skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The degree to which you believe the guy will make good on his promise to always buy snail tails in exchange for water is the degree to which you believe snail tails are backed by water. We can be pretty sure the US government will generally make good on its promise to take US dollars in exchange for not prosecuting you for non-payment of taxes.

>I reject your definition of "intrinsic value". Sounds sorta' like "regular value" to me.

I don't like the term 'intrinsic value' at all, since it sounds like it's suggesting some type of absolute value, which I don't think very many people (at least, not the ones having these conversations) really believe exists. I think the way they mean it is more in line with the way I defined it, to distinguish between something some people buy for its own sake versus something people only buy so they can trade it away to someone else, who is in turn only buying it so he can again trade it away. The latter still clearly has value to those people who take it in trade, and 'intrinsic value' is a convenient term to distinguish between the two.
Nope.

> However, you’re entrusting us to help you maintain your privacy; you should know how we will respond if the government asks us for access to your encryption keys. The government would need those keys if it wanted to read any encrypted files it does obtain. Without them, the files are useless.

> We won’t provide your keys to anyone without your consent — unless we are ordered to divulge them by a judge with jurisdiction over us. If we are ordered to divulge them, we will fight for you to have notice and an opportunity to object.

So I guess I'll keep waiting for a DarkMail client.
This is focusing on the wrong metric.

What if you had 100 uniques / month with a DAU/MAU of 50%? Insanely successful retention, right? Except it's only 100 uniques! The more important number is the "top of the funnel," which is the ultimate driver of sustainability.
I have to disagree with your comments on Ethernet:

- there is security at the Ethernet level with 802.1x. Mostly used in professional settings, to prevent anyone with access to an area to plug into an Ethernet jack and sniff traffic with ARP poisoning or access anything;

- the ACK support for WiFi is perfectly fine at L2. The reason Ethernet doesn't do ACK is that the PER is very low so there's really no need for it. The reason why all wireless standards do some form of ACK is that wireless is very lossy and relying on higher layers for retransmission would give poor performance (retransmission at L2 is faster, and transparent to TCP). There's ACK for WiFi but in wireless LAN (e.g.: 4G/LTE) that are also lossy and with a relatively high latency you even have two levels of ACK: at the L1/L2 with HARQ, and at L2 with ARQ. Different contexts, different mechanisms.
That's how I read the author's argument. Doesn't mean I agree with him; I would agree with you that the signs are ambivalent at best.
Add "?share=1" to the end of the URL.
And when you poke it with a stick, it falls apart. GANTT isn't an acronym, the chart was invented by Henry Gantt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Gantt
Ask HN: Do you have any ideas for a SaaS app?
Hey guys so lately I've really hit the wall in terms of creativity. I just can't think of any good idea I should be working on because of the fear that I would be building for an imaginary customer base that doesn't exist in the real world.

So I want to know if there's any real world problem solving SaaS application idea that you might want to share and that I can build.

I will give you early beta access and everything.
Please stop. Bringing up radical feminism in this context is just trolling. There is absolutely nothing radical in what they're doing here.
They were probably bringing in much less than $1 for each of those 400,000 people.
So as of this moment, you can't keep the keys yourself. Our technology absolutely allows for self-hosted keys. We do have private key managers being developed, which we intend to open source, and be for private use. It will be an option for the those that want the responsibility of keeping the keys safe, and also address your concern.
Does Mexico still have an emmigration problem? I know that for the last few years, the USA has had net-negative immigration from Mexico, as people are moving back.
> GDP per capita is misleading

that's why is better to use Purchasing Power Parity indexes, for example Mexico is 14th in Nominal GDP with 1,183B USD, but in PPP terms it is the 11th with 1,758B USD. The country as a whole has a GDP per capita PPP of 15K USD, but Mexico City has a GDP per capita PPP of 44K USD. It's a very big country with a lot of inequality between urban and rural population.
That's misleading: A lot of those transactions are microtransactions (not possible at all with credit cards) so of course the % will look elevated.
One of the best letters of this kind I've seen. I like how they were up front about the mistakes/miscalculations they made, and what they learned from it.
Each individual visitor (which does not correspond directly to a consumer) usually brings a fraction of a penny to the table, if anything at all.
Yes, I'm aware of what is involved in systems programming and what kind of problems I might end up solving. However my knowledge is mostly theoretical or based on spare time hacking or university classes practice. The point you are raising is valid though. One should be aware where he is going to stick his nose :)

Based on your previous post I see that you are an embedded developer. Would you mind to shortly tell how you started and what you found most difficult or most important in the beginning or even later in your career?
Entrepreneur Myths Demystified
Try the pomodoro technique[0]. It may seem cheesy, but it's a good way to flex your discipline muscle. You basically choose a task and focus on it for 20 uninterrupted minutes at a time.

