skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, my reply was not well thought out and I apologize. I latched onto the "free" word when instead I should have focused on the real issue that bothers me: commoditizing the competition.

E-mail was free, but you got a crap service and ads to boot, it was worth it to get a paid account. Now, for most people GMail would be fine, Google commoditized the e-mail market. They are trying the same thing with the Office market, but they are not succeeding because it's much harder to beat MS Office at its own game, as OO has found.

The bottom line is that when Google enters a market you can bet that they'll make the product free (and beta of course) and then compete with the help of their web ads monopoly. I don't think that's what is best for the tech market and neither it is good for us small entrepreneurs.
The last thing I want to do is put ads into my apps, but what choice will I have if Google drives the market to free-with-ads as it has done in certain cases?

P.S: I'm pretty sure that you can use Google Maps for navigation, I have seen at least two people do it with Nokia keyboard phones. You could create a route and it showed where you are on that route.

I think it would also be fair to call Apple a premium brand in certain niches and a value brand in others. Although as you've noticed the premium-ness from iPhone/Macbook tends to rub onto the other products in people minds and when it comes to quality.
I used to think UTF was a great thing. But I came to realize it isn't good to go through all this trouble just to keep using a 70s US-centric API. UTF is error prone and the problems are often subtle and hard to catch.

Also, the same API has serious issues with buffer overflows and off by 1. It would be great to move on.
The first round we raised, which was around $500k, we paid $65k in legal fees. Our lawyers spent 2 weeks in conference calls with the investors' lawyers, so we were getting billed anywhere from 4x to 6x their individual hourly rates (600-900/h for partners and 350-650/h for associates) for these conversations.

Part of the problem stems from the lawyer mentality that they are meant to be going to war for you. Although everyone in our deal was completely amicable, they spent countless hours haggling over trivial points to "help" us while losing us far more money in their fees.

What I would like from a dream startup lawyer would be:

* Document templates for all common funding/employee/equity situations
* Work done by single, highly qualified lawyer
* An understanding of what actually matters to (and is best for) startups
* The ability to short circuit conversations with the opposing lawyers
* Lower costs by reducing irrelevant overhead (fancy offices, etc)

I'm less fussed about 24h availability and don't care whether someone will cancel their dinner plans to work on my case, but I can certainly understand how the author of this article would be pleasantly surprised when he got those things as well.

Someone could charge me twice what a normal partner was charging per hour, and I'd gladly pay it if they did the above, since they would be far more than twice as efficient.
Your enterprise domain model should not be represented in code
That's a common mistake. I was "bitten" by Emacs, so I threw it away and learned Lisp with CMUCL and its builtin Hemlock editor.

Hemlock, turns out, was not only an Emacs variant, but an old-skool one, requiring 8 fingers per human hand.
I usually start with a theme called Wordpress Naked.
http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-naked/
It's pretty much a blank canvas.
Considering all the details about their own operations that were leaked, I bet they wish they had spent more time to get it perfect.

It's not like Israel is incapable of perfect assassinations. It's just a question of dedicating enough resources - time, money, manpower.

This has not only exposed agents and caused a diplomatic mess, it has exposed operational details:

- the hacking of hotels

- the use of disguises and surveillance teams

- the tempo at which is it conducted

- pattern of movements

- division of labour

- use of unknown poisons

- the austrian switchboard

Mossad will have to tweak all of these elements now in order to retain obfuscation.
No, I agree that Conrad shouldn't be teaching Emacs. He could have explained how to use any old text editor by loading from the REPL though.

I just don't want to learn Emacs. I just don't want to learn Emacs. I didn't think this was a controversial point. Why does learning lisp mean learning Emacs?
If I were Lego, I'd be chomping at the bit to license this and set up a casual chat/social network oriented virtual reality. (Sort of a voxel-based Disneyfied Second Life.) The marketing possibilities for Lego would be huge.
Guerrilla guide to CNC machining and resin casting, volume I
It is adequate. If I had to pay the full price for Office I probably wouldn't get it, but through BizSpark I was able to get it for free and OO just can't compete.
Additonally, MS offers healthy discounts for home versions, students and so on, most of the time you don't have to pay the full price.

