skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We changed the price for new signups and put a prominent message on the homepage for logged in member in the 'old' situation.

Changing prices is always tricky, the above story tells you that my judgment on this subject is as faulty as can be so you probably should take my advice with a grain of salt (or a pound).

If I were to do something like this again I would do a 7 day a/b test and see how the signup rate is affected before taking the plunge. Even that is not simple to pull off because it would mean somehow isolating users from the two groups from each other long enough that you wouldn't influence the outcome of the test.

The big lesson for me from all this is that price elasticity is a non-linear entity.
I don't think you can go wrong with any of these three, but I went with the Droid. Reasons:

- Better screen than iPhone

- Physical keyboard

- Verizon service (I guess this doesn't apply as you aren't in the US)

There's no question that the iPhone OS is slicker and easier to use, but the Droid lets you do more at once.

I'm not sure why you'd want to go with a Nexus One right now. Droid is about the same price, gets better network coverage (clearly that will change when the Verizon N1 comes out), and has a keyboard.

My only real complaint with the droid is that I wish the microphone was a little better. It's possible that the Nexus One has that advantage with their two-mic noise control system.

Edit: iPhone's biggest advantage imo is the app store. Android Market just isn't there yet.
The Problems with Turning Civilization into Software
heh...your description of the emo mac dude gave me a laugh, thanks.

I'm curious how the same individual might value a subscription to "trendy $100 jeans...as a service", both in utility and price? I think it's been tried with luxury handbags for about $50/month, but I'm too lazy to look up what happened to that business (and my battery is at 3% so I can't look right now).
In college, I was an English major. I took CS 101 because it was the ONLY course open and I needed 3 more credits. In the first or second class Bob Geitz (the professor) demonstrated that you can directly transform a FOR loop into a DO...WHILE--they were completely interchangeable, but had different nuances.

This was a transformative moment for me--I realized that computer code is poetry, with all the beauty and elegance and difficulty that implies. Further, it is poetry that can alter the physical world. In legends and mythology, what is the one-word name for "poetry that alters the physical world"? Magic.

I've been a computer professional ever since.
1) The hardware is nothing without the software. Even a nice capacitive touchscreen needs the right programming. So, I don't think I really need to draw a distinction here. Also, I think everyone is using roughly equivalent, commodity hardware.

2) All Droids lacks the wealth of apps the iPhone has.

3) All Droids lack years of market testing like iPhones have.

4) If your girlfriend works at Google, you are certainly biased, and I think anyone who has touched all the major smartphones can't really say any of them are the best except the Blackberry or the iPhone, depending on the application. All Droids and Palms are just me-toos trying to catch up right now. I'm not saying Android and its phones won't get there, they just can't be there yet.
Not really. It means that you can learn the technology once and apply it to multiple projects with different target platforms.
This works if your request stream is homogeneous. If it isn't (and they usually aren't), you need to break it up by type and check the 99.9th percentile of each of them. Otherwise you could find that 99.9% of HTTP GETs are asynchronous AJAX polling and the requests that matter are slower.
Taking an abusive monopolist to task != stifling innovation. Restoring competitiveness to CPU market will benefit all innovators.

Bailing out UAW (disguised as bailing out GM) != stifling innovation. Wasteful spending maybe, but by the same token it's also stifling a gazillion other things like children playground renovation and whatnot.

What's up with this guy?
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.

For a once-off purchase, I totally agree. For a subscription, there's a big difference there.

I know not everyone's like me but I tend to calculate the annual price for subscriptions I have. So even though I almost never use it now, paying $1.99 to the Problogger forum is no big deal. But $9.99? That'd be a $23.88 vs $119.88 - a pretty wide gap. There are lots of things I wouldn't spend $9.99 a month on something that I'd spend $4.99 a month on.. a flowcharting app might well be one of those things.
That seems unlikely to me. There's easily enough energy and matter around in our solar system to make a journey to another, and as far as we know, there's plenty of energy and matter in other solar systems also.

So a sufficiently advanced civilization could construct a self-replicating probe that heads to each solar system, replicates and recharges itself, then heads on to the next stars until the whole galaxy is populated.

From the perspective of the civilization sending the probes, this is relatively cheap; just the price of the materials necessary to build a single ship capable of carrying itself outside the solar system, even if it takes hundreds of years to get anywhere.
Reading "Predictably Irrational" now and it is a truly fascinating book. This is a good laugh, but the book offers more useful data and insight.
Very neat. Can I use your code to jump off from ?
Boston Consulting Group: Battery Costs will Stall Shift to Electric Vehicles
You know, I'll merrily be the first to call the administration on its ridiculous anti-trust actions, especially towards Google. I also oppose all the nativist whinging about letting tech workers in that the last few presidents and congresses have indulged. All that aside, let's cut to the chase about the real issue:

"Mr. Shapiro complains that the Obama administration isn't doing enough to make sure that the U.S.'s trade policy allows our goods to compete with cheaper goods elsewhere."

