skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If houses got cheaper every year, very few people would want to buy them, and people stuck with mortgages would have a powerful incentive to walk away from them. If cars got cheaper every year, then people would put off buying new cars for longer. If gold got cheaper every year, then a lot of gold coins would be dumped on the market.

If everything got cheaper every year, then people with money in the bank (or under the mattress) have an incentive to reduce how much money they spend, in general. This would lead to factories reducing their production and laying off employees, giving the remaining employees an even more powerful incentive to hang onto their savings.
Ask HN: How do I reach customers who don't know they have a problem?
I've created an app for the Shopify app store (an ecommerce platform) that provides a customer stock notification service: http://backinstock.info.

The app has been live for about three months, and there has been a slow but steady trickle of registrations and conversions to paid plans. This is good, but now I need to crank it up. The potential market is quite niche, but much bigger than I have reached so far.

After a few attempts at Google Adwords and SEO the problem I keep coming back to is that few people seem to actively search for something like this app.

Customers who have installed the app generally love it. I think the problem is that if you are a successful and profitable online store you are busy selling things rather than googling 'increase shopify sales'.

How can I reach customers who are doing fine, but could be doing better?
Ditto to this. Got so fed up with the others and GoDaddy's registrar setup is the only one I've had that's still issue free. I use Rackspace for my servers and I have no issues.
At first I thought this was going to be a conservative 'the modern world is killing everything good', but I was pleased to the argument come down to "computers are killing jobs, and this is a good thing".

Though I don't believe it's accurate to say that Europe thrived under the feudal system. Many people did the same meaningless jobs all the time. The author also claims that the Industrial Age & Corporations were some massive scam to get the rich more.
+1 for noting that a vague exit from the PC business is entirely unlike dropping the tablet. Weirdly, dropping the tablet might be dropping the “next big thing” that might be the disruptive innovation to their own business, but of course the Enterprise is not interested in disruptive innovation.
Can't resist that marshmallow? Self-control doesn't get easier with age
He couldn't care less about Bitcoin. What he does care about though is the chatter amongst non-Keynesian economists about the need for an objective currency, i.e., a gold standard - a force that would utterly devastate his precious welfare state. Accordingly, an opportunity to ridicule Bitcoin is a perfect segue to take sneaky, conniving, collectivist jabs at gold.
Geisinger Health Insurance Options
Yes this is one of the ideas that only survive if they have a fast exit. It`s a neat idea but it does not scale. The whole "coupon" space is tainted by groupon

Take the money say "Thank you" join Facebook stay there for a while and get exposed to totaly new ideas and leave with a team after the IPO.
HP building its cloud services on OpenStack
The Scalatember Edition
You can buy one service from GoDaddy and they'll give you a second service free for a year, then auto-renew that second unnecessary service. You can't cancel easily via e-mail and you can't cancel over the telephone. You have to log in and face an endless amount of confusion and upselling.

* This was for Domain Auto-Registration which includes GoDaddy Auctions.
I wondered what the other biggest gifts were, but could not find a canonical list. A good starter is the following:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2000/neurogifts.html

I guess that its top 3 still hold. In addition, I found the following:

- $1b endowment to found Vedanta University from Anil Agarwal Foundation (2006)

- $454.5m to National Taiwan University from Terry Gou (2007)

- $400m to Columbia from John Kluge (4th largest in 2007)

- $360m to RPI from an anonymous donor (page mentions largest in US history in 2001)

I could not easily find the official list all of these pages refer to, anybody has an idea?
I've been using NFS.N for over three years now. I have a number of small sites and domains with them. The sites cost pennies a month, the feature set is staggering, and the domain registration process makes Gandi and Namecheap look clunky in comparison. They're also painstakingly honest. They recently corrected a billing error of $56 over three years over their entire client base. [1] My only complaint with them is the lack of SSL, but that's what a VPS is for.

In fact, I like NFS.N so much I made a simple webmail app to interface with their e-mail forwarding service. It's highly experimental though. [2]

[1] http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2011/04/07/a-small-billing-...
[2] http://www.github.com/kijin/nearlyfreemail
http://imgur.com/vFpwu
Use YC not as a source of funding. Use it as a piece of education and networking in your start-up puzzle.

Edit: Funding by itself is no measure of success or validation. It might be part of the puzzle, along with the knowledge learned, and people met along the way (investors, customers, employees).
Product managers, not necessarily. Product owners, absolutely.

A small, product minded team can definitely handle many of the activities associated with product management. So can the CEOs of early stage startups. Dropbox, facebook, and twitter all had founders focused on the vision, avoiding frankensteinism, customer development etc.

