skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the subject of losing money, anecdotally, two of the coffee shops I frequent are owned by successful business owners (e.g. one of them owns multiple laundromats, other has a portfolio of rental apartments).

My hunch is that they use the losses from the coffee shop to offset their profits at their other cash-flow businesses. Is this a common practice (if it is so)? I know Microsoft's Office and Operating System businesses effectively subsidize the rest of the company (Internet, etc.)

This has been posted here before but "My cofeehouse nightmare" is a good read
http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/
Script To Monitor Your iPhone App Sale Ranks Across Categories and Countries
Is Wolfram the new Xerox Parc?
Yeah, I'd like to see the title tweaked a bit to clarify that, too.
these are good:
http://math.lanl.gov/~brendt/Publications/wohlberg-1999-revi...
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/part2/section-8.htm...
so he scripted google and fed it all into a learning algorithm?
How a about a more honest pricing structure, or at least more straight forward.
note from the official FAQ:
"There is no charge to list your room - it is free to post. We charge the guest a 5-12% service fee during the checkout process. The host receives the amount they set, minus a small 3% fee for credit card processing."

now that reads to me like the lessor ends up paying 3% of 112% of their posted rate, which means the customer actually ends up paying 15.8% (or 13.8% depends on which way you want to talk about percent, also this is at 12%) more than the lessor actually receives.
Also I take it to mean that the $30 room in city X will magically become a $33 room when I actually try to stay there.
Neither strikes me as very good from a customer experience point of view (customer being either side of the equation in this sentence), as well as somewhat unpredictable.
Sounds hype-ish, and loose on details... why are they doing this on their own, not publishing it in peer-reviewed journals?
Well according to the Fed statistics (http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h8/data.htm), banks actually are still lending just as much as ever (more so to consumers and businesses). The only dip in lending was interbank lending between November and January (by about 10%, but has since returned to previous levels).

If you look at liabilities however, banks are hoarding cash. Currently they have about three times as much cash on hand as in September. Presumably this cash is coming from somewhere, and their hoarding of it is hurting something, but it's not hurting lending. My guess would be the cash is from the Fed, the Treasury, and share offerings, but IANAE.

So it's not as simple as 'getting banks to lend again' ... because they already are. The problem is more who they are lending to (being on the hook to GM for a revolving credit facility would make me hoard cash too, since the probability of getting repaid is not so great right now), and the fact that securitization has broken down to the point where most banks have to keep the loans on their books, which puts them at risk, especially when some many loans are randomly going bad. Everyone is scared of investing in banks for fear these bad loans might wipe the bank out or cause it to be nationalized.

And really, to bring this back to Roosevelt, a lot of what we have to fear is due to fear itself. When everyone is running for cover, trying to build up rainy day cash and laying off people just in case things get worse... well, things will get worse. I'm not saying the whole thing is caused by attitudes, but being scared to buy anything but treasuries certainly isn't helping stocks, and the DJIA is a hugely visible 'indicator' that colors many people's economic outlook in general.
I'm a huge fan of the pure Python piece-- it allows us to integrate it much more easily with our cross-platform Python embeds.
I disagree with this sentiment.

There is a huge uphill battle for getting something like this approved for use in humans and a large part of that is proving that the device is safe as well as effective. Firstly, we don't even know that this compound will work against HIV, since they tested it against SIV. Secondly, the gel is something would have to be applied to the vagina very frequently (think: sex workers) without causing problems (ie inflammation) that could make infection more likely. Additionally, the researchers showed that the gel is effective in very controlled settings-- will it remain effective during intercourse? Finally, I am not even sure how you ethically do the controlled study in humans to prove the gel's efficacy. It will have to be designed very carefully, for sure.

I am sure there are many other challenges to bringing this to market that I am not thinking even of, but they will get there, and I don't think this first result is insignificant.
It's actually not so bad. It's just JavaScript and maybe my code (I wrote JS version).

Roger Alsing (who was the original author and inspiration) did later an optimized compiled parallel version that was able to get Mona Lisa in 1 minute 34 seconds (on a 64 bit 4 core machine).

http://rogeralsing.com/2009/01/04/scaling-clustere-evolution...

Also there are supposed to be some efforts to run it on GPU, which should be even faster.
what is meant by curated data is the opposite of what google does, eg
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/NewIn70Comput...

