skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a software vendor who wants to be benevolent, but not rip myself off, I really like this about Freemium: do “good” and “well” at the same time.
(see links to pg's "be good" at the end)

But for selling software, if you were truly benevolent, wouldn't you give it all away for free? Denying people who can't pay reduces the good you are doing - doesn't it?

Maybe an answer is that there's nothing wrong when people pay - because then they do get the value you created. It's only an issue when people cannot pay, and you deny them, because it's only in that case that your potential for doing good is unfulfilled.

I think the latter case only happens when (1) your prices are too high for the value particular users get from your software; or (2) too high for their wallet.

I think the solution to the first problem is to price your software (roughly) in proportion to the value customers get from it. E.g. "per seat" or "per server" or "volume-base" pricing does this. It's better to under-price than overprice (in reality, there's a huge range of values that customers get from a product, some get much more value from it than others - if you price too low, some get a fantastic bargain; too high, and you deny some).

For the second problem, some kind of charity version is appropriate, where you give it away to someone who just can't afford to pay for the value they would get from it. e.g. student versions. In economic theory, a loan would probably be appropriate; but a gift is nicer and simpler.

These problems become simple if your software actually helps people earn or save money themselves - then it's a non-issue that they can and should pay for it.

essay: http://paulgraham.com/good.html

video: http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-graham-at-startu...)
Think about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy if marketers get fired and become factory workers then the output of goods can increase. If factory workers are fired and become marketers the output of goods decrease. In total it matters what people are doing even if a person cares less about what their job is than the fact they have a job.
What do you do if the users abandon you?
Mayor Daley: Prepare For Mass Layoffs
One interesting difference is that if you are learning a proof, then you know when you are successful. At least for my research, I generated a bunch of small cases of the theorem I was trying to prove, then tried to learn the general case. If I was successful, I would have a proof of the original conjecture. When learning programs from some data, you can always test your program against the data but never can be sure that you are generalizing the data properly.
"I don't see iTunes as much more than a well written library program with an MP3 player tacked on."

What else do you want from a MP3 player?
Way back in 2004, I ran a little experiment with Google -- over a period of a week, I searched for an entire dictionary of ~110k individual English words and recorded how many hits Google returned for each.

Of course, a word can appear on a page multiple times. That's why, I think, folks used to ignore the stopwords. They introduced noise when trying to access the content words. Now, with span constraints, you can incorporate them into the analysis. So "a matrix" and "the matrix" returns very different results, even without quotes.
It makes sense... why not? Maybe it could be as good as Cuil??
I've had a lot of luck building scientific / research tools in Python / NumPy with Matplotlib. Integrating Fortran / C / C++ code is extremely easy as well, things like Cython / Pyrex also ease that quite a bit as well.

My biggest complaint about Matlab (besides the licensing) is that it's just a horrendously bad programming language (if you can call it a language at all). Any self-respecting hacker deserves better.

Matlab you have to buy a toolbox for everything (e.g. SQL database interaction). There is not (for most applications) you could want to do that Matlab can do and Python + NumPy can't.
Have you checked out memcachedb? It's a wrapper around the berkleydb that uses the memcahed protocol (so support is already available in your language of choice). They're showing benchmark stats that meet your requirements (> 1MM writes per minute on a single box, obviously more boxes = more writes): http://memcachedb.org/benchmark.html

It's simply key-value pair storage but it sounds like that might be all you need.
Most universities have studen license servers for Matlab afaik. And, Matlab is really really, annoyingly powerful. You've got almost anything to try your ideas, implement an academic paper. But, it is slow (execution time).

Prototype with Matlab, implement with C++. That's what I usually prefer. I am not a Python expert, just learning it. but I think it will be slower than C, and less powerful than Matlab, from my perspective of working.
Balsamiq wrote a good piece about what to do for case #2:

http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=382
Yeah, it was interesting to see my name there (I didn't post this on Hacker News myself). I'm not quite on BillG's level yet - give me a few more years :-)
That is an artfully done straw man argument. Freemium is about advertising not price.
PR Passion – Why Startups Should Never Outsource Public Relations
Explains why startups should keep public relations in-house during their early days.
> My biggest complaint about Matlab (besides the licensing) is that it's just a horrendously bad programming language (if you can call it a language at all). Any self-respecting hacker deserves better.

I second this. I found it extremely hard to work in Matlab during the day after spending hours the night before writing personal stuff in Python.
Google adds voice and video to Gmail
I'd think that speaking up against the status quo is fine, as long as your goals are in line with the new administration's goals. It would make no sense to appoint someone who wants to push an opposing agenda.
Website Scaling Day-By-Day
So this ends the myth that spam is distributed by Russians and Chinese. (Well, that's probably still true for Russian and Chinese spam, but not English.)

It is also good to know that botnets aren't fully responsible for this, because otherwise spam would be almost unbeatable.
IIRC Lincoln did.
You might perform a lobotomy equivalent on yourself. That scares me much more than the possibility of dying.
A School Chief Takes on Tenure
Improve your product. If they're not 'sticky' you're doing something wrong. That said some things will always be high churn - dating sites, house purchase sites etc - So you'd want to maximize the revenue as much as possible while you have the user.
Amen; this mistake killed a company I cofounded and got funded during the bubble. I'll add: you can't really build a platform without building and selling the specifics; without real customer drivers, you run out of oxygen in design and architecture wanking.

If you've built most of a "platform", you should be in a good position to turn out cool apps quickly. Hide the platform, let people wonder why you're so good.
So where are we now with physics, anyway? Converging on some kind of math/philosophy hybrid? Seems like as time goes by, these theories and constructs become more elaborate and abstract, which makes it ever less likely that we'll have the capability to test their predictions.
I posted the link with Gabor's name thinking many HN readers might appreciate the Xobni connection. Of course, I forgot that his domain was "gaborcselle.com" and that it would appear right next to the title in HN. So blame me, not him. :)
Thanks for reading, but your cynicism about my motives is misplaced.
The questions I have while working on my project is when to introduce the mium in freemium.

(1) Would you be wise to introduce the premium version at launch with the free version if there is enough value, even without that established free base to leverage off?

(2) Should (being the emphasis here in refering to good business conduct). Should a business have paying customers when a product is in beta version and isn't yet completely tested against up and down times, bugs etc...?

(3) If one were to go the route of having free users before having paid users, should the free users have access to what may be removed and added to the premium release in the future, for the initial purpose of gauging whether there is interest for certain features over others?

To elaborate on that last concern. If users do get to use everything for testing purpose, am I going to get into one of those weired battles with community when certain things get shifted over (even if everyone was notified at the beginning that this would occur).
Here is one take on Python vs Matlab: http://vnoel.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/bye-matlab-hello-pytho...

Also, check out Enthought's distribution: http://www.enthought.com/products/epd.php
If you're working for personal gain, you're probably better off with the Python+ solution because it's a) cheaper, and b) translates into knowledge that can be harnessed in other applications you write in Python. You're probably unlikely to write a real application in Matlab.

If you're going to be doing work at a university, you may find reluctance from the persons you are working with as I did a few years back. The argument you'll likely get is that when you pay for Matlab, you pay for the assurance that the implementation of the tools provided is correct and therefore your research is based on a proven foundation.

I saw the argument, agreed, but disagreed in the logic presented that those contributing to Python+numpy+scipy+matplotlib didn't have a vested interest in those tools also being completely correct. Afterall, I hear NASA is using some of this stuff...
No, that's a gross oversimplification. Re-read Doris Kearns Goodwin. Lincoln appointed his political rivals in the Republican Party to his cabinet. He did not appoint secessionists. And his strategy was imperfect: despite his immense political talents, he was still hurt by defectors and infighting.

On the other hand, slipshod vetting damaged two recent political figures: Clinton's cabinet nominations in '92, and McCain's selection of Palin this year.

Obama was elected to do a job. You may want him to do some other job, like uniting the political parties or greating a great National Salon so we can debate libertarianism and socialism and economics rationally. That's not the job he's undertaken now.
I find it interesting that the attempted theories to explain the makeup of matter seem quite ridiculous and almost humorous now. One would hope the theories about quantum gravity that are wrong will seem equally ridiculous in the future.
The sage project (sagemath.org) has explicitly stated that its goal is to become a viable open source alternative to Mathematica, Matlab, and Maple. To a reasonable extent, it has already reached that goal and it is progressing and changing rapidly. And it plays well with other mathematical systems (R, Octave, Mathematica, Matlab, Maple, Maxima, Magma, etc.).

sage is built as an extension to Python with both a terminal interface (extended version of ipython) and a web-based interface. It builds on Scipy and many other tools.

Anyway, it's a strong enough system that I've used it to replace both Mathematica and Matlab in my daily activities. It's FFT is similar in speed to that of Matlab (both based on the same open source software). Check it out.
"Have you published or disclosed any personal ideas that would prevent you from being confirmed, or that would cause your confirmation to be disruptive for an administration that needs to pull off an unprecedented economic turnaround and pass a sweeping health care reform? Yes? Then maybe we don't need you as Parks Director so much right now.
The point of my first comment on this page is to think about noise in the size of the market for a given post. You probably just hit a "small market" blip. To get a sense of your fit w/ HN community, average over many submissions.

Looking at your profile seems you're doing fine...

Regarding "dupes are okay" -- I don't think they're necessarily okay for HN, I was thinking more hypothetically -- just noticing that they're not bad for everyone all the time.

I wouldn't have seen this article if someone hadn't resubmitted it. Their resubmission helps counteract the "small market" fluctuation you ran into.

I agree though that dupes might attract karma-maximizers, and this might not be desirable.

I leave it to the moderators/owners of this site to worry about. If I stop liking the site, I stop using it.
More proof that we live in the matrix. Seriously http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Also, the seems to say that black holes are impossible.
Spyware and popups aren't the only way to gain a reputation like that!
I recommend checking out Clojure instead of Erlang.
http://www.emotiv.com/
Matlab is, to the programmer with experience in almost any other language, a tremendous horror. The language is almost as cobbled together and inconsistent as PHP with the added bonus of being worked on almost exclusively by engineers instead of people who actually want to write programs (this coming from an engineering student here).

That being said, if you have the mathematical chops to rearrange your problem into something solvable via matrix transformations, you can probably write it quickly and elegantly in Matlab without worrying too greatly about execution speed. Better, the built in toolboxes have already solved huge (engineering) problem spaces. Code already written is better than code potentially written...

Unless you want a solution that is repeatable or more general than Matlab affords. At that point you'd be better off doing the math by hand. I feel that the Python et al and C solutions fit into this niche. Prototype the math in Matlab, implement in a language that doesn't suck.
I think you'd be surprised at how powerful NumPy is. Try timing multiplying large matrices (I can tell you who wins, and not by a small margin)

One downside is you do have to poke around for the right functions, whereas in Matlab you have all the functions sitting in your (always global) namespace.
Try the BugMeNot plugin for Firefox. Then all you gotta do to get around NYTimes annoyance is right-click on the username field and say "log me in with BugMeNot"...
I recommend checking out Ruby instead of Python.
I believe "possible sources of embarrassment" is about limiting one's susceptibility to blackmail. Pretty standard for security clearances.
Getting Sloppy With Data/Passwords
so java programmers get deep into java.util.concurrent
dead??? Not sure about that one. There is more to programming than just multicore server backend stuff. Regardless, you don't "stop teaching it", you just teach more related to multi-core architectures if those do start to become more prevalent.
My brother switched to Mac a while ago, and pretty much the first thing he commented on as the major difference was that he could actually use quicktime.
Aside from the inflammatory headline, what the article seems to be saying is "teach more about concurrent programming during early software programming courses," which seems reasonable enough. Like pointers, concurrent programming concepts seem to be a tough pill for some CS students.
Technically it's a sleep->suspend->hibernation process, depending on how long the subject has been immobile.

Power efficient, but the reboot is a killer.
That's ridiculous. Programming is not all about multi-core performance. Also, programs do not all need to directly implement parallelism to be performant. The architecture can support parallel processing with sequential languages. A great example of that is Rails, when set up with mongrel processes, each of which can run on its own core if necessary.

Hyperbole, hyperbole, hyperbole <-- summary of this article.
Anyone mentioned Vencorps.com? If no one has I'd check it out.
Yep, that matches up with my experience when my blog got slashdotted and dugg and all that.

The thing they don't know yet is they'll get a good 2-800 daily hits from the residual effects of being linked by so many other sites, many months in the future.
Out of curiosity, could you elucidate why?
Take a look at
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...
Maybe it helps.
What happened here is that a few blogs like The Consumerist were profitable enough to support a few people, Gawker bought them to try to make something much bigger out of them.

Now that the economy is turning sour they will try to sell them.

But if you're efficient enough you might still be able to eek out a living from a blog like the consumerist. It's not a business with a capitol B, but it's a living.
Wasn't one of Clinton's picks given flak for having written something saying that kids should be taught about masturbation as part of the school sex ed curriculum? It seems to me that that's actually the perfect example of filtering out people who have spoken up against the status quo.
The article concludes by quoting:

"We're seeing a slow recovery," Bhandari. "We fully expect this to recover completely, and to go into the highest ever spam period during the upcoming holiday season."

When will spamming stop being profitable? There's certainly no shortage of fools in this world--something must be done to the medium itself.
If you're going to blog spam, at least make it worth clicking.
And mistook the V8 engine for the real "magic" of the browser. Doubly lame.
Australian web filter to block 10,000 internet sites
and maybe some walls and a floor if they're feeling generous?
That's a problem for them I guess... we have empirical evidence of black holes. Maybe what's impossible is singularities? Some physicist to correct me?
Emastic Beta3 released
Just thought I'd mention that `ipython -pylab` exists. It's a fantastic python repl (tab completion, all that nice stuff) which integrates nicely with matplotlib/numpy.

Matlab does have one advantage, though: scientific library support. Need neural networks, TV based image processing algorithms or something else similarly specialized? Matlab wins.
Can you provide some more info about them? I looked at the site, but there isn't a lot there beyond the signup-for-beta form.

It looks kind of like a social-media based VC thing, is that correct? Interesting idea, but how feasible is that model?
It seems that NumPy is the equivalent of Perl's PDL. PDL is some inline C code so you get the benefit of both languages.
My own experience is with software that was free for a year before my first sale (though I made it available for sale pretty much near the start). So I did do what you are thinking. But I developed it entirely in public: the first version (released) took me 2 hours to write. This approach was great for countering my perfectionism.

(1) Yes. You don't need a free version to sell stuff. But what does
"leveraged" mean in your case? If it's a network effect, where your offer has no value unless there are already users (e.g. a dating site), you would need some way to build up users.

(2) All products are incompletely tested... it's an opportunity to show customer service... and version 2. There's a question of degree here of course. You're right, you do have a chance to try it out on free users - although bugs are just as annoying for them as for mium/fee customers. Maybe the way to think about it is: are they paying for the benefit you offer, or for the absence of bugs? People complain, but they still buy - because they know no-one is perfect. Provided you treat them with respect, they may even like you more because of it.

(3) People don't like it if you take something away, especially if they started to rely on it. It creates bad feeling. I think a free trial (time limited) will give you the info you need.
>Why do you care how fast your browser is?

JavaScript runs outside of the browser as well (I'm using it for my current project). So, yeah, I care about the accuracy of the performance tests.
Amidst launch of WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King, Gamestop's CC processing craps out
1. Do you have proof?

2. Does it matter?

Consumer-grade cable service is so fast and such a big pipe these days, voice doesn't really require handling with kid gloves anymore.
I did not intend to attack your character only your argument. It seems like few people really understand which business models work well with each type of software / service. Freemium works well when you have a huge audience that you can serve cheaply but you only provide a modest benefit to. Like over the air TV / Radio, but you also need a premium service tier.

Most Movie theaters use a similar model where they make little money on the tickets and most of their revenue from the concession stands. Consultants can use the razorblades model where they will give you a free "consultation" and then charge to fix the problem. But it's hard to scale as they have limited space and high cost's for the initial transaction.

So what defines a good freemuium model is having a useful second tier of service and a vary cheep to serve lower level. A good example of this would be an online resume builder with a lot of templates and a paid review service. The fact a movie theater shows movies is not their business their business is setting people up to overpay on food ditto for our online resume review system. But, the movie studio's want their cut so movie theaters need to charge for tickets even if they are not making money from this.
Perfect timing. My copy of JCIP came in the mail yesterday.
Ask YC: To save GM or not?
I wonder which is better the government has already approved 25billion to save GM but GM wants more.

GM is a company that has been struggling for a decade vs. global competition because it refused to innovate. Pumping in 25-50 Billion might save 3 million jobs, but are there other options.

Would putting $100 Billion into auto company startups be better? The companies that come out of that would most likely get most of GMs assets on the cheap.

what do you think is better, give GM another chance or let bankruptcy create a fertile ground for a new kind of car company to come in and do better.

or maybe, there are a ton of problems like warranty enforcement and replacement parts that would be VERY disruptive. I just don't like the idea of us having Government owned companies.
Interview with Daniel Ha, CEO of Disqus (YC '07)
Yes, libs are my biggest concern but Python has neural net libs, don't know the quality though. Also very good image processing libs but perhaps not one for TV-stuff.
let them die, imo. keeping them on life support will just be a drain on everyone. bailing them out will just allow them to continue to be a terrible company.

instead, use that money to fund grants and initiatives and prizes to incentivize new companies or GM itself, provided results are produced. that way, the industry will move forward. a bailout would almost definitely result in stagnation for many years. imo, ofc.

the bad companies will go away and other companies will take their place, providing new jobs.
Cloud Computing will Require Dynamic Networks
Is there a way to get this book all in one PDF file? Having it split by chapter seems like a good way for me to get frustrated trying to navigate it.
I Apple is tinkering with Internet search, my guesses would be:

1. Extending Spotlight to handle remote data as well as local
2. ...
No, actually I can only think of that.
Fed lends $2 trillion without disclosure
Depending on your bent, you may find R (http://www.r-project.org/) with Python (http://www.omegahat.org/RSPython/) a very powerful combination. More statistical than some of the others you mention, and sadly constrained by memory unless you play some games, you will probably find that most cutting edge stats code is available for R. Data mining and AI folks also use R, but as you point out, other matrix and functional languages may fit your specific approach.
HN discussion thereof: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=337821