skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One more thing, Stephen Boyd's class on convex optimization (he is one of the co-author of the book) can be found on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query...

a person has pit all the videos in notes and put the said notes on a blog:

http://minhva.blogspot.com/2009/02/convexoptimizationii-lect...

so you can watch the video and read the text of the video at the same time.

Igor.
If I didn't live in SF, I could live off of absurdlycool.com, which is all ads.
Does it cost less than 1000x more? Because if it does, it's worth it.
Projects Seek to Dazzle Urbanites With the Night Sky
For people who are just reading a book at home, however, print will do just fine. For linear reading, Kindle offers no advantages and, for nonlinear content, has many disadvantages — so why pay $359 more?

I disagree here. Reading is only one aspect of the experience, the other aspect is the convenience of purchasing books. I am really bad about buying books. I don't quite understand why -- there are lots that I want to read. But when it comes down to paying $30 and waiting a week for shipping (or paying more for 2 day shipping), I put orders off indefinitely. This is bad, because time I should spend reading books ends up as time spent watching TV or playing video games.

I thought buying a Kindle might break this cycle, and it in fact did. I've had a Kindle for under a week, and I've already finished two books. I don't think I've even cared about TV all week. Making reading very convenient (and pleasurable) was well worth the $350.

(I also travel a lot, and end up bringing two books on every trip so I don't run out of reading material. That is a lot of unnecessary weight to carry around, and I often finish both books fairly quickly anyway. The Kindle is very light, and I can easily buy another book wherever I am. I have not been on a trip with my Kindle yet, but I think I can say goodbye to boredom during unexpected delays.)

Finally, the Kindle delivers an experience I have always wanted -- doing something useful from the couch. I like my couch, but I could never get comfortable with my computer there. I always end up wanting my nice keyboard or 24" monitor, rather than my tiny eeepc (or larger Thinkpad). So I never compute (or read) from the couch. The Kindle changes this; I can email it a PDF (or buy a book from Amazon), and then read it from my couch. This has multiple benefits; I can't get distracted by anything, since I'm physically away from my computer and desk, and it's also really comfortable. (The Kindle is lighter than the books I usually read, so there is less fatigue. Yeah, maybe I am just really out of shape.)

There are only two drawbacks -- it is very hard to skim things, and the PDF conversion doesn't handle diagrams or math formulae very well. This isn't a deal-breaker, but there's no reason why it shouldn't work.
What's low-risk?

Just the whole point of selling something to the end-user. There isn't much which can go wrong — you create something, people pay you for it, and you can grow (resource wise) as fast as your user base does. That's what I'd call "mom&pop", you start with something small, and you expand as your income grows.

That's compared to building something, hopefully growing like mad, getting VC funding, getting mentioned a billion times on techcrunch, struggling to just cut even…and then hopefully getting acquired.

I know which I'd choose; for a real business, the paid model is leaps ahead! But what does that mean for the Diggs, Twitters, other massive sites, and big ideas still in peoples heads which can't be monetized by the end-user?
Taggart Transcontinental...?
Marginal cost is simply not a useful metric with startups. There are plenty of similar industries, and the notion that this means anything at all is garbage.

The material in a shoe costs a tiny, tiny fraction of what the consumer pays, but that doesn't mean they give them away for free (plus shipping) and slap an ad on the side.

Internet startups may have low marginal cost, but they have disproportionately high fixed costs. Good progammers make 2-3x what a factory worker does.

Moreover, marginal cost is on a sliding scale. One more customer to my Facebook app costs me literally nothing, one more than our current setup can handle may force me to shard my database. So the marginal cost is 0 for a long time, then some really large number for one unit, then 0 again for a while, etc. You really have to average it out.

Also, startups that do have significant marginal costs (YouTube, Pandora, etc.) still don't charge. So while everyone always touts marginal cost as the reason, it clearly is not.
>> "if you can't exchange some for of payment for your product, it has no value"

If you're ad supported, that money comes from advertisers. I don't see why that's any less valuable than it coming from the customer.

