skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stopped using Groupon because businesses [in MA] were becoming mean. In most of the food deals I cashed in on, once I mentioned I was using a Groupon, their faces would go sour and it would make me feel cheap... something about the entire atmosphere would change. Anyway, I stopped using Groupons because now they just make me uncomfortable.
I agree that this firesale is a valuable lesson in pricing, and HP clearly cut the price by more than they needed to to achieve their goal of unloading existing inventory, but there are more factors at play here than price alone. I'd bet that if HP had just lowered the price to $250 they would have sold far less units than are now selling on ebay for $250.

The $99 price point set off a feeding frenzy on this sale, and once that frenzy started people who were trying to buy the unit for $99 and failing (due to all the retailers overselling stock and then cancelling orders) were able to rationalize themselves progressively higher until they were okay with the $250 price.

I'm not convinced there would have been nearly as big an uptick if this started out with a price drop to $250. Certainly sales would have jumped, but I don't think it would have been nearly as drastic as what actually happened.
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To be honest, I know very little of the history of LCDs. From what I can read on Wikipedia, the chain of research went something like:

- Liquid crystals observed.
- Materials science research into the properties of liquid crystals, during which the TN-effect was discovered.
- Industry scientists looking for a display technology that did not rely on vacuum tubes use the TN-effect to develop practical liquid crystal displays.

I don't see where the blue sky research on quantum mechanics plays into this, but it seems like you know more about this than I do so maybe you can point out the link I am missing. Maybe you mean the materials science research on liquid crystals, but it seems to me like materials science is largely a practical field whose main question is, "Is there anything useful we can do with this stuff." I don't think of it as blue sky research the same way I think of particle physics.

The study you linked is mostly about practical R&D in an industry setting and seems to suggest it's very difficult to measure the economic impact of basic research. But there was some interesting information in there, and thank you for that.
Believing in God causing him to send you to heaven is a gamble. The potential rewards must outweigh any prior probability of God existing, or any cost to your time spent praying and doing other religious things, right?

All I'm meaning to do here is tell you that your argument does not work. It doesn't work for convincing people, and it doesn't work as a matter of practice the vast majority of the time anyway. Take a straw man: the human species joins together and pools all our resources and the planet's resources into some giant project that, while lots of credible people claim is very unlikely, everyone helps out anyway. But it doesn't work out, and by the time we call it quits we're so starved for resources that we go extinct. Repeat with variations in as many hypothetical worlds as you wish, and maybe 1 or 2 get it right and the payoff was totally worth it because it made humans rulers of the universe or something. That's not a good gamble.

Do you believe that if the possible positive utility to be gained wasn't so vast, we shouldn't do scientific research because then the improbability of that utility and/or the costs that factor in begin to weigh on it? If so, that's an interesting belief. For myself, I don't find the probabilities that unlikely nor the costs that high, I don't need to posit the possibility of untold fortunes due to scientific research to argue that we should continue doing it.
Can you sniff for the plugin? If so, use the plugin when available and use a custom protocol at other times. Office 2010 could get an update to handle the protocol and Office 20next could just drop the plugin entirely.
You might find "Making Good Shape" helpful, as it is one of the few shape focused go books available in english:

