skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post Ian! I can certainly relate on the lack of marketing experience but, I can't say that I agree 100% with your verdict that the success of a product rests solely on how specific a problem it solves. Depending on your product's niche, you might find yourself struggling with marketing a product because your potential paying customers are used to general purpose apps that solve most of their pain points, even if not all. Just because those general purpose apps, as you've put it, create such little friction.

For example, I'm working on a startup that caters specifically to runners. That's it. We analyze run data and create nifty little visualizations. The upsell is even cooler forms of analysis that someone like a track coach, amateur, or competitive athlete might use. It solves a very specific problem: "how can I tell that I'm improving as a runner?" and it has very specific answers like "you shaved 25 minutes off your 5K time based on your best runs over the last 90 days" or "in the last 30 days, you've spent 65% of your training at a pace faster than 7:30min/mi (your tempo pace) - you're in danger of overtraining or, worse, getting injured!" Although, I can't even begin to tell you how many people have told us to generalize our app. Include cycling, swimming, hiking. Maybe somehow tie it to nutrition or weight loss. Maybe also vie for the role of becoming the Facebook of fitness. And, of course, the number of times that we chose to turn down the temptation to diversify... I'm all for staying focused. Running is the first and last thing I think of each day, but I think it's also safe to say that being specific can sometimes equate to being esoteric and, that, can sometimes be a long and difficult road to follow. I'm not saying it's not worth it. I'm pretty happy. Although, it doesn't grease the wheels for success indefinitely.
OK, I'll stop saying TDD. :)
Not even close. Anytime you buy low and sell high you owe taxes on the difference. This applies to everything from antiques to livestock.

It doesn't matter if the stuff is tangible or imaginary. You would owe taxes for mining World Of Warcraft coins if you sell them. You would owe taxes for picking up cans off of the street and recycling.

How much you owe can change with how you earned the money, but if you earned money you owe taxes. Only two things in life are certain. Taxes is one of them.
That's nothing, someone owns (owned) six million litecoins:

http://ltc.block-explorer.com/address/LTpYZG19YmfvY2bBDYtCKp...
surely ppg is a relevant measure of a player's skill right? I'm just pointing out that even if you think LeBron is best ever, it's not a landslide by any means as the parent comment seemed to indicate. "hard to argue he's not best ever." It's not really. He's in the argument, but by no means is he "obviously" #1.

Fwiw Lebron didn't win a championship for his first 8 years. Perhaps he will win the next 6 and make Jordan look pedestrian. He's not there yet though.
How Major World Events Affect Viewing Of Online Porn
FYI man, you can sit at home and do absolutely NOTHING -- and your name goes through like 17 computers a DAY, man.
Well, how does the propagation of transactions in the BTC network work? I honestly don't know, but I would assume that it is more likely for the originating node to be near to the relaying node than not.
I have used both T-Mobile and Aio heavily, and tethered off of both of them using various Android phones. Never had an issue.

T-Mobile's 5GB plan is a better way to setup a hotspot (with a stock Android phone) than a lot of purpose-build hotspots.
I an going to try that, that's a second comment today that it's not clear what to do on homepage...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_welding
If you have a smart TV you probably want to browse the web on it.
Are you suggesting that any given transaction is most likely to be a theft?
One disagreement:

"You can buy CFLs. Some are great, others make your living room look like a gas station bathroom in 1960."

Please, please don't. We all have a duty, with our wallets, to make CFL die. It is garbage, stopgap technology that should have been strangled in the crib. Oh and also it's toxic waste.

Buy LEDs. Buy incandescents. Buy xmas tree lights. Buy anything but CFLs.
Then you will miss the moment when "Bitcoin has arrived".

You see, if anything the last 5 years has taught us, is that Bitcoin's adoption can continue to dramatically increase despite wild volatility. (Data point: Bitpay signed up 10,000 merchants through a period when 1 BTC was sometimes losing 50% of its value intra-day!)

