skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should invest in a cheap trifold folder and an envelope/postage printer (or envelope tray for your existing, presumably laser, printer). That would cut down your operations time a lot if it gets popular.

Though, I think big, sooo probably not worth the cash.
> For example, when I am a passenger in a car, I typically pause the conversation momentarily if the driver is trying to change lanes or exit the freeway. If I'm walking down the street with a friend, I might pause and stare at a clown instead of dumping a constant stream of audio into my friend's ear.

I think you've nailed it there. It's also about expectations. If you're driving and you suddenly stop speaking (because you need more attention on the road for whatever reason), you know your passengers will understand. But if you're speaking on the phone, you know it will appear weird, so you don't do it (at least not as much)
To be fair, they do intend to have someone show up and fill the table.
Well I just built this for fun, and I will definitely end up in the red overall.

How many people would use a physical mailing service like this, if it had an API and lots of options for paper and envelopes?
I was always annoyed during college how math notations occluded what was actually happening.

I always had to translate math to common sense. Translate derivatives to speeds of gain, gradients to slopes, vectors to movements and so on. Only then I could understand why given theorem actually might be true (and useful). I could often spot some error in lecture during this process. Unfortunately my peers were most of the times not able to do the same (at least not in real-time).

I think much more general understanding could be achieved if my teachers could stand back from math notation and do some hand-waving more often.
I'd love to hear it. christopherolah.coATgmail.com
I'll only send letters to the US, but you can obviously order letters to be sent from anywhere in the world.
Influenza causes death through two primary routes: 1. Cytokine storm causing respiratory failure; 2. Increasing the vulnerability of the respiratory tract to secondary infections.

Route #1 is generally how healthy individuals (including the high-risk group of late-term pregnant women) die, while route #2 is generally how unhealthy individuals (people with weakened immune systems; people with existing respiratory conditions; the elderly) die.

My understanding is that H1N1 is not causing significantly more deaths through route #1 than seasonal influenza, and that the early indications to that effect were due to (a) Mexican health authorities only identifying the most severe H1N1 cases (this is also why Mexico had a much higher reported death rate than the rest of the world), and (b) the elderly being resistant to H1N1 due to its similarity to the 1957 pandemic influenza.

In short: Pandemics are complicated, and sometimes circumstances conspire to mislead researchers.
Is a re-warmed Greenland a bad thing? http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/its-ge...

I also remember a recent article (that I can't find currently) that explained how using Greenland as general indicator of global warming was incorrect.

Either way, I'd be much more concerned over the next ice age than a little bit of warming. You can't grow corn on top of a glacier you know.
How about an api so that we can script it? ;-)

Would make it a lot easier for Amnesty International. All that handwriting makes my hand numb!
Yeah, when I saw that, I thought, "how much did they pay him?"
talk about coincidence!
Hey cool I had this idea once.
Encouraging entrepreneurship via policy?
Retro is nice, and I certainly remember my time with 220s and 320s fondly (not so much my time with 240s, I was forced to use one of those all day for a couple of months, and the flyback transformer gave me a massive headache every day)...

However, I'm not sure I can give up my Inconsolata/Consolas in emacs :)
The problem with your business model is that you will not really make any money with a 6% margin. How about this? Start out with $2 a letter, then give bulk discounts based on the volume of mail sent. It seems that a lot of the comments here suggest that the API would be useful in a MASS mailling campaign. Your pricing should reflect this requirement without breaking the bank. Single letter users will in effect subsidize the mass mailers.
map data just shows where the roads are. Turn by Turn data shows which roads are one way, which side of the road the exit for that interstate is, and other such detail that you would need to know besides just the lines on the map.
There's a bunch of these services out there, but here's a couple that may be interesting:

http://www.postful.com/
http://www.l-mail.com/

Both look pretty clean and offer various capabilities to send lots of letters more efficiently, including an API.
I agree to some extent, though I interpret "haven't yet figured out a good way to teach problem solving" as "haven't yet figured out how to quantify the unquantifiable." In other words, problem solving -- in the sense of creatively overcoming new challenges and not just plugging values into memorized formulas -- is probably impossible to measure and standardize.

I believe you really can teach things like analytical thinking, lateral thinking, creativity, etc... (I have a number of books on these subjects) but how do you measure them via standardized tests? You can't. And so our educational system measures what can be measured: recall, application of rote formulas, etc...

Even the ostensibly freer essay portion of the SAT suffers from this problem: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200403/katzman
Very nice.

