skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is just plain not true. There are many e-commerce companies who are profitable and healthy immediately.

Start a store with Shopify or Miva Merchant for a low monthly cost, work of of your house and sell your goods for more than they cost you. Ton's of folks do this and are very quickly profitable on a small scale.

If you are trying to be Amazon or Walmart and sell non differentiated products for rock bottom prices, then you are correct. But there are plenty of companies content to run $2 Million - $20 Million dollar businesses without having to go through the pain of losing money for 3 years.
Why wouldn't Paypal invent its own Bitcoin (i.e. Paycoin) and have complete control of the system? Why would they want to use Bitcoin at all?

I mean, they're the 800 lb gorilla of online payments. They'd be smarter to invent their own thing than to use someone else's if they can.
Could you elaborate more? this is an intersection of interests for me
RethinkDB in under two minutes (video)
I liked the article as it recognizes that you can't just freeload on space. One thing I would suggest that you consider is the idea of karma. As a writer there are a lot of people that want to use your writing without paying, and in many ways they probably can. You can engage in a type of "paying it forward" particularly if you are working at a locally owned coffee shop. It will be hard to create hard rules- a lot of it is going to be karma.
Boston Bombings Suspect #1's blood turned into art
There was a post on HN jobs a little while back about a startup looking for a "front end guy" which reiterated several times throughout the post that they "need a guy" and if "you're the guy" to contact them.

The job sounded great otherwise, and was definitely one I would have been interested in, but I felt immediately disqualified and annoyed.

Normally these types of things don't bother me and I often think people read too much into things, but for some reason, that one did. Maybe it was the casual nature of the writing. It made it seem more personal, which, in turn, made it seem like the author was making it clear that they actually weren't interested in hiring women, that they legitimately felt as if a man was needed to fill the role properly, or that the idea of hiring a woman was so foreign to them that it hadn't even crossed their minds.

It was very off-putting.
So Rutherford says: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting" and then wins the Nobel prize for…

You got that right: chemistry!
>Okay, your accountant example has made it clear that there is really no obvious way of finding business problems by just merely looking from the outside.

Well, if it had to be spoon fed it would have no value, because everybody and his cat would be doing it.
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You want the job don't you? The job involves working with people.

Here's how that negotiation would go with any hiring process I've ever worked with:

"So Mr. Pwnguinz, what are your salary requirements?"

"On this piece of paper I've written down the least I would work for. Now you please write down the most you are prepared to offer a perfect person, irrespective of whether I am that person or not. Then we shall exchange papers."

"This is highly irregular."

"If after exchanging papers, we find that your number is less than mine then we can save time."

Two ways I see this going:

A. "Thank you for your time Mr. Pwnguinz".

B. The hiring manager writes down what they were considering as an initial offer, you write down $0, and you become an HR office legend.
You're also stating repeatedly that it's a fact that DRM doesn't work but without any sort of evidence or argument to support that position.

The proof is available all around - i.e. movies, games, ebooks and etc. released with DRM start getting pirated almost right after the moment they are being released. What kind of other proof you need to see to admit that DRM doesn't affect piracy? If you think otherwise, bring at least one example where DRM prevented illegal copying. Some even bring examples where DRM promoted pirating, creating an incentive to break it. (I.e. when content is offered without DRM there is less incentive to show off by pirating it, than to show off by breaking the DRM and pirating it. CDPR found it out by seeing that the pirated copy of their Witcher game was the cracked DRMed copy of their early retail version, and not their DRM free copy which they sell through GOG. They don't use any DRM since then).

* http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/29/interview-cd-projekts-ceo-...

* http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/04/24/talking-the-...

* http://truepcgaming.com/2011/09/20/relive-the-classics-drm-f...

I honestly don't care what DRM proponents in the industry internally believe or base their push for DRM on, since none of those reasons make DRM any more acceptable or ethical. But if you yourself propose to assume they are doing it in bad faith, hiding their real reasons, it should be even a stronger reason to oppose it according to your logic.
How should a blog author protect himself from legal responsibility?

Just consider this (perfectly valid!) case: I, a German blog owner, blog about immigration issues and my blog post attracts a couple of US neonazis which use the Hitler salute, which is legal in the US, but forbidden in Germany.

As I am not in control of the comment server, I cannot delete the offending comment and protect myself from legal problems (it's a criminal offence after all).

Obviously the same problem arises for copyright violations - anyone remember the spread of the HDCP masterkey?
A bit unfair, esp. when Microsoft budgeted $2000+ on SSDs alone.

I think the paper has a good point: scale-up should be definitely considered. I see systems that support 1.5 TB of RAM now... do you really expect your dataset to grow beyond that?

