skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SatoshiDice and the controversy surrounding it has pretty well emphasized that Bitcoin is not going to be as widespread a currency as some of the true believers want it to be. It has a niche use in SR and other semi/illegal things, but it's really useful only as long as the price remains stable (in fact, during highly volatile periods like this, most of the smart SR merchants pack up shop until the BTC-USD rate has stabilized).

However, the blockchain inherently limits BTC from being able to be used in the same way that, say, Paypal is right now, just because of it's inability to deal with a high volume of transactions, not to mention the confirmation time. And efforts to mitigate this through 3rd parties removes the distributed semianonymous merits, thus leading to a position where you're better off just using PayPal or a credit card anyways.
I noticed a decent number of sites ditching RSS because it was too hard to monetize. RSS feeds were fairly low interaction. You read the article, you go to the next, you're done with them. This means you're not going to their site and getting the ad impressions, seeing the related links, noticing the comments, etc.

I personally think that an HTTP meta tag would be the right way to link to a G+ page. And heck, this is a browser extension, so I don't even have to install it if I don't want it. But it's not like this is a nefarious plot by Google to destroy the web as we know it.
Getting Women Hooked into Open Source
> I wouldn't bet against a lot of money (google) shutting down something they have seemed to bet a lot on.

You mean like google wave?

Or checkout?

Or google buzz?

Or any one of a large number of other products / projects that are no longer.
What do they need to do to fix YouTube? (I'm really asking. I think some of it is broken, and maybe people can pass information onto YouTube people.)

1) Default to 240: I want to be able to always watch videos in the worst resolution possible. I want the lightest bandwidth possible. I'd sometimes be happy with just the audio. It seems that I can't default to 240, no matter what I click.

2) Small elements in UI: There is a teeny little grey drop-down arrow at the top of the Subscriptions list. I didn't see that for weeks, and the randomly changing order of the subscriptions menu drove me bonkers. Making that arrow bigger would be good.

3) Default to Uploads only: When I click a name in the subscriptions list I want to see the videos they've uploaded. I probably don't care about other videos they've liked. And if I do I can clicky the menu. Making me clicky the menu for something I do every time is sub-optimal.

4) Please god something for comments: Google and YouTube are full of smart people. Some kind of "poor comment quality" filter should be easy to implement. Allow youtubers to have no comments; full comments; or 'no poor comments'. (Maybe with a 1, 2, or 3 level setting). This would stop people posting "FIRST!!" and then getting into flamebaiting over it. It could stop some of the vile juvenile language use. (Seriously, I can string all those words together, but I can't show a nipple?) It's not a cure for poor comments, but it could help.

I don't know what iGoogle is. Seriously, I think I'm signed into it. Or maybe I signed out when I found out it was going.

I'm not quite sure where you're going with the MS thing. For years they've had "sweet spot" OSs. MSDOS 3.3 was good; MSDOS 6 was good. Win 3.11 for workgroups was good while the other win 3.1s were bad. Windows 98SE with plus pack (is that right?) was good, while all the others were okay. Windows 2000 was god tier. Windows ME was a crime.
Your writing style makes most of the people who read you think you're just petty and looking for an opportunity to kick people who are down. Frankly I think the same. This kind of playground attitude rarely occupies the mind of good men.

If you've really been lamenting people's excitement over bitcoins as long as you say you have, I feel sorry for you and maybe you deserve this token of happiness. Fruitless as it is, you make it seem like you don't have much else.
> But really many other companies and websites are doing similar things.

That does not count though. Good or bad operates on a scale that is independent of what the norm is, it simply means there is better and worse. But on an absolute scale all the players could easily be bad.
Sure, but a lot of our financial regulations are implemented as regulations on exchanges and banks (and as far as I can tell, Mt. Gox functions a bit like both...)
They aren't blank, they're forwarded to your followers. The design results in chasing links of reblogs from posts and following the people who reblogged to establish followed/follower networks that share values and talk a common language. This is why tumblr is famous for having intense politics.

