skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not much a of mountaineer, but it seems he only secures himself at 3:45 or so ?
The penny rule.

The number of people who go from pirates to $2.99 is dramatically outweighed by the people who go from $5.99 to $2.99. (Do the math; that's a net loss.)

The only way this works out for the developer if this scheme results is PR and raising awareness overall amongst people who are potential customers who wouldn't have known about the product anyway.
I wonder if anyone would notice - in the UK everyone but kids and old people seems to use credit cards these days. And old people frequently still use the pre-decimal terminology anyway.

Part of the reason for the widespread use of cashless payment might be that for larger amounts cash is totally impractical; the largest de facto denomination is £20, the £50 note gets you nowhere.

That said, I do really like the current design of the coins.

But weird currency experiments would be cool.
It's obvious why the public is divided: if you feed them (through the media) with the "debates" and "disputes" where "each side has to be represented" you're sending a signal: "there's 50% chance of X and 50% chance of not X." Average that then across the population and don't be surprised that you'll have almost 50% of people believing X and 50% of people believing not X.

If any media would make fair representation, they'd have to host for example 1000 scientists for one side and one (where they'd also have to constantly note that that one is typically not qualified in the area he disputes) for another (or even 10K scientists for one side and one for another etc.) That wouldn't make nice "debates" to sell advertising minutes or brag about the number of the viewers!

When you argue alone with the fool most won't see the difference.

Note also that the better title would be "The Unqualified Skeptics..."
I didn't think too hard because as soon as I saw his rationale for cost-based pricing I stopped thinking straight. So, just to get you started:

* Don't price things based on what they cost you unless you it's an ore or sorghum.

* Don't solicit customers that don't value your product.

* Don't demand that customers think carefully about which button to push to make a sale.

* Don't make the cheap option the first button users eyes cross.

You could probably go on to pick apart every sentence in the blog post (like his misunderstanding of the concept and purpose of a "sale") or the fact that his rationale sucks all possible incentive out of making his team more efficient at building and harnessing content for his game, but those are the big ones.

PS: if those stats are lying, that'll be the one smart thing he did with this page.
What he describes can be summed up as "Don't sell games, sell services". And I wholeheartedly agree.

Games-as-a-service in the future?
Do you think that we should take the risk of being sued for harassement? maybe we can say that we do that just for one month, once a week, then we stop.
It's interesting to watch the tension at Microsoft.

The IE team has to embrace standards (HTML5/JS/CSS) as much as possible to be thought of as a serious competitor in the browser wars. (Since the browser is the new OS.)

The rest of MS has to push Silverlight as the way to build applications, or else Windows itself is endangered, if there's nothing Windows-specific about future app development. (Hoping the browser isn't the new OS.)

Seems like both Microsoft and Apple are trying to figure out where to go in the post-PC era. Apple's clearly betting on mobile (which is a good bet), but MS is tied to their Windows/Office/Exchange legacy, and falling behind horribly in mobile. (We'll see if Windows Phone 7 does anything for them.)
No kidding! Right now, it's about as thick as a sheet of vapor.
I didn't like it at first, but took the opportunity to spend time getting to know it.

IMO, it is a better way of navigating around. If I'm wanting to go a child of a folder three levels up, I just click the little arrow next to the appropriate parent, then choose the child. As opposed to up-up-up-scroll-click.

Plus, I still have the option of manually editing it, if I so choose (but that takes an extra click).

It took me forever to notice the "search" box, though. That's another really nice feature, once you get used to it.
Although strangely it does seem that the size of hamburgers does follow Moore's law.
No, of course not. I was just being facetious.

If you allowed real insults, it could get out of hand quickly.
$5.99 is also an absurd price to begin with.

By the way, the next time someone on HN asks what "market segmentation" is or why product managers get paid money, this thread would be a good object lesson.
Yeah, because Surface has been so successful and doesn't mirror anything the DIY crowd hasn't been doing for years and for thousands less, because the tech is so simple. That's a good reason to tech it up further, so you can crank the cost up further - that'll make it sell!

