skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple dictates the iPhone's selling price (just as they do with the iPad, the iPod Touch, their computers, etc), even among third parties like AT&T. Given that the telcos make most of their money in the contract (and the upfront cost is marginal), haven't you ever wondered why they never competed on device price? Sure, not a problem in the US where Apple ceded control entirely to AT&T, but in Canada there is identical iPhone pricing across all carriers.

Wondered why Android devices with the same no contract prices go for "TWO FOR ONE!" and other values while the dated iPhone 3GS sat at $99?

Apple saw this as an image thing, and it has worked. Remarkable the number of people who'll talk about "giving away" Androids when the devices come with often thousands of dollars in contract fees.

But now the competition is underfoot. Wasn't it just a few days ago that Siegler was talking about how Apple wouldn't lower themselves to selling lower-end devices (which the 3GS overwhemlingly qualifies), and the sentiment was that they would never compete on price?

http://blog.yafla.com/The_Biggest_Lie_That_Ever_Was_Told/
Good idea, i'm actually going to do this, quite useful.

I don't know how you could profit from something like this though, i don't see a good reason why i should pay someone when i can do this with my own resources.
Thanks for the clarification, but I'm not sure I follow what I was wrong about. I wasn't saying that it should have 99.9% availability, I was just stating that in most situations, using Paxos to elect a master provides very nearly all the benefits (99.9% was just a vague figure to indicate this) of doing a Paxos commit each time.
I’m not sure those technical details matter at all.

If you ignore iTunes, Apple doesn’t do kitchen sink apps. Their apps might not have razor sharp focus (you can do a lot of different stuff with iPhoto) but in general they stick to one theme (but everything in iPhoto has something to do with photos). I’m a fan of the hypothesis that the only reason iTunes does so many different things is that it has to run on Windows. Apple might not want to ship a few different apps for Windows, they might want to keep it all together. Apple might already have split iTunes into a few different apps if they only had to run on the Mac.

The App Store doesn’t run on Windows, it doesn’t have the same problem so Apple just reverted to their default non-kitchen-sink approach.
I'd recommend Clojure for two reasons: You'll get experience with functional programming, and you'll be introduced to the JVM at the same time. If you learn Clojure and later want to learn another JVM language, you'll be halfway there.
In fact I don't understand why they didn't integrate App Store in iTunes.

The App Store installs itself as the second-highest icon on your Dock, just after the Finder. That's an amazingly prominent placement.

Remember that most people will be getting the Mac App Store unwittingly as part of the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update. If they didn't have a separate Dock icon for it, those people would never find out it exists.
I think the idea is that this would be a one-way street. That once you start relying on ad sales, all future decisions would be colored by that reality. Since the impact of the ad(s) would be great, the effect on the evolution of Wikipedia would likely also be significant.
Thatsa cosa thisa isa scama
Thank you very much Simon; I'm pretty glad to see that you appreciate my response time! :)
Most doctors get their information about medical issues by reading the marketing pamphlets from drug companies. If you actually read the relevant journal articles then you'd be significantly more knowledgeable about any given topic than the average doctor.
Have the terms changed so radically from the mobile store? At least there licenses like the GPL are incompatible with the extra restrictions that Apple places on the software it distributes, causing software to be removed or refused.
You say

I code you an MVP specifically based on the specs(without any iterations)

and then

Once I'm done and you're happy you pay me the rest($700)

Are there actually customers out their who are happy with the product after a single iteration (no matter how good the specs are)?

Seems to me the choices are either:
Built to spec, pay me when done

or

Pay me when you're happy. Multiple iterations may be required.
Does anyone have any experience with HashCash or alikes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Obvious problem is that in case of directed attacks spammers (or other malicious persons) would use native code or even GPUs to perform computations, while ordinary users would be limited by slower JavaScript implementations. It would help (but not solve the problem completely), though, if someone would show us some non-trivial code, that performs computation in background (without any noticeable impact on page interactivity), that'll finish in some minimal time required to write a meaningful comment or fill out a form.
>Can you imagine the volume of junk without $99?

No need to imagine: http://www.android.com/market/
they will price things to maximize Amazon's income, not mine

But, I assume, Amazon and the developer split the sale price? If so, then the more money amazon make, the more money you make, right?
Not all scraping is bad: some provide extra services such as search.

Google itself is a scraper.
The curious thing isn't so much that it could be done, but that they apparently were able to do it without spending any time fidgeting with the door.

The best way I could think of would involve something like a bent coat hanger, a chewed piece of bubble gum, and a small inspection mirror stuck through the crack in the door. It would take a while even for a practiced hand.
JP1 Remote Programming
If you do it right, you don't really have problems with dependencies itself. Also look at other package managers like Portage (Gentoo).

