skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will. One of the smarter things about Silk Road in my view was the nominal policy of disallowing trade in child pornography, criminal services, stolen credit card data and so on, ie illicit things that also have (or are intended to have) victims who are necessarily injured as a condition of production. There's no economic tipping point at which the consumption of child pornography could justify the abuse perpetuated in its production, for example.

While the drug trade can cause people to become victims (just as the legal trade in alcohol or cigarettes or many other commodities), such victimhood is incidental to the production and consumption of the illicit good rather than inherent to it. I think this distinction between what sorts of contraband could be traded on Silk Road (even if it was not adhered to in practice) is a big part of why many people were/are sympathetic towards Silk Road.
Amazon does a clumsy job at a lot of things. It's incredible. Their shipping and logistics? Top notch. Their server operations, including AWS? Very good. Their website UI? Pants. Utterly pants. Using the Prime Instant website to watch video and using Netflix to watch video is like the difference between night and day. Netflix is well-organized, provides helpful recommendations, and has meaningful categories. Amazon, meanwhile, uses the exact same UI for buying books as it does for browsing streaming movies. And it uses that same UI for office supplies, groceries, clothes and caskets. (Okay, maybe not caskets.) And it's a mediocre UI for all of them.

EDIT: I checked, you can totally buy caskets on Amazon. Wow.
They can't compete because they're producing mediocre products that add little value; products that consumers don't have a good enough reason to want. Creating their own Android equivalent store was an extraordinarily terrible idea.

The problem is not because the market is too efficient.
I think it says a lot about eve the way I look at the project and can't help but think that lighttable was just given up on 80% of the way through.

I'm sorry guys. I like what you're doing with Eve and I've heard the justifications re lighttable in the original eve post. But all that will stick to my mind is that you start building cool stuff, and then give up on it.
I found the reason to visit Stackshare real quick. I just checked today's Analytics of my startup https://www.virtkick.io - 20% visits originates from stackshare, so I now have to claim it. ;) Quite funny, I tell ya.

It doesn't change the main concern, though. leanstack.io was the greatest site to find services.
So now real life is a cliche?

Okay then.
You'd probably fall afoul of sanctions law if you tried that.
Netflix has been profitable since 2003.
Notes: http://jonalmeida.com/posts/2014/11/06/htsas-lec14/

This is my (new) most interesting lecture. There's a psychological side to employee startup culture which is covered in some management classes that I haven't heard about being covered here.

Great stuff!
Netflix was profitable for 2011, 2012, 2013.

They generated $231m in net income the last four quarters (while simultaneously dramatically expanding their expenditures on content acquisition and production).
The top level site (http://www.groovemechanics.com/) has some other cool instruments like a virtual analog sequencer and synthesizer. It would be awesome to be able to use multiple instruments at once in an integrated session - who doesn't want to be a JS-plug-in one-man-band?
Seach the article title on Google and click on the first result to read it without an account.
I've dropped Twitter. Their iOS client regularly pushed so many ads down my throat (in stream) that (a) I noticed and (b) I noticed it every day.

When I got to the point of blocking every advertiser (confirmed views +1!) but they popped back up under different special handles I resigned myself to defeat.

I will miss the serendipitous discovery of tidbits of information that it enabled, but the signal/noise (or rather, content/ads) ratio was overpowering. It needs to make money, but I think it's killing itself or at least transforming itself into the equivalent of TV -- content producers broadcasting to a largely passive audience.
Space law tends to be extrapolated from maritime law as many of the legal condundrums are similar. So if you had a pirate satellite then it could probably be seized under a letter of marque. It's a fun question, I'll look into it.
Great news and congrats to the GnuPG team. A practical near-term consideration: there are plenty of installs of GPG v1 still in the wild --- people who never even upgraded to 2.0. It might not be a good idea to rush to ECC keys if you want to interoperate with these legacy installs. But for the long term, this is a great development.
Free and open-source software is empowering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
"Alexa, how do you make a bomb?"
Wow, much respect for writing this. While my company isn't quite at Dwolla scale, I've had my own version of too-much-travel this fall, and I am over it. I realized I was making the most impact back home, helping the team create the foundation for us to do more with less.

All these conferences and these meetings are rarely world changing. They hold potential opportunities and the start of relationships, but we never know if those opportunities would have come to us through cheaper, more effective means.

