skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The OP is more interesting:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=1241...

The real problem was that they had a fixed exchange rate between the ingame currency and loyalty points. If the loyalty point formula asymptotically approached a max, this would have been a non-issue.

The real lesson is about the naive approach to forex.

You could also take a lesson about "optimizing the wrong thing". In machine learning it comes from telling the learning system to optimize a means rather than an end, frequently with hilarious consequences. See also paperclip maximizer.
In my freshman Chemistry lab, this, uh, underperforming student decided to put a beaker of some extremely volatile solvent (carbon tet, acetone, toluene?) on a lit bunsen burner, shooting flames about 12 feet high, damaging the facility pretty badly, and putting a stop to his medical school aspirations.

That was one of the first events in my life where I realized i needed to suspend morbid fascination, and develop a fear of getting killed.
Samsung's Galaxy S4 16GB version only has 8GB of usable storage
Shooting guns is fun. For some people, a real rifle, even something like a 22, is going to be more fun than a pellet gun. Trap shooting and sporting clays are also going to be difficult with a pellet gun.

Hunting is also a good reason. The US is big enough that a Federal ban doesn't make sense. While it might be reasonable to ban handguns (for example) in San Francisco, it doesn't make sense to ban them in Alaska or Montana where someone might want to carry a 44 magnum while hiking for protection against bears (ignoring the bear spray/firearms debate - and the fact that a shotgun is probably a better idea).

Personal protection is also a good reason, I think, especially if someone lives in a remote area.

Essentially, the US is a big place, and what's appropriate in Silicon Valley won't work in Alaska.
EVE has full-time economists. How do you even put that in a job posting?
>Ammunition is still pretty hard to do well on your own.

Could you clarify this? Reloading ammo is a very popular past time among many shooting enthusiasts and not difficult at all. You do rely on manufacturers for the powder, of course. You usually buy brass and bullets separately as well. But you can cast your own bullets if you're so inclined and many reloaders use spent brass to reload (making reloaded ammo cheaper than manufactured).
Video Game Broadcasting And Why I’m Putting It Down (for now)
The player didn't really "drive up the price by cornering the market." This was just an exploit of an edge case in the game's "average market price" algorithm, and didn't really have anything to do with cornering the market.
Houston claims not to have zoning, but substitutes regulations that produce the same sprawling effect as zoning that mandates sprawl.

Houston uses building line setback rules, huge minimum parking requirements, street width minima, block size and platting rules, fire code regulations, and the whole panoply of laws that mandate sprawl everywhere else with the sole exception of Euclidian zoning. The result is mandatory sprawl.

Market based land use would not have built Houston. It would never have created $3000 basic studio apartments in Palo Alto either. Markets aren't a panacea but what we've mandated instead is a disaster.
As wlesieutre mentioned, Team Fortress 2 wasn't free until after microtransactions have been around for some time.

Early on, the game had a consistent 1960s theme and each character had a consistent distinct sillhouette and behavior, so the game was easy to pick up and it was reasonable to play it competitively. It had great game design. Over time they ruined all of that for the sake of profiting off of addicted players.
During a chemistry class where we were doing batteries by inserting metals into acid to light a small light bulb, i theorized that since the voltage depended on the area of contact with the metal, then using steel wool would make mads voltage.

it did not work at first (maybe i had anything that would start a current with steel, don't really remember the details, or any chemistry from high school) but eventually i got some current (maybe some of the previous metal rod was still in the solution?). the light bulb wasn't burning brighter then before, but the part of the steel wool that was out of the acid sure was.

burning metal in a cup of acid. and no eye protection.
The thing is, the way you deal with those questions is part of the test. You say that you look out for other people because they matter to you. But just by saying that, you give away a very important piece of information: other people matter to you. They matter enough that sometimes you'll even take risks for them. That's a reasonably strong indicator of non-psychopathy in and of itself.
Nonprofit technology is stuck in the past. Amicus is fixing that. Join us
> Thanks for contributing to the bigotry that all gun owners are pernicious idiots.

Strawman. You made that up.

There are a lot of guns already and we produce even more. There are hundreds of millions of guns on this planet.

How about solving actual real problems? Clean water? Renewable energy? Food for all?

What I said is this: it is brainless to produce even more guns, instead of investing brains into more important problems.
...à la dinosaurs as birds?
My kids absolutely adore "the cave". They wave to people sometimes at red lights. ;)

They won't be able to sit back there forever. My daughter probably has 2 years and my son maybe 4 or 5. When they are both done with the seats, we can have them removed and get even more trunk space.

One thing that I ding Tesla a bit about... They don't tint the hatchback window the way they do the panoramic roof glass. This was a mistake as the back seats get hot in the direct sunlight and there isn't currently air conditioning vents back there.

