skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
another mistake a lot of people make is try to base their price on competitors.

sure you can undercut their $3/mo...or you can bump your price up to $15/mo and use the difference on advertising.

Chances are that 99% of your customers will never even see your competitor...so you won't hurt your business by charging more...and you can use the extra revenue to promote your product in places where your competitor just can't afford to promote in.
Is the toughness you're referring to the same kind of toughness portrayed in Hollywood and Schoolyards? So much of toughness and machismo is posturing. Do successful founders aggressively take control of every conversation and confrontation? Do they project formidability, authority, vision and power? Or do they cultivate the quiet, persistent confidence of a stoic? Or do you find tough souls who react deeply and emotionally to trying situations, but are always able to rally themselves, and renew their pursuits with redoubled efforts, their emotional trials only tempering their resolve?

Toughness comes in different qualities and colors. Do which do great founders wear?
My "Chrome to Phone" knockoff app for iOS
Very interesting.

The concern I could see with this would be that you raise your price for a few days - you get a few takers but not as many as you hoped, so you lower the price back down to the original levels. I'd be a little concerned that those who subscribed at the higher levels would not be happy paying a higher recurring monthly fee when they could now subscribe to the product at a cheaper rate.

Would you / did you just manage those users back down to the original payment levels for the future months payments ? Or leave them at the higher payment levels and manage on an adhoc basis should they raise issue with pricing levels.
Yes, Arabic (juwaar/jiraan) and Somali (daris/jaar/jiraan)

None of those words carry gender because they're plural.

In the singular, Arabic uses the male "jaar" word for both genders. While the same word is plural in northern Somali, since, as mentioned, it has no singular word. Arabic also has the dual (jaaraan/jaarataan) our two neighbors (m/f)
DiscoveryBeat "Needle in the haystack" business contest
Some principled fiscal conservatives don’t hate government, they have waste, and electing them to reduce the institution they’re part of is not absurd.

Unfortunately, principles do not win elections. The ones who actually win are the ones who want to deregulate business and regulate morals.
I refunded them the difference and apologized for the 'mistake'.
Pretty ineffective status symbol, too. How many people whom you might want to impress are going to see exactly what's on your bookshelves, and know enough to recognize Knuth as impressive? I'll hazard a guess that most people for whom those are true also know enough to be more influenced by other more meaningful things than what books you happen to have on your shelves.

(I bet some people do buy Knuth as a sort of status signal to themselves, though.)
I just read this same statement a few days back..it may have been from an earlier Essay vs the FAQ, or a interview transcript (more likely).

I don't believe PG holds to hard and set rules regardless.
So what was the website/product in question for this post?
How Much Space Does a Library Need? (Collections in an Electronic Age)
> Chances are that 99% of your customers will never even see your competitor...

That seems to be the hardest thing to convince people of. 'But my competition'... Yes, you are aware of your competition but your users are most likely not. They found you instead.
At http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266502 someone cites a particular occasion on which Knuth supposedly denied the story. As I remarked then, "full of shit" seems quite an unknuth expression.
http://ww.com/

Fair warning, not always safe for work, though we do our best to get people to label their cams properly.
Am I the only one who has no problem with a parent company not wanting pro-marijuana ads running on their sites?
They legitimately own Reddit, it seems rather childish that Reddit is "rebelling" by running the ads for free.
Your list of requirements for success is about as useful as telling someone that you need to go to college to get a degree. Its actually pretty vapid. It overlooks the ability of overcoming adversity to achieve all those things.

Your overlooking all the tremendously difficult and gutsy things you have to make a business sucessful:
1. Quit a well paying job which affords your family food,shelter and clothes.
2. Work 14 hours a day on a service that people may not buy even though they have given you letters of intent that they will.
3. Partner and work with people (devs, designers, customers) who you've known for less than the guy who works at your favourite pizza place.
4. Work on something which at the end of the day might be useless because the whole industry could change. (Launching a new mp3 player on the same day as the ipod)
5. Cold call hundreds of potential customers of which 90% will slam the phone on you.
6. Work with no health insurance (if you dont get funding) to save money for your startup.

I dont think you could even think of attempting a "real" money making startup unless you have brass balls.
I fail to see why you think I implied there was a logical connection. I was simply disputing the idea which I quoted.
t: cli task management for finishing tasks, not organizing them
When I was a kid and he was elected, I thought he would be a bit of a joke. A movie star elected governor by Hollywood- California really is crazy!