The government's thrown billions at the auto industries and banking, and Shapiro resents that it hasn't thrown similar largess at the tech industry in the form of protectionist trade policy.

(He might just prefer Team Red to Team Blue, but for the sake of argument I'm assuming he has a real reason beyond partisan dickery.)
Perhaps - but I doubt that this is how the searchers actually view things. I suspect they just think "I want" and head for the Google box. Most of my students work this way now.

Even if you're right though, I know the internet well enough to know I would look there for people to give me advice on any of these questions.
The best thing for me is that you don't have to worry about getting directions or knowing where you're going to go. There's also the ability to instantly pull up info--you never need to forget who that actor was, and discussions don't get derailed by pointless quibbling over facts that could easily be looked up.

And yes, you can browse HN on the toilet. Life is good.
i hate all of them

Wow, I find that surprising. Smart phones are just incredible pieces of technology, and have made my life a lot more convenient in lots of little ways. Obviously there is tons of room for improvement, but I think you'd have to be pretty jaded to truly "hate" any of the smart phones. (Value-for-money is another question, but you can always choose not to buy one.)
Sounds very interesting. I'm going to try writing some simple tests for my application.

On a side-note, the name sounds a little inapropriate in Russian.
Mr. Shapiro is completely right. Nothing good ever came of government programs. Take DARPA for example. We pour billions into that program, but what has DARPA ever done to spur technological innovation? Created a few infrastructure projects like "ARPANet" and "GPS". A few high performance computing projects, some robotics and automation projects, space projects, and intelligence systems. Aside from spawning dozens of billion dollar industries without which CES wouldn't even exist, they've done practically nothing at all!

Seriously though, Shapiro represents a number of industries who owe their entire existence to government programs and initiative. His audacity in claiming that government doesn't spur innovation and entrepreneurship is either astoundingly short-sighted or simply maliciously misleading. Given that Shapiro is a technology industry representative whining about interventions in the financial and automotive industries, I have to assume that he's simply abusing his exposure to wax political about his own personal opinions.
"I have a podium, and I can't resist preaching from it."
Looking at registration patterns in Django
If everybody ends up using these devices (and creating black holes for the signal), the gsm providers have to increase the output power on their antennas in order to get the same coverage as before.
> That only works if we don't care and they're better than the alternative.

The problem here is that I've tried a lot of different email systems and, so far, Gmail beats them all hands down--in every way that matters. Its storage levels and general interface is at least as good and its spam filtering and searching (the two main points) are better.
Tony Hsieh talks HR at Zappos
It looks great. I have a slight issue, though; whenever I try to import pydroid, it goes

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#0>", line 1, in <module>
import pydroid
File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\pydroid\__init__.py", line 8, in <module>
import pydroid.bitmap
ImportError: DLL load failed: The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.
Agree, this is not depressing at all. Maybe these people who think it is depressing should get out of their fantasy world, and start reading up on some biology.
I've had mine for four days too. As far as navigating text, a friendly Blackberry user pointed out to me that I should use the goofy trackball for navigating textfields. Works better than repeatedly trying to click in the right spot.

I came from a iPhone 3g. The spit and polish just isn't there on Android like it is on the iPhone OS. I'd rather have a little less spit and polish in exchange for a little less parental intervention. I want my Google Voice and don't want to wonder if Steve Jobs will decide to allow my phone to have the "next big thing."
If you have any servers that you SSH into regularly, I highly suggest getting an Android phone with a keyboard. ConnectBot (a SSH client for Android) is the reason I got my G1.
I used to talk to my WWE (WWF back then), GI Joe, and Transformer action figures. As a 5 year old kid, you realize that they aren't real. But you don't think that talking to them is anything out of the ordinary.

My guess is that kids talk to imaginary friends because talking is so new and they just learned how to talk so they want to do it all of the time.
Booth babe confessions
It is hard to say anything true about relations between the sexes without being somewhat sexist. I think that's because nobody really likes the naked truth on that topic.
Performance of ruby 1.9.1 string matching methods
I see them differently. Intelligence is an ability which you can use, it is similar to strength, so I like to think of it as brain strength. Wisdom is your knowledge and experience. So being more intelligent gives you potential, but you have to use your intelligence wisely to gain wisdom.
I moved from a crappy old phone to the Droid, and am quite happy with it.

No matter what you end up with, I'd say that the differences by upgrading far outweigh which particular 'cutting edge' phone you end up going with.

