skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Devil's advocate: In a technological civilization, it makes more sense to back a currency with energy than with any other commodity. (USD is already de-facto backed by oil [1].) In a sense, BitCoin itself is also energy-backed, as the mining yield these days is roughly equal to the cost of electricity.

That said, while a distributed currency that is miraculously 1:1 exchangeable with energy would be pretty neat, SolarCoin doesn't seem to be that. If anything, it would make more sense to just pay people in BitCoins for contributing energy back to the grid, or to mine BitCoins in a carbon-neutral fashion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar
Because someone paid the owner of Bot2 for it.
It works for porn, sort by "views" seems to pretty consistently be better content than "rating".... i think, i heard once from someone...
Well, I guess everyone is passionate about something.

I would submit that there are more deserving things in the world, but then again that is true of things I care about as well.
Depending on the size of the dataset, you may have been providing a valuable service to those on dialup (however unwittingly). I remember how even a download of 50-100MB would take dedication to keep everyone off the phone for hours and pray that there were no interruptions upstream. Paying $10-15 for a guaranteed CD of what I wanted would have been well within reason.
Then I'll just buy 100 $30 android devices and leave my apps open around the clock. Hell maybe I'll buy 1000 of them and rent out time on them to unscrupulous app developers.
Ah, people are still discussing EA's good practices.
The company I sold was indeed fully thought out - it was ranked one of the 5,000 fastest growing private companies in America by INC Magazine in 2011 ;)

It was sold by the buyer who bought it from me (acquired by a supplier), and I have no control over the content anymore, but as far as I can tell the site has been completely replaced at least twice since I sold it.

As far as "living a life of lies," I take offense, and I'm not sure where you come to this conclusion.

For me, living a life of lies meant telling myself I was meant to go to Stanford and run a Silicon Valley Startup.

Since I'm not sure there's any basis to the rest of your critique, I don't know how to respond to it.
Very inspiring. Lately, I've found more interest in reading about people building businesses surrounding curated physical goods rather than digital goods or services.
While a laudable initiative, this looks more like a way to get new cryptocurrency in the market by riding on solar community good will.
If ReactOS were "ready" right now (i.e., could run 99% of all Windows 7 software unmodified), with all the bad press that Windows 8 gets, it might even have a chance to steal some market share. However, I don't think they can catch up before Microsoft manages to release another "good" version of Windows, and then the game of catch-up will start again.

I hope I'm wrong. I'd really like to see this succeed.
This is fine let them keep screwing around with Netflix, Amazon, and Google(Youtube) it won't be long before they get pissed and build their own internet backbone/service providers(already happening).

I can't wait to get Amazon High Speed Internet.

So please, let them keep acting jerks.
Thanks,

It helps that I see some romanticism in shipping physical goods. As a kid I saw an ad in a magazine for a book on "how to start your very own far east import business". My parents would not buy it for me and it was probably some sort of scam, but the idea stayed.

Having a shop is definitely something I want to do, but I think I try to bring the subscriber count a bit higher before embarking on it. Other subscription businesses seem to make about 25% of their sales from products that people purchase more of after being introduced to them via the monthly packages.
They wanted to stop AnonOps from enabling the planning and execution of Anonymous operations. They bragged that a month after "rolling thunder" that the same nicknames/operations weren't there anymore. It's hardly effective, mostly childish.
Amazon Prime very rarely has any video in HD. Closed Caption also doesn't seem to exist on any video.
And I guess the same goes the other way... Every time I see the site, I want to subscribe, but I simply can't pay $25. :(
Both I and my wife have a tendency to call her tricycle a "bike" or "bicycle", and to ride on roads expressly marked as bicycle lanes.
Look at the man page for alloca(). Stack-allocated strings are more dangerous in the face of overflow than heap-allocated strings.
It appears to me to be "yet another" because the length before the string approach is usually referred to as a b-string.

windows (for example) has had a comprehensive b-string library (type is called BSTR) for about 20 years - due to it's age and provenance it has the downside of thinking a character is a 16-bit value...
Thanks. Any specific aspect you would like to read about?
I'd say 2 is the bigger issue. I can't say how sick I am of seeing people recommend bitcoin as a solution for every problem when 99% of the time it will not help at all.

