skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Once you've solved the doorstep-to-station issue, existing public transit solutions are fairly competent.

Which "doorstep-to-station" issue? There are two ends to most trips. And no, work isn't always close to a transit stop.

And, there are trips that have three ends, the "middle end" being the one that you make on the way home.

And, I wouldn't use the phrase "fairly competent" to describe a system that takes twice as long to get from point A to point B as many systems outside the "great cities" do.
Just set it up; note that you have to hit m.google.com/sync from your iPhone Safari browser to pick which calendars to sync. Outbound works fine without it, but inbound sync doesn't do anything until you select calendars.

With BusySync keeping my iCal synced with Google, it takes about 4 seconds for my iPhone to update after I add an event to my iCal.
I think its not only geeks, I think its anyone, and perhaps with good reason. I think a big factor is that clearly the experts have more or less proven themselves to be as clueless as the pretend-experts, perhaps worse. Essentially what we've seen take place in the economic world is equivalent to some winner-take-all wild west where anything goes, leaving us to not put so much faith in the theoretical prowess of the CEO's, the FED, and Wallstreet as we did before. When you have people at the top making incredibly bad mistakes, it removes respect for them and instills a (false?) sense of authority in everyone else.

The same thing takes place when a religious leader is shown to not be so moral, all of a sudden, despite you not having taken priesthood lessons or anything, you may now have a right to express morality more than him/her.
My code speaks for itself.
Ah, it's awesome that they've put some of that stuff in. I hope that stuff picks up faster than many previous cool PDF features have. :)
And now the story is dead. The systems works!
The long winter evenings of blind taste testing at our house simply fly by ;)
Or put it in italics instead of indenting it.
I like Coke more because Pepsi is too sweet for me.
The thing is, when you pay $50+ for a ticket you're paying for talented artist... I suppose the engineer should be considered the artist not the 'singer'.
http://bacolicio.us/http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/
Are the Creators of Twitter Living in the Last Dreamworld on Earth?
Did a US congressman leak classified intel on Twitter?
Ebay testing automated translation of auctions
Of course YC won't be basing their decision solely on the video, it's just a very valuable piece of input. If your best voice is your written voice, you might want to partner up with a guy that has technical depth, but can also give a wicked in-person presentation.
Disclosure: my wife Yta is working on this project.
I think as HN gets bigger, it'll become more and more like reddit. You either have to learn to live with idiots (like me, I'll admit) or you gotta keep island-hopping.
After reading The Daily WTF (and assuming those stories are at least 80% truth), these sorts of tales don't really surprise me.
I saw a band called "Metrostation" a few months ago. The place was sold out with tweens who were having the time of their life loving this amazing band.

Funny thing was, the band was not playing. Everything was tracked on 2 macs run by a chubby guy in a phillies hat on the side of the stage.

I'd argue the majority of people who go to these shows have no clue and will gladly pay their $50 just to see famous people and tell their friends.
higher risk, but also higher reward
I would pay money to hear that against the tuned version... did he make any recordings?
Between this, the rumored Livenation merger (hi antitrust!) and plummeting disposable income, Ticketmaster/Ticketsnow is in for a world of hurt.

Ticketmaster has such a terrible user experience, we don't even include them in our site listings (blog only) although we do include Ticketsnow. What is sort of funny: out of all the TicketStumbler ticket providers, they've been the most helpful.
Ted Dziuba, Paul Graham, and Fail
I find it interesting that there's no clamour for any sort of back or frontlighting on eReaders. I know paper doesn't have it, but even back in the Newton days I knew that was a killer feature.

(Even though the Newton's backlight buzz made it just as irritating to a snoozing bed-partner as having the light on would be)
That Facebook idea sounds like a lot of fun! Good idea.
It does not address the problem number one with micropayments - that there is a mental cost for any money transaction and if you are really talking about micro payments then this mental cost can easily dominate the cost of the whole transaction.
It's not which browser it's which browsers and how you use them
So what should I do if I want to be a part of this but don't have an idea or any partners?