I made this one this year - http://bit.ly/mypumpkin

Its really fun to see the confused faces as they ask what the heck it means. But, its even more fun to see people who do get it.
What type of envelope and paper cost that much?
Yeah, the service could be distributed so that the letters can be printed and mailed by any number of people.
being a mononpoly is not illegal or even necessarily bad. It's what you do with that monopoly status that is important. Until someone shows that Google is abusing it's power they will be fine. Up to know everything Google has done falls under the category of improving customer experience and generally making the internet and world a better place. Google was on the wrong end of the stick with regards to a duopoly in map data so they fixed the problem. In fixing the problem they made a duopoly a "triopoly" (is that even a word?). This in my mind is an improvement.
"I never thought this could happen to me..."
French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
Dunno, but from the top of my head: one-way streets, no-left-turn-allowed-here-signs, prolonged roadworks. Perhaps the map data doesn't even map up actual streets that well (does this road go over that one, or is it the other way around?).
Worse than meaningless: Actively misleading.

How many households are legally able to levy taxes? How many households are legally able to print their own money? How many households can borrow money at interest rates as low as the U.S. government can, because their money is a global-standard reserve currency?

The fed isn't even much like a state government, to say nothing of a household.

This isn't to say that all the debt that has accrued over the last year is good -- it certainly isn't

Well, it's not good in the sense that it's always bad to have to take emergency measures. But, given the alternative -- an even deeper economic cratering than we have now -- accruing debt has been, and is, the right thing to do.

Indeed, the stimulus has so far apparently managed to help stop the recession and produce modest economic growth, but unemployment remains ghastly high. We need more stimulus. Bring on the debt! That's what the federal government's emergency powers are for.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/stimulating-thou...
40c for envelope and paper sounds very expensive, surely you could find cheaper envelopes? And paper is what, 2-3c?

(I am from Old Europe so I might be off about prices in the USA)
I'd use it for just about everything. I hate sending letters, but I do really enjoy writing to people. Making the system fully automated would be cool on a number of levels.
keep an online archive of threaded conversations.
I got a cheap invite off eBay (about $4.50) so I could get stuck in with the D&D side of things. So far, I'm still confused, having never played a D&D, but slowly getting there.
I think if someone is paying to have a letter sent, it should be made of high quality paper and be sent with a high quality envelope.
it wasn’t so long ago that Silicon Valley was considered a poor cousin of Boston’s tech center

This was never true. It's true that the Valley has pulled further ahead of Route 128, but it was always the leader.
I was reacting to the last paragraph:

> Another perhaps even more important factor is that when a product is completely free, consumer expectations are low and consumer patience is high. Customers seem to really like free as a price point. I suspect they will love “less than free.”

I don't see how customers will see stuff from Google on their Google phone as "less than free".

The carriers will get subsidies, but they're not the ones who will need "patience".

So I don't see how the writer can justify that last paragraph. Am I missing something?
johnaspden has it right. To put it more explicitly, we can calculate the area of a circle by integrating the differential element of area dA for an infinitesimal annulus from 0 to r. Now, dA is simply the arclength (circumference C) times the thickness dr; since the circumference scales linearly with radius, this leads to the integral of a linear function as follows:

dA = C dr = τ r dr => A = ½ τ r².
Does C# really deserve this treatment?
Game Design: Using numbers and stats to tune the play experience
Bring on the short-term debt.

Committing the economy to heavy debt loads for the long-term future by writing new entitlements is not the kind of deficit spending that most economists think work, though.
How Google Voice Is Growing
Procure por complementos: Complementos para o Firefox
Daily use averages 50,000 to 150,000 trips, depending on the
season, and the bicycles have proved to be a hit with
tourists, who help power the economy.

At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so
badly that they had to be replaced — nearly 80 percent of
the initial stock, Mr. Asséraf said.

JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day.

It would be interesting to see what the comparable numbers are in Stockholm, where they have a similar effort running, but I haven't seen a single vandalised bike.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bjelkeman/2436951384/in/set-721...
Better to spend on entitlements than wars. It'd be great if we were eventually forced to stop warmongering because we simply couldn't afford it anymore.
Another example of data usually missing - speed limits.
I would check that assumption. Most letters I have sent were required because some service was living in the stone age, or making my life difficult.

For example, to cancel my gym membership, I had to mail a notorized document to their corporate office. The entire purpose was to discourage and inconvenience me. I'm sure they toy with the idea of making cancellations in-person only, at an office on the peak of Everest. I'd just assume that letter arrive flaming as printed on high quality paper.
I wasn't implying that it was scary or anything.
I'm a C# developer and just wanted to have a little fun. If I really wanted to scare people I would have put Java on it.
Hadoop, Pig, and Twitter (NoSQL East 2009)
So elect people who won't use violence for any reason.

But writing laws until you're so bogged down in promises that nobody can pay for anything is even more crazy than an unpopular war or two, which causes debt spending for a short time and then subsides.

