skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
User acquisition strategy is as important for a search engine as it is for any other consumer web company. Many that read HN are ahead of the curve when it comes to new technologies such as DDG. 99% of America just uses what they have until it breaks. So Cuil's lack of high quality results may not have been their only reason leading to their demise, but with 33m in funding I hope a solid chunk was devoted to acquiring main street America. Yes, Google initially won by having higher quality results, but any new player with higher quality results will only be marginally better than Google.
How does this business model even make sense? I just can't wrap my head around why you would produce a product, cripple it, and then sell it.

Edit: My point is that Intel is intentionally reducing the value of their product. How can they afford to do that and remain competitive?
I don't think we should kid ourselves that "local" is always more efficient (or "green"). If you're looking to prototype, it's a great tool, but larger 3DP machines are still more time-cost efficient due to how parallel the production can be.

*Full Disclosure, my startup: http://CloudFab.com works on 3D printing in a more centralized production model, but I still think MakerBot is awesome!
Thanks for the feedback!

It's very minimal right now. (This is basically what I got done on Friday before a late lunch. The Twilio API is that awesome.) I'm open to adding anything other Twilio-based businesses find useful--stats, graphs, whatever it may be.
Foursquare campaign brings in 33 percent more traffic to McDonalds
This is quite normal in high-end kit; If you buy an HP SuperDome for example with half the CPUs they'll probably actually ship you a fully loaded one with half the chips turned off (still for the price of exactly what you ordered). Then when you want to upgrade you don't have to take any downtime, you just pay them the difference and they supply you with the codes to unlock it. IBM do this with mainframes all the time.

First time I've seen this on consumer kit tho'.
Home page? Not the "New" page?

How recently? Can you remember what else you did that day? Can you remember what time of day you saw it? All these things can be used to find a short list of titles for you to skim read to see if you recognise it.

But I'm going to bed, so it won't be me. Good luck.
So you don't have to produce lots of different products? Mass producing the same good version is cheap.
All in one page here: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophys...
Don't get me wrong- I get why people are mad. It comes off as racketeering. And I certainly wouldn't want to drop $50 on this. But how is this all that different from software companies that do the same thing?

Your basic subscription to Basecamp, your Photoshop trial, your Windows 7 Home Edition, the Keynote trial that comes with your Mac, your iPhone... they're all capable of doing a lot more (for no extra cost to the company behind it), and you can upgrade for a cost. Another good example that the article mentions is upgrades in video games. This is a pretty common practice for software, so why not hardware?
Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704907
Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1705098
It's like region locked DVD players. It's all the same kit off the same assembly line, just with one jumper lead attached. If you're Sony or whoever you want to be able to shift your inventory from country to country if that's where the demand is.
Eh... Companies that produce widgets don't generally do so on demand. They over produce when the demand is low, and then fill orders from storage when demand is high. The average-ness averages out over time. (Unless the demand is initially high and then falls, but that's a different conversation.)

But when dealing with programmers, it's a whole different scenario. Let's run through the 5 programmers, 5 parallel tasks scenario again.

You give out 5 parallel tasks to 5 programmers and expect them to be finished in 3 days average. That means some finish early and some finish late. The ones that finish early don't sit on their hands. They get another task, or they start helping one of the slower programmers, if possible. (To be fair, the late task might not be because they are 'slow', but there might have been complications. We aren't assigning blame here.) There is never a situation where the demand for programming work is less than the supply when you're running a programming shop. If there is, you'd let someone go until there isn't.

In programming, everything is late because people under-estimate. Estimates have a built-in assumption that things go well, even when you try to estimate that things don't. The only way to build-in estimates for problems is to badly over-estimate, and those would be useless estimates. (Assuming, of course, that you don't already think they're useless.)

There are other factors, too, like wanting to please your boss with good numbers, etc... But I don't think they're nearly as strong.

So things are always late because of estimates, not because of some 'flaw of averages' or something.
The _business model_ makes sense, because the sale of these unlocks are practically all profit, and thus they can sell at multiple price points. It's just not right in a moral sense to prey on uneducated consumers like this.
If you start your own company, you can give yourself any title you like.

edit: That doesn't mean people will refer to you as such, or respect you, but that's a different issue altogether.

On topic, a Chief Philosopher probably would serve a role between product manager and evangelist.
This reminds me of something I've been curious about: is an office essential for a startup? Through my consulting, I've seen lots of companies embracing the remote thing, but few startups. Does it just not work? Why not?

Are there any examples of startups that have had most or all of their team remote that were successful and built a strong culture and identity?
Price differentiation between customer groups. It is not different conceptually from my downloadable software, which is free or $30 depending on whether you want a code which activates an if statement in the bitwise identical executable.

