skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a neat viral marketing / mailing list building idea for you if you like - a local radio news station here has a "weather guarantee".

They have a pool of prize money which increases daily. Every day on the radio they say what their guaranteed weather high is - if they don't hit it, they pick a name from their member database and give them the pool and start over again. Therefore you must join their database in order to win the prize - and the contest itself reaffirms the accuracy of the radio broadcast (if they are willing to be against their weather estimates they must be good!)

What you can do is have the same model with a daily flight time guarantee, and give away a free copy of the app as a prize. People who are going to buy your app will likely do it anyways, so this is a way to collect all the info of the "tire kickers" so you can slowly remind them over 3-12 months why they should buy your app. The viral part can come from getting additional entries in the pool by recommended your friends.

Just a random thought that popped in my head - something to consider while you have all this early launch hype surrounding you..
Usually you choose your deductible and the amount of drug coverage you want. Higher deductibles mean cheaper monthly payments.

If you are a male in your 20s and you are relatively healthy, you should be able to get good health coverage for ~125 a month if you are willing to do a really high deductible, say 10k. What this means is that you essentially only have health care if you get into a car accident or something, and for everything else you need to go into a walk-in clinic and pay yourself.

If you want routine healthcare it should be closer to 200 month. It's more expensive for women, closer to 300 a month or more.

If you are in less than perfect health then the rates go up, that is if you can get coverage at all. There are also certain programs that offer cheaper than normal health care because they use they are run by religious organizations who use the first amendment to get around certain regulations and fees.
The point that I took away is that there are plenty of people in their 20's that bust their butts. When the older generation is complaining about the '20-something whiners' the tone of those rants is usually about how little the '20-something whiners' do (i.e. they sit at home and watch tv/smoke pot/play videogames/etc rather than bettering themselves through education/etc).
Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?
"You are not projecting the image of a driven, with-it individual who is going to take a difficult technical, social, and marketing problem and solve it, making very rich rich men out of everyone associated with the project."

What's wrong with that? I'll take banal truth over exciting falsehoods any day. (Of course exciting truths are even better but you can't have everything)
I am actually commenting on TriinT's comment, not on your title. I'm not very agitated by hyperbole in blog titles. I also agree with your proposal that academic writing have informal sections which explain things in a manner that's not obfuscated for those not in the field.
For that matter, have you seen a book after that combines Victorian social satire with mathematical pedagogy?
> Not understanding that is what makes this guy just as entitled as the articles claim he is.

Does that make him 'entitled' or just naive?

> My advice to him would be get what ever job he can for now, continue to perfect his skills and learn to be grateful for what he does have.

Not always true. I've worked many jobs that suck the life out of you. And I've known people that have languished in such jobs because once you get home you don't feel like doing anything but shutting down. Thankfully I'm in a much better job now.
It's an opinion piece that covers no ground we haven't already read a hundred times over - I didn't see any reporting in the article. Sad - in order to compete with the Tech Crunches of the world, even the WSJ is throwing out flashy LinkBait with little substance.
Insightful.
I do wonder what you think of http://www.dimensions-math.org/ it seems to be more math focused, but is it too just techno-babble with pretty pictures?
Pioneering Internet 'detox' center looks to cure online addicts
I wonder what relation the code/create transition has to the transition from mental translation from your native language to thinking in your new language.
Social Security is (or is at least supposed to be) reimbursement of money you paid into the system. Welfare is a system in which society has chosen to give people money to live to prevent them from having no money at all so it's a gift not payment for any service.
If you haven't read Memoirs Found in a Bathtub do yourself a favor and get it post haste.
Damn I miss that show.
Sequoia Capital's redesigned website: a search bar
What do you think the value of sacrifice means? The value in sacrifice is in the helping of other people. That's why we talk about the value of sacrifice when describing military personnel but not when we talk about suicide.
You might be interested in Mancur Olson's Stationary Bandits hypothesis which he expounds in Power and Prosperity.
80 Nhân viên Bảo Vệ - Vệ Sỹ (nam+nữ)
Trung thực, thẳng thắng, cẩn thận trong công việc
Higher order programming in Javascript
> I'm definitely embarrassed for my generation that we perpetuated the lies, rather than encouraging choices, including self-employment or learning a trade.

This is mainly the result of over-protective, risk-averse parenting. To them, the best way for their child to achieve success was along this path. If their child tried to deviate from the path, they were grabbed by the scruff and forcefully put back on this path by their parents until it was ingrained in them as the only path.

To such parents, things like entrepreneurship are too risky. Their child might fail, and have nothing to show for it. It's better for their child to just go through college, get a job at a large corporation and possibly spend their life working their way up through middle-management until their seniority gains them a nice juicy salary along the way...
The older generation is bitter because they heavily invested according to a specific system of advancement, lived a good life because of it, and now these modern kids act like the system was always broken.

