skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Assuming that each download is a spoiled sale is utterly wrong.

People download stuff from net because it cost them nothing, they have good connectivity and the process runs in background. People share stuff because it cost them nothing.

Sharing works only on flat-rate tariffs. That is the starting point.
Because have you ever ridden a bicycle with a flat tire? I hardly think the two use cases compare.

Anyway Comment #24 makes a lot of sense http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=40865#c24 I see the enhancement for the end users who have NFI what http is but leaving it there provides more advantages as a whole than removing it.
The author appears to have done a fair bit of self-promotion in Wikipedia, which seems like a bad sign (though of course it doesn't prove anything): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Tim32 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Graph_isomorphism&... (see, e.g., a reversion from David Eppstein, who most certainly knows his stuff, saying "Persistent long-term self-promotion; blocking may be indicated.").
The Iterative Web App: Redesign of the Compose Page
"Hence vesting."

Your equity only acts as an incentive to stay as long as it looks like you have a chance of winning. Just like investors will eventually stop throwing good money after bad if you don't meet your numbers, your Engineers will start looking for paying work.

Getting good people who have other options to work for free for any period of time is no mean feat. Personally, I've gone the other direction; I hire inexperienced people and train, but that only works because I am experienced myself.

(of course, I've never seriously tried to get VC, so I have no clue how difficult that is.)

My point is just that as long as you have your Engineers, you can cover infrastructure with beer money (at least, until you get really huge.) which I guess was your point, too, what with saying the barrier to entry is low.

I'm just saying; keeping a few really good engineers happy without money is not as easy as it sounds. And, it's not as hard as you think for Engineers to come up with money. I spent almost $60,000 on servers last year.
How does that work? Scheme vectors are all about mutable state and a lot of the list functions are, too. Did you get a better Scheme collections library than the rest of us?
Yes, yes I did. Sorry, screwed up the terminology.
Welfare ... what program are you talking about?
Lincoln's Missing Bodyguard
Single page link: http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&...
A lot of that has to do with cost of living, and cost of living is quite variable with geographic location. For example a developer in my state, SC can easily break even on his time/effort with lower rates than a developer in New York or LA.

I assume that developers in larger cities understand that developers in towns no one has ever heard of have lower rates.
It can currently import files from a camera via a SD or USB2 dongle
Are i5's and i7's really much faster? The clock-speeds are basically the same. I know there's more to it, like cache size and such, but clockspeed and number of cores is a lot of it, and that only changed slightly. (2.33GHz->2.4GHz for the cheap 15", I believe.)
I like how they charge $50 extra for what is essentially removing the plastic screen protector cover that causes all the "glare" in the first place.

A "matte" MacBook Pro has an exposed screen, no black border where the plastic cover is mounted, and looks almost perversely naked.
No amount of CPU would make the NVidia 9400 faster. It's simply a dog.
What about https:// ?
Perhaps nitpicky, but I took issue with this:

"No other vendor dominates mobile games like Apple now. With over 50,000 games in the App Store, it has 10 and 20 times what Nintendo and Sony offers respectively, and this before Apple’s Game Center has even shipped."

The Nintendo DS is the best selling gaming system of all time, mobile or not. Its not even a competition - they've sold over 2x as many DS's as Apple has sold iPhones.

Not to discredit the iPhone's success in any way, but no one has come close to toppling Nintendo off the gaming throne.
I've been using it a lot. I've built a couple Facebook apps with it and they're running great. Recently the language got exceptions, which makes writing robust services a lot better.
> reread my post, don't do amalgams.

If I misrepresented you, feel free to demonstrate said misrepresentations.

> I fail to see the correlation between proponents of "authenticity" and dictator regimes. First, in the article authenticity proponents are pictured as "anti-globalization" activists:

Do you really want to argue that anti-globalization folks are not (mostly) left of US center? Or that they don't idealize rather crappy third world countries?

