skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a theory about the OP:

I am guessing that at $9.99, prospective customers assume that prior customer purchases don't reflect much due diligence -- that people would buy it for $10 "just to see", and just throw it away if bad. Prospectives might then assume that $20 is enough to get priors to research it, or to think twice before recommending it, and that sales at that price thus do reflect quality.

But prospectives don't know anything about priors purchases, right? Maybe prospectives are assuming that the stuff is selling at that price. After all, the seller knows the market best, right? And there is some truth to that assumption: If it hadn't sold at $20, it wouldn't have been around for long.

If that theory makes sense, it may be that your customers felt that $40 was high enough to suggest the consumer validation they needed. Validation was only one component of their decision, "value" was another, and at 80 they didn't feel the value was there. The theory suggests that if you had cut price below 40, your total sales would have fallen.

I imagine that buyers often treat prices like poker bets, and try to extract information about the underlying hand from the value assigned by the holder.
I was hoping for more profound changes. I've never read PHP internals but I'm under the impression the opcode language is not 'jitable' because it's an unformal mess while even python and lua are getting there ... It seems that Opcode caching is the most you can get out of the language as is.
This reminds me of my wedding photographer. She was just starting out and priced her services much lower than what she was worth. A few months later she bumped up her prices significantly and her business exploded. People viewed her lower prices as an indication of low quality despite a quality resume on file.
Eat Food, Mostly Plants… Live Indefinitely?
Doesn't that make it even easier? But then again I think 400 megaton isn't enough. Last time I calculated it ( I probably made a ton of mistakes ;p) it was in the the 10s of thousands or something like that.

Accelerating the space shuttle to 0.10c :
(2,030 t * (0.10c)(0.10*c))/210 PJ = 8700 (wolfram alpha)

2,030 mass of space shuttle in metric tons
210PJ the energy from tsar bomba.

But then you have to add in the weight of the bombs too.
since they are each 27,000kg and then you have to sum it up to get to something that can approach 0.10c (and I don't remmember how I had figured that one out)

And what says once you get to the other planet you can't fill the tank with nuclear materials over there for the return trip?
As of late, it seems to me that CO has turned into a blog where Jeff surrounds Amazon affiliate links with sometimes semi-interesting stuff (SSDs, scooters, his latest rig). Nothing against the guy though.
Console2 - A Better Windows Command Prompt
<?= always exists as of PHP 5.4, despite the short tags setting.
"Ever" is a pretty strong word, and I think he's going to look pretty silly in a century or so. For example, here's an estimate of travel costs with boron fusion rockets:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/fusion-propulsion-if-bussar...

If either Bussard's polywell fusion or focus fusion turn out to work, that'll be achievable within a couple decades. As Moore's Law continues and we get better at simulating plasma, it's not that unlikely that some form of fusion will work out.

There are a lot of possibilities for non-rocket launch, including various space-elevator-like schemes, laser launch, and mass drivers. Even without fusion, thorium fission could provide plenty of power.

It'd be pretty expensive and slow to travel to another star with fusion...but eventually, with large solar panels in close orbit around the sun, we'll have an awful lot of energy to play with, and just maybe we'll figure out efficient laser or microwave power transmission sometime in the next thousand years.

On the other hand, maybe we'll just colonize the Oort Cloud and gradually migrate to other stars over the next million years or so without really trying.

(And, not that I'm holding my breath for this one, but if Woodward's right about the Mach effect we'll get to other stars pretty quickly.)

As for the reasons...the resources of the solar system are millions of times what's available on Earth. Once launch is cheap it'll be a no-brainer to start mining the asteroids.
But, if anything, the App Store has proven that lower, non-zero, prices are better.

