skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
but the cartridge is still the high-value part

It costs them 8 cents to produce the blade they sell to you for $4. They have a high perceived value, but that's it.

They've taken double-edged blades that were simple, universally compatible and cheap and with some product design and major marketing effort convinced people that they needed 2, then 3, then 4, then 5, and now 6 blades to get a decent shave. They've deliberately manufactured the idea that the blade has value, and used patents to protect themselves from competition in that area.

So, you can choose a Gillette razor that is designed from the start to require constant replacement of a $4 part, or a classic razor with a high-cost stick that lasts a lifetime and 20 cent replacement blades. Seems right in line with the inkjet vs. laser printer examples.

Why, because if Gillette did it then so would Schick. And if Schick started giving away free razors then I might be tempted to try switching to a Schick razor next time I bought blades because the Schick cartridges might be twenty cents cheaper.

Of course. They do it because they need people to keep thinking of the stick as valuable. By paying for the stick, you've mentally committed which lessens the risk of jumping brands when you go to get replacement blades. That doesn't change the fact that the consumables are still where they make their money off of you.
I love the message that prompted this:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134756

I don't understand "send mail to try to find the message the URL refers to".

How do you browse the web?

It's like peering into the entrance of the rabbit hole.
Unlike Mobile Me, which is a key product that partially enables one of their most profitable lines of business, Apple launched AppleTV while overtly and specifically saying that it was an expirimental business that they weren't fully commited to.
Good call. There is some bugginess related to Twitter accounts being deleted, or Twitter nicknames being changed, and having that reflected on Plenty of Tweeps.

I'm looking into this, thanks!
http://serverfault.com/questions/85893/running-a-cron-job-ma...

I completely agree that there should be a better, direct way to test cron jobs.
I hate iTunes. Even when I'm using my wife's Mac. It makes everything I want to do difficult. Seriously, Apple needs to learn from Valve and Steam.

Recently I picked up an Apple TV. My wife was having problems ripping movies for the kids (much safer than letting the DVDs get trashed) and then getting them to run through the media centers on one of the consoles. So, I went and got an Apple TV.

Apple TV is mostly nice, but it has it's warts. First, the syncing is horrid. I have issues syncing while Apple TV plays movies. It can't, or at least, I can't find a way to do it. So, if someone is watching something, and it needs to Sync, NOOOOO. I've had this problem with my iPod, with Sync being the harbinger of death.

Anyways. The next issue is movie files that disappear. I've synced videos, played those videos, and then the videos have disappeared, or just stopped working. Or iTunes will tell me it's synced, and it won't show up on the Apple TV.

Seriously, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others really need to start working together. The Internet works far better than any crap they've put out. Grrr... frustration, nerd rage!!!!

Sorry. =/
Never had that problem. It's always just worked. Has it ever worked for you, or have you seen it work on someone else's chrome install?
This has me wondering whether there are any chemical reactions that use rock or dirt and yield energy. If those don't exist, gray goo needs to get staggering amounts of energy from somewhere before it can be dangerous. But if they do, why isn't anything biological using them?
That actually hides all other applications, not windows. Still, the effect is the same if either only one window is open in the current application or its windows completely overlap each other.
I still think Find my iPhone should be something supported by my monthly contract with AT&T.

It's something that all carriers could offer for a few dollars a month, regardless of phone.
How To Build Your [Personal] Brand Working For Somone Else
Sharepoint is part of Office division.
The only reason I'm still a Comcast customer is because I want to be in their IPv6 beta trials.
By that token, all security advisories are just advertisements for the security researchers' services.
http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/

This isn't the half of it:

What hardware are you using?

I am using a Lemote Yeelong, a netbook with a Loongson chip and a 9-inch display. This is my only computer, and I use it all the time. I chose it because I can run it with 100% free software even at the BIOS level.
For Keynote, http://280slides.com/.
The Aging of Science
Yes it doesn't offer all the functionality yet, but it will get better I'm sure.
And how do I turn it back on for the site I'm visiting?
with lawyers it's usually not a case of whether something is legal or not...it's a case of whether or not there is a risk of something being enforced.

I'm sure the admins attitude of "If you think it is illegal, don't apply." isn't going to help them either.
Yes, Microsoft is used to play second fiddle. But then again, didn't they clean up (or there were some stuff going on) their Online divisions couple months ago (or even last 1 or 2 years ago)?

Once in a while, there will be divisions that would require some changes. Couple years ago, Vista (or the OS div) was the main target. They moved Steven Sinofsky from Office to OS.

Once the situation over the OS div is better a bit, then the Online division. They brought up various outsiders if I remember correctly. Some from Yahoo!, not sure if they get anyone from Google (most likely not). Then Bing showed up.