"I'm having issues with chargebacks on my service, how can I lower chargebacks?"

"Use bitcoin no chargebacks!" (Thanks, but that doesn't help with the majority of people who want to use credit cards)

"Which cc processor should I use?"

"Use bitcoin! It has almost no cost unlike credit cards" (Thanks, but that doesn't help my problem and you're ignoring the costs/difficulty of putting money into and pulling money out of bitcoin).

etc, etc.

The community as a whole seems bent on spamming it everywhere at the moment and I am seeing a lot more backlash to it in various online forums I frequent.
My guess would be that they listed the book a long time ago and lost track of it or that their pricing bot has a bug. Or they're humans (one dedicated person can do a surprising amount of book sales, we discovered).

Our experience was that there is no inattentive-buyer market. Those high-priced books will not sell.

edit: I'd add that we didn't like to stock books with low prices like that. There's no margin in the <$5+s&h books you see on Amazon. Instead, we had a big pulper and we'd pulp our 10m copies of "Patriot Games" and sell them to recyclers. My understanding is that my former employers have moved to start making recycled paper themselves and selling that these days.
Data-Driven Journalism 101
The initial tablet market struck me as a very boomer focused device, one that made computing easy for a limited subset of tasks.

I think he's wrong that tablets have peaked. As the software and hardware on tablets catches up to the capability of a full laptop, they are a much more compelling device for use at home or at work. Content creation, software development and file management are still a challenge but these can be fixed.

I really hope the Surface and derivatives catch on in the enterprise, because I'm tired of lugging a 7lb laptop to and from meetings.
"who do not need to exploit anyone or anything, but can create value out of thin air."

I think this now takes the title for "stupidest thing I've read on HN."
This talk is very relevant too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA
EA isn't restricting you from reviewing the app in the store, they just aren't linking you from inside their app.

Also, it's incredibly frustrating for app developers to get support requests via poor app store reviews. It's a real problem.
I noticed when I uploaded an image a few days ago, the "direct link to image" field was missing entirely. I figured it was meant to curb direct hotlinking.
I bought a tablet for travel because I don't really care if I have a smart phone or not. I didn't really think it would replace things with keyboards and I still really like it for travel.

The real problem is that cross device integration is so awful, hopefully the future has us configuring environments instead of devices (environment there being the software I want to see when I look at a small touch screen or the software I want to see when I look at a large screen with a keyboard).
What kind of option would you prefer to have?
that doesn't work on amazon, any book with an ISBN will get condensed into one listing. You can get a little tricky with it, but not enough to allow intra-market arbitrage.

I understand that he's claiming it exists, and it might with other products, but my experience was that it does not with books.
I'm not sure if your "pretentious" comment was directed at todayiamme or not. If so:

If the idea of triple-quotes holds utility, what does it matter if it's "improper syntax" or not? I find your need to squabble over quotation styles pretentious.
Semi-OT, but: Considering how much reddit seems to depend on imgur and image hosting in general, how long will it be until reddit handles the image hosting themselves?

Sure it would add a ton of new costs and headaches (takedowns, etc), but don't you have to have a plan for this if you're Yishan? Imgur hasn't exactly been subtle about adding reddit-like features (comments, comment ranking, categories, etc)..
Nice. Maybe you can take your success in candy and branch out to other dry goods?

A surprise box of Japanese stationery might be popular in the US. No hard data here but I've seen a recent trend of Japanese stationery stores open in Japan [0] and vendors opening physical "antenna" shops here in the West Coast of the US. And, crucially, my pre-teen daughter is obsessed with them. Gambatte!

