skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If there were any compelling counterexamples, they would already be touting them already. Glad someone is calling out the emperor for wearing no clothes. Hope this idea gets traction.
If you like the medium size, medium density city experience why don't you move instead of blocking progress? The US has lots of cities like that, and only one large, high density city. We could desperately use a few more.
Quoting:

According to a new study, freshmen women spend
nearly half their day -- 12 hours -- engaged in
some form of media use, particularly texting,
music, the Internet and social networking.

How do you spend nearly 12 hours a day on media use?
I built a product which had the following goals:

1) Free to consumers.

2) Paid plans for business to get access to leads generated by the above consumers entering their data.

The problem was that I did all my upfront market validation with the first group, which jumped all over my product with comments like "I could totally use that!" and "wow what a great idea!" type feedback.

I built the product for the consumers first and launched a private beta. Then when I turned to build the other side of it for the businesses, I found most of them didn't see the need for it, and it would take a high touch sales process to get them onboard. At least until the product became a household name and had millions of users.

I quickly realized that I had run into what I've since deemed "the Groupon Problem". The only way to make the business work would be to pour in tons of capital to hit really high user numbers while paying for a high touch sales process.

I had envisioned being able to run the whole thing as a bootstrapped business. When I realized it couldn't possibly work that way, I scrapped it.

I learned a ton though, and now I'm just waiting for another great idea to really execute on.
I don't understand why people keep saying SF "needs" more density. Why? I'm assuming because the cost of living is so high? That is primarily caused by the Ponzi scheme of renter rights that make it so anyone renting for more than a few years is hugely disincentivized to move because they will lose their cheap rent, since their rents can never be increased to meet the market. So people stay in their crappy old apartment rather than upgrading, which reduces the inventory and drives up prices for everyone else.

Secondly, you don't just build apartments and you're done - a density increase requires more services to handle those new people. That's supermarkets, restaurants, hospitals, police, etc. All of that needs to be built up as well and usually isn't considered. If you DON'T add any of that, all you have done is reduce the services available for everyone in that area. What's the advantage of this again?

Finally, comparing the density of SF to Manhattan is not remotely accurate. Manhattan is the highest density part of NYC. SF contains a number of huge parks, mountainous areas like Twin Peaks, deeply residential areas like St. Francis Wood, etc. If you compare the density of the Mission vs. Greenwich Village or something like that, I could see it being relevant, but SF vs Manhattan is apples to oranges.
My bad - I meant countries and continents.

One further note: While some companies may abuse the system and bring over workers so that the underpay them, the H1B permits transfer to other companies, so they are free to leave.
It doesn't have to be a "hack". Most modern devices would support it just fine. The main problem is the older kindle devices that only support the mobi7 format.

An author is likely to get dinged on reviews if formatting on older eink devices is poor. So in practice the lowest common denominator wins out...
It would accomplish a huge amount. Density makes us richer and smarter: http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_o...

... and it is our best hope against climate change: http://www.alexsteffen.com/carbon-zero-2/
Actually, in a poll, you don't change your mind, it would kinda break the purpose :)

In an ideal world, we should not even be allowed to see the results before voting, since it could bias us (it should not in this kind of poll, of course).
> Actually, pit bulls are less or equally likely to attack than most other common dogs

You're really not entitled to your own facts, and this fact is false. All the data everywhere shows that pit bulls are always at the top of the "most likely to be involved in biting incidents" charts. Ontario, for example, has reduced dog bite incidents by about 25% by banning pit bulls from being kept as pets.
Without their big sales, I guarantee you that Steam wouldn't be making nearly as much money. It's basic economics, plus marketing. You try to get everyone to pay as much as they're willing to.

Of course, when that price = FREE, then it really is all advertising, for IAPs or something else.
'Bitcoin is combination of desperation and innovation'
My Time at Lehman
What happened to this startup 2 years ago that made the same thing ? They received an impressive amount of $$$, and now I don't even remember their name.. any idea ?
Another commenter's reply (which has been marked dead) brought up a great point about the value of this information for people in the future.

I want and expect privacy now and for the near future, but when my (future) grandchildren's grandchildren are gone (hell, not even that far from now), that information being aired publicly won't hurt me and could reasonably provide the future some benefit.
So you don't use the web anymore?
Sort of funny how the article is about packing them in even tighter in SF and the picture is of a bunch of empty hills behind the GG bridge.
Facebook Chat Heads now live for all Android users in new Messenger
I think the Pepsi example really doesn't work for two reasons:

First, the decline in sales in the sugary soft drink industry is only remotely connected to their social media advertising. It is a widely reported phenomena that is usually attributed to a more health-conscious society and a widening array of beverage choices.