My parents use OO though.
> I gave Drupal 7 a fair shot for a site I had to build quickly for my dad during the xmas holidays.

Is it really a "fair shot" if it hasn't been released yet?
Or python... I'm hacking together regexes for dealing with specific country formats in django right now... Is there a comparable python lib available?
Just another attempt to make everybody "middle class" and avoid tough conversations about income inequality in the US.
Same here. Friend of ours brought their Kinect over to unbox. We played Dance Central out of the box in under 60 second flat. My wife and I have never been able to enjoy a game that much, at the same time, in ages. Needless to say we bought one a day after that.

After playing with Kinect a bit, I bought Halo: Reach. Same story, it worked, it was good, and I was impressed. Then I saw there were games available for download, like Burnout: Revenge -- but with 720p graphic updates.

I think Microsoft has and will sell a ton of Kinect bundles both this Christmas and in the months to come. Once you play with one, you have to have it. Once you have it, you'll buy games for it. Its a very "hook, line and sinker" approach that is working.

Heck, I saw at least 3 families in Best Buy after New Year's picking up Kinect bundles. For a $3-400 purchase in this economy, where I live, that's something.
Windows Phone 7 'NoDo' update hitting phones in early February
Back in 2006 I released a WordPress theme based on my website design, called Tarski. Since then it's been through a lot of versions and many of the features it pioneered (custom headers; alternate stylesheets; navbar selector; update notfication) have been added to the core WordPress software.

http://tarskitheme.com/

Unlike many other themes, it has a decent amount of documentation (check the sidebar for a full set of links).

http://tarskitheme.com/help/

It's got an extensive API (in addition to the standard WordPress one), is child theme-friendly, and is used by thousands (the forked WP.com version is used, for example, by Terence Tao). Many wonderful users have contributed translations in over 20 languages.

http://tarskitheme.com/help/localisation/

I don't really have a huge amount of time to improve or maintain it these days, although I do try to keep it up to date with the changes that come out in new versions of WordPress. If anyone is interested in contributing or taking over as maintainer, please do email me at benedict@eastaugh.net. The code is, of course, up on GitHub.

https://github.com/beastaugh/tarski
Vanity Fair on Huffington Post idea claim lawsuit
Get real!

Show a percentage of their total tax burden based on their income and compare it to a family of four making $42k - then we can talk about barely scraping by....
Who owns your digital downloads? (Hint: it's not you)
Do editors publish things like this specifically to tick off people? There's not one reasonable item on the chart. Their _yearly_ car expenses could purchase 2 decent used cars in any part of the country. Their out-of-pocket yearly medical expenses suggest numberless boob jobs. Their clothing bills (well above what I have spent in my life) are reasonable only if they are participating in several bridal parties per month. Their utility bills exceed what I have paid on rent+utilities+food at different times in the past. If they're living in the Taj Mahal, well who's fault is that?

Etc.
Adrian is right- I tried to keep my book fun and about Lisp and didn't think a discussion of IDEs was fun or informative about Lisp. However, this has tripped up some readers, so the second printing coming soon will have some limited discussion of these issues, and lisp file handling as well, to get people started in the right direction.

-Conrad Barski
Yes - thanks. The current norm for a 'suitably powered' trial of a psychotherapy is about 300. We've just got a trial funded for that number (admittedly in a challenging patient population) which will cost about £2.5m in research and treatment costs. We would love to run 1000 patients and start looking at therapist-client interactions, individual differences in treatment suitability but that's out of the question.
Yeah, this article is really frustrating. The amount of money this family is saving AND spending easily puts them in the "rich" category, as does the kinds of things they are buying. Further, hiding the actual data in a scary-colored table (lotsa evil red!) and drumming up just enough expenses to put them in the negative stinks of a "researcher" with an agenda.

