skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still vividly remember an "Aha!" moment in AP Calc in high-school where a problem was stated as (paraphrasing very roughly):

Suppose a spherical snowball melts according to the formula:

dV/dt = K * pi * r^2

What is the shape of r plotted vs t for a snowball with initial radius of R1?

It was astounding to me at first that it was linear, and then when I thought it through and realized that one might naturally expect it to be linear (in real life), and that the change in volume per unit time to accomplish that MUST be proportional to the surface area just snapped into focus all at once. It's so vivid, I can recall what the room looked like, where that problem was on the page, and what desk I was sitting at 23 years ago. This from someone who can't remember what I went upstairs to get just 23 seconds earlier.

Both parents were high school math teachers, and they lamented even back then that the focus of high school education was much more about teaching the minimums to pass the exams and frankly, babysitting students than it was instilling a lifelong love of learning or deep understanding of the subject matter.

Famous quote from a math teacher at my high-school (neither of my parents :)): "The square root of two is an irrational number because it says so on page 169."
> It's not as if we weren't importing cheap crap from China by the truckload in the 1980s.

It was a lot less so than it is today.

My parents had a textile factory till the mid 90's - and that was still a relatively thriving industry at the 80's - as were a lot of other types of manufacturing.

For example, a lot of computers were made in western countries where as today there is probably not much in your computer that wasn't made in south east Asia, and I can say that without knowing which computer brand you are using.
I think it's funny that people ask about virtual goods "why do they sell so much?" and about music "why doesn't it sell enough?", when it's fundamentally the same thing: no tangible good is exchanged, the only benefit is the enjoyment and satisfaction of the buyer.

What effect does music have on macro economics?
I can afford to throw a life preserver with no real cost. When there are entire countries or continents of starving people to be saved though, it's not economically sustainable to just give them a first world standard of living from scratch. It has to be built up over time by progressively improving the standard of living.

Indentured servitude is prominent in American history too--it's how many of our ancestors got passage to the New World. And now here we are with air-conditioned offices, OSHA regulations, and paid leave.
Beating the Averages (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) is one of pg's more famous essays, and I've seen it make it's way some tech sites a few times in the past ~5 years.
Ask HN: Strategies For Detecting Scams
So I recently received a call from a debt collection agency. They exhibited all the signs of a scam, and when I looked them up there were tonnes of reports of them being a scam.

On the off-chance it was real, I called them back and requested the information on the charge, which although it seemed to be related to a legitimate doctor's visit, was from a diagnostics company and debt collection agency that the doctor's office denied all knowledge of. I called the company that the doctor said they sent the test to, but they had no record of me.

I threatened to contact the FBI about the calls (from the collector) until finally they gave me the complete information (which they all knew all along). That was also when I started getting polite operators that were cheerful and helpful. The doctor's office sent a test to a diagnostics company, who forwarded it to another company, who forwarded it to another company, who employs a doctor who did the test, who charged it to my insurance company. The insurance company denied the charge, and that's where it ended. They all claim that someone else should have billed me, but when the company that actually performed the test didn't get paid, they sent me (not the people they claim to be responsible for billing me) to collection.

That was an hour of phone calls, and now the one company I need to speak to in order to resolve the issue is closed for the day. Since I was so sure the collection agency was a scam, does anyone have any advice on how to be sure something is a scam, when you think it is?
Maybe Apple TV should be a TV.
A 'loss' would have been if they had to write off that money instead of recoup their loan. That it would have earned them more in the long term is not a loss, that is stretching the definition of the word loss beyond the breaking point.

The RIAA makes a similar argument, they count every mp3 downloaded as a lost sale, whereas it remains to be seen if a sale would have been made.

In both cases the word 'loss' is used in ways that suggest that in some alternative universe the 'loser' would have been better off, but that is one of those things that you'll never get to check, you can only live in one universe at the time...

Poor choices in retrospect are fantasy, you make your choices in real time to the best of your ability and you hope that you make them well. If you're going to second guess yourself (or be second guessed by third parties such as techchrunch) after the fact then you are engaging in deception. For all you know the whole thing could have gone south and then everybody would have have been saying 'wow, look at how much money they saved'.

Hindsight...
Uhm, fashion is one of the hardest things to deal with. Fashion inventory is almost worthless a season or two after it launches.

What zappos sells are what are labeled FMCG - fast moving consumer goods. In this instance, you want almost no inventory, but extremely effective supplier partnerships and delivery cycles. What they have is a really engaged consumer community who can help them predict what they might want to buy soon.

If they use the metrics efficiently enough, they can stock the really popular lines and get-the-numbers-right on the slower but better margined products.

