skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they become hidden in their wallet or drawer. The big box stores love this because the gift cards are already an interest-free loan

Gift cards are often better than an interest-free loan.

In some/many states (not CA), the issuer can impose "inactivity" charges. Yup - while it's sitting in your drawer, they get to bleed the card's value down to $0.
They're not principle. They're at best, guidelines. Things that have worked for some people, but might not work for others. It's also important to realize that completely different approaches have also been successful.

Take your example of unfuddle.com for example. Their model seems to be working for them, but it's quite a bit different than the pricing model used by GitHub (as another example), which also seems to be working. Github gives out a heck of a lot more than a taste for free, but have still managed to find a pretty effective approach to market segmentation.

I think it's also pretty important that in most cases, the "taste" you give out for free, is a big enough taste to be enough for the customer to want to bother tasting. Otherwise you're not really using a freemium model, and you really aren't offering much more to the customer than you would if you offered them a slick powerpoint and a demo site.
Feynman had an IQ of 127.

He wouldn't have gotten into the gifted class I went to as a kid.

He was, however, free to think, and act on those thoughts, and these he practiced into an art. That is more marvellous to me than a number on a test.
Doing Pro Bono Work Brings in Big Money
You clearly don't have anyone who insists on giving you, for example, $20 gift cards to Crate and Barrel: the gift that actually costs you money. You want to be able to tell them what you spent it on (to be nice), but there's nothing at Crate and Barrel that you can buy for $20.
Great, working again.
Quick-MI and the Redundancy of Interoperability
There are correct predictions. If you don't know of any you haven't tried to inform yourself.
The discussion is over here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1159438

(which is a duplicate link, but for some reason, that's the one that people decided to comment on)
It's definitely how most people do things today. The way I did it, like everything else, has its pros and cons.

Some of the pros:

1. My buddies in the dealership domain are my customers. They call me up and ask me for a feature directly.

From my experience, this yields better quality features than talking to the domain expert that's probably trying to translate his conversation with the customer.

2. There's the advantage of you being in a domain where most people are your friends then your potential users. A lot of psychological walls are broken this way (what is he trying to sell me?). We trust each other by our reputation in the industry and this tends to extend to they quality of software they expect from us. Them knowing that we're developing it ourselves helps a lot.

Imagine cold walking into a business like a salesman would and offering your product. Now imagine walking into the business where you know the owner very well and you intend of having coffee with him first, then telling him about how you might be able to help him out. Big difference.

There are more, but these come to mind now.

So it's not only quality of software, but also how much easier it is to get your first paid user base that will enable you to create a good product that would hopefully scale beyond your paid-users-as-friends.
Introducing GitHub Compare View
Why limit the search to journalists? If my understanding is correct, Arrington didn't have any prior experience in the news industry before Techcrunch.
Wow, that's a pretty content-free "discussion". Definition by single example, followed by an obscure reference to building up then tearing down the stack, ...

... and that was all.

Pretty poor, really. If you think that aids "understanding recursion" or will help you in an interview, I think you're very much mistaken.
There was a great story about a guy that did a similar thing for the fast food industry. Anyone got the link?
Depends on the area and snow received. I know people that run slicks year round, people who swap out studded tires, all season, 3 season, and tire chains. Not all living in the same area.
I'm curious why a lot of people / companies seem to be picking up Cassandra lately. I'm not one to peg one "NoSQL" software system against another, but I've been using HBase for a few months (albeit on a rather limited cluster) and feel that it fits great especially with its compatibility with Hadoop. We use Hadoop + Map/Reduce extensively at Grooveshark. Does anyone have experience in using both systems and can offer a candid account of both?
It's Not Just Microsoft Against Google
That only means IQ tests are utter bullcrap. I'm talking about real intelligence. Feynman was an extremely gifted mathematician from a very early age. He won lots of math awards and was even a Putnam Fellow. Those are far more legitimate tests of his intelligence than whatever garbage exam produced his 127. It's good you take a single example and try to generalize without looking at any other facts. Sure, most people with 120 IQs can win Putnam or go on to become great physicists.
ah yes, you're right. thanks...
Some stores calculate the the value of gift cards very carefully to be below or above the mean/mode (depending on stores and price distribution) to ensure that either money is left on the card, or more money must be spent to make the purchase.

