skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually trying to make the opposite point, which is the physical cost of a book is relatively unimportant. LuLu actually throws you way off. They quoted me $7.95 for the cost of a 300 page perfect-print edition. They are a small volume printer, <1000 copies. At Volume (2000+ copies), a perfect-print 300 Page book can cost as little as $2.50 - And there are, and always have been, a lot of printers that could that work for you. You are correct in indicating that the big publishing houses have access to scale and vertical integration in which they are probably paying around $1 for each book - but, at 2000 copies, $5000 vs $2000 doesn't matter very much when you consider all of the fixed costs associated with a book.

Where a big publisher CAN take advantage of their scale, is in spreading the risk over thousands of books. Sure, a lot of their $5K advances will yield a grand total of 75 books sold. Or, in fact, be completed but not published (Seen that happen). But, many of those books will break even, some will make a profit, and every so often, JK Rowling will show up.

Note - a private publisher is risking everything. If their 3-4 months worth of heartfelt effort turn out to sell 70 books at $10, and they get to keep all of it, well, 100% of $700 is still less than an advance of $5,000.

Almost all of the time, energy, risk(!) and money associated with creating a book come before the actual physical creation. I'd be prepared to say that for a 5000 book run, (which is considered a success, for most authors), approximately 90% of the cost is associated with the creation of the book, advertising, marketing of the book, and only 10% in the manufacturing of it.

Now, where we can reduce costs is in the marketing/advertising - with eBooks, you don't really need shelf space. And Social Networks/intelligence engines can do a better job of getting me the book I'm interested in anyways.

But, to create a great book, requires a team of professionals. And those people have to eat....

[edit: And, to steal a point from retric above, "What publishers focus on is not high quality books but rather figuring out how to convince people to buy crap books that they will not actually read." - That's true, the other strength of the Publisher is controlling the channel, aka the bookshelf in the past. But, given that there is no "bookshelf" to control anymore, hopefully great content will rise to the top, and that is yet _another_ inefficiency that we will be able to eliminate ]
They've removed the goat teleportation from this version :'(
"This content is currently unavailable".

Please provide a direct link to the image.
It's not letting me change the url. Here are two direct links. Editors please use whichever one works best if you decide to change the URL:

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/ycombin...

http://photos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs235.snc3/2224...
Grand Theft Auto = Minimum 5 years x number of vans / Judge's consideration
I made a mistake. It's an average of 12 years - where Republicans controlled the budget when they controlled the House - data from CBO here: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/Historicaltables20...

That said, the numbers are still gargantuan in terms of the increase. If I'm not mistaken though, the CBO numbers include the war numbers.

I think a better compromise would have been to allow for a line item veto which would have also also helped to greatly keep spending under control.

For a more explicit graphic have a look here: http://instapundit.com/79840/ - a comparative of deficits under the Bush administration and what's being currently projected by the CBO/White House.
He is probably using ipad and saw the blue flash icon.
How to Avoid Mediocre Co-Founders
A white Y using a standard font on an orange background isn't a hugely original logo.

It's quite conceivable that they came up with it themselves given the topic of the book.
"Honey, does this make me look like a shill?"
Wikirace - Wikipedia
Eh. The book is about generation "Y", a phrase that's been around for about 15 years. There are 8 basic colors. Odds are it's unconscious.

I was about to recommend a book on this called Borrowed Design, but apparently it's a hard-to-get classic. $189 used!

http://www.amazon.com/Borrowed-Design-Abuse-Historical-Form/...
He may look like a shill, but that doesn't make him one. He's the one that asked for it early. He almost certainly received no money. He's genuinely excited about it.
Ehhh, you know what? I've done both (and I actually did work on my own projects in my own time while doing A).

B is actually better.

There is an indescribable psychic toll that working at a megacorp takes on you. Daily I would wish for the sweet release of death rather than deal with another god damned conference call.

Now I just get a little cranky when I've been working for too long or someone's being an asshole.

I suppose I could try doing my own startup, but that's terrifying.
> Also, in the Under the Hood tab for Chrome Options, there is a new Content section for fonts, language and Google Gears settings:

This is not new as these settings are available in the 4.x version, but I was really hoping they would add a setting to set a freaking default zoom level finally. I've been wanting to use Chrome on my high-DPI HTPC for about a year. Chrome will DPI scale flash, while Firefox does not but the no-default zoom means every tab you create you have to zoom in to get your 6' interface.

