skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think those suggesting that this is an insignificant rise are missing the point.

These subscription billing services have close to the most powerful lock-in imaginable on your business. When you commit to one, you are trusting them with a vital part of your operations. At best, switching later is going to be disruptive to your business and potentially damaging to your customer relations.

This is the third of the most well-known recurring billing services to sharply increase prices in the not-so-distant past, after Recurly and then Chargify. In each case, that suggests they have either screwed up their projections so much that they had to grab extra money or deliberately screwed their customers over by dramatically increasing costs when they have an all-but-captive audience.

Either way, that is a serious black mark against an organisation that's asking you to trust them with something as important as your payment processing, particularly when those organisations are already relatively tiny compared to most payment-related services and therefore inherently risky to build on anyway.

BTW, blog posts from these services about how they are just trying to find a sustainable business model and hope their customers will understand aren't exactly reassuring. If they could get things so badly wrong before, why should we trust that they are doing any better now and won't see another rise next year?

This isn't newsworthy because of the amounts involved. It's newsworthy because it reflects on the competence of these payment services and illustrates a dangerous trend.
Efficiency DOES NOT purely kill jobs, it transfers them. When robotic arms replace factor workers:

- Factor worker jobs are destroyed.

- Robotic arms designing, manufacturing, shipping, etc. are created.

There may be temporary unemployment because factor workers may not know how to design, manufacture, ship, etc.

EDIT: Found an article "Technology and Automation Create, Not Destroy, Jobs" that is relevant. http://www.innovationpolicy.org/technology-and-automation-cr....

PS: Don't understand why someone down voted me. Never realized down votes are for disagreement.
Goldman and other banks profited because they were selling the financial products, not buying them. The sellers always make money.

Investors who bought the Goldman products did eventually lose money, however not soon enough to stop millions of people from starving.

For me, the takeaway here is that tremendous wealth and power inequality creates conditions where the stupidity and inattention of a wealthy elite can easily cause the starvation, death, and suffering of the people they financially dominate.

This story has repeated over and over throughout history. Usually, it happens when a powerful person like a King or Emperor behaves irresponsibly and causes terrible suffering.

I'm reminded of Nero watching Rome burn or Stalin starving the Ukrainians.

Concentrating power and wealth in the hands of the few is a bad idea because their slightest indiscretion causes mass suffering.
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Google and Microsoft to bid for yahoo
It already has happened. Modern farmers are as productive as 10,000 peasants. When basic needs are taken care of by machines/robots/automation people move into entertainment/healthcare/service industries. Starbucks, Disney, Hollywood, Facebook, are all businesses that exist because our caloric, shelter, textile needs are easily met.

I look forward to the future. The less effort humans spend making the things we need the more time we can spend creating the things we want.
I am not really sure it's the price change that is most offensive. It's the fact they were willing to do it without regard for their current customers. I don't want to deal with a company that is happy to change their price whenever they feel like it and I get the short end of the stick.
I do not think this applies to office suites?
OpenOffice/abiword v. Ms Office/Pages or whatever it is? I
"It is surprising to see this coming from Spreedly"

Really? A relative newcomer to e online payments space, undercutting the status quo pricing of the incumbents, suddenly finding they've underestimated the costs of running their service? Doesn't surprise me at all...

If I were building a new business based on any of the new online payment services, especially if they're significantly less expensive than traditional merchant accounts or PayPal, I'd be treating it as a short term windfall until they discover the hidden costs they're not charging you for. If they're _very_ lucky, maybe they've got some brand new fraud prevention technology that means the genuinely have lower running costs than PayPal or Visa, but I wouldn't bet _my_ business on it.
As both programmer and journalist, I can guess what happened behind the scenes. The author probably originally put in the newline into his headline but was overruled by the editor who felt that it would have distracted too many non-technical people. You and I see the correctness of the \n but a non-programmer will just see it as strange noise or punctuation.

He allowed him the C statement but kept it simplified - a good compromise I think.
The problem with Lorem Ipsum and what to do instead
If R did a little more hand holding it would be awesome.
Not always: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_Stat...
So, if I'm over 30, there's no time like the present!
Say you're writing an app that has simple business logic. Easy, you put that logic into model. Then you realize you need to write much more business logic code. No problem, model. But your model classes are getting fat and it looks ugly. So you refactor the code into modules.

