skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm torn. On the one hand, it clearly succeeded as a publicity stunt.

On the other hand, in terms of discovering what users will pay for Creately, the experiment was a failure. By essentially structuring the system as "donate us money", you prime the users to think "Hmm, even $1 is being generous to them. I'm a big spender... I'll go as high as $3." That is, ahem, an insane price point for any service.

You have to convince someone to dig out their credit card to pay you money. There is essentially no differentiation between $3 and $9 at that point, since neither amount is an appreciable amount of money to working professionals. (Students are another case. Since they're going to complain long and loudly about being made to pay, and are going to do their level best to steal your service anyhow, I think you can quite rationally make the decision just not seek their custom. Alternatively, you can segment your plans such that one which is free but helps your marketing meets their needs.) There are tremendous advantages to the business, however, from moving from $3 to $9. (Revenues net of Paypal fees just increased by a factor of four.)

Note that $9 is still VERY VERY cheap. The fully loaded cost of a professional exceeds that for every ten minutes. Also, if you look at any SAAS business they'll tend to tell you the same thing: the most expensive plan, which is typically bought by employed professionals spending other people's money, brings in more revenue than any other plan. This has been mentioned by Wufoo in interviews, it was true of DropSend when they published their numbers, and I know it to be true of three other companies who have not given me explicit permission to make the fact known.

Additionally, as Creately noticed, the kind of people who are attracted by "This only costs a buck!" are the worst customers in the known universe. They cause hugely disproportionate loads on your support resources, and feel entitled to do so because they're Paying Good Money For This, Damn It. They tend to churn like crazy. They'll fail at the most trivial of tasks (like typing in their credit card details) and then blame you for it. (When you spend a buck on something, if something goes wrong it is the merchants fault, the lazy bum. When you spend hundreds on something, you darn well check to make sure it went through alright.)
That was really interesting, though I've heard similar things before. Still, I liked the writing style.

Kinda felt like art.
Perhaps now that we are moving into an age of micropayments the smaller dollar amounts have regained their separation. i.e. a buck vs a fiver.
Web apps that only work in IE 6 are dead in consumer space and will be repalced evenetually in corporate space.

The desktop is dead, the web is the platform now

(10 year Linux desktop user, ex Red Hat employee, author of man resolv.conf in a bunch of distros, the 'mikem' in your sudoers file on RHEL/Fedora)
ah takes me back to the 90s.
This will be, for many people, unattainable. I won't deny that it is uplifting, and I am genuinely happy that you are experiencing a modicum of success, but it takes more than looking in the mirror for most people.

The points you raise do have merit, and I would suggest this post to anyone who is thinking of taking the plunge and starting their own blog or project.
That doesn't really change anything, because I want to prevent by colleagues from being coerced as well as myself.
I wouldn't call them hackers.
If a consultant turns out to be a Scientologist, it will make me seriously doubt his sanity, as well as his moral fiber. That makes it very much relevant to work. Political correctness can be very harmful, if it causes you too ignore the real impact that who someone is can have.
I understand how someone typing a blog post on their $2,000 Mac while listening to music on their $300 iPod could perhaps think that we are moving into a new age of micropayments because he paid $1 for a fart app on the the $600 iPhone in the pocket of his $100 jeans, but I don't agree with him.
How would you call them?
I can't stand the guy, but at least he's eating his own dogfood:

http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg
Biased Locking in the JVM
Or you could regulate drugs. It's utterly stupid to put people in prison for this, and gift billions of dollars in potential taxes to gangsters.
>> "You are failing to account for the capital built up in the property which is only returning 5% (on average), whilst it could be earning a (historical) average of 12% elsewhere. (The average index fund growth.)"

Yes but with a mortgage you're effectively investing someone elses money (the banks). You get to invest a large amount of money into a pretty good return investment, with hardly any outlay from yourself.

If you were renting and putting the (maybe £100 a month max) difference into some investment, you'd make next to nothing on that. But with a mortgage, you're 'investing' the banks money as well as your own.

I've only bought 2 houses in my life (3rd one soon), but both were financially very good. Even in the current market.
It's just the first example that is a terrible, terrible turn-off.
The multitude All-American Bowl obligatoriness Go unparalleled of N Ways
Vandals, defacers.
"... at least he's eating his own dogfood ..."

This is pretty recent, I mean post 2009DEC14 because I checked. Prior to that the site was by friending only. But do you really think this is his private account where his friends hang out for all to see? ~ http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=Mark+Zuckerberg&init=q...
Does walking at 1 mile per hour provide any cardiovascular benefits? I thought the point of exercise was to raise your heart rate?
I mean that Facebook is essentially a display business and that most display businesses derive 70%+ of their traffic from Google searches, but Facebook cannot benefit from this unless they put their information public.