This is hypothetical right now, but I am very seriously considering applying next summer.
Yep, yast and yum will do it too.

There is also the Hibachi plugin for Eclipse.
I think that's where things will eventually be, but the ticket industry moves very very slow. For sports, teams often sell tickets below market price for cash flow purposes. Season ticket holders often have to pay the entire balance upfront before the season even starts and independent of the team's performance. Also, if face value goes up too high their can be (and has been) a fan and media backlash. Also, many stadium agreements are set up so that a team makes more money from merchandise & concessions than ticket proceeds. In the NFL, if you don't sell out you run the risk of TV blackout; this also causes downward pressure on prices.

Concert tickets are a different beast since bands don't acquire win & loss records, but the public perception of face value still applies. During the season, prices can vary dramatically based on how good a team is playing. For example, Lions and Rams tickets we're going for $5 by season end. However, this almost never happens with bands on tour unless they require a reputation for sucking live. Also, what Ticketmaster doesn't make very public is that they often split their "convenience fees" with the artist.
Yahoo Might Buy Tumblr
This happens randomly. My Rutgers site (one page, edu domain), was de-listed for a couple of weeks (didn't exist, even when I specified "site:rutgers.edu"), then just re-appeared. I also noticed this with Oliver Steele's functional.js page - I was used to typing "functional js" into Google to find it, and at one point, it disappeared for a week or two from ranking alltogether, only to mysterious re-appear again.

Maybe it's some clever way to check whether or not people track their SEO? De-list sites, and watch if the person reverts to an earlier version of the page, or submits it for Google to crawl?
Kindle 2 text-to-speech demonstration
I think picking a co-founder based on what they'll bring to a YC application might be the best example I've ever heard of "the tail wagging the dog".
Who is the target audience for Linux netbook?
An executable operational semantics for Python
Businessmen can't afford NYC on just 500K/yr
You can load Mobipocket formatted books onto your Kindle very easily -- just drag & drop. Kindle mounts on your desktop as a USB mass storage device.

There's a huge selection of pre-formatted books available out there too. I'm partial to Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com/ as they have a very cool catalog you can load on your Kindle. The catalog contains hyperlinks that let use download books directly to your Kindle via its EVDO connection (for free!).
I just know I've never found a prime with this method, that PFGW didn't say was a prime.

n^2-2 doesn't always pass the Fermat test, but if it does, it is always a prime. I think it's base 2.

Is that an okay answer? I'll clarify in this thread if you need.

(Posted Lisp code to: http://www.decompiler.org/r2primes.htm)
Out of nothing more than pure curiosity, what do you gain (perceived or otherwise) from the new video requirement?

Does it just raise the bar of entry enough that you receive fewer applications; or is there something to be gained by the determination as to whether or not someone is comfortable in front of a camera?

Applying for a YC cycle is not on my to-do list for the foreseeable future, but if there is some kind of insight to be gained from video applications, I'd love to hear about it.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of a vocoder, not auto-tune.
There's a fantasy out there that auto-tune makes you into a great singer. There's way more too it than that! The difference between great and poor singers is all about tone and emotion.

There's way more to making pop music sound perfect than Autotune. Every step of the way is expertly crafted to fit together. No one complains about how much studio editing respected bands like Radiohead do in the studio, so we are we complaining about silly pop acts?

And to all the people who say that music is in a "rut" need to get off their butts and actually put some effort in to find the great new music that they'll like. Yes, you have to actually try, not just whine that things aren't the same as they were back when you were coming of age.

