skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People seem to be under the impression that Chrome has a location bar. It doesn't. It only has a search box with a "smart" I'm Feeling Lucky feature. If it detects that your query matches a url, it will re-write your query to the normalized url it matched and show you the corresponding page. Otherwise, it shows you all search results as you would expect of a search box.

To use the url-mapping feature, you need to start your search with either a top-level domain name or a protocol specifier, or end it with a "/". If you just type a hostname on your LAN, it won't try to visit that location, because it's not a location bar. It'll search, and fail to trigger the Lucky feature because a single word isn't specific enough to be detected as a url.

Though, it seems if you put a "/" at the end, then next time you type the word, it matches against the history and gets it right.

Anyway, it's too smart for me. I have trouble figuring it out sometimes.
I disagree with the analysis:

Of necessity, airlines enjoy small, government-granted oligopolies on various routes. That is to say that passenger air travel bandwidth along various routes is finite and heavily regulated. The public (via the government) allocates and rations that bandwidth among the carriers. (That is why airlines are in the regulatory category of "common carriers".)

Because of those oligopolies, and in some cases de facto monopolies, airlines are in a unique position to price gouge and to use discriminatory pricing.

Charging for carry-ons, which are vital to many kinds of travel, easily has the potential to be an example of gouging with discriminatory effect. For example, one can easily imagine a scenario wherein travel becomes hugely less expensive for BigBig Inc. (who can negotiate a big discount on carry-ons with their purchasing leverage) than it is for Ma-n-Pa LLC. At the end of the slippery slope, the oligopoly power of the airlines would translate into an oligopoly of consumption, at which point the public's interest in granting these routes to airlines has been corrupted. Yes, even without carry-on fees BigBig Inc. still has purchasing leverage but common carriers are regulated so as to limit the size of that price discrimination.

The situation could be compared to another kind of common carrier: providers of land-line telephone service. They too are granted monopolies and oligopolies in various markets (out of a historical engineering necessity). The regulations permit them to gouge and discriminate with fees for features that are deemed inessential - such as call-waiting or caller-id reporting. At the same time service deemed essential, such as basic "life-line" service, are price-controlled legislatively (on the theory that the right-of-ways granted to the phone companies, such as the use of utility poles, ultimately require a license from the public).
If you read the article to completion you'll note that the author addresses both of your points. He only recommends it for clients who you have a long running relationship with and who thus have a pretty good idea of what your services cost. He also notes that the price generally comes out to more than what his normal rate would be, given you use the tactic in the situation he outlines. Plus he explicitly addresses clients who feel they can't judge the value properly: "just give them a quote".
This reminds me of the following bit from a marvelous NPR piece a couple weeks ago where they interviewed Elmore Leonard and his sons in front of an audience. (Transcript at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1252532..., but one part was marked "unintelligible" so I've filled it in from memory). C Leonard is one of the sons (Chris) and E is Elmore:

Mr. C. LEONARD: Well, Elmore, you gave me advice. I told you that I was writing a novel and you said, good. Don't use any other words but "said" for dialogue and leave out the parts that people tend to skip. I think those were the two things you said.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. C. LEONARD: And they're both good, I have to tell you.

Mr. E. LEONARD: They're true today, yes.
Crockford didn't create JSON any more than Al Gore created the Internet. He coined the term and evangelized the use of JSON as a data format.
Slightly surprised to see how similar Photoshop is to today's version.
An apple engineer would risk and/or go through this for $10K? You have got to be kidding.
Ah, how clear. A Car is a generic object (clearly an English object given the spelling of its attribute names), with untyped attributes.

The thing I wish the JavaScript community knew much earlier in their careers was actual software engineering knowledge, such as Object-oriented, or at least typed, languages.

var car = new Object();
car.colour = 'red';
car.wheels = 4;
car.hubcaps = 'spinning';
car.age = 4;
Pricing is not done by purely rational actors. Saying "charge what you want" creates goodwill that can improve your rates.
Were they with a label in 2003? If so, it is certainly reasonable that 100% of a small number (their take from "in Rainbows") could trump 1% of a large number (their take from "Hail to the Thief"). HTTT sold well upwards of a million copies (gold in the US, platinum in the UK, which is at least 1.1 million). If the label's cut were not so excessive, Radiohead probably would have made more from their previous albums than from "in Rainbows."
I know that's why i say that in actuality the number of trials is 4. Each trial compounds on the previous.
In 1996 there were 250 academic journal articles published about marijuana, and in 2008 there were 2100[1]. In the US there are a handful of marijuana trials going on, but it's still very difficult to get DEA approval. I was at the MAPS conference this past weekend, and they were saying that to get approval for their psilocybin and MDMA research it was generally taking 2-4 years per study. And since marijuana is also schedule 1, the approval process is probably comparable.