And as long as the dataset fits within 1.5 TB of RAM, scale up will be more scalable than scale out.
Doing new things within the constraints of a genre is one of the marks of good art. All blues songs are the same just as all romantic comedies are the same. But Silver Linings Playbook was still a damn good movie.
The top comments all seem to be griping about the reward structure.
How did the "outside accountant" miss this :S.
The only reason your comment is sort of true (not sure it actually is) is the inclusion of "as an asset class". The easily identifiable top tier firms are killing it.
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'Obama Is Dead' Tweet Makes For Flash Crash
Outgoing unsolicited calls, once removed, might lighten the load of what people are imagining here, unless I'm not up to date on Twilio's TOS.
Language-agnostic Unicorn HTTP client library is now Unirest
Databases for lazy people
Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
Seconded. Chromium, Linux.
Do what? The showing off?
Chemistry is applied physics, after all.
I did the analysis and worked with Stephen on the science side of it.

If anyone would like to ask questions about what we did, I'd be happy to answer them.

There's still lots more interesting stuff to do, but it was enough for a blog post. Suggest away if you think we missed something obvious!
:D Yet another thing that just came to my mind: use different operating systems and software stacks on the two bastion hosts (or, at least, OS A on the bastion host and OS B on the "normal" hosts). You may, for example, choose a *BSD variant for the bastion host, and a Linux variant for the web hosts.

Simple reason: if the software stack of one of the hosts gets compromised (e.g. a 0day is found in OpenSSH), then the other bastion host cannot be compromised with the same exploit.
Interesting article, but the choice isn't truly a binary one between a SaaS solution and hand-rolling everything from scratch... Snowplow is a pre-rolled opensource analytics stack which runs on AWS, so it's pretty minimal in terms of developer effort and maintenance, and you get to own all your data.

https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow | http://snowplowanalytics.com/analytics/index.html

(And it's easy to build Chartio dashboards on top of Snowplow data - we're big fans of Chartio.)
Ruby Versions Demystified - Tech.Pro
I think it's just that these are real legitimate properties, and there are some people out there who both have money and are big fans.
The referenced analysis is including a ton of marketing & advertising expenses into variable costs which is probably not appropriate. If you're like Khol's where 75-90% of items are on sale at any given time, then it makes sense. But something like Plum District is more of an acquisition, marketing cost, not part of COGS.
The owner of the website (in this case eschnou) is always able to choose what to display on the web page. Just like you can remove unwanted comments from a Wordpress comment thread, you can choose which "indieweb" comments to display.
Check out this article here comparing Common Lisp and Scheme. I'm not the author, but I thought it was a really helpful overview of the differences between them, and I hope it will help you all too.

http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=729
Clearly it would be illegal. I was thinking about this as an extension of the market for day 0 exploits. Say you have found a new exploit. According to articles like this, you would typically sell it to some government spy agency, or even worse "bad guys", for something up to $500k.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21574478-market-softw...

This would be a way of converting that exploit into much more. If you had some experience in finance (or knew the right people), you could easily make millions on a series of trades. Illegal, sure, but this is for a person already used to dealing in very shady corners.
For various reasons, I'd rather not say, but it's a Valley Startup. The information is out there publicly on a few forums and glassdoor, a few folks I know who work there confirm it. There's an internal exchange there where they can internally trade their options, but with no exit plan and becoming too big to acquire, I'm not sure why I'd want to buy more options.

Most of the staff there is very young and it's literally their first job out of college so they frankly don't know any better. But any digging into how they expect to get dollars for those options are usually met with really deep concerns.
What took the most work? What was the most painful or repetitive bit? What new primitives in Mathematica would you like to see?
I had the same reaction.

I've been on both sides of the start-up game. I worked at some and I've also invested in some. The first thing, without exception, investors want to see is a fairly comprehensive business plan.

I'm still wondering how this guy received millions of dollars with such a flawed business plan. Either the BP was completely bogus and he managed to hoodwink a lot of people for a few years, or several people just completely missed the boat.

Either way, it's jaw dropping what happened.
Sounds like our API (Keen IO)! We offer simple client libraries for sending & querying the data. Still going strong over a year later and developers keep telling us how much they love the API. I think going through an accelerator, having some successful blog posts here on Hacker News, and using twitter effectively are what helped us spread the word and develop early traction.
Yeah, and for that matter, why would anyone partner with Facebook, when you could easily build another social network? I mean look at Google, they clearly pulled that off without a problem.