(google has pretty much admitted it does a horrible job with structured information...)
Why the Chevy Volt Doesn't Add Up
Exited and interesting approach. Adding more schematic will help such a system so it's working with time. Also seems to have the right kind of mad scientists.
Managing Ec2 with your iPhone using Sinatra
Ask N.YC: Who does Twitter's PR?
I see Twitter mentioned in a mainstream news story every few days. Very few of these stories make any sense. None of these stories are news.

How are these guys doing it?
Thanks for using us! Let us know if you have any ideas on how to improve the site.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV#Origin
> Startups can't afford to sponsor H1-B and H1-B's cannot start their own companies.
If a person on H-1B is planning to get a greencard joining a startup, even if they can afford to sponsor the H-1B, looks like a bad idea. A GC takes about a decade to get; most startups never make it to that.
I don't get it. Aren't you supposed to use profits to offset losses?

Wait...you mean cooking the books and making it seem like both businesses are doing just okay so they're taxed less...right?
How many independent coffee shops do you know take credit cards? I know a few but these shops I mentioned are cash only.
This looks extremely interesting but I don't know Smalltalk. Can a Smalltalker offer an opinion?
Dear Apple... Please give me picture messaging on my Iphone 
I do not understand why Apple did not make the Iphone capable of receiving picture messaging. Why do I need to login to viewmymessage.com to receive photos... am I the only one who DOES login and has issues 99% of the time with the page not loading correctly?
You're confusing government spending with government lending.

Also, banks which are in no way, shape, or form in trouble have taken TARP funds because the cost of borrowing is so attractive.

I forget the name of the bank, but it's CEO was on CNBC, as an example of a healthy bank.

Why does the TARP allow this? Because the program is a mess.

But it's not crowding out private investment, and it's not even crowding out private lending, because it does allow healthy banks to borrow form TARP just the same.
Which brings up an issue with this 'gel' in which they tested using SIV and according to the article you posted ...

"...SIV shares only about half of its amino acid sequence with HIV, making it a very imperfect substitute for testing anti-HIV drugs and vaccines."
Twitter Frenzy - Daily Show
One common set of assumptions in image denoising is that:

1. The pixels in the output image should be close in value to the corresponding pixels in the input image.

2. Neighboring pixels in the output image should have similar values.

I wonder if anyone has compared compression techniques using these sorts of assumptions.
i very rarely log on because its so f(& annoying. and yes the pics are hard to see and usually only frustrates me more.

NYtimes ran an article about why the iPhone is not popular in Japan and one of the main reasons was lame camera, and no pic messaging.
6 million users, & high profile investors equals pretty much all the free PR you can ask for. However, they may employ PR people to push even harder.
Sounds like a good candidate for a new app. After my game is finished will take a look :)
Payday advance
Payday advance also known as payday loans are short term loans meant for unexpected emergencies and or to help bridge unplanned expenses such as medical bills the gap between pay check. Getting a payday advance is simple. It just takes a 2 minute online application process.
I do have a suggestion. Make it so that the amount shown as pledged to a website only includes paid pledges.

As it stands, a bunch of people could say, pledge $100/200/whatever each to a cause to make it seem like that cause has already raised a lot of money, causing people who might legitimately donate to go, "Hey, they've already raised loads. I'll give to someone else".
I can't say if it's really "hacker" news, but it's definitely sugoi!
Sounds to me the like CEO decided to create the company after it became clear that Apple didn't want to be in the business of supporting enterprise iphone applications. In other words, Apple had a consulting division which this guy headed but then Apple decided it wasn't really in that business. This guy felt there was still a market for business apps (presumably from his experience leading the consulting division) so he left and founded his own company. This might have not have happened if Apple decided they were interested in developing and supporting enterprise applications.
There is no mention of "learning algorithms" or stuff of that nature in the post. Its a different approach:

"But if one’s already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding.
All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do."

The nlp involved is quite different from the mainstream direction.
Twitpay Launches, Uses Amazon Payments
awesome! 34 years old. Indian born. Tight fisted and super web savvy.
Netty.az
That's a great tip, I've probably gone as far as I can go organization-wise with the browser and w/o using a dedicated twitter client.

The problem with tweetdeck and twhirl and whatever else is that it turns twitter into IM, something constantly on that I have to check and that pops up alerts. I guess you could turn that stuff off, so that's what I'll experiment with.
Honestly I think that you are just trying to stroke your own ego when you classify religion as a type of lie. Please justify that.
Then they should just always do the homework and be on the safe side. Anyway, even if they screw up once and think they can get by without the homework, that's one F and they'll quickly figure out that that approach doesn't work for them.
It sounded to me like it was "This problem requires both brute force and cleverness, and I have supplied both.":

"But with a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way.... But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work."

