skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the app attracts the same target demographic as games that have a casual drawing component to them so I don't know if I would say the demographic doesn't have spending power.

If Drawquest was focused on in-app purchases and didn't find enough traction, I think they should have considered sponsored contests and sell those sponsorships to agencies representing larger brands. Imagine if Nike had a post "Design our new shoe" and gave out a prize for the most upvoted variation or "How would you change the Honda Civic?" and used it as a market research tool.

These are the types of branded opportunities that get some marketers salivating and knowing how to engage their agencies and participate in the RFP process is critical. I hope they explored these options.
Also, our privacy policy contains details on how we handle user data: https://www.virtru.com/privacy-policy

And we have a blog post discussing some frequently asked questions on government surveillance: https://blog.virtru.com/faq-on-government-surveillance/
> [...] But once Bitcoin penetration is significant [...]

I think we passed that point, there is an adoption of bitcoin, but it will NEVER be used as a currency IMHO.

I really hope the price stops fluctuating so we can use it as a value storage medium, but even that can be disputed.
how long would that be sustainable for, given the periodic difficulty increase in the various cryptocurrencies?
Amazon Considering Online Pay TV Service
I think this kind of stuff has tremendous space to add value, but we should always keep in mind that experimentation by simulation gives us insight into the extrapolation of theories, and only into reality so far as those theories are correct. Of course, done well it can help to validate or disprove theories when we have sufficient ability to measure starting points...
Soylent Update 1/21
I run a bitcoin ecommerce site without converting to fiat. Just because Overstock wants to pay additional overhead doesn't mean everyone else has to.
It's not worth invoking a flash container for 4 seconds of video.
I've heard of some tattoo artists that grab a copy of the barcode for Tampax or Corn Flakes when they're asked to do a barcode tattoo.
Many mind map products do imply a hierarchy, though, specifically because they often do not allow linking a child to multiple parents. While they visually appear to be non-hierarchical, spreading out in multiple directions, they usually are a data structure where each node can have multiple children, but only one parent. This can be represented in an outliner, while a graph data structure cannot.
Having the bulk of my Github commits all going to private repositories, I can empathize with this.

For me, in 2013, I made close to 800 commits to private repos. When I'm logged in, I can see the activity in the "Your Contributions" section of my private profile. Last year, I also switched employers and because I don't have any public projects I contributed to, my profile looks barren. However, that's far from the truth.

It would be nice if Github would allow me a setting to display just the commit activity, but not link to the private repos. I wouldn't be surprised if this is far off.

For those that would say "you should be contributing to more OS projects then", just remember that there are some of us who can't code 14 hours a day (anymore). We have families and/or lives out side of coding. This doesn't make our effort any less valuable than those that do it for the public. We just have a different set of constraints and responsibilities.
Those are the odds assuming you fill in the bracket by flipping a coin. You can substantially improve those odds by using data like seeding, historical win percentages and similar basketball knowledge.

According to http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB114304314046605235 a skilled statistician knowledgable about college basketball could get odds as low as 1 in 772 billion.
The title of this article does not reflect what the article is actually talking about. Also, while a nice gesture of the family member to write, as I read the article I was building up excitement and really wanted to know if she had written some interesting/secret information for the kids, but then found she was just praying. Nothing wrong or against that, just that my curiosity was sparked but ultimately my interest went unfulfilled.
That's really the question when it comes to having a separate president and CEO role (and often times having a separate CEO and chairman role). Who's really in charge, and what does the person who's not in charge do? There really isn't a good way to tell. Generally, it's either a sign that:

1. The President is being groomed for the CEO position once the "real" CEO leaves (such as Tim Cook).

2. One of the two needs to give up their position, but isn't because either nobody wants to force them out or they're too powerful to be forced out.

3. The company is so huge, the CEO needs to delegate some of their authority.

My money's on #2. Tom Preston-Warner clearly doesn't need training to be the CEO, and github clearly isn't big enough to need separate CEO and president roles.
I love how this is tagged as "New Features". Oh GitHub :)
"he took it upon himself to create a new kind of communications system for Facebook that could relieve some of the pain, bringing project management and communication into a single application"

There are tons of these things floating around, e.g. Basecamp from 37Signals

The thing about email though is that it's (a) free, (b) distributed not centralized (unless you choose to use a centralized service like gmail), and (c) the mental model is totally accessible to all including my grandma.

I don't see email going away.

On the other hand I do see Facebook going away.

zing!
I did not, thanks. However, can we agree that a drop down box and a comment buried on HN being the only indications men are welcome to apply amounts to hair splitting when we are deciding whether or not to classify this as a gender exclusive event?
I read many post-mortems, but this one, for some reason, struck me as being very frank and unforgiving in its assessment.
the exception being fundamentally flawed business models
- let's sell bags of rocks over the internet to children!

