skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You realize that Walter White is an anti-hero; a tragic figure not to be emulated... right?

But to your second point, yes, HPPD[1] is a serious condition.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percept...
Doesn't this remind anyone of the not-so-long-ago overhyped E-Cat?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
I understand the article's criteria for "one person" but I think it's worth it to add some nuance to that list...

Amazon was "one person" as in boundaries defined by legal ownership of a business entity, but it was really kicked off by hiring Shel Kaphan to engineer their first web store. If Jeff Bezos was more inclusive, and/or Shel Kaphan was more business-savvy, he arguably might have been a co-founder instead of a forgotten employee (albeit a wealthy ex-employee.)

If we rule out situations like amazon, and listed only companies that were truly "built" by one person until it reached critical mass, that would be a much more interesting list.
Is there a reliable source for Roman-era terrain? Obviously some of it is known, but could we make a reliable map?

Anyway, this is a great visualization resource. Really well done.
Looks very cool but I agree. The whitepaper shouldn't be the main introduction to this site. Many things, such as "What's the connection of Codius with Bitcoin's Blockchain?", need to be succintly described on the landing page above the link to the whitepaper.

Need FAQ please!
Casper, an Online Mattress Startup, Raises $13.1M
I don't mean to be cynical, but other than for niche clusters in the home, wouldn't such technology be hobbled instantly by incoming bandwidth?

Even in Germany, where the author lives, the top bandwidth appears to be about 50 Mb/s:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2457284,00.asp

Which although it is still much better than the states:

http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/results/usa/graph

They're both well below 1 Gb/s, no?
oh no. is this site down??? I was stoked on checking this out.
It seems like this is an instance of a more general trend: The commenting ecosystem is in decline. It's better than Reddit, but it's a shadow of what it once was.

I've noticed downvotes are trending now. The downvotes do correct themselves... most of the time. But there's a lot more frivolous downvoting due to the influx of people that have attained downvote privileges but haven't really shunned the mindset of other community sites that encourage that sort of thing. Eight years ago, pg wrote about a problem that may be happening here now: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/15n2/the_incontr...

It used to be that you could hold a contrarian opinion and not be at risk of being jumped on by the community or your position being misinterpreted. That seems no longer the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8143432

The person you responded to may have deleted their question because they're worried about how people might judge them for merely asking the question. Since HN consists of people you may be working with in the future, people have to be more concerned about choosing their words (and questions) carefully. It's not so easy to just speak your mind or ask innocent questions anymore when your identity is tied with your handle.

I don't know if there's a solution. There may not be another vibrant community of developers for another decade, for the same reason there isn't a second vibrant online auctioning site. Smart people are on HN because other smart people are on HN. The only solution I can think of is to resist letting irksome things irk you. Easier said than done, but it beats giving up.
I will confess to being someone that often forgets to say thanks. My thought process runs something like "Gosh, that was really helpful, I should say thankyou. But thankyou isn't enough, I should think of a better way of saying thankyou." Then I forget to say anything at all for some time, and then I feel awkward because I left it so long to say thankyou.

That's not an excuse. It's a total failure that I forget to say thank you properly whenever it's deserved (and even when it's not). It's something I am working hard to fix, but I still frequently mess up.
Full-page HTML5 Video Backrounds
Highly unusual, yes, but you need to have the full sentence available for parsing before you can make that decision. I would say that having a sentence change itself after having written part would be horrible for the user, and so autocorrect's knowledge is limited to what has been written before the questionable word, with no knowledge of what comes after.
Shel Kaphan, Amazon's first employee, should arguably be seen as a cofounder of sorts:

Although he's not officially considered a co-founder, he and Bezos were discussing the company even before it was incorporated, and Bezos once referred to him as "the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com."

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-earliest-employees-20...
I'd be really curious to see that too, especially if it remained one person until revenue hit some kind of critical mass. One person builds, ships, markets, ...

It's certainly possible but obviously very hard for many reasons.
Only if said glitches were noticed during the auction and you took preventative steps to not notify any winners and explained the situation immediately to all participants.

After announcing a winner and accepting money the deal is done!
>Disappointed there's no women on the list

Maybe they should try harder then.
Life's too short; do things for your own edification and satisfaction, not for the praise or recognition of others.
Somebody Crashed a Drone Into Yellowstone’s Biggest Hot Spring
I don't know about Clojure, but Common Lisp provides something called Compiler Macros[0]. They basically allow the programmer to define two versions of a procedure. One that is a macro, and one that is an actual procedure. The macro will expand only at compile time (it can also specify to call the procedure instead of expanding), and the procedure will be called only at run time. I suggest you look at [0] for some examples of how it is possible to optimize something as simple as squaring a number.