Now it's the E&D that got their piece of Ballmer Pie.

PS: I'm probably speculating.
Sorry to hear that. If you want me to remove your account, just drop me a line here or at bradb@plentyoftweeps.com with your Twitter username.
Yeah, the Wikibook version is more actively maintained. I haven't really touched the original in about 3 years. I keep meaning to revisit it and include some of the stuff I've learned in the intervening time (LLVM codegen and JIT, for example), but I've got way too many other projects that are occupying my time...
I feel like companies throw this around as a feelgood term to try and boost the esteem of the team after a liquidation.

For the founders it boosts their profile with one last feature on Techcrunch & in their resumes for the next job by touting "acquired by X" when in fact it was liquidated to X as a fire sale.
Ignoring the memo part here and focusing on having None/empty list as a return value, what is the problem of doing:

soup.find('table', {'class':'search-params'}).findParent('form')\
.find('td', {'class': 'elem'})\
.find('input')\
.get('name') or raise WebUIError("Web interface specification changed")

Shouldn't the boolean expression short-circuit and only raise WebUIError in case the expression returns what he doesn't want to?
This argument doesn't seem to make much sense, as MobileMe does store all of your information on a cloud service on machine's not owned or operated by you.
Coral Cache works for me:

http://www.t4f.org.nyud.net:8080/projects/business-card
>Or they've ad-blocked the ga.js.

That's what I've been doing. I've simply been using AdBlock Plus to prevent anything from Google Analytics from loading. I found that Google Analytics would often take the longest of any element to load, causing my browser's progress bar to spin indefinitely instead of finishing the page. Blocking Analytics entirely got around this annoyance.

In any case, it's nice of Google to provide this to the privacy-conscious.
You lost me there. We never sent messages to anyone to download and install files. Can you forward the email to me (dd at sucuri.net)?

*but I agree, we really need some improvements on our design.
Why do you think it is a bad idea to differentiate clearly (.com vs. .org) between the business and community aspects of Clojure?

I understand biz talk is a bit of a turnoff when primarily interested in the community aspects but I would expect somebody with limited technical understanding but responsibility on the biz side to prefer a site addressing their immediate concerns (which I think clojure.com does fine).

The only nitpick I would have is that it is not obvious to me if they're targeting startups or established businesses. In the later case "Training" (or "Coaching"?), "Development" (or "Seeding"?) and "Support" might be more on target than "Mentor", "Dev", and "Sustain". In the former (= startup) case I imagine their wording to be very good, but does anybody know if there is actually a market in Development and/or Mentoring consulting for startups?
Considering that Ruba was identical in most ways to Nextstop I imagine its a weird turn of events for them. If they ever wanted to be acquired by Google they probably just lost that opportunity
Any of those find calls can return None. None does not have a find method.
Why the hell isn't Conde Nast simply paying interns?

Guess: because they're actually really not OK with having interns (go! having an HR department!) and so the only way for the Reddit team to synthesize headcount was in this under-the-table fashion.
One of those icons looks awfully familiar :)
Sorry, my argument could have been made more clearly. I was talking about two different topics, .mac and syncing of iDevices with computers, and I didn't do a good job of separating them.

For .Mac, the fact that the service is paid and not ad-supported means that I don't have the awkward situation of my vendor being incentivized to sift through all my information with a fine comb in order to sell me their partners' products.

For syncing of iDevices, the fact that the data goes directly from the device to my computer is much more acceptable than having to make everything pass through Google's servers.

I'm much more comfortable with both of these situations than their equivalents on Google's platform.
I agree completely. When you've written enough code that you have confidence you can solve real-world problems, you're there. In my personal case it took just a couple of years before I could sell my code. And now I've done it for nearly 30 more years.

The best part is that you can sell your advice even before you can sell your code. That way you'll learn more about what the real world needs out of a programmer. And they'll pay you to learn!
There's definitely a place where it gets too extreme. I've caught myself going to check IMs and emails while a page loads in the browser. I pause in my writing at the end of a sentence and I flick my gaze over to check for new mail.

I think the point at which you can switch is when you can honestly expect to give the thing you are switching to your full attention until it is complete. So sure, go answer a few emails during a compile, but only check for the compile to be done in between emails.
... "at least in the short-term".