The App Store has also demonstrated that 0.00 is no longer a magic number when your payment information is on file.
Study: non-alcoholic wheat beer boosts athletes' health
VSS did this with all files by default. Does that put VSS way ahead of its time? :)
The title implies that Italy would have done better with a different prime minister, but I have no reason to believe this would be the case. Lots of European economies have done worse and Italians are, well, Italians.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وبتروجيت بث مباشر 
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وبتروجيت بث مباشر مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وبتروجيت بث مباشر مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وبتروجيت بث مباشر مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وبتروجيت بث مباشر
That is a good point. But FWIW I personally know several "shareware" developers that told me the same story with their own products. The bottom line is always: $9.99 = bargain bin pricing. Good converting prices start at $29.95 and up for productivity software.
Ask HN: Why is AirBnb worth 1 billion dollars?
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/airbnb.com+hotels.com/

As you can see, AirBnb gets just 1/10 the traffic as Hotels.com. The market cap of IACI (which owns Hotels.com) is around $3 billion.

Something doesn't seem right
After reading this post my insides were grumbling, "Ugh. Acquihire." And yes, this is actually the first TRUE acquihire to my knowledge, in that the products themselves weren't even a part of the deal.

But after browsing through http://www.madebysofa.com/#design, I'm absolutely floored. This is beyond top-notch.

This was a perfectly justifiable acquisition of sky-high talent.

Yes, I somewhat disagree with the acquihire in principle, but in these cases it makes sense. I liken this to buying a division from a large company. Keep the team intact, on-board them cohesively, and Facebook will have a big win here. I hope Sofa's team is successful in shifting Facebook's aesthetic from "function over form" to a better balance of the two.
pbreit,

Thank you for taking a look. What were your log-in issues? Beta testing is fun!

Email me at: jason@mialio.com
This is really interesting and I would love to know what the code in question was responsible for.

Requiring that work on it be done single-threaded like this suggests that some other part of the overall process broke down somewhere - the developers/automated tests/continuous integration server couldn't catch merge conflicts? Code reviews weren't done and made visible to everyone else on changes to this special code?
A van with a V8 and a manual transmission is so much more useful than a compact four-banger auto-trans hatchback. What kind of car do you drive?
The fact that we've already built equipment capable of delivering that much energy in a short time makes me think, holy crap, there really is.
IOS 5 JailBreak With Redsn0w Released
I found it, here.

http://www.economist.com/node/17101193
The checkered past of Groupon's chairman
Jailbreak iOS 5 On iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad, iPod touch is out now
No. God no.
SWITL Picks Up Semi-Liquid Materials #DigInfo
Will Toyota's RiN impact health & wellness?
What would a sane version of PHP look like? What are the good parts of PHP besides easy setup?
I'm lucky enough to cycle to work across London (6 km/4 miles in each direction) for my commute and I certainly wouldn't consider a folding bicycle or a scooter. A normal bike works well and I can have paniers on the back for carrying shopping, books, etc.

If you need to go geek then you can have all sorts of electronics on your bike to track progress, add a Polar heart monitor, get an app for your phone...
you can have many applicants per job even with full employment.

my understanding is that astronomy is one of the more competitive areas within academia, but i don't have any figures.
Not sure if the Yogi's protests will be fruitful because his demands are long and unrealistic. Since the black money in Swiss banks is an international issue it takes time to bring back that money.

But there was a country wide agitation a while back demanding for an Ombudsman bill (against corruption) which is now being worked out by a joint committee. It will most likely get passed in the parliament within two months. If it happens it'll be the first major step taken against corruption in the independent India.
Mdwrigh2ncsu.edu , zdw
Sir zdw & mdwrigh2
I need an urgent help.
plz respond me @ sweetshruti666@gmail.com
CodeMasters hacked - unknown hackers gained access to user databases
To elaborate, this manual refers to the Soyuz rocket, not the spacecraft which is flown to the ISS. Specifically, it's the interface documentation for attaching your payload to it. (The Russians/Soviets have a long history of naming their rockets and spacecraft identically.)

The ESA are collaborating with the Russians to build a Soyuz launch site at Kourou in Guiana. It's pretty much a complete clone of the site at Baikonur:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SBynwXjyxKI/TZiECQqNtGI/AAAAAAAACS...

This gives commercial customers an increase in payload capacity compared to launching from Baikonur because Kourou is nearer the equator (especially relevant for geosynchronous orbits). Plus you get the legendary Soyuz reliability.

