skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a fantastic article, and really hit home with our project. The rules of deflationary economics has become common knowledge in most product and service industries, but in my industry (higher education), the opposite seems to be true. Every single legitimate competitor raises prices year after year, much faster than the rate of inflation. The few that don't (Khan, MITx, Stanford, Udemy, etc...) do so by scaling back the user experience, reducing difficulty and removing credentialing. This means the value proposition to the student, even at no cost, will not match the entrenched system. There is a market for this new class of product, but it is defining a new market rather than competing in the existing one.

I actually think the reason more companies don't follow the strategy he outlines is that it is just too damn tempting to take the quick cash. For example, the current market value of our product is in the $500-$2500 per credit hour ($2,000-$10,000 per class) range. We could charge in this range and be extremely profitable. Instead, we price our classes at $100 per credit hour, pay our professors a much higher percentage and choose to take a slimmer margin. In classical "next quarter" business terms, this is a very bad business decision. Doing so, however, opens up a number of opportunities that our competitors can't exploit. For instance:

We had to develop technology and workflow that dropped the cost of high quality interactive content down from $10,000 per hour (or more) to around $120 per hour. Now that we have that option, we can scale our course offerings extremely rapidly while keeping costs at a minimum.

Being able to offer a bachelors degree for less than $10k (masters less than half that) gives us options for creative financing of education that again, our much higher priced competition just don't have. Student loans no longer become necessary, even without subsidies. State and federal subsidies could easily cover the entire cost of tuition (California currently spends more than $12,000 per student per year just at the community college level). Also, as our first program is CS/SE, there are many companies with a vested interest in increasing the number of graduates and having access after they graduate. The point is, we expect to be able to offer most of our programs at no cost to the student within a few years.

Since our largest cost saving was in not having any buildings, we are not limited by a physical infrastructure when it comes to scaling. We also designed our system to benefit from having more students, which means the quality of our program will increase as we grow...something that can't be said about many physical campuses.

TL:DR; Higher education is about to enter the tornado.
our system inherently includes automatic fraud prevention

If you're willing to share more, I'm listening. PayPal has "automatic fraud prevention" in the sense that, if you do something that deviates from what they expect, they suspend your account. I assume you mean something different.

Also, I followed the Quora question to this related one: http://www.quora.com/How-are-Square-and-Stripe-able-to-accep... I'm still confused about one thing, though. I understand that PayPal is both an aggregator and the merchant of record. It sounds like Braintree is not and aggregator and not the merchant of record. But this poster claims that Stripe is an aggregator, but not the merchant of record, and I don't understand what that means.
wow. i was curious if this would work on my networked machine and it did. boom! that was pretty quick. a+ guys
CEOs are still paying taxes on their non-salary compensation.
New York City, NY, Full Time, Ruby Developer.

We are Plexus Entertainment, developers of gowatchit.com, a new start-up making waves in the film industry; and we're currently seeking talented ruby developers to join our small, dynamic team. We launched a little over a month ago, and have already gotten some exciting press, including a Pogie from New York Times columnist David Pogue. Please check the following link for details: http://www.gowatchit.com/pages/jobs
Nokia shipped 1.3 million Windows phones in ONE week

They can ship whatever they want, but how many were bought?
I've been in this business over 30 years and have seen many applications I've created sunsetted. It is all a part of the cycle. Instead of worrying about it I make new applications for new companies.
Terry Wilhelm, Homeless and Unemployed writes Mitt Romney
I would give it another go using Veirling's recipe. I use it as my primary laptop at this point.
Looks like hackers are not interested in buying:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3540335
I can't tell if this is supposed to be surprisingly high or surprisingly low.

Either way, it is worth pointing out (perhaps to the choir) that the stereotypes of dumb jocks and fat nerds are not realistic, if they ever were. Strong minds correlate with strong bodies.

Which reminds me, I need to get back in my routine, and go out there and run today after work. :)
Kudos for using begging the question correctly, rather than the popular usage as another way of saying raising the question.
no, the hype is too much. According to Ben Graham you want to buy stock when a company is under-appreciated. Facebook has already reached god like status
Another problem is that gaming the system is often a faster route to a reputation than making meaningful comments.

So someone making an honest attempt to discuss unpopular opinions gets shut out but someone making relatively meaningless platitudes to the group gets cheered on.

For a small group that isn't interested in those opinions anyway it wouldn't matter, but it limits the usefulness of that reputation elsewhere.
"We had 845 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of December 31, 2011."

That blows some estimates out of the water.
Awesome job. Screenr.com uses the same java method to record my screen and it _never_ works, this was up and running in lessss than 20 seconds. Would love to see a recording featured added.
Why don't you defend your points instead of bringing up new ones? Trying to muddy the waters of a losing proposition?
One privacy enhancement which would be nice would be to see a list of IPs viewing the screen. Not sure how easy it would be to implement, but would give me total peace of mind to know only 1 IP is viewing (if that's what I'm expecting).

Stellar job though - no barrier to use whatsoever.
Interestingly, Google 2011 revenues are $37b, profits $9.7b, ratio almost exactly the same. Google also has 10x the number of employees as FB. Of course FB growth is much faster.
10 Giant things less valuable than Facebook
WikiLeaks May Move Servers to International Waters to Avoid Shutdown
"Did everyone but me know this?"

Anyone who knows Unix you would know this.
So what exactly is the purpose or benefit?
Ah the power of opensource.. This post exemplifies why I love open sourced projects, as stated the maintainers knew of the bug but it fell to the wayside and this fine gentlemen took it upon himself to fix it. We have to fight Oracle/Cisco to come up with patches for small subtle bugs at work. If the bug is not critical/widespread patches take forever.
Show HN: My afternoon project - a pleasant viewer for the "who is hiring?" posts
I remember that when Zynga IPO'd, they filed for $1 billion.

Does that mean that Facebook would consider themselves only 5 times more valuable than Zynga? This seems like a pretty conservative stance (it feels like Facebook is worth more than just 5 times Zynga). Is this to Facebook's advantage?

Sorry if these questions are a bit simplistic, I have a very light grasp of these concepts.
Has anyone had luck installing Linux distributions other than Ubuntu? I'm thinking Arch Linux may be great for this.
Google fined in France for making Google Maps free
Great Job!

Do you have an API?

I just dropped you an email :)
On a related note, Mike Dirolf, former MongoDB engineer, has a nice post on MongoDB data modeling on his new venture's (fiesta.cc) blog, which I found very helpful:

http://blog.fiesta.cc/post/11319522700/walkthrough-mongodb-d...
SEEKING WORK - Remote

Combo designer/developer (more front-end). I am a generalist who can sketch and design your UI, turn that into a prototype, wire it to the backend and deploy it. Though I work best (fastest?) when I'm working on the front-end, I am not afraid to dive in and mess with models.

* Ruby on Rails

* CoffeeScript

* Backbone

* jQuery, jQueryMobile

* HTML5/CSS3/Haml/SASS/Compass

* Git

Portfolio: http://impressar.io/a/2gx4tvs8iei

Email bobby at impressar.io

Location: Philippines
TPB is also blocked in Finland, including mirrors and IP addresses. But this mirror does work.
Can you tell me what the syntactical differences are between LESS and SCSS? Because they seem to do basically the same thing, as far as I can see. I use LESS right now, but for no good reason- I just happened upon it first.
I don't understand why the "disemvoweling" was ironic? That was something that she was already well known for doing on her own blog.

I actually stopped reading boingboing after the Violet Blue thing, because their response to it seemed so fundamentally dishonest.
That is such a great app! I love how simple it is to share the link and there's no need to download anything.

Are there any plans to share the screen of an android phone? I think that would be pretty fun.
From the general state of things, I'm under the impression that shorting their stock might actually be a wiser position.
"Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people."

Hopefully Facebook's success will see more and more companies moving to this sort of management style.
The idea is that by letting founders sell some of their stock early, investors and founders will be aligned and founders will be less likely to want or demand an earlier, safer exit that doesn't meet their investors' expectations. Basically, it lets founders get a few hundred K now so that they're more willing to try to go for broke later.

Founders Fund have even branded a share structure which allows easier conversion of co-founder (sometimes actually called Series FF) shares to shares of a later series sellable to investors in future rounds. I think that trying to grant early liquidity to founders has been common for at least two years and was a cause of major controversy during the Groupon IPO.

See also:
http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2007/12/22/what-is-serie...
http://www.quora.com/What-is-Series-FF-stock-and-how-does-it...
> and must act in good faith in a manner he reasonably believes to be in the best interests of our stockholders. As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Zuckerberg is entitled to vote his shares, and shares over which he has voting control as a result of voting agreements, in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally.

So he must act in good faith except when he doesn't. Got it.
I'm reading the Intelligent Investor. Graham is extremely conservative and demands, among other things, a 20 year history of dividends and a low P/E.

I don't think he'd touch internet stock in general because it's here today and gone tomorrow.
There would need to be a mechanism which prevents insincere candidates from looting the common campaign financing pool.

As you pointed out, the challenge is to find the least bad one. In this country, many health plans require a co-pay of $10-$20 in order to see a doctor. The purpose of the co-pay is to deter would-be patients from flooding doctors with trivial inquiries who would then be able to bill insurers for their (wasted) time.

So, yes, a co-pay is a disincentive, but arguably less so than the disincentives present in the system it's proposed to replace.
Hah, that does sound interesting, but the last thing I need is a repetitive strain injury in my eye muscles.
Pirate gone to heaven
Try SCSS instead? It provides much better errors for debugging (by virtue of not being javascript-based).

"when it goes wrong, which it does regularly" requires more substance though; LESS or SCSS have never presented a real problem for designers or developers I've worked with. These are valuable tools that address a deficiency when crafting CSS, and should not be discredited so quickly.
I have heard statistics but do not have a source that the university system in isreal is better positioned to perform tech transfer. The US schools are more focused on research reports where as Israeli schools are more focused on selling and building technology.

This is evidenced by the type of start up out of Israel which is patent style tech over social, web tech.

There are US schools pushing to potentially reward professors not just for research but also selling technology.
history of dividends? I guess he wouldn't buy Berkshire then...
Rust has typeclasses as well.
> but not inappropriate for adults

Plenty of people think it is for adults as well. But adults can choose to override their feeling on the matter (and that's what makes it so exciting). That's why clinical or medical depictions of nudity don't have the same feel.

> any private emotional moment between two people

An emotional moment is not inherently private though. Many moments are, but many are not, so it's diluted.

> it is fairly self-evident that extreme graphic violence isn't appropriate for children, though not because it's private.

Yup, and since it's a different type of issue, parents will permit a certain degree of violence - it depends of the type of violence. But for sexual material they will veto anything, and not try to determine how sexual it is.
Key information on revenue is on page 50. 85% of revenue comes from ads, which grew 69% Y/Y mostly driven by user growth (39% Y/Y) and showing a bunch more ads starting Q4 2010:

2011 Compared to 2010.
Revenue in 2011 increased $1,737 million, or 88% compared to 2010. The increase was due primarily to a 69% increase in advertising revenue to $3,154 million. Advertising revenue grew due to a 42% increase in thenumber of ads delivered and an 18% increase in the average price per ad delivered. The increase in ads delivered was driven primarily by user growth. The number of ads delivered was also affected by many other factors including product changes that significantly increased the number of ads on many Facebook pages beginning in the fourth quarter of 2010, partially offset byan increase in usage of our mobile products, where we do not show ads, and by various product changes implemented in 2011that in aggregate modestly reduced the number of ads on certain pages. The increase in average price per ad delivered was affected by factors including improvements in our ability to deliver more relevant ads to users and product changes that contributed to higher user interaction with the ads by increasing their relative prominence.
I think you have gravely misunderstood me. It's not necessary for the client to expire their entire cache all at once - this would be incredibly foolish.

If you make a GET request against a REST interface then you should cache the results of that request and note the datetime you made it.

If you need to make a subsequent request against the same resource then you can first make a HEAD request to get only the headers. By comparing timestamps you can see whether or not the resource has changed since you last accessed it.

If the REST interface is appropriately designed then the "last changed" value will propagate upwards from the leaves of the tree towards the API root. So caching the results of requests can save you from making an immense number of requests.
Microsoft offers alternatives to Google products amid privacy changes
Could they tie Android Market comments to Google+ identities? Would that fix anything?
It will be interesting to see how much staff, if any leaves after this.
I like timelapses like these, because often, finished work can appear obvious to people who aren't designers. They can't imagine that it would take several hours to complete something seemingly simple or minimal. But watching a designer work reveals interesting parts of the thought process and the myriad decisions involved.
I'm curious as to what facebook did to generate $382k of revenue in 2004. Seems like a great start for a company of their size at the time. IIRC, they didn't turn on ads for a while afterwards.

Link: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001193125120...
Until you find out that the borrow costs eat away 99% of the profits. This is what happened with groupon initially ...
I thoroughly enjoyed watching it; I've never seen the process a designer goes through when creating posters like this. It's what I imagine watching a code cast would be like if you have no programming experience.
Beautiful product, dead simple and I'd use this over Join.me which I see as your closest competition for quick screen sharing.

GOOG & Skype are also getting a lot faster on their feet in this space.

I'm intimately familiar with this landscape as we're preparing to launch our FREE webinar platform, http://www.MeetingBurner.com, in the very near future after ~1yr in beta.

Our target is the "webinar" space which includes all the trimmings like registrations, invitations, bundled conference lines / skype / telephony, analytics, pay walls, etc.

But we have a solid contingent of users that just want screen sharing 90% of the time and I love your focus on "2 clicks to start a meeting" etc.

Elegant solution and good luck.
I wanted to be a billionaire during high school (I still wouldn't mind it but it's not a driving goal). Wanting and becoming and doing are very different things. How many engineers and scientists were high school athletes? I'd be interested in that percentage.
Coming from seven years of Subversion, I am amazed every time I 'cherry pick' a fix in Git to another branch. Subversion could never do that, it's file based versioning vs Git's content awareness is a paradigm shift. Subversion now seems to be nothing more than a file backup system.

Linus Torvalds on Git:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
This reminds me of how totally ADD Google was before Larry Page became CEO. It just started all sorts of shiny puppy projects, or even bought companies like Piknik to support those puppies [1]. Google today is a much more focussed animal. It is Google+ and social.

Given the Motorolla acquisition and the massive growth of mobile, I guess Android is still safe for now.

[1] http://cr-48.wikispaces.com/Video+Gallery
Or using the hstore? I would also like to hear an answer on this.
Once you flash the BIOS, I suspect Brad's driver fix would work regardless.
The IPO was to raise $5 billion. In other words, they are issuing new shares of stock with a total worth of $5 billion. How this relates to the total valuation has yet to be seen.
$5b is the amount being raised, not the total valuation.
Facebook IPO Reveals Zuckerberg’s A Daddy’s Boy
Zuckerberg's letter is really fantastic -http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/facebook-ipo-letter/.

I'm really proud of him for clearly and loudly representing the hacker way when the whole world is watching.
Maybe to pay homage to Steve Jobs? Otherwise, I dunno.
Not everything needs to have a 'community'. A depressing majority of the web using public are idiots and having a no-consequence comment area just encourages them to leave their garbage for you to clean up.

All these people here making earnest suggestions about building comunities - you really should think about what went on here. Communities occur when people have something in common they care about, I doubt historic letters was ever going to be one of those. A community of people who collect historic letters? Perhaps. A community of people who just read them from time to time? Don't be so stupid.
Pearson-Incubated Startup Alleyoop Launches To Gamify Adaptive Learning
Its a bit more than a "want". They are telling this to colleges that offer that major, are taking the necessary coursework, etc.

To your question: I'll have beRecruited revisit in a few years when we have more students graduating college than still in it.
What’s Mark Zuckerberg’s Salary? $483,333 a Year.
Interesting.
The intelligence driving the object doesn't have to be artificial. Usually the local object is acting as an agent for a human user. Common examples are REPLs and browsers.
No, the 12% includes advertisements Zynga buys from Facebook, but not ads that appear on their pages.

"In 2011, Zynga accounted for approximately 12% of our revenue, which amount was comprised of revenue derived from payments processing fees related to Zynga’s sales of virtual goods and from direct advertising purchased by Zynga. Additionally, Zynga’s apps generate a significant number of pages on which we display ads from other advertisers."
Excuse me?

Exactly where did I say that "people who support IP are just like those slave owners"? (Hint: nowhere)

For the record, I happen to be quite a strong supporter of IP in general (and no, I don't support slavery). However, I also know that IP needs to evolve if it's to retain its value, and that this evolution demands a change in the underlying concept of property itself (a concept which, obviously, extends waaay past IP).

That puts me in direct conflict with people who don't want to make changes in this broader concept a part of the conversation regarding IP, and who back up this resistance by advancing a notion of property rights in general as being inflexible, absolute, and beyond question.

Obviously, this absolutist position has a dramatic narrowing effect on any IP-specific discussion, which is the whole point of taking that position in the first place. It is a suppressive tactic. In THIS regard, what we're seeing now is very similar to what happened in America in the 18th Century; SOME people who were in favor of slavery attempted to steer the conversation about it by advancing an inflexible, absolutist idea of property in general, promoting it as a socially necessary good. Then, like now, the assumption was that the status quo could be protected if property as an evolving concept were kept off the table, and property as a non-evolving concept were kept on it.

And THAT is what I'm talking about. I'm not making ridiculous claims that IP and slavery themselves are commensurate, or that people who support one are like people who support the other. And frankly, you'd have to be very careless or dishonest in your reading to assert that I am.

No, what I am (and have been) talking about are very specific tactics surrounding the rhetorical treatment of the idea of property in general. I'm noting that these tactics appeared when slavery was still seen as defensible, and I'm noting that remarkably similar tactics and treatments are appearing in IP debates today - especially ones in which people are trying to justify increasingly extreme measures to protect an outdated status quo.

These people - who can come from Malibu as easily as they come from Mississippi - aren't simply scared of change. After all, lots of people scared of change don't resort to falsifying the historic flexibility of property as a concept before using it to frame a debate. Only a vociferous and dangerous subset choose to employ this particular strategy.

Fortunately, the historic record contains many examples of this very aggressive response. And because there's a clear pattern to it, this record can be mined for counter examples that show how it was eventually defeated. Of course, it helps to have specific points of reference. Vague and neutral generalities help no one except those who are on the wrong side of this in the first place.

And yes, this is a partisan view. That's because the absolutist idea of inflexible property is also a partisan view. The moment you hear it, you should know that you're dealing with a person conducting their own non-neutral and highly offensive attack, and you should respond accordingly.

"Go to hell" is putting it politely.
Presumably he must act in good faith until he resigns from the board.