skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I view articles like this as if I'm watching a high school debate team competition where the author is forced to argue a side while ignoring the positives of the other side. Fun for seeing emphasizing different perspective, not so great for giving a balanced view.

> In some cases, sure, a free plan is going to cost more in effort than it pays in users who convert to paid

Definitely. This is the most common mistake I see with free plans. Over-eager founders like to think of their free plan as a trial period, where users will either stop using the product or go on to subscribe.

Instead, huge portions of your userbase simply want as much free product as they can get without paying for anything. Never underestimate the number of people who will gladly use your product right up to the limits of the free plan without stepping over.

This can be okay if those free users end up doing free marketing for you. Dropbox is a perfect example of a tool where many (most?) users never even have a need to upgrade from the free plan. However, those free users were poised to recommend Dropbox when their companies were looking for a file storage and sharing solution. They also spread the Dropbox name around with Dropbox share links.

Slack is another great example of a free plan that lulls users into proselytizing for you. How many companies adopted Slack simply because some of their teams were already using the free plan to get work done?

Yes, free plan customers tend to complain way more than you'd think. However, you don't have to listen to them whine. You just have to make sure they aren't soured on the experience in general. If your core product can be reduced to something with near-zero operating costs and an absolutely bulletproof, hands-off operating mode, a free plan isn't much of a drag on your company.

However, if your product is such that free users generate the same costs/server load as regular users, you're going to inadvertently create a business model where your 10% of paying customers are subsidizing the 90% of free customers. You really need some clear limits on the free plan and an ultra low overhead backend to make this work at all.
Wondering if she is talking about focus fusion like these guys do. https://lppfusion.com/technology/fusion-energy-generator/
Awesome! We've changed the URL to that from https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/vltax2.pdf above, and have bumped the year from 1989 to 1990.

Awesome to see you in this thread too!
> Wanting it for everyone in perpetuity is new.

Nah, that behaviour has been around since before this millennium. They don't actual want it for everybody but they think they might get a better response if they look less self oriented.

"do what I want/need, not just for me you understand, but for the community"
> The US has had a volunteer military for decades.

It gets those "volunteers" by putting the lower classes in a position where their only way of getting education and healthcare is to sign up for the military, and then high-pressure sales tactics to get teenagers to sign a contract that'll bind them for decades.
> organizations that transcend country boundaries are great, as long as they’re not vested with political power

The EU is an organization that transcends countries and is vested with political power, and despite being constantly bashed by far-right parties in Europe, has built a single market in Europe and many new freedoms for it citizens, like the right to move to and work/study in other member states.
Headline, abstract and URL edits to NYT are tracked by @nyt_diff on Twitter, it can be very interesting to see: https://twitter.com/nyt_diff

Not sure if they only catch front page article changes or what.

Newspaper article content is a big game that’s worth tracking, but what’s more difficult (probably nearly impossible right now) is local television news. Tons of news is pushed through to a wide audience and then it’s gone as quickly as it came with any damage due to errors or omissions being done instantly and probably permanently.
Privately sync personal, work, or client calendars
What is the common thread amongst all big-_____?

Government intervention in that market.
Pinged
I'm an interviewer at my company and burnt out
And yet they get to vote.
I would say that statement is incorrect. In many ways it depends on your SAAS product's economy.
Having free users have it's own benefits:
1) You can consider them as beta-testers as they will help you find issues with product faster

2) The most critical users frequently covert to evangelists if you listen to them (considering their "demands" are reasonable)
2.1) It's really useful to have active community around your product for different reasons. And it might be hard to do with corporate users for example :)

3) Access doesn't have to be completely free. You can make them hoop through some loops - sharing about SAAS on social networks, inviting friends and so on.

4) Frequently you can actually convert a decent amount of free users with good discounts. Longer people use your service the higher is gonna be the conversion rate.
In general discounts ain't a good solution, but a lot of people don't actually need your software - they see a good deal for some interesting product and buy it in reserve for the future.
I think a lot of us been there with all deals on Steam, having hundreds of games in a library you haven't and probably won't play :)

5) Many users are actually ready to pay for some kind of support if it's not too expensive. But if you built a decent community around your product your free users can frequently get help they need on your forum or some board.

6) As others said frequently previous personal experience really helps with onboarding so there is a higher chance somebody gonna recommend it to their companies.

There are gonna be other benefits as well too. Personally I have around 10 years in product marketing management and development in Russia and USA. And as some of our products were Shareware I must say the biggest problem in ex-USSR countries was always a huge amount of pirates, but from my experience if you play it right you can use even them as huge promotional channel.