[0] http://tsite.jp/daikanyama/store-service/tsite-en.html
[1] http://www.mymaido.com
If you're doing it properly, then yeah having a paper trail to justify it helps. Currently some of the drug dealers in the UK are using fixed odds betting machines in betting shops, they put money in, make safeish bets, lose some money, maybe win some then check out however much they've got and move onto the next one. Keeps a trail as you're on CCTV doing something entirely legitimate.
> Uber would do poorly by this metric because I rarely need to take a black car anywhere, so even though the app is great I rarely open it.

Would prospective purchasers realize this, though, by the nature of the app? In other words, would I also realize that I would rarely use it (on a daily basis), but see that you do continue to come back to the app and haven't deleted it over a long period of time?

> The app that shows me when my bus is coming is pretty crappy, but I use it multiple times a day.

If you use it multiple times a day, then you apparently are finding it useful enough to continue coming back to it. And in my mind, that's all I care about.

I know this isn't perfect, but again compared to user reviews, this would be way better in a large majority of the cases.

Especially in a genre where it's getting abused, like games.
Just because those things are technically sufficient does not make them practically sufficient. Your "proliferation of middleware" (which apparently includes all modern programming languages) isn't just a convenience, it's absolutely essential to developing anything useful.
Ask HN: How to parry incoming employment leads into consulting leads?
Specifically, I get frequent emails from founders and VP's of engineering seeking to interview me for full-time, W-2 roles.

Meanwhile, I am seeking only more limited consulting arrangements.

Consultants of HN, how do you respond to these leads?
Cool, I'd be interested in hearing your experience with generating sales and how your app performs. I recently released an app and saw, first hand, how difficult it is to get any traction behind it, even with a small following and engaged users.
Seriously? You never noticed that the martial arts world is male dominated in a way that many women find off-putting? Sure, some women are okay with it, but that doesn't mean all women are (or should be).
this sounds like a plausible approach, although I wonder for how long such a run would work given that very soon, the seller account would be shutdown if 99% of purchases were made by credit cards reported stolen or accruing reverse charges quickly. I could see that work briefly, but the seller account would long be gone now, after a single run even, I'd assume.

unless, this is just nothing large at play, just a random dude stealing cards here and there, less than 100k a year type of criminal activity.
Beyond space exploration they continue to cut funding to earth observation. In tandem they spend vast quantities of money on secret military remote sensing that could have had massive public benefits if the data was made public ally available. NASA could have released global high resolution satellite and radar imagery for free which would have spawned thousands of new applications.
But with the downside that they're nowhere to be found on the 106.
Tor allows for rampant abuse and is problematic to prevent. Many IRC networks ban it due to this.

However, the solution is to make it so if you want to use Tor on an existing that you instead connect via a hidden service address, allowing the IRCd to mark you as a Tor user and then allow channels to stem abuse.
This doesn't account for apps that are unusually efficient. My bus app allows shortcuts on the home screen to arrival times for a stop, so each day I spend under a minute with it open, yet it's a better app than a clumsy interface that would waste two minutes.
At some point in time, I found this list of C String libraries with some comparisons: http://www.and.org/vstr/comparison

The (different) approaches taken by many of these libraries are interesting.
Awesome suggestion, that's actually one of our next features - stay tuned!
OP's idea is a good one.

People who use lots of apps will delete apps they do not use. That stat would also confound "rent-a-user" schemes to pump up usage stats.
If I was building that rating dialog I'd want to still give the user the immediate ability to rate the app on the second '1-4 stars' popup, so that's the only thing that makes it devious.