Travel bothers me so much because it feels incredibly suboptimal, like I'm working harder not smarter.
I started blogging into the void almost exactly seven years ago. No promotion. No trying to be controversial. No plan. What I didn't expect was the effect that reddit, Hacker News, and eventually Twitter would have. They're essentially content discovery services, and I am grateful that all three exist.
That's indeed extremely funny. I spotted it some time after I wrote the original post, then started writing my auto-trolling reply to self. ;)
Most records released on aftermath end up at #1 or #2 on billboard.
I'm once again flagging an article because of a registration/paywall.
Useful Tips when Presenting
Almost everyone who would be in the market for this kind of a device already has something in their pocket with access to Google Now or Siri, though. Why use Echo when you have to be in a certain room?
reddit has been around since at least '07. I remember visiting the default front page back then and it was mostly developer-specific stuff.

A lot has changed.
Does that really function? If I order socks audibly, I have no idea what I'm going to get. It's a lot more efficient to look through a page of images than to describe all the intricacies of my sock preferences via text to speech.
this sounds rough:

Last week, he named Twitter’s fifth head of product in as many years. Its
most recent vice president of product, Daniel Graf, who came from Google
Maps and was handpicked by Mr. Costolo, lasted less than six months in the
post.

What was Daniel supposed to accomplish in 6 months? That's barely 1-2 months of strategizing then a 3 month dev cycle worth of work...
Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements, and in fact can often be counter-productive.

If you're passionate about your job, you're likely to work hard. But there's a line between "working hard", and overworking. Beyond a certain point, more hours may (or may not) mean more things done, but almost certainly doesn't mean more of the right things done.
If that's actually what he means, it's a feature, not a bug.
thanks for this guys!
They've made it increasingly annoying to use their site, particularly as a logged out user.

Their mobile site on android breaks -- forwarding me to an error page -- about 1/3 times I attempt to use it. This is the stock os and browser on a nexus 5.

The desktop site no longer allows me to view sensitive content by clicking the button: not on chrome w/ ghostery, not on ff with no plugins, and not on safari with no plugins.

I'm prompted to login at least 1x day, and you can't see who someone follows without creating an account.
warning : back button breakage.

Awesome , gutsy article though.
I have never believed in the twitter idea. Time will kill it.
Basecamp – Solve communication needs for non-coding projects
Why is India so filthy?
There's some truth there but also some misses. Besides the phone, Amazon's hardware has been at least decent and in the case of Fire TV, the best. The Kindles and tablets are more than usable. Even if only a speaker with a handful of voice commands (the complete Siri-like experience is a stretch; but, for example, voice search on Fire TV is excellent), the Echo looks to be a reasonable product.
well said. as a corollary, id say that finding the right balance is really energizing. in some sense, i think its backwards to decide you want to do something "great"- i think its better to get in tune with what kind of processes and styles you like, and let that dictate where you go, knowing that because you are doing things that are suited to you, you are going to progress much faster.
a website for posting small snippets of text is not a business
I was thinking in the same line.
Emacs seems to be empowering while the Visual Studio, though is really good IDE, is kind of enslaving. More you use, more dependent on it. In other words, open source seems to be heuristic while closed source seems to provide set of instructions to perform certain tasks.
I agree that their strategy is broken, but don't believe it's due a lack of taste.

I understood Amazon's hardware to be the opposite of Apple. Cupertino makes their profit on hardware mark up, so it makes sense that everything you buy on iTunes is as cheap as possible - standard complementary products theory. Since Amazon has primarily got their (marginal) profits from selling you content, it made sense that their ebook readers, phones, and tablets are cheap.

I don't get the Kindle Voyage. Premium priced hardware doesn't fit into their model. And now the Echo. I can't even guess how they think they will make money with this thing, or how it could generate more sales anywhere else in the org.
A while back I submitted a request to have our house blurred and it was granted. A contractor came out a few months later to do some work and was wondering why our house wasn't loading properly - pretty funny.

It makes me wonder if I could simply censor any house in my city. How could they verify that I own the house?
After just now hearing about Amazon Echo, I positively, absolutely cannot be the only person who immediately thought of this show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Humans

Also known as Äkta människor
The health benefits of intermittent fasting (study excerpts)
The NFL concussion settlement is pure evil
For those interested in working at Antarctica, check out the Big Dead Place:

http://bigdeadplace.org/

From the old Antarctica FAQ on working there and how it changes you:

First time is for the adventure,
Second time for the money,
And third because you can't work anywhere else

For those familiar with John Carpenter's The Thing, this is also an interesting read:

http://bigdeadplace.org/antarctica-the-thing-and-the-station...

As a whole the subjects became less trusting and more
suspicious of others immediately after their year in
Antarctica.” –A.J.W. Taylor, Professor of Clinical
Psychology, “The Selection of People for Work in Polar
Regions”

The essay ends:

In the actual USAP, employees are forbidden flamethrowers.
Brilliant Impersonators
I had to check the date to make sure this wasn't the 1st of April after watching that video.
Great article.

