skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This summer I met another guy who had chordoma, Josh Sommer. He's done a lot of amazing work helping to spark more research into the disease. Your page was the last kick in the pants I needed to look up a fundraising email he'd sent me awhile back and make a small contribution. Thank you.

When Josh first told me about chordoma, the question I asked myself was, "How can any disinterested party rationally decide to support a rare disease, when other diseases affect more people?". Your chart/discussion about the possibility of there being a higher ROI for rare disease research than for 'well established' disease research finally got me over this hurdle. Even though it has no numbers behind it, so I am not left "fully convinced" of anything, it at least created the possibility-space in my psyche that perhaps there is more reason to go after rare diseases than I'd realized.

In reality the emotional reason I have to give (having met Josh) is still a big reason why I care, but the attempt at a rational argument was the little nudge that pushed me over the edge: What if there are many such rare diseases that could benefit immensely from just a small fraction of the research that the big ones get? ...And what if studying these edge cases will also result in unexpected discoveries that have other implications?

"The more astute reader might immediately challenge this graph" line helps too. It makes me feel confident that you aren't trying to skew things one way without fully acknowledging the limits of your knowledge and the bias you hold.

Small comments:
* the "cash is king" line put me off a bit, and I think it could be erased without losing any oomph. In the big picture, it's not just about cash, it's also about getting scientists interested, helping coordinate the research, all sorts of things. (Though it's true that cash may be the only way for a normal person to contribute)
People announce stuff relating to technologies I don't use at conventions I don't go to all the time. A quick google suggests that it was more the concept of Azure that was announced, not its point-and-click accessibility (the WebPI). Even if I'm wrong on that, once again HN has confused me saying "I didn't..." with "Nobody did...". Sigh.
You don't have much space left in 64 bits for some financial numbers. FX swap trades with a billion dollars on one side and some very devalued currency on the other (e.g. zimbabwe dollars 1:60,000,000 at one point).

It gets worse when you start adding those numbers up.
Sony Ericsson adopts PhoneGap for Android, Symbian development
There are many current opportunities in bioinformatics.
The discussion in this thread seems to have some valid commentary.
One place to check out might be

http://genome.wustl.edu/careers/

We are hiring. jeldred@genome.wustl.edu
Ask HN: What are the best places to publish/sell downloadable software?
Hi,

We recently finished our suite of applications for test preparation developed on Adobe AIR platform. We are selling them on our website and have submitted them on adobe AIR marketplace for publishing which is pending approval. I was wondering what other places HNers use to publish/sell their software? Amazon starting selling downloadable software but it is still work in progress. Any suggestions will be highly appreciated.

Thanks.
Why imeem Really Sold Out
For some reason I can't get to the article. Anyway as another anecdotal data point: We have a few Google Search Appliances where I work. When one of them broke (rather catastrophically) Google Support was on top of it and the problem was fixed relatively quickly.

Edit: I suppose this is a case of "you get what you pay for". Google Search Appliances are non-trivially expensive. I guess they wouldn't be able to get away with bad support for those.
The dollars you spend purchasing Bad Code Offsets are donated to various worthy Open Source initiatives that are carrying the fight against bad code on a daily basis. These organizations currently include jQuery, PostgreSQL, and The Apache Software Foundation.

Very clever! In my grand naivete I assumed that my $.50 would go toward actually cleaning up bad code, but instead, it decreases the relative impact of my bad code by producing more bad code, which will help distract from mine.
Twitturly Sold For A Song
Not exactly entrepreneurial but visiting the MIT museum is always inspirational and Arthur Ganson will be hosting Friday After Thanksgiving: Chain Reaction
http://web.mit.edu/museum/programs/fat.html
at the MIT museum. Wish I were going to be able to make it
You could say the same thing for 2009, 2010, 2011...
Yet, do you know it?
I have worked on Financial Apps where we have ended up blowing away the 64-bit threshold.
I disagree. If I pay a company, they owe me support when their product breaks. If that's going to be limited to email support, not to mention non-responsive email support, they need to disclose that upfront.
The highest that lower limit can be is at the level where we can simulate each neuron in a human brain; at that point, we can build an AI merely by simulation.