Essentially, if your feed is public, then your name, stream, and life is just one big content creation stream for Facebook to show display ads against. Just doing it for names is worth hundreds of millions of dollars -- think of how many there are, how often they are searched, and how little competition there is for most of them. Domain authority alone should mean that Facebook dominates for searches of people who do not maintain their own websites.
In my limited experience customers bitch a pretty much constant amount unrelated to the quality of the product at that time. They want to get their "money's worth" out of you. So it's better to create a buggy program and let them bitch about that.
An independent company would talk about fixing IE rather than blaming the benchmarks.
I'm sorry, I don't go to great lengths to figure out what mr. Zuckerberg is up to, I just put his name in google and that page popped out.

It ought to be a rule that anybody associated with a company like that (say, Google, Facebook, etc) should have all their data public and with privacy settings at 'default'.
He seems to think there are no barriers to anything... IP, first-mover advantages, etc mean nothing apparently.
What surprises me is that linked-in actually comes up more than facebook even today when searching for people.
http://science.discovery.com/videos/what-the-ancients-knew-r...

"Romans were the first to invent mass production. They figured out how to use water wheels to create a factory flour mill."
Isn't most of what we read a re-hash of something or a re-statement? It's still nice to be reminded, tell them, tell them and tell them again :)
Off the top of my head:

Hotspot, the Sun production JVM, is written in C++ with a lot of inline assembly (hard to port).

Jikes RVM, perhaps the major research JVM, it metacircular, Java with C bootstrapping.

Jnode, an OS, uses Jikes replacing the C with assembly (x86).

Sun's Maxine research JVM is metacircular with C bootstrapping.

A large fraction of the other JVMs are written in C, sometimes C++, sometimes with Java as well.
"The perl community was pretty abrasive when I first looked in to it, the PHP community was the opposite so I ended up programming a large amount of stuff in PHP."

Interesting how the "feel" of a community dictates the choice of language. I thought I'd be immune to this effect after programming for 15 years but I recently chose not to use Clojure on an (eventually to be opensourced) project because of the "dumb fanboi" tone of a part of its community.(eg: http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2009/10/python-vs-clojur... HN reaction: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881642).

I chose to use Haskell instead (I like the "vibe" of its mailing lists and irc and blog posts and so on) and have been feeling a smidgen guilty about dismissing Clojure (which I think is really nice - I admire Rich Hickey's tech skills and design sensibility) for its community's stridency.

Seems I am not alone in my weirdness!
That blog post makes no sense and borders on the offensive - "[she] obviously does not give a damn if her state were filled by Iranian shit" is the sort of thing I'd expect to read on a far-right website. Am I missing something here?
Do you actually have a counter-claim against the paper or are you simply resorting to ad hominem? Your argument, as it currently stands, is a DH1.

edit: full disclosure, I'll be interning at MSR (different group) in the summer.
Truth. I used to be very heavy, and tried all kinds of exercises and diets, none of which worked.

And then I stumbled on the simple, inescapable truth: eat less. Eat way less. Eat well.

My BMI is now only a bit above the "normal" range (and still dropping), and the only real significant change I've made to my life is that I eat maybe half as much as before (note: I am not starving, not by a long shot).
+1 anecdotal here as well. Got it recommended by a friend, and just stopped getting colds. I recently forgot taking them, and had my first cold in years.
nicely written article.

Still it should be considered that the author is a VC. Hence it's in his utmost interest to portray entrepreneurship as quasi risk-free. The more people decide to start a company, the bigger his choice while selecting a company for funding.
Reminds me a bit of 37signals who is kind of doing the same thing, in order to promote their applications.
Why Low Overhead = Creative Mindset
But those are physical products and these are virtual services. In the user's mind there is (or starting to be?) a huge distinction between the two. I am not saying it's right or wrong, but would you agree you see a distinction?
I think for a start, we should teach new programmers to not be language snobs. To value their programming ability far higher than any particular language. Creating new programming languages isn't hard, that's why there's so many of the things.
True, but in this case PHP corrected its error (it now returns null for this use case, as it should)... this is why you don't rely on undocumented behaviour as canonical. If it says it should return null, but returns zero instead, check this result always.
Comparison: drawing straight lines on mobile touchscreens
Immigrants invest in U.S. businesses in exchange for visas
Steve Jobs Magazine Covers Through The Ages
Yeah, your wrists should be straight when typing. Though, if you switch it up enough, you can type in almost any position for a short-enough amount of time. But that looks like the express train to RSI.
Just add a little (python?) script in the repository root that sets everything up; then in the checkout instructions tell people to run 'python setup.py' to install the extensions needed.

