skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because we ran out of runway while bootstrapping, and the stress finally took out the founders (in rather dramatic fashion).

It's not all lollipops and blowjobs out there--sometimes you just get dealt a bad hand.

EDIT: Which isn't to say I hadn't tried before and wouldn't try again. It's just very easy in this bubble for people to ignore the visceral truth that starting a company is hard and that success is far from guaranteed.
Dogecoin is about 10 days old. The currency is based on the popular doge meme and will have max 100 billion units. It uses scrypt and has a random block reward.

http://dogecoin.com/

Price history on CoinedUp: http://doge.yottabyte.nu/

Dogecoin has a surprising momentum to it. I'm curious what role it will play once the initial novelty wears off. There are many more Doge than Bitcoin or Litecoin, so a single Doge will never be unattainable. It has a long way to go to even reach parity with the penny.
It's not too late!! We're students and right now is productivity time :)
So then, the real statement is that Bitcoin is useless, except for the people who are savvy enough to use it? I can accept that, but it's a very weak statement. You could have said the same thing about PayPal (which is now quite popular in the general populace) or even credit cards before they became mainstream.
I'm reminded of the study that found rats will choose heroin over food, over and over again, until they die; and the follow-up study that compared rats kept in isolation (matching the original study) with rats allowed to live more naturally in communities and found that rats living in communities try the heroin but then go back to eating food.
I mean you might be right but we have no clue whatsoever. In our great lab that is the world, we know that deflation leads to Bad Things (TM). I'm no economist, but I don't know of a time in modern history where people were saying, "Thank Christ we're experiencing deflation!"
You know, if we really wanted to be sure about that, we could just check the commit comments.
In the future, everyone will have their own cryptocurrency.
If we are talking enterprise, Microsoft is doing just fine. VPs will soon see that a Surface does most of what the iPad does, and everything their desktop does. Unless you can live without Office the Surface is a great device.

The problem for Microsoft is the enterprise is where they currently dominate, so maintaining that market is nice, but doesn't do much for their problem of the mobile market as a whole.
Show HN: SeenDB – Remember all the concerts you've been to
Hola HN,

I thought I'd show off a new hobby project I've been working on! It's called SeenDB and is a site to help music fans remember all of the concerts they've been to.

If that sounds cool, check it out at http://seendb.com or see my blog post here: http://blog.justinthiele.com/seendb-site-remember-concerts-youve-been-to/

Happy Holidays!

Justin
> And more to the point: who cares -- the real-world market absolutely dwarfs (by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two) the "online drug trade", so his fear-mongering there seems short-sighted to me.

The authors concern is that if Bitcoin were to take off become globally popular, the resulting online market would be much bigger than the existing real-world markets, because of lower barrier to entry and increased globalisation.

Take the current state of online drug/murder/cp trade and mutliply by however many times larger you expect the total bitcoin user population to be in the future than it is now.
It makes sense for a couple of self-employed startup founders :)
I think he's referring to an LLC 'doing business as' another entity. Right?
There is untapped talent out there, but I'm not sure the web can unlock all of it. You don't have a chance to develop your talents when you're going hungry each night. Nor is it easy to be talented under an authoritarian dictatorship. These are problems a website or smartphone app can't fix (though maybe they can help a little). I don't even buy that the web can raise people out of poverty. Seems like it produces more inequality if anything, though that remains to be seen.

What the web can do is educate people (though it's also capable of misinforming them). And it can make life a little more efficient (Shopping online reduces travel time. Google maps reduces time driving around asking for directions). These are modest improvements, and they could unlock some talent. Just not much.
Thoughts on Hybrid Mobile App Development
It's interesting you choose to compare a developed country to a developing country.

You're comparing a team that is supposedly in the A league to a team in the B league, then saying the former is good because it beats the latter. That's nonsensical.

For a real comparison, you must compare A teams to A teams.

The question should be: Is it better to have "low pay" in San Jose or low pay in Australia/NZ/UK/Japan/Germany/France/Netherlands/etc./etc.
Clickable link: http://seendb.com
RidePal and the private bus wars
It's a bit surprising considering OpenBSD's rigorous insistence on correctness.
Random changes causing a net decrease of entropy over time? That's a new one.
Tips to avoid common mistakes when making a game
I agree with you in essence, that large companies are intelligences built upon the substrate of many human minds, and that a company's motivations often diverge from those of the humans that compose them.

I'd go further and say that companies are alive (or at least independently intelligent) in a real sense. Companies are lively: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? [...] and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" They will lobby and sue to protect their interests, butt heads with other rival corporations, and hold grudges.