Mainstream people listen to fun, accessible music. It's always been that way, so get over it! There's great music of every type being made right now, you just have to go look for it.
No. Apparently it kills your career (and it took him a long time to get enough connections to get that gig.) Similarly, I heard the guy who ran Ashlee Simpson's sound on SNL was kind of booted out of the business.
No he's thinking right. Vocoders usually sound a lot different. Kanye and T-Pain are using Auto-Tune.
Remember that The Monkees predated MTV.
I'd like to offer an alternative theory: no one is an expert on macroeconomics. How much agreement is there between Friedrich Hayek, Paul Krugman, Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig von Mises? Claiming that someone is "right" about economics seems akin to claiming that someone is "right" about philosophy.
wait, no, it isn't AUPitch... There's a slider there that says, "enhance tuning" that is similar to auto-tune. sars.
Even if you define a slacker as someone with counter-cultural values, most of her examples were very poorly chosen.

Teach for America is a horrible example. The organization is good, and I'm not questioning the dedication of the teachers for giving up two years of their life for TFA. But the volunteers are not giving up a chance at a lucrative career in the private sector. In fact, TFA may be viewed as a strong positive to many companies.

Top business, medical, and law schools will give volunteers two year deferrals. HBS has TFA as 2+2 partner(2+2 is a program where Harvard will give admitted college seniors 2 years experience, then a MBA in 2 years. Stanford will give out two-year deferrals for law,medical, and business schools. Caltech will give out deferrals for some programs. UCBerkeley will give out deferrals for engineering. Also, many school have scholarships set up for alumni. Those schools are basically endorsing TFA

One of Wendy Kopp's goals is to move TFA alumni into leadership positions. Amgen and bulge bracket investment banks are working with TFA to recruit students. J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs have both found themselves competing with TFA for college graduates, so they decided they needed to partner with TFA. Google treats TFA like a core recruiting school, whatever that means.

So while volunteers are making big sacrifices to work for TFA, it might help them get other benefits like a high paying job, or entrance into a great grad school.

List of partnerships.
Schools:http://www.teachforamerica.org/alumni/grad_school_partnershi...
Employers: http://www.teachforamerica.org/alumni/employer_partnerships....
From the article:
"¶Look for cages whose target numbers are unusually high or low for their number of squares. Often these have unique answers. For example, in a six-by-six puzzle, two squares with a sum of 11 must be filled with 5 and 6, in some order. Three squares with a product of 10 must be 1, 2 and 5."

Why must two squares with a sum of 11 be filled with 5 and 6?
It's becoming more common lately for artists to sell tickets with very high face values: Jay-Z's recent concert in DC had the majority of tickets selling for $500 and balcony tickets for $375, which was slightly over the secondary market price. Elton John and Billy Joel's upcoming tour have tickets going for $200 and $100.

But the main reason is risk management -- why take a risk with high priced tickets when you can be sure that the scalpers can guarantee you a sellout at the profit margin you're comfortable with? As fallentimes says, audience perception goes into it also -- Bruce Springsteen sells his tickets for about $100 which is well under market for an artist that appeals to an older crowd. He probably thinks he is doing his fans a favor.
"When we are at our best is when we don’t give a fuck" - David Chang
I believe the scientific community is defined by complete commitment to the rational. Sure, there are people who claim to be scientists, but the scientific method is an exercise in pure rationality.

You would do best to rephrase that statement in far less concrete terms, because scientists (more specifically -- "scientists" trying to answer "why" and "how" our existence came about) are hardly playing in the arena of complete and total rationality.

As I linked before, scientists far smarter than myself have noted that the rational scientific method used in empirical observation oversteps its
rational boundaries when it attempts to answer existential questions -- those are the only real questions that are even disputed between religion and science. No intelligent religious person questions the complete rationality of empirical observation and the scientific method behind that, so the only domain were talking about here is that which is under dispute.

In this domain of dispute between religion and science, where it's pretty evident both world-views are in fact NOT completely rational (i.e. conjecturing about the unobservable and unmeasurable), it would only be fair to say that neither the scientist or religious believer has a completely rational answer that explains their own existence. This is a distinct difference from how the scientist and religious believer are subjectively viewed as concretely rational vs. irrational, when it is crystal clear that is not the true big picture of the differing world-views.