I believe they're planning on the first launch from Kourou before the end of 2011.
If I got the same value, I would definitely take the 9.99/hr one. LegalZoom is IPOing because I'm not the only one.

But of course we all know that when you pay $300/hour for legal services, you are paying for insurance, not the actual service.
Clickable: http://plusapps.eu/Earthquakes-Monitor.html
Oh please, like proponents of a crackdown on freedom need any excuses.

Or like "save the children" isn't the political slogan which always has been, and always will be, used to justify anything.

I am not sure if LuLzSec is good or bad, or a wash, in terms of how politician will use them. It does not really matter, politicians will use anything and nothing to get what they want.

But this BBC coverage is surprisingly fair. And if coverage like this becomes the norm, who knows LulzSec might actually be good for the public image of what anonymous hackers on the internet are.
There's nothing legally wrong with changing your product's price. If it were a subscription product, you may run into trouble. Also if you were advertising the old price, you might run into bait-and-switch laws.
Well, JavaScript's language features are actually not that shoddy. Better than PHP, that's for sure.

I think what made JS (and PHP, too) great is not some PR trickery, but the fact that it is genuinely more useful in many situations. It is so simple, and excellent for exploratory coding. So to an engineer, there is no pride lost - it's a tool that fit a very good niche.
Nobody is proposing relying solely on the private sector for space exploration. But we'll be far better off harnessing market forces to make space access cheap then letting NASA just do the minimum stuff it can do with the suddenly-cheap tools it has access to then we will ever be trying to make the unaccountable jobs-program government space program provide the access. That has demonstrably failed. How many more probes would we have if we cut NASA's budget in half but they could just buy rocket space instead of building and maintaining the Shuttle and ISS at umpty bumbkin billion dollars each?
Google Reader! I've been begging forever...
>Can we please get beyond the script kiddie phase and actually start bringing to light some of the deeply corrupt politicians and bureaucrats ala Wikileaks style?

The problem is that bringing these people to light is useless if you can't reach your audience. Internet access in India is still not really that great, and free-roaming Internet access -- the sort that drives people to use informational sources recreationally, a la Wikipedia and reddit -- has a long way to go before it becomes common. Facebook's penetration into India is basically nil, and Orkut isn't doing much better -- 40 million is a vanishingly small fraction of India's population. If hackers expose a bunch of corrupt politicians on Wikileaks India, it will hardly matter when nobody sees it.
In the states we'd probably call that a moped (At least in the area of the country I'm from)...
I would like to have at least seen a chart of sales and web site traffic.
When you're asked, during a job interview, which is the fasted lookup function, don't, as is very common, say, "a B-tree." Perfect hash tables always win, hands down.

Wait, saying a B-tree is the common answer?
Apple rips off idea, name and even logo of rejected app
This is going too far . Out of control I think.Attacking Army website had nothing to do with corruption. This will be treated as war on cyber assets and will act as counter productive to support to wikileaks or sony victims
I think iCloud will be great for Microsoft, they are including vista and windows 7 in icloud. I know lots of people with PCs and iphones/ipads.
My Weekend (48 Hours Dev Time) Project. Anagram Creator for 'Words With Friends'
I liked this one a lot better than http://www.wineverygame.com/ because its live results. I had to make a cleaner interface. I don't condone cheating and don't actually use it, but I wanted to jump on the scrabble band wagon that will only continue to grow.
This was a neat project too because I had to learn Word Search Algorithms. This was the most intense part and I was actually able to port Search Algorithms to strictly LINQ based.
Does anyone have any thoughts or experience with testing the "bargain-bin" hypothesis with subscription based payments?

I can see a one time purchase of $10 for a piece of software as appearing cheap, and therefore low quality. But what about a $10/year charge, or $10/quarter.
It is definitely not a pyramid scheme. A pyramid scheme is a program which promises investment returns which are only sustainable by capital infusions from new investors. The creators of Bitcoin never promised investment returns, therefore it is not a pyramid scheme.

You might argue that it is analogous to a tulip mania, but that's different. If two people agree voluntarily on a price for a tulip bulb or a bitcoin, that is all that matters.