I suppose it is a relatively reasonable demonstration of the fact that people in our society tend to grow their expenses to match their incomes. Although, saving upwards of $50k/year (33+8+principal) is actually quite responsible and their ability to do it is essentially proof that they are NOT "barely scraping by".
Whatever amount of money you make, you will spend almost all of it and don't consider yourself wealthy.

We all look toward making a little bit more.

Wealth is relative.
I always saw the it as the "itunes-stack" vs the "physical-disk-stack". You either only bought itunes movies or only bought blueray dvds. The itunes stack is price competitive because movies from the itunes store is lower priced than a physical blue ray disk, and that the price of an apple tv was comparable to a low priced blue ray disk player.
interesting. My idea isnt much of a game, but I could see implementing a gaming type of system with in, which might help it go viral.
It seems to me every other article I see at TC these days is the blogger equivalent of the local TV news pointing the camera at the newspaper article that broke the story.

"I was justing mindlessly browsing quora for three hours and now I'm going to summarize whatever some insider posted..."

"We just wasted a bunch of time on twitter, check out the screenshots..."

A few years ago when people were talking about the dark future of journalism this is what they meant.
It's too much if they're going to a public school. And it's more like 22 years, since all of the money isn't needed at the second they turn 18.

If you want to give your kids a full ride experience at a private school, of course it's going to be damn expensive, and I think perhaps Retric was implying that it's not worth it?
I'd only remark that if they are still paying off college loans they can probably calculate on being early in their careers (with little kids, I hope so), and so that their income will continue to increase while the mortgage at least holds steady.
$36k a year is easily their minimum payment on a $600k mortgage. If they are only a few years into their mortgage, there is no way $20k of that is going to principal.
It surprises me that important contributors like technomancy would not have some additional priority or clout. Without leiningen I doubt we would see one tenth of the explosion of interesting activity going on in the community. That said, I don't think anyone would like the results of democracy.
Please don't forget that you can also flag comments. Simply click on the link of the parent and click flag.

Downvoting alone doesn't do the job.
That's a cheap shot. Our trial will publish a detailed protocol and analysis plan, as do most large, publicly funded trials. Small-scale experimental work is a different matter. I personally agree that all experiments which could end up in peer reviewed journals should be registered before participants are recruited.

This would be simple to do by submitting ethics applications and an analysis plan to a trusted third party which would only release them once the author is in a position to publish, or at a pre-agreed cutoff (perhaps 2 years), whichever is the shorter (to avoid scooping). Perhaps I should set something up...
Other articles about GSM encryption being cracked haven't made it clear that the attack is essentially a known-plaintext one, which had me scratching my head about how you could construct a rainbow table for a stream cipher. Okay, not curious enough to do follow-up research, but still.

I assume the "hash" chain for the tables is generated by picking a random key to seed the cipher, advancing it to the position of the known plaintext, XORing with said plaintext, and using the ciphertext as the next element's key. (or at least using it to derive the next key) Unless I've missed something, the fact that it's a stream cipher seems to make it easier to target specific known bits, not necessarily whole bytes.
Your mortgage estimates are crap.

If their mortgage $600k @ 4.25% they will make principle+interest payments of $2,950/mo.

The first year they will pay down $10k in principle.

Year 10: $15.5k
Year 16: $20k

So, unless they had the huge house many years before they had kids they are only "buying" 10-15k of house.
Cool! Just some advice on using A Random Editor and loading files with "load" would be enough.

Thanks for the comment and the great book!
I very much agree about window management being much easier on Linux. Windows 7 made things better, but there's still a ways to go before they catch up with Gnome in this regard.
Puke Green & Incredibly Ugly Ottoman
agreed - I replied to a comment above with this suggestion. It would be nice if grant bodies started requiring this for all funded research, and kept (public) track of researchers with a bulging file drawer.
When Real Make Its Entry
Seems they spend an awful lot for housing (should property tax be added to that sum, too? Don't know that tax).