[0] http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/m_define.htm
> my experience business people aren't dumb enough to think that a "software solutions engineer" is anything different to a plain old programmer

This is true, but I think misses the broader point of the article. It's not really about the title you have (though that's unfortunately what the name of the article suggests), it's about explaining your personal value to an employer in terms of business value created.
Right now you cannot filter, but this is something the author said to be working on. You can see the discussion on Reddit here http://www.reddit.com/r/coolgithubprojects/comments/2b9vph/r...
Ugh. It hurts to hear/read it, but it's true - common courtesy is now "a surprise."

If I didn't say "please" or "thank you" every single time it was called for, my mother would have taken me out of this world (you know, since she brought me in to it) years ago.
Like I said, there would have to be some breakthrough physics here, like what "vacuum" actually means, or how dark dark matter is, etc.

I'm just pointing out that there are a number of logically possible solutions that don't involve violating the conservation of momentum, which may or may not be physically possible.
I do the same, but only today I read the whole discussion below the article. I don't know how I could miss it before - it's as good as the article, even if a little less structured.
He dismissed the idea in a very arrogant way, just look at the wording, because someone used a incompatible word. Yet, the experiments gave a result; but he doesn't like that, and instead of using arguments he used ridicule, which doesn't show any credibility.
Here it is on scribd from some kind person http://www.scribd.com/doc/235868930/Anomalous-Thrust-Product...
Maybe they didn't like your answer. Maybe they didn't like their own question, which is why they deleted it. Maybe they'll upvote you instead of saying thanks. Maybe they aren't around to give a thanks reply or forget about it. Or maybe they just don't care.

You're not completely out of touch, but it's unfair to put conditions on your answers. I recommend letting your kind deeds be their own reward and get on with your day.
Powerful, Secret White House Office
I think it's possible. How many founders does a typical start-up have? I guess I don't see a huge difference from one to two founders. I never was a venture capital guy until recently, but I think it's pretty important to success. Having some marketing money as well as the money to hire a few guys to help out early makes a huge difference.

My night project, PaperBox (gopaperbox.com), started with just two guys doing it a combined 20 hours per week or so. Over the course of 6 months or so, we have released several updates and grown substantially. I do wonder what we could be if we could commit to it full time and have any sort of a marketing budget.
I usually check the ask section so I can read answers from you, patio11 and a few others. You have helped me a lot and I learned a big deal of interesting and helpful things. That said, thank you.
A compound Easter Egg [0], goooooogle 'tilt' || 'askew', then search 'dogengineer'. Wow.

[0] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=askew&oq=askew&aqs=chrome....
Also thought of Justin Bieber as a good example of popularity != quality.
A Tour of Cryptography Packages in Go
Tumblr blocks an RSS reader with 25M users
In short, codius requires parties to select a group of reputable nodes to run the contract code but in exchange is technically simpler and faster.

Ethereum requires zero trust and gives pretty much a 100% guarantee the contract will be executed as written, but is technically more challenging and contracts run slower.
Just for the record: I agree.

I was just comparing that there was also a lot of excitement.
In times like that I always try to evaluate whether I'm doing/thinking something out of fear. If yes, then I have to go against the fear. It's the only way to eventually get better.

Also that whole thing about the best way of finding good answers on the internet is not to ask questions, but to post wrong answers. I use that one a lot. It makes me look like an idiot, but golly do I learn a lot fast.
Ha, was my first thought as well: you could write this same article about essentially every aspect of the Win32 API.
Perfect, I have the recursive part working, but I can't get the key pasted in the command prompt.

Decryptolocker.exe --key "<key>" <Lockedfile>

Everytime I paste the key in, the command prompt executes each line. Any ideas how to preserve the line breaks?
All models are wrong. Some are useful.

But what is your point, really?

By "understand" in physics, we really mean that we can predict what will happen in a given experiment to any desired accuracy based on the established "laws of physics".

"But even something we experience literally every moment of every day, like gravity or magnets, we haven't the foggiest idea of how it actually works."

I think this does a deep disservice to how much we actually do know about how the universe works.
Has anyone tried this with the Microvision CPU+ROMs?
Cryptocurrencies as a transport layer – what's wrong with Stellar
its exactly the same. I bet there was someone in 1996 who was saying "yeah, you could start a tech company alone in 1985, but today... its too crowded, I bet it can't be done anymore". It can always be done.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong but HN doesn't notify me when someone responds or something like other communication platforms do. If and when someone responds to a question on here I assume they are not ever going to check it again. I know I almost never do. The only exception is if there's sort of a conversation going on with responses every few minutes. Once it's been a few hours, or god forbid the next day, I'm highly unlikely to go back.

