skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the reply. I can understand your reasoning, but I think perhaps our situation is different.

For future reference, you might like to know that there are now regular payment gateway/merchant account combinations where you can use their systems to handle the final part of the transaction so you never even have card numbers on your network, so the PCI DSS issues are moot, at least here in the UK. The lock-in isn't ideal, but as far as I know only Recurly out of the major billing services doesn't effectively lock you in just as badly anyway.

However, we've found that the recurring billing platforms tend to lack precisely the kind of flexibility you mentioned above. We have all kinds of plans to use promotional codes, multiple offerings that users can subscribe to individually or in combination, etc. As far as we can tell, none of the "big name" billing services even gets close to supporting this kind of stuff properly yet.

For the benefit of anyone else following this discussion, I'll also mention that because we're in the UK but most (all?) of those billing services are across the Atlantic, there are serious concerns about legal differences, particularly data protection/privacy rules, and about tax, particularly how VAT is handled. Again, the billing services whose terms and conditions we've checked out had deal-breakers here.

Given that the billing services take a relatively large cut out of the payments, sometimes with terms that don't even guarantee any particular level of service, and that we'd have to implement a whole bunch of things on top of their platform anyway, we concluded that they simply don't offer enough to justify the risks and overheads.
This is pretty much the situation we're in right now, where there is no shortage of capital, but rather a shortage of possibilities for profitable investments because consumers have become more careful with their spending.

This is simply not true - personal consumption is at an all time high. It is even higher now than it was before our recently ended recession.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PCEC96

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PCEC

[Edit: added graph of real expenditures, didn't notice my first graph was nominal.]
I wonder if Jacek Dukaj is known outside of Poland? He writes very philosophical SF.
It's interesting how the low point on the graph is 1976, but they put the categorical divide at 1980.
There you go https://plus.google.com/112643613234453381402/posts/XTDu92t9...

Edit: this one says Dart, not Dash
Right now I hate alternatives...
I'd argue the other way, but things may be different for you, depending on a lot of things. :-)

I currently have 4 running virtual machines on my Macbook Pro. Three running a pretty basic Debian install for testing (yay, Chef) and one running Ubuntu with a graphical user interface. And yet, only half of my memory is wired/active, and with expanding disk volumes, the footprint on my disk is even smaller on my memory.
If you've got a really big tent can you sublet part of it out on Airbnb?

They'll need to make the Location field a bit more flexible, probably.
If they're not already, PC manufacturers should be very scared.
should of gone for the R Kelly joke instead
I just had an idea: is it possible to move the voting arrow(s) down to the end of the post, e.g. next to the "reply" link? From a user UI flow standpoint, it would be nice to be able to read a long post and then think, "After reading through such an insightful post, that deserves an up-vote" and not have to break the-flow-of-scrolling-down to do so.

Now, the current position of the voting arrow is nice demarcation of the beginning of a post, and it also serves to indicate the nesting depth of a comment. Something serving that purpose is still useful. But maybe this more conveniently-located voting option can be implemented with an onhover so that it's visible at the end of only the post that the mouse is hovering on (a few other sites have comment boards like this).
Stories like this are absolutely fascinating. I'm sure there are a ton of lessons to learn from Apple's senior leadership; lessons that would otherwise have been drowned under the attention given to Jobs and his leadership style. You can't have a successful company with one iron-willed leader; you need a team that knows what it's doing.
> charges not taking effect before Python 2.7

Almost. "We'll continue to offer the 50% discount on instance prices until December 1st, at which time Python 2.7 should be available."

The new pricing goes into effect November 1st. For the goodwill that would result, it would have been much nicer of them to keep the pricing as-is until 2.7 was rolled out rather than charging a rate that is too high (albeit discounted by 50%) because of a platform limitation, then correcting it 30 days later.
The drive for experiences has always existed and there have always been people that prefer experiences instead of possessions. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the point in time where material possessions are so cheap that anybody can have them, whether you want them or not.

i.e. Several decades ago only large institutions could own a computer. Now one can carry in their pockets computers that would have been considered super computers not very long ago and costing millions of dollars. See the trend? Eventually production will be almost as free as air, especially if we invent strong AI.

What that future will be like is very hard to imagine. How will our culture change because of that? Especially our world culture.
Journalism cliche alert: if there are a series of articles with the thesis "____ is the iPod-killer" or "____ is the new challenger to iPod", what that really means is that the iPod is the best. Replace iPod with Quake, or Y Combinator, or anything else that is best-in-class.
Calling it 'Dart' is rather confusing, given that there's already an existing Google product called DART: http://www.google.com/doubleclick/publishers/dart.html
Interesting. I worked at a large bank a while back and they had a use it or lose it policy. Either the law recently changed or they were out of compliance.
The reason that the government should take care of the poor and the sick is not because it is the most efficient and moral way to do so. Indeed, given appropriate conditions, I concede that "the market" and the goodwill of "the people" would be capable of ensuring that their needs are met in a more efficient and, according to libertarian logic, more ethical manner.