But this all changes as a company matures and as the product becomes increasingly more complex and multi-faceted. Larger development teams (~15-20+) often start working on specific product features. The company may have numerous external partners, customers, and users that influence the direction of the product. The CEO's time may shift from promoting/enforcing product vision to more 'CEO' type activities (e.g fundraising, PR work, analyst briefing). A product manager can be empowered to align the company's resources with the product vision.
The face is cool, but three.js - the engine behind this - actually has quite a pleasingly orthogonal API as well. Worth taking a look at alongside this.

(And where is the save button when I need it ;_;)
GlobalSign SSL Certs also hacked
Forex Markets Structure.
Does anyone know whether GA accepts single hackers as part of their space? I'd like to find a desk away from home, and GA seems like the perfect place.
New Relic for Python public beta
>The key to learning how to touch type is just typing _a lot_.

Absolutely. I don't think that typing-tutor software really does very much teaching at all, it's just a good tool for drilling yourself. But why not have fun in the process, rather than boring and mindless drills? I learned by playing the early Sierra adventure games, before they switched to the all-point and click interface.

Now I'm feeling all nostalgic...time to go download ScummVM.
GoDaddy: not even once.
"If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"
In economics people win for their work, not their winning personality. Krugman won for "his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity" - http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2...

Hayek also won the Nobel Prize and would undoubtedly disagree with almost everything Krugman believes.

He won for "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena" - http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1...

I don't believe the gold standard is a good for our mandated monetary system, but I also don't believe forced currency monopolies and gold confiscation should exist in a "free" country - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
I'd argue that the supply of money should keep pace with production, not population growth. Though you'd expect those two to be strongly correlated.
Money is a wealth transfer medium. If you're familiar with physics, think of exchange particles associated with forces. In biology, it's similar to blood. I'm not sure a transportation analog works but it might (I need to think about that).

Money works when it is exchanged for goods and services.

When money stops moving, the economy "stops". There isn't any exchange going on (or there's far less than before). Economic activity slows, employment slows, etc.

Credit and leverage, done right, allow more work from a given initial money supply (technically, credit increases the money supply), but this is predicated on the borrower repaying the initial investment. Done wrong, credit is extended for activities which don't allow repayment, and not only can't the the interest be paid, but the initial principle is lost -- and the money supply contracts.

Money is not wealth (value imbued in goods/services), but it can be (with a stable currency) a measure of wealth.

If the amount of money in circulation is decreasing (or the real wealth of an economy is increasing relative to a fixed money supply, say, with a gold/silver standard), then the value of a given denomination of coinage increases. Hoarding coin/currency/money becomes a wealth-accruing activity, while facilitating economic activity (by spending money) largely loses wealth. Hence the problem with a highly deflationary currency.

Economic theory says you want a currency whose value tends to be stable, or slightly inflationary, with time, in order to encourage spending rather than saving.

Note that none of this addresses the underlying physical economy, resource limitations/depletion, or other criticisms of traditional orthodox economics (most of which are highly valid -- we live on a planet of limited resources and good planets are both hard to find and the commute is a real drag).

Regarding your comments on savings: yes, there is a well-known "savings paradox" where individual incentives to save are opposed to the overall economic goals of growth. This is one of many such individual/group paradoxes, and is one of the principle reasons for laws (legal, moral, or otherwise). The 1971 book The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olson is one of the better illuminations of the concept: http://economics.about.com/cs/macroeconomics/a/logic_of_acti...

There are numerous other conflicts and paradoxes within economic theory and reality. Free markets, where they exist, work quite well. They're rather more rare, I'm coming to believe, than is frequently thought, and many forces work to limit them (political, plutocratic, monopolistic, and others).
I agree that the less reputable apps are probably being used to convert the in-app purchases into cash. As for KingdomConquest in-app purchases, my guess is these aren't being used to get cash, but specifically to confuse people trying to determine what's going on.
I can only borrow money (or sell stock in my company) if someone else is willing to save (or invest). A healthy economy requires a balance between borrowers and savers.
Amazing. We are surely looking at the future of porn.
How to Assess the Market Potential of Your Idea
Five years of Kiva lending and borrowing
No, actually, it's not. And that post proves it.

You can do some things to make it easier on yourself (and others) but it's not simple. You find out how un-simple it is when you hit one of those magical corner cases.