Now somebody is browsing your code and they are ripping their hair off, because there's a method on Order object and there are 6 modules included in the Order object.

Before you realize it, you're violating not only MVC but also OOP.

If you used Services, you could model nice controller/manager classes in OOP manner, with responsibilities nicely distributed. These are your controllers. Rails controllers are just the HTTP interface.
By far the best introduction, from the few that I've read, is Amazon's Dynamo: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.h...
But how many factory workers were there, and how many robotic arm designers are there now? Something tells me that's not a 1:1 relationship.
The right people will be motivated by the right words. Those who aren't right, won't hear it. If you read that and wanted to find justifications (references) on why Ellsberg was wrong, then you are too risk averse.
I think we all realize it's a terrible thing, but repeating how sad it is will get us nowhere. Understanding what caused it and how it works, on the other hand, can help us prevent further people from starving. I'm personally happy that HN often takes an analytical, rationalist point of view, rather than an emotional one like eg. Reddit tends to do.
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I am mentoring a cousin and younger brothers of some of my friends who want to study CS or consider a career in this field. If they ask questions about how to prepare for a CS major, or eventually getting a job at companies, I tell them what I wish I had known when I was 17. I didn't have such a person to turn to when I was college age and was wondering whether this was the right career for me, given there are so many interesting options.

It only takes a few tens of minutes of my time to reply to their emails, but the type of mentorship, upbringing, or just sheer luck you had while growing up may not be available to someone else. Sometimes, it just takes a few words to help set their course.

While I am nowhere as accomplished as dmr, it's empowering to know that someone ten years younger would still love to be in my position, and that a few kind words can give them the encouragement to keep going.
I will once I'm Warren Buffet rich and can move to my own island.
Disenfranchisement is a very important part of the problem. I used total population not "voting citizens" quite deliberately.
It is truly sad to see that some of the smartest minds in the room are using their brains in this fashion. Interesting times ahead.. as a man sows.. and the love of money..
>This pattern called “power law” or “80-20 rule” is found everywhere.

Is it found in China?

>If we could ban public corporations from the entire world, I would imagine that we would make the power law curve flatter.

Would it be flatter in China as well?

Author seems to suggest "our" inefficiency is caused by certain universal laws, which mysteriously does not apply to China.
It can't be that bad, Oracle are shipping it in their new Big Data Appliance.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/10/oracles-big-data-appliance....

It's probably more an issue of easily pre-filtering/aggregating the data before analysing it with R. I like this approach of moving the calculation to the data, but we must be very late on the adoption curve if Oracle are doing it already.
I thought the same thing when I first came across this info about a year ago. You might be interested in Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine" article. The title refers to Goldman Sachs, and the various bubbles that they have caused and how they did it: The great depression, tech stocks and the dot com bust, the housing bubble, $4/gal gasoline (and other commodities), the bailout, and their next target - the up-and-coming cap and trade/carbon credits market.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american...

Then there is his other article, on why no one went to jail:

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-stre...
Why do all the R guis depend on QT? Is qt big in science applications in general?
You have missed my point entirely. I am commenting on the nature of the democracy itself. My comment is meant to be neutral concerning Obama.
the average of all guesses

Should be something like "two-thirds of the average of all guesses".
I'm not suggesting that you should create modules and include these into your ActiveRecord-models. Feel free to create any kind of class/module/object/whatever, but as long it's related to the business logic put it under app/models.
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It doesn't work like that. The human brain works by mirroring other people, by bouncing ideas and passing it along. Alone, we are useless as an ant without a colony; somewhere along the way, you HAVE to utilize your mirror neurons that connects to other people somehow.
There are two types of dropouts: (1) those who can't keep up with the rest, and (2) those who are and realize they are far above the rest and quit because school would slow them down.

Those in category (2) like Gate, Job, Zuckerberg are rare. And schooling is necessary to train those who help make Gate, Job, Zuckerberg who they are. Without these engineers, managers, etc. there would be no Gate, Job, Zuckerberg. The dropouts of category (1) ain't going to do it.
There's absolutely nothing stopping any developer from learning other skills and changing jobs.

Sure, that works to an extent. I was a .NET developer and now I work in Ruby and JavaScript. But if I really had my druthers I'd be writing games for a living. But we can't all work for Valve. So it still remains that for many developers they take what they can get. Some aren't talented enough to get the job they really want. Others have other obligations that prevent them (such as families, geography, the economy, etc).

