skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> you'd be able to identify and measure it before it manifests in a skill

We actually have a pretty high degree of predictive power here using genetic testing, and we’ve only just started enumerating these predictors.

> the enormous amount of focus

Available focus is genetically predicted.

> I'm a pretty good programmer. I didn't get that way because of some supernatural force or mystical spirit

Genetics aren’t supernatural or mystical.

> I wasn't born knowing how to program.

You were born with some traits that made you (on expectation) better or worse at it.
With just the information you've given, there's no way you can conclude with certainty that the price is too high.

The real question is, how targeted is the email list towards a japanese language course offering, and what is the open rate on the email list.

If everybody on the list is interested in learning japanese, AND, the email list has good open rates, that MIGHT mean her pricing is too high. Or not.

That said, I'd rather have 5 customers paying $300 than 50 customers paying $30. Let the big companies take on the cheap users. As a solopreneur you have to chose your battles wisely.

I'm skeptical that price is the problem. People pay thousands of dollars for courses with super beginner, freely available information all the time. If you save me a day of research to cobble together all that beginner information, that's $300 well spent.
> every well-paid job doesn't need a genius

This echoes something I've been thinking a lot on recently. It's not just 'not every well-paid job'. It is quite literally most every well-paid job doesn't need a genius. A step further: most well-paid jobs will be impeded by a genius.

Geniuses aren't fun, awesome, let-em-loose-and-profit machines. They're people. Worse, they're necessarily weird people. While we need to cultivate them and give them the resources they need, optimizing society for geniuses would make a society most don't want to live in. Creating narratives where you are a rockstar-whatever or failure only sets us up for failure.

The message is be yourself. The message is that if you are a weird, quirky, feeling-left-out genius, that's ok. If you aren't, well, that's just normal.
It's funny that you mention experts use less support.

I work for an amazon subsidiary. We have free unlimited aws enterprise support. It's like pulling teeth for me to get our engineers to engage enterprise support. We know they have a ton of experience with triaging various aws tools and usage. Again we pay nothing for it, but one might consider we pay a massive amount for it as well. But we think we are experts on every system we touch.

Many of our issues would have been solved N days faster if we had just reached out to them immediately.

I would say we greatly over index on not bothering support.
This is absurd. Physical attributes.. size, strength, fast-twitch muscle, jumping ability, endurance, sprinting power and speed, these all have massive genetic differences amongst people. You can look up on 23andme they even display genetic markers for sprinting ability.

The "table stakes" for being an elite athlete in many sports are so far beyond what you can just mentally train yourself to achieve by will. Plenty of amateur athletes have mental focus and work ethic, and train religiously, but this doesn't push them anywhere near elite performance levels.
That's not that they are doing. That is what Amazon claims they are doing with no prove. SpaceX is slightly changing it system (non of its hardware).

Amazon reserving an a huge orbit and without real data claiming anybody else that want to operate there is only trying to prevent their system. That is unreasonable.

Amazon is trying to artificial hobble Starlink, not the other way around. If Amazon really designed it system in a way where Starlink hinders it, then why would Amazon be allowed to operate such a system? Such a system would mean nobody else can operate in such an orbit.

Based on similar claims SpaceX could have attempted to prevent Amazon system but they didn't because they knew it wouldn't, and did want to make false claims about it.
I wonder whether this height-reducing effect relates to the 'manlet' jokes one sees in various places online. There does seem to be a bit of an overlap in the demographics where one would see the two.
Kowloon Walled City in My Backyard
Nevertheless, steroids are still implicated in height loss.

He took a lot of steroids (I don't know which ones), his doctor told him that was the cause, and nothing else accounted for it. Anyone considering steroids should consult with a physician first. Me, I wasn't willing to take the risk.
> This is only true if you think there's absolutely no difference between any candidate in their stance on, say, campaign finance reform.