I don't think you need to add VCS-level support for this; it'll just create a more complex program which can result in nasty exploits without having too many benefits.
he's full of schmidt. the private sector responds to the shitty incentives the government provides. the private mortgage market had no incentive to act responsibly because the government backed fannie and freddie were buying responsible and irresponsible loans indiscriminately. if banks had actually been holding the loans themselves they wouldn't have made such crappy investments.
What if this were done iteratively? As they add more features to the premium, one could try creating different tiers with higher and higher starting points, you could then really start to see and breakdown where different segment's fall in the value scale. Anyone that paid more than the next tier, automatically gets in(can donate more if they want)? I am sure this would lead to too many plans (would probably need a moving bar to keep the numbers of plans reasonable).
I was talking about collisions within the same hashing algorithm. It might be the case that MD5^2(a) == MD5^2(b) where MD5(a)!= MD5(b), but not the other way around. So collisions in MD5^2 will be a superset of collisions in MD5. Iterating thousands of times will further increase the number of collisions.
How many people search google for people :/

If I'm trying to find old friends etc, I go straight to facebook and search there.
"In the user's mind there is (or starting to be?) a huge distinction between the two."

Actually, I'd venture to say that the distinction between the two is shrinking, and will continue to do so in the future.
You're arguing about the wrong thing: I still think the parent's position is reasonable and that's it's fine to only care about performance up to a certain percentile.

Maybe you don't like 99% and think it should be 99.99999%. Fine, doesn't matter. Do what makes you happy for your web app.

And besides, this "measurement" has nothing to do with the functional reliability of the app. 99.99% of requests completing within 100ms doesn't mean the other 0.01% of requests fail (as another poster noted); it just means they take longer. If you're worried about requests failing (as we all should be!), then that's a separate issue to deal with. So then you say something like, "99.99% of all requests must complete within 100ms, and no more than 0.0000001% of requests are allowed to fail on average." Or something like that.
I knew there would be someone who makes this funny claim :)

Yep, I'm sure facebook are hugely jealous of twitters revenue :D

Seriously. Wake up.
Not all at once, but yes.
Wow, "almost everyone" is a criminal? Let me know where you live so that I avoid ending up there.
I tend to agree that this is useless in terms of figuring out the right price point. It may also have a kind of psychological devaluation effect on the service.

As a publicity stunt, it makes sense. Although it would make much more sense for an already well known entity to stir things up a bit (just like Radiohead did with their album).
I think we are starting to see more in the area of seed funding. Just 2 days ago I was meeting with one of the people starting http://www.startupbootcamp.dk a seed fund in Denmark, seemed very much modeled at YC/TechStars model. There is definitely demand, and people are starting to pick up on it. One of the biggest challenges is one of critical mass. There is small communities at least in my region here, but nothing big enough to attract others elsewhere or attract me somewhere else (other then back to US).
I've perused it a couple of times, and I've picked up some good ideas. It's great that you guys have open sourced that code.
Given the prices listed of comparable products if they deliver more value than there competition they should be charging at in the same range.

If your app gets the job done better than visio for a company why shouldn't they pay you a comparable amount?
I have a funny story about this subject. A while ago when we were charging $9.95 per month for the site and I felt pretty good (several thousand members) I was visiting someone that also runs a large for pay website.

He looked at what we were doing and he said 'double your price'.

I laughed at him, and said no way, people will cancel in droves, if more than half cancel it'll be a net loss.

Sales went up.

We basically doubled our income overnight.
"She doesn't care" -- was just one of viewpoints for this problem.

jacquesm expressed another viewpoint: "people who hacked Detroit's web site are bad" (I agree with that).

My focus however is more about incompetency of IT department of City of Detroit:
They allowed their web site to get hacked, and on top of that they cannot fix the problem in reasonable amount of time.
how do you delete, is that the same as deactivate?
The Death of DMOZ and TECHNORATI
I think my mistake was in assuming that you could create a lookup table for iterated MD5, which I realise now would take up far too much space.
You have to read the tutorial.

It does a much better job of explaining the language.

ANI seems to be quite an interesting language. I haven't looked at dataflow languages before, so this might be fairly standard.
Someone is definitely "high on their own supply".

On the other hand, (having read the tutorial) it does seem to be interesting concept that could be helpful in some fields.

Pitty it's so poorly marketed. I hope they change that after it becomes a usable product.
Use a bug tracker for that!
I found the following approach very interesting:

* Generate a random price in the acceptable range (but don't tell the user about it)

* Let the user know that you made up a price and let him enter what he would pay

* If the user entered a higher price than the random one he gets the product, otherwise he doesn't

Of course this only works if you keep the user from trying to do this multiple times, for example by offering an invite-only system and giving every invitee only one chance.
Since the link is dead - how is this different from QTVR?
But it would be nice to remove the istockphoto watermark, besides.
Benefits of Cardio Interval Training
USB 3.0 SuperSpeed gone wild at CES 2010, trumps even your new SSD
If he has this attitude, I'm surprised he doesn't follow the lead of the Luther Blissett/Wu Ming gang, and just make a Creative Commons release of the books part of the deal with the publisher. (cf http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/about_our_books.htm)
Wow. Did you get complaints from existing customers?
Clueless.

