skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the cost of SMS is determined by how much consumers can be persuaded to pay

Correct, that's what happens in a free market. Since when are businesses supposed to price according to the cost of what they are selling? Their job is to make a profit, and the best way to do that is to find the balance between the highest cost and getting as many people as possible to pay that price.

Not to mention that SMS messages being more expensive than they could be is hardly a new fact, and indeed is written about often enough that it has been on HN multiple times in the last year alone.
Damn that's a big server... we've got 6 boxes that don't even add up to that.
Facebook blocks contact-exporting tool
Given that they've raised $87M in VC over 6 years (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zillow), kind of a small outcome to be $325M pre-money.
Are you planning on actually using it? I uploaded some music to Amazon's mp3 when it first launched and more to Google's MP3 and I have found very little need to use either one. I obviously can't fit all my music on my phone (an android) but I generally am ok with the music I have at any particular time and swapping.
Scarcity? What? Text messages are sent using idle channels that are not busy at the moment. It's only a scarce resource in the case that the available channels become saturated, in which case the provider has no qualms about simply dropping your text message.
With Google+ do you really need a blog anymore?
Clarification, obvious: You only get unlimited MP3 (and AAC) storage with any paid Cloud Drive plan. You won't get it with the free 5GB plan.

Of course, I think most people are probably on the 20GB plan since Amazon was giving those away with the purchase of an MP3 album for quite some time.
Well, yes and no, they do work on these other browsers, but most of the document features are disabled in Sharepoint/Office Web Apps are disabled outside of IE, at least as of 10 months ago when we migrated this stuff in.
Wait -- how?
The singularity will come when they can build Minecraft inside Minecraft
I don't stream much with it on my phone. But it's great to be able to download the album(s) I want to the device without needing to connect to my computer.

Also, can never have too many backup copies of my music.
Having done this migration in the IT department at the university I worked for, I can say you are quite right that $250k will likely not cut it.

However, the main reason many universities did not go with Google was because they failed to meet 508 Accessibility guidelines. Some universities got around this limitation, and Google eventually pulled its collective head out of its ass, but for quite a long time they simply refused to do accessibility compliance.
I used Facebook video chat this morning, and it required a download that you then had to run in order to proceed.
You see this type of article design pattern frequently: "You are being ripped off - Product A costs Company B a maximum of C Dollars on the margin, and they are charging you D Dollars, which is many orders of magnitude larger than C"

The common rebuttal is:
"You are making the mistake of calculating on the Margin, you forgot to calculate E Fixed Costs"

But, I think of it somewhat differently:

It is rarely the case that you _have_ to use Product A at Price D, but you still do, which means it usually has more value to you than Price D - and is it that unreasonable that Company B should charge it's customers what their customers value product A at?

I know I would.

As a side note - I've managed to get most of the people I SMS with frequently into using WhatsApp, and, once I see that I've sent less than 100 SMS messages for at least three or four months, I'll shift it over to my Data Plan.

Apple will likewise have simliar impacts when they bring their SMS alternative online.

So - the free market does respond to this in a semi predictable and reasonable manner.
I hate being ripped off just as much as the next guy...

But, I don't think showing the cost of SMS is the right way to fix the market. Guess what, there are a lot of things in this world that you buy with ridiculous mark ups.
Which continents? I wouldn't have asked had you used a singular term.
TECH ADVENTURE (College Students Contest)
I had the same experience at the start of my use of ZeroCater.

The great thing was, though, that I was able to just tell ZeroCater that we didn't want as much rice, and they fixed it. They're super responsive. We've been using them for about 2 months now, and are pretty happy.
Wow. Thanks. I've certainly learn a lot from the linked presentation. For me It really illustrated the fundamental flaws with Facebook.
The Bachelorette Season 7 Episode 7
The Bachelorette Season 7 Episode 7 on that certain moment. It’s not like that! In fact, it’s so different from that. It’s so magical and that it
We used ZeroCater for the first time today. Could not have been a better experience, especially because we signed up last night at 8pm.
Likely a combination of both, similar to Dropbox's freemium.
You don't understand Google docs then either. Or people emailing passwords. Basically, these things are not risky anymore than flying a plan is risky.
We're hiring, by the way!