I consider the combination of "reblog" and "follow" to be a major design win.
Oh thanks! I just c+p'ed from the article, goes to show you, it's just not that simple! :)
| Yes I am an anti-Bitcoin fanatic!

"Fanatic" is usually a bad thing. It means that you are so invested in your extreme position that you are unwilling to listen to contradictory ideas/evidence.

| And here you are saying "You don't _know_ it's
| not going to rise in price again" as if that
| constitutes a useful argument in favor of
| Bitcoin.

Who said I was arguing in favor of Bitcoin? I'm arguing that your position is too extreme, and derived from emotion rather than anything else.

| You just _assume_ that Bitcoin is in its
| 'early' stages, that it's similar to Wall
| Street.

All you're really doing here is redirecting. You're turning my statements into claims/assumptions without any discussions or supporting evidence. I'm now "assuming" that Bitcoin is in its early stages, but you have not said why you think that it isn't. I'm now "assuming" that Bitcoin is similar to Wall Street, but you're not saying why they are different.

If Bitcoin is not in the 'early' stages as a currency, then what would you define as it's early stages? All you're really doing is

Nothing Bitcoin does solves the problem money presents in the first place: its misuse by the greedy.
Here's the answer to all your worries: The Sex Pistols.

Yes, the punk band. Those misbehaving misfits that couldn't play their musical instruments and yet went on to change music forever.

The Sex Pistols succeeded with barely a shred of skill or talent because they were on a mission and executed it with ferocity.

No talent is required to make a difference. Just piss and vinegar and a grand vision. The Sex Pistols prove it.
Rockmelt Will Shut Down Social Browser
I'm currently pressed into service by a client as a lightweight db admin on a Windows box. Scripting the various tasks in Python there lets me use a language I already know, with code transferable on the day they decide to shift to a Linux server.
I wonder if that new "articles by supposedly influential people" is what makes Pulse a fit for them.
Startups often live on the cusp of 'other people think we should quit but we're not going to!' I appreciated these sorts of posts because they are illustrative. The only thing to be bothered by is if you don't find anything to learn from the experience.
(A bit of followup regarding payment tracking: you can click on "Billing" --> "View my current charges" to see a breakdown of just how much you owe. I presume it's updated daily if not hourly, but I didn't realize this when I composed my post.)
> What data would you want?

The data that was lost right here: "After that moment we basically stopped talking to artists for a year [...]"

Find customers as early as possible, engage with them as often as possible, and really really listen to what's being said. This is a huge benefit of bootstrapping. Customer engagement from the earliest possible time is vital to the process of transforming an idea into a product.
> Google and YouTube are full of smart people. Some kind of "poor comment quality" filter should be easy to implement.

This touches on something I actually feel deserves a second look, if only from an academic or sociological perspective.

I have never quite understood why Youtube appears to be the single largest (or, at least most prominent) internet cesspool. Comments there are routinely among the most vile I've seen anywhere, and I've never been able to rationalize a suitable explanation.
Winklevoss Twins Revealed As Owning 1% Of All BitCoins
Recent research has shown that placebo works even when patient knows (s)he's getting placebo.

Now it looks like the economic bubble works even when everyone knows it's a bubble: http://imgur.com/jvSKdEv
I spend all day programming, all I need is a hoodie to keep me warm- everything else is a distraction from what matters.

("Why I wear the same shirt every day", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4490538)

Why would I need a stylist?

:)
So, I guess I'll be the wet blanket here. It's pretty clear to me reading this that this person and their partner were nowhere near ready to found a startup. It highlighted the potential benefits for some people of getting a corporate(ish) job, learning about the business world, and learning the trade a little more before trying to starting a company.