Their yearly car loan payments bought my mum an entirely new car (in one payment). Maybe they shouldn't have bought two SUVs?
This goes to show how skewed our values are as a society. Apparently, the definition of "rich" that the article portrays, is having large amounts of discretionary income, after buying everything you could need. That hypothetical family certainly sounds very well off, and I feel no pity if they have to cut back 10% on their retirement savings in order to send their kids to daycamp.

This article made me feel very sad and uncomfortable. In most parts of the world, simply having any one of the amenities listed there would signify being "rich".
Contractor. Singular. And for a web-app. It's not like they're mainstreaming Ruby or anything.
I had been using that setup for years and its a great way to maximize screen area (although using Opera). In Mac OS X, I also have the dock in the left.
That note about "average insurance premiums costing $14k" (assuming for a family of 4) is likely using an extremely low deductible ($500 maybe? $1000?) A family earning $250k should be on a $5k or $10k high deductible plan with an HSA, giving them another savings vehicle along and for someone earning $250k, being able to come up with $10k in an emergency should not be a problem.

Ahh.. the linked article indicates the average is predominately $1000 deductibles. Raise that deductible!

In the last couple jobs I worked that offered health insurance, it was maddening that we didn't have a choice for high-deductible plans. Everyone was on the 'same great plan' (with a few options) but I could have helped contribute to the company's savings even more with a higher deductible.
"Please do not re-post this notice without checking with me first to see if it is still current and accurate."
And I also wrote "where for" instead of "wherefore".

Lots of people have used "Where art thou" in titles, which I think is what I should have used.

Unfortunately I can't change it without breaking any links, so I will now forever have an idiotic title!
I think RSS reading is a tool for pros. It's not for those who just visit a handful of websites every day, it's for those who are interested in many many more, and who want to automate the task of finding out what websites have been updated; not an everyman a tool, it's one for advanced users. It doesn't matter how simple RSS useage is made, if you don't find the job of checking your sites for updates tedious and laborious you're not going to need an RSS reader.

I agree with most of your post, but I think this is somewhat off. It's less to do with pro/casual than the style of content consumption.
Say Mrs Housewife usually just browses the front page of Yahoo. She doesn't need an RSS feed for that; she's fine with missing items. In fact, keeping up with all the content would probably be tiring.

But then her friend Mrs Awesomecook starts a great blog sharing her recipes. Mrs Housewife wants to try each one, but Mrs Awesomecook only seems to update once or twice every week.

This is when you want RSS. She wants to see every single item, but checking the site can become a chore. It's annoying to check this and her other friends' blogs when there's nothing new, but she also wants to see all of the new stuff and in a timely manner. By subscribing to an RSS feed, she can make this easier.

I think part of the problem is that Mrs Housewife has no idea what an RSS feed or reader is, much less what it's useful for. Furthermore, to learn a new technology like that, she'd have to see a benefit worth taking the trouble for, which usually has to be pretty high for non-technical users.

Edit: And apologies if my examples seem prejudiced/sexist, it was just the first thing that came to mind since it's somewhat similar to why I taught my mom to use Google Reader (which she now loves).
What do you suggest instead? UTF-32?
Moving Beyond Customer Support: Focusing on Customer Success
This hypothetical struggling middle class family makes almost 3x what mine does. I'm soon to have a family of four as well (one toddler now, new baby in March), and yet somehow we survive with a house, car, daycare, no credit card debt, etc. and still manage to afford luxuries like new laptops, iPads and iPhones on a reasonably regular basis.

I'm of course aware that different areas are a lot cheaper (and being in Iowa, I certainly live in a much cheaper area than most of the examples calculated for the article), but for comparison: My house payments are less than half what they quote for this family, and my full time daycare costs with one toddler are less than half the number they're using for the year. They also apparently have a house cleaner that's $5k per year. Again, if we had the money, it'd cost us about half that on a yearly basis (I've priced it.. house cleaning is the bane of my existence). (Using a cleaner is pure luxury, though, IMO.) Dry cleaning? Thousands in new clothes each year? Geez. I guess I have no idea what it's like to be "average" as we certainly don't spend much at all on that sort of stuff. Their budget for holiday gifts is also something like 3x what we tend to be able to do, their yearly college funding is in the realm of fantasy compared to us, etc.

