skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"From what I've read the only folks making money on there are selling books for $0.99 and selling tens of thousands of copies (or more)"

Not necessarily true. There is a genre fiction writer named Michael Sullivan, who writes fantasy in a similar vein as "A Song of Fire and Ice" (Game of Thrones for fans of the TV show).

His sales from April 2010 to August 2011 was over 70,000 and since then, he's sold over 12,000 a month, never pricing below $4.95 on Amazon, which after their cut, he receives over $40,000 a month.

He recently did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything)[1], where he disparages the 99-cent price and feels writers should have more dignity and respect for their work than that.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/s6375/hello_reddit_...
Congrats, very well done!!

Unfortunately I went down the standard route - publisher, Amazon, the lot... I had really great experience in dealing with the publisher, and I learned a whole lot of new stuff about publishing, etc, etc. But this is where good experience stops:

Absolutely no exposure into sales figures. I've no idea what's going on - only getting quarterly reports, but they, well... bit dry and lacking information.

Hard to influence the sales. Everyone's saying that the book publishing adventure doesn't stop when the book is out, but given the share from the sales, I really don't have any incentive to spend a lot of time promoting it.

Looking from this perspective, self-publishing looks quite interesting. Might even try it one day. :))
That rule is usually correct, but has some exceptions. Though 'between me' sounds better to my ear than 'between I'.

Regardless, 'me' is always correct as the object of a prepositional phrase because it's an object pronoun. 'I' is a subject pronoun.
Security concerns keeping you from using BaaS providers? We got your back.
Yes, it would be nice to know what tradeoffs mruby makes and how they differ from the ones made by other ruby implementations
That's an incredibly naive and short sighted view to take. What if one day, some activity that you now openly partake in, is condemned or made illegal and all people who partake in it are rounded up?

That might sound paranoid but history is replete with examples of oppressive regimes who captured, tortured and/or killed people they deemed subversive, immoral or unwanted.

One recent example that's perhaps not a cliche is Uganda, where very oppressive anti-gay laws are being passed and people in power are agitating for the death sentence for homosexuals.

What if gay Ugandan people followed your example and lived their whole lives openly on the internet?
Good article. I liked the points made, especially the comparison to continuous variables.

The argument about "true" randomness versus psuedo-randomness is very interesting. As the dilbert comment posted elsewhere points out, it's impossible to really know how "random" something is, because if it matches your expectations, then it isn't.

So it's hard even to compare "true" random number generators and psuedo-ones. You might even argue that PRNGs are better in some cases because you can make provable statements about the distribution of their output. (Of course, those statements might depend on the seed being "random"....)

Anyway, I guess the takeaway is that, as the author says, randomness is poorly understood; instead, we can only make statements about random numbers and probabilities and do our best to reconcile those with what we have to work with in real life. This seems like poor comfort to academics who rely on some formal notion of randomness that is unachievable, but on the other hand randomness seems to always work "well enough" in practice.....
WiFi is a big battery hog on my phone. I can go three days on one charge without it, but if I connect up to my home network with WiFi I get less than two.
Sometimes you don't want higher volume, because that requires more customer management-- and you get a lot more tire kickers and refunds at lower price points.
How long will it be before somebody ports a nice VM to DCPU-16 or targets a compiler for it? The architecture is so simple and familiar I'm guessing that's not a terribly hard job. Folks are probably not going to write their programs in DCPU-16 assembler.
If it's just the combination of your personal experience and an idea, no. As an investor, or developer, or competitor, it's still just an idea. You cannot transfer your deep domain knowledge to me over coffee.
What's (potentially) revolutionary about this game is the deep rooted support for emergent gameplay. A telltale sign of a great game is that players themselves, in exploring the game, find new and interesting things to amuse themselves. Minecraft is an obvious example, with hundreds (thousands?) of public servers dedicated to varied pursuits.

A different type of example could be EVE, where the rise and fall of corporations is gameplay not written in by the devs, but gameplay created by the players. Any game that has developed a professional gaming community could also be lumped into the category of having emergent gameplay, since there is an entirely new game mode (spectating) created by a community surrounding the game.

