skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two thing that I found lacking for less-than-good hackers like me :

- idiomatic (minor|major) mode organization (I found a book and a pdf which are old and might not represent the best way to do so)

- at emacs conf, jwiegley showed some old and tiny extensions (edebug, redshank) part of his workflow. Very interesting to discover dark corners of the large emacs extensions space and how people solve problems their way.
"You should know who your competitors are, but focusing on them is a waste of time." I agree. The point of this post is that entrepreneurs very rarely actually know who all their competitors are and this is a way to get a complete picture. As I say at the end, then it's time to move on and get going.
One interesting aspect is that it assumes the animal brain is great for some things but less good for logic-based flexibility. One might argue that human intelligence is animal intelligence "virtualized" by language and consciousness.

The idea is appealing but I have no idea if its true.
You rightly point out that the idea advocated by ballard, as stated, doesn't distinguish the probably narrower category that he's concerned about. But I think what he meant was probably business data - which is distinguishable from newsworthy information. Yes, there are problems associated with this distinction, but I think it could be formulated well enough to protect both press freedom and privacy in commercial transactions.

That said, I think ballard misidentified the problem in another way. The problem is not that "individuals have no rights to most of their own data" in US law - instead the problem is that individuals can be forced to bargain away all their rights to the info in question as a condition of engaging in any ordinary transaction of everyday life.
When The Supreme Court Decided Tomatoes Were Vegetables
Import taxes are huge; protectionism at its finest.
They definitely had some capacity issues near the end. On Christmas Eve I saw a UPS driver in a U-Haul truck in my neighborhood then later saw a U-Haul truck pulled up back to back with a UPS truck and they were handing off packages in a strip mall parking lot. Personally, though, I was rather impressed by the shipping carriers this year (UPS included). No late packages and I even got some delivered early. The volume has to have skyrocketed in the last 5 years so there is obviously going to be growing pains but shipping just gets better and better every year for me so I'm a happy customer.
The Tinder Swipe of Startup Life (a svbtle rap)
this calls the top of the bitcoin bubble, and other silly stuff in rhyme
They actually refer to the same thing.
He likely has a clause in the employment agreement preventing him from competing in any way. Pretty standard
...thats why the op is asking for examples of actual black entrepreneurs, so that what will actually happen is, when presenting a list of entrepreneurs as examples, at least some of them are black, and the kids are not explicitly or implicitly told that there are no black entrepreneurs. You seem to be arguing that presenting a list of white examples would not prompt stereotypes in itself, and I think you really need to show that instead of simply assume it.
The BS, me-too, antagonistic press release.
This is an interesting POV. There's this school of thought in business/marketing that continuous positioning is absolutely crucial for the success of any business because it allows you to offer better value to your customers. Not sure if I completely agree but most companies have to react when the competition changes a major part of their business model or does minor biz dev like dumping their prices.
> UPS just handed my package off to USPS who put a note in my box saying that I could come to a Post Office, wait in a long line, then pick-up my package myself. WTF is this?

It's UPS Surepost. Shippers use it for packages that are price-sensitive but not time-sensitive.

You don't have to go to the post office to pick up the package. You can sign the release, and have them leave it at your door.
this 2004 post by oliver steele remains one of the best things i've read on the topic: http://www.osteele.com/posts/2004/11/ides

key quote: "In fact, the most powerful languages may initially have the least powerful tool support. The reason for this is that the language developer, like the language adopter, has to make a choice: whether to dedicate limited development resources towards language features, or towards tool support."
RapGenius Traffic Statistics
Sorry, but 10-15 minutes of napping is nothing like what meditation can deliver, even at 3 to 5 times the time invested.

Sleep does so many positive things its hard to fully understand how great it is for us.
> Ah the joys of "SmartPost".

SurePost, since he said it originated at UPS.

SmartPost is the competing service from FedEx.

Notice that both of them have the word "Post" in it. Thus, not surprising that they hand off the last mile to the postal service.
>Comparable in size? You're obviously including Amazon's retail side, since AWS is only $3B of amazon's revenue [0] (vs 37B in revenue for Oracle).

And you're obviously including something in calculating Oracle's size, since Oracle's cloud business is $0 IIRC -- which is much smaller compared to AWS's $3B.
Error! We are unable to retrieve traffic data for this property at the moment.

Well, thats intersting...
http://ripplescam.org/
In reading that he's the money guy, is he really not holding up his side of things? What's he specifically not doing, that he should be?

It's hard to read between the lines to know if he's really not keeping up his end. Employees like him, he sounds like he's the field expert, he's got the money, he assembled the board, etc...
I'm not a shy person about personal details. They were threatening to give me 99 years in prison for Aggravated Robbery, which is a Class 1 felony, merely because of my inadvertent involvement in the crime. That's on the same level as murder and all of those frightening things.