Don't get me wrong, I love Git. I far prefer it over SVN and CVS. But it's not simple.
Using that hypothetical, you'd either think George W. Bush was the next coming of Jesus or Hitler. There was very little unbiased economic information in either opinion section. On his blog, Krugman is much less biased and inflammatory (perhaps because he doesn't feel the need to help sell newspapers there) and in this case, he brings up some valid points about the intentionally deflationary currency.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
Original posting from the person who claimed responsibility:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
A Taste of Their Own Medicine
Some of the other examples are pretty impressive too: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js
They also provide registration and SSL.
Hired Guns Are for Cowboy Movies, not Business
I have read 2 entries on your blog. I don't know the details of how bad things went but I can tell you this, Boy, can you write well.
Keep writing regularly and good luck.
Code Evaluation Startup Coderloop Acquired By Gild, To Cease Operations
Android, iPhones Get Satellite Connectivity
Commodities are things people buy. Currencies are what people use to buy commodities with.
Salesforce.com is the mystery domain buyer of $2.6 million Social.com
40 Grueling Interview Questions Asked By America's Top Companies
Ed really is worth learning, if only the basics. No matter where you end up, ed should be around. Even if you find yourself logged on to a Plan 9 box via telnet or something, ed will be there. Plus, the commands transfer to vi, and the ed command language is essentially the same as the sed command language! (and the Sam command language, used in the sam and acme editors, but those aren't as popular :)
People who want TVs (or who want to replace their current TVs) will buy one eventually. But if you’re in the TV-manufacturing business, there’s a big difference between a world in which the average TV gets replaced every three years and a world in which it gets replaced every four years.
Downvotes notwithstanding, I think saturn is fundamentally right.
Ask HN: Physical Magazines About Programming?
I'm looking for an actual physical magazine (that you can have delivered to your home) on programming and software. Kind of like the pragmatic progammer's magazine. All I can find now are online magazines. Any suggestions?
Find the Right Background Image for your Biz Page
Judges in Jeopardy: Could IBM's Watson Beat Courts at Their Own Game?
Metapoint: Headlines phrased as a question are almost always best answered "no."

Try it!
Thanks -- great article. This is the most readable and straight-forward explanation of git's internals that I've seen (and I've read a bunch of articles/books/etc. looking for resources to help others learn git).

I'd also recommend The Git Parable (http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.htm...) for anyone who hasn't read it. Different focus, but also helpful for understanding git's philosophy.
What kind of tracker do you want? You could start a Redmine/Bugzilla server, or you could write one-word "to-do's" on a whiteboard. There's a lot of work to be done, and one mechanism will not solve all your needs.

For something in the middle, I've found that a shared Google spreadsheet with status, priority, due date, title, and description columns gets the job done with near-zero overhead. Too much effort is wasted on learning/paying for/managing more complex todo lists.

A simple spreadsheet can also be useful to individuals. On that note, do either or both of you have a tool you like for individual use?
Upvote the story and it's in your "saved stories". Your submissions too -- so in fact, HN has become my new bookmarks manager.
Interest usually fixes that equation nicely. Typically inflation is 2-3% and right now the cheapest money you can get is around 4%. So even with inflation factored in holding onto your debt will cost you more then paying it off right away.
Advice to a Young Man Hoping to Go Somewhere
"A commodity is a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market... Examples are petroleum and copper. The price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand."

You could say a commodity is like a currency many people can produce.

Considering how commodities are often produced, the term "Bitcoin mining" is shockingly apt.
Volatility. An ideal currency is immune to supply and demand and is simply a medium of exchange for actual commodities (which can be burned/eaten/used to manufacture things). Of course no currency can meet this ideal, but maintaining stability is a key task of a central bank.
The revenue didn't shift to CL - for most categories CL is still free, the users of it are the ones who got to keep the money.
An appeal to authority is only fallacious if the authority is not a legitimate expert on the subject or if the conclusion is said to be true, and not just probable.

In this case, an appeal to authority is a perfectly valid way of asserting that a certain conclusion is more probable than the other.
Au contraire, shell script in a (real) POSIX environment is one of the most portable things... It's interpreted and there's always some kind of shell on any Unix system, unlike other interpreted languages. That's why lots of 3rd party vendors use shell scripts to package their setup tools.

Yes the tools behave differently on different systems, but 99.9% of the time there's very basic syntax that is respected across all versions of the tools. Stick to BSD4.4 C Shell syntax (http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/usd/04.csh/paper.html), don't rely on regular expressions in grep, and stick to the very basics of sed and awk and you can go pretty far in Unix.

