skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would agree with your loophole assessment. The easiest way to close such a loophole is to simply shift from income taxes to consumption taxes. (i.e. VAT and the like)

Then, you get two (perhaps three) desired effects:

1. Loopholes don't exist. (or exist for everybody)

2. Adding more value is not punished, consumption is.

3. The last effect is that it may slow growth, which may or may not be desirable.
Thanks about "there is no universal answer". I was thinking if there is some "average" equity that people are giving out for 100k. Example, in YC, it's 2% - 8%.
The two proposed causes ("men spend more time on the Internet"; "men are more aggressive") are plausible, but perhaps there are also fewer women who feel capable of editing the average Wikipedia page.
This is where Skype should have been going all these years instead of spending time on pipe dreams with EBay integration.

I wonder how long they (Team Apart) can stay ahead ahead of the long tail of all these collaboration apps coming online. They may have great tools, but there will always be more/better/other tools you want to use.

I think the Google Wave platform approach might be more of what they should do. Provide the platform with extension points and let everyone else build the apps for you. Developers, developers, developers, etc.
I don't understand this statement in connection to your first one.

I think its fine for people to take a stand for political reasons but not necessarily insane. That is not what has happened here. If they did not like Bush, they had 8 years to pull out of the U.S. when Bush was in office. They did not. They pulled out when Obama's attorney general started going after clearly illegal tax evasion.

I am not happy with the fact that I will be paying for the rest of my life for the costs of Bush's spending. You do understand how much the national debt and credit exposure rose during his terms, don't you? You do understand that "no new taxes" generally gets interpreted as "we'll silently create new debt"? I am highly conservative when it comes to money. I pay as a I go, and encourage others to do the same.
What's the "great benefits" to you adding "require 'rubygems'" like so many droppings to all your libraries?

Not that it makes any sense arguing further, but for the record, I was not talking about libraries, I was talking about apps. Top level apps that need to require those libraries somehow. I would have thought it was completely reasonable for top-level app authors to require rubygems to pull in the libraries they need but judging by votes, apparently not. C'est la vie.
Didn't work for me either, though I didn't know I could skip it, which is great to hear. I'll have to visit it again.

Edit: Not having an up button to cycle through the history kills me.
Convertible debt is the best thing from your perspective and means you don't have to answer this question.
Empower Your Crowd
Heavy Data Use Puts a Strain on AT&T Service
I was starting to think in terms of arithmetic encoding before reading the article, but the given solution is far more elegant.
GMail support people cannot look at your mail (though they can close your account, among other awesome powers). I imagine there must be techs somewhere in the chain that are able to access mail, but the GMail people who regularly interact with customers cannot.
Hacker news is full of smart people of similar interests. You shouldn't take comments as Gospel truth, but the fellow readers here can be a tremendous source of information.
For Hackers Who Don't Sleep
I would not go back to college unless it was absolutely necessary for my chosen vocation. The tuition/debt plus opportunity cost is just too high. So if you want to be a teacher or accountant, then a degree makes sense. But if you want to code, teach yourself, find freelance gigs to hone your skills, and then look for a job. If you just want to learn for the heck of it, get a library card. It's cheaper and will give you a better education.
Does providing the blow and hookers really count?
I wasn't aware that sharing your browser history with every website that cares to check it was a 'feature'.
I do consider that in some cases they have no problems abusing laws of other nations. The countries you mention are very small. They could not accumulate the wealth they have in a vacuum. One thing small "banking" countries have subsided on for ages is helping people/companies in other countries hide their money. If these small and noble nations are indeed noble, they will find a way to survive without doing this. They already have a head start. If we cut them off now, will they be able to survive as they have without continuing to engage in illegal banking? Or how long will it take them to devolve into banana republics?
and? it makes sense. sure, for a server every now and again, ec2 is hard to beat. But if you use a few servers all the time, well, it's a whole lot cheaper to build and host your own.
Your design is super hard to read, and I just graduated and no longer have access to my .edu account. Why do you need to log on, exactly? Fail.
No alumni email? That's what I used.
Good point. The one I've got only has one PCI in fact.
Love the last answer.
I think it's fair to assume that YC et al are looking for some or all of the elements demonstrated here - a feasible and practical idea, demonstrated skills, some thought out strategy / swot analysis.

For me, what makes this application as a sole founder stand out from the many other talented people who apply?

> How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet?

There's a joke in here somewhere.
"you must login to view schools"

Why is that?
Dropbox is indispensable to me.
It is my main sync method of my most important Keynote outliner file.
I am impressed by their obvious technical mastery as well as their clear idea of how things could turn out and how they could find their niche.
Do some research on a fellow by the name of Napolean Hill you may find it interesting.