(Ellipses covers several paragraphs in this case.)

The big stopper in some sense has not been the cleverness, but the brute force necessary, because without the brute force collection and translation, there's nothing to be clever with. I, too, am "wait and see", but this could be valuable.
Try asking Mr 10 Seconds if creating an account got in his way.
I've personally felt that grades for a class over the course of a semester (and also from freshman year to graduation) should be calculated using an average of both the student's overall grade point average as well as some sort of moving average, that shows a more realistic progression of their knowledge.

The whole point of a class is to go from a point of lesser knowledge to a point of more knowledge on a subject, but by simply averaging out student's scores over the course of the semester, there is no evidence of their progression. By using a combination of a moving average and the total average, a teacher can more accurately see how well the student is progressing.
Why do people post this stuff here? This article is non-sense. I barely skimmed it, but most of it was incorrect. No analysis and it just seems like author is trying to get attention.
Peoples minds work on such a strong relative level..
You can be upper-middle-class in California and kill yourself from depression.
You can live in a slum and work all day and be happy (Theoretically that is, if they weren't constantly reminded by a skyline, TV, commercials and rich tourists of their relative position. In fact, commercials are designed to lower your happiness, as they essentially try to show that life can be better.)

Not only happiness, but truth is relative for people. Exploring boundaries (like travelling) is the only way to be able to better position and evaluate standpoints on any subject.

The minds natural tendency to zoom in must be countered, consciously and regularly. For us, (I assume the people in Dharavi are not reading this) this can also definately be source of happiness and a way to set your focus on the right kind of things in your life.
Perhaps if They Think of Their Win Mobile Devices as Broken iPhones…
Less Wrong - community blog by Yudkowsky & FHI
there's this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/tivo/ref=atv_faq_tivo

which would allow you to watch it instantly on your tivo at 480p for $2.
AFAIK, the AIG he's talking about is a small (formerly) Swiss/international private bank (now owned by a company from Abu Dhabi). It's not the US insurance. (Google 'swiss AIG').
how much work went into developing it?
is it a radically innovative and useful application?
is it fun? will it spread socially? what kind of marketing will need to be done to get it sold?

there's a billion questions that must be answered that would affect such a decision. without any of that information, even the name of the app or what it actually does, how do you think we can answer that for you?
There's always a cutoff in a discrete system.
'Nanostitching' could lead to much stronger airplane skins, more
Is that awesome? Makes it hard to argue against H1B's when the US CIO is an immigrant.
The "recession" reference seems misleading. Poverty is kind of timeless.
For me, it's that I forget how many I've already bought and the developers and apple have done a sufficiently good job at making the "lite" versions seem uncool. Kind of like being the kid in school that always has the second hand stuff. People want to pay for the real thing.
This article was posted in June 2006. How much innovation has happened since then?

I ask because I've been throwing together a toy django app that lets users manage arbitrary data using a filing cabinet metaphor because I figured some users might find the idea familiar. I'd love to build a product that steals some market share from spreadsheets.

anyone have any thoughts?
I think a good analogy would be like a college girl getting completely drunk and passing out in some guy's bed at a party and the guy takes ripe advantage of the situation. What he did was wrong, but she was still completely foolish to put herself in that spot.

There is no reward without risk. I've had incredible success in business back in the day, from going out on the ledge and taking chances with people I barely knew. However, I've also had that success striped away from me by trusting the wrong people. I'd of been rich several years ago if not for a couple of bad choices. Normally my bad choices revolve around people.

From doing some introspection and reading this thread, I think the key is to mitigate that risk as much as possible. A person will never have complete information until the game is done. Its not like chess; more like poker. One way for me to do this will be through upfront expectations with the person as well as a contract like you described. I do need a lot more self examination, especially with how easily I can trust other people.
Ask HN: Looking for NYC-based technical co-founder for green meta-retail site
Fully-functional, uniquely positioned green/social impact ecommerce site seeks a co-founder to help oversee site development, co-raise capital, and grow the organization with the existing founder. The existing founder is strong in finance and business development and has founded three Internet startups to date. The perfect co-founder will be strong in technology but also capable of confidently co-pitching the company to potential investors.

