skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if businesses actually sell more if their products are priced like $9.95 or $9.99 instead of $10, or that it's just based on the expectation that such prices are more attractive to the customer. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing] doesn't mention whether any research was done to verify this, much less any results.
So, this is mostly tongue-in-cheek. But let's look at it seriously for a second anyway.

What makes him happy? Not all of these things he's writing about, of course. Though I'll bet he's happy when he writes about it, and gets the impression that people, real people out there, are reading it, getting excited over the energetic prose and maybe getting fired up and/or laughing. That's real.

But to actually try doing some of these things? Well, after half-an-hour riding horses in France, he'd have noticed they're a lot like horses elsewhere, and also be pretty chafed and ready to get off but not sure how to ask that in French. If he bought 10 grand worth of peanut butter, he'd realize two things: someone has to pay the bill, with real money that's generally hard to get, and peanut butter has an expiry date like everything else (and it's sooner than you'd think...), so he just wasted, like, $9970 that he now can't use to pay for overpriced hotel rooms and pay-per-view (if that were enjoyable itself...).

Come to think of it, this is a pretty good capture of the concept of happiness that is pushed by advertising. More, more, and more shit, all at once! -- that's happiness. If a rare, thick steak is nice, then surely a rarer, thicker steak is nicer! If sex is pleasurable, then surely more sex with more people is still more pleasurable! Doing anything that people on TV do must be amazingly fun, because they look so happy (and toned and suntanned and...)!

(Of course it's correct -- I mean, that's why lottery winners are all so happy with life. right?).
Finding people to work on short, proof-of-concept projects with.

I have a list of more than 25 items that I would love to work on, but have little motivation without someone willing to help out. I don't necessarily want to form a startup on these ideas, just get the ball rolling and see where it leads.

I would like a site that enables me to find others and create prototype apps in a matter of days, almost like a flash mob. It should bring together graphic artists, designers, developers, and specialists as seamlessly as possible. I think this would work especially well for mobile apps, where project size is often small enough that a 3-4 person team could finish a reasonable version 1 in a weekend.

Example: I want to build a mobile app to answer the question "Does this fit me?" The app would enable users to scan a bar code, upload if it fits or not, get predictions about if it fits or not, and receive recommendations on other items that may fit.

I have no idea how the design should look. I have no idea how to write iPhone apps and limited Android experience. I don't have a lot of experience building web applications. I can't do graphics for the life of me. However, I have a TON of experience in AI and data mining, and what I imagine to most people would seem like the "hard part"-- predicting if something fits, recommending similar items, etc.-- is actually the fun part to me. So I need a designer and an iPhone/Android guy with a free weekend.

If we planned on selling the app, then the site could optionally include some auto-generated legal code for agreeing to revenue/equity split. That would make it more of a flash-startup idea, though.
The writer of the piece is also the writer of The Truth About Cars - a notoriously anti-GM blog.

The Volt definitely has faults, but it's a brand-spanking-new technology - what do people expect?
This is annoying but what is more annoying is when you're on a multiple lane highway and 2 or more people decide to drive at exactly the same speed right next to each other. It would be nice if there was a rule (a law would be nice, but I don't see how you'd enforce it) that you could not drive within two car lengths of the car next to you at speeds over 40mph.

The added bonus here would be that people would not be sitting in other people's blindspots all the time and should reduce accidents.
"I didn't come in here to argue that RMS is right, but there does seem to be some sort of moral or ethical issue behind this that is far beyond RMS getting upset that someone else is able to make money with his code. I suspect that he could make quite a bit of money not being the 'free software' guy, if it were mere jealousy."

For me, the issue comes down to my own rights as a developer. If I sell an application with no source, nobody has a right to:

1) copy it freely to their friends
2) get my source

RMS gladly sacrifices the rights of a developer for the rights of a user and I just can't agree.

"If we take the idea that the computer is an extension of the mind seriously, any sort of proprietary software is extremely anti-social behavior. If I create proprietary software and allow people to install it, I am cutting them off from little pieces of understanding and knowledge that they could otherwise have."

The computer isn't an extension of the mind. It's just a tool.

"It is even worse if it doesn't work properly and I 'hang them out to dry' once they depend on it (i.e. stop fixing bugs)."

If that's the case, move onto another application. It's obviously working to some degree if you are using it. Even changes in operating systems won't suddenly make an application stop working (you can continue to use the old OS until you change to a new application).

Open source won't save you from this scenario. Open source developers stop fixing bugs all the time. I can't tell you how many abandoned projects I've seen on Sourceforge or Freshmeat. Sure, you could hire a developer to make changes..but you either have to:

1) hire a contractor (it's not easy to find a contractor that can get familiar with the code you need or is competent enough to get the job done in a timely fashion. This wastes lots of time and money (I know, I've been there).