As a consumer, gift cards are never a very good idea.
No way, I buy lots of eBooks. I consider them a cheap education, especially with some of those great $10 deals that some publishers have for modern titles (e.g. friends of ED, Manning).
Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1159697
"Have you read many peer reviewed economics papers? Or even college economics textbooks? They make same arguments....also note that while econlib is funded by the Liberty Fund, most academic economists are substantially funded by the government. There is potential for bias everywhere."

Economics papers are reviewed by other economists before publication, and government research funding doesn't dictate political ideology. Also, real economics papers aren't opinion pieces, disguised as "articles" in a "library" of economics.
Bill Clinton is supposedly scary-smart, at least in terms of being quick-witted and able to multitask very effectively. It wouldn't surprise me at all if his IQ were over 150.

Edit: see http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,987883,00.h...

"It's an almost scary mind, that of a multitasking wizard who plays hearts while he talks on the phone with a head of state, who sits through a dense briefing on chemical weapons intently doing a crossword puzzle, only to take reporters' questions hours later and repeat whole sections of the briefing word for word."

See also this page from Robert Novak's autobiography: http://books.google.com/books?id=7o5Cpjkk4qsC&pg=PA547&#...
Newspapers have been kicking around similar ideas for years (http://bit.ly/cTOokG) but bundling comes with its own inherent problems, including anti-trust issues, complexity of login, and the fact that similar content is usually not only cheaper to get elsewhere, but easier: No password hassles, no tedious billing, no worrying about if it's part of your network.

Still, some are trying and there will be more efforts on this ground in the next year. Maybe some will succeed.
That's another thing. Why don't almost all homes come with backup generators? I doubt it would be difficult to operate in a housing track.
I think it's fine to interview a startups that Andrew has already interviewed. I'm sure with a lot of these startups, there's plenty there.

Still, Andrew did a thorough (and great) job so it'll be interesting to see what the feel of this interview is like.
I wonder how this impacts Flickr's relationship with Picnik as the community's photo editing app.
In the last few months, my focus has been 90% on the software.

What I did with the dealership is Im more or less, followed the advice in E-Myth (http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...) and created position contracts for all our employees (7 of them now.) This has cut my involvement in the dealership tremendously. Now, I only put out fires, make sure management is going smoothly and handle some of the accounting.

At the head of the dealership is my brother, whom I trust. He makes sure that all manuals are updated and are followed. I make sure his position contract is followed.

This way of doing things will be much harder if you don't have a partner that you can trust to handle his part. Specially when things start growing.
Facebook Details How It Tests Code
Ever heard of Lorentz transformation? As for SR Lorentz gathered all the pieces together. Einstein "just" looked at them from different angle and what he saw was shocking.

Apart from that Eintein was not the most intelligent man that ever lived. He was smart enough man at the right point in history. Genius, but not thanks to his capacity but to his achievements.

I'm not sure what you mean by "contradicting Heinlein". The Starship Troopers Heinlein? ;-)
Picnik is built on Adobe Flex, so I'd say there was a bit of turf gained by both Google and Adobe
Windows Phone 7 skin for your WinMo [LeSScro Edition Video]
Windows Phone 7 skin LeSScro series for older WinMo phones
I am mostly commenting on the comments on the blog. "You guys have excellent customer service, so maybe I'll switch back after you make some obscure change for me that I could make myself, but am too lazy to."