Bitcoin is used and has value. The same could most likely not be said about a hypothetical currency created by Paypal, specially considering one of the most important assets Bitcoin has is its decentralized and unregulated nature.
Exactly. That's an application of the Pareto Principle where 80%+ of the returns are realized by 20% or fewer of the participants. Without those high-performance outliers, this whole category of investment asset class would simply no longer exist. Once those high-performance outliers regress to the mean (if they do end up doing so), the VC asset class is sunk. If the outliers remain as outliers, then either the asset class will shrink (on that note, read this interesting article on Zombie VCs: [1]) as the outliers will become the mean (the marginal and underperformers will be culled out of the market), or whatever edge they have over the mean will no longer exist. I have a feeling VC will never disappear as an asset class, which implies the former more than the latter.

[1] http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/04/zombie-vcs/

and... more recently "New data suggests the decline has been more severe than previously thought, finding fewer than 100 active U.S. VC firms in the technology sector.":

[2] http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/04/zombie-vc-shakeout-co...
There's already big players in this field, because it leverages what many states have already done under the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement. See, e.g., Intuit's TaxCloud https://taxcloud.net/tour/

That's not to say there isn't room to disrupt, but even though the bill is new, the field of software/services is not new, and its not an empty field that new entrants get to define.
Ah, okay. And how does comment federation protect against (SEO) spam? If everything runs automated, naturally there cannot be anything like a captcha or other anti-bot measure in the system.
Common Lisp doesn't (like at all) hew to conceptual elegance and so has a lot more useful stuff built in:

1) CLOS for object-oriented programming;

2) LOOP as a DSL for expressing complex iteration (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/loop-for-black-belts.html);

3) Type declarations and a compiler (CMUCL/SBCL) that can take full advantage of them;

4) Better tooling (CMUCL/SBCL + SLIME);

5) More commercial support options (Clozure, LispWorks, Allegro).

R5RS doesn't even have hash tables! You can patch together alternatives for Scheme for most of those things, but the fact that they're not built-in causes problems when integrating code from multiple sources.
I think that just means that he had an automatic bid that was higher than someone else's.
"How can your variable costs exceed your revenue by so much? You might as well not be in business."

I found it in the scribd doc,

"What value, then, was Ecomom providing to our customers? We became simply a middleman, and one that incurred double freight"

Basically they competed with amazon, whole foods, and walmart and lost miserably. either they discounted so heavily they could never dream of profiting, or when they abolished discounts, sales collapsed.

There's a strong cultural demand to not speak ill of the dead... but if the whole story were not tinted with the CEOs death, I think the tone would be astoundingly negative toward the CEO... What was he thinking...
What you have, shouldn't Change Who You Are
can you really raise millions without any documentation at all?

Yes, of course. Do you think Instagram had a "balance sheet" when they went to raise money? Replace Instagram with any other popular startup.
nah, just code in a biotech or for lab software. There is so much opportunity. Automate through code/robotics your job. Plenty of opportunities.

You will find companies that want a mix of wet lab and coder skills. You save them on the translation costs for making software the biologists actually need.
I think there are underlying problems with how people are taught today (too much rote learning, in my opinion, being just one). This problem exists in both public and private schools.

I also feel that current public (and many private) school solutions are not scalable. We can't keep throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at education in an attempt to give everyone an equal chance at education.

I do feel that finding better ways to help people become critical thinkers, thereby enabling them to "learn on their own", is best solved at the micro level.

Don't even get me started on the approach of standardisation. People simply don't think and learn the same way. Neuro-diverse learners being just one example.
For me the cloth dimensions in Firefox go up to 122, in Nightly and Aurora go only to 85 and the lines of the cloth looks blurred. (Win8, latest NVIDIA driver)
I noticed that too and was confused.
The smaller ones piggybacking off of Ebay and similar generally turn a (small) profit immediately. However, the large ones with innovative storefronts and the Google-like classy looking top notch websites are always making massive losses, often for many years at a time.

The reason for this is that investors hope that the wave of people moving their lives/shopping online will turn these big players into the next Walmart - which is almost exactly what is happening with Amazon now. So the strategy is not a terrible one, just a risky one.
The way they're spliced in means they don't have to crawl anything. When you surf the Web you're crawling for them.
Not really. If my Google ad doesn't get good responses Google replaces it with something that users like.

If I insist on targeting the wrong crowd it gets very expensive.

That's why Google ads suck less.
Imagine how much more of this could be done if they did open their data.
Brain Scans Show Humans Empathize With Robots
It was similar, but more powerful. Your API has a some predefined functions one can run on the data, the one I built had fully programmable capabilities, with any metric interacting with any other, from any time frame, etc.
Actually, the idea of coupling together a ARM SoC, a Ethernet switch, a USB audio interface and a bit of power-monitoring circuitry (and some relais) to make a dead-cheap desktop remote management solution has hit me too. Maybe even add a battery to provide a buffer against +5VSB outages (due to "real" power out); after all, a tiny ARM doesn't suck really much power.