Not holding my breath on this one. Not even taking a deeper breath than normal.
It's all C#, ASP.NET MVC. I'm just exposing functionality that I had to build in for http://ihackernews.com.
> I have to wonder if this product is cynically designed to exploit people who do not understand basic scientific reasoning.

You have to wonder? I have no doubt at all that that's the case. This product has SCAM written all over it.
The article says that the "latest, greatest Linux kernels should beware", so I don't know what to think :/
Lawful Interception: Friend or Foe?
Say what you will, at least the article has a sense of humor.

“How can you tell that Patrick is a young economist from the preceding discussion? Because he finds that the current government solution for the coins we use is 98 percent efficient and thinks this is inefficient.”
Yes, I have to wonder. Because it's also possible the people behind this believe in it, and are also incapable of basic scientific reasoning.
Thank you, that does make sense to me indeed. I'll stick with your advice.
It's not about books; no book is going to make you a better programmer automatically any more than a book on running will make you a runner. Start programming at whatever skill level you're at, start some independent projects, get a part time job...when you hit your wall, then find a good book. You're going to get a lot more out of doing than reading.
This should be fun. What's your half-dozen?
I think this is a great idea and very upfront for the reasoning. There are many games I know nothing about and would like to try, having the discount edition (barring there is a demo) lets me do this at little cost to me, and if it is a hit, I will be a lifelong customer paying full price onward. I dig it.
It often strikes me that for people that have no reasonable science education the world must seems like an extremely random, unpredictable and mysterious place without cause and consequence.

"My God, what must it be like in your funny little brains? It must be so... boring." -Sherlock (BBC)
Oh I see. Interesting.
I may very well use this to launch a Hacker News reader for iOS. Is there space for this (would you want it)?
You raise an interesting question. But ultimately the wrong kind of question. We shouldn't be asking ourselves how early can humans effectively search the internet. We should be researching how soon can humans make a search engine that is natural enough a small kid can use.

Now I don't have any kids or access to anything of the sorts, but isn't 6 exactly the age kids start asking questions? Questions that are sometimes hard to answer. This indicates that kids are in fact avid users of search, they just aren't very good at translating their query into something google can usefully understand.

Have you ever tried searching for something you didn't know how to exactly specify? My recent example is seeing a cool car in London. Now that I know what it's called I can just search for "morgan three wheeler". But the first time 'round I started from "three wheel oldtimer" and probably a few others like that, then looking through a lot of wikipedia etc.

Until we can make search engines behave like asking a human "Hey, that car looked cool, what is it?" kids won't be avid searchers.
well we won't use real insults ever, just insults related to how much you are a jerk, not heavy insults.do you think this matters ?
Don't you guys think you should credit Zachary and put up a link to awesomenessreminders.com as a source of your inspiration?

To say that you are not affiliated on a non-clickable bit of text after ripping off half their homepage is a little low.
Think "mod_rails". apache/nginx module to run Rack based applications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phusion_Passenger
TechStars Seattle Mentors Don't Have Time for Startups
At least here in Australia, prices at the shops will include taxes. So getting the correct change out while waiting in line is pretty simple.
It was up for a little while this morning and I was able to get a screenshot of the front page (so I know totals) but I couldn't download the actual transactions. Back down again.
Anarchist Cookbook authors hopes for discontinuation (read the author review)
Hmm. Python Cookbook release date 2005 and 'updated' for v2.4

I think I'll pass.
Simple.

Because it doesn't have to (in the USA). The market drives price, not Moore, and people are willing to pay the relatively cheap cost to get internet in most locations.

