skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Finding and Fixing Issues in Live Games to Increase Gameplay and Revenue
It's great to see how easy it is for drivers to switch networks if they are unhappy, but drivers have to understand that prices are going down and they'll likely earn less money over time on all networks.

When articles are posted about Uber drivers earning $90k/yr, I'm sure many folks quit their $40k office job and hit the road. The thing is, driving taxi is pretty low skilled so the growing supply of drivers will really push down their income. There's an efficiency problem when an Uber driver "can earn" more than 75% of Americans, and existing drivers have been reaping the benefits of those inefficiencies.
"To the moon" is a great example of the game you are looking for -- old school pixel art graphics, but it has a beautiful touching story. And the music... just listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QfPDmzpC2Q
There were plenty of older, married founders in our batch (S14) at YC. Some with kids. Message me directly at andrew at bayesimpact.org, and I can connect you with some to speak to.
isn't exactly universally accepted.

Good point. People will always believe in magic and gods and meeting dead friends again too, but while they continue to stand firm in their fantasy beliefs, we march forward creating an actual future.
>Energy, AI, Biotech, and Drug design

If you want to advance these fields throw money at universities, not startups.
How about fraud protection (on both ends)?

Exactly. There's a reason I prefer using a credit card over directly depositing cash in a company's bank account.

It's all too easy to forget that fraudulent sellers are just as much of a problem as fraudulent buyers.
Even if $90K a year is sustainable, driving a taxi is a very high-expense business. You'll drive your car into the ground far quicker than you did before, insurance is going to be insanely expensive (an UberX driver I talked to once told me his insurance is $7K a year), and gasoline isn't free (and getting less and less free every day).

The take-home from $90K driving taxis is very different than the take-home from $90K sitting at a desk.
The set of chemical substances that could be synthesized 100 years ago is a tiny fraction of the size of the set of chemical substances that can be synthesized now. A 100 year old cola recipe almost certainly contains only naturally occurring compounds, while a brand new pharmaceutical is almost guaranteed to contain synthetic compounds.

Additionally, creating a substitute cola recipe only requires mimicking the taste and physical characteristics. When reverse engineering a pharmaceutical it's necessary to duplicate the biological effects as well, which is far more complicated.
Remember when people used to line up to get their copy of Microsoft Windows? Fame is fleeting.
In AI, how can a startup hope to succeed when academia has had almost no success in 50 years (and I am doubtful throwing more CPU/neuron layers will 'solve' the problem).

I would say that academia have had tremendous success with AI research... but that's IF you accept that the goal doesn't have to be "a machine that thinks just like a human" and if you don't hold to an "all or nothing" outcome.

In terms of incremental improvements in techniques that make machines "smarter" and more capable of helping humans solve problems, there's absolutely been amazing progress. Look at Watson, for crying out loud.

So, if you accept that premise (that the goal is just "smarter" and not "thinks exactly like a human") I don't see any reason to think a startup can't make progress in this area. Will they invent the first full-fledged AGI? Maybe not, but I don't think that's the point.
I didn't go into rewards programs because that's an entirely more complex issue. In fact, rewards programs are a business hack upon the risk model.

At some point, someone noticed that they were accepting all of this risk money per transaction, and that they could make a tidy profit if they took only the low risk users, so that they could make profit on the risk model. Well, how do you attract the low risk users? You offer them a cut of the transaction.

Over time, as you pull more and more low risk users into the rewards pool [edit for clarity: there are only high risk users in the default pool], the cost of doing business as usual goes up, and you have to start raising your risk charges. Well, higher risk charges means more money available for rewards... and so on and so forth. Durbin should help to restore balance, but it will take some time.
Yep, I was surprised too. We submitted our infosec company and hopefully there'll be others who are doing the same thing. There aren't enough easy to use security tools, maybe one of us will be caught in the net.
Easy API Key Management for Node – A Sample App
Not GP, but:

⚫ Defendants are entitled to defense. You might even say it's in the name.

⚫ People are entitled to exploration and speculation of both history and legal issues. Legally guaranteed that right in some places.

⚫ Why are you so intent on prosecuting him? For that matter, I note a pretty pronounced pro-Spook bias in many of your posts.

⚫ The circumstances which lead to Qwest's precarious financial state were largely, some might say entirely, the result of the Government's actions against the company for failure to comply with NSL and other intelligence requests.

⚫ I see nothing even in the prosecution's case which establishes that the sale of stock 1) wasn't part of a longer-term asset sale, that 2) it wasn't part of a pre-planned asset divestiture plan. Quite common, there's been previous discussion on HN, I believe, on planned sales by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft stock.

⚫ If some of the "material, non-public information" related to surveillance requests, Nacchio was pretty much in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. Specifically: he was culpable if he disclosed the reason for target undershoots, or if he didn't.

