skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the key, "Choosing a pricing strategy based on competition is a natural approach, but also a flawed one. Price competition implies scarcity—supply and demand market forces. There is no scarcity for ebooks because digital files are replicated practically for free."

What Jason is alluding too, but no quite jumping into, is the economics of information. In the economics off goods, there is a limit to the supply of the goods, that limit is created by the economic forces of production. Basically the more it costs to produce an item, the higher the price has to be to recover those costs. But what doesn't change is the value of the good. That is why for some physical goods they are "impossible" to make economically because the cost of producing them exceeds their value.

In an information market the cost to produce something is very very low, but its value doesn't change. A book on design is valuable to everyone who needs to solve a design problem. Even if there are a billion copies of the book out there, the value is still in every one of them. So what Jason captures is that pricing information requires one to consider pricing 'value' and the value of information is directly related not to its cost of production, but to its cost or procurement.

Thus pricing a book for $40 which has information which would cost $400 to procure by hiring a consultant for a couple of hours represents a 'good value'. Pricing it for $6 will capture additional market but it leaves money on the table as well.

Its a different world and one that is not yet taught in business school as far as I can tell.
Live and Learn, or Lose
Do our politicians really have so little to do that they feel the need to restrict our first amendment instead of dealing with more pertinent issues?

Also, I think most of the people I know are contradictions to the statement "No one likes a troll".
It's okay, Arizona has already illegalized illegals.

If they'd only thought to illegalize illegal behavior, they'd have solved all problems forever.
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This isn't an either / or decision for a company. It makes sense to create a net if you're early in the lifecycle of a company or product—before it's reached product/market fit. Once a startup has reached product/market fit, however, creating a funnel and A/B testing the hell out of it is probably a good idea.

To use an example from your post, now that you know what people are looking for (and how they're behaving) on your paystub page, you can begin to tweak the design, layout, and flow of that page to optimize whatever it is you want to optimize.

With the above in mind, "make a net, not a funnel" is another way of saying "don't optimize prematurely".
By far my favorite book on the subject is conveniently available for free on the internet! "Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms" by David MacKay is wonderfully written, well paced and comprehensive. If you like the book, you should purchase a copy, David is a great guy.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html

Videolectures has some very good videos as well. Zoubin Gharamani has a pretty solid lecture on Bayesian learning at http://videolectures.net/mlss05us_ghahramani_bl/ (he's a great researcher but not the most engaging speaker). Try Christopher Bishop's lecture at http://videolectures.net/mlss09uk_bishop_ibi/ as well, it might be slightly more palatable.
> This app is incompatible with your HTC Wildfire.

Not that I even wanted to use it, but other photo making, photo editing, photo filtering and photo sharing apps work on my modest little smartphone. F.ex. Flickr, even the mobile Photoshop.
Yes, I understand combinatorics is different from probability theory and yes, he is somewhat mistaken in not distinguishing combinatorics from probability theory, but on the other hand the article is clearly meant to be informal, it isn't a dissertation on the division of (highly overlapping) sciences. Above all else, I find the statement from the critique above that "probability is decidedly non-discrete" wrong much more clearly then any statements from the original posting.

Similarly I find it highly questionable whether combinatorics is "clearly more relevant to general programming". In fact, what is "general programming"? Probability theory pervades all of Computer Science - from probabilistic algorithms (QuickSort), through cryptography, optimization algorithms (genetic algorithms, simulated annealing), networking (information theory, queuing theory), machine learning, the list goes on and on. For business programming, statistics (based on probablity theory) is crucial. Some of those applications include combinatorics, but I find it harder to find such a long list of applications of combinatorics being used without probability theory - it is a more specialized field.
And my editor (or any good editor I'd argue) can do the same thing with indentation just as easily.
The limited space is one major flaw of the phone and it almost makes it unusable. That is why I suggest a custom ROM. I use one called Supernova and it is great, it is basically the stock ROM with the internal memory moved on the SD card. With it I have almost 2GB of internal memory and almost 100 applications. The instructions are not super user friendly but it is worth it!
Using Passport for OAuth with Force.com
This must be the third time this has been posted.
Custom Styles for MapBox Streets
http://mapbox.com/blog/custom-styles-mapbox-streets/
>"Anyway, "systems" in this case includes daemons and server processes."

For that sense of "systems", Go excels and Java enjoys a great deal of popularity.
I understand where you're coming from with point 2. It can be very damaging for a company. Firing people because they're a Democrat or a Republican (or forcing all your employees to vote for Romney or Santorum) is going to get you in trouble, and quickly.

