skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not hindsight as I'm reading the news article that day.
Look at Verizon's profit vs Apple's.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-24/verizon-posts-loss-...

> Verizon and rivals such as AT&T Inc. sell the Apple Inc. (AAPL) iPhone and other smartphones at a loss as they compete to get customers to sign up for contracts that typically run for two years.

Verizon et al, run a 24x7 data/voice nationwide network.

That involves constant physical construction and capital investment.

Apple is the clear winner, selling their product at a premium with the middle man subsidizing the consumer's purchase price.
I think you might be misreading the graphs. According to the article a 1 year old iPhone depreciates by about 40%, and a 2 year old iPhone depreciates by around 65-70%.

Thus, a person selling their 1 year old iPhone would fail to recoup 40% of the sticker price overall while someone buying 1 year old phones and selling them a year later would fail to recoup all but 25% of the sticker price, give or take.
Anonymous Hack Syrian President's Emails with Password "12345"
I think it's a matter of personality and also the ability of the company to identify which team members can work remotely. While it feels "safe" to keep somebody under constant supervision, it doesn't necessarily make them more productive. Less experienced people tend to need more hand-holding, which can be a factor in adopting a remote employee model.
Although I take your point that people do a lot of needless computation these days, I don't quite understand the dig at caching. Isn't adding an HTML file to your server just manual caching?
Interesting, the term 'advocato' doesn't yield much in the terms of research along these routes, do you have a paper reference? (Lori Avocato does have a few papers that pop up on scholar.google.com though, I bet she got kidded a lot in grade school)

So perhaps the ideal karmic feedback device for this system is a compass rose with a center button. This would be

<agree>
|
<not this> - <perfect> - <more this>
|
<disagree>

The idea being that you could choose 'perfect' (which would exclude all other choices) or you could choose one of agree/disagree and one of not this/more this.

The idea of course is that there is an inferred 'commonality' point and by dropping these comments and stories you can have people give an indication of where they sit relative to those inferred points.

And while it certainly might lead to a bunch of 'echo chambers' my experience in such systems is that it pulls people out of those echo chambers into bigger clumps than that.
It's 5$ every 3 full months of participation, up to 25$. Seems extremely low.
British Government A/B split-testing tax collection methods
i think that variance is pretty crucial in this case. With iphones you always have a high end device whereas the quality of android phones differ greatly. i would still expect iphone to come out the best but still a comparison to samsung galaxies would make more sense
>He told me mortgage underwriters are doing web searches on applicants, which is the scary part.

Why wouldn't they? Why is it scary that they are?
Well now that the API is available, YOU could write that relevant app ;)
Calculating the energy density of gasoline versus battery is misleading unless you also include the engine, fuel system, radiator, battery, etc. Sure my truck can hold 120pounds of gasoline but the energy density includes an 800 lb "gasoline to transmission" adapter.

Once cars have "iPhone" batteries, gasoline cars will go away. A Nissan Leaf is rated for 3x the energy efficiency of a comparable car. I doubt people will mind giving up gasoline fumes and filling stations. (33khw in gallon of gasoline versus 3.5khw/mile in a Leaf.)

I can pedal a bike at 200W for an hour. Isn't this enough to charge 80 iPhones? How is this a useful comparison?
Keep this in mind too: Star Trek, while originally attempting to portray humanity in the future, inevitably created canon. Thus, there is a world war 3 in the star trek universe that occurs around 1999 (I can't remember the exact time frame). So It makes sense that 20 years after the world "ended", people would be pretty scared and do anything to try to right civilization.

In the end, as the original post implies, Star Trek is no longer a vision of the future, but rather a sandbox to put humanity into and see how they react.
You're right, the same rules should apply for everyone. The solution is simple: if a windows device with a locked bootloader is not acceptable, don't buy it. Buy android devices with open bootloaders if you want freedom to do whatever with your hardware. Moreso, buy Lemote Yeelong to guarantee the hardware specs will be open enough to adapt any OS to work on it.