Once you've mastered going through 20 uninterrupted minutes and can do it easily every time you have small definable task that fits in a 20 minute slot, go ahead and start working on controlling the procrastination time that might occupy the spaces between your 20 minutes of productivity. I've heard a lot of good things about rescue time[1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
[1] https://www.rescuetime.com/
Why the downvotes, I said kindly?
Candy Crush Saga creator actually trademarks the term “Candy”
Consumer startups with such little traction don't get anywhere close to $1 per user per month. I ran a start-up with a million uniques a month and we were making a fraction of a penny per visitor.
Just pictured in my head a modern day "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" moment where Picard instead has to learn to speak in animated gifs.
My First SEC Trial Transcript Has Some Real Comedy – SEC vs Schvacho
> I've never heard of anyone ever suggesting letting suffering children die as some way to keep the population low

Here is someone suggesting exactly that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4372752
Why mainstream companies are losing black talent
You're absolutely right. Thanks for checking it out.

As for the robot, I was going for something cute, like MailChimp. It was picture I took of a friend's painting. Awesome painting, but didn't translate well to a pro icon. Do you think a robot could work if I got a pro version done at Logo Tournament?

I do plan to make it easy to try it for free. Also make it much cheaper... say a flat $5/mnth or something.

I actually abandoned it over a year ago once I launched and realized there are 41394 invoicing apps and I don't know how to market.
1. In this case, I'm translating the top-level post, not speaking for anyone.

2. Idiomatically, "tech" usually refers to the computing (specifically software, in most uses) industry. I guess I could have said "Silicon Valley", but man, those extra 10 letters, very difficult :P
> Q. What would Virtru do if it received a request
> from the United States government for encryption keys?

> A. We will require the government to go to court,
> and if we can, we will notify you.

To me that seems naive. You won't be able to notify anyone if you get a National Security Letter (NSL). Lavabit had turned over encryption keys for individual users, because they had to [1]. They only shut down when the government wanted their SSL key, to give access to everyone.

How are you any different?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
Do you even know what you're talking about? Miranda rights are for interrogations.
Can you explain that graph? I have no idea what I'm looking at. Where are these fees going?
eh, I don't know. I remember when he first announced Canvas and most of 4chan simply responded "so what?" moot does mean something to most 4chan users but mostly just because they get to post in a moot thread I'm not sure you can really capitalize on that userbase, at least not in a monetizable way.
Make any Cloud Provider HIPAA Compliant
That's an interesting stance that I see no evidence to support. The urge to procreate is tremendously powerful. In many cases it is even more powerful that the urge for sex, believe it or not. I think you are massively understating it.

Now, this may not seem likely when you look at those in their 20s, but it jumps out at you if you look at those in their 40s. It's so bad that it actually leads to all sorts of loveless marriages and bad situations - particularly for women worrying about "running out of time". These are first world problems though.

What the third world problems are is children being born far to soon for the parent to become established - financially, emotionally, and spiritually, if you will. This leads to less than ideal environments for children to be raised, and as a result a poorer 'end product', if you will.

You've got to remember that many third world countries do not have the options and environment we do in the first world. A "pro-contraception" message isn't needed here. When the default is switched however, and you have the procreation urge matched with little to no knowledge of contraception at all, you have a far greater negative effect than what you are concerned with.
Robots, videogame, animation, tweets- a new take on Tate Britain
If we created a Announcing the [Male] Founders Conference (March 1) they'd be marching on washington
In a post that is pretty serious and has some heavy conversion, I appreciate your joke.
Not to be rude, but do you think someone who has, as you put it, "hit the wall" would make a good acquisition for a startup?

It's hard to put yourself out there like you appear to be doing, but it usually requires the opposite of people who have hit the wall, who can put in long hours with no immediate returns.
For once Betteridge's law of headlines doesn't apply because the answer is -- yes! At least it shouldn't be that difficult to laser off if he wants to redo it!
Probably because the odds are only 9 Quintillion to 1. Yes, that's a 9 with 18 zero's on the end of it.