Any of the following commands which existed on some archaic version of Unix will still exist and their limited but useful functionality can be extended in lots of ways, and is pretty darn portable.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_Unix_...
You're not considering the second order effects. Multiple competitors appear to compete with craigslist (either head to head or picking off the most attractive niches). Market grows, profits fall.

Are we better off? Just look at the service. Before we had tiny little text ads in the back pages of newspapers, now we have pictures, directions, the ability to search and sort, etc... clearly the service is better.

And I think once you take into account the second order effects, and the fact that there's significantly less friction around transactions, you end up with a larger total market, and probably close to a comparable number of jobs.
I don't know about 'official', but it's highly likely that the Chronicle of Higher Ed/Chronicle of Philanthropy are the most referred to. Here's a list from 2008:

http://chronicle.com/stats/big_gifts.htm

And here's a searchable database:

http://philanthropy.com/stats/topdonors/index.php
keep a tiddlywiki in a shared dropbox folder.
AMD ships 16-core Bulldozer Interlagos Opterons destined for Cray XE6
Are we marginally worse off?

No. We now have access to cheaper and superior classified advertisements and the people who used to work at newspapers are now free to continue on to other jobs.
When innovation has dried up, and revenue likewise, what other options are there?
So what was the cause of the original error and how did you fix it?
Congrats to CMU!
So what's the Swiss Franc right now?
so… the future != the past?
aside from this looking like a scam, the preview for this title actually focuses on the most useless part of authoring ebooks: building social media hype.

if you want to learn to code an ebook, go to http://blog.threepress.org/ which is a pretty satisfying mix of technical and 'get it done.'
I do most of my development on my server at home from my laptop (either at home or at coffee shops), but if I hadn't already invested in a beefy box I would definitely be using http://pair.io instead.
Jack Welch: China losing competitiveness. Must Create '10,000 Apples'
That's certainly a possibility down the road.

Our tech staff has a gForge installation that has LDAP configured and all the other goop, but only supports svn. Not managing accounts, password resets, and the inevitable extra map from student id jgordon to login SassySystemsHax0r is a big win.

Since it's their first time using SCC, I already have to deal with "but I just forgot to commit!" for the first two weeks. I'm a little worried that with a DVCS, I'd then also have to deal with "but I committed -- what do you mean I have to push, too? Well, can you grade against the local timestamp?" And that will happen all quarter...
Not the person you asked but I've used namecheap for 3 years now and haven't had any issues, the whoisgaurd they offer is cheap when it comes up for renewal and you don't have to have a card or anything on file for when renewals come up, they do email you a bit when they do but I don't mind that.

The interface isn't going to win any awards and most of my domains use linodes dns so I can't say how well their dns stacks up.

I also have a few domains on nearlyfreespeech which is quite a bit down on the interface but their terms are great.
And non-existent when the organization holding them for you (e.g. Paypal) decides to freeze your account.
If KingdomConquest is anything like World of Warcraft, there could be a huge black market for in-game items and currency. iTunes credit -> KingdomConquest credits/items -> cash.
Serious question: After this rash of hacks, is there a cert issuer people still trust? And if so, why?
The signature line seems an incidental indication of the cluelessness of this all.

A bit more central, what's with some "off the cuff" email as opposed to a considered announcement?

Now THAT I consider pretty unprofessional.
The loudness wars have been fought since the early nineties at least. This is not news.

Modern music sounds like crap because it is crap.
The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.

Reminds me of this quote from Jello Biafra:

Some day, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music...or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed property owners so brain dead and stupid they won't even see that if you're too goddamn greedy to pay taxes for schools and services, they're not going to be any good any more! And that uneducated time bombs are a very poor investment as a future work force. And if you go on teaching people that life is cheap, and leave them to rot in ghettos and jails, they may one day feel justified in coming back to rob and kill you. Duh!

(Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jello_Biafra)
Yes I'm with you with this wccrawford. Git is not simple. Git internals may be simple hacks for hackers but git usage is another story. It does have neither understandable nor compatible terminology.

Because it's simple bash scripts but distributed and decentralised it has a steep learning curve.

No, no git is not simple. It's really complicated.
Reach out to a few shopify customers you know that are doing well, but aren't using your app.

Everyone wants to make more sales! Offer to only demo/present your product, not to sell. If your product is good, it will sell itself. Also use that time to do a problem/solution ranking/analysis when you talk with them. I.e. does your solution rank with the top problems/areas these customers are experiencing? Even if you have no interest with solving say another more pressing 'issue' they have at least you will know why it is ranked higher (or lower).