The Jurisdiction was Williamson county, a neighboring county of Austin, TX. They are well-known for their no leniency attitudes.
Priceonomics Bitcoin Puzzle, solved in browser
Yes - a 6 month (or perhaps 3 before we forget?) update would be nice. I also concur that these are all personal productivity apps, based on your experience. The open question is do other people have these issues too, and can you find and market to them?

Also - was the title referencing, "4 touchdowns, 1 game, Polk High"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DikpddPf79g
Thiel Fellowship Application Advice
I once listened to Alexis give a lecture on the founding of Reddit. One of the more memorable points he made was recalling when they found "Digg". They were still in development, and someone had sent them a link. They spent 30 seconds looking at it, then said "cool", and kept on working.

My own thoughts is that the competition turned out not about features, but community. One might have thought Digg had a big leg up, because they basically had Kevin Rose using his role on Tech TV to promote it. However that was also a disadvantage. Eternal September is the death of most online communities, and they brought it on themselves. Reddit fortunately had pivoted to a platform for communities (sub-reddits) so as they picked up steam, the bad network effects were mostly concentrated to the default subs.
I agree in general (so many people, myself included, avoid finding competitors because it's like asking for bad news.)

That being said, it shouldn't take 20-30 hours. If you're looking for it but can't find it, there's something missing with the existing companies (execution, marketing, etc).

But make sure you know everything. Literally nothing kills a pitch or talk quite like not being able to answer the question "So it's like ____?", even if the mentioned startup turns out to be only tangentially related.
> It's going to get real messy, especially since he holds all money, bank, passwords info (now I understand why he wanted to take control of those stuff in the beginning).

You're not kidding. I hope you just mean logistical access (as in, currently holds the details to), as opposed to actually having them in his name. If the latter, you're pretty much screwed. In any case, when you discuss this with the board, once you get them on board with this decision in the first place, you're going to need to make a clear plan for getting access to all of those resources transferred. Hopefully you can do so quickly and without legal action required. Fortunately, if they're in the company name, there are steps you can take to get that access.
I don't know if related to freebsd but the latest FreeNAS doesn't boot on KVM :(
Because sometimes investors run the following algorithm:

Q) Do you have many successful competitors?

A1) No -- then why isn't anyone succeeding in this space? Maybe it is too ahead of its time but most likely there's a reason no one can make it work. In any case, I'm out.

A2) Yes -- in this case look at how much competition you have, it's too hard to break in now. It's a very crowded space and you won't be able to differentiate yourself. I'm out!

Proceeds to invest a couple months later based on liking the team and seeing who else is investing...
Possibly for startups that are past product/market fit (not many seed stage investments). Pre-product/market fit focusing on competition is a waste of time.
I have come to the same conclusion with my own research. My best hope for being in the EU is if my wife gets a work visa and I just travel there as a spouse on a residents visa and don't have official employment there.

This might be an option if all of my work is done online, but it does skirt the intentions of the law and I don't like doing that for moral reasons.
Some of my dreams would take months of planning, the best modelers/animators in the world, million dollar render farms and even that would pale in comparison. But to play the boring computer analogy, I'd say all brains are on a virtual P2P network sharing centralized cloud storage (various permissions/ownership) and sleep would include customized patches from a master repo.
One thing that helped me in my situation is that I made a document just describing my situation, written from the perspective that it is a business school case study. Then have some friends close to you read it and tell you who they think is at fault. The biggest key is that when writing the story, replace your company name and other names with made up names so people who you ask for feedback aren't biased.

This will give you first line of objective feedback even about your own positions.
Right, I had a hard time figuring out exactly how long to put there time-wise. I think the amount of time you put in actually looking into what they're doing (figuring out what they're doing well, not well, their traction) can vary it quite a bit.

You're right about the pitch-killing. A few times I've seen investors pull out their iPad during a pitch and google potential competitors. Then they ask the entrepreneur about them if they weren't included.
Mind explaining the part about hands behind your back?
Dear Web - An open letter to W3C member representatives and Web developers
One of the most depressing moments was when I got a high-paid and very desirable job at Dell. I was even upfront about my history with my interviewer (I've never hidden or lied about it before) who assured me that it wasn't an issue.

I was working for 3 days and was nice and comfortable in my office and made lots of friends when security arrived and escorted me to my car and told me I wasn't allowed back on Dell property because I failed my background check.

