skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Looking for a house in SV. What’s the best location for people like us?
We’re planning to move to silicon valley this summer, either somewhere around the 15th of may, or somewhere around the 30th of june. Based on our profile, where do you advise us to rent a House (or apartment)? This is our profile: We love energy around us so we prefer a busy street with coffee shops, stores and super markets. We would like to live in a surrounding where a lot of startup people live, we would like to meet them all! And because we are a promising startup (of course! :-)) we also want to live in a surrounding where we can bump into vc’s on a daily base :-). Of course we have some thoughts of our own. But what would you recommend us? Greetz from holland!
Unambitious startup ideas can be conjured up by a small team and sold to a big company later with hardly any up front dollars. If you want ambitious you should look outside the realm of 100% tech startups. Specifically, you should look in the food/tech realm - but don't look at the worthless calorie counters.

Disclaimer: I work for a struggling startup in the food/tech realm.
I remember the premier issue. It had Super Mario Bros 2 on the cover. Here's an image http://www.flickr.com/photos/bochalla/4002411316/
Building run-time models? Make sure you’re communicating with the business.
In some scenarios sure, in others I'd disagree.

Take your maps example as a generic zooming vs. folding example. When you use something like Google Maps, if you set your browser window to show you 2cm x 2cm, would that be big enough, I doubt it. And yet your screen doesn't have to be as big as an unfolded traditional map, thanks to panning and zooming. This shows that a.) dynamic displays can reduce the need for folding but that b.) there will always be a (subjective) question of what works best.

As to a more realistic example - as a kindle reader, I wouldn't want a screen smaller than it already has, no matter how much zooming or scrolling it offers. And while the device can fit in a pocket, I generally don't like having it in one. If it was half the width and I could fold it in half, I would love that.
I fail to see why companies that make money would fail to satisfy an investor?

Is there something about the YC model that makes companies that go on to turn modest profits not generate returns for the investor?

A business like Wal-Mart wouldn't satisfy you as an investor? I wouldn't have any problems taking 8% of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart didn't invent anything new, they just did it a little bit better than their competitors. Techcrunch 1969: "Wal-Mart: Sears for people who like to pay less"

Impressive algorithms don't make money, businesses that satisfy customers do. You're not going to 'change the world' unless your customers are happy.
We are doing tons of measurement. We use Google Analytics, Omniture, and Parse.ly. We are literally drowning in data.

I have only been in the industry a few years, but most newspaper websites that I come across do the same thing. We product 80-100 new pieces of content per day and it is very challenging to create a design that works.

About our Audience:
Our audience is the 5 million residents in the Riverside, CA area. As we are right next to Los Angeles, we do not have dedicated local TV news. There are 13 other newspapers in our market, including the LA Times.

About 30% of our audience accounts for 80% of our uniques & page views. Traffic picks up around 9 and peaks around lunch.

We have seen one trend: Homepage -> article -> homepage -> article etc for the 'top stories'
MAEDR | App Framework
But component prices are often public, and help people predict the cost of devices using the components before they are announced - so still very relevant to consumers.
Rapidshare is legal, finds German court
Site to compare Mobile Game Engines (iOS, Android, HTML5)
Your first link . . . we seem to be underperforming the logarithmic regression line solidly for the last forty years. Does it really make sense to pretend not to notice that? I guess if you want to sell the claim that solar is going to run out in two hundred years . . .

> If you don't agree please point to the errors in his calculations.

Free downvotes for people doing as you asked!
Something I've seen clearly is that if you haven't talked quietly with the founders of a startup, you might not know what they're doing.

I'm building a company right now that intends to have three major Acts in it's lifetime, the first of which is unimpressive but designed to get us customers and base knowledge for use while executing Act II, which we then intend to apply to additional verticals as part of Act III.

But Act I will likely look like something that two guys could put together in their garage in a year. And that's exactly what it is.
So instead of complaining about a fascist employer, you make the effort to complain about someone using common language, ignoring the utter insanity of a company filtering access to words on the internet.

