skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Compared to Dustin's though, both of those hurt my eyes to look at. This reminds me of Posterous, blogging is a crowded market but they differentiated themselves by being beautiful and dead simple. Competitors are good, it just proves that there's a market for a service like this.
Over-engineering. They could have done the same with bikes that cost significantly less.
Somebody has to say it:

In the year 2009 snail mail is grossly inadequate.

1. Does it prove anything? No. Sign something with a private key, that is proof.

2. Is it better for record keeping? No. Fires, floods, and rot are all enemies. Storing it digital allows one to replicate a lifetime of mail in 10 seconds.

3. Aesthetic? Only if you have a strong packrat or nesting instinct.

4. Cheaper? No. Not by a fucking longshot, not even close.

Take a one dollar bill out of your wallet, burn it, and send an email.
Google is closing in on a monopoly in certain segments of the advertising market. That's where they get all their money to undercut everybody else.

Similarly, Microsoft had a huge percentage of the operating system market, and they leveraged that to take over the browser market.
http://www.w3schools.com/ This site is a good reference for the W3 standards. Flash is currently most easily coded with AS3. Adobe recently redid the flash VM to behave more like a traditional programming language and did away with most of the movie clip timeline stuff, so AS3 is more like just coding. Very nice UI API as well. Essential AS3 is a good book to learn. http://www.smashingmagazine.com is a good reference for learning design itself. I think jQuery is the current winner, but there is something to be said for GWT as well.
How long should your “trial” period run?
The ability to send a PDF would be nice, so I know exactly what the printed product will look like, and I can use my own fonts if I like.
Mocking/Stubbing Frameworks, How'd They Do That?
I seriously doubt they cost that much.

The only electronics on the bike I can think of is the head light LED and the dynamo to power it. The rest of the electronics are in the docking stations.

I'm thinking the $3500 price probably includes the docking station which is kinda misleading.
Switzerland also has a bike rental program in several cities (http://www.suisseroule.ch), and students can borrow them for free (insured against their university account). During the summer, I saw people riding those bikes around all the time, but I have no idea how popular the program is. You can also rent bikes at all the major train stations.
gfggg
What is great with this program is that you take the bike only when you need it. You don't have to carry it with you all the time. You can combine subway, bus and bike. There are a lot of stations around Paris. You can use the bike one way only if it is raining for example, and use the bus/subway to go back.
I don't know how much sorrow and despair you think appropriate. You seem to be making an moral and emotional case. I simply observe that wars occur and have occurred for all of human history.

All I'm saying is that each generation should make it's own choices about spending money, and that increased debts are appropriate for short-term recovery of the economy in recession.

The next generation may not find it can pay for, say, pensions for people living from 60 until an average age of 100. But war spending will always find a way. That's the nature of wars -- they are deemed more important than other things, including social programs.

Look at it this way -- increased debt load means an increased chance of war, as non-violent options are not available due to restricted amounts of money and the only way to access that money is through a national emergency. Please forgive the example, but I think its apt: the nazis, after all, were the nationlist socialist party, not the free enterprise gang. They took control over all industry and turned it into a war machine. This was based on a movement for better social justice, but it easily transformed into a monstrosity. So your idea that somehow you can cripple the economy and prevent wars has not shown itself true in history. In fact, the reverse seems more true.
This post shallowly re-iterates "Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" (1994 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SAXREG.html), while praising the Valley's success.
Government spending does improve the economy, but not as much as tax cuts do. If you give money back to the market, it is guaranteed to be spent efficiently.

Government spending involves special interests (spending that benefits a small amount of people at the expense of everyone) and incurs some wasteful spending. Example: John Murtha airport http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/23/murtha.airport/index....

I thought the article was good in comparing a household (something everyone can compare to) to a government made up of the people. No household could ever keep up that deficit without forcefully taking money from someone else.
It's good for grandparents though
There's another competitor that wasn't mentioned:

www.mailaletter.com

None of the competing services that I know of provide an API, and if dcurtis releases an API that would be a significant edge.
It's just a performance trade-off. For those who need high-precision math there are plenty of options available.
I think to inject real Competition into the economy via Entrepreneurs, Govt must regulate Market Capitalization.
Does anyone really care about non-competes? Spend a winter in the Boston area and you'll find a simpler reason that people prefer the valley. I doubt that life in New England has ever been described as "easy". Given a choice between two otherwise equivalent locations, climate has a huge impact. Imagine the same decision when the easier climate is already seen as the better choice.
I know the name is mis-spelled it was late at night when I registered the name.
Never change a running system!

I would never change my hosting company if I would be fully satisfied and I would only be saving 100$ a month.
I owe him no such thing, nor did I attack him. I spoke of my own state of mind, that his comment made me think he was dishonest; I did not say that he was.