The younger generation is bitter because they heavily invested according to a specific system of advancement, discovered that the rewards provided by the system have fundamentally changed, and blame the geezers for steering them down the wrong path.

Neither generation wants to accept that the rules have changed and don't pay off the way they used to. That's why they're trying to find someone to blame. (Other than themselves, of course.)
yes, but coming from the WSJ which is a lot more widely read by policymakers than, say, TechCrunch this gives the issue a lot more coverage which is probably the right way to think about how it can be addressed by those with the power to address it.
If he feels he's entitled simply because he worked hard and did what his parents told him, he clearly had (and has) some unrealistic expectations.
Yahoo BOSS Might Be Bigger Than Bing
"Science has removed some old proofs of God - the watchmaker proof in particular, by providing alternative explanations for the existence of life."

Said more eloquently than I.
Heroku Sass
google tasks? part of gmail.
Joel, I didn't realize you had a rant on this topic. :-)

It is always great to see that other people are as annoyed by this as I am.

It feels great to attack this problem with modern technology! :-)
Which ones do? I've never seen one.
Not to disagree with you, but most big news outlets (WSJ included) have been whining about how blogs pirate their stories and re-spin them for Google juice. Turnabout is fair play.

Tell you what, I'll subscribe to the first newspaper that digs up the AT&T/Apple contract.
Tell the University you refuse to make it double-spaced. Then maybe I will read it.
Exactly. It's fluff to us, but it's news to policymakers. It reminds me of a comment someone made about an article that claimed that nobody will read your thesis: something about an informal section to go with the formal parts. Well, more-mainstream journalists reporting on something we already know up in our ivory towers is a way to get the message out there.
Xkcd on Branding
It is true that avid business travelers will likely get the most "mission critical" use from our service. Nevertheless, we hope the general traveling public find value in it as well. It can be good to know this info, even if you are not going to rebook.
FTA article: it took "1745 hours, or a bit less than 73 days" on a 1900 MHz Athlon 64.

Also:

"The sieving database was 4.9 gigabytes and contained just over 51 million relations.
- During the "filtering" phase, Msieve was using about 2.5 gigabytes of RAM.
- The final processing involved finding the null space of a 5.4 million x 5.4 million matrix."
I hope we see articles on Hacker News when the operating systems and homebrew apps start coming out.

Being able to do more complex stuff on a TI-83 would certainly allow beginning calculus students to cheat on tests, since most classes allow nothing higher than a TI-83 under the assumption that 83's won't do, for example, step-by-step integration.
So it's fake yet satisfying. Would it be like porn for the intellect, then?
You may be having trouble finding things because calculus done with full rigor is called "analysis". The classic introductory-but-extremely-dense text is Rudin's _Principles of Mathematical Analysis_. If you're reading on your own, though, I expect you'll get a lot more out of a friendlier book; my first analysis course was taught out of Strichartz's _The Way of Analysis_.

N.B.: Most everything in either book will be completely new to you. 1st-year calculus courses have absolutely no interest in teaching you what goes on under the hood; there's just no time. But I think the analogy to Feynman's lectures holds up pretty well.
RTFA.

That is the last typing I'll waste on you.
What do I do if you want to use Canvas if JS is enabled but degrade gracefully if it isn't? Use vector graphics? Generate images on the server?...

(I'm specifically not interested in "everyone has JS enabled anyway" responses)

edit: I'm using Firefox 3.0.13 on Ubuntu Linux and the text doesn't render at all in canvas elements... what gives?
As I can tell you from past experience, 300-400 dollars a month is not a small amount for someone in their 20s with little to no income. In fact, that's a veritable sea of wealth.

If it's a choice between eating and health insurance, which it was for me at times, people will choose eating. And having a roof over their heads.
Can you succeed living a balanced life?
Growing up parents and teachers harp on the importance of living a balanced life. Parents want their kids to excel academically, socially, athletically, and musically. College admissions won't shut up about how well-rounded they want their students to be. But I've noticed something: no one seems to accomplish anything
living this way. Success (as defined by an entrepreneur) seems only to be found at the extremes.

This subject matters to me because I'm currently working a "real" job and trying to get a startup ready for the YC winter session. This amounts to ~16 hours of coding every day, so my life is anything but balanced. One of the things that keeps me going is the above observation. Anyone else believe this to be true?
Actually, in all fairness to kevin, I think it would be silly to believe in God for no reason. But on the other hand, it's equally silly to say that he doesn't exist just because we don't see him everywhere. If there is a God, he's obviously not going to do all the work for us - he wants to us to learn, and we do that by learning from experience and from testing for ourselves.