It's like the demotivator for "Mistakes", this is probably best as a cautionary tail for people that have a startup itch, but don't necessarily have the necessary skills yet. I mean, this really talked about business and technology problems, but even assume they hit lighting in a bottle with the business model and didn't run into the technical issues, does it sounds like they would have been able to capitalize on it? I got a feeling that it was organized in an ad hoc way, and they weren't set up as an llc/s-corp/etc, had equity agreements, or basic contracts (otherwise, how did the one artist change not know they terms of the business, or opt out so quickly?) I feel like they would have ended up in trouble with the IRS, in a lawsuit with each other, or getting screwed by a less than scrupulous VC.

That said, everyone is better off from sharing, and I thank the author for it.
Generally, exchanges take less than 1%. Mt. God takes .6%, and at least one exchange (bitcoin24?) takes 0%.

So there is definitely room for this.
thanks for sharing this alexmic. I tried to built my own template engine but I think your approach is much better
What?! Dave Goldberg did not build SurveyMonkey. He bought it with help from a VC fund. At that time it was grossing something like $28 million with $23 million in profit. They paid about 10x profits. It would take a monkey to fuck that up.
>Please provide an example or demonstration of this.

There are two limits that this standard places on the number of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF. [1]

>What kind of alignment are you referring to here?

>Controlling the font size of header, body and footer?

I am talking about visual separations within the message. In pure text, everything carries the same weight, same font and same color. From the link of the site in the header to the unsubscribe at the bottom gets prominently displayed to you.

>Incorrect.

Well I couldn't find any reliable information to counter that. However as far I can remember, HTML emails have existed in the early days of Hotmail and Yahoo.

[1]http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html
Dear baddox

My name is Danjuma Sule, one of the sons of major Gen Gumel Danjuma Sule, The late Nigeria's former minister of mines and power in the regime of the late former Nigeria's military Head of state, Gen Sanni Abacha. When my father died he left me an inheritance of 13002422.34343422 bitcoins. Unfortunately bitcoin exchanges are not yet set up in Nigerian currency and I am in need of a young techno wizard with a bank account denominated in US dollars to assist me in gaining access to my inheritance.

It is on this basis I am seeking for assistance. Your percentage is negotiable. Please note; your age and profession doesn't really matter in this transaction. Waiting for your immediate response and bank account specifics.

Regards, Danjuma Sule
For a company like Linkedin which has been on the market for a while, you can buy a bunch of put options. It comes with a cost obviously, but it's a good hedge for an all stock transaction.

IIRC this is what Mark Cuban did when he sold his company to Yahoo!
You remind me of my friend who runs around yelling "You could have had real money". She means well, unlike you, and even she let up after I withdrew $5k in profit. I don't know why you think I'm being defensive, other than my efforts to dissuade you from being an ignorant smug ass - I assume the smug ass part isn't going away.
Chrome never implemented RSS auto discovery.

Everyone else has a "walled garden" why must Google be different? and why should they - arguably the least “walled” of said gardens - suffer the "openness" brunt?

The fact that they are not investing in RSS tools doesn't mean they're against them, it's just not in their interest anymore, and so I come to the conclusion that this is yet another Google Reader lament, and I thought we've already had our fill of these on the HN front page.

It’s the same discussion all over again, If you've not found a Reader replacement by now, or at least had your eyes on a couple of replacement candidates then you're just being stubborn.

Google lets you export your feeds and that is why they are not "evil", not because they refuse to indefinitely maintain a service that isn't of interest to them.

Also the crux or that post is an opt in feature that you have to install as a browser extension, if you don't like it then avoid the extension, but then how is it any different than Facebook's 'like' buttons or any of the other social widgets that are cluttering the web?!
> So I don't quite understand is the falling price because mtgox is down for maintenance

It had already dropped considerably (below $130, IIRC) from the ~$200 it had bounced back to from the earlier drop from $266 by the time MtGox shut down trading. The shutdown of trading at MtGox may have encouraged further decline across other markets, but it doesn't seem to be the original source of the decline.

