skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The manufacturing cost for a paper book is near-zero; a mass market paperback costs on the order of 50 cents to print.

On the other hand, as long as publishers insist on DRM, the cost of setup for the encryption software and serialization of a new encrypted file for download -- including payments to the company that produced the DRM server -- may exceed the cost of that paperback.

For contractual reasons book pricing is set on the basis of the current edition in print (royalty percentages aren't static but vary with the paper edition's binding, the number sold, the discount channel, and so on), and publishers are required to provide transparent accounting to authors if challenged. So their accounting workflow for shipping ebook units has to shadow the workflow for shipping SKUs. Hachette spent roughly 20M euros building a "digital warehouse" for ebook serialization and accounting a few years ago; I'm sure the other big six did likewise. They can't do anything else, unless they renegotiate their contract boilerplate with the authors.

Meanwhile, fixed costs for editing, typesetting, design, proofreading, and marketing are identical for paper books and ebooks.
And the costs of producing the text haven't changed - you still need to pay editors, proofreaders, technical editors and reviewers when necessary, people to read the slush pile to decide what to commission next.

That's all beside the point that utility determines price, not cost, although I'm not sure that's strictly true: I think that the perception of utility determines price. Because the perceived utility of an ebook is less for many people, party for practical reasons and partly because they perceive that the cost is less, they perceive that the price should be lower.

It's a beguiling idea. Even realising that production costs for ebooks aren't any lower, I still baulk at ebook pricing.
Vinod Kholsa seems to agree in that regard. He is investing in profitable ventures that have great potential to solve large problems. According to a NYT article, he wants to show that for-profit businesses can be more effective at achieving goals than most non-profit organizations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/business/global/06khosla.h...
steve.ww.com CNAME stevemorin.com
jQuery is somewhat guilty of doing this. I specifically am thinking of methods like $.each and $.trim. But at the same time I have just learned to think of it all as an adapter pattern. I'd rather have $.each work in all browsers than to have to check for whether forEach is available.
Amazingly cool.
Run Your Own Personal Cloud With Tonido
make it tied to your hn account and have a karma limit? I know that it can be easily gamed but as a low pass filter it would be fairly successful.

Have someone create an account on the site and then the site gives a token to put in your profile to verify. After that it is linked.
Despite my other comment, I actually think anyone smart should be able to answer the complete graph question, especially if you walk through a couple smaller examples. You don't need a class on graph theory to recognize the pattern 1+2+...+(n-1).
Give me a reason to care. Previous Windows Mobiles were crap and I am waiting to see how is it better in any way than Android and iOS.
I don't understand the assumption that ebooks should cost less than print books. At this point in time, Kindle/iPad owners tend to have more disposable income than the average book buyer. And the fact that they have an electronic reader indicates their willingness to pay a premium for convenience.
you are in for a world of hurt with USCIS, startup can't be your sponsor (too small).

your best bet is http://www.cicdgo.com/ they will verify the company and be the official sponsor on your J-1 visa. The J-1 is issued to you in your country.

IIRC we paid 500-600$ for their services
I've found building a Google Spreadsheet and tracking who you contacted and at what publication to be useful in the past.

This is certainly something that we'll be discussing at an upcoming panel about this topic re. startups and PR.
Interesting. I didn't try the SSD in the standard slot but maybe I will have to revisit this. Thanks!
Print books require raw materials, physical distribution, and have to compete for shelf space (<100% of physical books are sold online). None of those costs applies to ebooks.

>At this point in time, Kindle/iPad owners tend to have more disposable income than the average book buyer.

Uh, so what?
Bits are cheaper to manufacture than paper. However, their upkeep can be more. When I put a book on a shelf and ignore it for 20 years, and then try to use it, it works. When I put bits on a shelf and ignore them for 20 years, and then try to use them, it is much more of a crapshoot. It takes a lot more effort to keep my bits working for 20 years.
Editors, proofreaders, and reviewers aren't really COGS, anyways, for the same reason that software development is accounted for in SG&A or R&D, and not "cost of sales": it's a sunk cost.
> Uh, so what?

So money has less marginal utility to them. Is this some kind of trick question?
At a good university, with the intent of putting in lots of extra effort on your own and going beyond the scope of the classes.

I contest that the vast majority cannot program effectively without the foundation you get at a university, nor without learning what knowledge is out there that you don't have yet.

Also, my university had a class all about version control, legacy code, and portability. [so, suck it, other universities ;-)]
Can you please be more specific where you say costs are 'off the charts'?
I think his point is cost isn't relative to production costs but relative to what customers can afford.
Probably google's profit is much bigger in search market because you are more directed to searching for information on a service you may buy (and so, a company may be interested in advertising) than when you are watching a youtube video.

