skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds a lot like this internet boom era company:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-250529.html

"2001: The financial woes of Mercata, which lets shoppers band together to get discounts on items by purchasing them in bulk, are just another sign of how cash-strapped Internet companies are having a hard time getting investors to come back to the trough. It also marks another investment by Allen's venture firm, Vulcan Ventures, that has folded its doors."
SF-Sacramento-LA-SD

PHX-Tucson-ABQ-Vegas

DFW-Austin-Houston-San Antonio

Memphis-Little Rock-Jackson-Birmingham-Louisville-Atlanta

There's really only one place on the map that doesn't make sense for rail, and that's the inner northwest (bounded by but not including Wichita, Sioux Falls, Spokane, and SLC). Everywhere else on the map there are hugely valuable cliques.

The fully connected graph is a red herring. Until we properly invest in monorail technology (bona-fide electrified six-car monorail!), trains will never be the right way to get from NYC to LA.

But there is a whole universe of people I could hire --- people I can name right now --- if STL and MSP were wired to Chicago metro via high-speed rail. There are also clients who I could do 2-3x more work at, because we could staff on-site.
It was not always this way.
It does? I think the vast majority of plants that most people (at least, where I live) eat are non-fruit. Potatoes, beans, rice and other grains...
This is not a politics article, David. It's about high speed rail, not about the politics of high speed rail.
I think prizes are not the way to go - the amounts of money would need to be staggering.

Offering guaranteed fixed-price contracts like they plan to do with SpaceX is seemingly the best way to go. NASA still has to resupply the ISS, move crews and cargo and put spacecraft in orbit. By making companies bid on tasks they need done they will induce the development of the technologies required and ultimately lower their own (and our) costs.
right. they gotta work harder to lose the fat. it's like slow metabolism vs. a fast metbolism. either way folks gotta take responsibility
Responses:

"All the good names are taken."

Then explain why digg.com has 3500 times as much traffic as dig.com. All the single-real-word names are taken, but who says those are the good ones?

"Once you do find a name and launch a site, good luck getting the press to cover you."

Who expects the press to cover their website?

"Offline advertising won’t help you with exposure."

Who, other than major companies like Microsoft, even tries to get offline advertisement?

"If you are an established media company, your offline brand probably won’t translate into a large, ready-made online audience."

The offline brands that have international acclaim DO translate into large, ready-made online audiences. nytimes.com is ranked 113 in the world.

"Stealing the competition’s audience doesn’t work online."

The reason they give for why this doesn't work is why it does work. They're right, product is the way to build an audience... online. In the real world, Budweiser sells more than microbreweries, even though their beer is infinitely better. Without the internet, I would never have heard of Ayinger beer (small brewery near Munich in Germany), but now it's one of my favorites. The internet helps the little guy and the new guy.

"If, in spite of all of these obstacles, you are successful in building an audience, here’s your reward: low monetization rates."

Sure, because online you compute rates per view. No one is crazy enough to try to compute Walmart's profit per person who looked at a Walmart store or, better example, the New York Times profit per person who looked at an issue sitting on a newstand. If you did (if you could), I bet the rates would be quite similar.
How sensitive are the decisions you are trying to make to the actual market size? A factor of two? A factor of ten?

Does the market exist? Does the need exist?

For startups, these last two questions are most useful in my experience: trying to attack a large market because it is well established is not normally a recipe for success unless you have some way to take advantage of a new trend or a new technology.

I would also focus much more on what's required for you to reach break even operation in a niche or segment since failure to do so will kill you more quickly than many other things.
"Skype's outlook is improving!"

by dropping Outlook integration
Wow, I had no idea the Acela was that expensive.

Alternatively, I just checked and you can fly from Boston to Baltimore (today, with no advance purchase) for $96, and it takes 1'24". (I admit this isn't quite your example, but it's a reasonable illustration of a similar route).

Or you could drive New Haven to DC, which is 306 miles, and google maps suggests 5 hours 30 mins (admittedly optimistic in traffic). If you drive alone in a gas-hogging 25 mpg car like mine that'll cost you about $40.

I'm starting to understand why nobody takes the Amtrak.
> From our perspective, it was a matter of helping our partner and the Ruby community succeed.

I suppose what seems confusing to me is that there are a lot of things you could do to help your customers succeed, but many of them are fairly expensive - such as cutting your rates, or doing high end development work.

With more basic hosting, say EC2, I know that Amazon isn't going to do beans for me, so I'm on my own. I know exactly what the price does and doesn't include, and what I have to provide myself. EY seems fuzzier... it's almost like having an extra developer on staff in terms of talent, but it is and it isn't: you can't tell that person to go off and do something else.