If you could run zappos/amazon scale and drop ship from manufacturer... well - that's the goal. (See timbuk2 et al for more).
I don't care if they have free will or not. I just ordered a bunch of fruit fly killer traps a store just 2 hours ago. I can't stand fruit flies and I'm not sure who can. You should kill all fruit flies as well. http://www.fruitflysolutions.com
It's actually quite simple, I'm not interested in working on low-budget sites that need a ton of functionality for a very low price tag. There's a huge market for these types of sites, and Drupal and other CMSes are often the only remotely feasible option for these clients.

The thing is that I am an end-to-end web developer with 15 years experience with the full stack from back end, DB technology, server side languages, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Usability, etc. I have a very precise idea of what I want, and how to build it. With something like Drupal, you're only using 2-15% of the architecture for any given project, but yet the rest of it imposes assumptions and constraints which end up being performance and conceptual overhead. You can get a lot of mileage out of it, but you're constantly thinking in terms of the Drupal framework. This manifests in terms of lots of little compromises. I much prefer to build the app up from a basic set of web building blocks such as is provided by frameworks like Rails or Django. This typically costs more, but enables a much more polished product in terms of design, performance, and extensibility.
Here're the reasons I thought it was a scam:

- Crappy website

- Inaccurate information

- Very low quality phone system and operators

- Rampant reports of being a scam

- Asked for financial information to verify who I was (edit: which I didn't give them)
I usually check my caller I.D. display of an incoming phone number on Google. Most scam callers call lots of people, and there are reports about them on the Web.
Asked for financial information to verify who I was

NEVER give that out to a cold caller. You only give that out over the phone if you made the call to a known person.
Charlamagne Tha God Calls Lil' Wayne The Devil With Reason | Hip Hop MVP
I can see how their device would be good for old or rare books, but for anything mass market -- which seems to me would be the majority of what end-users want to "rip" (so they can take it with them on some portable device) -- it seems like it'd be easier to de-bind and run the pages through a duplexing scanner.

The software itself seems pretty good, what they need to do is incorporate all the dependencies into a single monolithic installer. The external dependencies significantly raise the bar for someone just interested in playing with the application who might otherwise install it.
The number they used to call had lots of reports of it being a scam. I would say 5% of the reports indicated it was legitimate.
http://classes.yale.edu/04-05/math230a/

"There is a widespread notion that 'ability' counts for more in learning mathematics than does effort. This is a doubtful notion, at best, and it has at least two bad consequences: it provides a recipe for failure and an excuse for failure when new ideas do not come easily."
I live in New Orleans. It's a great place to be, so all of y'all come on down!
well it's before mine too so I have no idea :)
I think implying a hard wired "want" means its not true consciousness - or at least not any better than in the future making humans who want to be garbage men (no disrespect intended)
Customers who bought Zappos also liked…
I hope this is tongue-in-cheek :) Just in case it is not, they are not referring to that kind of law.
That's not true. You can use any language/compiler combination that will compile to an ARM binary. See, for example, ArsTechnica's roundup of the state of C#/Mono on the iPhone: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/01/open-source-...
Google "Django jobs" and you immediately hit:

http://djangogigs.com/

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoJobs

and some other interesting links.
Unfortunately, I have no empirical data or to support that hard-coding in a payload has an advantage over a dynamic allocation. As an aside, the Python dictionary (hash table for you rubyists/perlfaces) works this way, as it over-resizes to allow growth, unless you specify its maximum size (__slots__ I think?)

My hope and understanding are that the compiler's static analysis skills will best align the given data, whereas something like malloc() would try to allocate on the heap as best it can with the open possibility of other data needing to be on the heap as well.

The point I was driving at, and what I tried to do, was to hard-code in as many known variables as possible such that the compiler could do its thing and try to be as efficient as it could with the given data. This includes the word list, the list of lengths, the target hash -- none of which has to be done by hand, but rather a higher-level script called before compilation.

Good times.
MongoDB is very nice. It's basically a bunch of tables with a binary form of JSON they call BSON instead of "rows". You can add an index to an arbitrary JSON "path" and it literally just works. I just wish they had broken out the layers a bit better. You are stuck with their default persistence for example which is very fast but not particularly safe. I'd sacrifice some speed for safer writes on certain collections.

And I am going to repeat the parent's comment that in MongoDB everything "just makes sense". It's just a big bucket with indexes. Everything you need, nothing you don't. So refreshing.
could = code, sorry...

and no, I'm not making this up!
They're not really competing with Google. Their big business model seems to be setting up a Gigablast cluster for customers to index a custom collection of info, a la the Google Search Appliance, but more vanilla. Further, they're not doing mail, or news, or reader, or wave, or groups, or chat, or android, or chrome, or GWT, or adsense, or youtube, or iGoogle, or docs, or app engine. So yeah, they have fewer employees, but they're not exactly doing the same set of things either - they're really focusing on performance in one area: search. Google may be about search, but they do a lot more than that.
There is a difference between learning from your mistakes and 'second guessing' yourself.