ARM devices should be scrutinized because not only is Windows adopting them, but OS X also (# 1 & 2 consumer OSs). x86 requirements should be monitored also, just in case the following does not occur.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/02/07/apple_intern_t...
http://semiaccurate.com/2011/05/05/apple-dumps-intel-from-la...
Funny, almost all of my software that connects to the internet gets security updates. Granted the browsers may be more solid on security than Flash is, but still, reducing attack vectors does include security updates.
"but it's not necessarily a path to success."

Nothing is an absolute guarantee. No matter what the path.

"Were repeatedly screwed by business partners and banks"

If your parents were "repeatedly" screwed over, they really need to take a look at their own decisions. I was screwed over a few times when I was younger. I learned from my mistakes and don't allow people to screw me over.

Your parents might be too honest and nice, which leads to people taking advantage of them. This will happen anywhere, not just business.

"it can be just another rat-race for lots of people."

Some people just aren't cut out to own their own business. My parents, for example, could never own their own business. They are too nice and would get screwed over (my Dad has gotten screwed over more than once in his life in various business deals).

One thing is true: you will never be rich working for other people and this is really the point of the book. For me personally, I would rather make $50K working for myself than $100K working for a large company. It's mostly about the freedom than the money.
Not my site. I just think it's an odd idea. Never would have thought we needed a website to discover keyboard shortcuts. And never would have been clever enough to think of using a Bolivian TLD.
Out of curiosity, how much money would you need before you'd be willing to give up this aspect of your privacy?
Mixpanel: Why you should intern with us
In 2008, I interned at Slide, Inc. and it was one of the most valuable summers of my life. I went from being a college hacker interested in starting a company to learning the intricacies of product design and working with a team.
At Slide, Inc. we stayed up late hacking (because we wanted to), I learned about product from an awesome product manager named Adora, and Max Levchin worked closely on a product that didn't necessarily have immense amount of business value for Slide.

After my internship, I had huge takeways:

- I wanted to start a company.

- I knew grad school didn't matter out in California

- I grew a huge network at Slide who became some of my closest friends.

- I learned smaller things like: git, python, vim, etc.

- I could have never built Mixpanel without having been at Slide first.

- Max Levchin ended up investing in our company during the recession - a time when it was hard to raise money.

At Mixpanel, we value our internship program because of this. Last year, we asked our interns to talk about their experiences: http://code.mixpanel.com/2011/11/15/internship-stories/

If you're looking for similar experience, please apply for an internship by emailing: jobs@mixpanel.com with the subject "Internship"

Sincerely,

Suhail

Founder @ Mixpanel, Inc.
However does the efficiency offset the inefficiency (physical and economic) to store enough electricity to make it feasible.
how hard and expensive would it be to make amateurish spacecraft and go into the space? and obviously (which I think makes is so hard to do) come back to Earth in one piece?
Ask HN: Where next to take my startup, Junto
Hi everyone! I'm looking for feedback on Junto – http://thejun.to

We're an online environment for the validation & production of startup ideas (for nontechnical founding teams.) The end result of a Junto startup is what I call an MVPU (minimum viable product for users) so basically a public beta.

Constructive feedback would mean the world to me. If you need to ask about our roadmap or revenue model, they're open for discussion too. HN's transparency was one of our inspirations for Junto in the first place.

Tl;dr: My primary concerns are how do we build an adequately-sized community so that the sample size for validation is substantial; Is there anything we need to be wary of, moving forward; What else can we do to be helpful for our nontechnical customer-base?
GigaOm acquires PaidContent
Compression spring
You may be interested in this site: http://lastyearsmodel.org/

I get satisfaction from using items for an extended period of time, but that's mostly from frugality. I think I'll upgrade my 4 year old phone this year because I could do with a good camera.
Tech startups facing unexpected challenge: the government
Anybody who doesn't want the job enough to do it for 10 million but would do it for 100 million is going to SUCK at the job

I think you're assuming to much in this statement. It's not clear that they would not be willing to do the job for $10 million. But there are 100 different companies who would be willing to pay them that much, and they've got to make a decision somehow. Other things being equal, they'll go with the one that offers the most.