This is the perfect opportunity for someone interested in the environment, helping small businesses thrive, and doing something positive for the planet to walk in as a partner and have an immediate impact on the direction of a startup that, with a small round of investment, can be launched in a very short amount of time. The site is real and it's 95% of the way towards being launch-ready in a basic form with plans for continuous improvement. Launch fast, update often.

The company is a for-profit venture, although it's social impact is beneficial, thus it fits the profile of traditional and social capital market investors. It is funded by the founder and friends&family to date. Co-founder salary will depend on successfully raising a round of capital. Existing founder realizes the importance of the role to be filled by this new co-founder and that will be reflected in the equity package presented to the right person.

If you have a strong business background, but not a technical one, and are looking for such an opportunity, feel free to contact us. A third co-founder who significantly increases the company's potential is not out of the question.

The company is based in New York City and the code for the site was written by a reputable local contracting firm.

Contact egreen.site1@gmail.com
Ask HN: Gui Design WebApp that makes all widgets look hand-drawn
I once saw a presentation of a webapp (it might've been at NY Tech Meetup, or maybe at some other startup-y thing) that allowed you to do GUI design inside the browser; the thing that stood out the most was that the actual widgets and windows looked like they were hand-drawn on paper. Does anyone know the name of that? They might've been YC-funded, but I am not sure of that.
First Real Photos of the BlackBerry 9630
> A 10 per cent payroll tax for each H-1B visa can be reinvested in whatever it takes to get American talent up to the same level.

The US doesn't need more low-skills folk. We need high-skills folk.

So, there should be some non-linear component.

One possibility is to auction H-1Bs. We pick a number that we'd like and let companies (and individuals) bid. Or, we could decide how much money we'd like to raise from the program and let companies (and individuals) decide what fraction of the total they're willing to pay.

In both cases, low bids lose.

Another is to simply charge a somewhat large fee, possibly on top of a payroll tax.
We've definitely debated this back and forth.

You can do this yourself on your site with:
http://tipjoy.com/api/#extracting_transaction_data

You can use that feed to show, for example, only the recent paid transactions on your site.
Is arguing against H1Bs a goal?
On the trail of the traffickers
Have you ever played with Scratch? My (then) 8 year old son loves it. You don't need to know any Smalltalk to use it.
Why is this important? Because in the end it will fail. Facebook is trying to copy one of the most efficent ways to browse content on the internet, Friendfeed.

Sorry, which one is more popular? Facebook or Friendfeed? The masses have clearly chosen Facebook, and it's quite difficult to switch social networks. Even if UI-to-UI Friendfeed is superior, that doesn't mean Facebook will fail. I'd say that this is a failure on Friendfeed's part, if anything, to turn its superior UI into increased usage quickly enough.
So you're saying that the Webkit team would delay a security fix while hunting for a performance offset for it? I don't believe that.
9 Out Of This World Home Theaters
>Considering all of the WebKit browsers I've used seem to crash every half-hour

Funny. I've been using Chrome regularly for about 2 weeks now, and the only crashes I've had are when it tries to start emusic's download app. I have one window open with a few tabs, and it's been open for about 2 days now.

Either something is wrong with your setup, or something is unusually great with mine.
I like to abstract data access from the implementation of its storage, so making changes to the storage methodology shouldn't/won't require substantial changes to business or application logic. Keeping the separation clear is more difficult for some people than others. One of the problems with the route you are suggesting is that people don't know the future. Eliminate bottlenecks as they start to come up, and don't tightly couple unrelated concerns.
Ooh. That'll be useful. I ended up having to make a new account for my latest donation drive, simply because on the last one, I'd taken in maybe.. $150 of paid pledges, but my 'amount' was near $400. :x
Online dating offered on SugarBaby4u 
A Sugar Daddy is a successful man that excels in his field not only in the office but with his Sugar Baby.
Nope, Cyc was built off a ridiculously complicated upper ontology using $80M+ over 25 years.
So I've been beta testing for two weeks and I think Divvyshot is a great service for a few reasons:

1. It allows you to share high res photos without downloading a client, sending an unreasonable number of emails with attachments, or resorting to other archaic methods like swapping jump drives.

2. You can invite other people to add photos to the same event which is awesome when you go on vacation/to a party/etc. and everyone is taking pictures with different cameras.

3. Facebook integration = one-stop posting. (Though I wish it would present separate albums on Facebook as they were created on Divvyshot).

4. It’s easy.

5. I never have to right click “save as” again if I want a friend’s picture off of Facebook.
Why couldn't it be? There's a controversy. The point he's making is, this CIO pick has the White House taking a side.