This assumes, of course, that we'll be able to observe every possible action of a neuron, and that these actions are all finitely computable.
Deleted the Cash is king comment. You're the second person to say that.

There is also an edge case potential. That is another point i will add to the page in a bit.

Re: Josh. We're not strangers ;)

http://pathdependent.com/2009/11/04/preface_to_fundify/

P.S. Thanks for the contribution!
Wild speculation. Love it.
The Palin Publicity Machine
Our Favorite IE8 Add-Ons
As the existing player, you have to kill this stuff off before it starts cutting into your profit margin. My guess is that we won't be seeing AmEx-branded cards with lower processing fees anytime soon.
Three's Company (Why three co-founders is better than two.)
Okay, raise your hand if you actually are working on phone-to-Exchange sync software...

raises hand
Why Microsoft's mobile strategy stinks
Hacking in Boston is usually up to date with software related entrepreneurial/hacking events: http://www.thesponty.com/profile/251336/Hacking_in_Boston/
Best business by far, High-End Finance, of course depends on which angle you look at it from.

But, when you get to a point where no-one really no-one can agree on what you are selling and if you are selling it at a good price or not. Well, you have got it made.
You get what you pay for.

It would be much less frustrating if this were the case, actually. Empirically, $15,000 is not enough for them to routinely return email within a week. In many businesses, that would be "Yes sir, right away sir, can I get you a cup of tea while you wait sir" territory.

Plus, from what I've heard, it doesn't get any better for the next two orders of magnitude, either.
Mozilla kicks rebel coders to kerb with Firefox 3.6 'lockdown'
The meat we have now is rather unhealthy and unnatural. Cows are built to eat grass and chickens are built to eat mostly bugs. Instead we stuff them all with corn and soy. This makes the omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratios very wrong. This imbalance is strongly implicated in many human diseases, heart disease in particular. The only truly healthy meat is grass fed.

I'm very skeptical, but it seems at least possible to me that test tube meat could be formulated to better approximate "natural" grass fed meat than the mass produced feedlot stuff we have now. They could fix the fatty acid ratios by "feeding" the meat with algae secretions. The only way to find out will be with experimentation.

Of course this brings us back to the question of what our food market would look like if all grain subsidies were removed. It's quite likely the vast corn fields would be converted to pasture and healthy meat would get cheap. And it's quite likely that proper pastured meat production is more efficient than all the test tube processes.
I threw money (RAM) at the problem and the server is back up, at least it is now ;-)
He was being sarcastic. Most people over the age of reason understand that it's OK to enforce your borders.
Which usually means the shark fins are starting to circle, regardless of whether the folks in the boat have noticed the mindshare leak.
As always, the clarion call on the internet remains - Caveat Emptor - Buyer beware.
Mashable's 2009 Open Web Awards - Votes
Project Orion (To Mars by A-Bomb)
I use Google Apps for Domains Enterprise at my place of employment and have always found their support to be very quick and responsive.

My gripe is they always have Apps for Domains features after everything else. For example, I can't upgrade users beyond 25GB of storage even though this is available for normal google users now.
For all you students out there, don't miss out on the 'Education' offer from SpiderOak!

50% off any premium package (100GB from UNDER $5 month when purchased yearly) just by registering with an '.edu' address!
Communications’ innovation killers
That's not necessarily true. AmEx has always been a weird creditcard company. Traditionally, unlike MasterCard and Visa, AmEx encourages you to pay off your bill in full each month. They instead charge you a yearly fee, and used to offer better rewards to cover it. While this has changed a lot with the creation of branded AmEx cards and AmEx Blue, I could see RevoluionCard as a return to their traditional business model--but now backed by float, rather than monthly fees.

