skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
is there any other benefits of "no price tag" approach, particularly for buyers?

Yes. Say the marginal cost of a good is $1000. The fixed cost of developing the product was $900,000. There are 100 potential customers. In order to break even, the average sales price must be $10,000. But let's say that some customers can afford to pay $50,000, while most others can only pay $5,000. Without price discrimination, the product simply would not exist. If you charged $10,000 to everyone, the smaller companies simply could not buy. But if you price discriminate, and charge the small companies $5,000 and the big companies $50,000 you can cover your fixed costs and break even. Everyone wins. The producer makes money and both the small customers and big customers get a product that otherwise would not exist.
I think that since there was nothing valuable inside, finders might have thought it was not worth the trouble sending the wallets back, while a baby picture is valuable to its owner, so it was worth sending back. If I had found such a wallet, that's the way I would have acted.
There is a simple chart which might help you to better understand what type of business do you want to start:

1. Startups pursuing large markets (either existing or new). Typically they require a lot of work and/or serious technology investment in the beginning and must demonstrate considerable traction/growth in terms of increasing market share/sales/user base/technology innovation etc. and at the same time seek for substantial funding to be able to hire workforce, develop technology, pay for data centers etc.

Such business requires a lot of work and serious time investment until they exit or grow considerably (3+ years), involves substantial risk of failure and potentially huge payoff in case of success. And the reason why pg and other investors are describing startups in this way because this is the only kind of business which is fundable (i.e. what YCombinator and other investment companies are interested in).

2. New businesses pursuing smaller markets with less competition or less competition risk. Typically they have better chances to succeed, require less effort, imply slower growth, have typically clearer business model and smaller payoffs, require no outside money investment. No one would invest in them anyway unless they demonstrate serious growth potential -- that is the business is viable but not fundable.
From the leasing companies. For example, if you go the CBRE site, you can view all of their properties there, via a software service provided by loopnet. There's definitely room to start another service by getting those listings out there to a broader audience.
How about http://grabaperch.com/ ?
Carbon Nanotubes in Ordered DNA Wrappers
It seems obvious that your immediate problem is coming from trying to have both a job and a startup (and a marriage). That's really hard and, in the long run, insane. If you're as much of a startup guy as you say, your only way to restore sanity is to drop the consulting and just do a startup. The minute you do that, the structural contradiction in your work life will be resolved. Things won't become easy but at least you'll feel they're doable. That was my experience at least.

Where are you going to have the best chance of doing that?

It's difficult to tell from your writeup what your wife's concerns really are. She may be right that you're kidding yourself. People do that all the time, imagining that a change of scene will fix their problems when, as Johnny Rotten sang, "The problem is YOU", i.e. the problem is within you and only self-honesty and growth can prevent you from simply recreating it in a new location. If she's like most wives, she knows things about you that you don't know. I'd use that as a resource by getting her to talk about exactly why she thinks you're kidding yourself and what she would need to see to change that opinion.

I was going to add that it's also possible that she just doesn't want to move and is coming up with arguments to defend that. But your description makes it sound like that isn't the case. If so, you're luckier than most guys in your position; what are you waiting for?

One other thing leaps out at me: The main issue many people bring up is cost. Could there be a dumber way to look at this? What's more important, a few hundred dollars a month or your sanity, health and happiness? It seems to me that people who offer this sort of analysis are the ones who have freeze-dried their own souls and want everyone else to do the same. But I'm probably jumping to conclusions.
Easily summed up as the the opposite of what the rest of the music industry is doing with an emphasis on being realistic all the way.

I'm still wondering how much more time it will take before the realize they are on the wrong track and reverses on their actions and listens to their actual customers.
Note that that's 40 wallets in each of 6 categories; the total number was 240.

If half of all wallets get returned, then the variance of the number returned is on the order of 40 * 1/2 * (1-1/2) = 10, which means a standard deviation on the order of 3 wallets returned, or ~ 8% return rate. So the "puppy" and "family" figures might be out by about that much.

The cute-baby category had a measured return rate of 88%, which means a variance of something like 40 * 0.88 * 0.12~=4.2, for a standard deviation of ~ 2 wallets or about 5% in the return rate.

So if these results are unlucky to the tune of two 2-sigma errors pointing in the "right" direction, the puppy category might really be as good as 69%, and the baby category might really be as bad as 78%.

So, at least as far as simple sampling error goes, the "baby beats puppies" result seems pretty robust.

(No need to tell me about all the oversimplifications in the above. I know.)
This might be nitpicking but I feel like the "Clear" button is misplaced. There must be another position for it that allows me to quickly reset and start drawing another character. Come to think of it, it would be great if there was a key for it. Click and drag with the mouse, reset with a keystroke. Almost like playing a first person shooter!
but presumably the focus here is what people choose to spend their money on, and taxes aren't much of a choice.