Enough owners have raised these concerns that I believe they will likely correct one or both of them in future revisions of the car, and we'll see if they make it one of the proposed hardware retrofits.

In the interim, we had the back windows after-market tinted and the kids have no complaints.
That's true, Manhattan-style skycrapers aren't the only option. The transit-reachable parts of SF are already denser than some of what you mention as comparable, though: the Mission has 50% higher population density than West Hollywood.

One problem is that density is much lower in places like the Outer Sunset, in part because there's no cross-town subway. Total SF population could be increased significantly if the western half's population density could be brought up to what's already the case in the eastern half.
For example, checking downforeveryoneorjustme.com or asking if a co-worker can reach a web site is different from contacting the site's operators to tell them about the trouble you're having.
I think the general response from HN would be that you don't find ideas, you find problems.

I'm interested in following a similar path (lifestyle business, software related), but I don't feel confident going out and asking people about their business problems. I've thought about going to my friends, but most of them are in programmers or (I feel) not in a position to know of good problems that the business they work at would pay money for.
Startups Are Like Modern Abstract Art
Yeah, it is the most expensive car I've ever owned, and it is also the first car that I have ever truly loved. I enjoy every minute I am in it, and I can drive it around town doing errands and such without wasting gas which you can't do in some other very expensive luxury sedan or sports car.
I guess you're asking for a total, which would be tens of thousands. However that's comprised of one success and a lot of companies returning $0.
the goons have a long list of market shenanigans like this. cough cough ice cough cough.
It's a great read. Don't be dissuaded by the low ratings at Amazon; they're from conservative trolls over comments he made after the death of Breitbart.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/06/andrew-breitbart-fa...
My complaint is spurred by how extremely often it seems that anti-regulation sentiments are expressed in forms like "doing x wouldn't do any good" or "doing x wouldn't solve the entire problem", when in fact doing these things well and in good measure might do a large bit of good and nobody sensible is claiming it'd solve the entire problem. These hyperbolic phrases have an effect on the logical bounds of the conversation and encourage binary thinking, easy, satisfying answers, and polarization.
I'm not very familiar with Everquest. Was there any in-game law enforcement to punish players doing this? Vendetta? Assassins for hire?
I don't think it necessarily has to be evenly distributed. If you think about options people probably either A) Made a good amount of money or B) Made none at all. Most companies issuing options are likely venture backed and not going to settle for a marginal gain. Thoughts?
At their expense is usually assumed.
I actually never tab in my emails. I use line breaks instead and have learned to do tab enter for sending emails.

For me, it's a big time saver to do that instead of having to move my cursor to the send button. I didn't realise it was causing problems for other people.
Yep. The major alliances have numerous people that essentially have full time jobs running logistics operations (there is no instant travel, you actually have to move goods through often-dangerous space. Also the mechanism for controlling space, "sovereignty," is complex and requires constant maintenance), commanding fleets of hundreds of ships, and performing IT/security for their forum communities.

One thing that amazed me: since spying and infiltration are real problems, some forum administrators implemented a form of steganography where an algorithm makes imperceptible edits to posts, uniquely for each user, so that when a leak is posted, they can figure out who it was. This was a few years ago, I'm sure by this time a few rounds of counter-measures have been tacked on.

The depth and sophistication of strategy in this game are just way beyond anything else.
Heh, that's something that happens in the Kingdom of Loathing too, though it doesn't impact any built-in gameplay.

There are third party sites that get a feed of all in-game transactions, and track whether prices are rising or falling on items. Of course, this can be manipulated in exactly the same way described in the OP -- either for humorous reasons, or for some sort of trade scam.
OS X and iOS are much closer to NeXTSTEP than birds to dinosaurs are close to each other.
Like this:

Economic Consultant for CCP Games - 2007 to Present
Here's a few suggestions:

- Don't expect to find an undiscovered market. Instead, look to see what existing competitors there are in a particular market. Are they dated? Tired looking? Do they have a terrible UX? Is their pricing model geared toward only Enterprise customers, leaving the small-and-middle business tier underserved?

- Look within a crowded market and see if there's a niche within the market you can serve where the other products are simply too generic to handle their needs (for example, is there an invoicing solution for just auto-parts vendors instead of just an invoicing solution for everyone)

- Start surfing forums where customers of a particular SaaS solution hang out. Are any of them complaining about how bad existing solutions are? Can you fix that problem in a way the competition can't?

Those are a few ideas. There are probably more. Most it will depend on your level of interest and desire to dig into this kind of info as a whole.

Good luck!
The German tech- and startup-scene hates the Samwer brothers as much as the rest of the world because they gave German startups a bad name.
One of my favorite opeds on this is "San Francisco can become a world capital. First it needs to get over itself"[1] in Pando Daily.

