skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Instead of an insurance comparison service, these guys should start an actual auto insurance company.

Nobody likes insurance companies, so there's certainly a market for an insurance company that people love.

Be ambitious. Build something big. Comparison sites are not a big or ambitious idea. Comparison sites are a feature of bigger platforms. If you're building a platform, call it that. Otherwise, build something bigger.
take a part of the block content and use it to generate a valid id attribute
I commented below regarding this issue of voting for free and it not costing them anything.

I feel like, after reading your comments parent and your reply that I'm replying to, I feel that it might be beneficial to have each user on the site have a weight calculated from various criteria (that probably doesn't exist yet).

Firstly let's assume that submitted ideas have a lifecycle, something like this:

Inception (posting to the site)
Green-lit (threshold of submitters required Yes votes)
Lack of Interest (threshold not met)
Released (product launch)

Let's say a project reaches Release (from our above defined lifecycle), all users who voted "Yes, I would use this" for the project might need to verify they've used the app or risk having their weight ratio degraded (thus making future "Yes, I would use this" votes count for less). If the project they 'backed' fails then there is no change to the weight.

This solves one side of the problem for idea submitters. They should be able to view something like an "Interest Index" which takes into account the weight of users who have stated they would use it.

Eventually if I clicked "Yes, I'd use this" on 40 projects and 20 of them reached release and yet I never followed through with using them, my vote might not count for squat any longer.

Just a thought.
I use Pinboard and it works just fine. titles, a description, and tags are good enough search wise.
> He's already been investigated (or prosecuted, I forget) for expensing personal stuff at the fund.

Are we still talking about the same thing here?

> or buy the asset personally and then invest it personally.

Yes he could obviously do this, but he can't just give part of hte funds assets away, which is what I was clarifying.
Birds 'Self-Medicate' With Cigarette Butts
Absolutely! Feel free to shoot an email (in my profile) if you need help setting it up.

We're also on irc.freenode.net #balanced
Given the recent NYTimes piece regarding dropouts, it may be worth noting that the two additional cofounders are dropouts as well.

(I have the strange fortune of knowing both of them as well as the subject of the NYT piece.)
Hi Aria. I have a question regarding the use of automatic sentiment analysis and it's relationship to choice. It seems to me that there is a fundamental divergence between the program of "give me what I will enjoy" and "give me what I need". It seems that your startup is focused entirely on the former question, and there's no doubt that if you are successful you will indeed be consuming more attention, which is of course the primary commodity in the attention economy.

But wouldn't it be better to use NLP to emancipate people from the attention economy altogether, to help identify not what people want, but what they need to he happier, and more engaged in the real world doing real things for real people?
You've Just Crowdfunded Your Way to Success -- Now What?
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that people who are even aware of what ZNC is would be able to run their own instance on a server under their control.
I don' think Android is appropriate for the desktop. It's way inferior in comparison with regular Linux (i.e. GNU/Linux with glibc and etc.) and there simply is no point in using it that way. Probably the other way around - conventional Linux will make more inroads in the mobile sphere in the near future.
You're not being down voted because its a YC company, your argument just doesn't make sense as clarified by a sibling comment.
I forked a repo via the website and submitted a pull request, so it's working from Florida.
Here's a gotcha related to Pingdom -- if your account isn't set up properly, you can run out of SMS credits which means you may not get that critical SMS alert!
This is a great question. Our primary crowd will initially be tech-focused, so if you pitched an idea where your target market is restaurants, you're not going to get people from the community clicking "I'd use it." That said, you would probably still get some useful feedback (other apps in the space, technical challenges, etc), just like you would by posting here. Later down the road, we might be able to offer access to other markets by posting to our site (e.g. select by a market category when you post, we push out your post to a group representing that market).
Musk has said he plans to blanket the country with Superchargers in the next few years, so that is just a matter of time. Remember that it took decades before we had gas stations all across the country.
Apple loses tablet market share to Android (woo hoo)
Agreed. I thought that's what it was at first, and I got really excited :)
NASA To Send Another Rover To Mars In 2020
How about the car that can use the infrastructure that already exists?

All this talk about new transportation fuels imho always sidesteps the fact that gasoline will never run out.

Petroleum will, but producing gasoline out of other sources is something that we already know how to do, and have done in industrial scale in the past. Fischer-Tropsch is cost-effective from coal at some point below $150 oil price. If you want to be carbon neutral, you just have to use a carbon feedstock that fills from the atmosphere, and a carbon neutral heat source.