Previous to ZeroCater, I was the first engineering hire at Justin.TV: http://abstractnonsense.com/life-at-a-startup

If that sounds like the kind of experience you would enjoy, email me (bill@zerocater.com) - we're currently looking for our first engineering hire.
You're misinformed about the channels that are used. It's actually the control channels that carry the SMS messages (the channels used for association to towers) not the voice channels. These channels can easily become heavily utilized with a large number of connected calls or devices associated to a single tower. Additionally, the message isn't dropped, it's instead queued for later delivery which typically occurs when your device migrates to a different tower.
New ID in Arizona was simple, walk in, fill out the paperwork, walk out with a valid drivers license. No waiting for it to be mailed.
Okay I tried and failed: what qualifies as "eligible" MP3 and AAC files? I misread the "Learn More" link that was related to previous purchases as being the "Learn More" for eligible files, but afaict that "Learn More" link related to eligible files isn't active so I'm confused as to what will qualify as eligible.
"You've found market price when buyers complain but still pay." - pg
Miroslav Krleža
Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav Krleža , Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav Krleža , Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav Krleža , Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav Krleža , Miroslav , Krleža , Miroslav
Photos and Tagging are Facebook's best defense against Google+
http://i.imgur.com/umToE.jpg

Illustration by Julie Kang. Email me if you'd like an introduction.
Wireless is in no way a free market. It is tightly regulated with monopolies granted to the highest bidder.
Definitely not my experience.
tldr: MIT doesn't teach everything. Author discovers rapid iteration, the value of throwing away code, and possibly source version control because users of his game solved it faster than he did with superior "logical" reasoning.
I've been able to video chat with EVERY contact I have through a range of services (Gtalk/Gmail, Skype, MSN Messenger, iChat and even my Nokia N95) for years now, and I still don't feel the incentive to do it - so that's why I'm not too excited about the announcements from FB today.

Group video chat, however, is another beast. You can hangout with multiple friends together or do team meetings with your colleague from home. I can see that work.

So, for now, G+ has the advantage here. I'm still waiting for Skype to drop it's ridiculous pricing.
If I wanted to sue people for having pirated copies of my content, the first thing I would do is ask everyone to upload all their files to my servers so I could inspect them. If I paid them, they probably wouldn't even realize that I was out to get them.
We're adopting an approach where all developers fork our main git repo, and code review is applied to all pull requests before a merge.

It's yet to be seen if this overhead is worthwhile.

Review before commit is a very low-overhead approach, and the side effects of distribution of systems knowledge and pride in your code make it a tempting alternative.
It will be made available soonish. We want to clean it up/make it a tad more user friendly first. And that will probably be after the last shuttle launch this weekend.
I'm always amused when tech types (who tend to lean libertarian) act so outraged when something they purchase doesn't correspond to costs + some "fair" markup. (People seem particularly fixated on the prices of ebooks and text messages, for some reason.) Do you want to question the basis of capitalism and the free market? I'm all for it! But if you don't, don't complain when companies charge what the market will bear. Don't hate the players, hate the game.
Wow. I feel violated.

grabs water bottle
Unless you got a huge amount of your traffic from DDG, I would imagine the recent update to Google's search algorithm (Panda 2.2) had more to do with the dropoff in your traffic than Punchfork did.
Lessons learned from a design meeting with Jason Fried.
Text messages are sent in the signaling channel, this is the channel that tells your cell phone it has a call and other stuff interesting only to telephones. The advantage here is your phone is always listening to that channel.

SMS is sent during idle spots in that channel, but it is a very limited channel and you couldn't run large amounts of data through it, there just isn't enough idle time.

Scarce idle time sounds oxymoronic, but it is only idle in the sense that it isn't connecting and disconnecting phone calls.
I wish I knew more about trademark law. The applicant is very interesting though: Magellan Capital Advisors LLC
Remember When Twitter Was A Joke? No One Is Laughing Anymore.
So I get unlimited space for music at $20/yr? Umm, yeah sign me up unless there's a catch.

Unlimited space for music details
Limited time offer: All paid storage plans include unlimited space for music at no additional charge. Upload as many songs as you like without taking up any of your storage space. Listen to your music anywhere with Amazon Cloud Player.
what are they doing?
Posted 2 hours ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2735799
Google have reinvented LiveJournal. Excellent.

(This time I mean it seriously, not sarcastically.)
If you don't have need for relational integrity, then MySQL is a liability. MongoDB does not have relational integrity which is one of the reasons why it's faster.

When did Mysql have relational integrity?
We tried that, but I think that we were one of their first customers and they weren't really adept at making changes yet. Things must've changed after we stopped being a customer.
The problem with the filtering is that it isn't transparent. Updates from people I'm actually interested in don't show because Facebook's feed algorithm thinks we don't interact on the site enough, and there's no mechanism to correct it or even let me know I've missed something.

Perhaps it's been fixed more recently, but I found that incredibly annoying.
Maybe they just thought you needed more starch in your diet.
Yes it is. Often it's not for nefarious reasons - it happens a lot where I work because we use data from collaborators that is unpublished, and it's considered unethical to jump over them by releasing code or results based on it.

Of course, the problem is that it can sometimes take years to get large datasets published and this means that the code gathers dust and gets forgotten in the meantime. By contrast, the papers and results aren't, because those are the things by which academic careers are measured.

