skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is always easier to armchair quarterback people's stories like this, but I do see two problems that immediately stuck out at me.

Success in business centers around execution and if you do not execute effectively you are bound to fail. In the first paragraph the guy says "The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat?" As a business owner if my customers were telling me I was "doomed" I would be working to change that perception. If a potential long-term customer sees your business as doomed from the start, he or she is probably going to resist going to your business by instinct. This can be especially true in the restaurant business and even more so with coffee shops. People are creatures of habit and tend to go places they like and enjoy. If you want people to come to your coffee shop it is going to take time (more than a month). If they do stop in and feel as if your business is doomed then what incentive do they have to come back again?

The second problem I see here is this guy had a dream and in that dream there was a part where he would open the shop and there would be immediate success. Not success earned by time and through customer loyalty. He expected the success of opening the doors and having people rushing in. Starting a new business takes time and, as others have said, a savings available to handle the rough times and starting period. This is especially so with restaurants and probably more so with coffee houses. Expenses are going to be high between rent, payroll, and food expenses. If you can't afford to handle these without a single customer walking in the door for a month or two your chances of success are instantly diminished.

The final problem I see is this guy was not open to changing his pricing. His solution was to go with the cheaper product rather than raise his prices. It is a known fact that people will pay more for a better product, but they aren't going to pay the same for a cheaper product. I surely wouldn't buy a Kia at a BMW price.

While I feel sorry for this guy and at the same time give him credit for trying, I do not feel as if he put enough thought into the business, gave it enough time, and surely was not familiar with the management side of running a restaurant. Sadly he learned the hard way and now his life is destroyed.
Maybe he will have a lot of ex-pat users too? Lots of Nigerians outside of Nigeria. Seun, you could subtlety promote the Overseas category.. or you could have a small fee for posting in (parts of?) the Overseas category while leaving the rest free - similar to craigslist's "free except for" policy.
> In my view, a good teacher is still underpaid at 100K per year.

Teach for America throws inexperienced recent liberal arts grads into teaching and pays them peanuts. They generally outperform experienced teachers.

Teachers are generally over-paid, I think. The problem is really that nobody with ability would choose to work in such a bureaucratic shit-show. It's not the money.

I bet lots of SUPER qualified people would go for a four year stint in teaching. Retired people, young mothers looking for reduced hours for a couple years, or recently cashed out entrepreneurs, or whatever. The bureaucracy currently precludes this.
I found the article interesting - thank you - but I'm a little confused as to why it's here on Hacker News. I'm comparatively new here - 75 days - and I'm frequently perplexed by the choices of articles.

You've been around 10x longer than I, and have much more karma. Why is this of relevance to hackers?

Please help me to understand.
Oh. I thought "digital signage" had to do with cryptography.
Tax Solutions - Business Finances | Nationwide Tax Solutions
Are you facing serious debt from IRS or state taxing authorities? Our tax solutions at Nationwide Tax Solutions can help protect you from personal hardship and ruin.
In the Facebook Age, jobless but not friendless
The movement to give every American a trust fund at birth
I don't see many people freaked out by it.

Depends on your circle really. For personal stuff, I make full use of google. However for anything business related my leash of trust would be a lot shorter. I'd feel much more comfortable to pay for a service that gives me someone to blame/sue should the response to a disaster be less than adequate. You really just don't get this with google.
If you own shares of five mutual funds (a modest number for a middle-aged person with some retirement savings), you may have stock in 300 separate companies, each of which may have partly-owned subsidiaries. Somehow, all this can be handled with transaction costs of about 1-2% per year.
Open up the second floor, put in a bunch of desks with fast ethernet, and let customers rent or time-share them. Coworking is becoming much more popular, is seems.
Here's a page with some sample audio clips. There are some papers that are some credited to the guy mentioned in the article on the publications page

http://www.research.ibm.com/tts/
More illuminating keyboard review:
http://xahlee.org/emacs/keyboards.html
http://xahlee.org/emacs/ms_keyboard/ms_natural_keyboard.html
It looks like OpenDNS.com does something very similar to this. You use them as your DNS gateway, and they claim to provide faster, safer, and (if requested) censored results.

It doesn't appear that they have a user generate database of domains, though.
How much do those PR agents charge exactly and what do they do for you, specifically?
Please... for the people who watched the video, please instead of saying it's "PURE TRASH", could you cite a few parts of the video that are factually incorrect?
In my understanding, the islands are much smaller. I think 100 people would be enough, though that would largely depend on the design.
I dont think I care about flash on my iPhone.
Compare: "How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time" http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/cdc-usenix-sec02/cdc.pdf
Don't you think an ultra libertarian island would have at least a few guns? Hell, they'd probably have a robot army and strategic nukes.
A large number of ultra-wealthy people?... then have a battleship cruising nearby. Or deploy some turret system. Or both.
Libvirt release, supports copy-on-write
Advanced SMPS Topics: Input Transients
They are doing a lot of PR work, if they make it easily available, most people here will buy it even just out of curiosity.
Seedcamp Tel Aviv Winners
Malthus didn't go wrong we he observed that humans can't grow geometrically forever. That's totally correct.