A hydrogen economy is a complete hoax. If you want to make your fuel synthetically, hydrogen has practically no advantages over synthetic gasoline.
Haystack wrongly accused of Plagiarism
This is 2012, we don't want names that make sense. What the hell does the word "Uber" have to do with cabs? If my startup was vrxpubz.ly and was a way for kittens to upload cat litter into their social graph, I'd be good for at $500K in seed.
He no longer has access to read your comment.
The installed base of smartphones and tablets will exceed those of desktops and laptops next year. There are 6 billion phone subscriptions in the world, and only 1 billion pc's. All those phones will become internet-enabled within a decade. It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of mobile, but it's also impossible to predict winners and losers in that space because most of the growth still needs to happen and there are no precedents to base decisions on.
Children Increasingly Targeted For Identity Fraud
This is a great writeup! I love reading these types of postmortems because I always end up learning something new.
I think bitlbee will let you cram your various non-IRC instant messengers into an IRC-like interface. I've never used it, but it seems like an easy first step.
I sincerely hope that the Haskell community rises to the challenge to fill the leadership void left by these remarkable computer scientists. What a beautiful language, with such beautiful people speaking it!
Yeah, I use Intellij daily, and the UI is quite poor. Little things like the way tabs work, the way the debugger buttons are inscrutable, the way that the vertical splitting works with opening files using the C-S-n shortcut, etc are quite annoying.
It turns out that the obstacles are the same for both: tonal inflection. Most people are familiar with this fact as it pertains to Chinese and many of the languages of southeast Asia (Thai, Vietnamese, Cantonese et al) but remain completely unaware that it also a core feature of the languages of Scandinavia, Danish included. btw, Google translate does an excellent job translating Chinese (but a pretty terrible job with a superficially related language like Japanese). It turns out Chinese and English word order are the same.
I agree. I was kind of annoyed when I thought I needed to sign up to browse the page and of course I didn't.
Well, if you are the analytical type, you start by going back from start to finish and looking at all the decisions you made. At each decision point, you write down three things:

1) What did we know?

2) What did we not know, but could have known?

3) What things could we have been doing that would have maximized our 'view' of the state of the company?

Don't bother questioning your decisions or feeling guilty, just look at what you knew and didn't know and figure out a way to work that maximizes your knowledge at a given time.

Now once you've gone through and chewed every bit of operational knowledge you could off that bone, take one step back. And ask three more questions;

1) What was our mission when we started?

2) What did it become?

3) Was the mission wrong or did we execute it poorly?

Again, its not to heap guilt on yourself for failing it is to develop a way of tackling problems that you know are reasonable ventures to begin with (they solve other peoples issues as well). Sometimes things fail because they are before their time (other things need to be true that aren't yet true), some things fail because they solve a problem which is really just an annoyance and so nobody is willing to spend real money to have it solved, and thirdly you sometimes find that the cost of the solution is higher than the value of the solution.

Of those three, the last one is worth looking at again. If you can re-evaluate how you solved the problem and get the costs down, sometimes a 'failed' startup can become a 'successful' next product, even when it is essentially the same idea.

Once you have that analysis, if you find that you could be better (which is to say "I don't now enough about marketing" or "I don't know enough about accounting" or "advertising" or "managing customer expectations") or some other basic skill that running a business require. Your next step might be to either get training or take a job that can fill that gap.

If you found that you just couldn't take the uncertainty, the high highs and low lows, and futility of pushing a wet noodle up hill. You might want to consider working at a larger company.

If you found it was exciting and exhilarating and you can't wait to do it again, then use your hard won experience to pick a problem to solve and head out back into the forest.
That book is a great read. Terrific look not just inside Benchmark but the late 90s VC world and some of the big startups from back then.

One of my favorite bits is the aforementioned sell job to get Meg Whitman to join (I believe Meg doesn't the credit she deserves for taking eBay from a tiny startup to a huge business). I remember laughing out loud when the Benchmark folks discuss Meg's kid having a crush on one of the VC's kids. Every little bit counted and they pulled out all the stops.
> We will send you an email before billing your card.

You may want to put that in very clear text on the homepage.
Huge Skill Gap in Tech = Huger Opportunity for Mobile Devs
I'm not looking to pick a fight with you, I'm just illustrating the thought process that goes into something like this (at least, mine). To help you understand your market better.

- screen and irssi is a far better experience than using a bouncer. Perhaps offer that? These services, back in the day, used to be "shell providers" for this reason.

- Most developers I know run their own VPS and probably wouldn't consider a service like this.

- I happily pay $20/month for my Linode wherein I do this, the big reason being I can also torrent, compile, host quick Internet stuff, do development work, receive mail, etc.