I went through enough depression at the time that I gave up on the tech sector for a few years and worked food industry.
If you're shopping for a 4K display to do professional video editing, I suspect this Sharp 32" might be preferable: http://store.apple.com/us/product/HD971LL/A/sharp-32-pn-k321...
Yeah, that makes sense. I was thinking along 'companies started by african-americans' as the presentation context, which carries the subtext of blacks as the exception.
This is a well-known process that most, if not all, registrars adhere. Use the googles.

When a domain expires, the registrant has a "grace period" in which they may renew it (at regular price) without penalty. IIRC, this is ~30-45 days.

After this, it goes into a "redemption period" (I don't remember how long this is) where it is basically in limbo. I believe that some/most registrars will still allow you to regain control of the domain during this stage, although at a MUCH higher cost.

Eventually, the redemption period is over and there is a short period (5-7 days?) before the domain is finally released and available for registration by anyone.

FWIW, I just looked up a .net domain (these timelines sometimes vary by TLD) I had that expired 27-Oct-2013. It is currently still in the "redemption period". Same thing for a .org domain that expired on 28-Oct-2013.

I wouldn't expect for the domain to be released and available for you to purchase any earlier than 1-Feb-2014.
John Heartfield, the original culture jammer
Indeed, many mathematicians think in terms of non-standard analysis, and then translate their proofs into standard arguments, even if the non-standard ones can be made just as rigorous as the standard ones.

Terry Tao has a wonderful series of posts about hard and soft analysis, ultrafilters, and non-standard analysis. He writes

I feel that one of the reasons that non-standard analysis is
not embraced more widely is because the transfer principle,
and the ultrafilter that powers it, is often regarded as some
sort of “black box” which mysteriously bestows some
certificate of rigour on non-standard arguments used to prove
standard theorems, while conveying no information whatsoever
on what the quantitative bounds for such theorems should
be. Without a proper understanding of this black box, a
mathematician may then feel uncomfortable with any
non-standard argument, no matter how impressive and powerful
the result.

and

The main drawbacks to use of non-standard notation (apart
from the fact that it tends to scare away some of your
audience) is that a certain amount of notational setup is
required at the beginning, and that the bounds one obtains at
the end are rather ineffective (though, of course, one can
always, after painful effort, translate a non-standard
argument back into a messy but quantitative standard argument
if one desires)

(from http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/ultrafilters-nonsta...)
Just because a competitor does a certain feature or something a certain way doesn't mean they iterated quickly, perfected it and you should copy. It could also be that they simply have enough customers they are scared to change anything for even the better and are stuck. At my last company we got to a point where the executives were happy making zero product changes to make life easier on our support team and not make customers mad due to re-training and causing new bugs.

Some others may be nimble enough to add whatever your killer feature is. But their management team or investors may want to keep with what works and not vary from that path.

Point is some companies are in different points of their life cycle. I think it is good to know who the players are but to use your own product vision to guide you. If you have no product vision and your goal is to just copy, well good luck with that. Why a product is built a certain way isn't something you can always figure out.
No amount of data will allow perfect predictions. And the physical world doesn't scale like AWS.

UPS oversubscribed their transport network, that's all. At some point, they should've stopped accepting packages for Dec 24th delivery, just like Amazon halted accepting new Prime members to maintain service for existing members.
Almost all ground shipping services are now "day-definite delivery" the same way Air services are. UPS ground, FedEx ground, and USPS Priority Express offer money back guarantees now, although large shippers may have different contracts of course. Several times I've used the $4 next day shipping via Amazon prime only to have it come UPS ground from a near by distribution center.
> Also, the stigma of having a criminal record sticks to you forever. Even now, in my middle 30's, it's nearly impossible for me to get a tech job even though my felonious history was from when I was a teenager. You pretty much have to resign yourself to the fact that you'll work at 50% of the salary as your peers or have to make your own future by starting your own companies and projects.

You do not have to resign yourself to anything. I have built a career in the valley and I am currently far above market salary doing the work that I love at a company I love. That was after starting in this industry with no demonstrable computing experience and a felony conviction after four months pretrial detention, without so much as a college degree. I have discussed my experiences before and have found that the companies that understand and work with me, oddly, end up being the places I want to work.

A record only makes you work even harder for the success that you want. I work three times harder than most coasters around me because I know I have something to prove. Resigning yourself to the impossibility of success is letting your incarceration and the system win. Never resign yourself to anything, and above all never let the system win.
It's not going to get real messy unless he wants to go to jail for fraud / theft / embezzlement.

You need to present your case to the board, there is no other good way to go. If they side with you, your co-founder will have no choice but to turn over control of the money, and in fact you should encourage the board to force the point on the money / passwords / etc controls anyway.
I guess the rules of the prison impose the inmates to keep their hands behind their back in front of the wardens.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6965433 it was proposed that Emacs users, true Emacs users, are like the Igors from Pratchett's Discworld novels. Someone clearly didn't understand the reference, and a little was explained.