http://www.gobooks.info/k73.html

The problems are very challenging, but that shouldn't stop you from thinking about them and then enjoying the enlightenment of the answers after a minute. Very helpful material! Best of luck in your pursuit of a better game
The feature does exist, it just isn't as accessible as some people would prefer. There's an opportunity cost to almost any UI change, so it is perfectly valid to ask whether a feature is useful, important, and popular enough to justify making it easier to use at the expense of making something else harder to use.
nope, they didn't go through YC - http://www.quora.com/Box-net/Whats-the-story-behind-Box-nets...
CCRMA at Stanford, anyone students or faculty around these parts?
Looking to get an idea of what kind of grades, portfolios, and GRE scores students had. Also curious what type of references you used.<p>Also would be interested in hearing anything positive or negative any has to say about the MA/MST
http://launchleads.com/blogs/launch-leads
Out of Utah, doing incredibly well.
You guys rock! Thanks for all the work y'all put in.
Yep. Steve & I asked Chris (from memamp) to join the team not long after we moved in with him at the end of the summer. We acquired infogami in January of 2006.
That was my first thought as well, and I still think it's a decent idea. The main drawback is that Bob Someguy might not understand that the file he's got is just a link. If that's the case, he's going to be confused about why it's updating online when he's editing his 'local copy', annoyed when he can't work offline, and possibly lose data when he edits an actual local copy thinking he's got a link.
This time it's no red herring like the nefarious 3.0.10 release!
Fee-fi-fo-fum...
Same here. I've been trying out the 3.1 RCs, and I think the asset pipeline has some potential, but I haven't found a replacement for Jammit's JST compilation. (Although I haven't looked very hard. I'm sure there's a solution out there.)
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Next time you go to the doctor, ask him to take all your blood instead of just a sample.
I'm in New York and I subscribe to offers from Groupon, Google, LivingSocial, Yipit, Amazon, OpenTable, and Yelp (the last 3 aren't too frequent). I personally feel that the number of interesting offers has stayed the same or gone down in the past 3-6 months.

I don't have any data on this, but many of the deals seem to be in the $10 for $20 range. I feel like deals are a waste of time if they aren't for at least $20 off, since I often feel like the original product was overpriced by at least $10.
Subversive? Who me?... I think I still have that TMNT shirt.
I don't think this can be based on their current business, but they must have a related idea (something cloud) with greater market potential + their proven ability to execute in the space.

There's been allusions to developments at dropbox that are not yet public.

BTW: dropbox's initial application was single founder.
Virgin America seems to board back to front (after first class, families, etc.) and it tends to be just as time consuming as boarding front to back in my experience. It's even worse because the people sitting back occasionally decide to put their bags in the front above seats that haven't even started boarding that need their own bag space in return. I think boarding any which way with one piece of small carryon or similar will do far more than the order in which you have people board.
Ask and yee shall receive: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100151188843156...
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Alternatively, $9bn is about 11,250,000 dead children. ( http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html )
I didn't know how cheaply a laptop could be purchased for so I just checked on Ebay for Used/Refurbished laptops. Currently there are 47 'Buy It Now', nominally complete and working, laptops/netbooks available for $40-60.

They all looked pretty crappy, is it reasonable to assume they are all stolen property on the basis of their price alone?
Compete and Alexa also both show a traffic drop since June. It's unlikely that they are all wrong. Also, all of these services are most accurate with big traffic sites such as Groupon.
Yes — but if an evil person were running a blog like that, they could write posts about other people's inventions and put fake old dates on them. They could also fake the timestamps added by their mail server, but not the timestamps added by the mail servers of their subscribers. So the timestamp wouldn't have as much legal weight.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everybody drops to zero, and yet people buy stock.
At a glance, UI. Dropbox is horrible for restoring things - it's possible, but it's definitely not the primary use-case. Especially with something visual, you can go a lot further a lot faster if you can see what it was at each state without having to hit the back button a bazillion times.
You board first as first class, because you have time to put your suit jacket up, and get your first free beverage, before they have to confiscate the cups for takeoff.

If you boarded last, you'd get no pre-takeoff beverage to sooth your nerves.

At some airports, they board the larger jets through multiple doors - First/Business gets their own, and everybody else crams into the other one. I've also been asked to wait to board while the first class gets situated and has their pre-flight drink. (I've also had that pre-flight drink, and it's pretty nice!).
> 1. There is no magical flag that allows all mail sent by anyone at Microsoft to hit your Hotmail inbox: that could easily be abused, and for many users it would defy their expectations. I've sent your post along to the people responsible for spam filtering in Hotmail, though, to take a look at.

If you have a system that sends automated mail, it would do you well to test it with common email hosts (particularly the one provided by your company). Maybe they did, and this one got through anyway.
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YC summer 2011 had 9 single founders (out of 64). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938349
Although YC doesn't favour them, it's far from impossible.