2) Hire a full-time employee. So now, instead of paying a company $1000/year for bug fixes/updates, you need to pay a full-time developer 10X more.

3) wait for someone to pick the project up. This happens, but since most open source projects are a hobby for the developer, major bugs that you need fixed aren't a priority when the developer needs to pay the rent.

Some companies based on open source do offer support. But it's just as expensive as any other company. So it really offers no benefit.

Either way, Stallman, the pirates, and the zealots have pushed me away from selling software. This is mostly because many of the people from all of these communities feel entitled to my proprietary work. Over time, this is going to make it difficult for anyone to sell software (because everyone is going to just share it for free..and not care). So, all of my software ideas are now web service ideas. This is where software is headed. So now instead of paying a one-time fee (which is what I was going to do originally), you will be paying a monthy/yearly fee to use software (and you won't get anything even close to the source).
If you are using free software, and a feature is missing or a bug is present, and you have neither the time nor skills to correct the issue, you can sponsor or request that someone else make the change. Alternately, anyone else using the software could have that time or skill, and their contribution would benefit all.

With proprietary software, you absolutely give up that ability.

So yes, you do always give up the freedom. The counterpoint, though, is that if you were never to exercise the freedom, it has no value. So even though you've given up a freedom to use a proprietary solution, if you never encounter a case where you want/need to exercise that freedom, it hasn't really hurt you. That may be more what you are getting at?
Acne. Annoying me for 7 years.
People writing "loose", when they really mean "lose".
This is all true, but unfortunately the amount of money spent on gasoline over the lifetime of a normal car doesn't approach the price premium of the Volt unless there is a phenomenal skyrocketing of gas prices.
Google’s UX Team: How people behave online
You can do this in visual studio if you hold down the alt key and do your selection.
This is actually a valid point. Freedom of choice seems to be a given nowadays. Obtaining freedom FROM choice is a lot of work.
Huge market, single point of distribution with known history of 'complicated' app validation. I feel bad for the developers in the same way I feel bad for people that lose in the final stages of a poker tournament. Its not always the quality of your app or idea, but sometimes its just luck.

With the recent ruling reinforcing the legal standing of jail-breaking a device to load applications, does that mean that third party application market places are also legal? I know there has been some debate about that, would be an interesting spot for someone to consolidate a multi platform app store.
... a custodian who actually cares to improve it, along with the insight and ability to say "no" to enough features that it has sharp unified direction and doesn't become a typical example of open source feature creep.

Unfortunately, I have a hard time seeing any reason to believe that this resembles Oracle, and any such beliefs seem to be indistinguishable from wishful thinking.
Right so far :-) But the HFTs are not in the game for the long haul; they will immediately sell the stock to another investor, at a price between what the HFT paid for it and what the stock is worth to the other investors. That's why it's high-frequency trading. The buy and sell are almost synchronous.
lol pathetic whiner.

"it's not fair wah wah wah" ahahhahaha
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. I've spent too much time in places (rest of the internet) where there's no real incentive to make sure your point is clear, so I had trouble making it so. :(

Working on it though. :)
Lifehacker had a tip that's working for me. Turn off spotlight searching.

Settings->General->Home button->spotlight/search.

Uncheck everything, then do a hard reset (home+lock for 10 sec).
Wasn't this originally going to be the only way to release apps for iPhones? Later they caved in & allowed native. I didn't get an iPhone until a couple of years after all this though so my history may be off somewhat.

Point being, if true, this was no 'secret' - it was originally plan A.
I generally try and batch read HN (via rss) daily, and sometimes I feel that I am missing out on new comments (made after I finished reading and closed the tab; most commonly the new/recent posts)...would be nice to avoid bookmarking and searching for the new comments
Online banking in South Africa is excellent - I was shocked when I moved to the US how archaic it is.

Transfers are a breeze, fast, and everyone does it.
Integration with cell phone infrastructure is also great.
Or we shift our oil subsidies to another energy source like solar/wind to supply the electric. We're already paying high gas prices, consumers just don't see it at the pump. Out of sight, out of mind I guess. Government can play a big role in setting the stage for infrastructure by changing the rules when the time is right.
My personality isn't really amenable to endless scale repetition either, which is part of the reason I'm here on Hacker News and not hanging out at Musician's News. But I did at least come to an appreciation for what I'm missing out on.

Like I said in my original message, I have no desire in propagating the "If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing right". I don't really believe that anymore, despite having been raised that way. If you have to choose between that and half-assing everything, do it right every time, but if you understand the reasons for that "rule" then there are plenty of times it's worth just doing enough.
"How many Free software supporters did you count said they're explicitly against profiting from software?"

Do I really need to keep count? Look at any discussion involving the GPL.