However, I believe the split here comes whether this is a "political issue" or a "human rights issue". In my opinion, it's human rights. And I believe any company should ensure that its employees are not fighting against equality. I guess this also ties into equality for its employees. I assume there are LGBT employees of Mozilla, and I think they must feel pretty uncomfortable right now.

Unfortunately (again, in my opinion, etc.), it's treated as a political standpoint, something that big parties can argue about. But it isn't - it's about whether LGBT individuals have the same rights as straight people.
Mind Games: Sometimes a White Coat Isn’t Just a White Coat
I drew a Cosmic Calendar, inspired by Carl Sagan's idea.

http://i.imgur.com/h6vYI.jpg

Looks like the time-line for fire needs to change. ;-)
how bout ((positive-negative)/total)
Like anything in Freakonomics, I'd take that with a truck-sized grain of salt.

Curious: Are you referring to the book? I don't recall reading that in there... I guess I'll need to go back and take a look.
And the http://nodeup.com/ podcasts
I totally agree. I want to hear what went wrong, how it was fixed, what can be learned about it. I don't really want an apology at all, I just want an understanding of why something happened and what can be done to prevent or mitigate it in the future.
Very cool hack. I've always wondered what format the Lytro data was in.
> Throughout history artists have been poor because nearly nobody wants to pay for art.

Since when do artists have a monopoly on creativity? My work is extremely creative. I write software. And I make plenty of $$$ to boot.

If you create anything, then you're being creative. Get it?
Intent is a well-established legal idea. E.g. "mens rea" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea And it strongly favors the defendant, because in US criminal court, the burden of proof is always on the prosecution. There must be evidence presented in court to convince a jury "beyond reasonable doubt" that intent existed.
I think you should watch this:

http://thewebivore.com/go-the-fuck-home-my-ignite-talk
The Secrets of Overnight Success
Firstly, hats off to raganwald for another thought-provoking piece.

Whether or not the hypothetical interviewees in his letter could push the legal claims they threatened, companies may very well shy away from this violation of privacy simply to avoid the risk that they could be held liable later.
Some context: The connection was for an appliance provided by a trusted vendor that only needed access from specific outside IP addresses and would not need to be exposed to any internal systems, it could be locked down.
There was no way around needing external access and we only had two weeks to finish the project (it was requested by the President of the company because it was requested by a large client) however we were still faced with "it will take so much work, that it will be 3 months" In the end we were able to implement what was requested on time and the customer was happy. Roadblocks like these are why startups are able to run circles around large companies, unless there is someone inside to bulldoze through the red tape things just don't get done.
(humor) Karaoke Agile Hits it Big in NYC
Postgres 9.2 will feature linear read scalability up to 64 cores
Square hired 19 Apple and 31 Google employees so far
Really? Because it seems to me that a lot of engineers at instagram figured out that using the same set of preprogrammed filters over and over again allows users to feel like they are being creative.
I wonder if a game company could afford the lawyers to pull off something like that today.
(Obviously, this instance can be taken solely as a political issue - donating to a political campaign. However, I think the underlying human rights issue is still there. This is an assumption. Mr Eich could have donated for purely political reasons... but I find that difficult to comprehend.)
I've heard this before, and after working in a 250k loc Python codebase for 4 years, I can't say that this has actually ever been an issue.

Any decent editor lets you handle block indentation very simply, and it's typically easy to see what the indentation level should be.
The "why it doesn't work on Win7" thing is that they started to emulate VGABIOS - probably to still support the VGA init on 64bit windows without needing the 16bit realmode stuff around.

They probably found it a good idea to just reuse the code on Win7/32bit as well, so there goes the hole (a really good idea, I might add).

As for "writable ROM", some VGABIOSes map MMIO registers into the ROM area, as this is the only place safe for them to repurpose like this (16bit code, no real API for MMIO setup).
I had coreboot's BIOS/x86 emulator (also used to run VGABIOS) break badly when I disabled those, and Microsoft has a much better test suite for issues like these.
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So... for the one occasion out of a million where somebody needs to "debug" a piece of data, it's necessary to suffer the bloat of a text format for every other piece of data we transmit?

How about we just standardize on a binary data representation (eg. MessagePack), and use common tools to export/import to/from a human-readable format? Best of both worlds.

And, as an aside - why are we using XML? It's ok as a markup language, I guess, but as a container for data? We could hardly have picked a worse format:

It's crazy verbose - even when compared to other text formats (eg. JSON). Compare:

values: [1,2,3]

with:

<values>
<value>1</value>
<value>2</value>
<value>3</value>
</values>

Its verbosity makes it hard to read, and hard to edit.