Administering a personal development machine is a gateway to becoming a better hacker these days, so I think you'll find that your market ends up being miscreants who have $5 to throw away on a throwaway bouncer to cause trouble.
Linux desktops and Linux workstations are pretty common for certain classes of scientists and engineers. I work with a lot of folks at national labs and big engineering companies who run Linux exclusively on all their systems.
I wouldn't call that worthless; it's something worth thinking about.

We have a ton of thinking/testing still left to do as we flesh out exactly what the product will be. Gaming/aggregating good vs. bad support ("I'd use it") is going to be crucial.

While traffic from said groupies would be nice, we'd like the actual feedback to be a bit more useful than a group of people marking "I'd use it". A reward system for making the right picks of apps that actually make it (whatever that definition of "make it" ends up being) is probably a worthwhile thing for us to think through.
Fantastic, that's very promising.
THIS is in the New York Times (blog) and creating such a storm in a teacup? I think part of me died inside. Are any of the great minds in the world really worried about this?
Introducing Free SpaceBase Lite for Location Apps
Here's a link to the actual status page: https://status.balancedpayments.com/
Show HN: North Carolina's interactive social media archive
I don't know what their European sales look like right now, but I suspect making a land-yacht would limit their potential audience a bit. ;)
How To Accept Bitcoin On Your Website
Ok, I might well be missing the point. But enough people upvoted that I think this is a common perception: "Oh, not another time-waster". So, maybe make the homepage address this issue head on with a good video that shows why this is compelling, awesome, and productivity-increasing.
at /domain/portal just put a contact page and ask them to specify what they are looking for. You'll have to do it manually until you build the automated system but maybe the inconvenience would be motivation?
Thanks for reminding me, my apologies. I was focused entirely on the network components since that's the part of the problem I personally responded to and overlooked it. I've updated the blog post:

Note: I initially forgot to mention that we had a single fileserver pair offline
for a large part of the day affecting a small percentage of repositories.
This was a side effect of the network problems and their impact on the
high-availability clustering between the fileserver nodes. My apologies
for missing this on the initial writeup.
I agree that Surface probably wasn't designed to solve a user's specific problem of fitting plug A into socket B.

What it does do is:

1. Run MS Office natively.

2. Allows you to touch your Windows 8 app store apps.

Disclosure: I recently accepted a position at MSFT but not anything related to Surface.
when was berkley db built? this whole nosql discussion bores me. not to mention that graph databases which is also part of that nosql talk originated in the 70s?
Good ideas are not worthless.
The porn is in the top ten of their priority list. A great way to find the weak points and blackmail possibilities for current and future opposition leaders.
"No petrol. Less range than an M5. Lame."
Me too! :(
As I was reading, I was impressed with how narrow the line is between "alarming" and "nuttier'n squirrel poo."
mm, the only place I've put this into practice was when I was learning French and living in Quebec, I'd simply say that I was trying to practice and most people would go along with it. I can see it being a problem if your bad accent makes the language unintelligible though.
We're on it! We're planning on building a Prismatic app for all tablet and mobile devices. An Android app is coming soon.
From that it looks like a variety of models have all reached conclusions of 1-2%.

I can't think of a strong reason to suggest that it would be higher. The argument is made on that page is that it is strong in places like China, though my understanding is that is not correct. Plenty of PCs in china may sell with Linux (or freeDOS) but my understanding is that they are always ubiquitously flattened and replaced with pirate Windows.
Have you looked at anything else but Pingdom?

It has nice visuals and free trials, but it's a relative newcomer to the market of the monitoring services and they also have a tendency to keep things simpler than they need to be. Something more mature and enterprisey, like RedAlert, would fit the bill.
Yes, please excuse this horrible issue. I think it is actually a UX fail, but we are not quite sure yet and tracking it down!
Interesting story. What was your product exactly?

We were original doing Jaiku in 2006 with the full focus on mobile initially but pretty soon changed focus to web, because it was impossible to get mobile distribution at those days. We sold to Google in 2007, but had we continued, we would have faced a very interesting decision, when iPhone app store came out: move main focus back to mobile?

Thinking about this alternative history is very interesting. Twitter was clearly ahead on the web, although we gave them some challenge when Leo Laporte and his fans switched from Twitter to Jaiku. But in this alternative history had we realized importance of iPhone early enough (very big question mark, as we were based in Finland, the land of the Nokia) we could have had chance to execute on mobile better than Twitter.
I'd say it doesn't necessarily indicate failure in part of the system, just a significantly different set of priorities for investors and the global economy. Investors seem in general more interested in quick returns (there's exceptions, Amazon for instance), rather than putting money in for a slow burn and contributing toward a company.