As noted in the comments, Larrabee hasn't been killed and I'm not sure there's even any new news about it in this.
Interesting article. It has been a long time since I have worked this "close to the metal." Back when I coded at the machine level, there were no branch predictions performed by the processor to help maintain the pipeline. What you had were different opcodes for your conditional jumps - 1 for when the jump was likely, 1 for when it was not. It had amazed me (a bit) that never got reflected in higher level languages. Now that I see that the processor makes (educated?) guesses, I suppose I am no longer surprised.
Pretty impressive, but webapp != synchronization in desktop app. Especially when it's pretty far from a complete clone, however close the UI looks.
This is excellent news; thank you. I'll go see what I can find on that. If you talk to them again, let them know there's definitely interest in that.
This is one of my biggest problems. When compilation, image creation, or device flashing takes longer than ~1 minute, then I will switch to the browser and get lost. 15-30 minutes later I will discover that my build, flash file, whatever was done, and will resume work (and feel really bad about it).
There’s No Such Thing As A Bad Client
If it's just reading HN I could see this, but I don't think it's a good solution. The very problem we have is too many notifications. Whether they are mail or test suites, they interrupt you and take your focus, even briefly, away from what you're currently doing.
Organizationally it is a mindshare problem. Every successful tech company faces this. Windows Mobile was always the 'little brother' of Windows and Office, and could never get the kind of resources and talent needed to win in that space. Google Reader is arguably an example of such a team at Google. Mobile Me is a little brother to Mobile / Mac sales.

If your users expand to the full set of all iPhone and Mac users... then your mindshare and resources internally expand. And you can finally improve the product.
While reading this article, I realized that somewhere around half-way through I had switched to another window to send an IM about something that had popped into my mind. It was a bit ironic.

I used to do work in 20-minute sprints. It was originally for eye strain, but I found myself very productive for those 20 minutes, as if I was driven to be sure I got things done such that the break didn't severely interrupt me. It really helped me focus on results.
what I meant was that I got a letter from my host telling me I got hacked(a week or so after I fixed everything)...and they linked to your site.

But after hitting your site, I got the impression that it was just a scam site trying to get me to install some malware.
thanks for explaining this
Wal-Mart slashes iPhone price to $97
meh... in an el nino year?
What is NoSQL?
I've tried to read up on NoSQL because I hear so much about it, but I can't really seem to find a synthesis that uses terminology I can understand. What is a relational data store as opposed to a non-relational data store? What advantages does NoSQL confer and how does it achieve those?
Chrome 6.0.408.1 dev on Mac OS X 10.6.3 and it worked.
If a civilian threatened to kill me if I didn't stop saying something he didn't like, I would regard it as a violation of my free speech rights.

I don't see any reason to make an artificial cut between this sort of action, and a similar action by a government. Even if you don't call it a violation of your right to free speech, it's still a bad thing, and just as much a cause for concern.

Libertarians like to make semantic distinctions here because they have a particular ideology that they want to push. In particular, they like to pretend that mere freedom from government oppression is all the freedom that anyone should want.
Why would you even need the entire credit card number to sign up for a service likes this? That's what boggles my mind the most. Amex really only need enough data to identify one of their cardholderes in such a way that noone can sign up for someone else.

Name + billing address + four last digits should be enough? Or eight last. Or four last + CVC. Asking for everything that's required for a purchase is beyond dumb. To me, it's like giving out your password while talking to customer representatives, that's also something you don't do.
They should have fired Ballmer when they saw his Windows 1.0 ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk

A used car salesman running Microsoft is out of his depth. Is it really any surprise the company has floundered for years?
I'm assuming b/c purely FP languages have handled this for a long time without the need to program around the language.
A high-level 3D visualization API for Java and ImageJ.
RMS doesn't browse the internet. He has his own version of the internet that's made up of sites that give the user complete rights to fork, reuse, recycle, or modify the product without any previous permission. Anything else is illegal, a scourge to tech, and must die.

(I'm willing to "spend the karma points" on this one)
That's definitely hard to answer.

I thought I was awesome when I was in high school (I was about 16) but a few more years of experience made me realize how wrong I was.

I'm 25 now and I think I have a good grip on the generalities of programming, but I still have a long way to go in really understanding the underlying fundamentals of various languages and some of the over-arching principles that govern language design and function. (It's worth noting that I've been a professional developer in various languages for about 4 years, and I've been programming for fun for 11 years.)

Personally I think programming is like most other things. It's relatively easy to be minimally capable, but extremely hard to be really, really capable.

Sorry for the long-winded answer :-p
>Now you can say, "MS has missed the big trends like mobile devices and search".

And the Internet.
My biggest issue with Facebook is that it is so incredibly buggy. It seems like they don't run any testing before doing changes to the UI or releasing new features. Basic functionality seems to only be working off-and-on, and sometimes you just get periods where Facebook becomes totally unusable, for instance when your news feed (or "News Ahoy!" as it says on mine) is sorted completely randomly and only shows old updates (and no, I'm not talking about the "Shiniest booty" here, but the "Fresh booty").