Also, if it's a 1on1 discussion with someone via e-mail, skype, or some form of private message, I'll almost always say thank you. But if I put a question up on an open forum and one or more persons happen to respond I tend not to say thanks. I dunno why, it just doesn't seem to be common internet etiquette to do so. A quick google search on a couple big name technical help question sites shows that it's not very common for people to say thanks for open ended questions to the community.
How to enable players to challenge other players (JS)
Are there any driver issues with a clean Ubuntu 14.04 install? (the post had mentioned some issues with the touchpad)
Thanks for the link. I'm really surprised by the presence of the "flexible" option since it provides little more than a facade of security. (A self-signed cert is also insecure, though less so, unless there's some way to pin it on the CloudFlare side.)
How we got here: a visual history of US mobile companies
I use an iOS app called, Reporter (http://www.reporter-app.com/). It prompts you to answer a set of user defined questions throughout the day- Are you looking at a screen? Who are you with? Where are you? How many cups of coffee have you had?- through powerful surveys.

It also captures "background" data using the phones sensors: number of steps, temperature, volume, elevation, phone battery, etc.

Its great for lightweight tracking and all the data can be exported in CSV or JSON formats.

I wrote an article about the 500 reports I've captured over the last 107 days:
https://medium.com/p/c4454b9d8456
I can't believe that everyone is falling for the "in fairness to any bidder..." ploy. The person who benefits most from rerunning an auction with a glitch is obviously the seller. They have every incentive to rerun an auction if there were any possible issues that would prevent higher bids.

Unfortunately if they are the ones with the domain you want then I don't know of a good way to avoid this.
> I wouldn't have a problem either if all the far graver crimes/criminals that Snowden's leaks revealed would also be prosecuted with as rigorously but we know that's not going to happen.

What specific crimes could we use to prosecute specific people? What the NSA is doing might be illegal and unconstitutional, but that doesn't mean there's a legal framework in place for punishing people specifically. I believe there are cases still moving in the judicial system to prove NSA actions were illegal and/or unconstitutional and to put an end to those actions.

>If there's no surprise or outrage, that just means the nominal raison d'être of the founding fathers / US Constitution is so far dead that it doesn't matter anymore. Sadly, this is most likely the case.

Calling it nominal is certainly the right usage. The founding fathers/US constitution offered the majority of the population no power whatsoever within the system. And the ink was hardly dry on the paper before the same founding fathers were flagrantly violating the rights of even propertied white men with, e.g., the Sedition Act. People went to prison for the crime of criticizing John Adams.

I'd say we're much better off now. Rather than saying it's "so far dead that it doesn't matter anymore", I'd say it's entering the prime of its life in the long view.
I guess 10 got lost between creating the URL slug and writing the rest of the article.
> People - don't be a jerk. If you ask a question and someone answers, say thank you. They've taken the time, does it cost you too much to be polite?

this is why i am in the habit of top-quoting my replies if i put any effort or thought into it. when people are wrong, embarassed, or let something slip they shouldn't have, they're likely to delete. it's just human nature.
Worth noting for the HN crowd that Cryptonomicon is split between action in WW2 and the present day (OK ~2000) - with the latter mostly involving a start-up working on a cryptocurrency.

The template start-up business plan from Cryptonomicon is available online:

http://avsport.org/microcomm/admin/busplan.pdf

NB The entire Baroque Cycle is utterly fantastic - particularly in the audio book version.
Regarding the EmDrive…

OK, so, there's microwaves producing forces on either end of the cavity, and one end is bigger and…

wouldn't the forces be proportional to the area normal to either direction? i.e. one end may be smaller, it may even be a point (making the cavity a cone), but microwaves bounce off of the tapered neck of the cavity too.
Show HN: Rushwallet, URL-based 100% client-side instant Bitcoin wallet
Don't forget you have to manage your certs. It's an extra burden.

Let's say I am a freelancer, I make website for small restaurant. Until now I could make a website with frontpage, menu and gallery put it on a server and be done with it and collect a monthly fee.

Now, you have to manage the cert, that is say every year re-issue a new cert and invalidate the old. It adds costs. Without much if any benefits for some class of websites.
I've definitely seen people downvoting based on popular opinion rather than the merit of a comment. It's definitely a deterrent to me commenting if I think there's a chance people won't agree with me. My solution has really been to just stop commenting altogether, since "me too" comments are so useless.
Technically sure...but playing the semantic game, find me a registrar that advertises the ability to purchase a domain as "renting".
Isn't that one reason why the karma level for downvoting was initially set as fluid on HN? I still can't downvote, but I rarely (if ever) come across an instance where I would use it here.
Both Thoreau and Spooner are out of date in numerous ways. When they wrote on the subject of voting:

- Slavery was legal.

- Votes were cast publicly (hence the concerns about what is broadcast). The secret ballot was introduced into federal elections at the end of the 19th century, in part to address this concern.