This site provides charts to help see the structure of the novels, and decide on entry points into the canon. The actual chart is here:

http://www.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/the-discwor...

Enjoy!

Added in edit: It should be noted that there are geeks and hackers who don't like Pratchett, just as there are geeks and hackers who don't like The Princess Bride. Not sure what to say to them.
> They definitely had some capacity issues near the end. On Christmas Eve I saw a UPS driver in a U-Haul truck in my neighborhood then later saw a U-Haul truck pulled up back to back with a UPS truck and they were handing off packages in a strip mall parking lot.

UPS always hires seasonal workers for the December rush. And since the workers are seasonal, the delivery vehicles also have to be seasonal. They can't afford to buy trucks that are parked for 11 out of 12 months. Lucky for them, fewer people move houses during the holiday season, so they can borrow U-Haul's spare capacity.

Even UPS's regular trucks have a driver and a helper during December. For the other 11 months of the year, the trucks only have one employee in them.

You may also have noticed the postal service doing multiple deliveries on the same day. It's easier to overlay the abnormal package volume on top of the regular mail delivery, rather than to split the mail routes.

The holiday rush has always been crazy like this. Nothing new in the Internet era except for additional volume.
10 bits per channel is nothing new, but requires specific openGL application + driver + video card support, so you don't get access to it in standard photo viewing/editing apps.

Are you sure the banding you are seeing isn't just because, like most users, you have a 6 bit panel?
RapGenius and Google: Tales in Growth Hacking Gone Wrong
Ripple sounds like a terrible idea. As some people aptly named it as Keynescoin.

I believe Mastercoin and Coloredcoins are Ripple-style ledger on Bitcoin network technologies.
Do people have a romanticized vision of the startup scene? What do you think..
"Excellent acquisition and integration machine"? From who's perspective is this? The customer? The employees?

From employees perspective:

At least in my org, integration is still sputtering along almost 2 years after I have left. Oracle bought another company shortly after us that we had to integrate with, in addition to Oracle proper. Over the last 2 years, most of the more competent engineers have left because they couldn't take the work or environment anymore. The end result was more work for everyone else and inability to find new employees due to the hot market. New feature development are practically non-existent.

On the non-technical side, there was nothing excellent about integration. We lost vacation time/holidays. We didn't have wireless for probably 6 months at the office because our wireless wasn't "secure enough". Everything worked less well than it did before, from phones to the network.

From the customer perspective:

For the customers that don't care about whatever product you are integrating with, they haven't seen many new features because everyone is focused on integrations. There are now less people that understand the product focused on you.

For the customers that do care about the integrations, at least in my org, the integrations have been so shaky I can't help but think there will be some buyers remorse. And again the quality of people supporting you is now lower.
"Since (a,0)+(c,0)=(a+c,0) and (a,0)×(c,0)=(ac,0), the points along the horizontal axis have an arithmetic just like "ordinary" numbers"

Holy hell that is clear, concise and compelling. If only my professors would have explained it like this more often in my freshman calc class which was so much more abstract and proof based than anything I had encountered before. The only thing I remember form that time is hellishly long study groups late into the night with my classmates.
The kind of facility I was in was more of a place to warehouse prisoners. They housed 50 people in bunk beds in each warehouse room with no air conditioning. When we moved from the dorm to (for instance) the cafeteria, there were some required rules for the safety of the employees.

All the inmates had to be 3 feet from each other, hands clasped behind their backs, looking down.

A lot of it was purely for psychological purposes. We were never addressed by our names, just "Inmate". I asked them why they didn't just call us prisoners, and they told me that it was because we were Inmates not prisoners since we choose to be there. The not making eye-contact thing was pretty rough too.

It wasn't as out of control as the Milgram experiment or anything, but I did get the distinct impression that the person who put together the operations manuals was very well versed in some of the darker parts of psychology.
>An investor or friend shouldn't be the first one to tell an entrepreneur about someone new in their space.

This line resonated with me. I know the stomach-dropping feeling of someone mentioning a potential competitor that I've never heard of. I usually play it off and say, "Thanks, I'll definitely check it out" and then immediately Google it on my iPhone as soon as possible. Luckily, in my research I haven't found anything all that similar to what I'm working on.

This brings up a corollary question: Assuming I have a pretty well-informed view of the competitive landscape and I can't seem to find anything that solves the problem in a similar fashion, how do I sufficiently answer the inevitable question from investors about my competition? I've often heard people write and say that business ideas ALWAYS have competition, the tricky thing is that the competition isn't always immediately obvious. Answering that a startup doesn't have direct competition leads to skepticism, therefore creating distrust right off the bat when it may not be warranted.