skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I am genuinely baffled as to why any developer would want to encourage this kind of behaviour. Why willingly go from earning 100% to 70%?"

The answer is in the article: to keep one's customers happy and make some money in the progress (apparently, some customers are willing to pay to get the same software in an App Store version)

Also, having all your customers 'on' App Store applications means less hassle and costs w.r.t. the distribution of upgrades (there is extra red tape, too, but it may, in the end, be a win), may make it easier to sell add-ons (Are there in-app purchases in Mac OS X apps?), and may mean less support because users will upgrade to the latest version sooner.
You are clearly someone who is obsessed with racial issues and in particular, issues that have some kind of data backing up what seems to be your theory that blacks are inferior to others. Sure, wrap it up in fancy round-about sentences and quotes from well known race-baiting sites, but do expect to be called out on it. Wrapping up racist statements in PC words doesn't make them any better.

I'm done with this argument, I don't think you deserve much more of my time.
I created http://dudmail.com - a disposable email site that allows you to automatically forward emails, and permits attachments.

It's not been as much of a success as I was hoping (currently 1200 registered users, with quite a large number more of unregistered users), but it was a project that I started and finished =)
Those cookies sound pretty consumable to me :)

This is a good insight, and I echo it. My wife loves Pinterest and she gets new cooking and decorating ideas from it all the time.
There's a shop around the corner from the US embassy in London that does all the needed photos. 2 min walk, very affordable and very friendly. The people in the embassy recommended him.
This brings to mind a fantastic article about how to thrive as a knowledge worker.

'My Life as a Knowledge Worker' by Peter Drucker:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19970201/1169.html
Yes, as I remember it, that link used to be correct, years ago. However, the original site has disappeared.
Created a fun book recommendation site for kids: http://bookoneer.com
It's a very thoughtful post, they've put the usual Fog Creek thought into this. But I suggest that one year is not enough time to properly evaluate the policy.

For one thing, I wouldn't say this is known good until the organization has demonstrated to itself that it can recruit / train / inculcate new people into this system. I'd suggest they'll also want to keep an eye on how the sales team evolves over time -- habits die hard, but they do die, and it may be that the commission system served to ensure that some positive habits were maintained.

For another, this may be suited to their competitive niche, or even this particular moment in their market penetration. If the product is selling itself, if the market is growing for everyone, then commissions may not help and may be counterproductive to the image and relationships they want to build. The situation may change if the market position matures and stabilizes.

I'm not saying any of these _will_ be issues. I'm just saying that corporate cultures develop over periods of years, and that comp systems are important signals into that development. It sounds like this is going great, and good management will always be looking at how corporate culture is moving -- but I would think management would want to keep a careful eye out for unintended consequences of this for quite some time.

(And they may well be doing just that. But the post seems a little more definitive.)
Start your own competing service then. Seriously. Then you'll understand why things are the way anigbrowl explains. The one "divorced from reality" is you. There is significant cost associated with PayPal's operation. Their management of all this risk is what earns them their profits.

PayPal provides a service and you are getting benefits from it at a relatively low cost. They are taking risk on from you selling stuff that is making them very little money (trinkets and baubles, as you described).

I'm not saying PayPal are a bunch of saints, or that they don't have some policies which aren't right. As a musician, I find the situation described in the article to be abhorrent, and it's behavior like this that prevents me from using PayPal except as a last resort. But what you are saying basically boils down a temper tantrum about how things should be different. Well, if you have an idea as to how to do this in a way that doesn't bankrupt you, there's your entrepreneurial opportunity. Go change the world.
I worked in a commission sales environment and had a completely different experience. Probably your company management sucked. As it is I had my reservations about my management too, but the payment of commission has the neat effect on focusing attention on boosting their bottom line and diverting oneself away from most of the other dubious metrics they liked to distract me with.

I raised an eyebrow when Joe referred to system-gaming by "making fake phone calls to hit call numbers". If you're incentivising staff with ensuring they adhere to largely meaningless metrics like that you're doing it wrong (it's more or less exactly analogous to judging programmers by their lines of code). Beating them with a stick for not meeting those sort of targets is "coercion", not to mention requiring data-collection time sink; offering a carrot for things sold, which presumably requires tracking anyway, isn't.

Commission sales specifically attracts people who consider themselves to be better than average salespeople. Yes, sometimes they have sociopathic tendencies (although they tend to be the ones who only think they're good). Yes, without going to the ridiculous lengths of some recruiters, good salespeople do tend to have a more mercenary attitude towards work than programmers (they don't have weekend cold calling projects either!), just as programmers on average have somewhat different motivating factors at work from investment bankers, academics and actual rock stars. Even if greed isn't always good, sales roles with an absence of commission and commensurately higher salary incentivises those who suck at selling (or who despite impressive credentials suck at selling your product specifically) to stick around longer. If you're a startup, you're probably not able to offer your staff as attractive a package as Fog Creek or select your salespeople so successfully in the first place.

I agree with the original poster that sales jobs are a good idea for hackers considering starting a startup
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My Life as a Knowledge Worker, by Peter Drucker
That would imply that commissions are the only way of measuring performance. Everyone in a company has to be accountable to their performance, why should sales be any different?
I hope you guys plan to release numbers progressively throughout the year on how many people are successfully continuing with the course?
I think it's a stretch to say the author is wrong. He was very clear in stating that aren't necessarily bad, just that they come with costs. In his case it looks like the costs outweighed the benefits.
The Javascript Guide to Objects, Functions, Closures and Scope
> The nice thing about vi is its ubiquity.

I could name a very long list of things that are ubiquitous, yet are not nice at all.
I think it would be fine if it added a note in parenthesis clarifying that. The question you have posed, whether the small benefit outweighs the many risks, is a valid one, but one that needs to have the premise of the small benefit established.

I suppose, in a purely theoretical discussion corner-stoned by Ariely's research, the question becomes whether sales is a more mechanical or creative task. I would argue that in a split sales/customer service environment it could very well become the former. Whether that is desirable is dependent upon one's business model.

Absolutes are probably not the answer - there will be models, e.g. Groupon or real estate, where sales commissions may be well worth it. Businesses that depend on relationships, however, may want to re-think a system that encourages maximising the rewarded variable at the expense of all others. Bringing light to the assumption that salespeople require commission, though, is a nice place to start - thanks for that.
Interview with Josh Feast Founder of Cogito Health
In addition to client work...

* Created http://jspkg.com for hosting javascript packages. A sort of plugins.jquery alternative, except for all JS projects. This is still a very active work in progress that I've been working on for about 7 months now.

* Created the jquery dynatable plugin as a semantic HTML5 replacement for jquery datatables (http://jspkg.com/packages/dynatable).

* Rewrote basically the entirety of the rails/jquery-ujs adapter (kind of a creation, right?) that's now included in Rails (https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs and https://rubygems.org/gems/jquery-rails).

* Rewrote the entire remotipart gem for ajax file uploads in rails (https://rubygems.org/gems/remotipart) (again, I'm assuming the rewrite counts, since it essentially became an entirely new project that happened to have the same goals as the original).

I also contributed to a lot of other open-source projects like the ruby carrierwave gem, citizenry, ruby sunspot (solr gem), ruby-git gem, and some others.

I consider these contributions to be pretty much on-par with things created, because whenever I want to create something, my first step is seeing if there may be some existing project that even comes close, to which I could contribute instead of starting something new for people to keep up with. So really the only difference between creating and contributing is whether or not I can find something of similar quality and purpose that already exists.
I am still getting emails from my domains that were brought transferred out during the last week in December. I assume that this count is based off of when the domain is actually transferred out as opposed to the date that the process is initiated.
I think you're getting downvoted because you're ignoring the point.

The point isn't that the "Pagerank" system is broken, it's that the "placing quality search results above irrelevant casual mentions" system is broken.

That you continued to reply as though you didn't read the parent remarks is furthering your downvoting.

I don't agree in downvoting on that premise personally (and haven't here), but I certainly understand it, and would state that it's at least better than getting downvoted for having posted an unpopular opinion.

Had you done a better job of explaining your position, or differing it from your original statement when dealt replies that furthered their original claims, then you might have had a chance to recoup some of the cost.

Beating a dead horse on a post that already got downvoted is likely only going to get you more downvotes, and rightfully so.
Anonymous Threatens Sony, Spares PSN Customers
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "how easy it is"?
Physicists create wrinkle in time
Great questions! To be honest I don't have enough knowledge of the MRI internals yet to be able to answer these 100% correctly. Maybe I'll write a follow up post or an update to this one explaining these issues when I have time for more research.

But for today:

1. str2 = str doesn't actually create a new string. RString represents a string value, not a string object. So str2=str creates a new RString because that essentially defines what str2's value refers to… Think of RString as an internal pointer to the value that str or str2 is referring to. Sorry - not a good explanation :(

2. How are shared RStrings modified? Not sure yet, but I'm curious to find out. Will let you know on my site somehow.

3. Yes, simply calling str2 = str or in a variety of other ways will do it.
You should use a kill-a-watt and measure it. Probably less than you think. Laptops already on the edge of their thermal envelopes, anything above their low steady state (browsing, listening to music) will cause the fans to spin.
While I'm as much a fan of productivity pr0n as the next guy, every time I look at an org.mode customization walkthrough or something similar I'm reminded of this classic blog post by Merlin Mann: http://www.43folders.com/2005/05/18/because-buying-new-runni...
I completely agree, but it's also extremely common. A lot of people get lured in by the equity.

But do the math -- 1% equity on a $10M acquisition is $100k. Even 5% on a $20M acquisition is just $1M.

Does anyone have data on how many people made more than $1M on a web start up acquisition or IPO in the past five years?

You need to get market rate, or darn close, or founder-level equity.
How will CES cope without porn stars?
Are you kidding me... the Courier font?? I can't read that. Sorry.
It grants you permissions above and beyond what you'd otherwise have and doesn't remove any existing rights, so my understanding is that you're offering no consideration to the licensor and so it's not a contract.
There isn't a difference; your post (to me) implied that people working on more complex deals should be more highly rewarded. My argument is more that removal of commission-based compensation doesn't necessarily remove the concept of reward for hard work. All it does is decouple it from each individual sale. Better people who work better / smarter (should) still be compensated appropriately.

I completely agree with your assessment of sales commissions elsewhere--and I think we've all seen enough of a share of unfair, incompetent management to understand the rationale. That said, I also agree that there is some serious baggage that comes with commission-based compensation and it's worth a look to dump it.
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Where Starbucks Went Wrong in Its Coffee Pricing
E-mail is so broken fundamentally, that it's not even funny. I'm surprised more people aren't trying to replace it.

E-mail's based on the idea that it is free to message me and bother me and take a few precious seconds of my stream of consciousness.

If it's free to email people, then of course spammers will flood email channels with their deals and scams.

Ideally, I want a communications platform where only my 200 or so friends, co-workers and friends of friends can message me for free. Anybody else who wants to contact me has to send the message with a $1 bitcoin (interrupting my stream of conciousness price would be custom set by me, so lil' wayne would probably set his price at $75).

If the message from a stranger I got was in fact a cool dude I met at a party last weekend following up on that cat picture, then I'd click "reply and return" to give him back that bitcoin. If I see that the message is from a prince, I'd just ignore it and go buy some gum or something with his precious $1.

The current horrible e-mail architecture feeds giants like gmail, microsoft, yahoo b/c everyone is going to get tons of junkmail and people around 1999 had to start moving to cloud based providers who did free spam detection to parse through people's emails (Outlook Express sucked at spam cleaning). Problem is the web giants are snorting in everyone's private communications. It's as if the US Postal Service offered to deliver all mail for free, but in exchange opened everything and read it and if they thought this is something you shouldn't read or if this is marketing propaganda, so they won't deliver it to the recipient. I think pretty much everyone would think that's a crappyly architected postal service, but I guess with email we shouldn't be thinking about those kinds of things. Let's just figure out some new technical protocol instead, after IMAP and POP and SMTP will be replaced by SPDY or RESTful HTTP right? Yeah, let's build that instead.

True, e-mail is a universal platform, but it sucks.
That you'd still see an outcry is an indication, I think, that you need to do even more to notify people. If you're going to charge 4-5x your normal rate, you need to make sure people know it before they accept it. Have the driver tell them, "We're currently charging 4x our normal rate, just so you know." Make the app pop it a sample fare in big numbers. Do something to make it absolutely blindingly obvious, not an alert that you can dismiss without really reading.

If there's no reasonable way to accomplish that, then perhaps that's a sign that the surcharge is inherently unreasonable.

Even if everybody was completely aware of what they were getting into, there would probably still be an outcry. But it would be a completely different outcry, along the lines of "you're charging too much and taking advantage of people" instead of "you completely ripped me off".
Outsourcing Jobs
I didn't have that at all. I did did commissioned sales for several years, and then I worked at a company as an engineer that had commissioned sales guys. Yes, you had to hand out the new customer leads equitably or people would freak out. But none of the stuff you mentioned happened. That sounds like a toxic work environment.

edit: I worked at a place where the salary was enough to cover me and the commission was a bonus of 50-150% on top of the salary. I always knew I was at least starting at a living wage. If I was starting at 0, it might be different. Also, we would do 1-2 sales per day, so the volume was high enough that a lead here or there didn't matter. But in businesses where a sales guy makes 3 or 5 sales a month, I can see why each individual sale can be fought over.
You need to get market rate, or darn close, or founder-level equity.

I have done the math, and I agree 100% :)
Facebook's highlighted stories and subscriptions don't fit.
Still a work in progress, and none outside of my fulltime job:
FitBolt (fitbolt.com) - workday health & wellness platform. Gives you alerts/actions/notifications with posture corrections, exercises, stretching, health & nutrition tips. Currently have a web version, firefox & chrome plugin, and pokki (desktop) version
I think the piece is overly optimistic about the prospects of coding becoming common place. We have dealt with the software crisis since the inception of software and up till now, no one has proposed an even half way plausible plan on how to address it. As such until someone solve the software crisis in a measurable way that can improve the quality and predictability of code. It will remain a craft, as such only the most skilled craftsmen will be of real value, with the less skill providing solutions that are far more expensive to maintain.

As well the for the majority of the population, writing software is just not attractive it's what technical minded people do, which is 10% of the population at best. Couple that with the fact that the industry up until now has not been that attractive to females and you start to see that there are a bunch of technical and cultural issue working against coding becoming the next mass profession.

The majority of people look at a logic puzzle and see frustration, they don't see a challenge that is interesting to solve. The minority that do, have the spark that is needed to code. Figure out how to give everyone that spark, and you may have a flame, but you still have to deal with all the other issues once you get the fire going.
Thanks for your response. What I meant was that him not knowing Google tailors results has no bearing on his gripes about

1. not being able to link to the original article,

2. Google favoring Google+ posts in search results overall,

3. and the Google+ interface looking and working terribly.

I used poisoning the well because it was a related ad hominem: you're saying him being wrong in this one instance means he is wrong in these other unrelated instances.
Isn't the whole point of Uber that by requiring you to book a ride using their app, they're not classified as taxis and therefore sidestep all of the associated regulation?
Navigating the Tablet Market
Sony's Tablet S has its individual merits, but is it more suited to your individual needs than Apple's iPad?
so what's their business model?

i ask because it seems like the kind of thing that would be worth knowing before signing up for something free. if i am paying for something then i am the client, but if not, am i - or my data - being used somehow?
I don't think the data is meaningful at all.

I moved about 40 domains on the 29th. None of them will show up in that data.

Either I was using them, so I was already using a nameserver other than domain control, or I was not using them, so I don't care what the nameserver settings are and I let the new registrar copy them across. Those domains still show up on domaincontrol.com, but are no longer registered through GoDaddy.

It's possible that porting to different registrars has different side effects, but at least for my domains ported to name.com this data will show no change. I'm not surprised then that the data shows no statistically important change.
It's probably also a factor that a lot of people were fairly inebriated on New Year's Eve. :)

It's one thing to create UX for the optimal user to notify them of the price surge, but people celebrating New Year's Eve?
I will be trying this out when I get home tonight! My ][e is as fully functional as it was in the early 80s when I got it.

I'm glad someone remembers these games. I still have a good chunk of these games (some legit copies, others pirated via Copy II+ sector editing). Really glad Bilestoad made the list.

Wish list:

Aztec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_(video_game))

Below the Root (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Below_the_Root_(video_game))

Championship Load Runner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Championship_Lode_Runner)

Captain Goodnight and the Islands of Fear

Conan: Hall of Volta
This might be a shameless plug, but I have created a javascript markdown editor a few months ago. I had some problems with the wmd editor (weird quirks and bugs) and generally wanted to play around with js. So, uedit[0] was born. You can use the demo page[1] to see it in action. It works in ie6+ and doesn't require any other js libraries.

List items are added automatically and you can use shortcuts for the most frequently used markdown tags such as bold, italic, code listing, images etc. It also uses it's own undo/redo manager for more granular control.

[0]: https://github.com/amir-hadzic/uedit

[1]: http://amir-hadzic.github.com/uedit
A Message from Rep. Howard Coble about SOPA
And there are guys who will take your cell phone, etc, and hold it for a small fee outside the US consulate in Rio.
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For Android at least, check out "Locale":
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.twofortyfouram.loc...
http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel#TOC-How... Thanks to @mark_reeder