I would personally support a wholesale change in culture in this area. Code and data/results/conclusions are not as inseparable as most scientists would like to believe, and often should be published as a unit. There has been push in this direction for a while in the engineering sciences, but other informatics disciplines like biology lag badly in this respect.
Why do you care what View Source looks like?
It seems ironic that the same people that sit around and obsess about what the latest groovy language is that you supposed to be using to make your web site with can not seem to make a very good web site for themselves. But then, I am addicted to Hacker News, so what does that say about me?
And Friendfeed⸮
That's probably good for arguing about good backup practices too. In the department I worked in it was common for grad students to have months of code written on their laptop that was not duplicated anywhere else. The problem is that these students were working independently and didn't really have a need to transfer the code anywhere else.
I am going through what you describe right now.

Here is what I am doing:

- brainwashing myself. I am reading positive books like Peaks and Valleys by Spencer Johnson and The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino. I didn't have the time so I made the time. Everyday.

- I am reaching out to my family members and pushing away from work.

- I am enjoying the sunshine and trying to laugh more. Both are free.

- I have spoken to my accountant and the tax man about dealing with some of my debts. There are other debts I don't know how to deal with, so I don't worry about it.

- I am learning a new language. It's another way to change my thinking. This post explains the idea behind it: http://dreaminespanol.com/spanish-lifehacks/eradicate-bad-me...

If you ever catch yourself hating life or yourself, you must stop. It's a downward spiral and completely toxic. Take corrective action now.

Start your life over again. You can. That's why we have a new day every 24 hours. Start over as many times as you need to to get it right.
I hate to put it this way, but what are you doing on HN? Seriously.

I apologize if I offended you, Ryan. All I am asking for is for an example of one company that had reach the sort of mass FB has (coupled with a total dominance in its vertical)and ended up loosing to a competitor. Enlighten me.
Basically anything under 100% is feasible to finance without too much cost to the public. And once you get to the point where you want to go on an austerity budget the point is to lower the deficit in most cases, not pay down the debt (which would slow the economy, which you need to increase so that your debt slowly becomes a lower percentage of GDP).
Had my first experience with ZeroCater today -- late last night I told a friend I'd be coming by to work out of their office, and somehow between last night and lunch today they were able to add an 'extra' order on to the delivery and had a sandwich for me at lunch today -- +1 for food in my stomach
With Facebook and Google racing to beat each others free products, could this mean Microsoft may have just wasted $8.5 billion?

This is a real question, I don't really use video chat much at all.

edit: Or at least massively devalue their investment.
For a long time: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/ansi-diff-foreign-key...
when ive got my first mobile phone, in the 90's, SMS were actually free. one day they decided they could ask money for it. the rest is history.

I wonder how much really cost internet data traffic however.
There are other things that can be caught by code review, too, like potential performance problems ("why not use a hash table, instead of iterating through the array doing comparisons?"), or code that could be refactored to be shorter and clearer. I've also seen code reviews turn up issues like "you're using library X, but even the author of that library says library Y is better".
I had to look up MariaDB, that's true in the codebase sense from the gist of it. Postgre is more popular than MariaDB I suppose.
Yes to everything stated above. We have a system that schedules events in the future, and the times are all wrong for a couple hours per year because the system is effecting DST @ 12:00am UTC instead of 2:00am local time! Getting time right in all cases is much more challenging than my people realize.
What do you do if you want to share something (eg pictures) to a certain group of people (eg everyone who attended your wedding) and also give everyone else in this group the possibility to post new things (eg additional pictures) to everyone else in this group without adding every single person? You can't do that with circles (yet) but facebook groups are perfect for that.

Another usecase would be the "epic bro" circle Google used in one of the Google+ commercials. Why should I and everyone of my "epic bros" create the same circle separately?
Well, that's kind of interesting. I just bought 100G so I could store all my mp3s in the cloud player while travelling. After uploading about 40G, this plan must have activated, and it shows "< 1%" of 100G used. Cool idea: I might use the space for data now.
So what is your point exactly? That the only reason people will stay on Facebook is that they already are on Facebook

Yes. Your neighbor's mama was never on Myspace, ICQ, AIM, YIM, MSN, and chances are she is not on Gmail video chatting.
So this was about a year ago... what's happened since then? I'd never heard of DNS RPZ before now.
If you could invest in any publicly traded company with $1, would you?
Theoretically, if we were to remove the financial barriers to entry into the stock market, such that you were able to invest as little as 1 dollar and own part of a publicly traded company, would you?
Sure, you would make returns on your investment, but since it was only a dollar, you'd be really lucky to make 30cents. What I'm trying to gauge here is the level of emotional / ideological / political attachment you might garner from investing in a publicly traded company.
I see the capital markets to be as much an opinion place as they are a market place. We vote with our dollars - we tell the world what we deem to be important with our investments.
If provided with the opportunity, would you voice your opinion?
what carrier/country?
I think the problem is fundamentally one of economics. Research is good, but you have to decide how much money to allocate to it. In order to decide, you need a metric for performance. Really, only scientists are qualified to judge whether the results of other scientists are worth anything, so currently the only metric we really have is publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Ultimately, therefore, that's where the incentives end up.