And because the long tail to distribution in the USA is very long indeed, due to all the space, and that takes a lot of time and money which is sucked from the people who have it / can afford it.
Which is why, for kids under 12, a simple portal of white-listed sites, such as Kongoroo(http://kongoroo.com), is more important than Google.
You should check out Sword of the Stars, they took the slider system from MOO, and they managed to make each race have a different form of FTL travel with pros and cons.
People in general seem to have a weak understanding of electromagnetism, and they vacillate between ignoring it and fearing it. I have friends who will turn on a radio and listen to their favorite station and they were unaware that the radio waves going to their radio were also hitting them. When I explained this to them, they seem surprised. I wasn't able to quite explain to them that an AM radio wave coming from several miles away was extremely weak and extremely unlikely to ever do them any damage.
Telnet terminal built using HTML5 Canvas/WebSocket/Node.js
Not sure if you have some other strategies for the URL scheme, but I'd probably use RESTful paths... like:

/users/{username}/posts instead of /by/{username}

or

/posts/{id}/comments instead of /comments/{id}

And how come threads are indexed by userid but posts are indexed by username? These kinds of things are the things that slip by developers and give them headaches. I can easily imagine not noticing the username/userid switch and being like "WTF!? 404?!" for a while.

I would expect the standard REST paths would a) make it easier to guess the paths and b) allow for simpler URL generation in client apps (you can generate the url for a user and then just tag on /comments or /posts to get the url for those things)
Isn't this an expansion pack and not the full game? His customers already have a relationship with him! Why is he offering them teaser pricing?
You are right. I am putting a link right now.
Or you could save your money, spend a bit more time searching, and not waste valuable real estate on books that get obsolete in a year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTXqHZiDcR0

Read the comments. One born every minute, so to speak :)
AnandTech and other sites have mentioned that newer drives (Sandforce in particular) do background garbage collection which eliminates some of the need for TRIM - but does require idle time.

I'd say go for the SSD. I just upgraded to a 240GB OCZ Vertex 2 and the speed boost is almost unbelievable.
Just as a followup, this OWC mercury isn't the only one that does built in garbage collection. From what I can tell, most newer generation SSD's do it. While it's not as good as TRIM support, it's a reasonable approximation.

As a side note for anyone else considering buying an SSD, there are rumors flying around that Intel is getting set to re-release their SSD line with a smaller micron next month. This should cut costs and increase speeds in time for the Christmas season.
I thought that `import unittest; def TestMyModule(unittest.TestCase): def test_simple(self): self.assert_equal(1,1)`
was short enough, it is shorter than the ruby equivalent and all that `nose` stuff ends up being the same thing as writing the same kind of stuff in a Rakefile...
My friend usually buys half an ounce to an ounce at a time, and it lasts him anywhere from a month (if there's not much to do but play video games and read) to six months. Cost ranges from $200 to $400, depending on quality.

Considering I regularly spend $50 per weekend on drinks, it's an incredibly cheap way to take a vacation from your mind.
That sounds like the reverse of what http://amiestreet.com does with music - they start it at free and the price goes up to 99c based on demand.

If you buy it at the low price, you can "recommend" it (write a review) and then later after the price has risen, get the difference in price credited to your account. (The difference between the price at the time of the review and the current price.)

Unfortunately I think they're closing up shop in a month or two...
I think the original commenter was hinting at the opportunity for the author to provide a service on top of HN data, like monitoring posts, replies, karma levels, or providing more categorized feeds based on preferences.

It could violate terms of service as it could at its most basic level scrape Hacker News for this information, but there hasn't been any issue with it so far.
It's a slippery slope.

Even with that disclaimer in your FAQ, things could get ugly for you.

IIRC, the "awesome" guy said that around 7% of the people they call get upset with hearing they're awesome.

I imagine your numbers, from recipients who don't get the joke or are caught in a bad mood, would be higher.

FWIW, I would never offer a service like this, not only b/c of the potential liability issues, but also for all the bad karma you could stir up.
SWF seeking long term relationship.
I think that the characteristics described in the article would make this funds very good VC. They could divert some money to invest in specific domains funds.