No, thats irrelevant. The relevant factor is which viable candidates have accepted contributions. And the answer is “all of them.” The part where one of the guys accepting bribes tells you “I’m opposed to bribes” is marketing.
As usual: it isn't completely natureo or nurture -- it's both.
This was actually a basis for the international Ham Radio scene back in the day I believe. I also see it playing out with FLOSS software development -- to me it is exciting when people from other backgrounds and countries download, comment, and improve on my software.
كلمات اغنية يا اولي زينة عماد
There's plenty of studies finding correlation between IQ in adolescence and future income. Once you note how much luck and work ethic matters it's actually not a low amount of correlation for IQ alone.
Nobody is preventing anything. Starlink went threw all the process to get regulated and now wants to slightly lower in the range they can operate in.

It does not inherently prevent anybody else from operating. In every orbit their are many different sats and sat providers operating.

Amazon claims are entirely based on their inability to run their theoretical system when SpaceX is there. If their system is that fragile, then maybe they shouldn't be allowed to launch it in the first place.

SpaceX could have equally claimed the planned Amazon system was interfering with them, but they didn't.
There are many legitimate reason for one to need to be able to print or copy text from a document. Enforcing an entirely optional "security mechanism" when there is no technical reason to at the expense of the users of the software makes no sense at all, especially if the only argument is to respect the authors implied arbitrary wishes.
It's hard to learn about things nobody discusses. I've been around for a while and can't say I've ever noticed those being mentioned anywhere. If you wanted to write something longer about it I'd really love to read it :)
It sounds like you're describing a vaudeville theatre or musical revue. These were way, way more common before movies and television came to dominate American entertainment (and before the electric guitar and synthesizer allowed for "big sound" from a small band or single performer). They are enshrined in our movies because many of the biggest early American movie stars, like the Marx Brothers, crossed over from vaudeville. It's much less common today, but I'm sure some venues of this type exist somewhere. Similar forms can be found with more frequency:

1) Comedy clubs, where there is an emcee who introduces various comedians to perform their routines

2) Dinner theater, which typically features tables arranged around a central stage. Full meals are served, and a play (typically a musical) is performed while you eat and drink.
The New Yorker themselves corrected it from "the average classroom had forty-six students" to "as many as forty-six students". They published a "fact", in the lead paragraph, that they themselves eventually agreed was wrong. How is that "taking claims out of context"?
I appreciate this article is about how bad the NYT is, but let's never forget their most epic correction of all time:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/movies/room-237-documenta...
Your sister isn't Kevin Durant, by any chance. :-) No idea if this phrase was originally his, but it is often attributed to him.
Similarly, I work in industries with fairly expensive software. Off and on they'll offer free, limited educational versions. When a new version comes out I'll often dabble with it at home if there's a free version available--there have been times where it wasn't offered, so I didn't. Often, it's new or updated features. Because my day to day work is getting things done I'm less likely to risk a new and untested approach and we stick with older software versions until we have to.

Without a free version I'm less likely to try out a new version or deviate as much as I would if there's not a clear benefit. It makes the software stickier (assuming they did improve it).
But this “new era” is just a move back to the pre-free era where software was proprietary.

So it’s a regression.
We had tiered classes when I was a kid. Stupid, normal, smart. They weren't called that, but that was basically what was going on. I was put in slow math classes and still my grades were poor. My teachers, my parents and even myself, we were all convinced the subject was beyond me. I had no talent for it.

As I grew older, this didn't sit right with me. By high school I switched my focus to math and science. By college I had chosen engineering, eventually taking all your typical undergrad math classes: differential equations, linear algebra, vector calculus and so on.

I'm still terrible at math. It never got easier. Every step I took I found to be very difficult. I got by with work ethic and sacrifice. I could have easily given up at any point along they way. Why didn't I? Not sure. Maybe I was fueled by resentment.