So it still remains that many people code in Java because there are large, entrenched systems written in Java that need maintaining. I of course have no research to support this, but something tells me most developers -- especially passionate ones -- would not choose to work in Java over all other possibilities in 2011.
It's not 1:1. It seems there would be more jobs created because of the robotic arms business (and business related to this business). Updated parent comment to include a link.
Rails is not your application framework. It is not well-suited to being your application framework. We have exactly this problem in the Python world, where people lean on Django for everything, and insist on making everything interoperate with Django's view of the way the world should be.

It doesn't work. Factor out as much as you can and make as much of your code into units as possible. You want to be able to test your code, run it and inspect it, and have it overall be very non-magical.
iPhone announced: early January 2007

Microsoft Surface announced: late May 2007

iPhone shipped: end of June, 2007

Microsoft Surface shipped: mid April, 2008

(all according to Wikipedia)
And still with AI systems taking care of the plane security there would be failures that will knock downd computers , lightning strikes, generator spikes, some kind of fisical damage to the plane, fire at the computer rack. All this is usual enough to keep comercial flights from using drones.
Not if the universe is infinite i suppose?
The latest generation of microprojectors would make more sense than really big displays. Imagine buying something roughly the size of an AppleTV or Mac Mini which also is the television - you just point it at a white wall or sheet or screen for a nearly arbitrarily-sized screen.

I use a projector tv at home now but it's a pain to configure because it's designed to work with too many kinds of input. Integrate a more compact and elegantly designed projector with iTV, make iPad and iPhone your control surfaces but download content from the cloud - it could work. And unlike the big flatscreen, it'd be easy to take to the Apple Store for service/diagnostic if need be.
This community is exactly the type of testosterone-driven money-obsessed community that would create a Goldman Sachs Commodity Index that will cause starvation, and then absolve themselves of responsibility due to some free market arms-length ideology.

It's not a coincidence that you're disturbed by the comments. Wall Street entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are fundamentally very similar in mindset and outlook.

Entrepreneurs are trained to have a laser focus on their own issues and to look at everything in terms of dollar value.

Recently, it is becoming more clear to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that short-term windfalls are preferable, so they try to pump up the speculative value of their companies and dump them before anything bad happens. Pumping and dumping your own Silicon Valley start up is surely one of the easiest ways to get very rich right now.
as the main picture is too small to view, it remains a mystery why the Japanese IT industry destroys talent.
The emphasis on history is really the killer feature. I almost posted this a few days ago because I love how they frame older documents in modern contexts:

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/question-and-...

I didn't, in the end, because I decided it would lead to a useless discussion about how stupid Gandhi was.

On a tangential note, wouldn't it be great if there were a news network (say like NPR, the good parts) whose focus was to include history in everything? For example, when covering the Libyan war, also cover the colonial history, previous wars fought there (http://www.google.ca/#ssource=hp&q=%22benghazi+stakes%22) - really anything related would do. We could better understand what's going on, learn things of substance, and the material wouldn't have to be the same old recycled talking points bullshit, because you'd have all of history to draw on. (It needn't just be history, either; that's just where the most ready material would be.) Rather than interviewing bobbleheads for their opinions, interview scholars for their learning. I bet you could get some pretty good historians to go on for cheap.
I zoomed right in and found it has something to do with three spirals and pixelated text surrounded by jpeg artifacts...
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Last I checked, KDE 4 already supports SVG pretty much everywhere, making it work with high-resolution screens without problems (in theory).
I saw a demo years ago that used a glove that provided some sort of feedback so you could actually "feel" the objects
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I don't view my candle maker argument as a straw man rather than an example. I could provide more examples starting at the industrial revolution moving forward, and I assure you there are countless, which would by definition make it not a straw man argument because I'm not misrepresenting anyone's position nor am I cherry picking 1 instance to prove my own argument.

As far as you're argument for unskilled labor, I have two things to say. 1. I think you are greatly overestimating and marginalizing people. Plenty, if not the majority of people have the ability to be innovators at least in some small way. 2. Even if your argument about unskilled labor does hold water, which I don't believe it does, you can break down a task into enough moving parts, or create a user experience in a way that people don't necessarily need to have genius levels of knowledge to be productive with the tools given to them. A perfect example is the military, where you take something like operating a jet aircraft and make it more accessible to people. There are countless of other examples in almost every field.