Omitting the truth is just as dishonest as lying. You don't try and parse technicalities with honesty, either you were acting in good faith or you weren't, not telling the restaurant that you intend to sell the reservations - something certainly outside their expectations - is deceptive and is most certainly dishonest.
Not just European: Montreal, Canada has this too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixi

Interestingly enough, vandalism seems to be much lower, though still significant: "...one in five bikes have been damaged and 15% of bike racks are defective..."
Excellent read.

Take into consideration threats from external sources like asteroids & evil spaceships and you've got even less of a probability of survival. ;)
You are right, but keep in mind some organizations and processes still "trust" a time-stamped hard copy more than an email. We're fortunate enough to be very tech savvy, but this service, to me, is meant to be an accommodation to those who refuse to join us or are stuck in the past, or those who think it's a fun thing to try.
LOL that's precious, an email to notify you to send snailmail.
Seconded, although that would take away from how straightforward the service is.
don't be the front-end guy in your startup
I agree with you that requests/second is not the only or more sensible parameter to meter performances, this is because redis-benchmark reports latency percentile too. I just suppressed the output in the example, but it looks like this:

====== SET ======
10008 requests completed in 0.39 seconds
50 parallel clients
3 bytes payload
keep alive: 1

1.03% <= 0 milliseconds
38.83% <= 1 milliseconds
73.12% <= 2 milliseconds
95.34% <= 3 milliseconds
97.93% <= 4 milliseconds
99.50% <= 5 milliseconds
99.75% <= 7 milliseconds
99.84% <= 8 milliseconds
99.93% <= 9 milliseconds
99.94% <= 10 milliseconds
100.00% <= 11 milliseconds
25401.02 requests per second

As you can see under this load most clients are served in 4 milliseconds or less, including both the transmission of the request and the reception of the full reply.
Not in Europe, but in Montreal (Canada), we've got Bixi bikes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIXI) and it has similar issues with damage and theft. In addition to the issues mentioned in the wiki page, there were also problems with double billing... but it still seems to be doing well regardless.
It's kinda like how London buses are made by Mercedes. You might think that's an extravagance - but if things are to be used hard every day, it's a false economy to cut corners up front (unless you go so cheap they're effectively disposable).
What about privacy? So looks like this isn't useful for sending private and serious mails.
For an antidote, read Larry Niven, some of the Known Space novels--he claims that humans are not suited to space, because they grew up in this idyllic world which prospered in a narrow band.
Wild, so he is actually folding, stuffing, and licking the stamp?
At 6 cents/per he'd need over 100 mailings/hr to come out around minimum wage.
I like the API idea, pdf idea, maybe .doc files.

You could do what those efax places do for free faxes and include an advertisement in the envelope. Hell, put advertisements on the envelope itself.
1. Public/private key authentication is, as of 2009, still not something the mainstream internet user can figure out to do easily. I'd guess most don't even know it exists.

2. I can also delete a lifetime of mail in 10 seconds. The steps required to redundantly store or back up data require either knowledge the layman doesn't have or expensive software (assuming they don't know of the free alternatives).

3. Letters are like books in that there will always be people who prefer the personal feel of paper and ink to a computer screen.

4. Agreed.

You seem to be assuming that his market is YC users or other techies. As stated in other comments, this has great applications for the elderly, non-techies, and people in other countries wanting to send mail to the US.
Pretty much everything hurts my eyes compared to Dustin's work :)

In all seriousness, I thought Postful looked pretty good.
I've just been pondering such a service, as the result of a friend of mine, being moved to an assisted living facility. He has no email there, and wouldn't be able to use it if he did. I would love to send him quick updates on my life and my kids, but, while I could spare him five minutes to dash off an email and attach some photos to it, the task of printing the photos on a color printer, finding his address, etc., usually gets the task procrastinated, sometimes for weeks, in that "I'll do it tomorrow" procrastination dance.

My thoughts on this line were as follows.

1) It needs to allow photos. They can be an extra charge of course, but I would want to send photos.

2) There's a ton of paper handling equipment out there. If you invested about $20K, maybe 10K if you bought used, I would think you could get a solution that was 100% automated. It printed, stapled, folded, printed the envelope, and stuffed the contents. A service with such an automated capability, that showed pictures of their equipment on their website so I knew it was real, would definitely be reassuring from a privacy standpoint, as well as a reliability standpoint.

3) As for API, my thought was to make the whole thing, just email. Parse incoming emails to confirm the sender is an account holder. Parse the email for the markup headers that you define to designate recipient address. If they don't exist, fire off a reply email to the same address, telling them they messed up and didn't mark up their submission properly. Done. No visiting your website at all, after I set up my account.