P.S. Getting a good "PR" manager is a good thing too. Frequently you can contact people who are vocal and berating your product and just give them access to Premium features for free :) You won't receive money from them, but having less negative reviews will help your sales. Frequently they would appreciate the gesture and make favorable recommendations. (In many times people just are unhappy with something else in their lives, they just project negativity on your product cause they are in a bad place and getting a response from a real human means a lot to people - if it's not just some "sorry script" many customer support agents use).
TLDR; A company is claiming that they have found a way to reverse a hash function, and that they can use this to break current and post-quantum encryption algorithms. They provide no evidence to back up this claim, but they are patenting a "secure" algorithm that they'll make available for "free".

I'm sure that unsupported claim and magic patent aren't related to their valuation.
Slimelight is truly special. There was a period of a few months where I'd go almost every Saturday night. That dancefloor is really something special at 5 or 6am, like being on another planet.

Sadly it's still mostly quiet these days (well now it's completely quiet, but pre-Covid it was also quiet). But I went to one of their birthdays two or three years back and it was packed. London's whole goth scene descended on it.
The article misses the biggest reason to offer a free plan. If your competitor has one and you don't, they're the "default" that everyone uses, and nobody bothers looking at your product. Along the same lines, you're probably not entering a completely new business, so you need to give someone a reason to check out your product.

The intelligent free plans are the ones that offer some things for free, but they say "If you like what you get in the free plan, you can pay to get X" for some useful X. Evernote did it for years with their free plan. Evernote was THE notes app. Now that they don't really have a free plan any longer, but Notion does, it'll be interesting to see how it works out. But keep in mind that Evernote is an established company, not a startup looking for the first 10 paying customers.
Do you only respect that if you agree with their reasons as well? The kind of rah-rah patriotism for your country isn't one sided. Plenty of axis troops thought they were fighting against evil. Let's also not ignore the fact that service wasn't always voluntary.

It really just seems like you're looking at this with a very limited, black and white perspective. That's your prerogative but it doesn't really line up with the experience of most of the service members I've known and spoken with both personally and professionally.

I can't speak much to the experience of soldiers from other countries but people come into military service in the US from the full spectrum of the country. Wealthy families with generations of decorated officers to young people who really have no better option when it comes to their future. You may disagree with the entire idea of the armed forces but the reality is, especially for those who come from poor socio-economic backgrounds, there is no better option. A stable job that will provide housing, healthcare and education and a ticket away from whatever other negative things that may be going in their life. It's an alluring prospect. (Recruitment practices get pretty gross, I'm sure we can both agree there, but the benefits are very real).

Whether or not that is right is certainly something we can and should debate as a society, but there are a vast number of reasons people joined the armed forces and most of them aren't because they want to do bad things.
If it only supported Safari on Mac
Charles is the best chance Republicans will get for a while (I honestly wouldn't be surprised if everyone in line for the throne at the moment isn't a royalist at heart)

> if governments can expropriate the sovereign’s wealth.

It's pocket change, not worth the effort.

The thing that needs to be eliminated is The Crown's ability to be used to bypass parliament
I think poppler is a library, not an application. Anyway, it's one of the two PDF backends for Zathura (the other being MuPDF) so it's at least included indirectly.
Well it's much easier for women to be attractive because of makeup. Being muscular for men is only half of the equation, you need to buy fit clothes to show them. Also taking care of your beard do make a difference.
I read the "influencer" in original post as descriptive not prescriptive.

> the companies in question evidently don't value information, and have instead relied on personal hubris

Nothing in the post indicated hubris to me. "I have used this service before and can give you an estimation of how well it fits our usecase" is probably the best information about a service you can get. The alternative is to spend time and money to discover that yourself.
Sometimes they correct it in a tweet or follow up substack and no one reads that one, the previous one confirming their biases was much more entertaining.
Free plans are about generating recognition, word of mouth, etc. They are much cheaper than advertising, and better at targeting actual users.

If you don’t offer a free plan because it’s too expensive, but blow $$$ on social media and web advertising, you’re probably doing it backwards.

For example, why does anyone know or care about GitHub? Because it’s free.
Not everyone should be a "bomber" n.9 like Lewa...
What you are saying is simply not true. mRNA vaccines took absolutely no time to design, as they have an automated platform to synthesize any given mRNA. Companies have even disclosed they went from sequence to vaccine in just 24 hours.

Your point only applies to those with a recombinant vector. But even on those, Oxford were so fast because they already had a developed platform and they were working on a very similar epitope.