The point remains that the document you've provided as definitive evidence is anything but.
Last time was July 2014.
Hello - will the new 3rd edition come with an updated screencast series? How will you price the screencast + ebook bundle?
Not more; I said half my pay that I'm earning now. Actually, not even half. Any amount of money that I can earn while sleeping is fine by me.
Many folks do it full-time because it pays more than the their other job. There are also incentives if they driver full-time hours.
I think this and the grandparent miss the point. The paragraph starts "it's too hard". Too much choice, lack of metrics, lack of clear comparisons can make things as hard as no choices. The availability of discount brokers doesn't solve the problem, as evidenced by the number of people making mistakes.

"Most people either pick individual stocks and bonds and expose themselves to high volatility, or pay very high fees to mutual fund managers and lose to the index anyway. Most people are also non-experts when it comes to portfolio rebalancing and tax optimization."

Education, clear UI, consistent metrics and prioritisation are all potential issues. Do all these services exist outside of your country? What if I move countries? How do I explain it to my mother? What if I only have $1000 to invest?
Yeah, but that pisses off passengers and drives them to try Uber competitors.
I think startups can prevail in terms of business model and not just technology.

Look at Uber, Uber has an app, but the real issue in Uber is creating a marketplace, managing a brand, managing relationships with drivers, fighting the taxi companies, etc.

Innovations in how health care is organized and delivered are very possible.

As for food and water I'll say that the case for vegetarian and veganism is often overstated. Out here in upstate New York we have plenty of water and plenty of hillsides that are good for grazing and not for tilling. In other places the situation is different, but in some places animal agriculture is part of the solution and not the problem.

I think both the single payer and pension arguments miss the fact that the US is at a hub of a system. Inflated drug prices in the US finance drug development and cheaper drug prices in the ROW. Similarly, what a government run pension fund can attain in another country is unrelated to what one can attain in the US.

I agree with the part about stagnant real incomes, which meshes with the rising cost of health insurance, housing and college, but I don't think professional pension fund managers do that much better than individuals in the long term. They may avoid stupid mistakes like selling all of your shares in the winter of 2008-2009, but the real advantage pensions have is that they can borrow from peter to pay paul, at least in the short term.
It's a very well written article by a reputable author about a serious issue that you haven't read.
Also,I just found this, by looking at an old HN thread about BizSpark:

http://aws.amazon.com/activate/
Electronics is an online business these days, the equivalent in the UK (Maplin) keeps up only because it sells lots of other random bits and pieces like cables and consumer electronics that nobody really buys. Their actual electronic component business is tiny and expensive. They occasionally have great deals on tools though. I can't speak for Radioshack, but sadly the technical expertise in Maplin is lacking. They know a hell of a lot more than the guys in PC World, but about proper electronics design/components? Don't bother.

To be fair Maplin are trying to move with the times, they've got a cheap 3D printer, they sell Arduino bits and so on.

I can get next day shipping from Farnell (£20 min order) with all my bits at industry prices. Farnell and Digikey cover components for most hobbyists (and of course lots and lots of big businesses) nowadays. For those of us in Europe options like Mouser and Digikey are normally secondary, simply because they ding you with exorbitant delivery charges unless you make a big order and you have import fees too; though I think Digi now includes everything.

Then came Sparkfun, Adafruit, Seeed and the glut of third party vendors selling hobbyist things. Not to mention Tindie and of course eBay. There's just no contest any more.

If you need parts fast, then Farnell is usually good (usually...). Digikey is extremely reliable, but for international orders it's 2-3 days. Other companies? It depends, but most of them have expedited options.

It's often said on the Amp Hour by Dave Jones that going into a parts business is a mug's game. Your margins are razor, razor thin and going to brick and mortar will kill you.
The article is not compelling. Visa and Mastercard only take a very small cut of txns (15-30 BPs). The bulk of fees go to the card issuers with the bulk of that revenue supporting loyalty/rewards programs. You could try to get rid of V/MC but they have provided quite valuable organization.

The only argument that you can really make is that the issuer cut needs to be trimmed in which case rewards/loyalty cards would mostly go away. Good for merchants, bad for issuers and terrible for cardholders.

A payments network on the scale of V/MC that has worked near perfectly for over 50 years is far from "fundamentally broken".
Translation: More ROI plz, we got the bankroll now
I'm genuinely surprised. I imagine this is just a policy of minimum appeasement, but it's very interesting how rapid the change was.

Edit: Also, the strike is going forward - not all of their demands were met. Maybe this is just so Uber can say "hey, we tried to do what they asked?"
That's an argument against that particular kind of regulation, not regulation in general.
You may nave a point, but you're making up numbers and forget other scenarios. How much ram and HD overhead there is to virtualize ping? How much time do I need to spawn the vm? Vms are great, but there are problems better solved by containers. Use both.
Excellent write up. What I find in a lot of these sort of Agile process stories is what comes before and after the process is almost more important.