3a) I would also suggest a way for me to assign frequently used snail mail addresses as part of an email address. For example, say you assign me the email address QWERTY@mailservice.com. Whenever I mail to that address, you know it's my account, and send the contents of the appropriately marked up email to the recipients. OK, fine. But now, allow me to assign sub-addresses. So, for example, if I email QWERTY.terry@mailservice.com, and I've already defined the address of terry, now I don't have to mark up my email at all. I just put QWERTY.terry@mailservice.com into my email address book, and my friend Terry is the same as contacting anybody else with email. With such a system, mailing somebody and emailing somebody take exactly the same steps on my part. In fact, I can even CC them on an email I send to somebody else.
I think that people have forgotten that Netscape also gave their browser away for free.

Google is not leveraging its data in this case so much as it it leveraging its pile of cash made from its dominance in search. The situations are analogous.
I heard that in India it's a common occupation to wait in lines and sell one's place.
A BarCamp in Grand Rapids, MI, US.
Even better, you could distribute the mailing by geography to minimize shipping time. If it's close you could even have them deliver in person and save 44c.
(Did you just invent a new postal system?)
Tried to make a feed for the @twitter/team list.

http://twiterlist2rss.appspot.com/twitter/lists/team/statuse...

got a python traceback.
Music has been found to have some deleterious effects on productivity.

via Eliezer Yudkowsky, since I can't find the study itself right now:
"I don't listen to music while working, because of studies showing that, e.g., programmers listening to music are equally competent at implementing a given algorithm, but much less likely to notice that the algorithm's output is always equal to its input."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/16d/working_mantras/
Google's Robots.txt Updated for Halloween (scroll to the end)
And since the police sometimes murder innocent people, I think we should also eliminate them. I propose increasing the debt in my town so that we won't be able to afford police in the future!
Keeping fear and anxiety in their place -- not banished, but in perspective.
If you like this, you might like the curved screen of glterminal:
http://ldopa.net/2006/01/14/glterminal/
Take it as a compliment.
The vast majority of people I know don't know about digital signatures. Most of the remainder can't use them, and are uncertain of how to verify them. The result is that they don't trust them. They all, however, understand and trust a piece of paper with a statement and signature.

Dustin's service doesn't solve that, but your comments are, quite simply, ahead of the game, and detached from current reality. That reality, as is always the way with reality, changing, but that change takes time.

EDIT: First paragraph re-written.
Maybe it was addressed elsewhere, but my problem with these is I'd likely be trading the nice new battery that came with my car, for a battery that's been abused by many people. It's not like you would expect the battery replacement station to actually care about an individual battery, and the people who actually use them aren't going to care either.
Yes, but you have to present next week.
When it looks too crazy to be true, it probably isn't true.

Wikipedia: 'The price per bicycle has been variously stated as US$1,300 (if provided by JCDecaux), €300, or US$3,460 apiece'.

300 euro seems like a reasonable price for just the bicycle itself, the other figures must include other costs.
Also, let's not forget that the scheme is subsidized by giving JCDecaux a monopoly on a lot of advertising space in the city, so even at a high cost it may still be profitable to them.
A Material Based on Sharkskin Stops Bacterial Breakouts (with pic)
You Aren't Average
So Google has a monopoly in cash?

As I said this is an area to study, not to find 'analogous' situations. The first thing to define in a case is what is the relevant market.

You could make the case, and its probably true, that Google has a monopoly in internet text advertising. However, it would be hard to argue that this market is not part of the larger internet advertising market.

Microsoft had a straight up desktop monopoly. It was not legal for them to leverage that against another company.

I don't know how it matters in the context, but since you brought it up, Netscape didn't give their browser away until 1998. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape
This is written about SEO, but applies about as well to anyone else involved in selling things online.
A language without purity / proper constness / powerful static checking will not be automatically parallelized.
Many delivery vans are made by Mercedes, too. There's nothing extravagant about them - they are just good quality delivery vans.

There's Lamborghini tractors, too! http://www.lamborghini-tractors.com/
Wrong. D2 has features to ease multi-threaded development, so it's a language 'issue'.
"Ayn Rand's Revenge" - NYTimes Book Review of new Rand biography
I don't have a college degree ... I don't because I didn't had enough money and had to get a job. I also live in a European country, and living in Silicon Valley would be like a dream come true (having around you smart people that share your passion must be great).

Unfortunately the world is still looking up to these college degrees as an exclusive guarantee of some sort. I know that college graduates had opportunities to learn and interact with real mentors and everything, I know some of them worked really hard for that degree ... but there are also many graduates that haven't learned anything and wasted their time and resources, going through exams by gaming the system. I also know that in some colleges in my country you can bribe the dean to get that degree in a couple of days.

One day someone offered to hire me to work for the government ... he was impressed with my online resume. The offered salary was one fourth as I was earning at my job. I told him I didn't had a college degree and he never spoke to me again ... there are times when I consider my lack of a degree as an asset.
> Government spending does improve the economy, but not as much as tax cuts do. If you give money back to the market, it is guaranteed to be spent efficiently.