This isn't necessarily just down to investors being money machines, but in part due to the fact that the global economy is improving but still massively fragile, even if that $500m was split 5 ways, you'd have to convince an investor that $100m in a business that could go belly up is a safe bet, even though the economy could rapidly go wrong and ruin luxury items like electric cars.

Plus lets be honest, if you play it on the investment game there's every risk people will buy in, get cold feet and dump the stock pretty quick, ruining confidence in the business and creating a negative public perception.

I will tack on at the end, I'm not an economist so I could be way, way off base.
I don't think Romney was necessarily giving his honest opinion on Tesla. He was running for president and environmentalists = hippie communists, so of course he's going to publicly hate on Tesla.

Comparing strategic DOE loans in energy to Stalin and Mao is going a bit far, btw.
I actually use bitlbee with ZNC on a daily basis, and there are some rough edges, like seeing users as giant numbers (G+ ids) when connected to GTalk if they aren't in your buddy list, but it otherwise works really well, and I'm always happy to centralize all my "realtime" communications into my IRC client.
> I can't tell if we're being punk'd.

You just completely and utterly missed that it's a 950x570 screenshot (so essentially a stamp) during a debugging session with the visual debugger taking the bottom half of the screen.
The thing is, for games at least, "overfunded" is probably closer to "the right funding." It's a balancing act - you often can't really-really ask for the amount you actually need, because fewer people will put money in, but if you aren't overfunded you end up in a situation where you may not actually be able to make it at all.

The whole thing ends up predicated on being the Big Popular Kickstarter that goes over budget and it really sucks. I think that maybe having two numbers on a Kickstarter page would be a good idea: "Minimum Funding LEvel" and "Optimal Funding Level", or something.
Apica named one of the fastest growing technology companies
Sorry to have lost you, but thank you for the feedback!
Founder Divorce: Nine Lessons From When My Business Partner Jumped Ship
Long time reader of HN, I thought this would be the first article that I share- I spent countless hours thinking about the moment my business partner left and this article covers the main lessons from that event.
And only perfect, normal, modern German. "This is not good" in yiddish is more like (depending on dialect)

Dos iz ni[sh]t gut.
1) yes

2) i deleted my old blog
Considering 300 miles will take 4+ hours, 30 minutes for a refuel/bathroom/coffee break is hardly a deal-breaker. If you are not making a long trip, then keeping the car topped off in your garage should take care of most charging needs.
If the rule that kept them from investing in Apple and Intel also kept them from investing in Webvan and Pets.com (and a dozen other costly failures) they might think on balance it's a good rule. You'll note there's no page on their portfolio for "bad investments we didn't make".
- Do you think you would have the opportunity to avail yourself of the fruits of "academia" if the current approach was fundamentally broken?

- What would happen if viability of academic research was tied to one being a successful business person? (Asking in light of your comment elsewhere in this page re. "tenure system".)
Money are of no objection to that industry. The combined budget of NSA, CIA, FBI, Pentagon, foreign bases, Afghanistan and Iraq occupation, etc. is in the trillions. Why trust FB or Google if all it costs to capture and store the information are money.
What a trash comment. No, the closed garden application computer is not the right way to go for non-programmers. It gives tremendous monopolistic power to corporations - fuck that.

We need to get rid of all the kinks out of linux, make plug and play work seamlessly, and improve usability. Part of that means getting rid of the dependency to use the terminal (who uses that piece of shit anyway?) and the need to config text files to fix driver issues. Linux still has the ability to reach #1 in non-programmer desktop usage.
> It's fast enough that we've got physicists writing simulations in it.

Cool, source?
Yes, the profile is super broken and new. We're focusing a lot of energy on it now. Please forward your bugs to feedback@getprismatic.com and they will be fixed quickly.
it definitely has to be based on profile views or something else, more than interactions, because a few of my people i never interact with on facebook and almost never view their profile. but they all do have crushes on me.
Here's a good breakdown of his voting history on technology issues:

http://www.ontheissues.org/TX/Lamar_Smith.htm#Technology

Not a great picture. Voted against network neutrality, sponsored SOPA, although he did vote against taxing Internet access.
you can search for and add just about anything you can think of. give it a try. you'll quick branch out into totally new areas.
According to the article on pandodaily (also on the front page at the moment), that's part of what they are doing too.

http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/05/from-kidnapping-and-bribery...
I definitely like the idea/approach.

It may complicate the initial product, but we could always keep this less exposed to end users (or at least the voters/reviewers).

Thanks for the awesome feedback / insight / thought -- I really appreciate you taking the time to think though it for us!