When I look at 0x10c, and know that I'm going to have complete control over a CPU in game, and this CPU will be the basis of my pursuits in the game, I know that there will be interesting things to be done. This is because there's such a strong focus on allowing players to create their own gameplay. No other game (that I know of) takes its players' creativity seriously enough to rest so much of the fun on their shoulders.

Having Notch to hype the game certainly helps, but helping to create this world is alone an exciting prospect.
Sass vs. Stylus: Who Wins the Minimal Syntax Battle?
well his revenue isn't over...most of that is fixed cost...his variable cost is very little.

So a year from now, that same book will still bring in similar revenues(he just has to keep up with the promos).

Meanwhile he can write 4 more books in that same period, and quadruple his income. The next year he can write 5 more, and a year after that he can write another 4.

And altogether they'll make the same income...especially if he builds a reputation for writing good guides, and will begin marketing to his existing customers("hey, if you liked my book on Unix...you'll love my book on Linux")

And so many books are written, because people are hoping to strike it rich. To be the next Harry Potter writer. Same with startups...the stats show that 90% of them fail...but people are still doing it hoping to make billions.
Not an option for a lot of people.
Why not consider capturing emails with those landing pages initially? That way you have a list of qualified leads who are ready to buy the product.
Re niche. Yes, do you think the whole sales/marketing process was easier because your target market are quite narrow (ruby, UNIX, programming)?

Would you have priced differently knowing what you now know about discounting effect?
In particular they're very clear on the finite-project angle. You can't just raise funding for your art studio, but for some specific piece of art or project your studio is doing. A startup can already use Kickstarter to fund a specific project that way, if they want (several game studios have). But they can't just raise funds for the company "in general", which I don't think is something Kickstarter will be looking to change.
Mruby and MobiRuby
AT&T Watson vs. Apple Siri: Talkin' about a smackdown?
North Korea Government website costs only $15
could you write up a blog post for the author's experience with the publisher(i.e. reports/promos they did, your earnings per book etc).
I have no opinion whether this is a bubble or not. Just one thing:

This is not a Ponzi Scheme.

Get your definition of Ponzi Schemes right, please. Ponzi Schemes are a specific type of fraud, not to be generalised to everything that relies on superficially similar principles.
Totally. That is why I code my web apps in assembly. Frameworks and higher level languages have nothing to offer.
I upgraded to a Lumia 900 from an iPhone 4 and I'm really liking WP7. I'm looking forward to WP 8 even if I have to buy a new phone to run it.
Those paragraph link URLs are positively absurd.

http://scripting.com/stories/2012/04/19/itsDefinitelyABubble...

http://scripting.com/stories/2012/04/19/itsDefinitelyABubble...

http://scripting.com/stories/2012/04/19/itsDefinitelyABubble...
I'm a pretty big believer in the idea the ideas are emergent phenomena. On creative days, I can average an idea a minute. Most of these are things I've heard already and forgotten (except some small part in the back of my head) or combinations of 2 or 3 comments/blogs or papers or whatever I've read here or elsewhere. Also most of them are crap. An even higher portion of the "original" ones are crap. But the ones that make it through my internal filter are usually not full ideas in themself, no matter how excited I am about them. (and again, most of those are crap too)

I suspect a lot of people work this way, based on conversations etc. Some people just don't realize it. A lot more ideas have already been done/started by someone.

What does this mean to me? It means that a lot of the new things are logical, or semi logical progressions (or at least natural extensions via human thought).

As I see more of this, I've started tracking how bits of thought and idea float through groups/networks of people[1]. I've decided that the basic notion of "my idea" is broken. In my experience ideas are usually the result of bouncing thoughts through a pile of distributed human nodes, getting filtered/modified/improved, until finally someone has "a flash of brilliance". Then finally a good idea emerges.

So I don't worry about people stealing my ideas. They probably aren't mine. The are ours (for a pretty large our). Instead I've decided that unless I am prepared to execute, and can gather the team to do so, the best course of action is to keep my thoughts streaming through the network. They will grow and build, and may help others get to execution of something awesome.