Yes, I use Pirate as the language on Facebook, can you tell?
There's a thin line between novel and gimmicky.
At least they're honest about it. Calling them out because they were blunt in a comment just encourages them to be more subtle, not necessarily write better code.

And particularly in an open-source project, bluntness like that is helpful since it tells other contributors what needs to be replaced ASAP.
I agree. I actually did the same thing.
There's a comment saying Conde has hundreds of interns. They don't pay them because nobody in publishing pays any of their interns.
You should get an immediate Connection Refused if there's no one listening on 80/443.
Creating an Atlas of the Human Mind
Functional languages like ML and Haskell use option types instead of nulls, and they have tools to work with option types that go far beyond what most languages have for nulls. For example, in Haskell, that chain of function calls might be written like this:

find "table" [("class", "search-params")] soup >>=
findParent "form" >>=
find "td" [("class", "elem")] >>=
find "input" [] >>=
get "name"

If the result of any call in the chain is Nothing (equivalent to null), we get Nothing. Otherwise, it keeps on going and (if, for example, the name of the relevant element is "signup") we get Just "signup".

Simulating Haskell's option type is actually the article's proposed solution.
I'm failing to see any mention of a .gov domain in the article.
This sounds more like a design flaw in BeautifulSoup than anything else. The OP is wrong in directing his anger towards NULL/None/nil. (BeautifulSoup should be returning an empty collection, not None.)
NOSQL stands for Not Only SQL. It is a label that is being applied to data stores that provide alternatives to the standard SQL based relational databases.

These alternative data stores can be a better match for the domain model, volume, and usability of the application data.
NoSQL is basically a hash table. They are much faster than relational databases since hash table lookups are quick O(1). However they don't provide the ability to query the database like you can in SQL. For example, you cannot select all the items whose price is > $20 unless you iterate through every item in the NoSQL store yourself and check if the price is > $20.

So why would you use NoSQL rather than just our own hashtable? NoSQL allows you to keep a hash table separate from the application server so you can devote an entire servers RAM to the table to increase performance. It also allows you to distribute the table across multiple machines to in essence create a big distributed hashtable. NoSQL is great replacement for any type of data that you would have previously accessed by doing a "SELECT * FROM table WHERE primary_key = ?". Furthermore since NoSQL doesn't have to do indexing, or any of the other overhead associated with a normal relational database it can be much faster.
F5 Week in Review May 17th - 21st
What you really want in this case is a way to overload the "." operator. If it were just an alias for call you could change None to respond to call on an undefined method with None. That would sort of short-circuit the chain and avoid these errors.

It might require a few changes elsewhere as you would be getting None where you used to get an error, but relying on the error might have been some lazy programming to begin with.
Oh, you're absolutely right. I thought that BeautifulSoup's find would be lazily evaluated, like Django's Queryset.
I'm assuming something must be wrong here: the minimum offer shows up for me as $2,147,483,647

A website with ~$1000 monthly revenue selling for 2 billion dollars?
The "lawsuit as car crash" analogy is a pretty good analogy. You pay a lawyer now as insurance against getting crushed by the legal system later.

If you step back, it is reasonable to ask why we have a legal system where driving without a seatbelt is actually a pretty good analogy for hiring without a lawyer.

And I think that we ought to acknowledge that the system remains this way, at least in part, because it leads to many lucrative billable hours for lawyers.
And I submit this months ago... clearly, title is everything.
Tracking the Ancestry of Corn [Maize] Back 9,000 Years
This is confusing... looking at it from the "if I was the target audience" perspective:

General idea: unpaid work is a strange idea, but I didn't have anything else planned - why not?

Looking at the blog: 20h/week - that's cool, they're not expecting any actual work done. "Manage relationships with merchandise providers" - wait what? "help negotiate new licensing agreements" - phone monkey? "manage workflow of merchandise production from end to end" - doing actual work? with responsibilities??

I'm confused about who they're looking for. It looks like they need unpaid salespeople / junior account managers. But if someone can do the sales / manager position with ~1-month training and be useful for the other 2 months... I'm sure s/he can find a better position which actually pays commission.
If they're going to be doing anything of value, pay them. What's the big deal?
Monad comprehensions are not necessarily a trait of purely FP languages.

Yes, in Haskell or F# (the 2 languages I've played with) ... monads are so natural you don't even notice them many times. But this goes both ways, what's natural to do in Python, isn't so in other languages.

Also in this particular case you're not programming around the language ... dynamic OOP languages are all about late-binding, that's their strength. If you're using something like Python as if it were Java, you're missing on lots of useful stuff.
Isn't this post a blatant advertising for AppStoreHQ ?

It's not like i learned something new from it, they just promoted their future app store.

Sometimes i wish there was a down-vote on HN...