He went wrong in a much more subtle way, and one that I can't really blame him for. He went wrong in the assumption that humans would continue to grow geometrically until all resources were expended, then be forced back down by resource starvation.

Instead, human growth has been tapering off in industrialized countries, and long-term forecasts of human population in the year 2100 has been dropping for a long time now. Many, many, many people have all the food they need and the continued realistic prospect of all the food they need, yet choose not to have children.

That is Malthus' fallacy, even though he was reasonable to believe it. Now, as it turns out, he was also wrong about where the resources would run out because he grossly failed to account for human ingenuity, but that just moves the "end-of-resource" date around if humans still grow geometrically, it doesn't actually ruin his argument. Voluntary, pervasive non-geometric growth does, especially when combined with continuing human ingenuity.

(This is very poorly understood on the internets.)
Digital signage is a pretty unique industry in terms of the sales cycle. There are some industry blogs that you could probably get on.

(I used to work in the industry and sold a few of my own solutions)
Free does make business sense in the web world when advertising was the primary revenue driver. You cannot sell meaningful advertising without meaningful inventory, so there is a period where you spend "free" with meaningful inventory.

The larger question is whether other business models require the same focus on building a free userbase before implementing the business model. For all those services that charge, it affects user behavior if you implement too early and may limit the market size of the product. But on the flip side, sometimes if you charge, it conveys a sense of value upon the product.

If twitter started charging from the get-go, it would not be as big or as useful of a service as it is now.
Given those two interpretations, it sounds irrational to be loyal to a company. Coupled with a bias towards an employee's best interest, I think saying "can't" is reasonable.

I might personally expand on what is meant by "company" and perhaps more importantly, an employee's position in it. It certainly makes less sense to be fiercely loyal the more expendable you are. A larger company can make more people look expendable (imo).
Analytics spike from $15m fundraising round
I would, and did, call them equally-doomed. Barring global calamity, I can confidently predict that not a single one of these will exist in a decade.
basically:

* Clear Applications - https://www.clrapps.com/ - Job evulation (bad timing?)

* Devunity - http://www.devunity.com - Collaborative Tool

* Similar Web - http://www.similarweb.com - No explanation, just a firefox extension.
He doesn't provide actual numbers, just relative spike graph.
Hasta La Vista, Noovo
The cloud is indeed real - but not necessarily better. There are real risks associated with it, not just FUD. Outsourcing every aspect of your business can potentially increase your focus on your "core competencies", but you run the very real risk of having a provider close their doors, forcing you to re-evaluate at a moments notice. The "cloud" isn't some magical thing where hardware failures don't happen, it's a real infrastructure managed by someone else. When you hide everything behind the term "cloud" (as in: But we don't have to evaluate their architecture - it's in the cloud!), you risk relying a little too much on someone else's ability to manage a datacenter/network/infrastructure.

Sometimes this is a good decision, sometimes this is not. IT people hate the lack of clarity, because when something fails and they can't explain why or what they did to prevent it (nothing! it's the cloud!), it's their ass. And that's a very real risk.
Already reported:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462287
Maybe you can add that as a suggestion in this thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445959
The press needs to stop using "the cloud" as a fancy-pants synonym for "on the internet".
Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job
> My point is simply that a light hand is probably better, but avoiding acting when things are getting really bad is a horrible idea.

Govt doesn't do "light hand". Moreover, doing the wrong thing is worse than doing nothing. The US govt is still trying to protect textile jobs in the Carolinas. (It would be mean to point out the mess that is govt efforts wrt the auto industry.)

When proposing/supporting regulation, it's poor form to assume that it will be done "correctly" by "the right people". Instead, you should assume what we actually observe - that it will be done badly, if not maliciously, by incompetents.

If you want to assume "correctly by the right people", make an existing govt system IN THE US work that way.

You're assuming (1) "a light hand" is a stable situation and (2) that the folks doing the acting will do
But, it extends the syntax of JS, so the only thing one can do, is to create a compiler for it to compile into JS that is compatible with the target interpreter (most likely a web browser).