If you want a 32bit userland, just make a directory, debootstrap the i386 userland there, and schroot to it. It's a 30 second operation.
I sent that quote to everyone in my stochastic calculus class. I couldn't be the only to feel that dumb today!
FrostWire 4.20.2 su LinuX
I self-published a PHP programming book (http://www.littlehart.net/book) and I've sold about the same number of copies as he has (~200 between PDF and LuLu) but (a) I didn't charge as much as he did and (b) didn't hook up with any affiliate marketing / promotion until October of 2009. Sold about 150 copies (PDF + Lulu) before I found my current publisher.
Reddit explains their architecture, scaling and recent downtime
And they're not summarily killing the product. What a pleasant surprise.
Creative and Elegant Business Cards From February
As we come to the end of February, it would seem like a nice idea showcase some of the lovely business card designs that have been lovingly created!
A couple physics classes would explain almost all of these.
Flash and Flex based app, interesting acquisition. They are getting integrated into many online photo services and it is a very well done usable app for all skill levels. I also wonder if aviary.com is going to be acquired as they are just about as good and have many apps.
Ditto. Most unforgiving "tutorial" mode I've ever experienced in a platform/shooter... )-:
> Slightly less devastating storms predicted.

The AGW "settled science" claim was for significantly more devastating storms. Now we find that the AGW hypothesis leads to something significantly less.

The AGW argument is based on horrible consequences. If the consequences aren't actually horrible....

> Aside, this exact same story from a different news outlet already flooded through here last week and got no play. Why submit it again?

Actually, it's not. Last week's story was an "unpublishable" paper with basically the same conclusions. This week's is peer-reviewed and published. It was written by someone whose research KirinDave agreed with when it supported KirinDave's position but now that additional data has changed the author's position....

Perhaps KirinDave will tell us what would change his mind.

I used to believe in AGW but I now think that it is significantly overblown. I note that the "I used to be" argument is considered convincing by AGW advocates when followed by "a skeptic", so surely the other form deserves equal consideration.
Firefox may never hit 25 percent market share
So it's silly to have spare tires and jacks in cars, but houses should come with backup generators? :)
So it's a YC version of TrueSlant.com? Could be cool! Good luck, guys!
To add to your point - battery tech (as well as power management tech) has progressed, but we've invented ever more power-hungry devices to match that progress.

Those 4 AA batteries used to run your Game Boy for a handful of hours - nowadays a Li-ion battery packk that's half the size of those AA batteries can keep your Game Boy running for just about indefinitely. Except we no longer run 8MHz CPUs in our mobiles ;)
Actually, ChevronTexaco owns the patent:

http://www.ev1.org/chevron.htm
MAN KNOWLEDGE, IDEAS OF MEN, BY MEN, FOR MAN.
I wish Ryan King had said why the other DBs named were rejected. That could be useful info.
Internet Exploiter 2 – bypassing DEP
Signs: The most useful thing you pay no attention to
Unfortunately...I have been using Wachovia...and I just got off the phone with them, and they confirmed that I can't do a wire transfer without coming into a branch - which sucks.
You can always use the mobile version which IS a separate webpage that you type the domain and your password into and it generates your password (which you copy paste).

http://supergenpass.com/mobile/

Although this still requires that you trust supergenpass.com to not change the javascript it is serving you into something malicious.
Probably no effect until they start retooling the site for buzz/ picasa etc..
Use undefinedundefinedundefinedundefinedundefinedundefinedundefinedundefinedundefinedundefinedundefined as your password.

That happens if Cookies are disabled.
With chrome I can only use 1 digit for the inches in height (could not enter 5'11")
Thanks. It is a pain in the ass. If the problem were consistently one thing or another on my system, I could live with it. As it is, not knowing whether or not the problem will pop up is too much for me to deal with.

I'll take another look at my font libraries and setup to see if there's anything I can do.
Github hosts a lot of your code for free as long as you're ok with everyone seeing it. If you want to put your company's source on it, you need to pay for private. It's an even clearer pricing tier segmentation than Unfuddle's.
We sold our condo in March (after two months on the market) for $12k under asking and bought a house in April for $1k under asking. We're told that if we wanted to sell our house now, we'd easily make $40k on it because things have heated up again.

