skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you can't figure out a good reason to support free users too, then don't. Not every app is suitable for a freemium style of business.

The big advantage of freemium is lower friction. The people who buy your product don't typically need it advertised or explained to them. They've either already got experience with it due to being free users or they will set aside some time to trial you product for free for a while. Beyond that a free product can build up a strong reputation that carries over to the paid versions.

Billions upon billions of dollars are spent every year by companies trying to create familiarity and trust in their brands. Being able to do that with a free version of your actual product is just as worthy of the expense and in many ways a far more honest form of advertising.
A better recipe for digital cuisine
What intrigues me most about your article is that it begs another question. How much testing is enough? Based on your account of the situation I don't think you tested enough variables. Were the premium features just something you threw up as an attempt to monetize the site or did you really think through the needs of someone who is willing to pay you?

Stepping through your site there are lots of suggestions I would make (which are beyond the scope of this comment), but at what point can one say he's done enough testing to say "I'm done with freemium". That's the question I'm interested in.
Anand benchmarked FileVault(1) and his conclusion was "Overall the hit on pure I/O performance is in the 20 - 30% range. It's noticeable but not big enough to outweigh the benefits of full disk encryption."

1. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4485/back-to-the-mac-os-x-107-...
I'm surprised at how simple you've made it, excellent work.
This is a Steven Wright joke.
How to avoid a gendered conference
This is correct. It's an encyclopedia with few personalization features, so well over 90% of HTTP requests are served directly from cache.

It may not be easy to explain this in a banner ad, but the money is really going to different efforts that are trying to expand / entrench / defend Wikipedia in its adolescent phase.

Like: making operations run more smoothly, on more continents, and not require the constant intervention of a few wizards; enabling a virtualization framework which so more volunteers can work with ops or do wilder experiments (the "labs" project); inroads into academia; improving automated testing; expanding our ability to host multimedia; the GUI editor and usability projects; or the Wikipedia Zero project, where we try to get the site delivered to mobile devices in the developing world for free.
I've wanted case studies to be more popular in software development. Now with things like GitHub we even see how software changes over time. Someone needs to mine the value in that for teaching purposes.

Sorry if this is tangential.
Gödel, Escher, Bach Reddit read through: buy your book now
Assuming there's something here, which is a bit of a stretch for me, let's ask the obvious question: where else has this been tried? Did it work? Better still, how do we know we're being equal enough?

This is not Marxist by any means, but I have to use Marxism as an example. The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn't work, people say it wasn't tried enough. In the examples where it does work, there's always some special attribute or thing that causes it to, like a very small sample size. Yes it works in some cases and at some scale, but it never really works in a practical way. It's just a cluster of feelings about fairness in search of an practical application. This is, by definition, a "loose analogy". Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we?

I love Finland, and I admire the Fins I've worked with. But I think we can play this game of "If we were only like Europe" only so much without actually having to apply some critical thinking skills. We are not like Europe -- as much as we'd like to be. I've been reading articles that claim we can improve various parts of society if we were only like some European country my entire life. If I didn't know better, I'd think a lot of academics spend time in Europe and become Europhiles the rest of their lives, much to the rest of our detriment. Seems like no matter how hard we try at these things, we can never be like European country X. There's probably a good reason for that. My best guess is that this has something to do with culture, but I'm not sure. If you want a country of Fins, perhaps you should consider moving to Finland?

So yes, maybe there's something here, but I have no idea what it is. Does the author suggest outlawing private schools? Perhaps indoctrinating our national culture with pithy slogans like "accountability is what's left when you take responsibility away"? Tighter control over immigration so the culture is more cohesive? Greater oil revenues? Decrease our population to 1/70th of its current size? More alcohol consumption? What is there that's here that we can take away and use today aside from a general admiration of how nice Finland is?
The simulator can simulate a low-memory warning. To simulate an app being killed, just kill the app from Xcode.
... where there are serious externalities. Isn't this where government regulation is most suited?
You discredit your point with your examples. It doesn't take a huge population to create most of the world's success. The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S.

Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.
On Design
Personally, I think this one sentence from the article has a lot to do with why US schools are less than good: [In Finland] "If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it."

In the US, if a teacher is bad and the school is public, not much can be done. They certainly won't be fired.

Private schools, on the other hand, have more freedom in this regard.

I think the article made a lot of good points regarding creative play and avoidance of heavy standardized testing.
Hundreds of Fans Question Sal Khan: The Reddit Interview Gone Wild
Monads in python [ed: *mind explodes*]
Just wanted to remind anyone who wanted to join the readthrough to buy the book now.

Also use the google calendar to keep up: https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=OXM5YnM0cjgzaX...
I tried Zaarly, encountered a bug, and -- for the first time ever -- had someone actually respond in the Olark chat widget when I said something about it.

(After googling them, the person who responded was a "marketing coordinator", so hopefully my bugreport gets passed on unmangled to the developers. Still, very cool to have anyone at all actually responding to me.)
Check out Identical Twins Otto and Ewald
Sugar: A Javascript library for working with native objects
The Value of the Designer Who Codes
A rule of thumb: if you ever end up with a situation where you want to display data that is essentially just a table and you can't drive that via a fairly simple sql query then that probably means you need to revisit your design.
Nitpick: it's Red Hat. Two words.

I wish other Open Source companies adopted some of Red Hat's awesomeness, specifically open development of upcoming releases, a public bug tracker, and their patent promise.
Geographically, yes, politically it is very, very far from the rest of Europe.
But remember this was just one provision of a larger bill, and I don't think line-by-line veto is possible anymore.
You're right, I interpolated "finns" for "Western Europeans," which is what was said in the first paragraph of the link you chastised me for not reading:

"American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students."

The article you linked goes on to clarify: "The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded." The correct comparison is European ancestry to European ancestry, excluding first and second generation, not "American whites" vs. Finns.

In any case, I've seen this study pop up for a while now, and more recently on facebook a lot of my friends have been linking The Atlantic's piece.
Agreed. And certainly better than creating bad indices.
If you're doing FDE, you should be encrypting your backups as well. It can be relatively trivial, depending on your backup setup.
Yes, and then in the interview, Mr. Warner says something like "if people think they can just watch these interviews, take notes and then replicate the success, they are delusional". So he's pretty much admitting the article is pure link bait and there's not much chance another startup will have the same luck. Bo Fishback himself says in the interview that it's unlikely it could be replicated.
The thing is, I actually do want to be able to watch, take notes and repeat the steps other founders used to get traffic and users. So give me realistic and concrete examples of what is possible for the average founder to do to get users.
For example, the other day I went on Yahoo Answers and answered a bunch of questions with links to my website. It was boring and tedious, but the next day I had about 100 referrals to my site from Yahoo Answers. That's the kind of thing I want to learn about - it's simple enough, repeatable and it works. Just doesn't make for sensational headlines.
> Bzzzt! Wrong.

Don't do that shit. It's annoying and adds nothing to the conversation.
I heard about identical (monozygotic) twins Otto and Ewald from a German researcher at the 2010 International Society for Intelligence Research conference in DC. I just asked a local friend who is a behavioral genetics researcher what website he recommends as a first look at Otto and Ewald, and what they mean for the nature-versus-nurture question, and he surprised me by recommending the site for popular audiences submitted here. He says he uses the pictures from this site each time he teaches undergraduates about human genetics. Heritability matters, but specific training matters too.
Life there is probably better than in any other CIS state, on average (or it was before the recession). Freedom is another question but the answer depends on your definition of that.

Anyone who was happy with .ly should be happy with .by
Where did software quality go?
Clearly we buy some things on that basis, or businesses wouldn't pay for the ads.
Excel Escapades
GNU /bin/ed 1.6 released
What externalities? What material harm is caused by putting up a sign, beyond "I disapprove of it"?
Since you're 'Asking HN' it might be appropriate to mention more explicitly about where you want the developer to be. You seem to have chosen US focused boards. Are you excluding remote developers?
I think the websites that people look at are very region specific.

P.S. My favourite new thing is jobstractor.com so perhaps you should ensure that you're tweeting your job ads in a suitable manner.
I do like some of those, especially the technical improvements to things like the editor interface, but as a long-time Wikipedian I confess I'm a little bit skeptical of some of the larger ambitions. I think Wikipedia's competitive advantage basically is writing an online, unencumbered encyclopedia, and providing useful data export so others can reuse and adapt it.

When it gets into things like the Foundation itself improving education in the third world, there are a lot of complexities where I don't think it really has a competitive advantage over many of the other charities who have been working on that problem for a long time. So if I had my say (which I don't), I'd focus more on making the data more easily exportable in various forms so third parties can take on those missions, rather than Wikimedia itself becoming some kind of global NGO working to bring knowledge to the developing world (a mission that seems uncomfortably missionary / "white man's burden" ish to me in the first place).

The situation has improved recently, but for years there was a bunch of hiring and spending on ambitious projects, but what I see as a core function of Wikipedia, the database dumps, which give the free-as-in-freedom practical effect (free licensing isn't that useful if you can't get the data) languished in a pretty poor state (with no full-history dump for a long time), which seems like misplaced priorities. Even today the dumps aren't all that user-friendly, even for technically inclined researchers, let alone less technically inclined adapters/remixers/reusers, and as far as I can tell, improving data export isn't one of the top Foundation priorities.
This is like a really nice, hand carved slide rule.
According to the article, the percentage of immigrants went from 2.3% to 4.6% between 2000 and 2010. According to Wikipedia, the number is 2.7%.

The fact that the variation between schools is low tells us very little. Supposing Finns score 546, and immigrants score 500, you'd expect the average score of a school with 30% immigrants to be 532. That's not so far off from 546, in spite of the fact that immigrants are scoring 46 pts worse.

Like it or not, the data says there is a huge gap between immigrants and non-immigrants. Maybe the vague wording of a reporter suggests differently, but so what?
Pela estrada fora da Route 66 - Estados Unidos da América
Then you veto the entire bill - explaining why.
Happy New Year Here Are Some Great One-Sentence Startup Pitches
And the same organization that says that about piracy , the SGAE, has increased its income every year, and this last year the managers have been taken to jail because they stole a lot of money and instead of giving it to the authors they were supposed to help they put it in their own fake businesses.Piracy is no bigger than in any other part but in Spain the little brothers of RIAA and company have been lying a lot through all the media till the point that a lot of people even believe it.
But isn't the percentage of users who pay what determines whether you're net ahead, and not the total number of paying users [1]?

If Dropbox has ten million users paying them $10 / month, but they have to support another billion free users for twenty cents per month each, they're screwed.

1. Assuming you're making enough to cover fixed expenses
Isn't the exact same principle true of Android, with the slight distinction being that any app can multitask, not just the 5 classes of apps? Android may also kill any app whenever it wants (and prior to 2.1 or 2.2 actually did that very often, requiring always on apps to have ongoing notifications). It's just not as strict as the iOS scheduler.
And write them down.

One of the teachings of the Masons, Mayans and Rosicrucians when setting goals; write them down, read that list often, keep that list secret. Rewrite the list often. Repeat.
"using varchar for a column that you know will only have numbers"

I've been bitten too many times by the recommendation of using numeric types for [0-9]+ data. Unless it's fundamentally going to involve arithmetic I say leave it as some kind of string type.
But who wants to be an 'average' founder? :)
I think the key thing people are forgetting is the V in MVP. It has to be viable. I keep seeing people building minimal products, but nothing that's viable.

It's also a factor of people spreading themselves too thin. You don't have to do a dozen features and make them all minimal. Do the 2 or 3 that are core to the application and make them full-featured. Who knows? That might be all you need.
20 Craziest Bikes Ever Made
Been a long time fan of Mixergy. Andrew has a talent for digging into the responses from founders to try to get real, honest answers out of them.
"Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten." (Nobody has the intension to build a wall) - Walter Ulbricht

Less than two months after that statement was made the work on the wall that separated Germany for decades started.

Never should a citizen have to trust a representative. The moment you have to democracy becomes impossible.
I believe this is something that EveryMe is trying to build (https://everyme.com/). I think it'd be neat, but I remember people being skeptical about it when I tried describing a similar idea I had awhile back.
I think there's been a historical shift in what the word 'Knighthood' means.

The knighthoods discussed here are earned and given for different public goods -- charity, business, entertainment, etc. Current Knights include Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney, and Sir Richard Branson. It's not heritable or noble, although of course the origins of the word itself are.

(Interestingly, 'Senator' has undergone the same historical shift -- it refers originally to the hereditary nobles who ran the Roman Empire. It's just managed to get away from the aristocratic origins. As have terms like 'Drugs Czar')

It is the case that it's the Queen who awards these titles, but in the UK almost everything does, officially -- she's a symbolic figurehead -- the powerless root node of the tree of government, if you like.

Does the US have any kind of equivalent system of recognition? France has the Légion d'Honneur, for instance, which is a non-aristocratic, republican order of merit.
The good thing about 2012 being a leap year is you can have a full day down to do maintenance and still meet a 99.997% 24*365 uptime (credit to @steve_evil for this).
I've got to disagree about not using varchar for a column you you know will only contain numbers. I'm assuming you mean something like the numbers of a phone number (dashes and parens have been scrubbed out). Even if a field will only contain numbers I won't use a numeric based field type unless there is the possibility that I would be using the value in some form of mathematical function. I might add and subtract from an account balance but I would never add or subtract from a Social Security Number or zip code.

(I don't keep to this rule for surrogate keys which will be int/bigint auto incrementing, even though I won't be doing any math on the values themselves)
Just out of curiosity; I have moved from IT management to consulting and design. I haven't been running production systems directly for the last 3 years.

What is Red hat doing to support this many employees?

Who is using Red Hat most? When I was at Lockheed, I was deploying CENTOS - as well as at other startups. I also used Ubuntu in a number of cases.

Are extreme scale companies, such as Google Facebook and Amazon not using their own custom builds?

I just can't figure out what that additional 1,000 employees would be doing.

EDIT: Ok after reading that article, and a few others; they are going for a big cloud push. With the acquisition on Gluster, it would appear that rolling native cloud-specific features into their offering makes it a strong candidate for cloud infrastructure on which others build their business and services.

I can also imagine that with the federal cloud strategy, where they see the ability to shift several billion in annual spending on systems to cloud based services, that redhat will be selling to those who are trying for that federal business.
Reading this, I am most shocked that there are still that many mapmakers -- the age of exploration is long past and I guessed that the few updates that are necessary (renaming the cities and updating country borders, add a new street here and there) was pretty much done by a couple of guys on a computer, somewhere.
He would have, but this bill included the funding for salaries of military personnel. He actually said, at the time that he signed it, that Congress had forced his hand.

Edit: OK I don't really know if he would have. But he did say that.
Ask HN: Are business podcasts a waste of time?
There seem to be dozens of podcast sites about business and entrepreneurship. I hate to call anyone out in particular, but just a few examples:

Stanford's Technology Ventures Podcasts
Mixergy
This Week in Startups
etc.

I've spent hundreds of hours watching these shows, and to be honest, I don't think I've actually learned anything. I'm starting to think that business is best learned by doing, not by endlessly consuming startup media. Which is a shame, because I really enjoy watching the above mentioned shows.

Anyone else feel the same way?
Looks good and mark it.
Apple default apps. At least when I had my iPod Touch 2G, some apps simply needed a device restart or they would not perform well at all. Simcity for example, was the one I always noticed.
Manage in what sense? If you're trying to sync. between multiple machines, one approach is to check in the /etc files in your home dir and symlink. Or are you looking for something else?
I'm looking forward to digging into this book as well. I've gone through most of R Graphs (Packt) and R Cookbook (O'Reilly) which are great for learning the nuts and bolts of R and R in Action looks to be the next step.
It's possible that some of those map layout problems are NP-hard, as similar problems in graph layout are proven NP-hard.

Point well taken either way.
Once augmented reality apps become more common I can imagine this becoming more popular. If you are a tourist and want to find stuff, or just see the ads you would be able to load up the ads layer and maybe even get discounts for your trouble.

If you want to just see the architectural facades as they were meant to be seen, then no tech required. I would love to see Vegas or New York, for instance, with the ads scrubbed and then be able to pull up dynamic ads with a phone or heads up display.
Less content could actually turn out to be better. For example, many of the content farms and linkbait blogs would disappear. That could be a good thing.
On a second thought, I guess there is a certain potential benefit (to the consumer / economy in general) of being able to walk into any restaurant and use WiFi. Still, I am happier to see changes like that come about naturally rather than being forced from above.
I'm unfamiliar with the boot camps you mention, and googling turns up primarily fitness related links. I did turn up http://devbootcamp.com/ but its scary to quit my job and spend 10 weeks + job search time without an income. Even still it sounds tempting and i will run some numbers to see if its possible to save enough in time.
Neat. Any thoughts on what the revenue model might look like? My first inclination is that this might not be a big enough problem, but there are a number of examples of recurring group activities where prior confirmation is useful - running groups are the first one that immediately came to mind.

I think the core of the idea is more "really simple RSVP" and much less about carpooling. With that focus, there are probably some really nice ways to simplify even further...
Glad we were able to help!

Members of the Zaarly team from pretty much every department sits on the livechat at different times. Everyone from marketing to design to development spends time on there to learn from actually talking to users first hand.

Your bug report will be delivered untarnished, I assure you (=

David Spinks
Enforcer of User Happiness
Censorship On Hacker News
Yahoo is red hat, I believe amazon is also. One of the reasons is why should even large companies want to focus on supporting an operating system (yahoo still sort of tries this with freebsd) when a company that does that and only that will probably do it better.
The correct comparison is European ancestry to European ancestry, excluding first and second generation, not "American whites" vs. Finns.

True. But since the number of European immigrants to the US and non-white native Finns is very low, the correct comparison is unlikely to differ significantly from the numbers given. So technically you are right, but I don't think there will be much difference in practice. Do you disagree?

It's also the best comparison currently possible, since I don't know of any data set that provides more granular data than what Sanandaji used. Do you?
Finally, a HN post where http://damnyouwilljessop.com/ is directly relevant :-)
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