If you wish to hold some bitcoin, I suggest that you not get carried away. Perhaps allocate at most 5% of your net worth to it, and whenever that allocation rises to 8% or so, sell enough to bring it back down to 5%. That way if bitcoin drops to zero, you can lose 5% of your net worth and not lose any sleep over it.
Yes, I've had and actively used an Android for about a year and half now. I use it quite extensively, have bought a number of applications and I guess I'm basically the audience you're targeting - people who actively go out to find, and potentially buy, applications (this group is imo a relatively small subset of all Android users, I know many more Android users who have never used the Market than those who have).

Anyway just to make it clear that it is, imo, not to be considered 'well known' information amongst the general Android-using population. Heck, I've even written toy Android applications, and I still didn't know.
I believe it's mostly a matter of how mature and educated a society is. See counterexample also: the ban of minarets in switzerland (which practices some form of direct democracy)
Scooters are great in San Francisco - I had one and found it was a great way to get around, given the climate and difficult parking. However, outside of SF, they're not so good. For example, you couldn't even get from SF to Oakland because they're connected via a freeway, and so you can't go there with a low-powered scooter.
No Capital? No Problem. What You Get For Free Is Priceless
Really well executed. Fun to play, works great, well done. A killer feature for an app like this comes to mind; genre/artist specific games : )
Many of the problems and annoyances with PHP could be fixed while keeping backwards compatibility.

Just a short list I can think of now:

- Short array syntax. Completely optional but would clean up the language quite a bit. This has been proposed several times and shot down each for no real good reason.

- Promote complex primitives into objects. With the proper interfaces it wouldn't break any old code. Once this is done, deprecate the myriad of str* and array* functions in favor of the object methods. This also cleans up the "what order do i pass in the args" problem that so many people cite.

- Named parameters. Gets rid of passing in default params or an array blob for functions/methods that take lots of optional params. It also opens up the way for DSLs.

- Replace PEAR with something better. The quality of PEAR modules is really low and PEAR always seems to be broken one way or another.

- Add a list and hash type. PHP's array is very slow for some cases, and sometimes you need to enforce the datatype you're working with.

- Use exceptions for errors. Could be a runtime flag to prevent breaking things. It's incredibly easy to write bad code because PHP make it easy to ignore problems. Things like functions that connect to the db or trying to retrieve data from a stream don't throw exceptions on error.
Ask HN: Is my karma rotting?
Everyday I'm inactive I notice my karma goes down by 1 point, but none of my recent threads have been down voted. Does Karma now 'rot'?
Non physorg.com links:

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110504103742.ht...
Male Enhancement Pills, Modern Day Taboo
Ask HN: Can you defeat Lodsys for $1?
Lodsys is alleging infringement against some developers because they don’t have a license to use the Lodsys patent.

Apple has a license to use the Lodsys patent.

Solution: Sell your app to Apple for $1...

Then you lease it back from them (a perpetual, worldwide, royalty free, etc. license). Buy-leasebacks are common for all other kinds of capital. No obvious reason it couldn't be the same for this IP.

In the license terms, you just leaseback the IP you want to keep (i.e. all of it), while Apple is the new owner of record.

Can you find any problems that can't be solved in the legalese of the buyback agreement?

(I apologise for the earlier mispost of this same thread. It should have been in “Ask HN:”)
Thats not true about Google. They consistently develop products that address needs I didn't even know I had: Chrome, Docs, Maps, all the way back to gmail. Hell, their business is based on search, which embodies this concept.
Agreed. An obvious example from the real world is the tablet.

Prior to the introduction of the iPad, Microsoft and its partners had shipped lots of models of tablets for over a decade and they were all failures.

Then came the iPad. The iPad didn't succeed because Apple presented it well. It succeeded because unlike all of its predecessors it didn't suck.
I liked this one a lot better than http://www.wineverygame.com/ because its live results. I had to make a cleaner interface. I don't condone cheating and don't actually use it, but I wanted to jump on the scrabble band wagon that will only continue to grow.