Nevertheless, the major problem here is that these questions of existence are answered in the name of Science. The common person understands science to be the authority on all things rational, because they've seen it in practical use on all things empirical. The only problem is that most fail to realize that the scientific method only has true rational authority in the domain of the empirical. Can't you see the inherent problem here? Science has no more authority in answering existential questions than any other world-view, because all of science's rational authority comes from the empirical, where things can be measured, observed, modified, etc.
It's not very noticeable while reading. I'd say it's not any more jarring than flipping a physical page.

Much like a real book, Kindle really does seem to disappear while you're reading from it.
so according to her, you are supposed to stalk someone on facebook before you even approach them in real life?

All that stuff might be correct for regular dating, but I don't think it applies that much for Valentine's day. Thats the one day, where the shoe is on the other side, with women being desperate for a date so that they don't end up alone on Valentine's day.
The release clearly stated that the Kindle 2 was 20% faster (now corrected on the page). The video demonstrated that this figure was certainly within reason.
Seth Godin - why you need a tribe
That's basically what I heard. Basically there's a positive correlation between unemployment and grad school enrollment. I've under the impression that your pay over the total time spent at a company can really depend on starting salary. So college graduates hope to wait out the bad market by going to grad school. And the unemployed hope to improve their job prospects by going back to school.

Comic with data from NFS:http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1078
Nope. The big question seems to be what forward protection we have against potential obsolescence/abandonment of the format/platform.

OTOH, the basic format is just HTML3 shoved into an old-school Palm database (.pdb) format (!). There's some sort of encryption/DRM/whatever on top of that.
I think it is pretty silly to call skepticism and empiricism anti-intellectual. Those, rather, define intellectualism. I would describe my post as anti-pseudo-intellectualism.

Whatever the author of this post meant, it reads like a classic appeal to authority (this, the late Carl Sagan taught us, is a dangerous form of anti-intellectualism).

I wrote primarily to defend those laymen that spend a little time thinking and writing and talking about macroeconomics or psychology or any other soft science.

Why let everyone have their say? Because, the standards in the soft sciences are materially hardly different than in a reddit-flame war anyway.

It is intellectually dishonest to hold soft scientists to no standards at all and, in the next breath, bemoan laymen for doing the save very things.

Last semester, I read through the entire literature on interest rates in England in the industrial revolution. I found it could very well have been a reddit thread (although with much more fetching typography); it was uncivil and lacked any hope of scientific resolution. As far as I have read, most other macroeconomics literature is no better. (Check out the Journal of Economic History and the Economic History Review if you can.)

I think that partitioners in those fields forfeit the right to be snooty about lay opinion when their opinions are no more scientifically substantiated.

Let me be clear. My standards for the hard sciences are different. When there is hope of empirical resolution one must work very carefully in that framework. For instance, I feel pretty comfortable saying young-earth creationists are loony.

But maybe because I spend most of my day working on actual science, I am being too snooty myself.
Mobile phones sales are doing well not just in the rural areas but in the bigger cities as well. Everyone has one - from the guy who drives me in an auto to the maid who comes in to clean my house.

And their mobiles are usually really good models too - better than mine most of the time. It's stuff like this that gives me hope that India is getting upwardly mobile [ excuse the pun :-) ].
Rantings. Not worth the time to skim.
Banana Scheme
Snaptalent relaunches - completely changes business model (YC W08)
You can directly put non-DRM'd files on the kindle. It's just that it only natively supports basic text and it's own semi-proprietary format. The effective difference is very small, but it's there.