The actual problem, from an app developer point of view is that you can't ensure that the lib behave exactly in the same way as on the developers system (and that may not just because of different versions but also because of different compiler settings etc). In many cases, the app developer also has some own patches inside some of the libraries to integrate them better into his application. It is often utopic to wait and hope to get those patches upstream.
Thumb1 sort of sucked at performance so the only people who used it were the ones who were very memory-constrained. Thumb2 is much better.
> otherwise (literature, languages, philosophy, history...)
> you can do it on your own, it will be mostly on books.

Not really. Even in those cases (or possibly more so), you need the perspective of someone experienced and well-read to show you how to look at the literature. Such people are usually professors at universities.

Actually that holds true for most subjects at good universities.
Didn't Google have downvotes for results - shouldn't they be sufficient to achieve the result you want? Presumably Google would learn that you consistently downvote wareseeker and exclude it from results in the future.

I haven't used it because I don't want Google to remember my search history. But if you are willing to stay logged into Google (which would be required for your proposal), it would not be an issue.
I don’t think that should ever stop you from complaining.
Buffet definitely was already in control of the company when he decided to list on the NYSE, in fact, recall that he bought the company largely out of pique at getting 'chiseled' on price by the existing management team during a private purchase of shares..

The only reason he listed was to get his current shareholders some liquidity; he's quite clear about this in his annual letters from the time. He had no need for or interest in the liquidity himself, and was, I would say judging from his actions over the next 20 years, pretty happy with his then-current disclosure situation. He did pretty much everything he could to keep Berkshire out of the drive for quarterly investment earnings game for public companies, and worked hard to reduce any requirements for reporting on what was going on at Berkshire.

Also, agreed, that high share prices helped him make a point that he spent many decades beating the drum on: value over price.
I've taken a look at those resources. In fact, I even read a bit of Learn You a Haskell and tried writing some code.

And yes, I am not looking for a language that I will use on a daily basis. If I wanted to build something now, I will pick ruby because that's the language I know best. Instead, I'd rather learn a language that makes me write code differently.

Thanks for the advice. :)
LinkedIn, Zynga, Facebook, Twitter...

IPO season is now open.
The OP has a title, "Does One Word Change 'Huckleberry Finn'?" This title completely changes the tone of the original title.

Titles matter, they establish a direction and context for what is to follow. Retitling something on HN has even greater effect; Some people (like myself) may be very interested in the literary impact of a single word change but may be tired of rehashing the same social debates over again. I might have skipped this post entiurely were it not for my surprise that the times would use a title like this.

Other people might be very interested in your title but be disappointed that the content doesn't match the title very well. Your title could apply to any of a few dozen recent posts in the news about this bowdlerizing.

My suggestion is that it would have been better to post the original title and include a comment with your feelings.
Hi "tedmorgen"

Watch how HN gets gamed by ted and his new buddies voting negatives down and positives up on a SCAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks for the comment. I agree, the design is horrible, heh, I even put that in the footer indicating that the site was a result of an idea and a couple of hours in photoshop + xhtml/css.

That being said, I'm going to shift the design, as I totally agree with your comments as soon as I'm done with monitoring over HackerNews for questions/concerns/etc... :)
Factor, it is a stack based language that is fairly different from the rest of the stack based languages(it counts lisp as one of its major influences. ) It has a good standard library that includes both a web framework and a GUI framework.
But that is not true of any other human activity. Every human activity is learned.

And most of those learned activities are eventually replaced by better ones. People learned that the right way to portion food was by tearing with their hands until someone invented the knife. People learned that the right way to draw was with a stick in the dirt until someone invented paper.

What you think is the right way to do anything is only that because you haven't discovered or been taught a better way to do it, and that includes searching the internet.

Yet you argue that the correct way to use a search engine should be "how you do it when you first try it and don't know anything about it".

Actually, I think the argument is that a good way to be successful in business is by offering your customers more perceived value than your competitors. In search engines, it's more valuable for your users to not have to learn how your algorithm works in order to craft a search query that will satisfy their needs. It's valuable to be able to use natural language to search.

Right or wrong, the business that refuses to provide that value because they disagree with it is going to fail miserably.
Haskell is probably good for a C programmer since the non-pure parts -- IO and the foreign function interface -- are C-like. By contrast, the other languages mean the OP would learn a new runtime environment as well as a new language.

I can definitely recommend Haskell for expanding your mind and making you look at familiar languages in a new way.
I'm impressed with the Mac App Store so far. Pretty bold of Apple to push it so prominently onto every Mac user's Dock as part of a point update to the operating system.

My little landscape generator app, Turtledoveland, is currently at #5 on the Top Paid list for the Graphics & Design category.

