skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Startups are a long-term game.

While I agree with this, it's definitely not the position I see here often. The quick flip or at least buyout-as-a-business-plan seems far more popular and glorified.

I guess I can understand that, to a point, but it indicates a very naive view of success and an unrealistic idea of what business is actually like. Unfortunately, that's echoed and reinforced in many places -- intentionally and otherwise -- YC and its surroundings being among them.

I like the premise here. I think it's simply that motivation comes from the belief, valid or not, that you're really doing something that has serious potential. He doesn't quantify what that means, and I think that's best... "big" means whatever it means to you, whatever motivates you, because that's what will make you feel like you're doing something important.

I'm not a feelings person when it comes to business. But being a solo founder, those ephemeral little buggers are important.
The central authority in Chaumiam systems only issues the currency and accepts deposits. It is not required to process transactions.

It is worth pointing out that Digicash survived longer than Bitcoin has even been around -- twice as long, in fact. The reasons for its failure are not as simple as "people just did not care." There were forces in the US government actively working against all civilian use of cryptography, especially those systems that might thwart law enforcement investigations. Patents on cryptography (ironically, this includes patents held by Chaum himself) did what they typically do: prevent systems from being deployed on a large scale. There were bad management decisions, like Chaum's refusal to accept a huge monetary offer from Microsoft to integrate his system with Windows 95 and another large offer from Visa.

Yes, there was a general lack of concern on the part of credit card users about the security of their card data. That lack of concern is largely fueled by all the legal protections bank customers get -- nobody actually feels the pain of credit card fraud, except for the money mules:

https://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=143095

That lack of concern is equally challenging for Bitcoin. I suspect that most people do not really care about any of the issues Bitcoin is trying to solve. Few people are seriously worried about runaway inflation of the US Dollar or of the Euro. Bank fees aggravate merchants, but those same merchants are generally unwilling to accept anything other than their nation's currency, and deal in Bitcoin only through intermediaries that perform currency exchange.

In another four years, if the news about Bitcoin is something other than, "Bitcoin trading at all-time lows," or "Analyzing the failure of cryptocurrencies," you can at least claim that Bitcoin fared better than Chaum's systems.
I'm genuinely curious which type of online store earns less than 5% net but generates $1mm in revenue.
Elaborate? We are big believes in quality, which is applicable for both designers and clients. When you find a happy match, you end up with a better quality outcome, which in the long run leads to more projects. Same goes for the client; if you match well with a designer, you end up being a better client, which leads to long term engagement, and therefore high quality designs on many products to come.
Shhhh...you're ruining the secret
Ask HN: Favorite support site SaaS?
We're getting big enough that support is becoming an issue for our small team. We're looking for a solution that helps us automate support through chat and email. Extra points if it helps us create a FAQ library from support emails.
as a backend engineer the publish/subscribe part of this seems like a scalability nightmare. is anyone using the publish/subscribe features on a large site with lots of instances?
Erm, that's an op-ed piece. Can someone explain why a proposed pipeline through Syria would be threatening enough to Turkey that it would rally many other states behind it in astroturfing the 2+ year conflict? The decades of oppression under the Assad family had nothing to do with it?

Also, seriously? Global Research is a source?
Have you considered finding a better employer? They exist.
Can someone explain to me how this works? I've never heard of a company returning money except in the event of a shutdown.
You can use S3's CORS support to allow your users to upload directly to S3 without even touching your server. Downside is that it can be hard to debug and it requires your users to use JavaScript -- but otherwise it's a big win.

See http://philfreo.com/blog/how-to-allow-direct-file-uploads-fr... for a Python example.
Huh? Who is saying no protection is needed? What we are saying is that the protection is far too long.
With the printout of the raw TX, the recipient would just broadcast it on the p2p network (sendrawtransaction), that's how he would give himself the coins.

As to your other questions, it make no sense. In what situation would person A, offline in a state of civil war, absolutely need to send money to person B, and then would need to steal the coins back??
I wouldn't put it past the copyright cartels in the US to find some way to bend copyright law to go after people bringing copies of books into the US, even just for personal use, that were obtained in a manner that would be considered illegal in the US. On the other hand, in this particular case, I don't see how the "offender" would ever even get on the cartels' radar for the act of bringing a Kindle (in personal luggage) loaded with books under copyright in the US and in the public domain elsewhere across international borders.
"only issues the currency"

This is not an "only". The central issuer also apparently makes management decisions that lead to the success or failure of the scheme, as the anecdote about Chaum relates.
I was almost with you until the end. Gold/silver suffer a similar problem, unless you actually physically possess the metal then the certificates are of little value unless they are redeemable via some trusted 3rd party. In a shit hits the fan scenario, no such trust is likely to be present.
If this works, why not go a step further and add decoration or accenting to the characters to better anchor them? Not unlike how on dice 6 and 9 are differentiated by an underline.