From my personal user point of view, i have searched very few times in youtube (just as an example) for a company or a product and then clicked on an ad. Just on the other side, i have done such thing many times on google.
We still live in a physical universe. Information is physical. Those digital books take up digital storage space. Server farms have displaced distribution centers and book shelves with digital lockers. On the bright side it saves us from hoarding books we've already read and which take up space in our homes.
Android phones, tablets, netbooks.

Great choice of prices and features.

Multiple hardware vendors.

Open and friendly development ecosystem.

Open market without one gatekeeper.

Sales numbers accelerating month by month.

It looks like the game is over. The winner is Android.
The fixed costs for creating a software title are identical whether you sell the product as a CD or as a download, but in neither case do those costs have anything to do with the price of the title. The title is priced based on perceived value (usually, as perceived by the most lucrative segment of the market it addresses).

This is the second comment here that brought up editing, typesetting, &c. Is it the view of people in the publishing industry that books should be priced at a % markup over total costs? Because that seems crazy.
Products aren't based on cost. They're based on value. If value is less than cost, they don't sell, and don't get made.

What it cost is irrelevant. What the market will bear is what matters. Only when we achieve low barriers to entry and high competition do prices converge to cost.
It does seem the Chrome OS will be out by the end of the year.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/11/chrome-os-release/
I would have said 90 as each node is connection to 9 other nodes if they really are all connected. I wouldn't have considered each connection as bidirectional so no divide by 2. It's possible I would have said 100 because it likely in practice that a program will also have a connection to itself. That's it for me I guess.
I got rejected two years in a row now, which was kind of sad. Does anyone know what they're looking for or why they want to keep it as small as they do?
Appreciate the response. This is great starting point. Thank you for all the info.
THIS IS DATED AUGUST 14, 2010. THE IE9 BETA WASN'T EVEN OUT.

Stop blindly upvoting.
You're right, and that's why I asked if nobody really "brute-forced" it, but one probably never knew about meshes and never wondered about the # of links in them until one has had someone describe it to them. My objection, if you will, is that the stimulus for such subjects comes mainly from a class on graph theory (sure, there are exceptions).
I'm a full-time Android developer. I alternate between using a Nexus One and an iPhone 4 as my main phones.

One of the big differences is that iOS devices have hardware accelerated graphics. You don't really notice how weak transitions and animations are on Android until you get used to using an iPhone. It's a subtle difference, but it's real and it makes a difference.

Other "fit and finish" advantages that the iPhone has:
-The lack of a back button. On Android it's great in theory, but in practice it's unpredictable. Depending on where you are it might kick you out of the app you're in or it might take you up a level in the hierarchy or it might take you to the previous document you viewed. The iPhone is better for avoiding this ambiguous navigation.

-A single place for storing apps. It's frustrating running out of space for apps on Android and having to worry about moving them to the SD card. On the iPhone you have games that are bigger than 1gb and you don't have to think twice about installing them or about where they go.

-The iPhone's app store is still better than the Android Market. There are good apps in both, but the iPhone still makes it much easier to discover the best apps. Between having Genius, lists like top grossing and most downloaded, better categories, and better reviews it's just overall a nicer experience.

-The iPhone's music player is better. It has the downside of requiring sync with iTunes but once you have your music on there it's much nicer. It's easier and faster to browse. It's got features like Genius and 2x speed for audiobooks and coverflow, which despite not being super useful, runs fast and smooth.

-The iPhone's camera is faster than any Android device's camera I've tried. It makes a big difference when you're trying to capture a fleeting moment if the shutter lags half a second from the time you press the button. On the iPhone it's instantaneous.

-It's a new feature on the iPhone, but folders for home screen icons is great. The default Android launcher feels outdated.

All that having been said, there are a ton of nice things on Android. Built in voice nav is awesome, being able to share data between apps, the way intents are handled and the ability to set defaults is nice, and there are a ton of other things I love about Android, but since you asked about what people are talking about when they say the iPhone has fit and finish, these are the big ones in my opinion.
1) Agreed, that is a bit annoying, but I thought it less annoying than losing your entire session by quitting if you inadvertently type Ctrl-D twice to terminate input to the ‘body-set’ command.

2) The brackets are used similarly to their meaning in EBNF to denote optional elements. The expression ‘r[euse]’ means you can type ‘r’, ‘re’, ‘reu’, or ‘reus’ as aliases for the ‘reuse’ command.
pow.ww.com -> 206.183.111.208 ?

cheers,
~B
Offsetting that is the fact that bits can be hypertextual, can be marked up without damaging the book, weigh nothing, can be backed up over the short run, support full-text search, can automatically remember your place, can be downloaded instantly instead of shipped, and support skip-to-chapter.