"Beside, if GPL make it difficult to earn money, than it's a pure side effect."

A side effect? I just don't believe it. Stallman and many people from the community are very focal about being anti-corporation and anti-profit.

If you can't see this, then I don't know what to tell you.
> Basically 25% of the population impose their will on the rest of the 75% of people.

If 4% of the US people own 75% of the assets, then your 25% ruling 75% of the people is off by a few factors.
Indeed.

But does it have to pay for itself? Nobody buys a car that is above the cheapest model expecting it to pay for itself. A sunroof or bigger engine will never pay for itself, and is usually bought to get some other benefit (sometimes mostly in the mind of the buyer). The same can happen with early PHEVs and EVs.

By the time all the early adopters who buy them for the technology or environmental benefits have one, the technology should have improved and price lowered enough so that the cars will be attractive to a larger group.
I do like the truckers hitch, but have some different preferences for the other knots you list.

For a fixed loop at the end of a rope, I prefer the zeppelin loop. It's just a tiny bit more difficult to tie than a bowline, but has the virtue of being very easy to untie, even after being subjected to great loads (ie. it doesn't jam). It's also very secure.

When joining two ropes together, I like to use the zeppelin bend. It's very easy to tie, very secure, and very easy to untie (like the zeppelin loop, it doesn't jam).

As for the clove hitch, according to Wikipedia, it "can slip when loaded. In smaller diameter cords, it may jam and become difficult to untie after being heavily weighted. It is also very unreliable when used to hitch to a post with sharp corners."

So, instead of the clove hitch, I prefer to use the double constrictor knot. Unfortunately, like the clove hitch, it can be difficult to untie when subjected to a lot of stress. But it is very, very secure (gripping tighter and tighter when either end is tugged).

Here are some other knots I find useful in various situations:

For an adjustable loop, I prefer the adjustable grip hitch. For a simple noose, I like the figure-of-eight noose.

If I need a fixed loop in the middle of a rope, I like to form the alpine butterfly.

For an incredibly tight grip on a slippery cylindrical surface, where weight will only be applied in one direction parallel to the cyliner, there's virtually nothing better than the icicle hitch.

For tying bags shut, there's the appropriately named bag knot.

For tying packages, the packer's knot.

To tie my shoelaces I use the Turquoise Turtle Knot, which is very simple to tie, and never accidentally unties.
My Polyphasic Sleep Experiment
Sounds like your beef isn't with the car, but with policymakers who are too cowardly to put a price on carbon emissions. Incorporating externalities, I think the cost-benefit analysis of the Volt becomes much more balanced.
that's support. I'm talking about selling software. There's a difference.
I'm pretty sure Starck is a better marketer than designer. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
Not a built in solution for this, but have you seen lamson - http://lamsonproject.org/ ? Handle emails with python - would be trivial to simply post their contents to a url.
"If you spend just a few minutes on Hacker News, you’ll come across Patrick McKenzie in one way or another"

You can say that again. I am starting to feel the overload.
>As long as we're comparing who did what first (as if that's relevant today), ReadDirectoryChangesW came in Windows 2000. inotify came in 2005.

Inotify was a replacement for dnotify. Which was there since 2.4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnotify

Also comparing the two subsystems is entirely wrong. ReadDirectoryChangesW is still a polling mechanism, inotify and dnotify are kernel level events.

>Amusingly, this just displays your own naivete. The only way to get security if someone has physical access is through cryptography. Pressing cancel on a local login screen is equivalent to booting into single user mode or just using a boot disk and wiping out the local administrator's password.

You're just being an obstinate child here. There's a difference when anyone can defeat your security, and when knowledgeable people can defeat your security. Why do company's take people of the premises when they're fired? Because it's easier for them to lash out, and cause damage. Well it's certainly easier for a passerby to break into your system by pressing cancel. Outside physical threats are always there, especially in the form of delivery men. What's the point of even password protecting something when the UPS guy can come and hit cancel cause he has 95 at home? Not only that but you still need a password for single user mode, and it would take a bit longer for him if he had a boot disk.

>Microsoft Research is the most prolific non-university academic CS research lab in the world. The people that work there are all truly brilliant. (disclosure: I did an internship there this summer)

This isn't about Microsoft Research, this is about Microsoft products. This is a completely irrelevant point. MSR is a fine institution which is a great place for academic papers, they don't generally develop products for Microsoft.
If only I could turn back time...
*nix. Too bad its the best thing out there.
How is that paste an example of the compiler being guarded?

In fact it looks like '/etc/passwd' is readable to the compiler after all.
The fact that most people seem to think that it's okay to get sick from the diseases of aging, get frail, suffer, and die, and that we shouldn't try to do something to fix that problem (really fix it, not just prolong suffering a bit).