You can also convert (via windows app or an amazon service) your own files into kindle's format.
quiet, you
It looks like a thin wrapper around generous quoting to me..
I'm guessing it gives pg an easy, low cost way to see how applicants present themselves and sell their ideas. It seems like he's trying to come as close to an actual vc pitch without having to meet everyone in person.
Have my dinner -- those photos just lost me my appetite.
As far as I know, to buy a kindle you have to log on to amazon.com with a computer (or iphone =P).
Ask HN: Tips for engineer who wants to seed his own startup
Hi,

I am in the process of mapping out a product for my first Startup.

If you have some time could you post links or comments on tips on the best way to start up?

My aim is to seed fund it, and run it apart from my day job.

Any comments will be appreciated!

Regards

Mark
BTW, Melodyne [1] does this plus some more jaw-dropping tricks.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFCjv4_jqAY
As the article mentions. I won't, usually, highlight text in a word processor because I'll sometimes drag the text somewhere.

The interaction isn't free.
I find it totally believable. Really, really stupid, but believable.

This is some off-brand calling card company, not Verizon.
repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=KKq79YXjOv
And hopefully it's interesting as well :).
Personally I'm on the side of quitting everything and focusing entirely on your startup. If you don't, you'll find yourself 8 months from now and some other startup will come out with pretty much the same thing you've been working on.

And if you can't quit because of work...take a vacation. 2 weeks of working non-stop should be plenty of time to get most things up and running.
Given it is 2001 and not so much broadband adoption, I'd find it easier to believe if it was some script-kiddie who found a way to play with a modem and DTMF signal generation.

Also, as already pointed out, this does not seem to be a big company at all. In a world where even a idiot can start a company, you will eventually end up with companies run by idiots.
Could well have been a competitor (as others have suggested), or perhaps a severely malfunctioning phone. (It's not unheard of; there was a series of 911 hangup calls around where I used to work that was eventually traced to a vending machine modem).

Why wasn't it in the news? Well, because nobody ever told them. It's not like you'd issue a press release.

And why were they running such a cheap operation? Because they were stupid and greedy.

(Not saying the story is 100% true, but it's certainly plausible)
Rather than micropayments, I think there's a need for micro-tipping. I may not want to make the mental effort to decide whether to pay 4 cents for an article before I read it, but I often feel grateful to the author of a piece after I read it. The problem is that there is no convenient way to act on that impulse -- no way to make a quick micro tip. An upvote on Hacker News and Reddit serves this purpose, but there is no money involved and the upvote link lives on the aggregator's site instead of the content provider's site.
This drives everyone else crazy, except when I am doing it on the New York Times website, in which case it tries to define all these words for me, which drives me crazy...
What's wrong with a repost?
I thought their old idea had merit...what went wrong?
Hm, I think links in downvoted comments should appear as light-gray too.
Certainly not Vodafone. I don't know of any CDMA carriers over here in Europe.
Yeah but I do make some points. Or at least try to. It's not just blind ranting, I am trying to make me a then there point y'all...
average revenue per visitor.
Autotune is just another tool in the producer's toolkit. And by tool, I really mean instrument. Like any instrument, you can't just use it and automatically make a blockbuster hit. People have tried...

Good music is good music, no matter how it's made, and I have a lot of respect for someone like T-Pain who's basically single-handedly proved that Autotune can provide powerful emotional effect in songs. I also have no problem with helping pop stars sing better, on albums and in live performances. I prefer the best product for my bucks, if at all possible. I trust a producer like Rick Rubin to know when to employ what techniques to a record to maximize my enjoyment.
Are applications from outside America accepted? How are they handled if they were selected?

I'm somewhat new to the YC funding process, not sure if I can find this info somewhere (a link would be appreciated if that's the case).

Thank you!
Me too.

And boy oh boy do we hate using the new york times website.
There is something not quite right with your form handling in the signup process. I had to refresh a few times to get through it. And the next button should stand out more.

But, otherwise, very well done guys. The presentation is beautiful and the economics of the business are mouthwatering.

I have been toying with a (presumably) very similar plan, but I have been busy with other things and other schemes. Maybe I'll see you on the field. Good luck.