We're not interested in selling, though.
This is a good idea, but the execution is lacking. In particular, the data entry is really painful. There are two big problems:

1. I have to somehow know the calorie counts for every exercise I do and every food I eat. You should let me input the activity/food and calculate the calories.

2. I am not in front of my computer all day. In particular, when I'm exercising and eating I'm not. And that's exactly when I want to add data to a service like this. You need an iPhone app, not a web app.
Journalism: Based on bringing transparency.
Secretjournalismstartup: Clouded in secrecy.

While this dichotomy has always been present in news media (some ink-stained retches, including yours truly, will protect scoops and anonymous sources to the grave), not knowing who is really behind this beyond people "funded and advised by YCombinator, the people behind Reddit, posterous, and Justin.tv" doesn't encourage faith. Maybe the mystique will make up for it.
>> The BBC is NOT a government body. It IS state funded, yes, but it is a separate entity with a board a charter and lots of non-governmental oversight.

>> there is a difference between tax funded and government owned.

Okay, yes, that was poor wording on my part. Whether truly State-run or some sort of tax-funded NGO, though, the premise is more or less the same. He who has the gold makes the rules, and in this case, the BBC's funding is a result of legislation, not the direct choices of voluntary customers. You're right, there is a difference, and I was conflating the two for the sake of my argument. I still would not say that they're answerable to the viewers, however, even if it is more responsive to public opinion than outright State-owned TV would be.

>> And in my opinion (and it really is my opinion, but I know others share it) we have the best TV programing in the world.

This could be; won't argue with you there. This is still not an acceptable premise for spending other peoples' money to promote subjective matters of taste, though. Government and culture don't mix, on the same basis that government and religion don't mix.

>> I think the BBC is MUCH more accountable to us viewers than pretty much any other network I've seen.

You may very well be right; I wouldn't necessarily doubt that. But you have to ask, is the BBC seemingly more accountable than US stations because it is tax-funded? Or are there some other reasons why US stations seem comparatively less accountable/responsive? I tend to think it's the latter. There are plenty of explanations for why the television market is the way it is. Artificially high barriers to entry. Unnecessarily-limited broadcast spectrum. Regulatory capture. Practically all of our media being owned by the same handful of people/corporations. Situations ALL facilitated in one way or another -- you guessed it -- by government.

>> Also we get major sports and other stuff on the free channels

And here, we've come full circle: people are paying for this "free" content.

edit:"bandwidth"->"spectrum"
Apologies in advance for hijacking the thread, but...

Why can't Google, with all the smart developers in the world, learn to read the language settings from my Browser to choose the language I'd like to see their site in, rather than guessing a language based on where I happen to be sitting?

People travel to foreign countries and use the internet there. Fortunately, every browser in history has had a way to tell websites what language to display.

Unfortunately, every Google site ignores that setting.

Picnik: La edición de fotos ahora es divertida. Sweet!
Doubtful. But there's some logic to arguing, "Hey, we don't quite agree with the DOJ's ruling about us, but given how that went it seems it would also apply to Google."

If a court of law finds you guilty of dong something you think should be allowed, and later you see a competitor doing more or less the same thing, why not argue that such judgments should be applied equally?
Well, you're going to see drastically different numbers depending on content. The CPC ranges from pennies to around $50 for specific ads. So you can't make any sort of comparison between your site and your friend's.

I recommend that you just run a/b tests. Is there a reason why you don't want to switch to adsense for a week? Then just compare your numbers and go with whatever is better.
please add metric options also
(Author here)

I am sorry I sounded angry. Besides the sensationalist title, I surely didn't intend to.

I've done more Actionscript programming than any other language, keep OSS projects with it, I am not angry at all.