[1]Source: Claudia Little in Psychedelic Salon podcast 218: http://bit.ly/doBrGA.
Ow, the cross-eyed mode isn't so easy on the eyes and not sure how that would work. Anyone had better luck (and vision) than I did?
""Do X, Y, and Z and your code will improve" is something only managers believe"

The thing is, it is absolutely correct for some definitions of X, Y and Z. There are plenty of programmers in the workplace who just suck at constructing code. They don't know how to write good comments, format their code logically and consistently, use good variable and function names, etc. It goes even further: they do not understand why these things are important. I still see plenty of code like this:

bool nothingToDo; // Is there anything to do

....

if (nothingToDo)
{

// We don't need to continue

return;

}

or

if (time.elapsed() > 10) // If ten seconds or more have passed

{...}

Requests to refactor such code are often met with "This is trivial, just step through the code and figure it out", sometimes from senior programmers (at least in title). And these are not necessarily stupid people, they are often good programmers but not very good software engineers. Have you ever read some of the code open sourced by Google and found yourself thinking "Sheetz, this code is ultra clean"? I bet the people responsible for Google's coding guidelines have read Code Complete. I have been involved in writing coding standards a few times and I referred to Code Complete in each of those instances.

I also completely disagree that this book was written for managers. A manager with no technical background is very likely to dismiss refactoring or code layout as wasted time.
There are better ways to create goodwill. Exceeding expectations or being a fun person to collaborate with, for example. And neither of those approaches put your livelihood in jeopardy by introducing unnecessary risk with a gimmick.

I'm starting to feel like the 37signals guys in this thread. There's something to be said for making a living by doing good work and charging a fair price for it.
A pixel is not a pixel is not a pixel
There's more than one variable at work with the Radiohead album.

1. Over time, you would expect to make more for an album. Expanding fan base, inflation, ...

2. Insane word of mouth advertising because of the pricing plan.

3. It was probably a better album. As the article mentions, pay what you want is a great way to inspire better work.
The last project I did was as a barter. At first it started with talk of money being exchanged. Setting up a new webserver, installing some LAMP applications, etc. This was supposed to take a few hours, it really only took 2. My billable rate wasn't even worth the time it would take to do the paperwork (this would include getting a tax id and paying payroll tax). So I just asked for a slice on his ESX server. I'm happy, client is happy, a single penny wasn't spent by either of us.
Apple Requests Return Of Lost iPhone Prototype
Not so! During the current recession wages have gone down while productivity has gone up.

Furthermore even people in marginal jobs will make more if they live in a high cost area. For instance a gardener can charge more per hour in Los Angeles than in Ohio, even though the productivity of the two are identical.

Wages are fundamentally set by supply and demand. Productivity affects demand, and hence affects wages. But a high cost of living changes the supply curve, and also affects wages.
You could have mandatory schooling with no state run schools. That is more or less what the new health care bill does with health insurance, mandates coverage but leaves the job of selling policies to private insurance companies.
Indeed so. But as Gizmodo paid for, took possession of, and then publicized the device, it seems pretty clear that they've crossed a line into criminality. The US customs service spends money on finding and seizing knockoffs, including the iPhone, and I wouldn't be that surprised if they moved on it; even though they might only seeks a token penalty like 1 day in jail.

Gawker has money and connections

And Apple doesn't? :) Really, the only reason I can think of not to come down on Giz like a ton of bricks right now is the perception that they've been throwing their weight around with developers lately.
the hospital is never reimbursed, and private emergency rooms transfer the patient to the county

This is not the case. Hospitals (including private ones) get some reimbursement from Medicare for bad debt cases. My wife manages the department responsible for this reimbursement at a local hospital, and we've had endless discussions about this. And in a conversation with their CFO over a friendly ping-pong game, I was told that contrary to public wisdom, the ER is actually profitable -- and this is an urban hospital with a high "disproportionate share" of bad debt.
He might be saying that some people will fail at it no matter how many times they try.
A new(?) way of pricing ads
Hi!
I am currently working on a webapp that delievers news to users. The project is merely a hobby, but it might be fun to make a few bucks off it as well. I won't go into details on the app, lets just say if you like tech-news, thats what you get, if you like tech and science, you get science as well.

Lately I've been thinking of introducing ads, and how to make it blend with the real conten. The idea is to offer advertiseing-space in some of the biggest news-channels, like tech. I would then have a bidding round, on that slot (or your ad is shown more than your competitors ads).

The bidders offer what they think it's worth, while they don't know how much the other companies are offering, for example: Company A offers 1k, company B offers 1.5k and company C offers .5k. When all bids are made, the company that offered the most money ends up having to pay, while the others get free advertisement. Company B, who won the bidding, will then get much more time than the other companies, but their ads will also be shown, how much depends on what they offered.