Say I move one of my sites to EY; is your "whatever it takes" attitude going to include fixing up my ugly design/graphics work?:-)
Greg Chaitin on the limits of Reason (2006) [pdf]
Most sexual relationships, feel free to prove me wrong, don't have a 20+ year age gap. Sorry but in my locality teenagers (yes 19 is teenaged) are referred to as "teenage boys" (as opposed to teenage girls, boys being a male descriptor) or "youths" as well as "young men".

The large age gap brought to mind the pederastic (not necessarily paedophilic) relationships of Greece BCE - Socrates apparently railed against older men consumating such relationships.

Morcom's death appears to have been a pivotal moment in Turings formative years - my Freudian speculation was that Turings attraction to younger men, teenagers, could have been an attempt to chase the relationship of his youth that ended so abruptly; much as middle-age men are want to chase younger women as an attempt to recapture their youth.

It also seems right that having left his parents and arrived in bording school only to have his only real friend taken from him by death could well have spurred Turing on into his studies whilst social success may have led him to fritter away his gifts, ignore his studies and follow more worldy pursuits.
upcoming? Wasn't that the startup. yahoo bought it. ( http://upcoming.yahoo.com/ )

I think the problem is structural - the money flows from gig promoters, hence the interface is not built for the user's desires.
The title is wrong. The brain isn't more efficient than previously thought. The axonal propagation of action potentials is... but that means that the brain burns more glucose and lactate elsewhere (at the synaptic junction, if I understand Magistretti properly).

The other HN item (direct link to the New scientist entry) is much better.
I'm not sure if we have it backwards, but the article definitely oversimplifies it. It also makes some embarrassing points for ephasis, plants using antioxidants as defenses, green tea might be, but I doubt many fruits are NOT meant to be eaten by animals.

The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are supported by very strong science.

We've also had some very good recent research into vitamins and other antioxidants in pill form. The news there is not so good, it seems vitamin pills may be worse then useless.

With cancer it's more complicated. Some vitamins like C and D have proven anti-cancer properties but in doses that would kill you. In low doses C might actually be helping some cancers, as they can use it as well as healthy cells.

In summary:

Backward? No.

Oversimplified? Yes, it is complicated.
"...that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors..."

Classy.
upcoming was bought by yahoo in 2005.
I totally agree that the sites are built for the promoters and not the users. The biggest problem I see how can this be built for the users and make money at the same time, any ideas?
It seems to me that the patch wasn't for "GitHub, the EngineYard client", but instead, "GitHub, the Ruby community resource", just as they support JRuby, Rubinius, and Rails development.

If you operated a site that EngineYard saw as a valuable resource for the Ruby community, I'm sure they'd help you out in whatever way possible as well.
FWIW - thanks for hosting them for so long. GH is a wonderful service, and I'm sure EY contributed greatly to it's success.
even better would be a web app that took form html as input and spit back warnings and errors. it wouldn't be able to complete the whole check list, but at least you wouldn't have to look at 59 items every time.
Seems staged to me. It seems unnatural how those 4 people started dancing at exactly the same time at the first wave.

Ps. This is similar to an event where a guy started a dance party http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk
thanks for the link - Fravia's site offers a wealth of knowledge.

RIP to a great teacher, from reverse engineering to searching.
I wrote the initial version of Hecl on the train going back and forth between Rome and Padova. Trains are great for working, and are so much more relaxing than flying around.
It's quite common, particularly long after the fact, for teachers to say things like "of course we knew he was special". The Turing Scrapbook, which is at least partially biased in favour of Turing as a demi-god(!), makes no claims as to Turing being notably gifted as a child; indeed mentioning he was nearly stopped from doing his exams.

He was certainly a gifted child but his exceptional mathematical abilities only appear to have really taken root during his University career.
How YouTube could make $1.2B a Year
If you’re building anything on which marketers will participate by creating, consuming, or sharing content, this article is for you. Its central message: you can easily and effectively monetize your platform by allowing marketers to pay for deep analysis of their audience and yours.
> "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."

I don't buy it.

There are people who are stupid in spite of characteristics that one would ordinarily expect to be associated with reduced stupidity. But I'm betting that any statistics package would show a substantial if not perfect correlation.

And I'm still looking for that technique, or that piece of knowledge, which finally cuts off the lower levels of stupidity.
This is totally fake.
What you describe is that paying customers subsidize 'community resources', which is great for me as a mooching Rails (and github) user, but perhaps not so great for paying customers. I don't think they'd put it that way; and indeed I believe they must provide a lot of 'extras' for their customers for the cost of that service. Still though, it seems that it's a service that will be best with clients who make a lot of help requests, getting their money's worth.
The public energy-efficiency database a private company won't let you use
I was a little sad to find out Jobs hung up after requesting 4000 cups of coffee. It would have been far better to actually see if a little Starbucks could pull that off. Or if they would just turn it down altogether.
I worked on another boom-era company with the same idea: actbig.com. And just recently here on HN someone posted http://groupon.com which is part of this most recent round o' startup frenzy.
But other than tourism and rapid transit (noted above, and not inconsiderable), what does private business have to gain in the short-to-medium term?