Taxes are the rent you pay for choosing to live in the USA.
The first half of your sentence answers the second half.

If you don't like it, the better approach is to flag it. "Not Hacker News" comments aren't Hacker News either.
From the site guidelines...

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."
good point, so it is effectively "rich businesses subsidizing others" :)
well, depends on a company. I run a company but I LOVE getting straight and immediate answer on a question "how much does this cost?" rather than spending weeks in phone calls with sales guy asking me "how much can you afford?". I think asking this question is somewhat silly :(
It's not enlightening at all, this is exactly the kind of thing that puts me off about the media. Like noticing terrible mistakes on a note on some technology you really grok, reading articles like these makes me reconsider what I've read regarding other international issues (e.g. Iran). There are many things stated as fact here that are simply not true. Freedom of the press, for example, is very much alive. Reporters are not afraid of the police or the government, just pick up any random national newspaper.
America's obsession with cars explains the high transportation outlay (currently > 17%). So many assume that they have to buy new cars (preferably luxury brands, which connote status) and change them every x years. They'll buy them on layaway even if they can't afford the payments.
That is actually a good Idea. Thanks for the suggestion. :)
> I believe an investor can leverage knowledge he has about a particular industry or company to beat the average on a risk-adjusted basis.

If that were true, wouldn't mutual funds be able to find full-time pro managers who can consistently outperform index funds?
Orion Magazine != The Onion. This is not satire.
If you do decide to move to the Bay Area, I encourage you to join us at Hackers and Founders. It's like Hacker News, but in real life!

http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/

I recently led a discussion at Bootstrapper's Breakfast--another great meetup--regarding balancing work and "life."

http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com/

These are only two of the many, many sub-communities built around the startup scene in the Bay Area. In short, I don't have enough experience to provide useful advice, but there is probably a much stronger "support" circle in the Bay Area than outside of Atlanta for people like us. It may not be home for you, but I'm sure it'll feel like it.
Apparently some reporters are. Maybe just more local to Juarez? How can you state that there is no problem on basis of a few positive samples (I'm guessing you mean articles critical of the military)?

Are you saying there is no problem with army suppression of dissent? press or otherwise? Just wondering how you are more qualified than the author of this article to say one way or the other.
Everyone answers these things as if humans were completely homogenous. Some people can do math better than others; some people can run faster than others; some people can work longer than others.

Like most of these sorts of debates it mostly ends up being people justifying what they're already doing and comfortable with. Sure, there are studies, but they're about the median; startups are about the statistical outliers on one or more vectors.
I never thought about this.

But what happens if the company that purchased the product at 50k finds out another company paid just 5k because of their size?
the very fact that she still is alive to tell the story negates the safety issue (i imagine the concerns are trumpeted for decades toward her, not new thing)

she's probably healthier than those safety-conscious people who buy groceries at wal-mart

by volume, plants are consist of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, phospate, potassium; thus major elements. they do take CO2 from air pollution to grow. motor oil, if it ever breaks down, probably will just supply C and O. lead is not even a trace element, average plants probably don't take Pb and if they do, probably extremely minute, like 0.0000001% (# pulled out of my ass)

maybe just washing it with baking soda and rinsing it with running water is sufficient, probably overkill -- don't worry much about plants, they are normally safe, that's why you rarely read news about people got killed by eating plants.

i'm starting urban gardening too (i played with aquascape before) ... it will be interesting
I'm pretty sure he's referring to Flash as navigation. Leaving Flash in to play songs makes perfect sense, but having those ridiculous all-flash front pages and navigation "flash app" is retarded and should rightly be abolished.
Not to mention if you are a current full time student, you have to swap insurance or housing for education. Heck, I feel like most of that circle should be education.
I didn't "choose" to live in this country.

I was born here. And without open borders to make residence in multiple countries, we are not "free" either.
Ewww, 'night soil'. Rinse and peel those vegetables carefully, Shanghai.
Cheer up - Paul Grahams worldview isn't the only one out there.

Do some reading on 'mISV' companies. Google Bob Walsh, Erik Sink, Rob Walling, Andy Brice and Patrick McKenzie - all of whom have written excellent material about building viable, bootstrapped, part-time software businesses.

Also, see this excellent talk by DHH on alternatives to the classical 'balls out, big risk/reward' startup scenario:

http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...

Good luck!