Spending a bit more time would have been surely safer, and would not have delayed things significantly. What we have now might not be good enough after all, if it's true that the SA variant escapes immune recognition on individuals vaccined with Oxford-AZ. I hope to be wrong.
I do kind of like the idea of alternatives to a completely free plan, like pay a few bucks once to be able to use the basic plan forever with low limits etc. Another one I've seen that I like is to allow free use with registration, but you have to register with an email address at your business domain, no free or public commercial email domains allowed.
Facts are things that can be tested and proven over and over again in reality. A pen is dropped, it falls to the ground today as it has fallen to the ground in the past, 1000s of times.

When establishment media outlets have to substantiate or provide "evidence", that's usually a belief more than a fact. Facts are binary, it's either a fact or it's not.
Used to play this game all the time back in the late 2000's. Honestly thought it died out long ago. Really glad to see it still alive with an active community.
Mr Trump also holds a “small financial interest” in the McDonalds Corporation, having once purchased a hamburger.
One of the problems with trust is that people see corrections and admitting ignorance as signs of unreliability and confidence and stubbornness as signs of reliability.

I can't count the number of times someone arguing with me has dug up a correction or retraction page on something unrelated as proof that a source is nonsense.

If they did issue a pile of corrections and changes, this post would instead be "the thousands of errors the NYT has made."
Because there's an obvious implication that Trump is pushing the drug because he has a financial interest in pushing the drug. But if his financial interest is so small that he stood to gain hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands at most, then implying he's doing it for financial reasons is extremely dishonest.
> Oh look, here’s a project at Carnegie Mellon University doing exactly that. Let’s hire from there. Sorted!

> Now we need a solid compiler tool chain fir MacOS. This exciting project at the University of Illinois looks good, let’s hire one of the founders. Bingo!

None of these are garantee of top 1% talent
Another idea, maybe a certain type of person is the one pondering intergalactic relations. I'm not sure all humans would be so friendly if they came to think about it.
It’s disingenuous and you know it.
No, 192.0.0.0/24 and 192.0.2.0/24 are completely separate networks.

See "Classless Inter-Domain Routing" [0] (a.k.a. "CIDR")

--

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing
Also not the parent.
Unraid. https://www.unraid.net

Edit: link
As another commenter mentioned, your description of type #2 clubs in London misses the mark completely, and I suspect you aren't actually aware that type #2 clubs as described actually exist (which is fine - many people outside the scene won't know about them).

A hen or stag party would not be allowed in. The few tourists who are there are generally there becaus they know the scene and came specifically for the night. These aren't venues that you'd stumble into on a drunken night out. They're often holes in the wall in quiet-ish streets in Tottenham or Hackney or Elephant & Castle, and you generally have to buy a ticket for 15-25GBP in advance.
The computers rejecting your job application
It's the unknown I'm talking about. I'm talking specific skills. How is the ability to play the harpsichord inherited genetically? Is there a gene that gives you great golf skills? Just being highly intelligent doesn't specifically predict you to be an extraordinary sculptor.

What's the simplest explanation? There's a specific gene for each and every human activity that causes extraordinary natural ability in that activity, or that there isn't and ability/results are more of a function of things like practice, discipline, and immersion at a young age?
There's also the case of services which will only do (or strongly guide you to) the highest level subscription for the trial period without obvious indicators for which option you see is available in lower tiers. Sure, you can dig through the features table linked from the pricing pages, but that's unnecessary effort.
> I would say that most educated people inherently believe that the media should not automatically receive benefit of the doubt any longer.

Yup. These days I only get my news from The Daily Wire and Joe Rogan. I'm educated, and I just can't trust the lamestream media.
This makes me wonder, 3 branches of government exist to balance each other out. Journalism stands on its own, what’s the counter balance to journalism?
OP already stated they don't know what kind of steroids were used.

It's an anecdote and third-hand information, at best. Maybe OP misremembered something. Maybe the doctor was wrong or simply trying to convince the guy to stop using steroids. Maybe the guy lied about what really happened to protect their medical privacy.

None of us is in any position to determine what really happened. Facts as I understand them:

OP chose to not use steroids themselves because of scary story from person they knew.

Everything else is damn near wild conjecture as to "what really happened."
If you leave out massive outliers like coconuts (which I highly suspect are not what 99.9% of people think of when they think of "seeds"—I realize that's not the case for you), I think the variation would actually be quite similar.
MIT license history is here:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=926...
First version 1984, revised version more widely used 1986.
I'm sure that software was released in a permissive wray long before that, but I'd have to do more research, and that's enough for my point.