- Only a subset of Americans could actually vote. In addition to the disenfranchisement inherent in slavery, women were denied the vote, and many states had poll requirements like property ownership, taxes, literacy, etc.

In addition, neither argued that people should not vote at all, but rather that a vote, by itself, is not sufficient to enforce morality, justify any given government action, or achieve justice. I agree with them on all of that.

But the argument against complacency in voting is not the same thing as arguing in favor of never voting.

In the end, you clearly don't want to vote, and that is fine with me--I don't think that anyone should be forced to vote!

But that's not the argument you made to kick off this subthread. You didn't say "I don't think I should vote" or "I don't want to vote" or "I think voting would make me feel less rational."

What you said is that "the vote changes nothing" and makes "the voter" less rational. That's a general argument about voting for any given person. I don't think you've proved that point, and I think you've stopped trying to.

edit: copy edits
I wholeheartedly agree. Downvoting people simply because you disagree with their viewpoint is an abomination. It should be a tool for discouraging abusive language or non-constructive discourse that doesn't add value to a conversation. I've been downvoted many times simply because I expressed a perfectly valid opinion that someone simply didn't like.
Worlds first in car payment app
In visual effects, there is need to transfer around massive data sets. WE have found that 1 Gbps Ethernet just doens't cut it, but right now 10 Gbps Ethernet solution are just too expensive for now, or require specialized cables (fiber optics).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-gigabit_Ethernet

I would really like those prices to come down and also to use just regular CAT cables.

Right now it seems that the switch to faster than 1 Gbps networking is just too costly and not easily incremental (because of the switch to optical generally.)

PS. There is 10GBASE-T but I think there is zero adoption or promotion of this substandard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-gigabit_Ethernet#10GBASE-T
Using SSL Helps Ranking According to Google
I like atom, but the experience on Ubuntu can be quite frustrating, especially if you use Unity, which is the case here on these laptops.

Right now I cannot even launch it. I didn't install it from the PPA though, but from a recent commit.
Click the 'threads' link at the top once in a while. It adds a little latency, but I kind of appreciate the fact that it slows down the conversation a bit...
Mistakes are how we learn! Some of my best learning moments have been giving a wrong answer and then other people point out I'm wrong. (NB: it's completely possible for people to be polite when pointing out someone else is wrong.)

OTOH, it takes a certain confidence to let your mistakes hang out in public. There is this feeling that everyone on HN is constantly judging all other people so we need to "look smart." When I was younger I tried to hide mistakes to look smarter. It's a bad habit in general.

As a community I think we should encourage some kinds of mistakes.
This is actually my #1 problem with Quora too. I try to write a lot of pragmatic questions to answers, mostly because I like the idea of helping folks. Unless I'm totally in left field, I feel like I'd like some acknowledgment that my answer was either what they were looking for (thanks!) or that they thought that it was incorrect (I disagree because...).
I just clicked outside that box and it disappeared.
Show HN: Wu.js – Higher order functions for ES6 iterators
I find the same problem here as in SO. People like downvoting for what ever reason, but there's never any context as to why.
If you feel a comment should be downvoted, go ahead, but provide a comment as well so the author knows why it was so. How are you supposed to be better yourself otherwise?
Yeah, I understand people learn new things all the time, but is HN a really appropriate place for Facebook posts?
Slight off-topic, but I recommend never using the phrase of the pattern "simple {and,but,yet} powerful" in anything, ever. It doesn't convey anything meaningful, and it's very overused.
Google teams with Barnes and Noble to Offer Same-Day Delivery Service
Disagree. He's being prudent and rational to hold these experiments to the same standards that we hold other more mundane ones.

Hoax phenomenon and devices always seem to fail in precisely the way that this one has. As you more carefully examine the test setups, suspicious conditions of the experiment persist (like the lack of using a vacuum in the vacuum chamber), and observed phenomenon continue to diminish as the accuracy of the test equipment improves.

And I use the word "fail" knowing full well that they claimed that they had positive results. If they couldn't use best practices in performance of the experiment like evacuating the vacuum chamber and they couldn't even show that their null device that wasn't designed to produce the same effect didn't work, then they have some serious problems.
I hate the 'scrum' + 'agile' buzzwords, but if those are stripped out, I like the idea of starting off by building a crappy but end-to-end compiler for a language that does almost nothing, and making it nicer as the course moves along.
How do people attain downvoting privileges? A possible solution would be to simply remove many people's downvoting ability. Reserve the right for an elite few who have insightful things to say and are sparing in their usage.

This is a new account and I've found that it's surprisingly liberating to not have a downvote option. When I disagree with someone, I can either reply or I can just ignore the comment. Good content will sift to the top anyway through upvotes. I would be interested in discovering any issues behind such a system.
Wonder what it is about the name MUMPS that makes software called that so terrible...
Save Time Repairing iPhones