They would probably get some good return in money but also achieve some strategic goals and some middle-term economic growth.
Great inspiration for new tech stuff and usage
Read somewhere that $1 notes account for almost 50% of paper money in the US. To me it also makes sense to get rid of them (replace them with $1 coins).
That is not the case in all countries. In fact, I'm not even sure it applies in the majority.

Assumptions of uniformity are usually (uniformly) wrong.
I've mentioned it several times on HN...I happened to get lucky on my first try with the Philippines. I worked with Alex in Belarus, but it was just too expensive to send money there. I've had varying degrees of success with developers in India (so-so work, terrible communication) and Pakistan (so-so communication, terrible work) before I tried the Philippines.

The consensus on the Philippines seems to be that they aren't as good as developers in Eastern Europe or India. I don't know how anyone could paint a whole country with such a broad brush. In reality, it's because Filipinos have such strong English skills compared to Eastern Europe or India that outsourcing companies swoop them up first and pay high salaries, leaving few competent developers for small businesses. This is especially true in Manila/Makati.

I found my team by posting in the job section on http://www.philweavers.net/forums/. I lucked out and found one guy based in Cebu who is flat-out amazing. He gets paid a percentage of the projects we do, and it's on par with American wages. He found 10 more guys (designers, developers, data entry, content writers), and he manages them. The guys that work under him get paid $2.50-$4/hour, and they do great work. Right now we do transparent outsourcing for web design companies. They put in the face time with clients, pass us the specs, the guys in the Philippines do the work, and the companies pass off the work as their own.
Maybe with this stuff? http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/#dfn-readAsBinaryStrin...
Embracing Open Source
The fourth subpixel would be infrared.
Could run it in non-visible frequencies (though that may cause some surprising detection "bugs").
That's why you start high, and then go down. People actually want to pay you buckets of cash if you let them - all startups should keep that in mind.

As a consumer, I've also thought - hey this service/product is totally worth $50, and I would give them that money - but it's priced at $10 - so I'll just pay what they ask - 10 bux it is - it's a steal! - Great for me, not so great for the seller.

Have you ever felt like that as a consumer?

And if you're looking for consumers who can't afford more than $10 to spend on this theoretical product, maybe you're in the wrong industry segment, or you need to match the sale price with the production costs - ie you can't hire coders at $80,000/year just to make a $10/user product - until you hit that scale of # of customers.

McDonald's hires kids for their crew at perhaps $12,000/year, and sells burger meals for average, maybe $6 - $10.

And they're extremely profitable - even though they are selling physical goods with warehouses, processing plants, real estate, etc.
Shouldn't matter - you would be dead within two weeks of a total global loss of power.

We simply couldn't produce enough food.
Brilliant! But perhaps we could go with a 2.5 part coin instead? There's just something that feels right about that.
Are You Hip to Hipmunk[YC S10]? Pogue Posts / NYTimes 
Great to see this tool getting coverage from some mainstream media. I've recommended Hipmunk to several friends and family members simply because it's a great tool for finding and comparing flight information.

Pogue goes into detail about some personal history he has with Hipmunk co-founder, Adam Goldstein:

Eventually, I hired him as a tech reviewer for "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual," and he was amazing. His writing sounded exactly like mine. I started assigning him little sidebars and appendixes to write. By a year later, he’d written a Missing Manual himself: "AppleScript: The Missing Manual," published when he was 16, too young to sign his own book contract.
Odd though that people only seem to doubt the evidence when they want to do something!

Don't want to give up smoking, drinking, sugar, driving an SUV or running the AC 24*7 ? Then convince yourself that the scientist are divided on the health benefits/global warming.

I've yet to see somebody say that scientists are divided on general relativity and therefore I don't need to worry about falling off this cliff.
Relevant old Dilbert comic: http://books.google.com/books?id=vWBwU5gLo60C&lpg=PA117&...