I could of course be entirely wrong, but there's at least the chance here that AmEx is not interested in killing a competitor.
>Outlook is to most people the most irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish ever to grace their computer.

You're forgetting that it was competing with Lotus Notes.
We have three founders and it's been pretty solid. It's very hard to have a decision impasse with 3 people. We all defer to each other's area of expertise and in the (many) areas where were are all stupid (but still have the make a decision), we defer to the majority (or occasionally, it's a "loudocracy"... :-) ).

Another downside that I don't think was mentioned is that your "ramen profitable" number goes up by about 50%.

Even with that, I think the 50% bump in (free and maniacal) manpower plus the extra perspective is totally worth it.

I always say that it's better to optimize your CHANCE of success rather than the magnitude of it, should it happen. Hard to argue that a good (free!) co-founder wouldn't do that.
Huh. Serves me right for being overly anxious.

Thanks and good luck to you too bhousel.
if you are suggesting that you leave these secret urls open to the entire internet, and just rely on them being inaccessbile, you're looking for trouble. Depending on the type of documents, at the least your users may not be happy about them being unauthenticated, and I personally would worry about legal issues. Add authentication.
Fewer requests through resource packages
My personal guess is that Arrington's source heard about a real project, but it's actually just another Android Developer Phone, not a consumer product.
Yeah, until they need to find an email from 2 months ago. Then they wish they had Gmail at work.
It needs an index on one side to the pertinent parts of the website, and an index on the other side with links to the different foundations/places to donate. My initial reaction was disorientation because of the lack of navigation and the huge font.

Also you might want to try try offsetting the main text from the white background using a slightly darker (greyish) color. You can do all of this relatively easily using css.
Giving the header an (offsetting) background color might help as well. You also might want to use a smaller font for your body text (and add in more text even if you don't expect people to read it all).
Stephenson's "Spew": Social Media in 1993 coming true today?
I'm also waiting for GApps to grow their size, but it's possible that the paying customers are last because Google treats them most carefully. Roll stuff out to your paying customers last, when you know it's solid.

This mostly applies to features, not size limits, but it could be behind their thinking in general.
Yes, but I still think they should have some courtesy and answer an email, when they broke your feed URL...
The more and more I see articles like this (http://www.trendpreneur.com/online/social-media-online/socia...) and how trying to filter through the Twitter/Facebook noise is the future...the more I think of this story.
I applaud the $12M effort -- we need more transparency. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant", and apparently the most expensive, too.

Does anybody else think this is an isolated example? I kind of think most US government projects are awash with similar odd expenditures. Well, ad hoc operations anyway.
It's not nearly so simple in practice. If your codebase is old and large, and no one person knows it enough to change significant amounts of it, there are simply some fixes that you never have the time to risk.
Ask HN:Is it actually possible to earn money online?
I was going through my spam directory just as a curiosity, just to check what does these thousand odd messages contained. Apart from usual Viagra and length enhancement drugs, there were some emails offering "paid to click" websites. These websites apparently pay you to click on ads,often as minimum as $0.001. But a question begs to be asked, is it actually possible to make money online? If you type "earn online" in google you can get many of these sites which pay you to click or sign up from referal links. But we all know these sites never pay you a penny. Apart from Amazon mechanical turk, I have never come across a big company which gives money for doing simple tasks.

So do you know of any?Because this will be hell of a way to earn some pocket money.
Either AmEx has an incredibly long-term view here, or Revolution Money is toast.

Rev's whole business model was this: do what the major legacy credit card companies do, but cheaper. This is achievable because a business that used to require massive proprietary machinery can now run on cheap commodity PCs and networks. They'd lure retailers with transaction cost savings, and crush the legacy credit card companies by undercutting their profit margins.