You're valuable to the customer, and valuable to the advertisers.
Interesting. I have only ever ridden the Shinkansen, and I guess I just assumed it would be the same everywhere.

(I think metal detectors are pointless, since there is no intrinsic value in blowing up a high-speed train. A terrorist will just go for the subway instead, where security measures will be too intrusive. Oh well, everyone loves their security theater.)
The Story of Stuff -- Sustainable production and consumption
You'll have to use the restrictive GPL-3 or compatible licenses and be forbidden from using the more liberal licenses. All point of view.

(I wish software library people would put their licenses up front instead of making me download it to find them.)
Elegance and surreals
Comics for Hackers
in reality there probably aren’t a lot of 10% lifts left after the first handful

I am genuinely surprised by how many I find even years after starting my business. (And in where they are, too. All that work on the application, marketing, SEO, etc etc and the thing that pushed me over the day-job line took me all of one Saturday to implement on a lark.)

In regards to cost of customer acquisition: time you spend playing with your conversion funnel does wonders for this number and as your COCA decreases you start to have all sorts of fun options. With a price increase and a few recent lifts in conversion it is now economical for me to advertise on keywords I couldn't before at prices above where my competitors can profitably match. This results in a winner-take-most kind of situation on the AdWords auction -- good news for me (and for Google).
Topps launches augmented reality cards with Total Immersion technology
It's a pretty simple argument...

A. Charge users from day 1. Your profit is easy to figure out, you should be profitable early.
B. Build a userbase, *then* figure out how to extract money from it.

A is a low risk lower potential reward, B is a high risk higher potential reward.
I think that HN does not really need down-voting for articles at all, but on the other hand, it needs some automated killing functionality.

EDIT: [About the editors, it takes an hour and sometimes more for a link to be killed, at least when I flag a link and I see it for hours - happened today. So maybe automation will help in any editors shortage]

For example, someone few days ago submitted your article "Why TV Lost", although it was already submitted, and we already discussed it! But he was able to do it, obviously because the submission detection script does not think that "www.domain.com" is the same as "domain.com", and treats them as different links.

Also if a link is submitted previously and it was dead because it's spam, then if a user tries to resubmits it again it should be killed automatically. Like Google homepage, myspace and all of these bla bla bla.

There are zillion techniques for preventing spam, and you know it better than me for sure.
But there is a vision that you have about spam on this website, that I don't really understand yet.
Yes. Because science is concerned epistomologically with that which is objectively true. Given certain axioms, certain statements can be shown to be objectively true, or "true" given those axioms. Math is "out there", meaning it can be discovered as objective truth by anyone regardless of cultural context. Does it always correspond to the natural world? Likely not. But it is still "true" in the sense of a coherent system of axioms.
In the spirit of this article/book, when I interview people I ask them to have an apple or an orange and judge them entirely based on the fruit they choose.
simulated annealing is really old, and sounds like a similar effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

Though explicitly representing back-steps in a search is an interesting idea. It doubles the order of complexity, which will result in the square root of the depth available.
This can be uber useful for a lot of stuff. We developed something functionally very similar to detect image spam at my $employer a couple of years ago. Good stuff.
The convex optimization is used to reconstruct the original signal.

The underlying compressive sensing theory says that if you do a measurement of a sparse signal, then convex optimization should allow you to recover that signal with high to overwhelming probability. The reason compressive sensing is interesting is that:
- the process of taking measurement is linear (no iteration a la JPEG), thereby allowing one to foresee very low powered sensors.
- the number of measurements is expected to be much smaller than what the Nyquist-Shannon theorem says (Nyquist is just a sufficient condition, not a necessary one), thereby realizing a de-facto compression of the signal with no a priori on the shape of that signal (except the knowledge that it is sparse)
- the measurements are automatically encrypted.