When I do plan to execute, then I will be a bit more careful about talking and spreading the thought, but I still find that until something solid is being produced, an NDA (or social implicit version thereof) really isn't needed. Everyone that can execute is probably already executing their own ideas and doesn't have time/energy to "take" it from you. There are more ideas than doers. (corollary: those who will try to steal probably can't execute...)

Finally, since there are more ideas than doers, even if your idea is taken, there is another one coming down the pipe tomorrow :)

[1] This is an interesting game. It is very hard to figure out how to formalize (probably because I don't care that much) but for example I've tossed some thought out in meetings, then seen it appear later in a another meeting in better/different form a week or two later, no attribution, but thats ok, its just experiment. Similarly, in college when I bartended (and thus was a member of a small core network of college-town bartenders with lots of links to the rest of the campus) I would play the 'rumor game'. I would randomly mention stuff (true or not) about me near known gossips, just to see how it would bounce around the network and see what came back. Highly amusing, and very informative in relation to this too.
I would say "it depends" however someone without the deep domain knowledge would have a difficult time executing so you most likely don't need an NDA anyway.
I'd love to feel that way, but I have a bad feeling about all the patents they have accumulated (more than any other company for 20 years or so).
n.b. When you unbundle it from an app store, processing $30 transactions costs about $1.50 to $3 at the high end (getting screwed by a legacy processor) not $9.

He's doing VASTLY better than e.g. if he had taken that book as a first time author to a technical publisher. For one, the book is actually published: he'd still have months on the timeline at even the most progressive dead tree publishers. For another, at similar sales levels, his ~$5,000 advance would not be "earned out" yet and he could expect his first royalty check the day after never.

With regards to authoring as a commercially viable profession: traditionally, it isn't for the majority of published authors. There do exist folks who make incomes engineers would find reasonable from selling snooks (including technical ebooks). Well, OK, some of them make incomes engineers would find unreasonable, but not for being too low. (Independent authoring, like independenr software development, is 10% about writing and 90% about successful execution of a sells-writing business.)
There are already a number of compilers targeted at it. Browse through reddit.com/r/dcpu16 and you'll see a new one pop up every few days. I'm curious how long it will take before we see compilers that are good at optimization. Pretty much every compiler I've seen crop up makes admissions that it's generating terrible code.
Unless you're bothered by a conscience, the best way is to sell buzzword-laden, churned-out crap to people with more money than technical sense.
Speaker Dock Made Entirely Of Bamboo, No Electricity Required
I guess I didn't make my point well enough. The point is it isn't an option, not because you want it hidden, but because you've already "lost". You can't keep it hidden anymore and you shouldn't live under the impression you can.
Robots Could Be The Future Of Prostitution, Researchers Claim
Good question.

I don't think we do. I think 1 global namespace would be enough.

Say we ditched TLD's and limited domain names to 10 alphanumeric characters. That would still be enough domains to give 450,000 to every person on the planet.

That's with just alphanumeric characters capped at a length of 10. Allow unicode and remove the cap and we would have plenty of domains to go around.

All in 1 namespace.

Edit: yes I understand that the vast majority of those domains would be nonsensical, however even eliminating 99.99999% of them would still leave enough meaningful domains to go around the world many times over.
Over time, I've come to think of the 'huge idea, but I can't protect it or deliver on it' as a 'not huge idea'.

As entrepreneurs, we (at least I) are constantly coming up with and assessing new business ideas, strategic spins, etc.

This is just one more metric that a bit of wisdom teaches us to apply to our ideas. It is hard, very hard, for people who aren't used to the ideate-evaluate-rubbish-bin cycle, though.

How many thousands of business ideas have I gone through for the launch of the 10-ish businesses I've actually launched? Quite a lot. Even with all that weeding out and continually increasing experience (sigh), it's still a long slog. I constantly have 'great' ideas that on application of my own rules and the wisdom gleaned over the years turn out to be 'meh' to 'really bad idea, avoid!!'