We need to be careful when we start telling people what they're not good at. We need to be careful when using terms like "talent". Many of us would like to quickly quantify cognitive ability, tie it to our genetics and be done with it. It's easy. But perhaps that's the problem, it's easy.
This supports the parent post and does not refute it.

Although you may have been unsatisfied with iMovie, it is in fact the free tier of Final Cut Pro, much as GarageBand is the free tier of Logic.

Interestingly enough, iMovie and GarageBand even have iPhone and iPad versions (though sadly there's no iPadOS version of FCP/Logic yet.) Though Final Cut Pro and Logic do run amazingly well on an M1 Mac mini.
"We can fine-tune this as we accumulate experience, but I propose we start with a limit of $10 million in total compensation for a CEO of any company doing business in the US, with no one in the company or its subsidiaries permitted to earn more. "

Successful hedge fund managers can earn much more than that in a year. So people should be encouraged to start hedge funds rather than work for public companies?

There are are athletes, movie stars, and rock stars who earn more than $10 million a year. Why pick on CEOs -- their jobs are at least as important.
Top 1% developers definitely average about top 1% salary. High-variance returns like startup stock luck don’t count.

If you’re not paying your devs substantially more than industry average (like several times more) they’re probably not that abnormally good.
What happens when substacks make mistakes?
> He sounds like a highly detestable human being.

That is over-the-top harsh.

I disagree with the choices the author of XPDF made. I would have made different ones.

Neither of us fully understands his mental state, or why he made those choices. So let's focus our criticism on the choices themselves, rather than outright dehumanizing another person for making a technical decision.
"Those two" found friendship after a war. I'm still holding out hope that's not the example we follow in the US.
Malcolm Gladwell made the same point back in 2002 with "The Talent Myth". McKinsey & Company helped Enron find the most "talented" employees. It didn't work.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myt...
The original text, before you clipped it out of context and framed it, says "When you average out grade levels, most US classrooms have a number of students that starts with a two. More rarely it’s a one or a three. It’s never a four. (At some outlier schools? Maybe. As an average across a large sample? Never.)" This is accurate, as is the claim that The New Yorker's figure of an average of 46 is completely off base. As your own figures clearly show.

> someone who works for a right wing think tank.

This kind of bias contributes nothing and makes good-faith discussion impossible. It's openly insulting and can only produce a flame war.

Edit: Reworded to be a little nicer.
Yes, every resource matters more to poor people

Yes, you can simply not cater them

Leaving a void in the market means someone else can consider making a competitor and inheriting all those problems, and maybe they have a good time

If you are that competitor, ignore this article
Adult intelligence (g, IQ, whatever) (which predicts most of the things we’re taking about) is thought to be about 70-90% genetically heritable. Most of the rest isn’t known (maybe effectively random).
Having all that "free" shit in app stores doesn't help. I wish Apple and Google would require apps to charge some minimum.
Try searching for "steroids osteoporosis." It's a known thing they can cause osteoporosis and osteoporosis can cause height loss.
I like that "no compelling evidence they possess a theory of mind". I spent some time worrying about what "people" would think when I was young, but never "what does that individual person think?" And I never spent any time trying to be attractive because I didn't find men attractive. Reddit helped me read everyone else's minds and made me more normal, but I still don't have conversations where I'm thinking "How are they reacting to what I said?" or "What will they do if I act like this?"
The Importance of Causal Inference – Medical Scheme Racial Bias Allegations
I am involved with a number of products which range between paid-only, freemium and free, so I'm familiar with the pros/cons. I know both sides of the equation but was offering comment on one half.

The author appears to have a freemium product in their portfolio, and acknowledges there can be reason for that.

Countless established or major players (Dropbox, Basecamp, Trello, etc) seem to make use of the freemium angle. Suspect there's something in that and that a free tier is a necessary evil at times.
My experience too.