Also, I tried downloading from the beta channel on windows and got Chrome 4.x (beta). Is there a trick to getting on the 5.x stream?
it would be interesting to know how many people actually watched the Grammy's. Last year 19 million people watched the show.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2009/02/grammy-r...
orange looks much more like the yc orange in the photo. in real life, it looked a shade lighter.
And...queue Amazon publishing house in 3...2...1...?
The fundamental misunderstanding here is how we relate our parsing of mathematical expressions to the way a compiler parses expressions:

While we can parse the following expression properly:

a < b < c

parses to:

(a < b) AND (b < c)

obviously most compilers don't do that. As others have pointed out, the < operator should not be associative.

The misunderstanding, though, is that the original expression

a < b < c

actually could be parsed (I'm making a bunch of assumptions about the grammar and parser type here) by treating ..<..<.. as a ternary operator, like ?: in C++.

Then, in the syntax tree, the compiler could re-organize the expression to be the correct an unambiguous:

(a < b) AND (b < c)
The comment you're replying to was not asserting that Ruby fails to follow its own rules, but rather arguing with the rules Ruby follows; other languages have made an exception to their normal rules for this case, and apparently some people feel it would be better for Ruby to do the same.
Easy Advice for Refinancing a Mortgage
Gates and Jobs look into the future of personal computing (2007)
Maybe it's an opnion thing than.

I've done both and am currently working on my own startup while keeping a 9 to 5. While the startup work moves along at a slower pace than I'd like, I wouldn't change it for anything.
I write a general-purpose web app, so I don't need to worry about what new devices are on the market in order to "stay competitive". If you tie yourself to a single device, you have to accept the consequences.
The only "answer" that is hard to match to a standard brainteaser question was "they are seven and a half degrees apart."

I believe the question is, "what's the angle formed by the hour-hand and the minute-hand of a clock when it is 3:15?"
Under Firefox's versioning system this is 1.5 or so.
Hundreds of Quakes Are Rattling Yellowstone
Shameless self promotion aside, this was pretty funny, and I don't understand the hate.
"Race" Categories as an Admission Factor at U.S. Universities
How big is the 9 to 5 you're working at? That might have something to do with it. I was at a 200,000+ employee firm.
How Labeling Can Help You Increase Productions and Build Product Branding ? 
A Good label can change the destiny of any product and help it become well known. The label of the products wins the customers that will result into the augmentation of profitability. An efficient labeling machine can make all it happen. So choose the right labeling machine that can not only allow you to apply labels but also perform diverse applications like label coding and printing.
If he had molested a child he would probably serve less time.
At first I thought this term referred to the race to change a biographical article to past tense after a person dies.
Quite. Strangely messy too...option and page menus have the same icon, the appliction doesn't seem to render properly, and a number of other quirks. On the other hand it feels faster: considerably so, in fact.
switch to the dev channelr ather than the public beta, that's where most of the excitement is. It is a bit more alpha than beta, mind - it's not uncommon for major functionality to break for a day and then be repaired the day after.
PBS Frontline did a very fascinating documentary on this

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tentrillion/view/

And terrifying, too.

In the long run, not only are we all dead anyways, but I think that the government will come alive and fix this somehow ... they did in the 90s. Sort of.
I interviewed for a QA position at (Deleted to protect the guilty) where I had to answer a bunch of brain teasers like this. I always prepare thoroughly and even enjoy solving these sorts of puzzles, so I knew most of the standard ones by heart and did fine. I would say that about half of the people who interviewed me did not appear to have the mental acuity to answer such questions themselves. I did learn some new and interesting puzzles though!

Two months later I was hired for what turned out to be an excellent software development position at a completely different organization.

When I interview technical candidates, I ask a pair of related questions that encompass data structures, sorting, and time complexity. It is a very simple-sounding problem. The good candidates get the questions almost before I finish asking, and the mediocre candidates struggle.
Isn't the opposite (few enough that Google can make this change) just as plausible, if not more so?
I doubt it. People have gone pretty batty when it comes to that particular offense. I hear that one's "prison experience" is somewhat different when its discovered that one is in for this particular crime as well.
Holy shit his wife is hot.
Sounds like a problem with Chrome to me. Browsers (theoretically) are not supposed to crash. If some crazy script can cause them to access memory improperly and crash, that is bad.

It doesn't matter that the website is coded poorly, with that opinion, malicious websites are "coded poorly" as well. Now, it doesn't mean that the crash you see is necessarily a security vuln, but it is at least a bug.
The people need to stop believing the Democrats and Republicans are on different teams. They are on the same team -- the powerful elite.

