skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right in that holding a position that is extremely divergent from the consensus view is an interesting place to be.

I don't know if that necessarily follows that having a "fair" debate is impossible. There's nothing unfair about a majority of people disagreeing with you. Objective truth isn't determined by majority vote.

It is unfair to say "you're the only one who thinks that, so you must be wrong" but I don't see any of that happening here. If anything, I see a lot of "you're the only person who has expressed this opinion, I'm curious to know why that is?"
"Tech" is far too broad a term to be a legitimate field. I presume you don't really claim to speak for all technology-based industries.
Love seeing these posts but without any details on what he was doing on the "business side" that failed its unfortunately not very useful for the reader.
I think this is great. We use Google Maps for geocoding today, we paid around 10k for this years license.

If you guys can do the same without the rate limiting restrictions they place on us, we'd switch over in a heartbeat.
Inside or out of the HN bubble, if Comcast had real competition you wouldn't be paying nearly as much for your 105 megabit connection. You're kinda making my point.
From the graph it appears that the change in ranking is more or less a result of Apple's competitors improving their customer relationships while Apple barely changes.
Is it bleeding money? Otherwise I don't understand why anyone would shut down a service with 25,000 uniques daily.
Virtru dev here!

Virtru allows users to easily send encrypted email from their existing email address. It is super easy to use and currently works in your browser and on your phone.

We are launching our public beta program today and would love feedback from the community. Several of the Virtru team members will be monitoring this thread to respond to feedback and questions.

EDIT: Virtru team members: DHowitzer (CTO), ravenac95, znelson, jgilpin
Why are they using GIF for video, instead of a proper video file in the video tag?
Really, if you are worrying about ongoing monthly costs with AWS, you might be better served with a different host. If you want to be billed at a monthly rate, you should think more about dedicated hardware. Unless you are spinning things up and down with some regularity (in response to demand), AWS is usually more expensive than a dedicated server.

I think that only giving the hourly costs helps to reinforce this.

(I say this not knowing anything about your particular setup...)
Aren't the autistic-transgendered-albino hackers are also an underrepresented group? Where does the fragmentation stop?
^H is the escape sequence for the backspace character. Since the days of BBS it has been used to comedic effect in the manner you see here.
Rob Ford OUT OF NOWHERE!
I believe not leaving people room for conscientious objection is irrational.
I think the phenomenon is brought up in discussions of sexism in the tech industry disproportionate to the degree to which it occurs. I don't think people who typically bring it up are actually concerned with the issue, but rather want to poke a stick at the notion of feminism itself.
You have clearly never lived a remotely shit life to make such claims. Do you understand what absolute poverty is?
I think it's safe to refer to most cryptocurrency methodologies as "Bitcoin" when talking to the masses. Making a casual relationship between misunderstandings of technology and a given implementation of it doesn't make a truth.
That's a sound argument, and I agree with it, but I'm having trouble linking that to contraception.

You and I are both a result of chance. To the level that your grandparents decided to have sex at 7PM instead of 7AM, and that your grandmother didn't shift to the right afterwards, allowing a different sperm to be "the fastest".

Is our existence a denial of the person that would have been created had the other fact occurred? That's a rather strange position to take.

Conversely, suggesting contraception is squandering our human capital is not much different than suggesting abstinence is. Is a young married couple that chooses to have sex with a condom different from a couple that chooses not to have sex at all?

Perhaps I'm not properly understanding your point though.
(He was making a joke. GRANTT -> R&D Grant)

#jokesAreLikeFrogs
No one is suggesting that societies mandate contraceptives, simply give them the choice and education. Along the lines of "hey, if you're barely surviving, and already have 3 children, you may want to reconsider getting pregnant right now".

How is that not a personal choice?

"implicitly biasing" sounds like you're saying societies shouldn't offer full technology and knowledge, because people might make decisions you don't agree with. Please clarify.
Rumour Roundup: Samsung Galaxy S5
moot - what was the worst part of the community and how was that handled? And what was the best bot of the community, and do you have any ideas how that was fostered and encoraged?
That is unfortunate, I would have loved to use this service.
Reasonable arguments I have to agree except the first one.

Spotify takes my time which is valuable to me instead of my money for the free version, and I like listening those ads about the new released albums, not really annoying. So "music is worth paying money" and they are getting money from those ads because Spotify users listen them. Like youtube, but there you don't earn anything though :)

Other than that, It is always good to have competitors and i wish them good luck :)
Note: Y Combinator sponsored event that endorses discrimination based on sex. Time to take my clicks elsewhere.
Eric Dollards Advanced Seismic Warning System
Help Eric Dollard Save Millions of Lives
For me ios 7 has lowered the bar when it comes to expectations from Apple. My Ipad Air crashes multiple times daily when browsing websites, somehow the flash free world seems just as craptastic as the flash filled one.
That's what IEEE 802.15 is for.
I spent more than some time to create a Shopify admin app for Android, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shopify.ad.... It's up and running and generates already some money each month (60$ - 100$). Zero marketing, just Google Play.
I wanted the app to be so much better than it is right now but unfortunately Shopify will release their own Android app soon which will render my app useless. It's quite devastating. So I consider this endeavor a failure. Now I am on the lookout for a new project idea. I think I will stay in the ecommerce realm since I like it very much and think it's easier to make money with merchants than with ordinary consumers. In case anyone would like to team up, my email is in my profile ;)
> I could almost imagine a world where animated gifs replace all kinds of communication.