You will not likely have a better opportunity than now to do this. It sounds fun to me and I am an old guy. I keep wondering. Why would you not also earn a little money along the way as needed? Doing whatever.
> I rarely see any well thought out, cohesive arguments for re-structuring wikipedia.

Yes, there are a few (such as the examples to improve citizendium). The first would be to remove anonymity. If the editors are know it would improve quality and would help to bring in specialists from fields.

Currently WP is now a vehicle for anonymous slander. Lies simply get repeated. Things do not have to be true – it just have to be on another website.
The problem, of course, is how to solve this without neutering both CSS and the DOM in the process.
That doesn't have to be a file from the users. It can be a sample filename he sees his colleagues names; thus trying to solve the problem of versioning by filename by non SCM users.
Who knows. For a country with Japan's neighbors and no navy I'm sure it's not a potential vulnerability they're eager to create.
I assume that it's simply setting styles on links using the ":visited" pseudo-selector, and then either:

1. Using JavaScript to get the rendered style, and thus work out whether you've visited a particular URL, or

2. Setting background images on links which only apply when visited, and checking whether your browser retrieved those images.

It's a rather old and well-known trick.
"We were better for having known him, and he was better for having shared his life with us."

The rest is detail.
key educational fact that the ability to learn abstraction seems to be tied to puberty in most children

What is the evidence for this, in view of the fact that children in several other countries around the world learn the same things the author suggests that American children learn at much earlier ages?

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/ame...

http://www.cbmsweb.org/NationalSummit/Plenary_Speakers/ma.ht...

http://nces.ed.gov/timss/
I haven't touched my alumni email in so long, I wouldn't know where to look for it.

Any reason to not just allow any email?
It makes me sad that Yelp won't innovate in their core product. The site UI is virtually unchanged in 3+ years. I'd love to see them un-bury the histogram of ratings, and add granularity such that a tween complaining about the waiter's shoes isn't weighed the same as a 500-word review of a tasting menu's intricacies.
Wikipedia can never work, it's a socialist experiment.

;->
"The ridiculous things people name their documents to do versioning, like "proposal v2 good revised NEW 11-15-06.doc", continue to crack me up. "

So true...
Your recent post on the education bubble is well written. I look forward to future installments. Since I assume you make financial decisions with hard numbers, I'm hoping to see some as this thesis continues.
> How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet?

There's a joke in here somewhere.

I'm curious about what other sole founders answered here. I believe I wrote "Does a man ever truly know himself?" once...
Very so. As a lifelong rock and film fan, it's WP schoolin' me alla time. Cuz, as Mark Twain put it: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
I'm guessing you need admin access to the database to mod things down. Flagging is all there is so far as published info.
Shazam, an application that identifies songs being played on the radio or TV, takes so long to load that the tune may be over by the time the app is ready to hear it.

Shazam runs straight off the iPhone. Its load time has nothing to do with AT&T.
He gave more to this world than he took.
he's making a case for the product with this statement.
Flipping for 'sufficient' entropy is pretty much what the method does, where 'sufficient' in this case is the maximum.
I doubt they have the money, although there's an outside chance one of them could scrape it up, but it strikes me as a fairly perfect fit for any big newspaper, such as the NYT or the Washington Post, who actually has a somewhat similar (good, but it's no Yelp) local product.
wow, this is cool to see someone else submitting this here =] i built this because i didn't like that i couldn't connect with others on hacker news (though i can understand this was probably intentional to prevent spam).

i will fix the .edu email requirement eventually, though i originally intended this to be for undergrads on large campuses (such as illinois.edu) so they could easily find each other. if you're on this site and you spot someone else, you know from there that you have at least a few things in common: you most likely read pg's essays, you like to build stuff, you might be a little entrepreneurial, you're interested in programming or ui design.

larry and sergey met up because one of them was doing campus tours. i wonder how many start-ups would have been created if the individuals weren't physically too far apart and had a common place to meet up.

the colors were inspired by xcode's midnight theme.
I think the point Carl Banks was trying to make is that Lisp programmers don't trust standard functions - not that there aren't standard functions to do the job.
send me an email =]
http://emberapp.com/explore/categories/ is sort of like a Flickr for artists/designers with lots of user-submitted screenshots.

http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-skins has actual HTML+CSS coded templates for sale.
Cool Digg comments visualization
Just want to take this opportunity to say that I love dropbox and its an awesome service. Great job by Drew and the rest of the team.
"...over the last 60 years has unquestionably been one of the most aggressive nations in the world .... With breathtaking moral duplicity, the USA maintains enormous offshore havens ..."