ALWAYS have a lifetime free plan. It's okay to make it a useless lifetime free plan (your data disappears every 2 weeks; you have a 3 email per day quota; etc.). It just need to be enough to seriously evaluate your product, and if it has APIs, to develop to them. There are sometimes good reasons to do more, and sometimes not. But that's the minimum.

In the early days of AWS, I would build thing on AWS' free tier, and they turned into products later. One product is making AWS millions (literally). AWS lost out when I changed orgs, my one-year free tier quota was gone, and I couldn't do the same at future orgs.

At big organizations, the overhead of a PO is sufficient that you don't do it unless you have a compelling business case. Free plan allows you to build a business case over a weekend.

I've gone free->paid many times.

It's worth noting the figures here. The case for a free plan is much more compelling for a Fortune 500 company who will sign a million-dollar contract than for a small business.
Yeah, I know what it does -- it's had many different missions grafted onto it. It's a cool plane.

But I mean it's obsolete for its original mission. It can't fly higher than Soviet SAMs anymore. It hasn't been able to since the 60s.
The thing that's confusing me, is that apparently people who think things without moving parts and adjustments are "simpler", are basically looking at things from an end user perspective. Your response seems to confirm that.

But it's not obvious to me what simpler for an end user has to do with more reliable. I mean, my smartphone usually dies in about a year or two. Actual phones in olden days didn't.

So I still don't get why electric cars would be considered simpler in a sense that's relevant to reliability in expectation.

Carburetors need adjustment and maintenance, but some cars with ECUs and EFI from the 80s are getting old enough that the electronics are actually failing. So how do you define "simple" and "reliable"?
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

NYT and New Yorker and other establishment media outlets are corporate businesses. Their only interest is to push their propaganda narratives to further their own interests and protect their owners and other corporations.
Tangent, but BeyondCompare is one of the few tools I'm proud to have purchased. I use it all the time for file and folder diff. It has been invaluable for me and my work on both Windows and macOS.
Did you read my comment?

1) Author contrasted claims made to _national_ averages, not _LA_ averages.

2) I agree with you that they got it wrong, I even said as such:

> However, finding out actual figures for LA schools is hard, as you have differing figures published by differing sites, based on sources who are on either side of a dispute that involves class sizes. That said, based on this one I found, it looks like the average isn't 46, that's more of an outlier, but neither is it in the "most have a number of students that start with two. More rarely it's a one or three".

However, the author's assertions of _how they got it wrong_, are, from a cursory reading, also misleading.
It would be seen as a strong, disruptive political statement. Some people in my generation have legitimately never heard a pro-gun message other than the weird trolling the NRA prefers on their social media accounts, so when I say "you can take steps to feel safe when there's a burglar in your neighborhood" they hear this guy with his flamethrower: https://fb.watch/3wkI4gq4WM/
Scalia wrote certain things in dicta in Heller in order to get Justice Kennedy's vote, in a very narrow ruling in a case specifically about handguns.

I wouldn't read much into that on the constitutionality of "military weapon" bans -- keeping in mind of course that the things gun control advocates like to call "assault weapons" aren't actually military weapons at all, as manufacture of actual military weapons for civilian ownership has been heavily restricted since 1968 and absolutely banned since 1986.
Checks the guys saas...

$4 plan.

Hmm. This rounds to free. I wonder how he squares that.

Anyway, my advice would be: depends on your unit economics.
There’s books and web sites and stuff. Learning doesn’t just come from discussion, but research. (Edit to change “learning” to “research” because autocorrect changed it and I didn’t notice until now)

If you haven’t read ESR’s Cathedral and the Bazaar, it’s pretty good and will go into some of the background.
> I don't think I agree. It's great for individuals and countries to be friendly, but I see two problems with a one-world-government system.

I agree that power corrupts but it doesn’t follow to me that power corrupts more at the top than at the bottom. I’ve heard some horror stories about small towns in Texas. I’m sure there are similar stories everywhere.
I switched from greasemonkey to tampermonkey because the webextension version of greasemonkey wasn't compatible with some of my scripts anymore, but tampermonkey was.
I'm not a big fan of that. You disincentive usage.