I can think of certain phrase to describe that that wouldn't make it through those filters.
What does their overall histogram look like?
X for Y, where X = "Airbnb" and Y = "Large existing market poorly served by technology", is in fact a good shorthand for "frighteningly ambitious".

Literally. Airbnb is a frighteningly ambitious company. It is explosively generating value and we don't know how it's going to play out long term. It could end up with us living in caves with dogs watching out for the Terminators.

It is hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously after it suggests that "Airbnbing" auto mechanics is unambitious. It's possible that most Americans have routine car service done at dealerships where they're being routinely fleeced, and that the current crappy system of servicing vehicles is driving talent either out of the businesses or to those giant dealership shops. Have you ever tried to find a reliable mechanic? I drive an old Audi. It's painful.
Even Twitter wouldn't sound ambitious if you say "we are group SMS for the world".

To better understand how ambitious a startup is, assume that its adoption is 100%. If everyone is using it, does it change lives? If everyone chats on Twitter, does it impact politics? If everyone is on Facebook, do you reconnect with old friends? Etc. Dropbox is in that category too.

With used cars purchases, I can see how everyone would use the site, and still not have any meaningful impact. Cheaper cars. More efficient market. But still, in the end, cheaper cars. Am I missing something?
White house to announce Big Data R&D Initiative
To follow up -- what sort of architectural decisions were those?
I kept waiting for the other foot to drop, and it never did.

This is great if you're playing hangman against a computer. Probably, you're not.

You're playing against a person, who probably has some sense of your strategies.

Even when I was a kid, we didn't play hangman by choosing random words. What's the fun in that? You notice how the other person plays, and in the next rounds you pick words that break their strategies.

You notice they are doing the "common letters" or even "common vowels" strategy, and you give them "lynx".

Or you trick them with a word that has a few easy-to-get letters, but is going to be hard to guess the last few because there are so many possible matching words -- I had a great one that I forget now... maybe "budder"?

Did everyone really play with randomly-chosen words? What a waste.
When the Panda Strikes - Why you can't afford to ignore SEO
> not particularly professional…

I am reminded of http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-...
新2系统出租
I do not think that is correct. Let's say that, at some time, you know the word has an E, with 99% probability at position 1 and with 1% at position 2. You also know there is 50% chance that the word has an O. I would guess the E, because it comes free, even though it is not the one that gives the most information.

You must somehow weigh information gain against risk.
How skilled a developer would we need to handle these issues?
SaaS Revenue to Reach $14.5 Billion in 2012
White House Makes Big Data Collaboration a Priority
If you are going to change the name, make it googlable. It isn't just to avoid strange symbols (C# I'm looking at you), but the name you choose, if typed in a search engine, shouldn't return other more prominent results. So, don't call your company HomerSimpson, for example.
Maybe some broad-sweeping entry level books or literature reviews would be good. For me (and possibly many others on hn), the extent of my knowledge in the field as a whole is pretty small so I think some introductory resources geared towards someone coming from a strong software or math background would be best.
It would be nice to see those graphs with a logarithmic y-axis.
You have it right. 20 % of electricity use means, that on average power is the same 20 %. When it is blowing in large areas, more than 50 % of electric power is produced by wind turbines and when it's not blowing the percentage may be very small. In Portugal the maximum power share wind turbines have had is 75 %, though only 17 % on average is produced by wind.[1]

This creates two problems:

1) You need to have a lot of transmission capacity, which is used very inefficiently. With conventional powerplants you can forecast pretty easily, where and how much electricity is produced and consumed and you can size power grid accordingly (with backup capacities, of course). With wind power the production places and amounts are all the time changeing and you should have plenty of capacity, of which on average only small share is used.