> I rarely see vegetarians as mostly concerned by marxism.

Good for you, but no one said that they were. Few people, including vegetarians are "mostly concerned" with Marxism and it's quite possible to criticize consumer culture from a non-Marxist perspective. Nevertheless, a lot of such criticism is from such a perspective. That's why I wrote "FWIW, "marxist analysis" does produce a lot of railing against consumer culture which is apparently derived from their first principles. If you want to argue against market economy and consumer culture without invoking marxist principles, have at it."

> Moreover it is questionnable to correlate dictator regimes with Marxism: many south-amercian or african regimes are/were backed by the US/France/etc...

The existence of non-Marxist dictatorial regimes doesn't imply that Marxist regimes don't tend toward the dictatorial. Note also that western countries have supported somewhat Marxist clients.

> I'm just saying that there is a need for more autonomy in the system to prevent crises like recent ones (e.g. the rice crisis in 2008).

How about some supporting evidence for the "more autonomy" theory? IIRC, the rice crisis was due to a price increase that wasn't even noticed in the US. That's why I mentioned the recent corn crisis in Mexico. Prices went up more in the US, but Mexico had food riots.

> It's just common sense to say that third world countries with more food-producing agriculture (instead of say, cotton) are less fragile to speculation on food which can lead to disasters especially in bad years, or

I'm not interested in "common sense", I'm interested in what's actually true.

If cotton gives them a GDP of $2000/year while rice gives them a GDP of $500/year, cotton gives them a much bigger cushion if the rice price doubles. Yes, a cotton failure hurts, but so does a rice failure.

An extra $500/year can make a huge difference at this level. It may let them save enough to survive a bad year.

> that controlling their crops vs using GMO's makes them less economically dependent on big corporations.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that GMOs double their yield and the price is equal to 10% of their crop vs a "traditional" price of 0. That still looks like a 90% benefit. Why is that bad?

Of course, if the benefit is 10% but the extra cost is 50%, it's a bad deal, but foreign corps aren't in a position to force anyone to buy. (Their govts are, but that's a different problem.)

If you're going to argue that someone close to the edge shouldn't do what's most profitable for them, please provide the numbers.
A friend of mine launched a hosted service that allows people to build their own Q&A site for free. It's called QHub. Like any blog or forum it requires a lot of work to get the community built up but it's not impossible. I guess it all depends on the passion around that niche. http://www.qhub.com
Upgrade retailers like MacSales.com will buy the stuff back from you, so at least it's not entirely worthless.
An Animated Analysis of Pascal's Wager
You buy your notebooks based entirely on one connector? You must have a lot of USB 3 devices your livelihood depends on.
Visual Aesthetics in Early Computing (1950-80)
> Will somebody please forward this to the ACTA negotiators?

What makes you think that they haven't known the numbers for years?

More to the point, what makes you think that telling them the numbers will change their position?
Assuming that each download is a spoiled sale is utterly wrong.

It also brings up interesting questions like, "What other purchases would they have forgone?"
5-Day 1-On-1 Instructor Led CCIE Security Mock Lab Training
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You watched

http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-bo...

, didn't you?
I lost interest when he said a good product isn't good enough, you need some sort of spam engine.

That is a severe distortion; of course he never said that. He didn't imply it, either, unless you add the assumption that all marketing is spam.

As for "good software sells itself", the bulk of the post is devoted to an example where that didn't happen.
Spin is not only a matter of factual misstatement and omission. In fact, I'd use a stronger term for those ("lying", for instance). The spin is in the use of slanted terms at every opportunity. Hard-earned tax dollars. Highest level in American history. Staggering budget deficit. Dumped in the laps of our children. No free lunch. System risks collapsing. Doubling all income tax rates. Unemployment costs have surged. Numerous strings attached. Are taxpayers getting their money's worth?

Even if there is not a single misstatement of fact, and not a single consequential omission, even if every single one of those phrases is in itself an entirely defensible description, that's a whole lot of spin.