They should probably revisit the deal and the information that they had at the time. It's possible that there was some information they viewed as 'worthless' which would have changed their mind had they given it more weight. This could possibly help them out in similar situations in the future.

Saying "we can't go second-guessing ourselves" is a sure way to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. _Especially_ if they are subtle mistakes with large consequences. That said, they shouldn't devote millions and millions of man-hours pouring over what they could have done different either.
GREAT essay-- I wish everyone would read it.

Curious question to PG: At this point, you can have any darn schedule you want-- I imagine your schedule is a combination of personal preference and habit... But do you think that YC (and YC companies) would be more successful if some/all of you adopted manager's schedule?
I think I speak for everyone when I say: "hindsight is 20/20"
Never seen Pascal's Wager applied to free will before, though I suppose it makes as much sense as when applied to theology.
You're absolutely right about that, and I'm sure that this is a 'learning moment' for them. I never meant to give the impression that you shouldn't learn from your mistakes.

If there is a clear reason why they wanted their cash back - and nobody seems to have a clue why they did that - then all this is is speculation.

Money in the bank in the short term is sometimes more important than a great payoff at some distant point in the future (if it happens).
Also, grasses, which try to maintain a constant shoot-to-root ratio; if they get cut down or eaten, they drop some of their root.
Requires Silverlight.
A Tiny Review of Scala
IPhone 3.0 Notes Sync? Sure, But Evernote is Still King
How exactly does one avoid placing importance on the company of others?
Poster here. This "unimpressive feature" is at the heart of YC backed Posterous. Thought it would be interesting to see the comparison.

And if you want to talk about site guidelines, your comment is against them:

"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. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
Boy is that not true. A lot of startup investments at that time spectacularly failed to pay.

Investing in startups is not like buying public stocks, where if you buy at the bottom of the market you're almost guaranteed a positive return. It's exactly the opposite, in fact. The returns depend almost entirely on which startups you pick, and hardly at all on market conditions when you invest.
Let me expand upon my one line explanation. I apologize for being terse last time.

Let's say the stock market increases at 10% per year. This growth is driven by more capital being invested in the market each year. That means everyone in the market earns 10% interest every year, right? Well, in reality, that's not the case. Some people earn 30% and some people lose 20%. In fact, if anyone earns over 10%, that means that someone else must be earning less than 10%. So, maybe it's a 10-sum game, but most people still use the term "zero-sum game" to describe the situation.

Distribution of wealth and standard of living work the same way. Everyone's standard of living is increasing at 10 moon units per year. This growth is primarily driven by technology. However, if people in emerging markets are to have their standard of living increase at 15 moon units per year (which it is, and that's great), then someone else will have their standard of living increase at less than 10 moon units per year. That doesn't mean that our standard of living will decrease (although I wouldn't rule that out); it just won't increase as rapidly.
HTC Snap Unlocked
HTC Snap Unlocked lacks in flair, it makes up for in sheer, latest portrait QWERTY handset as a bit frumpy from photographs, but trust us when we say that it's totally passable in person. you can add email addresses from your address book or from incoming emails.
Okay, I wasn't being entirely serious. ;-) Thanks for the article - as someone who just moved here 6 months ago, it's neat to imagine what things looked like 50 years ago.
Humans are meat computers with buggy self learning algorithms.

Will does not apply. Garbage in garbage out.
The title isn't claiming they suffered a loss, more that they lost out. Those are different senses of the word.

And they did lose out, if they had convertible debt and asked for the money back instead of converting it. That is an exceptionally rare outcome. No VC does a convertible debt deal expecting it to actually be a loan.

Everyone seems to hate this article, but I found it useful. It is an interesting data point that a fairly highly regarded VC thought so little of Zappos that they opted not to convert a convertible round. It's up there with Battery turning down Facebook.
Gorgeous. I've been trying to work through a 600 page textbook on this for a few months (intended for a biology major). It's nice to see someone just come out and say how genetics works!
I moved to silicon valley in 07 and was (and still am) very interested in the bookmarking space... I was doing an analysis of delicious and came onto a link for startupschool, which I then applied to and got into, not really understanding anything of what was going on until after the event... So actually, Jessica Livingston told me about what YC was at a reception for startup school, which is probably a unique way to get an introduction, if not the best way to make a first impression. (:
Evernote is not be the perfect solution in it's space. Many users complain that it crashes often and/or won't even open up for them. Their Optimal Character Recognition (the founders expertise in) is amazing but slows down their program. Could be a case for less being more for users that just want to take text and picture notes and then sync them.
I just forwarded this to my team at work and I hope they read it.
At the risk of sounding ignorant, what is zappos? I've never heard of them.
Are shoes "fashion"? I would not be able to tell the difference between a shoe from 10 years ago versus one from today (and somehow, I've accumulated a lot of shoes; running, cycling, sneakers, sandals...). I am sure some of Zappos' customers care about the latest and greatest, but many probably don't.
Let Me Google Is Your Friend That For You.
Not to knock them, from the little I know I'm very impressed, but this study showing Gigablast to be better than Google was conducted by Gigablast.