The reason that the government should provide this welfare service, however, is that it results in an incredibly desirable situation where any citizen of the United States would know that, no matter what the state of the (semi-)unregulated economy, it is guaranteed that they will be taken care of.

Were welfare left to the emergent logic of the market, somebody who, say, depends on medication to fight a chronic condition or somebody who cannot for some reason hold a job reliably (like my pan-handler friend who can't get a job because of his face tattoo and rotting teeth) would not be able to count on being able to survive should there be a severe economic depression or a war.

To live in a society where somebody who depends on an external institution to them to keep them alive cannot absolutely depend on that regardless of the economic climate is, in my opinion, uncivilized, and for such a person, downright hellish.

If you could convince me that the market is more reliable over time than the US government, then by all means, I might consider the dismantling of the welfare state a viable option.
I agree that Tim Cook is an advantage to Apple. I disagree that he is really "new." Tim has been at Apple since 1998 and has been in a place of power since at least 2004 when he took over for Steve Jobs as CEO the first time. Tim has been part of the winning formula for the better part of a decade.

I think the glaring omission in Gruber's article, though, is Apple's lost advantage in Steve Jobs. It could be argued in the 11 years Steve Jobs was away from Apple that Mac hardware and software more or less coasted in terms of innovation.

The simple unibody design splintered into a dozen different beige boxes stacked on top of each other shortly after Job's departure in 1985. Mac OS gained color, cooperative threading, and a few peripheral updates until Steve Jobs came back in 1996. I'm not saying it was worse. I'm just saying it was uninspired incremental refinement. The design language at Apple didn't change from the day he left in 1985 until he finally came back in 1996.

And almost immediately after Steve comes back we've got OS 8 with its first UI facelift in years. System 9 quickly led into OS X. On the hardware front we got the bondi blue iMac. Then the iPod. Then the desk lamp-esque iMac G4. Not to mention the short lived G4 cube. Apple was alive again.

Now that Steve's involvement has once again diminished, what will Apple look like over the next decade? Will iOS 9 look that much different from iOS 5? Will the MacBook Pro evolve beyond a giant sized MacBook Air? Will Apple successfully branch out beyond phones, tablets and computers?

Tim Cook will keep Apple in fine shape. Apple will at worst be like Dell in its heyday. Delivering products people want at prices nobody could compete against, disrupting the traditional manufacturing process. But will Apple continue to successfully innovate? Companies tend to change to reflect the current leadership. HP was once a company that Steve Wozniak wanted to work at forever. In less than a decade after the founders were gone the the HP Way was gone and the company was never the same.

EDIT: I want to add this is mostly a counterpoint to Gruber who is clearly trying to diminish Jobs and glorify Cook. His brief treatment of the subject is to say Jobs brings "beautiful, elegant, innovative, and fun" before seemingly dismissing Jobs as merely a designer whose designs are something that get copied by other firms anyway therefore implying he is not a real competitive advantage unlike the "can't-be-copied" Cook operational competitive advantage.
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We have always had unlimited vacations at NewsCred and have never had anyone abuse it. We are approx 20 people now. People love it.
I understand these things are partly symbolic, but besides that is this really useful? I mean, is there a real business benefit to Apple by making Khan take the next immediate flight to China rather than the one a few hours later. Similarly, what was your friend doing that was so important that he couldn't wait to get a change of clothes?

I personally do my best work when I'm relaxed and un-stressed. The apple environment seems to be diametrically opposite to this. I can see that some people might thrive in this environment, but I always wonder at what cost to themselves.
As an ex-MSFT person, this doc sounds like a Microsoft doc more than something you would see from Google.

And I'm amazed at sentences like these - can you imagine MSFT saying this and getting away with it?
"The goal of the Dash effort is ultimately to replace JavaScript as the
lingua franca of web development"

and

"What will Google developers be using?
We will strongly encourage Google developers start off targeting Chrome-only
whenever possible as this gives us the best end user experience."
The problem with the article he quotes is that it is wrong about the price of the x220. The x220 with default specs on everything except the bluetooth, webcam, ips screen (much nicer than an air btw), 128 GB ssd, and most expensive wifi (includes wimax) is $1290.60 . The ars article claims $1999.
There's nothing new about this. Apple has been doing vertical integration for decades. When things went badly, pundits criticized it. Now it's the whole new rage. There's nothing particularly enlightening in this article, nothing that would be of any use to anyone hoping to replicate some of Apple's success. Advice to have good design and a low price is just a platitude.
I completely agree. John raises a lot of good points, but most have a little too much fanboyism. However this post in particular is particularly insightful and raises excellent points for discussion
"Python 2.7 will include support for concurrent requests, which could further lower your costs."