So to answer Kevin's question: prayer. That's what suggests God's existence to me. Yes, it's very personal and subjective, but it's an 'experiment' of sorts. If God's there, AND wants us to know about him, AND created us, then surely he'd provide some way for us to find out about him, and he'd make it possible to tell him part of some 'trick' or 'coincidence'. I believe one can simply ask God if he's there, and he'll answer. I also believe you can ask him if the Bible, or the Koran, or any other thing is true. If you do your part to learn for yourself and then seek his guidance - he'll answer. How he answers is the very personal part. The Bible talks about 'fruits of the spirit' - feelings of love, joy, peace, comfort, etc... I've prayed, and I feel those things. They're distinct from anything else - they almost have a 'personality' to them. Maybe another person will get a different answer. I would never claim that a person who got different results was somehow 'less worthy', because like I said - it's personal. It's between that person and God, and he judges our lives. I'm in no position to judge what someone else feels.

Now, I don't expect everyone to believe what I said just because I said it, but to me what I experienced is evidence. Nothing anyone could say or show me could convince me that I didn't feel that. And that's why I said that no science could change my mind about God. It could make me question complex beliefs and assumptions, but the aforementioned comet doesn't make me question those feelings by any stretch of the imagination.

edit: I added my email address to my profile - if anyone has further questions or issues with anything I've said - feel free to email me.
and may i ask, why?
California's Subversive Organization Registration Law
Text messages are 20 cents each, or $5,000 per megabyte.

Wow.
Salvage Parts
Olddominionauto.net is an online source to stumble quality used auto part & salvage parts for retailing, assured 6 month and 1 year parts warranty with fixed labor guarantee.
probably got tired of being spammed with business plans, so they hid it
This is possibly the most unusable website I have ever seen. I can't even get to an "about" page. It keeps sending me to a Chinese version of the site.
They're sequoia. They could use animated fire gifs, flashing text, and under construction bmps if they wanted.
It can also provide a wrong sense of security which might turn out to be more harm than good for a normal customer.

Providing a track record will be extremely helpful IMHO.
Aside from the fact that saying post-anything makes me cringe, this was good. I see a new law on the horizon:

"Anything sufficiently innovative will face an uphill battle due to the technological illiteracy of the user base."

It may need to be phrased more neatly though. ;)
Just search for "deck."
I wonder what segment of the industry has this "debate [...] regarding the utility of learning more than one programming language".
IIRC, with some carriers it can even be $35/message. The part that irks me the most is,"You get charged 20c/message to receive messages. Oh, and by the way there is no way for you to prevent a text message from being sent to you."
BOSS is an incredibly useful part of a hackers toolkit. It's fast, very few restrictions and is great for finding arbitrary web content without building your own spiders.

For example, want to search for Twitter and Facebook users by their real names? The right combo of site: and intitle: and BOSS gets you that, see http://overtar.appspot.com
Question is do you have a sustainable model, once everyone buys your app you don't a new stream only from new customers. I just bought your app ;) just wondering if I have to worry about the future of it.
I think he'd probably agree - by definition, his theory means that he's no better at predictions than anyone else, and as I understand his investment strategy, he positions himself so that being right once in a while covers the losses of being wrong the rest of the time.
Or simpler: you solve problem X, making you code as clean, documented, and extensible as you can. Then a team member has to extend it to solve X', where X' is designed to show up bugs in the solution for X (turkish language insteadof english, etc).
I guess their target audience is simply anyone who manages to find what they need to find and do what they need to do on the site, but still...pretty weird. I'd love to know why they did it? How does making their website into a search engine look-alike help them or their brand?
Red Wine - Helpful in Breast Cancer
http://www.sequoiacap.com/us/search?q=login
Users sue Facebook for being too social
ROFLOL this is horrible, at first glance it looks nice until you try to use it
the higher your bar for "success", the more extremes and effort are required to achieve it.
Ha ha ha, I'd sure hope so. The tilt controls are only intended for fine-grained control of moving a little ways... otherwise the user navigates the MAV around by specifying waypoints.
Free beer to the first entrepreneur to send the following image saved as a PDF:

http://quinnell.us/sspb/wiki/images/gnomes.png
It sounds pretty likely... though I think tree-dwelling creatures (like many of our recent-ish ancestors) tend to have eyes on the front of their head even if herbivorous -- examples include possums, sloths, koalas, monkeys. I'd guess depth perception is pretty important when you're climbing a tree.

Anyway, I'm certainly not arguing that binocular vision isn't good for hunting, I'm just saying that the extra few millimeters distinguishing men from women probably doesn't help much. I'm pretty sure men have more widely-spaced eyes than women cuz we're just plain bigger than women (a fact which _does_ actually help with hunting).
They have obviously reached the point where their reputation exceeds their accessibility.