It has a poor mapping to the structures we actually use while programming - it has no built-in notion of arrays. It has superfluous node "attributes" that don't map well to common run-time constructs.
This is what I actually believe.
Since we're talking about good writing here, I feel it's only just that I point out that point three piqued your interest, not peaked it. Unless your interest was at its apex at point three, but since you liked points four and five so much, I doubt that's the case.

At any rate, his previous point about there being no "right" or "wrong" language is something that is absolutely true. I think that's the most important point in the letter, which is outside his list of five points.
How Fiverr.com is changing the creative economy $5 at a time
Show HN: Share rides to Coachella
Mathematician not a statistician...

Would it be reasonable for 5 stars to normalise the data? Should star ratings be on some distribution, for instance?
Me thinks Go's niche is to be an accessible, imperative Erlang.

It is already well equipped to write distributed network servers, web servers, message queue servers and such.
Can someone please make a Perl for Python programmers?

It actually took me 30 minutes today to figure out how to do:

text=open('file.txt').read()

without creating 3-5 lines of code which seems excessive for a simple operation.

There are apparently 20 ways to do it in Perl and they need their own CPAN library for it :-( [1]

[1] http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/File-Slurp-9999.13/extras/sl...
Since this is already a post about language and writing:

> Point 3 peaked my interest

The homonym you want here is pique[1]

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pique definition 3
Alright, everyone is thinking this but no one has mentioned it. I'd build myself a girlfriend
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Hey DDVTWAU (dont down vote this was actually useful)
You need to allow people with interest outside HN some time to catch up on the hip new acronyms
Amen.

Mathematical notation is optimized for symbol manipulation using a pen and paper, not communication of information. Even to us programmers, it's a slew of one-letter variable names that very rarely seem to have the same meaning.

Furthermore, those single-letters are not from a character set that has been stuffed into our heads since we were 3 years old, so there's an amount of translation going on, similar to the process of learning a foreign language (hear spanish -> translation to english -> process thought -> generate response in english -> translate to spanish -> speak spanish vs. hear spanish -> process throughout -> speak spanish).

Bret Victor's project seems to be attempting this a little bit: http://worrydream.com/KillMath/
I used to have a boss who would tell me how I had the power to do anything, to change the world, with my magical software-writing abilities. He didn't understand why I wasn't out starting my own business, with no one to tell me what to do. But there is always someone to tell you what to do. Whether it's your employer or your customer (and even that distinction is dubious), whoever has the money makes the rules.
I understand that much, but my point is that in so many internet cases, intent seems pretty much impossible even to establish, let alone sufficiently prove.

So maybe that places an insurmountable burden on would-be prosecutors, then, and we're actually left with a law that's almost impossible to practice in many cases? I'm not sure. Like I said, not a lawyer.
Sounds like there are a lot of closers out there ;)
It costs nothing to sell a book to 10,000 customers as 1000 customers. There's no supply chain for an ebook. No support costs. No, re-occuring billing, or Q&A sessions for them.

More customers could arguably give you free word of mouth marketing, but fewer "qualified" customers could give you better leads.
This post single handedly uncovered an idea for a new niche' of premium programming books: how to program in language A for language B programmers.
Often I see the advice of "charge more", in light of that, the "Agency" plan at $99 per month seems low and makes me wonder if you could charge more.
Why are you going home? There are still unclosed issues in the bug tracker.
That story from Amy, is super awesome stuff. Not many have made it to that point - 3 years - however.

On the other hand, all this discussion seems more like a silver lining towards disruption in angel investing space too. Sublime for entrepreneurs, disastrous for others may be.

It's threads like these that make my day at HN :)
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> It's carbon neutral in the sense that the CO2 it puts in the air was taken out of the air a decade ago, not millions of years ago.

That doesn't matter at all.

> Buying wood funds planting trees. Buying gas and oil do not.

Buying wood to burn it also increases the price, reducing the use of wood for better things.
I don't have any experience with Ada, and I don't intend to refute your points. Nor do I have oodles of experience with either Rust or Go. However, as I see it, the problem with our current language ecosystem isn't "we lack a safe, fast, low-level language in which to implement things"; as you've pointed out, we've long had Ada. Instead, the problem is "people are using C++ to laboriously construct applications that, while not safety-critical, still require a high degree of reliability". This is a social problem rather than a technical one, and it probably has more to do with path dependence and resistance to unfamiliarity than with the technical merits of the modern iterations of either language.