Second, Pepsi's intention in offering contributions to non-profits based on social media recommendations was probably seen as a way to boost corporate image in a domain far beyond potential soda drinkers. It probably was meant to influence investors, journalists, regulators, and people like Mayor Bloomberg in New York who would portray soft drink vendors as an evil in our society. When you are a big as Pepsi, directly influencing buyers is only part of your advertising outreach.

Still, I agree with the article's overall conclusion. Social media advertising is typically not a very efficient way to convert advertising dollars to revenue. But it can be. With any advertising method, you have to devise a way to measure the results of a campaign, whatever your goals are. Otherwise, you are just throwing money in the air, hoping it lands somewhere useful.
Well, not if you want to do self-hosting of your own equipment.

Turnaround time from Dell is minimum two weeks. Add weeks as the servers get bigger and more custom. Also, most DCs need time to set up racks, power and connectivity.
the brokerages willingly and desperately send them data feeds. some of the sites charge money, all of them have premium and featured listings programs. sometimes the brokerage pays, sometimes the individual agent does.

also NYT charges a truly obscene amount for real estate ads. it pays a big part of their bills.

[I am CTO for one of the NYC brokerages]
Agreed on TL, Bayview, HP. For those unfamiliar with SF: Tenderloin is in the heart of SF (walking to Union Square shopping, Financial District) and where you go if you want to score drugs, offload stolen good, pick-up, or feel scared at night. Bayview and Hunters Point comprise miles of water-front property, close to the city center, on transit (T-line trolley car). Today they are a mix of industrial use, abandoned/empty/derelict industrial (there are brick warehouses that have been condemned since the 1989 quake), mixed in with some low income housing, and converted military barracks.

For a city infamous for its high rent, small rental stock, and boom in highly paid jobs to leave miles of water-front property undeveloped is near criminal. AFAIK, there are some complexities around industrial clean-up, but either way someone needs to get it done.
Samsung is selling so many smartphones that its chip division can't keep up
Excellent point, but perhaps termination is just a detail. We already know that it's unsolvable. What's the rush?

Next you'll be telling me that different polynomials in P matter, like O(n^27) is too slow or at least requires attention to constants and scale.

This construction also solves the divide-by-zero problem very elegantly. When we promote Natural Zero to Real, we make sure that it's something like:

(1, λ_:Unit. (1/2, λ_:Unit. (1/3, λ...)))

This makes division by zero a legal operation (pointwise division of sequences) if we extend our tolerance to sequences without the Cauchy property (and why not? It's just bits).
I assumed that the original request for an international TLD was implicitly referencing the seizures and other downsides to country-specific TLDs, since they are frequently discussed on HN. Perhaps I misinterpreted the intention of the request.

Also, I don't think it's necessarily true that one country will always have jurisdiction over specific Internet names. The Internet isn't "done"; both the net and the concept of "jurisdiction" can change over time.
AppGratis simply served a need, both on the consumer side (App discovery) as well as on the corporate side (app promotion). What ratio paid apps to free apps they were running is guesswork but I'd imagine if they would fail at the mix they would fail in the marketplace. The bigger problem is that they were simply too good at what they were doing and were competing with Apple on Apple's turf. Apple would like to control how you discover Apps and any kind of curation that is successful will sooner or later be hit like this.

Whether or not AppGratis could have seen this coming is debatable, but the product was solid and seemed to have served a genuine need. If the app store would not be broken in many respects then AppGratis would have never been able to carve out the niche that it had.

App curation at the level that AppGratis was doing is really hard work, and you can't blame them for wanting to be compensated for that hard work. So a certain percentage of paid promotion is a fairly obvious step to make the model viable imo.

Their biggest mistake - if you can call it that - was probably to be too good at what they were doing.

In the AppStore no threat to Apple is too big to fail. Better remember that if you are successful with an app you wrote and you are possibly in competition with some portion of the Apple empire.
Well if you remember the bottled water centi-thread then perhaps you remember the discussions on that thread about cost and where the 30M from was $2/bottle for 'SmartWater' * 3 bottles a day * 365 days a year * 14,200 employees. That was the "crazy worst case" number of $30,660,000 per year.

"If anyone believes that 2007 Google cared about 3M in the bank, I have a bridge to sell them."