My opinion has changed drastically since then, and I find myself proud to have him as our governor.
This is one of my projects that I made a while ago and have been using since then. A bunch of other people seem to have found it useful, so I figured I'd post it here.
Poll: Where abouts are you hackers from?
I'm curious about where HN readers hail from. I get the feeling that most of you guys and gals are from the US. But I might be wrong. Apologies if this has come up before - that must have been before my time. :-) Country choices are based on google analytics data from my ruby newbie blog.
Other? - Post below!
The Federal gov't won't ever let California outright default on its debt. Why? It is the largest economy inside the US, it serves critical national security purposes, and being the biggest state debtor it will take dozens of other broke states down with it. A default would trigger a copycat landslide in the dozen other states who are also crippled with massive debt. If half the states default, all the dike holes the Fed has been filling with fingers over the past 2 years will have been for nought. It just can't be allowed to happen, period. At least in plain sight.

It's exactly like how the banks are keeping their 1+ years worth of "shadow" housing inventory off the market, so as to keep a floor on prices and prevent everyone from panicking and running for the exits at once.

And just like how the Federal bailouts were passed through back channels(i.e. Maiden Lane I & II, reserve swaps with foreign central banks, etc), and arcane accounting tricks that no congress-critter can comprehend, and the biggest political smoke & mirrors America has ever seen, so too will it go for the bailing out involvent states. It won't be Obama handing Schwarzenegger an oversized $30 billion dollar check on TV like a grinning Ed McMahon. No, it'll be a thousand tiny accounting tricks to prop up California, and keep the markets in perpetual doubt about the overall fiscal status of California.

Our entire Federal fiscal and monetary policy is a waiting game. They don't know what will happen, but the thinking is if we can all just hang on long enough for everyone to adjust to the economic new normal, then we can at least avoid an outright national collapse. Nobody on the planet can even know if this will work, but there are zero alternatives.
> in terms of setjmp/longjmp, but with multiple, persistent stacks.

That's exactly the thing I used to help me visualize it :) Funny you came up with the exact same model.

Setjmp and longjmp are by the way probably two of the most abused calls in the C runtime package. But when you need them, you need them badly.
I didn't watch the video, based on some of the other responses here (I do not have time for the presentation fluff), but I hope he made mention of slime.vim. If not, I will toss in a quick plug for it --

Want to quickly send blocks or lines of code to REPLs (and sometimes the command line) in your other screen windows? slime.vim is a vim extension that copies text from your vim session and pastes it into the screen window of your choice.
It doesn't sit 100% comfortable suggesting this was a 'mistake' - not saying this doesn't work - just that I don't feel entirely comfortable with it.

To follow up on this - with A/B price testing how does this work when you are lowering and raising your prices all the time - what's the general approach - to admit 'mistakes' or refund the difference or just manage on an adhoc per issue raised basis ?
Newspaper sites are a privacy time-bomb
I'd agree with that - I remember a control engineer telling me that the "clever" bit of systems was actually implemented in about 1% of the code. All the rest of the stuff was boring as he was concerned, but was the bit that was actually necessary to make stuff work in messy industrial environments.

In an academic research environment you only worry about that 1% - the rest is irrelevant to getting something published.

[NB I worked in academic research for six years - mostly on engineering related topics]
For any poker players out there, this is analogous to the Texas holdem preflop matchups JTs, 22, AKo.

AKo > JTs : http://twodimes.net/poker/?g=h&b=&d=&h=Ah+Kd%0D%...

JTs > 22 : http://twodimes.net/poker/?g=h&b=&d=&h=2h+2d%0D%...

22 > AKo : http://twodimes.net/poker/?g=h&b=&d=&h=2d+2h%0D%...
I've described a closure to myself as 'a temporary freeze on the scope and all variable bindings as they were when you got there the first time'.

Is that correct?
From my experience doing price testing, there are certain natural grooves for prices. Generally the fit the 1,2,5 model: $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, $100, $200, $500, $1000.

These prices have a Goldilocks structure where there is a natural market price bounded by a high and low price point.

For instance, for small business software as a service, cheap end is $10/mo, high end is $50/mo, and just right is $20/mo.

In another case, price per user tends to be $5/mo./user at the low end, $10/mo./user is the fat middle, and $20/mo./user is the high end.

You can see how the OP fit this model as he went from $5/mo. to $10/mo. to $20/mo. Without knowing his product very well, I would surmise that each price increase signaled a higher level of quality to the market while still remaining within the reasonable and expected bounds.
Exactly. Many exploits rely on crashing components of the system. Depending on configuration settings a system may automatically be sending in watson reports for certain kinds of crashes. This makes it possible to track down the origin of a virus / worm after the fact. Step 1: take notice of the exploit in the wild. Step 2: determine it's method of operation. Step 3: correlate watson reports with exploit (likely there will be many of these). Step 4: backtrack to the oldest reports which might be from when the exploit was being developed, then dig out as much information from those reports as you can.

Certainly this doesn't work all the time, but even if it worked only very rarely it'd still be a pretty substantial payoff.
From my experience doing price testing, there are certain natural grooves for prices. Generally the fit the 1,2,5 model: $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, $100, $200, $500, $1000.