This is exactly what pricing does in a market. It allows the participants to signal the importance of a product to them. That $100million bidder is signalling that it's more important to him to get mister AAA CEO. Is there some reason that we should ignore that bidder's signal?
Picard states this several times, almost explicitly, when explaining to alien cultures why the Federation doesn't use money. The pursuit of wealth was superseded by the pursuit of the betterment of the fellow man/member of the Federation.
Rebuilding Famigo with Twitter Bootstrap
Someone should write a book just about the day jobs (and sources of income generally) of famous people. It's hard to imagine an aspect of history that's more overlooked.
Exactly!

You need to fail fast and keep tweaking your idea until it becomes a success. You also can't be married to one single idea. Many people have a problem with this.
Assume it's already built, now what would you do? how would you market it?
I'm inclined to agree. If you have to spend any time at all figuring out how to fit the cost of a SQL Server license into your business plan, that's the entrepreneurial equivalent of a code smell.
You seem to be right, but I think you mean 6 months instead of 1 year, from looking at the chart provided.
Skyrim's Social Network
I have no experience in this area, other than having seen trolling on mailing lists, but my guess would be that a face-to-face confrontation with the troll would only give them further ammunition for subsequent enraged outbursts, or serve to make the situation even more dangerous/volatile.

Probably the solution is not to react to the troll, and for their outbursts to be met with silence. Don't read their content, and avoid forums or lists where trolling regularly occurs. When that's not possible report them to the list/forum admin, without engaging with the troll directly.
The only primate to communicate in pure ultrasound
he's a politician, and his government has done something that's getting positive press. he's just jumping in front of a camera.

also: Antarctic, not Arctic.
Using Moonscript (Lua's CoffeeScript) the performance benefit of LuaJIT when compared to all JavaScript implementations makes it a really interesting.

Well, actually Lua doesn't look bad, even though it really needs syntactic sugar for OO, but there is enough of it. Not just Moonscript, but also Loose (Perl's Moose ported to Lua).
Revenue is not scandalous. Nothing noble about building a service that fails.
Maybe rephrase your question to be clearer, but I'm assuming you mean mining the chemical components of batteries. Not what I was referring to.

I'm talking about the fundamental difference between a battery of any variety (chemical, flywheel, etc.) and petrochemical energy sources.

The article compares energy density of gasoline and other energy sources with "electric". It's a poor comparison. These are different categories. One is an energy source which is also a storage medium (single use), the other is a pure storage medium.
Google doesn't know all your Web History. For example it knows which links you clicked in search results but it doesn't know how much time you spent on them, when you closed them or which links you clicked on those pages.
I'm not going to be impressed anymore until someone puts a camera into orbit for a few revolutions.
It is a low amount of money, but what are you giving up in order to get that money? A little privacy?

Edit: It seems like Google is giving you 5 dollars, for you to do absolutely nothing out of the ordinary
If this was anything like a typical process, drilling fluid would be pumped under pressure down the drill pipe. Not a few drops - rather hundreds (or thousands) of liters. Obviously, this is not hard-rock drilling so I'd assume the volume of drilling fluid would be reduced. It would still have to be a substantial amount, definitely more that 1.5 cubic meters.
The thing is - there is no recipe to become quickly wealthy. Everyone will have their own road and no one can use someone else's experience to get to the same place.