I just thought I'd mention it to save other people the 5 minutes I spent researching it because it just seemed to good to be true.
Nope. I have kept every computer I've owned ever since the ZX81. And none of them has broken. Perhaps I'm lucky... But chips used to be rated to last 25 years, and by the time I left the semiconductor industry it was down to 5. Why? Yield. But I'm sure you've worked on chip design and have more experience on this topic than I do...
Uhoh - I missed decimal place. 3 billion/sec would mean about 3000 of the cheapest Rackspace cloud machines, which could have been operated for 18 hours for about $810. I'm not sure Rackspace lets you have that many though.
I think that preference is exactly why you're not a venture capital firm.
Sharing an office over the internet: An experiment in video portalling
I think there are some real parallels between being an academic and being an entrepreneur, but academia is orders of magnitude more forgiving than the market. The research an academic pursues may end up not having any real impact, but as long as it's novel, it's a contribution. Such researchers don't become famous, but they can attain tenure and continue doing research no one cares about.

When starting a business, you don't get points for making something novel that no one wants. You just fail.
The title says 'lost big', not 'lost out'.

It is my understanding of the use of convertible debt that the industry uses this as a means of recouping part or all of the money in case an investment doesn't fly but doesn't tank either.

If it flies convert otherwise demand your cash back and treat the investment as a regular loan.

Wait too long with converting the debt and you'll find out that the knife cuts both ways.

What I really don't get in all this is why after such a spectacular exit this founder would go and pick up such a small investment on a convertible loan basis.
That's interesting, looks like I have something I need to read about.
There is a parallel to the "work expands to fill the schedule" thing. Our big company team recently moved to a brand new big building. No expense was spared. Lots and lots of conference rooms are available; a significant amount more per employee capita. However, the scarcity is only marginally less. People just start booking rooms for time slots or of sizes they don't really need.
Concealed guns law rejected in close Senate vote
They're ten years old and doing over a billion in gross sales annually. Hardly fledgling.
Mathematicians: An outer view of an inner world (audio and slide show)
Inventing a New Kind of Business
I found most of these sites to be pretty low on content...
I remember people being disappointed about Bezos's talk last year at Startup School; it felt less like a personal startup story and more like an advertisement for Amazon Web Services. If he'd given a talk more like the one in the video, I doubt anyone would have been complaining.
(Not mentioned) My personal favorite: http://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com...
Yeah, it's easy for the design to be minimal when the site doesn't do much.
EngineYard Hashing Contest Post-Mortem
I love d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com the best. I should register a site that explains the difference between principle and principal.
Many sites have email as a feature. We're thrilled to see more attention being paid to that feature.

But our vision is quite a bit more than just that feature.
I found out about Paul Graham through comp.lang.lisp. Way back in my freshman summer of college, I had an internship where I didn't really have very much or very important work to do, so I spent a lot of it reading about Lisp. Graham's name came up a lot, and his essays were interesting. Ended up reading On Lisp after that.

I moved over to Hacker News from Reddit the day it became publicly available.
This just makes me glad that pg encourages hackers to be entrepreneurs. In my experience, engineers could use a little dose of overconfidence, but that's probably the last thing finance guys need.

I say this because most business/finance guys I know are alpha male former jock types, while engineers are often brilliant and shy. There are, of course, tons of exceptions.
It's okay for them to be a little conservative. As we've seen with the likes of GNU extensions and Boost, it is certainly possible to move forward without perfect standardization.

But part of me also wants to put C++ on life support, and simply devote all time to the improvement of D (akin to temporarily moving Python 2.x forward until Python 3 is more mature).
His essay on Lisp/HTML/Viaweb was a reading assignment in my Programming Languages class at Brown (thanks, Shriram!).
In Finance Theory/ Market Microstructure there is the concept known as "Noise Traders" (Finance Theory, see Journal of Finance, is a playground for mathematicians and physicists btw). Noise Traders create a market niche for themselves by taking risks that other informed traders will not take, as such they crowd out "normal traders". This allows them to command a higher return on investment.
IFeud - 'The Daily Show' explores rivalry between two iPhone apps.