"I want to be clear here that the blame, to the degree that there was, is largely in the United States, not in Europe, not in Britain."

Because the American branch of the Illuminati run Iceland, Northern Rock, those German manufacturers who were having to finance their customers because banking disappeared, and so forth?

"And it was fundamentally because a low-interest policy created too much money. It was an easy-money policy and eventually an easy-money policy catches up with you."

Most of the bubble money supply came from leverage (massive fraud with a sprinkling of "deregulation"), not interest rates.
tell me more about 3 plz
Tell HN: Promote my iPhone app a little bit, and get it for free
Become a better programmer by taking a shower
You are correct. It was a DH1 reply.

The last sentence from the webpage: We hope our results will convince the JavaScript community to develop and adopt benchmarks that are more representative of real web applications.

I am a web developer and over the years I have suffered a lot and wasted a lot of time just because the different IE releases did not conform to the existing web standards. It just doesn't feel right when MS try to convince the JavaScript community about something while they ignored the recurring demands of the same community in order to push their proprietary standards and extend their monopoly.

I am not trying to defend my argument, but just trying to express the thought process that led me to the argument.
> and tend to favor phasing out prison terms for non-violent offenders,

So, white collar criminals shouldn't serve prison sentences? How should we punish non-violent white-collar criminals? Take away their holiday homes?

> It's the intellectually lazy, "Common-sense", Joe-Sixpack politics of 3-strikes laws that got us into this mess. "Lock criminals up and throw away the key, I say!"

Most countries have laws that separate habitual criminals from society. Most people view prison as having four purposes:

1.	Rehabilitation (i.e. change the behaviour of a convicted individual through positive (reward) and negative (punishment) reinforcement).

2.	Punishment

3.	Protect the public by separating harmful individuals.

4.	Serve as a deterrent to potential criminals.

The “three strikes” and similar laws in other countries are clearly to protect the public by separating habitual criminals from society. This is completely reasonable.

The deterrent effect has two components – the severity of the punishment and the effectivety of the prosecution. If a criminal believes he can escape prosecution, the deterrent effect will not work.

Unfortunately the left did the most damage to the judicial system. Firstly, prison sentences aren’t a deterrent any more. In the old days you received a prison sentence with “hard labour” - this was removed because the left opposed it – in most countries prisoners sits around all day doing nothing (this also increases the cost of incarceration).

The same goes to work – it was usual practice to set prisoners to work in their community on government property/parks. This not only reduced the cost of their incarceration but served as a powerful deterrent to people who see them and shows them the disappointment that society views their actions.

In my country the left started “improving” the criminal and justice system (with almost all the suggestions leftist suggestions). Unfortunately violent crime tripled in 15 years and all other crimes increased.

It is unfortunate that the same justice system that “Joe sixpack” likes works so effective in countries such as Singapore or Japan.

/rant
Gotta try it with my service as well. One thing keeping us back from pushing it further up is the current, lower pricing.

What happened to the existing users when you doubled the price? Did your cancellations go up? Or did you freeze the price for the old users?
Even simpler way to lose the weight is to eat the same but cut out the HFCS (assuming you consume it now). My wife who doesn't lift a finger to exercise lost weight easy by simply altering some foods and cutting down on sugar intake (while still occasionally easting cookies/desserts).

And you'll be amazed at what they stick HFCS in these days (hint: everything).
You may want to know that "cross compile" means that you compile for one architecture while on a different one. Like compiling for PowerPC while on an x86. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_compiler

Since that was clearly not what you meant, I was confused as to what you did mean. I wouldn't call what you intended "cross compile" - there's no "cross" to me. It's common to implement a higher-level language in a lower-level language.
The payment method matters a lot too, paypal and credit cards are for practical purposes unusable for services under $2 / month, you'd have to charge for a year in one go, and annual renewal rates are terrible, they're much worse than $5 / month because people will no longer remember what that charge was for and they'll cancel, or worse, they'll charge back and it'll cost you more than you made in the whole year ($25 chargeback penalty, even if it isn't your fault), not to mention a hit on your chargeback record which could at some point cost you your merchant account (usually a 1.5% limit on chargebacks).

$10 (or $9.95) is where the game really starts, less than that is really only to get people to subscribe for trial purposes for 3-10 days with an automatic up-sell to the full rate if they don't cancel.

That's a tried-and-true scheme and it is good for a very large portion of all online revenues on services.

The biggest problem - and you address that somewhat in your last paragraph - is that people that pay $1 feel just as entitled (or even more in some cases) to your premium support time, because, after all they are now a paying member, they intend to get their moneys' worth.

On a $1 charge you can afford support on roughly 1 in 50 customers, it had better be a very quick to resolve issue.