Do not hesitate to believe that the wars are good for both parties. Only one congressman voted against the war and he is a republican.
That's his daughter, you horribly inappropriate person.
Complete noob. Can you explain this more. if you bcrypt(12345) isn't the result always same ? If the hash varies then what does the inbuilt nonce depend on ?
Out of interest Dani, is it possible to use a relatively benign lithium salt solution rather than pure lithium to do the tritium recovery?

As for the geothermal alternative, unfortunately it seems drilling holes to geothermal depths isn't easy or cheap either. Geodynamics in South Australia are arguably at the most advanced stage and they've had multiple drilling failures at their hot fractured rock geothermal pilot plant. They originally claimed that hot fractured rock geothermal drilling was in the regular 3-5km oil and gas depth "window" and thus should be straight forward. Ubiquitous geothermal from the mantle is much deeper still, so I suspect as a viable alternative to fusion you'd just be replacing one multi-billion dollar engineering challenge with another!
While this is a beautiful interface, I often read things like "traversing a long source file trying to look for a specific method’s implementation" or "sick and tired of having to scroll through a raw copy of jQuery..." and am confused. Why don't more people use their text editors' search functionality to find a specific piece of code? I never find myself scrolling through long source files.
Well, he did say honey...
Automatically predicting the usefulness of a product review
How to choose an efficient PDF to Word Convertor?
When my friend is preparing her graduation paper, she need to refer many PDF materials and quote some contents. So she need a PDF to Word Converter. Here is the way of how to choose an efficient one and provides some details to refer to.
What was with the elbow obsession?

My guess is that the "need to have arms with pointed elbows" (which seems to have been noted via A/B testing) may be for two reasons. Firstly, showing elbows means showing the subject from a greater distance than a face-shot. This is perhaps less confronting, and also makes it easier to incorporate other elements (eg, blackboard, apple) that add context.

The pointed part is perhaps related to actions. Non-pointed elbows happen when we hold a fairly inactive pose (eg, arms by our side). Pointed elbows are for holding things, pointing at things, and interacting with objects and people - all of which are much more engaging.

Any other thoughts?
Yeah true.. It's nice to code once though. I feel immense pressure to make a native app for the iPad b/c it's the preferred method of interfacing with the device for obvious reasons.

With the iPhone the pressure is a little less b/c people aren't expected to interact with a web app or any app for hours on end on a small mobile device like that.. For the iPad, a laptop replacement in some sense, users will be interacting with it quite a bit more.
Note this has 11 parts and runs more than an hour. It's great though.

Steve Jobs his relationship with Bill Gates: "I think of most things in life as either a Bob Dylan or Beatles song, but there's that one line in that one Beatles Song. You and I have memories that longer than the road that stretches out ahead, and that's clearly true here.

Some advice to startups in video #11 about 1 minute in.
I really enjoyed seeing that Gates is still super smart and really enthusiastic about the innovation that’s happening right now. Makes me wish he was still running the show at Microsoft.
DPI does not mean what you think it means. At all. DPI metadata is completely irrelevant to the web.

It's a piece of metadata about an image that says how densely it should be when formatted for print. Unfortunately that's almost completely useless, because you can't just tell someone to give you an image at $X dpi, because what you actually care about is how big you can print it, so you end up specifying 3 pieces of metadata: W x H @ DPI. It's always much better to just ask for an image at a specific pixel size.

Even programs for a print workflow have to essentially ignore most DPI metadata, because it's usually set to bullshit values like '72' and '96' by asinine applications doing their best to perpetuate irrelevant platform-specifc details. It's marginally better when new Photoshop documents default to shit like 5" x 7" @ 300dpi, but that's still a pointless artifact of people insisting on using a bitmap photo editor for digital painting.
Justin Lilly - Server Switch
Will be there - great to see there are enough startup oriented Melbournites to make this a possibility!
Ideally one could use a proper IDE for this purpose but then OP has touched a good point; and IDE higlighting the calls of methods those are declared in the module would really help in understanding the source. I'm definitely stealing this! Thanks.
Macy's stores passwords in cleartext
Jason Fried: Getting Real Talk at IIT
The Agency Model - a concise description of what Macmillan wants
with eBooks, you don't really need shelf space.

I predict that the extent to which this turns out to be false will surprise us all.