However, I'm not sure what the odds are for successful single founders. And at least some acquire co-founders (like dropbox).
Those problems can be mostly solved without much trouble. First, if the user chooses to open the file instead of saving it to their downloads folder, then it will be downloaded to a temporary folder and you don't have to worry about the user finding it again and trying to re-open it. Either way, it makes sense for the standalone program to remove the downloaded file the first time it is used to successfully establish a connection, and instead store the connection information in an internal library, presented to the user in a way that makes it clear that the files are online.
I don't really understand. My point is that they had some guesses about the possible uses if the experiments bore out. It's a disproof of the claim that you can't make some kind of predictions about these things. Whether the predictions are always correct is a completely different question that I am not trying to answer.
Google (and Bing and a few others) now determine most of what people can see when they go looking for information online. The reason Google is in this position is because they have figured out how to most profitably use the content generated by others. As their market share increased and they rolled out more and more products (Adwords, Gmail, Google documents, Google+) they became more effective at presenting ads to us, for their "customers", i.e. their advertisers. Their "product" is us, the punters hitting the big "search" button.

Google has become such a dominant force in advertising that it would be inconceivable for any business with any sort of online presence not to have some advertising via Google.

I think this is what Mr. Lanier means when he says: "The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system."

I agree with him. Google has gone from being one of a multitude of search engines about 8 years ago to becoming an eco-system in it's own right; and Mr. Lanier argues (and I concur) that it is ultimately to our detriment.
there's no browser-native way for a website to launch a program on your PC.

I played a game called Vindictus a while ago, and it did just that. I'd click a link on their webpage, and it would launch the executable. I'm not sure exactly how the mechanics work, so unfortunately I can't describe it in detail.
All that you said, and also that the staff is much more willing to cater to your needs.
The great thing about software engineering classes is that you generally get to "build" something, or focus on a large project.

I was a CS major, but the biggest project I worked on in university was a software eng course with a team of 6 others. The really cool thing about that course vs other courses was that so much of it was just about putting something together and integrating a bunch of people's work.

Only after that course did I truly start appreciate how important it is to have impeccably nice, reusable code and an organized code base. Things can get quite out of hand if they aren't so you need to put your foot down sometimes.

The assignments might have been more challenging in some of my other classes (AI, Programming Languages and Paradigms, etc), this one was about building. It's definitely a class that will separate the builders from the "students." I think some of the classes I had taken before helped, but I learned even more from building and coming up with solutions along the way-- and honestly, if you can learn on your own and are motivated, it will take you a very long way.
Looks like "Microsoft doesn't understand user experience" articles are becoming popular again on Hacker News.

I would like to remind people that even a design focused company like Apple do softwares with crappy user experience (think iTunes).

User experience is hard to get right and what you would consider a good user experience might not be a good one for your neighbour: some prefer clicking on buttons, some prefer clutter-free UIs with keyboard shortcuts.
> people . . . must be well qualified . . . [so we should trust them].

Surely not an argument from authority. Before we can accept this reasoning, we have to have proof that the people allocating the research funds have interests that well match those of the public, not just the scientific community, and we must also have proof that they have a good track record of applying those interests to ends that match them.
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There are dozens of clones of angry birds. Some of them as good or possibly better. And we aren't talking about clones of polished products here, we're talking about a site that admittedly took a 2.5 hours to make. The comparison to a fart app (though their site is vastly more useful, and a unique idea AFAIK) is apt.

Lets take something with a bit less stigma. Background-changing apps. There are, what, 100+ of them? Probably more? Lots of them even share some backgrounds, which is visible if you just skim a dozen from the app store's images. And almost every single one has probably paid back the dev time it took to make, if not through sales then through ads.
"Sprockets supports JavaScript templates for client-side rendering of strings or markup. JavaScript templates have the special format extension .jst and are compiled to JavaScript functions"

From sprocket README. Although, I have switched to Rails 3.1 and I am not using asset pipelining at all, just sticking with jammit.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=oleksiy
Sprockets includes Jammit-inspired JST support. You can use it with either EJS or Eco templates. See the "JavaScript Templating" section of the readme: https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets#readme

You can even write your own JST template class. Here's an example that adds Mustache template support: https://github.com/josh/mustache-trimmer/blob/master/lib/til...
Because it's insanely simple—which is, basically, what all the other answers boil down to. When I tried Dropbox, I was skeptical: you mean it actually transparently syncs folders from my desktop to a server, and lets me download easily from the server? Yeah, right. There's some catch.