[1]http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-...
I know from personal experience much of the last 5 years worth of work for me (software / algorithm design) has been building automation. Helping companies that were struggling push forward by replacing human workers with software.

Perhaps in the recent down years companies were pressured to become more efficient and now that the economy is picking up they are reluctant to go back to hiring people versus paying for software and automation.

/completeSpeculation

I can think of two companies I've consulted with since 2008 where the CEO's told me they were picking up a new contract(s) that would represent massive growth (200-300%) but that they wanted to keep their same labor force without having to hire.
Excellent point. Ignoring marketing labels, his statement was as true as can be.
I happily negotiate away stock options in favour of signing bonuses or better still, salary.

I don't want your equity. Pay me.
Your test code should invoke the real API if it's testing the real API. If you're testing a REST client, on the other hand, then it's best to unit test on a controlled set of requests and responses. Testing on the real API comes later, when you're doing integration.
On the web, it's copying a tab from somewhere else and pasting it into your web field... or at least that's how I do it :|
The network of YC alumni is quite awesome. Everyone’s willing to help each other out. It’s the second most helpful community I’ve ever been a part of. The first? Hacker News. Ask for feedback and you’ll get it. Ask for help and you’ll get it. Give back to the Hacker News community whenever you can.

I have to second that Hacker News has been one of the most helpful communities for me. They (you) single-handedly are responsible for helping me seed communities for 5+ different applications, and most still exist today (graffitiGeo, OfficeHours.TV, Hacker News Directory, Bloc, CupidWithFriends) and pushing the sales of a book I wrote into bestselling categories on Amazon. I know friends who have similar experiences when they launched their own products. I hope to some day write a proper thank you letter to HN.

I see other products launch and I'm sometimes envious that the owners run another large community where they promote their other apps (e.g. Let's Date promoted by Suicide Girls), but realized that the same opportunity exists for anyone on HN. Makes me wonder how most people grow their products early on, because I'm probably taking HN for granted at this point.
I get it, because they didn't have any zoning rules, zoning rules don't work!
NeXT basically took over Apple from within. Their technology ended up in basically every Apple product, nearly completely displacing what was there before. Their top people became Apple's top people. Their CEO became Apple's CEO.

Apple watchers from the time often joked that NeXT bought Apple for negative $400 million. Buying NeXT is what turned Apple from a perpetually "beleaguered" niche computer company (remember that word?) to one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

The modern Apple, Inc. is much more NeXT Inc. than it is Apple Computer, Inc.
Dell Products Make Their Way, Circuitously, to Syria
From the article

"It’s worth noting that nothing happened to those players, and they were allowed to keep the fortunes they had amassed while the exploit worked. “Oh, absolutely,” Lander said, laughing. “Good for them! Clever guys.”"
How many conservatives live in San Francisco? 12?
Google Glass Battery Life
Valve does too. Hats.
Yes, you do need to point it out because this story is the perfect storm of naivete from HN. It sparks all the irrational nerves of the pro-science crowd with the hints of anti-science, the 'man' keeping the 'hacker' down storyline, the 'school is so structured it sucks' crowd, and definitely the anti-government group here. And we can't forget the 'Aaron Swartz didn't do anything wrong' crowd.

Sure, this story has an overzealous prosecutor looking for an easy score and to set an example, but the way people talk you'd think she was following teacher instruction in a lab and an accident happened and for some reason she's being persecuted for it.

She should've known better and done what the rest of us did - set the thing off in the forest behind the school.
hahaha "[for high paying jobs] Tesla financial calculator makes it easy to factor in the value of time saved by being able to use the carpool lane or avoid trips to the gas station"

So, if you make lots of $ per hour, they will claim that having a model S will save you time and so they added the money you would be making into the price?!?! that's just crazy!

specially when a gasoline/hybrid car you can get:

- 300miles per refil

- each refil takes 5min

with the Model S

- 200 miles (250 if you buy the expensive one)

- 4h refil / 1 hour refil (if you buy the expensive superCharger)
Ok, there was quite a bit of discussion below about where the money is.

In verticals like e-commerce, it is indeed dominated by about 100-200 players. These guys range from RetailMeNot which is owned by Whale Shark Media to companies like FatWallet and Ebates. There is actually a big variety of major players in the space, but still most commissions are concentrated with them.

If you get into CPA, there's many, many more players out there. I know a few personally that make ~$100k+/month and one that does $500k. However, the commissions aren't concentrated with them. There are thousands of players making $5k-$15k/month with campaign churn. They tend to be 1-person shops working on the latest hot offer.

CPA is very crowded but is easy (sort of) to break into. There's a lot of money to be made, but you also deal with a huge amount of fraud and competition.