By contrast, the odds of hitting the Mega Millions jackpot is around 175 million to 1.
Mobile gaming is about risk management. There are a lot of failures but the successes can be huge and pay for everything else. You try and try again until you strike the rich vein of players who are actually willing to sink money into virtual crap. Even with incredibly coercive game design and analytics - finding and engaging these users is hard.
World's worst password
You're assuming no progress will be made in bitcoin scalibility in the near future, and comparing it to another technology stack that arguably hasn't seen any meaningful innovation in 40 years (since the advent of the debit/credit card.)
The transmit power budget allowed by the standard is shared with the various antennas at least. Even if a given transmission uses the maximum power to maximize the modulation and coding scheme used BF will at least reduce the interference to other AP and devices, so it's still has a positive impact on interference, which is reduced.
What you're talking about (massive ground-level driving effort to pinpoint where along streets specific addresses are located) would boost accuracy. Without a Google level address parser, though, you don't get usability for a lot of use cases, which is frankly much more important for a lot of companies. One of the best things about Google's geocoder is that you can throw various location names, as humans type them, and Google will return something, and it's usually the right thing. For many applications, this is the desired behavior, rather than precision.
great. Thanks. Will signup when it becomes available :)
> Is there any label that people apply to themselves or others that successfully filters out the lunatic fringe from reasonable people?

I don’t know, it probably has to do with the visibility of these fringe groups and your position in the spectrum described by the label. I am sure there are lunatic social democrats somewhere, I have just not yet met them, and I am also positive that there are lunatic liberal democrats somewhere, but again I have not yet met them.

OTOH, there certainly are lunatic ‘scientists’, but they take a sufficiently small stage in public that I can self-identify as a scientist without having to worry about being confused with them.

> I'm not afraid to call myself a feminist (even though that puts me in the same camp as some crazy people) in the same way that I'm not afraid to call myself a hacker or a man or a parent or an urban farmer.

Even if I was a hacker (I really am not, just an interested guy), I would hesitate to call myself a hacker in front of an audience that associates the word mostly with their CC details being stolen.

Language is difficult.
Startup delusion is the new gold rush, the only ones making money are those selling the dream. As soon as I see someone using startup buzzwords like runway, pivot etc I see a sucker who is has stars in their eyes.
Excellent, the source code equivalent of

http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/

which implies that about 99% of westerners walking around with Kanji tattoos either have gibberish font (hilarious, read up about it) or think they have some girls name but its actually "weeds / brush (vegetation) / wild grassland"

The concept that you'll look better with a foreign language phrase as part of your skin is weird / mildly amusing all by itself, but the really funny part is the execution is so often an epic fail. So you've got an illiterate foreign language on your skin, not just a foreign language.

Given the apparently extreme popularity of the above genre, ridiculous source code should fit right in.
Serious question: are you a parent?

I have two (planned, lovely, adorable, whatever) children and while I adore them and am proud of what I'm doing, raising kids well (or at least as well as I'm able) is hard. Very hard. I mean, it's so hard that the very idea of compelling other people to do it when they haven't chosen to seems extremely immoral.
I think Tom and Chris are doing a fantastic job running and growing github. I'm just curious how this idea of trading CEO roles without making it public for a while works in practice. I think it could potentially matter to their employees, along the lines Ben Horowitz discussed in his post, "Shared Command" [1] - different situation, but analogous potential muddling of the chain of command.

Obviously some companies with both a CEO and a President can be amazingly successful [2], but tend to still be clear about who is ultimately in charge. It's not that I doubt Tom and Chris share a vision for github and clearly communicate and execute on that vision together; I just wonder when and how that model might hit its limits.

1. http://bhorowitz.com/2013/07/03/shared-command/

2. http://www.spacex.com/about/leadership
they aren't really myths. This is just ignoring the cause twice... so it seems right. remember, they 'sell' aid.

what happens is, country A explores country B. country B is now in misery. Country A now gives out aid, while continuing to explore. Country A is still making country B miserable, but now feeling good about it.

...And this institution, in exchange for tax breaks, have to sell you the idea that the last step is not bad. While blatantly ignoring that the cause is the first step.

Of course Aid is not bad. What is bad is that it is at that point to begin with. And we all know that giving out handouts is necessary, but hardly the solution to the problem they advertise.
Unlike lavabit we're not a content provider and therefore not bound by the same laws. We're just a third-party provider that holds the keys. #7 on the blog post here goes into more details: https://blog.virtru.com/faq-on-government-surveillance/
Just a FYI there are a handful of companies already doing something very similar. Except instead of physically picking up your mail, they receive it on your behalf (made possible by USPS form 1583 [1]). Then they digitize and forward (you pay S&H.)

[1] http://about.usps.com/forms/ps1583.pdf
Chris is a really smart guy, and while this hasn't worked out as well as hoped I look forward to seeing whatever he does in the future which I feel certain will be bright.

If you're seeing this Chris, and need anything at all (aside from a few Mil of investment, which I just don't personally have), hit me up and let me know.
Another issue with GDP is that it increases as an artifact of marketization, independently of changes to efficiency or standard of living produced by marketization. If two people each cut their own lawn, this contributes $0 to GDP. If they swap so that each mows the other person's lawn for $5, GDP goes up! If they each hire the other person as childcare to watch their own kids while cutting the other person's lawn, GDP goes up even more! This is because GDP does not include non-paid productive work, so simply making it paid increases GDP (even if actual production goes down).