It turns out there isn't. That's simplicity. That's why they "won."
can anyone point me, where I can read a comparison on Jammit vs asset pipeline/sprocket or could you offer your opinions. thanks
We should always be wary that we do not try to argue using whataboutism (http://edwardlucas.blogspot.com/2008/02/whataboutism.html).
SlashDot discussion here, http://slashdot.org/story/11/07/25/1239210/Bitcoin-Is-Not-An...

And a recap on a previous comment about BitCoin weaknesses. Looks like 3, 5, and 6 have already been proven.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596729
Why Weak AI Is Interesting Enough
1- I've never seen a company's automatic emails be flagged by its own mail system, that's pretty impressive.

2- I'm actually using Firefox, and I had 2 instances of that plugin installed for some reason, and it still gave me the error. Although my main point is that the error dialog doesn't tell you the real problem.

And btw I like OneNote, it just seems I won't be using the desktop version.
The difficulty is that much of the time, blue sky research projects appear at the time they are being funded, to have absolutely no known possible applications, nor any sense that future applications will come along. It is not possible in the present to know what the benefit will be. This is basically the definition of basic research, and if we just said "ok, no funding for stuff that has no known application" then we would be sitting around with very very smooth wheels on our carriages.
Honestly, I'm just applying stuff as preached by Customer Development & Lean Startup. I highly recommend those. Ash Maurya's Running Lean has some good conversation "templates" too. What I bring to the table here is not anything new that nobody has already talked about. What I bring here is the actual physical act of picking up the phone and applying those methods.

In a nutshell, I call someone up in the target market, within that first 15 seconds give them a reason why they shouldn't hang up on you, then get the actual conversation started to see if they have the problem, and if they're interested in a solution .. giving them the opportunity to object (you won't learn what the objections are if you keep trying to convince them otherwise).. and you'll either make a sale, or learn something new that you should think about addressing in the solution, or just in the way you pitch the next person. I'm not really doing any justice here, CD and LS covered this extensively!
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The short answer seems to be: you can't protect yourself, it's a waste of time and money trying, and just keep making your stuff the best it can be for the audience you want. Unless your target audience is in China, don't worry about China until you're Google (and even still, don't worry too much about China). Or at least that seems the best strategy for a startup that's short on time and cash.
I guess it depends on your definition of 'seen'. Certainly the evidence is very unambiguous:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/08/21/...
It's comforting to hear you say that someone will benefit from the ISS, since so far it's been a dead loss.
Deleting a user's file without their understanding is generally a bad idea. e.g. Bob saves the file to his Downloads folder and opens it. The next day he wants to open it again only to find that it's missing. He eventually learns that he has to re-download every time. Microsoft gets blamed for the 'bug'.
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The first four characters of my FL driver's license are a soundex code of my last name. So, this appears to be a common practice.

I always thought that part looked suspicious. Thanks for the tip.
I don't think the claim was that the 'ripoff' icon was literally copied from the original, just that the concept for the site - right down to the concept for the favicon - were copied.

But I salute your sleuthing, none-the-less.
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Also, what percentage of the populations color blind? You'd have people boarding for red when green was called, etc. Letters give us 26 possible boarding stages. Even without keeping accessibility is mind, you'd only be able to reliably use, what, %w{red blue green yellow orange}? Purple is out -- too ambiguous.

So yeah, no color codes. Have I beaten it to death enough?
Academic journals are gatekeepers of academic promotion, the prestigious old journals are the only ones that count today, and they are owned by Wiley and friends.

To make matters worse, academics are among the most tradition bound creatures in the universe, especially when there is no clear criteria for truth (which is like all of the social sciences and humanities). The only thing they have to calibrate against is consensus, and consensus favors institutions already in place.
Particle physics has been chugging along for thirty years without a major discovery. Everything fits the Standard Model to a depressing degree. The worst-case scenario is that we'll actually find a Higgs boson in the expected range... and then nothing else.

It's perfectly possible that further interesting physics takes place at energy scales too far beyond the reach of any accelerator we can build in the next few hundred years.
Well, I’m not all that convinced of the usefulness of the ISS myself, I was trying to make a more abstract point.

If there are significant scientific discoveries to be made on the ISS, the Europeans will also benefit from them.
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