Thanks to Noam Chomsky ... and almost noone else ... I already knew all that.
This is an interesting little anecdote from their blog - http://blog.getdropbox.com/?p=33
Health Insurance Reform For Capitalists
Yep. You'd be modifying the String class itself, not just Strings that find their way into some file.
Tell HN: useful archives
http://venturehacks.com/archives

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

I am looking for some answers to my own questions and stumble into these two great archives. Hope it's useful.
Clickable links:

http://venturehacks.com/archives

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive
Fred Wilson gets Texas Holdem Investing and explains it with Venture Capital
How Dr. Cook Scooped The Times
will change this at some point--have been pretty busy with my current start up (yc s09, graffitigeo.com). i didn't want people to be getting spammed, though i'm sure this wouldn't be a big problem if i kept the plain text e-mails off and used captcha.
The problem is you do not know if its something you regret until you have the regret. From my experience, the more regrets you accumulate, the more you learn to not have them and enjoy the process of life.
According to https://www.getdropbox.com/about , Arash Ferdowsi is a founder (and CTO). Looks like the entire dropbox team is 15 people.

One of the most remarkable things about this application is how accurately it predicted what Dropbox would be. The idea isn't hard to grasp, but its brilliant execution continues to distinguish dropbox as a surprisingly good product.
Don't forget Kickstarter and Everyblock. Chicago will be fine.
I did this recently. Just got back last month. I quit my job and went traveling for over 7 months, through South America, across by freighter to South Africa, and by land up through Africa to Egypt.

It was the best experience of my life.

I was hugely nervous about doing it, but it was something I had always thought about doing. Naively I didn't expect to learn much, just that I'd have an interesting time, but I ended up learning a lot about myself (on top of everything that I learned about the countries I traveled through.) Long term travel gives you the luxury of distance and time to think clearly, something you do not have very often in life. On returning I've readjusted my priorities and I think I know better now what really makes me happy. I hope that everyone gets a chance to do something like this. It is a luxury (although it really doesn't cost as much as you'd think), but an amazing one that is well worth it.

I also have some excellent stories :) Let me tell you about the desert in North Sudan...
So long as you have someone to stay with and feed you to recuperate after its all over, you should go for it. The only thing that should stop you is knowing that you would actually be living on the street when its over and have little way of picking yourself back up.
Writing a simulation of yourself would not be even remotely practical for most people.

A tool to allow people to create such a simulation could be an intresting idea for a start-up.
thats what I assumed...you got momma to back you up, she's not gonna let her child starve ;). go for it!!
Just based on the title, I'd have to say "more probable than any other state". I should probably have flagged this article, but 'eh.
Mule ESB makers offer Tomcat-based Java server
Seal pulls 5-year-old from dock
Upcoming startup workshop in San Francisco (organized by Joel Spolsky)
Heck, tell the entrepreneurs your interviewing your story and ask if you can sleep in their offices for the night. You'll probably get the real story if you spend a few hours with them after hours anyway.

Aye, [do your tour-of-interviews] and you may [go broke]. [Stay home], and you'll [save $20/day] ... at least a while. And [loosing your soul] in your [cubicle], many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and [do your tour-of-interviews] and tell [our corporate overlords] that they may take our [souls], but they'll never take... OUR [DREAMS]!
Yes, they did. It is time for a national death penalty moratorium. This is not the first time.

This is a more straightforward read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Willingham
I would give this guy an interview.
Boo hoo. AT&T is offering a product just like any other business. They don't get special sympathy just because they have millions of customers. When I pay my ghastly $100/month bill I expect to get the service I paid for (access to internet whenever I want) and as long as I'm getting that coverage, I'll be happy. Sorry NYTimes, I don't buy it.
You might be a little crazy. Why don't you put the money in the bank for now and find some entrepreneurs to talk to in Chicago instead of chasing all over the place? You have 37signals in Chicago and Adrian Holovaty of Django/Everyblock and that's just off the top of my head. If you want to go on the road that could be fun as well but just saying.
The research described is about the adaptive benefits of sleep to species as a function of their ecological environment. This has no implications for the differences between individuals, even though the article desperately tries to make it seem that way.

If you're suffering from insomnia, get help. Don't be a smart-ass and fool yourself into thinking you're supremely adapted to your environment.
As an 'average punter', I'd never never ever put anything I valued into a 'cloud'.

Why become dependent on a service that can walk away at any time? How many times have people been screwed by net schemes that folded ... just for music alone?

Then there's the security question. How many stores and banks have lost millions of customer accounts to hackers? I can protect my stuff better than you can ... simply because it matters to me more than it will ever matter to you ... but also because my storage is part of the diffuse cloud of all users, not the concentrated cloud of a few giants with big bullseyes painted on them.
And it certainly wasn't the first time, either.
Most of this article pretty much flies in the face of everything that I've read on the physiologically restorative powers of sleep, including things like links between insomnia and alzheimer's.

As a "hacker" that hasn't slept well or regularly for about 15 years now, I'd dearly love to be able to fix my sleep lack-of-patterns. Sleep has become one of those imaginary, wistful things that sounds wonderful but is out-of-reach.
Sure. Why not? Just make sure you have someone that can send you $20 if you run out of food.