What this book gave - overall excitement about possible future, that's it. It should not motivate, not educate.
1. Make a mechanism to allow up/down-voting of comments and allow the display of high karma comments in a static list that someone can scan right away... finding useful information in a chatroom is overwhelming and requires 100% engagement... irritating at least if the user multitasks while visiting your site

2. Please no chatroom on the front page! ...it's overwhelming and annoying ...just a list of threads please.

(All in all cool idea, whether it takes off or not! ...at least it brings new genes into the selection pool for evolving better online communication tools and metaphors...)
Your ISP knows all the sites you visit.
Customer Lifetime Value techniques: be careful with cohort analysis
And the job isn't so hard that they couldn't find a passel of candidates at $10MM.
Slicing arguments (in JavaScript)
You're arguing that the highest paid people in the world operate at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Was Steve Jobs a $1/year CEO? How about Sergey Brin?

Good leaders typically have different motivations than "I could afford to upgrade my yacht from 10 million to 25 million". I understand that that complicates your economic model, but guess what, it's people we're talking about here.
Sorry, it's even worse, I picked the gallon figures off the Internet because I was lazy. Thanks for the correction and calling me out.

It seems the Twingo figure was in UK mpg, so US mpg would be closer to 40 mpg (US).

Same for the Maruti figure, it would actually be 50 to 60 mpg (US).

From what I read, both are still way more efficient than your average American car.

I'd like to get an Accent, but they're close to 30.000 dollars after (humungous) taxes here in Uruguay.
Very nice idea guys, going to use that.
25 Documents You Need Before You Die
Let’s Meet The Real Jerry Yang
Just sold my hacked droid Incredible (the original) for $400 fwiw.
Great-looking tool and an even better post. It does a very thorough job of explaining Twine's value to someone who might not already understand localization pain points on iOS. If Apple's own localization doc were this straightforward, we might see a lot more localized apps out there.
In addition to the general workday communication issues, there are individual income tax issues, as well as benefits issues. The company now has to do payroll tax in another state, and find a health care plan in the employee's state. This is often not worth the expense for a small company.

Furthermore, location of an employee in another state may establish a tax nexus in that state (depends on the state), causing the company to have to pay income taxes in that state. This is generally not worth it for a company of any size.

If you're a telecommuter, you are generally best off by trying to work for an enlightened huge company that already has offices everywhere, or doing corp-to-corp consulting.
I agree that Founders at Work is a far superior book as far as useful, actionable information goes.

However, I probably would never have read Founders at Work if I hadn't been inspired to get into entrepreneurship by Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
I agree, and I meant to emphasize more clearly that I don't think the 5% figure is meaningful (and that it shouldn't have been stated without the appropriate caveats in the article).

My main point was simply that I don't think it's prudent to create a worse experience for half of your users when you're so unlikely to gain any actionable information from it. It would be quite extraordinary if they found out that the speed increase caused a decline in conversion or a huge improvement in conversion, so I think it's safe to say that the measurement wouldn't make them reverse the change or make them allocate significantly more resources toward faster load times.

But, to reiterate, I agree that they should not have made the claim about 5% conversion when it wasn't properly supported.
Is the cost of a Windows XP Embedded license really a significant part of the total cost of a custom touchscreen computer install in a factory? I'm genuinely curious.
Does it? VPNs make this easy to get around. Tor does as well. HTTP proxies.
GIT utilities: summary, repl, changelog population
Haskell: Pure and lazy, yet functional
Spiders dodge cannibalism through remote copulation
Apparently when Wallace Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize, one of his colleagues at the insurance firm said "What – Wally a poet?"

http://www.kevinstevens.net/writings/wallacestevens.htm
Oh, no! People really want an iPhone, and Apple knows it so can make a big profit wringing money from the mobile phone service providers.

The companies want their high "EBITDA service margins", which were 40+% and are now around 10%. Since they can't force Apple down, they are suffering, and planning to make up for it by raising service fees on their users.