Developers and companies in general are there to build new things and push out new features. But what I have found is that sometimes the backlog and feature requests cloud the ability to focus on changing the entire product or user experience.

There is a lot of "feature creep" in products these days where rather than refining the current product, more is added on to it to "enhance the user experience" or to provide "more productivity".

There should be at least one sprint per month or quarter that is devoted to removing backlog and feature / functionality from the product. Yes, removing features from the product.

Making this a normal process gets people used to the idea that it is ok to get rid of something and to be constantly looking at how to improve by removing things versus always adding.
How come there’s an iPhone 6 but breast pumps are stuck in 1.0?
Ask HN: Fastest Web Framework? Rails, Django, Node.js, ASP.NET, PHP on HHVM
I have to create a SaaS. What backend should I choose?

Which one's the fastest in terms of processor performance? Something which will let me scale with minimum hardware.

I have to stick with the one that I choose as this is something which can't be changed later; like Facebook got stuck with PHP.
In practice, "AI" is used as an umbrella term that definitely includes that kind of stuff. I can't speak for YC, but IMO Semantic Web work should probably fall under the AI umbrella in this case.

(Edit: in the interest of full-disclosure, my startup is doing a lot of work with Semantic Web technologies, particularly in terms of applying them to Enterprise knowledge management)
Ars Technica: Destiny Review
Migth sound good in theory but in reality not so much. Porting an app from iOS to Android. Rewrite. Using the google cloud apis and moving to amazon or azure. Rewrite. All vendors want platform lock in. The underlying tech is really fairly irrelevant.
The "less than $500k in revenue" requirement is more limiting than one would think.
If a data format is open, startups can still provide proprietary metadata & analytics, which could be distributed via API. The presence of open data would encourage startups to define a common, open API. The challenge is convincing startups that they should invest limited resources into building an ecosystem, instead of a walled garden.
I agree, I think this list is just going to make folks add AI or science! to their startup idea in the hopes it has a better chance of getting in to an incubator.
And have you been affected by Watson? Neither have I.
I'l agree that HN isn't the best place to debate it. But if we all agree on that, why does it seem so one-sided on here? Flame-bait assertions that Israel has what the Nazis could only dream about are just fine and highly upvoted, as are vague and unjustified claims that Israel's response is heavy-handed. Meanwhile, just pointing out that the conflict is more complex than that and Israel has reasons for what they're doing too is apparently considered unacceptable off-topic debate. Is this place a Hamas propaganda site or something?

Keeping out of the debate entirely is fine, but if we're doing that, let's downvote and reject posts like the ones in this thread by yamayb and jdimov that are packed with inflammatory rhetoric that has nothing to do with the original topic here.
Just Apple. Not anybody else trying to integrate with payments companies. Apple only is responsible for this.
Are you implying that these fields are only pure science? I'm just curious.
> - How much space does this airline's seat provide?

> - Does this plane have power outlets? And not the ones that EmPower plugs, those don't count. I'm looking at you United!

Seatguru
Audio fingerprinting as used by MusicBrainz is a little different concept. Because it doesn't have the need to match short phone-recorded samples, we can use more efficient algorithms for both the fingerprinting and their matching. It's usually not the match rate that goes down when dealing with a large database, but the false match rate that goes up. And of course performance. Those were my two main things to worry about when I was working on AcoustID (the current fingerprinting technology used by MusicBrainz).
There's no incentive to build and run a free Uber/Lyft competitor the traditional way.

If someone were to build a Stellar-like decentralized market that matched drivers with riders who pay with the market's internal currency, the incentive to build and improve upon the service would be the appreciation of the currency. People who thought it could succeed would buy some of the currency cheaply, build applications that make the market easy to use, and profit from the gains their improvements cause.

It could happen.
I doubt Apple will make any money off of transactions, can someone prove me wrong? They aren't part of the exchange, so they wouldn't have any way to collect fees. I don't know where the author thinks there would be "extra costs" - payment technology has always been something the financial institutes absorbed. In this case, I imagine Apple incurred the cost of developing the app and the payment networks will have an ongoing cost to maintain their Token Service Provider.

Apple Pay is really just an implementation of the contactless schemes (I say schemes because mastercard, visa and amex have their own flavours which preceded EMV's specs) using EMV tokenization, as the author mentions.

I agree that the payment system and requiring a third and fourth party can eventually be eliminated, but how can we expect the financial institutes to replace credit cards when they have no control over the payment networks?

