skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure it's painful, but thanks for sharing. I agree with cup, that reading about failures can be more valuable than reading about successes.

If anything, your story adds more fuel to the fire for the approach that @sgblank advocates[1][2]. Get out of the building, talk to customers, validate customer needs, etc. We've been doing this, but - to be honest - we haven't done as good a job as we could. Hopefully we will soon start another big round of Customer Development interviews, much more targeted this time, building on the feedback we got the first go-round, and moving more into what Steve calls the "Problem Presentation" phase.

It's a tough slog, but I continue to remain convinced of just how important it is.

[1]: http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development-manifest...

[2]: http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/
I've been there done that, so I get the frustration you went through. Lesson # 1 What people say is cool doesn't mean that it's something that they'd use. Just because you say you're building the next Facebook will get you some "that's cool" responses but doesn't mean they'd actually use it.

One of the most useful things I do to validate an idea is to actually use YC's application- if you can't answer all the questions about your idea without any doubts, you're don't have a solid idea yet. And validating your idea means to follow up at the very least with the people that said it was "cool". Forget the stealth startups, be completely transparent in what you're building and have beta users follow you from day 1.

Good luck with your next thing!
Hacker Breaks Through Encryption Shield Before Uploading Nano-Virus
I completely agree. This is just another transparent way to whine about Reader.
I would be interested in:

Once he found out about the dynamic pricing he tells us “I think I am just going to release with another platform.” FUCK! Are you serious????

What other platform(s)? What were differentiating factors between those, and your service? Do artists suffer any particular trending pain-points in alternate services?

1,700 or so artists could probably provide great feedback into what they actually want in a platform, vs building it in a vacuum.

Thank you for sharing!
"In Bitcoin, we are currently watching a microcosm of how the traditional financial system came to be the way it is. It's really a rare opportunity to see the evolution of complex social systems in real-time."

I fear we are also watching the schooling of a naive minority in the difference between what is "right" and what is "legal." Way too many people I've talked to about Bitcoin are so in love with the concept that they haven't really considered the implications. Yes, someone could, conceptually, break into Mt. Gox and "steal" all of the Bitcoins there, which some would see as a multi-million dollar equivalent theft, and the "authorities" would see it as a 'zero' dollar equivalent theft. Unlike regulated currency Bitcoin doesn't have an enforcement agency. That limits your options when it goes away.

I've been looking, such that I can, at various 'events' (alledged or actual unapproved transfers of Bitcoin from one wallet to another) and have yet to find a single one where there was any legal repercussions at all. I'm interested in finding some so if anyone reading this comes across them I'd love to read them.

This is really a 'new' thing when it comes to case law as far as I can tell and somewhat wide open to interpretation.
In Finland, it looks normal [1]. What are you talking about?

Google gives different results for different people, country, etc. So, the link in your HN title shows differently for different people. May be, you can post a screenshot?

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/TcTkpUG.png
Are transaction fees small enough for that to work? $65 versus $61 is only about a 6% difference, and you need two transactions for each trip, so the fees would have to be under ~3%.
To be clear: I'm not suggesting that it's easy to keep your 4 year old in the office all the time.
The biggest problem with Google has been that they've been a "benevolent monarch", more or less. Meaning, much of the reason why google has been good for the web has been due to specific choices that google leadership has made and the ways that google has chosen to wield its power. This contrasts to strict limits on power and strong external forces from competition, etc.

As long as the monarch is benevolent this is great, but then there's no mechanism to prevent abuses of power, and then maybe the monarch changes, or circumstances change, and the inevitable happens.

Google is making more money than ever, but that's still not enough for them. And now we're starting to see a lot of the "well, we chose not to be evil" slip away. The problem with "don't be evil" is that it's weak, and it's a double negative. Contrast it with "be good". Neutral isn't evil[1], and once you're down in the moral gray area pit anyway it's easy to move the goal posts and define "evil" differently. One could make a very well-founded argument, for example, that Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and even EA or Comcast are not, strictly speaking, "evil" companies.

[1: what makes a man turn neutral?]
I'm a little old fashioned here - but sampling is about as simple copyright breach as you get - its cut and paste.

However, if I were a record company and the top google search for a day was a skinny kid who has audiences full of screaming target demographics, no amount of cocaine on prostitutes would be too great till I had him signed in a contract Fautus would consider a bit on the restrictive side.

Mumbling about how unfair it is to not be able to copy other people's work without paying them is a bit disingenuous, but if I owned those copyrights then this guy is a great way to get more out of the back catalog.
That's a naive, but not entirely unfounded concern. It's been quite common in the last few days to see enormous trading walls at certain values. If a large percent of the volume is set at an obscene price (200-1000% of the current average) then after a certain point, you effectively can't buy Bitcoin any more. There have already been enormous spreads (50$ difference and beyond) on several exchanges. That is not a sign of a healthy market to invest in.
"Dynamic pricing" -- does anyone really like that? I've seen reports of online booksellers (no, not Amazon) giving people different prices based on the account they use. No one really likes to feel like a sucker.