There clearly are ways in which bits are less valuable than ink, but my gut sense is that for most people, that's more than made up for by the ways bits are more valuable.
I kind of passionately disagree. I think that both Apple and Microsoft's tools blow Android's out of the water. Objective-C and C# are more pleasant languages; the graphics libraries are in vastly better shape (ever wonder why Android scrolling blows so much compared to iPhone?); tools for profiling and the like are vastly better; etc.

Android's tools don't suck, but I think they're objectively inferior to Apple's and Microsoft's across the board.
I tend to believe that's already the case. If someone truly wants to write, the cost of taking up the activity is fairly cheap. People don't write just for money, they also write because they have something that wants to get out.
That seems sort of user-hostile, but hey, it's your call.

I don't consider even IE 8 to be a burden any more. It doesn't get some CSS effects right, but stuff generally renders OK without modification. I can sort of understand blocking IE 8 if you really don't want people to see your site without border-radius or whatever, and if you don't feel like taking the time to patch it up with conditional code, and if all those lost visitors don't matter to you...

But so far I've found IE 9 to be spot-on. Are you experiencing a rendering glitch with the latest beta? If not for rendering issues, then what's to be gained by blocking potential visitors or users just because you don't like their choice of software?
Citation? I'm serious - I looked but could not find an article with real numbers. The one linked in the OP http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html is using made up numbers.

Joel actually has a pretty good theory - the same 199 incompetents plus one good programmer apply to all job openings. The good programmer gets hired and the other 199 flock to the next job opening. Occam's razor selects that explanation.
They said to "keep it in mind" not that it invalidates everything he says.

I keep in mind the fact that Barack Obama is an elected member of the Democratic party when he tells me to vote for a Senate candidate. It doesn't invalidate his opinion about that person, but it certain factors in.
I live in San Diego. It's happened to me once or twice.
Share HN: A Greasemonkey script for fast Google search results browsing
Given the recent trend with Groupon type sites, I could see using it for a deal a day site with categories of deals like smartphone.aday.com or vacation.aday.com instead of random deals that happen to be near you.
Windows lacked the fit and finish of the Macintosh.
But it didn't matter. Because there were hundreds
of Windows machines whereas there was only a few
variations of Macintosh, all controlled by the
same company and priced at a premium.

Windows is priced at a premium, you just don't feel it because the cost is rolled into the cost of whatever piece of kit you just bought. Is our memory so shallow as to forget the anti-trust methods that brought Windows to dominance? It wasn't because the market wanted it, it was because that's what was crammed down the throat of the market.

And the most recent Android Foursquare build has finally
delivered the awesome Foursquare iPhone experience to Android.

That line sort of says it all, doesn't it? How many times have you heard that the other way? "delivered the awesome Android experience to the iPhone" - yeah probably never.

I'm just bitter because I've been working on a html5 version of my site specifically for Android, and it's a major PITA. The 4 android phones I have all behave differently, the different OS versions have their own quirks and bugs. And the hardware, god the hardware! Awful.
Dana White Addresses Oxford Union Society
I teach the intro. to HCI course at a Canadian university. The course project includes the design and implementation of a mobile app. I'll be using this article as evidence that my students should develop for Android rather than the iPhone.

Most would prefer to develop for the iPhone, and are taking steps to gain access to Macs and developer accounts for that purpose. This will be a nice push in the other direction.
No. It should be pretty obvious that this doesn't work for most 'work' and only works for repetitive things that just use the things that the human brain can do in seconds that might be impossible on a computer. OCR, while not impossible, is much more error-prone with computers than humans when dealing with hand-writing, for instance.

And there's certainly no way this 'microtask' is going to do janitorial work.

The applications of this are fairly limited, and calling it 'the future of work' is ridiculous.
I used blinking text not so much in the “Danger, Will Robinson!” sense but rather to suggest that the response is not idempotent. Repeating the same request could result in a different, non-error response.

User-configurable color schemes are in the works.
And now "the market" is taking a hard look at where e-books should be valued at.

I think those whose interest is to keep e-book prices artificially high need to come up with a better explanation: it seems to the average person (and I include myself here) completely illogical that if you have a book in a file, it somehow "costs less" (or even anywhere near the same) to print that file into a book and then transport it somewhere, involving probably dozens of people, than it does to just copy the file.
Yea, I am using a google spreadsheet now. I was just thinking that it would be easier to automate it.
What do you think makes WP7 superior to Android? Please be as detailed as you can; this is not an argument, it's a feature request :-) A million lurking volunteers, bored but capable as they are, will take it upon themselves to improve Android before Google gets around to it (it's a vicious race for good hacks.)
You seem to suggest that it is all due to hindsight. Much of that suggestion is of course your own opinion from thin air as I assume you do not have any experience in intelligence service work. Even if you do, do you not think that at least some of the things mentioned in the article are mistakes even if the person is placed in the position they would have been before the attacks and used only his foresight?
I guess the Sencha Touch guys are up for some reeaaally good competition.
Technology lock?
Python, Java, Clojure, Scala, Ruby, Groofy ...
Every of them have webframeworks so I don't see the problem.
I was about to ask the same question....