2) To cover the consumption during non-windy times, you need to maintain backup power plants, which should be able to follow load rapidly. Water power is ideal for this, but as penetration level raises you need also other power plants, gas turbines for example (but who wants to maintain a turbine, which is used rarely...). Also batteries may be applied in the future, but in large scale that is nowadays pretty much science fiction.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Penetration
I think it's important to give clear examples here - research questions that biologists have posed but are struggling to answer with existing software tools. They certainly exist, but I think some overestimate the bottleneck. For example, I would argue that the bioinformatics challenges at Ion Torrent are less important than, say, chemistry that creates longer reads :)
Get paid to launch startups, become the tech co-founder of your favorite one
Strange Computer Code Discovered Concealed In Superstring Equations
This is a good insight. To formalize it: each question segments the words into 2^max_word_length groups of various sizes, and we seek to minimize the worst case number of questions still needed, regardless of which answer we get back.

Which, for the ispell words list, appears to be 'e' :( edit: which was the solution found for the suboptimal method in the article, and which is not present for words in the corpus 25% of the time

code at http://pastie.org/3693750
Facebook Photos Slip Through Great Firewall, Arrive in China
With AIDS, for example, it infects a cell and causes that cell to replicate as many copies of the virus as possible (remember viruses don't replicate on their own). The cell eventually ruptures spreading out more copies of the virus to infect more cells. By killing the infected cell as early as possible, you drastically reduce the number of copies produced.
Does this mean that RSTLNE on wheel of fortune is non-optimal too?
Don't forget that Airbnb once pitched themselves as "EBay for space", just as Your Mechanic now dub themselves the "Airbnb for car repair"

What once seemed like a niche, unambitious company now is frighteningly ambitious.
Similar to other questions, but can anyone explain what exactly this data is and what analysis is being done on it?
Myspace for Harvard students.
That's a wonderful story; wonderfully written.

If you don't mind, it reminds me of an Asimov story I've always loved, "Profession". http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html
"I can't trust myself around Kickstarter. Kickstarter, please do quality control for me."

Conversely... This is the perfect opportunity for someone to buy IndieKicks.com and start blogging about cool projects that you can help out. Make it not just funding, but projects like SETI@Home and the likes as new ones come online.

"IndieKicks.com - Create the world you want."
Super Happy Block Party Hackathon, Palo Alto, Saturday / 50th SuperHappyDevHouse
Y Combinator Applications due today, did you apply? (Reddit thread)
I wish the top questions were more interesting, and not so many "what does [some random string of punctutation] do in [language of the day]?" I'm really surprised anyone finds that worthwhile ...
Ask HN: Hosting suggestion for python and django
I am starting, or at least I plan, to learn python, along with django or web2py.

Anyway, I searched a good shared hosting that supports django, but und nothing after 1 hour. And of course, decent pricing.

If there's nothing, I'll take a small VPS.

Thanks in advance!
CTRL+A can also do the trick.
I can't tell what you're actually arguing for or against in this thread. There seem to be two different things:

1) The rails.app project wants to solve a problem that doesn't exist. There are a lot of comments here from other people who think getting started with rails is confusing, and who point out that your much-touted five steps are not complete, canonical, or easy, so I won't further beat that dead horse.

2) There are many harder problems you'll come across when doing rails professionally. This is incredibly true, nobody disagrees, but it's irrelevant to the rails.app project.
This trend of people complaining about the perfectly innocent and common use of swearing is getting pretty lame.

Especially combined with the unfounded accusation that there is some kind of deliberate, manipulative intent behind it. What on earth makes you think this is intended as linkbait? Nobody ever uses swear words where you're from?
Fascinating!

He taped his friend jumping and climbing in a parking lot to model the animations after (and posted the video): http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1985/10/october-20-198...