In this case, I believe he outputs the "compiled" (more appropriately maybe, "transformed") code in Continuation Passing Style[1] where appropriate.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style
Ask HN: Anyone offer 110% guarantee for their products?
Has anyone actually offered a 110% cash back guarantee for their products or services? I read about it in The Four Hour Work Week, but it's a little scary to actually do it in practice. Ferris claims very few people maliciously take advantage of it. Has anyone here gotten burned by this type of guarantee?
The Small Files Problem
Software Development Attitude
Tubes for the Sticks: Internet for Rural America
I have to add another vote for Clipperz (http://clipperz.com). I started using it to manage insecure passwords. I tried to use a generic insecure password as others have mentioned above, but I kept encountering slightly different password restrictions that made this very difficult. I think Clipperz is web-based password management done right. Encryption is done in the browser and the javascript code is open source. Only encrypted data is stored on the server, so they can't even get your information. I highly recommend at least checking it out.
I find xargs handy, it lets you use the output of one command as arguments for another command. As an example, I have a little alias that I use to grep through my ruby/rails source trees:

alias gr 'find . -name \*.rb -o -name \*.rhtml -o -name \*.erb -o -name \*.rjs | xargs egrep \!*'

(backticks can be used similarly, but can run into command line length limits)
That assumes that upvoting and flagging are a reasonable feedback loop for on-topic-ness. They aren't. Most stuff that's either on or off topic doesn't get upvoted, so there's not much data there for positive reinforcement to establish norms. If you look at the "new" page, most of it is on-topic at any given time and most of it will never see the front page. Flamboyant titles probably help set things out from the pack, but don't improve the quality of the site.

I see meta-threads like this as the commit-list-flames of the OSS-world. You screw up the repository, and the crotchety regulars tell you how and why. This both educates and triggers social cohesion-fu, which maintains some level of quality.

If we imaged, for instance, that we were to remove those flames from the OSS world, and suddenly, shitty code would be silently disappeared by the invisible hand of coding goodness, I don't suspect that would be nearly as effective. People would keep committing bad code. Turns out telling them why their code is bad teaches them to write better code.
Numerical Analysis tools for C#?
Hi everyone,
I'm doing some machine learning stuff and wanted to play around a bit with some online applications. I'm doing a great deal of C# programming with ASP.NET. I thought about learning Python and then using IronPython to implement it in the .NET framework, but I don't think NumPy and SciPy are implemented yet. Plus I don't know Python as well as I do C#.

Are there any good resources for just coding these advanced math techniques in C# directly?
if only there was a machine-readable semantic-based web everyone could use ;p
Life at Wal-Mart
I got it within seconds. They provide software to run those "homebrew" bill boards in Coffee shops and such which just run off a computer and an LCD monitor.
Sousa pointed out, recorded music reduces the number of people who can make a living playing music.

He should have read his Henry Ford. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/hnfrd10.txt

In a little dark shop on a side street an old man had laboured for years making axe handles. Out of seasoned hickory he fashioned them, with the help of a draw shave, a chisel, and a supply of sandpaper. Carefully was each handle weighed and balanced. No two of them were alike. The curve must exactly fit the hand and must conform to the grain of the wood. From dawn until dark the old man laboured. His average product was eight handles a week, for which he received a dollar and a half each. And often some of these were unsaleable--because the balance was not true.

To-day you can buy a better axe handle, made by machinery, for a few cents. And you need not worry about the balance. They are all alike--and every one is perfect. Modern methods applied in a big way have not only brought the cost of axe handles down to a fraction of their former cost--but they have immensely improved the product.

Like the machine-made, to the artisan-made, axe handle, recorded music is vastly superior to live music - especially given today's digital recording and distribution systems. Leveraging mass distribution, a musician today can afford the luxury of honing a fine product. A live performance is rarely a fine product. It is usually middling in quality, and often below middling. It is usually expensive. For those that wish to see as well as hear their music, today, with DVD and Blu Ray, the live performances that are good can be distributed in a high-quality captured form to wide audiences, at low cost.
You overestimate the importance of AdSense.

Search ads have much more clicks per page view because they are better targeted. Google generated 67% of their revenues in Q4 2008 from their own site and just 30% from the AdSense network.
This is great advice. Most of this stuff is a snow ball. The bigger bloggers/new agencies keep an eye on smaller bloggers/new agencies to source material from. If you get some good local success you are much more likely to be able to approach/get approached by someone with a bigger audience.
I know, I was just trying to keep things simple.

Or, you can use the other definition of atom: indivisible part, and an atom of DNA is it's smallest building block :)
I've been looking for something like that for years!
So, no great teacher would choose to work in poor school districts. We already have to give incentives to experienced teachers to work there.