That's pretty much it, what do you think? And please, no "the web is full of news-crawlers, you'll never make a single buck", I know, and I don't care.
Everything you say is a little wrong. There's nothing unusual about bills passing just before a recess. The Federal Reserve Act was big news at that time. Extensive hearings were held on it and it received overwhelming support from Democrats in Congress as well as President Wilson.

The Federal Reserve is partly a federal agency (led by the Board of Governors) and partly a group of quasi-independent banks. The 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks are nominally independent, but have a lot of control from the federal agency, including direction of their open market operations.

The Federal Reserve does not directly lend money to the federal government. It usually buys U.S. Treasury securities on the open market. This benefits the government by leading to lower interest rates.

Most of the profits from the Federal Reserve are paid to the U.S. federal government (the member banks get a 6% dividend on what they are required to pay in to the Reserve).
Another rule: use short words.

"Short words are the best and old words when short are best of all," as Winston Churchill would have it.
Oracle is one of these companies that seems to have a corporate culture which finds it morally wrong to offer any product for free for which they can legally charge you.

If Java were not already open source, you can bet they would find some way to start charging for the JRE.

For them, it's just business.

Yes, you can argue that it makes no business sense to do this, nor to charge for the ODF adapter, but for them, business is making people buy a product, even if it costs them in the long run. It's almost like a mental block.
I hear what you say, but my gut reaction is that there are clients who will pay a higher, more appropriate rate for certain work, but only if it's not demanded of them. My personal forays into the world of pricing, with informal A/B testing, is that customers will pay a higher rate if they suggest it, and not if I do.

YMMV, but your insistance on pricing "correctly" and not putting your livlihood at risk suggests to me that you are not getting the money you might, becuase you're not accepting the risks that make it possible.

As I say, I don't know your context, and your opinion adds a respectable cynicism to an otherwise exuberantly optimistic discussion, but my (limited) experience suggests it works.

I don't blame you if you decline to run the risk.
Price Elasticity of Demand
rubyonrails.com redirects there too
This seems to be a smart movie on Jobs' part. I'm not an Apple fan per se (I don't own any Apple products) but can see some definite advantages to Jobs' strategy.

1. Every business guy I've talked to loved the iPhone's power and what they could do without needing to lug a laptop around everywhere. So the iPhone has a definite business appeal, and keeping porn out helps keep that ambiance.
2. Clearly he is using the porn store for Android as a, "hey, Android is entertainment, iPhone is for professionals " type of message.
3. I think the other smart thing, which no one in Apple will talk about is the reduced bandwidth consumption they will have by not having porn! It is an inherently bandwidth hungry system (presuming online, not stored in a DB) to be encouraging videos and images.
3a) This allows them to leave out a strategically bad (PR/Marketing-wise) niche that would strain an already strained infrastructure.
3b) This strain on the infrastructure would affect those business types that they have good appeal with.

FWIW - I think people claiming that Apple is socially conservative is absurd. They have a former VP candidate for the Democratic party on their board. And I bet if people looked into it, they'd find a health balance of board political donations go to liberals.
Doing this sort of thing changes the dynamics of the relationship between you and your customer.

Let's not forget that it also changes the dynamics from the developer's perspective, as well. I don't consult anymore, but I imagine I would work a lot more efficiently in the strategy described - it would help me focus on solving the client's real problems instead of creating justifications for the hours I bill.
Why are you looking at Montana law when this incident occurred in California?

http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2010/lost-and-found-californ...

It's not a secret that when you find lost property you either leave it with the establishment in case the owner comes back looking for it, contact the owner directly or, failing that, take it to the police. Instead of doing that, he took it home, took it apart and sold it to gizmodo.
Bpo services in singapore
Specialising in IT Services, Software developemnt, webdesign & WebDevelovement, Digital Video & 3D Animation, xsosys.com provides an incredible service to your Information Technology needs.
While I like the looks of the new MacBooks (not the looks of the older models), they are still a matter of taste. In that sense I don't think they have reached the limits of industrial design yet.
One eyebrow went up at "...he made the heretofore unthinkable suggestion that I finally focus on my novel. I actually felt OK taking him up on the offer and spent a few weeks at the artists' colony Yaddo".

The other eyebrow went up, and the jaw dropped open, at "Salvation came in late October when Organic Guy managed to score some White Russian...Within two weeks, the number of times J was marked for behaving aggressively at school dropped back to the single digits, even zero on some days. This was all the scientific evidence we needed."