The slight deformity seems perhaps too subtle.

There are already alternate characters buried in the Unicode character space that could serve as simple substitutes, like ḏ or ḃ or ṗ.
"The difference between straight labor and creative work is that the artist is, in theory, building an exploitable asset."

How are laborers not building an exploitable asset? When last I checked, that is exactly what they do: they build exploitable assets for others.

Really, it sounds like you are arguing that Fitzgerald's publisher should be able to charge for his work in perpetuity.
Love the Andrew Chen quote, "your ad-supported Web 2.0 site is actually a B2B enterprise in disguise."
This reaction isn't pretending technology doesn't exist. On the contrary, I believe they are very forward looking to oppose a seemingly innocuous thing that could become a tool of some imagined police state 50 or 100 years in the future. Legislating against this would be a good precedent for when those drones that can track X-centimeter objects from Y kilometers away become more commonplace.

So no, it's not the freedom from having your license plate OCR'd:

> And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier.

It's the freedom from having the government know exactly who was exactly where at all times, which may be important for peaceful groups (if the only possible victims were violent nobody would oppose this) that are against its policies.

The question is not "how can we preserve our privacy by preventing technology from advancing" but "do we want the government or arbitrary private entities to be able to know what we are doing all day every day?"
Scriptcs gets a REPL
I'm not comfortable giving out too many details about his store without permission, but here's a list of 83 industries that average less than 5% net margin: http://biz.yahoo.com/p/sum_qpmu.html
Paid, an iOS app built on the Stripe API
With all the hackers on here, I thought it was worth a shameless plug of our new app Paid (built on top of the Stripe API). No more logging into the web control panel to check on your payments.
What the FUCK? You're either too young, too ugly, or too callous for you and me to have anything to discuss.
Chances of that: zero. Not slim, not infinitesimal, not a fraction of a percent. Zero.

Regular money works better for the nearly all situations.
Is there a service where, given a domain name, you can get an assessment of previous security problems, or potential ones?

Many cities have restaurant inspections, so why not this?
thanks for the compliment, :) so you liked the future workspace screenshots?
As much as thats annoying, it does make a lot of sense. If you can assert that everything which bears that logo is going to be medically related (and not just something random), especially in wars and the like, means you can be more certain of someones intentions.
The issue is that there just isn't that much data. You collect a bunch of macro level time series variables. Ok now what? No matter how cool or sophisticated your model is, there is just too little data to tell which models actually fit reality.

The criticism I describe is what most economists tell me when I bring up agent based models. In practice they mostly just ignore the field.
I read somewhere that average IQ of the Indian population is 80. With average IQ so low what do you expect.
"Large scale software development is unfortunately statistical."

Too true.
Spotify's nightmare realized: Chrome extension allows MP3 download of any song
Yes there are people building real world offline transactions. See the whole API: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Raw_Transactions Typically they use this API for offline cold storage wallets.
Especially presence/touch-activated explosive devices.
This first question comes up all the time in security threads and you should know the answer is "it doesn't matter". If the threat/concern/flaw/whatever is valid, the person who raises it doesn't need to have a better alternative.
Meyer Wolfsheim would never hear of it. :-)
With what, exactly, am I "carrying on"? What "fantasies" do I engage in, and who here doesn't, you including?
Look, I have actually studied p2p. I'm sure you have not. I doubt, for example, that you could quote off-the-top-of-your-head the research papers relevant to p2p.

If you had done your homework, you'd realize that p2p has been around since the nineties, and its only successes have been some weird military-type applications, file sharing, file distribution and Skype.

So p2p is not a new, superior paradigm about to burst into the mainstream, only being held back because of Moaning Minnies like me not pushing it hard enough.

It is actually an old, tired, second-hand, inferior technology that has been failing to go mainstream for twenty years.

"Please don't argue about a tech that appears too complex it can't suit old people"

You actually have to read what I wrote.

Part 1: I explained to you how technology is deployed to suit people who can't deal with complexity: an engineer builds it into a product/service for them - making the service simple enough to use.

Part 2: I explained to you why said engineer would never use p2p for said service: because all the bandwidth is available in the centre.

You know, to make a p2p system that can even approach the ballpark performance of a centralized system, you have to deal with connection asymmetry, connection heterogeneity, overlay construction and churn tolerance. You'll have a devil of a time just deploying and testing the fucking thing, forget about development. And you still get a less performant system overall.

The tech doesn't "appear" complex, it IS complex. For Grandma to be able to use it, the poor sods in Engineering have to make it "appear" simple, which makes the complexity THEIR problem.

