skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have two questions in argument if I understand you correctly.

1) What's the difference between a business model based on having enough users vs. having buyout offer?

I don't differentiate a business from a company in that way. Business and company in the real world are pretty much the same thing. In the tech world, large number of users may bring a business into profitable stage because they have a huge pool of leads. Even if the conversion rate is low, there is still many chances to earn, especially due to the trust level. This model is similar to the traditional business.

High tech startups rely on the second way a lot because once they catch some investors, they made money no matter if the business is really profitable or not. That's why it's like gambling, you don't need to have a real business, as long as you make somebody believe you can make money, you win.

2) Is every business a gamble?

Not quite. The odds are a lot higher if you follow the typical business rules in the real world to provide true values to your customers. Now, a lot of people believe in that money can make money, so no real product is necessary. That's completely wrong. This belief puts everybody into gambling. At the end of the day, you will find that only the product/service values being realized can make money. So business is not gambling. We consumers are living on it everyday. If there is no product/service value but money trading, we will be running out of the fuel so quickly.
> What will be interesting though is the use of cryptography to protect things like our pin numbers at the checkout line.

Once my professor said the ATM machine in Japan randomized the order of the keys on the screen. I don't know how much effort it will require someone to upgrade the software to have a randomized keypad on the screen, but the risk of upgrading it is worth it.
> Would love to hear about better embedded options

How about just posting an image of the first page with an href to the raw pdf? I could then simply read the pdf in my browser. The embedding adds nothing.
You cannot even cancel an auto-renew for a single domain without having to call into a call center, sit on hold, and then go through the various levels of scripts that drones read to you.

It is clearly designed to bill you to death.
It seems a bit odd that Javascript and Ecmascript landed in two very different parts of the graph.
I saw this and had to read. I feel obligated to post after reading some of the comments. I've never dealt with Network Solutions until I arrived at my current employer, fall of last year. I've to say, that they're by far the worst in the industry. I've dealt with many registrars and I use to think GoDaddy was the worst until I came across these guys. They nickel and dime you for everything. It cost just to redirect a domain via their c-panel. Transferring domains is a pain, along with just about everything else. You'll definitely be talking to a sales guy when you call support and he'll escalate the issue because he has no idea what he's doing. The real support guy will also try to sell you. I work for a company that owns a lot of domains (in the 100s) and have found my experience with Network Solutions to be horrible. Lucky for me, we only have 30 something domains with them and I've been waiting until this year got here (new budget begins) before I paid the fee to transfer them all over to the registrar that manages majority of our domains.
Argentina restricts online shopping as foreign reserves drop
A couple of commercial services exist like this today. Repayonline.com and adaptivepayments.com have similar services. I believe one of them is the engine behind square cash. How will this be different, other than price and the open source angle? Will it be limited to the same contract negotiations bank-by-bank or network-by-network?
Just for the record, we have a similar system in New Zealand, and it works great.

1) In New Zealand there isn't really any incentive to become homeless, because a case worker takes you through an assessment process. This ensures that houses are only given to people who are truly homeless. Furthermore, I suspect you might underestimate the negative social image associated with living in state housing. If you need it, no-one really looks down on you (our current Prime Minister grew up in state housing), but if you're a young 20-something with a job, state housing is certainly not 'cool'.

2) The housing projects I have witnessed have not turned into centres for crime. It probably helps that these housing projects are really just clusters of 5-20 individual houses on a common plot, in the middle of some suburb. They're not segregated and concentrated.

EDIT: rXoX and im_a_lawyer, it looks like you've both been shadowbanned.
I'm sorry, you're wrong. Semantics are important because the meanings of the words people use are important. If there's one thing feminism should have taught you it's pay attention to the discourse, because the discourse shapes everything around you. Yet here you are telling me to ignore it.

Also, you have a messed up vision of what "critical engagement" means. Addressing arguments on a logical basis -- which is what I'm doing -- is a perfectly legitimate form of argumentation.