> if so why does it have that effect, I don't run into the street and burn my cash just because the banks are closed on Sundays

OTOH, you might demand more dollars for goods (or just be less likely to accept them at all), or, on the other side, accept less good for dollars and be more eager to get rid of them if the main outlet for trading dollars for other currency shut down on a day that it would normally have been open (e.g., not a regular Sunday office closure) after a day of high volatility trading where the dollar had lost half its value before the trading was shutdown.
Two Centuries Of Energy In America, In Four Graphs : Planet Money
MtGox is not the only exchange, although it might seem that way sometimes. It would be like your bank is closed on Sunday, but there's still banks from the same branch open next door.

Because the blockchain is shared, the only thing that mtgox being down prevents you from doing is buying/selling with money stored on mtgox itself-- you can still move money from your personal wallet(s) (you're not keeping 100% of your BTC on mtgox, right?) to another exchange and sell it there.
It is support for Apple with the OP casually mentions Apple as being somehow better than Microsoft today then vaguely points to Windows 8 as if there were anything especially wrong with it from a moral point of view. IMHO, My post is more on topic than the OPs because I actually address the Google situation where the OP is just shallow insinuation and emotional appeal directed at Google.

I have yet to see any proof that Google has done anything shady with the information they collect from users that isn't mandated by law, while that is not true of Apple. That's probably the reason that people continue to trust them with their data while people trust Apple simply because it is trendy or easy.
Hey, I like GNU Unifont! What's wrong with it?

http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

Terminus is nice, too, I suppose:

http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/

http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/shots.html

Inconsolata is popular:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconsolata

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
Sure. I took the rhetorical tack of agreeing with the label because I'm firm enough in my conviction that I don't care if someone writes me off as a fanatic.

I'm actually tired of listening to contradictory ideas/evidence about Bitcoin. It gets pretty repetitive and it never gets very convincing.
If this is true, then it doesn't actually do anything to confirm the argument of the original article. The opposite actually. If you had selected a random sample of people and placed them in jobs in Google, then sure, that would provide a lot of evidence that academic performance doesn't matter. But that isn't what happened: this is a sample of people who already made it past the Google hiring filter, which allegedly is placing too much weight on credentials.

If the premise of the original article was correct though, you would expect that the uncredentialed people who made it past the hiring bar would be far stronger than the people who got an unjustified boost based on their credentials and the prejudices.

If it's true that easy-to-measure academic credentials are basically uncorrelated with job performance, then that's probably a good indication that their hiring process actually is well-calibrated: if people with poor credentials were doing better than people with good credentials, then their hiring process isn't giving sufficient weight to non-academic factors. If people with good credentials were doing better than people with poor credentials, that would indicate that they were putting too much weight on credentials and could improve hiring by weighing other factors.
Oh I'm really just not a nice person.

"Take no pride in your confession that you too are biased; do not glory in your self-awareness of your flaws. This is akin to the principle of not taking pride in confessing your ignorance; for if your ignorance is a source of pride to you, you may become loathe to relinquish your ignorance when evidence comes knocking. Likewise with our flaws—we should not gloat over how self-aware we are for confessing them; the occasion for rejoicing is when we have a little less to confess."

- http://lesswrong.com/lw/h8/tsuyoku_naritai_i_want_to_become_...
I read:

>The bitcoin fanatics have carefully constructed their position to ensure that they can interpret literally any event as evidence that bitcoin is not stupid and not doomed and not a scam.
It's amazing how much better I remember the graphics being on those levels. Memory is a funny thing.
Well, he has probably been careful to ensure that he can't lose according to his rules. If the USD to bitcoin exchange rate doubled every week for the rest of his life, he can easily maintain the claim that it will still eventually crash. If the exchange rate does crash, then he can say he was right. I can make the same claim about the US dollar. Without a time frame and price in the hypothesis, saying "it is doomed to crash" or "it is doomed to failure" is not a falsifiable statement.
That the reporter got their comment about the latest plunge provides no evidence either way about when they first talked to the reporter about their Bitcoin holdings. For a story like this, it's almost certain that the interviewing began more than 48 hours ago.