In our line of work, anything that needs an NDA and could only be delivered by a large player, and the only thing stopping them is that they haven't thought of it yet is emphatically not worth pursuing.
Новый Комеди Клаб / Comedy Club (2012) - SATRip
Oh, I know.
My module is your fault! :)
Weight is also saved by using Oxygen instead of heavy metals to donate electrons. Using oxygen (Mr 16) over lead (Mr ~207) will be the main source of weight save.
Wow, the background on that page takes forever to fill in on my iPhone 4. Like over a minute. And the whole Mobile Safari hangs for 30 seconds or so if I switch orientation, I think because it has to resize the massive background image to the changing screen width and the processor isn't up to it.

So I would be cautious of using this technique with huge images.
Not sure whether I agree, but he could've done a better job explaining what "rebooting the Internet dev process" means... it seemed so cryptic.
Could be a technical+political battle raging inside.

History shows that backward compatibility guys usually win in MS. I would be really surprised if they decide to NOT support older devices.
Listening nodes? Bah. http://nearbuysystems.com does it without listening nodes - just an existing wireless infrastructure.

Privacy implications? Indeed. That's why it's implemented as an opt-in guest wifi network. Can't do that with a listening node either.
Shuttle Discovery Is Demated From SCA - Images
Because its actually:

file.rb:

require 'stuff'

class foo
def something
alert = UIAlertView._alloc \
._initWithTitle _S("Hello"),
:message, _S("I'm MobiRuby"),
:delegate, nil,
:cancelButtonTitle, _S("I know!"),
:otherButtonTitles, nil
alert._show
end
end

Instead of

file.h

#import <stuff>
@interface foo
-(void)something:(BOOL)what andthen:(CGRect)thisthing
@end

and then file.m

#import <otherstuff>
#import <yetmorestuff>
#import "file.h"
#import <oh shit is this in the right place?.h>
#import <i think this is ok>
#define SOME_HACK
#import <this better come after that define up there.h>

@implementation foo

-(void)something:(BOOL)what butthen:(CGRect)thisthing
{
alert = [[UIAlertView alloc]
initWithTitle:@"Hello"
message:@"I'm ObjC"
delegate:nil
cancelButtonTitle:@"I know!"
otherButtonTitles:nil];
[alert show];
}

Fuck that.

1. Don't Repeat Yourself. Computer have more memory than 1986.

2. Don't forget to turn on warnings-as-errors, otherwise that code above will compile and then break because (of course you noticed) the method declaration doesn't actually match the declaration but the compiler doesn't care because its a brutal hack.
>>> Finally, since there are more ideas than doers, even if your idea is taken, there is another one coming down the pipe tomorrow :)

This has to be one of the hardest things to remember for entrepreneurs, especially new ones. I frequently have to remember not to fall too hard for some cool idea, and I've been at this for a while now..
Secret of Successful Forex Trading
Note that the tech is there to do this with the cell radio -- no WiFi required. It's just a lot more expensive and hasn't been widely commercialized yet.

The gap that's left open here, as with many semi-anonymized tracking systems, is joining the data up with some other stream of data that identifies the person. Once cell phones become wallets, that should be easy enough for merchants to do. Just join up the purchase transaction data with the location data. Of course the obvious way to do this would be to simply provide an open-access WiFi spot that required a valid email to access. And don't forget that such publicly-accessible data as your WiFi radio ID is easily put on a database and traded. Over time, using several such matching systems, you could probably build up a 95%+ accurate tracking system of people with their identities attached.

Not trying to over-dramatize this story. No matter what your views of privacy and anonymity, to me it's fascinating from simply a technology standpoint to watch all the pieces slowly lining up. It's like watching a puzzle slowly being fitted together.
Did you choose at the bird image in your front page using Mina? (I'm asking because normally we see successfull people in that place and supposedly it converts well).
This reminds of the whole 'MS is killing .NET' articles that were taken for fact a few months ago.