When I tell you that a->b and b->c thus a->c, do you really need me to cite a source?

Saying that "every other group is a men's group" directly in response to the question "why don't we need men's groups?" is very explicitly wanting to prohibit men from addressing men's issues. I do not need to cite sources to show that.

To placate you, here are just a few examples of certain strands of feminism actively blocking efforts by men to organize for men:

"CAFE has attempted to open chapters at several campuses across Canada in the past year, only to be met with heated protests. In June, the Canadian Federation of Students put forth a motion to oppose “men’s rights awareness groups” like CAFE, alleging they “provide environments of sexism, patriarchy and misogyny to manifest and be perpetuated on campus.”" [1]

"The Ryerson Students’ Union (RSU) takes issue with a men’s issues club. If it were not so serious, it would be laughable. An organization that collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in mandatory levies from Ryerson students is afraid of three students—two of them women—starting a men’s issues group." [2]

University of Toronto feminist group pulls a fire alarm to prevent a men's group lecture from happening, since they couldn't stop the lecture by protest alone. [3]

[1] - http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/08/15/controversial_men...

[2] - http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2013/04/01/ryerson-stu...

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2KPeMcYsuc

I'm certain that if you warm up your fingers and do some googling, queries like "X university bans mens group" would provide more such articles from around the world.
I can confirm that network solutions engages in this type of disgusting behaviour with my own experience.

I have one domain with them which I bought through a private buyer. They had it with NS so I just stayed with them instead of transferring to another domain registrar.

Yesterday I got a email about renewal which was nice and genuine. However throughout the whole renewal checkout process they added up-sell services by default. Also they defaulted to 5 years renewable.

Finally their domains are $40 / year which is about 4x more expensive than other providers.

By the end of the process I had been through like 4-6 "upsell" screens and had to opt out of about 2-3 things I didn't want like private registration and brand protect (registers all the useless tld's for your brand).

By the end of it I vowed never to do business with them again. Im already being robbed at $40 / year
I have more to share. Unfortunately the post isn't seeing much traction :(
I can't say I knew him well but I knew him out of school, and this is completely unlike the guy I knew. Your theory makes sense -- especially the humorous elaboration about thinking about calculus at all times as grounds for divorce -- THAT sounds like the classic sense of humor.
My start to photo management
If Pay It Forward can make it big, so could iWoz. I mean, his life has had all sorts of drama, and yet it's a really heartwarming story. If done right, it could be a truly great film of tech and humanity.
Peter Norvig on xkcd 1313: Regex Golf [Updated IPython Notebook]
Beware: Poverty lines are often set as a percentage of the per capita GDP. So, in real terms, if the average buying power increase did not outpace the buying power increase of the richest few, poverty could increase, even as people are able to afford more.

The world bank data that you linked to seems to be using a relative poverty line.
A few hours? If you don't make progress in 10 minutes, leave.
Isn't Network Solutions the company that got caught buying up domains that users would search for, if they didn't buy them immediately? Thereby forcing users to backorder domains at an increased cost? This post does not surprise me. GoDaddy isn't close to this bad.
The web link is off Dr. Tesfatsion's website. She has long advocated that the agents in an economy are Turing complete, thus you run into the halting problem in the general case.
The first thing someone should contribute is Sparkle support
https://github.com/andymatuschak/Sparkle/tree/master
From Ars Technica @ http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/amazon-may-spawn-liv...

