-technical people barely know it exists.
Is that the same guy (I honestly don't know)? There is no answer on Quora that I saw. If so, then yeah that post would be viewed in a very skeptical light. If not, well then unrelated.

Edit: Looking at other responses about his history I doubt it, it sounds like he previously worked in DevDiv (my home), not OSD (the home of Bing).
My wife took my 3GS iphone last year when she lost her phone and for a few months I used a 3G iPad and a prepaid dumbphone we had lying around. It was a surprisingly decent setup. Because I do so much of my phoning on Skype the actual monthly charges were about half of what they were with my 3GS plan.

One thing I realized was the iPad plan is the dumb pipe plan we've all been waiting for. It's really a neat trojan horse Apple's set up with the carriers for some future disruption like an iphone nano where the bluetooth headset is the whole phone and they can sell the thing for $149 without a subsidy.
Well, hello! First off, Yahoo's never initiated a lawsuit with Google. It was Overture that sued Google in 2002, when they refused to license their patent for search ads. Yahoo acquired Overture a year later, and it settled out of court.

Sure, Yahoo could've just dropped the case, but I think that's different from initiating a lawsuit against a competitor.

Up until this week, Yahoo was never known for using their patent portfolio as a weapon. They'd built up defensive assets to protect against other competitors, but didn't use it offensively. They even worked with Google, Facebook, and others to defeat patent trolls like Eolas.

You can say what you like, but you weren't there. Ask other people who were, and they'll tell you the same thing: in 2005, Yahoo had bright prospects, they were making solid progress, and everyone was optimistic. Some of the most intelligent, creative people I know have their names on Yahoo patents, and they signed the contract for many of the same reasons I did -- the patent system is deeply broken, but the only sane strategy for a company Yahoo's size is to build a defensive portfolio. And we regret it.
I am with you 100%, but let me explain what they are thinking: "I have a 6 figure job, a nice home, a luxury car, but she choose this artist without 30 cents in his bank account." The attitude says more about the commentor than the concept they are complaining about.
Yes, I just meant to point out that there is a way to do closures in Python 2.x. Looks like here the author wants a function that saves its internal state, i.e., a generator.
Do you mean "underserved"?

I agree that the two can coexist (and probably have to). Kickstarter might work for areas with untapped potential when the game is published by a recognized personality with public goodwill on their side. But to be honest, to actually do something novel and unproven, or with a budget that is larger than goodwill can provide, someone needs to take a bigger risk. And to make that happen the I think the risk-takers will need equity. So while I am happy to see this Kickstarter project grow so big, I don't think traditional publishing should or will go away, lest we end up with only the games that someone can pitch to public backers in a Kickstarter video.
I use the iOS app iTap RDP regulary and it works great, with minimal input lag.
Oh absolutely but if you've ever gone hiking without a compass you may have experienced the 'many straight segments run you in a circle' kind of effect. Generally for a 'huge' success the first 10 years are just developing potential, there aren't a lot of questions because its 'obvious' where you need to be.

But once you get to the top of that mountain, you really need to think long and hard about the next mountain you are going to go for. I've always been a big fan of a 1yr, 3yr, 5yr planning system where every year you think about those three time frames, yet as a core value perspective you need a different scale to think about things. Ten years seems to be a reasonable tech scale.
While that's true, I don't think any of them really had critical mass. Of those you mentioned, I had precisely one friend on Myspace, none on Hi5 or Friendster. I had two friends on Orkut. I think Facebook played it smart by making it an exclusive network on college campuses at first, then opening it up.
Actually I made minor progress on it by just banning the msdn domain.

I think I've also figured out a pretty cool product idea from this as well. However I'm not going to get into it here because people have taken my product ideas and turned them into products twice now (actually one of them was a Hacker Newspaper iOS app which looks very, very, very similar to my http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/).