Volatility is unfortunate, that's for sure, and it is expected to decline over time as trading volume increases. But if you want to measure Bitcoin's success/adoption, look at actual adoption, instead of volatility.
I forgot about that point. At some stage they would send you a refurb as you likely "proved" you sent yours in. They knew they would replace it so sometimes it would come back stupid quick. In all but the last of mine, I got the same unit back which likely accounts for the delays. They, and I as well, likely preferred letting us keep the same unit for warranty, live, etc purposes as the "move my stuff to a new Xbox" wasn't terribly fun to do, much less any more than once.
Just got the email.

---

Firstly, thanks for signing up for the beta of Visual Node, and trying out the tool. Your feedback has been incredibly helpful to us.

Today we have a very exciting announcement for you. Since the summer Red Gate has been working with Microsoft on a free, open source Node development environment for Visual Studio called Node Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS). We've just released the first public alpha of NTVS, which you can download from:

https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/

NTVS offers what we believe is a much richer development experience than Visual Node, including:

Various Node project types,
IntelliSense and editing,
Debugging, including remote debugging on Linux,
Profiling,
npm,
Azure deployment,
Support for both Visual Studio 2012 and 2013

In addition you can create NTVS projects based on existing code, making it easy to upgrade from Visual Node to NTVS. Please see https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2013/11/22/node-js-develop... for more information.

If you have any feedback we'd love to hear from you. You can report bugs or improvement requests at https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic, whilst support and general feedback/discussion is available at https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/discussions. Please do vote on the bugs/improvements you'd most like us to work on.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you again for participating in the Visual Node beta program. As I said, your feedback has been very helpful, and continues to influence the development of NTVS.

If you have any questions about anything in this email please do post to the discussion URL on Codeplex - we'd love to hear from you.

Kind regards,

Bart Read
NTVS Contributor
Red Gate Software
https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/
That's it huh? I'd assume ~100% would regret some investment they made.
Here framing the problem around a Walk class makes for a more elegant implementation but the proscribed steps will never get you there.
I think most Unix commands have a function type which is not representable in haskell, if you don't want to fall back to strings everywhere. So you end up with many functions like ls and ls'. For a shell I prefer a dynamically typed language.
Your post doesn't quite parse for me; while I am fairly conversant in political philosophy I'm having trouble connecting "philosophy of liberty" to anything the FSF does.

My annoyance is simpler, though: I dislike propaganda. That the FSF seeks to re-define the word to the exclusion of all else is bothersome, much as, for another example, the American Republican Party seeks to redefine "socialist" to mean "center-right". It's the poor debate tactic of the extremist who can't accept the validity of opposing positions.
Free linux distribution that provides network services with an Web interface
Of course, but the issue as always is where are those niches, what do people need that's simple enough to be built by one or two people? How does one find such a niche? I'm a developer and thus practically by definition I can't think like my customers, things that might seem easy or worthless to me might not be to someone else, or maybe not.

Having a SaaS product with monthly subscriptions would be my ideal, but you gotta know what people want and will pay for and how to find them.
Russian mobs.
There's no IP for fashion. And I think the world is a better place if everyone copies GUI design and makes things consistent. Remember that the point of IP is to serve the public at large.
So if this currency does become ubiquitous the Winklevoss' will be the kings of the world? God dammit.
Gains on Bitcoins realized are totally taxable. (i.e. you have more cash than you put in)

The only special laws are relaxations to the normal tax rate.
Near as I can tell, all Ashe Dryden does is digs up some statistics about the overall population (women choose to be caregivers and earn less than men on average) and declares victory.

Among other things, if these statistics implied women can't create content and push it to free internet services, wouldn't that imply women couldn't contribute to facebook/instagram/etc?