In the case of the broad-spectrum communications monitor, the message is known to be sparsely located all over the frequencies.

Igor.
A Search Engine for Venture Capital
> Combined spending by federal, state, and local governments on roads and airports amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Not exactly a profitable enterprise.

Profit is not measured by spending, but by the relationship between spending and revenue.

> it's hard to see why there is such a fuss over the funding of trains.

Because they lose public money - they cost more to build and run than folks will pay to use them. I've no objection to you spending your money on them, but I'd rather not spend my money on them.

> Having some double standard about profitability and competitiveness when we subsidize airports and highways to the tune of hundreds of billions a year seems rather disingenuous.

We don't subsidize highways; the total taxes collected more than cover the costs. That's why the rail folks try to get a piece of it.
Holy cow, you'll be dining on troll food tonight!
you can catch a train by showing up 30 mins early

In the US and Japan, I have done even better than this -- you can show up right at the scheduled departure time, and as long as you make it through the doors, everything is fine. (The train in the US wasn't high-speed, FWIW.)

This works nicely in Japan, especially, as the train frequencies on the Shinkansen are almost the same as commuter trains. If you don't have a reservation, you can just get on whatever train you like. This convenience would obviously never work for airlines.

Personally I think the big advantage is passenger comfort. The comfort level of a high speed train, even in 2nd class, is better than first class on a plane.

I think the convenience is that trains can go to the city-center. Everywhere I go, it always adds an extra hour on each end to get from the city center to the airport. (Chicago Midway and NY LaGuardia are a bit different in this respect.)

Even with not-that-high-speed trains, this seems to make it convenient enough to consider using. I know the Boston/Washington DC corridor benefits from this. (They are all short flights, but it is a pain to go from the city center to the airport, wait a while, spend 30 minutes on the plane, and then go from the airport to the destination city center. If you take the train, you cut out all the waiting and needless travel, you arrive at your actual destination.)
'wasteless' seems cromulent to me.
Evolving faster Haskell programs
I would pay $10/month, maybe even a lot more for a search engine that learned my interests. Fore example, if I say 'spring', I am not interested in soap, or perfume, or early season vacations. Or if it finds a match in a forum, it discounts posts that have no follow on. My list is quite long, but I could see paying $100/month if it saves me a few hours per month.
It says 'pHash is an open source software library released under the GPLv3 license that implements several perceptual hashing algorithms, and provides a C++ API to use those functions in your own programs.' right on the frontpage, looks pretty clear to me
How to build a front page
Yep. Someone needs to build a S3-like solution and open source it, down to the cluster setup and harddrive specs and brand names. I have set up a storage cluster once with mogilefs and perlbal but finding documentation was a nightmare. There is none, you have to dig through the mailing-list archives.

But then again, that is the kind of stuff that people get paid ridiculous amounts of money to build, heck, I know I did. So I wouldn't bet on it. But if I had the time I would probably do it.
All I really read in here is that China is pumping money in to the US, so the US is safe.

Because of this the dollar is obviously the safest bet for investments, creating a spiralling effect. This leaves other currencies somewhat less attractive.
> Isn't the truth the weaker statement that new ventures which can't clearly demonstrate, in advance, that their balance of return+risk is likely to be better than investment in their competitors are unlikely to be funded?

That's an interesting, but different and irrelevant question because there's no reason to believe that high speed rail in the US won't require on-going subsidies. The only argument is over how big they'll be.

Run the numbers on every proposal you see. Compare the total salaries for the "jobs created" to the projected revenue (ridership * average fare). Look at the estimates for other on-going costs. Look at the startup costs.
I think whether or not you're able to subsist off of ad revenue depends on your situation and goals. A friend of mine can make $900 a week off of CPM revenues. While this wouldn't be enough money to run a 10 or even 5 person startup, it is plenty for him to cover his rent, car payment, and costs of living.