I can envision it too. Looks something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
How I stopped worrying and learned to love the Mongo Shell
Good timing or pure coincidence?

Just yesterday, a discussion about how BackBlaze restores fail.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7093016
This great naming happened when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the '90s. At that point, they had industry-typical incomprehensible names and product lines. Legend has it that Jobs' first act was to draw a quadrant on the board with personal/professional columns and desktop/portable rows. That was the iBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac Pro.
" senior leadership of USPS made it clear that they would never participate in any project that would limit junk mail and that they were immediately shutting down our partnership."

This part is really interesting. Why would USPS do that ? Can someone from outbox elaborate on this ? I would love to get rid of the junk mail that I receive on a daily basis in my mailbox. It is crazy and I have to waste time in taking it out of my mailbox, sorting through them to ensure they indeed are junk and then throwing them into my recycle bin. Not to mention that the recyle bin then needs to be placed bi-weekly outside to be picked up. It is time we had a donotcall.gov equivalent for junk mails.

Sad to see these guys go. The business model sounds like something I would have tried as a user. Funny though that never heard of them personally. Guess need to watch more Jay Leno!!
Is the sky falling?
Pardon my fat geeky autistic ass. I meant to say "beep boop fart. does not compute!"
There is no small instance type in any current generation instance types anymore.
>If we take 'intrinsic value' to mean... being backed by something with intrinsic value

Hypothetical situation: Water holds "intrinsic value" to me, for obvious reasons (in much the same way as your freedom from US government prosecution). I know a guy who will trade me some water from some snail tails. Therefore, snail tails are "intrinsically valuable".

I reject your definition of "intrinsic value". Sounds sorta' like "regular value" to me.
Warren Buffett Will Pay $1 Billion for the Perfect March Madness Bracket
sorry to see it go. USPS should have bought it or integrated it (but I saw the blog post about them saying "we'll never do that")

Hell, I would have still paid for the service for the archiving and online filing part even if they continued to send junk mail.
Come on you can't compare web development to drug development. Ditto with the guy talking about polio. With the current regulatory landscape we need patent protection to incentivize anyone entering this industry. And even then you have CEOs of major biotech firms calling startups a delusional risk given the low probability of success.
Map school: a free introduction to geo
I believe you, I just haven't run into this myself and I guess it is correct that YMMV depending upon setup then.

All of my WD Green drives are sitting in a Linux server and exposed as samba shares to various computers (including some running Windows 7) and HTPC devices. My guess would be that this setup results in greedier read-ahead caching by the local OS because of the relative slowness and unreliability of accessing blocks via a network-share file versus what the OS considers to be a local file.
I think your overall style is rather needlessly confrontational. First with OP, and now with me.
The MAU for DrawQuest in relation to their total registered users is pretty good, as long as all those users were not acquired in the last month.

Their DAU/MAU (how many monthly actives come back daily) falls short of a highly engaging application. It is at ~6%. If that number were much higher, I think they would be singing a different tune.
Junkmail effectively subsidizes the USPS.
I am an android dude so couldn't download the app but am curious as to how the app is currently monetized and what the daily installs look like.

With high CPMs on mobile decent ad strategy should be able to monetize that app quite well. Or even a virtual currency of some kind of drawing tools, bigger uploads etc. Should be more than enough revenue there to keep the lights on and build out a new app...
We actually don't have any rate limiting currently (we can handle a pretty high amount of concurrent requests and will hopefully be able to scale up hardware before we hit any performance issues).
Man, seems like this is "Useful Startups Going out of Business" month...

Good luck guys.
I work at Backblaze -> we absolutely do NOT throttle.

Inherently each pod has some built in limitations, for example it has a 1 Gbit/sec network card, so you won't be able to exceed that. But many, many customers get 100 Mbits/sec upload speed, I can show you our internal chart if you like.

I'm glad you got a fast restore download, we have been BATTLING Comcast in recent weeks, between 5pm and midnight downloading restores from Comcast has been trickle slow. Some people claim this is due to Netflix traffic, but I think some system admin somewhere is not doing their damn job. We think we have finally figured out a work around just this morning...
It's some time confusing to read all of these success stories around here. Even the failures mentioned in HN aren't really failures (most of them).