But yet it exists! http://www.kidzrocks.com/
Bitcoin is a digital bearer instrument. It is a way to exchange money or assets between parties with no pre-existing trust: A string of numbers is sent over email or text message in the simplest case. The sender doesn’t need to know or trust the receiver or vice versa. Related, there are no chargebacks – this is the part that is literally like cash – if you have the money or the asset, you can pay with it; if you don’t, you can’t. This is brand new. This has never existed in digital form before.

Doesn't this reveal the flaw in the "Bitcoin is the solution to the Byzantine Generals' Problem" argument? My understanding is that the bulk of transactions costs associated with most payment systems is associated with chargebacks. Some result from fraud by the payer and some by the payee. Regardless, a digital bearer instrument doesn't eliminate these failure modes; it simply avoids them entirely. If the BGP is about solving the problem of fraud, then Bitcoin hasn't solved it. It's simply avoided it.
Surprisingly gracious and heartfelt.
1000 people applying, 10 people who follow through.
Your points are fair when you look at national payments (with the current adoption), but the math changes when looking at international money transfer.
> Bitcoin isn't free, but it's far, far, cheaper than credit cards, and gives far less money to banks.

You're not listening: BitCoin is WAY more EXPENSIVE than a credit card TODAY.

* People know how credit cards work
* Everybody accepts credit cards

You are comparing a payment medium with an asset/currency/payment-method/protocol. It's not a fair comparison (for BTC) because it's a really awesome technology which could evolve in many different things.

BUT saying that BTC is cheaper/easier than using a credit card TODAY is a simply not TRUE.
Amazing Video: Emotional Health Can Save Us
about blog: yeah, I agree you need to obey the laws and everything, but does the law state that you need to store the keys?

Until the law does, keeping all the keys in one place is an invitation for the bear to get the honey. If all the honey was in separate honeycombs, the bear might still get them all, but would probably have a tad bit more work to do.

Atleast hypothetically :).
It took me a really long time to understand twitter, but now that I finally get it, it's a fantastic service.

I quit Facebook and pretty much only use Twitter now. It's a fantastic news source.
> I'm not sure what "[Yale's] policies on free expression" are...

I would guess that they are referring to Yale's Freedom of Expression Policy: http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression

EDIT: While I'm at it, here's what I came up with when I googled "Yale appropriate use policy":

http://its.yale.edu/forms-policies/appropriate-use
> YC is looking to find an open space for aspiring female founders and...

PG is probably partially covering his own ass after the most recent debacle. Correlation does not equal causation and all that fun stuff, but this is rather well timed.
I'm an Outbox customer and am really sad to see it go. I did it expect it though. In fact, every time I thought of Outbox it was always accompanied with worry about them shutting down. I just couldn't see how they could afford to do what they do when customers only pay $5 per month.

I didn't read the entire post yet but I wonder why they never tried to or considered raising prices. I would of paid substantially more for the service.

I don't see all that much value in the service for my personal mail but for my business mail, I purchased a UPS mailbox and have all mail sent there and outbox takes care of it for me without me having to go there all the time. I just renewed my UPS mailbox for the year too!
>s tfu

Not really.

The way I understand GP's comment, he was stating why the whole idea might be considered controversial/misandric/inappropriate by reversing the genders (I'd say he was quite successful, btw, as you have clearly demonstrated by assuming chauvinistic/misogynistic intentions behind GP's comment). On the other hand, what you have done is you projected your dogmatic worldview where intellectual discussion and criticism is not welcome and only one point of view is correct/allowed.
nitrous.io provides an interesting service. I have experimented with the free tier and I am considering going on a paid plan. One big plus is the live collaboration support (I have not tried it, just read about it).

One thing that I am not sure about (some clarification would be good): the higher level paid plans are advertised to (soon) have custom domain support. So, in addition to being a development platform, is it also meant for deploying web apps that don't need to scale to large numbers of users?
>If the BGP is about solving the problem of fraud, then Bitcoin hasn't solved it.

Do you have any idea what the BGP is?
Hahaha; if you read the comments in the article, they were vicious. The subject line was just shock value - granted Asana is a good application that many use.

I just don't think they should go up against Email. Historically Email have won many times (there are few exceptions like company impose Yammer)
Syntax error or not, tattoo still seemingly dumb.

I figured it was going to be a forever loop or something...
Hello world, repeating each character n times. - Programming Puzzles & Code Golf
Hacker News is not working via http
Hacker News is not working via http. There's no redirect to https, Please Fix it.
^H means "backspace", so "Twa^Hitter" means <strike>Twatter</strike> Twitter.