However, I've found it difficult to convince anyone that we should consider companies alive, or at least entities that are qualitatively different in intelligence from the humans that enable them. The argument usually centers on that a company is just a bunch of humans, so it is best understood as such. However, the 'more is different' effect (e.g. you can better understand a human as an independent entity than as a bunch of cells even though it is entirely composed of them), and the selection pressure molding corporations (optimizing profit), I believe leads to a new type of collective intelligence (one different from human intelligence) -- basically a true AI, as you are arguing.
I also want Bitcoin to die. For me it isn't about the politics of banking, it is about the fact that the whole system is designed in a way so as to waste maximum amounts of energy on doing nothing of real intrinsic value (which he touches on re: carbon footprint).
Mayhap I am misrepresenting the origins of Linux. Simply put, it was less rigidly modular in construction than it could have been at the beginning.[1] Indeed, I think it is a perfect case for the argument of "first get it done, then figure out how to make it modular." Probably a better argument for keeping the model such that you can keep the full picture in your head when working on it. Not sure.

[1] Consider also this lovely thread: http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=65915&curpostid...

You can do simple
things easily - and in particular, you can do things where
the information only passes in one direction quite easily,
but anythign else is much much harder, because there is
no "shared state" (by design). And in the absense of shared
state, you have a hell of a lot of problems trying to make
any decision that spans more than one entity in the
system.
People must really understand that Watson is, like almost any successful AI (not AGI) product today, "just" a huge statistical pattern matching machine.

Arguably, that's all a human brain is as well. I don't want to start some big debate here over symbolic reasoning versus statistical pattern matching, but there seems to be quite a bit of contemporary thought along the lines of our brains being largely based on "pattern matching" as a foundational mechanism.
Sexism sucks, and stupid. I am really surprised to read things like that about U.S. which was supposed to be an even society. In a place normally perceived to be sexist, Belarus, girl coders are OK and i never heard about them being joked at or harassed for being girls (while in many other professions this is true, it's hard to imagine a female Belarusian chemical engineer). Maybe because salaries of coders there are so much higher than of almost everybody else, guys don't feel so confident about themselves with them to harass.
I find pair programming to be an excellent when you are debugging a problem and need two sets of eyes. It's also great for teaching/learning when a junior developer has banged his/her head against the problem before coming over to a more senior person for help. For research projects or deep thinking exercises, it's pretty counter-productive.
One way to mitigate that is to always squash-merge the suspect work. In some orgs, it's really hard to establish a culture of good "git hygiene". Typically CI is already branch-focused, and the merging process after CI/review/etc. is tailored to just throw out the "noise" from the incoming branches.

This also handles issues such as staff who just don't get that long-lived, continually remerged (from master) branches are evil when viewing history using `git log --graph` or similar GUI views.
The /r/bitcoin subreddit has a suicide hotline disclaimer stickied to the top. Yikes.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1t5ofu/please_stick...
This is a very good point. It is important for non-researchers to know that when you want to do a mouse (or rat, dog, or non-human primate) study, you have to decide what particular strain of mouse to buy. There are MANY options from Harlan, Charles River, etc, and each strain has its own genetic composition. Some of the strains are intentionally inbred, or intentionally outbred.

I think this variation might also be more important than some people are giving credit for. It is entirely possible to run a mouse study twice, confirming the results. Then, you can run the same protocol in a different strain and get no results or different results. Then, you have to try to understand which strain might be more applicable in a human population.
yes, better to have a real bomb threat
Really? That's why we took so many years building HDMI? You can send that kind of data over the air as sound? and down a cable? What were we thinking? All this bother with radio waves, and compression, and hundreds of conductors?

Telephone with two cans and a string works. But not well enough that you can convert your Vinyl to OGG.
DataBase Administrator
ODesk and Elance announce merger
I'm thinking it works everywhere. But given that I don't hear these words enough on my teams, it was worth a share. Especially between people who are rewarded for different goals.
Reminds me of Kevin Kelly's blog post on this. I realize that what you are talking about is different to a degree, but the idea that our hivemind forms an AI really intrigues me. I'm very interested in learning how to test it:

http://kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/04/the_search_for.ph...
For this project, it's hard to do that without actually building a reasonable prototype. I have a technology demo but it requires a lot of explanation. Once people get it, some people do get very excited, but I need a better demo or set of prototypes or sales deck. Working on that for the rest of December.

There are two potential markets, one b2c on mobile, one b2b. I have some interest from b2b already, but selling to them is going to take longer.