When a more appropriate way of quantifying research output and its benefits is found, hopefully a beneficial change in culture will trickle down into the academic trenches.
All your friends are on Facebook, so you don't have to search/find them on Skype. N-to-N video communication is now much easier. Default will be to use FB rather than the Skype client, especially once they add voice calls, conference calls, and group video chat.
If SMS was always free, but plans cost $5 more than they do now, would anyone even notice or complain?
The article says:

A decade later, MySQL – a feature-poor database relative to the commercial alternatives at the time – was the most popular relational database on the planet.

I would have thought the most popular relational database on the planet would be SQLite....since it ships with every android and iOS device, and with Firefox and Chrome.
I think the objection here is to the cell phone market, which more resembles a cross between an oligopoly and a cartel than a free market. You only have a handful of players and giant barriers to entry, so it's not easy to send a real signal about your unhappiness or choose an alternative.
Oh, and I forgot Microsoft Access....does it count as 'relational'?
EDIT: ok, I'm was just being a whiny brat.

Zerocater: remove the option to log in with facebook. When people use it, they do log in, but they aren't connected with the account their company admin set up, and if they're as bad as me, they just give up and end up with food they don't really like.
No FLAC support?
Hi Pierre -

Thanks for the details on this! We dug into our Wordpress and realized that W3 Total Cache was configured to block anything that had the word 'bot' as part of its user agent string (sigh). That's now fixed and live.

As to the redirect - that's actually a bit of devious magic on our end. Since jquery.it is hotlinking to our JavaScript and CSS we just added a bit of JavaScript to automatically redirect them to the right jQuery.com page:

if ( /jquery\.it/.test( window.location.hostname ) ) {
window.location = window.location.href.replace('y.it', 'y.com');
}

Thanks again for your pointers - looks like the jQuery 1.6.2 blog post is already showing up in the search results and jQuery.it is not in the first page of results (although "jquery 1.6.1" hasn't updated yet and jQuery.it is still there - I assume that it'll be remedied as the Google spider makes more progress). Thanks again!
On a $300-600 device? Really?
Interesting; thanks for clarifying.
Readmill - flat is the new black
In my cloud drive settings (I have a temporarily-free-with-purchase 20GB account):

"Upload an unlimited number of songs in any supported file format with Amazon Cloud Player.

Supported file formats for songs
Cloud Drive currently supports song files in the following formats:

.mp3—Standard non-DRM file format (Includes Amazon MP3 Store purchased files)

.m4a—AAC files (Includes iTunes store purchased files)

Any MP3 or AAC files added to your Cloud Drive will be available for playback and download using Amazon Cloud Player. Upload your music now with Amazon Cloud Player."
WP7 caters to people who shop a smart device (same public who'd look at iPhone and Android). Bada is more of a feature phone on steroids.

Apple sues Samsung for look-and-feel copying. At the same time Samsung does a lot of hardware-related stuff for Apple.
This is just repeating the same old crap that is completely devoid of anything but the most abstract high level concepts of how these things work.

I can't claim to be any expert, but I know at least that in GSM a handset must be allocated a dedicated control channel from a limited number of timeslots in the current cell for the duration of an SMS transaction. This happens on the receiving and transmitting ends. In order to establish said channel, the handset is first woken up through paging, which places load on another shared channel.

For each physical frequency, there are only something like 16-24 slots available. For each physical station, there may only be handful of frequencies in use, perhaps only one.

Installation of a base station is not cheap. In a busy metropolitan area with even 100 teenagers getting upset because their SMS failed to go through the first time they tried to send it (and repeatedly pumping send until it finally works), at least make a guess at the math involved for infrastructure costs to support this kind of thing. Don't forget to factor in the load it places on the random paging channels shared with voice signalling (again, more investment in physical frequencies to reduce error rates here).

In short, I wish someone who actually understood this stuff wrote some kind of rebuttal, the rhetoric is clearly at least a few parts bullshit.

Don't try to imagine this using some analogy like tiny UDP packets being spat out on a packet switched network, that's not what these networks look like. Transaction time is on the order of seconds, which requires a "physical" circuit to be setup beforehand.

Yes, sending SMS would be practically free on the Internet, but that's comparing apples to oranges.