Some of these shifts might improve welfare, but GDP increases regardless of whether they do or not, just by putting dollar figures on existing activity. A government really wanting to artificially boost GDP could give it a big boost by mandating that each parent take care of a different parent's kids for N days a week instead of their own, at a government-fixed rate of pay. The payments in each direction net out, childcare probably does not improve, and GDP goes up.
Outbox was supposed to disrupt the post office, but now it's in the trash bin
<div id="something-to-complain-about"
That's his strength, but in terms of monetizing, it could also be a weakness. That demographic isn't really known for its willingness to pay for things, or to be led around by the nose by anyone.
> the bias in future generations against having children

You need to provide something that suggests this bias is prevalent in any society at all.

There is a bias against having many children (i.e. 2+), sure. I'm not seeing anything at all suggesting there is a prevalent bias against having any children at all, nor that one will develop over time.
New Mobile Device That Lets You Send Smells
They're not talking about "free expression" in the generic sense. They're specifically talking about Yale's Freedom of Expression Policy [1]. Comparing this to Yelp doesn't make sense, because the Dean of Yelp never said, "I disagree that Yale violated its policies on free expression in this situation." The policy in question specifically states that Yale values "the need to be able to 'think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.'" and acknowledges that "such freedom may sometimes make life uncomfortable in a small society such as a college. But it also asserts that 'because no other institution combines the discovery and dissemination of basic knowledge with teaching, few need assign such high priority to it.'"

I don't really have a bone in this fight, so to speak, but I do find it interesting that the Dean of Yale has such a problem with the way their students are using their data to express an idea, when their very own Freedom of Expression Policy says:

Yale's commitment to freedom of expression means that when you agree to matriculate, you join a community where "the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox" must be tolerated. When you encounter people who think differently than you do, you will be expected to honor their free expression, even when what they have to say seems wrong or offensive to you.

Although, if we're being pedantic, their policy technically states that they expect their students and graduates to honor others' free expression, not that they agree to honor their students' free expression.

[1] http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/freedom-expression
$1 of income per unique visitor per month is much too high to be a good number to plan with. If your site doesn't have a natural commercial interest you're going to be selling adds at a rate that corresponds to maybe a $0.01-$1 CPM. If the average unique visitor views 50 pages a month that's just $0.0005-$0.05 in income per person.
Not everyone wants a sustainable business. Some people just want to get acquired. This was even mentioned in a business class I had in the 90's.

Did you make money? Yes. Did your investors get their return? Yes. Sounds like a successful exit to me. Every week I'm seeing an article about Google/Apple/Microsoft buying a small company that had no hope of being profitable on their own. Everyone defines success on their own terms.
Bitcoin miners.

Simplistically: Each transaction can optionally include a fee as an incentive for Bitcoin miners to include the transaction in the block they're calculating. Right now, blocks can produce new "mined" Bitcoins, so the reference implementation doesn't frequently add a fee as the incentive to calculate a block is still quite high. As the "mining" (new Bitcoin creation) rate declines to zero, fees will become more important as an incentive to continue calculating new blocks.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees has a complete explanation of the current reference implementation of fees.
> The officer asking the questions identified himself as "Bob Hope" of the "movie association" — presumably the MPAA

FBI, MPAA, ICE?

Before you voluntarily want to have a "terrifying" chat with someone for an hour, you just might want to figure out who you're dealing with.
Thanks. It sounds very interesting. From the little I've seen, seems like it could be used to simulate systems in a "smart cities" context. I will detinitely take a closer look.
Looking forward to you organizing and hosting a Male Startup Founders Conference and paying for it out of your own pocket.
Network Solutions Auto-Enroll: $1,850
Please let me know when web programming finally gets solved more elegantly, without the anachronistic ugliness of js/css/html.
If you use Evernote and Buffer you will love what boosting can do for you
If I have a comparable amount of confidence in my snail tail guy as I do in the USG's hunger for USD, then snail tails are suddenly "intrinsically valuable"?

I agree that intrinsic value is sort of a nebulous thing to begin with, and I'm not convinced that the idea even makes sense to at all (as you've suggested), but your definition just seems confusing at best, and perhaps even useless (though if it's useful to you, then have at it).
Toys + Mobile Games = Win
I guess different people have different definitions of the word 'comedic'.
> Sadly, USPS sees bulk mailers as their customer...

Not so sadly, doing so allows more reasonable rates for normal mail.