There are so many different angles to startup burnout, that sometimes it seems like we're playing a really rough game like American football, only instead of head and spine injuries we've got mental health problems and repetitive stress disorders.

Early in a startup the big enemy is yourself and poverty. Try to get yourself to finish that feature; to push the product over the line. To persevere after the launch basically goes unnoticed. The burnout is emotional because it's rooted in self doubt. Once a startup starts getting traction a different type of mental stress sets in: a fear of squandering an opportunity. All the late nights are rooted in the fear that your startup has had some luck and some traction, and maybe if you don't push so hard it will become another Excite. Used, but left to the wayside while a better contender came in.
My mom told me how her grandma used to cut flax and then leave it in a marsh where it would rot/decompose and make the fibers easier to process. Then from fibers would be threshed (I think that's how it is called) and spun into a string. String was somehow processed into fabric (sorry don't know how). Well clothing and carpes were sown out oit.

Anyway to kind of answer your question this wasn't the middle ages and it was you know 1800s or so. And the process could be done almost all manually.

Also the way it was desribed some people from the village knew how to do some things better than others and they would barter or work together in groups. So maybe those that knew how to spin fibers would exchange it for milk or grains and so on. So yet, it was a lot of work. People maybe had a few outfits but didn't have walk in closets full of clothes. Pillows, carpets, bed sheets were prized posession would last for a long time, being patched and repaired of course.
This post makes sense except for the unrealistic notion that some kind of mystical unikernel is going to descend fluorescent pink-winged from the heavens and spear code cruft with its long sinuous Tusk of GreatCode +37.

The goal of less kernel bloat is a great one, however the realistic options in a modern environment are either (1) accept the performance and management overhead in running and maintaining a whole new kernel per application; or (2) use containers, thereby unifying the kernel across all containers and removing that overhead (but accepting some security risk).

The pink-winged unikernel is option (3) Everyone rewrites all their code to run on some exotic kernel, or accepts a very complex and long-winded automated recompilation of their existing kernel (eg. Linux) in line with automated application profiling and agrees to deploy on paravirt instead of containers and take the resulting performance hit.

I think (3) is unrealistic, though parts of it will eventually occur at appropriately latency-agnostic portions of mature continuous deployment processes, but do wish unikernels and their winged brethren the best of luck.
This is not the reality of what is required to do great things [1]. This is one path, but there are many others. There are lots of people who work 40-50 hours a week and have incredibly successful startups/companies/whatever. There are people who work 80 hours a week and their startup is a complete piece of garbage.

Jamie Zawinski has a great great blog post about this [2], which I'll quote part of:

> He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don't do that, you're a pussy. He's using my words to try and back up that thesis. I hate this, because it's not true, and it's disingenuous.

I'm not saying the OP is trying to sell this lie too. He is posting about how he is tired and wants to go home and relax. However, the life he describes is very much in the vein of Jamie's blog post. This lifestyle is not required to succeed, and it may in fact be quite counter-productive (as this blog post is attesting to). If your life isn't like this and you aren't working this hard it really isn't saying anything about how likely to succeed you are.

1: Though I don't know exactly what "great things" is... Making a lot of money? Going to Mars? Getting on the cover of Forbes magazine? Some of these require more effort than others.

2: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se...
I think the point is that we should program a way to avoid programming.
bane wrote: "I looked around for a little bit on the web but there's really pitifully little we know about this kind of day-to-day minutia."

I would call that myopic; the Internet does not yet contain all of human knowledge ever recorded. Given that Classic civilizations left many artifacts and were well studied throughout history, I would be surprised if some musty university library in Europe does not contain a thesis on ancient hairdos. I doubt Google scholar has been that thorough, yet.

I do get your point, and do agree that many details of ancient civilizations are lost to history, but it's not because they can't be found in Google.
No, I am not saying that the CEO doesn't work and he/she is in the beach all week. Also, it is impossible to generalize but if you build a good team you can focus in very specific issues, the major part are solved by your team.

I am not talking about startups, just about established and successful companies.

In this context you can read about Zuckerberg speaking Mandarin... http://fusion.net/story/23532/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-s...
Amigarolled
Whoa a pleasant exchange on the internet. Yay.
There are a few ways of thinking about Amazon, here is one: they can invest back into new products in the same way Google do but at a larger scale since they don't have the pressure of returning profits to shareholders and Amazon's distribution and infrastructure is more likely to be complementary to followup hits than Google's search ad business.

In this hit based model, they can afford more than a few misses and they have already had plenty of hits (AWS, Kindle).