But I'm a software guy, not a hardware developer - I can get a basic circuit board done, but no BGA or SMD mounted stuff...

I think the market for such a card - especially if built in half-height to fit into existing servers - is very very great. Wake on LAN just isn't enough for managing thousands of desktop computers, and "true" IPKVM systems come at a hundreds-of-$ price tag, and they're an external box nonetheless.
Maybe there are some guys at reddir: /r/electronics or /r/ece that do high density pcb's and arm.
It ought to go without saying that Facebook is trying out this new image format because they expect benefits.
>It should be for startups and good ideas that can't get funding elsewhere.

Not sure how I feel about this.

Kickstarter does seem to cultivate a wonderful image of taking backers who support projects "to help them come to life, not to profit financially" and connecting them with creatives to enable "their dream to create something that they want to see exist in the world". [1]

It's all very "feel good" and I can understand the feeling that established people or projects are taking advantage of the platform, masquerading in a way. However, it's a bit of a "So what?".

People want to put their money into this and feel a part of it. That's not necessarily helping or hurting anyone else who wants to use the platform.

I'd be really interested in seeing what the trends among backers are. How many small versus large projects the average person funds, whether there's an trickle down exposure to more needy projects from the large overfunded ones, stuff like that.

1: http://www.kickstarter.com/hello
I have no problem with her socioeconomic status. I think a lot of journalists are just very upset with the notion that other people can write equally well, and thus it is a communal act instead of a career option. I mean, I am sorry, but you know that she most likely wants the 'golden days' of newsprint back (whether or not she experienced it) simply because of the career stability. And she would probably be happy with the other regressions in society that would imply.

That's what happens with technological progress, it ebbs at lifestyles and sects before they are even acknowledged to exist.
> Seems like a good business opportunity for someone to open a software-selling business in all 50 states, take .5% of sales plus add necessary tax depending on buyer address and deal with the sales tax.

You'll need to compete with incumbent providers, including Intuit's TaxCloud, that do this free of charge (for retailers, they do get money from the states) for multiple states. (Currently, only for the 24 states that are part of the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement, but under the terms of the new bill, those would be the exact states that would be qualified to collect remote sales taxes without doing much new; certainly, those same incumbent providers are going to be adding support for new states as soon as they start either joining the existing Agreement or meeting the requirements, including establishing certification procedures for software providers, under the new bill for states that aren't part of the Agreement.)
ST2 screenshots too...
WWDC 2013 Student Scholarship
Where the fuck was the board?

It looks like he did a "party round" with tiny investments from a lot of sophisticated investors, combined with bigger investments from less sophisticated investors, and none of them were competent and interested enough to exercise any oversight.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ecomom
See http://freedomdefined.org/Definition and https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8051.

(This parallels the distinction between free software, on the one hand, and freeware and shareware, on the other hand.)

I don't recall Aaron's views about this issue, so I'm not asserting that he would have been upset about this. It should probably be possible to find documentation of his opinions.
Makes me wonder if he was showing rosier financials to investors. It's one thing to fail. It's another to commit fraud. That may have been on his mind when we was contemplating suicide.
Django 1.5 introduced {% verbatim %} {% endverbatim %} which takes care of what you describe.
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins...
You indirectly mentioned this in your talk: You have users enter their CC details whens starting a free trial on AR instead of when the free trial ends.

I've heard Rob Walling recommend this approach on his podcast, and noticed you do it for AR, but I've never seen you write about it. I would love to hear just a little more about it and any A/B data you've collected on it.

On the one hand it obviously decreases the number of users passing through the sign up stage of the funnel, but on the other hand it's obvious that the customers who do sign up convert a lot more.

Thanks!
Is starting with Clojure a poor idea (jumping off the deep end)? I'm mainly a Ruby dev and looking to expand my knowledge-set
Where Do I Want to Send a Check?
Code Writing Apprenticeship (Pre Launch)
Here's an idea I'd been tossing around; kind of doing in little one-offs of mentoring in my area. Maybe others want to learn to code? Maybe others want to be a Mentor?
We've got a bunch of ideas for how this might be fixed – some of them are documented here: http://indiewebcamp.com/comment#Accept_a_comment

My personal inclination is to accept any comments from people I know, and notify myself of any from people I don't know. I can then approve them/block them by adding them to my address book.
Comments don't need to be displayed automatically. For example, comments from domains that you have previously conversed with may be displayed automatically, but the author may choose to queue up other incoming comments before displaying.