I think it's probably partly rationalization because they think it's inevitable (but it is not inevitable, and I'd like that to become a more mainstream view so we can hurry up and work on this problem), and partly ageism, which makes a lot of people think that old people have less value so their pain and loss isn't as bad.
True, but not always a willing participant -- an informant may be providing information out of necessity, say, if the informant's living conditions are intolerable because of hostility.

I have no problem with the release of the documents, but they should be responsibly redacted with the aid of experts, and truly edited rather than dumped.
You're right OSX did have Quarts and expose before linux did. I was talking about Microsoft Operating systems but I wasn't clear enough.
That's the feeling I had before watching this video. Have you watched it already ? I'm pretty amazed by what he says even with my previous thoughts about him.
Heh. I really feel sorry for devs who submit to the Ovi store, it's like Nokia is going out of their way to prevent me from buying apps there.
I can let any spelling mistake or grammatical murder slide except this one. I won't comment on it as that's a bit petulant, but I will seethe inside and often, almost without thinking, I'll disregard whatever else they wrote.

Silly I know!
How do you solve this problem for those of us in Colorado (or other non-flatlands) where nearly every drive involves mountains and hills. Would the idea be that in the dead zone, the car is smart enough to increase or decrease horsepower to adapt to these conditions and retain 0 acceleration or...? I think you would run into the same problem that cruise control runs into in the mountains - we don't have variable ratio transmissions, so at some point going up a hill it has to shift down a rev in order to stay the same speed. Doesn't work very well.
It all depends on what I want to do. For quick hacks, I prefer a language that supports that: perl or python (since that's the two I know well enough).

When writing programs to a very limited platform, I'd rather use something I can control much better, which is most often C.

Other times, I don't really have a choice: if I'm writing a web application, there's not much else than JavaScript that I can use on the client side (assuming I want to be reasonably portable, and don't want to use flash).

I tend to use whatever language fits the job at hand best, since they all have stronger and weaker areas.
I think the problem was that they didn't learn anything from that experience. It was undermined by internal political processes, and the party line for most of the 2000's was that GM was never going to build hybrid cars because the GM execs decided batteries didn't appeal to their egos.

It's got nothing to do with profitability, viability, maturity of technology, etc. I mean, GM built, marketed, and invested millions into some of the MOST unviable cars out there you can find. At one point, almost every single car they sold was at a loss - they were paying people to drive them off the lots. You can't get more "unviable" than that.

And I don't think the argument is "who killed the electric car" - the real story is "who killed GM" - the entire company is an exercise in producing a black hole for money, not in manufacturing or car making.
Advertisements!

They're obnoxious, obviously biased, and interfere with whatever it was you were doing (watching a show, visiting a website, reading a newspaper, whatever). It's just wrong. And we all know this, yet we just accept it like it's some fact of life.

In addition, it doesn't just affect customers, but all newspapers/magazines/sites that rely on "advertisement income" to make a buck. One thing that puzzles me greatly is, how pageviews and sales are apparently their #1 concern, yet at the same time they're talking, in all seriousness, about "being objective" and "journalistic integrity". It just doesn't go together.

Since the internet is already beating the hell out of pretty much all old business models, maybe it will get rid of this one as well, or at least transform it into something more palatable. But so far, the industry's response has been to make advertisements (on websites at least) even MORE obnoxious and intrusive.
Stay home, send a robot to work
I agree it's not ideal profit-wise, and neither do I expect every iPhone user to be interested, let alone technically savvy, enough to jailbreak their iPhone. But I find the fact that the executable won't be free even if my source code is (and I don't mean free as in "free of charge" - people deserve to get paid for their work and then some) a farce, at best.
Actually, it's 160 7-bit bytes, so that's $0.25 per 140 bytes.
Things that were made in a different day and age will generally take more effort to understand or get into, though. It's easier to pick up what's already all around. I'm not saying it's better, but that's how it goes.
Thanks for recommending my work.

Here's a direct link to the MP3 of Peter's interview:
http://bit.ly/cRejSj
[Album] Usher - Versus (2010)
>I don't care about democracies, but I do care about liberty.

Agreed. In America, the top judges in most states are directly elected by the people. Is this really a good thing? In China, people in many govt and party tiers are elected by the people in the tier directly below them. Is this really a bad thing?

It seems to me that transparency and clear rules are more important than the technicalities of the voting system in both legislatures and judiciaries.
It seems the developer just let his 1 year distribution certificate expire. This is really careless on his part and blame should not be automatically placed on Apple.

If you distribute a web app using SSL, and let your Verisign certificate expire, are you going to complain that Verisign is unfair because now your customers are getting security warnings/errors in their browsers?
That it be better than previous offerings in some measurable way that's valued by the consumer?