(I'm in the same boat; currently only a few weeks from launching my first product.)
> Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

The thing is that global warming doesn't have an on/off switch. If we cut back emissions by 22%, then we're slowing down the global warming process significantly. As much as I'd like to see big business curb their carbon emissions, there's simply no way they will be cut back by 75% anytime soon.
Ask HN: Article where a Meetup.com guy was talking about taking it 100% paid?
Can't seem to find it. Anyone have it bookmarked? Paying 5 awesome points.
I agree about the overload/sanity. My best chance of dropping the consulting is, without a doubt, in silicon valley. There is an entrepreneurial-supportive environment there that I feel would greatly increase my odds. The biggest upside, however, is the jobs I can get in between my own startups - if I never do succeed. I can get really interesting work in Silicon Valley that I can't get here - which means I'll be less apt to start a company just to have something interesting to work on. I'll be able to channel my creative juices into a more interested job.
Yeah, I am curious about this, too. Wouldn't it be better to formalize this approach? Lets say, base price is 50K but there is, say, a "Startup Edition" which is essentially the same but for companies that qualify as new startups. I've seen this approach used here and there. Sill price discrimination? Yes, sort of. Formalized? Yes.
I do consider the diminishing returns. I consult a lot because of the hole I dug myself into financially in my last startup, not because I want to. When I'm done with that, the only way to get to work on my startup is to rack up the hours.
I already work entirely from home, which is the ONLY reason my situation is even remotely workable. I probably should have mentioned this in the post.
It's not going to get bad publicity if it works well on the hardware it's supposed to work well on. The OS is meant for netbooks remember?
"I would never dare to submit a commit like this into our internal repository, much less to a public one."

Never? Are your deadlines infinitely flexible? I try my best to adhere to single purpose commits too, but being under the gun I know I've slipped on a few (hundred) occasions. And no, I don't go back and split commits.
Vanishing middle class at 4M....down from 12M in 2000
At last a purpose for those permanent markers that people use accidentally on a whiteboard now and then :-)
Equal rights were (and are) a fundamental idea for the US, egalitarianism less so. However, the anti-aristocratic feelings were strong. Recall, for example, that the titles were easily abolished.
You don't have to stretch that far, just think about all the psychologically manipulative tactics used in advertisement.
Notice he never does answer the question of "what should we do?" So even if you accept his premise (which I don't) he provides no direction on where to go from there.

"Just wait it out and complain loudly" seems to be all he has to offer. Given he thinks the world is basically going to end if something isn't done I'd say that's a pretty stupid strategy
Yes, I'm saying there is no problem with suppression of dissent. I can't say no reporters have ever disappeared in Juarez, as I can't say no bartenders have ever disappeared there either. Juarez is a dangerous town ruled by narco-gangs. I'm saying it's not something common in Mexico; reporters aren't normally scared for their life or anything of the sort. As I said, just pick up any random Mexican newspaper, there is a fair chance you will read criticisms of every government branch, the police, and the military. The part at the end where the reporter explains how the military is in control of the government is especially ridiculous.
More than 3 million U.S. jobs will move offshore by 2015
Thanks for the comment. I was wary of that book because I heard it described as a way to become a sort of uncaring-manager-at-a-distance while getting rich quick.

Since there's more to it than that, I'll give it another look.
I've heard that city soil can be highly contaminated. I wonder what the best way to deal with this is?
here you go(scroll down to "dear meetup commmunity"):

http://web.archive.org/web/20080120191653/http://www.meetup....

looks like meetup has removed the page from their site, probably why you couldn't find it.
I do not understand why the above quote is marked down (-2 points when I was looking at it). We may agree or disagree with certain arguments, but if an argument is well presented, or a quote from a mainstream publication, I do not see any reason to shout it down.

Now, I abhor this distinction between the white and black population, but this may be because I grew up in a European country with essentially no blacks, and have not internalized the American history of the racial relations. However, if we remove the "white" label from the above quote, the argument sounds mainstream. I do not agree with it, however, and besides, see it as illogical: the second sentence neither follows from the first sentence nor contradicts it, and how it is a "fact" is unclear to me. No studies have been mentioned, so this must be pure speculation.
This is becoming prevalent in the world of game engines, where the engines sell for big money, but companies making under $100K per year can buy for a few thousand (Look up Unity 3D or Torque for more info).

It serves as promotion and builds a much larger community for the engine developer. It also lets them get money from the mass-market, as usually the indie licenses come with less support requirements. For the big name publishers, they make a lot of money but provide the support SLA, custom development or source code access.
Ah, this is very helpful. I was aware that I wanted to do something like #2, but I was not aware that such a partitioning was the norm.
Well, as I read it his argument is that it's totally fine if people want to garden in the city, but that they shouldn't extrapolate that to mean that we don't need the vast spaces dedicated to agriculture that we have in, say, Iowa.
Yes, they call this "international auctions." If you poke around in their FAQ you'll see this documented.
... and have to take your car door with you into the supermarket?
Works perfectly for me now. Maybe the training's working!
"If this, or any other test says your site is slow from a particular location on the net, what can you possibly do about it"

Basically it nails down to reducing the number requests and the roundtrip time per request (aka latency).