"The secret company policy is to reward disloyalty!"
I think you're misreading it slightly. It's not that SWFs are the ideal investors for startups, it's that they're pushing a ton of money into the ecosystem and distorting it.
Wow! And here I thought they were using a paywall to prevent load from rising too high.
Maybe a more proper question: How is Twitter going to make money, as in "earn cash"?
The average wage for a good software developer is close to 1000$

From your link;

A good computer specialist or programmer who still has to stay in the country will do the job for $250 - 300 per month

At $8/hr, in a month he would make $1408 (22 business days/month)
From the government’s point of view, there is no reason to make it easier for citizens to anonymously and untraceably send money to one another. It’s politically impossible for them to eliminate paper/metal cash, but they’re not going to make cash transactions any easier.

(And any country whose central bank supports completely digital anonymous cash will suffer the fate of Nauru: first it will attract money launderers from all over the world, and then the world financial system will shut off all contact with it until it reforms.)
I was even more amused by the nonsensical explanation they give after that phrase. Apparently their Faraday cage blanket works "similar to how noise canceling headphones work with sound waves or how a grounding wire neutralizes an electric current."

So apparently their Farady cages work like two completely different physical phenomena, neither of which is anything like a Faraday cage. I'm also amused by the fact that if it really works like noise cancelling headphones, belly armor actually emits radiation!
I can't use Spotify in Belgium. How does it compare with Grooveshark ? It looks to be the same concept, one is a desktop app, the other a webapp.

Grooveshark doesn't have audio ads, no limit (that I know of) but does not seem to have a mobile app. What makes people pay for Spotify's service compared to what Grooveshark has to offer ?
I'm sure some tablet from the future will be that thin.
So basically your reasoning is that "you" should be able to set the price for "my" work.
Good System Administrators are Blind
The whole idea behind Haystack (hide illicit traffic amongst many innocuous http requests) made no sense to me when I read about it a few weeks ago, but I assumed it was being incompetently summarized.

Interesting reminder of the need for peer review.
A sterling suggestion - I award you half-a-crown
Present. There are a number of games that require internet access - MMOs, some where your save file is online, and some which simply phone home frequently. ie, Assassin's Creed 2.
Scott Hanselman on Innovation, Apathy and Stand-Up - Episode #9
Before we do any of that, we have to determine if children are already effective with current search engines. It's possible you want to build something no one needs. The study linked here did not establish that.

Sometimes, if my understanding of what I want is fuzzy, or I just don't want to expend the mental effort to synthesize good search terms, I'll just pass a naive question to Google. It often helps me down the path to determining better keywords, and occasionally it finds what I'm looking for.

In other words: what you want might already exist. We don't know until we study it.
Well, the first site of the network and the last will help us stirring down that bad karma. anyway thanks for your feedbacks! the informations you point out are really useful
Throw your cap over the wall
What makes me curious is why transistor density does follow Moore's law. My theory is that it sets a benchmark to manufacturers.
Why go to the effort of eliminating small coins? Why not just go ahead and switch to an electronic currency? Or at least an electronic replacement for coins and bills like they do in Japan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suica
Great to see this tool getting coverage from some mainstream media. I've recommended Hipmunk to several friends and family members simply because it's a great tool for finding and comparing flight information.

Pogue goes into detail about some personal history he has with Hipmunk co-founder, Adam Goldstein:

Eventually, I hired him as a tech reviewer for "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual," and he was amazing. His writing sounded exactly like mine. I started assigning him little sidebars and appendixes to write. By a year later, he’d written a Missing Manual himself: "AppleScript: The Missing Manual," published when he was 16, too young to sign his own book contract.
Concept products are like essays, musings in 3D. They are incomplete promises. Shipping products, by contrast, are brutally honest deliveries. You get what’s delivered. They live and die by their own design constraints. To the extent they are successful, they do advance the art and science of design and manufacturing by exposing the balance between fantasy and capability.

http://counternotions.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/concept-produ...
> Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc