skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In books, the answer is to sell eBooks priced at impulse levels, then sell thousands or millions of copies.

For instance, the #5 seller on the Kindle is a $1 book: http://www.amazon.com/Wife-by-Wednesday-ebook/dp/B005SJLB24/...
I just bought this one but wasn't there another bundle just last week? I wonder if too many too soon will lead to bundle fatigue
My main gripe was that it prunes updates over a certain age (one month?) without telling me, and it pissed me off to no end to find out the way I did.

Fever still prunes updates, albeit with an explicit and definable value. It allows up to eight weeks, which is usually enough for me to catch the important updates and makes sense from a personal server perspective, seeing that I don't have an infinite amount of storage available for the burgeoning database of feed updates.

After Bloglines died, the concept of cloud-based RSS readers made even less sense to me, seeing that it took all my saved updates with it. I feel the same way about e-mail, but I don't really see a dead-easy alternative available at the moment, especially with Gmail's two-factor authentication.

Google Reader also used to, basically, not work at all on Opera, which is normal for any Google service, so it never really grew on me. Its design annoys me to no end as well.
FX is the home of non-mainstream comedies.
Well...look at stuff like Minecraft. Notch was nobody, he just made something that people wanted.
Let's posit three possible situations:

* FBI Digital Forensics Agent: "Hey, did you guys see all of this data CarrierIQ is dumping to the phone unencrypted? Gold mine! Where is that manual?"

* FBI Wiretap Expert: "So these idiots are doing our work for us and sending it to people we already have a open subpeona with for cases X and Y. I wonder what else they are sending that the AD wants in those cases? Where is that manual?"

* FBI Field Agent: "The director just sent me this memo that Senator Franken included two queries about these CarrierIQ clowns in the last packet from the committee. Time to prioritize the investigation! We do have the manual and copies of that web site in our subpeona request file, right?"

All three are possible. All three could be happening concurrently. None of them are illegal and only one is ethically questionable. You have no idea what kind of scenarios happen in the real world, but in your world it seems that questionable surveillance is the only possible justification. I have provided alternatives and if I had to give an honest guess I would probably say that right now all three are ongoing, forensics probably noticed it first and told the wiretap guys while at this time the political/legal case probably has more agents working on it than the other two.
Stratolaunch-Systems: a new Paul Allen project
Ask HN: Grooovy (discovering iphone meetups)Feedback
We're trying our hand at the iphone market and feel good about this product from the feedback we've received from our early beta testers. Hope you enjoy it. We appreciate your feedback! Thanks
FBI Says Carrier IQ FOIA Denial Not Proof Software is Being Used
I recently went through treatment (melatonin + lightbox) and I'd say I feel like a million bucks compared to when I basically just slept only when I was tired and woke up naturally. I'm not sure how long I can stay on the treatment, and if I'll snap back afterwards, but so far (about a month and a half into it) it's pretty great, and I feel way more rested and in sync with the world.
Except people don't do Comedy Central specials for the money, they do it to get exposure. Heralding C.K's success is like how people praised Radiohead for releasing their album independently. He already has a rabid and loyal fan base, but that's after working the comedy scene, writing for big shows, having stand-up specials on HBO. This article makes it seem like anybody can generate their own material, promote it and eventually have their own TV show, but there's a lot more to it than that.
I had a vague idea you were Indian, but no strong sense, FWIW. I also can't imagine how it would affect what I wrote. These are not new topics I'm only considering now.

I didn't know what to make of this point:

"You pick the example of black people being thrown to the bottom of the social structure of north american society [example in the post you're responding to was more blacks picking cotton historically in the US] because you know that arguing with that is unethical by pretty much any current standard. But just recently James Watson stated precisely that the average black person is less intelligent than the average white."

Can you clarify your point, then? Or less tangentially, return to your original points about the topic at hand, and present research that's too taboo to discuss?

If you claim your opinion is too taboo to discuss, that's pretty much just blowing smoke; people who disagree (and explain why) aren't shying away from a taboo; they're disagreeing. If you have "inconvenient truths" that seem to contradict common opinions, that's far more interesting (and yes, is worth discussing), though if you don't entertain the possibility that you're misinterpreting the data (because you're already crystal clear...), it's all a waste of breath.
Funny, my experience is that learning to read the idioms (and write the most convenient idioms) of the language is an upfront penalty, and once you've made the investment things start moving smoothly.

Of course, it's everyone's privilege to decide which penalty they'd prefer to pay, and that doesn't mean there aren't language features that can make put it on a new order of expressiveness.

But are we talking about those features? Or are we talking about "aesthetics/readability"? If it's the later, that's probably a different thing, and I have my doubts that it's anything objective. Particularly if it has much to do with which specific tokens indicate the beginning/ending of blocks or enclosing arguments to a function.
If this happened in one of my classes I would walk out. I like the data oriented approach to learning, but the whole tone seems to be that education flows from professors to students. "It's the professors fault that students aren't learning, it's the administrations fault that students aren't learning, it's not the students fault that they aren't passing our tests". Education is something that comes from within a student.

If the students don't want to learn something, they aren't going to learn it. Period. They might cram for a test so they won't piss of their parents by seemingly pissing away their money, but that doesn't mean they will have actually gained anything from the classroom experience.
Zynga, Pincus, And Embracing The Edge
> I don't know of any tracker that will tell you what IPs are currently connected

Maybe I don't fully understand your comment but every tracker will tell you what IPs are currently connected. That is what trackers do, that is the very feature that make them trackers.
I've only used it for an hour or so last night, so I can't really say. However, TextMate 1 with MissDrawer definitely does.

https://github.com/jezdez/textmate-missingdrawer
You are over-simplifying and therefore trivialize what data-mining is. Data-mining is about deriving fact-based conclusions from complex information as an alternative to making decisions based on intuition or ignorance. Like almost anything complex, it can be done very poorly (as in the OP), or it can be done well. That doesn't mean that it originates in mis-representing information for the sake of 'finding whatever you need'.
I upvoted this in hopes of generating some discussion about whether there might be a better way to do this. Here's one idea:

With very few exceptions, all of these words will contain at least one vowel. This suggests that we can (for the most part) compress the data from: (1) a list of 24 lists of words, to (2) a list of 6 sets of 2 lists of words.

So now "a" looks like this:
bdefhjklmnptyz -a- abdeghilmnrstwxy

Now you can apply the same mnemonic trick to each of these word lists as the author does in the article, but you wind up only having to memorize 12 lists instead of 24, plus a slight overhead for non-vowel words (there are 4).

This can perhaps be improved further by removing redundancy somehow (though maybe not, as the redundant structure might be easiest to check mentally).
The best way to scale this down to lesser-known acts is to reduce the barriers to entry for both the comic and the audience.

More specifically, if comics had a free service or tool that allowed them to set a price, upload some content, and have a promotional site like he had for his show it could work wonders. YouTube does this pretty well, but what he's done is much better (though there's a lot of benefit to having lots of videos in one place with good discoverability). Recording and editing is also getting cheaper every day.

To lower the barrier for the audience, shows for new acts would need to be even cheaper or free. Once they build a following they can start charging more.

The iTunes model is almost certainly the one to follow here: sell it cheap and go for volume. If the content is good and the barrier is low, people will eat it up and the artists will get their fair share and more. The middlemen in this equation are really the biggest problem right now (for so many reasons).
A common misperception. Humour on HN isn't verboten as such, it just needs to be carefully cloaked in some sort of substantive contribution to the discussion. It's empty responses, not funny ones, that draw the downvotes. The kind of humour that predominates on other websites, unfortunately, happens to be of the empty variety and so recent immigrants from there tend to draw flak for one-liners that don't convey any information.

SNR is prized and cultivated around here. That doesn't rule out humour per se, but it does considerably shrink the set of humourous responses that are appreciated.
I think the point the parent was making is that all it takes it one person stripping the DRM and the content is on the Internet (torrents, usenet, private ftps, etc). It might not be easy to share person-to-person (for non-technical users), but if one just searches the Internet the content would be there somewhere.
Visualizing Light at Trillion FPS, Camera Culture, MIT Media Lab
VC MEMES
Can't believe someone put it on a Torrent site with that lame excuse. His experiment is interesting and I think it works but only for acts like him. I'd like to see stats on the Humble Indy bundles I feel they follow the same model but at a smaller scale.
This fork of Macvim has a very Textmate-like file browser baked in.

https://github.com/alloy/macvim/downloads

https://skitch.com/ericschiller/gtbb9/index.html.haml-dev-sa...
> Engineering currently makes up 64 of 402 open positions.

There are 64 unique job titles in Engineering (and 56 unique job titles in Technical Operations, which also includes software development job titles), but that represents a lot more than 64 (or 120) open engineering positions.

That's not to say that Facebook isn't as big as many people think, though.

(I work at Facebook.)
Killing Innovation (Without Even Trying)
It has nothing to do with humor, it's about noise. You can be funny while also contributing to the conversation, but posting jokes instead of contributing will tend to get down voted.
It was pretty recent, but I think a lot of Indie devs want to get in on these bundles so they won't be going away anytime soon.
So what has Fermilab found at 140 Gev? It was originally described as a Higgs canidate. Or is it a supersymmmetry particle?

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2011/04/07/fermilab...

I saw an article (but lost it :( ) that speculated there mat be as many as 5 Higgs bosons.

Edit: If you google "fermilab 144 gev", you will find several articles and a learned rant arguing for the Higgs at 144 Gev.
Out of curiosity, how can they enforce that sort of thing? Blocking ip's is the only thing that comes to the top of my head, but some tricky javascript might be able to keep google from even knowing that they are being crawled at all. How could google even find the people doing it? (Besides, you know, reading this article.)
I hate this argument. So let's take it a step further.

How can this model scale down to unpopular acts? Or untalented ones? Or people who just started making art last week?

Because everyone who makes any art at all is entitled to compensation, right?
hey, look at me!

For safety, not for fashion. Hopefully.
I also do some work from the Philippines when I'm there on occasion, but I'm based in the US. One problem I have is the reality of power "brownouts" in the RP interrupting bandwidth.
Hey, I work at Facebook on HHVM.

I actually view Facebook as the opposite of what you're describing. VMware, for instance, really did have a bimodal engineering organization; some pieces were amazing, but many were so-so. That can have its strengths, too, and it has worked out ok for VMware to date, but Facebook has the absolute opposite philosophy. For instance, you don't have a "hiring manager" here, because the selection process is decoupled from the allocation process. This means a uniform bar across groups; e.g., I interview people destined for all different parts of the stack, and I expect the same level of skill for all of them.
> I wonder if this could be solved by using a message queue and just have dedicated step for updating/deleting data

See but now you're building some big thing. Let's just include that in MongoDB or whatever, a "constraints engine". So that you don't have to build it from scratch each time, and can have some mature, well tested thing instead of something ad-hoc and probably buggy. Now you need to carefully build migrations again !
The field of statistics is very concerned with mis-representing data, and has developed a huge array of methods for dealing with uncertainty. It is important for people to appreciate that there are some minimum steps that must be taken for statistical analysis to claim validity. One of the first, which is almost universally ignored in pop-stats like the OP is state your assumptions, then justify them.

Stats are open to interpretation, which is why academia favors peer review, where faulty underlying assumptions can be checked.
Yes, seriously. It's a personal preference. Is the second part of your comment intended to imply TextMate isn't a serious text editor?
And that might be a compelling argument if there was a competitor to Amazon who offered the same value proposition plus better service as a differentiator.

In this case, I don't think there's really anywhere obvious for the traffic to go, so the "increased business" is fairly minimal.
Tim Bray said it back in 2003: don't be a sharecropper.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
I think this might be the best one yet
Buying cheap car insurance through your smartphone
Quite an interesting product. I typed a competitor's name in and immediately saw a huge list of ads they were running. Very helpful in just ten seconds!
Besides, you can put html code in textviews, webviews and their ilk, make the links clickable and the app will silently create the corresponding intents.

The only aspects I can think of right now that are lost in the translation are webpage roots and local # anchors. There might be a lot more, though.
There are a half dozen other mass ad crawling services selling the same service (being able to search and analyze your competitors' ads), dating back at least several years.

On one hand you'd think if this wasn't permissible, they'd be big targets and Google would go after them legally. On the other hand, what would the legal basis for blocking this be?

Someone browsing my website and seeing a Google ad has not agreed to any Google terms of service. It's a tough argument that a browser is allowed to do this but a crawler isn't, especially when Google's own crawlers now include javascript-executing webkit browsers.
There were plenty of people coming from the IPs of music labels on Napster back in the day so it doesn't surprise me that they continue to use P2P services. IIRC, it was on the order of tens of thousands though that included parent companies and subsidiaries.

Our lawyers told us it wasn't useful (and might have been harmful) to our case so we never did anything with the information.
I personally find it much more polished than Sublime Text. It's not quite TextMate yet, but close.
There is one feature in TextMate that's not in Sublime which I really love to the point, where it's an absolute requirement for me: when I edit a file in TextMate and my account lacks permission for saving the file, TM would allow me to sudo right from the GUI in order to still save.

This is much better than seeing that I can't save, copy the whole file to the clipboard, reopen it with 'sudo vim' and then pasting it (no. Not even 'sudo subl' works)

One of the main reasons I use an editor like TM or S2 for is system administration which often requires root. For development I'm usually using the JetBrains IDE with the respective plugins.
Jive Software jumps 38% in Wall Street debut
Our Kindle Speed Reading App and the truth about Kindle App Approval Process
Notch was also an anomaly. I agree that it's a beautiful story, but rules aren't defined by their exceptions.
Meta comment: HN is becoming an incredibly sad place when the developer of the shootout benchmark site makes a technically valid and polite point - and people mark him down simply because they don't agree with it.

And the irony is the shootout site is written in PHP - so its not like he is especially biased against it.
In terms of distribution, SoundCloud and YouTube is very very close to being a good alternative to centrally-run companies of old. In terms of comedy, Derrick Comedy was actually really popular even before one of their stars got on Network television, simply from uploading videos on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/derrickcomedy.

Musically, one artist that's blown up solely from releasing their own material on the internet is The Weeknd ( http://www.the-weeknd.com/) , who makes and posts songs much more often than a band on a label does (his schedule seems to be one EP every six months or so).
CR #448822
Exception: always bring the interns in house. I've heard the talent crunch is bad, but I cannot imagine a remote internship being beneficial at all.

I tried working a remote internship once and it was awful. I didn't get anything done, had no idea what was going on, really a big waste of time. The first day I got to the office I fixed a bug and got the product to actually work though. The rest of my time there I did some good work.

Interns don't know what they are doing. If they did, they would be full time employees. They need to have somebody to point out some of the basics, not all!, but enough for them to actually be productive.
This is so embarrassingly bad, I don't know where to begin.
Windows Phone SMS attack discovered
This only scales so far. Once more books are priced at impulse levels, it will provide less of an advantage and ultimately hurt your bottom line compared to the current typical price level.

It's similar to web apps being "free" in order to attract eyes/users. I think competing on other fronts (quality, connection with users/readers, obsession with consumer satisfaction) are preferable to cutting price because it's "too easy" to compete on price
A Man Builds A Lambo From Scratch… Literally
My thanks to @knowtheory for pointing out that suicidal people often feel alone/apart/disconnected from other people. I struggle with this, myself.
Anything specific? I haven't noticed noticed anything very much amiss with Sublime. (It's as native feeling as Chrome, say, or indeed TextMate.)
Anything on TV more widely available than public access is, almost by definition, mainstream. Even the non-mainstream shows are mainstream, their selling point being that they're "non-mainstream."

If a show doesn't make big dollars for the network, it doesn't get on in the first place. Almost everything you see and touch today is mainstream, and if you think it isn't, it's because it's been marketed to you as non-mainstream.
I hate this argument too, so it's a good thing no one in this thread is making it.

The conversation here is about discovering talented acts who would have been popular in a classic promotion environment but need the initial audience.
Using conventions for data constraints is quite dangerous. Whereas bugs in software can be corrected, bugs in corrupt data often cannot, as the data is created in a temporally-dependent way (i.e. you captured it wrong) as well as that it may be massive (i.e. your corruption is widespread across TBs of data). Basically, you might only get one chance with data.

A convention-based approach, or even a well thought out data-enforcement approach, will have bugs and failures, and you just have to hope these failures aren't severe enough that you lose your "one" chance.

Relational constraints OTOH when used in their usual way make it virtually impossible to have situations like this.
It's like when Sam Odio wrecked Jonathan's Card, there is always going to be that one jackass.

Thankfully though people can still feel good about paying for this after somebody does that.
Articles like this tend to elicit an interesting response from people. One one hand, many seem to believe that statistics = deceptive manipulation. One the other, many call for better statistics education in schools. Sometimes, both claims are made by the same individuals. So it seems that statistics education has at least two goals: explain what statistics actually is, and then explain how to do it correctly.
It's more polished now than it was. It's still in its nascent stages, but it's improving on a roughly monthly basis, in a definite excellent direction. The vi approach seems to be at its core, which is notable as new features are being implemented. And it's scriptable in Nu, which is pretty sweet and gives you access to all of Cocoa.
Why not use that account instead to post this? If you were popular, then people would be more likely to contact you. My first inclination is to wonder if you are hiding something?
You're talking college stats and calc. And even then Chicago and Stanford. It's like saying that Harvard's Math 55 should be the model for intro math courses in college.

I think the original poster was thinking high school and a target much more like Freedman's text (http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-4th-David-Freedman/dp/03939...).

And what Freedman's book does probably better than any other text in the field is teach how to think about statistics. It doesn't have a lot of formalisms, but if can come to an understanding of what he teaches in that book you'll have a rich understanding of stats.

With that said, if Calc was taught in the context of functions and probability, as in the Gemignani text then I think we'd be better off than how Calc today is focused around engineering.
Show HN: Divvy - fast and intuitive unsupervised machine learning.
The ads we crawl aren't served from the google.com domain, and we haven't agreed to any TOS.

If this were the case, then you wouldn't be able to run a headless browser without accidentally violating TOS and robots.txt.
I've never seriously used C# before, but the desire to build an iPhone application, combined with my unfortunate distaste for Objective-C, recently led me to MonoTouch.

MonoDevelop, MonoTouch, and C# have been an absolute pleasure to work with. Completion is insanely fast, with fuzzy matching. C# delegates make implementing event handlers a pleasure. The integration with Interface Builder is a bit shaky at times, but I suspect that may be a bug in XCode.