skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was what I thought at first too, until I double-checked the study. If you look at the data here (http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0053/...), the cumulative percentage is 214.2%. That means it wasn't a "multiple choice, pick one" question - it was a "mark one or more reasons" question.

That means that 51.1% of parents surveyed did not mark "quality of education" as a reason they chose to homeschool - it was on the list as an option they could have marked, and they chose not to pick it. That's pretty telling, IMO.
> When a Match.com asks me to pay $30 a month, I cringe. I'm perplexed by this.

As other commentors said, it's partially volume.

Second, it's partially strategy - Netflix could charge more, but have a smaller customer base. Even if the net profit for the short term was higher at a higher price point, they might think it's worth it to get market share, word of mouth, and future expansion.

Third - for some services, customers see higher price as a desirable attribute. That could be the case in dating - people in certain demographics might prefer to know whoever else is using the site is serious enough to pay a decent chunk of coin, not just throwing a profile up for kicks.

Lots of factors. Shortest answer is - strategy. Netflix might be able to make higher short term revenues and net profit, but they might prefer the lower-price driven expansion to get economies of scale, volume, market share, word of mouth, and loyalty. Match.com might be able to make higher short term revenues and profits by lowering price and attracting more users, but instead they prefer trying to brand and position themselves as a premium, curated, high-quality site for serious people. Strategy is complex, lots of layers you can look at it, especially when playing at that really high dollar level.
FICO is credit slang for FU, right?
To be fair, in the few cases where I've seen good data, most groups do better in the US than in their native countries.

For instance, Asian Americans have average income of $65,000. Japan, the richest country in Asia, has average income of about $40,000. Japanese Americans also live 2 years longer than Japanese.

Swedish Americans are also considerably richer than Swedes, as I discovered today:
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-o...

Like it or not, ethnicity plays a big role in many social measures. The US is very diverse, and certain groups drag our averages down (groups that are very small in Europe and Asia).
Why Steve Jobs Wins, Part Eleventeen
Truck + 300 MPH Jet Engine = Pure Awesomeness
Microsoft Updates Toolkit to Block Attacks Against Unfixed Vulnerabilities
You probably haven't experienced corruption. It takes away the level playing field that would exist otherwise. When the rules involve bribing, those without the means and capacity to bribe but who deserve their chance are simply left watching.

Sure, in this case the bribing rule may be okay since they are all standing in line at an expensive restaurant and presumably could afford the $50 bribe. What if the rules were made public and now everyone starts to bribe the maitre d'? Imagine what that would do :)
Interesting opinion. In the NatGeo documentary I saw, the semi-legalization of Marijuana has brought an influx of supply, making it harder for (legal) growers to find places to sell to.

If its legalized, it can still generate vasts sums of tax revenue. Look at how much tax money tobacco and alcohol bring in.
You are drastically overestimating the technical acumen of the average buyer of online music. Most of the people buying music from iTunes are the same people writing 'patio11 support emails complaining that his bingo card generator broke their internet.
I assumed the quoted song-writer does. I'm not sure how else he justifies not being able to retire from his work. He doesn't seam to be suggesting the quality of his work is to blame. I know quality and personal interest is the reason I don't purchase (or pirate) most popular American music.
Yes, the semantic flaws in the content industry's criticism of file sharing are indeed a great injustice.
How about 10gen, the company that created and maintains MongoDB? MongoDB is released under the AGPL.
I doubt that's why they didn't put a Windows key on their keyboards. Maybe it was a licensing issue (as Microsoft required keyboard manufacturers to license the key), or maybe it was something else, but I'd be surprised if they held out that long over OS2.

For me, the Windows key was always known more colloquially as the "crash CounterStrike" key.
Fine fine, I'll install a mobile theme or something later today. ;)
Because the law believes that bits have colour: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

I'm not sure if this exact issue has been litigated, probably because the copyright holders would really rather not even discuss the issue, and it isn't the problem anyhow. A strict reading of the laws involved definitely show it's copyright infringement, but one could reasonably argue the appropriate damages for the act should be a flat $0. One can reasonably counterargue too, though. Something along the line of "Well, then they should have bought a second copy", though the problem with that is then you have to defend how when it is disadvantageous to the customer for it to be considered a strictly physical product, we consider it that way, but when it is disadvantageous to the customer to treat it as an abstract intellectual good, we treat it that way too. However, that's only a logical contradiction, not a legal one. This is probably why this has (to the best of my knowledge) never been litigated, even a victory of the case could set a precedent they wouldn't want. Best for them to just keep this out of court.
(Disclaimer: I don't use craigslist, I've been to the site <10 times in my life, so I'm making assumptions about what's available to the end user in terms of reporting issues. If I'm wrong, I apologize in advance.)