Finally, I can't prove it. I'm not a professional economist, I don't have the background nor the data to provide any sort of coherent theory on the subject. What can I point to though is history, the history of innovation throughout time. Horses to cars, the transition to computers, the internet, there are so many things that have increased efficiency and people have shifted and adapted and continued to innovate and move forward and there continue to be jobs and task for people.
Actual Article
http://www.japaninc.com/mgz_nov-dec_2007_it-talent

Also Part I - My struggle at the Frontline of Japanese Enterprise IT
http://www.japaninc.com/mgz_spring_2007_frontline_japanese_i...
Aside from the price and consumers only wanting the cheap crap there are no user interfaces that can handle it. No desktop GUI can scale well with high DPIs so you can only use it in niche applications anyway.
If you want to sound deep, you can never say anything that is more than a single step of inferential distance away from your listener's current mental state.

This is important for more than just sounding deep. Many communications require calibration to the audience to be effective. An advocate who neglects this appears to be a crank, speaking mostly to indulge himself rather than convince others. A teacher who neglects this confuses and eventually loses his students.

And yet, on the net, where any communication can be excerpted out-of-context and forwarded to new audiences, every calibration will be 'wrong' for some readers. Opponents of a viewpoint or teaching will, in fact, be motivated to forward low-context excerpts to alternate unintended audiences, to discredit rival speakers.

I don't know an easy solution. Maybe audiences will wise up about this cheap forward-out-of-context maneuver, and demand better of their aggregators/forwarders/filters. Or maybe persuaders will be pushed to specialize in certain narrow ranges of the inferential chains, and avoid saying anything to other audiences that could possibly be redeployed to alienate their usual audience. (For example, mass majority politicians.)
What does it mean for it to be iPad-optimized? I skimmed it very quickly, but it looked just like any other issue of HM.
The anti-luddite argument is actually an argument in favor of social darwinism.

When people say that the jobs will shift to other sectors, they are really saying that an elite few will control all the wealth and if you can't appeal to their self-interest you are expendable.

The elite few who control all the wealth right now are not even spending or investing their money. They are just sitting on it. Because they'd rather have the money tomorrow than the services of the poor today. This is another way of saying that the current world's poor are expendable to the elite.

I don't see this mindset changing any time soon. All logic indicates that the world's poor are going to starve to death in their ghettos while the elite technologists sit on their money piles -- money piles defended by predator drones and LDAP.
You named the reason why I think he doesn't care. He had everything he needed and it didn't cost them money. The only you could buy with money in USSR is some pompious things. Items.

In USA, you buy better education, better health care, better neighbours, different social circle, better leisure, better future - you buy all that with money. You didn't buy these with money in USSR. His parents had all this because of their status, not because of their high wages. You could only put your money in useless and overpriced things.

If you don't care, you can live anywhere. Might as well invest in some expensive property.
I always assumed that there was something horribly wrong with the idea that technology kills jobs, but that link explains the fallacy quite clearly. It's actually the same logic as that which disproves the fallacy that destroying things stimulates the economy (yes, some people actually believe this).
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From my admittedly limited research I found these quotes:

"It really has become like a cult."
"...is more like a cult..."
"...has gained a cult-like following."
"...a cult hero..."
"...is growing a cult-like following..."

Ops... that was my limited research of YC.

I went to wikipedia with my limited research and you can too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
I found quotes like: "The approach emphasizes the role of the imagination in learning", "In early childhood learning is largely experiential, imitative and sensory-based."

Maybe it's a good thing for kids to be allowed to be kids while they are kids... just saying.
As long as we keep reaching for higher goals increasing efficiency in society is a good thing. We might need to structure society in a different way to encourage more people to pursue those higher goals and to ensure that those incapable of that will still be able to live a decent live.
When you do map and reduce operations with functions that have no side effects (and your reduction function is associative), then changes in the ordering of operations don't affect the result of the overall map or reduce operation, any more than when a CPU reorders instructions to avoid pipeline stalls. Map and Reduce are a way of breaking your problem up in to pieces that have no inter-dependencies or shared mutable state, so that they can be executed in parallel without any of the pitfalls of concurrency.
I surf, and also build websites. What does this actually do? Store a photo/video of a surf spot by location. Is that all? What incentive is there for people to do this?