I had to design a website for a law firm that deals exclusively with high net worth clients. They need to be accessible but they do not wish to be approached by 99% of the population. It's a difficult balancing act.
If you go to the bank and deposit $20, you are entitled to get your $20 from the bank. If you fulfill your half of a contract, you are entitled to the other party’s performance.

Well, if you enter into a verbal agreement with someone, you're not necessarily entitled to anything. When your parents told you to work hard at school and college with the promise that the world will take care of you, you didn't enter into a legitimate contract. So despite your whining, the world doesn't owe you shit.
that link is a 404.
+1 from me too. I love the SP episode.
Perth Scuba Classes
Welcome to WA's friendliest dive shop. Located just minutes from the Perth CBD in Welshpool, why don't you join us for a FREE Sunday Morning Shore Dive and BBQ.
Wait. What?

Paypal always charged to receive money. That's how it works.

What am I missing?
programmers don’t think in code. Sure, some might tell you they think in code, but I can almost guarantee that there’s a little voice in their head that’s still speaking a human language (especially since many programming language constructs are essentially unpronounceable

Sigh. Another victim of Sapir-Whorf.
It is quite a coup, especially because text messages are essentially free to the carrier:

Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks.

This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. Voice communication itself had taken place via a separate signal.

"We were looking to a cheap implementation," Hillebrand said on the phone from Bonn. "Most of the time, nothing happens on this control link. So, it was free capacity on the system."

via: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-...
Start-up Survey: What iPhone/iTouch Accessories Should We Build?
You can have SMS blocked, but you have to call them and request it specifically. I believe the salespeople try to frighten you into getting one, warning you of the dangers of receiving an SMS without a plan.
Search is a very crowded space. And someone should ask Sequoia what would prevent Google from doing this?

I don't think this is a defensible model. I think I'm going to pass.
I'm pretty sure that there'll be other business models besides mobiles apps if data proves to be valuable =)
Ask HN: Would you use this service? Voice to text for mobile phones
Thanks, just updated it.
Agreed. I saw WSJ.com and expected actual reporting. Maybe unsubstantiated, "bloglike" content should have "blog" or "ed" in the domain name (blog.wsj.com).
What on the iPhone really is useful though? Twitter? Hell no. Yelp? Not really.

The vast majority of apps for the iPhone are purely for leisure as opposed to productivity, and the Facebook app is by far one of the best in terms of usability and completeness of featureset (i.e. not a dumbed-down version of the full web interface).
Surely we can hack our language to get across our emotions civilly without resorting to swear words. I appreciate your comment and hope the sentiment you expressed is more widely shared around here.
@maurcy Thanks, this technology behind the site which is as rightly pointed out is rss mashup is not the core strength.

The main USP, if you will of the site is the sources it polls and the editorial team.
i think its awesome. if you suck at web design.
The rates have changed. PayPal didn't tell it's users. But you're right, the blog post didn't make that clear.
Now that's singularity fiction; I think speculative fiction really does well when there's a case for a truth or a worldview underneath, and like you said there are lots of "fun-with-philosophy" implications here. Good luck shipping!
Joel - you are spot on with this... I've seen this happen so many times. They don't want people to leave the gate, so they'll trickle out delays (15mins, 30mins another 15mins).

The other one I love -- When they are late they announce it as "due to late arrival of the incoming aircraft". Not sure what this is exactly meant to mean, but to me this is "we're late".
> No, I'm annoyed at the "is X a Y ?" format that seems to be the new headline 'meme'.

It's been the "meme" in far more than HN headlines for years, though.

Coming up, are swing sets potentially hazardous for your children? That and more, after the break.

Even though we all know what the "answer" is, the fact that it's phrased as a question activates some stupid part of our lizard brains that will keep us glued to the tube.
No, it makes them massively unfunded liabilities that you, me and our children will be paying out the ass for our entire lives. Congratulations.
Cheap t shirt printing company
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He mentions generational justice. Does that even make sense? The older generation is going to die first, and then the one that was younger gets to take their turn. A revolving system like that doesn't have to have each pair of adjacent agents breaking even with respect to one another if the inequities are passed on.
Well, I'm not saying I like the idea that we should be oppressed and then take our turn to oppress the next group; I'm just saying the notion of "generational justice" doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
"Everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do."

-- Steven Brust
apparently they don't do any kind of verification yet: http://twitter.com/IE6Offenders/status/3394307542

suppose you could add mozilla to the list, if you really wanted to.
the burden of proof clearly lies with those who posit the existence of an unobservable quality to cognition.
This is great, but be wary of your son doing too much muscle building when he is so young. I have heard from several sources that it may stunt growth. Never seen anything conclusive, but I have never looked for anything either.