As for distinguishing the two, I don't. My goal is to find good coders, simple as that. In the absence of information suggesting someone is good, I need to assume they aren't.
Reinventing The Condom With Easy-On Tabs And Beef Tendon
You just assume that most people will know what to do and how to do it to protect themselves.
As someone who played chess as a child but gave up after high school what are some apps that would get me back into the game?
You're right, but I'd go farther. I work at a large enterprise (~5000 staff, about 2/3 technical) and his synopsis rings true to me.

I used to scoff at (to use his terms) some Leads, and especially Leads of Leads. But then I saw a few good versions of Leads of Leads, and I don't scoff in a generalized fashion any more. Having a good appreciation of what other teams across the org are doing, and being able to make the right connections, is a real talent. It's also a talent to not be parochial about the collaborations you encourage.
The original transaction was likely made at a discount to someone willing to peddle the smaller bundles.
Lots more Koans: http://pineapple.io/tags/koans
Is the site down for anyone else?
Actual adoption as a currency requires pricing in that currency, that requires stability.
This bit caught my eyes:
"while paying AdBlock Plus to whitelist their other Adwords ads"
So, adblock sells the ability to display ads to it's users? Isn't that just plain wrong?
A big part of education startup failure is conflict of interest among all the parties. For an individual teacher to adopt a new technology is not super difficult; you just have to solve a real pain point, or show that your tool can help them actually teach students. The problem here is that teachers have no money. Not only are they rarely given discretionary money to use for the classroom, but they're severely underpaid professionals who are notorious for already spending lots of personal money on their students. No way to monetize this group effectively.

The second layer is District/State boards of education. The problem here is educating (ironic) these former educators on what the classroom needs. Often, these people believe that the technologies available the last time they were in the classroom are sufficient for teachers to do their work. Additionally, teachers have very little pull in this group, as most are elected/appointed officials. This group actually has considerable influence money-wise, as there is a lot of money earmarked for technological purposes. But by and large they are not aware of technologies that are not prefaced by Microsoft, Dell, or IBM.

The ancillary of the second layer is the district/state IT department. Let's just say that the best people in IT don't wind up here, because the pay and work environment are horrible. To save costs, you're constantly looking into open source solutions. Likely, these people will believe your excellent product can be easily replaced by a Wordpress install with a bunch of plugins. Maybe it's really because they just want to prove they can program like any professional (hint, they cannot). So, no support from IT for you.

The final layer is at the federal level, people who make policies. Your best bet here is to have a 20-year Senator who will vouch for your product, lobby for you with all the other old people involved in setting educational policy. Here's a hint though - people think Common Core is a radical change but it's half a century in the making and really doesn't change what anybody was already doing except for adding more testing. Long story short, if your product isn't another way to test students in a standardized manner, you'll get no traction at this level.

So, good luck!
Why does every thread featuring SO contain this knee-jerk response? If anything, HN is the "bad" place with its constant nagging.
Betas (TV Series 2013)  Amazon Studios
Bitcoin has kind of a backwards privacy model compared to conventional finance. All transactions that have ever been made are public forever, but it's not so easy to prove that any particular person or organization controls any particular address. At least, assuming your client is mixing addresses and handling change transactions properly.
Amazon.com: Betas [HD]: Season 1, Episode 1 "Pilot [HD]": Amazon Instant Video
It's not a certificate problem, I think somebody's misconfigured the server. It's listening on port 443, but not actually responding appropriately to TLS traffic.
All things considered I think a 50% regret rate is pretty damn good, considering the majority of those companies will probably not pan out.
Actually, only #1 and #2, "simple statements about what these objects will be doing", are relevant. The 'nouns' points are misleading at best. OO is all about behavior ('services'), not about data. A class doesn't encapsulate data, it encapsulates state. That's a big difference that many OO aficionados don't realize.
Another source of confusion is that in some OO languages 'everything' has to be a class. A Java class in many cases isn't a class in terms of OO. Java Beans e.g. certainly are not OO classes.
From the James T. Kirk school of chess.
You could create a new Bitcoin Wallet and transfer the bitcoins to your "new" wallet.
How the Rich Get Richer, Rental Edition
If you're in the US, it's easy to buy BTC through Coinbase.
The article itself looks like blogspam, but it links to a Bloomberg report speculating the same thing. The pulled quotes are the meat of the Bloomberg article.