The shame! The sorrow! Take pity on poor Verizon (whose "profit [in 2011Q3]" doubled during the last quarter, bolstered by customers attracted by its portfolio of iPhone and Android devices."; they sold 4.2 million iPhones in Q4). Remember sad AT&T ("profit [in Q3] of $3.6 billion", and 7.6 million iPhones). Lend support to Sprint, whose "bid to lure subscribers to its network is its unlimited data plan, which AT&T and Verizon no longer offer." “The iPhone helped AT&T reverse the tide and boosted Verizon’s portfolio. It is having a similar net-positive effect on Sprint as well.”

If only evil Apple hadn't come onto the scene and ruined the profit margins of the phone companies!
This is amazing, thank you very much. I look forward to beingg done with nano and notepad++!
New Entrance in online shopping : Menzkart.com
As much as this might not be popular, different advertising inside the stream (before and during), is difficult.

In addition. doing things like overlays on the video is currently impossible in html5.
Did you tried creating a imageData for every single character in the "ASCII gradient" and then using putImageData( imageData, x, y )?
"Our data suggests that buying an iPhone is a better economic decision"

Wow, what a leap. Is the author aware the purchasing a phone for resale value is actually NOT the main reason to purchase a smartphone? Any article that starts by quoting MG Siegler should immediately be discounted anyway.
Not really, this stuff follows a curve like Moore's Law. Take the first DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous cars. No one finished, or came even close. A year later, several cars finished. Progress will accelerate.
In YT's early days it was mostly people recording vlongs and responses from their webcam. YouTube. Get it? Certainly professional vloggers would rather use a nicely cut, professionally edited version. But that doesn't represent the majority of YT users. That bizarro world you talk about is the underpinnings of YT's critical mass.
GigaOM And paidContent Join Forces
What I find most interesting is the contrast this article's discussion paints with the one we saw only 2 weeks ago, How Much Is an Astronaut's Life Worth?[1]. Some of the highly-rated HN comments included:

Space is dangerous. We should stop pretending it can be made "safe". It just gives politicians something to wag their tongues at when something inevitably goes wrong.

The problem here is that NASA is a political agency, not a scientific one. Each year, elected politicians sit down and decide how much they're going to get.

This provides thoughtful perspective on policy trade-offs. As Thomas Sowell has written, "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3518559
Can Facebook run out of available users?
I have always hoped that new power and energy advances would come from these military applications.
Agreed entirely; I enjoyed RDPD as well. The review is indignant sputtering, as vague and insulting as the book is claimed to be. "Common sense looks like genius when it’s viewed from a cesspit of stupidity"? The reviewer's final attack is to admit you may learn something from the book, but only if you're stupid.

Every time someone (like the reviewer) uses the phrase "beat the market," I sigh and shake my head. To hear some people talk, you'd think getting a job was "beating the job market"; riding the bus is "beating the transportation market." Somewhere out there, phantasmic figures are matching opportunities with takers perfectly, so that every prospect becomes break even; every creative, individual, independent action you could take is rendered pointless by unseen forces. You might as well sit on your ass. It's efficient market theory turned demotivational wisdom.

Surely, if there were so much value to my being across town, it would cost me more than $2 bus fare. Or a professional trader would have already found me, told me where to go, and made a profit on the transaction. You can't beat the market.

I only developed a head for business in my 20s, but I imagine that if I had been running lemonade stands and mowing lawns as a kid, I would be immune to thinking that opportunities were for others to discover, or were already exploited, or that being enterprising only brings risk. This is the kind of lesson taught by RDPD, and I wonder if the reviewer has learned it.
Not necessarily. Only a very naive entrepreneur would fall for this and they would be sorted out rather quick. People fail or know/realize the huge amount of uncertainty and still choose to do startups. Different people have different levels of risk aversion and there is no common goal/value system.
This article butchered the very first line:

Even after he published, Prufrock and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot continued to work his day job at a bank.
I would do this. I would even keep it honest by not using other browsers for some stuff.
Kickstarter Fundraising Record About To Be Broken