That's debatable. For example, Moody's Economy believes otherwise (see page 9 of http://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/Economic_Stimulu...).

Now, I'm not saying one or the other is correct (I know enough to know I don't have the tools to judge), but you say this as a statement of fact when it's not a settled question at all.

> Government spending involves special interests (spending that benefits a small amount of people at the expense of everyone) and incurs some wasteful spending. Example: John Murtha airport http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/23/murtha.airport/index.....

Yes, and so do tax cuts. In the US, we have a menagerie of various taxes and exceptions and brackets, etc., and it's very easy to tweak it to benefit special interests, like we have many times in the past. That doesn't invalidate the idea of passing tax cuts just like earmarks don't invalidate the idea of government spending.

> I thought the article was good in comparing a household (something everyone can compare to) to a government made up of the people. No household could ever keep up that deficit without forcefully taking money from someone else.

I'm not advocating for the deficit, but just because you like the analogy doesn't make correct. Likening a household's budget to the United States' budget is like likening a photon to a race-car: any similarities there are are very shallow, and you're likely to come away with huge misconceptions.

This is actually precisely why I hate seeing economics articles on social news sites: it's a lot of propagation of (often wrong) ideas within a community of people with insufficient knowledge to be able to sort the good from the bad.

I really wish we'd just stick to what we're good at, rather than getting into the subject of macroeconomics and politics around here.
A point is a measure of length used in typography, it's defined as 1/72 of an inch. Many programs default to assuming a 96 pixel-per-inch monitor. The font is supposed to be 20 pixels high, so you have to specify 20 * (72 / 96) = 15 points (or some multiple) for non-blurry rendering. My Windows laptop, however, has a higher DPI setting - 125% higher than normal, so I need 12 points for 20 pixels.
Quite right.

What we should be doing is measuring the output of colleges. This article argues for measuring the inputs, and says anyone with different inputs is inadequate.

It doesn't matter who is responsible for what, as long as the outputs are adequate.
In theory you can get rid of entitlements, too.
It's a good idea, but it can't really be applied. It would even be kind of annoying if every bottle bin were a flashing, noisy video game. If it doesn't work on a universal level, it's a bit wrong to call it a 'theory'.
Modular Interactive UIs with JavaScript - drag and swap sections easily
Great idea. I hate the hassle of sending physical mail the $1 is well worth it. Do you/will you offer the service to/from/within Canada?
The problem with your argument is that there are huge sections of human knowledge in which we really don't know that much -- even experts. In fact, I'd wager there's a hell of a lot more stuff that's debatable than most people would be comfortable knowing about.

I've said it before: I don't think any topics should be off-limits as long as people can reasonably discuss them. In fact, I think it's a test of a community to see what it can productively discuss and what it can't.

Startups are full of people acting under intense pressure with incomplete information. As such, these topics are just little baby toys, artificial constructs of arguments that have little real impact on people's lives. Being able to have reasonable conversations about emotional and important things with incomplete information is something we should all strive for, not something we should be afraid of.
Moving past the era of web-safe fonts
The college requirement on H1-B visas is broken. But believing that doesn't require me to believe that "Startup Visas" are a good idea. If we want to foster more startups in the US, we should fix health care. Far more potential startups are killed because their founders can't give up company health care for their families than are killed because their foreign founders can't get visas.
Actually, during that period, I was often vexed that very few separated the good idea (bundling a web browser free) from the bad (anticompetitive OEM deals) -- at least in the national papers. It all got lumped into Microhate.
reminds me of http://www.tpc.int
I purchased and attempted to read Atlas Shrugged a couple of years ago. I failed, because rarely have I ever come across a more tedious, sermonizing, simplistic and unconvincing philosophical treatise poorly disguised as a novel.

She could have distilled her viewpoint into a couple of paragraphs (it doesn't seem particularly subtle or complex), but that would probably have made it too easy to argue with her supporters, who can pointedly ask, "well, have you read it?"

No, I have not. I tried and it was terrible.

For great fiction with a healthy dose of philosophy, I'd recommend reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco instead.
I love the idea of a printed letter API (like what postful.com has) as a solution to send automated letters to people. First one that comes to mind is to send a letter to someone if they do a chargeback or their credit card was declined.

I look forward to implementing something like this!
50 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do
I disagree, Google would most likely offer this app for a very low price or free. Most of the current (decent) GPS turn-by-turn apps are very pricey up in the $70-90 range, of which apple takes a 30% cut. I find it unlikely Apple would want to cut off that income by introducing a Google Navigation app.
> because that goes straight to the bottom line!

Not if the insurance company has a say in this. They will raise premiums for bad working conditions.