> Update: Amazon spokesperson Drew Herdener has denied the WSJ's report, saying that Amazon is "not planning to license television channels or offer a pay-TV service,” according to Seattle Times Business Reporter Jay Greene.
Welcome to magazine journalism.
Have you had an opposite gender friend review your profile?
Well, I was about to start a war here. That sorted it out. Also, don't put the reset button right in the middle of the screen.
Since you're intent on demanding citations, I'll ask you to cite where I lied about and belittled the position I'm attacking. Thanks.
Even so, it speaks poorly of his method (or maybe just his personality?) that it took 90 dates to actually find a good match.
I thought it was GoDaddy that was caught doing that.
For those like me who find the Smalltalk syntax appealing, there's hope to make more of it (given Objective-C's roots, this makes every sense): http://objective.st/
Heatmaper: on demand and insightful heatmaps for retail
Heatmaper is a cloud service for retail stores which analyzes the recorded videos from existing cameras to reveal insights and help improve store layout and product positioning

Our state-of-art technology is proprietary and recognizes the customer activity, transforming it into insightful heatmaps
Thanks, just the kind of information I was looking for. That looks like exactly my problem too.
Men looking to marry into a wealthy family will be hanging around the local clubs and lounges.
From the looks of it the reason she wasn't offered in the first place is that he didn't really answer many questions at first. You have to answer at least a few hundred for it to be useful.

It sounds like rather than actually trying to use the service he didn't feel it was worth the time and rather spent enormous effort to figure out what questions he should answer and how best to fill out the profile.
I remember reading about this on io9 quoting Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University. (2009)

>A black hole that would survive the entire trip would have a radius of 0.9 attometers, would have a mass of 606,000 tonnes, and a power output of 160 petawatts. The lifespan of the black hole could be extended by feeding it mass, too.

http://io9.com/5391989/a-black-hole-engine-that-could-power-...
People still use network solutions? lol j/k
HTMLS - HyperText Markup LiveScript
I agree, but what made me sigh was that in order to make that story 'stick' for me, is to be really crisp about the selection process. By going through and detailing the ways you tried to disprove your result (which is counter to the narrative) you legitimize the conclusion. But without that, the critical thinker is left without any way to evaluate whether or not they reached a valid conclusion.
So the expected value of playing is around $.25?
Many many people would rather accept state housing than work. I'm not even opposed to that choice on the whole. What I'm opposed to is rewarding that choice, and a more fair basic income takes care of that.
I think something better already exists - it's called speed dating. It was invented by a rabbi as a Jewish matchmaking event where you meet many people over a short space of time (maximising the chance of finding mutual attraction). But most cities have very few events which are consequently overpriced due to lack of competition.
Your sites require all of the imported stylesheets[1]? I usually import only around half of the bootstrap-sass stylesheets[2].

[1] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/tree/master/less

[2] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-sass/tree/master/vendor/as...
I'd love to see a canonical "pick these suites" article for Amazon's Elastic Load Balancers. I've managed an A- but it'd be nice to know which of the 50ish ciphers shown in ELB config I should be picking.
My wife and I give to http://www.worldvision.org/ (one of the partners listed in the Gates Letter). They've been doing incredible work for over 60 years in both development and aid.
I am a current customer of Outbox and also a customer of VirtualPostMail (VPM) for both personal and business mail. And I am a former EarthClassMail (ECM) and PayTrust customer.

Since many seem to be asking about alternatives, I have generally positive views about VPM and ECM. They get the job done, though neither of them will blow your socks off from a technology standpoint (e.g., search, image resolution). I used ECM for 2 1/2 years and then switched to VPM, which I've been using for the last 2 1/2 years. VPM is considerably less expensive than ECM (which probably targets pricing for SMBs rather than consumers).

For reasons I can't grasp, I consider dealing with physical mail one of the most undesirable "life maintenance" activities imaginable. In 2000, I started using paymybills.com (became Paytrust/Intuit) -- basically VPM for bills only plus online bill pay. I paid ~$10/month and easily would have paid double that. I emailed them around 2001 and suggested they expand to provide the same service for all mail. When Intuit acquired Mint, I emailed Aaron Patzer a suggestion that they look into doing to mail what Mint did for financial information. He put me in touch with a product manager he said was looking into this, but apparently it never went anywhere.