(I'd bet you'd benefit from thinking more deeply before playing 'gotcha' with non-dispositive article excerpts.)
I would hope to never disagree with you - a very smart fellow on here. I however believe Google has put multiplies more money and 'skin in the game' when it comes to Google+... examples of what I think are the way they are pushing it so aggressively by integrating it everywhere. Wave was a pretty large launch I'll admit - but it still felt like an experiment - It felt like to me Google has said publicly in many ways 'This is how we are competing with Facebook and we'll stick with it till it works' - pertaining to Google +

Google Buzz was lot softer launch and commitment...

Checkout is still alive right?

*I do miss wave, my friends and I (with office jobs)used it as a chat channel throughout the workday. We have since moved to hall.com - wave still beats hall though...
Better than I expected, obviously. Thank you.
Imagine what it would be like if there were bank holidays, but they are not predictable in a calendar sense in advance like our holidays... and every bank has their own list of holidays. And also there are only five banks.

I think the price is falling because there's been a speculative bubble rising, and the speculators' confidence is a fickle thing. Maybe up until now, you were a speculator and you didn't think you needed to go anywhere else. Now Mt.Gox has frozen trading and they are also not processing withdrawals. Most people stop trading too.

So, it's a fire sale, because nobody knows if our bubble will blow itself back up again, or how long it's going to take for that to happen. If you were keeping 2/3 of your money at Mt.Gox and now you're afraid that it's utterly gone (at least you know you won't be trading it today), so you've only got 1/3 of what you had, and everyone in town says it's worth 1/7 what it was yesterday.

A few people would surely take the money and get rid of it.
But that's okay, because bitcoins aren't "real money".
You should look a little more into what GDP means. The "money" you see is very much the tip of the iceberg.
That's part of what makes this strategy a bit strange, because "normal" users don't care about or use Google+ either.
I'm far from bullish on Bitcoin, but this article strikes me as irrational nonsense. Why is the fact that Bitcoin is volatile today proof that it will always be volatile? There's no secondary analysis, just reiteration of this one axiom as if it were an irrefutable fact. The whole article sounds like someone in finance making their bet against Bitcoin and being really loud about it in hopes that everyone else will agree and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
SMBC- How Internet Fighting Works
I am facing a similar problem as the author.

I work at a newspaper and since I've been here (8 years now, I'm 28) I have learned some skills:

* Advertising Design(Print and Online Ads)
* Layout Design
* HTML
* CSS
* Some JS
* PHP
* mysql
* Currently teaching myself Python
* Online Advertising (Booking Campaigns)

I know how to do a lot, I just don't feel like I'm good at any of it. This is where I feel Jack of all trades (master of none) is an insult rather than a compliment.

Like the author I feel that if I apply somewhere else my skill level might not be up to par. It really is frustrating.
Yes, perhaps it would feel dishonest, but think about it for a bit, you are a musician, and you want your music heard. So you give out your music for free. Later, people want to support you, so you start selling at $1. Now you are getting play on the radio, whatever - you are hot now. Bump that price up automatically to $5 or whatever and get paid because your value increases.
It seems like it's just a way for Amazon to avoid paying transaction fees on real money. With their margins, this could make sense and be a worthwhile endeavor.
Totally. Plus I'm married and a dad. I gave up long ago. Just give me some plain t-shirts and shave my head and I'm good.
You should tell the guys at mtgox.com about this, as they appear to have this error all over their web site.
... Are you going to hell-ban me if I say no? I know HN has this odd focus on being polite, but I've found that a good honest brawl does more to express what people are thinking than timid conversation over tea.

I mean, I'm done in this topic, if that'll satisfy you.
Ah, of course. Thanks :)
How does the industry in general make its money?
Thanks – what was your approach?
This is awesome fun! Just spent my whole evening toying around with it. GOGOGO Prima Polys and Totally Turtle!
CensorZilla (2004)