Eg: "Are .NET programmers going extinct?" "Are .NET developers the next buggy whip makers?"
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/devwir-net-java-html5.html

There are rumors both ways about whether existing WP7 devices will get WP8:

http://wmpoweruser.com/rumor-windows-phone-8-being-tested-on...

For good or bad, MS is being tightlipped about a lot of things these days, and taking speculation for granted hits the credibility of the article writers.
Definitely agree. The place where ruby syntax might shine a bit is in code that does not interact with the Cocoa/IOs specific libraries (e.g. doing calculation, parsing/manipulating strings).
Not if you use a SpaceX Falcon 9.

edit: A quick search turned up a cost of less than $5,500/kg to LEO so it would only cost $492,882,500!
Can you expand on that? I'm genuinely curious (as an un-informed observer)
Show HN: Complete Tweet analysis and stats about IPL and IPL teams.
5 books every developer will benefit from reading
> [...] $300-$400 range.

Sorry: Over what time?
It does exist: https://github.com/llvm-dcpu16/llvm-dcpu16. The only problem is that there's not going to exist a compiler in-game. People will have to import the compiled assembly code, which isn't nearly as fun as staying in the game during the whole process.
The only reason I haven't brought a Windows Phone is because I am stuck in a contract at the moment. Once that expires I WAS going to get one.

I am not sure any more. I have an iPad and I am used to free system updates. I expect to get IOS updates until it becomes impractical for the specifications of my device to run the next IOS version. Basically, I expect IOS updates for 3-4 years.

I expected the same with my Android phone. Alas.. that didn't happen. I got one update after a year and am still on some outdated version of Android. This is why I won't be getting another Android device.

I figured Windows Phone would be more like the iPad where you get updates for a couple of years. I thought that the cash cow was the app store, not the OS so keeping everyone that can be on the same version of the OS would be very beneficial.

In short.. if WP7 users get left behind it would really put me off getting a Windows Phone 8 phone. What is the point when I will almost certainly be abandoned by the next update.
Nice. I am still using community 1.3 because 1.4 had some REST-based error. I didnt even know there had been more releases. I will definitely try this revision this weekend.
Neo4j is a great tool.
> I can't see a much better tool than XCode for Objective-C (and arguably C/C++)

I don't know about Abjective-C but you must be joking about C/C++. Visual Studio (even the 2010 crap) is a state of the art IDE. Ever used it?
If you're talking strictly about software for Mac then Visual Studio doesn't count, but XCode is still a crappy piece of software as described by so many horror stories. The fact that there aren't any better says more about the state of the platform than about XCode's quality.
If you have that much depth of knowledge, then I think the idea is going to have similar depth. In which case you come up with a short summary that doesn't give away any of the key insights.

But even if you're generous with information, the idea probably isn't at that much risk. The idea would have to end up in the hands of somebody who not only could out-execute you, but also has the time and interest to do so, is smart enough to recognize the value of your idea, and isn't already attached to some idea of their own.
No. There are plenty of random variables without non-uniform distributions. Plus an event in probability theory is not what you think it is. An event can be any subset of the sample space.
The recent ANSI/NIST ITL-2011 biometric standard is XML Schema based, but includes a TYPE-98 security record that is nothing but ASN.1. ASN.1 was chosen to meet performance requirements, as XML-based cryptographic messaging was found to be too slow.

The just published DoD EBTS 3.0 standard uses ITL-2011 and is also defined using XSD. But it too looks to an ASN.1 binary representation of its XML markup messages to get the data compression and performance needed for high volume transaction systems and hand held mobile biometric collection devices.
His discussion pertains to actual sources of randomness(not just the notion of randomness). Even randomness in our technology is generated from deterministic models.

It's sort of strange -- Physics seems like it should be deterministic, so where could random possibly come from? If the Universe is deterministic, then shouldn't anything we observe that seems 'random' actually not random(including human thoughts!?!?)? Enter philosophy land.
Could Youtube just silence the videos?

Sometimes I just want to see some cool flying robots and the full video is disabled, because the creator decided to include some background music.