Could?

For me the biggest hindrance to using GAE isn't even the new pricing (though the new pricing makes it far less compelling than it was compared to other services), but rather the uncertainty of virtually everything.

The fact they they aren't even sure how future developments will impact their own pricing pretty much sums things up and ensures that I can't invest a lot of time developing something tied to their platform.
So many false dilemmas. Proposition (a) only demands a non-zero level of redistribution (call this X). One might believe (a), but also believe that our current level of redistribution is greater than X.

Assuming one does believe (a), and also believes that our current level of redistribution is lower than X, it still does not follow that we need to redistribute from the rich. We could also redistribute from politically connected insiders (e.g., teachers unions, the military, real estate speculators) to the poor.

Your dichotomy of helping the poor also excludes a third possibility:

(c) Some of the poor are deserving of assistance, and some are undeserving. It is morally right to redistribute to the deserving poor, and morally wrong to redistribute to the undeserving.

(I tend to favor policies which automatically make the deserving/undeserving distinction. E.g., eliminate welfare/unemployment and replace them with unpleasant, low skill government jobs that pay welfare-like wages. Poor people willing to work get the benefits and those unwilling to work do not.)
So far there is no bashing of John in this thread, just a single anecdote and story about Tim Cook and how his way of managing has started becoming part of the fabric that is Apple.

Apple has a proven formula, they have been able to make consumer products that people want without giving people a big choice.
Dogs with fleas...
One of the main reasons why Windows eventually started to collapse under its own weight was backwards compatibility.

True. On the other hand, that backwards compatibility is an important reason why Windows was so utterly dominant for so long. It's (as always) a tradeoff.
I really wish that we would see a concerted effort to get Python in the browser (or anything reasonable, really) rather than creating yet another new dynamic language that needs half a decade to grow a decent ecosystem. JavaScript has been around for years and only in the past few years have we seen a legitimate developer ecosystem emerge around it.
Maybe that is why, maybe it isn't. The problem is, when most of the population doesn't have disposable income, it makes it much harder to go out and make money in a productive way. Of course, there is always scamming. That works in any economy.
"Why don't you let the founders decide which publication they want to talk to regarding their launch?"

... "So we advise they pick one and give them an exclusive. Most pick TechCrunch."

You must not like reading.
You should reach out to my friends at Crittercism: http://blog.crittercism.com/why-your-awesome-startup-should-...

They've got a nice big office at 300 Brannan Street and they're looking for cool startups to join them there.
Apple Finally Axes DigiNotar Certificates, Adobe to Follow
I agree with you in that I don't see the business benefit, but I can understand that a boots on the ground approach can be very beneficial and can sometimes help avert a disaster of even greater proportions.
In operations, given the number of units they produce and sell per day, the answer is yes. For the sys admin types, the answer is the same as if the data center had a major fault and the market is opening in a couple of hours.
Have we forgotten the Newton? The Newton had issues, but lack of daring design innovation wasn't one of them. Now that Palm has boomed and iPads and iPhones are everywhere, it's difficult to appreciate how crazy the Newton was at the time. People didn't know that mobile book-sized computers were the future. The Newton was a bit too futuristic, too ambitious for its own hardware.

Apple also tried a bunch of things in the OS space before NeXT and Jobs rode to the rescue. They just didn't succeed.

Which brings this right back to Tim Cook, and the unsung operational heroes that really built Apple: It isn't that Apple didn't try to innovate in the Jobs-free interregnum. They just didn't succeed. It takes more than just good intentions and "vision": It takes operational skill.
For you it sounds like a great deal to take someone else's money. You say that you have run multiple companies that did not exit or sell. So stock in your past companies has always ended up being worth zero dollars. It would always have been a good deal for you, in retrospect, if you had sold some stock in your past companies. You don't have to give up any control for an angel investment nowadays, so what's the downside?

Take some investment, if you can, and use that money to hire people and get going faster.
I'm curious, would you prefer to write code like this over the explicit version?

foo bar: 'baz', quux('onoz')

Or are you just concerned about inconsistencies?

I like not having to specify parentheses, but only do so when it's immediately obvious to a reader of the code what the result of the statement will be.
Wow, thanks! I'll definitely get in touch.
This is exactly the point that HN seems to be oblivious toward.