I could charge people $5 for the download and $25 for the code. Not a great idea, I think, but straightforward.
I personally would like to see more informative articles like this on basics, its been really fun like seeing articles on netcat. You always pick up little juicy details
The earlier attack on the Scientologists sent at least two guys to prison:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/guilty-plea-in-scie...
Heh. Another programming-language ABC I put together about a decade ago: http://wry.me/~darius/writings/abecedarius.html
Autism’s First Child
1-2 months tops before someone breaks their security.
This reinforces my belief that the 'market' is just one giant shell game. Invest your money in something tangible like making a product.
It's a form of damaged goods price discrimination. People who would not have bought the full-price processor will buy the crippled version.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/journalarticles/...
Curl: analyzing ten years of more code and contributors
IBM mainframes have been doing it for decades.

In their market, it makes sense. You buy a cheap mainframe and, when the time to upgrade comes, the hardware upgrade consists of a phone call.

Now... Would you have to run a Windows program in order to "upgrade" the CPU?

I kind of like the idea of writable logic inside the CPU.
Ask HN: MariaDB, OurDelta or Percona?
Apparently there are now three different active distributions of MySQL. Are you guys using any of them already?
Well, you assume that training actually produces results. It might well be that after spending considerable time and money on the new employee he's still not a very good match for the original tasks. Then you are stuck with a loss and an employee you can't fire (since, for example, the 'testing' period is something like 2-4 weeks -- this might depend on the country/state, etc.).

Or, training does work but the investment is usually so big (not just on the trainer but the lost productivity of the team members involved) that the employee would need to stay employed a number of months/years at least, to recuperate costs. So if the employee resigns before that (since he gets a better offer) you are still in the red.

I've personally had people work for me that didn't actually fit the task, but only because they were quite smart and I was certain they could pick up the domain (any domain) quite fast.

But right now, for example, I'm looking at CVs of student candidates and I'm reluctant to invest in their training because I have a small company and the risk of them leaving after they are trained is high.
Why not type in the pin code at the POS terminal?

All Credit cards (smartcards) in Europe (Visa, etc..) already have a chip integrated . So whenever you do a purchase in the store, you have to enter your pin into the terminal, to complete the transaction. No pin, no transaction.

I don't think that this credit card 2.0 is solving any problem at all.

Maybe the founder have never been to Europ and don't know that this exists here... imagine. hehe.
Because you own the physical hardware, not simply a "license" to use the hardware.

Unless processors are coming with EULAs now?

This could set a dangerous precedent for automobiles or any other physical good.

EDIT: I'm speaking of consumer, not business purchases.
well, that risk is exactly why they're testing the idea out in low-end markets first - so the people who would break the security for this probably don't even care for this laptop anyways.
Just if the transactions went through with your personal secret pin code. And even then it's certainly a case by case basis.
It seems a little clearer in that case, because mainframe purchases are often pretty explicitly "licenses" rather than "purchases", with an actual contract negotiated between the two companies. IBM used to even come and take back the machine if you stopped paying the annual fees, because you didn't really own it. Consumer hardware is more typically a "sale", though, with no real contract-negotiation phase, and both parties' obligations completed after the sale, except for any warranties.
Culprit of what? There's nothing wrong with the markets at the moment. They don't go straight up.
Most of the cost of the chip is in the R&D just like in software so the cheap chips cost about the same as the expensive ones on manufacture. For years, people have been overclocking cheap chips to make them run like the top end ones which shows there is little difference between them. Therefore price differentiation comes into to play so they can maximise their profit. It's similar to what Microsoft do with the different editions of Windows.
awesome idea, may be I can hose in the air with an air compressor and that should help overcome air flow issues too.

nah, I will just reverse the vacuum cleaner, air compressor's too expensive and that's better utilization rate for the vacuum cleaner too.

hung flat against an exterior walll just to block out noise

Plain brilliance at work!
This is how the industry has always worked. The 486SX was a 486DX with the FPU burned off with a laser. Initially this was to make use of parts with a defective FPU, but parts with perfectly good FPUs were often disabled to fulfil demand.

CPUs are produced to a single design within a processor series. The ones with no faults are clocked the fastest and have all their features enabled. Parts with lots of flaws are sold off as crippled budget processors. AMD's triple-core processors seem a bit strange until you realise that they're a quad-core part with one faulty core.

Overclockers have known about this for years, identifying countless 'good batches' of processors and GPUs that were perfectly capable of being clocked faster, but were sold as cheap parts to fulfil demand.