These prices have a Goldilocks structure where there is a natural market price bounded by a high and low price point.

For instance, for small business software as a service, cheap end is $10/mo, high end is $50/mo, and just right is $20/mo.

In another case, price per user tends to be $5/mo./user at the low end, $10/mo./user is the fat middle, and $20/mo./user is the high end.
Tactics for Finding Early Customers For Alpha/Beta Feedback
This is a very good idea -- one can increase the heat exchange quick dramatically, actually. This works also for washing machines, driers, and dishwashers.
This discussion is an 'intellectual discovery' for its participants. Its unfortunate you wish to hinder that through dismissive remarks instead of constructively participating.
This is true, but not 80%. This number is way, way out of whack.
Beside search, what are the other Google products that are developed in-house?
Link to website : http://www.jumpingurl.com
Btw, this is awesome: http://ww.com/dilliecam
Have you seen a keynote given by Jobs since he returned to the company? You can't watch one without hearing about their philosophy and values. Sometimes it's mere lip service, but it's always there.
Lazy evaluation: evaluate an expression only when you are actually going to do something with the result. For instance, in a generator you can generate 'infinitely long lists' because only those values that are consumed are actually generated.

Is that what you mean ?

Or do you mean when that principle is expanded to the whole language ?
The message is still there, it's just that there are much more sales talks because, well, they're doing much better as a company now.

The message has matured now - perhaps it wasn't just enough to be different - now their message is that they aren't being just different, they are better. You can see it in those product videos they do in keynotes, you can see it in Ive, Schiller, Cook, Jobs interviews and they definitely are trying to be better. In their products they don't have much to excel with the common stuff everybody does because it's the same suppliers for everyone - Intel, NVidia, Foxconn, Samsung, etc. but look at where they are trying new approaches everyone else has tried and given up on or haven't tried at all - a touchscreen phone when everyone said touchscreens don't work or a tablet computer when everyone thought that had been tried and failed or just the spectacular attention to detail (ironically, the most similar company in that aspect would be the IBM/Lenovo with the Thinkpads).

Don't get me wrong, Apple isn't infallible, they have failed spectacularly on some fronts and have been unable to compete on others but they seem to be doing just fine as it is.
The power of reddit (and for that matter hackernews) is the top-voted comment on most articles is a thorough debunking/rebuttal. I'll often read articles that seem perfectly reasonable but are quickly ripped to shreds by the community. So while you are getting a pre-filtered view of the news, you're not getting a single viewpoint on that news.

Furthermore (edit), the subreddits that you subscribe to radically change the articles you encounter on the homepage.
> We shall see how well it works out for them to be the brand for people who aren't fond of rules...computer geeks excepted. Computer geeks who want to change the world seek platforms with fewer rules.

Geeks are such a small fraction of the market that they only matter as a function of influence. The success of desktop linux shows the "power" of said influence.

In other words, Apple can do just fine by telling non-geeks that choosing Apple means that they're technically advanced.

FWIW, geeks do like Mac laptops more than the market as a whole. The "geek cred" ad can leverage that if need be.
Fair point, but I expect the front page will be literally full of "VOTE" items at the right time.
It's also interesting to note how different the iOS AppStore is from most of other stores. Some apps keep changing the price from 0.79 eur to something higher and then back again.

This is easier to see with one of those apps that keep track of apps that lowered their price, some of them keep appearing on that list.
They already accept controversial and divisive advertising. Here is an example: http://i.imgur.com/pRN0K.jpg
Wow, that's gimmicky. Let me guess how this started...

Designer: How can we save energy by redesigning the fridge?

Engineer: Well, you could save a lot of energy if the expansion coil weren't warming up your air-conditioned interior. We could run piping from the fridge to a box outside, like a window-unit air conditioner.

Designer: No one is going to run pipes out of their kitchen... Oh! Lets put the whole fridge outside! No ugly pipes, and then it would be in the sun! Solar power!

Engineer: ... Do you even know how much energy a fridge uses compared to cheap flexible solar paneling? How are we going to insulate it from the 95 deg direct sun in the summer? How do we keep seals from freezing in the winter? What about all the energy you lose every time you open a window from a climate controlled room to the outside?

Designer: And LED's!

Engineer: ...

Designer: It's like every unit sold is an advertisement for us!