Maybe the Samsung Galaxy Tablet, which is not in the stores and could cost between $500 and $1000?

I went from iPhone 3G to HTC Desire (Android 2.2) and really wish I'd waited for the iPhone 4G. Both hardware and software is inferior, do love the freedom from ITunes though...

Bought the iPad two weeks ago, made my HTC Desire suck even more:/
[India]: Top Places to Work/Intern at in India?
I have been looking at various academic/industrial research institutes to intern and eventually work at in India, would love to have a nice compilation sorted by votes!
Problem is, the "threat" of uncontrolled update rollouts significantly hampers adoption in many large organizations (which is where the majority of IE6 laggards are located).
I don't understand this idea that it is a good idea to waste such vast quantities of time for both the potential employee and the employer. Whenever I've looked for a job in the past, I'm typically still employed. Using PTO to go to day long interviews means I can't give a company a shot unless I already know I want to work there.
Awesome work! Looks really great. Been looking forward to this a lot. Read through the documentation now, and will port mobile web app to this in the upcoming week, just gotta read through the source and plan a little.

I'm not yet seeing anything for special tablet layout stuff, I had expected it to jump between tablet and phone mode with media queries. Well off to read the source.
One of the most eye-opening lessons of my professional life:

I had a set of coding questions to give final round candidates to complete in person. By paper, whiteboard, or laptop -- their pick.

The success rate for candidates was about 25%.

I then started giving the same questions as a time-limited take-home test, for first-round candidates.

The success rate jumped to almost 100%.

Same questions. Less-filtered candidates. The difference? The primary determinant of success was interview environment, not candidate ability.
Forget the shoulds, look at the reality. Publishers are going to create a piracy nightmare for themselves. Lightweight files, easy consumption through devices that get more and more popular.

iTunes proves you have to compete with piracy. Make it easy and fairly priced and you can move a bunch of volume in digital content. $7 is the no brainer pricepoint for books. The first publisher to optimize for that is going to be king of the Kindles.
Huge numbers of them die prematurely of random causes every month

Indeed, but you face life in prison for intentionally killing someone.

There is a big, big difference between the two
You might be interested to know that Facebook is turning a profit, and has done for a while.
LiveKd for Virtual Machine Debugging (Russinovich)
Or indeed, given the context, how the inventors of the Web allowed everyone to use their ideas without patents.
> The web site I'm working on at the moment will reject IE altogether.

That is... dumb.

Just don't to anything, it'll look broken in IE but no more. If you want to do something specifically about IE, add some kind of warning bar with a conditional comment. You have no idea what the future holds, and locking out a whole line of browsers out of a site is stupid.
Where is being a monopolist a crime?
Can't imagine surving the oncoming winter without my fleece clothings. Thanks for digging it up.
What's up with the latest posts claiming JQuery plugins when they aren't. It's using Flash.
It looks terrible because it's using the web font for Alte Haas Grotesk.
The Nexus One is absolutely still the best phone to develop and test with. I also happen to think it's the best phone for daily use.
Consider starting a company in your home country, and launching under that.

It doesn't matter if you only cater to US customers, and it means that you won't be employed by any other US company whilst working in the US.
You see, the problem is that you are being reasonable. When browsing through consumer goods, people in general often do not reason out the value of the good. They feel it out. One of the major feelings that people have in this situation is justice. "Bits costs less than paper. Therefore bit-books should cost less than paper-books because otherwise they're ripping me off!" It's not reasonable or universal, but it is a big issue in pricing.
What I wish is that Microsoft would just give up on MSIE. For its time, IE6 was the shit. But they let it linger for what, 6 years? Meanwhile Firefox started being awesome, and now we also have Chrome which seems to be setting the standard these days.

As a web developer, MSIE has caused me nothing but hell. Versions 7 and 8 improved a lot, but they still have very annoying headaches that I am constantly dealing with.

One of my biggest fantasies is Microsoft one day realizing how much they HURT rather than HINDER the web, and just throwing in the towel. "We give up."

Developing their own browser does nothing for Microsoft anyways. It's not like using MSIE makes you special or makes your brand awareness of Microsoft any stronger. If they had any forethought for the future, they would just give up now. One can fantasize, anyways... :P
And after investing your interest would be the perception that Twitter is undervalued...
I think the fizzbuzz thing is a myth reinforced by confirmation bias. No one takes to the Internet to talk about how an interview went as expected, and rarely to mention a better than expected outcome.

We're only hearing from the subset of interview processes that attracted subpar candidates or had particularly bad luck.