And all that spin makes the article look much less useful to me, because -- not being an expert on US taxation or federal finances -- I don't know whether there are in fact any misstatements or omissions that are relevant, and the spin suggests that the author may be more interested in promoting a particular viewpoint than in giving as accurate an account as possible. (So: thank goodness for the spin; it saves me from being taken in from something that looks even-handed and factual when it isn't...)

It's certainly not hard to think of some things that might be important omissions. For instance, it seems like there's a considerable difference between a one-off huge spend and a general policy of spending a huge amount; the US government has (reasonably enough, prima facie) been doing a lot of one-off spending in the hope of stimulating its troubled economy; so are those big increases "since 2008" and "in the last decade" systematic increases in government spending, or are they part of a short-term attempt to stop the economy collapsing? Oh, and are they inflation-adjusted? One other comparison in the article is, but curiously the author doesn't say about these conveniently scary figures.

As for your final question: That figure of $31k is for spending, not taxation; the amount collected in tax is allegedly $18k per person. So, the question is more like: Would the average person say "I'm willing to give 45% of my income to the federal government, so long as I get back 70% more than I put in"? I suspect the average person probably would, although of course that might just be because they wouldn't appreciate that the difference is going to come back to bite them or their children in the ass.

(Yes, I appreciate that most of that $31k/person doesn't reach them in the form of cash: some of it is in public education, infrastructure, defence spending, etc. And yes, I appreciate that it doesn't reach or benefit all people equally; but then the $18k isn't taken from all people equally, either. But a discussion that takes all that stuff into account isn't going to begin with talk like "give 80% of my income to the federal government".)
> Candidates grow frustrated because they've responded to a recruiter who isn't going to work for them until it's financially convenient (i.e. they find a candidate who pays a juicy enough contingency fee),

No recruiter actually cares whether you get hired. They care whether they get paid. Since they can get paid when someone else is hired ....

> and the candidate in the long term has to continue burning up their own resources looking for work.

You can't outsource your career to someone who isn't dependent on your success. (You probably can't outsource your career to anyone.)
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة و ديبورتيفو لاكورونا بث مباشر
http://egyteams.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_5084.html
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة و ديبورتيفو لاكورونا بث مباشر
Panerai Replica, Replica Panerai, Panerai Replica Watches
Wow, wouldn't this be a recruiter's dream? What prevents them from harvesting this and spamming us all?
I'd like to know PG's development setup was when he was building Viaweb. I heard it mentioned somewhere that PG used vim, I'd like to see his .vimrc, etc. etc. from the time.
Well, it's not so much which parts of the SSD have been touched, it's more about which pages have currently-in-use blocks stored in them. If you're using half the capacity of the drive, then it's likely you have a considerable number of empty (or at least erasable-without-needing-extra-writes) pages--especially if your drive's controller does some basic defragmentation.

And no, SSDs aren't worthless without TRIM. But if you're likely to use the majority of the storage space on the drive and do a lot of writes besides, it could be the difference between "fast" and "really damn fast." Either way it'll still beat the pants off most rotational disk drives.

I think the takeaway, though, is that if you've spent potentially-obscene amounts of money on an SSD, wouldn't you prefer that your OS take full advantage of its capabilities to consistently deliver top performance?

(And no, that's not a dig at OS X. I'd recommend that Windows XP users upgrade to Win7 if they're considering upgrading to an SSD simply for the TRIM support. It can make that much of a difference depending on the user.)
I can't help comparing this to the extreme absence of self-promotion in the most prominent example of somebody doing this who turned out to be the real thing (Perelman).
When I was a freshman, I got an email from Microsoft that said "One of our recruiters recently reviewed your resume and is very interested in speaking with you about your interests and skills".

I didn't actually have a résumé at the time.