I didn't think much about the transition -- just aiming to phone and portable web browser. In less than a month, though, it turns out I've got:

- a suprisingly decent point-and-shoot camera, as long as it's not dark

- a hiking/biking/skiing GPS

- a car-nav GPS

- a guitar tuner

- barcode scanner & product nutrition database

- portable music/video library

- and more! ;)

Really, it's a general purpose computer that happens to be bristling with both sensors and telephony capabilities, and an almost always-on connection to the internet. Regardless of whether it's 95% as slick as it could be and more 'open' (Android) or 98% slickness level and less 'open' (iPhone), they're still pretty much equally revolutionary.

(N.b. as a developer it was very nice to be able to write software for my phone from day one, without having to jump through a ton of hoops.)

(Edit for bullet points.)
In other words, would a Stanford (1st) or MIT (1st) grad be selected over a Northeastern (61st) or George Mason (65th) grad based on university affiliation alone?

Based on university affiliation alone? Probably not.

But university affiliation opens a lot of doors for PhD students. When I was doing my doctorate I found that I was much more successful in getting people to reply to my questions about their research when I started emails with "Hi, I'm a doctoral student at Oxford University...".

Similarly, if you're at a major institution, you're more likely to make useful contacts, both in terms of local faculty members and visitors. I doubt I'd have my research cited in TAOCP if I hadn't met Knuth -- and if I had been at the Polytechnic of East Anglia, I probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to meet him.

Overall, though, I'd say that you're probably approaching this the wrong way. Most students are better advised to look for a supervisor first, not to find an institution and then look for a supervisor later.
Oh...

And it's not just a matter of miniaturizing electronics. There is a matter of the energy density of signals in the air...
user system total real
str.casecmp(x): 0.150000 0.000000 0.150000 ( 0.147026)

str.include?(x): 0.220000 0.000000 0.220000 ( 0.224157)

str =~ /x/: 0.620000 0.000000 0.620000 ( 0.619257)

str[x]: 0.480000 0.000000 0.480000 ( 0.476655)

str.match(x): 1.240000 0.000000 1.240000 ( 1.244419)

str.scan(x): 2.260000 0.000000 2.260000 ( 2.259026)
I think there will be more control of hardware as time goes on. Palm provided methods of accessing hardware in the browser for webOS, I suspect Google will do something similar for web pages that you give permission to.
Admittedly, I didn't know much about Tony Hsieh's earlier days pre Zappos. What I find very interesting is that he really took to heart what he perceived to be a big failure of his first company and actually worked hard to not make that mistake again. The fact that it was corporate culture, which manifests itself as fantastic customer service for it's customers is all the better for me.
I think that part of the reason why the apps for the iPhone are better is due to the Android platform in general. No one codes Java for fun or for cool points. You don't see companies popping up like Tapbots where the UI's are carefully constructed pixel by pixel for Android. The coolest thing to hit Java for a long time is Clojure, and that's only for data nerds.

The mac is cool, OS X is cool, developing for the mac is cool. That's why people like the iPhone. It's cool. People want their shit to be rad, and they want others to think that they are rad too. You don't get this with Java, so I don't think we'll ever get this on Android.

Suffice to say... I have a Nexus One (previously I had a MyTouch 3G, and before that an iPhone 3G) and I love it!
There are bots that use SSL for C&C communication over port 443. There's also obligations under certain banking regulations to be able to intercept all communications (e.g. on the dealing floor) and whilst some Internet access may be useful, opening things up too far can cause more problems than it solves.
A $20/month VPS would likely do the job well enough.
PushButton Tutorial Series - Tracking &amp; Jumping
I haven't read that yet (though I definitely will later) but that's interesting about the dairy findings. West Price found the exact opposite of that in his book (http://bit.ly/4MIoVe). Can you elaborate a bit more on what they found suspect?
In China I found that using a UDP based OpenVPN to Slicehost was higher performing than the TCP on top of TCP issues that you get with SSH Tunneling when there's packet loss.

There's even some pretty decent desktop clients for OpenVPN, see Viscosity for OSX.

This is assuming you have the ports open (the Great Firewall of China does HTTP inspection but not port blocking).
Specific response:

> I have to load a submenu to stop loading a web page?

The icon up by the location bar doesn't turn into an "X" for you while a page is loading? (When the page is fully loaded, it's the bookmark icon; when the location has focus, it's a search icon. This is on the Droid, though.)

In general: your points might be right, but it's also tough to tell how many of them come from being used to the iPhone, vs what your experience would be like coming from a blank slate. I'm certain some of that comes from falling short of Apple's high usability standards, but I'm also certain some of it may just be that you've gotten used to The One Way To Do Things. ;)

I've never used the iPhone but in the few weeks I've had a Droid, I've been annoyed very rarely and impressed more often.
> No, it isn't. "Good user experience" is a just a fancy way of saying "people enjoy using it". Even if you can't fully articulate a rationale, you probably have a concrete idea about whether you enjoy or don't enjoy using a thing. A sharp knife has a better user experience than a dull knife. A cardboard box has a better user experience than plastic clamshells. It may not a thing you can point to, but the meaning is pretty easy to nail down, unlike "Freedom".