If this seems like a con, then the whole IC fabrication industry is a con - artificially crippling ICs has been standard practice for decades.
The Pleasure of Walking
Sure. Drop me an email if/when you get started.
Ignoring the querystring would break for a lot of sites' URLs, like the default WordPress URLs (Hacker News' too, to be recursive).
Undergrad here; not true. I'm currently building a scanner because I hate carrying my textbooks around campus, and any one book is heavier than my laptop. I did search for pre-existing scans, but most of them don't exist. By the way, scanning is only $150+ if you count the cost of a camera. If you already have one for other reasons, or can borrow one, you can make legible copies for free, or spend a little to make a platen and fixed camera mount for better copies in less time.
You don't have to scratch your own itch. An entrepreneurial hacker could start selling "$50 value" unlocks for, say, $25.
Considering that don has been a member here for three years, and you for less than 100 days, maybe it's more accurate to say that the Haskell haters finally made it...?
What study abroad programs end up becoming
Any good business seeks to extract the maximum amount people are willing to pay. A single price for all buyers works against that. (I forget the economics term for it.) It's why coupons and discounts for senior citizens exist. Senior citizens and people willing to spend time clipping coupons often can't afford to pay regular prices, so businesses offer discounts where they still make a profit. Some profit is better than none. I'm sure Intel would love to produce high-end chips for people willing to pay, and low end chips for others. But, the cost of designing and building two separate but similar products would probably be much higher than simply crippling high-end chips. The alternative is that they only produce high-end (or low-end) chips and normal prices, driving low-end (high-end) customers to competitors, or they lower their high-end price and try to make up the difference in volume.

It does seem a little dirty to sell something to somebody, but restrict how they can use it. But, Intel isn't just selling a chunk of silicon. They are selling the work that went into shaping that silicon just so. They could have designed it much more cheaply if it didn't need to do so much. So, by buying the low-end chip, you aren't paying them for the extra effort they put in for their high-end customers. If you want the extra benefit, then you must pay for the extra work.
I've built a couple of sites using Laterooms and they are very approachable. Each time I've spoken on the phone first & gone through things. One site was barely a holding page at this stage. You might have more luck this way.

Their API is one of the good ones too - lots of nice stuff available.
If you buy a crippled processor and hack it, I'd guess that Intel has no cause to sue you, precisely because you own that processor. But they don't have to make it easy to hack.
culprit that is the topic of this discussion which is "ETFs: The next crash?" as far as I can tell? Have you read the article?
Perhaps it's that barriers to entry on the net are so high. I think you could usefully sell a $30 computer (simple to program, cheap to make, flexible enough to be useful) in places like Africa etc to people who could not afford to have one otherwise but even a basic web browsing experience needs a lot of CPU cycles nowadays. Of course there are text-based browsers, but you might as well go with the $100 price point like OLPC and just look for subsidies. I have heard nothing about how programmable those are, for young hackers in poor countries, I hope there's access to python, js, or similar.

Closer to home, I would have quite liked to use the Playstation 3 as a computer, to the point that I learned quite a lot about the Cell chip inside it and started thinking about Linux distros again. But Sony made it non-expandable (boo), with no access to the GPU (WTF), were late with driver support (argh) and finally ditched the OS loader option entirely. They briefly hinted at giving away their 3d modeling engine but changed their minds about that too.

Now, I know they recoup the hardware development costs from royalties on the games and have an investment to protect, but with a little more patience, support, and faith in their own engineering instincts they would have been rewarded with PS3s popping up up at every science fair. People are nostalgic about their 80s computers out of all proportion to their quality because they were easy to do things with if you wanted.

I do think there's still room for lightweight and hackable products. One which missed the mark by going down the x86 route and overloading price and spec was the eee keyboard PC (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/eee-eee-keyboard-eee-pc-wir...). Imagine if it had been $99-200 and run android or so!
Twilio has so many options for improving phone support it is unbelievable. Imagine an integrated CRM which, as your phone rang, brought up Milly Smith's account info on screen. Or a quick prehuman prompt asking her for her SSN so that she never had to tell your employees. Or both of these, in a call center environment.
Ex-child prostitute sues Village Voice over sex ads
NewsTilt Was An Obvious Disaster From the Beginning
Intel Plans to Equip Chips With USB 3.0 Host Controller in 2012
That 'huge hit' of 1982 would be a Microsoft Kin today. Also, only a few 'you' managed to make a big hit. It wasn't that easy. In fact, many winners of that time already had some other product (Commodore, Atari) to build upon.

Today, I think the main barrier is economies of scale; it takes a much larger investment to enter the market at a competitive price point (for example, Apple sells a petabyte of flash memory on the opening week of a new iPhone launch, and probably even an order of magnitude more.) because of this innovation almost has to happen in markets where supply is (still) so limited that the big boys do not want to compete (current examples include color e-ink and roll-up displays)
Yeah, I read the article. Naked short selling would have nothing to do with this. The parent ruled out ETFs and substituted naked short selling for the cause. You could view my post as highly sarcastic.