I wouldn't call that particular tactic black hat, but it did raise my suspicions.
Accenture, I imagine, has a lot of overhead. Freelancers, in general, don't. I rent an office for $200 a month and buy a laptop maybe every other year. All my business comes in via referrals. So my costs are pretty negligible. Thus a lower rate.
Similar site (loosely similar):

http://brand.site.co.il/riddles/usingyourhead.html
There's a bit of a HN discount built-in, at least for me ($100/hr vs. $125 normally). Reason being I'd hope to get a lot clearer specs from folks here, which cuts out a lot of wasted time.
Twilight Saga - Imax
IMAX - The official web site of the entertainment technology company. Contains list of global theatres, films and distributors.
Looks like Opera Mini removed it a while back also. I didn't even notice. :) So in the end, it's not that big a deal imho.
Enjoyed this article.

A similar theme (modern communication technology prefigured in earlier practices) can be found in Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage.
I think most people here agree that SO is head-and-shoulders above its competition. I can point to specific things about it that I don't like, but in the end I come back and I appreciate the content. What I am curious to see (and I think this is roughly what bonaldi is talking about) is how well the SX software supports other less-technical communities.

My main concern is that SO had such a large and willing user community from day 1, that you could survive problems in converting visitors into active participants just through sheer numbers. For a nascent community, there are the karmic barriers to entry (e.g. I've been a casual SO user for over a year, and am still not able to fix someone else's spelling mistake!). Also, the question domain of SO lends itself to being able to ask a fairly concise question and getting a decent answer with a minimum of back-and-forth. This is important, because SX handles discussion so poorly (and I realize that's by design).

Anyway, I hope it works out for you - I do admire your goals and ambition. I just hope you keep an open mind about what the software needs to do to best serve the new communities, and adjust it accordingly.
> low-cost, low-quality pages for long-tail Google search results

It's called spamming. Mahalo is spam, Jason is a spammer; friend or not that's simply what he does.
You definitely seem to be on a similar track! IActionable is interesting, I hadn't really considered trying to handle the rule aspect of assigning achievements, though I can see for some sites how it certainly would be valuable. Have you had any luck getting traction?
I have a Microsoft story which beats that: I was invited to give a talk at Microsoft Research about research I had done, and when I arrived I was introduced as "Colin Percival, who wants to work for us".

I gave my talk and escaped as quickly as I could.
Chrome address bar is very smart. It will decode the %xx%xx%xx escape to their recognizable original characters, e.g.

http://i42.tinypic.com/241kxhc.png

But when you copy the whole URL, it will be copied as the %xx%xx escape as every URL do

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en_US&query=%E6%B5%8B%E8...

Note if you only copy partial of the URL, not the whole URL, you will still get decoded text
Probably Apache defaulting to the first virtual host.
I like it. It's pretty cool.
The email address in your profile is only visible to YC staff. If you want people to be able to contact you, put your email address into the about: box.
Interesting - I have the same anecdote - I have purchased _three_ generations of Macintosh Laptops - 2008, 2005, 2002 - And the last two, unfortunately, have been lemons.

Interesting failure pattern - overheating resulting in CPU stalling resulting in persistent Spinning-beach-ball of Death. The 2008 Airport dies, sporadically, but it has had a good run for the last 3-4 months, so I no longer carry my USB-WiFi dongle (Amazing that they even make one for Macs)

On the flip side, I'm telling myself that the last five years of misery will be worth it when it feels so good to upgrade to a laptop that is flawless (fingers crossed) - think of how amazingly good it will feel to have applications launch, consistently, within 30 seconds. :-)

(Regardless, even with the weird pain, I've never even considered switching back to Windows Laptops. CMD+Space, terminal, Enter is just too perfect to consider doing so.)
Ask HN: Pricing models, stand-alone software vs. enterprise what works?
My company is currently (or should I say typically) reviewing pricing for our product. We're too small to compete against our largest (and much more successful) competitor directly, but we've historically priced to stay about 20% below them. They gear their offering as an enterprise rollout typically costing in the millions, while we pitch to stand-alone users. Obviously it's hard to compete well in this arena.

We're looking at repositioning ourselves towards the other end of the market, against other stand-alone vendors. But our pricing is about 2x theirs even though we offer about 2x the features. There are many more vendors in this space, and one defacto standard vendor that looks to be on its way out.

We've gained pretty good traction in both areas, but we feel we're getting close to maximizing this "in-between market areas" space and want to expand. It's obvious to us right now, with the way the market is, that competing against our enterprise competitor more directly will just result in us getting squashed like a bug (they don't do very many acquisitions and out technology wouldn't integrate easily into their portfolio anyways). So it looks like we'll be fighting down market.

Since we're priced well over those competitors, we have three choices.

1) Pitch what we have, and hope our feature delta carries the day. We have evidence though that we've lost a few bids to cheaper, but less capable competitors.

2) Lower the price on what we have to directly compete. But we risk cases where we might have made $100 to instead make $50 without guaranteeing at least a 200% increase in sales to make up the difference. Plus the perceived "premium" value for our product potentially goes out the window and we end up head to head against the wrong competitors.

3) Build a new "lite" version of the software (for minimal effort, just turn off some features) and sell that as a new SKU. This helps us directly compete down market, while still being able to offer a flagship to our upmarket folks. This is the option that currently has the most traction. But it risks the same problems as option 2, while also increasing the complexity of our offerings (and all the stuff that goes with that).

Anybody have experience with this kind of thing? How'd it work out? Any tips, ideas?

(sorry I can't talk directly about my company or the space we're in, it might make sense to model us like an MS-Office competitor. Except that the large enterprise competitor is Google Docs, and we are also competing against MS-Office, iWorks, Star Office, Open Office etc. and everybody charges for their software...there's no advertising revenue in our space. The competitive landscape is almost exactly like that.)
Exactly how is that statement not sexist?
Aren't there already other apps meeting this need? The problem with a "directory" format is that it lacks personal depth. I've never gotten a qualified business lead from a directory (and I'm listed in several thanks to some certifications I've earned int he past). They are always looking at the rate and keywords rather than "Is this person good to work with?"

At the end of the day, personal referrals are the way most people do business. It's inefficient, yes, but so far I've never seen a suitable replacement.
You've pretty much got it, especially the 2nd paragraph. And your right they would need a developer, or at least some familiarity with the inner workings of their own site in order to insert the code needed to award an achievement to a user. They can also manually assign achievements to users, or generate achievement claiming codes and send those out to users as they see fit.
Ah, thank you for that.
I'm glad that got wontfixed. It's not the convention at all in Windows or OS X. I can't stand applications that unexpectedly mess with my clipboard. Lotus Notes does this all the time and it drives me nuts. I make an attachment, and bam, my copied text is gone.
ah! that makes a whole lot more sense. thanks.
Games. Art creation tools. Sound mixing. Musical creation tools. There are plenty of media-rich applications written by independents and minor players, enjoying far more success on the app store than they could via shrink-wrap channels or home consoles.
Dropbox is your friend. It works on all major platforms and even on the iPhone.

re: tethering, I'm outside the US of A, and iPhone tethering works fine. So this particular rant at Apple is misdirected.
I bolded the top row if you don't mind...

sans serif font + italics = no go
I'm actually half inclined to pay more for the West Coaster. Why? He's got better friends.

Sure its an intangible, and I might indeed be crazy (or have a bad case of selction bias from previous contacts) but I imagine a guy in an office in Palo Alto swirling around in his aeron and asking the guy behind him about how to X and getting an answer in 30 seconds. I imagine the mid-westerner embarking on a 20 minute google session to find out the same. They both had equal skill when they started, but the mid-westerner ended up costing more at a lower rate.
Analysis of existing ASDF files