I'll be sure to let HN know what kind of sales numbers that actually means, once the numbers come in...
Indeed. The last hit piece the NYT ran on this topic explains why: this deal is likely to make Goldman, Facebook, and all the investors who buy into Goldman's SIV a lot of money.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/friends-with...

Also, this deal is peripherally related to bailouts at best. Goldman will not require a bailout even if they lose their entire $500 million investment (i.e., if Facebook goes bankrupt tomorrow, which is exceedingly unlikely) - Goldman has a market cap of $90 billion.
So HN is just another gamers-paradise?
The Fallacies of Distributed Computing Reborn: The Cloud Era
A nice idea, but you're going to find yourself in support hell faster than you can say "but I said no iterations". As soon as you develop anything for anyone you become their perpetual unpaid technology bitch, phoned at 4:30 AM to be asked how to reprogram the VCR or why minesweeper won't start up.

But seriously - whatever you do, make very, very, very sure that you have, in writing, a contract which explicitly states that once you deliver, you're done, or you'll end up in hell.
You've gotten a lot of answers, but nobody's given you the best one yet: Dancing. With others of the opposite sex.

For exercise purposes, you might want to look into energetic dances, like collegiate shag or the lindy hop. But even slow waltzes provide a surprising amount of exercise, and nothing motivates like interacting on a physical basis with the opposite sex.
Just to adjust your calculations a bit since side effects aren't all equal, the ranges are likely much higher than you mentioned.

Trivial side effects (small temporary rash) are probably in the 1-in-100 range. Moderate non-life-threatening are probably in the 1-in-3000 range.

Dangerous or life-threatening side effects are in the one in a million+ range.
Most of the apps I use are not there too, we'll have to wait a bit I guess.
What about Chrome and Firefox. are they forbidden and they didn't bother submitting ?
Is it just me of is LinkedIn just not relevant anymore? As in I have a LinkedIn profile but I never use the site. I don't even know why I have a profile on it.

So what is the value proposition of LinkedIn exactly?

I'm fully willing to admit I'm quite possibly an edge case here.

Whatever the case it seems there is no real "buzz" around LinkedIn so this just strikes me as a way of cashing out before the bubble bursts.

LinkedIn has now branded itself a "social networking" site (even toasters are "social" these days). This raises an interesting question: what if Facebook decided to enter LinkedIn's space?
Only if the webstore weren't packed full of apps which are nothing but links to websites.

I run stuff offline pretty frequently. Online more frequently, but losing offline capabilities (especially in the face of links-as-apps) would be absolutely crippling for me.

Not that I doubt good WebStore apps will be capable of running completely offline. But that's certainly not the state of things right now, and the added programming complexity implies to me that it won't change very quickly.
I hope you appreciate that the expression "Nigger merely comes from the latin word for black" is as factually true as the expression "Cocksucker merely describes a person as one who performs an act many people find mutually pleasant."
Accurate version: Goldman finances its operations through debt rather than equity because of it's explicit federal backing. The risk capital it is investing in Facebook is therefor debt rather than equity. Facebook is so hot right now that it is probably overvalued. This leads to a debt bubble - rather than an equity bubble - which is much more painful for the economy.
A Hands-On Pre-Release Review of the BlackBerry PlayBook
Totally agree with that. There is an opportunity for someone to take the content and actually improve on it somehow (e.g. an expert engine or something, or better machine driven ontological navigation, etc), however it thus far its just been improving the SEO of it.
Another sad fact - in my experience, I have had more luck in convincing people to get their kids vaccinated by pointing out that the guy that did the study linking vaccinations and autism has been prevented from practicing medicine in the UK, than by explaining the studies that show that vaccines categorically do not cause autism. The science just doesn't interest them, they want an authority figure to do the thinking for them.
What twaddle. So the investor information GS is sending out says "at some point in the future we might sell some of our Facebook holding and we won't feel obliged to tell everyone who's bought Facebook stock through us". This is supposed to be interesting? Of course Goldman Sachs doesn't want to rule out the possibility that they might sell some of their Facebook stock. The possibility of selling later is, after all, one of the main reasons for buying any sort of securities.

You might as well look at some major company's annual report to investors, find things like "We depend on manufacturing facilities in China for much of our production; in the event of war or a breakdown of international relations, our business might be adversely affected", and say "Major company says US, China may go to war". (I don't know whether that particular concern is in any large company's annual reports, but that general kind of thing is absolutely commonplace. It's mostly a way of suggesting to investors that the company has been very diligent in looking for risks to their business.)
Google seems to like building systems that automatically scale across all keywords and niches.

For example, for a low competition keyword, 1 link can make a big difference to a site's rankings. For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more links to change anything. It's the same algorithm affecting the rankings in both cases, just in the latter case there's a lot more data being used as input.

That's the way they seem to do things, so I'm guessing there's a fair chance they'd take a similar approach to the influence of down-votes on rankings, if they went down that road.