And whatever they cared about the money ($3M or $30M) they cared even less about the impact on engineers choice of place to work by deciding to stop spending it. And that lack of caring was the entire point of the question. If you have the tape you can remind me offline what Eric's exact responses was, my best recollection was that it was as I gave it. (Not that I expected much different)
A way to get around b) would be to have the association merely provide financial help, or possibly have the association be a group of lawyers such as the EFF where they will represent the company who does have standing to sue.
empirically false.
Interesting to see so much difference between three similar services on the same area. Though I do not understand why you felt having a woman on one team made it better. Seems as this heavily biased the results.
Direct benefits from Social Media are very low, yes. But this article ignores the fact that a lot of modern SEO relies very heavily on Social Media. So even though direct links from Social Media are worthless, the effect it will have you more likely making it on page one of a Google Search result makes all the difference.
Show HN: My first iPhone app - Shop popular fashion from Instagram.
HP is particularly special because of all the ships from Pacific nuclear tests being taken there to be cleaned, which mostly consisted of spraying them with water (left to drain on-site). So in addition to chemical contamination from Navy facilities of the era (PCBs, particularly), there are various radioisotopes.
Ha, yes, I thought it was going to be him from the name as well, until I went to the site and found out otherwise. I suppose moot is a word, though, not just a name. Although the only time I heard it used using the discussion definition instead of the more common one was a Tolkien book or something. Maybe they aren't from the US and people outside the US use it this way.
Most of the people in dire straits in SF came here from elsewhere. I don't think subsidizing is the city's responsibility, and doing so only encourages more to come.

I know this sounds harsh, but I can't see how incentivizing low-income people to move to an unaffordable city is feasible or prudent.
I came in to say your second point. For a given area, people often complain about parking, and jump to having more parking structures as a solution. But when you have more parking structures, you'll need wider roads.
Maybe I'm lucky enough that I see my doctor regularly and he keeps up (without any pharmaceutical marketing?) on every medicine that might help me out, but why should consumers be force to depend on that?

You think that marketing helps? Maybe your doctor is unduly influenced by pharma marketing and prescribes you the worse drug that give you IBD; hell, maybe he prescribes you the wrong drug altogether because of marketing, and you die. It may sound beyond the pale, but borderline cases involving antidepressants (perhaps the most overmarketed drugs) have already happened.
Haha! Good to see you here Jon! I went to reading festival last year, was hoping I'd bump into you actually... Nevermind ;)
shutting down the docs.
ب is a programming language exploring the role of human culture in coding
I don't see the relevance of either. Antitrust deals with breaking up colossal monopolies like AT&T and Standard Oil... not sure how that relates to this in any way. IPRs are a new concept to me, but I don't see why any entity can't challenge the validity of any patent. If there's a problem with that, which I doubt, the company receiving the troll attack could presumably be the challenger, with the association reimbursing its fees.
I Tried Hacking Bitcoin and I Failed
Patent trolls suck. But with out patents there is no incentive for innovation. The issue is not that Patents are bad, it is that you can patent a "unique way to swing on the playground" and be awarded a patent. Patent officer often don't know what they are awarding a patent for.

This is supposed to be kept in check by the fact that you can fight a patent.

I think that if you file a patent, sue someone over it, and lose you should be forced to pay 8X the amount you were suing for. That would severely limit who would try.

I also think that patents should only be allowed to be resold twice. This would limit the number of patents which could be used to extort money.

Lastly I think you should only be able to sue for patent infringement if you have a product using the patent currently in the market.

Those 2 simple rules would remove a lot of trolling.
Because relatively few people have real dental insurance (not dental "discount plans") vs. health insurance, the dental care market in the U.S. is actually fairly competitive. Nobody's going to go bankrupt from uncovered dental expenses as long as they're careful to budget for an average of, say, $500-$1000 annually (depending on your history) and are willing to shop around.
America needs more dense cities like NYC, for economic, national-strategic, and environmental reasons. But the citizens of cities will decide how they want to live.

The people and property owners of San Francisco may not be able to make the sacrifices that going ultra-dense require, even though San Fran is putting a huge amount of effort toward becoming far more dense than it already is.

IMO Los Angeles is more likely to have the ducks lined up for becoming ultra-dense over the next 25 years. Perhaps the demographic and geographic conditions are making this possible. Perhaps the strong, small property owners are also removed enough from where the corridors density will occur.
transliteration vs translation
Coming from the company that put a "TM" after every mention of the generic word "Cloud Server" on their website.
Ubuntu 13.04 – Preview of the Last Named Release?
All that said. RackSpace (who I do use for some of my hosting) has several patents. And it is kind of a Pot/Kettle scenario since they have used those on smaller companies in the past.
Show HN: Scratch Off - Photo Sharing With a Suprise
well it's not like you are going to put condos on the Marin headlands.
I meant a two wheeled motorized bicycle. Some have been around since WWII
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9loSoleX

The laws vary state to state in US. No car likes being stuck behind a low powered slow moped though.
Punch communications 'seo social media and pr agency'
1% Imagine what would happen to the bitcoin market if they start selling off their bitcoins? Maybe Zuckerberg should start playing the market eh?
> The posed question is kind of offensive and arrogant if you think of it. It is kind of along the lines of 'Will/do you hire someone who is a woman/foreign/handicapped/ugly?'