This was a neat project too because I had to learn Word Search Algorithms. This was the most intense part and I was actually able to port Search Algorithms to strictly LINQ based.
So..... doesnt that mean your couchdb instance is live straight to the web... isnt that... a bad idea?
The N12 Bikini - first 3d printed article of clothing
> Lots of European economies have done worse

I think the article already addresses that. It stresses that "Italy’s economic illness is not the acute sort, but a chronic disease that slowly gnaws away at vitality". Spain, Ireland and Portugal might be in worse shape but they might be coming to understand that they need a tough treatment; Italy doesn't. The PIGS are at shock; Italy is just dazed at stupor.

> Italians are, well, Italians

:^) OK, you won.
The first iPod actually was pretty lame. Sales didn't take off until it was cheaper, used USB, and iTunes was Windows compatible - see also http://www.systemshootouts.org/ipod_sales.html ... Apple's "focus groups research" involves selling a product, sometimes with absurd flaws (e.g. the headphone jack on the 1st gen iPhone) and selling an updated version a year later. This works out because there are people who have bought every iteration of the iPod and keep them in collections, and people who deny to this day that the iPhone4 deathgrip exists (bought my iPhone4 three months ago, when I hold it like I've held my 1st gen iPhone, I lose signal, but have a case now so that's moot), and it seems to work out for them. Why pay for focus groups when you can have the focus groups pay you?
I'm totally digging these ideas :)
Skype sued in for patent infringement
Do You Lack Self Control? NBG, RFID Will Take Care Of That.
Traffic Sources, Conversion Rates, Anatomy of Launching Fab.com
This is scooter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_%28motorcycle%29
This is moped:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped

So what do you call the latter, if you call the former scooter?
$49 Human SEO Analysis - HN Special
"I'm 38 now and set in my career path more or less"

Fun exercise: Sit down. Think you just died. Like now. Just turn that around in your mind until it sinks in. Watch (hopefully) many of the rationalizations for your choices fall off. Repeat.
Camel In Action
>"Coding tricks I learnt at Apple"

I'd wager "learning how to properly use 'learned'" wasn't one of them.

http://www.urch.com/forums/english/9214-learned-vs-learnt.ht...
"The descriptive answer in American English is:
There is no such word as "learnt". Use "learned" always."
New Version of Google Chrome( Web Browser) 12 | Technorox
The shuttle programme was good and necessary.

But maybe we could have used some of the x trillion dollars spend on killing people in the past few decades.
Why did the two lisp atoms lose all their money?

They got consed
I don't think it's a marketing problem, I think the problem is that the products suck.
CERT Resilience Management Model (RMM)
What he means is that plenty of small airstrips have no ILS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system) and just publish GPS glideslopes... and if you're landing in zero visibility and you lose GPS tracking, landing is going to be dangerously hard.
He is their George Bush.

Seriously, in the last decade we have seen more direct, deliberate corruption and out right political douchebaggery than I would have thought possible. And in all of these scandals, not a single politician has paid.

Just like I said when Inside Job came out, if there was any doubt that we are living in a oligarchy, let all doubts now be cast aside.
As if people around the world actually visit Wikileaks website to read the expositions. That's the task of media.

The gazillion newspapers and TV channels of India will do a nice job in highlighting Wikileaks expositions of Indian politicians if it is released. (recently Julian Assange promised to release the list of Indian black money holders in Swiss banks)
Meh, sure basic operations are always going to be slower due to lack of type information, but for most work it's going to be pretty close to the JVM in terms of I/O, database access, etc. For compute specific tasks, sure it may not be the right tool for the job.
I don't. I would guess though that the complexity being talked about is not coming at least majorly from Cocoa.
Actually, they were very careful to never use the word 'sync'. You don't "sync" anything, the files are just there, on all your devices, always up to date.

I think that is an important point.
Duke Nukem Forever is finally officially seriously available
Productivity is...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Localizer_Performance_with_Vert...

GPS is also replacing ground-based radar for traffic control in the US.

It's a good idea to have alternatives in your cockpit, but 99% of the time GPS is the easiest and most accurate option.