As an investor your question is: would you rather Amazon invest $50-300M trying things out with the advantage of their brand, position and infrastructure - or do you want them returning that money, pay tax on it only for you to have to find somewhere else to park it?

> No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Cable is dying and tech and media companies are currently running a multi-billion dollar race in working out who will own whatever platform is next (Amazon buying streaming rights, building tablets and phones etc. is part of their version of what they hope next platform will be - winner(s) take hundreds of billions in market cap).

It is so untrue that as soon as Time Warner dropped their print and cable businesses Murdoch offered $85 billion for the content business that remained and they turned him down.
If we don't have a working build by 3pm tomorrow, we're all fired...

This is a bothersome and worrisome comment that probably has been repeated (in some variation) too often. How is this the fault of the developer(s)?

I appreciate that founders need to fulfill their promises, especially when having the backing of investors, but these type of statements seem to indicate a failure in communication and planning (more than execution).
There's definitely a trend, at least among newer VC firms, towards full-service support. Operational guidance, marketing, knowledge bases, best practices, etc. These firms are attempting to differentiate themselves by offering value-added services, and not just capital.

I wouldn't necessarily put YC in the same bucket, given that it's been successful on its own terms for years now. This move feels more like an "vertical" expansion through the lifecycle of existing investments, and less like a "horizontal" expansion into whole new services and models.
cool!

A comment for the ROOT users (http://root.cern.ch/) amongst you HN readers: this appears to be very similar to 'ckon' which emerged from my PhD since 2011, and takes the humongous headache out of building C++ software modules within the ROOT analysis framework: http://tschaume.github.io/ckon/

@rachelbythebay: Since 'ckon' uses the same principles as your depot build tool, I thought you might be interested to take a look: https://github.com/tschaume/ckon :-)
Holy shit, thanks for linking that. That's pretty awesome.
Not loading for me, :(
Twitter is already the premier platform for cyberstalking and harassment. The question they're struggling with is, how do they monetize that?

Maybe if they charged for rape threats. Perhaps use something like the Facebook model, and charge a fee that scales based on the number of the target's followers to make a "Featured Rape Threat" that appears more prominently on the feed.

Or they could actually make a real effort to do something to stop the harassment, but obviously there's no money or "Big Vision" in that.
I've also been finding it useful to identify companies for product validation testing by seeing who uses various underlying components that are within my core demographic, combined with LinkedIn/moves.io to find someone to speak to.
Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements

If that's true, it should be possible to make a list of companies that have been built without the founders working very hard (or rather, extremely long hours). What are some companies that could go onto such a list?

As a filter, let's use criteria "The founders got rich enough not to have to work anymore, or the company went public," since that's generally why people start startups.

EDIT: I've updated the question to ask specifically for instances of companies that have IPO'd or been acquired without the founders working extremely long hours, and also to clarify that I'm asking about the founders' working hours, not the employees. Thanks, enjo.
Amazon has a number of self-produced shows. Also, they have an interesting "pilot" season where they put out the first episode of a half dozen or so shows and then let people vote on which one get produced into a full season.

The quality of them is on an uptick as well. 'Transparent' has been getting a good deal of critical attention and 'Tumbleleaf' an old school by hand stop-motion animated production is just incredibly high quality.
This is getting ridiculous:

https://www.facebook.com/MissingCalifornia5

Anyone have any contacts at the FBI?
The danger here is actually being so far inside the tech echo chamber you can't see that they have an audience that really are buying their stuff. Yes, the Fire Phone is a misfire, but they have built an incredibly valuable high spending audience with the other Kindle devices.
It doesn't shock me at all -- It's one of the reason's I got the hell out of SF, and I'm not going back. It's an effect of the monster we've created, the collateral damage of our industry that the lottery winners, the VCs, the media, and the politicians all sweep under the rug. It's an effect of the "don't show weakness" cultural norm that we've created for men, and it's about time we get over ourselves and tear it down.
Six months is hardly a fair shake for anyone, let alone someone in such a crucial role. That said, six months is two quarters on Wall Street's clock. That can feel like a lifetime for an embattled CEO. When CEOs come under fire from investors, they like to shuffle around the executive deck.
Reminds me of one of my favourite Wikipedia lists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_map_images_with_missi...

It's fun that some of the sites have useable imagery on one service but not another.
I haven't dropped it 100% but I've turned off all notifications. I've even unfollowed some users and brands that I got push notifications from where I wasn't even @mentioneded. The iOS app is getting really spammy now.
Is it echo or is it Alexa? Just decide and be done with it.
It would be shocking if Echo doesn't work the same way, that would be an incredible waste of bandwidth and AWS CPU power otherwise.
Yes. I was tired when I wrote that.