</joke_explainer>
Don't Tell Me How Fast I Read
I would cut FIOS off today if this happens! Live sports in the only reason to really have cable anymore.
If someone misunderstands what I mean about self-identifying as a hacker, it creates an opportunity to explain that the word can mean "person who is driven to build, tinker, explore, and experiment" the same way that the word feminist can mean "person who feels that civilized societies shouldn't treat women as second-class citizens".

Language is difficult, but it's important enough to care about doing well.
It's an excellent piece. I'll admit to being a bit confused by the assertion, however:

> "letting children die now so they don’t starve later—doesn’t actually work, thank goodness. It may be counterintuitive, but the countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world. This is because the women in these countries tend to have the most births, too."

I spent five months in Kenya, and a couple weeks with the Samburu tribe during a drought. All their animals were dead, piled up, because there were no more leaves to eat. We were driving a caravan of food to distribute in the region, since otherwise the people would have been next. And the dilemma was explained to me clearly: we can't just let people die. But it means we have to send food aid all the time now, unlike decades ago, because the population is simply larger than the land can support, except in its best years, and it makes the people essentially permanently dependent on outside aid.

So I'll admit to being stumped by what Melinda Gates means when she says that overpopulation isn't the result of aid. Simply asserting that "countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world" doesn't explain anything -- it's just a correlation, and might very well be due to the fact that such countries already receive the most food aid, for example.

I'm certainly not arguing that I am against, or that anyone should be against, food aid. But I am utterly unconvinced by Melissa Gates saying that "saving lives leads to overpopulation" is a myth -- she doesn't substantiate it, and it seems like the weakest part of the whole post. It all depends on how you define overpopulation, but I just don't see it yet. Of course, rising income and education lowers birth rates in the future, but that doesn't change the simple fact that, at low levels of income and education, more food aid directly results in more people, which is often more than traditional local practices and agriculture can reliably and sustainably support.
I didn't say those things. I was saying that it's not ironic and pushing back against a particular straw man in the letter.

1. Government aid has its problems.

The fact that the Gates Foundation helps government programs implies that private organizations execute better, at least in some aspects. Gates later admits that government aid has its problems, so it's odd that he dismisses objections in this way.

2. Philosophical objections should be acknowledged and addressed.

At another point in the letter, Gates hypothetically asked, "Imagine that the income tax form asked, 'Can we use $30 of the taxes you’re already paying to protect 120 children from measles?' Would you check yes or no?"

Many people would have no problem with that arrangement but do have a problem with not-optional line items in the federal budget. The point is that right now donations are enforced by the IRS, which is an odd form of charity, and I think it's reasonable (and certainly not ironic) to have philosophical problems with that and to prefer more democratic forms of aid.

Perhaps the benefits are worth overruling the drawbacks (point 1) and philosophical objections (point 2), but calling reservations about government aid ironic is either sloppy or disingenuous.
Not sure what the original comment was, but essentially trading firms build their own ticker plants to get their "curated" view. Obviously, twitter followers won't be building their own tweet plants. I'd imagine that the main challenges that are faced with twitter's fan out is in data persistence and scale of data involved.

We could talk about how trading system architecture does not apply, but there are potentially many ways that it does. The main difference in web architecture versus trading-system architecture is the messaging data model. Trading systems are architected for low-latency by building messaging systems that focus on transmitting events as opposed to fully fleshed-out data structures. For the uninitiated, a typical web-app will commit data to a DB, then request all data. A low-latency trading system does not build an orderbook data structure and commit that to a DB, then request it from the DB, it merely listens to a stream of events (e.g. firehose) consisting of buys, sells & executions and builds its own book, so that the orderbook data-structure is always available locally in-memory as opposed to being a DB request away. The beauty with this architecture is that special data structures need not be a complex select/join away with DB's and cache layers taking on a ton of work. It allows just the events to be propagated and let each app decide for itself what it necessary and what isn't necessary and it allows the relevant data to be built in realtime, with low-latency and a high amount of determinism.

Modern systems on higher-end commodity hardware that I have dealt with, with the right tuning can push around 2M 120Byte msgs/sec with an average latency of 6-7 microseconds per host. I'm told with extra/better tuning hitting 3M 120Bytes messages/sec sustained per host. Of course this is doing everything in-memory w/out disk, but even having a disk as a bottleneck doesn't preclude this kind of performance. It just introduced 5-20ms outliers in the message processing workflow as pages are flushed to disk.

The way I've envisioned applying trading system arch to Twitter is where there are tweet submitters that get aggregated into a sequencer that then a bunch of fan-out machines read and committing the fanned out data structures to a memcache and/or data persistence cluster of some type. Each fan-out can be its own shard discarding irrelevant tweets. Other apps that want data can get them via other apps that provide a firehose listening directly from the sequenced data from the firehose or merely subscribing/joining the firehose feeds and processing the data appropriately.