EDIT: Maybe I should clarify further. The next crash will not be because of anything related to ETFs or any type of shorting. The next crash will be the result retail investors having unrealistic expectations about how fast the market will rise. The 1990s and mid 2000s set unrealistic expectations about how fast the market will rise. When retail investors are not pulling off double digit returns, they claim things are rigged and leave the market. This is what will drop the markets again. I say we're looking at another major downturn in about two years.
I read the link and I wasn't denigrating it at all. I was just trying to point out that it reminded me of the Nikon F-Mount which has been a very durable mount.

For many photographers, lenses are the most expensive part of the camera system and it's nice that Nikon has kept their camera bodies backwards compatible with their lenses for 50 years. It is also largely forward compatible (allowing modern Nikon lenses to be used on older Nikon cameras).
Alzheimer's Drug Improves Perceptual Learning
You can also type M-x menu-bar-mode (where "M-x" means "alt-x" or "ESC x").
Modern processors could be considered software as much as they're hardware.

Further, it delivers what the customer expects. It just turns out that Intel nicely provided additional functionality that you can unlock if you pay for your part of the R&D cost of it (which is the real cost of processors).

There is nothing wrong with this practice.
Cygwin users may want to check out ssh-pageant or charade to access ssh keys from PuTTY's Pageant storage.

http://github.com/cuviper/ssh-pageant

http://github.com/wesleyd/charade

Disclaimer: I am the author of ssh-pageant. I found charade just recently and noticed that it takes a very similar approach.
Old, active versions of _processes_. An application is typically made up of many interacting processes. The application is supposed to be robust to most processes terminating -- in fact, it's often the ways errors and exceptions are handled.
Naked short interest has nothing to do with naked short selling?

Would you then like to explain what has anything to do with this?

I find this issue highly important, so I wouldn't expect "highly sarcastic" comments of very high use.

EDIT: the article is not about "The Next Crash". It's about the hidden risks associated with ETFs.
As far as I'm aware from the economics blogosphere, arguments about "structural unemployment" are popular these days mostly in right wing think tanks. And they only seem popular there because hypothesizing that there are tons of jobs available for the unemployed permits one to reject Keynesian/Monetarist prescriptions for further fiscal/monetary stimulus.

I haven't run into any serious economist who believes in the idea, and certainly haven't read any proponents of the idea who are able to justify why this rate is allegedly 5-6 percent higher now than two years ago, or at pretty much any previous point in American history for that matter.

I wouldn't mind talking about this if others are interested. To me, the simplest evidence that this argument is dishonest is that its proponents don't seem to be acting consistently with their beliefs. If they really are right that the natural unemployment rate has risen, any further stimulus or monetary expansion will result in significant inflation which will need to be headed off by the Federal Reserve, and which would permit the organization to divest itself of its fairly risky mortgage-backed securities in the process. And this would be a zero-risk way to drive a stake through the heart of pretty much every left-leaning empiricist out there too....
Cool mention at the end of the article about "augmented reality", by using an app that identifies color via the phone's built-in camera.

Reminds me of the compass belt...
http://feelspace.cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/technology_01.h...
was anyone else thinking of jesse schell's presentation of a gamelisted world when reading this? (link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FSsztwbRW0 )

i wonder if i get more points for cooking a burrito myself.
Human Pacman (crowd pixels, not costumes)
We've been on a hiring binge recently so I'll shed some light into my thought process:

1. Can be a mismatch because they are too "corporate" for a startup, ie. unwilling to work outside the 9-5.

2. Open Source people can be weird and only want to work on what they are passionate about. This isn't always the case at a company.

3-5 has their own downsides.

What we quickly find is that none of the above are true criterions for hiring, this is what we usually look for?

1. Do they have passion for what we're doing (Games)?

2. Are they technically sound (they do well on our little programming tests and in-person interviews)? This is pre-screened by either having previous experience or coming from a stellar school with good marks.

3. Are they going to fit in?
I don't understand why people are mad, but I do understand why they'd be surprised. The value of the processor is physical. It's protected by property law. At one point of the manufacturing, the processor is purposefully damaged and devaluated to meet market demands. The force of the market is to take goods, damage them, and sell them as inferior goods. That's not what you would expect an otherwise "reasonably functioning" manufacturing economy to incentivize. Taken out of context, some Chinese school child might be learning "in the great American Capitalist system, goods are damaged on purpose to fulfill the optimum of their system: farmers are paid not to plant anything, and chip manufacturers damage their own goods on purpose. Why do they do this? Because the rules of American Capitalism dictate it.