Otherwise, this is actually a pretty good idea, speaking as a developer who has received low ratings for things I could have easily explained to the user if they had used the 'feedback' feature. Something like this would be a good way to remind the user they can actually interact with me and I will respond, at a point where they might need it.
I think this is the third time I have heard that stationary idea, so there definitely could be something to it.
This article is awesome. And you'd think journalists would get overwhelmed, but 99% of people are too lazy to follow through with something like this so that shouldn't be a problem.
YouTube used to offer a view of your download speed, compared to other customers of your ISP, other ISPs, and other countries, but it appears to be closed down, sadly.

* youtube.com/my_speed
If you are single, you can just quit your job and focus on MVP. There is no excuse to keep working at a job you don't like if you have no other responsibilities.
OR Find a job where there is less work (like in government or academia) so you can spend more time on MVP. You don't have to start a Start Up to build something.
> I've asked you to provide references. You haven't.

Google.

I even gave you the phrase to Google for: "unreasonable restraint of trade." In fact, add the term "every contract," and you'll find thousands of relevant hits, including Supreme Court cases going back a century.

If you don't like Googling, then I recommend picking up a good textbook on antitrust law -- "unreasonable" will be in the index. It's just such a fundamental concept to antitrust law. Rivers of ink have been spilled debating what kind of behavior is reasonable and what is unreasonable.

What you've just done is the antitrust equivalent of demanding a citation for the sky being blue. I give up. There's no way I can have a productive conversation about antitrust law with someone who aggressively demands citations for even the most basic of concepts. It shows that the primary motive is not to understand the topic at hand, but simply to argue.

P.S. Since you like to accuse people of violating the rules of debate, this isn't an "appeal to authority." It's a suggestion that you get a better background in antitrust law before arguing with people about it.
This is so sad to me. If there is no political pissing contest to be had, the people in-charge don't care to do it.

Why is curiosity not enough? Why must we all be more concerned about who has more nukes than about the 99.999%+ of space out there that we've never touched?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Something about human nature...
It's not like they're preventing you from rating the app however you like from the app store -- same as any other app. They just aren't actively pushing unhappy users there.

It's dishonest manipulation to ask happy users to rate you and unhappy users to email you?
You can, but the margins are much, much lower.
Maybe so, but this would cost you a lot more vs. purchasing reviews, and would probably still be outweighed by the usage statistics of "real" users.

If going by usage statistics, every user -- and more importantly, real users -- opt in to "rating" the app. Now, you're depending on people actually taking time and being willing to review the app, which is mostly only done by false users.
It’s highly immoral, irrespective of whether or not rules are in place that disallow it. Hating someone for doing something immoral is very justified.

I’m quite shocked at the warm embrace this sort of immoral behaviour seems to be getting on HN. Google has to explicitly ban such behavior, remove this app from the store and EA needs to be publicly shamed. How could anything else be acceptable?
My yoga 2 pro has completely allowed me to replace two devices. The only possible advantage a dedicated tablet has would be size/weight, but I've yet to encounter that in my purely anecdotal usage
There's so much wrong with your post I don't even know where to start.

As a consumer, I want ratings to reflect what people actually think about the product, because that's a valuable aid for my own purchasing decisions. As a developer, I _also_ want ratings to reflect what people actually think about the product, because that means I'll be competing on the actual merits of my app, rather than how good I am at deception.

What we're seeing here is good for neither consumers nor (other) developers, it's only about manipulating ratings for EA. I really can't understand how anyone would portray this as a positive thing.

Hating on EA for this sort of shenanigan isn't "cool", it's having a modicum of sense.
I am not, left the language ecosystem before the 1.0 release.

Might consider it again if a customer requires me to use it, otherwise I am happier with other more modern languages.
This is why you can't always trust best practices
I find this story quite sad because the original Dungeon Keeper predated app stores, shady rating techniques and was really awesome. (This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Keeper )
Http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-press/
> Working long hours is not a function of where you live. It's a choice.

Our choices are often informed, for better or worse, by those around us.