At the same time, I've been talking to a friend who is looking to start up a website that follows more in the footsteps of YouSendIt. We've had several conversations on whether its more valuable to offer a service for free to build market share and then suffer the pains of losing users when you switch to a paid model or charging from the beginning and seeing much slower growth. I appreciated that the article at least addressed the fear of switching to a paid model, but I would have been interested to hear how Kumaran thinks YouSendIt would have done if they would have launched with a freemium model already in place.
The 100 oldest registered dot com, org, net, edu domains
The Physics Guide to Hooking Up (Brownian random walks vs. Lévy flights)
The Seven Deadly Sins of a Side-Business Entrepreneur
Romeo and Juliet is actually my favorite play to read of his. If you don't get it, it seems like slush. But his point is that adolescent romance is risky and dangerous, and that youth makes bad decisions. It's a critique of slush romance.

Pinter and Sophocles could not write as well as Shakespeare did. The man wrote absolute poetry, line by line. It's difficult stuff, but then, the best art always is. Find an actor capable of reading Shakespeare and the hair on the back of your neck will stand up.

That's not to say Pinter isn't good. (Sophocles isn't at all bad, but his writing dates terribly.) The problem with Pinter is that he doesn't write for aesthetic. A common misbelief is that Shakespeare only wrote in iambic pentameter and used weird language because his stuff is old. That's not the case. People in Shakespeare's day wrote plays that look and feel like normal plays. Shakespeare believed, though, that he could write plays so grandiose that they transcended everyday reality to become timeless. He wrote challenging lines to force people to dedicate themselves to his performances. His stuff is absolute poetry in a way that writing almost never is.

I hated Shakespeare when I was 16. I was lucky enough to get a teacher good enough to explain why Shakespeare is as acclaimed as he is. Since then I haven't said a bad word about him. He's so incredible that it's hard to look at his stuff objectively, so it's easy to criticize him unless you actually look at what he did.
Come on, PayPal works just fine. They even have recurring payments. Its silly to pretend theres "problems" with accepting payments on the web. Anybody can do it via PayPal.
Does anyone who has a Kindle or Kindle2 also have the Kindle application for the iPhone? I wouldn't expect the app to be an adequate substitute, but I'm interested to see how people would compare it.
Review: Becoming Productive in Xcode Screencasts
True, but they rarely use web interfaces, do they?
For your consideration, PayPal subscriptions service: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/subscr-i...

It works just fine and no need to get the thousands of ISPs that exist involved, which is incredibly messy.
The irony of it all is that is the first post that I really wish I could downvote.

C'mon! The guy doesn't know what he's talking about, yet he is quick to say that HN "gets it wrong". Others show him he doesn't know the rules and he replies that the rules should be more explicit, when the fact is this very idiosyncrasy is what helps HN not to grow too much: it takes someone who is really interested in participating in the community to stick around and learn how things work around here.

I'm flagging the link. I never liked Jeff's "from-the-hip" style of blogging, but now more and more of his articles is plain linkbait and a way to get attention to Stackoverflow.

(Btw, Jeff, the whole spiel of writing even when there's nothing to say is annoying and makes more noise than signal. Quantity does not always trump quality. Practice makes it perfect, yes, but all I can say is that you're getting really good at producing crap.)

To have a post on HN with such an inflammatory title and factually wrong claims is downright offensive. It's no different than me going to his office and screaming how stupid he is.

In fact, I'll cancel my rarely-used StackOverflow account.
How will they prevent malicious questions such as prime number factorization, np problems, from eating all processing time??
Im asking it seriously!
At least they have to enumerate all these questions to prevent system abuse.
Funnyly "The Last Question", Asimov's short story also comes to my mind.
I would be all for a train that went from Vancouver BC to San Diego, or even further south.

Half the population of the US that lives west of the rockies, lives within 15 miles of I-5.