Something in this post was really powerful and easy to connect with. Thanks
Sennheiser HD280 Pro headphones are pretty good at isolating yourself from the outside, and the outside from you. Definitely sound different than a set of open ear headphones though. Just a recommendation. I have a pair and they're pretty solid. They can grip your head tightly though depending on your head size, but I haven't found them uncomfortable.

http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD-280-Pro-Headphones/dp/B0...
That's pretty cool. I always looked at the rtl-sdr stuff but lost interest when I looked at the max frequency being less then my signals of interest. The MMDS apparently changes that though, didn't know about those before.
Hey, that's a really nice comment! Thank you so much for your feedback.

I'd love to make more on Hammer. We make okay money on Hammer and don't have to work on it too much. I think there's a few reasons we don't make more. For one, I don't know that there's big money in developer tools, especially given the vast number of free tools as you've said. We are planning a few extra pay-monthly features which might be really nice, mainly new features for hammr.co. Recurring subscriptions are a better long-term model.

We're also integrating with our hosting platform Forge (getforge.com) which you might've seen. Super-fast static hosting. That's the hosting provider we use for the Hammer and Anvil sites.

> hammer seems to aim at a skill curve just lower than myself

A lot of people feel this way. I personally think Hammer's great no matter what skill level you are. We're trying to keep it zero-configuration; a very simple, consistent tool. Not too many clever tags to remember, and less support and maintenance on our end.

> My guess might be that their might be more in the Windows world, though that could be a prejudice.

A Hammer gem sure would be nice! ;)
> Don't you think it'd be just a 'founders conference' in that case?

That's right, but its seems YC is looking to find an open space for aspiring female founders and, at the same time, still remain open for male atendees. What I said was because in the application form you can say if you are male or female.
Will quitting porn improve your life?
"but I'm having trouble linking that to contraception."

"Conversely, suggesting contraception is squandering our human capital is not much different than suggesting abstinence is."

Artificially disconnecting sex from children increases the bias in future generations against having children. I explained it better elsewhere in this thread. Abstinence doesn't cause this artificial disconnect.
These are divergent goals - we can have super low energy tech like 802.15.4/ZigBee[1] as well as higher power, super fast wireless tech like 802.11ac.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.15.4
Do you think of that as a large number? What would be a number that would cause you to shut down?

I'm not trying to be facetious, I just think that 25,000 uniques/day in a consumer play is not a lot. Do you feel differently? If so, can you provide some context for me to help understand your position?
and Youtube and Twitter would certainly disagree with this.
The SSL2 ClientHello thing is, IIRC, also a compat hack; Firefox used it (at least until recently) when it connected through proxies.
We're building a backend using Docker that can do just that. It's called octohost and there's lots of information available here: http://www.octohost.io/

We have a static template that you can see here: https://github.com/octohost/html

You can also use all sorts of other languages/frameworks - a full list is here: http://www.octohost.io/languages

Deploys use git.
So we agree that the technology behind IoT (IPv6, low power connectivity, low power small form factor highly perform any computers) is valuable. We also agree that industrial usage of IoT is probably a net gain. We disagree about the PIoT. I believe it can in fact be built to be secure from spy agencies provided that the hardware and software are OSS. You believe it will be too much of a target for the spy agencies to ignore (I agree with this) and that the agencies will find a way to break any implementation (I disagree).
Virtual gender swap with the oculus rift
We're building http://www.divshot.io/ to be exactly this. Currently in private beta and will be launching soon (in fact, anyone who sees this just shoot us an email and we'll let you in).

CDN-accelerated, automatic development and staging environments for every app, SSL support...take a look!
The larger discussion is happening here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7097254
>Is it not rational, in fact extremely smart, to have a preference toward electing women into office, when all other factors are more or less equal or less important?

If one assumes falsehoods, many irrational decisions becomes rational. For example, like the assumption that a male politician doesn't care about women's issues. In fact, I live in a country with 40% of the parliament being women, even though 60% of the voters are women. Women decide the outcome of the election, which might be one reason that men are used in forced labour but women are not.

Anyways, if the choice is between a male and a female politician who are completely identical in every respect other than gender, then it's a roll of dice - but such a situation is not realistic.
Great idea. Just wondering that if you didn't spend any money on marketing, how did you get the word out, SEO?
If the performance of the professor in a class cannot be reduced to a scalar value, then it seems probable that the performance of a student in a class also cannot be reduced to a scalar value, and professors should be required to write paragraph evaluations of students instead of just assigning them something from an A to an F.

In other words, if reduction of complex performance to a scalar value is invalid, then the entire grading system that defines academic success is bogus.