When I heard about ECM, I signed up for their service in a heartbeat. It wasn't perfect, but I considered their service to be (barely) worth the $800-$1000/year I paid them. When I learned about VPM, I quickly switched to them and remain a generally happy customer and average about $200/year in fees.

Similarly, I signed up for Outbox the instant I heard of it, wanting to test it out on the trickle of mail I still get at home to see if it might be an improvement on VPM. The one thing I never got from Outbox was peace of mind that they would be around for the long haul, so I thankfully never cancelled my VPM service. I sent Outbox an email in March 2013 inviting them to charge more because I knew today's announcement was inevitable if they did not make some fundamental changes. I never understood why they wouldn’t scan bulk mail I wanted open (you had to have it delivered). But I was cheering for them and am sad to see it come to an end.

[Edit: typo]
I could see the opposite: use of bitcoins for transacting and some of the other interesting applications Marc mentions. But it strikes as being a horrible value store given the volatility and lack of any underlying value.
Ah, that makes more sense. Haven't used their DNS - do they let you drop the TTL, at least?
The domestic guide in cases of insanity
Why Is Cosmos Blocked in the US on Youtube?
Youtube is telling me episode two of Carl Sagan's Cosmos contains content from EMI or SME (?). Does anyone know whats going on?
Only since 2011? This stunt's been illegal in Australia for as long as I can remember.
Side projects that actually get shipped and are potentially HN-able (I refuse to believe you've never had a cool web app idea). Open source libraries for useful functionality for JS/Ruby/Rails. MOOCs (esp. with algorithms). Reimplementing/redesigning already existing open-source libraries (e.g. creating your own JS promises library, node.js router, Sinatra-style framework, JS templating language, etc. etc. etc.).

I would specifically caution against selling yourself short in job applications. Do not call yourself a "junior" software engineer. Call yourself a software engineer. Do not advertise in a cover letter that you are very new to coding. Just focus on what you've done.
Weibo Goes Down in China, Traffic Redirected to Freedom Software
That's kind of why public housing failed in the first place: rents alone could not make up the entirety of the needed maintenance and staffing budgets.
There's still a lot of work to be done to make the experience of car shopping easier, so it's sad to see CarWoo shutting down. Side note: those interested in disrupting the car buying space like CarWoo/TrueCar may want to check out http://www.hackomotive.com/ the $35k hackathon put on by Edmunds.com this February. (Disclaimer: I used to intern for Edmunds.com on the API team, http://developer.edmunds.com/)
> (I believe most people could find an interesting match even just by randomly selecting 88 people that fit their criteria)

Sure, but it's a lot easier to meet those 88 people if you can get them to message you. For most guys to meet 88 women via OkCupid they'd have to send thousands of messages, which would probably take years.
The article did not mention anything about skipping questions that were important to him; it specifically said that he had originally been picking questions "more or less" at random.

You're also assuming that the set of questions he had algorithmically selected did not overlap with the questions that were important to him. This seems unlikely.

The only dishonesty here is that by (presumably) determining the breadth and detail of his answers by order of importance to the cluster, he is in effect answering the questions /as if/ they are as important to him as they are to the average representative of that cluster. But if everyone else was also answering the questions "more or less" at random anyway ("He’d been approaching online matchmaking like any other user"), this doesn't seem so bad (and is probably why his algorithm gave him so many failed dates, since the relevant questions wouldn't have been answered).

Honestly all he did was make himself way more visible. You'd probably get a good amount of dates by making a sign and sitting in Central Park too. Sure, it's a bit distateful, but no less manipulative than that (and much more clever).
SSDs have a slightly higher failure rate than mechanical drives, and when failed are mostly unrecoverable. Here is a report of massive failure rates (>50%) with OCZ drives: http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html

Right now the safest thing to do is to store at multiple cloud providers, where they have proper measures to manage disk failures.
Relying on the massive global logistics network to support massively nonequilibrium populations in highly infertile land is counting on a patently unsustainable level of resource use to create a massive risk.