In my opinion:

1 is unfair. You can't say with 100% certainty that any popular website is immune from something like that, so he can't say "yes". He certainly can't say "no" without making the site look bad. So how does he answer?

2 is unfair. If you ask about a specific ad, they can look in the system and say "that ad was placed on X, it was reported as problematic by a user on Y, we checked it on Z and reported it to the police." If you say in general "what are you doing about 'these girls'" then you're making him look bad by saying "I don't know 'which girls' you're referring to." Again, if you don't give him a chance to make a proper answer, then you're not really being fair as a reporter.

3 is similarly unfair unless he's at his computer and can give you the information. Obviously the post in question is crossing the line, but what do you expect him to do about it right then? If they manually screen the ads, then someone's not doing their job right, but can you say with 100% certainty that everyone at CNN is doing their job right 100% of the time?

Finally, 4 is unfair because if she'd actually reported the thing using the proper channels, then the post would have been gone before she'd have time to put together her story. But that would go against her interests, so it's much better to ambush him in person with an ad he's never seen before.

On the other hand, if the question is the less-personal and less-exasperated "why do you rely on your users to police your site?" then that's a fair question.

The underlying question for this reporter is this: Is your goal to get answers? Or is your goal to embarrass him for ratings?

(EDIT: replacing "stupid" with "unfair".)
So not really a user of craigslist -- may have found an apartment a few years ago, but never visit it. Here's my response:

1. It's impossible to say that about anything. Can you trust that children are not being sex-trafficked at walmart & mcdonalds?

2. This is a good question.

3. Asking him to speculate on an ad is stupid. She could be a stripper or something else, hell now I'm speculating... maybe that was the only picture she had

4. This relates to number 2. If they say that they scan those that have been reported by users since there are a lot more users than staff then it's everyones responsibility. If you see something that's wrong you should report it. In much the same way we don't expect pg to review every post and news story -- there is a way for us to report by flagging.
I am Jon Bradshaw and I am one of the co-founders of BoomStartup. If you have any questions please feel free to ask me anything that you'd like.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I think that when Apple starts caring about the set-top, you're going to know about it, because you won't be able to catch a train without seeing 10 billboards about it, and the product offering itself will be so complete that HN users will not be able to shut about how unjust its restrictions are.

The notion that Apple is just lousy at marketing set-top products and that's why this isn't a runaway success beggars belief. Did you see Steve Jobs just collect a huge round of applause for introducing buttons on an MP3 player? Because I just saw him collect a huge round of applause for introducing buttons on an MP3 player.
Phys Ed: Does Stretching Before Running Prevent Injuries?
Speed Test: Flash vs HTML5 On The Nexus One [video]
I guess that makes sense, I would be pretty annoyed if Facebook sent me a notification every time they roll out some random new feature.

I like the idea of bots, but I don't see a lot of consumer grade users using it. Seems more like a toy for the nerds amongst us, although I am sorely tempted to whip up an Eliza bot for notifo. That said, I also wanted to modify a z-code interpreter to allow people to play infocom games over twitter.
ok...
I think she has a point but didn't cut to meat of things(These days people apply link-bait heavily).

I have notice that people repeat exactly what pg says and nothing else. I don't have a problem with repeating, but I think they also need to add to what he says.

I kind of carry around a formula: 95% copy and 5% innovation. Innovation should be low because it reflects taking a risk that by simply copying would mitigate. But, Innovation should never be zero as you effectively don't add anything to the community and become less competitive.

Currently, pg might have a set of belief that he has found empirically to be true. But if you consider the search for the optimal set of rules for forming a start-up, I think pg might have reach a local maximum and it is necessary for start-ups both in YC and out to search this space that defer from pg current views, so a new higher local maximum can be achieve for the entire community.(Think Particle Swarm Optimization)
Exciting times for Utah Startups!

It's definitely exciting to see IActionable.com up there.
The benchmarks used in the video can be found here:
http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark
I have yet to hear a solid argument for 75-year "ownership" of a copyright.

I also view the ability to sell the copyrights themselves (patents, etc, etc) to a third-party as very distasteful -- as opposed to allowing someone to use your copyrighted item(s) for compensation -- as it seems very against the spirit of the law to give up your original right as the author.
> 4. Why do I have the responsibility to report this
> to you when it's your Web site?

Because you're a human being?

How is seeing an ad for underage prostitution, and not reporting it because "it's someone else's responsibility," any different then seeing an assault in progress on the street and claiming that it's the police's responsibility to get involved in that, and not yours?

If someone just ignores a murder/assault/robbery in-progress we would think of them as an asshole, so why is this reporter different? Because she's a journalist?
Feels responsive here (Safari 5).
This is pretty neat, when you look beyond the virtual g/f part. Users play the game, and as part of the 'maintain a relationship' part of the game, you take a vacation with your virtual g/f in the real town of Atami and you take a guided tour.
Yeah I believe you and I'm sure this is all great (as a parent of 2 school-aged handfulls, "good luck with that", as they say).