Basically, an deputy governor of the PRC bank gave a speech yesterday saying "it’s no longer in China’s favor to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves" and there is language in a guidebook they released yesterday guiding the PRC to take a less interventional approach in currency markets.

This is bad, but not quite as immediately catastrophic as the blogspam makes it sound.
The 120-Hour Workweek - Epic Coding Time-lapse
Isn't that in the category of difficult things that aren't necessarily part of programming?
I assume that someone with hundreds of millions of dollars does.
Right now I'm working through the book "How Not to Play Go", by Yuan Zhou, but he has many very good books I could recommend. Neil Moffatt is another good writer, and I particularly enjoyed "Double Digit Kyu Games" by him. If you're not afraid of diving right in, Yuan Zhou's "Master Play" series, where he dissects games by different Go masters are very entertaining as well.
Calling it a daily coupon site would probably have been more accurate.

I actually thought that's what the article would have refereed to as well, but as far as I'm aware, Woot! and similar sites are doing just fine. Woot! in particular is owned by Amazon now and has several dozen "daily deals" open at any given time now.
"Mr. Karnilowicz estimated that 5 percent of the city’s (San Francisco) 212,000 rental units (about 10,600) are kept vacant by landlords who would rather not deal with rent control (others estimate the number is higher, about 25,000 units). He said that many owners would rent those homes if there were reforms, like requiring the rich to pay full market value."
The AeroFS clients are another vector. You would have to have application specific firewalling and restrict them to communicating with the server.
Thanks, that's useful to hear! Agreed, I'm highlighting one potential "problem", but it's probably more complex and multidimensional than that: my aspirations for a general product, marketing experience, educating users about specific use cases.
Great to hear that you're gaining traction with runners and that you're resisting generalising your app. It must be tough, once you gain users, to decide on a roadmap.
Fiat means value by decree, and value of bitcoin is decided only by free market, without any decrees
Bootstrapping your company? Come share our startup space in SF
Sample size was 4500+ distributed between the two versions. In this case, the sample size was not small but the conversion rate of the page was very low.

Which is why a 600% increase was even possible. That's usually a problem with A/B testing in the real world. There are so many websites whose conversion rates hover in the 0.xx% range. Thoughtful hypotheses almost always result in significant gains. Not because they did something magical, but because they simply communicated their business offer better.
Sadly it's unlikely that this is how it would work. Most probably when you agree to license the Google Apps package it's an all-or-nothing affair, so if you want Play on your handset, I'm guessing you must take Chrome too.
Different thing entirely. Woot just sells stuff itself. Groupon and the ilk recruit businesses, and charge them to offer coupons online, then don't pay the businesses their end for like 5 months. Woot just sells stuff. Sadly, though, since Woot went to Amazon, it's just Amazon for refurbished stuff at $5 below Amazon prices.
Incorrect. That article is comparing the estimated exposure from a broken CFL with the exposure from eating Albacore[1] tuna. The actual mercury content in the CFL is obviously much greater.

[1] And not all canned tuna is Albacore. The stuff sold as "light" tuna is typically lower mercury content (don't have a source handy at the moment.)
4 spaces in front of the content - the problem with it is that on larger text, it puts it in a scrolling div, which is not easy to read.
What it is, versus what it does?
As a general principle, it is always good to have at least some knowledge of 2 levels of abstraction below (and above) where you work, because they tend to leak!
Then you will miss Bitcoin's success as payment processing, as a remittance (replacing Western Union, MoneyGram...), etc. Bitcoin is used more than just as a currency. Restricting your view to only its use as a currency is not seeing Bitcoin's success in these other areas.
Well, I think the trick is to not think in terms of niches. A great way to start is to find something people already use, and then make it better. The trick is it should actually be better, otherwise it'll be a crappy clone.