EDIT to add: Some people might bring up airline tickets or hotel rooms. Limited analog inventory, not infinite digital inventory.
Do any beginners want to team up? Going to give this a try to learn more JS and learn how to build an autonomous agent, I don't have any intention on winning.
While I don't believe in the Europe's collapse, please please don't say it's just 'money a little tighter and skip holiday'. At least in Portugal people are indeed suffering. I never in my life before this seen people garbage searching for things (excluding homeless people).

I saw someone that went to highschool with me a couple weeks ago searching through garbage bins for things he could sell.

I hear stories from my mother (she works at a bank, deals with people having problem paying their credits, mortgages mostly) and some of there are tear jerkers.

We in tech maybe doing ok (I'm earning more than ever) but for a lot of the population, it isn't this rosy. Kids are indeed skipping meals because the parents CAN'T buy them food.
Today we celebrate
I for one would be happy if the MSM would stay out until bitcoins are ready for prime time (another year perhaps)
lets all stop with all the fear mongering. Do you guys really believe that every time a site loads a facebook or twitter widget they aren't tracking you either. I can name 1000 other trackers that sites actually do install and that do genuinely sell your information. There are a handful of widgets that do the same thing for twitter and facebook so lets just stop the bs.
"You lost."

I don't know if I'm more annoyed by your smug attitude (and the attitude that many others here have regarding Bitcoin), or if I just feel sorry for you that you have to be this smug and condescending about having been "right" that it is in a slump.
I work in an office where people have had both kids and dogs in the office, on rare occasion.

I was always surprised by the kids, because they were really quiet. My own kids are very noisy and would not belong in an office, but these kids were sticking around for an hour or two between one event and another, completely unnoticed by me until I saw them. It's no skin at all off my nose and benefits my coworker in some way, so more power to him.
No, it's a model that works only for the very most popular acts. Independent artists who compose original music and tour clubs make McDonalds wages (or often less) doing that.

Which is to say nothing about the idea of creating a structural requirement that professional musicians have to live an itinerant lifestyle.

You can want artists not to care about their recording rights as much as you like, but wanting recording rights not to matter is not the same thing as them actually not mattering.
To be fair, most of those are from 6+ hours ago.
Automated ClickOnce Build and Deploy Using Powershell and MSBuild
You seem to have capitalized the name of the exchange incorrectly. It's not MtGox (like a mountain), it stands Magic The Gathering Online Exchange, a website where you can trade children's playing cards.
Legit concerns! We use it ourselves though and we actually don't look at the app too often, mainly when we want to see if the other is there or are in a conversation..

We'll also be building in some privacy options very soon that will make using the app a bit more comfortable :)
I like the whole video thing. Clever way to not have the video "always on" with their black and white picture every x seconds.

However why re invent the wheel with their "streamer"? Can't we just have a normal chat + a "link/media' history that we can browser and search like on jaconda or other group chat tool?
As a student, I agree, but it's not this simple. My parents still expect me to get a job, and I need something to do other than just sit in my room all day on my computer. It's nice to have people to talk to, and I don't have any friends who are entrepreneurial and hackers who can be a good cofounder or whatever. It doesn't seem like there are any great solutions to these problems, but maybe I'm not looking/thinking hard enough.
LinkedIn Buys Pulse For $90 Million
Not when it comes to rumors about unannounced products.
Anyone outside of Continuum who can share their experiences with Numba and/or NumbaPro?
No joke - years ago I had a rodent friend named Sqwiggle (named by my girlfriend). Thanks for the inadvertent trip down memory lane. :)
Adopting DevOps – Part II: The Need for Organizational Change
"The majority of people that have Bitcoins now are the people that don't want to sell them. Ever."

You may be right, however I don't think the inverse is true.

"The majority of Bitcoins are owned by people that don't want to sell them. Ever"

There are some big players now that absolutely want to continue selling coins as they're being earned.
Waiting around for people to embed metadata in their webpages is a terrible business strategy.

This is way better for google than something like an embedded RSS feed. This lets google generate the equivalent automatically, without webmasters needing to do anything.

Yes, this occurs at the expense of other things (annoying developers). But that's the reason.
I am really excited about this. Here's some feedback from my first impressions:

1. Offline support: I'd love to work on this offline, write unit tests, use vim, all those nice things. You mentioned elsewhere that you're running the server-side simulation in Node—would be great if that was open sourced. :)

2. Better auto-saving: If offline support isn't available, editing online needs to be improved. I was messing around with my AI while on a shuttle with flaky WiFi. I saved my progress and navigated away. Later I came back, and turned out my progress was not saved. (a) Let me know if saving failed? (b) Maybe use LocalStorage as a fallback?