In terms of what I want, well, any ideas on how to improve signal/noise on HN, whether via automated filtering or some other method.
Don't forget that Google's headquarters is in a sprawling campus near the suburbs in Mountain View... with a small Microsoft campus near by. Your hypothetical "hipster" choosing between Google, Microsoft, and Apple in the bay area is choosing between bland suburbs and bland suburbs.

Google also buses people in from San Francisco... which you have to admit beats the hell out of having them all drive in... or even take up seats on public transit for that matter.
Given your experiences/history, I for one would like to know what you think is driving the G+ crusade.

What disappoints me is how much it has failed. I used to love Google products, but lately...not so much.
It is an evolutionary trade off due to how human beings instinctively handle cognitive dissonance.

It is very amusing and somewhat depressing on how the most intelligent of individuals can be reduced to a frothing reactionary if you know his/her life history and deduce their biases.
Microcredit is still an unproven intervention. It seems like an obviously good thing, but we have a paucity of evidence for its efficacy as a remedy for poverty. The best available randomised trials show indifferent results, with only marginally statistically significant benefits.

http://www.cgap.org/gm/document-1.9.55766/FORUM2.pdf
Initiativbewerbung macht Sinn
Macht eine Initiativbewerbung eigentlich Sinn?
Die Antwort bekommt Ihr in diesem kleinen Video.
Here's what I would worry about. Obviously the YC folks know what they are doing generally and this is an experiment that may fail or may succeed. So this is offered in the spirit of addressing a possible issue. If you haven't thought about it, at least thinking about it may help you avoid it.

What I would worry about would be the fact that there is a difference between being given an idea and turning around a general idea into something new. If you are already in business, and you are going to be successful, turning around an idea you already have into something different is a familiar process and a necessary skill. On the other hand, the question becomes what happens with those who don't have an idea?

I can't speak for the people who will apply, but I know there is a huge difference between the attention I put into working on my own ideas and working on other people's. Ok, these categories aren't mutually exclusive. These aren't really comparable. Even if forced by circumstance into doing a specific thing for a business, it's different than being essentially hired by investors to implement their ideas. Again these aren't mutually exclusive categories or anything, but they represent something I would hope you'd be careful about.

One way to go about this would be to work with such people to find ideas after accepting them.

Being excited about something is important in running a business regardless of its size or scope.

Your response suggests you are aware of this. So maybe all of this just acts as validation that you are on the right path.
Indeed. My first Exposure was Laura Ries as a Guest on Fox Business. Since that point I have read all of their books and completely agree that Positioning by jack trout and al ries is a Must Read, as are their other books.
this is an opinion piece related to this bloomberg article: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-12/sec-said-to-plan-ac...

I have never quite understood how these secondary markets work, is this article saying that they are going to shut down completely? Are there laws regulating selling your own shares of a non-public company, or is it just that a trading market cannot be setup for doing that?
I never used EB (I had a set of World Book Encyclopedias) but the thought is the same...it is a weird sense of finality that comes with knowing something you grew up with that was so oddly reliable is fading away due to technology that provides things it doesn't (fast iterations on rapidly changing data) but lacks others now possibly perceived as less valuable or assumed without testing the veracity (perceived up front accuracy/fact-checking).
You're definitely right to quote this, but I think it was the exception to the rule.
Why should they have to?

Some of their customers want it, it is a trivial idea and there's video proof that Apple didn't invent it anyway (Neonode N1m).
No, it wasn't: http://www.doublefine.com/news/comments/the_partys_over_but_...

So they really got what they wanted plus three million in the end. (Minus ten or so percent, right? Five for Kickstarter, the rest for Amazon.)
The Wikipedia article says "Whilst adverse selection in theory seems an obvious and inevitable consequence of economic incentives, empirical evidence is mixed." This paper gives more concrete empirical evidence.

The WP article later says: "On the other hand, "positive" test results for adverse selection have been reported in health insurance,[8] long-term care insurance[9] and annuity markets.[10]". The reference #9 is Finkelstein, A.; McGarry, K. (2006). "Multiple dimensions of private information: evidence from the long-term care insurance market". American Economic Review 96 (4): 938–958.