Incidentally, I think that likely.
The problem with ‘feminism’ is that it is essentially worthless as a label to denote a political ideology – sure, there are some people who call themselves ‘feminist’ who have perfectly respectable views, but there are also a bunch of people calling themselves ‘feminists’ who are worse sexists than anybody else.

Sure, equal rights and all such things are good and proper aims, but ‘cutting off penises’ is not. Certainly there is a lack of women in some fields and one should attempt to help balance gender distributions. Surely nobody should feel ashamed for reporting an (even attempted) rape regardless of the way they dress. Of course, if strong independent women want to sell sex for money, they should be allowed to – oh, wait, one of the leading feminists (Alice Schwarzer) is strongly opposing any legalisation of prostitution and you will find people who call themselves feminists opposing any of the previously-mentioned targets as well.

I like to think that ‘communism’ as a label has much the same problems – surely ‘people should have equal incomes’ is a somewhat acceptable (not necessarily agreeable) opinion, and calling yourself a communist possibly justified. But what is the relation between the ‘communist’ label here and the ‘communist’ label of the people who built a wall around their country (GDR) or killed all intellectuals (Burma)?

Is there no word that one can use to describe the ‘sensible’ (equal rights, balancing of gender distributions etc.) feminism? Put another way, if I happen to come across someone who calls them-self a ‘feminist’ online, does that actually tell me anything about them?
Where did you get your equity? Do have debt on any of them? I want to follow this plan too, but don't have the equity for down payments...
"aiming to be acquired as a profitability plan is perfectly valid."

Getting acquired and becoming a cost center for another organization is not how I'd define success.

Yes, companies like this exist, but they typically are in the news because they're the exception to the rule.

For any sustainable business, the obvious part has to be how it makes money; the tough part is building it in a way that captures the customer.
Canvas was fun. While I don't know the details, imo it failed (at least community-wise) because they made some strange changes for strange reasons (removing so called sticker-rain, removing audio-remixes, etc).
The weeks after these changes the user base dropped largely and once that started there was obviously no coming back due to massive decrease in activity on the site that would scare away new users. Myself included: Previously I was spending at least 1 full hour a day on Canvas for about 5 months straight and just some days later it went down to like 5 minutes a day before leaving completely.

To this day I fail to see how they ever wanted to monetize Canvas. I think that was the real issue here. It looks like the site had a few hundred uniques a day for the last couple of months and the servers are still running...

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/canv.as
Voluntarily-offered information is not the same thing as information scraped, bought and sold, and you (should) know it.
> Treating differently by "distinctions" is discrimination, not just making them.

Segregation is treating people differently by the axis on which segregation occurs.
This actually does seem like a damn useful project. I'll put an issue up for keyboard problems I noticed. If I have some free time I might try to help out at some point.
You're right.

Moot needs to start exploiting his strength (heading the most unruly demographic on the internet). His name really does mean something to the users of 4chan, and that's a pretty big demographic.

That demographic could make his next project infamous. infamous is still famous.
How can Virtru help email users who are concerned with government surveillance activities that have been revealed in the last year?
Github PLEASE work on some kind of 'Proof Of Activity'

98% of my work is private and all employers get to see is about 100 open-source commits when I have roughly 4,000 commits throughout several private organizations. I know I need more open source contributions but I should be able to prove to an employer that I am a heavy Github user and have more experience than 100 commits.

Sometimes I've been asked to send a screenshot of my total number of commits, and happily oblige to the odd request but a screenshot is not even worth it's weight in the physical world (aka nothing).
Quara has been syndicating their content to several outlets. I believe Slate has a number of questions from Quara on their site as well.
Proof of useless work based, to be precise: the only reason work tokens are hash computations instead of say push-ups or soap bubbles is the ease of bookkeeping. So it always puzzled me why that aspect matters.
> We aren't going to send Seal Team 6 in to knife everyone we want to kill around the world.

Sure, but that has to do with risk and reliability and cost effectiveness, not accuracy.
ActorDB 0.5 released - a distributed SQL database
> As a way of confronting condescending stereotypes, I have often fantasized about organizing a group of Nigerian school children to "help build a school somewhere in America"

Sort of along those lines, http://www.africafornorway.no
Erlang syntax again ... and again ... and again ...
Agree. 400K uniques/month isn't a lot. I'm surprised Poole was seemingly satisfied with this number, considering he knows exactly how much traffic one would need to survive.
802.11ac is the same as 11n in the 2.4 GHz band. All the new features are for the 5 GHz band, and its support is required for 11ac. At 5 GHz there's plenty of spectrum so wider channels still make sense there. But not at 2.4 GHz indeed.
Why would a company not want to limit its biggest business?

The Outbox dudes complain about government but many/most companies would not so willingly partner up to shrink its best business.
I explained it better somewhere else on this thread. I don't fully know what HN etiquette is (I'm new here) but I assume it's probably in bad taste for me to copy/paste it into several different replies.