It seems to me like this "average" family is living a life of relatively decent luxury compared to what I can afford, but the article would have me believe I should feel sorry for them barely being able to me make ends meet? Of course I'd love to make more and if I did make more, I'd find ways to spend it - no doubt - but isn't that always the case? If they're uncomfortable with their financial situation, they can cut back and live like those of us who don't have a big house on a cul-de-sac, a cleaner, huge college savings, and fully funded retirement accounts.
While the article doesn't exactly present a credible conclusion, given the family's rather high expenses and savings rate, it does ask a valid question: What is rich? If $250k a year is not rich, what is? Where did $250k come from anyway? Why is it not $150k?

Let's face it, a family earning $250k in the SF bay area is by no means considered rich, while one earning the same amount in Tulsa, Oklahoma will definitely fall into the wealthy category. I suppose I take issue with politicians drawing arbitrary lines and saying that everyone above the line is somehow more responsible for the nation's tax revenue than those below it.
This is actually huge news as it marks the beginning of what many of us feared and destroys future entrpeneurship. I have no idea why the FCC decided mobile Internet should allow these practices.
I'm reminded of the "millionaire next door" and "stop acting rich" (thomas stanley and the other guy!). $600/month lease payments on one car is not unheard of but truly rich people don't do that sort of thing. It seems the this article is using "aspirationals" as their ideal family, then bemoaning the fact they don't have enough spare cash.

A $10k used car could cart them around just fine for a couple years - the equivalent of $400/month - 3 years would be $277/month.

If the 'high status' jobs require a 'high status' car, let the employer pay for it.
How to Get an Extra Hour or Two Per Night
D&D used to be like a UNIX app
Samsung sold 10 million Galaxy S Phones in last 6 months
I have a feeling Amazon is better at pricing my app than I am.
I'm sorry, they are putting more towards their retirement than a large % earn in a year?

Their college savings for the children are more than lower income families manage to save annually (also, if they have college loans why can't the children?)

More-so, if you are barely scraping by, perhaps not drive expensive cars and live in 750k homes for a while??
You don't need to put $33k/year into a retirement savings account if you're already buying $20k/year worth of house.

After all, house prices never go down, right?
That is quite ugly, I wonder if woot monkies are accepted for trades
Why does learning Lisp mean learning Emacs? Because it is the best available environment for Lisp, at least among free ones.

Mobody forces you to learn Emacs, but then you either have to pay for commercial IDEs, or use some unhelpful (even hostile, if you are used to benefits provided by sophisticated IDEs) enviroment. You can also set up Eclipse plugins which nobody in the Lisp world heard about, let alone uses. You can use simple text editor and go back to the way software was written in 70s. All these things because you refuse to use some piece of software, and yet are willing to learn others. The choice is yours, of course.
Also known as lazy registration.

Also known as a neat trick you can try out on hobby/free apps but are most likely horribly inappropriate for the average startup. As soon as you get even remotely serious, for example spending money on marketing, you're going to wish you captured email addresses up front. When you're spending money on customer acquisition, "cool, 10,000 people tried our app" doesn't mean nearly as much as "cool, we have 2000 email addresses".
OK, OK ;) Upvoted for repetition.
"Innovation, exploration and discovery" were all rampant in the 80-es, especially on European C64 games. Some examples of music that uses the unique noises of the SID chip instead of only imitating existing instruments:

- Arkanoid (Martin Galway): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtcnDPDdtLg

- Gianna Sisters (Chris Hülsbeck): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGxX3lTnHh8

- Commando (Rob Hubbard): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrQuR1LHAVI

- Crazy Comets (Rob Hubbard): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbQoQFLM_1s