There'd have to have some sorts of thresholds, but there'll always be points above which the algorithm can be gamed, just like pretty much every other aspect of their ranking algorithm can be gamed.

Right now, in a low-volume-keyword niche, a sleazy operator can kill the rankings of competing sites pretty easily by buying them a few dirty links and letting Google's algorithm do the rest. If a site hasn't got lots of quality links pointing to it, and let's face it, the vast majority of sites don't, it's pretty easy for someone to kill its rankings.

A lot of people say that it's impossible to affect the rankings of someone else's site, but that's simply not true. You can't easily affect the rankings of a big established site with lots of good links, but a little small-business site? The reality is it's pretty easy. I don't think Google have any interest in quashing that particular myth, because the reality is actually kind of scary for small business operating on the web.

(Apologies if I'm going off on a tangent there. You are absolutely right in pointing out that I was assuming a flawed implementation.)
First off, I'm afraid I don't understand what a phone subsidy is, perhaps we don't have them in the UK or I've never seen them on a price plan here.

Assuming it's something you pay for owning a smartphone, would it still be there for a smartphone that costs nothing? If so, then the extra cost for the iPhone is still $49.

The comparison ought to be an iPhone v another smartphone and contract with comparable features, not an iPhone v not buying a phone at all.
Since this is a nonlinear equation, I would try to solve it numerically. I don't see much interest in solving this analytically.
Yes, that was my point and I wasn't being serious with the first sentence. Sorry if my sarcasm was too straight-faced.
Sure the "peer" review you require is on the long list of side-effects on one of the MMR manufacturer's own packaging. Look it up.

The doctors being encouraged comes from the mouth of a doctor friend of ours that used to work for the NHS. Sorry you are just going to have to take my word on this. I can't prove this.

Disagree with you on individual verse society point, but this is a discussion for another day.
Yes, #1 - very slightly painful. Not terribly painful, but just a pinch. Maybe something like a 2 second wait. It has to cost more than an instant and doing that also makes it a bit more of a pain to game with scripts.
My first sentence was sarcasm. I indeed did look it up to verify its meaning and to determine that it was what I wanted to say, even though the term was not unfamiliar to me.
I don't want to rad on your idea, as I see what you're saying but MVP's should be, by their nature, a minimalistic approach to your product which you plan on extending down the road as you gather feedback and validate your ideas through your customers. That being said, when you have a vision of your MVP in your head, as it's minimal you can clearly go in depth with who you want certain parts of the app to work; For instance, if you strip down a lot of features(like you would with an MVP) you're left with a few core features with which you can specifically jot down how you want them to work to the point where you can say(for instance, for upvoting articles) I want it to send an AJAX request, etc. I hope that clarify's the point I'm trying to make.
This is exactly what I meant. Lots of people have added the idea about crowd-sourced re-ranking based on blacklisting, then said "it'll never work..."
Hyperbole is OK, but please choose a torture method generally accepted as such, like being stretched on the rack or having your testicles fried in a frying pan. It will make your hyperbole stronger, and avoid contributing to the widespread notion that waterboarding is not "real" torture.
Well, the pun was not about the => operator, but about Ruby becoming "less parseable". As they say: "Only perl can parse Perl" ;-)

So => is the "hashrocket" operator? I can't find any reference to this name besides this: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/152544
Android is inherently insecure.
Tells them about Home Sharing. They should be able to share music and apps over multiple accounts.
It's not the answers I'm bothered about, it's just how they spam my search feed. I whack in some queries to google and the first 10 results will just be the same SO question but spread over multiple different sites.
Apparently the very first target was ... the Intel i860: http://www.winsupersite.com/article/reviews/windows-server-2...
If it was horrible I would not have bothered. It looks very good already, just lacking the polish.
This is big news here locally in the SLC area. They've had huge contractor open houses at the site for people who want to bid on the projects and stuff.

I hope it brings with it an uptick in the local tech sector, too. Not that things are bad around here, we've got tons of ex-Novell, ex-Word Perfect graybeards and their associated wisdom, Adobe nee Omniture, Mozy and a whole host of other good stuff going on, but it'd be neat if we could kick it up a notch.
AT&T currently offers to upgrade to a 3GS for $49, but it's refurb.
I would say that it is very likely Goldman would have made this play regardless of it's federal guarantees. The difference - and the author's point - is that there is less systemic risk in this scenario because Goldman would get the $450M through the equity markets rather than through the debt markets.

The author's point is that we have created a system where risk capital is being financed through debt rather than equity.
A sufficiently intelligent and reasonable person should be able to, with enough consideration, make up his mind about just about anything that lives in a knowledge domain. It's not like the medical profession emerged fully-formed from the head of Zeus.
Can you do SEO more efficiently with a botnet than without one?