I can definitely see the character performing all those actions from my own childhood memories..
Yes, it has historically been some sort of quilt. See also:

http://www.gnu.org/award/prior-years.html
Join us for the first ever 'Super Happy Block Party Hackathon' this Saturday! Hackers + Artists + Palo Alto. Including investor office hours where aspiring entrepreneurs and startups will have full access to more than 25 of Silicon Valley’s top Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists (register in advance here http://bit.ly/GWDvmo). This Saturday, March 31st, from 1 pm – 1 am on High St in downtown Palo Alto. Looking forward to seeing you there!
It's been too long since I've taken statistics to be sure, but I wonder if you could account for this by randomly placing the options in the top position then comparing the results of when A is on top versus when B is on top?
For the few who can't just use StartSSL, couldn't you just use a self-signed certificate? I mean, it's suboptimal, but it's a far cry from "no way," isn't it?
LOVE the rewind feature - nice work guys
Students are Woefully Prepared for Internet Age Job Market
I work on Moai - we just shipped 1.0 last week. It's designed to be a minimalist, open source framework for game development. We think that's the best approach for experienced game devs - look at Bungie's Crimson Steam Pirates on iOS and Chrome for an example of what you can achieve. If you need a higher level scene manager, then check out Rapa Nui for Moai at https://github.com/ymobe/rapanui
Uh, that's the title of his own blog post.

And few others could get away with that without being eviscerated as self-aggrandizers.

The ongoing discussion has not involved other people talking about Dustin Curtis much at all.

There is incredibly little that is compelling in what Curtis is pitching (in fact I find it all a bit laughably naive. His overarching goal seems to be to create the next The Verge or something? And some minor tweaks of blog authoring is going to make that happen?) It lit a certain niche of the web on fire because it was pitched by someone with a high PageRank, achieved via pretty pernicious tactics (the outrageous 3.5 inch bit being prime). Then everyone starts their clones and offshoots and discussions because they want a piece of the traffic attention.

I asked in my original comment in this post "What are those aspects [that resulted in it hitting the top of Hacker News]?" No one has answered. I have yet to see anyone describe why this deserves any attention at all.
So, Best Buy still exists for some combination of two reasons:

1. You can get your stuff RIGHT NOW
2. You supposedly can get customized help/advice

What can other companies do to hasten Best Buy's death? Amazon seems to be piecing together a distribution network for same day/next day delivery in dense urban markets (at least, as a Prime member shipping to Chicago, I was offered some sort of courier delivery for $4). Perhaps Walgreens, etc. could up their game and offer an intelligently stocked selection of need-it-now things like cables? They're open 24/7 in most markets and could probably deal with "only" a 100% mark-up. Certainly, the immediacy of purchasing a TV from Best Buy is important to some, but I suspect small accessories account for the majority of purchases which, if a day's lag time had not been an issue, would have been made online instead.

The help/advice need seems like a more interesting niche for start-ups. Hunch.com seems like the right sort of idea if applied to Amazon's offerings. Let's say my friend suggests that we do a Skype video chat. While I personally can read through product specifications, know various companies' reputations for providing driver support over time, etc., my parents would be lost. A good salesperson asks questions about a customer's needs which help filter down a huge set of potential products down to just a few. Imagine paying a trusted, independent, and knowledgeable person $10 for a ten minute chat along with an interactive Amazon browsing session. People like my parents would be delighted. Heck, I'd use such a service if I was shopping for, say, a kitchen faucet.

What else can be done?
Superb. As a fellow Torontonian, programmer, and just a guy with a mom, this story warms me up. She sounds badass.
Walmart is a world-class innovator in supply chain management, retail engineering, shipping logistics, inventory tracking... the list just goes on and on.

Walmart is one of those things that is just so effective and so pervasive that we forget how important its original ideas are. It's like learning to like music in 2003 and hearing the Pixies for the first time and not getting it; you don't realize that virtually all of pop/rock music for the last 20 years is built on stuff they popularized.

But unlike the Pixies, Walmart has ruthlessly refined and improved their systems instead of breaking up the band with a faxed message from Black Francis.

Point being: innovation isn't always easy to spot in a simple paragraph on a message board.
My all-time favorite link to put in an HN comment is the one I will put here, "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

by Peter Norvig, LISP hacker and now director of research at Google.