I was able to make a very comfortable living as an affiliate in high-end lead generation and B2B, both places where it was extremely difficult to compete with me. There are many segments like this where time and being willing to pick up the phone are often all the competitive advantage you need.

However, what happens is you can build a business or a site or do the campaign churn. People that build sites make some money for a while but are often crushed by more dedicated competitors. People doing the campaign churn (they don't own sites, just advertise stuff and make money off the difference) can keep going for a while, but have to constantly seek out new advantages.

Last, the ones that build businesses make the big bucks. And they often become more than affiliates, seeking to sell the products themselves or vertically integrating in their chosen space. One I know was dealing with travel and eventually became the booking agency for his vertical. No one can compete because he has exclusive direct relationships - the same advantage I sought in my own verticals.

There is a ton of money to be made, but it is a field fraught with risk, fraud, deception and hyper-competitive people with far fewer scruples than you.

I chose to leave the field after making my pile and build the tools I always wanted when I was in it - a much better business overall.
I am talking about constraints on buying the power, brass, and bullets. If you wanted to make all of those things 'off the grid' as it were (like you were equipping a small army) then you show up on the radar just as clearly as you do if you're buying a lot of guns.

For black powder weapons you don't need brass, you can make your own black powder out of raw materials, and lead is pretty easy to get hold of as well.
Anti-unregulated banking is a left-liberal position. But lack of regulation isn't what I hear when I listen to gun culture complaining about "liberal elites" in Washington and "bankers" on Wall Street. Is that necessarily anti-semitism? No. But you brought up Hitler, not me.

>Do you really think the future leader of an authoritarian, genocidal state apparatus would be anti-government?

Most uninformed thing I've read today. You might want to start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch
Amazon is not that big of a program actually. They have compelling data offerings, but the 24-hour cookie is a liability and there are far fewer driving traffic since Google went to town on spammy sites.
It's an understandable stance, but IMO a disastrous one.

I lived in SF for a year, and to be honest I found it to be somewhere between "cool" and "intolerable". The city is filled with transplants who, the moment they set foot in the fair city, turn around and try to slam the door shut behind themselves as hard as possible, and this has so many negative effects.

San Francisco is a city devoid of pragmatism - it is a fairy tale theme park run amok. Instead of getting more people to and from work faster, it is hostile to most forms of mass transit. It is hostile to the population growth necessary to un-fuck the city's transportation disaster (aka MUNI and BART).

A city is a naturally-arising conglomeration of people that will happen anywhere you combine places people want to live, with places where they can work. The key word here is people. The city has entirely forgotten that - zoning for new office spaces is onerous and slow. Zoning for housing developments nearly non-existent outside of Mission Bay. It has gone out of its way to act directly against the very basic interests of its constituency in favor of maintaining this picturesque, fairy tale backdrop of the 1930s frozen in time.

After experiencing the SF housing market first-hand I honestly have a changed view of the city. When you're just visiting, the old houses, the low density, the unique architectural style, it all feels so picturesque and lovely. Nowadays to me the city feels like a an embalmed corpse - superficially resembling some idealistic long-ago era while lacking any real semblance of function. It is utterly broken, mismanaged to absurdity, all so a small number of people can live in a slowly-crumbling fairy tale.

Nowadays I live in NYC, and frankly have no desire to go back to SF. It's cheaper (!!!), the city has done a remarkable job of preserving old architecture, mixing old with new (see: Hearst Building), and new development. There is a constant stream of development that keep both commercial and residential prices in relative check. And despite the loud cries of San Franciscans, the density and Manhanttanization has created no shortage of culture, interest, and unique neighborhoods.

Hardly surprising. After all, a city is primarily defined by its people, not colorful paints and period-architecture. Keeping people around, at the end of the day, is your best shot at preserving the spirit and character of a place than any sort of architecture.
I can't defend all of Breitbart's actions, but he did commit some acts of serious original journalism. A recent New York Times expose on $4 billion in waste in the Department of Agriculture due to fraudulent civil rights claims was based on original reporting on Breitbart.com[1]. By itself the traditional media doesn't report on these kinds of stories because they are afraid of being called racist.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/us/farm-loan-bias-claims-o...
The game mechanic itself is not actually the problem here but the way it was implemented left it open to easy exploitation. It can be implemented in a way that is not easy to exploitation though. Basically their algorithm for deciding on the worth of an item based off of market transactions was not good.
Best answer I've seen yet.
I play the game quite a bit, its said that there are some very rich russians that hire people to manage alliances, make money, and lead fleets.
Laurie Spiegel interview
You make a very good point, i had netflix for a while and loved the recommendations it made, it was always pretty good at predicting if i would like a movie or not. However i canceled my account and now occasionally use a friend who has very different tastes and it really is like an entirely new experience.