I'm thinking of the history of sailing and later aerial travel. It was expensive and risky, but this was considered worthy of investment because there were known destinations and thus opportunities for the procurement of fabulous wealth.

By comparison, space looks rather barren. There is commercial gain in launching satellites which allow us to communicate or observe things on earth more easily, but we've more-or-less automated that. Moving to the moon or Mars would be cool, but the moon is a total desert and Mars and Venus aren't exactly welcoming either - terraforming would be cool but is a truly humongous undertaking. Meantime, it's not like we see lots of asteroids zipping around bulging with desirable rare minerals.

I want to love the idea, but I don't really see where the business model is - the number of people who need the speed offered by suborbital travel is really low, and we're quite a ways off from showing how it would be cheaper than atmospheric flight. Seems to me that a space elevator which did away with the need for expensive rocketry would be a much more attractive investment opportunity.

EDIT: to clarify, I think private sector + space = win. I'm just not sure where the human spaceflight is a really big opportunity. The article seems to suggest that the best return would come from even cheaper satellite launching.
I have been working on one of new startups for events for a year. It will be official lauching soon to college students this month.
I was bullied at school, it lead to me achieving better grades.

Is it such an unreasonable consideration that being rejected by society (even the society of Kings that would have been more than open to homosexuals) would lead one to focus attention on more ethereal pursuits?
Of course not.

You're a form on a webpage and an empty promise.
Autoradio install packages
Car stereo install packages items, Vehicle-specific Mounting Kits,
a specialist in car audio accessories, mounting kits and stereo harnesses
dash solutions mounting kit.
I think he is a little too ambitious in terms of who would be willing to pay for data. For those people who admire their stats out of curiosity, I doubt many would cough up money for it, especially for more than a month or two. Only companies who use Youtube for marketing and distribution would actually NEED their statistics, in any respect. Although I suppose, nevertheless, there will be a small, small group of super-users who want their demographics for whatever strange reason.
Thank you for that. Recognition from people who don't actually agree with me is always very welcome.
This is new.

Java can use multiple sorting algorithms with different trade-offs. Merge sort algorithms have a good worst case scenario, but are somewhat slower in many average cases. They also need more memory. By contrast quick sort algorithms have very bad worst cases, but tend to be faster in the average case.

The bug you pointed at was a replacement of Java's merge sort with a merge sort that does a better job of speeding up when it runs across runs of already sorted data. This is a replacement of quick sort with a variation that has better average running time.

So what is the difference between a merge sort and a quick sort? Well both are divide and conquer algorithms. Merge sorts are based on splitting a list into two halves, sorting each half, then merging the two lists. Quick sorts are based on taking an element from a list called a pivot, then dividing the list into elements that are larger, smaller, or equal to the pivot. The larger and smaller lists are then sorted in turn. If you're clever about how you set things up you can do a quick sort in place, and this is faster than having to assign then free up memory.

This algorithm is a variation on quick sort that uses 2 pivots rather than 1. The win over a traditional quick sort is that you can sort in place with the same number of comparisons and less moving of data around in memory. This is a win in two ways. First of all you do less moving data around. Possibly more important is the fact that if you're doing the same number of comparisons but swapping less often, then those comparisons have more predictable results. If you understand CPU architecture you'll note that this means fewer pipeline stalls, which really helps performance.
Mice Levitated in Lab
I take your point, but I would still assert there are more and better resources for learning how to be the next Ken Thompson than there are for learning how to be the next Richard Branson.
Good post. I would go as far as saying that not listening is the cardinal sin of any kind of management - I have seen some of the same issues come up with employee management. Basically, don't fear to explain your problem and your proposed solutions to those affected; best case scenario you will gain valuable insight; there is no worst case scenario.
I have this problem too, I want to find tech events, and when I ask for them people always point me to meetup.com, which I often have to leave disappointed. I just feel like I cannot trust that it really has the events I might be interested in, often I am able to find more by googling and asking around.

For example I trust Orbitz/Kayak to find nearly any flight I might care about (as long as it is not in SE asia), but there is no such site where I could search for events and not feel like I might be missing out on something.