Edit: I know a few years ago there was a new group created by merchants to develop a "payment card" which would be free of charges. Seeing how big merchants are, it would only make sense that they collaborate to develop a free payment technology which works with the financial institutes.
I'm also reminded of Gartner's Hype curve:

http://na1.www.gartner.com/imagesrv/newsroom/images/hype-cyc...
I am thrilled to see the term "Punctuated Equilibrium" used in regards to language evolution! Very interesting!
Not really. IMHO programming languages should become more and more expressive to the point of being as closed as possible to spoken language, in a distant future.
You are a single data point. We have hundreds of other YC participants that fit the 20-something and single description.
No reason a competitor couldn't offer the same level of protection.
MiniZinc Challenge results announced
Google’s first state-side Adsense partner will make your crappy site sing
shouldn't you pick the one that you are the strongest at?
Would you recommend the GH4 over the Canon 5D Mark III?
I'm not sure a middleman service is even really necessary. There's plenty of drivers right now driving for multiple services. The more services there are, the more competition there is for drivers' time, which means drivers have more leverage.

One could read Uber's insistence on canning drivers who turn down too many rides as an attempt to reduce this leverage, since the only way drivers can exercise it is to turn down Uber rides in order to drive for somebody else. Requiring them to accept a certain volume of Uber rides effectively ties them to Uber.
Simple—it's not Turing complete. The whole premise is to eliminate recursive structure. Replacing them are measured folds and unfolds of data and codata respectively. These allow you to get as close to infinity as needed on both sides without going over (for some moderate syntactic and semantic penalties).

Within a language like the Calculus of Coinductive Constructions like Morte appears to implement it's not such a strange idea to have normalization.

So, no infinite loops means no Halting Problem means no completeness.

The upside is a larger set of easy-to-perform optimizations, much greater mathematical elegance. The downside is that you cannot directly write an interpreter for a complete language. Though you could write one which halts every N steps and requires user input to continue. In practice, that isn't the worst idea for a repl anyway.
I also thought the Financial Services section was rather tame and un-disruptive.

The problem is not that it's hard to find good ways to save and invest, although that is a true statement. The problem, at least for most people in the US, is that besides Social Security, "personal saving and investing" is currently the only available way to secure one's future/retirement. An additional, related problem is that the only personal saving and investing option available to most people is "buy one or more Financial Services products": Savings accounts, stocks, bonds, funds, 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, even pensions which are long gone. They're pretty much all the same scam: Hand your own personal money to someone else, and in 50 years, it may end up bigger or smaller or the same, depending mostly on who you chose to give it to, and other factors totally outside of your control. If it ends up bigger, you chose wisely and/or got lucky, and deserve to retire comfortably. If it ends up a lot bigger, you chose brilliantly and/or got really lucky, and deserve to retire in luxury. If it ends up smaller, you chose stupidly and/or got unlucky and deserve to eat dog food when you're old.

Can we get away from "use your own personal money to buy a risky financial services product" being the sensible way to secure one's financial future? Now that would be a worthwhile problem to solve.

Not to mention the fact that "Saving and Investing" is only available to people who can actually afford to save and invest (which is yet another problem that desperately needs solving).
The bicycle is a 80/20 solution, but it's hard to make VC-level money in the business. Plus, a few more decades of high-tech short-distance personal transportation and we'll all look like in Wall-E and the bicycle will become 20/80.
How does high-impact writing work?
Swift.nV Tutorial Part I
Some simple steps to scale a Ruby app
Working on http://www.buzzerati.io - I crawl, mine and discover tech news and rank them based on fb shares/number of tweets and linkedin shares. So, you can see what is the hottest content being shared on social networks.
I've been following the wheel-wear issue with some interest. Curious what alternate wheel designs might prove more resilient under the off-road conditions found on Mars.

I'm supposing that any sort of rubber or similar material would prove prohibitively expensive in terms of mass?
Is it just me, or are these RFSes too vague to be inspiring or actionable. It looks like you perhaps had a good list of actual ideas, which you redacted to death ?
And the irony is this is exactly what Uber is doing to the traditional taxi industry.
libpcap is a lot of fun to play with.

Writing a simple protocol dissector, starting with IP, then TCP, then app-level protocols is a good project. I had to do something similar many moons ago. You'll get a sense of what's actually being put on the wire, and what your networking stack is doing for you behind the scenes.
> Now open the compiled `main` file in a text editor and search for this text:

FYI, the unix utility 'strings' has this as it's raison d'etre.
Well said, we share our planet. Poor animals and plants dont have their own voice, but certainly need more represntation in our daily thinking.

Would be great to hear from the leader of the startup world. Even if only to bring attention to their cause

What would be some good startup ideas here?

My only idea is a company that manages National/Regional parks and has a monetary incentive like a)Being paid by people who visit their parks. b) Being paid as a service per square foot they manage. What other incentives can we create to make sure the companies are kept honest without involving too much government oversight?
I'm going to hire a developer experienced in the backend, not create myself.