My theory for now is to get a little more interest from b2b with my non-interactive prototypes. That will at least give me more confidence to go forward, in case b2c doesn't work out.
As far as I understand exlir compiles into erlang code. So there should be no performance difference.
Depends on the grass. It would be unusual to be arrested just for stepping on the grass, but if the police ask you to get off the grass and you pull your pants down and take a dump, there's going to be trouble.
Nokia has done a great job of building marketshare on the back of extremely-low-margin phones like the 52x series, but I would hesitate to declare it a victory for Microsoft/Nokia just yet, it might just be a dead-cat bounce.
Your shocked because your old and have no sense of humor and think money is serious business.

Dogecoin has the fastest rate of adoption, of any crypto-currency. Ever, period. It makes every coin, even bitcoin look like an absolute failure.

Because it's fun, and kids think it's cool. You guys missed the boat, because you were too busy being serious.
I know right! Financial stability, stable systems of investment and lending, managed inflation and currency supply. Some damn terrible consequences there!
My apologies, I did not at all mean to imply the opposite of that. Hard work is certainly required to succeed.

However most people talking about the American dream are talking about it being sufficient, which is what I was talking against.

Statistically you don't get lucky and get rich (guess what happens to lottery winners a year after they win most the time?) and you rarely work hard and get rich. You can get a little lucky and live a good life working hard, and you can get really lucky, work really hard, and get rich.
try doing your own experiment and just do it, I'm pretty sure you can find 20 minutes a day to set aside for it. The first thing that you will notice is that it is TOUGH, but after several weeks you'll start to gain moments of clarity and eventually it will "click" and you'll get it. Or it wont, and you can just move on
I dream of a world where this is built in everywhere that I write expressions. It's so hard, and we desperately need it. Bret Victor has called a lot of attention to this lately, and rightly so.

It's easy to forget how much we have to remember inside our heads just to work with code. And why? Much of this work could and should be done by the machine, which would free us to focus on what we want. But the need for context, different execution environments, etc, all make this difficult to tackle generally.

More and more lately, I find that I'm interested in this problem more than the code itself.
Perhaps that's why it seems to be extra specially isolated (separate credentials, separate domain, separate API endpoints).
Noise-cancelling headphones, perhaps? There will always be quite a bit of noise in an open-office coworking space.
who cares? Nobody owns it anyway.. This is what I don't get. They say only 1000 ppl own Bitcoin. So why the popularity? I mean who cares if those 1000 ppl get rich or lose all their money?
I'm not keen on pairing, but instead of planning things in my head, that's why I do TDD. The tests explore various ideas (as in effect the tests are clients of whatever I'm building, just like the finished app will be) so I get to play around with it before writing any code.

I just don't know how to do that as a pair.
Nobody thinks it's 100% up to luck, but luck does play a huge part in it if you call "luck" all those things which are beyond your control and which you can take neither credit nor blame for.

The simple fact is that a desire and willingness to succeed is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for success. There are many people who are successful because they were born into the right families and given the right opportunities, and there are many more who struggle all their lives in poverty for lack of same, despite a sincere and demonstrated desire to succeed and more hard work than the vast majority of the people on this site will ever know.
Ask HN: Why do you visit HN?
What are you looking for? Did you find it? Why do you keep coming back?

Don't get me wrong, I love HN – I'm just curious why everyone else is here too.
How to fight marketplace fraud
Certainly whac-a-mole. Didn't mean to imply otherwise.

For myself, no need to filter them out without evidence. Keep a few controlled accounts to periodically try and see what the delay is. And get extra suspicious if all images are opened at once on a mass send out.
I can't wait until the National Academy of Sciences holds additional proceedings on the seventh planet in our solar system!
Oh yeah, I'm aware this guy is just here to sell his $10/month network of entrepreneurs. To be honest, it's not hard to find other solopreneurs struggling - I already connect with people this way for regular check-ins, and for much of 2013 I even set up a regular Google Hangout to do that.

But it is at best a minor help, at worst a distraction. It doesn't come close to replacing a cofounder who will force you to talk through important issues, who will dive deep with you into the product.

I answered the question because it was worth crafting an answer, for me.
It is when that's on par for daily fluctuation.
All Aboard the Pebble appstore
Bevel - A Better Shaving System
Not all bitcoin usage is speculation but you are right, most of it's current value is probably reflected through speculation.

Now there are two things that give bitcoin it's value:

1. Usage / Adoption

2. Speculation

Right now, China seems to have trouble speculating in bitcoin. There is no question of China ever having any usage in the near future given their government's stance on bitcoin.

Adoption of bitcoin has been on a steady rise over the past few months. No, apple or amazon are not yet accepting bitcoin but there are a growing number of people who are starting to see why they should accept it and why it's a viable payment method.