My point is just that unschoolers aren't sending their kids to a big brick building full of professional teachers.
Craigslist has manually screened every adult services post since May 2009. In a blog post last month, they noted: "before being posted each individual ad is reviewed by an attorney licensed to practice law in the US, trained to enforce craigslist’s posting guidelines, which are stricter than those typically used by yellow pages, newspapers, or any other company that we are aware of. More than 700,000 ads were rejected by those attorneys in the year following implementation of manual screening, for falling short of our guidelines."

http://blog.craigslist.org/2010/08/manual-screening-matters/

Craigslist also does other stuff, including phone verification for every adult services ad: http://blog.craigslist.org/2010/05/an-open-invitation-to-rac...

As Craigslist notes, this is a lot more screening than any other services does, including classifieds or the Yellow Pages.
Status.Net (raised over $2 million in funding) uses the AGPL. Their software is similar to Twitter (they run http://identi.ca), but they seem to be targeting the enterprise market: http://status.net/enterprise-network

If I made my living selling desktop software, the benefit of using BSD licensed libraries without contributing back to the community would be obvious. The GPL has a similar status among web companies. As a consumer, however, I appreciate the choices that AGPL software give me (e.g. hosting the software on my own server, adding or removing features, etc.).
Could AirPlay Become The New TV-Out For Apps?
"The reverse also applies"

Absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt. I am happy to engage in fair discussions of the tradeoffs between real schools and real homeschooling. I'm also happy to discuss the tradeoffs between what schools can become in the next 20 years with technology vs. what homeschooling can become with technology in the next 20 years, which I believe leads pretty inexorably to a mix-and-match situation. I only regret that my children will at best pick up the tail end of that transformation since entrenched interests will be holding back schools as hard as possible over the next ten years.

I'm objecting, in both directions, to holding up an ideal on one side and a strawman on the other.
I love that Old Spice created video replies to people in near real-time. That's real interaction with a brand.

I love that Tipp-Ex had the creativity to put together a whole ton of funny clips ahead of time, and leave people to discover them. Amazing effort.
IActionable FTW!!
> You can steal an idea, for example.

How so? I can't even really write about it without getting mired in semantics, but here goes...

Suppose, one icy winter, I see you scraping your car's windows with an inverted plastic coffee mug. I'm having a lot of trouble with my store-bought flat, shovel-shaped scraper. I copy your idea: I bring a plastic mug out to my car, and use that mug to scrape frost off my car's windows the next day.

Did I "steal" your idea? How did I do that? You still have use of your plastic coffee mug. What's missing?

And then there's the issue of independent invention which happens a lot more than "copying == theft" folks ever admit. I invented the round windsheild frost scraper in the mid-80s. Unfortunately, someone else did, too: I found a round scraper in a K-Mart once, with a patent number on it.

Did I steal his/her idea? On my mother's grave, I did not. I invented it independently.

Similarly, I invented the same propulsion system that Freeman Dyson did in the 60s for "Project Orion". My sister claims to have invented "curtain walls" in high school, a long time before she went to college for an architecture degree.

Describe how I can "steal" an idea.
Apple-Google to be at war in music space by Christmas
> This was hardly "gotcha" journalism.

They edited out how she introduced herself to him, and edited in him standing there paused thinking about the difficult question that was just sprung on him without warning. She was almost certainly very friendly and casual in the beginning, and then she waylays him when he's not ready.

Does he have an obligation to know how his ship is running? Yes. But she took advantage of the fact that he hasn't taken "public relations training" or whatever and is basically a decent guy. What he'll do now is learn the standard PR deflecting non-answer in case something like this happens, and then give a prepared statement later. That's a shame, and that was absolutely distasteful gotcha journalism.
I didn't mean to get into the semantics of "theft". If you notice, I said "To me I'd consider that theft".

What is significant, I believe, is the moral weight of categorizing it as theft, rather than specific technical definitions and jurisdictions. I believe the same context is meant by the Obama administration's choice of words. We are at a time in history for which there is no precedent for all the things we are able to do. It's for this reason I bring up these arguments with an audience which seems to largely favor making free use of any product deemed fair game by their own justification.
Finally a use for crowdsourcing!
You could always convince the Scientologists that she's critical them...
BitTorrent is a competitor to NetFlix in the same way that it, and P2P, was a competitor to the iTunes Music Store. Even if it's not free or not without hassle, it's still a way that some people get movies/TV shows etc. Which makes it competition.
Why Ping May Be Bad News for Blippy
No offense man, but it sounds like you are making aggrandizing generalizations to simply sound smarter than the guy who built the deck.