I'm very, very much in favor of medical cannabis. I don't doubt she saw some positive results...but her home sounds like it might itself be a bit 'dramatic' if not in fact 'volatile'. To say her story is even anecdotal evidence is a stretch -- in no way is it scientific.

Let's be scientific about coming to scientific conclusions, is what I'm suggesting. I'd love to see a valid, scientific study done on this topic, for I believe we would find benefit in cannabis. Stories like these, though well-intended, make it all seem like more of a Moonshine and Snake Oil movement.
Just curious--in situations like this would there ever be a situation where they run out of ad inventory to serve?
New technology - the threat to our information
Clicking the thumbnailed images did not reveal more detail, and merely popped the thumbnail itself into a Lightbox-like viewer.

I found this amusing in an article condemning perceived affordances.
I can tell this after 5 years and 20+ Data Quality web services created for actual users paying actual $'s.

Create separate SOAP, XML, REST services on different http addresses. That way you cover 99% of users. Different http addresses allows you to scale via different functionally isolated servers.

SOAP is good for computer to computer interface using tools. Good for moderate to complex web services needing a batch processing of many records in Request/Response. Tools help with complex XML structure you get Request/Response Intellisense under .NET. You can use code generators for quick development.

REST is good for a manual occasional use, good for quick test and simple single record web services not requiring a batch mode. You can look at the XML response in the browser.

XML is a matter of preference and those who got familiar with pre-SOAP. You don't get Request/Response Intellisense. Using XML DOM will slow down processing - you can compose the XML quickly if doing it with string operations. Do not have any advantage over SOAP.

Bottom line for our customers - early days XML pre-SOAP just created their interface and forgot it. It just works. When SOAP came the tools made possible quick development. They created it and forgot it. It works fine for them. For quick assessment new customers are using REST. Get a feeling with manual test via the browser. They can see the XML response right away in the browser. When they need multiple Request Records they usually go with SOAP. That way we are covering all bases.
Tumblr Raises Another $5 Million in Funding
But, Alex, while I believe that no mother would actively harm her own child, the mother in question is not medically trained, and she has NO IDEA whether or not the long-term effects of marijuana are better for her child than the long-term effects of

a) doing nothing at all for his autism,

b) doing whatever is current standard practice for treating autism,

or

c) doing something that is bizarre and zany for autism.

She sees some behaviors change for the better, behaviors that might have changed for the better on their own. She has no way to sample the tissue of her child's brain to know what is happening to his brain. On the basis of her self-report, she doesn't appear to be doing him active short-term harm, but as a parent I try to validate what I do for my children with the observations of many other observers. She would be able to help her child with more likelihood of success if placebo-controlled, double-blind studies compare all the possible treatment approaches out there.
"Ability" doesn't imply "first-class support" or "good idea". In languages that aren't Lisp this usually ends up being done by passing a raw string to eval() which is extremely error prone. It's not something you do lightly.

Constructing macros in Lisp however /is/ something you do lightly. A typical lisp program might have a 20/80 division of macros/functions. You aren't going to see a sane program in other languages that do the same thing.
Software that can interpret sketches as input (e.g. a circuit diagram)
This happened once before, a year ago, guess its someone forgetting to renew the domains every year:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8epum/has_rubyo...
It proves that it is possible for a "pay-what-you-want" pricing scheme to generate more money for producers than the traditional model.

I am sure more money was spent in total on their previous album. What Radiohead did in this case was shrink the total market for their album yet capture more revenue for themselves. From an economist point of view Radiohead caused the GDP to shrink - less $ of goods were created - yet Radiohead got paid more and more people were able to listen to music they liked. So the world is better off yet the GDP is smaller.

Coupons and rebates are another example of "pay-what-you-want-pricing." The manufacturer sets a high list price then offers a discount to people motivated enough to jump through the hoops needed to get the discount. You decide if it matters enough to you.

My point is that there is room for innovation in economics - trotting out a 200 year old theory about grazing animals may not apply in a world where most of the things people want can be provider for almost zero cost.
It is exactly that kind of pretentiousness up with which I shall not put.
Fringe Companies: Bootstrap Or Venture Capital?
What? No Beagle Brothers? HERESY! =)

Good set of pics; a lot brought back some good memories. Thanks
I think it's a bug with the "Flow" theme. Suggest an alternative, I'm definitely ready to move on.
Boom Times for Young Workers
It thankfully steals nothing from PHP

I love this quote.
Perl's syntax is designed to be more close to natural language.

Both Lisp and Perl are in the same camp ... I could hardly read an algorithm written in them before learning and actively working with them.

Either way, I'm tired of languages that can only be extended by adding functions. Declarative APIs require much more than that.
This is a really neat puzzle. Try to figure it out before reading the solution.
Technically it cost $5,000 and at least one man's reputation, and possibly his job.