Engineer: I need a beer and an escape slide.
I concur with the rest that say don't get a lawyer too soon, but that you do need one if things get serious. The key questions to consider are:
1)	have they proven that they are serious? Sometimes they are just fishing for competitive information or trying to steal code (don't get all paranoid and defensive, but be smart, don't show code. Show efficacy). Make them prove that your company and tech is specifically what they need and that they have a cash ready to pay. If they say ‘well, we can get money to buy you’ then I’d be suspicious.
2)	What is the company worth to YOU? Its not just about cash, but is the offer of employment something positive or negative to you? Then ask yourself what the company is worth to THEM. Do they need this badly and can’t do it themselves? Or is your tech one of several vendors they can buy? There can be a large difference how you two value your company.
3)	Consider your alternatives such as the following: keep going on your own, ask them to license the tech from you, ask them to invest in you, charge them for consulting
4)	Consider their options: are there others to acquire and is the industry in consolidation mode right now where if you don't get acquired you loose your chance.
5)	Overall DO NOT SHOW THEM CODE unless they buy it or license it or put up cash in escrow with an escrow entity that YOU choose. If they are buying tech, you can offer to let them test it out for efficacy. Seeing code does not prove efficacy. In the final due diligence of a deal they can inspect the code or you can mutually agree to a 3rd party inspecting the code.
Wow. Nevermind then!
I'm a research scientist who wears a suit and doesn't understand your attitude. I don't wear a suit to cover up any lack of ability, I wear a suit because it's very comfortable, extremely convenient (lots of pockets!) and means that I don't need to worry about my outfit. I also enjoy being treated better generally because I look neat - doesn't matter about your body shape, a decent single-breasted suit makes you look good.

Isn't part of the attraction to no-dress-code places (like start-ups, universities and research institutes!) that you can wear whatever you like without being judged on it? Why do you prejudge those of us who wear a suit? Especially when they're uncertain of the dress-code of the place that they visit for the first time! I don't think that I'd want to work somewhere that the staff make such a judgment on such a shallow first impression, if I am honest.
Agreed, but I would feel even more lousy continuing to charge them the higher rate while charging less to others.

You don't lower and raise your prices all the time, you do it once to determine the sweet spot and then you stick with that for a much longer time.

For me it was exactly as described: 2, evaluate, 2, evaluate, *2 evaluate -> go back one step.

At each step we had at most a few hundred signups processed before we made the decision.

The fact that it took as long as it did is only because I was skeptical, I should have realized much earlier that it can't cost too much to try, after all your signup rate would have to halve before you start to lose money.
Can somebody elaborate on the use cases of such a set? Are these volumes more theoretical and academic or practical? Is ownership more of a symbol or are they genuinely interesting to read, given a cramped startup lifestyle? What level of formal comp sci education does the author assume?

Not skepticism, just genuine curiosity and intrigue. I don't have a formal CS background, so forgive me for the naiveté if this is obvious stuff.
> You could argue that these are somehow related, that the young and hip would be attracted by the Think Different ad. I don't dispute that. But the later ads of kids jamming with their iPod ear buds communicate a message that is much closer to the general perception of Apple as a brand today.

The Think Different ad was about Apple, the company. Kids jamming with their iPod earbuds was about the iPod. The Think Different ad was about revitalizing the Apple brand, and Jobs points out how the Nike ads aren't even about the product to explain the logic behind that ad, not to suggest that Apple was going to take that approach forever like Nike does. It makes sense that after they'd established the values they wanted associated with Apple, they'd return to product-centric advertising.

In 2008, ten years after the Think Different campaign debuted, six years after the slogan was mostly retired, and well after the earbud ads hit their peak, there was a study on whether flashing Apple or IBM logos faster than could be percieved could prime people to be more creative. The results suggest it's not really necessary for them to keep playing up that angle.

http://www.physorg.com/news125073871.html

I won't say the restrictive policies governing iOS hasn't dampened the message somewhat for people like us, but you have to remember that a lot of it is about empowering people who aren't super great with computers and don't feel they have the freedom to use them the way anybody here does, because of their complexity and vulnerability. Remember that thread a little while back, where HNers were sharing stories about how some family member would write long lists of instructions just to do something like check their email?
Yes, it is. That's my favorite cam actually, the guy that set it up is super friendly.

ww.com is a huge grab bag of both the good, the bad and unfortunately the ugly. People got married there, it has caused divorces, I've seen babies be born and I've seen people die... It's been the project of a lifetime.
"Under his command the budget remains clean and the employees are happy."

Don't any of these places have accountants? Surely, there should be some requirement to recognize the future costs being taken on, properly discounted for net present value?

Or am I just naive?
This seems like the worst way to use the outside temperature to your advantage. They didn't even mention that it would have to be heated in the winter unless you wanted your milk to freeze solid. It's probably a lot more practical to just keep your fridge indoors and hook it up to a heat pump outside.
- 6,263,507: Browser for use in navigating a body of information, with particular application to browsing information represented by audiovisual data http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

- 6,034,652: Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person in the vicinity of a display device http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sec...

- 6,788,314: Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person in the vicinity of a display device http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sec...

- 6,757,682: Alerting users to items of current interest http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sec...