I find the list fascinating, and plan to use it to build a solid DnD campaign (in 3.5, 4.0 is WAY too restricting!)
4chan decides to do something nice for a change
I don't know if the rest of your comment is true or not, but I agree with you that the demo was kind of weird. Steve Jobs was like "I tap here, the menu comes up. And it's on the TV."

I thought he was strangely casual about it as if we were used to that kind of interaction and "flow", even though that's the kind of things that have been talked about for many years (the idea of starting something on my phone, it comes up on my TV screen when I get home, everything is sync'ed, etc.) without really seeing something commercial that really does it.
The tax revenue won't vanish if the price goes down. I'm sure the legislature will use a flat tax of a certain amount like they do for gasoline. It doesn't matter if gasoline costs $0.99 or $3.99, California still gets 64.5 cents per gallon.
Pricing is probably disrupted more by the inefficiency of the market; like most people, if I wanted to buy an eighth tomorrow, how would I know whether $50, $75, or $250 was a good price?

Which is to say that there are least two factors (scarcity and lack of transparency) artificially inflating pricing.

On the other hand, in a truly free market for tobacco, a pack of American Spirits might only cost a buck or two; nicotine is our one and only drug-war success, and I think the state has demonstrated that it can extract profits from vice goods if it wants to.

You'd still pay $75 (is that the right price?) for an 1/8 if that was the only legal way to do it, even if you could get it illegally for $30. At least, I would.
I would imagine a proper response would be to actually address the questions - i.e. discuss what CL is doing to inhibit sexual exploitation.

Calling someone else's backyard a mess might feel good - but doesn't say anything about your own.
I don't off hand, but for a start search on the upward funarg problem.

Here's the history as I learned it in the '80s (mostly):

Original Formula LISP as done by McCarthy was dynamically scoped for any one of a number of reasons:

They didn't know better (this is 1958, when LISP was implemented as subroutines callable from FORTRAN running on a vacuum tube IBM 704 and a lot of it was based on a 1955-6 language).

They didn't know how to make it efficient, or I think especially interpreted LISP, statically scoped when the latter became recognized as a big and/or the right thing, largely due to Algol 60 (as in 1960). Among other things it's memory hungry (see the Wikipedia Funarg problem article) and there just wasn't much of that to go way back then. The 704 was IBM's first "core by default" machine....

Scheme in 1975 was the first statically scoped LISP although the first production quality version was T in the early '80s (and that was a necessary proof of concept).

By the time of Common Lisp in 1984 it had long been recognized that default dynamic scoping was ... not good, Common Lisp's change to default static was perhaps its biggest breaking change and it was years before many code bases were changed to it (by this time various LISP dialects were pretty mature and there were some seriously useful systems written in them like Macsyma and the Lisp Machine).

Since then, of all the Lisp dialects I consider to be "major", only Emacs Lisp (ask RMS) and AutoLisp (AutoCad's extension language of 1986 based on "a very early version of XLISP" the date of which I don't know, but XLISP proper started in 1983) are dynamic by default. Everyone else has followed the lead of Scheme and gone default static.
Odeo Releases Twttr ... "very similar to another service called Dodgeball."
Worse, the arguments seem to be based on "potential" rather than "fact".

It seems to me non-"internet" piracy cases are largely based on hard evidence, and when they try to include evidence for "potential to do" it's also based on some other hard-evidence, e.g. a large-scale CD-copying machine, a pallet of 100,000 blanks.

If you'd been convicted before for the same offence, then you're more likely to get more jail-time for repeat offending, i.e. a predilection for continuing that proven behaviour, but the punishment meted-out for copyright offences seems massively, unbelievably out-of-scale. Probably because they're often compensation paid to the copyright owner, rather than punishment for breaking the law.
This is why the news industry is dying. Too much bullshit.

The story is: Craigslist says they do X - explain what X is.
We verified with Y & Z and they say that have not received any reports/information inline with X. So then they contact craigslist and ask them questions:

1. When did you implement X

2. How is it going?

3. Do you have any metrics/success stories.

4. Who do you contact? (Follow up with them to verify)

5. When we talked to Y & Z they said that they weren't contacted by you can you explain why that is. Since by your own policy X that is what should have been done.

Then I may have learned something. Hell you could even through in some stats so I know how big the problem is -- is it 1 out of 100, 1 out million etc.

Instead you get people posting on the internet interviewing in cars, and ambushing someone who doesn't have time to research anything at all. Perhaps if they ambushed the head of program X they would know the relevant details, but that person might not even exist.
Craigslist charges money for these ads and claims it manually reviews them. Presumably the person walking by a murder/assault/robbery isn't witnessing a crime the perpetrator asked and paid the owner of the alleyway for permission to commit.
Anderson Cooper did an interesting report about this on 60 Minutes a couple of years ago. Video here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/19/60minutes/main3386...