...

> How about asking "Will/do you hire someone who is good for the job?". The question asked here though is more along the lines of "Will/do discriminate in your hiring process and how much?"

I don't disagree with you, but I think it's important to realize that this article is written to address and correct some common human biases. People whose moral development exceeds a certain level are less likely to subconsciously classify and stereotype people based on a handful of social cues, but are more likely to evaluate people as individuals. This article is not written for such people. It is written for people whose moral model of a person is so simple as to equate "autistic" with "dysfunctional" and ignore the individual characteristics of a person.

It may be offensive or arrogant to discuss autistic spectrum individuals in this way, but it's also necessary because most people are simply going to stereotype and dismiss them unless they're prompted to think more thoroughly about the issue. Decades in the future, when humanity's collective moral reasoning has hopefully progressed, we will be able to look back on articles like this and marvel at how simpleminded people were at the time. But articles like this are a necessary step to getting there.
I'm saying that founding a startup is not terribly different than founding a bakery, it's just the ROI characteristics of the business model are better. If one's skills are lacking in marketing, the basics of business/contract/tax law, time managment, accounting, or the core competency of the business then it's probably a bad idea. Some people are rockstars and can learn these skills on the fly, most can't.

So my point is this: if someone is not a rockstar and they don't already have these skills, they can learn a huge amount by joining small companies in their C or D rounds (ie, corporate-ish) and practice those skills by applying them in a structure where it's likely they have more experience coworkers to learn from. Then they can found a startup when they have the tools and an idea they're passionate about.

If a person can "get addicted to a steady income" then their financial planning sucks or they aren't committed enough. Better off they don't bother and waste time and capital that could go to people that give a damn.
"AppGratis simply served a need, both on the consumer side (App discovery) [...]"

How can you call "discovery" a process where users receive everyday a push for the app that paid the highest bid to AppGratis ?
"But with out patents there is no incentive for innovation."

Aren't all of the tech companies who are supposedly violating these patents proof that the patents aren't needed for innovation?

Isn't making a better product so you can have a leg up on your competition incentive enough?
"have you considered that many (though granted not all) of the "junk" answers may due to the hacker mentality"

What I find more interesting is that this thread has been allowed to survive rather than being downmodded. And that tells me that some influential HN'ers consider the responses to this survey meaningful - either individually or in aggregate. One of the often ignored aspects of HN is that to a meaningful degree it is an extension of people's workplaces. I find it handy to remember that when participating.

I rather doubt that the point of the survey is actually collecting data on HN'ers ages. Detailed demographic information about people on the internet is readily obtainable from other sources.

On the other hand, information about who is likely to "vandalize" HN is more difficult to collect and highly relevant, and this is the jist of PG's response as I read it. I couldn't really come up with a better term for crapping on a poll than "vandalize." The scare quotes are there because what is happening is normal internet behavior.

Perhaps the vandalism is somewhat invited by the absurdity of the youngest age and the quasi-absurdity of the oldest - does it really matter from an HN demographic standpoint to distinguish between those over 80 and those over 90 - both cohorts must have came to computing as adults.

Not that this excuses the behavior, and perhaps the invitation to vandalism is intentional because the wording and presentation of many attempts at data collection via ASK HN is awkward enough to invite meanness of which vandalism is one form.

[EDIT] Indeed, the creator of the poll claims to be studying quantitative psychology.
I'm sure there are some small, local companies who can't afford to/don't have the expertise to manage a website, that can leverage social media for promotions, sales, and general brand awareness. But those are also the people who tend not to measure ROI, so who knows? This was a really interesting article on the subject, if a bit biased: http://www.fastcompany.com/1760849/does-social-media-have-re...

It seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle from social media "gurus". Audi's manager of social media says "Today the equation to measure that doesn't exist" when asked about measurable results. So he (and much of the industry) claim that they just don't know, but it's probably doing something, and it can't hurt, right? So their clients/supervisors are scared of missing out and they continue to approve these gimmicks that, in my opinion, aren't very effective.
Quaternions are useful for modeling rotations, which become non-commutative in 3+ dimensions. Octonions? They're connected to certain loops (in the abstract algebra sense... they aren't a real group because of non-associativity) for which I have no idea whether there are real-world applications. Group theory gets some play in cryptography, and loops turn out to be useful in survey design.

More screwy are the sedenions (16 basis vectors) which also have zero divisors (i.e. xy = 0 does not imply x = 0 or y = 0).
Light Table a year ago