It's one thing to have local shortfalls of food or water of a few percent which can be satisfied with largely local imports of a few hundred kilometers (say, Germany, which is roughly 90% self-sufficient for food production). It's quite another to require massive imports of food and fresh water.

Economic efficiency is directly opposed to sustainability and risk.
Instantly. Zero exchange risk for the merchant (Bitpay considers their hedging strategies as part of their core-competence-- they don't always convert to USD/Euro/GBP [1], they sometimes stay long bitcoin). All payments for the day are aggregated (in USD/Euro/GBP [1]) and sent to the merchant (as long as it's more than $20, I believe. So it's much quicker than credit cards (and don't forget money from credit cards can be automatically pulled from the merchant account up to 120 later, whereas these ones are irreversible.) [1]Note: This is why it's easier to say "fiat" when referring to national currencies. :)
Argentina Bans International Home Delivery for Online Shoppers
The OS is, the apps aren't necessarily.
The generally accepted rule is 1) Be attractive and 2) Don't be unattractive. That's more than a bit reductionist, of course, but tweaking your profile text or message texts only helps at the margins, assuming you don't have deal breakers. com2kid isn't going to be getting dozens of inbound messages a month just by revising his profile (sorry, com2kid).

(On the other hand, updating your pictures genuinely can give you many, many more views, messages, and responses.)
When we all first joined Facebook, we were hit with an exciting torrent of old friends we'd lost touch with, especially old hookups/romances that suddenly became possible again. This was like a pathogen entering a fresh population of potential hosts.

Then, over the past 6 years, we explored all of those new possible relationships and took them to their conclusion. But now there's nothing left; like the pathogen killing off all its hosts and having nowhere else to go.

In order to survive, the population has to create new hosts faster than they're being killed i.e. Facebook would have to generate new connections for us at a faster rate than we can explore them. I don't think it comes anywhere close.

In this sense, it definitely has biological underpinnings.
...so wait, their system treats you like dirt if you provide more information? Somewhere out there a data miner is laughing his ass off.
I've been quite happy with iwantmyname -- and I've noticed their co-founder frequents HN.
Yahoo Acquires Mobile Marketing Startup Sparq
This is an unlikely move. The cable companies and broadcast networks have pretty much killed every effort for a straight streamed internet based TV services. Including a very costly failure by Intel (ironically just purchased by today by Verizon who may have a chance because of their existing content deals)

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/21/5330172/intel-tv-project-v...
Great to see something new in this space. I remember having to rewrite quite a bit of backend code when SimpleGeo shutdown.

Note to self: code back-end API consumers with Interfaces and drivers instead of hardcoding API calls.
How 3 years in I finally paid to Evernote
Yovigo Social E-Commerce Platform Completes Beta (now public)
I had a startup called lowpenny.com that was very similar to CarWoo (before CarWoo) except we charged the auto dealers to use our system instead of charging users which is what CarWoo did.

The process of buying a car needs to be disrupted but the solution is not apparent to me. Would love to know why CarWoo is calling it quits.
I had this issue with Comcast. I didn't even buy the modem from them; I bought it from Staples, and yet, a year after I'd been with them, they decided to start trying to tack on a modem rental fee.

When I talked to their 'executive' customer service (whatever it is, the people who actually can do anything), they told me to -send them a receipt-. Are you kidding me? Why don't -you- prove that -you- own it? Where's -your- receipt? You didn't bill me for it for a year; pretty sure if we go to small claims court that will be taken as evidence in my favor.

Regardless, since I bought it from Staples, I went back to the store, told them the card I used, the day I bought it (because yay online CC histories), and they printed me off a copy of the receipt. Sent that in...got confirmation they'd remove the charge...and of course I had to call again the next month because the charge was still there.

I'm really tired of these freaking monopolies.