Daily quota is the way to go. Amazon free micro instances are a perfect example. Enough to build. Not enough to go to production.
Hi, author of the page here. I didn't expect this to end up so high on HN.

You're right that there is a place for free plans, the article I wrote is probably too one-sided. I planned on adding an extra section near the end for some cases when a free plan does make sense (I will wait until it is no longer discussed here).

Other than the "influencer" angle you mentioned, it also makes sense for products where you can offer the first X units for free, and many will have the desire for more (2 free designs for a website builder, or the first 10 levels free in a video game).
sigh Did you even read the bit where I pointed out my issue was comparing claims made about LA averages to _national_ averages?

No? At least you're open about your bias.

> At least you're open about your bias.

Newsflash: people who work for right wing think tanks generally have a predetermined position in any dispute involving unions. Film at 11 for anyone who really needs it.
A Different Way to Relate to Anger
The main reason IME for a header-only C++ library is that when it is template-heavy (as a lot of C++ code is these days), a lot of it ends up in headers anyway, so it's not a big leap to header-only.

I've never seen a widely used header-only C Lucas library, and while it wouldn't surprise me, it seems harder to justify.
This is true for paid services too. My team is working to offer a service which allows people to create a feed of images, and we’re all fairly worried about what we’re going to see uploaded.

We’ve all worked on social websites (including Facebook) and we’ve all seen what users are capable of uploading.

One of our internal initiatives is improving our ability to find this stuff and remove it without having to actually engage and look at it regularly. Ugh. Offering any kind of storage at all, free or paid, comes with some risks.
This works, until it doesn't.

If your free plan is killing you you're structuring it wrong. Free users shouldn't get support, that's reserved for paying customers. A free user should basically have to just read documentation. And if there's premium features with expensive hosting costs that aren't trivial to subsidize, then that is not a free feature.

You also lose a lot of market share when your competitor starts offering a free plan.

Have a free plan, but never think of it as more than a lead generator.
Also once you deal with medium to large companies they will have an internal support team solve a lot of minor issues before it ever gets escalated to you.
As as aside, I recently goofed up our company website DNS (updated a record on long TTL with an incorrect), but quickly fixed it and found a partial workaround to propagation: flush the DNS cache of Google[1] and Cloudflare[2]. It helped with DNS cache refresh within minutes from most global locations, if not all.

[1] https://dns.google/cache
[2] https://1.1.1.1/purge-cache/
Many/most strategies become less profitable percentage-wise as you scale up the trading volumes. You end up pushing the market around and affecting the patterns upon which you rely.

If they've found some pattern that very reliably makes 40k to 50k a year on a 300k investment, with downside semivariance similar to the S&P 500, they're beating the market, but maybe the pattern will never make more than 80k a year, even with infinite bankroll.
Though combining a paid "lifetime" plan with the deactivation of inactive accounts as the article suggests seems like a bad idea. That's deceptive in my book.
This post is a good example of the initial realization that folks experience with graphs as data structures. I can see author exclaiming, "Graphs are an intuitive way to express knowledge!" Graphs as data structures can be more nuanced than is usually discussed.

Hypernode graphs seem to be very applicable to knowledge graphs, though they have different names depending on the discipline -- nested state machines, statecharts [1], UML hierarchically nested states [2].

I recently participated in a lecture series on Applied Category Theory [3] that touched on the underlying math of composition. The course focused on optimization of design choices in complex decision spaces.

[1] https://statecharts.github.io/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML_state_machine#Hierarchical...

[3] https://applied-compositional-thinking.engineering/lectures/
This doesn't hold only for sport. Take a person with an IQ of 90. He will never become a fields medalist. I don't see how that is different then a small player not being able to win olympic gold in basketball.