3. Better built-in library for common operations: o.lib.physics is a great start, but I'd love to not have to implement things like: "orbit around TARGET at distance X", "maintain distance X from TARGET", "orient towards (or away from) TARGET", etc. Sounds like these kinds of libraries could sprout organically from the community, but it's not obvious where to find them.
Oh no, he has low HN karma? How can he possibly have any valid opinions?
It is available for multiple platforms, I have it on at least one of my desktops.
Yeah, I signed up too, I never said the sign up form was difficult. Doesn't solve the mystery of whether this has anything to do with your twitter account, since there's no reason why that @ sign should be there.

My edits make the comment a bit dramatic, but that wasn't my intention.
They've changed the name, it is officially MtGox with no official acronym.
Keep Moving Forward. Pick up the pieces, mend the broken bones, take a vacation, regroup, do something else that you love and are passionate about. Failure is part of life. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, right? Just keep at it.
>>>because if you're going to go with your gut reaction, there's no point in discussing anything with you

Well that's how people react, so get used to it. I also reacted that way when I saw "Human Placental Extract" in a list of a woman's cosmetic ingredients. Full disclosure means you don't always get the nice welcome you want.

EDIT to fix clumsy sentence.
| You lost.

Would you really care to wager money that Bitcoin will never rise in price again? Regardless of whether or not it will 'take over the world,' it's too soon to say what will happen to Bitcoin.

Wall Street didn't disappear because of the Great Depression, but I'll bet there were plenty of people right after the crash that were predicting doom and gloom.

| Bitcoin fanatics

You just come off as either an anti-Bitcoin fanatic or a troll.

| insane volatility

Do you really expect anything that is in its early stages to be stable? Nothing about Bitcoin is currently stable, and I don't exactly see people encouraging their grandmothers to use it for day-to-day transactions.
Speculations affect every currency or share. But it affects bitcoin stronger because of its low market cap.

Think bitcoin as a some random micro cap manufacturing company located overseas, one news coverage and everything changes.
CP is hardly "government enemy #1." Terrorism is. You do not see one hundredth the attention or money of anti-terrorism activities directed towards 'protecting children.'
I'm gloating like mad because I'm tired of the cloud of idealism that crops up in every Bitcoin article.

I want to be rid of this financial magical thinking. I ain't gonna apologize for that.

And I rather think your smug/condescending quota doubles mine.
I trust google to build good infrastructure more than I trust the collective developer community. That's one reason -- whatever they build will be more robust, flexible, and extensible. And immediately adopted by hundreds of millions of people automatically.

I guess that's not the same as "durable", but playing devil's advocate, those seem like good reasons to me.
Welcome... do it again.
Even the people at the very top of the value chain in the music industry --- the vanishingly small set of people who produce commercially viable music --- can't make the business work. So I'm curious as to why you'd have tried to start a company in music. Did you start before Dalton Caldwell's talk?

I'm just interested in how people pick the ideas they pursue.
uhh...what? This is an opt-in feature of the Google+ Chrome extension.

Meaning, you'd probably only install this if you wanted extra Google+ functionality in your browser, like, say, alerting you if the page you're on has a G+ page. Your analogy is terrible.
Sure, feel free to send me an email! It's all about learning and having fun.
>Cool.. Is this still an active project? It says © 2011 but it's still in beta and there isn't much on the site.

Not sure, I'll have to ask him. There are some 2012 updates on the site, but I thing he moved on to something else now.

>I don't think this idea (RailsPress?) is so original that no one's thought of it before, but it doesn't seem like anyone's really executed it yet. I'm thinking about starting a Github repo for this if there isn't already an existing one I can contribute to.

Sounds like something that, if executed well, can have a real market.

I'm surprised there isn't any SaaS offering something similar for SMEs. Like the way WooForms let's you make, well, query forms.
>>>Products using it should be required to say as much though.

Yes. But they don't want that, see? They don't want me and everyone else to be able to say No and spoil their payday.
True. That just means it's going to get worse once the 60% drop today is accounted for, and looking at the new posts, people are in a panic.
Thanks for the comment. Well, it's an experiment for now. I asked few HRs, and their reaction was positive ( of course this doesn't have to mean anything ).
Beside emails, I think to offer blogs as well, something like john.besthi.re so we will see how it will go.
I think I can come up with a simpler explanation of one way function to start with. Lets say the word I want to apply one way function is 'america'. Lets say I assign a number to each character in the password and the number that I assign is equal to the position of that character in English alphabet.
For eg: 'a' would get the value 1, 'b' would get 2, 'c' would get '3' and so on.

My one way function adds the values of each character, in case I apply it to 'america', it would be 1+13+5+18+9+3+1 => 50.