I do think, however, that specially inside the agency niche (to where I belong), there is a very strong blindfold, people really believe that flash is the only tech that matters on the web. Really.

I was aiming more at agency flash devs, to try to stir up some of the signs one can pick up.

I do have a lot of frustration to vent, however, with the toolset, community (certain parts of it) and Adobe. But ironically, all 3 of these have improved greatly in the last couple of years.
About 8 years ago I helped a friend put together an SEO book he wrote (along similar lines as the old SEO Book) that he went on to sell at $37 a copy - title is "search engine optimization strategies" if you want to find it.. don't want to get accused of linking for profit :-) Revenues well into the six figures by now and residual sales continuing. There's money in them thar hills (though not for me, I got paid for my hours at the time only, oops!).
The color scheme screams "for women", but I think there are plenty of men who would like to lose weight.

I guess you could look at that two ways:

* The site is 'opinionated' and has decided to focus on female users.

* You're tossing half of your potential user base out the window.
Elegant answer for simple question - What Should I Watch This Weekend?
The oldest use of the quote that I can find is from a 1998 WHO document:
http://www.searo.who.int/en/Section1257/Section2181/Section2...

“Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas" is a 2001 novel by James Patterson, so I don't think that can be the origin of the story.

Also, note that Brian Dyson was CEO of Coca Cola Enterprises (NYSE: CCE) not CEO of The Coca Cola Company (NYSE: KO). (When people say "Coke" or "Coca Cola" they almost always mean the latter, not the former.)
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=5949&fuse...
Glottal Opera -- see vocal cords in action
Because it's completely unnecessary for most? In the last 7 years I've lived in city, suburb, and now on a farm. The last time I lost power was about 10 years ago living in the city.

Why should my house come with an expensive item I will most likely never need and if I did need it, is available within hours?
Can Anyone Help HelpAReporterOut Understand That Competition Is Perfectly Legal
"I just find it curious that these specific themes tend to occur again and again."

The markets for each of these categories is huge with plenty of room for innovation in specialized niches. It makes sense to me to see plenty of competition in each category.

That said, they do tend to line up pretty well with the demographic involved in your typical internet startup:

Project Management/Bug Tracking = Developer

Discussion Forums = Gamer

Music/Events = Hipster

Dating and Match-Making = Single

And there you have your computer programmer with ironic t-shirt, no girlfriend and a level 70 mage in WoW.
wow, why didn't someone come up with this idea sooner?

i had a linens n things gift card that i hung on to for about a year bc i couldn't use it. then they went bankrupt and...well, then i just had a card, and no gift.
To sit and chat with the gents who plan strategic acquisitions at Google would be a fun day. Great buyers market. Hope the exit was HUGE.
I use the previous year's Christmas gift cards to buy gifts the following Christmas. :)
The Power of Building Codes: Chile Death Toll Less Than 1% That of Haiti
Become a Firefox Personas Reviewer
Did these other sites permit you to post listings directly to their site using an API? How about extending this idea to motorcycles? You could add cycletrader or other motorcycle specific sites.
I'm really interested to see how they'll handle liability. If they want to make a lot of money, I'm going to guess the founders won't be vetting anything before it gets published. However, if they're pushing it on Reddit, writing the checks, selling the stuff to other publishers, I'd find it hard to see a DMCA claim holding up. At that point they're doing a lot more than for their content creators than Youtube or Scribd, making them accomplices in any libel lawsuit that might come up.

Will they go to the wall for one of their writers? Doubtful.

So do they have a new angle on the legal side of things?
It is funny, though not surprising considering it comes from a right-wing think tank, that this article doesn't mention that Canadian banks are much more regulated wrt what they’re allowed to do with their money and higher capital requirements. The investment banking side of the business is much smaller relatively in Canada. The problem in the U.S. isn’t the retail banks; the problem is the big investment banks on Wall Street.

The Canadian capital markets don’t amount to very much, and mortgage securitization was pointless because the big five banks hold all the mortgages anyways.