And, for those for whom compensation is attached directly to how many hours they spend working (when you think about it, this group includes plenty of people on "salary" as well), where you live and the hours you work are directly correlated.
See also: "A Rocket To Nowhere" by Maciej Cegłowski. http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

Future archaeologists trying to understand what the Shuttle
was for are going to have a mess on their hands. Why was
such a powerful rocket used only to reach very low orbits,
where air resistance and debris would limit the useful
lifetime of a satellite to a few years? Why was there both
a big cargo bay and a big crew compartment? What kind of
missions would require people to assist in deploying a
large payload? Why was the Shuttle intentionally crippled
so that it could not land on autopilot? ① Why go through
all the trouble to give the Shuttle large wings if it has
no jet engines and the glide characteristics of a brick?
Why build such complex, adjustable main engines and then
rely on the equivalent of two giant firecrackers to provide
most of the takeoff thrust? Why use a glass thermal
protection system, rather than a low-tech ablative shield?
And having chosen such a fragile method of heat protection,
why on earth mount the orbiter on the side of the rocket,
where things will fall on it during launch?
Thanks. I'm a full Finn, even if I happen to reside somewhere else :)
Wow, the giant flashing ad on the left of that article was so distracting I was unable to read the text. I eventually opened up the web inspector and just deleted the damn thing from the DOM.
You may have missed the thread that PG started on the topic: It has a decent amount of smart people asking questions about who it might serve.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423
PyCon Finland was great! http://fi.pycon.org/2013/

I believe it was the first time they held the event; everything was well-organised and went smoothly. I gave my Generators talk, which went over pretty well.

I met a lot of really cool Python programmers, and I'm looking forward to attending and speaking if they hold it again this year!

(By the way, swing by #python.fi on IRCNet!)
SimplyInsured Gets Some LUV From Southwest Airlines
Great production values and music and a really cool video. But I have no idea what the gameplay of your game is. It looked more like a really cool music video than a game trailer. I'm just a little confused about what it is. But everything else is top notch.
Please can we retire the word "disruption"
Devil's advocate - most rating behavior tends to be "interrupt driven". I.e. if stuff is working correctly, the user just carries on, but if stuff is broken, the user gets frustrated and leaves a negative review (what else can they do?).

The net result is your reviews will be negatively biased...unless you do something about it like this.
I think this would still address that (and I mention this in another response below).

As someone deciding between the two, I will see that you keep coming back to the app, even if you don't use it for a very long time.

Versus the other app that you averaged a longer session, but stopped using after a shorter period.
No necessarily. It depends if storage is done by using batteries installed at the person's home or by sending the current back into the power grid.
Of course it is. What else could it be? It’s dishonest, highly immoral manipulation.
Lockheed actually developed a fighter version of it, the YF-12:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12

It never got beyond the prototype stage, though.
No kidding. I own no BTC, but jumped in there just to have a look, and it's testy and tense. Staff jumping on anything that sounds vaguely negative, even if not directly related:

[09:19:42] <Asmiran>	if the bug is caused by known reason

[09:19:55] <Asmiran>	it should take not that long time to solve the problem

[09:21:36] <@SarahCoinBit>	Asmiran that is your opion, don't pass it off as fact

(even though the logic was flawed, admittedly)
The Atlantic is down
So now not only's the catalog is meh, the quality/stream too.

Why are they pushing people so much to piracy?

And don't get me started about the situation once you're outside the US.
Then presumably you agree that Google should be called out for this and no longer treated as a trustworthy custodian of the open web.
"Users" Lol..1 guy threw his 3GS in the grass.
No, no, no!! That doesn't help whoever doesn't run it's own server, which is nearly everybody.

Why must the client be a web app? Why not a regular app? You just install them on your devices once and have the same interface for every server. Damn Atwood's Law!

It's the reason standards exist, so that you are not at the whims of Google and the like. Just stick Thunderbird on your desktop or K9 on Android.
I'm assuming this is your site? It's very nice looking.

How do you plan to monetize if not up-selling to paid organizer accounts?