Then if you go to the actual paper by Nathaniel Hendren, linked to by the Slate article, you'll read:

"""Previous research has found minimal or no evidence of private information using the revealed preference approach in these settings. In life insurance, Cawley and Philipson [1999] find no evidence of adverse selection. He [2009] revisits this with a different sample focusing on new purchasers and does find evidence of small amounts of adverse selection. In long-term care, Finkelstein and McGarry [2006] find direct evidence of private information by showing subjective probabilities are correlated with subsequent nursing home use. However, they find no evidence that this private information leads to adverse selection in the form of a correlation between insurance purchase and subsequent losses in the LTC insurance market.35 To our knowledge, there is no previous study of private information in the non-group disability market."""

In other words, WP's "'positive' test results" isn't as strongly positive as you might think from that short WP summary. The finding from this paper is the development of a more useful model of the problem which can make more concrete statements like: "For those who would be rejected, private information imposes a barrier to trade equivalent to an implicit tax on insurance premiums of roughly 65-75% in long-term care, 90-130% in disability, and 65-130% in life insurance."

That could not have been done using the information in the Wikipedia article.

You complained about two things: that there are no new findings, and that the Slate article could have been writing from the Wikipedia article. I think I've shown that there are definite new findings in the actual report. It was interesting enough, after all, to get the researcher "offers from economics departments at Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton."

As to the quality of the Slate article - the entire first half is meant for someone who has never heard of "adverse selection", and it explains the topic much better than the WP article does. It then covers some of the research methodology, and describes the policy impact and ties to changes in US insurance law and politics. None of the last half is covered in the Wikipedia article.
They were originally going to call it the Distract-o-Matic, but I guess inPulse has a nice ring to it too.
How long until you get where you're going: making seed funding a credit card application? A web form with supporting documents, a video, scan social networks, cut a check. Or better yet, a check card.

Announcing the Y Combinator Amex...
I may add Swagapalooza, I think.
Yeah, I don't facebook. Never have, never will.
I wish I had wrote: "There will be an app for that". I'm 99% sure someone from HN will program it.
After reading Ridiculous Fish's version of this (http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/The-app-that-was-fixed-...), I use a mental version of Dr. House.

It's worked out a couple of times... "How can the process have failed when the logs indicate success?" "Everybody lies." "Oh, so maybe the log is written at some point before the process actually finishes?" "Treat with steroids."
Related NYT article with some more facts & insights

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/business/global/india-over...
Courseoff - making college course schedule planning easy
The other side to this (as I am sure you are aware) is that if this experiment fails it means one of two things:

1) It's a bad idea, or

2) The implementation needs work

I think the biggest difficulty in assessing things will be if it doesn't meet expectations, determining which of these applies after the fact.
So... if it's a problem with designers not liking bootstraps stale design, why not build templates that use Bootstrap as a base and release them to the public?

I really don't see the issue.
If your company was acquired by someone and then they ask you to file patents on the IP that you sold them, then what's so wrong with doing it?

Rather than bitch and whine at Yahoo, why not bitch and whine at your decision to sell to Yahoo in the first place?

Granted, I think that when you cooperated with the lawyers and helped them apply for patents on the ideas they acquired, you acted professionally and in good faith.

If you had purposefully not cooperated and the post was about how you fooled them and they did not patent any of your ideas, that would have been professional suicide, and would be best posted anonymously.

So yeah, Yahoo's pursuit of patents is stupid, and this latest action is truly despicable. But you did what you were supposed to do.
There's nothing evolutionary about "social signals". It's very, very old. Since the beginning of time advertising companies have used big data to better target their ads. Facebook obviously makes this easier, but it is not new. 20 years ago advertisers knew, within a margin of error, what type of car you drove, how much money you made, and whether your wife was pregnant.

Social signals are less valuable than search terms. Search terms very often lead to a direct purchase. Social is just another avenue, like TV, to build brand awareness. It's very valuable, but it's not search-valuable.