Each generation has a choice in leaders and a decision to make when it comes to using violence. But mandates and entitlements take that choice away from future generations, spending all the money based on things the previous generation thought were a good idea. Not only is the amount of money much greater, it's a different animal entirely.
See the link. The statistics are there.
i would be more likely to use it if it had an API.
That black ink may get you into red.

http://www.printpsi.com/automated_mailing_system_maverick_in...

Here's your business model if you want to get serious:

1 - You setup a few offices in key metropolitan areas. (NY, LA, etc.)

2 - Each office has an automated setup to print envelopes and letters and stamp them. (I'm sure USPO has a system for this so you wouldn't need to literally stick things on an envelope.)

3 - Web-app/api is centrally hosted and linked to the distribution nodes. Based on destination, you assign the letters to the nearest distribution node.

4 - You undercharge FedEx/UPS/etc 2 day. (That's your ceiling). If you mail in NYC to another NYC address, they're gonna get it the next day.

You have fixed up front costs (the machines) and recurring monthly costs (rent, electricity, paper, ink, etc.).

I would think an investment of around a few 10Ks could get you up and running in the initial key metros (NYC, SF, etc.) and then expand.
Someone else who can't tell the difference between math and arithmetic.
In Germany the official post office provides this service for 1,90 Euros (stamp costs 0,55 Cents). https://www.schreibcenter.de/schreibcenter/

I like the interface of your service!
The points in this article basically boil down to this...

- Global Warming is real and undisputed by mainstream scientists

- Greenland is in big trouble because of it (and here's a few stories of the people who would be impacted)

- We must curb our carbon emissions

There's no discussion of the science, no mention of other ways to solve the problem, and no intellectual thought at all really. It's a human interest piece designed to create an emotional response.
BHeard
We've updated our pre-registration pages. They are still static ATM. Would appreciate feedback from the YC community, please.

www.bheardusa.com
Controversy erupts over lunar lander XPrize
What if nobody is buying? Anyway, further discussion seems futile.
"Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each"

What were they thinking???

Surely it must be possible to design a cheaper bike for that purpose? The electronics shouldn't be much more complicated than an average mobile phone?
I wish I could mail myself a note on a certain date. Would be cool to receive a one year old note from myself next year.
Wow, that's a great idea. I'm adding that feature right now.
[Did you] make a mistake? is kind of valid, no? Casual, but acceptable.
Time spent posting the letter? Or is that wrapped in..
Growing up in MA as a DEC child, I'll admit my perspective is biased... but when I grew up when DEC was the #2 computer company in the world. And they were far from the only Route 128 powerhouse. I'm not saying the Valley doesn't have its own powerful history, but think about this: In its heyday, Route 128 was so big that, decades later, the rubble from what is left is still the #2 tech center in the US and the world.
DrScheme's Halloween "Easter Egg"
The situation is more complicated.

It raises the monetary costs of dinner for people, who want to pay to avoid waiting. For the normal-waiting patrons the strategy feels like increased congestion. (And they bear the costs.)

Why do restaurants have queues anyway? Why don't they just raise their prizes until supply meets demand? There's more than one scholarly article about this question.
13 world class mathematicians on doing mathematical research
Search Your Tweets With TweetSaver
Erlang/OTP Master's Theses
How did the author completely leave out the difference in employment laws. California: you're free to go work for anyone you want. Mass.: you're free to work for anyone, except our competitors or anyone we think might be a competitor, read your contract dummy.

If you work in a specific field, would you really want to be in the state that enforces clauses in work contracts that restricts your mobility. Or the one that sees work as every man has a right to eat. Most likely, the people looking to hire you are your employers rival.
This just makes me think about all the wonderful iPhone applications that are being strangled in the cradle because their inventors don't have power and clout to pressure Apple the way Google does. I wonder if Apple realizes that Microsoft is to Mac as Google is to iPhone.
This article belongs in the dictionary under the term FUD. It's basically designed to scare people away from any option other than the traditional system iby saying only old school institutions possesses the wisdom to determine what is and is not worth teaching.

Two problems here...

1. The whole point of accreditation is to make sure every school teaches the basics that students need to earn a degree.

2. If an institution does a poor job of training students their degree will become devalued. This happened at ITT Tech at one point and it led to them reforming their curriculum and becoming accredited (and honestly there degree still isn't exactly well respected). So we really don't need a council of professors to deliver edicts from on high.

In the end I think this line of thinking is just Higher Education realizing they can't fend the fair market off anymore and doing everything in their power to avoid having to compete.
I use ezgram.com. Same idea, same price.
Aside from flagging it for being off topic, it would be proper to say "if the government were an average household".
Trips Iberia
AT&T is probably more of a roadblock here than Apple. I'd bet as a condition for allowing them on their network, they get a cut of the current navigation apps.