This is NOT something any sane engineer would want if he could avoid it by getting Grandma what she wants by using a simpler alternative. Like a central server, for example.
How is this different from https://www.pay-pad.com?
Huh? No one is stopping you from saying whatever you want. OP is just offering information about what might come across as racist.
There is no such thing as meaningless data. Data are just observations. Meaning is constructed from the interpretation of data.

The primary questions of good science are what, where, when, and who. These are the questions you answer when you collect data. Once you've answered them you can address secondary questions of why and how. Asking why and how without giving priority to what, where, when, and who is putting the cart before the horse.

When you are unable to answer why and how for a given set of data, it is not meaningless. Rather, the lack of correlation or explanations just says that perhaps we need to look into this more deeply. "I've looked at the data and I don't know" is a profound statement, and it can be inspiring.

Science also has to be falsifiable, and effectively that's what these graphs do, at least as far as extrapolating from the NY study goes.

I agree it would have been more helpful if the author had presented conclusions about what the data mean or don't mean, but they aren't a priori meaningless simply because there isn't a visible correlation. No correlation, which is the rather obvious conclusion, is just as meaningful. I hope this is more clear.
>>(I forget ther name)

Uber.
So a stupid question about virtualenv for you. Why does it default to full paths for everything?
What's worse are laws that are basically enacted in reaction to some specific situation but shouldn't be applied or necessary in the general case.

Sometimes it seems like the majority of the legal code is archaic if not completely corrupt. I wish there was a way for the public to revoke laws that were ridiculous. Jury nullification? If there is a way they should be teaching it in the schools.
The financial system bears much of the cost of fraud, and avoids externalizing the cost of poor security. That's not true of Bitcoin, where losses are for the most part irrevocable. Bitcoin might be more "secure" in some fiddly sense, but the credit card system is much safer for normal people.
Your description seems to assume that A is offline and B is online. What happens when two bitcoin users are both offline for a prolonged period and A gains access first and moves his BTC to another wallet before B can submit the transaction? What mechanism beyond individual trust permits this to be an effective means of monetary transaction? Would you trust someone writing you a check in a war zone with no access to a bank to not later put in a stop payment on that check?
Thanks for the note and the constructive suggestion. We will continue to improve. One pixel at a time. :)
I don't use matlab-esque tools that much, so I can't really comment on the functionality, but from a web dev perspective, it's really cool! How long did it take you guys to build it?
What would be the immediate benefits of this? Would it be mostly related to multithreading?

And on a side note: As a NoScript user, I'm surprised that I've had to give Javascript permissions to Twitter just so I can visit that idsoftware.com link inside of the tweet. Obviously I don't visit Twitter often, but that should never be the case for it or any site.
No point usually, any company large enough to have HR isn't allowed to answer that. Frustrating, because I'm not going to sue you, I just want to know if there is something I need to work on.
Have you never heard anyone refer to immigrants as parasites?
Wars observe trademarks? I thought the Red Cross was established by international treaty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Geneva_Convention
I worry more about governments than organized crime these days.
I am an Indian developer. I read somewhere that average IQ of the Indian population is 80. So my IQ is probably 80. How long will it take me to become a ninja/rock star programmer. I want to make a plan for becoming an expert.
So what?!

My brother studies in Hatay, a city near Syria. This city used to be a safe, liberal city.

Until the fucking "civil war".

Now, it's filled by a kind of some radical islamists migrated from Syria because of the "civil war". Now women and children in Hatay are afraid of going out of their home because their streets are full of aggressive and criminal North Syrian extreme islamists.

Check those links. This war is definitely not for democracy.
> It's part of the reason why "law" isn't the answer to every societal problem.

I sure wish more people like you had stronger control over the legislative process.
And you're more confident in ECDSA why?
We can usually get new ones for about 15$. I don't think the adjustment costs less. There is also the option of not wearing it, as wearing rings that keeps touching a mouse is annoying sometimes.
I was just thinking about making something like this after finishing my college stats class. I'm not sure if I just don't see it, but it would be cool to add in some statistics stuff, mean, variance, linear regression estimates and stuff like that.
You do realize that NATO is a separate entity from the UK, Israel, France, etc. right?

Unless you can show actual NATO forces what you've said is the equivalent of saying that the UN is waging a terrorism campaign because some of its member states happened to allegedly be involved.

And while I agree the Al Jazeera link is thought-provoking, that's all I could see in there. Thought-exercises about who benefits from what in the whole series of conflicts. If anything the writer seemed to go along with the idea that the uprising commenced due to the Arab Spring and now it's a question of what actors external to Syria might do.

The only discussion I saw regarding NATO was whether or not NATO would have cause to go all-out after Assad... without any discussion of what "going all-out" might mean (since presumably it doesn't involve the military).