Oh, and I'm in San Diego and should have a couch that you can crash on. Email is in the profile.
That's the most outrageous, devilish thing that can and eventually had happened or will happen with death penalty. Someday, we will know we killed an innocent man, and in that day we will ALL be murderers. We all being murderers, we should all be sentenced to death (the Death Penalty Paradox).
Amazing application. Out of curiosity, how much equity did YC take? (6%)?
I like the idea, but what I would love to see (being 6 years removed from Virginia Tech) is an alumni option. Just something simple to help fill in the gaps of the LinkedIn/Facebooks. So many of those searches have such a large result set that isn't necessarily relevant, which hinder the serendipitous finds of people you weren't looking for but would like to get in touch with.

Would be enough to display names that include graduation year, which you might be doing already for current students (I don't have a functional .edu anymore).
true. i think the parent question is more about adding "goodness" to the world, and less about commercial success.

my personal opinion is that search, which sates the quest for information, is a problem worth solving. chat, at least as the text-based instant message kind of things, creates problems. or rather, it's an opportunity loss.

the fact that i'm talking means i'm not listening. even if this weren't procrastination, even if my main goal in life was to communicate with strangers better, is IM helping me get there? is this the problem olark wants to solve, or do they just want to make yet another IM service?

(ps - i think visually. i communicate best with diagrams. discussions with my husband require a whiteboard or paper scrap. i'd love a communication company whose mission was to prevent misunderstandings. make exchanging perspectives faster, help us get along and respect each other while disagreeing, help us make decisions better.)
I tend to have outdoor hobbies, and I'd just love to organize HN hiking, camping, climbing, surfing, etc trips. Geeking out while being outdoors and far from technology sounds like a beautiful way to spend time.
While its no more than an anecdote, I've found this to be true. I only seem to have trouble sleeping when I'm working on a project that keeps me thinking all day long. When I am, I sleep light, waking often, and frequently only sleep 5-6 hours and wake rested. On the other hand, after finishing the project, or in a lull when I'm waiting on something (parts to arrive, someone else to get back to me or the like), I tend to sleep deeply and need upwards of 10 hours a night.

On the other hand, I will once in a while get an opposite period, I'll be working on a project and not be able to get by without at least 10 hours of sleep, or I won't have anything to do and not be able to sleep more than 4 hours at a time.

Sleep just generally seems to not be worth losing sleep over...
Ask HN: learn first or as I go
I have an idea for a website, and I want to develop it in php.

Should I learn php first or just learn while I develop the site?
there's a simple experiment for this- just put off doing it for some length of time and measure your regret at intervals. After waiting long enough that you're pretty sure you'll regret it forever, you can do it.
Crazy Uncle electronslave.

Also, the guy who invented that thing. You know, that replaced razors? (I remember this as being my favorite sci-fi trope, next to "name all the presidents from 1965 onwards.")

Like this dude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wan_Hu

In all seriousness, I think anyone who aspires to legacy isn't focusing on the shape that their life is currently in. Legacy's for dying loaded fogies to worry about, not people young enough to be writing their own bios for press releases.
AT&T has more of a scalability problem than most businesses. Usually you don't have the laws of physics coming in to interfere quite as strictly.
For non-subscribers:

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/0...
here is one answer of one of the aforementioned parties: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=715667
Title could just as easily be:

AT&T Doesn't Provide Purchased Service

or

AT&T Networks Oversold and Underfunded
To Be Relentless
Hell, I would say I learn something significantly new every 4-8 weeks. Then again, I may be operating under a different definition of significant.
Back in '2000 or so, there were approximately 40 products in that space - I counted because I was working on one. They all required some form of download - and non of them got critical mass.

Odigo Communicator; ICQ Surf; Zadu; Hypernix Gooey; Cahoots GetWebby; and a whole lot more. Also, there was an IE addin called 3rd voice that let you annotate a site for others.

I wonder if now is a better time for this kind of products.
I signed up, I've been hoping to run in to someone who would be good to work with on campus
He doesn't have to "regret" having not done it, just "wish" he had done it for it to torment him forever.
1) It sounds like AT&T badly need to invest in some form of packet shaping for their wireless data that prioritizes cell phone data (calls+text+voicemail) over regular traffic.

2) The iPhone should have the option to use Edge for calls, regardless of 3G signal, if there's congestion. Heck I'd probably choose to use Edge all the time, it's so much more reliable in SF.
Video Game Streaming Is Here: The End of the Console?
There's nothing about lawyers that requires geographic proximity. If you really dislike Chicago based lawyers, hire a lawyer out of a VC-specific lawfirm from SV or NYC.
Kickstarter is Brooklyn-based, not Chicago based.
How did this get on the frontpage...
SnapStream TV search is cool.