Good teachers would concentrate in wealthy districts, because the best teachers would have an amplification effect, and those kids are going to end up in college and most will end up in good jobs because of their family connections.
Oh, and of course netcat (nc). Indispensable for debugging anything TCP/IP based.

echo -n 'GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | nc news.ycombinator.com 80

Of course there are more specific tools for specific protocols, like curl or wget for http, but nc is the swiss army knife.
> we get Food and Drugs that are safe?

Nope. We get blockbuster drugs, after a long delay, and that's about it. As to their safety....

We're not seeing new antibiotics.

Feel free to explain why Viagra is more profitable than a new antibiotic. (Profit = revenues - costs, so the argument should consider both revenues and costs.)

> Notice that regional banks like BB&T, United Bank, and PNC -- non-investment banks, didn't engage in predatory lending. Their growth was stunted during the housing boom

Their growth was stunted by govt action because they weren't meeting their "lend to folks who can't pay back" quota.

> And again, due to regulation and FDIC, your money is much safer than pre-Depression era banks.

Huh? Somewhere north of $2 Trillion is being pissed away because of govt regulatory failures and you think that my money is safe?

>>Govt regulation is also political in the worst sense. Wells Fargo took a huge hit when it stayed out of the subprime mortgages. Regulators refused to let WF enage in unrelated activities (acquisitions, opening branches, etc.)because WF didn't "play ball", activities that said regulators let cooperative institutions do. Note that regulators don't take the hit.

> I'd like to see some URLs, because (no offense) you're either being too concise or babbling non-sense.

http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/192184...

The "Community Reinvestment Act" is code for "subprime loans".
A video-conferencing iPhone in the works?
The problem is, it's a heck of a hard task to determine who is a good teacher. How would you do it?

Give bonuses and raises to teachers who's students perform well on standardized tests? That just encourages teaching to the book.

Student evaluations? Then the teachers are obliged to suck up to the students for good ratings.

Leave it up to administrators? That creates huge potential for bias and currying for favor. At least when that happens in a for-profit company, the free market will shake out the worst cases eventually.

Seniority is not a great way to determine pay, but it's not an absolutely terrible way either, as generally, more experienced teachers ARE better teachers.
Have you got the next million-dollar idea? Head over to RentACoder or eLance and make it happen.

I am totally against this kind of advice, i always believe people should not get into businesses which they don't understand; be it Internet, Stock markets, Space Tourism or selling Coffee. At the end of the day, you have to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. With this kind of advice, you will have innocent(dumb) people thinking that, all they have to do is find a developer on RentaCoder and pitch him their million-dollar idea and they are rich. There are many more subtleties in starting a startup and like any other businesses, you have to be knowledgeable about it to make it a success.
Lessons from 1960s on how newspapers can survive today
How I DOS'd My Cell Phone Using EC2
The price of the product probably matters a lot.

e.g. I don't plan on prorating monthly subscription cancellations but this won't result in any severe amount of money gone if someone tried to abuse unless there was some giant, coordinated scam. In the latter case, whoever's credit card got stolen would likely do a chargeback anyhow.
setopt pushd_to_home # pushd with no arguments goes to ~

I would personally dislike that, because without that option set, calling pushd (at least in Zsh) with no argument will actually rotate the top two elements on the directory stack, which can be extremely handy for switching between two places, rather than needing to constantly call `pushd +1` or `pushd -1`.

e.g.:

$ pu ~
/home/user
$ pu workspace/project
/home/user/workspace/project /home/user
$ pu /tmp/data
/tmp/data /home/user/workspace/project /home/user
$ pu
/home/user/workspace/project /tmp/data /home/user
$ po
/tmp/data /home/user
$ po
/home/user

note that I alias pu="pushd" and po="popd" for easier shell usage...
Some of the things described in this article shows that wal-mart is implementing lean mfg ideas (or lean retail, rather).
Never quit changing.
It's been a long time since I managed to sit through that whole video when it first appeared on reddit.

Right of the top of my head I can point out that the video contradicts itself.

It claims both that A:

The money supply is constantly being inflated (that's correct)

And B:

That interest guarantees some borrowers MUST go broke.

(that's wrong, we just agreed the money supply is constantly being inflated.)

For more discussions:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=295...
They ask if you want to install them. You have the option to opt out but the fact that they make money on people being careless concerns me.
It has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations on its six faces.

That's wrong, there are only 22 pieces on a Rubik's Cube. 8 edges, 6 faces, 12 corners. 8! * 6! * 12! = 1.3905608 × 10^16 and even here there is a lot of symmetry. For example dividing by 6 faces and 4 rotations of each face you get 5.79400335 × 10 ^ 14 unique combinations.
Writing Technical Documentation with Sphinx, Paver, and Cog