GPL version 1 was released in 1989:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
Interesting article, and I think we (I'm the author of the submission) may both be right to some degree. I wrote the article with an small/indie SaaS business in mind, which often targeting other small-medium businesses and developers where the goal is not necessarily to become market leader.

The intent was to say in a convoluted way: focus on those that value your business, and in particular focus on paying customers (the higher the better). In general it's better to have fewer customers that pay more and pamper them.

If you have millions of users the story is very different of course.
I noticed it's like this on Amazon the other day. It meant I couldn't narrow down results to find what I wanted so I could give Amazon money
What constitutes the government intervention which enabled big tech? Wouldn't (tech) giants go even more unchecked without government regulation?
It depends on which 10.
> However, those free users were poised to recommend Dropbox when their companies were looking for a file storage and sharing solution.

You can take the Dropbox example further though. The free plan was absolutely necessary for Dropbox. If you're in the file sharing business, it's only going to work if all users are using Dropbox.
At Notion, we used to have a limited free plan where we only allowed users to create 1000 blocks (pages/paragraphs/embeds/checkboxes/database rows) before we directed them to upgrade to the "Personal Pro" plan. Supporting free users dealing with the block limit was a major headache, just as described in the OP, but more importantly the Personal Pro plan was kind of a dead end - few users converted to Pro, and those that did weren't worth much, since the Pro plan is pretty cheap and doesn't have much network effect.

We took a hard look at that free personal plan and how it worked with our goals. Instead of phasing it out, we decided to make it unlimited - now personal users can make as many blocks as they want [https://www.notion.so/personal]. But importantly, we also switched up our segmentation at the same time: we restricted the personal plans' collaboration model and created a new "Team Trial" plan, with the same 1000 block limit, but with all the teamwork features included. Another thing to note about our Team Trail is that it's not time-limited at all, teams can keep trialing Notion until it has clear value to them. We have many fewer users frustrated by the block limit, but those who are are much more valuable, and are getting a lot more out of Notion -- when they upgrade, it's to a Team plan with strong network effects and a path to future expansion.

And all those (now) very happy users on the free plan? They're like jonpurdy [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26059666] - they'll take Notion into their (future) teams and workplaces, even though in the shorter term they're a strain on our systems.

My advice is - there's more nuance to this than "MAKE IT FREE" vs "DON'T MAKE IT FREE". Think about how you structure upgrade incentives around value, and about how your free plans fit into your overall market strategy.
Poe’s law is pretty strong here.
Evolving Ext4 for Shingled Disks [pdf]
It inspired perhaps the greatest modern work of all time!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_Was_Here_(album)

Domo arigato!
> because that's where they can be the most efficient at getting the most billionaires to help

They should choose between the donors and the billionaires then. (regardless, they are a tech company, they could employ people remotely)

This still does not address the issue of the dishonest fundraising though (pretending that they need your help despite making 1/10th of their wage and not saying up-front on what they spend the money on). I am sure that you would be upset if you gave money to a beggar that you later see getting in his Mercedes, or if you donated money to an organization for the homeless but then realized that 90% of the money goes for researching new pie recipes. It honestly feels like that.
Other journalists.
> 85lbs isn't a lot to lift or carry close to your chest, but it's a lot to hold out in front of you.

The way the anecdote is usually told is that Schwarzenegger was the only guy on set who could carry it at all, not that he was the only guy who could hold it out in front of him. Is that an exaggeration?
How to Heal Your Creative Soul
Thanks. What I find the worst about 'must not be similar to past pw' is that you have to store the pw in plain text somewhere (or at least retrievable).
I stopped reading after the extremely misguided first line. I work with, live with, and generally am surrounded by “educated” people. I don’t know any of them who would agree that the premier news outlets are mostly trustworthy.

Educated people understand what pays the bills for the major news outlets and it sure as hell ain’t trust.
Change your MAC address with a shell script (2019)
> nobody should show them real data.

I’m not sure what you mean by this.
This is just my opinion, but I think that the software I use should empower me, the user: I don't think my software should force me to "respect the requests of the publisher", and I especially think it shouldn't restrict basic functionality like the clipboard in pursuit of that goal.
If you are student of grammar and journalism, do your self a favor and follow @nyttypos. I was stunned by the large number of mistakes that professional journalists make, that their editors miss, and that they refuse to correct.

Here is an article about @nyttypos and his/her obsession...

https://www.theringer.com/2020/8/18/21372181/nytimes-typo-tw...