But user experience is nebulous. The examples you give are obvious in the choice in which is better or worse, but, for example, I can't stand the blackberry interface because the fonts are ugly. now, someone who isn't a typography snob won't care. For me it has a poor user experience, but for others it does not.

> You're not actually saying anything though. Of course people value different things, but unless you have some idea of what those things are, you may as well be talking nonsense, because you can't draw any sensible judgement on the value of an abstract concept over something concrete.

What I am saying is that there is no accounting for taste. That a universal one-size-fits all judgment cannot be made.

> But that guy competes with the guy who serves A^C, and the guy who serves B^C, etc. You cannot possibly appeal to every possible demand, which is why we have competition.

I don't understand your point here. Clearly the winner is he who can satisfy A^B^C, and while perfection is an impossible goal, as entrepreneurs, we should strive to make as many happy customers as possible, given our constraints.

My point boils down to two things:

1) as users of phones, we shouldn't get all bent out of shape in determining which is the best phone. It's fun & we tend to want to justify our own purchases & there is a sort of rooting-for-our-team aspect to it, but in the end it's pointless. some people like the nebulous concept of "freedom", while others like the nebulous concept of "slick".

2) as entrepreneurs, it's silly to pick sides based on what we want out of a phone as a user. instead, things like whether or not a market exists so that you can make money or whether or not the device has the necessary capabilities to support your idea should drive the decision. Our own biases and preferences as users should be secondary.
Yeah right. Wake me up when they have a shipping product. Until then, it's just vaporware.
Sometimes I have difficulty coming up with the keywords I need to search for a topic. Finishing the sentence "How do I ..." sometimes helps. Once I've done that, I might as well search for that before refining.
I wonder how much of the increase in Santa belief between 5 and 7 relates to them understand the should lie when asked that question? Extremely young children tend to be fairly direct, but 7yo are wiling to play make believe for attention.
http://www.bagborroworsteal.com

Seems to have been re-branded as Avelle.
What do you want to do with your phone? This is the important question. If you are just using it to call people, send messages, browse the net... so you don't need an expensive one.

Precise what you need and then decide each one to choose
once again slashdot posts hackernews as "new" news.
would be nice if they linked HERE to gain from the new comments not the 2.5yr old comments. oh well.

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/01/09/2154224/Why-Pr...
FWIW, which probably isn't much, I have a degree in fine art. Most of my work these days is UI design for web apps, but I also end up coding those UIs. With the exception of one long-standing project, any backend development I do (which does come up from time to time), I do in Ruby, which I switched to almost exclusively after using PHP for years, because it felt cleaner and more natural to me. Not that I have anything against PHP (I don't want to make this into a language war), it just felt like a better fit for me, personally.

I love beautiful code, whether it's javascript, ruby, or just html/css markup. My goal, at the end of the day, is to do as much as I can with as little code as possible. For me, I find that when I'm pleased with how my code looks, it also runs better, more efficienly, and more smoothly-not to mention it becomes much more maintainable.

I would say that there are certain artistic principles that influence the way I code and I try to extend the clean elegance of the UI to more than simply its appearance. I want the code that powers it to match that aesthetic in terms of its form, readability, and efficiency of function.
From the standup I've seen:

The reason the caveman were skinny is that before they could eat meat they had to chase it for few days and kill it with a stick.
Epidemiologist: How to Stop a Vampire Epidemic
I'm mostly trying to point out that the N1 is not a new phone in the sense that the original iPhone was, and your entire first post indicates an overly simplistic view of the phone and its software. When Snow Leopard was released and started shipping on new Macbooks (with newer hardware) it would have been ridiculous to suggest that this "new computer" was "too new" and will suck for awhile thus we should wait a couple of iterations.
I've been trying to figure out a way to automatically do screen captures of the Stormpulse map at various intervals. Being able to use Python ... perfect. Thank you.
Why is art reduced to craft in this modern age? Really, for any programmer to assume they are being artistic just because their code is 'nice' is absolutely absurd, and it's horrifying to think it happens. To be an Artist now is to be a social/cultural/literary critic. There cannot be art in programming, no matter how creative one thinks they code. Please stop it!
"like I said I'm a gadget freak so I needed a new fix"

I'm the same way Michael.. I've owned the iPhone, 3G and now 3GS.. and I'm getting bored with it. But there are a few apps I've grown to love and can't be without (iKindle is one of them) so I will be sitting tight for a while.
The Copyright Bubble