So, if somebody had to find the word from only from resultant sum or value, it would take time to come up with all the possible words.

Some of the possible candidates also include aameric, cmeriaa etc. Clearly in this case there are many possible words that map to a particular value or sum, in the good one way function there are not going to be as many words that map to one value, also a good one way function is more complicated(for a computer too or computer takes non polynomial time) than the one I chose!
| ready for prime time (another year perhaps)

Could this become another "Year of the Linux Desktop" meme? ;-)
I think you might have missed yesterday's bitcoin events, the bubble popped.
Well, we're still looking for a mascot... ;-)
> In the UK, one producer sued the dance group MIAIRIRIS for sampling his work. Although the song was a top ten hit, he had no idea it sampled his song until a member of MIAIRIRIS mentioned it on the radio. It had been manipulated beyond recognition.

I don't think it's always a simple cut and paste. The article mentions Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You" sampling the Police, or The Beastie Boys sampling Led Zeppelin or the Beatles. You might listen to some of these songs and have no idea about the original. One time I was at a party and Kanye's 'Harder Better Faster Stronger' came on. I remember saying "I didn't know Kanye sampled Daft Punk" and someone replying something along the lines of "nah this is all original Kanye"
See, you're considering this from a US-centric view. There are lots of currencies, so there's no single 1:1 conversion rate.
I'm definitely just waiting to see what's up when Mt.Gox comes back online. Wish I had some money in btce to buy a few though.
I used to be a Google fan as well. Not a BIG fan but a fan.
In late 2010 I decided it was time to move on from Google. It took a while but I already went back to Firefox (nightly), started moving my emails to fasmail.fm (with my own domain so I'm not tied to anyone), I'm trying to use only DuckDuckGo (it's difficult... I have to admit that Google is unbeatable yet), stopped using google+ and Google Reader (since 2011), avoiding Google Talk, Analytics and Web Master Tools, etc. I think I'll make it to the end of this year. They are evil.
Because he talks about more than just this browser extension. Spoilers, I read to the end:

My personal stream was my RSS feed, you want me to replace it with a Google+ profile. My news aggregator was the RSS aggregator of my choice, you want me to use a semi-read-only version called Google+. My browser would auto-discover the stream related to any page I visited and would allow me to subscribe to it, now you want me to use a Google+ chrome plugin which in addition kills my privacy.

Everyting worked quite well, and you could pick our side and help us make it better -that’s what you’d do back in the “don’t be evil” days.

Oh, right, I forgot: You killed RSS auto-discovery in chrome, Google reader is dead, and Feedburner is a living dead. I get it.
> Buy bitcoin at Mt.Gox the world's largest and oldest bitcoin exchange! [1]

Regardless of their origins, they now use this CamelCase. In fairness, I did omit the period, inexplicably.

[1] https://mtgox.com/
Not only that, but MtGox handles over 80% of all bitcoin trade. No wonder it's plummeting; every currency would be greatly affected by something like that.
I see this happen more and more that we talk to our potential customers about the idea we've been brewing and they say 'heck yeah I would totally use it', later only to find no interest in it. One thing I learned is, most of our ideas are pretty cool and most likely all the potential customers would agree when you try to validate but very few would actually hop on to try it. May be the implementation wasn't right, or may be its too hard to change the customer behavior to switch. Sometimes the customer was not serious enough when you pitched.
Eh didn't read the reply and not worried about the down-vote. No hard feelings at all.

Don't suppose you could point out the bit that caused the confusion? It would help me avoid this sort of response in the future :)
Yes! Yes I am an anti-Bitcoin fanatic!

Why? Because it's _so obvious_ to people outside the Bitcoin fixation that Bitcoin is crippled. 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.

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

Nothing Bitcoin does solves the problem money presents in the first place: its misuse by the greedy.
You have a tangible yet unmarketable product. Rather than abandon it completely, would you consider open-sourcing it? Any contribution to the open source community is a positive use of time (in my opinion).
I wonder if one has to pay sales taxes on amazon coins. If not, then they have a successful way around that little nuisance.
Exactly. And stock is typically much cheaper for a company to spend than actual cash.

A perfect example of this was the Facebook-Instagram acquisition. It was right before Facebook had their IPO, so it was much cheaper for them. Ironically, since Facebook's share price dropped so quickly after IPO, that billion dollar valuation ended up being closer to $715M

source -- http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/24/3551872/facebook-instagra...
This seems unkind. What data would you want? It's easy to jeer in hindsight, but frankly if focused and professional market research could reliably determine the existence of new markets there would be no need for a startup to find them. This very web site wouldn't exist.

They played a hunch and lost. The linked post details lots of mistakes, but this particular one doesn't seem like one to me.
Is it likely the mass sell off will come once mtgox reopens? Certainly many have their bitcoins tied in there and will begin selling once open?