To Apple, I would think that equaling the playing field with this feature is much more valuable than their $30 for each TomTom app.
I can see this being very useful for businesses wanting statements and comments for the record.
Confession Of An Entrepreneur: Don’t Feel Too Lonely, You Are Not Alone..
As a HN reader I thought to share this with the rest of you.<p>Best,<p>Sahar Sarid
My favorite part is from Ed Witten, a leading theoretical physicist, and also a Fields’ Medalist, who replied:

“There isn’t a clear task. If you are a researcher you are trying to figure out what the question is as well as what the answer is.

You want to find the question that is sufficiently easy that you might be able to answer it, and sufficiently hard that the answer is interesting. You spend a lot of time thinking and you spend a lot of time floundering around.”
This article seems oddly focused on France. I also know of similar efforts in Germany. And I have seen similar bikes in Spain.

It would be much more interesting to get a European perspective.
I "know" Java because I had to do many undergrad projects in it, but I don't advertise the fact that I know Java at all because I actively do not want to work with it. It is a language designed for incompetent replaceable programmers, and I find working with it sort of insulting in a way, and just not enjoyable in general.

Depends on your (or your student's) approach to employment, really. If you want any programming job at any cost, of course you should know Java. There are lots of Java jobs, though the flip-side to that is that the market for Java programmers is extremely flooded.

On the other hand, if you're more worried about actually finding "interesting" work, pitching yourself as a Java programmer might help more than hurt. I would personally rather stack boxes or something along those lines than work on some kind of enterprise payroll nightmare in Java. Some would not. As always, it depends.

That said, Java is pretty simplistic if you're familiar with any even vaguely similar language (which you certainly should be, since the overwhelming majority of code out there is written in them). There's really very little to "learn" anyway...
It's really a shame that paypal makes more than you do. Are there any payment gateways that are better for low-price transactions than paypal?
In my opinion, the #1 thing US policymakers could do for entrepreneurship is to fix our broken health care system.

I'll share a personal anecdote: My wife and I have a daughter with significant medical needs. The only reason I can even contemplate being an entrepreneur is because I live in Massachusetts, where we have guaranteed access to health insurance that is only priced by age and zip code. In any other state, because of her pre-existing conditions I would have to choose between being an entrepreneur and taking care of my daughter's health.
Google Wave to the rescue?
I haven't voted you either way, but from the video it's still not clear to me whether the $5 was a known or unknown amount. I agree that the exercise makes more sense if it's unknown, but I don't think it was ever clearly stated.
Book-A-Minute
There are presently a number of GPS turn-by-turn applications on the App Store so it seems unlikely Apple would reject this app unless Google were to add some poison pill to force a rejection.
Eh, I don't think the reason you don't see 18 y/o people doing significant work in materials science isn't directly the lack of alternate funding; it's that there's no alternate funding for 18 y/o to do materials science b/c without proper background training they're unlikely to make any material progress in the field.

This is the same reason there's no "alternate funding" for bright but undistinguished 45-y/o people with no prior background in materials science to go and do materials science (short of education loans for late-life career changers); it's a field that requires lots of education (in the sense of learning) and specialized skills and someone without those skills isn't likely to accomplish anything on the investment.

Generally yes: advances come when you pair motivation to investigate topics of interest with freedom from more-mundane considerations and access to the necessary resources to make advances (idleness, if you will); as the frontiers of most applied sciences have gotten out of the reach of what wealthy dilettantes can easily afford you don't see them making many advances (but you do see plenty of advances in industry and academia, still, both of which allow their researchers enough of those things to make advances and both of which -- unlike most wealthy individuals -- can afford the tools many times over again).

Please note that I was careful to say that the prospective 18 y/o outsider materials scientist (or what have you) needed the training usually acquired in a university context; I deliberately did not say that they needed a university education.

It seems that for most bright-and-motivated types they could easily accelerate that training substantially if they had more freedom to choose courses a-la-carte; the loans-for-college approach currently doesn't allow for that kind of discretion, but a more financially-secure student would be better-placed to negotiate that.

All that being said: there's almost no way that someone without the equivalent of that kind of training in an applied science will make material contributions to that field; at present economic constraints make it very hard to obtain even the equivalent of that training short of actually going to school and getting a degree (at which entails putting up with all the bs and time-wasting stuff that that entails).
Why didn't they just subsidize bike and bike lock purchases for individuals?
RSS for Twitter Lists
No question, but was it ever really startup-heavy?
> than an unpopular war or two, which causes debt spending for a short time and then subsides.

You say that so casually; I think the word war is like the word God, it slips right past something in peoples minds that it shouldn't. The slaughter and murder of innocent people shouldn't be so easily shrugged off, and I'm perfectly happy handcuffing future generations from the ability to make war easily. Were our policy on wars different, we wouldn't be having problems paying for the other stuff.
umm i m no smart ass.. but i think e^(pi i) = -1 cuz LHS = cos PI + isin PI = -1 .... :O