Then, you are entering a market where people already pay for stuff, and they can hopefully understand why yours is better. If you get their attention, you have a good chance of starting to build a subscriber base.

Being unique and new is great, but it's a incredibly tough way to get off the ground.
Consider this: They paid $0.00 for the transfer of $150 million dollars.

A direct (i.e. not based on third party credit, regulations, etc.) transfer of wealth of this magnitude between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold. Depending how safely you want to make the transfer, and how far the entities are on the globe, it can cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Bitcoin has real value. It solves problems on an incredible scale. I wish I realized this months ago.
Credit cards work...
you could get no output from a program that didn't have side effects.
> Someone

This is a little misleading. This could be a business etc.

A mining pool or exchange transferring from one wallet to another (ie. to cold storage)?

You wouldn't want a typo in your address for that amount of cash! I'd probably break it up into a bunch of smaller transactions just to be safe.
SaltConf Speakers and Labs Released.
Backgammon: the best way to want to kill yourself. I was playing a 21-game match against someone on the Internet, it was 17-16 for him, but I was in a very good position and I doubled and he (incorrectly) accepted. I was about to build a 5-prime between my 4 and 8 points when he got a lucky roll, hit two of my blots and closed off his home board. He won a gammon and the match. One lucky roll, 1/36 chance and I go from still being in the match to being a 3% dog.
OS X Mountain Lion: Still unsupported and vulnerable
Thank you for the response. Usually on HN you dont hear a lot about MS products, its nice to hear about something different especially in a positive light.
Government can tax anything they want. Even the babysitter and making change from a stranger.
No, I have a Keon, but the ZTE Open is very similar. They both have low-resolution screens (same as non-retina iPhones) which can cause trouble too. They are quite good lowest-common-denominator test devices, not so good as primary smartphones, though I'm kind of fond of mine.

I must say I find it a bit problematic, philosophically, that an HTML5 app toolkit should be designed for a single platform and should have to be "ported" to new ones. What about it is so platform-specific?
After spending the last 18-months immersed in the professional StarCraft 2 scene, I can totally appreciate a lot of the meta-stuff around Chess now. I always enjoyed Chess, and was not too bad at it (compared to those around me, certainly nowhere near even an amateur-pro!), but for some reason SC2 "clicks" better for me (I think being addicted to Brood War while spending 6 months in South Korea probably has something to do with it).

The discussion of "mind games" {"nettlesomeness" here) is something that SC2 has an obsession with, and certainly can play a massive part in pro tournaments, and I'd never considered it applying to chess... but now that I think about it, everything in SC2's meta really came from Chess to begin with, only applied in real-time with 300+ actions per minute and hundreds of pieces with few illegal moves. And yet I struggle more with grokking the advanced strategies of Chess than I do for StarCraft!
Are there any legal or quasi-legal ways to play online poker in the US, currently?
There's cargo culting on both sides of the question.

Because someone heard pg say he's not overly fond of overly OO code (which he has said in the arc design document), or some other well-known thought leader on programming (like Yegge), they then form a particular dislike of all OO code and even the idea of OO, itself. It's not rational or very fully formed for most of the folks who hate OO. Likewise, there are folks coming from (maybe?) a Java or C++ background, who feel that strict OO is the only sane way to approach designing a program.

I'm not going to try to give examples of good or bad code in either category...but, will point out that Haskell is not an OO language (in the Grady Booch sense of OO, though you can encapsulate methods in data because it has first class functions), but there's an awful lot of beautiful and correct Haskell code out there. Likewise many other functional, Lisp, and ML-derived languages. OO design can obscure meaning, but there's no reason to get reactionary about it. It's one useful tool; it certainly works great for UIs and some types of API.
This is how a hacker invites to his wedding