I hope the preliminary research findings discussed in the interview submitted here are replicated and prove to have clinical benefit for human patients. Finding out whether or not they do will still take much work by other researchers.
Yikes, good call. I confused GNU IceCat[1], which was formerly GNU Iceweasel with Debian's rebranding of Firefox, which is still known as Iceweasel[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...
I am sure they are. That is the rational for the 'PUE' adjustment.

Typical data center charges a power 'rate' for your actual power (either metered or fixed) and then a 'environment' or 'rent' charge which covers the cost of power they are buying to keep your stuff cool. That ratio, the power you use in your machines, vs the total power you use inclusive of the datacenter is the "PUE Factor". Old school data centers, which were built on a model similar to a mainframe 'machine room' that larger corporations had, had very expensive and clunky cooling which meant that while you paid maybe 11 cents for a kW of power to compute, the datacenter was charging you 25 cents per kW to remove the that heat, so the ratio would be '(25+11)/11' or 3.27! facilities built in the 90's had ratios in the 2.2 - 2.7 range, built in the oughts its usually 1.8 - 2.3 and built in the 10's its closer to 1.3 - 1.8. Dedicated facilities like Facebook, Amazon, and Google build get even better ratios.

Another thing that these places will offer is called 'smart hands' or 'remote hands' or 'tech on demand' who for $50 - $150/hr will go out and swap out a part that you've drop shipped to the place. Assuming you've got power strips that you can remotely power cycle and IPMI boards for doing 'boot from BIOS' type work you generally need no staff at all on-site, so your grossed up power/cooling/rent charge is all you end up paying. This makes it easy for ops guys like me to compare options, which range from a low of about $150/kWh-month to $250/kWh-month (some 'retail' co-location facilites go as high as $600/kWh-month but that is not a bulk deal for someone like AOL or a search engine like Blekko) So at the low end of $150/kWh-month that is (150 x 12 or $1,800/yr and for a 1U server pulling < 500 watts net cost around $750/year in all up data center 'recurring' costs). At $250/kw*month its only $1,500 a year. My estimate at $1,084/year earlier is pretty achievable for anyone putting 9,500 machines into a data center.

[edit: remove asterisks]
Silicon Beach and Silicon Hills – Welcome to the Family
FounderDating expands to bring entrepreneurs together in Los Angeles and Austin.
This is delightful! Thanks for sharing.
Bill Gates & His 11 Tips For Success You Will Never Learn In School
It is a wonderful and inspiring story. It is the best way to honor one's parents. Thanks for sharing it with us.
This Site Finds You a Better Seat on a Plane
This is common behavior for hackers: Few years ago I was on a vacation in a nice villa with "internet in the house". It turned out that this means DSL in the administrator's room. One hour trip to the near town later there was Wifi coverage in the estate. Nothing of the their work's magnitude, of course. Drinks were on the house that night.
My Boss on Britney Spears and e-commerce angel investing
There appears to be a project on Kickstarter to create an open source pressure sensitive pen. The current design doesn't look like it incorporates a "higher precision" tip like the iPen (http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/ipen) or Jot Pro (http://adonit.net/product/jot-pro/) that have already been mentioned, but it could be promising.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/option8/pressurepen-open...
Very little on SO (10), but much more on ServerFault (430ish).
The picture of Matz, Stallman and the Quilt is priceless.

I like that this award goes to Matz, good choice!
I don't think foldability is just a medieval thing. People want screen real estate. They want to see their photos and videos in a large form factor. They also want to carry the screen in their pockets or backpacks. Foldable paper is a neat idea that achieves both. I would find it rather frustrating if I could only zoom into small parts of a map and never view the whole terrain in its 40-inches-across, 60-degrees-of-angular-diameter glory. Size matters.

Scrolling and zooming are not appropriate substitutes for folding in electronic displays. A real substitute would be a pocket-size device that can project an image of arbitrary size in mid-air, so that people can see their maps IMAX at a distance of 3 feet if they want to.

Edit: some rewording.