For a big retailer like Whole Foods, these transaction costs are a direct cut of their profit. AmEx takes around 5%, Visa/MC take 2%, Revolution takes 0.5%. If you can run the business cheaply enough, you can get a lot of retailer market share by offering to cut these costs, and maybe even divert some of those savings into features that make your card better for consumers.

So there are three reasons I can see for this deal:

1. Hastening the failure of the Revolution card means AmEx can sustain its absurd transaction costs a little longer.

2. AmEx is thinking ahead many many years, and thinks that the Revolution approach will get them some new markets, and are willing to accept the risk that they'll be cannibalizing some of their existing retailer/consumer market.

3. AmEx thinks it could save a ton of money by adopting more current technology, and wants the folks who built Revolution to help them do it.

These are listed in order of decreasing likelihood. I would bet that the Revolution Card's growth slows significantly, very soon. I wonder also if there were other problems impeding the company's growth, and pushing the investors to sell now rather than hold out until the market really was more disrupted.

On the bright side for startup folks and consumers, this deal suggests that now is a great time to start another credit card company based on low transaction costs. Revolution already figured out a lot of the hitches, and retailers ought to be suspicious now that they're owned by the industry's biggest usurer. The industry is even riper for disruption now than when Revolution started, and hardly disrupted at all.
Huge. Longer than 2^30 digits. I was working on statistics. Doing probabilities requires doing some crazy factorials. These often require handling large freaking numbers. I'm a PHP guy, so BC Math and GMP Math are my saviors in this area.

Thankfully, all the huge numbers are just in the computation of the statistics and don't need to be stored long term in a database. The thought of having to store an integer in a BLOB is frightening.
3 years, $300M acquisition.

As noted below, there was quite a bit of investment in the company. Breaking into the retail payment processing industry is definitely not an easy task. Still, the relatively quick acquisition shows there is value to be had by taking on the incumbents. Perhaps a more capital-efficient indirect assault on the sector would be possible.
Good point about ramen profitability going up with a third partner. On the flip side, you could say that your company is even further along when you do in fact reach ramen profitability then.
7 Ways to Improve Prostate Health in 90 Days
The problem is that it's extremely hard to know you are a buyer at all. They put a lot of effort into concealing you'll get charged, and since they silently get your credit card details from the hosting site, you don't get the usual 'enter numbers and agree' page to signal you're entering into a transaction.
Tony Schwartz talks about some of the things that seperates elite performers from the merely very good in his book The Power of Full Engagement (HBR article here: http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2001/01/the-making-of-a-corpo... ) One of the points he makes is that the very elite (he studied tennis players particularly) have rituals that they perform that allow them to reocover, refocus, and rest very efficiently. And that the more often an athlete stretches themselves physically or mentally beyond their own limits and relies on these rituals to help them succeed, the more powerful and effective the rituals become. So even without accounting for players changing their own playing style because of Tiger, they may suffer from impaired performance because they are simply not as practiced at performing at a high level within the crazy media and fan circus that surrounds Tiger Woods as Tiger Woods himself is. He clearly has developed and repeatedly stressed and practiced those rituals of performance within that environment far more than any one else has had chance to.

Schwartz goes on to relate this to performance as a "Corporate Athlete" but his tips have far more applicability in my mind to the startup environment than to the typical corporate environment.
There are some integrated travel sites for the UK - for example http://www.traveline.info/index.htm
My guess is your third option. If AmEx can continue charging 2.5% while reducing their operating costs to a point that would make 0.5% profitable, that's lots of moolah for them.

I'm sorry that I'm just now hearing of the Revolution card. I use AmEx for no good reason at all, and a not insignificant number of merchants won't take it because its fees are so high. Of course, AmEx could also solve this problem by just reducing their percentage to 2% with the new technology.
Where open source was, and where it is now
I must be spending too much time with people under the age of reason on the internet, I can no longer detect sarcasm in such issues.
I'm fascinated by your use of the word "hope"
With Apps Premier edition ($50/user/year) you get a special PIN number. I've always gotten pretty rapid responses from their team on most support requests using this feature.
More than $100 million was invested in the company over those 3 years.
BugsVoice beta online - turn bugs into opportunities
Actually the 2012 is not always discussed as the end of the world. If you look at the article it also proposes the possibility of a major change in society. The completion of cycle in the mayan calendar, I think, indicates just that. End of the cycle of one society.