- Use a CDN to reduce latency (e.g. cachefly, cloudfront)
- Outsource some javascript libraries (e.g. jquery) to google's CDN
- Move servers closer to customers.
A brilliant idea! Would love to see a blog post overviewing how it works.
I can't help but feel like this should be submitted as a patch - anybody know if he's done so yet? I was unable to find anything.
The Art And Skill Of Working With Bureaucrats
What if your wall(s) have texture?
I'd substitute exciting for enlightening. The writer is obviously a frustrated novelist, and I don't appreciate being told what I'm supposed to feel about the facts I'm reading, or the tease-and-reveal storytelling. This is not journalism, it's dramatization.
I would advise using a wiki. Wikis fit well the programmers mental model as their main concept of editing "source" code that is compiled into a "machine" language (HTML). What wiki to use will depend on your favorite language or concepts. I use Foswiki http://foswiki.org (although I hate perl), because you can mix html/css/javastrict with the wiki syntax, and it has no database so I can hand edit easily the pages in emacs or use various shell hacks on them. But many nice wikis exist, for intance moinmoin is a nice one for python lovers.

I maintained my site with hand edited html, then I wrote a template engine for it, but for one year I have just ported everything on Foswiki (Foswiki is the active fork of TWiki), and have no regret. And if I want to add features, I can code plugins to it, use other people plugins.
The plutocrats don't seem to realize that in gutting the economy, they will also eventually gut themselves. Goldman Sachs, I am looking at you.

Gordon Gekko was supposed to be a satire, not an exemplar of how to live.
Craigslist Advertising for Charity: A Novel Philanthropic Idea
It's an aggregate over all households. People are students for 4 of the ~60 years of their adult lives, so only 1/15 are full-time students. (Perhaps more, as this doesn't count grad school or two college-educated people getting married and becoming one household. But it also doesn't count the people who don't go to college at all, which is an even bigger proportion.)
This is inevitable, yes, but I am also tired of people who pretend that it is good for any but the businesses who benefit.

With very rare exceptions, it won't be good for those who lose their jobs in the US, though it does offer a benefit to those who get those (now vastly-lower-paying) jobs. Mainly, the business benefits.

Capitalism's problem is that it is amoral, has no sympathy, and will destroy the lives of 3.4 million people for 10% more profits.

I love capitalism, but I do not love that.
The key to success is being relentlessly resourceful.

Everything else is fluff people make up to make themselves feel good about the path they chose or assign meaning to random events.

Read the above a few times until it sinks in. Give it a couple of days, then read it again. If it doesn't set things straight, try this:

1. The effort applied must be adequate for the goal -
both in scope and direction. Neither excess nor dearth
are virtues.

2. Determining what is adequate is just as important
as is the execution itself, and must have adequate
effort put into it.

3. Determining the goals worth pursuing is again equally
important.

4. The first three items are actually one and same item
applied recursively. Recursion does not end at three
items.

5. The first three items are ongoing processes, not
accomplishments that can get "done". They must have
time and resources allocated and artifacts defined and
tracked.

6. When starting a task, always pop up a level above and
ask yourself if what you do makes sense. "Bottom-up"
validation.

7. Periodically unwind all recursion layers, then roll
them forward again and make sure they still make sense.
"Top-down" validation must be performed with adequate
frequency.

8. You don't know most things you will need to know to
succeed. Determine the important unknowns and put
adequate effort into reducing uncertainty.
The iteration lenght must be adequate to the relevant
timeframes.
I think it's bunk too - a much more logical explanation is that communal care of children is good for the species/tribe.
Everyone loves meaningless gestures of charity on Facebook, so join up, especially because this one may turn out to be not meaningless.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114346357248
I don't like the way this article presents the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology. A conception such as morality vs evolution is nothing short of dangerous.

I think this is a probable scenario:

"Oh, look, a wallet. I wonder what's inside... Alright, no money anyway. Some tickets and shit. Should I return it? Can I be bothered? Must be a real hassle for the owner with all these cards of course. - Oh, a picture of a baby. I bet this person is stressed out with the kid as it is. Hey, might as well be a Good Samaritan today..."
Hmm. 22% of energy is used directly by consumers. The other 78% is stolen by evil scary corporations which provide goods and services to consumers [1]. Therefore, consumers using less can only reduce waste by 22%.

[1] I realize that some businesses are several transactions away from serving consumers directly. Doesn't change the point that all business exists to produce stuff people want.
The hazy future of Web typography