It's impossible to say what it's value should be based on current adoption. The value right now could be $1 or $1000.

My personal investment style is also biased towards low cost index funds.. I'm a Boglehead. However, Bitcoin is the only exception I have made so far. It's one of those rare moments that I personally see value in what the technology brings and can achieve.

I'm invested, more in terms of building tools/startups around bitcoin than in just buying and speculating, though I'm guilty of the latter too. It's even more fun because I truly believe in it's potential. (gambling by comparison, is less fun ;))
>Deflation, by providing a risk free return for sitting on currency

How is it 'risk free return'? What guarantee is there that the currency will continue deflating?
Our Moon Shot
Not really.

IF you don't care about trying to wrest currency away from central control (and I really don't care about that at all) then you can come up with some really nice, cryptographically secure systems that don't involve heaps of processing power, have instant verification, support offline transactions etc. etc.

It's only the political aspect (we must have decentralisation and a fixed supply of coins!) that mean Bitcoin has to operate that way, an thrash away at petaflop speeds, burning electricity as fast as it can, to try and keep security.
> I think you're forgetting the phrase "shit happens".

Oh come on. There is no excuse for not using contraception when you're not financially, emotionally, and maritally prepared to have a child. I don't know about this particular man's case, but 95% of unwanted pregnancies are due to failure to use contraception or use it properly [0], which is nothing more or less than sheer irresponsibility on the part of the future parents.

> How would his having a wife have any impact on his situation?

Seriously? It's much easier to raise a child when both parents are present. It gives you more flexibility in terms of work, even if both parents are working. You save a lot of money because you're not paying individual rents. You save money on food as well. You get tax benefits from the government. If one of you has a job with health insurance that includes dependents, then the other gets it too. The list goes on and on.

> He seems like he's working hard to take care of his kid but like most people wishes the huge company he works for would help a little more. Where's the entitlement?

He irresponsibly had a child when he wasn't prepared to raise one, and is now expecting others to help him out. That is entitlement.

0: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/2008/05/09/ImprovingContracep...
Well, by Bradley Manning's account, he listened to Lady Gaga while leaking classified military documents, so maybe hit pop songs are not as innocent as they seem. :)
Ask:Startup Skills Trade/Opinion
would you be interested in trading with other startups/founders that have technical skills. Maybe even as little as recommend to friends/opinion of website/idea to full website design, etc. If your have marketing, copywrite, Legal, HR, Business, Developer, Designer etc. get in touch through this google doc.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1szAw3ewku3o0AuvK3c4r3zydllvgJyI02jq1g8qEIs4/viewform
> The success of pairing depends heavily on the skill and personalities of those involved. If the skill disparity is too great, you end up with one person doing all the thinking while also lecturing the newbie. If neither collaborator likes the other, you'll have issues. Even something like preferring different editors can get in the way.

Very much agree. I was a client at Pivotal for a few months, and learned a ton from them while pairing. We brought their XP style (slightly tweaked) back to our office once our contract with them was up, and continued pairing about half of the time. We could all get along well enough, and had agreed on using the same editor, so the only pain point I felt was when working with people with a different skillset. Though the different skillset problem made development go slower, but the more experienced people are teaching the less experienced people, hopefully making the tradeoff worth it.

Another advantage to pairing is that it keeps developers honest -- if you're supposed to be doing TDD, then ideally your pair helps you stick to it instead of taking shortcuts you "know" are okay.

Edit: oops, grandparent asked for negative experiences. The only ones I had were frustration when working with people who were already frustrating to work with. (Ideally, while pairintg they'd be learning, and would become less frustrating to work with...) I do agree with parent's point about it being less useful when banging out boilerplate or obvious solutions, but that's not really a horrible experience, just a little wasteful feeling.
I most certainly hear noises other than 60Hz hums, coming from capacitors which correspond to what the computer is doing, including from my current PC. It's called the piezoelectric effect: http://product.tdk.com/capacitor/mlcc/en/faq/faq00031.html
> On a more philosophical note: if there is some true randomness in how our brain works do you think that that actually gives us any more control over our lives?

"True randomness" in the sense that randomness is part of our current understanding of physics is just something not being determined by the prior state of the physical universe. It is, therefore, indistinguishable from things being determined by something that is neither part of nor itself determined by any set of things within the physical universe, i.e., "true randonmness" is empirically indistinguishable from the action of causes which are not themselves determined by the physical state of the universe.

Or, IOW, free will (that is, the ability to act other than in a manner determined by the prior state of the universe) requires (but is not implied by) a physical universe in which "true randomness" exists.

So, true randomness in the physical universe doesn't imply free will, but it is necessary for free will to exist.