My bet, maybe robots will do all our work and we would become all spiritual, some people may say the time frame is too short for this but it doesn't have to be abrupt. 2012 may mark the start in some way. May be the first positronic brain will be completed on that day. sigh... hopes
I've had to build a system to theoretically handle indexes up to 1.2553643905927429e+30 but we haven't got that far yet (biggest # is a billion billion billion or so)
Is there any legitimate reason for a company to pass your payment information onto another "partner" (aside from a payment processor like PayPal, etc)? I can't think of one.

If there isn't, the simple thing would be to just ban this practice.
It is possible to earn money online. Create an "earn money online" product and spam it. Better yet, offer an affiliate reward for it and let others spam it. The "earn online" packages you're seeing are likely cousins or siblings of the rebill scams that (used to be) in Facebook apps and at the end of checkout processes now.

That's the sad truth about "make money online" programs like that. Think about it, even if it was legit: by signing up for any kind of service that offers money for menial tasks, you're putting yourself into a kind of digital piece work factory -- about the lowest possible position in the labor pool.
As far as I know, we (SpiderOak) were the first backup company offering 2gb free - since December 07. It works well. I'd much rather offer real value than spend money on customer acquisition via advertising. On average, free users don't store that much, and most backup data is infrequently accessed, so the cost is manageable.
Dear HN - help me with my online dating site
Dear HN,

I'm trying to come up with some wildly different approaches to the online dating problem. I'm emphasizing concept development instead of technological development (which is overemphasized, in my opinion).

One strategy for instigating creative ideas is to ask oneself "what is the dominant idea behind all this?" Take Speed Dating, for example. The dominant idea behind speed dating is "going on a large number of small dates instead of a small number of long dates". One can throw out the "dating musical chairs" format, but still keep the basic concept. So my question is:

What is a good excuse/activity for people meet up for 5 minutes?

I'm thinking about hooking up people via gps/cell phones, although that may change. I would like to get some input or ideas of anything that comes to mind. I don't care if it's outlandish or "probably won't work". I'm not looking for "right", I'm looking for "different". While the "crazy, but wrong" idea might not work, a related idea could, so please don't hold back.

- Steve

PS Any hackers on my list who are into experimenting with concepts (not necessarily this one), join my meetup "Hacker Codejam": http://www.meetup.com/hacker-codejam/ . It's kinda a hangout for programmers who like to work on their side projects from time to time.
That is very short, the subject has been explored much more deeply in the past.

I'd suggest Brian Foote's Big ball of mud where he talks about software going through phases of expansion and consolidation, he also discusses the total rewrite in much greater lengths. Although it too is lacks hard data and I find parts of the format and discourse annoying (can't exactly put my finger on why), I think it is still more interesting.
http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html
AmEx absolutely reams merchants, but it's probably in your interest to use one if you can, because they provide a lot of nice benefits to the buyer. This includes extending warranty coverage, travel and rental car insurance, accepting returns if the merchant won't, and actually having decent customer service if something goes wrong or a merchant rips you off.

What I'd like to see is a merchant that actually splits the transaction cost savings with you, so e.g. if you use a Revolution card, your groceries cost 1% less (and cash saves you 1.5%). This probably violates their merchant agreements with the other card vendors, though.
I agree opportunity cost is a better metric, but there's yet more to it. In another 10 years, Itanium might surpass x86 as the old architecture hits the wall and the new continues to speed up (if in fact it does).

It's almost a matter of insurance -- Intel can't afford to be stuck at ~3.1416 GHz :-) while competing architectures continue to improve. If in fact they can.