Shelf space at a bookstore is the primary advertising medium for books. Most people don't consult the New York Review of Books. Most people see very few book advertisements. Even those of us who do most of their book buying online still wander through bookstores and libraries. Physical objects have a powerful draw. I buy almost all of my computer equipment online, and yet I still find myself wandering through the Apple Store, just to experience the physical presence of computers and computer users.

Dedicated physical bookstores are going to get even harder to keep open. They might get smaller. They might continue to diversify until they're basically cafes with books lining the walls, or small performance spaces where authors gather to hold readings, or something. But I suspect that, somehow, the biggest and most successful publishers will continue producing copies of physical books and putting them on shelf displays in places where readers are likely to gather, just to get those books in front of people's eyes at the exact moment when those people are in a book-browsing mood.

Then they'll sell electronic copies. Right there in the store. Barnes and Noble apparently agrees with me: They're plugging the Nook front and center in their brick-and-mortar stores.

Or, maybe I'm wrong. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

PS: To anticipate every reader's first objection to my wacky hypothesis: This didn't save the music stores because music is inherently unbrowseable in a store. Music stores used to have little listening stations with headphones, but did anyone ever actually use those things? They never had what I wanted to hear. The iTunes store blows that experience away, to say nothing of Pandora or YouTube or a filesharing network.
As a fellow person seeking a little attention lately, just you know, for the motivation to get into something... it is a shame that the groups we mingle with (I've browsed HN for ~2 years without making account but have always felt at home here) do not support mini-adventures very much.

I always viewed HN as a place where I could go for reviews or receive some advice from other people seeking the same thing. Yet, it seems the groups I once called home are showing this aura of 'elitist' instead of lending a hand.

If HN is the group we associate with, why is a harmless plug after a comment on a fresh blog such a terrible thing? We want the group we associate with to give us feedback!

Do I need to take out a loan, invest $30,000 in a startup, and get VC funded to be able to plug a website?

I guess this is over-dramatization and full of useless e-motions; and not entirely aimed at HN, but communities in general. I participate in a few forums, but let a few years pass by and this elitist wave of old timers seems to just mock/bash the people coming up from the bottom.

If plugging a site isn't the right thing to do, explain why, and give some advice for pulling in readers. If HN is your only community and you don't have some massively read site, how do you get fresh readers?

edit: (I told you I was being over-dramatic), but yeah, I do tend to click the "Review my App: etc."
Downvote me if you like, but it will still be Grammys.
Hitler's angry reaction to the iPad
I'm happy to see browser competition heat up once again, and Chrome is running my htpc for the limited web usage it needs, but the Mac version 4 was totally unimpressive when you factor in the scarcity and immaturity of the plugin ecosystem, compared to the excellent (and much faster) plugins that I depend on in Firefox(1).
Here's hoping they catch up fast.

(1) Specifically Rikaichan, which turns on/ off in < 1 second on all my various computers, compared to anywhere from 1 second to 30 seconds (no joke) in Chrome's Rikaikun.
I'm based in Christchurch and also able to work remotely.

I'm available for Django/Python/JS and Arduino/Physical Computing/Interaction Design contracting.

TweetZombie http://tweetzombie.rancidbacon.com/ is a recent personal project I worked on with Django/Google App Engine/Twitter API.

I also maintain Planet NZTech http://planet.nztech.org/ which you might want to check out. I'm also a co-founder of Spacecraft the Christchurch Creative/Hacker Space http://spacecraft.org.nz/

Also, as a Kiwi I hate tooting my own horn, I'm trying to get over that. :)
To The Lone Entrepreneur: Make Your Failure Public
I bought the book with high hopes, but to be honest I found it a little dry. About halfway through I had to give up on the idea of reading it cover-to-cover, and instead just cherry-picked the interviews I wanted to read. It lacks a lot of background info on the interview subjects, so unless you are familiar with them you may find yourself lost as many historical and technical details are referenced without additional explanation.

Personally, I thought "Founders at Work" was a much more interesting read and would recommend checking that one out first.
Jokes almost always get down-voted unless they're phenomenally clever (probably a reaction to the legacy of the +5 Funny from slashdot).
We're a humorless bunch here :)
Swiss warn UBS bank could collapse
Eventually all the ad dollars will be spent changing you into someone who does want to spend more money.
Doesn't seem like a big deal to me. If there's a multitouch api available from JS (is there?), you could do pretty much everything demoed in those apps.
By creating a page linking to all these "difficult" destinations, they have made those destinations much easier.
These were funny...in 2009. Old meme is old, now.
it's different when the person plugging the site hasn't even bothered to register a domain...and the blog only has the one blog post that the person is trying to link.