There's also no real discussion of how Israel would benefit from any of these pipeline schemes. For all the animosity Israel and Syria might have had for each other, the current situation has to be considered worse from their point of view than a stable Syrian nation where all the weapons were staying in secure Syrian bunkers.
There is a difference between the design of the protocol, and the realities of deploying it. Bitcoin is not immune to this: despite its supposedly "decentralized" protocol, the Bitcoin developers have enormous power over the system. A bad decision by the Bitcoin developers could kill Bitcoin, and inaction by those developers could also kill Bitcoin. Were it not for the early efforts of the developers, Bitcoin would never have received any attention at all.

It is also important to remember that Chaum's poor management of Digicash did not exist in a vacuum; the patents on the digital cash concepts and protocol designs were key in ensuring that only Chaum could deploy the system. Were there no patents, Microsoft might not have bothered to make an offer; they could have just implemented a digital cash protocol themselves. There is no single reason for the Digicash failure, but rather a list of reasons that collectively doomed the system.
Immediate benefits of porting an ancient game that runs fine on just about anything?

It's not about the result, but the process of building it. Lessons learned can be applied to situations where the result does matter (and, hopefully, blogged about).
Why couldn't the NYT have transitioned as eloquently as the Washington Post onto the web?
So, suppose we want to know what 'bark'
sounded like in the common language
15,000 years ago. Call that common
language X.

Well, take languages A and B now where
'bark' is shared as a cognate.

Now, start with language A now and
realize that
as we go back in time
15,000 years ago
to language X
how 'bark' was pronounced
changed year by year. Then realize that as we
go forward in time from language X 15,000
years ago
to language B now, how 'bark'
was pronounced has changed year by year.

Then the change in how 'bark' is
pronounced in languages now is
smaller than either the change
from language A now to language
X 15,000 years ago or from language
B now to language X 15,000 years ago.

So, how close is how 'bark' is pronounced
now to how it was pronounced 15,000
years ago? Closer than to how 'bark' is
pronounced between A and B now.

So, if 'bark' is pronounced nearly
the same in languages A and B now,
then it was pronounced nearly the
same 15,000 years ago. Thus we
have an approximation to how 'bark'
sounded 15,000 years ago.

It may be that languages A and B
have a common ancestor more recently
than 15,000 years ago. So, for
a better approximation want to pick
for languages A and B languages
for which we have some hope that
their most recent common ancestor
was X 15,000 years ago.

How to do this? For candidate pairs
A and B, look at geographical and
genetic distances and pick the most
distant pair.
Repeating your words three times won't necessarily make them true forever. EDIT: Nor one time, in fact.
Unfortunately, Zeo closed down last month: http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/lights-out-for-zeo/
MIT Robots Can Assemble Your IKEA Furniture For You
Sorry, didn't know of the original post.
Oh come on, get that stupid parenthetical out of the title...

It's an interesting idea, and I'd love to see HN discuss it.
It's not gray at all. You may record someone in public. You may record someone on private property iff you have permission or you are on public property. You may not use their image in an advertisement without a signed release.

(IANAL also)
Yes. Linode publicly stated that they were using public-key cryptography, that the private key was secured with some crazy-long passphrase, and that the passphrase wasn't stored digitally, meaning that once a month when they billed they had to manually enter the private key.

So for the hackers to get the decrypted private key, then either Linode must have royally screwed up and kept the decrypted key in-memory during the rest of the month (which seems rather unlikely), or the hackers must have had control of the machine during the time in which they did billing (which I don't think is true, because billing presumably happens either at the start or the end of the month, and didn't the hack take place a bit earlier than that?).

So yeah, I believe them when they said they got the private key. But nobody's said anything to convince me that they got the _decrypted_ private key. And if the passphrase really is as long and complex as Linode claims, then it should be reasonably secure (caveat: I am not a security researcher, or otherwise qualified to judge the security of anything).
Data that answers a question nobody wants answered is effectively meaningless. If you are showing a lack of correlation in a situation where a correlation might be expected then good job. If you are showing a lack of correlation between giraffe migration and cactus branch count then you're wasting everyone's time by bringing it up.
I do know, which is why I said I was being facetious. My point was that it's ironic for them to be talking about reducing user choice when somehow given all their contributions to Linux I'd not chosen to use their system anyway.
Is this Fred Wilson's first new investment in 18 months?
Sure, as people themselves. But as my employee, no. Only if it really serves me.

We pay the bills so we can make some requirements.
You need one more read of the article in El Jazeera. And see my other comments. I'm from Turkey, follow the this shit actively and my brother studies in Hatay, near the Syria border. There is plenty of crazy bullshit in this war. And you can easily make sure this fake "civil war" was established by a global organization to break the gas monopoly of Russia and Iran by some research in Wikipedia.