HN people live in a bubble and seemingly have never met anyone who is in real poverty -- they think because in college they had to eat Ramen they were poor. They are clueless.

Real poverty is being illiterate, being malnourished in the womb, being raised in a crime-zone, growing up without dental care.
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I think this is it:

http://www.management-advantage.com/products/overtime-exempt...

1. "Minimum Salary Test" The minimum salary level for exempt white collar employees according to A.B. 60 is "no less than two times the state minimum wage for full time employment." "White collar" exemptions refer to the executive, administrative, learned professional, creative professional, computer employee, and outside sales exemptions specified in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as amended effective 8/23/2004. Computing the California minimum salary level for January 2009 we do the following: Current minimum wage = $8.00 per hour X 2,080 hours in a year = $16,640, multiplied by 2 times the minimum wage = $33,280
++irony;
Does "deflates the yuan" mean the yuan is deflationary?

In that case its value should get higher and exports should decrease, as happened with the Japanese Yen.
Nah. Adhominaters gonna adhominate.

Facts reduce the (net) number of things to argue about. Anonymous lets the commenter create a straw man or label the author as fanboi even more easily.
It's hardly the first time logistics has been touted as the key competitive advantage of a company. Take Nokia for example. Massive economies of scale, designs taking maximum advantage of that, and incredible supply chain management[1]. All this kept them going for a while even after the wheels fell off, but by now they pretty much have no logistical advantage left.

Apple pundits seem to think that Apple's (undeniable) advantages are going to be permanent, just because they get a great deal on Flash memory or tied up the world's whole supply of 9.7" touch screens. It's a pretty ridiculous position.

[1] As an example of this, there's this great story about how in the late 90s there was a fire at a critical Philips chip factory, which they tried to cover up since it was expected to be a quick repair. Someone at Nokia noticed that there were irregularities in the shipments, investigated the matter, found out about the fire, and started talks with Philips. Nokia decided that Philips were talking bullshit about the repair schedules, and basically sucked up the whole world's supply of the alternative components to replace this lost capacity. Other phone manufacturers relying on this plant were left high and dry for months, pretty much.
I break out this link whenever the topic of PC manufacturing comes up:
http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/2009/04/display-rati...

Thinkpads are (were) well known for their 4:3 screens. People are downright fanatical about them, and continue to buy old T60s off craigslist rather than buy new from Lenovo. Tall screens are better for documents and spreadsheets. 4:3 displays instantly differentiate business-machine Thinkpads from all other laptops.

But now Thinkpads are 16:9. They lost one of their defining features because "these manufacturers make more selling TV displays than laptop displays, and the PC vendors have almost zero say in this change. We simply have to adapt. As much as I would like it to be so, 4:3 is not coming back."

Meanwhile, Apple goes and sources millions of 4:3 iPad displays simply because that's the best resolution for the iPad.
I think because, there's no reason to assume they would be - labor costs are still (mostly) driven by supply and demand. If gizmos and computers and internets increase a worker's productivity, the gains go to the business owners, while the worker still gets paid at whatever the labor market decides. (During the 60's era wage earners had some natural advantages: booming demand for labor, restricted supply since single-income households were the norm, less ability to send manufacturing or service jobs offshore.)

Higher top rates in the 60's era also meant some of that productivity gain in wealth went back to the average worker. The whole economy gained wealth from public investment in infrastructure, funding for education, healthcare research and so on. But around the late 70's, the tide started to turn towards lower taxes at the top. A few more trends got rolling at the same time: technology that made big productivity gains possible; entire manufacturing industries being sent overseas; the financial industry getting really interested in ways to move existing wealth from where it was, to their own pockets.

That makes it sound entirely bad, which it wasn't... those trends also led to a slew of innovative new companies, disruptions to established business practices, stock options as a way to share in the risk and reward, and lots of cool gadgets. It's more interesting now than in 1960. But there are a lot of workers getting the shaft, and don't necessarily need to be.
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HPCC is not a MapReduce framework.

Interesting, I quickly read through the article and didn't catch this until I read your comment. Definitely some slight of hand on their part.

(Although, now that I'm looking closer, their site does have a comparison to why they're better than MapReduce: http://hpccsystems.com/Why-HPCC/HPCC-vs-Hadoop/Components#be...)
Land and power over others (the same story since the beginning)
I would say that's extremely common in Canada. Not sure what's worse, having a sense of entitlement as an employee, or thinking what you offer is above average as an employer.

Snarkiness aside..I have mixed feelings about your first point. Entitlement sucks, 100% agree with you there. Flip side, vacation is awesome on so many levels, I feel that there genuinely should be a push for more vacation time.
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