This should be able to handle the hundreds of millions of fanouts per second that are necessary in a distributed manner with great efficiency in the number of hosts involved. If you need to expand capacity, it's just a matter of bringing up extra capacity to the fan-out hosts and persister hosts.
so from a security standpoint, this is equivalent to the status quo, except transferring responsibility from Google to a small startup for maintaining keys? I'd be shocked if google doesn't encrypt emails at rest. Is there still plenty of inflight unencrypted SMTP traffic to worry about that this could address? I guess you have to worry about the recipient if you are sending email to a non gmail/hotmail/ymail address?
I would be interested to hear how HN readers approach charity. I personally am constantly struggling with questions like: once my basic needs are met, how can I possibly justify not giving the rest of my income to life-saving causes?

My working theory is a combination of (a) my basic needs are actually quite high when you consider the many potential rainy days for which I must save, (b) I don't know enough to donate with confidence that my money is doing more good than harm (this Gates letter addresses some of my concerns here), and (c) I must simply come to terms with being selfish to the point where I would rather spend money on a candy bar than a life-saving vaccination for someone else.
You really think that COINTELPRO-type ops are are likely as space aliens? Or is that just gratuitous condecension?
Yes, religion is influencing my views. I am first and foremost a Catholic (although a pretty crappy one who's always in a state of mortal sin). And the Catholic Church teaches that birth control is objectively and inherently offensive to God.

But I don't argue from that angle because all of God's truths are rooted in common sense and logic. They aren't just some random rules or decrees that are disconnected from reality and meant to make people's lives harder. They can all be argued for rationally and without needing to appeal to the supernatural for a good long time. It's like a mountain of logic built on a kernel of faith.
I think e-mail is here to stay for awhile longer.
Did I say anything about Flash? I was talking about a video tag. And are you saying that a 4 seconds video in the video tag will be less efficient than an img tag with an animated GIF?

Personally I see no point in using GIFs, unless on a site which allows embedding images, but not videos. On a site which you control, video tag works just fine.
Interesting discussion. Is there some data / guidelines / description available how the funnel at different sites compare?
I suppose this is an excellent example of testing prior to moving to production. I have 'ex nihilo ad absurdum' tattooed on my right forearm. It was more a reminder of the dark depression that spawns from philosophy and to distance myself from the subject. I would undo that decision if I had the choice.
Another vote for Venmo. There are no fees associated as long as you pay from bank account or debit card. Credit card costs 3%. Easy to find friends through social media. Easy to get friends to sign up.
You said "visits" which implied you were making a website. This is very different than the gaming space.

We make more than $1 per monthly active user and I know for a fact that our game monetises poorly when compared to the free to play games that monetize very well.
> We can and should have pseudonymity.

We already do. We've always had pseudonymity.

> Then we should abolish the police too. Criminals will just feel bad knowing they are at fault. Who is to blame, is irrelevant to how you address a problem.

Don't forget journalists, whose entire purpose is breaking boundaries created by privacy.
no , Indian names?
It seems you need a bit more than dclowd9901. Perhaps "White Privilege and Male Privilege" by Peggy McIntosh and "Oppression" by Marilyn Frye are good places to start:

http://www.iub.edu/~tchsotl/part2/McIntosh%20White%20Privile...

http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/tbettch/Frye,%20Oppression...
Dwolla has free micropayments (up to $10). Amazon offers special pricing for micropayments (5% + $.05) and so does PayPal (although it requires a separate account). If BTC price goes too high, the dollar costs of Bitcoin transaction fees will get pretty high as well. Anyway, here's an interesting article to read: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-02/bitcoin-is-an-expen...
Web-flow editing from Pull Requests
My wife and I have 4 kids, from ages 1 to 10. Raising them is incredibly hard.
You can avoid the trap applying the usual rule of three [1]. You do something manually once or twice - once you find you need to do it the third time, it's a good indication you should automate.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_program...
I'm terribly sad about this. I was eagerly anticipating their rollout to my market and would've happily paid more than the $5/month charge for the benefit of never opening another piece of junk mail again.
> (the exception being fundamentally flawed business models - "let's sell bags of rocks over the internet to children!")

Are you sure? :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock
It might not be encouraging but it is honest and it is factual. No company, however much you might wish it, can do magical things. At best, you can leverage the laws of large numbers to do things which are apparently magical to those people who do not have an understanding of maths, technology and engineering. This is exactly how stage magicians accomplish their tricks. A solid understanding of physics and high precision engineering.