Imagine getting on the train in Seattle in the morning, switching trains in Sacramento and arriving in San Francisco in mid-afternoon. With wifi and cell phone coverage fully available for the whole trip.
"it seems paralyzing to try and keep that stuff in mind and react in real time"

You're leaving out step three:

1. Read guidelines and reassure yourself that flirting is something you can understand and perform acceptably at.

2. Work up your courage and go to a bar/party/gathering where your friends say you will meet women.

3. Freak out when you actually get to the bar/party/whatever and consume a large quantity of alcohol to take the edge off your anxiety.

4. Find someone to talk to, forget all the rules, and either bomb out completely because they find your awkwardness off-putting or do just fine because your nervousness and ineptitude are within their acceptable range.
To get 'A' right, you have to line up product and price. That's not low-risk. Your argument that B is higher risk/reward than A is nonsensical; it depends entirely on the particulars you choose.
Thanks for the clarification, Igor -- my knowledge of this is second-hand, from a friend's description of an interesting project he's working on. I had never heard of compressive sampling or convex optimization before that, and it was eye-opening to see what's possible.
No offense, but are you even reading me before you respond, axod? Do you see why I might ask that?
When women get power at work, do they use it like men do?
'Digital living room' getting closer
what are you successful consumer subscription products?
I believe the point was simply that the cost isn't fixed. It rises in hardware costs, storage, bandwidth, labor, etc. with a user base. It would most likely be very much worth it to have the increased user base. But the profit/cost isn't a fixed ratio.
I run DecentURL.com, and have had basically the same experience. I made a few dollars off some "$7 premium services" for a while, but recently stopped running those as there just wasn't enough demand. Not that I made "selling" DecentURL a priority -- so I shouldn't say too much.

I'm turned off the ads-during-the-redirect thing, but I can see where it might be an effective money-maker.

I like what cli.gs is doing.
Nice list of `find` examples for *nix
Interesting. Though what that implies is that Microsoft might end up doing something other than what they started on, leaving someone else to dominate a market they once dominated.

Like how people don't buy mainframes anymore. IBM is just another player in the server market and they sold their desktop unit and Macs switched to Intel. Now they make CPUs for consoles where taking over from Intel and MIPs chips.

Similarly I could see Microsoft losing dominance in Operating Systems as more things become web-based. They move more towards web services and Xbox - which is already happening to an extent.
A bit off topic, but I notice you have both huge credit card debt and rental properties. Isn't that just a losing arbitrage?
Not bad.

1. On a first glance the interface is a little overwhelming, and I am not sure where to go/what to change first. Have a single column of options that can be expanded/condensed accordion style (think the Mac MS Word formatting sidebar).

2. Buttons produced are only a single image. It would be nice if multiple images/sprites were created (that is, a single image file, with multiple images). The additional images would enable hover and on click capabilities, providing a user with visual feedback that the image is indeed a button, and that it is working. That being said, you may also need to include the relevant CSS necessary for a user to select the correct sprite in each situation.

3. Having the Undo/Redo on the top right seems a bit unnatural. (I didn't even notice these options at first; moving them to the top left may be better?) You might also consider using the standard arrow icons for these options with a text description on the bottom or on the right

4. Other people have already mentioned this, but additional fonts and a color picker would be very useful.

5. The site's layout requires a fairly wide screen. When I don't have my browser window maximized, the layout gets kinda messed up (input boxes flow to the next line abandoning their label).
Fantastic AJAX Newsletter Module
it's not so much a science in of itself as it is a toolkit that science MUST use in order to define itself.

when math is used and the results are verified as truth in science, physics, or observation of natural events, we can say that the toolkit is valid under scientific scrutiny.

basically math by itself doesn't really prove anything, but the application of math validates both the math AND the science it is applied to
Any way to find those fonts without needing to register somewhere?
A Disturbing Fidelity Ad
I've used it and found it easy and super helpful! Thanks for this!