In a perfect world, perhaps we'd be using Ada for all tasks that currently require C++. However, the fact that we're still using C++ over Ada suggests to me that there is still room for new languages in this area. I agree that it's sad to see so much redundancy and duplication of effort. But if the end result of all of this is that future applications are written in a more reliable language, isn't that still a net win for society, regardless of what that language is?
re: medical record sharing

I don't think it is that ridiculous really. Assuming that the policy to require a signature from the patient stands, fax seems like a pretty natural choice for sending a paper form. Alternatively, they could take the time to scan the form then email it.

Ideally, both you and I would probably prefer something completely digital (both forms and health records). Towards that goal, I think the biggest problem would be interoperability. Someone like Kaiser could (and maybe they do) use all digital things between themselves, because they can enforce a uniform software platform.

One nice thing that I've seen about some digital medical record systems is that they print out nice reports. That is a good fallback system, so that you can still fax or email simple documents around.
Sadly I haven't had time to dig into the full data file. Hence the quick hack using a few jpegs instead of all of the data. :)
> It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.

Most of these are standard clauses in many ISP TOS.

> It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass,

That bit seems okay.

> annoy or offend,

That bit is too vague.

> to use ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language*

This, in combination with the 'intent' section above is okay.

> or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.

I'm gently surprised that this last bit isn't already covered by existing law.
I probably could. In fact, I could probably charge more across the board - two of my paid users said that it's more valuable to them than they're being charged (remember: the underlying goal is to help these people get more repeat work + more money!)
Wait, because they didn't generate useless "jokes" on 4/1, that's the nail in the coffin? Not their several-days-behind news or general irrelevancy?
Legislating should be like coding in that being able to delete lines of code is huge win.
Think it's the filters. Some are purely an algorithm, but I assume other filters work by merging the photo with a template image. Maybe this has to be stored in high res in the app.
It's the people—I rarely use the filters, but I enjoy sharing photos with the people I know (and am getting to know) on Instagram.
(Reply-to-self, too late to edit)

Here are slides from that paper's presentation, for a quicker overview: http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~dell/publications/dellzhang_ictir2...
I don't know much about the law here, but isn't it required that you make such information public? That is, isn't that part of how campaign donations are tracked and regulated?
Are we going to see an Nginx module?
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Alternatively, use named captures:

> obj = re.match('(?P<id>\d\d)(?P<name>\w+)')
> id = obj.group('id')
> name = obj.group('name')
I think it's great that there's an increase in attention to the medical space from smart young folks. From my experience though, being smart and hard working have very little to do with success in the medical-tech space. It mostly has to do with 1) if you can show ROI with the least (can't emphasize this enough) change to anyone's daily workflow, and 2) having a very very hard working sales team
We're not opposed to religion we just try to practice tolerance for believers and non-believers. It is only faux-devout Americans and fundamentalist Muslims (who have more in common than either would care to admit) who see non-belief as "staunch opposition"
Right, but I would say that the general startup mentality is that you will be working more than the average work day. So telling people to work longer, rather than inspiring people to work longer, is usually not the best way to go about it.
To what extent can you actually require someone to work longer anyway?
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CS Lewis was quite effective in his CRM. That's just awesome.
I really like "Concrete Mathematics". It has nice, interesting problems, a very readable style, and introduces all notation used. It also has well written solutions to all of the problems.

That said, I read the book after I had a math degree, so while it seems very accessible (more so than most undergrad discrete math books), perhaps someone who read it as an undergrad can comment.
Ask HN: Can you review my start up website?
I am curious if you guys could take a look at www.confusinghomework.com. Tell me what you think about the idea and if it has potential.
Can you please fly over to this place and tell my boss about these 25 hours? Don't mention the rest though - as a corporate drone I learned the hard way (a good amount > 70h/week for roughly a year) that there's only one correct reaction to requests like this from my manager:

1) Smile and say that you don't agree, point out what might work

2) Don't follow that request (in my home country it's even against the law as soon as you require certain amounts. Unless you're in very specific scenarios)

3) Go elsewhere

And - the biggest lesson of all: Avoid peer pressure and congratulate your coworkers that don't back down and leave after a 10 hour day, instead of joking about his part-time job attitude. Cost me dearly to learn these lessons - but I'm sure I'll never forget those.
Discover Magazine had a recent article about just this:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calori...
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How did you manage to get 500 subscribers before launch? Marketing? Leveraging existing networks? SEO?
http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/modern_perl_a4.pdf

Perl isn't batteries included, but its packages are usually actually tested on multiple versions. This allows for the community to move on its own. There is no dictator, by design. Try #perl for help as well, or the package channel if there is one.
And people wonder why kernel maintainers are grumpy.