I was thinking of this could be built, but figured I must be in some sort of minority. I assume not many people are willing to travel long distances just to attend tech events, and if they are local events, maybe you know about them already.
Have you had a look at http://calagator.org/

It's mostly focused on Portland tech events at this time, and I don't know how well it would scale up, it's also not a business, it's provided as a service to the community which means it's not operating under the same constraints you would face as a startup.
I am continually astounded by how much, and at the same time how little we know about how our own bodies work.
Seems staged to me. It seems unnatural how those 4 people started dancing at exactly the same time and at the same beat at the first wave.

Ps. This is similar to an event where a guy started a dance party http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk

Damn it: I don't understand why this submission went [dead] two times.
Calagator - calendar aggregator
Maybe the new Vex WiFi improves that situation:

http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexnet-upgrade-bundle.shtml
Ask HN - I suspect I've been blacklisted, who can I talk to?
A while back I wrote 'applause' and got heavily downmodded, which I objected to. Does this mean I'm blacklisted. Nothing I do has any effect...
I agree...I think users would be even less likely to pay for something that used to be free. Maybe they could get users to pay for more detailed analytics, such as a breakdown by time/date, location, or a list of other videos users had watched. But this data would only be useful to a small fraction of YouTube users.
I know only one law: He who thinks that everyone is stupid, probably is.
Does this mean I'll no longer get a free GitHub account as an EngineYard customer?

EDIT: N/M, found the answer.

Does this mean I can have a free GitHub account because I'm also a Rackspace customer :)
For commercial law there is the obvious test of whether the law leads to prosperity. Can we have a utopia in which our favourite artists, well funded by copyright royalties, are free of the tyranny of the day-job and may create full time, unfettered by copyrights on existings works that they wish to improve, rework, remix, play-off and a
dapt? Probably not, but the problem we face is clear enough: construct a system of commercial law around the trade-offs that lead to artist abundance.

There is an Economics and Law movement, partly inspired by Coase's Theorem, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/The_Swedes.html, that has high hopes of economic efficiency as a basis for discerning between good and bad law.
Strange Twitter Bug found by Cabel Sasser
1.2 billion (100m / month)
Bill Stone says "I'm going to the moon -- who's with me (TED video):

http://blog.ted.com/2008/08/archive_bill_st.php
You have to seed it with some content.
EY is worth every penny they charge because they provide an incredible quality and commitment of service. They are without a doubt the best hosting company I've ever had the pleasure of working with. Not only are they quick with assistance 24/7, but they all know what they're doing.

This really shows poorly on the guys at Github. It sounds like EY went out of their way to accommodate the growth rate (I have yet to hear the Github guys dispute that) and just because EY was asking to be paid for all the hard work, Github was unwilling to, for once, be paid...Github ditched them.
Cambrian Cloud Explosion
Songkick.com is an events site, for live music events around the world, and they're awesome. They've even got a plugin for iTunes to recommend you gigs based on what you listen to.

(I no longer work there, but their product looks better than ever.)
This is pretty incredible. I'm curious as to what sort of engineering hurdles keep this technology from being scaled up. I remember hearing about this via Michio Kaku on one of the shows he did many months back. Anyone have an idea of how this technology works or scales?
related discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=814446
it seems like the article was more focused on tech events. I wonder if a tech focused event site or a general events site would be better.
The vast majority of plants that most people eat have been so altered by selective breeding that they are quite unlike wild plants. When Richard Dawkins spoke in my town in March 2009, he made a special point of ridiculing a video purporting to show that the banana was intelligently designed by a divine creator, and finished his comments on that issue by showing a picture of a wild banana, which looks very different from the cultivated bananas that are universal in world commerce. The same is true of potatoes, rice, maize (especially), and most common foodstuffs.

The evolutionary history of cooking

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html

goes back as far as the origin of genus Homo, and modern human beings would look--and eat food--a lot differently if they hadn't already undergone a lot of evolutionary selection for eating cooked food.
Starting launching a startup in this space, but then took a sharp turn and launched Urbantastic.com instead.

The idea was to improve the user experience - basically by putting a Pandora-like system in behind a Google-like front end. We launched it, it worked great. With a few clicks the site would sort everything in the city by what you'd be most interested in, and keep that sorting (without signing up) for the next time you came. But about a month in we concluded that the UI was not the issue. I agree with StrawberryFrog in that the issue is structual.

I think that there's still a big missing piece. Something's got to get event listers and event seekers in one place that adds more value than just finding things to do (and I don't think content like local news is anywhere near enough). I'm half expecting something to evolve out of Facebook events, but it's not there yet.

Also, crunching the revenue numbers from local (Vancouver) weeklies, then multiplying worldwide, it's not the kind of money that you can take a lot of investment for. People just don't spend much time looking for things to do.

Short answer: it's a feature, not a product. But to what product does this feature get added? I don't know yet... There's been a _lot_ of failed attempts already.
Parallelized Knuth-Morris-Pratt Search Algorithm